The Rites and Wrongs of Janice Wills (3 page)

He smiled a half smile at me and shook his head. “No, thank
you
,” he said. “It was great reading. Especially the part where you speculate on the inverse relationship between baseball ability and intelligence. Oh, and the part where you argue that certain borderline personality traits are actually just culturally reinforced in theatre kids.”

I stared at him.

“Seriously?” I asked. “You’re not offended, right? This stuff is, ugh, well, it’s just notes. And it’s not exactly flattering. I’m a moron to have left it lying around. Oh — you didn’t show this to anyone else, did you?”

He laughed. His laugh enveloped me. He smelled faintly of cigarettes and spearmint, and he looked so handsome standing there, his hair tipped by sun, like some beautiful Greek god dropped down in Melva.

“No, relax. It’s probably true it’s best not to let this fall into just anyone’s hands,” he said. “But I’m glad I found it. I liked it. Somebody finally speaks truth to Melva High School. You’re good. As an anthropologist, I mean.”

I stared at him again, unable to thank him for the compliment. Then the moment broke. He wiped his hands again on his shirt.

“Well, anyways. See you around, Janice.” “Thanks again,” I said.

“And you and I,” he added, turning to go, “we should hang out sometime. We’ve got more in common than I realized. Compared to everybody else in this place.”

“Definitely,” I said. “Definitely,” I repeated, but he had, like a mirage, already disappeared.

I continued to stare into the absence where Jimmy Denton had just stood. I’d just had an actual conversation with him! And he had actually suggested that we hang out! I wished that Margo had been there to witness this and reassure me it had really taken place.

I whipped my hair over my shoulder the way a beautiful girl would in a shampoo ad. Things felt different. Either I was hallucinating, or it seemed Jimmy Denton liked me, at least a little.

By the time I walked outside to find Margo after school, the crowd in the student parking lot was just beginning to thin out. Margo was sitting outside the back entrance, soaking up the late-day heat. A few clusters of lingering students were still hanging out around their cars, flirting or wasting time before sports practice. I threaded my way through a crowd of Goths slouching against cars in guyliner and black pants, Cowboys sporting the fuzzy my-first-mustache look, Dumb Pretties laughing too loudly and wearing scandalously short flounced skirts, Smart Pretties with organized notebooks, quiet voices, and knee-length skirts, Hip-Hoppers encircling one bank of lockers in the corner, a little knot of the Formerly Homeschooled wearing long prairie skirts and off-brand sneakers, and a crew of Football Players crowing loudly at some joke. “Hey,” I called.

Margo looked up at me, smiling. As I approached, I couldn’t help questioning my best friend’s fashion decisions. Margo’s
T-shirt said “Get Funky!” in sparkly letters. It was the sort of shirt a bratty twelve-year-old would beg her mom to buy her from Wal-Mart. Margo was, in my opinion, the prettiest girl at MHS, but she barely ever fixed her hair and tended to dress “thematically” rather than fashionably. Today was one of her ironic looks: a sort of tongue-in-cheek take on the Early ‘90s Britney Spears—Idolizing Prepubescent Fangirl.

FACT:
Margo is from one of the oldest and most well-established families in Melva, the Werthers. Her ancestors made their fortune in textiles and then rose to a position of enormous political influence throughout both the state and the entire South — although more recently, things had changed for the Werthers. They still had the prestige of their name, but that was about it. They were Melva’s threadbare aristocracy — not poor exactly, but definitely not rich. Money aside, Margo has always worn awful clothes on purpose because she just doesn’t care. Or, rather, she cares a lot about demonstrating that she does not care.

ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
In the art of primitive cultures, breasts and hips were interpreted as signs of fertility. Example: the Woman of Willendorf, a figurine made 24,000 years ago. Margo had the hips, the lips, the butt, and the breasts to be a true fertility goddess, but at Melva High School, these
things were interpreted merely as Bad Girl Potential. Either Margo was unaware of this supposed aura of Bad Girl Potential around her, or, as she did with most dumb assumptions, she chose to ignore it.

“Where were you all lunch period?” I asked. “The craziest thing happened! You won’t believe who I ended up talking to.”

“Oh, crap. Sorry. Chorus. I met Jen to practice for a minute and then we ended up going through lunch. Sorry about that,” Margo said, stretching her legs out lazily from the curbside where she sat and fishing around in her purse for a cigarette. She claimed that she tended to smoke only when she was anxious, but I’d noticed that it was mainly just when she was bored. “Who’d you talk to?”

I looked around to see if other people were in listening distance. They weren’t, but I still felt nervous speaking Jimmy’s name, as if uttering it would conjure him to appear suddenly behind me. “I’ll tell you later,” I said. “When we’re not at school.”

“Okay. Still wanna go to the Cellar?” Margo asked. I nodded. The Cellar was the Mocha Cellar, the only hangout that existed in Melva.

ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
As I detail in my most recent essay, “Margaret Mead, Melva, and Me: An Anthropologist Comes of Age in the
Land of Livermush” (currently seeking publication), a town like Melva will often have one establishment that attempts to add a touch of cool, a touch of urbanity. And by this, I mean a pseudo-Starbucks (since Melva doesn’t have the economic base to support the prepackaged “cool” of an actual Starbucks) — a weak, watery version of the chain. Teenagers will take over this establishment as their own hangout, driving the adult customers away, and spend long hours but very little money. Said establishment will thus last only one to four years before becoming financially insolvent.

The Mocha Cellar was currently that establishment, and by my watch, it’d be extinct within the next year. As it existed now, it was a dim, grungy basement beneath a sandwich shop that hosted local bands and apparently sold coffee. I’d never actually seen someone drinking coffee there, but everyone in high school went there all the same — to loiter long hours and occasionally gulp down cookies as big as your face and giant, bewhipped milk-shake-type beverages, and of course to escape our parents.

When we got to the Mocha Cellar, I could hear the little cluster of Beautiful Rich Girls, or BRGs, whispering and giggling as soon as we walked in the door. Theresa Rose, Tabitha, and Casey wore ridiculously oversized young-Hollywood sunglasses perched on their heads like headbands. They were all three beautiful in their varied hues — TR was the blonde, Tabitha the dark, high-cheekboned one, Casey the classically pretty brunette.
Being near these girls was like basking in a golden light. Old people looked on and smiled. Happily married Baptist preachers stuttered uncomfortably. Even wobbling toddlers became smitten and clung to them. That was the kind of black magic TR and her crew wielded.

ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
Yes, these girls were of a classic type, or stereotype: the beautiful girl bullies, the clique of popular girls, the mean girls. It was like they’d walked right out of a movie — living, breathing caricatures. At least as far as I could tell. In their presence, I felt all my worst physical flaws sharpening into stark focus: My shoulder blades stuck out like a stegosaurus’s spines; I had eyebrows like two woolly caterpillars trying to mate; skinny arms; hair the color of paper grocery bags; and the long legs and feet of a frog….

I’d been bursting to tell Margo about my encounter with Jimmy, but now I wanted to wait until the BRGs weren’t so close. I’d permanently move to a remote Polynesian village if they ever heard me gushing about Jimmy.

“Who’d you talk to? What was it you were so excited to tell me?” Margo asked.

“Oh, you know,” I said quickly, thinking of Jimmy’s face and voice while trying to avoid the gaze of the BRGs. “Just things. Always things.”

We got glasses of sweet iced tea and took our usual table, but even as we were pulling out our chairs, I felt something — the cold realization that the popular girls’ gaze had shifted to us. We’d somehow managed to attract their idling, carnivorous attention.

Theresa Rose called out to us. “Hey, Margo,” she said in her syrupy voice, “love the shirt! Very edgy, very fashion-forward!”

ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
The leader of the rival tribe offers a challenge. In this setting, that challenge comes in the form of sarcasm: direct address with a wicked mock-compliment.

The BRGs looked at us expectantly, waiting for Margo to respond to TR’s comment. Instead, Margo glared at the wall, not answering. There was a rustle, and then three pairs of well-shaved legs, all fragrant with spray tanner, were coming toward us. TR giggled, more than she needed to, playing up her double-edged friendliness. She was the de facto leader of the BRGs, alpha bitch, legend among Melva girls and guys alike ever since she’d supposedly shaved her crotch as an eighth-grader and flashed it for five high school guys during a game of truth or dare behind the Girl Scout hut in the city park. She and her pack surrounded us, looming above the table where we sat. Margo shivered beside me.

ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
By remaining standing, thus maximizing their physical presence, the BRGs exert dominance over the weaker, lesser tribe.

“Hey, Margo, I don’t think you heard me. Oh, hi, Janice,” TR said, nodding at each of us. “I’m thinking of joining Science Club. Is it too late in the year?” She smirked at me.

“And you’re entering Miss Livermush, right, Janice? Or will you have scientific obligations — excuse me, anthropological ones — that you need to attend to?” Tabitha added.

I hunched my shoulders in an awkward, nonresponsive shrug. Margo elbowed me, hissing, “We have to say something back! TR can’t just do this!”

I shook my head. I was an anthropologist. An observer. Indeed, it was because of TR that I became an anthropologist in the first place. In seventh grade, I’d been stricken with the self-destructive urge to try out for middle school cheerleading. Yes, Janice Wills, Gangly McGangles, had wanted to be a
cheerleader
. Don’t ask me from where this impulse had come, but with true monomaniacal madness, I’d been consumed with the desire to dance around and do splits and smile my face off. (I could not and cannot dance. I could not and cannot do splits. And I don’t smile excessively. I am, generally speaking, not a performative person.) I blame this whole episode on temporary insanity.

Anyway, I’d sheepishly, eagerly shown up at tryouts. TR, the team captain, quickly nicknamed me “Stilts the Clown” and
“Wobbles” after I fell (more than once) during the routines. Needless to say, Stilts the Clown had not made the middle school cheerleading squad. When I’d found out and gone home crying (at my lapse in judgment and subsequent humiliation more than anything), my mom had said to me, “Oh, darling. Sometimes to make it through these years, you just have to step back. Become an anthropologist when you need to, you know? Observe the behaviors around you without taking it too personally. It’s just adolescence, after all….”

My mom had made what she thought was merely an offhand comment, but I clung to her advice. Thinking like this seemed to be the only way to make myself feel better. And so I’d gone to the library and checked out every book on anthropology I could find, and what I couldn’t find, I ordered off the Internet:
Ethnography Through Thick and Thin, Coming of Age in Samoa, Local Knowledge, From Lucy to Language, Critical Anthropology Now
… Not all of it had made complete sense to me, but I loved feeling like an explorer somehow, even if it was in my own town. I felt safe that way. Intellectual. And it was completely interesting! That was the best part — I actually liked this stuff. Cheerleading, blech, be gone! I was better suited to being an anthropologist anyway.

Back in the present moment, TR smiled her acid smile. In response, my own mouth arranged itself into a jigsaw of doubt.

“So, Margo,” TR continued. “We like your shirt sooooo much. Just wondering, where did you get it?”

Tabitha and Casey were laughing silently at us, swallowing little snickers. TR gave a careless toss of her shimmery blond hair and then leaned toward Casey and Tabitha, whispering. I heard Tabitha mutter “drug dealer” and “baby.” Anyone who’d been in Melva longer than forty-eight hours would have known that these words related to various threads of gossip about Margo’s family currently in circulation. I wasn’t sure how the drug dealer rumor had started, but Margo’s older sister, Becca, had just had a baby during the past year. Margo’s sister wasn’t married. This had caused a small stir.

“So are y’all comin’ to the party this Friday?” Tabitha asked.

Margo didn’t answer, recrossing her legs.

ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
In warding off the attacking tribe, members of the weaker tribe must avoid direct confrontation — even the direct gaze will be taken as a challenge. Members of a weaker tribe must play dead and wait for the aggressors’ interest to wane. Thus we kept silent.

“I heard that
last
Friday night someone saw you with a guy,” Casey said, directing her attention toward Margo.

TR made a coughing noise that sounded like “slut.” Margo flicked her raised foot dangerously close to TR’s ankles.

“Hey,” Casey said to TR. “We should get that stuff from my house for the junior class party. And then go check and see if they got that dress for Miss Livermush in a small enough size for you.”

They had lost interest in us. I thought we were in the clear at that point, but no — too late. Margo cleared her throat and hawked up an enormous wad of phlegm. It landed, glistening, on the grungy floor, only millimeters from TR’s pretty foot in its wedge sandal.

ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
In the solitary act of retaliatory aggression, a lone member of the weaker tribe has, in popular parlance, “gone maverick.” Such an act could trigger an all-out battle or a more indirect attack, but either way, the repercussions will likely affect the entire weaker tribe, not just the lone aggressor. In other words, Margo’s actions made me very, very nervous.

TR coughed, smoothed her new jean skirt, and sidestepped the glob with her long legs. “Ohmygod! Wait!” she said, in the same fake, drawling voice she used to charm the First Baptist Church ladies and sell yearbook ads. “I can’t believe how forgetful I am!”

“What? What did you forget?” Casey asked, now looking puzzled.

TR nodded and cast her long, purpley lashes downward, then looked sorrowfully over toward Margo.

“I was thinking,” TR said. “With Miss Livermush coming up, and your family having a new baby in the house, you might
be a little tight on money. And I believe in competition, so I want you in the pageant. I might have a dress you can borrow.” She smiled sweetly, as if bestowing a generous gift. But then she frowned. “But, oh! Oh, no, it would definitely be too small for you, I guess…. Maybe Trisha Young has one you could borrow? Just to help you financially?”

FACT:
Trisha Young was approximately the size of a baby elephant. TR also managed to make the word “financially” sound like something chronic and contagious.

“I’m only trying to help,” TR added, very softly. “Because left to your own devices, Margo, you dress like a schizophrenic homeless woman.”

TR’s phrase zinged past us like an arrow. No one spoke.

“Come on, girls. Let’s get out of here. It’s slirting time!” TR sang. The others cheered. They stepped past our table and left, leaving a cloud of tuberoses and honey-vanilla where they’d stood.