Second Helpings

  Haviland, like Mac, wants me to bust out of the snow globe. I don’t think it’s a bad idea myself. But I’m worried about taking a nasty blow— instead of breaking through—when I hit the dome’s border head-on.

  the twenty-ninth

  I was feeling pretty hopeless when I was living in the most moneyed, peaceful, and trouble-free era in American history. So you can imagine how I’ve been since 9/11.

  It’s affecting me on a physical level. I’m awake for twenty-three and a half hours a day, but not really awake. I’m kind of in a walking-sleep state that makes it impossible to do . . . anything.

  I got a C on my AP Physics test. I’ve never gotten a C in my life.

  And running? My race pace is a stroll with just enough bounce to distinguish it from a walk. I haven’t won a meet all season.

  This has brought much grief to my father, but my mom didn’t worry until she realized that I wasn’t eating. I have never not been able to chow down.

  “These tragic events have taken a toll on everyone,” she said, eyeing my barely touched bowl of Cap’n Crunch this morning. “I think you should talk to a counselor. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  Ha! Our Professional Counselor has been unhinged lately herself. We’ve all seen Brandi in the parking lot behind the school, furiously sucking on cigarettes to cope with the onslaught of traumatized students who have sought her infinite wisdom.

  “Don’t think so, Mom.”

  My mother’s brow wrinkled with genuine panic. I hadn’t seen her this concerned since my sophomore year, when I told her about my MIA menstrual cycle.

  We both sat at the kitchen table in silence for a few minutes. During this time, my mom stared at me while I stared at a fascinating green thread hanging from my place mat. I’m telling you, I’ve been the walking brain-dead lately.

  Finally, my mother said, “I think you should visit Gladdie.”

  She thought that going to Silver Meadows and talking to Gladdie and WWII vets about the 3 H’s—Hitler, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust—would give me—guess what?—perspective. Quite frankly, I didn’t have the energy to argue, so I took her suggestion. As much as I hate to admit it when my mother is right, she was.

  At Silver Meadows, I was given the red-carpet treatment.

  “Look who it is!” exclaimed the receptionist, a chubby, fortysomething lady named Linda with frosted Farrah Fawcett wings. “It’s J.D.!”

  “Uh, hi,” I said. “How did you know . . . ?”

  “Oh! Gladdie’s told everyone about her brilliant, boy-magnet granddaughter!”

  I laughed weakly. Boy magnet. Har-dee-har-har.

  “Just go upstairs and follow the noise,” Linda said. “You’ll find her in the recreation room.”

  Sure enough, I could hear Gladdie’s strident voice rising above everyone else’s before I was halfway up the staircase.

  “So I say to the fella, ‘You can’t make a burlap purse out of that sow’s ear!’ ”

  Riotous, pacemaker-shaking laughter. They didn’t seem fazed by current events in the least.

  Gladdie was sitting at a card table designed to seat only four people, but was surrounded on all sides by an elderly coterie. Whether they were the same group as the first time, I honestly couldn’t tell. I’m not ageist or anything, but old people have a tendency to look alike. However, I did notice that Moe, “the cat’s meow,” was sitting right next to Gladdie. A deck of cards rested on the table, untouched. The game had been indefinitely postponed.

  Gladdie roared when she saw me.

  “J.D.!”

  Then, on cue, the whole group exclaimed, “It’s J.D.!” They were so excited to see me, as if I were Bob Hope or Milton Berle or some other ancient entertainer I’m not even sure is dead or alive at this point.

  “Uh, hi.”

  After a few minutes of grandiose and grossly inaccurate bragging about her granddaughter, Gladdie asked Moe to get her walker.

  “Well, guys and dolls, I gotta shuffle off to my room for some good old-fashioned girl talk with my granddaughter, here.”

  Moans of disappointment all around.

  “I’ll be back in time for arts and crafts, don’t you worry.” Then she clasped Moe’s hand and gave him a wink. “And I’ll see you later.”

  Moe lifted her hand and gave it a gentlemanly kiss.

  Was that . . . ? Could that . . . ? Were they . . . FLIRTING? I could barely wait to get to her room to interrogate her about what I had just witnessed.

  “Grandma! Have you landed the pick of the litter?”

  She looked at me with uncharacteristic coyness.

  “Oh my God! You have! You have a . . . a . . .”

  “A boyfriend, J.D.,” she said. “I’ve got me a boyfriend.”

  Gladdie told me all about their courtship. The flirtatious glances over the Yahtzee cup, the long conversations in the dining room over bowls of goulash, the hand-holding during Sunday-afternoon showings of Abbott and Costello. It all sounded very, very sweet, yet very, very distressing. I mean, imagine discovering that your ninety-year-old grandmother has a better shot at getting laid than you do. Not a pretty picture, now, is it?

  “So! I hear that you’ve been letting those towel-head lunatics get you down,” Gladdie said, relishing the political incorrectness only tolerated in the elderly.

  “Yes.”

  She sighed and sat next to me on her sofa, a dusty, rusty-brown velvet job that makes me sneeze if I sit on it too long.

  “Look, kiddo. We were all quaking in our boots during the Big One. Still, I had faith that our nation, the greatest nation in the world, would pull through and show those bastards what they had coming to them.”

  “But this is a different kind of war, Gladdie.”

  She didn’t even listen, she kept right on going about her contribution to the war effort, how she sold war bonds and worked in the Federal Office for Price Administration, whatever that was, and bartered coupons for nylons and pork chops.

  “I took comfort in doing without because I knew it was all for the greater good. We all made great sacrifices, none more so than those boys who lost their lives. Tragedy was part of our daily routine. But through it all, I never understood the point of being sad when I could choose to be happy.”

  Of the incessant jumble of words that have tumbled out of my grandmother’s mouth over the last ninety years, I would doubt that any were more perfect, or more profound, than those.

  “Don’t stop doing what you love,” she said, tenderly patting my knee. “Don’t let your future be ruined by a bunch of loony sand monkeys.”

  And with those words, the wise sage turned back into the mortifying big-mouth I’ve known my whole life.

  Gladdie obviously lives by the “choose to be happy” philosophy. She always seems happy, something I’ve long attributed to her senility. But maybe she was born that way. While it may be in her blood, it’s just not easy for me. I think Bethany got all the happy genes.

  I’m still scared about the future. Actually, I’m petrified beyond words, which is why I can’t write about it at length. Though Gladdie did help me today. It’s small and stupid, but I realized that I can’t keep doing what I don’t love, starting with cross-country. I don’t love competitive running. Never did. Now that my transcript is locked and loaded, why should I still participate in an activity that I hate so much? I should be doing something that’s important to me and isn’t just providing unnecessary padding for my college applications. The only glitch is that I’ve been living for college admissions officers for so long that I don’t even know what I like to do anymore.

  I need to work on that.

  October 1st

  Dear Hope,

  Pineville High has certainly taken our President’s advice to heart. Everything here is back to normal. Our Class Character elections perfectly illustrate that point:

  Most Athletic: Scotty Glazer

  Best Looking: Bridget Milhokovich

  Class Flirt: Manda Powers

>   Class Motormouth: Sara D’Abruzzi

  And last but not least . . .

  Class Brainiac: Me (and Len Levy)

  Hmm . . . Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Maybe that’s because we won the EXACT SAME TITLES IN THE EIGHTH-GRADE ELECTIONS. I’m surprised you didn’t still win Class Artist. The only differences between eighth grade and now are that the yearbook staff added new categories and reversed the middle-school rule that allowed only one victory per student. Scotty also walked away with Best Looking and Most Popular, the latter with Manda, of course, whose coupling with King Scott has elevated her social standing at Pineville High to nosebleed level. The Clueless Two got Bestest Buds. I got Most Likely to Succeed—again with Len. The addition of new titles made it possible for even Marcus Flutie to come out a winner. I would love to joke with him about his oxymoronic status as the universally accepted Class Nonconformist. But I can’t. It’s not that simple, even though I know you think it is.

  Anyway, I should be comforted by Pineville High’s resilient unoriginality, but I’m not. I don’t want things to go “back to normal.” I want things to be better than back to normal, because normal was never good enough for me.

  Predictably yours,

  J.

  october

  the second

  Bridget and I sat in the auditorium, watching Scotty and Manda get rock-star treatment.

  “Most Popular, up! Best Looking, on deck!” yelled Haviland.

  The yearbook photographer had recruited a dozen students to gather at the bottom of a ladder that had been spray-painted gold and coated in glitter. The lowly masses gazed up at their idols, who were perched as high as their Most Popular status could take them. As I watched, I started thinking about how this degrading display is at odds with our nation’s new appreciation of true courage and valor. I was figuring out how I could turn this into my first Seagull’s Voice editorial for the year, when Bridget clogged my brain flow with one of her classically sincere questions.

  “Why doesn’t anyone, like, take me seriously?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Best Looking.” She stuck out her tongue. “Bleeech.”

  Jesus Christ.

  “Bridge, don’t make me slap you. Don’t be one of those gorgeous girls who longs to be average-looking so she can be taken seriously. It’s insulting to the truly average.”

  “It’s just that—” Her voice broke.

  “What?”

  “It’s just that, like, I did a really good job in Spoon River last year, right? And I was good enough to get into SPECIAL.”

  She was good in last year’s play; I had to admit that. Her performance surprised me even more than Pepe’s. Pepe’s triumphant serious stage debut would have shocked me, as it proved there was much more to him than his legendary reign as the Black Elvis and PHS talent-show champion. But his predictable unpredictability has made it impossible for him to shock me anymore. Anyway, I told Bridget that she was good enough to make people temporarily forget how goddamn blond and gorgeous she is, which is the best compliment to her acting I can think of.

  “Thank you, Jess,” she said, the telltale redness rushing to her face and neck. She paused, and pointed toward Dori Sipowitz, who was in the corner, perfecting her pose with an oversized tragedy mask. “I just, like, totally beat her out for the lead in Our Town. And she’s still considered Class Drama Queen.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that you wanted to be voted Class Drama Queen?”

  “Well, like, yeah.”

  “Oh, come on, Bridget! Dori is a theater geek, through and through,” I said. “There’s no way anyone at PHS would see you as one of those tools.”

  “Percy said the same thing at play practice,” she said. Pepe was cast as the Narrator in Our Town.

  “Pepe’s right. You’re too pretty. You’re too popular. Too many guys want to get into your pants.”

  “That’s the problem,” she said softly.

  I’ll say it again. Jesus Christ.

  “Best Looking, up! Brainiacs, on deck!” yelled Miss Haviland, who’s also the yearbook adviser.

  “We better get up there before Haviland starts ranting about how today’s youth doesn’t respect time,” I said. “Don’t we see that our collective disregard for punctuality contributes to the unreliable devil-may-care image that undermines our credibility as a generation?”

  Bridget wasn’t listening. She was too busy chowing down on what would normally be her ponytail, but was released from its elastic for the photos.

  “Stop chewing on your hair, unless the saliva look is what you’re going for.”

  She kept right on gnawing as we made our way to the stage.

  Each Class Character photo is taken in front of the same red-and-white PHS logo backdrop, but with different props. For Class Motormouth, Sara yammered into a cell phone. For Class Flirt, Manda hung her hooters all over P.J., her prop/male counterpart, while Scotty glared off-camera. For Best Looking, Bridget and Scotty gazed lovingly at themselves in handheld mirrors. To her credit, Bridget rolled her eyes as she did it.

  “Honey, this isn’t Class Clown,” the photographer said. “Now, do me a favor and look pretty, like you’re supposed to.”

  Bridget called out to me, “See what I mean?”

  It was quite nauseating.

  Len was dutifully waiting for our photo, wearing a T-shirt I’d never seen him in before. Underneath a black-and-white pic of Einstein, read GREAT SPIRITS HAVE ALWAYS ENCOUNTERED VIOLENT OPPOSITION FROM MEDIOCRE MINDS.

  “Cool shirt,” I said. It reminded me of something Mac would say. I wondered if he’d be disappointed in my decision not to apply to Columbia. He’ll never have to know.

  Len cleared his throat, as is his custom, the signal that the babble was about to begin. “Not as perfect in its simplicity as Flu’s days-of-the-week thing that he has going, but it is a fashion statement in the truest sense of the word. Did you know that Einstein wasn’t a good student? In fact I doubt that he would have been voted Class Brainiac, because his teachers thought he had a learning disability, which is really ironic—”

  “I get it,” I said, cutting him off.

  I get very impatient with his blathering. Once he gets started, he can’t stop. It’s best just not to get him started at all. So we stood there for a moment not speaking, which is the way I like it with Len. When Len isn’t speaking, I can just gaze upon his hotness and begin to forget that he’s Len. I can get close to convincing myself that he’s this totally new cool, smart, and geek-cute guy, but as soon as he opens his mouth: Same old Len.

  “This is getting to be a habit with us. You know, first the Seniors of the Month photo, now this. I have a feeling that there are going to be a lot of pictures of you and me together in the future. Um. Um. Um.” He suddenly got all tongue-tied. “Um. I mean, that you and I will be winning all the big awards throughout the year and will be asked to pose with each other a lot and so we should just . . . um . . .”

  Mercifully, Haviland intervened. “Brainiacs, up! Most Likely to Succeed, on deck!”

  For Brainiacs, Len and I were surrounded by textbooks. This was funny, since I get all my work done in study hall and haven’t lugged home a textbook since my sophomore year.

  “Smile!” the photographer urged.

  We smiled.

  “Most Likely to Succeed, up! Nonconformists, on deck!”

  “That’s us,” said Len and I, simultaneously.

  “Most Likely to Succeed,” said I.

  “Not Nonconformists,” said Len.

  “No kidding,” quipped the photographer, dripping with sarcasm.

  For Most Likely to Succeed, we held a blow-up globe over our heads, which I suppose represents our inevitable world domination.

  “Smile!”

  We smiled.

  “Um. Jessica. Do you?”

  “Nonconformists, up!” Haviland shouted.

  Where was Marcus, anyway?

  “Um. Jessica?”

  I
turned to Len. “Uh, what? I’m sorry.”

  “How’s your. Um. Cross-country season going. And?”

  “Ugh. It sucks. I suck.”

  “Um. Do you have a meet on Saturday. Or?”

  “Yeah. Every Saturday. I hate it. It sucks. I suck.”

  “Um. Because I. Um . . .”

  “Nonconformists, you’re up! Come on, Nonconformists!”

  K8linnn Maxxxwell—who had her name legally changed to this Nonconformist spelling over the summer—hopped around the auditorium on her Nonconformist pogo stick, looking for Marcus.

  “Tra-la-la! Tra-la-la!” she sang, her Nonconformist catchphrase. “Tra-la-la! I’ll find Marcus!”

  “Um, Jessica?”

  “Nonconformists, where are you?” shouted Haviland, louder than before.

  Where was he?

  K8linnn boinged over to Haviland, the bells on her Nonconformist jester’s cap a-jangling.

  “Marcus isn’t here,” she said, gritting her teeth, which were covered in Nonconformist neon-green orthodontia. “He didn’t show up. Tra-la-la.”

  I damn near peed my pants I was laughing so hard. Now, that’s a Nonconformist for you.

  I was about to say as much to Len, but when I turned to face him, he had vanished, too. But Len’s disappearance didn’t disturb me at all. I was thinking about Marcus. Where was he?

  Where is Marcus?

  Why can’t I stop myself from asking?

  the Seventh

  In case you were wondering how my cross-country season is going, I still suck.

  Suck, suck, suckity suck suck.

  I suck worse than I did last spring. I’ve sucked about as badly as a nonparaplegic can suck at the sport of cross-country running. Last year I won the Juniors division at the Eastland Invitational. I won by eleven seconds, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is. Today, on the same course, against all the same girls, I ran forty-two seconds slower than I did last year. I came in twenty-third place! Twenty-third! The only upside to my suckiness is that the paper only prints the names of the top twenty finishers, so my humiliation isn’t a matter of public record.