“I can’t bring myself,” I said.
“Ask him at school on Monday, then. We’ll find a way.” She opened the door to my mom’s car. “Hi, Peggy!”
The whole way home, Meghan and my mom chatted cheerfully about her older brother’s baseball playing and her older sister’s college, and Meghan’s art class or something, while I put my phone on airplane mode, and then leaned my head against the cool window and talked myself out of throwing up.
That night we had dinner at the Grill with Sam, and even though I felt terrible about it, I didn’t call Sarah or Molly. Seeing Meghan, who had nothing to do with D’Arts, and didn’t even know the people involved, was too big a relief to be sacrificed by getting back into the real conversation about it, whatever that was going to be. I couldn’t imagine going back to school, and Sarah and Molly were evidence that that would have to happen. Plus, Molly was so—I don’t know, good, I guess. I just felt like she might be judgmental. So I avoided them both, thinking they’d assume it was because Meghan was a better friend and now that she was in town, I wasn’t interested in hanging out. I didn’t sleep at all that first night. I felt bad about Sarah and Molly, and brink-of-death panicked about Kyle. Meghan slept in my bed and I paced the room for like ten hours, checking my computer and phone every five minutes, opening books only to close them again, watching the silent, still street glitter under the lamps out the window. Time is a heavy, thick thing at night, and it moves like glue. That was the first Kyle Malanack all-nighter I’d pull. I took six more Excedrin, exceeding the limit again, which is part of what kept me up, since those things are like 80 percent caffeine. I also chewed two entire packs of gum.
On Sunday, I turned my phone on, and had sixteen messages from Sarah and nine from Molly, who wasn’t pretending anymore. “Call me right when you get this,” she said. “Did something happen? Are you okay?” I didn’t call back.
Meghan and I spent the day downtown, shopped at Urban Outfitters and Barnes & Noble, had lunch and dinner at the Grill with dozens of old people and a couple of Michigan students who sat on the same side of their booth and alternately sipped from their drinks and made out. As soon as they started kissing, I felt my stomach twist, wondered whether whatever had happened at Kyle’s would make me horrified by love for the rest of my life. When an old woman clucked disapprovingly at them, loudly enough for everyone to hear, Meghan threw me a knowing grin, not realizing she and I weren’t on the same side anymore. I was like the old lady now, disturbed that I had to watch their disgusting session. Of course, her reason for thinking it was inappropriate probably wasn’t that she had woken up less than forty-eight hours ago with a gaggle of naked teenage guys, unable to remember what she’d done. I wished I were the old lady, and then saw Meghan looking curiously at me. I wondered if I’d ever be able to explain how I felt—to anyone. The mere thought of trying made me feel exhausted and lonely.
I didn’t see anyone from D’Arts, and I worked on convincing myself that even if something had happened, as long as I never mentioned it again, and no one else did either, I could just pretend it hadn’t, and go on. I would just pretend. Pretend. Stay quiet.
The idea that that might work gave me a little comfort for a day.
12
Because people are fundamentally animals, it makes sense that I knew before I knew for real—that something was very wrong, like I-can’ t-make-it-go-away, parasite-clinging-to-your-insides-gobbling-up-your- life wrong. I mean, more than what-had-happened wrong. I mean lasting, scary, something bigger than I had ever imagined.
There was the way the hallways seemed suddenly to expand and contract. They were long and daunting and dark, even before precalc, when morning light blasted in from the windows and lit the school like a stage. There was the way several seniors who had never talked to me moved their bodies a bit closer to each other when they saw me, the sharper voices they used, a weird, silent laughter underneath their “Hello, Judy.” The fact that they said hello at all, which they had never done before. Maybe it was just Meghan, I hoped, maybe I had just multiplied the dwarf thing to the next power by bringing her to school. Or maybe it was because
Runaways
was going up that night, February 8. Yes, maybe that was why the building had that stomach-turning energy. Everyone was just nervous, that was all. All day I felt like my stomach was a bleeding ulcer, like I might fall, like the floor was uneven, moving. I kept telling myself it was
Runaways
, that I was just nervous, too, I mean, it was the first show I’d done at Darcy.
But then Goth Sarah cornered me in the doorway to American lit and was like, “What the hell is going on? Are you okay? Are you mad at me?”
“No, no,” I said, “I just couldn’t deal with it this weekend. I’m so sorry.”
Right as Ms. Doman was about to start class, Molly came in and looked over at me, like “What the hell?”
I looked back at her, mouthed, “Sorry.” I passed notes to both her and Sarah, saying, “I’m sorry, and I’ll explain everything I can asap.” Molly turned and nodded, but when I passed the one to Sarah, she read it and her expression didn’t change at all and she just stuffed it into her notebook without looking up at me or writing back. Meghan was watching us like a puppy at a Ping-Pong match.
On the way to AP bio, I told Meghan that Sarah was mad at me and had every right to be, and that hopefully we would all hang out, at lunch and after school and before the play and as much as possible before Meghan went back to California, and I’d fix it.
“Why is she mad?” Meghan asked.
“It’s a long story,” I said, “but she’s been a really good friend and I never tell her anything. Kind of the same with Molly, I guess.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe because I don’t want any of it to be true.”
Then she went to the library to do homework, since Mr. Abraham didn’t allow visitors in his top-secret dead-cat lab. I went to AP bio alone and dissected Cletus the Fetus’s vascular system with Rachael Collins, and it was the happiest hour of my life, because Rachael and I have that kind of relationship where even though we’re high school lab partners and it seems like we see each other constantly, she’s so polite and quiet that we still barely know each other and so we didn’t have to talk about anything except anterior ventral veins. I made labels: cephalic, jugular, axillary, subclavian. But toward the end of it, I started thinking of my own neck, of what an autopsy of my body would look like. And as soon as I began to think of that, I thought of myself on the table, that black slate or whatever-it-was table, naked, cut open by my classmates, them laughing and labeling my jugular as they sliced it open but no blood came out, because I’d been deblooded like the cats. And as soon as I imagined that, and I mean really imagined it, the way you can sometimes understand death and forever in the dark of your bedroom as a little kid, the smell of the cat hit me. And it smelled like clammy, chemical death, and I gulped down a bunch of air, trying to push the rising nausea back down, but the more I swallowed and breathed the more dead cat and veins and stomach and muscles came into my body through my lungs and I could feel my skin prickling and rising in a chill, and even that made me think of cats, the way they arch their backs and the hair stands on end, and Rachael was like, “Are you okay, Judy?” And I realized all the blood had drained out of my body and I had to excuse myself and run to the girls’ bathroom.
I locked myself in a stall, and right away considered staying there for the rest of the day, or even the rest of the year. I could write an “out of order” sign and stick it on the wall and hope it would keep people out forever. I sat on the toilet, pulled my legs up, wrapped my arms around my knees and buried my head in them. Even though it smelled like pee, being away from the pickled cats was such a relief that I felt the nausea subside a bit, and I sat there for a long time, maybe even fifteen or twenty minutes, focusing my mind on outside things: a coral reef I had swum in when Chad and Sam and I were kids; the image of my mom’s purple terry-cloth bathrobe hanging from her and my dad’s bathroom door; the leather cover of my most recent diary, with flower imprints and a thin strap. I thought of blank pages of paper, my pink pen, scripts, the smell of books. I kept my mind on good smells, maybe because the bathroom reeked more and more, maybe because of the cats.
Then the bell rang and the doors started opening and girls came in to chat and put on frosted lipstick and I heard a stream of pee and then Kelly Barksper’s voice come out from a stall like, “Did you hear what it was of ? Oh my god.”
But no one responded and she was like, “Kim? Are you still in here?”
And then she left her stall, didn’t even wash her hands, or at least I didn’t hear the water running, and then the door of the bathroom opened and closed again and I didn’t hear anything else. But the nausea was back, so bad and intense that I had to climb down from my perch and throw up into it. I was bent over the toilet, retching, praying no one would come in, when I remembered suddenly that Meghan was there, that she’d been in the library waiting for AP bio to end, that she’d be waiting at lunch for me. So I dizzily wiped my mouth with a piece of toilet paper, thinking how scraps of it would probably be glued to my face for the rest of the day. Then I inhaled and opened the stall door, just as Elizabeth Wood and Amanda Fulton walked in. When they saw me, I knew for sure that something horrible was going on, because of the way they stopped and stood absolutely still, staring at me. Amanda’s mouth was open, like she was going to say “oh my god,” but nothing came out.
Elizabeth pulled herself together before Amanda did, was like, “Oh,
hey, Judy
,” which was enough evidence because she’d never said hey to me before, and certainly not all fake-casual like that, so I was like, “Oh, hi,” and bolted from the bathroom as fast as I could, worrying, even at a time like that, that they would notice I hadn’t washed my hands. Without even checking the mirror to see if I had barf on my face or toilet paper stuck to my mouth. I went straight to my locker and checked in the mirror, and I looked fine, actually. A little pale around the eyes and flushed in the cheeks, but okay. I swished some mouthwash and swallowed it, put a piece of gum in my burning mouth.
I realized I hadn’t seen Ginger all day—maybe she was absent. I was thinking about this when I saw Meghan, standing in the hallway, looking around, confused. People were staring at her as they walked by on their way to lunch, but she’s used to it too, so I didn’t have to say anything like “Sorry I brought you to my school and then left you in the hallway for the sharks to devour.” Maybe they were just staring at her because they couldn’t believe there were two dwarfs in the world and thought she was me, like, since when did Judy have tan skin and curly dark hair? When I walked up, Meghan’s face lit up and I had the thought that she really loved me and it would be so nice if she could just live in Ann Arbor and we could go to school together and shut the rest of the world out. Or shut the world out and never go to school again, just hang out and read books.
“ Judy—you okay?”
“Sorry. I got kind of sick—something about the cat freaked me out all of a sudden, so I went to the bathroom.”
“You okay now?” she asked.
“I’m over the cat thing, if that’s what you mean.”
We made our way to the cafeteria, and when we got there and walked in, it was literally like we were in a movie, and I mean a really overstated, crazy one about high school dynamics, where everything that happens is so obvious that you want to hit the writer over the head with your lunch tray. Except the person writing the story about my life was doing a little high-school-humor joke about irony, since I was the protagonist and didn’t know what the hell was happening. Isn’t that what irony is, when everyone else knows something horrible that’s going on with you but you don’t know it? Like Oedipus killing his dad and about to fuck his mom and the whole audience like, “Oh my god,” and him like, “Life’s too good to be true”?
Because when we came into the cafeteria the entire room froze. Conversation died like someone had blown a fuse, and the smell of whatever nasty food they had prepared hung like a toxic curtain over the room. My stomach clamped and I had the panicked thought that I might throw up right then, in front of everyone. The entire room was watching me. But I didn’t throw up, and the freeze lasted only one single, mind- and soul-wrecking second, before people went back to talking and Meghan started to say, “Wow, I guess two dwarfs are—” but got cut off because Goth Sarah had seen us and come over from the table where she’d been sitting alone.
“Judy! What the fuck happened on Friday night? People are talking about it.”
I started coughing when she said this, and couldn’t stop. She whacked me on the back. When it finally looked like I wasn’t going to choke to death, I said, “What are they saying?” and made my way to the line, looking at the glass counter, all steamed up from the “pasta” they were serving, which looked more like a red Jell-O mold with some bow-tie-shaped noodles floating in it.
I pointed to it and a plastic box of salad, and the hair-netted woman on the other side clacked some blocks of food onto my tray. I thanked her, slid down the line, paid.
“Um, Sarah, this is Meghan. Meghan, Sarah.” They stopped for a moment and exchanged real smiles, before we all remembered we were in a horror movie.
“Judy, did you”—Sarah’s voice dropped to a scratchy whisper—“hook up with Chris? Or Alan? Did you—um, did you guys—are you okay?”
At this, Meghan looked from side to side to see if anyone had heard, but no one seemed to have, so she went back to staring at the neon pasta she was carrying.
We made our way back to a table in the corner, where Sarah’s bags were. As we walked, I felt a million insect eyes on my sides and face and back, prickling me like a heat rash. I felt jittery, like I might drop my tray. Which would have been fine, since I couldn’t imagine eating a bite of food ever again.
We sat down and looked at our food. The red pasta reminded me of the cat and my stomach lurched. Sarah didn’t say anything, just watched me.