Big Girl Small (22 page)

Mainly, I was obsessed with whether people could tell I wasn’t a virgin anymore. Molly and Goth Sarah definitely suspected something was up, and the truth is, I wanted to tell them, was even planning to, but how could I? I mean, every time they saw Kyle and me near each other, he was ignoring me—like at rehearsal on the days when he didn’t drive me home, or left with Kim, or at the twins’ party, when he was sitting with Kim, which killed me, wearing gray cargo pants and a crisp blue T-shirt that showed under his unbuttoned coat. His hair was longer than usual and he had pulled a gray winter cap over it, so there were curls sticking out the bottom of the cap. I thought of the curls at the nape of his neck, and felt incredulous that as far as Goth Sarah and Molly knew, he had driven me home twice and that was it. If I had told them we’d done it, they would have died of shock, although they also would have forced me to face the truth, which was that his not calling or paying attention to me in public wasn’t actually okay.

Elizabeth Wood was with him and Kim at the Barkspers’ party; she was talking about “her career”—I could tell by how her perfect, kewpie doll face moved. I turned to Goth Sarah to be like, “Look, Elizabeth is demonstrating her passion for acting,” and Sarah laughed as if it were funnier than it was, which made me feel mean and slightly better for about two seconds, before I just felt mean and therefore even worse. Kim and Kyle were listening to Elizabeth’s monologue. I was hoping for a way to go over and join in, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I kept thinking of Kyle in his room, all sleepy, with just me there. But no one seemed to notice anything different about me—or him, obviously—and this made me feel like it hadn’t even happened.

Even though I had hated Ginger’s smoking seminar in my backyard, I was grateful for it at Kim and Kelly’s, because now I had actually smoked once before and didn’t look like a total loser. This time I held the smoke in my mouth again, and it had no effect again. I think Molly was kind of surprised to see me try it. She turned the pipe down, unapologetically, casually, the way she wore her karate suit, or took classes with her dad on the weekends, and as usual, no one judged her. Goth Sarah puffed like a pro, although she took only one hit, maybe because she was driving. I wondered if she had smoked before, or if she was good at faking it. Kyle didn’t smoke; whenever the pipe came to him, he passed it to Kim. But I must have seen him refill a milk glass with whiskey at least five times.

In fact, it was at Kim and Kelly’s that it occurred to me how much he drank. He drank a lot. But he wasn’t a loud drunk; he just got quieter and quieter. Chris Arpent did the loud drunk thing for him, maybe, for all of us. Chris stood on the deck that night, shouting about how it makes no sense to call it “going commando” when guys wear no underpants. I have to admit, he was kind of hilarious, standing with his body in a commando pose, one arm stretched out in front of him, miming that he was holding a gun, and then turning to the guy behind him, like, “Dude, where’s your underwear? What? I’m a commando too, and I’m not free-balling all over the battlefield.”

I was laughing until Goth Sarah leaned over to me. “He didn’t think of that himself, you know. It’s from—”

“Well, it’s pretty funny anyway.”

“Do you want to go soon?” she asked, and even though I didn’t, because I didn’t want to create the possibility of Kyle’s leaving with someone else, I said, “Sure.” I’m not the kind of friend who makes you stay at a party if you’re having a horrible time. My friend Stacy, at Huron, was like that. Whenever we went anywhere, I knew if I was leaving with her then I might be trapped for like ten years in a place I hated if she was having too much fun to want to leave with me, or liked some guy and wanted to wait and see if he would leave with her instead. In which case I would have to call Chad or my parents to come get me. And she was totally the type to get super drunk at a party and leave with some guy, and leave her car there, even if she was my ride.

Molly had to babysit for her little sister, Susanna, in the morning, so she couldn’t sleep at Sarah’s. I said good-bye to her, and she used it as an excuse to get up and walk over to where Chris was sitting. Inspired, I went over to Kim, pretending I wanted to thank her, but actually to warn Kyle I was leaving—in case he wanted to stop me.

“So, Kim, thanks for having us,” I said. And I said it right during a huge lull that no one was expecting in the conversation on the deck, so everyone heard it and it was really stupid, but then Chris started laughing and laughing. And then everyone started laughing, so I pretended I’d meant it as whatever joke they thought it was, and Sarah and I left. Kyle didn’t say anything, and I couldn’t tell if he’d been laughing or not. “Yeah, Kim,” Chris said, “thanks for having me.” I didn’t get it, but they were all high, so maybe every stupid thing seemed funny. Kyle smiled at me, gave a little wave as I left.

At Sarah’s, we let ourselves in and ate some grilled shrimp we found in the fridge. When we were finished with our snack, we went downstairs, and I got Sarah’s desk chair and pulled it into the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth. When I got back to her room, she had already folded out her metal trundle bed and raised it up so the two beds were side by side. And once I had climbed up onto my side and we were lying there on her matching twin pale yellow sheets, she was all of a sudden like, “It’s totally not worth it, worrying about him so much all the time.”

“I don’t worry about him all the time,” I said. “I mean, I’m not even sure if I like him that much,” I said.

“You can tell me. I mean, did anything happen that day he drove you home?”

I couldn’t bring myself to say no, but couldn’t manage the truth, either.

“You know, we hung out for a while, that was all.”

“Hung out? What am I, your grandmother? Did you guys hook up?”

“Maybe a little.”

She screamed with glee. “You did?! You hooked up with Kyle Malanack!? You are kidding me! Are you excited? Horrified? Glad? Angry? Have you guys talked about it?”

This was like dipping my toes in the swimming pool and knowing immediately that they would have to be amputated. The water was much too cold. I can’t overstate how much I regretted having admitted anything at all, and I frantically backtracked.

“I mean, I don’t know if it counts. We just kind of held hands or whatever.”

“Held hands? What, in the car?”

“I don’t know if it was even holding hands, really. I mean, he kind of brushed my hand as I got out.”

“Oh,” Sarah said. She must have been so weirded out. I feel bad, even now.

“Hey, Sarah?”

“Yeah?”

“When have you smoked pot before?”

“With Eliot, twice, why? When have you?”

“Just that one time when Ginger came over to my house after school.”

There was an unpleasant moment of silence, while we both remembered how rude I’d been not to include Sarah. I was sorry I’d brought it up, but also relieved that the conversation had moved away from Kyle.

“How was that, by the way?”

“Smoking? It sucked.”

“I meant Ginger coming over.”

I turned over in the bed and pulled the covers up to my shoulders, stuck one foot out—the right one. I like to sleep this way; it keeps my body temperature exactly right and makes me feel like there’s a possibility of escaping the sheets.

“It was just okay. She’s kind of weird, I think.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

We were quiet again.

“Judy?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you mad at me?”

“Why would you think that?”

“I don’t know—it’s just, I feel like you don’t really —”

“I’m just incredibly tired.” I faked a huge yawn that became real halfway through. Needless to say, I wish I had confided more in her when I had the chance.

Sunday took ten years. I went home to our silent house and read and spent an hour picking two pictures to upload to Facebook, imagining that Kyle might see them. One was a picture I’d taken myself, of me holding the camera out and kind of smirking; the other was from the Halloween party—Molly had taken it of me and Sarah sitting on her bed in our sexy witch costumes. I couldn’t wait for Monday, to see our fetal cat or sit in American lit, to catch a live glimpse of Kyle anywhere. I had made up my mind to talk to him, and this felt like a plan. Maybe it would go okay. Maybe we would be weekday boyfriend-girlfriend. I even thought I could live with that. Sunday night, I reread
Charlotte’s Web
, one of my favorite books, but even though I love that story, it seemed unbearably childish and optimistic now. I had the feeling, while I was reading it, that I had floated up above myself and was watching Judy read the book, but I wasn’t me anymore. Maybe that’s what they mean by growing up; it was like there were two of me, one the same me I’d always been, and the other one suddenly too old for her.

Monday came but Kyle never approached me. I was wearing my black corduroy miniskirt and boots, and I tried to say brilliant things about
The Crucible
in American lit, but my words betrayed me and came out garbled. Kyle was across the room, in track pants and a white T-shirt, looking at the blackboard. I noticed he was wearing new sneakers, wondered if he’d gone to buy them with his mom, or by himself. When I spoke, he barely turned around, but then neither did anyone else. I mean, we had all stopped being that curious about each other, unless there was real gossip. I want to say that I felt like my heart was breaking that day, but since I now know what that actually feels like, I’ll just say that I felt very bad. After a run through of the moronic bilingual song “Where Do People Go When They Run Away,” I found myself standing onstage next to him.
¿Dime, donde van? Tell me, where do they go? And what do they say to
each other? Do they sit in the theater all day like sad old men?

“Um,” I said, hating myself for being pathetic, and wishing, wishing I were tall, that he didn’t have to bend down to make eye contact with me. But I didn’t even need to wish that, it turned out, because he looked straight out, over me, even after I asked, “So what’s happening?”

“Nothing, why?” he said, still not looking at me. I walked off backstage.

Two more weeks passed. It was as if we had never met. I began to wonder whether I had imagined our encounter. I went through the school days in a numb haze, stopped raising my hand, even in American lit. I ate lunches off campus, alone. In the evenings, I labeled papier-mâché globes with Sam, couldn’t bear to leave the house except for school and rehearsal. I didn’t call Sarah or Molly, didn’t want to tell them anything, didn’t want anyone to know. I slept one entire weekend, told my parents I was sick, which was true. The next one I spent at the Grill, “studying” for finals, avoiding Sarah, even though she called a million times and I missed her. I practiced in the mirror how I would tell Sarah when she got back from South Africa over Christmas break. I would act like I had thought it through over the vacation and could now explain—or that I had gotten over it. Maybe, I thought, I would actually have gotten over it, and I would be able to laugh about it with Molly and Sarah. It seemed doubtful.

Christmas break came. Time kept moving the relentless way it does. That used to scare me, I have to say, and it still does. I used to think, all the time, that even if I sat under my parents’ dining room table and did nothing and spoke to no one, time would still move, and I would still grow up. It’s hard to explain, especially the part about the dining room table, but that’s always how I thought about being unable to control the slipping away of my own hours. Before school even got out, Kyle’s family went to St. Bart’s; I knew from his Facebook page and chatter at school. Molly went to Atlanta, and Sarah went to South Africa. We all had to be back the second week because, like I said, you weren’t even really allowed to travel if you went to Darcy, because rehearsals started up the second week of break.

I spent the entire agonizingly long week and a half at the Grill with my parents, who didn’t take any time off, including Christmas Day, because they liked to make hams and turkeys for their regulars, who I guess were so old they didn’t have friends left, or couldn’t travel to see their families, or whatever. Or students who couldn’t afford to go home. I usually loved Christmas dinner at the Grill. Everyone had the same food, so it felt like a huge family holiday, even though some of the people were strangers and we were all eating in a diner. My parents loved it too; they were always in great moods, even though it was a spine-cracking amount of work, cooking fancy food for that many people.

It snowed seven of the nine days, until the Huron River’s edges froze into jagged patterns of ice and a wall of white rose outside our windows, taller than I was.

When we got back to rehearsal in January, it was still six days until school started. Everyone was giddy because we hadn’t seen each other in a week. Most of the juniors had crazy tans, some fake and others real. Everyone was talking about where they’d been, what they’d done over the break. Kyle was wearing a white polo shirt and had one of the real tans. It made him look preppier than usual, more like a game show host than his usual bedraggled director self, but it also looked on him like he hadn’t had to work to get it, had just been playing or doing his thing, and the sun had attached itself to him like we all wanted to. He was in an especially joyful mood, bounding around like a puppy, with his teeth electric white next to his tan. Everyone was in the best moods ever, and I felt left out, totally alone. My happy days at Darcy were over.

It’s not like Kyle was rude; I mean, he was very friendly to me those first days back, said hi, said, “Great job, Judy,” one day after a full run-through. But he didn’t call me and I didn’t call him. I wanted to, even just to make the point that I didn’t think girls should have to wait for boys to call us. But I couldn’t bring myself to make that point with Kyle. So it had been over a month since I’d been to his house, and when I saw his name flash across my cell phone screen, I almost had a heart attack.

“Hello?”

“Hey, what’s up?”

“Not much.” My heart was a jungle drum. I wondered if he could hear it pounding in the background, like traffic, if the sound would drown out my voice.