Circling the Drain (12 page)

It's the last song of the last dance on the second-to-last night of camp.

Which means it's the last dance of the last dance, and the air is heavy (though lighter than it was five or so hours ago, when the sun was up and boiling the Neuse River). The air is thick, solid, something to push through on the caged-in blacktop, on the dance floor.

The crowd is dressed in their finest, outfits carefully selected, though wilted now, at the end of the last evening together, after a whole evening of dances, a whole summer of evenings.

It's a slow dance, and it's the last one.

She stands with him at this moment.
Bill's so cute
, her campers giggled all summer—the gaggle of them, a mass of nine-year-old bodies swarming this way and that, little brown bodies shiny from so much heat and sleep and scheduled fun. She is their Counselor in Leadership Training, their almost-counselor, which makes her better than their real counselors who are old (in college, even), but not so young that she isn't cool, and not too old to be fun, or to understand about the nuances of nine-year-old clique etiquette.

She stands next to him, close after a month of letter writing, neither knowing what to say:
Went sailing today. Rob says you are really nice. What kind of music do you listen to?
Neither of them knowing how to answer:
Am soooo glad the dance is tomorrow. Missy may be the senior counselor but she's soooo dumb! We're having a regatta today. Hope I win
. Neither of them sure what their letters might mean.

The letters have traveled in a Jeep full of mail, from boys' camp to girls' camp and back, handed out after lunch to be softened by reading and rereading, folding and refolding—each envelope a promise: something to be scrutinized and wondered about.

But neither are sure just how to proceed—how to turn the mysteries of what's not said into something daydreamable, something worthy of the fumblings of a kiss—though they have thought, each of them many times, of this moment, and of this last dance, this last song.

She's pulled in tight, his arms around her waist, as the music plays and the lights in the fenced-in blacktop (a basketball court by day, now rendered Special by the milling crowd, the bright lights, the sense of ending), shine through any dark corners, illuminate any dark thoughts that might be lurking in their fourteen-through sixteen-year-old minds.

The counselors weave through the crowd giggling and separating:
Six inches, six inches! C'mon, lovebirds, six inches
.

Pulling them apart, the cruelest of enforcers, they rip Capulet from Montague.

It feels that way.

After all, this is the last song of the summer.

She is close enough to smell his Polo cologne and see his freshly shaven cheek (he shaves regularly, she thought to herself when she met him, savoring the words and their mature implications—implications she didn't understand but approved of wholeheartedly), and close enough to see the light on the damp curve of his tanned neck. In fact, her
eyes are level with his neck, she is focused on his neck; closing her eyes and inhaling his neck and thinking:
This is the last song of the last dance of the summer
.

She does not think, as the music swells and they turn in awkward small steps to it, clumsy feet moving in a tiny parallelogram—an ever-rotating square—of the time two years ago when, fourteen and as yet unkissed, she stood awkwardly in this same spot.

And as they turn slowly, she is not thinking of that summer, when she was in cabin 23 and convinced she was more awkward than the other girls with their prep-school sophistication and their older boyfriends, their bleached hair and minuscule bikinis. Of when that summer's boyfriend, Tim, stood near to this very spot and held her stiffly during the last song of the last dance of
that
summer. Or how at the end of that dance, she turned her face towards him and closed her eyes and how his mouth descended like a huge wet thing, swallowing hers and most of her chin while she scrunched her lips together against his big wet tongue and thought:
That's not what I expected
.

She does not think of how Tim said:
Let's try that again
, and this time she closed her eyes and tilted her face towards his and opened her lips slightly and again his huge wet mouth came crashing down on hers and again his tongue found her lips but this time it wormed its way inside and it was lukewarm and thick. It was the same temperature as her mouth and afterwards, after she'd quickly wiped his spit from her face with the back of her hand, she wondered at that, her first kiss:
I thought his mouth would be warmer than mine, or colder somehow
.

But she's not thinking of that now, two years later, as she breathes the grown-up smell of Bill's neck, and feels these hands on her back. In a year she'll say:
Bill was incredibly
boring. He was smart and rich and handsome, but boring. He did things that became unbearable. He spent my birthday talking about the Dewey Decimal System!
And a few years later she'll come across an article in the paper about a scholarship he'll win to medical school and she'll think back on the months of visits after that last dance, of the letters and the phone calls and what a sweet person he was and she'll be ashamed of her own behavior, ashamed of her abrupt evaluation of him.

And ten years from now, at her younger brother's wedding, she will drink at a party with her siblings and his name will come up and her little sister will say, beer in hand:
I was so mad at you for breaking up with Bill. I was in love with him. I was a ten-year-old in love and I thought what you were doing was stupid
.

But he was so boring
, she'll say.

Maybe you didn't listen hard enough
, her sister will reply, and tilt her head back to take a swig.

And then she'll remember this moment. Music floating in the liquid air as his arms press her to him. Then the last notes of the song hang for just a moment while the crowd erupts in frantic movement, fully conscious that there are moments to be stolen before the boys are loaded back on the buses and taken a few miles up the road to their own camp. The last few notes of the last dance evaporate and he leans in.

And in a few seconds the director of the whole camp will swoop down on them and pull them apart, yank her from their dark corner to another corner, darker, outside the blacktop, where she'll be informed of her breach of conduct, of her failure as a Role Model for the Younger Girls. Where the cold, wet taste of his lips on hers, pressure all wrong, taste all wrong, will linger while the director speaks in a
quiet but Disappointed voice, and the memory of mouths tense, their arms fumbling, will blot out the sound of the director's words.

Meanwhile the girls will buzz around the boys, their careful hair melted into mess and the boys, dressed like sun-marked clones in their Duck Heads and wrinkled madras oxford shirts, will goof around and try to make sense of this ritual, this history of Dances and of Boys and of Girls.

But she's thinking of none of this as his arms circle her waist and pull her to him, press her into him. And they are both careful and conscious to close their eyes as they lean into each other, unsure of what lies around the next curve, unsure of the very moment they are about to devour.

1. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar

The fat girl speaks the truth.

There are all kinds of anger, she says. Some kinds are just more useful than others.

We talk a lot, though no one except me sees her. She stands there sucking on a Fudgsicle like the day is blissful and warm, but I'm freezing.

I am not angry, I tell her, though it's not really true.

She smiles. Saying you're not angry is one kind, she says. Not very useful at all, though.

We are outside in the early fall day. School began three weeks ago and I am carefully watching the crowd file by.

The fat girl says, Faith, don't get your hopes up. Sweetie, that is never going to work out. She's talking about Tony Giobambera who has dark curly hair all over his body and smiles with his mouth but not with his eyes; who walks slowly, like a man with a secret.

I say, You never know.

She says, Actually, I do know. Then she sucks off a big piece of chocolate.

2. Carrots make a lovely snack

The fat girl sits behind me in school. All day, in every class. She eats jelly beans and Fritos. Shh, I tell her, you're making too much noise. She just smiles and brushes the crumbs from her mouth to the front of her blue blouse.

You are the only one I bother, Faith, she whispers. No one else cares.

I look around. We are taking an exam in World History and everyone else is focused on their work. The entire class has bowed their heads like they are praying. I have a copy of the exam on my desk but no answers filled in.

The fat girl moves on to Pringles. She reaches in and takes two chips, balances one on the other and wraps her lips around them.

Look, I'm making duck mouth, she mumbles over my shoulder.

I can't hear you, I hiss, and cover my ears with my hands.

The fat girl sits in Andrea Dutton's old seat. Andrea Dutton is a cheerleader and member of Honor Society who's very pretty and can be nice or awful at whim. The fat girl sits in her seat because Andrea Dutton flipped her car three weeks ago and ended up in the hospital in a coma and everybody said what a tragedy it was. I don't know where the fat girl sat before that.

3. A lady pays attention. Every boy likes a good listener

When the bell rings the fat girl and I go outside. Tony Giobambera always smokes a cigarette before fourth period on a bench in between the old building and the new building where, if he was anyone else, he'd be sure to get caught, but he's not.

He doesn't care if you watch, the fat girl tells me, so I find a place on the grass where I can see him but pretend to stare off into space, thinking about more important things than how much I would give up just to have Tony Giobambera run his finger along my cheek and my throat one more time.

Which won't happen, the fat girl says. She is perched beside me eating rhubarb pie.

Where did you even get that? I snarl.

Wouldn't you like to know, she snarls back, and turns away.

But it did happen once.

4. A lady prepares her appearance: Cucumbers make the eyes less puffy. Vaseline can make a smile shine

It was after what I did, the long summer after I'd shed myself completely and was prepared to come back to school like a whole new person, only inside it was still me. And it was at a mostly senior, end-of-the-summer party a week before school started. Everyone was drunk on beer or getting stoned in the basement, and I walked from room to room waiting for someone to notice the new me, but I was invisible.

I wandered out back, down wooden stairs, away from the bright lights of the house towards the small latticed huddle of a gazebo. Inside there was a bench and I sat, slapping away mosquitoes and feeling a tightness in my chest that made me want to scream.

So far no one had said anything, even though I'd lost fifty-eight pounds and my skin had mostly cleared up. Even though I missed almost a whole semester of school and disappeared for more than six months. Nothing, not a word.

While I was away at Berrybrook, Miranda Turner's parents found a joint in her room, freaked out and shipped her off to an alternative high school in Idaho where no one was allowed to wear makeup; where they had to dig potatoes if they got in trouble. I knew it wasn't just the pot that bothered them, it was me. We'd been best friends since fifth grade, but even though really I was a good friend, Miranda's parents behaved like my unhappiness could infect their daughter. Like somehow she didn't have her own misery.

Miranda managed to smuggle a letter out of the Idaho prison-school. I didn't receive it until after I'd gotten out of Berrybrook….
You can't listen to them
, she wrote.
They're afraid that you're going to convince me to try and kill myself too. I'll probably have to give one of the gardeners a blow job to sneak this letter out to you. Can you believe my parents think that's better than leaving me alone so we can be friends like always?

5. A lady thinks carefully before speaking: ugly thoughts set free can never be recaptured

I sat on a bench in that gazebo, knees to my chest, picking at the vines that climbed a trellis overhead, ripping off leaves and stripping them down to their veins, when Andrea Dutton came stumbling out of the trees. Her clothes were a mess, all twisted and covered in pine needles. A minute later, out stepped Tony Giobambera, zipping up his pants. He caught up to her and threw his arm around her shoulders and I watched them stumble in my direction.

I had nowhere to go, so I stayed. If Miranda had been
there, she would have made me believe everything would be okay, but I sat alone and they trudged right up the steps.

Andrea Dutton stopped when she saw me and swayed back and forth. Didn't you used to be that really fat chick? she slobbered.

I seized up but didn't say anything.

I heard about what you did. She pointed her finger in my face, her eyes were bleary and her skin shined. I pressed myself against the grid of the gazebo.

Tony batted her hand away. Jesus, Andrea, you're a lady, huh.

Shut up, you pig. You don't even recognize her.

Tony swung around. Sure I do, he said softly. You're Faith something, right? He reached out with one strong hand and traced the outline of my cheek. You look great, he said. Really.

Andrea punched him in the shoulder. Let's go, okay? He looked at me, smiled, and all my tight dissolved into warm. Then he took Andrea's hand again and they continued up the hill.

6. Everyone appreciates a pretty smile

The fat girl has Oreos.

Don't you ever stop eating, I ask her? You're such a
joke
.

She doesn't say anything, just continues to lick away the frosting and studies me until my face grows warm. I look down at my nails, which are dirty and chewed. We are sitting on a low wall, in the sun near the back of school. I see a football fly in the distance. The sky is cloudless and blue.

Listen, she says quietly, I'm all you have.

7. A lady believes in herself. She's not afraid to follow her instincts

The day I did it was a pretty day. Clear and cold, just before Christmas. I always think about that: how full of promise that day seemed and how that made everything worse somehow. I had planned a little bit, but when it came right down to it I didn't wake up that morning with an idea of what would happen or when I would know. I just knew. I just turned a corner and knew.

I cried when I thought about it, which was all the time. I felt like the light inside me had flickered and gone out. Killing myself would bring erasure. What I wanted was to lift the needle off the record and stop the song abruptly.

I took pills.

I took lots of pills, beautiful pills of all colors. I saved them for months beforehand, scouring medicine cabinets anywhere I went. I didn't even bother reading the labels after a while. What mattered to me was the way they looked together, like colored pebbles, the way they felt when I reached deep in the jar of them and let them run through my fingers: slippery and precious. I saved up. I waited for just the right moment to pour so much possibility down my throat.

8. No one likes a busybody

I first met the fat girl the day I heard about Andrea Dutton's car accident—in the bathroom at a movie theater. It was the day before school started, four days after the party where Tony Giobambera touched me. Two girls I didn't recognize were teasing their hair and talking when I walked
in. One girl said to the other, Did you hear about Andrea Dutton?

No, the other girl said. What?

Coma, the first girl said. Flipped her car and shit. Can you believe it?

Jeez, said the second girl, then paused to light a cigarette. And she was so popular.

By now I was safely in a far stall but I could smell the smoke.

Hey, who was that? I heard. Maybe she pointed.

I dunno, sighed the first girl. Why? You recognize her?

I swear that's the fat girl from Homecoming, she giggled. Faith whatever.

You are so high, the other girl laughed. As if. And then after a few minutes they both left.

The old weight settled on my chest. My world felt cracked and pressing. I stayed in the safety of my stall and wept.

When I finally pushed open the door to leave, my eyes were red and puffy. I splashed cold water on my face but it was obvious that I'd been crying.

Don't worry about them, someone said from another stall. One of them'll die in a terrible perming accident and the other will be killed by an abusive boyfriend when she's in her early twenties.

I smiled, I couldn't help it, and hiccupped: That sounds like something my friend Miranda would say.

Miranda Turner? the voice asked. She got sent away to school in Idaho?

Yeah, I answered quietly. I bit my lip. I felt like I wanted to cry again.

The second stall door opened and a girl walked out. She was holding an ice cream sandwich. Hi, she said. You must be The Fat Girl from Homecoming.

I stared at her. She was enormous, her face almost
squeezed shut with excess flesh, her eyes slits, her cheeks gigantic half-melons. Her fingers were huge and thick.

Yeah, I said, but not anymore.

Bullshit, honey, she said. Once a fat girl, always a fat girl.

Then she took my arm and led me out of the bathroom.

9. Everyone likes a lady

I do outpatient therapy. I go in twice a week to see Dr. Fern Hester who I am supposed to call Fern and tell how much better my life is now that I have lost all the weight and decided to live. Fern sits with her hands clasped lightly and her ankles crossed. Her skirts are always knee length and the same brown as her hair, which is straight and badly cut in a short, off-center pageboy. She has big square glasses that she inches back up her nose by squenching her face together—something it took me a while to get used to.

Whenever I begin, Fern sits quietly. She stares at me with practiced encouragement if I don't come up with something to talk about immediately. Those silent moments are horrible swollen things that make me nauseous and angry, so I try to prepare a few topics before I arrive for something to fall back on.

I never tell her about the fat girl.

I never talk about Homecoming.

Three weeks ago, I told her: This girl at school is in a coma.

Fern nodded, concern peppering her face.

And everyone says she was totally drinking and stuff. I didn't really know her.

I watched Fern. Her glasses were greasy in the light. They reflected me, brown hair hanging limp, pimple near my
nose. I touched my face. I had known Andrea Dutton. When we were little kids we played together, when we were five and six, but that didn't give me the right to call her friend now. Yet I felt this urge to associate with her, to own at least part of her tragedy.

Her absence was a huge gaping hole in the fabric of our school, of the town, even. I pictured her lying in a hospital bed, her blond hair cascading along a pillow, her pale skin smooth and pearly, her lips open just enough for a tube to pass through. The room must be lined in flowers, I thought, with her parents holding a vigil by her side. There could be no doubt that people wanted her back.

She goes out with Tony Giobambera, I said softly, then regretted it, because Fern's eyes lit up like a pinball machine and she leaned towards me expectantly.

Silence. What was there to say about Tony Giobambera? Somehow I think he actually sees me, not just the fat loser I used to be, but me, Faith, a person? I can't breathe properly around him? I want him to save me?

He's kind of popular, I said. She leaned back and scribbled.

10. Present yourself in a positive manner. A lady is her own best fan!

In the afternoon I get called into the guidance office to talk about my record. To
explore ways of accenting my candidacy for college
. To
make myself a more attractive applicant
. The fat girl waits in the hall.

You used to be in the choir, before your difficulties…

It seems I have no extracurriculars and now that I've
moved over the rocky areas and into such a better place, men
tally speaking
, it's time to put the past behind me and think about the future!
A good academic record can be a great academic record with just a few civic activities…

So what am I supposed to do, I ask the guidance counselor, Mrs. Twine, who is far too cheerful for the good of anyone. Run for Student Council president, or something?

That sounds like a very good idea, Mrs. Twine responds enthusiastically.

No! (I'm angry, I can't help it.) No, it does not sound like a good idea. You have absolutely no idea what a good idea is. I am a joke! Running for Student Council would be so stupid…