Invisible Girl (6 page)

I pull off my shirt and my training bra. I hook the bathing suit top in the front and slide it around to the back. Next, I step out of my shorts and underwear and put on the bottoms. Annie shouts, “Hurry up” through the door. I stuff my shorts and top into the backpack, and then open the door and hurry to the locker, afraid to make eye contact with Annie, who stands like a beach beauty right out of
The O.C.
in her orange-and-green bikini.

“Let’s go,” she says, grabbing my arm, and as we rush into the sun, I catch a glimpse of us in the mirror, a tall blur of tan, blond, orange and green, followed by a short blend of olive, black, blue and purple.

I blink in the sunlight. “They’re up on the sundeck,” she says, and I follow her smooth back with the indented waist up redwood stairs. Music blasts from someone’s iPod dock as we reach the top. Warm coconut oil mingles with the scent of some woman’s coffee and cigarette. Ahead of me, at the far end of the sundeck, is a wall of guys.

Panic beats like a bird trapped in my chest. We walk closer. Annie tosses her head and her hair flashes like gold. We’re so close now I can hear the low hum of the guys’ voices and I think I can smell their guy sweat.

I really need to get out of here, but there is absolutely no escape. Annie is jittery—I feel an invisible substance that jumps from the guys to her and back again. Half-naked bodies are pressing all around me. I can’t breathe. I feel small but on display, something so grossly inadequate that everyone will be compelled to look only to drop their eyes, shiver, and wish they hadn’t looked in the first place.

My breath stops. Black rises in front of me. I’m about to faint, but at the last second I crawl up inside my head and beg for my words to save me.
Stentorian
storms through my brain as blasts of male laughter hit my ears. I can breathe again. I can even let the words disappear and look around me at the girls lying on their beach towels.

Waves of calm take the tightness out of my chest. I’m a witness, not a participant. I’m Nancy Drew getting information for the case she’s trying to solve. None of these people are people I have to know. Just a collection of faces and names whose words will become part of my report to my father, Carson Drew.

I look over at the wall of guys without fear and my eyes land on a strip of tight tanned stomach over a pair of blue bathing trunks. For a second, blood beats into my face, and then I remember I’m safe from this hot flesh with my Warrior Words, marching in my mind, while I just observe. When
lascivious
and
turgid
pounce into my thoughts, I even smile slightly, thinking of the books with bosoms on them I found under my mother’s side of the bed, and all the words I learned from them.

“That’s John Keswick III,” Annie whispers, following my gaze and I look up from the blue bathing trunks to a muscular torso and the face of a movie star. He smiles, flashing perfect white teeth. He’s very tan with thick sandy brown hair, a man’s jaw and bright blue eyes.

“Hey,” he says, dropping the hand with his iPhone as we walk closer, but he’s not looking at both of us. He only sees Annie.

I peek at her, a stolen sideways glance. She grows in luster beside me. Beams of light glint from her hair. A fuzzy force field of hormones whirls around her body. Words from a National Geographic documentary we watched in social studies pop into my head:
When the Yanamamo female is ready for marriage, she is dressed in rich tribal colors and brought to a neighboring clan for inspection.

“Am I getting a lesson today?” she asks JKIII. “I think I forgot my racket.”

Giggling rises from the towels spread on the deck, and I look down and focus on the girls spread out in front of me. Leslie and Emily are slathered in suntan oil and hunched over a Facebook message on Leslie’s BlackBerry. Eva has a hat on and probably lots of sunscreen because of her fair skin. She’s not even aware of the other two girls, but in her own world, texting on her iPhone.

That’s something that you don’t see in my neighborhood in Boston. Even though most kids have cell phones by the end of eighth grade, no one has a BlackBerry or an iPhone because they’re way too expensive. Most kids have one or two old Dell computers at home and have to wait for other sibs to do term papers and homework before they can check their Facebooks.

I, of course, don’t have any kind of phone since when I suggested to my mom that we both get one, she said that if God had wanted her to be a prisoner of technology, she would have been born with a metal chip in her head.

I never even brought up getting Facebook, even though we have a computer on the desk in the living room that my dad uses for law school, because the whole point of that is having friends to keep up with.

Leslie says to me, “Throw your towel down here,” and slides hers over to make room.

The direct contact wrenches me completely out of my safe observation surrounded by Warrior Words. I’m back, underdeveloped and exposed, on a sundeck in Los Angeles with kids who send sexual signals to each other so strong I can almost smell them. Hurriedly, I unroll my towel next to hers and lie down on my stomach so no one will notice my chest.

Leslie sits up holding a bottle of suntan lotion. “Do you want me to do your back?” she asks. “Emily already did mine.”

I nod, caught off guard in this world of reciprocal female acts. She rubs the cream over my back. Her hands are strong and warm. The sun feels good. “You should undo your strap,” she tells me. “You’ll get a mark.”

The minute attention paid to a detail of having a tan line across my back pleases me to no end. I feel a wild surge of gratitude for Leslie that she should take such an interest in me.

I bunch up my towel under my chest and unhook my strap. Leslie rubs cream in the spot that has become socially precious. I close my eyes for a second, enjoying the warmth of the sun and smells from lotion, flowers, and the cinnamon Orbit that Leslie cracks.

The mood is broken by Leslie’s friendly voice. “Guys,” she says. “Have you met Annie’s cousin Stephanie?”

The wall of teenage boys moves, differentiates. I think of bees clustered into a humming mosaic until they finally fly away, yielding views of the individuals. I can tell there are four of them. JKIII is on the far right standing next to Annie, who flips her hair and says, “Omigod, I’m, like, so rude. Guys, this is Stephanie.”

All the eyes turn to me. I’m stuck in a quarter-seal, arching up partially from my stomach with my chest covered up by the towel and my back naked. I’m still warmed by Leslie’s touch and her concern about a potential pale streak across my back, so I’m emboldened enough to be social. “Hi,” I call out as if I’m Nancy Drew sandwiched by her girlfriends, Bess and George, when their collegiate-sweatered boyfriends, Ned, Burt and Dave arrive.

“You have to hear the way she talks,” Annie says. “Stephanie, say—”

“Annie’s old suit,” Eva interrupts, walking around me as if I’m one of those frogs we dissected in science class who’s lying on a little board with its legs and arms pinned down. “I was trying and trying to think of where I’d seen your bathing suit before, then suddenly it came to me. It was Annie’s, like, two years ago.”

Red rushes my face. Eva’s raised eyebrows and satisfied smirk scorch holes in my brain. Desert air rises from my throat and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.

JKIII snaps an irritated glance at Eva, then looks back to Annie and says, “Annie, what did you want Stephanie to say?”

A couple of the other guys look at Annie also, waiting to be entertained. I’m stunned with the realization that the guy mind hasn’t even grasped the enormity of my humiliation. That none of them seem to get the direct correlation between wearing a bathing suit someone wore at twelve and being physically immature. I’m giddy with the idea that the guys here just think Eva was interrupting with some boring talk about clothes.

Annie flips hair over one shoulder. “Okay, her best stuff is with r’s. Like, ask her to say, ‘How far is that car?’ ”

Everyone’s eyes are on me as JKIII says, “Say, ‘How far is that car?’ ”

I half roll my eyes to Leslie, who giggles, and then I say, “How faa is that caa?”

Annie squeals, “Don’t you love that?”

A guy standing next to JKIII says, “Say ‘idea.’ ”

I give a little shrug. “Idear.”

He nods vigorously. “I knew it. We went to the Cape two summers ago. They all do that.” He smiles at me and seems pleased, as if I’ve done him proud.

JKIII fist-bumps the guy and says, “Little bro, remembering the Cape.”

The boy, I guess his brother, takes a little bow and Annie jerks her head at him. “This is Brian.”

I give a self-conscious nod. He’s really cute. Not as cute as JKIII, but he has the same bright blue eyes and big smile. He’s just a little shorter and not quite as muscular, and his hair is darker. I figure he’s probably around two years younger than his brother, more like fifteen.

“And this is Andrew.” She flips her hand toward a tall boy with black curly hair, fierce brown eyes, and his arm in a cast. He doesn’t smile, but looks at me hard as if to see if I’m something at which he should also be angry.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hey,” he returns. He doesn’t turn away. He keeps staring at me. I can’t stop staring at him. He’s got something in the back of his eyes, something so raging I’d expect to see him in my neighborhood in Boston. He doesn’t seem to belong on this porch of privilege where everyone only needs to care about tans or tennis games. He suddenly snaps his eyes away from me like it’s okay for him to try to find out what I’m hiding, but not for me to see into him.

“And this is Matt,” Annie’s social director voice cuts in. The boy next to Andrew is shorter, with straight brown hair and green eyes. “Bri, Andrew and Matt are all the same grade as us.”

I nod again, vaguely relieved that at least all the guys that I’ll have to see are not older and, thus, exponentially terrifying.

I start to settle back onto my towel to try to relax when I feel Eva’s eyes boring into me again. She’s nothing if not relentless, and I can tell she’s furious that her observation of me wearing Annie’s old suit didn’t unleash an outpouring of derision over my obviously immature body, or, at least, a torrent of covert, smug looks between all the girls.

She’s studying me hard. Her math and science brain is analyzing facts. There is something bothering her. Something about me that’s not adding up. I don’t belong in this world. She can feel the false premise throwing off her calculations, and she won’t rest until she unmasks me. She’s seen the old and unfashionable outfit I wore last night. Now she’s observed that I don’t have a bathing suit of my own.

Suddenly, a light pierces her eyes, like she’s discovered the cure for cancer. Dread spreads through my stomach and I prepare for her next assault.

“Hey, Stephanie,” she purrs, walking up to me. “Why don’t you show us some pictures of your peeps in Boston. Then maybe you can tell them about us and we can all become friends.”

Becoming “friends” means only one thing. She’s demanding to see my Facebook and she’s, of course, noticed that I haven’t once texted or BBM’ed in her presence while the others have done it endlessly in the same time frame.

In an instant, I know, she is hoping to reveal that I don’t have a cool phone or BlackBerry. If I do whip out a phone and pull up my Facebook, she’s hoping I won’t have that many friends and that those I have will be obvious losers. I’m sure she can’t even imagine that I’m not on Facebook. That would be a jackpot for her of unbelievable proportion.

Her idea sparks immediate interest from everyone. I know from overhearing kids at school that everyone is always trying to expand their number of Facebook friends. That it is the ultimate validation of one’s worth as a person to have hundreds of people wanting to read about their every mood and activity. The girls all look eager to check out their eastern competition, and even the boys seem curious to scope out the female inhabitants of my exotically accented city and maybe have a few cyber hookups.

“Great idea,” Annie screams. “We can be friends with some of your friends and then finally meet them in college!”

Someone says that Annie is a “friend ho” and that she’ll do anything to increase her number, which is already up to 438. I don’t even register who said it because I’m quaking with terror. Within seconds, I’m going to be exposed as electronically naked and without the rich social network that they so easily take for granted.

I have to think fast. The girls and guys are looking at me with deep excitement and Eva has a cruel smile curving her lips as if she’s already pictured me disgraced.

I mentally scramble for a strategy. Something. Anything. I have no idea how to navigate out of this. No
Mystery of the Fraudulent Facebooker
to guide me.

Suddenly, I picture this girl from St. Henry’s High, Maria Giarelli, an eleventh grader who was actually suspended for the last month of school. The high school scandal, of course, leaked into our school and even I heard about it, just by standing around the other kids. Would it really be so bad if I just borrowed a little something from her life?

“Um,” I drop my voice. “Do I really have to go into this in front of the guys?”

This, of course, makes the guys lean in even closer. I sigh heavily, just like Leslie did when she was about to disclose how far she went with Ben in Truth or Dare last night. “I, ah, got shut down.”

“What does that mean?” Eva demands.

“My Facebook got shut down and my phone confiscated for two months.”

There’s a collective intake of breath. I scan the eager faces, which are awaiting the titillating details. Everyone knows there’s pretty much only one reason this ever happens and it always has something to do with sex.

“So, there was this high school party,” I begin.

Smiles crack. Stories about high school parties always promise good stuff about bad behavior. “Some people got sort of wild. And, I, ah, posted the ‘inappropriate photographs. ’ ” I make my voice sound like a really uptight teacher, thinking that’s how Annie would do it.