Everybody Sees the Ants (15 page)

I see the car parking in the playground lot, and I feel like something bad is going to happen. I don’t know what to say to Ninja Girl. Frankly, I’m a little scared of her. She’s ranting now. Pacing.

“Every five minutes on TV, I have to hear about erections that last more than four hours, and yet nobody can say the word
vagina
! It’s crazy!”

I see the car doors open, one by one. I imagine four Naders. “Shit,” I say.

“Shit? Why ‘shit’?”

“Maybe we should get out of here,” I warn.

“Why?”

“Those guys are getting out of their car, man.”

She laughs. It comes from her throat. It’s deep and sexy. “Those
guys
”—she places finger quotes around the word—“are my friends.”

“Oh.” I relax. “Good.”

“So are you going to say it?”

“What?”

“Vagina.”

“Oh. Sure,” I say. “Vagina.”

She grins and claps her palms together quickly, as if she’s just won a round on a game show or something. This is the exact moment I realize we haven’t traded names.

“What’s your name again?” I ask.

“Ginny. You?”

“Lucky.”

“Seriously?”

I nod. She laughs, grabs me by the POW/MIA T-shirt and says to her approaching friends, “Hey, look, guys! I just got Lucky!”

Four minutes later I am squished into a car with five girls. Three of them have crew cuts, so I thought they were guys at first, which I think I should keep to myself. Ginny is next to me, and I can feel the heat of her leg through my combat shorts. This is not the moment to think about her naked. And yet, I do.

So I am squished into a car with five girls—three of whom have crew cuts—and I now have a boner. The ants say:
Jesus, Lucky Linderman. Can’t you control that thing?

I start to think of everything I can to get rid of it. Nader. Aunt Jodi. My mother. My grandmother’s funeral when I was seven. My granddad Harry. Jungle diseases. Amputations. None of it works, so I pray we have a few more minutes of driving before I have to stand up again.

“Do ya?”

I’m snapped out of my ugly-people-places-and-things visualization by Ginny asking this over and over. “Do ya? Do ya? Do ya?”

“Do I what?”

They all laugh like I just told a joke. I feel like I got away with something.

“Shannon says you probably wanna do Ginny.”

“Oh,” I say, nodding. “Uh—well. Not really.”

They all laugh again. Ginny looks at me, hurt.

“Well, I mean, I would if I thought about that kind of
stuff, you know? But I’m—uh—not uh…” How do I tell a carful of girls that I’m a virgin?

“He’s a virgin,” Ginny says.

“I am not!” I say.

“Oh boy! You are the biggest virgin I ever met,” the girl next to me says. She pats me on the knee. “It’s okay. We’re all virgins.”

“Virgins who love to say vagina,” Ginny says.

They chant it together. “Vagina! Vagina! Vagina!”

In my life I’ve been cursed with crazy dreams about booby traps and prison camps and frog rain and amputees and talking tigers, and yet nothing I ever dreamed can compare to this.

A half hour later I’m sitting on the ceramic-tiled floor of the local rec center, and in the next room my five new friends are rehearsing a play called
The Vagina Monologues
.

When they told me the name of it, I wasn’t sure what to say. Luckily, I didn’t have to say anything. “It’s a play about how our vaginas are always controlled by men,” Ginny explained. “But we’re here to take back control.”

One of the girls said, “Fuck yeah!”

“Just sit here. We should be done in an hour,” Ginny said.

“But—”

“You can see the show next weekend with everyone else.”

“So why’d you bring me along, then?”

“It’s better than walking around the block ten times a night, isn’t it?” she says. “Or spying on people from your aunt’s patio.”

At first I listened through the door, but between the traffic outside and the hum of the central air-conditioning, I missed every second word, so I gave up. All I know is that the play has something to do with vaginas—which, I have to admit, are beginning to interest me.

By eleven fifteen, I am pissed off that they brought me here only to sit around and do nothing, and I feel trapped because I have no idea where I am and no idea how to get home. I feel like the stupid little kid again—just the way Nader makes me feel—so I prop myself into the corner and see if I can find Granddad.

I am in a PT boat drifting down the Nam Ou river. The water is muddy and reddish, and Granddad is sitting cross-legged in the bow. He is so skinny I can see every sinew under his skin. He is brown from the sun and white from malnutrition. He has open sores in various places. He is missing an arm this time.

I am compact, squeezed into a corner in the stern of the boat, using the walls like a blanket. I am dwarfed by the cliffs on either side of the river. The river is so calm; there is nothing but peace here. How did everything become so quiet?

I suddenly realize we are alone. There is no guard. I get up and pad over to Granddad Harry. I look down at myself and notice I am in better shape than any other dream so far. Even my hands are muscular.

“Did we escape?” I am torn about what I want him to say.

“In a way.”

In a way?

“Are we going home now?” I ask.

“Not quite.”

“Where are we going?”

“To pick up your friends.”

“I don’t have any friends.” Do I? I think about Lara and Danny back in Freddy. They aren’t really my friends.

“Then we’re going to have a party. Dancing. Feasting. Laughing.”

Of course, he’s delirious. That’s the problem with being trapped in the jungle for nearly forty years. A person can’t do that shit without going crazy.

I suddenly hear distant yelling. It is my five new friends—nameless except Ginny and Shannon. They are standing on a jagged bit of rock at the river’s edge, smiling at us.

“Over here!” Shannon says. She is waving her arms back and forth over her head.

“Help!” Ginny says, her hair swaying behind her.

Granddad uses a long stick to push the boat toward them. I don’t see until we get closer that two of the girls are completely naked. I am not aroused by this.

As we secure the boat to the small wooden dock below the rocks, the boat becomes a ferry. It just grows. I look up and Granddad Harry’s arm is back. He’s wearing a Navy-type uniform, like he’s the ship’s captain. I see I’m also in sailor clothing, including shined shoes.

As we help them aboard, they change, too. Ginny’s tattered black pajamas turn into a tight-fitting pink beaded ball gown. Shannon’s makeshift rice-sack dress transforms into a fluffy, frilly dress I can’t ever imagine her wearing. The crew-cut girls experience the same magic as they board.

Old-time music, the kind Granny Janice used to listen to, plays through the ferry’s speakers, and I’m the first to sit down because I’ve never danced in my life.

“Come on, Lucky! Dancing is the cure!” Granddad says.

He has two girls—a crew cut and Shannon—and they move gracefully in circles, as if they’ve done this with one another a million times. It’s beautiful. Shannon’s dress is flowing behind her. Granddad is laughing so hard his face looks forty years younger.

“Come on!” he says.

I stand up and hold my hand out to Ginny and the other two crew cuts. We form a dancing circle, the same as the others. I don’t step on any toes. I don’t trip or stumble or fall. When the song is over, another big-band number comes on, and I continue to swirl and spin and move my feet. I feel free. I dip the girls. I spin them. I spin myself. I bow. I am a movie star.

While we’re dancing, Ginny looks at me right in my eyes, and I realize she can see into my future. She can see who I will be, not just who I am.

Then there is an explosion.

Have you ever felt the concussion of a bomb landing nearby? It is like nothing else. It is the instant delivery of hell. It is like everyone you ever knew dying.

•   •   •

The rehearsal room door slams shut, right next to my head.

I’m awake, and the girls are walking past me toward the main exit. When I look up, I see the girls are talking to me, but I’m nearly deaf from the explosion. I shake my head and swallow. Through the crackling in my ears, I hear Ginny say, “We’re hitting McDonald’s before they drop us off. You hungry?”

“Yeah,” I say. An hour later the girls drop Ginny and me off at the playground and make a date for a dress rehearsal on Friday.

They drive off, leaving the two of us alone in the dark playground. As Ginny walks across the soccer field, she lights a cigarette and tosses the spent match.

“What was the driver’s name again?”

“Karen.”

“Karen,” I repeat, trying to separate her from the other two crew cuts, but I can’t.

“The one with the nose ring is Maya. She’s Puerto Rican,” she says.

“I didn’t even see her nose ring,” I say.

“You sat across from her at McDonald’s for, like, twenty minutes, and you didn’t see her nose ring? Damn. You’re not real observant, are you?”

At McDonald’s, all I could do was picture all five girls in their ball gowns, on the ferry on the Nam Ou river.

“So Maya and Karen and Shannon and—uh…”

“Annie.”

“And Annie.”

“Yeah. Her name is a sick joke. She has red hair and she was adopted. Get it?”

I don’t get it. This must be obvious.

“Little Orphan Annie?”

“Oh. Yeah. That
is
a sick joke,” I say. “Is that why she shaves her head?”

“What?” This isn’t an
I didn’t hear you
kind of “what.” This is a
what the fuck did you just say to me?
kind of “what.” I am instantly aware I said something wrong. “What did you just say?”

“I meant—uh—does she shave her head because she doesn’t want anyone to see her red hair because her name’s Annie. But now that I said it—uh—out loud, I’m seeing how stupid that is.”

“Why do you care so much about hair, anyway?”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t?”

“No.”

She takes a long drag and tosses the butt to the side of the road. “So you don’t like my hair?”

“Your hair is awesome.”

“Yeah, it is,” she says. “It’s the only part of me anyone cares about, though.”

I don’t answer at first, until I realize she’s waiting for me to say something. I say, “Why do you think that?”

“Jodi didn’t tell you about me?”

“No. Should she have?” I ask.

“Oh. Well, it’s not a big deal or anything, but I model.”

I nod. Of course she does. Look at her.

“But just my hair. My hair models. The rest of me rebels,” she says. I want to tell her that her face and her legs and her perfect hands are also model-worthy, but I figure it’s probably a bad thing to say.

We come to the place where we have to split up. I have to somehow get into Jodi and Dave’s house undetected at two in the morning. Ginny has to turn into a backyard ninja. The last thing she says to me before she runs off is “I really want you to come to the show. Think you could swing it?”

“When is it again?”

“Next Friday and Saturday.”

“Sure,” I say, and then she is gone.

Before
my shower the next morning, I stare at the scab in the mirror. It’s still the exact shape of West Virginia, but it’s healing and peeling at the edges, and with each application of aloe, I can feel parts of it getting ready to flake off. The worst and thickest part, right over my cheekbone, is the exact shape of the Monongahela National Forest, too. I swear—I am not making this up.