Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar (6 page)

FUCK
YOU FOREVER

“If I were a tree, I'd be an oak tree. My branches would spread out over all the children who needed shade,” I said as convincingly as possible to the two apathetic junior high gym teachers, Mr. Vale and Mrs. Walker, who were working their alter ego positions as guidance counselors that afternoon. Mr. Vale and Mrs. Walker were built to coach teams. They liked to clap their hands and take wide-gaited paces in the gym while they watched the thrilling competition of middle school sports. Their day jobs as counselors offered no such opportunities for handclaps or wide-gaited strides, and this stripped all life from behind their eyes.

“And who do you look up to? As a human being?” Mrs. Walker asked, with her unfocused stare, holding a pen over her clipboard.

“Mother Teresa.” I nodded, bullshitting my way into this opportunity. I straightened out the homely church skirt, which I'd worn as a costume to demonstrate my pure intentions for the occasion. To underscore the depths of my bullshit earnestness, I wrinkled my brow, looked up at them, made some serious eye contact, then closed my eyes to punctuate how wholeheartedly I was invested in my quest to dominate the school's social landscape. “Certainly—Mother Teresa.”

Mr. Vale chortled, casually covering his mouth. Excellent. He knew I was the real McCoy.

This was my interview to join Kenilworth Junior High School's Peer Support Team.

I knew that becoming a peer counselor would gain me some clout and instantly up my star ranking within middle school. As a Peer Support Team member, I'd be a modern-day messiah, a beacon of light, my student body's touchstone.

The school had just introduced the Peer Support program. The idea was to create a process where students who were having personal issues could find a member of the Peer Support Team at any time during school hours and talk to them confidentially about their problems. Boy oh boy, did I want a piece of that. How could any warm-blooded creature not want to be the school's secret keeper? Becoming part of the Peer Support Team would give me direct access to the deepest layers of Kenilworth's prepubescent psyche. And, because of that, kids would live in fear of me. This is what I wanted. Underneath that church skirt was me, hoping to convince these people that my intentions were purely to help my fellow students—when what I really wanted to be was the Don.

Peer Support came with so many perks. For one thing, team members could get pulled out of class at any time—and I loved getting out of class. Finding ways to get out of class was one of my greatest strengths as a student.

Another big plus was that Peer Support would play to my anthropological side, allowing me to hear about other kids' problems in a controlled, basically scientific capacity. My family was so boring and straight. I wanted to know how the bad kids lived.

 

Back in second grade, I'd become friends with a girl named Kyla Warren, mostly because she wore all the clothes I wasn't allowed to wear. I had penny loafers; she had jelly shoes. I had birthstone studs; she had long, dangly earrings. I had to wear blouses and sweater sets; she would wear a Garfield baseball cap over her scraggly bob and a Pound Puppies shirt
at the same time
. It was insane. I understood my mom's anxiety about branded girlswear, and on principle I agreed with her. I didn't want to be a part of a cartoon animal marketing ploy, no matter how cute Garfield was in that empty lasagna pan. But Kyla Warren looked like seven-year-old Drew Barrymore in
Firestarter
. I mean, she had a jean jacket with STUDS. I think that sums it up.

One day during recess, Mr. Armstrong, the janitor with a peg leg and cowboy hat, caught a stray dog and locked him up in the tool shed. Kyla and I were the only two kids, running from opposite ends of the field, to save the dog. It was our own private Rubicon: two children, from very different homes, brought together in a moment of canine crisis. As Mr. Armstrong went inside to call the SPCA, we sat outside, whispering through the cracks, “IT'S OKAY, DOGGIE! YOU'LL BE FINE! DON'T WORRY!”

I turned and stared at Kyla's shirt. Kermit the Frog. Oh dear God.

“Kyla, do you think I could go to your house after school sometime?”

“Yeah, sure,” she said, squinting through the crack in the shed door. “Come over for dinner tomorrow.”

I was shocked, suddenly in awe of her power. “Shouldn't you ask your mom first?”

She turned to me, snapping her gum. Watermelon. “Why?”

I shrugged. “I have to ask my mom if I can do
anything.
”

This seemed to freak her out. “Really? Can I come over to
your
house sometime?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “But I'll have to ask my mom.”

I was so excited. What was it like to have a mom who didn't need consulting? A home where jelly shoes were considered exactly as fancy as I believed them to be?

The next day I went home on the school bus with Kyla. Everything seemed normal until we got off the bus and started walking. ALONE.

“Where are we going?” I asked. “Where's your mom?”

“She's at home.”

Panic started welling up in my throat. My hands were clammy. My mind was racing, thinking about all the kidnappers driving past us and thinking,
Maybe those two today?

“She doesn't pick you up from the bus stop?!” I asked. I was horrified.

“No! I'm not a baby!” She was right. We
were
seven, totally capable of using toasters and stuff. Still, as we walked along that busy road, I'd never felt so small in my entire life. At any minute, I was sure a hawk would swoop down and pick me up.

“Let's stop in here!!” Kyla pointed to some kind of storefront on the corner. It had an enormous door with a large black-and-yellow awning. Overhead was a mounted oil pump jack, the old-timey kind from
The Beverly Hillbillies
, and a sign:
BLACK GOLD
.

This was not my neighborhood. In my neighborhood we had a fresh produce market and a tiny Italian restaurant owned by a singing fat man with a huge smile and free candy. There were no bars with pump jack awnings. “What is this place, Kyla? It looks like a bar.”

“It
is
a bar,” she said, and skipped up to the door and opened it.

It was a bar, or bar/pizza place, and the air was choked with cigarette smoke. I'd just walked into a scene from a movie my parents would turn off if I came into the room.

Kyla went up to the counter and waved for me to follow her. I was walking very slowly, trying not to show the fear I was feeling and that Kyla was so clearly not feeling. She looked so much like Drew Barrymore that I started to wonder if I was actually in a PG-13 movie. “C'mon!” she said, and came back to grab my hand.

In one corner of the barroom sat an old man, smoking and playing
PAC-MAN
at a table machine, his ashtray overflowing onto the video tabletop. He looked up at me and winked.
That's it!
I thought.
I'm finally going to get kidnapped. My mom is going to KILL ME!

Kyla led me to the saloony kitchen doors and popped them open. “Hello! It's Kyla! Just wanted to say
Hi
!” A couple of people in the kitchen looked up, but no one responded. Eventually she got a wave from one of the Chinese dishwashers.

Kyla turned to me and said, “Okay! Let's go!”

That was it? All that danger just to say “Hi” to a Chinese guy? Kyla grabbed my hand and dragged me through the crowd. As we passed
PAC-MAN
, I didn't want to look over, but I couldn't help it. I glanced at him, for just a second, and he winked again. Somewhere my mom shed a tear for her daughter, whose days were numbered.

We crossed the street—it was a REALLY busy thruway, and we were less
Abbey Road
and more baby ducklings. When we landed on the other side, I followed her into a block of duplex houses. Then my heart jumped. “What's that?!”

There, in one of the bungalows, sat a monkey in the window.

Kyla stopped. “Yeah, that guy has a monkey. He won't let me touch it, though.”

“You know a guy who owns a
monkey
??” I couldn't believe all this was happening ten blocks from my own house, where all we had in our windows were barking purebreds. The monkey was standing on a cat's scratching post looking at us. He was tiny and wore a diaper. He was perfect.

“I don't know him. He's mean. He told me I shouldn't be on his porch asking to touch his monkey.”

“Who the heck has a monkey and doesn't want kids to touch it? It's so cute. I like his little diaper.”

I'd forgotten I was seven and without a parent. I was an explorer.

“Let's get closer to it!” I said. “Let's go to the window! If the man comes we can run. We're fast runners, remember? Didn't we outrun Mr. Armstrong yesterday?”

Kyla followed me to the window. The monkey screamed in excitement.

“He's even cuter close up!” squealed Kyla.

“If I had a monkey,” I said, touching the window where the monkey's hand was, “I'd put it in clothing, like a man or a woman. They have people faces. Oh my God, look at his ears!”

The monkey started pulling on his diaper and jumping around.

“It's dancing!!” I shrieked, and I started jumping around, imitating the monkey.

Then it happened.

The monkey pulled off his diaper and grabbed his penis.

Kyla laughed, but I was totally mortified. My stomach rolled over on itself. “
GROSSSSS!!
” I yelled, then covered my mouth in horror. I looked at the monkey's tiny black nails wrapped around his dink. I'd never seen a real dink before, and now I had a tiny monkey penis burned into my soul. I looked away but saw the penis everywhere, like floaters after staring at the sun.

“
Run!
” I yelled, turning around and running across the lawn back to the sidewalk, dragging Kyla behind me. We ran for blocks, blasting our way across intersections. Just as I was realizing that I'd never be able to outrun that monkey-dink image, Kyla shouted, “Up here!” and led me up the front walk of the left side of a bungalow duplex.

She threw open the front door and out tumbled two small blond shaggy dogs. “That's Tia and that's Amber,” she shouted. “Look out, they're both having their periods.”

I had no idea that dogs had periods, but sure enough those dogs were, all over their butts.

A creepy winking guy, a monkey penis, dogs with periods. I was learning so much about the world. All my childhood training was telling me to call my mother immediately to rescue me. But my instincts were screaming,
Dear Lord, let this never, ever end
.

“Who's playing that music?” My parents didn't listen to music in the house, unless it was Mannheim Steamroller or Vivaldi. Vivaldi is powerful, but it's not exactly, “Hey, I have stuff to say to you, listen to me” music. In Kyla's house the music was blaring as soon as she opened the front door.

“MOM!” she said, throwing her bag and shoes onto the floor. “It's Bob Marley.”

The house smelled like something. Not smoke, but something like smoke. The carpet threads were really long and the walls were covered with movie posters, not paintings. And there were plants—lots and lots of potted plants. My mom had a couple of African violets and a hibiscus tree, but this was like a jungle, right there in the living room.

“MOM! WE NEED SNACKS!!” Kyla tossed her head back dramatically, as though we should already have been taken care of. Then she turned to me. “Want to see my doves?”

She pulled a chair up to the fridge and grabbed the cage that was sitting on top. Her kitchen was small, with a table in the middle and a fluorescent light box on the ceiling. On the table was a tiny nude statue. Apparently Kyla's family liked to look at the human body while they ate, which was weird, but then again not much weirder than anything else I'd seen in the last fifteen minutes. I could tell the statue was sexy from the position and size of the statue's butt, which was bigger than any human butt I'd ever thought possible. Anything even remotely sexy in my house generally arrived on the TV screen, and when it did, my father would immediately run in front of the TV and open his robe so we wouldn't see it.

I nodded at the cage of doves in Kyla's arms, trying to feign seriousness. “It looks like you had hamsters and you did a magic trick and turned them into doves.” She just put the cage on the table, but I heard laughter behind me. Kyla's mom emerged from her bedroom, wrapping a large silk kimono around herself as she extinguished a tiny cigarette into a crystal bowl on a shelf in the hallway. She smelled like musk. She was beautiful, but in that really scary Catwoman kind of way.

“That's funny. You must be Kelly. Kyla said you were funny.”

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Warren.”

She kissed the top of Firestarter's head. “No, please call me by my first name,” she said with a husky voice. “Rowan.” Rowan looked me up and down, then back up again. I felt my cable-knit sweater heat up. “Kelly, you look very smart.”

“It's just my glasses,” I said, adjusting my big pink frames. “Glasses make everyone look smart, but really they just have broken eyes.”

Rowan opened the fridge. “See, that's what I mean. A dumb person wouldn't say that. You have an aura.”

“An aura?” I looked down at my sweater. Was it stuck to my shirt?

Kyla pulled a dove out of the cage. “Mom is a Wiccan.”

“Oh.” I had no idea what
Wiccan
meant. I decided it was probably Rowan's last name and Kyla was bragging, like Fallon on
Dynasty
standing there declaring, “My mom is a Carrington,” as she blithely pulled a dove from a cage. I must have looked confused, standing there trying to picture the Carringtons with doves on their fridge, because suddenly I realized that Kyla was laughing at me.