Sloppy Firsts (6 page)

What was worse, however, was hearing Hy go on about how she and Fly don’t celebrate V-Day because they think it’s more important to show love for each otherevery day, and not get all artificially mushy on February fourteenth.

"That’s deep," said Manda.

"Yeah," said Bridget.

Sara, who celebrates this holiday by quadrupling the number ofOmigod!-I’m-so-fat-I’ll-never-get-a-boyfriend s, just sighed into her Diet Coke.

Jesus Christ. I hate Valentine’s Day. It goes back to that elementary-school tradition of collecting all the valentines in one big cardboard box o’love and the teacher handing them out one by one in front of the entire class. This was fine and dandy in first and second grade when Valentine’s Day was an equal-opportunity holiday and everyone gave valentines to everyone else. This lovely little practice made the sentiment completely meaningless because it didn’t discriminate.

By third grade, Pineville Elementary School’s reigning prepubescent bitch realized that Valentine’s Day could serve as a sadistic competition. Nadine LaDieu declared that she was only giving Valentines toboys . Not just any boys, mind you, but only the ones she considered cute and/or cool enough to be part of the elementary-school elite. All the girls agreed to do the same, my Smuckers-spined self included. Then she made all the boys promise that they would only give valentines to the girls they thought were cute and/or cool enough.

I gave one to Len Levy. This is when he was still fairly popular, before he developed a case of socially crippling purple-all-over acne.

I went home empty-handed. And brokenhearted.

It’s gotten worse as we’ve gotten older. On no other day does the world find as much delight in reminding those of us not fortunate enough to be getting down with a significant other on a regular basis just how pathetic and undesirable we really are.

I thought Scotty might give me an ironic V-Day gift, like those chalky candies with messages likeHot Stuff andSweet Lips on them. He could have given them to me as a friend, for laughs. But deep down I would’ve known that the effort involved meant it wasn’t a joke at all. But he didn’t. And I can’t blame him. Especially after my lukewarm reaction to the birthday rose. Not to mention that mostboyfriends fail to deliver what girls want on V-Day. And Scotty is not my boyfriend.

The only person who showed any romantic interest in me was this tiny black kid who sits in front of me in French class. EvenI outweigh him—he wrestles in the 103-pound weight class. For the past few weeks he’s been giving me these goofy, googly-eyed grins or turning around at random intervals to say,Bonjour, mon amie . Today he asked me a bizillion times if I had a Valentine. Conclusion: He has a huge Pepe Le Pew–like crush on me. I don’t know how this is possible because he’s one of those freshmen who looks too young to have a working set of nads. (Though, with my menstrual cycle MIA, I’m one to talk.)

Of course, I bitched and moaned about my bad luck. Why would this half-pint choose me as the object of his affection? The only info he has on me is what he’s found out via our forced French I Q&A sessions:Je m’appelle Jessica. J’ai seize ans. J’aime courir. (My name is Jessica. I’m sixteen years old. I like to run.) That’s what I get for wanting to be trilingual and taking an academic elective with freshmen.

By the time eighth period rolled around, I was more depressed about my loser love life than ever. I decided to cheer myself up by watching Paul Parlipiano leave his AP Physics class. As he glided out of the lab, I thought about how perfect he looked in his khakis and plaid button-down shirt. He was laughing, so I wondered what he thought was so funny. I saw ink scrawled all over his book covers and wanted to read what it said. I fantasized about what it would feel like if I wrapped one of his sandy blond curls around my pinky finger. At that moment, what I wanted most in the world—more than world peace, more than a cure for cancer, even more than Hope moving back to Pineville—was for Paul Parlipiano to smile at me and say,Hey, Jessica. What’s up?

Then it hit me:I’m Paul Parlipiano’s Pepe Le Pew.

That was my Valentine’s Day epiphany.

the twenty-fifth

I’m pretty sure I’m losing my mind.

I forgot my locker combination today. This wouldn’t be so weird if I had just returned from vacation. But today isFriday . I opened my locker twenty times this week with no problem. However, when I got to my locker this morning before homeroom, my hand had no clue what to do. My mind was blank. Leftnothing, rightnothing, leftnothing .

I turned the knob, hoping that my subconscious would kick in and instinctively stop on the correct numbers. It didn’t. Then I furiously tugged on the lock, hoping that it would miraculously pop open. It didn’t. I got all panicky when the warning bell rang and I wasn’t any closer to getting it open. My ears got red-hot and I could feel the sweat trickling into my bra crevice. In desperation, I started spinning out random combinations thatseemed like they could work: left 38, right 13, left 9 … left 42, right 23, left 2 … I stopped only when Mr. "Rico Suave" Ricardo popped his head out the door and asked, "Well, Miss Darling, are you going to join the rest of the Ds-through-the-Fs for homeroom this morning?"

I went to homeroom and proceeded to have a quiet conniption. The only other person who knows my combination is Hope. Not much help.

So I tried to visualize then analyze the particular situation I was in each time I opened my locker. Was there a pattern? Did I usually carry on a conversation while I turned the knob? Or did I open it in silent concentration? Was my backpack on my shoulders or off?

By the time homeroom was over, I was out of my head. Not because I couldn’t get my books, but because it was my very own brain malfunction that was preventing me from doing so. We learned in Psych that the "breakdown in selective attention" is one of the first signs of schizophrenia. Does this qualify?

Then again, menopausal women are known to go a little wacko, so maybe the fact that I haven’t menstruated in almost two months is having a similarly psychotic effect. I’m waaaay late. However, there’s no possible way that I’m pregnant unless (a) I got knocked up by daydreaming about a very naked Paul Parlipiano while I was sitting on the toilet or (b) I’ve been chosen for the Immaculate Conception Part Two: Electric Boog-a-loo.

Ha. Ha. Ha. Funny.

This is my attempt at being blasé. I can’t get too freaked about my non-period because stress is probably responsible for it’s tardiness to begin with. But every time I go to the bathroom, I silently pray for a smudge of blood on my skivvies, only to be let down. I feel like I’m in ninth grade again, when I was the last girl I knew waiting for menarche to open the door to thewonderful world of womanhood . Ack.

Still, if I keep getting more and more bizarre, I don’t think I can blame it all on PMS. I’ll have to persuade my parents to take me to a doc who can give me the get-right-in-the-head meds I need.

Schizophrenia or no, I needed my books. I had to go down to the office and have the secretary look up the number for me. No way would I admit that I’d forgotten it, though. Not seven months into the school year. On a Friday. I’d rather lie. I’d say that I hadn’t used my locker in ages because it was so far away from all my classes and I hated being tardy. Scotty (it’s always good to name-drop a fellow scholar/athlete in these situations) was nice enough to share his with me, even though it wastechnically against school rules. But now I needed to get a pair of running shoes (again, evoking the scholar/ athlete thing) that I’d stuffed in there during cross-country season …

I had the lie set up by the time I got to the office.

"Well if it isn’t Jess Darling!" chirped Mrs. Newman. "We don’t see your face around here very often."

School secretaries are always thrilled to see me. It’s the last-name thing. They assume I’m way nicer than I really am.

"Hi, Mrs. Newman."

"What can I do you for?"

Is hokeyness a prerequisite for high-school secretaries?

"Well, it’s a long story, but I need my locker combination …"

"Jess, say no more." She started clicking away at the nearest computer.

"Uh, you don’t need to know why?" I asked. I was a little disappointed. I had my faux facts in order.

She just kept right on smiling. "Not fromyou I don’t."

Even though I didn’t have to, I gave her the whole bogus story anyway. Her only response? "That Scotty Glazer is a nice boy, isn’t he?"

She wrote the numbers down on a slip of paper and handed them to me. (For future reference: left 45, right 17, left 5.) Then I turned to leave without looking up from the paper and crashed right into … Marcus Flutie! He had just gotten up from the bench behind me. He had been there the whole time.Again.

"Ain’t you Jess Darlin’?" Marcus drawled, mocking Mrs. Newman. But it came out sounding like a Bible-belting, Ritz-cracker-casserole-making housewife’s comment about a poodle wearing a crocheted sweater:Ain’t you jus’ darlin’!

Mrs. Newman’s smile disappeared. Marcus ignored her.

"I know where your locker is, Miss Darlin’," he singsonged, which was true because his is located only about a half-dozen or so away from mine. He knew I had lied. He gave me the two-fingeredtsk-tsk. I froze.

"Leave her alone. Don’t you have enough problems of your own?"

While Mrs. Newman lectured, Marcus brushed my hair back with his hand, leaned in, and whispered, "I won’t narc on you, Cuz."

He smelled sweet and woodsy, like cedar shavings. I felt his hand on my neck and his breath on my cheek. Suddenly, I was rubbery and red.

I stumbled out of there. And when I did, I found myself face-to-face with the last person I wanted to see after something like this happens: Sara. Oh, she would just love to be the one to tell everyone about me and Marcus. Not that thereis aMe and Marcus , mind you. But whatever almost-nonexistent thing that exists between us would be too much for Pineville High to handle. That’s exactly why this next scene was so painful:

Me:[Trying to sound cool.]Oh, hey, Bruiser. What’s up?

Sara:I’mfine. But what’s up with you? Are you feeling okay? Omigod! You’re bright red. And sweating. And you’re out of breath.

[She’s viciously suspicious. She searches for clues.]

Me:Oh, no. I’m fine. I just ran down here to get … uh …something.I … uh … got a little winded.

Sara:The track star got winded running to the office?

[Sara shakes her head and purses her lips. She’s onto me.]

Me:Uh … I … uh …

[Marcus strolls out of the office and stands between Sara and me.]

Marcus:Let’s hear you sling the bullshit.

Me:Uh … I …

[Marcus crosses his arms, covering up the five smiling faces of the Backstreet Boys, whose images and silver-glitter BSB logo are emblazoned across his chest. He risks ridicule whenever he wears this teenybopper T-shirt, which is quite often. Most people don’t get the joke. I do. In a world where Marilyn Manson can’t shock anyone anymore, Marcus knows that wearing the Backstreet Boys T-shirt is one of the most subversive things that he—being "Krispy Kreme," after all—can do. He thinks it’s funny. Itis .]

Sara:[Shoots Marcus a withering glance.]Omigod! Ugh. Stop bothering us.

Marcus:[Looking at me.]I’m not bothering you, am I?

[The T-shirt cotton is thin. The ink-black Chinese character band tattooed around Marcus’s bicep shows through, needing translation, needing to be understood.]

Me:Uh …

[Marcus walks away, laughing.]

Sara:Omigod! What was that all about?

Me:That freak? I have no idea. He must be high.

Fortunately, when Sara recounts this strange story—this isolated, unprovoked incident—to everyone we know, she puts herself in a role that is equal to mine.

"Can you believe thatquote Krispy Kremeunquote came up to us all high to spout off some weird-ass shit?" she asks. "Like we care."

Us. We.Both innocent.

The thing is,I do care. I don’t know why. But with the Marcus–Heath history and all, I simply can’t tell Hope about what happened today. Not the truth anyway. And that makes me a horrible friend.

March 1st

Hope,

Sorry you always have to go through my mom or dad to get to me. I’m phone phobic since you left. I never pick it up anymore. The reason I don’t pick it up is because the very idea of having a conversation sucks all the life right out of me. It really does. Besides you, I resenteveryone who barges in on the few precious hours of downtime I have between track practice and tossing and turning all night.

Well, tonight that person was none other than Hy. I shouldn’t have been so shocked. I was the one who gave her my phone number.

To be honest, I was thinking more aboutyou than her when I did it. See, I was thinking about you at your new school and how hard it’s been for you to make new friends. And how you said you were grateful whenever anyone went out of her way to be nice to you.

So we talked. She told me all about the circumstances that got her exiled to Pineville. Apparently, Hy used to go to some hoity-toity private school in Manhattan. ("You needed mad bank or mad brains to get in—I had the brains," said Hy.) Midway through her fall term the dean sent a letter saying that the school no longer had funding to continue her scholarship. ("They had to bounce the riffraff to make way for more trustafarians," Hy said.) Her mom couldn’t afford the tuition for the spring term. ("I never knew my dad," said Hy.) But there was no way she was going to put Hy in New York City’s public school system. ("With the chickenheads and thugs," Hy said.) So until her mom transfers to her company’s Jersey branch, Hy is living with her aunt and enrolled at PHS. ("With the Hoochies, Wiggaz, and Hicks," I said.)