Sloppy Firsts (21 page)

When the bell rang, I wanted to give Pepe props for being the best Geek of all time. Plus, I wanted to ask why he let himself get pulverized by paintballs that one depressing night. What had gotten him so down? I really wanted to know. He seemed invulnerable to that kind of sad resignation.

But I didn’t get the chance. Pepe bolted from his seat, sped out the door—and into the arms of a tiny, freckle-faced freshman gymnast named Drea something-or-other. The only reason I know her first name is because I overheard Burke and P.J. pointing her out and calling her a "spinner," as in,Sit on my dick and spin. Ack.

Just then I realized that Pepe’s voice and his bod weren’t the only things that had changed. Pepe hadn’t called me"ma belle." And that’s because I wasn’t anymore.

Undocumented Event #2

Bridget doesn’t know about Burke and Manda’s S.O.S. and therefore, when she gets all mushy-gushy, she’s totally unaware of how ridiculous she sounds.

"Going to L.A. didn’t get me any closer to being an actress, but it was like, the best thing that ever happened to my relationship with Burke," she says. "Like, he’s so much sweeter now."

Manda doesn’t know that I know about the S.O.S. Thus, when she gets all booey-hooey (whenever Bridget is out of earshot), she’s totally unaware of how transparent she sounds.

"Burke needs a strong woman," she says. "Bridget has been so clingy since she came back from L.A. Puh-leeze."

Sara doesn’t want Bridget to know that she and I both know about the S.O.S. Hence, when she gets all friends-to-the-endly, she is totally unaware of how on-the-brink-of-spilling-her-guts she sounds.

"Omigod! Let’s make sure junior year rocks," she says. "Let’s make more time for each other. Friends are forever!"

I don’t want anything to do with Bridget, Manda, Sara, and the S.O.S. So I say even less at lunch than usual, totally aware of how alone I am.

Undocumented Event #3

Scotty dumped his summer chauffeur and is now dating a cheesy freshman cheerleader named Cory.

Kelsey. Becky. Cory. Apparently a cutesy-wutesy name is what Scotty looks for most in a sex partner. (For the record, I hate being called "Jessie," the diminutivization of my name favored by senior citizens and my parents.) The ironic thing is, Scotty doesn’t go by the cutsified version of his own name anymore. At some point this summer, Scotty Glazer died and a sex-machine named "Scott" was born. (It’s no coincidence that Robbie Driscoll was similarly replaced by "Rob" two Augusts ago.) If I had reason to say his name (and I don’t), I know I’d flub up and call him Scotty. I have trouble remembering names of people I don’t know.

I didn’t bother to write about these events right after they happened because I was too preoccupied by the Bubble-Gum Bimbos and Marcus the Genius episodes. Then I busted my ankle. Compared to that triple-whammy tsunami, the aforementioned trials were mere toilet swirlies.

Perspective.

Then I started thinking about the downside to perspective. Perspective basically guarantees that there’s no such thing as a pure emotion. Every emotion is based on how sucky (or not) something is in relation to something else that has already happened. I realized that Hy and Marcus and my ankle wouldn’t be so huge if I had experienced a Hiroshima-size disaster.

Hope’s moving doesn’t even count. I say this only because I remember her reaction to the news. She was upset by it, but she didn’t have a tear-out-your-hair hissy fit like I did. True, she’s more laid-back and go-with-the-flow by nature. But I think the real reason she didn’t act like her life was ending is because she had already experienced what that really meant. Heath’s death gave herperspective, and that made it possible for her to see that things weren’t really as bad as I thought they were.

It kind of makes me wish that the worst thing that will ever happen to me will just hurry up and happen already. That way I could live the rest of my life in bliss, if only because I know how much worse things could be.

the twenty-fifth

We’ve been in six out of eight classes together every day for a month and Marcus will talk to everyone in class except me. Or anyone I associate with. For the latter, I can hardly blame him.

To his credit, Len Levy was the first person in our class to go out of his way to talk to Marcus. I don’t think his motives were all that Samaritan, though. I think Len was threatened by Marcus’s intelligence and was following theGodfather keep-your-enemies-closer philosophy. I don’t know if Marcus is a genius, but he has definitely stunned everyone with his ability to always have the correct answer whenever any teacher calls on him, even if he’s spent the entire class period doodling in his notebook. Regardless, Len and Marcus have become kind of tight in the past few weeks.

At first, I didn’t mean to mooch in on their conversations. I literally couldn’t help hearing them, though. I mean, Marcus is in back of me and Len sits next to me in every class. I wasright there . Then I figured that listening to their conversations could have a therapeutic effect on me. I thought that as soon as I found outanything about Marcus, I’d stop being so psychotic about him. The real Marcus—not the reformed rebel/genius I’d created in my hyperactive imagination—would be sure to disappoint. Then I could stop being such a girl and just move on already.

Here, with as few editorial comments as possible, are

The Top 10 Things I’ve Learned about Marcus Flutie from Eavesdropping on His Conversations with Len Levy with One Ear While Sara Buzzes On and On about Nothing in the Other:

10.Marcus was diagnosed with ADD in elementary school. (This helps explain why he is always in motion. He never stops jiggling his foot, drumming his fingers on his desk, twirling and letting go of his tie, and so on.) He thinks this is a bogus condition designed by fascist headshrinkers who want to destroy any spark of individuality and foster conformity at a young age.

9.Marcus thinks the medications that doctors prescribe for his ADD (Ritalin, etc.) are worse for him than some recreational drugs, namely, pot, E, and ’shrooms.

8.Marcus had to do community service at an old-folks’ home as part of his penance. After his 200 hours were up, he got a job there because he likes "kickin’ it with the old fogues."

7.Marcus is teaching himself how to play guitar. He bought it not because he wants to be a rock star (let’s face it, the only reason guys want to be rock stars is so they can get play from hot chicks, and Marcus already gets more play than he can handle) but because it gives him something constructive to do with his hands instead of smoking.

6.Marcus is trying to stop smoking. Tobacco, that is. He figures this will be harder to kick than all the illegal substances combined because he was neveraddicted to all that other stuff. He just did it because he was bored, which he now realizes was a sad lack of imagination on his part.

5.Marcus adopted his semiformal jacket-and-tie dress code in order to better look the part of a goody-goody honors student. (Besides, what could be more subversive in a world of casual Fridays in which Internet gazillionaires dress like skater punks?) Now he does it because the chicks are digging it.

4.Marcus is currently "chillin’" with a senior named Mia. She’s six foot two, which makes her the first girl he’s ever been able to look in the eye. This, he has found, makes it much harder to lie to her. He hopes this will stop him from hurting her feelings, which he always seems to do with girls he’s chillin’ with, but never intentionally. Mia is not that bright, but she has a cartoonish Saint Bernard named Bubba that Marcus likes to play with.

3.Marcus spends a lot of time alone now. When he got out of Middlebury, he knew that he had to ditch anybody who knew him only as Krispy Kreme, which was everyone.

2.Marcus often has the urge to talk to people in the middle of the night. He tried chat rooms, but he found the idea of talking nonsense to a worldwide web full of strangers extremely depressing. He thinks we’re losing the ability to touch each other in a personal, human kind of way. (Me too!)

1.Marcus writes—in longhand—in a journal when he can’t sleep. Usually this helps him fall asleep. (ME TOO!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Do I even need to tell you that my plan royally backfired? I thought that learning about Marcus would demystify him. That I’d find out there was nothing more to him than tired, nonconformist clichés. But he’s more like me than I ever imagined. I listen to Marcus talking to Len, and I wish he were talking to me. This punishment for peeing in the yogurt cup is far worse than anything the administration could have come up with.

October 2nd

Hope,

Exactly one year ago today, I sprinted the last 100 yards to win a cross-country meet against Eastland and nailed a new PR (19:32) in the process. I was feeling proud and happy. I rentedHeathers at Blockbuster and was looking forward to what new insights/analysis we would come up with in our tenth VCR viewing. I got ready to make two bowls of Chubby Hubby—mine topped with Cap’n Crunch, yours without—when you arrived for our Friday Night Food and Flick Fest. You wore the slouchy gray Old Navy cargo pants I’d persuaded you to buy and a white Fruit of the Loom T-shirt you had embroidered with pink and aqua daisies. You didn’t burst through the kitchen door cracking a joke about the Clueless Crew or doing a dead-on imitation of one of Christina Aguilera’s white-girl soul riffs or bearing a construction-paper-and-glitter gold medal that you’d insist I wear on my chest all evening. Your face was sad and serious in a way that I hadn’t seen since Heath died. I knew something was wrong. Then you said it.

"We’re moving to Tennessee."

As horrible and impossible and all-other-ibles as the news was, I knew it was true. You put the ice cream back in the freezer so it wouldn’t melt, and I cried for hours.

Today I dug past layer upon layer of microwave dinners and foil-covered leftovers in the freezer. I found that pint of Chubby Hubby covered in flowery frost, unopened, uneaten. And I cried all over again.

I still miss you.

Nostalgically yours, J.

october

the ninth

No one at PHS gives a crap about anything even remotely resembling an intellectual after-school activity. Plus, any student interested in writing channels that creativity into home pages full of bad poetry or fanfic. Not to mention that the only issue of the school paper that anyone reads is the one with the Senior Class Last Will and Testament, and that doesn’t come out until May. So no one was shocked when Miss Haviland, our English teacher, announced that not one student showed up for the planning meetings for the September or October issues of theThe Seagull’s Voice.

Miss Haviland (who, on account of her unmarried antiquity and love of lacy blouses and long flowing skirts, will be referred to as Havisham here on out) is a former make-love-not-war hippie who has been both the junior honors English teacher andThe Seagull’s Voice ’s advisor for thirty years. To her, the lack of interest in this fine publication was simply "a travesty." Don’t we realize that "the school paper is a forum for discussing the issues that are important to us? The school paper provides a platform for voicing criticism of school policies and procedures! The school paper is an outlet for creativity! The school paper gives us the opportunity to resuscitate the written word!"

Blah-diddy-blah-blah-blah.

Needless to say, no one was moved by her speech. We figuredThe Seagull’s Voice had squawked for the last time. Oh, how wrong we were. Havisham announced that starting today, participation on the school paper would be mandatory for all juniors and seniors in honors English. Juniors are responsible for writing and reporting all the stories. Seniors are responsible for editing and laying it out. We were all pretty pissed off.

Our class is known for being particularly apathetic, debunking the media myth that Gen-Y is made up of a bunch of optimistic, wanna-do-gooders. But goddamn, do we galvanize against any oppressive force that wants to better us through academics. The Clueless Crew spoke up first, saying they couldn’t possibly work on the paper because they needed to devote their after-school hours to perfecting their cheerleading routinesand planning the homecoming festivities. Scotty and P.J. complained that it would interfere with football practice. Soccer guys, field-hockey girls, and band nerds voiced similar objections.

The class was too busy whining to hear Havisham explain that we’d useclass time to work on our stories. When it finally hit them that the paper could be a time-waster extraordinaire, most of the bitch-and-moaners quieted down. Then Havisham revealed that she had most of the stories for the first issue already planned out because of the time crunch. We just needed to decide which ones we wanted to write. So the rest of the period was spent determining which intrepid reporters would write such groundbreaking stories as, "Cheerleaders Work Hard on Homecoming" and "Football Team Gears Up for Winning Season."

I refused to volunteer for any of these sorry-ass stories. Miss Hyacinth Anastasia Wallace gets a six-figure book deal, whileI get to write forThe Seagull’s Voice ? Thanks, but no thanks. As the period wore on and we got down to the less plum assignments ("Cafeteria Gets New Pepsi Machine"), I was happy as hell when I could make my early break for it. I was almost out the door when Havisham said, "Jessica, I’d like to talk to you after class. I’ll give you a pass."

That’s when I knew my luck had run out.

Once we were alone, Havisham sat down at the desk next to me. I could literally hear her bones creaking.