Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar (11 page)

“Um, I just peed my pants. Can I use your phone?” I said. “Also, one pack of Benson & Hedges Special King Size, please.” I slid my five-dollar bill across the counter to her.

“Did you say you peed your pants?”

“Yeah. Do you mind if I come behind the counter to use your phone?”

The look on her face said “I mind, sweet Baby Jesus, I mind,” but I stepped behind the counter anyway and stood there beside her as she passed me the cigarettes. Then she stood back, about ten feet from me. AS IF she'd never seen someone pee her pants in line before.

“Can I use your phone?” I repeated, a bit annoyed that it was taking her this long to make sense of my urine-soaked pants.

She passed me the phone, but I could see she was still staring at my jeans. “Yeah, I have a condition. My kidneys, my bladder—something!” I laughed, feigning complete exasperation as I dialed my house. I'd watched enough women complain about medical conditions on
Sally Jesse
to know how to pull this kind of shit off. “My doctor's been bugging me to get an operation for months, and I keep putting it off. But this? This has never happened to me before. I hope I don't have full kidney failure or something. Maybe I should just get the operation. What do you think?”

The ginger gelfin lady didn't move.

My mom answered the phone.

“Mom? Can you please come and pick me up from the Husky gas station by my school?” *pause* “Yeah, I'll tell you when you get here.”

I hung up and turned back to the leprechaun. “Thanks for letting me hang out. I guess I'll have to go under the knife after all. Hey, if I pass out or something, call nine-one-one. Maybe my insides are all leaking. I'm not really sure how this body stuff works, but apparently my doctor was right! Can you believe that?! I needed the operation.”

And I just kept talking for the four minutes it took my mom to pull into the parking lot.

“What happened?” my mom said as I sat down in the passenger seat of her gold 1978 Volvo station wagon. Lucky for me, her shiny, well-worn leather seats wouldn't soak up the pee from my pants.

Mom looked a little frantic—though maybe that was just her housewife clothes talking. In her best bleach-out-a-tub leggings and a giant T-shirt, she looked like a hobo. I knew I wouldn't be able to sell her the lie about my bladder/kidney failure, so I bit the cord.

“I peed my pants.”

“OH THANK GOD!” She clutched her chest and looked over at me. “I THOUGHT YOU'D BEEN BEATEN UP!”

I made a “Huh?” face. (I'm a big body language person. I'm the Helen Keller of body language. If Woody Allen and I had dinner, we wouldn't even have to open our mouths.) “What do you mean, ‘beaten up'?! Why would you think I'd get beaten up?” said the fourteen-year-old freshman with pee in her pants.

“Your kid calls you from a gas station and tells you to pick her up,” she said, shrugging her shoulders, “your brain says RUMBLE.”

“
Rumble
, Mom? No one says
rumble
anymore! No one!”

I was waiting for my mom to ask me why I was at the gas station. That would have been my VERY FIRST QUESTION. I was already a better mom than she was. My parents always knew where I was. Didn't they assume I stayed at school when they dropped me off there? Mom probably figured I was too ashamed to go into my high school's office with piss in my pants. And, oh God, she was right: What if this
had
happened at school? What if I had to go through high school as the piss-in-the-pants girl?

“Kelly?”

“WHAT?!” I snapped, thinking she was about to tell me the cigarette jig was up.

“I was just going to ask if you were okay. I forgot to ask that. I probably should have asked that first.”

“I'm fine,” I said. I quickly added, “I ran to the gas station when it happened.” I had beat her to her own possible game and ended my misery, all with one little lie.

She nodded. “Smart thinking.”

With a mother named Gaye, back on the elementary school circuit I'd flip out once a day at kids who were making fun of “fags.” “MY MOM IS GAYE, OKAY?!” I'd shout. “SO JUST LAY OFF THE FAG JOKES, YOU GUYS!”

Mom had graduated from nursing school in '74 at the height of her hot little disco queen days. She admits to trying cocaine once, “but it didn't do anything. Drugs didn't work for me. But don't ever do them—you'll get schizophrenia or something.” She'd worked the nursing night shift on a psych ward when I was little, and she'd tell me stories about it over breakfast. “One patient said he wouldn't listen to anyone but God, so I got on the speaker and yelled, ‘GERRY? THIS IS GOD. YOU HAVE TO TAKE YOUR MEDS NOW. AND, YEAH, THAT'S RIGHT—I'M A WOMAN.' Oh! And one patient said she was going to kill herself. She asked me, ‘Should I take pills or jump off the roof?' I told her to take the pills and
then
jump.”

Now she was in the car with her piss-panted teenage daughter. All I had wanted was a pack of smokes. All I had wanted was to be a normal teenager. Why couldn't my body just cooperate?

“Well, Kelly, I thought you'd been beaten up, okay? When your fourteen-year-old kid calls
you
from a gas station and needs to be picked up, give me a call and tell me what your initial thoughts were.”

“That's not fair. I'd know she just peed her pants.”

As we pulled up to the curb, my dad was just leaving the house on his way to work.

“Hey, honey, what happened?” he said.

As I got out of the car and stood there with my own acidic piss burning my inner thighs, I recalled a deep-seated sense memory from infancy: it itches when you piss yourself. But of course I couldn't tell my DAD what happened. This was a guy who rarely even talked to me about anything other than pancakes and
Melrose Place
. If he thought I couldn't control my bodily functions, he'd totally drive me to the hospital to see if I was dying, because (a) I wasn't a toddler, and (b) I wasn't over ninety.

“Nothing,” I said, and snuck past him as briskly as possible.

“
She had an accident,
” Mom whispered, and he looked over at me standing on the front porch, keeping his eyes above waist level. I waved at him weakly. I could tell Dad heard the phrase
had an accident
and thought
period period period
, so I knew we'd never, ever speak of this moment again. When a dad thinks of his daughter's period, it's like that moment in a terrible futuristic action movie where your memory is erased with some sort of technological magic wand. POOF! GONE!

“Can someone unlock the door for me? I need a shower.”

“Mom, tonight I'm sleeping over at Mara's house.”

I got out of the shower, dropped my piss pants and underwear into the washer, and scrunched my wet hair into a towel. For years, my mom had blown my hair dry every day with some kind of Russian high-output blow dryer—until she stopped in 1991, saying that fourteen-year-olds were too old to have their mothers blow-dry their hair. I was too lazy to do it on my own, so I let my hair air-dry for the first time in my life. Without the blow dryer, I discovered, my hair was actually curly. Ever since fourth grade, I'd gone to bed every night with stick-straight hair and wished I'd wake up looking like Tiffany. Now I realized that all I had to do was scrunch it dry and it was as springy as Glenn Close's perm.

And that wasn't all. Ever since I was three, I'd been forced to wear these glasses, which seemed to get smaller in photos as my head grew larger every year. Then, just a few months before all this, I'd gone in for a regular eye appointment—and suddenly my vision was 20/20. After years of embarrassment, by some Zoltar-the-wish-granter miracle, my eyes were working on their own. Of course by this point I no longer liked Tiffany, but now I looked like her, curly hair, no glasses, and all. Maybe it takes five years for wishes to come true, I thought. The same way that the best time to start something was five years ago. My glasses-less face and wavy hair did not land me on the Paris runways, but they were famous beyond belief in the West Edmonton Mall catalogs.

This glorious long, curly hair and glasses-free face may explain why I'd just landed my first boyfriend: Alex Brown. Alex was in the same grade as me, but he might as well have been twenty years old, because he came from the suburbs and had experience with girls who drove their own 1970s sports cars. It was such a cliché to get my first boyfriend the same day I stopped wearing my glasses, but that just made my life feel more real, you know? It was like I'd emotionally gone from living a Dickensian life of charcoal and dust to living like Cher in
Clueless
. But I didn't give a shit about living the cliché, because my new boyfriend was a blond hockey player AND A TWIN. Tonight was my first high school party, and I was so ready to
just do this
.

I'd had a crush on Alex since before my eyes were 20/20 and I looked like dogmeat. I was friends with Ken, a guy on Alex's hockey team, and I spent most of my time failing Math 10 while talking to Ken about how I wanted to date Alex. Somehow Alex was interested, even with the glasses. He met me in a stairwell one day at 2:10
P.M.
so I could pass him a note, which pretty much laid out our lives together—from first date through our third baby. I don't think he talked to me again until I came to school sans glasses. This party would be our first event together as a couple.

Not only was I in a new school with new people, but I'd naturally developed a new face and new hair. And now I was going to this party with the guy of my fourteen-year-old dreams who suddenly liked me. I basically convinced myself that I'd wished my way into this dream scenario. I'm pretty sure this fucked up my sense of reality forever and is directly responsible for many of my fearless decisions.

And I knew exactly how to prepare for the party—thanks to a million ABC Afterschool Specials and that season two episode of
Roseanne
when Becky mixed all of her parents' liquor and called it a Tornado. I told my parents I was having a sleepover at my friend Mara's house, and Mara told her mom she was sleeping over at my house. Meanwhile, we were both planning on sleeping over at the party. CLASSIC AFTER SCHOOL SPECIAL LIES WE LEARNED IN OUR PARENTS' LIVING ROOMS.

I got out my little army surplus backpack and filled it with my toothbrush, pajamas, and a Perrier bottle full of straight gin, vodka, and rum: the makings of a top-notch Tornado. I also grabbed a beer out of the fridge, in case the sixteen ounces of pure liquor didn't take or something. Of course there was enough alcohol in that Perrier bottle to kill a person my size, but I had no clue, because my parents never really drank around me. (Thanks a lot, you sober jerks.) I'd never been drunk before, and I had no idea how much alcohol it actually took to get drunk; I just wanted to make sure I had enough, because if I was going to take the risk of stealing my parents' alcohol, I'd better take enough to make sure I got good and drunk. At five foot six and ninety pounds, I figured it would take at
least
a Perrier bottle full of Tornado to do the trick.

My dad was always up for driving me anywhere. In my mind, except for sleeping and eating, he spent his life driving around the city nonstop; wherever I was, I'd just call him and he'd show up. On the way to the party, I asked him to stop at McDonald's. I am an absolute product of McDonald's cradle-to-grave marketing. When I'm upset, I eat a burger. When I'm excited, I like to add fries to that. Thankfully I don't get too upset about anything in life, so I'll never be obese.

My first true best high-school friend was Mara. She was bubbly, social, pretty, and funny, and those were my only requirements for friendship. My dad dropped me off at her house, and I sat down in a park across the street with my bag of McDonald's and my bottle of Tornado mix. I wasn't going to bring the alcohol into her mother's house. Sure, I stole the alcohol from my parents, but that was for a good cause. I respected parents on the whole, and I didn't want to be the Bad New Friend who snuck booze into her house. I'd seen that special too. Her boyfriend, Korbin, was going to drive us to the party later on, but it was his dad's birthday, so he couldn't stay.

I'd set Mara up with Korbin after he fitted me with skis at a local ski hill. He was cute, but he had a really small head, and I already had a boyfriend I was obsessed with. To me, the important thing was that I really needed a friend to be going through all the same stuff I was going through. I mean, what good was a BFF if I couldn't ask her sex stuff because she wasn't having sex? Giving her a boyfriend was really my way of enabling her to have sex talks with me. It was a selfless gift to myself.

“What is that?” Korbin asked.

“It's a Tornado. A bunch of alcohol mixed together.”

Korbin shook his tiny head. “That's not a good idea. You shouldn't mix different types of alcohol.”

“It's the
only
idea,” I said, taking a long, burning swig of straight gin, vodka, and rum, then chasing it down with a bite of McChicken. “I couldn't take just one kind of alcohol—it would be too obvious that some was missing. So I just took a little from each.”

“You're a smarty, Kelly Oxford!” Mara said. She took a swig from the bottle and made a great whiskey face. Mara had blue eyes, dark hair, and bigger boobs than me—and to make things worse, she was the youngest of three. I envied all of those things, as a flat-chested eldest child who was “so full of shit her eyes are brown,” as my dad charmingly put it.

I took the bottle from her and started to drink—and really fucking fast, because I was DETERMINED to get drunker than her. I drank three-quarters of that bottle and chased it with a bottle of 7 percent beer (Canadian), washing it down with my McChicken and fries. Mara drank the other quarter bottle. It took me only ten minutes or so, and I must say I was impressed with my time, like a Tornado marathoner.