The Adults (17 page)

“Really?”

“Really. That and some hereditary shit. Long-lost grandfather I never met, who died in the war. I’m supposed to carry on his qualities. Be virtuous. Heroic. Johannes.”

“I could never be a Johannes,” I said.

He stood up from his desk, walked toward me.

“You can be anything you want to be,” he said. “For example, I tell some of my friends to call me Jonathan and some to call me Jack.”

We were quiet. He had friends. It was something I never considered before.

“You haven’t eaten the cupcake,” he said.

“It looks cancerous,” I said, poking the cupcake. “It’s very neon. You eat it and if you don’t die, I’ll try some.”

He laughed. He buttoned his shirt back up to cover the wagon. “I have this faculty meeting. We’re getting a new vending machine. Shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes.”

In his car, I threw an empty Sprite bottle in the backseat, pleased at my power to rearrange his life. His window was cracked where a rock had recently hit it. I picked up a twenty-dollar check from “Grandma.”

“I thought you were rich,” I said.

“My parents are,” he said. “A lot of it doesn’t trickle down. Like I said, they really really wanted me to be a lawyer. They’re still waiting for me to go to law school. I told them not to hold their breath. The day I go to law school, Emily, that’s the day I’ve surely sold my soul. But for now, they say they won’t fund this life of Shakespearean gooblygok. A direct quote. And I look them in the eye and say, ‘Gooblygok? I’m no lawyer, but I know that’s not a word.’ That’s why they don’t give me money, because I say annoying shit like that.”

I didn’t know if it was seeing his grandmother’s curly handwriting or Natalie Merchant that came blasting on the radio, but something made me feel outside myself. I looked down at my legs and they barely looked like mine.

“Do you remember me?” I asked. We had never talked about what happened on my stoop and I was starting to fear I was the only one who remembered that moment.

“Remember you?” he asked. “From two seconds ago when you spoke?”

“No,” I said, laughing. “From October. My porch.”

He sighed. He turned left.

“Yes,” he finally said. “Of course. You had glass in your foot.”

“I did,” I said.

He pulled into my driveway.

“And you didn’t even flinch.”

“Not once,” I said.

“Right there,” he said, pointing to my stoop. “You looked like the saddest, bravest, most alive girl I had ever seen. You were so alive. I can’t explain it. Your face.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He sighed. “When you get to be my age, Emily, that’s the kind of stuff you start noticing. People have two deaths really, their physical death and their emotional death. People just start to emotionally die at some point. Some earlier than others. Take Mr. Heller, for instance, barely alive. But you, you are definitely alive, my dear.”

Mr. Basketball leaned over and opened the passenger door for me. He hovered over my lap for a moment. He was so close, his face was suddenly terrifying. There was a tiny wrinkle in the corner of his eye, a coffee stain on his collar, a patch of dead skin on his temple where he must have forgotten to wash. He slid his hand down to my foot.

“Has it healed properly?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “It has.”

I got out of the car and walked slowly into my house so he would know I wasn’t afraid.

“Who was that?” my mother asked when I threw my backpack on the tiles of our kitchen floor.

“Who was who?” I asked. I poured myself some lemonade.

“Who was that man dropping you off?”

“That man?”

“Emily, who was that man?” she said.

I took a long cool sip of my drink.

“That man was the man who dropped me off.”

I put my glass down. The liquid settled in my stomach. I was alive. How exciting. My mother put her hands on her hips. “Fine. Fine. Be that way.”

“Oh relax, Gloria. It was my friend’s dad Maximus.”

I pulled my homework out of my bag. My mother took an orange out of the refrigerator and began to peel it using her hands.

“Listen, Emily,” my mother said, throwing the peel into the garbage. “I just have one thing to say. If a man tries to have sex with you and you don’t want it, do you know what you say?”

I put my hands over my ears.

“Don’t scream,” she said, removing my hands. “That will only make him violent. Just confuse him. That’s what your Nana always told me. She said you start singing something crazy, real crazy, like, ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow.’”

My mother was so beautiful. She was biting into an orange and the juice ran down her chin.

“I know that sounds crazy,” she said, wiping her mouth. “But that’s the point. You have to scare him more than he scares you, get it?”

I
was pleased with your haikus,” Mr. Basketball said in class the next week, handing them back to us. When he stopped by my desk, he said, “See me after class.” “You all seem to understand the beauty behind a haiku and that’s a good thing.”

When the bell rang, I nearly skipped up to his desk.

He explained to me that while the poems I wrote were interesting, they were not haikus.

Emily Vidal’s Haikus:

Mother is always the next morning,
A painted river of Maine
Framed and frozen body of water
Father said he had affiliations with.

Here are two brown lamps
And Mother dressed in scotch
For the season (whichever it may be)
The weather here never seems right.

“But they are still poems,” I said. I stood very still. I thought it would somehow help.

“I have to give you an F, Emily.”

“But why?”

“You’re so smart, sometimes I forget how young you really are.”

“You’re giving me an F because I’m young?”

He handed me the poems with the F on it. I felt like a dog that just pissed all over the carpet.

“I can’t bring you home today,” he said. “I have a dentist appointment.”

I closed his door behind me. Janice was in the hall, leaning against the lockers.

“What did he want from you?” Janice asked.

“I’m not a bad person just because I don’t understand what a haiku is,” I said.

“I know that,” Janice said.

“Well Mr. Basketball doesn’t. He’s mad at me.”

“Maybe he’s not mad at
you
.”

“Huh?”

“He has a polyp. In his colon.”

“I don’t think that’s it.”

“It might be.”

“Why don’t you go and ask him then?” I asked. “He’s your boyfriend, right?”

“What’s your problem?”

“I don’t have a problem, other than you’ve been lying to me about Mr. Basketball all year now.”

“I’m not lying,” she said.

“Why don’t you go in and say, ‘Mr. Basketball, since we are fucking I need to know if you have a polyp in your colon.’”

“That’s too suspicious, Emily.”

Janice was in a tight black shirt that said
LOOK
on the front. There was saliva bunching at the corners of her mouth. For some reason, I wanted to hurt her.

“Janice,” I said, “Mr. Basketball touched me.”

“Of course,” Janice said, shrugging it off, refusing to look surprised. “He touches all of us.”

“No,” I said. “I mean, he touched me.”

“Where?”

“On my leg.”

“Here?” she asked, and put her hand around my thigh.

“Yes,” I said. “He ran his hand all the way down my thigh and to my foot.”

“So what’s the big deal? That’s baby stuff.”

“No, you aren’t listening.”

“I hear you,” she said. “And I’ll tell you what happens next.”

I felt the urge to put my hands over my ears but I didn’t.

“First, Emily, you’ll suck his dick. And then once he’s hard enough, once it feels like a sausage in your mouth, you have sex until he comes.”

“Janice,” I said. “Stop it.”

“Is this grossing you out, Emily? Because this is sex. This is what he’ll want from you. You arch your back at a forty-five-degree angle and scream.”

“No,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, walking away from me.

“Janice,” I said, running after her. “Why do you have to be like this?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You’re scaring me.”

“I’m scaring you?” she asked. “You’re the one who scares us.”

“Huh?”

“You lit Richard Trenton on fire, Emily!” she said. “And I defended you. I’ve always defended you! I’ve always said, hey, guys, we all know Richard was the crazy one, Emily was just trying to help Annie. And what do you do in return? You stand there, and you say, ‘Mr. Basketball touched me.’ And you know I love him. I
love
him.”

She walked out of school and into the parking lot where the Other Girls were sitting on red and white cars, nibbling on peanut butter and jelly matzoh sandwiches. When I first saw them eating matzoh sandwiches, I asked, “Are you guys Jewish?” Only two of them. Fewer calories.

I chased after Janice.

“My third cousin was a child actress,” one of the Other Girls was in the middle of saying. “She was in hair commercials, she was so beautiful. And now she’s in an insane asylum.”

“Go figure.”

Janice’s eyelids were coated in tragic skid marks of one-dollar eyeliner and red eye shadow she stole from the mall. She licked her finger and used her saliva to smudge her eyeliner into one smooth line.

“I know a guy whose cousin went to an institution after he tried to commit suicide,” Janice said. “Cost the guy’s parents twenty thousand a year, which doesn’t include the food in the dining hall. And after three years, he was still fucked-up, running around in Santa pajamas, talking about tits and dicks and the Apocalypse.”

I told Janice I thought it was rude to use words like “tits” and “dicks” to describe the dead or almost-dead.

“Dead or almost-dead, they still have dicks, right?” she said. Then, Janice fluffed her hair and asked us about clits and whether I thought hers might be covered in scar tissue—was that why she couldn’t orgasm anymore with Mr. Basketball? I didn’t know.

“He’s gained, like, ten pounds in the last week,” she said. “Maybe that’s why.”

I told her maybe we were getting too old to make fun of people just for being fat.

“What I’m too old for is breaking habits,” she said, and I worried that this was the only reason we were still friends.

One of the Other Girls announced she was going to ask Mark to the Halloween in Spring.

“You can’t have a date to the Halloween in Spring,” I protested. “It’s an after-school dance where we’ll play Spud and suck corn syrup through straws.”

“So, you can still have a date,” Janice said.

“Yeah,” Brittany said. “Exactly.”

Janice turned to the Other Girls. She started telling them about the new kind of sex she had been having with Mr. Basketball lately: desk sex. She said that by the end of the year, they were going to have had sex in all the classrooms. The Other Girls got excited, saying, “If you have sex on my desk, I’ll kill you, Janice.” Janice got excited too, and her stories took on the epic quality of a fairy tale, stock characters, predictable endings: of course it’s the middle bowl of porridge, of course the duck is actually a swan, of course Mr. Basketball fucks you after school, Janice, of course his penis is the size of a baseball bat. Of course the baseball bat goes inside you, why else would love hurt so much?

“You’re such a liar!” I screamed. “I want to see you dance with him at the Halloween in Spring.”

“Fine,” she said, but still wouldn’t look at me. “I will.”

A
t the Halloween in Spring, one of us went dressed as a super-hot kitten. One of us went as the country of France. One of us went as Saran Wrap. One of us went as a banana.

“I can’t believe you came as a banana,” one of us said.

“I’m a
slutty
banana,” Martha said.

One of us was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Janice was so disappointed.

“Brittany,” she said, “jeans are so boring.”

Janice thought anyone who didn’t dress up for the Halloween in Spring was a loser who cared too much about being “ridiculous.” “I don’t care about being ridiculous!” Janice had cried in the bathroom, wrapping the colored Saran Wrap around her naked chest like a tube top.

As a defense for being costumeless, Brittany held out a bottle of liquor that she stole from her parents.

“Sweet vermouth?” one of us asked. “What is that?”

“Adults put it in martinis,” Brittany said, holding the green bottle to her mouth. “It’s really expensive.”

One of us passed the bottle around, one of us exclaimed, “I can’t believe they drink this,” and one of us killed a fly against the wall with a hairpin. This felt like a cleansing.

In the cafeteria, the girls stood on one side of the room and boys on the other. I ate potato chips and sweated hard in my super-hot kitten mask and watched Mr. Basketball by the vending machine flirt with Ms. O’Malley. Another teacher walked over to them, drunk off her flask of vodka that wasn’t as secret as I overheard her telling them it was, and asked who the fuck the president of England was. “There’s no president of England,” Mr. Basketball said. Mr. Basketball and Ms. O’Malley laughed together and I saw myself in the reflection of a vending machine. I looked ridiculous. I wanted to claw my eyes out, rip off my costume.

I watched Mr. Basketball and Ms. O’Malley sip on their Hawaiian Punch martinis out of paper cups, and the other teacher spilled her drink over what a prankster Mr. Basketball was:
What do you mean there’s no president of England?

Ms. O’Malley left to bring Janice into the bathroom. “Plastic is not a costume!” she screamed, and tugged her arm.

I walked closer to Mr. Basketball. We stood, not speaking. It felt like a competition of who was going to forgive who first, and for what?

“You’re a cat,” Mr. Basketball said to me.

“And you’re a clown’s nose,” I said.