Hyacinth Girls (20 page)

After the first few days of sitting by myself, I stopped going to the cafeteria at lunch. The school library was open, and I played games on
the computer, plugged in my earbuds, and pushed myself far, far away. Sometimes when my stomach rumbled and no one was around, I pulled a twig from my pocket and sucked its dirty end. I held it like a cigarette and wondered about Grandma. I knew which shows she watched every day, and I imagined I was there with her, sitting on the sofa, eating a bowl of Cocoa Puffs. Sometimes she looked over and said my name. Other times I held her hand, and then she lit a cigarette and we died together. I didn't know if she hated me because of what I'd said. I hadn't told her good-bye that day, and I realized I wanted to talk to her.

I locked myself in a bathroom stall and took out my phone. “Grandma?” I said, when her answering machine clicked on. “Grandma?” I was giving her time to hear my voice and pick up. “It's Callie.”

She didn't pick up, so I kept going. “How are your sacs? Are they okay?”

I sat down on the toilet and took out my leaf, balanced it on my thigh.

“I just wanted to say I'm better now. I'm sorry about what I said.”

I wondered if she was sitting there, listening. I touched the leaf and waited. “I didn't mean it and I shouldn't have said it.”

I gave her one last chance to pick up, and then I told her I had to go. Then I took a red pen out of my bag and looked at the smooth, clean walls around me. I could write anything. I could tell the world that Dallas was a fat-chinned cannibal who ate penises for breakfast. Or that Ella was a defective scarecrow. I could draw pictures of them both, burning at the stake—but instead I lifted up my shirt. There was only one word that I wanted to write. Babyshits. I wrote it on my stomach first. Then I unzipped my pants. Each thigh took the ink. I pulled down the neck of my shirt and wrote it on my shoulder. The pen tip was cool as I pressed it into my skin, finding new places. It would be my word now. It was the one thing I had.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: (no subject)

Date: Thu, Sept 3 2009, 19:22:14

Robyn

Today I woke up so happy because I forgot that you hate me. For 10 amazing seconds we were friends again. You told me to watch cartoons and eat some cereal and when you said my name I opened my eyes and smiled.

It wasn't real. I'm alone again. C

Rebecca was excited about the first Friday of the high school year. “School spirit Friday,” she reminded me. “Do you know what you're wearing?”

We were supposed to come to school dressed in blue and white, our school colors. There was going to be a pep rally and freshmen were expected to try the hardest, painting our faces and arms half blue and half white. It was supposed to make us love our high school, and love each other, but I knew it was a lie. Under the paint I would still be Babyshits. Even if I could transform back to Double Hockeysticks, it wouldn't mean a thing. It was empty. It meant nothing, and I told Rebecca what I thought.

“But don't you want to show you support your school teams?”

“The color I'm wearing won't make any difference.”

“It might make a difference to how you feel,” Rebecca said. “Like, when I was a kid, I used to get these chain letters in the mail. The message always started the same way: THIS IS NO JOKE. It usually said it had been around the world at least seven times, and promised that believers who forwarded it on would have good luck, while people who broke the chain might die or lose money. And Callie, I knew it was probably all made up, but I always went and got a pen and started copying it out, which took a really long time. And it wasn't that I believed a piece of paper could have all that power, but while I was writing it,
I
felt powerful—like the things I did might make a difference. And I liked to believe that I was part of something bigger, and could maybe help the people around me by taking part.” Rebecca put down her spoon and looked at me for a second.

“I mean, you guys nowadays are a lot less gullible than we were. There aren't even chain
e-mails
now, are there? I knew this one guy who thought he was going to get ten thousand dollars in the mail, just because he'd sent five dollars to a name on a list. He told me he was going to throw a big party on the beach when the money came, and of course, it never did because it was all a scam. But for a while, he felt rich.”

“That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. He must've felt ultrastupid.”

“Maybe.” Rebecca closed her eyes for a second. “Maybe he needed that lesson. I guess the point is that some rituals can be good for you, even if they don't make a real difference to the eventual outcome. Even if they don't give you the thing you think you're going to get.”

I looked at her and realized she wanted me to be brain-dead, like her and everyone else. We'd all be zombies doing brain-dead meaningless things together. That was what life was.

At school, I started paying attention. When the bells rang everyone jumped. At pep rallies, everyone screamed. In homeroom, we stood up
when the loudspeaker told us and put our right hands over our hearts. The principal said the Pledge of Allegiance, and some kids mumbled along while others mouthed the words. One boy at the front shouted the whole thing, and he stood up so straight you could've chopped him right down. I looked at the raggy flag hanging over the door and wondered if people were feeling something right now. Were they believing? Was the principal really thinking about what each word meant? Or was this just another zombie habit? Something we'd all memorized in kindergarten before we were old enough to decide what we really believed. I knew it was wrong to think this. But what if nobody felt the things we were supposed to? What if everyone was pretending? And what if one day there was a completely different flag at the front and nobody minded at all?

The recording of the national anthem played over the loudspeaker and everyone sat down before it finished. Nobody sang along. Mrs. Dobbler looked at her laptop and rubbed lipstick off her teeth. We were all basically brainless.

My algebra teacher gave me a detention because I was late.

“Miss McKenzie, you will be staying after school.”

He looked proud of himself. He was enforcing a rule. Everyone in class was copying an equation from the whiteboard, and I sat down in my seat and opened my notebook. But I couldn't do the next thing. I couldn't copy the symbols. The X's and Y's. I couldn't pretend that they had meaning to me. That the letters were numbers—variables that might change at any second. Lose value, go negative, shrink to nothing at all. Everyone else would try to solve it, but not me. I broke the tip of my pencil and looked at my wrists.

If a number could disappear, how would you prove it existed in the first place? How small could it get before it vanished completely? In real life there was no coming back. X couldn't equal –1,000 one minute and
then rise back up to 64. Once you lost your value, everything else did, too. And maybe all those things you thought had value had been empty all along.

After school, I texted Rebecca to say I was going to Ella's. I walked to Shabby Maggie's on Main Street and wandered around the store, touching all the things that people had thrown away. I knew that when I got home I'd find a new message from Phoenix Drake. The night before, the picture of the Grim Reaper appeared, and I'd read what DH wanted me to see:

Babyshits! Are you happy that you're still walking around, fouling the earth, making a mess wherever you go? Your smell makes us sick. Your clothes look like garbage you found in the trash. You're a dirty fucking cockroach and I'm going to crush you.

Dallas had more than six hundred friends now. She was friending new people from school, while at the same time, my friend list had gone down from 356 to 322. And of those 322, most of them hated me, and none were my friends. Everything I'd been was gone, and even though I looked the same and dressed the same, I was someone else now. I was Babyshits.

I picked up a T-shirt from the men's rack. There was a picture of a black man with an Afro on the front, and the shirt was the color of babyshits. It felt soft and worn out, so I held it in my hands, wondering where it had come from and why. The sleeves had held someone's arms and then let them go. Now it was here with me. I bought it for three dollars, and when I got home I put it on before checking my computer.

Phoenix hadn't sent me any messages, and Dallas and Ella hadn't written anything new. I rubbed the soft sleeves of my shirt—they smelled like fabric softener—and then said my name. Babyshits. I felt like a wild
dog again. I wanted to sink my teeth into something. I started writing a message to Phoenix Drake:

Dallas & Ella. I know it's you. Love, Babyshits

A few minutes after I sent it, I got a notification. Dallas had invited me to join a new group. It was called “
HAVE YOU SMELLED BABYSHITS
?”

I clicked on the group. In the left-hand corner there was a picture of me from last June, dancing at Ella's house in my green pajamas. My hair was frizzy and my mouth was hanging open and it looked like I was either panting or trying to take a shit.

This group is for people who have smelled the most ass bad smell around—Babyshits. Share your photos and experiences here.

Phoenix Drake was listed as the group creator. There were seven people in the group, and Kevin Brunetti had written a comment.

Smelled her today and it smelled like dung. ROFL

I looked at the picture of me again and then the air stopped working. My chest was moving up and down, but the air wasn't going in. I grabbed the front of my shirt. Something wasn't working. It was the air or my lungs. Swirling or spiraling away. Like black leaves. No. Yes. Yes. No. I pushed myself onto the floor and waited for it to be over. For the colors to strip away. Clear. Deep. Stranglified.

The door was knocking. I breathed.

“Callie?” she said. “Why are you on the floor?”

A zombie.

“Hon? Are you okay?”

There was a yellow sock under my bed; I reached for it and held it.

“Looking for my sock.” The sock told me to stand up, so I stood, very shaky.

“You've got your own personal Bermuda triangle in here.” The zombie picked up a jacket and hung it on the door. “You'll have to clean up this weekend. Dusting and everything.”

I dropped the sock on my bed and moved to my desk. I clicked so the screen went dead. The zombie was watching me.

“Hey, where'd you get that shirt?”

“Shabby Maggie's.”

“I'll put it in the wash for you. It might not be clean.”

They had made a group about me and it was only going to get bigger. The shirt wrapped me in its arms and I shook my head no. It didn't want to be clean. It wanted to stay the way it was, exactly how I'd found it.

When I woke up the next morning, I held my breath before checking. There were eleven members in the group now. I'd slept in my new-old shirt and it told me,
Don't change
. My unbrushed hair felt right, and then my skin said,
Please don't touch
. So I left my foundation and eye shadow on the sink.

“What's with the new look?” Rebecca asked, when I walked into the kitchen.

“Emo,” I lied.

“Emo? We used to call that ‘hippie.' ”

Before first period, I saw Dallas and Ella coming down the hall. If I screamed at them, they would laugh. If I asked them to stop, they would throw my words back in my face. I tucked my hands inside the hem of my shirt and made my face as smooth as blue water.

“I think someone's very proud she used the potty,” Ella called.

“What a good girl, Babyshits,” Dallas said, clapping.

I didn't think I would make it to homeroom. My legs couldn't understand why they should walk me to that place. They thought I should run away, take off into the woods, and when I didn't, they told me they were going to collapse. They said I'd have to lie there in the middle of the
hall while someone called an ambulance, and then what would I do? I pinched them, and they kept going.

As I walked through the hall, I felt them moving around me. All the zombies who hated me, all the empties who would join in killing me. I was a tree in the woods, and they were the villagers, circling me with axes and knives and switchblades, ready to stab me from every side. They'd seen the word carved into my skin, and it made them want to take me down. I let my shaggy leaves hang over my face and walked fast, looking at no one.

When I got to algebra, I heard a gagging noise. The teacher wasn't there yet and everyone was watching me. “Smile!” Ashton Davies held up his phone. Click. Click.

“Beautiful.” He turned the screen so his friends could see and I put my head down on the desk while more phones clicked.

“Babyshits,” a voice whispered, and I knew they were waiting for me to creep along in the mud and pose for their photos with a sluggy smile. I pressed my head into my arm. I heard Mr. Gimble come in, and when he turned on the whiteboard and said “square roots,” I lifted my head. I couldn't stop picturing it all of a sudden. Square roots: like boxes under a tree. They could be red or black and filled with seeds, or leaves, or shrunken people. And maybe square roots weren't just under trees but were also inside people. Like a box behind your ribs that held the smallest thing that was you, multiplied by itself. I drew the square-root symbol in my notebook and put Ella's name underneath.

Inside her box was a pair of sharp sticks. Hockey sticks or toothpicks. But if I pulled those out, I wasn't sure if her box would be empty. I remembered how she'd cried when we watched
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
and the way she'd carried my bag around after I sprained my ankle in sixth grade. She'd given me my favorite earrings, and turned vegetarian for a while after I told her that pigs were as smart as four-year-old
children. But if her square root wasn't just evil, what was the solution?