The Rites and Wrongs of Janice Wills (9 page)

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“Janice, my sweet,” my mom said, knocking on my bedroom door. “Are you okay?”

“Janice?”

“Janice?”

“Mmmmm,” I answered through my pillow, holding my breath until my mom left.

I was thinking about my anthropology notes, neatly laid out, Word files and Word files. I’d always liked how my voice sounded authoritative and wise in those notes — in control, like those voice-over narrators on nature shows or during movie previews. I thought of Margo’s angry words, of Paul’s list, even what Jimmy had said about my observations. And it occurred to me: I was not part of the action.
Oh, God
, I thought.
I’m not an anthropologist. I’m the Lonely Voice-over Narrator of Adolescence. The Bitter Voice-over Voice
.

And the rest of the weekend was like this:

When I emerged from the blankness of the weekend that Sunday night, I assessed. The postparty tally was: one pair of vomit-stamed shoes, one lost hoop earring from the pair I’d borrowed from my mother, a pair of jeans that smelled of old wine vomit and cheap beer, and zero friends. I would have to retire from party appearances yet again.

I told my mom after dinner, “Margo hates me. Junior year has turned into a disaster.”

My mom replied, “Oh, darling. Y’all will make up! And the Miss Livermush Pageant is coming up! Won’t that be nice?!”

“Yeah,” I answered through gritted teeth. “Something to look forward to.”

“Well, let’s try on dresses for the big event, shall we? There was a great sale at Belk so I picked up a couple for you to try,” my mom said. I could tell by her voice that she thought she was being helpful. She was almost as excited as when she dresses our dog, Pouncer, in a holiday sweater. Almost. I took the first dress to try on.

ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
If you are an American adolescent female and your mother picks out some on-sale dresses for you to try, they will never be beautiful. You will hate these dresses.

“Hold your shoulders back!” my mom barked. She tried to square my shoulders, making my shoulder blades stick out all the more. This dress was a hot pink concoction with a full, frothing skirt. It looked horrible. I noted with disgust the dark hairs sprouting on my bony ankles.

“Oh, don’t you just look gorgeous! The bow really adds some nice volume to your chest.”

The bow was very large and perched on my shoulder, covering my entire left breast. Correction: the area where my left breast should be. I had noticed that my breasts, or lack thereof, were actually even smaller than the breasts of Melva High’s rumored-to-be-anorexic girl. Or else the Supposedly Anorexic Girl just had more naturally pointy nipples, giving the illusion of more breast than I’d ever possessed. This bow would hardly fool anyone.

“Honey,” my mom called down the hallway to my dad’s office. “Come see how gorgeous Janice is in this dress!”

I groaned. My dad walked in, studying me the way he studied the Dow Jones. His face was inscrutable.

“Looks great,” he said noncommittally, but it sounded more like a hesitant question: “Looks? Great?” He paused a beat, and then turned back down the hallway.

“Pretty in pink to make the boys wink!” my mom yelped, clapping. “Well, let’s try this other one too. They were both marked down!”

“I can’t see why,” I said.

ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
Some cultures are less familiar than Americans with sarcasm. If I didn’t know better, I would believe that my mother was from one such culture.

“Mom, you know there’s really no point in doing this,” I said, my voice breaking slightly. “I’ll never win any scholarship money. It’s hopeless. I’m a hideous wildebeest. I can’t get anything right.”

My mom cocked her head at me and gave me her squinty-forehead Wise Mother expression. “Sweetheart, I don’t care about the scholarship money in this case. And you shouldn’t either,” she said. “Sometimes our victories are more personal. I just want you to
try
. And be brave. You’re such a smart, thoughtful girl — I just want you to try something outside your comfort zone.”

“You know I’m only doing all this out of anthropological interest,” I said.

“Janice, you …” Mom paused. “I’m glad you have this special talent, this interest, but you realize it’s not an excuse, right? It’s not an excuse to avoid your own life.”

My eyes grew hot, and I looked down. “Stop, stop, stop,” I murmured to the floor. “Everyone keeps telling me this stuff.”

“Janice? Janice. You’re crying,” my mom said. She lifted my chin so that I was forced to look at her. “What happened? Is it worse than I’d thought, what you said before about Margo and junior year being a disaster?”

I nodded, thinking of Jimmy’s hard mouth on mine, of Margo’s cold face, the words we’d said to each other, Paul’s humiliating list. I cried harder and harder. My mom frowned, then pulled me close to her, stroking my head like I was a little girl again.

“Janice,” she said. “Tell me, sweetheart.”

And so I told her — a partial version of the story. How Jimmy Denton had seemed so artistic and cool, how he’d liked my anthropology research and invited me to the party. How Margo had been annoyed by me and thought I was too critical and liked TR better, but then showed up at the party anyway. How I’d gone for a quiet conversation with Jimmy that had turned mean — and how he’d basically told me I was an ugly girl no one would want to kiss and that he thought our main bond was that we both hated everything.

I looked up at my mom through my watery eyes. She frowned at me, almost as if she could tell she was getting only a partial sketch of the evening but that it was enough nonetheless.

“Janice,” she said, her face calm and serious. “First of all, it sounds to me like Jimmy has his own problems to sort through — problems that have nothing to do with you. And as for Margo, I understand why you were hurt, but I have a feeling this is something you two are going to survive. What worries me
here is how off your perspective is, how warped. Do you know what I mean?”

“All my observations are anthropologically valid,” I said, shaking my head and burying my face in my hands again.

“No,” my mom said. “Hear me out. I’m not such a bad observer myself — where do you think you got your talents anyway? First, Janice, you’re smart as a whip. You’re clever, quick — you’re an interesting person in addition to being the daughter I love. Second, contrary to your own fixed belief, you’re actually a pretty girl, not a hideous wildebeest. Third, you will not believe anything good I’m saying about you right now, not because I happen to be your mother, but because every teenaged girl is constitutionally incapable of fully appreciating her own good qualities. It’s simply true of your species, your tribe.
This
is anthropologically valid: You cannot help the fact that you will not believe these good things I’m telling you.”

I sniffed and looked at my mom.

“Sweetheart, you’re wonderful. And I honestly think you’ve got a fighting chance to be Miss Livermush.”

I scoffed, still sniffling. But I hugged my mom too.

“Well, be a good sport for me and try on one more of these dresses.”

The second dress looked like something a mother of the bride might wear — a very elderly, very frumpy mother of the bride. Maybe even a grandmother of the bride. The dress was sea foam colored, with sleeves, and covered in long, dangly beading. I gritted my teeth and took it to my room to change.

“Mom, I look like a First Lady from the seventies,” I said when I emerged.

“Nonsense! You look wonderful!”

“Not gonna work, Mom. Not acceptable.”

“And you can move in that one too!” my mom said. “You can really get some good movement going if you need it. Like this.”

She demonstrated, one arm going up, skipping from foot to foot. My mom was doing the Pony.

“Try it!” she huffed. “This will wow those judges.”

Still wearing the sea foam gown, I threw up one arm and mimicked my mom, skipping from side to side. It was the most ridiculous dance I’d ever done.

“That’s it! That’s it! That’s how a future Miss Livermush does the Pony!” my mom said. “Ohhhh, you would have been the queen of the dance floor! Chubby Checker would be proud!”

My arms were flying, and I was laughing, nearly gasping for breath. I collapsed into my mom, giggling.

“Thanks, Mom,” I whispered.

She smiled at me.

“But I still think these dresses need to be returned,” I said. “I’ll find something else that’s on sale.”

Mom held up her hands. “Do what you like.”

Later that evening I sat at my computer, frowning at the screen in front of me. Writing an essay extolling the virtues of livermush
was the last thing I felt like doing. Partially due to Paul, the occasional vegan, I was a vegetarian — well, a fish-eating vegetarian, a pescatarian — and I hated livermush, a gross processed meat product. Still, I figured that stating this would not win me friends on the Melva’s Miss Livermush scholarship committee. How did anyone write fifteen hundred words on a subject like livermush anyway?

I leaned forward, holding my temples in my hands. The glare from the computer screen made my eyes ache — made my whole head ache.

I thought about calling Margo. Maybe she’d been feeling lonely and wildebeest-like too — so much so that an invitation from TR and her crew might have been hard to turn down. I held the phone in my hand with her number there, ready to press SEND, but couldn’t do it. I had tried calling Tanesha, my favorite friend from French class, thinking I might see if she wanted to hang out (although we hadn’t ever hung out with each other outside of school except for when we’d worked on a project), but she had been out at the mall with friends. When I heard them all laughing over French fries in the food court, I chickened out, using French homework as an excuse. There, of course, was no French homework.
Girl, you lunchin’. You’ve been in outer space this whole week
! Tanesha had said, laughing. I’d desperately wished at that moment that I were eating fries with her, with someone, anyone. I’d even almost called my old junior cotillion dance partner, Petey Bivins, but then I remembered how I’d told the whole “date” story to Margo, how I’d laughed about Petey’s distinct
smell, all the while drawing (what I’d thought at the time were) witty anthropological comparisons. My eyes burned.

When my cell phone finally did ring, it was Paul again. He’d called a few times Saturday, but he hadn’t left messages. I knew he was calling about the list. I knew he probably felt bad for upsetting me. But what could he possibly say anyway? I wondered.
Sorry for pointing out something that’s obviously true?

I almost checked desperatemeasuresmelva.blogspot.com but didn’t.

There was only one thing to do now: type fifteen hundred words on livermush. I could take an anthropological approach. Heck — this could be a chapter in my larger piece on the whole Miss Livermush Pageant! I decided that this was going to be the best livermush essay anyone had ever read. The most anthropologically valid livermush essay anyone had ever read. And while I was at it, why not try a little? Operation Fighting Chance at Miss Livermush was about to begin. I was going to try this time. I began typing.

Six days postparty, and I still had not talked to Margo. We were practicing the rigorous art of at-school avoidance. Aside from one tense run-in in the upstairs bathroom — Margo had refilled her bag so hastily to avoid me that she’d dropped her lip gloss onto the floor and left it — we hadn’t seen each other. Walking the halls alone now, I felt like a woman in a space suit, invisible, apart, breathing a different atmosphere from everyone else. I missed talking to someone at my side. I missed having a best friend. I hadn’t seen Jimmy once since the party. And I’d taken to eating lunch on the empty stadium bleachers, where neither Paul nor Margo would have thought to find me.

After finishing my Miss Livermush essay, I had composed a letter. It went like this:

I decided I’d give myself another week before I sent it. But in the meanwhile, I had to continue going to high school.

What I Did This Week
(Instead of Talking to Margo)

French was one of my favorite classes, mainly because it was small and Ms. Gerard was fun. We made French food and learned French cuss words. (Tanesha and I had gotten the idea to write one-act plays in French to practice our dialogue, and we’d argued that cuss words would authenticate our conversations.) Ms. Gerard had even done a whole lesson on French vocabulary words for cosmetics, since cosmetics are so emblematically French.

Tanesha and I were
meilleures amies
, at least for one full class period a day. I’d wondered if Tanesha might count as an actual
meilleure amie
— especially now that I’d ruined things with Margo. We talked a lot to each other, and I loved hanging out with her, but, still, she remained an At School Friend. She was a Cool Black Girl, and Margo and I were merely Socially Unremarkable White Girls, a subcaste of the Smart Pretties. The Cool Black Girls sat at a different lunch table, and they danced really cool-ly at school dances or on the sidelines of football games. In PE one time, Tanesha and her friends had tried to teach me to pop, lock, and drop it, but as I shook my scrawny butt to the ground, I worried that I looked ridiculous and pathetic rather than fun and willing to try new things.

ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
The racial breakdown at Melva High was essentially half white and half black, with a tiny dash of “Other.” People
got along for the most part, but mostly in accordance with the At School Friends system. At least we all went to the same prom, unlike some high schools I’ve heard about.

When Ms. Gerard turned to the board, I whispered to Tanesha, “Hey, Tanesha. Can you help me learn how to dance? In time for the Miss Livermush Pageant?”

She looked askance at me. “I thought you hated dancing.”

“Well, it’s Miss Livermush … and it’s not like I’m going to get any points from the talent portion of the competition anyway, but I need to do
something
, and I thought maybe dancing wouldn’t be too hard … if you could help me.”

“You think I can dance because I’m a black girl?” she asked.

“Ummm. I think you can dance because I’ve
seen
you dance, and you can dance. But I’ll be honest and say dancing was definitely not among the gifts handed down to me by my pasty Scotch-Irish forebears….”

Tanesha winked at me. “Just leave it to me,” she said. “After school today. Meet in the auxiliary room in the gym.”

After school, I stepped into the auxiliary room and saw Tanesha and another girl. Their backs were turned to me as they both bent over a CD player in the corner. Tanesha looked up.

“Oh, hey!” she said. “There you are! We were just figuring
out a song. I’m guessing you want to avoid anything too hip-hop, but I was thinking maybe Beyoncé? Everyone likes Beyoncé, especially moms. All moms secretly love Beyoncé.”

I stupidly had not considered what I would dance to. Beyoncé? Maybe this made sense. Something poppy, something crowd-pleasing, something in between Shania Twain and Shostakovich.

“Or what about Bob Dylan?” I asked.

“No. I hope you’re kidding. Definitely not,” Tanesha said.

“Okay. Beyoncé, then.”

“You’ve got it,” she said, “and hey, I haven’t introduced you. Do you know Susannah? She goes to school in the county, but we dance at the same studio. I thought she might help. Susannah, Janice. Janice, Susannah.”

The girl next to Tanesha stopped fiddling with the CD player and turned toward me. She smiled a friendly, radiant, beautiful Victorian girl smile. Her teeth were like a string of nice pearls. Her lips had a little cupid pout. She wore a tweed skirt and a ruffled shirt that would have looked dowdy on anyone else in the world, but only made her look interesting.

“Hi,” I said, my stomach sinking down to my feet. “We do know each other. We’ve met. Through Paul.”

Susannah, still beaming, walked over to me. As I was reaching out to shake her hand, she rushed forward to embrace me in a full hug.

“Of course,” she said into my back, not releasing her embrace. “Of course! So good to see you.”

“Good to see you too,” I said into a mouthful of her hair. “Thank you for helping me.”

ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
People who have mastered the art of warm friendliness are far more annoying to hate because they reinforce the notion of your own hateful, bad person-hood. All the while you are busy hating them, you are made sick with the knowledge that they probably do not possess a hateful bone in their body. Nor are you even worthy of their jealousy. It wouldn’t occur to them.

Susannah gracefully pulled off her skirt and shirt, revealing leggings and a tank top underneath. She began stretching, pressing her hands all the way against the ground. Her body was like a piece of licorice. I was out of my depth.

Tanesha turned on the music.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s get down to business.”

For those who have not had the experience of learning a choreographed dance: It is terrible. First, I watched Tanesha and The Friendly Victorian Beauty perform.

“It’s easy!” Tanesha shouted. “We kept the routine pretty basic and short!”

They moved completely in rhythm with the song and each other. They shimmied their hips and did a little dip. There were a lot of sidesteps.
I can do sidesteps
, I thought.
It’s just like walking, only sideways, rhythmically … and I can walk
.

Then I stood up and tried to follow along. I just let loose — gangled my gangles, lankied my lankies, shimmied my bony knees to the ground. It was not like Beyoncé's dance moves, but it was certainly as close to Beyoncé as I’d ever gotten.

But an hour later, I only had the first five sidesteps down pat. Beyond that, I got lost. I didn’t fall on my face. I didn’t trip. I just couldn’t keep up. Everything was too fast, and my muscle memory was too slow, too feeble. My muscle memory was geriatric.

“You’re doing great!” The Beautiful Excellent Victorian Dancer shouted. “You’re doing awesome!”

It occurred to me how much more humiliated I would be doing this if she, Susannah, were also going to be dancing in the pageant. With Paul as her escort too. I swallowed, blinking back tears.

“Let’s keep at it,” I said. I was trying.

An hour later, we sat down and drank bottles of water. I still had not really mastered the routine.

“How am I looking?” I asked, a little short of breath. “Much better!” The Victorian said with her sweet cupid lips. I looked at her and wanted to cry.

“Ummm. Is there anything else you were thinking about doing for your talent?” Tanesha asked, grimacing a little as she said it. “Not that you’re doing a bad job. Not at all. But it’s new for you, that’s all.”

“No, no,” I said. “I understand. Forget it. Hey, I made an effort, but I don’t think dancing’s my thing.” I thought of the paper I’d written back in the fall, my genius paper “Margaret Mead, Melva, and Me: An Anthropologist Comes of Age in the Land of Livermush.” That might work. “I’m an anthropologist. I should represent that to the judges. I could read this paper I wrote a little while back.”

“Does that count as a talent?” Susannah the Lovely asked, blinking her sweet doe eyes.

“Well,
I
consider it a talent,” I said. My voice sounded colder than I’d intended. “So it’ll have to count.”

“Are you entering the pageant, Tanesha?” The Victorian asked.

“No,” Tanesha said. “I mean, I guess I could if I wanted to, but … I dunno. I’ll be at the dance afterward, though. Everyone’s going to the dance.”

“Is it weird that way?” I asked. “This weird social divide? It makes me squeamish.”

Tanesha threw up her hands. “Yeah, but I guess you could say I have other priorities,” she said. “Livermush Princess is not high on my list.”

I turned to Susannah. “What about you? Are you dancing as your talent?” I asked her.

Susannah wound a strand of hair around her finger and did not reply. Then she looked up at me. “I didn’t have the GPA,” she said. “I didn’t qualify.”

I stared at her. The GPA wasn’t that hard to get, was it? It hadn’t occurred to me —

“Hey, it’s no big deal,” Tanesha said, reaching over for Susannah’s shoulder. “Who cares?!”

Susannah was crying! Just a little bit. She looked away and wiped her eyes quickly.

“I’m such a baby,” she said. “No, it’s not a big deal. I was just a little disappointed, that’s all. School’s not my thing.” She looked at me. “You’re really lucky, Janice,” she said. “I mean, I’m a tiny bit jealous. Paul was always telling me how interesting you are, and you’re smart, and …”

FACT:
My mind had officially been blown. Susannah, The Beautiful Victorian, with her retro aesthetic and her dancing ability and her status as The Official Girlfriend, was jealous of me?!

“Susannah, what are you talking about?” I said. “You’re so beautiful and cool and talented! And being smart is totally different from being good in school. Look at Einstein! Seriously. I’ve been intimidated by how cool you are this whole time!”

She looked at me and burst out laughing. “Paul was right about you,” Susannah said, smiling. “You
are
great.”

“Thanks,” I said, feeling generosity flood through me like June sunlight. I’d managed to help Susannah feel better, and for some reason I suddenly felt at least 24.3 percent cooler myself. She wasn’t so bad, The Perfect Victorian. “We should hang out sometime — all of us, Paul, some others. Get a group together.”

“Oh,” Susannah said, blushing a little. “Well, sure. We’re still friends, me and Paul. But you did know that we broke up, didn’t you? A while ago.”

I was so surprised I couldn’t even say anything.

“Come on, y’all. I’ve gotta get out of here in a little bit,” Tanesha interjected. “An anthropology essay sounds like the right thing for the Janice Wills I know, but let’s practice this dance one more time just in case. You never know when you might need to impress somebody on the dance floor.”