The Lit Report (2 page)

I have a few other friends at school. Brandy Light, who is skinny and pale to the point of invisibility, sits behind me in homeroom. She doesn't have an eating disorder—she's just one of those people who can eat crap all day without gaining an ounce. She loves candy, especially Reese's Peanut
Butter Cups, hates all forms of exercise and loathes the sun. Brandy has an older brother named Bud, who's in and out of jail, and twin little sisters named Margarita and Cristall. It's a good thing their mother found Jesus before she had a chance to name a kid Highball or Shooter. My mother says Bud is messed up because every time he says his full name, people laugh at him. I don't agree. I think Bud is messed up because his mother drank a case of his namesake every day she was pregnant with him. No amount of prayer is going to fix that.

Stewart and Marshall sit on either side of Brandy. Stewart is Korean and Marshall is Pakistani. For reasons unknown and unfathomable, they model themselves after Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and make terrible jokes about women, Jews and black people. They insist they're being ironic. Of all of us, only Brandy believes in God, and even she won't let a
WWJD
bracelet touch her bony wrist. What Would Jesus Do at Westland Christian High School? Turning water into wine would be frowned upon, as would hanging out with hookers. And forget about loaves and fishes in the cafeteria. Unless he could turn them into tuna melts. I figure Jesus would be happiest hanging out with me and my friends. I just can't see him playing on the basketball team or joining the Young Entrepreneur's Club. He might sign up for the choir, I guess, but is there anything in the Bible about his ability to carry a tune? At Westland, in order to graduate, you have
to join a club and commit to it for a full school year. Since none of us wanted to join the Bluegrass Club, the Mountain Biking Club, the Future Homemaker's Club or the Forensics Club (although that one sounded kind of cool), Ruth and I formed our own club. The Classics Club is fully sanctioned by the school and devotes itself to the reading and discussion of classic books that have been made into movies or
TV
shows. We meet once a month at Stewart's house, since he has the biggest
TV
. Because I've usually read the books, I hand out copies of a brief book report, Brandy fakes some discussion notes, Stewart and Marshall bring the movie, and Ruth provides the food. As we anticipated, no one else has ever tried to join, although if Jesus asked, I guess we'd have to let him in. He might have some interesting things to say about
Madame Bovary
or
The English Patient
.

Basically, Christian school is something that makes our parents feel good. Anyone with half a brain (which is about half the student population) can figure out that we're covering the same curriculum as other high schools—we just have Christian teachers, mandatory Bible study and daily prayer as well. We still have to write math exams, but no one bats an eye if you get down on your knees by your desk and ask for divine assistance. You're actually likely to get a better grade if you do, assuming you don't get caught reading the answers taped to the underside of your desk. In that case, you will be sent directly to Hell (aka Principal Dooley's office).
And don't believe anyone who tells you that kids at Christian schools don't do drugs, drink or have a lot of sex; we're teenagers, for God's sake.

The morning I saw the Soul Snatcher—after Mr. Dooley's announcements and after the obligatory prayer-fest and roll call (Ruth's absence was noted with a bit of eye-rolling on Mrs. Gregory's part)—I applied myself quite diligently to chemistry, physics and geography. It's always easier to concentrate when Ruth isn't around. She's my best friend, but if we had mottos mine would be
Don't Rock the Boat
and hers would be
I Wonder What Capsizing Would Feel Like?
I actually like school, a shameful fact that I reveal to as few people as possible. My grades can't help but reflect my fondness for academic stuff, but I keep my report cards to myself. My mom signs off on them, murmuring “Thank You, Jesus,” like he's my extra-special tutor. Report card day at Ruth's house is seldom a happy occasion. Ruth is brilliant, but in a wacky way. She can't do calculus to save her life, but she does a great business in signature forgery. There's a big market for that around report card time. I keep telling her that not graduating from high school will ruin our grand plan, and, to her credit, she's not actually failing anything at the moment. And of course she's never absent without a note signed by one of her parents.

At lunchtime I thought she might turn up at the Dairy Queen, but she wasn't there so I trudged back to school
alone with a belly full of the Brownie Batter Blizzard I need to keep me awake during Bible study. At the end of the day, when I finally dug my cell phone out of the bottom of my pack, I found fifteen text messages from Ruth, all saying the same thing:
Call me NOW!
Since the first message had been sent when I was on the bus that morning, I figured I could wait until I got home to call her. Talking to Ruth can be exhausting, and I like to be comfortable while she yammers at me. Plus, I was still a bit pissed off. Somewhere between the Dairy Queen and closing prayers, I'd gotten over worrying that the Reaper was an omen. Ruth's text messages confirmed that she must be okay. Bored, but okay.

When I got home, I picked up the snack my mother had thoughtfully left in the fridge and took it to my room. Baby carrots and broccoli florets—yum. I keep a small cooler in what Ruth calls my hopeless chest, which is her idea of a witty
double entendre
. My hope chest also contains an assortment of salty, fat-laden snack foods and a stack of tea towels embroidered with ironically appropriate Bible verses like “He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” I grabbed a jar of ranch dressing, a Coke and a bag of Doritos, swiped a few carrots through the dressing, nibbled a few chips and burrowed under my duvet to call Ruth. When she answered, I yelled, “Bueller!” in my best Dean Rooney voice. In my opinion,
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
is a classic, even though it wasn't a book first.
Ruth and I quote from it all the time. Maybe she hadn't spent the day driving around in a sports car or leading a parade, but she sure as hell hadn't been suffering through math and Bible study like me.

When she didn't laugh I yelled “Bueller!” again.

“Shut up,” she snapped. “It's not like that. I've been here all day, in bed, waiting for my best friend to return my calls.”

“Are you sick?” I asked, suddenly feeling guilty for not answering her messages sooner. “Do you have cramps or something?”

“No,” she said, “maybe I'll never have cramps again.” Even for Ruth, that was a pretty sweeping statement.

“Never have cramps again?” I said. “Cool. Where do I sign up? Did you go to a new doctor?” Ruth and I have been going to the same doctor since we were born. No way would Dr. Mishkin give her anything that affected her reproductive abilities, not without her parents' approval, which they would never give. Not ever. We're supposed to abstain from sex until we marry and then breed like rabbits. Birth control just doesn't enter into it. We're not even supposed to masturbate.

“Shut up,” Ruth moaned. “There's no doctor. It's just that...” Her voice trailed off. She actually sounded sick, and I was getting more worried by the second. Maybe I'd dismissed the Reaper too quickly.

“Just that what?” I said, sitting up in bed and creating an avalanche of chips and carrots.

“I did it,” she muttered.

“Did what?”

“It,” she said. “You know—sex. I had sex with Rick Greenway. On Saturday night. At Sharon's party. In the upstairs bathroom.”

“You had sex with Rick Greenway on Saturday night at Sharon's party in the upstairs bathroom?” I sounded like I was playing
Clue
.

“That's what I said, didn't I?” Ruth was starting to sound less like a character from
Steel Magnolias
and more like my old friend. “What are you, a fucking parrot? We got loaded and we had sex and then I came home. And that's about all I remember. So I can't even tell you if it was any good. My first time and I didn't even get a good look at his dick, so don't ask.”

“I wasn't going to,” I said, although I couldn't help thinking about it—Rick's dick. Rick's prick. And I didn't even like the guy. I knew that Ruth had vowed not to be a virgin when she entered grade twelve, so she was right on track, if not a little early. “You weren't raped, were you?” I asked.

“Don't be an asshole, Julia. Of course I wasn't raped. I went to the party to get laid and I did. It's just...” Her voice trailed off again.

“What?”

“It's not all it's cracked up to be, that's all. It hurt and it was over really fast.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I've read about that—you know—in novels.”

Ruth snorted. “Yeah, I bet
Pride and Prejudice
is full of stuff about dumb chicks who get drunk and give it up at parties to grade twelve guys with small pricks.”

“How small are we talking about?” I asked, looking speculatively at a baby carrot on the floor. She'd obviously seen something. “Zucchini? Parsnip? Dill pickle?” There was a moment of silence. I wondered if Ruth had hung up on me. She does that a lot.

Suddenly there was a loud cackle of laughter from my phone. “Gherkin,” Ruth announced. “Definitely a gherkin. With a side order of pearl onions.”

“Wow!” I said. “Excellent image. Makes him sound like the deli special.”

“Yeah, well, he wasn't.”

“Wasn't what?”

“Special. He wasn't special at all.” Ruth sounded like she was going to cry again, so I said the first thing that came into my head, something my mom had first said to me when I was thirteen and had a massive unrequited crush on Brandon Portland.

“There's someone special out there for you, sweetie,” I said in my suckiest voice.

“Yeah, right,” she muttered.

“You deserve at least a Polski Ogorki,” I said. “Or maybe you'd prefer a plain old kosher dill—”

“Shut up,” Ruth yelled. “You'll be lucky if you get a pickled green bean.”

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness...

—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities

Don't worry. I'm not going to start every chapter with a Dickens quote. Even I'm not that much of a nerd. But you have to admit,
A Tale of Two Cities
has an awesome first line. Most people have heard “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” even if they've never read the book. What they don't know is that the sentence goes on and on for over a hundred words.
Over a hundred words
. There's no way that Mrs. Hopper would have let old Charles get away with that. No happy faces for him. Anyway, in just over a hundred elegant words, Dickens gets the point across that it's a good idea to look at things from as many angles as possible, since each person has a unique point of view. Or as my Nana used to say, “There's more than one way to skin a cat.” Maybe that's oversimplifying it a bit. Maybe “One man's meat is
another man's poison,” another of Nana's favorites, is more appropriate. She and Charlie D. would have been soul mates, although, now that I think about it, all her favorite sayings are pretty gruesome. Like, “Living is like licking honey off a thorn.” Gross. True, but gross.
A Tale of Two Cities
also has a really famous last line, but that's a whole different thing.

Everything went back to normal after Ruth told me about the party. She didn't mention Rick Greenway (or his tiny tackle) again, and I didn't ask for more details. I informed my mother that I could no longer eat anything pickled. When she asked why, I said it was something to do with deli food being unclean. When my mother became a Christian, which was when I was about three, she immediately joined a Christian book club, the aforementioned exercise class, a group that does devotional ikebana and a choir that sings only Christian country music. She's backed off a bit since then—she dropped the choir and the book club—but she's still so busy that she's never actually gotten around to reading the whole Bible, so she believes just about anything I tell her. Like when I didn't want to go to camp, I told her that, according to the prophet Jeremiah, log cabins were an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. Or when I didn't want to take saxophone lessons, I told her that the playing of brass instruments was expressly forbidden by the Maccabees. I think that one's actually true. Especially when it comes to the tuba.

Ruth doesn't have much luck when it comes to parents. For one thing, she lives with both her parents; I live with just my mom. My dad lives across town with his new wife, Miki, and he's only been to church once that I know of in the past seventeen years. Ruth's parents are certifiable religious lunatics; my mom is a legal secretary who speaks three languages (English, French and Italian), loves musicals and is famous for her Holy Trinity flower arrangements made out of irises, pussy willows and wisps of sphagnum moss. My dad is a nurse in the neonatal unit at the hospital where his wife is a pediatrician. Ruth's father is a preacher, her mom is a preacher's wife and Ruth says that what they don't know about the Bible could fit in a flea's asshole. My mom stopped going to Ruth's dad's church when she realized what a redneck jerk he is. She's never come right out and said it, but that's my interpretation of her switch from the Glory Alleluia Gospel Assembly (aka
GAGA
) to her current church, All Saints. She says the music's better at All Saints, but I think what she really likes is that Father Shortwell doesn't yell, “I'm in the business of saving souls for Jesus, and my business needs backers,” when he passes the collection plate.