The Geography of Girlhood (6 page)

that if you hurt him, or carve a figure eight

into one of his soft spots,

I will fill your locker with hate notes,

I’ll carve
bitch
into the side of your sled.

I’m not above snagging your tutu

and tampering with your blades,

breaking bones or poisoning your cocoa,

because this good boy with a broken heart

is like you without ice to skate on.

These sound like pale threats, but trust me,

if you hurt this dumb-ass kid

I never thought I’d know,

your life will be spent

in the hot nub of a sunny day,

waiting at the edge of a lake

that just won’t freeze over.

It’s the last day of tenth grade

and all I have to show for it

are a bunch of B plusses

a very strange stepbrother

a very vegan stepmother

one ex-friend that’s ditched me

to become a cheerleader

another friend who’s going as crazy as her father is

a sister who hates me

a never-ending crush on her boyfriend—

but the weirdest part

is that I am leaving tenth grade

being friends with the girl

who was the whole reason

I didn’t want to show up in the first place.

If anyone tells you that life is predictable,

DO NOT BELIEVE THEM.

4

I’ve never asked my father to stay out late before.

Because of this, he interrogates me for an hour like

I’m one of the guys who work for him at the mill.

Where are you going
and
When will you be back
and

Are you sure you’ll be back
and it goes on and on, until

finally my stepmother says,
Gerald, it’s fine. It’s summer

vacation. Let her go.
Then she smiles at me and it

makes her look kind of pretty and for the first time,

I can sort of see why my father fell in love with her.

We leave twenty bucks in an envelope

and get our bottle of whatever

from a tire in Mike Neeson’s front yard

because he is legal

and we are not.

We go to the drive-in to drink it

and it tastes terrible but Jenny says that’s not the point,

it’s about the way it makes you feel.

I feel dizzy and dangerous

and temptation sits like a pat of yeast

on my tongue, rising and rising

and sour.

It’s dusk when the movie starts

to filter through the trees

and Jenny says,
Come on,

lets go downtown
,

and she starts the car and we drive away

heading for trouble

like we’re heroines in the making

like we’re starlets getting lit into being

by the curving screen.

Jenny sneaks into the Hilltop

and smuggles me out a beer

before going back in.

A drunk guy’s outside

telling a really loud story about

a fight he got into last week

with his neighbor

and then I turn around

and there’s Mr. Stearns,

my history teacher.

He laughs and says,
I’m not going to ask

what you’re doing here, Penny.

and I say,
Then I guess I’ll have to ask
you

what you’re doing here

and he kind of laughs

and that’s how it started.

I want to know what it’s like

to fall against you in the heat,

you, my own history teacher,

my own Battle of Gettysburg,

my thirteen colonies.

You have hiked from here to Idaho and back,

always loving the wrong woman,

the compass biting your palm,

your sex swaying like a bean stalk.

It’s as though you’ll always

be a teenager, a scalding runt,

self-centered, effusive, your

crooked teeth like Letters of Congress,

like crates of tea in the Boston Habor.

Tonight, as we stand outside the Hilltop Tavern,

my B’s and B plusses glittering behind us

and Jenny yelling
Come on!
from the car,

I want to know what its like.

With this liquor quick around my hips,

state capitols slurring my speech,

I want to see whole declarations of independence

float from between your lips,

and I want to believe

they are meant just for me.

Were you flirting with
Mr. Stearns?!

Jenny yells when I get in the car

and we laugh and laugh and

all I know is

at this moment I feel like

I can do anything I want

and be anyone I want

and go anywhere on the globe

and still call it home.

By the time we get to Rick Stangle’s

famous Start of Summer party

it’s almost eleven.

After everything that’s happened tonight

I’ve almost forgotten

this is the first actual “party”

I’ve ever been to.

But when I get there I realize

that parties are basically just

School With Booze.

All the same people are here

wearing all the same clothes

talking about all the same things,

except they are having fun

and people who would never normally

converse with each other

are drunk enough to actually do it

and there’s something

sort of sweet about it

even though from what I can tell,

it does seem to involve

a lot of vomiting.

I walk out into the moonlight

and there in Rick Stangle’s backyard

are my sister and Bobby

and I stop and stare

because when it comes to them,

I can never stop looking.

Watching them is like a disease

I can’t be cured of.

Tonight, though, instead of pulling Bobby

into her arms like she always does

my sister shoves him away

as if something has unhinged in her.

Then Jeff Eckman, who has slept with everything
that moves

calls over,
Come here, Tara
, and

without a second thought,

my sister goes.

Bobby stands there in the moonlight,

jamming his hands in his pockets

and for the first time

he looks like someone gentle and sweet

like someone I might know

or someone I might be.

My sister crawls in through her window

at three in the morning,

and I’m there waiting,

having already covered for her

and been yelled at by Dad

for being half an hour late.

Were you with Jeff Eckman?
I ask

And she says,
So what if I was?

I glare at her.

Bobby loves you.

Bobby is an idiot
, she says.

No, he isn’t!

If he’s so great, why don’t
you
go out with him
,
she mutters

and crawls into bed

pulling the covers up over her

lying, cheating, beautiful head.

I haven’t seen Denise all summer,

until today, when she came over

after her doctor’s visit.

When I asked her how it went

she said she told the nurse,

I feel restless, I forget street names,

my house key has been missing for days.

Remove your clothes
,

the nurse replied,

and stand against the wall.

Pretend you are in your own house

or better yet pretend

your name means desire

in a different language.

The form they gave Denise was standard:

Chicken pox?
Yes
, she wrote,
only last year,

contracted from the children’s section

of the public library.

Herpes?
He was a brave man
, she said,

his room was filled with war medals.

Alcoholism?
Well, there is

a bottle beside my bed

but I don’t remember how it got there.

As for the doctor,

he had her lie on a table.

She said her body was remarkably quiet

as she recalled scenes from
The Wizard of Oz.

I felt tears clotting my eyes

and I pulled her to me,

my faraway friend

who said she could still feel the stethoscope cool
against her heart,

who said she could still smell the cool paper
beneath her,

who said she knew that

if she wished hard enough

she could make herself well.

For my sixteenth birthday, Jenny says I need to forget

about the fact that Denise won’t come out of her

room. Jenny says I need to forget about everything and

go a rock show. Jenny says I owe myself a good time.

When have you
ever
done anything crazy on your

birthday?

She’s right: last birthday, I went sailing. The one before

that, I went to a fancy dinner at a stuffy restaurant with

my dad. Of all of them, I remember my fourth birthday

the best. I ate cake and my mother gave me a globe.

She held it and said,
Where should we go?
I shrugged.

I don’t know.
She spun the globe, then stopped it with

a finger.
Wherever I’m touching, that’s where we go
,

she said, lifting her finger off Mozambique.
See? We’ve

got a whole world to choose from
, she said. Later, as

she was tucking me into bed, she put the globe on my

dresser.
If you ever need me
, she smiled,
just remember

I’ll always be somewhere on here.
And two weeks later,

she was gone.

As the ferry coasts into downtown,

all lit up and windy and magic,

I realize kids who grow up in cities

must never dream of

going anywhere else

because they’re already there.

Here we are, sixty miles from home,

standing in a club

with the coolest people on the planet

who can probably tell we’re from

the uncoolest place on the planet.

Jenny says we have to get closer to the stage

so we push our way to the front

where kids are sitting on the ground

and some of them are sneaking smokes

and wearing Yeah Yeah Yeahs T-shirts

and Jenny’s got a flask of something

and then the lights dim

and everyone screams

and the first chord is struck

and the lead singer runs onstage

wearing something

she starts to rip herself out of

and people are shoving and squishing

and I am in the middle of it all,

hot and breathless and happy,

like it was someplace

I was born to be.

When I get home from the concert

at two in the morning,

Spencer is sitting in the living room

reading
Lord of the Rings

for the umpteenth time.

Don’t ask me how I got stuck with

the world’s biggest nerd

waiting up for me,

but there you go.

To make matters worse, he says,

maybe one day I’ll go to concerts, too