On another whiteboard is the Wiener Meter. It’ a three-foot-tall, dry-erase hot dog indicating with brown marker how many I’ve sold, and how much more I have to sell to pay for two years at County and two more years at a state school somewhere. I have $2,466. I need $5,454 more, assuming I get some good financial aid. I make a profit of $2.17 per frank, so I need to sell 2,513 more hot dogs. At an average of twelve hot dogs a day, that’s 209.42 more days of selling hot dogs one day at a time.
It’s good to be goal oriented. I will study accounting. Get a job at the phone company and get an apartment nearby so that I can continue to take care of my parents.
Zoe says it’s good to be goal oriented but that I have the wrong goals.
Tucked in a desk drawer that no one knows about is a red folder filled with information about studying abroad in Sweden. On the wall behind me is a black-and-white signed photograph of Astrid Lindgren sticking out her tongue. And my bookshelf is filled with soft, washed-out, well-loved copies of her books. Not just the Pippi ones, although those were my favorites. (I was Pippi Longstocking three years in a row for Halloween, and one year my father dressed as my horse and I pretended to pick him up with one hand.) But the more obscure ones too, like The Brothers Lionheart, in which the heroic young brothers die not once, but twice, to experience two different levels of heaven. In their final death, they jump off a cliff together so they’re never left apart.
I guess that red folder represents the goal of my true self. If there were no society, no circumstances, no friction, I would become an author-slash-illustrator of books about egalitarian utopias like Sweden, where girls are more like boys and vice versa. And I’m really not sure my ideas about Sweden are accurate, so I would start with a study abroad to find out.
Abroad is a word that people at Johnson High don’t think about, though. At least since they fired all the guidance counselors and put the school secretary in charge of “guidance.” She just goes about her normal business, and if someone has a guidance question, she refers them—with a not so kind gesture—to her pile of applications to County College of Morris.
Just for kicks I open up my file cabinet and pull out a yellowing crackly construction-paper volume of Mother Ship and Barnacle Girl, which of course I’ve kept because I’m like that. My mother’s face was drawn in profile. Her torso, the figurehead of the ship, and the hull the rest of her body. As Barnacle Girl, I wasn’t really a barnacle but a super girl with a mask and tights made shiny by pressing down too hard on a purple crayon.
“Over there, Mother Ship,” says Barnacle Girl in a black crayon speech bubble.
“Our destiny awaits,” replies Mother Ship as she beaches herself on the shore.
Well, you can’t argue with that, I think, and I tuck the book back where it belongs, still wondering how it will all turn out.
DISAPPOINTMENT
I wear my (schm)UGGs because I don’t want to make any noise crossing back and forth across the gym. Even though I like the sound of my high heel hitting a floorboard when there’s a hollow underneath it (clonk), I don’t want to call attention to myself today.
I shouldn’t have worried about it, though. Only ten of us showed up to “Paloozapalooza,” Johnson High’s combined Art Show, Science Fair, and ClubExpo run by Ms. Brennan.
The gym is dark. They only bothered to turn on half the lights, and some of the fluorescent tubes are buzzing and flickering as if they have mosquitoes fluttering around inside them.
A ripped and peeling student painting of an eagle making a muscle hangs on the far wall. A lonely red and gray banner hangs over the bleachers. BASKETBALL STATE CHAMPS 1987.
Outside it’s windy, but warm. Sandstorm weather even though we’re far from a desert. Every once in a while we can hear a gust of wind slap and whistle against the windows, which are high above us. In the hallway above the gym door, Ms. Brennan’s eight-year-old scrawled a pink Paloozapalooza poster in bubble letters with the final “ooza” squished together because she didn’t leave herself enough room.
Each of the ten Paloozapalooza participants is setting up a card table “booth.” In science, I am “presenting” my findings of my study on fruit fly genetics; in art, my Self-Portrait in the Lincoln Tunnel; and I am supposed to hand out flyers to recruit people for the school newspaper, which right now I create entirely on my own. So far I’ve given a flyer to Thalia, Ms. Brennan’s eight-year-old. And to Julian, who is here to recruit for the school’s first GLBT support group. He is wearing a fedora and a skinny tie to look official. And spreading out a fan of “It Gets Better” brochures that have been graffitied with black Magic Marker cocks in people’s mouths and the word fag scrawled all over the place.
“How could it possibly get better than this, Hannah?” he asks sarcastically, holding up his fan of tarnished materials.
“I don’t know, Julian. We are the lucky ones.” I sigh. “Here. Want to join the school newspaper?”
“Sure. Want to join GLBT?”
“Sure,” I say.
“Really?”
“I just like the message. It’s got to get better, right? How could it possibly get worse?”
“Oh god. Don’t say that,” he warns, and just then Amanda Le, the school’s entire Asian contingent, starts playing “Für Elise” on the bassoon. Hers are the only parents who showed up, and they huddle next to each other, standing in front of their daughter, holding one of Julian’s brochures, listening intently to the music.
When Amanda is finished, Julian and I break into applause and whistles, which makes Amanda smile a little and take a little bow next to her bassoon.
“Show me your work,” Julian says, so I escort him over to my fruit fly exhibit.
“Some fruit flies have blue eyes and some red. And some of them,” I say, turning the page to another graph, “have same-sex partners.”
“This is groundbreaking,” Julian says.
“Not really. They could just prefer the company of men,” I start.
“Who wouldn’t?” Julian finishes. It’s an old Homer joke from The Simpsons.
I show him my self-portrait.
“So Freudian,” he says. “The tunnel. It’s a celebration of the mysteries of the vagina.”
“What?” I laugh. “I just like the Lincoln Tunnel.”
“Of course you do. Here. Take a brochure,” he says, lifting and lowering his eyebrows.
Ms. Brennan has dressed up a little for the event. She’s wearing a peasant top and a straight denim skirt with brown leather boots. She’s flushed and innocent and trying to muster up some enthusiasm for us. Even though she spent a week begging the custodian to set up the microphone and speakers, there is now absolutely no need for them.
She has prepared a little speech, so she starts to talk without the microphone as we gather around her. Her husband, the only other adult in the room aside from Amanda’s parents, hoists Thalia up onto his shoulders. Mrs. Brennan clears her throat, blushes, and begins to read from a folded piece of printer paper. “Welcome to the . . .” She stops, looks up at us with our heads down, ashamed to be participating in this lame event rather than the packed-to-capacity pep rallies for the football team. “You know what? I’m going to use the effing microphone!” she announces.
She tosses her piece of paper aside, stomps to the microphone, and turns it on. It squeals for a second and then calms down. “And do you know why I’m going to use this fucking microphone?” Amanda Le’s parents look at each other with concern. “Because you guys fucking deserve it. You guys . . .” She has to stop and wipe a tear and take a deep breath. “You guys are my fucking heroes.”
Ms. Brennan’s husband is smiling—giving her some hand signals that seem to mean “ix-nay on the ucking-fay,” but he seems proud and amused nevertheless.
“Really. You guys are warriors. Warriors against the cult of stupidity that is taking over our nation. And I’m p
roud of you. I don’t care if the rest of the school isn’t proud, or that your parents don’t give a shit. In spite of that, you showed up. And you care. And you should be proud of yourselves, because obviously, no one else is going to do it for you. You guys are strong, intelligent, caring warriors, and I’m so happy I got to know you! I’m proud of you, and Mr. and Mrs. Le over there are proud of you.” Mr. and Mrs. Le nod enthusiastically. “And Joe and Thalia are proud of what you’ve accomplished.”
“I’m proud, too!” a voice announces behind us. Zoe suddenly sweeps into the gym with Noah, the clonking of her high-heeled boots echoing across the otherwise silent, practically empty, pathetic, half-dark gym.
“And I’m proud as a peacock,” Noah says. “I learned proud last week!” He walks and then gallops a little, his hand letting go of Zoe’s to engage in some enthusiastic flapping. A little chick trying to take flight.
“Sorry we’re late,” Zoe says. She hugs me. I was hoping maybe my dad would come. I knew Zoe would show up, though. She’s very good at feigning interest in my pursuits. She is, when I stop to think about it, my entire family. Some people have whole rooms full of people to feign interest in their pursuits. Large Italian families full of sisters and brothers and cousins and aunts and uncles. I have Zoe. And Noah, of course, but feigning isn’t his best talent. He tries for a second to be interested in genetics, but then darts over to Simon O’Malley’s exhibit on “String Theory and the Ever-Expanding Universe,” which Simon basically copied verbatim from a PBS Nova special.
“Here,” Zoe says, and she hands me a brown shopping bag with pink ribbon handles from some boutique.
“What’s this?” I ask, peeking inside.
“Clothes,” Zoe says, without looking away from my painting. “This is so good. The brushstrokes around the eyes and the fluorescent light from the tunnel . . .”
“Thanks,” I say. “Why clothes?”
“Party. Eight o’clock.”
“What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” As much as I like rules, I have trouble with the rules of fashion. I wear clothes to cover my skin and stay warm. If it’s cold, I wear more clothes. If it’s warm, I wear less. I’m not particular about the intimate details. Which I’m sure is true of teenagers in Scandinavia. There, it’s too cold to be vain.
“Full details or big picture?” Zoe asks.
“Big picture.”
“Well, UGGs are for walking home from the beach after surfing in Australia. They are shapeless and bland and sloppy and will give you shin splints if you wear them for more than an hour. We’ve also talked before about avoiding trends and dressing for the shape of your body. If you’re wearing pants, they need to be . . .”
“Boot cut or flare,” I finish.
“And those?” she asks, pointing to my legs and taking a sip from her water bottle, which I’m guessing is filled at least partly with vodka.
“Are skinny jeans.”
“And you are . . . ?”
“Not skinny.”
“Which is . . .”
“Good. I should accentuate, yet balance my curves with proper proportion.”
“Right. We need to go.”
“Where?”
“Ethan is having a party.”
“Ethan Drysdale?”
“Yup.”
“What about Noah?”
“He can come. Let’s go, Nos,” Zoe lifts her poncho-covered arm like a bat wing and gestures for Noah to wrap up his ramblings about the cosmos. I consider her poncho and why that would be an impossible choice for me. Where would I put my backpack? Under it? Like a turtle? Or a soldier trudging through the trenches in the rain?
She does look good, though. Everything she’s wearing is the same tone of steely gray. Even her fingernails. Which are polished. Something I’ve never even bothered to try since they’d just get chipped in ten minutes anyway.
I pack up my stuff and obediently go to the girls’ locker room to change for our Ethan Drysdale manhunt. I have my reasons for accompanying her. There’s the anthropological curiosity: How do rich kids behave at a party? There’s my own romantic fantasy: Maybe Danny Spinelli will be there; he and Ethan used to play Little League baseball together, and they still hang out sometimes. And there’s my obligation to Zoe: my talent for keeping her safe and checking her outlandish impulses that began the very day I met her at age seven. I was collecting reeds for a project on papyrus at the marshy, swampy part of the lake at the end of our street, and I found her posing nude for a teenage boy who promised to give her a dollar.
“Hey!” I interrupted him just as he was about to take a photo, and he ran like a deer through the reeds, the susurrations of his retreat rustling around him until he made it to the street.
“That was stupid,” I told her as she pulled on her T-shirt.
“I know. I should have gotten the dollar first,” she said, and from then on I knew I needed to watch out for her in a different way than she needed to watch out for me.
• • •
The girls’ locker room is so deeply embedded with live microorganisms squirming in the grout between the gray and yellow tiles, I expect one day it will become sentient, and the walls actually will talk. Hopefully they will send a positive message to future students:
Girls in your underpants, I speak to you from the walls. Listen to me and to those who have come before you . . . Surrender not your power to popular girls or to boys who cannot help but use you . . .
“Hannah! What’s taking so long?”
Zoe interrupts my reverie long enough for me to finally notice the clothes I’d been unthinkingly squeezing myself into. A lacy white push-up bra beneath a crisp, white blouse and a camel-colored merino wool pencil skirt.
“What the heck am I wearing?” I ask.
“We need to stop at the bar.”
Zoe sees my breasts as an opportunity. A year ago when I developed them—I could actually feel the tingling of cells wildly dividing and creating more and more mass to push against my bra—Zoe, who will never have breasts (they are just nowhere in her family tree), did not get jealous but instead was struck with an idea.
She squeezed them together with a push-up bra, dressed me in a low-cut business suit, handed me her mom’s reading glasses, and drove me to Mickey’s, the local dive where my dad used to take me for a lunch of maraschino cherries while I spun around on the bar stools.
I could barely see as I stumbled in wearing the glasses and asked for a case of Corona. Seventy-year-old Mickey was too distracted by my boobs and too convinced by my professional getup to ask for any ID. He brought the beer right out and loaded it into the car as if businesswomen every day are walking into dive bars asking for cases of beer. So now I’m a regular, even though I never drink. The case of beer I’m able to acquire has gained us entry into any party we want.
“Don’t you think these rich kids can get their own beer?” I ask.
“We are more alike than we are unalike,” Zoe postulates.
“Since when, Maya Angelou? Since when are we anything like them at all?”
Zoe ignores me and rushes me out, handing me some jeans to change into when I’m done buying beer. Clicking this time across the gym in the heels Zoe has brought for me, I say good-bye and thank you to Ms. Brennan, who is playing some kind of complicated patty-cake game with Thalia. She seems to feel a little better now, about the turnout of the event.
“It was the first one, don’t forget,” I tell her. “Next year it will have some traction going in. You can build on it.”
“That we will, Hannah! Have a nice night!” she calls.
FEAR
In the car, Zoe’s old Chevy Nova spotted with primer, Noah tells us his theory of extraterrestrial space travel.
“Guess what, Hannah?” he asks. Zoe has trained him to start this way, a small prompt to at least try to engage in conversat
ion rather than just blurting out his theories without regard for the other person.
“What, Noah?” I ask.
“Did you know that we will probably never see a being from another planet . . . because other solar systems are so far away? No one can even really fathom the size of space. One light-year is six trillion miles, and the closest star is four-point-four light-years away. And if beings from another planet could get to us, they wouldn’t have any need to get to us. That’s the paradox. If they had the enormous amount of energy resources to travel twenty-five trillion miles, they would not need to exploit our planet for energy because they had already figured that out. And if they figured out the energy problem, it follows they could probably solve the water problem and food problem. There’s really no reason for them to look for us.”
“What about slavery? Would they need us as slaves? Or pets?”
“We’re here,” Zoe says as we pull into the sloping bar parking lot right in front of the Dumpster. A requisite rat scurries underneath it.
“Oh. Pets,” I hear Noah considering. He’s still talking as I climb out of the car.
The wind slams the door shut. It’s an ominous wind. The kind that turns over the leaves of the trees, exposing their backsides and threatening a storm. I turn up the collar of Zoe’s mom’s trench coat and step into the bar, making sure that my cleavage is exposed. I walk into the packaged goods side of the building, where Mickey himself stands at the cash register reading the paper.
The place smells of metal beer kegs and mildew—the yeasty, stale smell of beer, cigarettes, and middle-aged bad breath. The air tastes like a dirty penny. It is decorated with the free promotional neon signs from beer companies and one very large buck’s head above the center of the bar, which is directly behind me as I ask for a case of Corona in my raspy, mysterious starlet voice.
“Right away, dear,” Mickey says, and I like him because he doesn’t bother to strike up conversation. He signals to his slow nephew bar-back to grab the case from the walk-in refrigerator and put it in the car, and I pay him in cash. As I’m paying, though, I can feel myself being watched.