Burnout (7 page)

“Mmm-hmmm,” Sheila says, crossing her arms to glower down at me from her side of the counter. She’s obviously not convinced. “Glad to see you found some proper shoes at least, though I’d rather you had found some makeup remover.”

I try to wiggle my eyebrows in what I hope is an endearing way, though my voice comes out hollow and strange. “It was a Halloween costume gone horribly, horribly wrong.”

Sheila raises her eyebrows at me. “Class and name?”

“Junior. Masterson,” I answer.

Sheila types something, and then I see her add something next to my name. “ID, please.”

“It’s at home.” It’s too hot in here. And there’s that smell, like industrial cleaner.

She glances down at the screen. “That’s your third lost ID.”

“It’s not lost,” I explain. “It’s at home.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Sheila says, and then pauses for the first-period bell to ring. “It’s not here now, and this is your third strike.”

I shrug, at a loss. “Sorry.” She just keeps staring at me
and my stomach goes a little funny. “Is that . . . bad?”

She pulls a familiar-looking form printed on yellow paper out of the wire paper organizer on the desk. She slides it across to me. It’s an ID request form. “You lose three IDs, you pay two hundred fifty dollars and get a one-day in-house suspension.”

Whoa, no. There’s a loud
whooshing
noise inside my head, the kind of sound your life makes when it’s swirling down a toilet. “I . . . I didn’t know that.”

“It’s in the student handbook.”

I gulp and try to keep my voice calm. “There’s a student handbook?” I squeak.

Sheila actually looks a little bit sorry for me, which makes me want to cry even more, because I don’t deserve her pity. I did this, whatever this is, to myself. “And you signed a piece of paper when you started here saying you’d read it. All students do. Sound familiar?”

Oh God, that
does
sound familiar! I’m such an idiot. SUCH. AN. IDIOT.

“Look.” I take a deep, shuddering breath, “I can’t get a suspension.”

“Then you should have brought in your ID. It’s a one-day in-house suspension. No big—”

“No, you don’t understand!” My words tumble out. “I’m sorry to be totally freaking out on you, I know you didn’t
write the rules and you’re probably a really nice person, but seriously, I
can’t
get suspended!” I can feel my heart straining, cracking, splintering. “I promised my parents I wouldn’t mess up anymore.”

Sheila sighs at me, hands me a tissue from the flowered box on her desk, and says, “This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to give you a day pass. Come in tomorrow, bring your ID, and we’ll be good. Don’t bring in your ID, and I’m filing a report and you’ll get the suspension. Understood?”

“Yes. Understood. Thank you.” I snivel, wiping my nose. “Thank you. I can get it tonight.”

Apparently, that’s too much information for Sheila, because she snaps, “Just bring it in tomorrow,” pushing a clipboard with a xeroxed form across the counter. “Fill this out, it’s your day pass.”

I scribble in my name and student ID number, and then sign and date it.

She signs it, stamps it, and hands the form back to me. “Find your ID.”

S
eemy was freckles and two tiny pigtails at the nape of her neck. She was wiry arms and delicate wrists and no need for a bra. She was calling men “Hey, mister” and women “Hey, lady.” She was vending-machine monster tattoos and grabbing my hand when we crossed busy streets. She caused whiplash in boys.

I was broad backed and big footed. I was still growing taller. I was not thinning out. I was the not-fat sort of fat with muscled legs that don’t fit into skinny jeans, a belly that was round even after the stomach flu, and hands my mother said could build an ark. I worried that I would be too big for a firefighter to rescue me. I sounded stupid when
I giggled. I sprouted tiny boobs at ten that have stayed the same size, and I got my period at eleven, and even though my mom started in on me early about loving my body and my shape and my size, it was hard not to wish it all away.

It’s dumb to still be hurt that I was always too big to be the baby when I played house with my friends on the playground as a little kid. No one could pick me up to rock me to sleep.

I could never tell my mom how badly I wanted to be a wiry girl. Her entire mission as my mom was to get me to love myself for who I was, to appreciate my strength. And it’s not that I didn’t appreciate it. I just wished it came in a smaller package with a narrow waist and bony ankles.

I used to think that Mom and Dad getting back together was the thing I wanted most in the world. And then I met Seemy and I knew I had never truly wanted anything before, not the way I wanted her to be my friend. It was a want and a wish and a prayer and a hope that came from the same place that makes you believe in Santa, or that monsters disappear when you hide under the covers.

Seemy would laugh at me because in the beginning I always looked so surprised when she showed up for plans we had made. Once she said,
Oh, you poor, big old bear, have you even
had
friends before?
And I told her,
Not real ones. Not like you
. And she squealed,
That’s so sad!
and hugged me.

There was a little park near Seemy’s house that we called Twee Park. It was tiny, a grove of trees circled by a wrought iron fence that hung heavy with thick vines. A short cobblestone path led from the latched gate through the trees and opened into a small circle, a blue bench at its edge. The trees made it shady, and the early weeks of that first summer we spent hours sitting on the bench drinking iced coffee, cracking each other up and making plans for city adventures that never happened.

That was before Seemy made two declarations. The first was that both of our looks were
utterly, unforgivably forgettable
. The second was that we should probably start drinking or else our summer wasn’t going to be any fun at all. Where Seemy was from upstate, kids spent summer nights around bonfires deep in the woods, drinking beer and roasting marshmallows. She made it sound like a Ralph Lauren commercial.

We’ll run around the city all summer with a buzz, looking totally amazing! It will be like a movie!

I agreed. Of course I agreed. In the beginning I would have said yes to anything Seemy suggested, because for some reason she had chosen me to be her friend and the least I could do was say yes. Yes to Kahlúa in our iced coffee, and yes to erasing ourselves and starting over.

It did hurt a tiny bit because I was already making
myself over and I loved the results because they made me look like Seemy. She said,
We have to have a serious talk. Promise you won’t get mad?
And then she told me I needed my own style, and then I realized I looked like her in the same way a “magic growing dinosaur” toy looks like its larger self before you drop it in water and it grows five hundred times its size. It stops being cute and starts being weird and bulbous and gross.

Seemy said I should go the other way. Away from cute. So I did what she said and I ricocheted.

Seemy puts tiny star stickers on each of her fingernails? I paint mine black with a Sharpie. Seemy buys a pair of Lolita-style oversize sunglasses in the shape of hearts? I pierce my eyebrow. And then my lip. And then my tongue.

I made myself delight in my manufactured edginess. Black clothes, black hair with rainbow stripes, platform combat boots that hiked me even taller, skull rings. It made me angry sometimes, that I was stuck being the shadow to her light. I made a T-shirt with a quote from that old band Rage Against the Machine. I tore off pieces of duct tape to make the words, and I never washed the shirt so they wouldn’t come off. A
NGER
IS
A
GIFT
, the shirt said. Seemy thought it was awesome, and sometimes I wore it and felt a secret prickling of pride because she didn’t even know it was directed at her.

Cute little Seemy, and big bad me, tipsy masters of New York City.

But toward the end of our friendship, right before the Nanapocalypse, she started to get all prickly about the cute thing. Toad would say something to her, call her pixie or laugh when she said something serious, and she would lose her shit. Start screaming at him. Swearing. Which would make him laugh more. And it
was
kind of funny, because here was this tiny thing wearing a pair of bright red rain galoshes and a 1950s party dress roaring out streams of obscenities, and halfway through it’s like she would just give up, and she would keep swearing but her voice would get higher or she would curtsy or giggle or do something that dulled her edge down to nothing and then she would sigh and say, “Nobody takes me seriously,” and Toad would say, “Sure we do, pixie,” and then he’d pass her the bottle.

Once, around this time, Seemy and I were walking and she stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and asked me, “Do you think I’m sexy?”

Some woman brushed by and snapped, “Very sexy, now get out of the way.”

We were in SoHo, on the way back to my apartment. It was a Saturday in spring, so the sidewalk was totally
clogged, and all I wanted was to get off Broadway and onto one of the side streets.

“Well?” Seemy asked. People streamed around us. Tourists looked as us, anxious for any kind of in-the-wild New Yorker moment. “Am I?” Seemy turned in a circle. Not a cutesy turn, but a matter-of-fact
Please be honest
turn. She was wearing a pair of high-waisted blue wool sailor’s trousers we’d found at Beacon’s Closet, a snug plain white T-shirt. It was a less adorable look than she usually went for, especially since she’d taken scissors and slit the T-shirt right down the front so the electric blue lace bra she’d stolen the other day showed through.

“You’re the sexiest thing on two legs,” I told her.

She scowled and stomped past me, groaning. “You just say that because you love me. Toad said the same thing.”

Sometimes, near the end, when I’d go to meet her in the park before going out, I’d find her talking to the guys we called randoms who hung out there sometimes. I’d see her through the gate, sitting on the back of the bench, holding court over a group of guys who made my stomach lurch in nervous anticipation.

If you took apart the way these guys looked, dissected them with one of those online dress-your-character games, they wouldn’t seem so alarming. Tattoos. So what? Preschool
teachers have tattoos. And their clothes were nothing to scream in terror about either. Maybe a little worn, but nothing alarming. Jeans. T-shirts. Maybe a hooded sweatshirt or a baseball cap. Boring, right? But then you add in the scabs. Maybe one the size of a quarter on an elbow, a nick under an eye. Maybe they don’t have all their teeth. Maybe their tattoos don’t look like they came from an actual tattoo shop, maybe they look like they were done with a pen and razor. Maybe they have hoarse voices, maybe they move too suddenly, laugh too loud, maybe they have sunken faces and beady eyes. Maybe they punch each other sometimes and you can’t tell if they’re joking. Maybe they dress younger than they are. Maybe they aren’t teenagers. Or even in their twenties. Maybe they’re even older. Maybe they’re men. Full-grown men and they’re standing in a park talking to a sixteen-year-old girl, watching her like they are starving and she is the first food they’ve seen in days.

A
fter I leave Sheila in the office, I don’t go to class.

I need to start covering my tracks with my mom.

I squeeze myself into the ancient wooden phone booth in the basement by the woodshop and call her with two quarters I find in the bottom of my shopping bag.

She doesn’t pick up, so I leave her a message. “Hi, Mom, it’s me. I’ve been having weird cell phone reception issues, and it’s not letting me pick up my voice mail, so I don’t know if you called. I’m on a pay phone at school, just calling to say hi and everything’s fine. Hope you’re having fun. Love you!”

I don’t realize the darkness came until it goes away, and
I find myself holding the phone in my hand, listening to the rapid beep of a disconnected line.

I hang up the phone. I refuse to think about what’s happening to my body. If I don’t think about it, it’s not real. It will go away. I will find my backpack and everything will go back to the way it was.

I sneak out the back door.

By the time I get to our apartment building in SoHo, I’m totally soaked. The good thing is that when it rains, our neighborhood gets a break from the tourists. They duck inside the supersize flagship stores on Broadway that are really just elephantine versions of the same stores they have in the mall back home. And then as soon as it stops raining they pour back out onto the streets in disposable transparent rain parkas printed with
I LOVE NEW YORK
on the back, unfolding their laminated street maps in the middle of the sidewalk in giddy clumps, totally oblivious to the actual New Yorkers who are trying to walk by.

Mom says in the old days she never used to have worry about that “element.” She says it like she’s talking about murderers and thieves instead of tourists. I’m not sure which she thinks is worse.

There’s a film crew blocking the sidewalk in front of our apartment. I actually don’t mind having to walk into the narrow street to get around them, since it drives me
crazy when people make movies about New York in a place other than New York. Only assholes shoot in Vancouver and then call it New York. Only New York is New York. Our street is always in movies, since it’s tree lined and the buildings are old and picturesque and it’s dotted with precious little restaurants and boutiques with striped fabric awnings and faux-weathered signs hanging from curlicue iron rods that make it look charming without looking like an outdoor mall.