Notes on a Near-Life Experience (11 page)

I
REMEMBER WHAT HALEY SAID ABOUT THE FREAK BATHROOMS
, the ones none of our friends ever use. Maybe I'm one of the freaks now; maybe I've been one all along. I decide to use one of them, the one in the math building—don't get me wrong, I'm curious about industrial technology, but I've got to pace myself. When I walk through the door, it's like walking into one of those old movies from the eighties about high school, the ones that show girls with too much makeup on smoking in the bathroom while they try to hide their hickeys with cheap cover-up and talk about abortions. Well, it's almost like that. It smells like smoke and there're trashy girls. I rush into an empty stall. While I sit there—too nervous to pee, for some reason—I listen to them talk.

“I had to call into work for her this morning because
she was too wasted to get out of bed. I told them it was food

poisoning.”

“They believe you?”

“Who knows. They acted like they did. They have to. Who else are they gonna find to work that crap job?”

I sit in the stall, not quite understanding what I'm doing there, trying to breathe, when I find myself in tears. Not just crying quietly, but sobbing, unable to catch my breath, making loud gulping sounds. I haven't cried like this since I broke my femur in a freak trampoline accident. The bathroom goes silent except for my wailing. I imagine the girls looking at each other, trying to figure out who's in here, what's going on. The second-period “bell” sounds, an unnatural electronic buzz.

“Shit. If I'm marked late again, they'll call my house.”

I wait in the stall until I hear them leave. When everything is quiet, I unlatch the door and walk over to the sink. I've started to wash my hands, just because it seems gross to leave a bathroom without washing your hands, when I hear a retching sound. Someone is throwing up. I freeze. The toilet flushes and I hear the sound of a door being unlatched. Without thinking, I turn around to look at the puker. It's Kiki Nordgren. She doesn't belong in this bathroom. And she doesn't look sick, the way you should if you've just thrown up.

I realize I'm staring. I push down the handle of the towel machine and the grating sound reverberates through the bathroom. I dry my hands, looking back once more before I push through the door; she is watching me.

After school I see Kiki walking to her car with a few of her bratty friends. She looks perfectly healthy. So if she wasn't throwing up because she was sick…

So even Kiki…

It seems impossible.

H
E CALLS ME UP, WHISPERING
, “O
KAY, HE'S HERE, AND
I'
M
going to tell him, but I wanted to tell you first… that I am going to tell him…so that you know.”

“Who is this?” I ask.

“Cute. Very cute,” Julian is still whispering.

“Why are you whispering?” I yell into the phone. I get giddy like this whenever we interact now; I start acting crazy and silly, and I instinctively start bouncing on the balls of my feet. I am trying to learn to rein it in. Usually it takes a good three to five minutes for me to be able to act and communicate like a normal person. Julian is surprisingly normal about my weirdness. But now that I think about it, he usually seems kind of nervous, too, so maybe he doesn't notice how weird I act.

He begins to speak in his regular tone of voice. “Allen is here and I'm going to tell him that I asked you….”

“Is it really that big a deal?” I whisper, trying to throw him off.

“I don't know,” he starts to whisper again, but catches himself. “Quit doing that—the loud and then the whispering. Listen, I just wanted to warn you in case he freaks out and we have to…flee…or something.”

“Flee? Did you just say ‘flee’? Why are you talking like a spy? And where would we go?…We can't flee….”

I hear Allen's voice in the background.

“Who are you talking to? Are you
whispering
?”

“Listen,” Julian says, “I gotta go. Bye.” He hangs up the phone.

I call him right back. He answers on the first ring.

“What,” he says, “you think I shouldn't tell him?”

“The marshmallow floats at midnight,” I whisper, and hang up.

Allen walks through the door twenty minutes later. “Has he, like, ummm, touched you or anything?” he asks.

“I wish,” I tell him.

“Gross,” he says. “At least it's not Kiki, though. I told Julian, 'Mia's weird and whatever, but at least she's not all
intense
like Kiki.' ”

“Thanks for your support.”

I find myself humming Broadway show tunes and making up lyrics in my head about how the world knows I'm in love and my brother doesn't think I'm too intense.

“W
HAT ARE WE GOING TO EAT TONIGHT
?” K
EATIE ASKS
.“I
T'S

date night. I want Chinese.”

“Date night?”

I'm confused for a moment about who she's referring to, what she means, and I remember. She thinks my parents are going out like they used to, even though Dad moved out.

“I don't think they're going on dates anymore, Keat.”

“Why? They especially need dates now so that they can see each other and fall in love.”

Well, anyway, Dad's in Peru. I can't figure out if Keatie is trying to change what has happened or if she just can't see what has changed.

O
N THE DAYS WHEN
I
DON'T HAVE DANCE CLASS DURING
school, I typically have practice either before or after school, which means that I usually get to see Kiki Nordgren five days of every week. At these practices, Kiki typically does one of the following three things:

(1) ignores me.

(2) talks about whoever she's dating in front of me— probably hoping that I'll talk to Allen about it.

(3) tries to rechoreograph my routines.

After seeing her in the outcast bathroom, I assumed this would change; I thought maybe Kiki would be nicer to me, so that I wouldn't say anything, or that she'd be even meaner to me because I'd discovered her secret. Truthfully, I hoped
she would change somehow, become a nicer person because she had problems or something. Yeah, right.

At first she was a little different. She still did all the stuff she normally did, but it felt a little forced, kind of awkward. After a few practices, after I didn't say or do anything about what I'd seen, Kiki was her old self again.

I guess a lot of people started getting asked to the prom around the time Julian asked me, because today at our after-school practice, everyone is talking about the prom. I am friends with most of the girls on the team; some are members of Kiki's legion of brats, but for the most part, the other girls don't really care whether I convinced my brother to break up with Kiki or whether Kiki likes me. Most of them can't remember who was dating who six weeks ago, much less six months ago.

While we stretch, everyone talks. Mandy has been asked by a guy she doesn't really want to go with; Ana hasn't been asked at all, but Ben, the guy she has a crush on, hasn't asked anyone yet, so she's hoping she still has a chance. I'm dying to tell the entire planet that I'm going to the prom with Julian. I told Mandy and Ana at practice two days after Julian asked me, but no one else knows; I am sort of waiting my turn, waiting for someone to ask me whether I've been asked.

Kiki Nordgren doesn't have to wait.

“Kiki, who's asked you so far?” a sophomore in the Cult of Kiki wants to know.

I hate the way people just assume that more than one guy will ask Kiki.

“Jake Dowdle and Ryan Walker,” she says. She manages to sound bored by the whole conversation.

I hate that she
has
been asked by more than one guy.

“Are you going to say yes to either of them?” Mandy asks.

“I don't think so. I'm waiting for someone else to ask me.”

“Who?” half the team choruses, probably worried that Kiki has set her sights on their potential prom dates.

“I'm pretty sure Julian Paynter is going to ask me, and I'm going to go with him,” Kiki says, glancing back at me. She leans forward, acting like she's letting the girls in on a big secret, like they have all suddenly become her confidantes. “I think the whole reason Allen and I had problems is because Julian liked me so much. Allen probably didn't know it until after we started dating because Julian was too shy to say anything. So when Allen found out, he broke up with me, for Ju-lian's sake. Plus, Allen's probably gay anyway; I think he was using me as a beard or something.”

A few of the girls laugh when she says this.

Kiki speaks as if there's no doubt that what she said is true. I freeze. I know I need to do something, but all I can think of involves running at her, screaming, jumping on her back, and clawing at her perfect face. I could ask Kiki if her lunches taste as good coming up as they do going down. I could tell everyone what I heard in the bathroom. I could spread rumors about her, the way she always does about me, make her look ridiculous for once. But I am frozen. And even if I weren't, I don't know if I could expose Kiki.

Ana speaks before I can, though. “Kiki, Julian already has a date. He's going with Mia. He asked her a while ago. Right, Meems?”

Every girl in the room turns to stare at me.

“Yeah. He did.” This is my chance to tell it like it is, to get Kiki back for all the lies she's told, all the rumors and mean things I know she's said about me. “And my brother isn't gay.” Beautiful. Way to stick it to her. That'll show her, Mia.

For a moment, Kiki looks scared and embarrassed, but in a millisecond her face has turned back to stone. When she speaks, her voice is even. “I think I'd be a better judge of that than you would, sweetie. How nice of Julian to ask you. He must really be looking out for you… with everything that's been going on with your family and all.”

How does Kiki know anything about my family? I am too stunned to say anything.

Ana comes to my rescue. “Is that why guys ask girls to prom, then, Kiki? And you've been asked twice already?”

The ability to be catty and cruel must be genetic; I've watched enough reality television, talk shows, and soap operas to have picked it up by now if it's a skill you can learn, but I can't think of anything to say. I'm outmatched.