Lemon (7 page)

Rossi fakes orgasms because she wants the boy to feel good.

‘That's like lying to yourself,' I said.

‘It doesn't bother me.'

‘How's he supposed to learn to give girls real orgasms if everybody's faking it to make him feel good?'

‘That's not my problem.'

‘It's everybody's problem. Fake orgasms, fake smiles. How are they supposed to know the difference?'

She flicked her hair the way she does when she thinks I'm being juvenile.

‘It's no wonder,' I said, ‘when girls say “no” guys keep shoving fingers into them.'

‘Gross, please, spare me the details.'

‘They figure “no” is just token resistance.'

‘One day, Lemon, you'll grow up and we'll talk.'

I witnessed non-consensual sex while I was sitting in a tree last week. This boy pushed a girl on the grass and his hands were under her shirt and down her pants and she was saying ‘no' and he kept at it. I wanted to shout at her to grab the dweezle by the balls and give them a good twist. She just lay there, probably because she didn't want him calling her frigid or a dyke. What's sad is these girls grow into women who fake it. And the dweezles grow into men who think that women who don't let them do whatever they want and look ecstatic about it are bitches. People call me a bitch because I ditched Doyle. The one time I let him put his fingers up my snatch, all I could think about was when did he last wash his hands? When it started to hurt I told him I had to piss, which put a hold on the groping. Next I made like I had major menstrual cramps and had to locate some Advil.

I've been thinking maybe I should write that play, not to please the crawlers who'll probably give me shitty marks anyway, but to shed light on this crucial topic: the perils of faking it. I mean, if you fake it long enough you must lose sight of the real thing. Faking gets you places but then you have to lie there with your legs over your head
ooh
ing and
aah
ing for like, forever. Maybe you stop
expecting
to feel anything. Maybe it becomes normal to spend all your time making somebody else feel good.

8

O
ld Huff has us reading
A Midsummer Night's Dream
again. I'm doing Helena who's got to be one of Shakespeare's all-time most boring characters. Personally, I think the bard must have had a problem with women because they're all either chasing after some guy, doing flirty-flirty with some guy or trying to get some guy offed. Then there's the saintly, virginal types who don't have a live nerve in their bodies.

‘Who can tell me something about Helena and Hermione's relationship?' Huff queries. Everybody tries to look busy because nobody wants to tell him anything.

‘They hate each other,' Kirsten says. ‘That's obvious.'

‘Why is it that obvious?' I ask.

‘Yes,' Huff says, ‘why is that obvious?'

Kirsten twirls her hair, thinking hard. ‘They want the same guy.'

‘Is that a reason to hate somebody?' I ask.

‘They're
rivals, duh,' Kirsten says.

‘Do we always hate our rivals?' Huff inquires. ‘Don't we respect them?'

‘Not if they're after your guy,' Nicole explains.

‘What if the guy
lets
the girl go after him?' I ask. ‘Shouldn't he take some responsibility?'

‘He's a
guy
,' Kirsten says as though this explains everything.

This concept that boys are ruled by their gonads really irritates me. ‘How does his being a guy free him of responsibility?' I ask.

‘That's obvious.'

‘How is that obvious?'

‘He's a guy,' she says like I'm stupid.

‘Hermione doesn't hate Helena at the beginning,' I say. ‘Helena hates Helena.'

‘Why does Helena hate Helena?' Huff asks. As usual he's leaning on the back of his chair, looking as though he's about to make some profound statement. He never does.

‘Why does anybody hate themselves?' I ask.

‘Interesting question,' Huff says. ‘Why does anybody hate themselves?'

Megan, this fat girl, says, ‘Because their parents don't love them.'

Everybody tries to absorb this. Huff narrows his eyes to suggest that he's in deep contemplation. Being parentless, I can't comment.

‘Do we know that Helena's parents didn't love her?' Huff inquires.

‘She's
totally
ugly,' Kirsten explains. ‘She hates herself because she's ugly. That's obvious.'

‘Who says she's totally ugly?' I ask.

‘
She
does,' Nicole says.

‘No, she doesn't, she just says she isn't short and cute like Hermione.'

‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,' Megan says, which is truly outrageous as she never says anything. Personally, I think if
you
don't think you're beautiful, nobody else will. I know this from experience as I happen to think I'm hideous even though this Greek plumber who shows up for Cookies 'n' Cream tells me I'm ‘gorgee-ous.' He says it repeatedly, licking and dripping, ‘You are a gorgee-ous girl. Howcome you not married, what's a-matta with boyz deese days? They got no cocks?' When I tell him I'm only sixteen, he does this Mediterranean shrug like there's no better time to get hitched. The point is, him telling me I'm gorgee-ous doesn't make me feel any less hideous.

‘You're suggesting that she suffers from low self-esteem,' Huff says.

Low self-esteem
is a term used to excuse rudeness, laziness, meanness. Any time there's a problem at school the likes of Blecher blame it on low self-esteem. I bet Blecher figures old Hitler suffered from poor self-esteem. The rude, lazy and mean types don't get any less rude, lazy and mean after Blecher's pep talks. The old sense of entitlement kicks in. They want it all, and everybody knows the fastest road to power and riches is guns. Guns are a big self-esteem booster.

‘She's got a crush on a guy and he hates her,' Kirsten says. ‘That would depress anybody.'

‘Why?' I ask. ‘I mean, why would you want somebody who hates you? It seems to me, if you had half a brain, you'd go read a book or something.' That's another thing I can't stand about Shakespeare. He's always making people chase after people who hate them.

‘It's not about brains,' Nicole says.

‘That's obvious,' Kirsten says.

What they mean is it's about sex, something I – a frigid dyke – wouldn't know about. Huff's getting a little red around the ears with all this hormonal activity. The bell goes. I beat it.

Rossi won't come out of the bathroom because she's discovered that Kirsten and company have been texting about her, describing demeaning sexual acts she allegedly performs to try to be popular. They say she'll let a guy shove anything up her snatch, including small animals and snakes. I tried to make like this is so ludicrous it's funny. I did a fake laugh - me who despises fakery - hoping to keep Rossi from taking the slander too seriously. Ha ha ha. That's when she went into the bathroom. I can't see her taking pills or anything so I'm not too fussed. Her mother yells at us from the bedroom again. It's not actually yelling. She's not mad at us, she's just worried because there's nothing in the fridge for us to eat.
She
can't eat because she's got a serious stomach problem and doctors had to cut out most of her stomach. All she can eat is special gruel in cans, which means she forgets to buy real food on the way home from her bank job. After standing all day, she lies on the floor in her bedroom and rests her legs on the bed so the fluid drains from her swollen feet back into her body.

‘It's okay, Mrs. Barnfield,' I shout back. ‘We're eating Triscuits.'

‘Isn't there some cream cheese in the fridge?' Mrs. Barnfield yells. ‘I thought for sure we had some cream cheese.'

‘It's okay, Mrs. Barnfield. Get some rest.' I don't tell her about Rossi locking herself in the bathroom because she's got enough problems. There's been another bank merger and people like Mrs. Barnfield are getting downsized. Already the bank has cut back on her benefits, which is a major problem because she has to take all kinds of expensive drugs for her stomach problems. Her husband's no help since he's dead. He was a video poker addict who took off for South Carolina where they used to have video gambling machines in every convenience store and gas station. When he couldn't get any more cash from his credit cards, he locked himself in his car and set it on fire. So Mrs. Barnfield and Rossi haven't had it easy.

I'm thinking of making Rossi the star of my groundbreaking play. I started writing it last night when I couldn't sleep courtesy of the personal-trainer drummer. My main character's name is Lillian and she's been laid off from a bank and dreams of starting a hat-making business, only she keeps getting sidetracked by a soap opera called
Truly Loved
starring liposuctioned model types who jump in and out of the sack.

‘I never for one second forget that I'm dying,' Tora says. I'd forgotten she was there. That's how she survives in school. Nobody notices her.

Lillian, my main character, hadn't known that soap operas are about beautiful people humping. So there she is surrounded by hat felt and feathers, getting distracted by naked men and women going at it between the Dust Buster commercials.

‘I wake up,' Tora says, ‘and I know it's only going to get worse.'

‘What?'

‘Everything.'

‘Maybe you're depressed,' I say. ‘Maybe you should go on one of those drug trials they're always advertising. The ones beside the ads for premature-ejaculation recruits. They pay you for that stuff, all you do is take the drugs.' I've considered applying only I don't think I'm actually depressed. Sometimes I want to kill people but I don't think that qualifies as clinical depression. Athough it really got me down when I read about the British giving the Indians bits of blankets infected with smallpox. There was old King George stuffing himself with pheasant while the Indians were opening gift boxes stuffed with contaminated blanket.

‘You should come out, Ross,' I say through the door. ‘You don't want to worry your mum.' She doesn't answer. I've looked in their medicine cabinet. There's only Tylenol in there, and nasal spray. Mrs. Barnfield keeps her heavy-duty medications in the kitchen. Melody Pasternak tried to kill herself with Tylenol and ended up barfing black stuff for days. Rossi knows this so I can't see her trying it. Melody even wrote a suicide note about how she couldn't stand the loneliness and how Byron Whitehead had broken
her heart. Byron Whitehead is supposed to be an intellectual, he edits the school paper and writes really fascinating articles about scientific studies nobody gives a goose's turd about.

‘Ross,' I say. ‘There was this woman who lived in the eighteenth century. Her name was Mary Wollstonecraft and she was fed up with women having to follow men around all the time. And she was fed up with old Rousseau who wrote about how women should be breeding and breastfeeding. Basically she was fed up with dickheads telling women how to be women. This was way before the suffragettes or anything, I mean women weren't supposed to even have brains before the nineteenth century. Anyway, Mary wrote a book about women's rights, insisting that they should be equal to men's, and that it was high time girls stopped being raised to think that the most important thing in life was to please men. That's how people thought in those days, that a woman's duty was to please some dolt. Pretty soon everybody was saying nasty things about Mary because she was challenging the status quo, so there she was, all alone in some attic, writing down what was important to her.'

I don't hear anything in the bathroom. I try to remember if there are razors in there. ‘Ross … ?'

‘What's your point?' she says.

‘Just that you don't have to care what people say. People always talk. Words are wind, Ross, one big fart.'

‘I'm not like you. You don't care about anything.'

I don't argue. Like I said, the only time I've been heartbroken was when my hamster died.

‘What happened to her?' Rossi asks.

‘Who?'

‘Mary what's-her-face.'

‘Oh, well, she met some painter she had the hots for but he was already married. She asked his wife if she could move in with them but the missus wasn't too wild about that idea so Mary took off to France thinking there'd be some radicals there. She wanted to educate French women about how they didn't have to be doormats. The hitch was, the French Revolution was getting going and they didn't like freethinking women there either. Pretty soon those French Revolutionaries were talking about sending her to the guillotine. Fortunately she met some American adventurer she went nuts over and he told her to go to Scandinavia to educate women because the Swedes wouldn't cut her head off. So off she goes on her good mission, spreading the equality word. When she gets back to London she finds out that the adventurer's been banging boots with some tart. Mary got so depressed she walked around in the rain, figuring if her clothes were soaked she'd sink in the Thames. She didn't, though, a boatman pulled her out.'

This doesn't seem too smart, actually. If you want to sink, use rocks. Maybe Mary Wollstonecraft didn't want to drown. Maybe her dunk in the Thames was a cry for help.

‘Then what happened?' Rossi asks.

‘She left him and met some other guy she respected and trusted and who respected and trusted her. They got married, even though neither of them believed in marriage, and they had a baby.'

‘And they lived happily ever after,' Tora contributes.

‘No, actually. The placenta got stuck in her uterus and some doctor shoved his arm up her and tried to yank it out but it broke into pieces and got infected. She died two weeks later.'