Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar (12 page)

As I was choking down the last of my fries, Korbin stood up. “I have to get home for my dad's birthday party,” he said. Mara clung on to him and giggled as they headed toward his parked car. I tried to follow them—only to discover that I was thoroughly fucked up. I staggered along behind, trying to keep my eyes focused on the ground, which was moving a lot.

And then the first bad thing happened. I saw a Chinese man on a bicycle coming toward me, fast. I tried to jump out of the way, but my body wasn't having it.

Vomit just started flying. It flew out of my mouth and nose.

I vomited all over the Chinese man's bike wheel.

“Stommm-ach fluuuuuuu,” I slurred, looking up at the man.

He just shook his Chinese head and yelled at me in Chinese, with a fist in the air and chunks of McChicken on his tires. Then he pedaled off into the darkness.

This whole thing was instant and unexpected. My brain was telling me,
This is bad
, but my body was no longer mine to control. I was beyond the kind of drunk you can hide. I was the zombie with the fucked-up face and walk, staggering sideways across the street with my backpack on. This was as close to palsied as I ever hoped to get. But somehow I was also the fastest drunk in the West, scrambling to make it across the field and catch up with Korbin and Mara, who had managed to miss all this. Which was a shame for a couple of reasons:

1.   Who wouldn't want to see a Chinese man riding a bike get barfed on and then just keep pedaling and yelling in Chinese?

2.   They could have suggested I *not* get in the car for a little while.

 

The drive to get to the party was only ten minutes long. But in the backseat I was going through a metamorphosis, transforming from girl to monster. I spent most of the ride with my head against the car's blue interior, realizing I'd overdone it. Then my stomach, very quickly and violently, churned onto itself.

“Oh God! I'm gonna barf!!”

Mara and Korbin turned around simultaneously, she laughing in anticipation and he in complete horror.

“HOLD ON!” Korbin said. “I'M PULLING OVER! Hold on for TWO minutes! ONE minute!!” But we were on the freeway; there was no place to pull over. So I did the only logical thing: I pulled my shirt out, tipped up the sides to form a container, and then vomited an ocean of McChicken and fries and booze into my shirt. With force.

It was quite a spectacle. “Guys, I don't chew enough,” I said distractedly. “Look! There's a whole fry in there, Mara. And it still smells like McDonald's.”

And then the second bad thing happened.

I opened the window. Then I grasped the hem of my shirt tightly and gave the pool of vomit a good flick in the general direction of the window. But the window wasn't open quite far enough and my aim was drunken and everything I'd caught in my shirt hit the ceiling of the car. And it stuck there until, slowly, pieces peeled away and fell at my feet. It was raining vomit.

“FUCK, NO! KELLY, THIS IS MY DAD'S CAR!!”

By now we were just a block away from the party. Korbin pulled the car over near a ravine.

“GET! OUT!”

I didn't feel like Korbin was even yelling at me. I knew he was really angry at the alcohol.

As I sat there patiently, scooping vomit fries off the floor mat and throwing them onto the road, Korbin was totally freaking out. “Here I am, doing you a favor driving you to this party, and you just throw up all over his car? On my dad's birthday?!”

I was having kind of a hard time registering any of this, really. So I just sighed, looked up at the forty Korbins who stood before me, wiped my vomit hands off on my jeans, and said, “Your head is
so, so small
, Korbin! Mara, how do you even look at it?”

This whole time, Mara had maintained her composure. She was just drunk enough not to be upset about the vomit. Now she came over and sat down next to me. I rested my head on her shoulder and fell into a slump.

“Kelly, do you have a change of clothes in your bag?” she asked.

I pulled open my bag. Inside was the set of pajamas I'd brought to the party.
What a loser
. Who the fuck brings
PJs
to a high school party? I mean, at what point during this party did I expect everyone to put on their pajamas and go to sleep, like normal people, instead of just drinking and playing loud music until they passed out under the kitchen table like animals?

But Mara saw we had a job to do. She helped me get up and stagger over into the woods along the ravine, then helped me take off my wet, vomit party outfit and put on my pajamas: a cotton top-and-bottom set in a multicolored star print. “Thank you, thank you,” I slurred. “We aren't gay just because you saw me naked, right?” And I vomited again.

I pulled out my toothbrush and dry brushed the vomit out of my mouth. Like a real lady would. Like Princess Diana would. Then I crawled into the backseat of Korbin's dad's smelly car—the clean side this time. The other side still looked like the Hamburglar had exploded all over it.

Korbin opened my window. “Kelly, put your head out the window.” I did as I was told. Korbin started to drive, and I lifted my chin and face up toward the sun, and thought,
You know, being a collie wouldn't be so bad.

Two minutes later, I arrived at my first high school party like a queen: in pajamas, with my head out the window of a vomit-filled car.

Korbin pulled up to the garage door and turned his microcephalic skull around. “I'm going to get Alex. Get out of the car.”

I stumbled out of the car with my backpack on, into the crowd of kids on the lawn. Everyone stared. Then one of the girls looked me up and down in my jammers, then spit.

This girl was known as Shar. She was the toughest girl in this group from the 'burbs. She was short and Greek, with dark hair except for two white blond streaks that framed her face. She looked like a lightweight boxer. She was basically the head bad girl of this crew. Like if
Mean Girls
wasn't about prissy bitches, but instead about blue-collar suburban kids, Shar would be the Rachel McAdams.

At this point I was really, really drunk. All the remaining alcohol had hit my system; I was a green-light go. A few minutes later my boyfriend, who had a great, regular-sized head, and pinhead Korbin came out of the house with a bunch of garbage bags, paper towels, and a bucket of water. I wasn't humiliated at all, mostly because the day before I'd peed my pants in public, but also because I wasn't sober. I could have taken off all my clothes and curled up in the fetal position on the front lawn and crapped at this point and it wouldn't have fazed me.

From that point on, I have only flashes. I remember putting my face under the kitchen faucet and rubbing it viciously. I remember lying down in the master suite, on the ugliest frilly gray bed set in the entire world, and yelling at someone to turn off the ceiling fan. I remember Alex's friend Matt coming in the room and standing on the bed and singing me a song about Kentucky Fried Chicken. I remember looking out the window and seeing my boyfriend washing out the car, Korbin's dad's car, on Korbin's dad's birthday. I remember thinking I was going to die. And hours later, when the room stopped spinning and I could sit up and open my eyes, I thought,

Wow, my parents were right.

I am clueless.

I am an idiot, a complete fuckup child with no idea how to navigate this world.

That lasted about five seconds, until my boyfriend came in the room to check on me. When he saw I wasn't Janis Joplin dead, he whispered, “Do you feel better? Do you want to come outside for a cigarette?”

I checked the clock. It was three
A.M.
and I still felt like shit. Not “I could die” shit, but “You almost died, you fucking moron” shit. Sudden panic set in.
My parents.
I'd told them I was at Mara's house. I'd never lied and I'd never spent the night away from my parents in an unreachable location. What if they needed me?

And then Alex started kissing me and reason flew out the window. We were in a master bedroom in the middle of the night alone, and we hadn't had sex, and—I wasn't about to do it now! I mean,
he'd just cleaned up my vomit.
Did this guy have no fucking compass for vileness? Of course, with age I would learn that the Force is strong in the male libido, especially in a teenage boy. And he was a really sweet guy, athletic, and a blond twin. I realize I've mentioned this twice now, that he was a blond twin, but that's because I loved it. He was basically the male version of Jessica Wakefield from
Sweet Valley High
.

Most of all, though, I really didn't want to fuck on that ugly bed. I stopped kissing him. “Let's go outside for that cigarette.”

Out on the deck, twenty or more kids were hanging out smoking and listening to Jane's Addiction. We headed over to a picnic table. As we were walking, Alex put a cigarette in my mouth, like I imagined people in
Grease
might have done. (I was the only white girl in my school who had never actually seen
Grease.
) This guy we knew named Zane Morley passed me a lighter. Zane was a funny guy; he looked like my farmer uncle: taller than everyone, thin, wearing a trucker hat—but not a brand-name trucker hat, like a real dirty hat. He was one of a few of Alex's non-hockey-league friends who I liked a lot. He was smart and jaded and a full-on antagonist, so I related to him.

“Thank you, Zane Boon Morley.” I never missed an opportunity to say his full name. It was such a good name.

“Feeling better?” he asked. I nodded and lit my smoke.

He gave me a funny look. “I saw you get picked up by your mom at the gas station yesterday.”

My eyes darted up and back down. I nodded in acknowledgment, praying he'd go no further.

“Why did your mom pick you up from the gas station?”

As soon as he said it—and he was smiling when he did—I realized there were, like, six other kids listening. I stared at him and just kept nodding, which meant nothing. I was an idiot.

“I KNEW IT!” he shouted. “You totally got caught stealing!!”

I am not a big fan of lying. In fact, I'm the most pathetic liar on earth. But in that moment I knew I had a decision to make. For the next three years, I realized, I could be known by one of two monikers: Gas Station Thief or Pissed Her Pants Pussy. It was up to me to choose.

Between those two, I would take Gas Station Thief all day long. But since I couldn't lie, I kept nodding and smoking, thinking about all the bullshit that being a teenager was going to mean. I had to make friends, but be myself? It seemed impossible. I had to not die from drinking, and stay out all night, and smoke? This was a lot of stuff for a kid who just two years ago was getting Peter Pan's signature in her California vacation autograph book.

Then, just when I needed to change topics, I remembered something. “Where's Mara?” I hadn't seen her since we got there.

“After we got through cleaning out the car, she went with Korbin to his dad's birthday party.”

“Ugh. I feel so terrible that you guys had to clean that up.” I really
didn't
feel terrible, and I know that just makes
me
terrible. But I was more embarrassed about the McDonald's vomit than anything, and frankly I was just glad someone else dealt with cleaning it up. Plus, I wasn't mature enough yet to realize I could just laugh and tell Alex, “Ha ha! You cleaned up the barf because you love me, or you want to have sex with me—and we didn't have sex, you fucking sucker!” like I can now with my husband. I was a fourteen-year-old little liar who still thought I had to appease people's sensibilities to keep them loving me. I wasn't old enough to realize that I could be my terrible self and have people love me for that.

I went in the house to pee, walked into the bathroom, and ran right into Shar.

“I like your makeup,” said the goddess of Goth, nodding at me.

I looked in the mirror. DEAR GOD. My eyeliner and mascara were all around my eyes, up to my eyebrows and down to my cheekbones. My hair looked like a beehive that got knocked down as I was getting screwed on a piece of plywood in an alley behind McDonald's. You know how Bugs Bunny used to get in drag and be all sexy? I looked like the Tasmanian Devil version of that.

How did this happen? Oh, right, washing my face in the kitchen sink after I got to the party. Stupid makeup.

“Thanks. I didn't really do this on purpose. I got— I mean, I think I have alcohol poisoning. I barfed all over my friend's boyfriend's dad's car . . . on his birthday.”

“The boyfriend's birthday?”

“The dad's birthday.”

“Ouch.”

“I know.”

Shar had other things on her mind, though. “I heard you got caught stealing at the Gas Bar. It's cool that your mom picked you up like that. My mom would have told the cops to pick me up. She doesn't give a shit.” She sat up on the counter and started picking at her cuticles. “You have a good body. What'd you steal?”

Wait, what? Was Shar hitting on me, or was this how tough girls and teenagers made friends? I was tired, and my patience was wearing thin. “I didn't steal a fucking thing. Okay?”

“Then why'd your mom pick you up?”

I looked at her and suddenly her rank and the Greek hair didn't mean a thing. I didn't owe anyone answers. “That's none of your business.” There. I'd done it. I'd done the one thing I'd been suddenly afraid of since becoming a teenager. I'd been honest to myself and mouthed off to someone who hadn't decided if she liked me or not. I could have kept my mouth shut and let her roll with this wave of Kelly compliments, but I wanted to shut this operation down.

Shar stopped picking her cuticles. “Oh. Sorry.” She hopped off the counter and walked out of the bathroom. I shut the door behind her, lifted the fuzzy pink toilet seat, pulled my pants down, and peed . . . into a proper toilet.