And Then Things Fall Apart (5 page)

Amanda, it's true, is sort of hot, if you are into girls like her. And if you are a stupid hormone-driven idiot like my dad. My mom isn't chopped liver, though. She has longish brown hair, not unlike a mermaid's, and her ears are pierced more than once, which is a little lame but hot if you are
her age. Which is something I honestly do not know—more than forty and younger than fifty is my best guess. She is very amazing, and although she has abandoned her only daughter at this suburban version of the Bates Motel, she is, actually, or at least often is, my favorite person

Amanda. Ugh. If you were looking for the polar opposite of my mom, it would be her. (See chart.)

I could go on and on and freaking on. But they are also opposite in ways that are more complicated. My mom works all the time. And when I say all the time, I mean every day and late at night and early in the morning. She doesn't even sit down to eat lunch because she is always on the go, and it makes her perpetually exhausted and angry.

There was a time, before my parents got the restaurant, when we actually went out to dinner. But the whole business is tainted now. Any place we go, Mom's always tallying how much profit they are clearing. Even at weddings and catered graduation parties, I can see the wheels in her brain clicking away, calculating their markup and wondering who did their draperies. Should she get a guy in to stencil some maps of Italy on the wall? Should she add a weekly pasta special or would that be too much for Jorge and Sebastian to handle in the kitchen?

She used to be more fun too before the D&D. We talked a lot more. She sang around the house and actually baked cookies once in a while. How Martha, I know. But the cookies were good, and it was fun and she was totally cool to be around.

Amanda, on the other hand, goes to community college part-time and works at the Dine & Dash. She goes to concerts downtown and sees lots of movies. She shops and buys (or occasionally shoplifts) expensive nail polish with stupid names. How noble. She screws married
men for fun. That's about it. I don't think she even reads books.

!

Mom's the one who
hired
Amanda in the first place, which is possibly the most depressing thing ever. Mom said Amanda had “good energy” and would be “great with customers.” Did my dad think,
Nice tits,
or,
How will she look wearing obscene lingerie, dancing in the walk-in freezer for an audience of cheese, bags of ice, and me?
That's where Mom said she found them, ridiculous underwear and all. Oh, the humanity.

What hurts so bad, and I mean
Bell Jar
bad, is that I really liked Amanda. Why I would befriend such an insane, undermining, manipulative whore from the underworld is beyond me. Before I found out about her and Dad, we were so close that she was the one who helped me bleach and dye my hair for the first time. Said she had done it before. Said, “It will look so much better than your hair now.” Said, “What are you, chicken?”

Anything hair-related was something I would normally have done with Nic. She was my go-to style guru and we were always deeply involved in each other's evolving look. It's what we did together. But there was nothing normal about me at that point. Things at home with my parents fighting all the time and with Matt and our white-hot love were spiraling out of control.

At Amanda's apartment I sat in a folding chair with a towel over my shoulders as she wrapped hanks of my hair in tinfoil. She smoked half a pack of cigarettes while we ate low-fat pita chips with jarred salsa, waiting for the fuchsia to penetrate. I was transforming into a new person in her kitchen, trying to have power at least over the way I looked. And she let me sit there, like a dumb bunny, rinsing my hair in her sink and blow-drying it into shape as if she were my loving and loyal friend, instead of the person responsible for murdering my parents' marriage with an ax.

Amanda is also the one I spent at least eight hours a week working with at the D&D. Eight hours is a lot. It's more time than I spent with Matt during the week. More time than I spent with both my parents. I spent more time talking with Amanda, one-on-one about my life, than I did watching TV, for Christ's sake.

It's my own fault. I'm the one who decided she was so cool in the first place. I was fooled by her makeup, her well-placed eye rolling, her willingness to listen to me while I blathered on and on about Matt and school and books and all the rest. What choice did she have? I was her bosses' daughter. I had a choice, and I shouldn't have chosen her. I ignored the little things she did and said that made me uncomfortable, like making fun of my mom's jeans or taking quarters out of the register so she'd have enough to buy a pack of cigarettes at the 7-Eleven. It all seemed worth it to
be in our girl gang of two, to hear her say “You're right,” or “Got a light, Keekinator?” Making me feel like my life was as complex and subversive as I imagined it.

I used to have a real best friend. Nicola. She
is
nice. She does well in school. She is also a teenager, and we text and study together. She used to come over and we'd try new things like ratting our hair to make retro hairdos or concocting natural facial masks from organic ingredients found in our own kitchens. Nic is great. She is well-groomed and hell-bent on Northwestern or Princeton. She is lovely, decent, and for all intents and purposes exactly like me.

Amanda is not like me. She isn't in high school. No, she'd been through all that crap and come through it smelling like a rose. She was smart about things I knew nothing about, like craft beers and sex, and twenty-one-and-over shows. She had her own car and apartment. She had a job.

When we were together, I felt like I was finally sharing time with a like-minded individual. The thing is, my brain is not high school material. Why waste my time talking about SAT scores and homecoming and the latest homeroom scandal that no one over eighteen gives a rat's ass about?

Being with Amanda was—it was just amazing. She let me try smoking in the back when my parents weren't around. I didn't like it, but I loved just holding a cigarette between my fingers and staring into space like I was French and my heart was broken. It wasn't then, but it is now, and
Amanda, screw you. She's, I dunno, twenty-three, twenty-four. I mean, barely ten years older than me. When she was fifteen, I was five. So, okay, there's a large gap, but still. Too close for freaking comfort. Sick. Dad, you are a little sick. And I hate you. A little. And a bit more every day.

Some people, they just get it. They do what they say they will. They show up when it's important. They have integrity and genuine kindness and you can trust them with everything. Nic is one of these people. One thing is for sure, Nic would never have slept with my dad. The thought would never even have occurred to her in a million decades. Which is to say, a zillion billion years. An eon? An epoch? My eyes hurt and I am going to stop now so I can scratch the five places I am allowing myself to grate like cheese with my bitten-down nails.

MUTANT FROGBOY

Your hot tongue feels like
Laughter in my mouth
Alive.

Your smooth amphibian skin
Slides over me, silvery heat
More.

You are muscle and sinew
Supple and balanced seeking contact
Again.

My name is Karina, so why doesn't anyone call me that? Keek. It's starting to sound like slang for urinating or puking. “Yo! Gotta take a keek.” When I was little, I couldn't say “Karina,” so when people asked me what my name was, I'd say “Keek” and then smile like a big dope while they all oohed and aahhed. Fast-forward thirteen years, and this is why I am fifteen and known to one and all as Keek. Don't make me keek.

I totally keeked last night. For real. Gram made me chicken soup and an egg salad sandwich and gave me a big glass of orange guava juice, which sounds total yum but at about ten thirty it was just the opposite. I didn't quite make it to the bathroom, because for a minute I didn't know where or who the hell I was. I thought I was home and that Mom and Dad were down the hall, but, duh, Dad was in the basement and Gram was watching the night rebroadcast of
Judge Judy
. As if being fifteen with the
chicken pox isn't humiliating enough, I go puking down carpeted hallways.

I so take the body for granted. You need it to move around and stuff. To bring thought to action. I'm all about my brain. I often think I would be more than happy to be a brain in a jar hooked up with electrodes like in sci-fi movies from the 1960s. Then I could keep myself amused for decades with my own mental blathering, or at least figure out how to take over the world with my understanding of
The Bell Jar
and rudimentary applications of sine and cosine.

But here I am, weak and skinny, and I'm seeing health as something exotic. Wrestlers have intense strength and bulldog tenacity. Cheerleaders—whom I, perhaps unfairly, mock—can command their bodies to do splits, backbends, and hula-colorful-hoops around their hips, and barely break a sweat. The picture of health. I am like Dorian Gray: From afar I look like your average pink-cheeked teen, but on closer inspection, the blush is from fever and I'm covered in weeping sores like a leper waiting for Jesus. Christ! And so freaking itchy.

I need my poor itchy body. Even though it betrays me all the time. Cancer cells could be lurking in my breasts right this second and only cause trouble when I'm in my fifties. My body could also derail my whole vague virginity plan with its own agenda, like it did that midsummer's night in Matt's room last June.

Oh, God. That midsummer night in Matt's room.

Let me just say that last summer we had only been going out for a little while, but long enough to know that we were crazy for each other in a new and extreme way that surprised us both. Matt invited me to his parents' annual
A Midsummer Night's Dream
party. His parents are the biggest geeks around. His dad is some kind of executive networker and attends a lot of galas and fund-raisers downtown. His mom's an optometrist with a thing for Shakespeare in the Park. His house is enormous, and the yard is even bigger. His parents must be surprised that their only son is such a jock. That he needs help with his English essays. That he doesn't need eyeglasses. Needless to say, Matt's parents really like me. A lot.

I showed up to their big annual garden gala in a white sundress and a flower behind my ear. There were giant paper lanterns dripping light all over the backyard, glowing pale yellow and pink and lavender like miniature moons. Fire-flies twinkled at our fingertips. Most of the guests wore costumes, the women in fairy wings like oversize kinder-gartners, and garlands of flowers around their necks. The men went for a troubadour/Renaissance faire/Hobbit look with sandals and peasant shirts. In two words: Awe. Some.

And then Matt took me by the elbow and pointed toward the garage, where this skinny guy with a giant papier-mâché donkey head started skipping among the guests, tossing
flower petals from a basket slung over his arm and braying—like HEE-HAWing. “My mom gave him fifty bucks to do that,” Matt said.

The donkey came over, took its head off, and it was—who the hell else?—Earl the Squirrel, sweaty, out of breath, and already half-drunk, laughing, er, his head off.

“Hey, Keek,” he said like he was actually glad to see me, and then to Matt, “Dude. You haven't lived until you have been a Bottom,” and then he cracked up again, glitter sticking to his forehead.

“Don't be an ass,” I said, and we were all giggling like idiots, and I hadn't had anything to drink yet.

Earl went to find food, and Matt brought me and a bottle of wine to his room so we could drink and talk and watch the lovesick fairies in the garden eat stuffed mushrooms and talk about the stock market under white Christmas tree lights.

“Cool party,” I said. We were sitting on his bed swigging from the bottle like pirates. Up until then we'd only been able to make out on park benches like French people. Or in his car, or in the back of the D&D. We hadn't even been at each other's houses or anything official like that. But it was clear we were into each other and an actual couple, and there we were—on his bed. His room was semi-tidy and had a soccer ball in one corner and an empty fish tank in another. The wine was delicious. Or maybe after the first twelve sips I just got used to it. I'm so like Esther that way, hoping that
one day I'll wake up and think that alcohol actually tastes good and not like poison. It—and I mean the whole situation—was on fire with amazingness.

“Cool party if you're into that stuff. Shakespeare, I mean. You are, right?” He was so beautiful. He had a little glitter on him, too and his lips were dark from the wine. I was into anything he wanted me to be into. And what kind of honors English student would I be if I didn't adore Shakespeare?

“Yeah.” My voice was weird, low and husky. When I saw him take a book out of his back pocket, dear reader, I almost passed the hell out. Because then?