Big Girl Small (34 page)

14
It’s been 9 days since I ran away, 216 hours; 12,960 minutes. This morning I woke up before it was even light outside, not crying for once, and put on my last clean clothes—and when I say clean, I mean filthy, because I’ve just been washing out the same outfits and wringing them out to dry them in rotation. I chewed some gum, sat on the bed, turned the TV on. News. People dying, markets collapsing, everyone losing their jobs. I waited for the gentle knocking, ready.

And when I heard it, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and jumped down, walked toward the door.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me.”

I opened the door and there was Goth Sarah, looking totally calm, unsurprised to see me. She was carrying a Whole Foods bag. I hadn’t seen a human being I knew—other than Bill—in nine days. And since I’d ruined my phone, I hadn’t even heard anyone’s voice. More than once, I had wished for an old message from my mom or dad or Sarah, for one of their saved voices from before all this. Now, standing in the doorway of my room at the Motel Manor, Sarah was so familiar and so strange at the same time that it was like seeing someone arrive from being dead for a long time. I didn’t say anything, because I couldn’t. The tears started underneath my eyes, boiled over, and poured down my face. She watched me, deciding whether to pretend not to notice. She was wearing ripped gray fishnets and a sleeveless black lace dress with a white T-shirt underneath it. She looked skinnier than I remembered, smaller. She reached her pale arms out and hugged me.

“Hi, Judy,” she said, into my hair. She was crying too.

“Hi.”

She pulled back, looked at me. Her eyes were puffy, with circles under them. She didn’t have any makeup on, rare for her. “So I brought you some things,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her right hand.

“Thank you.”

“Just some clean clothes, Fruit Roll-Ups, Power Bars, Naked juices, you know.”

“Wow. Thank you.” I swallowed, backing into the room, wondering if she would follow. Now what would we do? She kept looking at me, her eyes wide and tired.

“So,” I said, “how did you find me?”

She shrugged.

“Do my parents know where I am?”

“Uh,” she said.

“What are you doing here?”

“I came to make sure you were okay.”

“Right. So they’ve known all along?”

She shrugged.

“How did they know?”

“I’m not really supposed to say that they know.”

“Okay, so if they did know, how would they have found out?”

“Maybe some guy would have called them and told them you were here.”

“And when would that have happened?”

She smiled a superwarm smile, shrugged again.

“A while ago,” she said.

“A while like two hours? Or like nine days?”

“Can I come in?”

I nodded, backed fully into the room without taking my eyes off of her. Because I was terrified that if I looked away, even for a second, she would disappear, and I would be alone again. And I wouldn’t know whether she’d even been there for real. Being alone can make you lose track of what’s real and what’s not. Maybe because most of what’s “real” gets confirmed by how and whether we talk and write about it. Until the moment I saw Goth Sarah at the Motel Manor, Bill had been the only person who stood between me and absolute solitary confinement. Now that I had seen someone I knew, even though it meant my horrible story was true again, I couldn’t believe I had made it through nine days alone. What if she left and I was never brave enough leave the motel again? I couldn’t bear the thought of spending another second there.

Goth Sarah slowly sat down on the bed, and I climbed up next to her. She put an arm around me.

“So they’ve known the whole time where I was,” I said.

“It still counts,” she said.

“Right. So what—are they here? In the hotel?”

“No. They’re at home. They just sent me.”

“Every day.”

She nodded. “Didn’t you get my note?”

The envelope. I leaned over and took it out of my notebook, still unopened. Sarah watched. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t know who it was from, and I was too scared—”

“That’s okay,” she said, “you don’t have to . . .”

I opened the envelope and unfolded the piece of paper inside, thought how well I knew Sarah’s handwriting, how it reminded me of American lit. And lunch. The hallways. All the note said was, “I’ll keep coming back. Don’t want to intrude, so just let me know when you want to talk or if you need anything, okay? xoxo, Sarah.” At the bottom was a little doodle of the two of us, standing side by side on a little path that reminded me of
Harold and the Purple
Crayon
. There was a moon above us and a line at the end of the path that suggested the horizon.

“Thank you,” I said. “I wish I’d opened it when you put it there.” This wasn’t true, exactly, but it felt okay to say it anyway.

Sarah just nodded. I folded the note neatly and put it back in its envelope.

“So how did Bill find my parents?”

“Uh. I guess he looked them up.”

“Does Bill know you’re here too? Does he know you?”

She nodded and blew her bangs out of her eyes. I noticed that her roots were little-kid blond, like Alan’s. She was the opposite of most people who dye their hair, wanting to be blond, with the angry black roots poking out of their scalps in protest. I loved her for this choice, choosing her motor oil hair, rejecting the utterly, conventionally desirable blond girl underneath. But I also had a quick jolt of the hope that someday she’d be able to go as is.

“You changed your hair?”

“No, I haven’t dyed it in a few weeks is all.”

“Oh. It looks good.”

“Thanks. I’ve been really sad.” She paused. “We all miss you.”

“I feel like a patronized infant.”

“You shouldn’t,” she said.

“Who’s ‘we all,’ by the way?” I fished.

“Just, I don’t know, your mom, Sam, me, Ms. Doman?”

I remembered, suddenly, that Ms. Doman was a real person, not just a character I had invented. Again, I felt disoriented. “Ms. Doman misses me?” I asked.

“Totally,” Sarah said, encouraged for the first time since she’d arrived. “I think seeing me reminds her of you. She calls on me constantly, but then she’s super disappointed no matter what I say. It’s like being the person she married after her true love died.” A little smile played with the corner of her mouth, like she wanted so much for this to be okay, to be able to be friends again, for me not to be gone forever—or to have become someone she didn’t know anymore.

And I can’t deny that the thing about Ms. Doman made me feel slightly better. But I was too whiny to thank Sarah. So I said, “I can’t do anything by myself.”

I thought she’d say yes, I could, that I had proven myself, but instead she looked straight at me with her bruised-looking eyes and said, “No one can.”

“
You
can.”

“Of course I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. You’re always taking care of everyone, especially me—getting me home from school every day, rescuing me from Kyle’s that day, getting the—”

I stopped short of saying the word, since my breath ran out as soon as I remembered her standing in the doorway of my room, holding the unmarked DVD. I saw a photorealistic image of Alan moving toward the bed on my laptop screen and felt instantly like I might throw up.

Sarah was watching me closely, her head tilted to the side. “Every single thing you mentioned is because I have a car. And I happen to know, although they were planning to surprise you with it, that they fixed the pedals in your dad’s car, which he’s about to give you, so from now on you can drive me around. And pick me up at Eliot’s next time he dumps me.”

“Did Eliot dump you?”

She swallowed, and I could see the outline of a sob, trying to get out of her throat.

“Shit. I’m sorry, Sarah, I had no idea—”

“There’s a new Japanese exchange student named Kimiko—”

We looked at each other, and her eyes widened, and her mouth twitched a little, and then she started laughing. And within one second, it was an avalanche of laughs—maybe because she was so nervous, or maybe because she was so relieved to have an excuse to laugh, or I don’t know. There were words flying out from in between her gasps: “I mean, Kimiko, really? It was like, he’s such a racist—all she had to be was—oh my god, they’re like, doing Shinto naked together right now even as we speak.”

And suddenly, I was laughing too, even though it wasn’t funny, and realizing that it was the first time in weeks that I had heard my own laugh. I was sorry it was at Sarah’s expense, and about something so deeply unfunny.

“I’m sorry,” I said, as soon as I calmed down. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to pick you up or something. I’ve been kind of selfish lately, I—”

I expected her to contradict this. But she said, “It’s a small thing, obviously. I mean, whatever, teenage love, right?” We watched each other again, both waiting, both knowing this wasn’t true, and that it didn’t make us feel better. Kyle didn’t love me, and Eliot didn’t love Sarah. And there was nothing small about either of those facts, really. I thought suddenly of Molly.

“Where’s Molly?”

“At school,” Sarah said.

The word sent me tumbling back down to the bottom of myself. “What am I going to do?”

“Come back. It hasn’t even been two weeks—you can make up the work. Molly and I’ll fill you in on everything. There are a million things we’ve been dying to talk about. Stockard and Greg broke up for one. And well, Chris and Alan got expelled, and . . .” She paused for a moment, as if telling me about them in the same sentence as other people might be insensitive.

“I guess you haven’t heard about anything that’s happened, right?”

“Not really,” I said. “What were you were going to say?”

“It was just about Chris and Alan, about Stanford and UCLA?”

“I heard they were expelled,” I prompted, “from the paper.”

“Stanford and UCLA found out what happened and they’re not letting Chris and Alan come.”

“They
found out
?” I had an image of the video being screened on campuses across the country. I looked up at the ceiling, got an odd sense of comfort that the same cracks I’d been staring at since I’d gotten to the Motel Manor were still there, right where I’d left them.

“You know, I mean, D’Arts told them.” She looked at me strangely, like maybe I hadn’t realized something.

“The whole thing was, like, a really big deal at D’Arts, you know, the whole—I mean, it was a huge public relations nightmare.” Sarah looked nervous, like she didn’t know whether she was allowed to tell me anything, or she thought I’d crumble, that my arms and legs and head would snap off like puppet parts, that I’d literally break down. But I sat still, kept my back straight, focused on my excellent posture.

Sarah slouched down. “D’Arts expelled them to, like, prove they could handle discipline issues or whatever.”

I felt a twinge of powerlessness and rage. Goth Sarah was watching me, maybe wanting to see if this news made it better. But what was I supposed to feel, except that it had happened without me there? I wanted to hear about Kyle, but couldn’t ask.

“Their lives are totally fucked,” Sarah tried again. “And yours isn’t.”

“Maybe it is, though. I mean, that video is going to last forever. Maybe everyone who meets me from now on—for the rest of my life—will have seen it.”

Sarah shook her head. “No,” she said. “You’re going to apply to college next year and get into Harvard. Or Juilliard. You can go wherever you want and no one will ever have heard of any of this shit. But you have to come back and finish school. We’re doing
The
Wiz
for the spring show.”

“Oh.”

“You haven’t even missed auditions. And how could Minogue not give you Dorothy?”

“Maybe she’ll cast me as a Munchkin.”

“No way,” Sarah said. “She’s definitely all about height-blind casting.”

I smiled, and Sarah said, “And anyway, it’s just one more year and then you can totally remake yourself once you get to coll—”

“As a seven-foot Amazon?” I asked.

Sarah laughed. “I’ll buy the stilts,” she said.

“I can’t show my face at D’Arts. How can I? I can’t.”

“Of course you can. Seriously, Judy,” she said. “Think of all the famous people who have, you know—in a way, sex tapes aren’t even bad anymore, they’re like, normal. More than normal. People do it to get famous! You’re a step ahead.”

I wanted to believe her so much that I almost did. And she must have seen that she was making progress, because she picked up speed.

“Kyle probably won’t even finish high school, or it’ll at least take him an extra year at some lame school and then he’ll never get into college without them finding out. And Alan and Chris
aren’t
going to college
. They’re about to spend the rest of their lives pumping gas, flipping burgers, pulling old ladies out of the shallow end at Fuller Pool! Alan’ll be seventy-nine, with tufts of hair coming out his ears, lifeguarding. Chris’ll marry his mom, because she’s the only woman who will ever look at him again.”

I laughed, in spite of myself.

“Come on, play Dorothy, finish school with Molly and me. Those pricks are gone forever, and D’Arts completely sucks without you.”

I was still back on his name, and she knew it. She looked at me. “Do you want to hear about Kyle?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Whatever.”

“Apparently he’s having some kind of, I don’t know, breakdown.”

A knot formed in my throat. “What do you mean?”

“During the hearing? He cried until his parents had to take him out.”

I swallowed the knot and it rose again, painfully.

“Was he faking?”

Sarah lay back on the bed, grabbed a pillow, and looked up at the ceiling. I wondered what it would be like to be looking at those cracks for the first time. She propped her head up on her hand, and blew her bangs out of her eyes again. They settled right back down and she peered at me through them.

“I heard it happened twice—both days of the hearing. I don’t really know. Maybe he was super fucked up about what he did to you, or maybe about his sister or whatever.”