The Symptoms of My Insanity (4 page)

“Yeah, but Mom—”

“A couple of beers. That’s all she had … and boom! No kidneys.”

This overdramatic, “I’m clueless” stuff has got to be some passive-aggressive mom technique. I refuse to believe my mother doesn’t know the difference between beer and roofies, and urban legends and actual news stories. But before I can explain this difference once and for all, Mom says how excited she is that we’re finally going to get rid of my split ends on Saturday. I guess her kidney story settled it: I’m not going anywhere with Blake.

“Come on, sweetie. Don’t look so upset.” She turns to me at the red light and reaches over, pushing some strands of hair out of my face and tucking them behind my ear. “Can’t you wear a shower cap or something when you’re painting? This isn’t the best way to present yourself,” she adds, picking a piece of dried red paint out of my hair.

I don’t respond. Instead I set more dried red strands free from behind my ear.

“Well, good thing we’re going to get this cut soon anyway.” She looks at my face. “What?” she says. “You’re not excited to have a girls’ day with your mom and your sister?” She smiles and pushes the strand back behind my ear.

“Just have a girls’ day without me!” I plead, pulling away. “Why can’t you have a girls’ day without me? And then I can go to the DIA and then after …” I trail off, seeing the hurt expression on her face.

We drive in silence for what seems like a hundred miles before pulling into Jenna’s driveway.

“I’d like to meet him first,” she finally says, taking out the festive pink gloss from her pocket and reapplying in the
rearview mirror. “I’ll meet him. And then [cough] maybe.”

“Okay,” I say. And that look on her face, well, it’s a mental snapshot I wish I hadn’t taken.

•   •   •

The minute I walk into the Masons’ house, Jenna starts laughing. She shakes her head at me and pushes her chopped-out, wispy blond bob away from her eyes.

“I keep telling you my A-minus girls don’t need new bras, Izzy. But so sweet of you to think of me.”

Stupid Lola’s bag sticking out of my backpack.

Jenna and I head up to her room and she immediately puts one of my new double Ds on over her T-shirt.

“I’m totally wearing this baby during dinner.”

“No! God, take that off. It’s so ugly.”

She cups her hands over the bra.

“I can’t believe you fill these things. I’m so jealous! I can’t even fill my own two hands.” She heads to the mirror to ogle her new air-boobs.

The first time I saw Jenna, all I wanted to do was feed her a giant sandwich. She was so thin and pale, I thought she might be sick. But after watching her finish off an entire plate of nachos and win three events on our middle school track-and-field team, I quickly learned that her pale skin, blond hair, and rail-thin body really
are
due to what she likes to call “my cruel genetic fate.”

“So … tell me again. You ran into Blake Hangry while buying lingerie?”

I left Jenna a scattered voicemail while I was waiting for Mom outside Farmer Jack’s.

“Yeah,” I say, smiling. “Wait, no, at Arbor’s Drugs. I told you, he spilled his Gatorade on me and—”

“Oh right, so his sports juice is all over you, and then he compliments your art skills, and then?” Jenna grabs another bra out of the bag and slips it on over the first. “Wait, let me guess. You perform fellatio on him in the bathroom of the store like a good little Broomington girl?”

“Ew,” I say. “You know I hate that word.”

“Fellaaaaaaatio,” Jenna sings.

There’s a big rumor going around school right now that Meredith Brightwell got caught giving Jacob Ullman a blow job in a girls’ bathroom stall last week during sixth period. I still don’t even know how Jenna’s mom found out, but Cathy Mason always finds out about everything. So of course my mom found out too and totally freaked out on me. She was acting like
I
was in the bathroom stall too, like Meredith and I are still best friends or something, giving tag-team blow jobs.

Mom’s uptight about a lot of things, but sex things, oh my God. I think that’s why she and Grandma Iris don’t really talk that much anymore. Allissa and I usually only see Grandma Iris about three times a year, on all of our birthdays. Except this past July she came in for two entire months after Mom had her debulking, this major mucus-scraping surgery for her stomach cancer. They were civil, I guess. But if you didn’t know any better, you’d think Grandma was a hired nurse. I don’t know all the details about why they
don’t talk much, but according to what I heard Grandma Iris say to my aunt Lorraine on the phone one time, “Some things are unforgivable,” and I think “some things” refers to Allissa being “irresponsibly conceived in sin.” My grandma has a very loud phone voice.

“Fellaatio, fellAAAAAAAtio,” Jenna is still singing and fumbling to secure the clasp of her third double D.

I cover my ears and whip my head back and forth dramatically. “Stop, please.”

When Mom found out about Meredith last week, she sat me down for the longest, most painful lecture of my life. She kept calling Meredith a “bathroom stall
nafka
” and ranted on about respecting oneself, and making smart decisions, and the difference between being social and being taken advantage of, and the worst part was that she kept using the phrase “pleasuring boys” over and over again and asking me if I knew what it meant.

Hello? I think a girl who’s used the Internet to find out the details of almost every rare cancer in existence is definitely able to Google “blow job” when she’s dared to by Cara Larson in sixth grade. DISGUSTING! I would NEVER ever do that EVER. I couldn’t believe it when I heard about Meredith doing it. I thought that was only something women do when they’re absolutely desperate for money to survive.

Of course I just shook my head when Mom asked me about it, acting like I had no idea what it meant. Not Jenna, though. I was here when Cathy Mason barged into Jenna’s bedroom ranting about blasphemy. The Meredith news
must have interrupted her cooking, because she was holding a giant bottle of olive oil, which she unknowingly used as a prop, twice. And when Cathy grilled Jenna for more information, Jenna didn’t just shake her head like I had. She looked right up at her mom, and with her usual sugar-sweet, wide-eyed sarcasm, her hands pressed up against her chest and eyelashes batting, she said, “Yes Mom, it’s true. All the girls at school pleasure boys in bathroom stalls. How else are we supposed to get them to like us?”

But Jenna’s always been able to say things like that and get away with it.

“Okay, okay, sorry,” Jenna says, seeing that I’m still covering my ears. “So Blake compliments your art, and then he just asks you to go to the DIA with him?”

“Yup.”

“And your mom’s letting you go?”

“Well, she has to meet him first, but—”

Jenna snorts and gives me an overexaggerated head nod and a double thumbs-up.

“I know.” I fall back traumatically on Jenna’s book-covered purple bedspread.

“You should just say, ‘Mom, why do you have to meet the guy I’m going to be getting it on with in dimly lit corners amidst important art?’”

“Jenna!”

“What?”

“His little sister is going with us,” I say. “And, God, not everything is about … sex, you nympho.”

“What do you mean by that?”

I frown. “Nothing. I’m just kidding.”

“Oooh, is that new?” Jenna asks, plopping down next to me on the bed, now wearing five of my bras at once.

“What?”

“Your ring,” she says pointing to my silver band, partially caked in paint.

“Oh. No. Allissa ordered this online in like July, but it ended up being too big for her skinny fingers, so she gave it to me. I just found it again in one of my smocks. I had it on all summer, though. I’m sure you’ve seen … it.” I trail off, knowing what’s coming next.

“Uh, no,” Jenna says. “You were cooped up in your basement making love to your art supplies all summer. Remember?”

I nod, and chip some paint off my ring with my thumbnail, reminded again how totally behind I am on my portfolio. I’d hoped to have most of it done already, but I didn’t get much accomplished over the summer. Allissa’s on-campus summer job answering phones for some psych professor was more important than me having time to do my art while taking care of post-surgery Mom. And the house. And her office. And acting as a human Grandma-Iris-the-Nurse buffer.

“I’m sorry. That was …” Jenna turns her face from me toward her mirror. “Of course you were dealing with your mom and everything.”

“No, it’s okay. Besides, it’s not like you weren’t … busy partying with your writing group friends in Ann Arbor, so—” I cut myself off.

“I wasn’t partying.” She whips around fast. “I was—I was around. You were the one who—”

“Sorry, sorry. Right, forget it.”

“So … Oh!” Jenna says now, bounding up and heading back to the mirror. “I have to tell you what Blake did in drama class today.”

“What?” I say, happy for the change in subject.

“Okay, well, he was doing a scene from
A Streetcar Named Desire
—do you know that play? It’s wonderful. The set design alone, if it’s done right, evokes so much in itself. We so need to watch the movie together. You think Blake is hot? Please. Wait until you see Marlon Brando—”

“Jenna—”

“Okay, so he’s doing a
Streetcar
scene with Emily Belfry, who by the way had the worst Southern belle accent ever. It was like a Valley girl with a twang and every so often she sounded Scottish. I told Mrs. Fredmeir that dialect training is essential to good acting, but she never listens to any of my suggestions—”

“Uh-huh. And?”

“And okay, so he’s about to start the scene when all of a sudden Mrs. Fredmeir is like, ‘Mr. Hangry, I think Stanley here would be shirtless, no?’ And Blake’s like, ‘What?’ Looking like he’s going to upchuck on Emily’s shoes. And Mrs. Fredmeir’s like, ‘Mr. Hangry,’ you know, with that proper voice she has? And she basically tells him that he needs to have his shirt off in order to fully get into character, and she’s like quoting Stanislavski and stuff, which, okay, kind of makes sense, but—”

“Wait, are you telling me that Blake—”

“TOOK OFF HIS SHIRT!”

“No!”

“Yes!”

“What?”

“Yeah, and he looked so embarrassed.”

“That’s like harassment.”

“I know! And I swear Fredmeir was checking out his abs the whole time because you know, this is how so many of those nasty student-teacher fling things start and—”

“Unghhh,” I groan, “please don’t ever say
Fredmeir, nasty,
and
fling things
in the same sentence ever again.”

“I’m just saying that during the scene, she looked professional … yet aroused.”

“Jenna!”

“Sorry, sorry. So anyway, Emily, who can’t act in a Tennessee Williams play to save her own life, got to spend the next seven minutes sounding like a Southern Scot doing a scene with a shirtless Blake Hangry!”

“Wow,” I say, sitting back.

“Yeah. I told you. Take drama with me,” she says, fishing through my Lola’s bag again.

I shake my head. Thank God I was able to fill our creative elective requirement with art and not be forced into taking drama or lip-synching my way through a choir class.

“So … you’re not going to start dating Blake, are you?” Jenna asks.

“Yeah, right.”

“Good! I forbid you to get a boyfriend this year and start acting all couple-y on me. Besides, maybe it’s not even a date on Saturday.”

“Yeah, maybe. Wait, what do you mean?”

“Well, his mom’s the one who put your info and stuff on the DIA website, right? Maybe it was her idea to invite you, like an art buddy for his little sister.”

“Oh. Yeah. Maybe. So … no, you don’t have to worry about me having a boyfriend. I’m sure you’ll have one before me anyway, hands down.”

“What? Why would you say that?”

“Because, please, you always have someone after you. Like Nate Yube. I know you’re still totally—”

“Wow! Izzy! This is very cute,” Jenna interrupts, finding the pink bunny nightgown in the bag. She tosses it to me like it’s a hot potato.

“Unghhh,” I groan again, throwing it back in the bag.

“So,” Jenna says, “judging from your hot new pajamas, and all my brand-new bras, it looks like you had some fun girl time with your mom.”

“It wasn’t girl time, it was …” I pause, thinking about the girls’ day with her and Allissa I tried to blow off. “I just needed new bras.”

“No. I think it’s good you’re spending time together. It’s important.”

“Yeah. Well, I just needed new bras.”

“I know,” Jenna sighs, ripping the tag off the top bra she’s wearing. “Oh! I can’t believe I almost forgot to ask
you this! What are you doing after school tomorrow?”

“I don’t know. Not too much,” I say, watching her pull more tags off more bras. “Actually, I should stay in the studio and work on my portfolio—”

“Good, then you’re free.” She grins mischievously.

“Well, not exactly … Wait, why?” I already fear the worst.

“Okay, so don’t flip out—”

“Jenna, what did you do?”

“You’re the assistant director-slash-set design helper for the winter musical. Congratulations!”

“Jenna! No!”

“Isabella! Yes!”

“No! No way! I don’t have time! I have to finish my portfolio, I have all this dance stuff to do for my mom, and I have to maintain at least a B-plus average to even get to go to Italy. I have no time for this.”

“Come on, it’s not a big deal. It’ll be fun.”

I shake my head at her. It’s not a big deal for someone like Jenna to direct a play, but to be honest, the thought of assistant directing, of telling everyone what to do, makes me want to vomit repeatedly all over myself. Plus, and I’m sorry if this sounds rude, but all the people who do the plays are kind of crazy. They’re really loud and they gesture a lot when they talk, and sometimes they just spontaneously burst into three-part harmony.

I continue to shake my head. “No. Absolutely not. No.”

“Come on, Izzy.” Jenna grabs my hands, air-boobs swinging. “We’re in the final stretch. It’ll be easy. And now that
Blake and all those basketball guys are there too, and I have to watch all the girls—and a very horned-up Mrs. Fredmeir—drool-swoon all over the place, I desperately need one person around who doesn’t utterly nauseate me. And Ryan Paulson needs major guidance with the set, and you’re so good at that stuff.”