The Rites and Wrongs of Janice Wills (8 page)

I sat with Jimmy in his bedroom, looking at the posters on his walls (old movie stars: James Dean, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe). I registered the details slowly, savoring them. My head was still murky with the three beers, and I wanted to close my eyes to rest, but I also didn’t want to miss anything. The bedspread I sat on, the entire room in fact, smelled faintly of Jimmy. I inhaled slowly and quietly. I wanted to absorb every molecule of Jimmy-ness.

He had kept his hand on my arm as we’d walked inside from the party. He had talked to me. He had complained.
I hate these people. I hate this town. These assholes. What a joke
. In my swimmy brain, I’d thought,
How strange that even Jimmy Denton, seemingly the coolest guy in school, is just as miserable as the rest of us. How strange
.

He’d talked, and I’d nodded. Be quiet and throw in a few nods, and suddenly you become the most understanding person in the world. He told me,
Wow, Janice. I don’t know why we haven’t talked before. You’re such an understanding person
. I’d nodded again. I
was
an understanding person — I was the Jane Goodall of teenaged behavior. I felt like I really
knew
Jimmy, down to his core.

Jimmy touched my arm again.
I feel like I can talk to you
, he said. Or did I imagine it? I was sleepy. I, Janice Goodall, nodded once more. I felt the sinews of his forearm, his curly arm hair. He smelled of Right Guard mixed with Head & Shoulders mixed with the faintest male sweat, and it was the most wonderful concoction I’d ever smelled. Every moment felt slowed, and I had the definite but not-quite-fully-formed wish that he would press down on top of me, the full weight of his chest against mine.

“Let’s listen to some music,” he said, getting up from the bed. He turned off the overhead light, clicking on a small lamp. He selected something melancholy, and I approved.

“I love this album,” I said sleepily. “The Athens music scene has always been stronger than Chapel Hill’s. I hate to admit it, but it’s true.”

He turned to look at me.

“Did I mention that?” he asked.

I couldn’t remember. Had he? Or had I read it online? I couldn’t remember now. Fervently, I nodded. Our conversation and his blog were blurred in my mind.

He moved back beside me and touched the wisps of hair on my neck, half-reclining, and my head roared like an ocean. I wondered if I looked prettier in the half-light, and sleepily adjusted my pose to soften the jut of my bony hip. Draping one elbow casually against my breast, I half-consciously tried to create the illusion of cleavage.

ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
The female of the tribe offers courtship displays to the male.

“What’s your story, Janice?” Jimmy asked, sounding meditative.

I shrugged. I felt like he wanted me to confide in him, but I wasn’t sure how to answer. I was accomplishing more when I spoke less, it seemed, and plus, he was gently tracing one finger up and down my arm.
I want you to keep touching my arm. Please keep touching my arm
, I thought, and then,
I could help you pass calculus. Talk to me about how your dad is stressing you out — I want to be your confidante
. Instead, what I actually whispered was this:

“I dunno.”

“There’s gotta be more than that,” he said. “We’ve got at least one thing in common. We both hate this place. This shitty town, full of shitty people, these assholes. Assholes who think they’re the shit.” He smirked a little at his own joke.

Listening to him, I wondered if we did have that in common. His tone was so angry, so hateful.

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “I mean, I criticize this place a lot. I look around and I see things that I don’t like. Things that annoy me.”

Jimmy nodded, urging me to continue. I felt my slow thoughts crystallizing briefly into something that made sense.

“But, well, don’t you think it’s possible to be annoyed by something and love it at the same time — in a way? Maybe that’s
more accurate. Maybe I have more of a love-hate relationship with Melva. A fond annoyance, maybe?”

He looked hard at me. “That’s not what it sounded like, reading your notes on the people at school. I didn’t sense much love or fondness.”

“Oh,” I said. I tried to think for a minute before continuing. “I don’t think I meant it that way — I didn’t intend it that way, at least. Really I guess I’m sort of scared. Of a lot of things. It’s easier to stand back and try to figure everybody else out. I’m not even trying to be mean…. But maybe it does come across that way. Now my friend Paul hates me, and my best friend, Margo, hates me too, and …”

I stopped, feeling tears gathering in my eyes. I blinked, collecting myself, wondering what had made me suddenly confess all of this to Jimmy — things about myself that I hadn’t even previously put into words.

“Maybe it’s really more discomfort,” I continued rambling. “I mean, when I was reading your blog, sometimes it just seemed like you felt alone, and maybe that can sound like anger. So maybe you don’t hate every —”

His finger had stopped tracing my arm, so I stopped mid-sentence. He frowned at me.

“You read my blog,” he said.

I just looked at him as if I didn’t speak English.

“What blog?” I asked dumbly. The beer made me want to close my eyes. This effort of articulating all these nebulous thoughts, of keeping them straight, was too exhausting.

“I have a blog, but it’s set on private now. Or it’s supposed to be. You need a password.”

“Huh,” I said desperately. “Maybe I did happen to see your blog one time, maybe when I was searching for something else,” I added, hearing the terribleness of my own lie, the unbelievability, “but I can’t remember exactly.” I needed to change the subject. “Anyway — what’s
your
story?”

“My story is I can’t wait to get out. I hate it here.” He paused. “My parents sent me away once. I was going to kill myself.” He laughed a rough non-laugh. Cracking his knuckles, he turned away from me. “But you already know all that, right?”

I kept perfectly still, the way deer do when you drive by them at night. I definitely had not read anything like that on his blog, but there’d been a lot of entries I hadn’t gotten to…. I felt a little dizzy.

“Mmmm-hmm,” I muttered like a bad android, just to fill the silence.

He moved closer to me again and began gently tracing my arm again. I felt a shiver, the good kind of shiver, like I got sometimes when the hairdresser rubbed my head during the shampooing. With all of my Jedi mind, I willed his body closer to mine.
Closer, closer
. I realized that instead, I was inching my body closer to his. Maybe I hadn’t creeped him out after all….

“Your friend Margo is pretty, but I kinda like talking to you,” he said as he moved his finger, tracing a line across my stomach — over my T-shirt, but still. I held my breath.

“You want me to kiss you,” he said. Just like that. A fact. A mathematical truth. I closed my eyes to avoid looking at him. “I can tell you do. You haven’t been kissed before. A girl like you.”

The way he said it didn’t sound mean — more like an observation. Objective. Anthropologically speaking, I could be categorized as a Previously Unkissed Almost-Seventeen-Year-Old Anthropologist. I felt myself float up to the ceiling, where I hovered, watching myself silent on the bed, watching Jimmy and his tracing hand — watching the whole thing.

That was when he placed a hand behind my neck and kissed me.
My first kiss
, I thought.
One of the ultimate rites of passage
. And it was happening here, now, with Jimmy. His mouth was warm and soft. My body shivered again and a low noise (mine) tumbled out.

I murmured, “I don’t criticize everything. I don’t hate everything. I don’t hate you.” Fortunately, my words were so low and garbled that he didn’t seem to hear what I’d said.

Still holding my head, he said, “You know why I hate this town?”

I shook my head, every muscle in my body twitching in preparation for him to kiss me again. My whole torso seethed with warmth.

“I like … both. Guys and girls. It sounds stupid to say it…. My parents figured it out, and they want to send me away again. To this camp or something. Convert me back to normal.”

I opened my eyes. He stared at me as his words settled in a way that told me I would never speak of this, never breathe a word. My mind had turned to mush, and I felt as if I were sinking into quicksand. He’d just kissed me. His words were
confusing, but I still felt myself wanting him to do things that sounded like phrases from a romance novel: to
tumble against my body
, to
be the man of me
. All my thoughts were misfiring.

“I don’t love anyone or anything here,” he whispered.

And then he was kissing me again. This time harder. My muscles tightened at first in happiness, but then his tongue was pressing into my mouth, gross and eel-like. Our teeth were clacking together. He pressed against me harder, and it was crushing. It hurt. I gasped, but the weight of him was too much, and his mouth was hard and mean.

He bit me.

I pulled away, a tiny bead of blood oozing on my lower lip — and that was when I began to cry. Jimmy laughed a hard, mean laugh. His eyes were narrow and hard.

“Don’t worry,” he said coldly. “I’m not going to date rape you or anything.” He laughed again, another hoarse, empty laugh. “Yeah, right.”

He sprang off the bed. My eyes were spilling hot, fat tears. He turned his back to me and changed the music. There was a knocking on the bedroom door.

Jimmy opened the door. I was so jangled that for a moment I couldn’t process anything. I took two deep breaths, and then my anthropological training kicked in — my observational skills, distancing me from the scene. I was merely an observer. And it was Margo standing there. She looked beautiful.

ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
A man in rural Zimbabwe often still must pay a
roora
, or bride price, typically ranging between five and ten cows, to the family of the woman he marries. The way she looked tonight, Margo would have gone for eleven cows at least.

From where she stood in the doorway, she couldn’t see me. I sat crying silently.

“Hey,” she said, leaning against the doorway and jutting out one hip. “Casey said you wanted to ask me something.”

Jimmy looked at Margo, then back at me, and then back at her again. And Margo saw me.

“What are you doing here?” I asked her, sniffling. “You told me you were sick.”

She hiccupped and turned her head away. “I felt, uhh, better,” my former best friend responded, “so I went to dinner with TR and Casey and Tabitha. You’d already left, Janice. I called your house. And we hadn’t really even planned to come by the party. It was a last-minute thing.”

“You could have called my cell phone,” I said.

Margo held up her hands in a gesture of exaggerated helplessness.

I wanted to throw up. First Jimmy had scorned me, and now my best friend had gone to dinner with all my sworn enemies? I couldn’t decide if I was more disgusted by Margo’s deceit, or by how impossibly clichéd it was — ditching me for a chance to hang out with the Beautiful Rich Girls. And then she happened to show up at Jimmy Denton’s bedroom door?! In the history of classic teen betrayals, how utterly unoriginal.

I swallowed and said the following words to Margo very carefully:

“I hate you.”

She looked at me for a few seconds. “Whatever,” she finally said.

Jimmy walked out of the room. Margo and I just stared at each other. My head was starting to hurt. I looked at the door and saw Margo wobble a little in her heels.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Dumbly, I followed her back downstairs, back to the blurred
glow of loud voices near the bonfire. As we went by the keg, someone handed Margo another cup of beer, which she drank quickly. We passed faces I knew. A bunch of soccer guys chatting up two cheerleaders. Some Student Council Types and a few Softball Huskies ambling over for more drinks. A freshman in a pink skirt vomiting quietly by the bushes. Across the bonfire, Jimmy Denton hooked his arm possessively around some other nondescript girl in a skimpy dress. Everything flickered with firelight, the images drifting in and out of focus. It was unbearably sad.

Tripp Duffy, the captain of the MHS baseball team, sidled up to Margo and me, spitting dark tobacco juice on the ground between us.

“Ladies. You’re lookin’ lovely this evening.”

Margo and I stared at him. Tripp was good-ol'-boy handsome, with a nose slightly crooked from a baseball that had hit him in the face, and the collar of his pink shirt popped.

“My buddies and I, we were talking. We said, isn’t Margo lookin’ good recently?”

Margo laughed, spurting beer out her mouth and nose, spilling some onto Tripp’s shirt. Was she drunk? I wondered. Why would Margo be laughing at a compliment? Perhaps she had a case of contagious laughter, a psychogenic illness I’d once read about. She kept laughing, clutching her sides and guffawing at his great joke. Then I saw that she was also crying, tears streaming, and her face was contorted in a way that looked like pain rather than amusement. Even though I hated her now, I felt a pang of worry.

Tripp looked at Margo, looked at the beer spattered on his pink shirt, looked back at her, and sneered. “Dumb slut.”

Coughing, Margo stopped laugh-crying and stared at him.

“Yeah, that’s funny. Keep laughing. You gonna have a little brown baby soon too? Just like your big sister?”

And that was when Margo punched him. It wasn’t exactly a good punch. Her arm was slow and uncoordinated, and her fist made only a dull, clumsy thump on contact, but the cartilage of his nose crunched slightly. And then there was blood.

“What?! Margo, what —?” I said. Margo was still crying. I’d never seen her like this before.

TR and Tabitha ran up beside us. “What happ — Tripp! There’s blood! Coming from your nose!” TR shrieked.

“Stupid bitch hit me. What’s wrong with you?” he hissed, pointing right at Margo.

TR jerked Margo over to the side, her eyes flashing. She spoke in a low, barely contained growl. “Seriously, Margo. We liked you.” She actually looked wounded.

Margo shook her head, doubling over. It looked like she might bear-hug TR or put her in a wrestler hold or —

Margo vomited onto TR’s shoes. It was red and chunky and fermented-smelling. It made a loud splatter.

TR stared at her feet, appalled. Her lips twitched but emitted no sound.

I stared too, horrified, at TR’s shoes for a moment before Margo sank to the ground. Sitting cross-legged, she held her head in her hands and began to sob and hiccup.

I stood before my supposed best friend, chewing my lip, the sour smell of wine vomit rising. Tripp and the others had scattered the moment Margo began to heave. Finally I guided the sobbing Margo back to the house through the basement door. We felt our way into the bathroom. I got a cup of water for Margo, who continued to whimper. Her face was runny with mascara and snot. She’d be lucky to get two cows for her
roora
now.

“You lied to me,” I said from my darkened corner.

“Not exactly. Well, sort of,” she whispered.

“How could you do that to me?” I asked, my voice breaking. “How could you choose TR over me? And what,” I said more quietly, “were you doing knocking on Jimmy’s door anyway? Jimmy — my crush, remember?”

Margo sighed. “Okay, first of all, Casey said he’d asked to talk to me. That’s all. It was nothing. And second — honestly, Janice? I was annoyed with you. I didn’t want to come with you to the party. You’ve gotten tough to be around. Your whole ‘anthropology’ thing … I’m sick of it. You’re so negative. So tough on other people — so tough on yourself.”

“Come on, Margo! Seriously? Anthropology is all I’ve got,” I said. “That’s not negativity. It’s truthfulness. Accuracy.”

“I’m not talking about anthropology. You’ve got to keep doing that. That’s your thing,” she said. “I’m talking about actually
trying
stuff sometimes. Not being all wry and detached. Not always commenting on people’s weird habits or stinky breath and then comparing them to some tribe you’ve read about somewhere. You know?”

“No,” I said, my voice rising. Margo’s words had cut me like jagged pieces of glass, and now I wanted to cut her back. “I
don’t
know. What I do know is that my observations of you are one hundred percent correct, Margo. You’re the girl EVERYONE whispers about. You keep secrets from your SUPPOSED best friend. You flirt with guys even when you apparently also have some Secret Boyfriend. You think you’re so pretty and cool and blah blah blah, but you’re NOTHING. Nothing but a fake and a cliché.”

“And YOU, Janice, are a fraud,” Margo said, her breath hot and sour in my face. “You’re afraid to do anything but sit on the sidelines and judge everyone. And you call yourself an ‘anthropologist’ like it’s this great excuse.” She laughed a dry, hard non-laugh. “Ha. You don’t know the first thing about actual anthropology.”

We stood statue-still for a beat, just staring at each other. I blinked back tears. Then Margo walked out of the house. “I want to go home,” I heard myself whimper.

FACT:
I sounded like a small baby mammal on a nature documentary, calling for its mother.

I stumbled back up the gravel drive to my mom’s car, where I sat for a long time, crying, before I drove away.