The Unknowns (11 page)

I attained the cafeteria and looked around for somewhere to sit. Instinctively I took note of the four or five girls who were at the center of my narrowing researches. Ginny Oyler was sitting with Leah Toomey’s crowd, which was new. And there was unusual hilarity at Michelle and Tara’s table. Michelle’s back was to me; she seemed to be reading something to Tara and Louise and Becky Busch and Lisa Buonano. I wondered what the joke was. And then my eyes met Tara’s and she stopped laughing and began to make frantic shushing motions to her companions, patting the air with her hands, and the cafeteria seemed very big and very noisy, and I was sure there had to be some way to reverse one of the steps that had led to this moment, but of course there wasn’t. And Michelle turned around in her seat and scanned the room and finally gestured in my direction with the gentlest nod imaginable, and the entire table looked at me and broke into laughter, except for Tara, who stared down at her lunch with an expression that I was unable to read.

The bathroom in the school’s basement got very little traffic, and its heavy air smelled of damp cement. Warmed by the giant boilers next door, I sat in a stall and tried to reconstruct from memory my observations of 39 ninth-grade girls—not to preserve the information,
which was useless to me since Michelle Kessel’s lunchtime reading yesterday, but to imagine it through the eyes of its subjects. What would Becky Busch think, for instance, when she learned that, next to her name, I had written
Never smiles
and
Insists that trees are not alive b/c they don’t walk around
? Or Nancy Chang, whose entry, in its entirety, read
Smells good:
publicly she’d be repulsed, but would she also, secretly, be pleased? Counting out the thirty-nine girls on my fingers I reviewed my useless notes, meditating on each in turn, in the hope that I could wring the shame from them. I could distract myself for brief periods by examining the shapes where the paint had peeled off the cubicle’s wooden wall: under the blue-gray was a coat of forest green. In sixteen minutes I was due in biology with Michelle and Louise and Tara. I had skipped it yesterday. I could skip it again today, become a truant, get expelled, start over at another school, but what I’d done would follow me there. When Carl Driesdale transferred to Wilson, everyone knew he’d been thrown out of his previous school for biting some kid on the dick. Was that even true? I tried to remember arriving at school yesterday, before I had ruined my life, and I wanted to weep from nostalgia. And then the bell rang, and by some autonomic reflex I got up and headed out of the bathroom into the treacherous world.

As I walked the five floors to the bio labs, pressed in by crowds, I kept my head down like a spy, glad for the first time not to be tall. I pushed the door open and everyone turned to see if Mr. McCallum had arrived. Michelle Kessel’s caroling voice filled the lull with the words, “Hey Eric, it’s great that you think I’m a user!”

There was general puzzlement—what possible connection could there be between Michelle and the quiet, doughy kid with the weird clothes? I took an empty seat at the back as though none of this was happening. Finally Angela Martin, who was nice but lacked subtlety of mind, asked Michelle what she was talking about, giving Michelle a chance to say, “Look!” and begin digging in her book bag. I stared
at the chipped wooden surface of my desk, where compass points and Swiss Army knives had engraved forgotten initials, geometric doodles, the word
RUSH
.

“Check this out, you guys,” she said. “This is Eric’s secret notebook.”

“Awww,” said Angela, as though Michelle had taken out a dying bird. “You should give it back to him.”

“Just wait,” Michelle said. She began paging through the notebook. I knew what was coming, but it took her longer than I expected to find the entry. Where was McCallum?
“Angela Martin,”
Michelle read.
“Skinny. Vegetarian. Likes Matt McGahan.”
Laughter, shouting. Angela put her hand over her mouth in astonishment. I’d never seen anyone do that except on TV.
“Plays flute in orchestra. Asked me how long until class. Seems like nice person. Member of Save the Environment Club.”

Abigail Slott said, “Oh my God,
no way
!” in a tone of pure joy.

“What is this?” Sean Lippard asked me.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Michelle said. “There’s more!” She looked around the classroom. “Oh, oh, Abigail’s in. Wait.” I tried to remember what I’d written about Abigail Slott. Michelle seemed to be flipping through the pages from the front, which meant she hadn’t noticed the entries were alphabetized by last name.

“Here we go,” she said.
“Abigail Slott: Pretty hair. Sarcastic. Plays volleyball. Visible bra straps. Often comments on smells. Mostly friends with guys—Sean L, Steve Olssen (boyfriend?). Can be scary. Ignores me.”

I started to disengage, reducing the classroom to a meaningless array of pure sensory data—light waves at different frequencies hitting my retinae, sonic vibrations in the air’s molecules.
If Michelle Kessel humiliates you in the forest, does she make a sound
? It worked for a few seconds, until I became aware that the blur of red and yellow and tan to my left was Molly Clarke, who had never spoken to me
before, and who was looking me up and down as though I were something incongruous and threatening, a leopard or a nudist. “What was this
for
?” she said.

“Oh, Molly, you want to hear yours?” asked Michelle.

“What did you write about me?” Molly asked me. I began to jiggle my leg rhythmically, counting the beats in groups of four and sets of sixteen.

“Yours is short,” Michelle said.
“Molly Clarke: Quiet, shy. Went to Japan on vacation—interested in Japan.”
I had thought it might be useful to know that, for some reason.

“Did he really call you a user?” asked Allison Ketcham, who had been omitted from the notebook for her strange pockmarked face and the frizzy hair that exploded from her scrunchie.

“Yeah, yeah, you wanna hear mine?” said Michelle. “OK:
Michelle Kessel—smart, pretty. Nice legs—”
and here she paused dramatically
“—or just short skirts?”
There was laughter, maybe more than she would have liked.
“Likes to be in charge. Doesn’t laugh much. Lots of makeup. Popular. User.”
She stepped on the last word hard, as though killing a bug. She skipped the next sentence:
Switches best friends a lot: Beth Gillman/Vicki Gordon/Liz Anderman/Louise Treadwell
. I caught her eye and realized that she wasn’t just having fun—I’d made an enemy.

To Louise, in a stage whisper, she said, “Can I read yours?” There was no way the crowd would have let her skip Louise’s entry once she’d announced its existence.

“Louise Treadwell,”
Michelle read.
“Pretty, blond (dyed?), sexy clothes. Kind of dumb.”
She enunciated this last very clearly, looking straight at me.
“Always turns in work late, says she left it at home. Mean.”
She omitted
Always with Michelle
.

“I think that’s all the people in this class,” said Michelle. She had left out Tara’s entry, in which I had recorded Michelle and
Louise’s corruption of Tara’s innocent love for her My Little Ponies. “You guys want to hear some of the others? You want to hear Vicki Gordon?”

It was in the middle of this speech that McCallum walked in. The room got quiet—McC. was not a teacher to fuck with—but Michelle was already looking through the pages. He hovered behind her for a moment, then reached down and snatched the notebook out of her hands.

Michelle was unflustered. “Sorry, Mr. McCallum,” she said, sticking out her chin like a tiny prizefighter. “But that’s not mine, the notebook, it’s Eric Muller’s.” I admired the way she was careful to distinguish me from Eric Auerbach.

McCallum sighed—he hadn’t even begun teaching and already he was faced with a distracting mess. He gestured with the book as though he was going to throw it at me, then opened it to a random page. After a few seconds he looked up at Abigail Slott and chuckled.

“Mr. McCallum,” Michelle said, raising her hand perfunctorily, “there’s some really disgusting stuff in there. Some of the girls think it’s really inappropriate.”

McCallum raised his eyebrows at me sardonically. Then he took the notebook’s corner between two fingers, as though it were a kitten he was feeding to a tank of piranhas, and dropped it onto Michelle’s desk.

“Put it away,” he told her brusquely. “Now: photosynthesis.”

As far as I could tell, Michelle never allowed the notebook into general circulation. (There were, after all, passages that she didn’t want people to read.) Thus it became a collective fantasy object for the student body, more thrilling than the real artifact could ever have been. Besides the girl profiles, most of what I’d recorded was mundane—who talked to whom, who ate where, who whispered in
class. In the school’s dreamlife it was transformed into a deranged epic of perversion and lust. Over the next three weeks I was asked to confirm the following: that I had made a list of girls I wanted to have sex with; that I had spied on girls through their windows and taken photographs of them in the nude; that I intended to drug Angela Martin and force myself on her in the cafeteria; that I had collected and catalogued my masturbatory effluvia and planned to present every girl in the school with the relevant portion, in a Ziploc bag, on Valentine’s Day. I denied each rumor with the kind of embarrassment that looks very much like guilt.

The ordeal was interrupted by a tedious, anxious vacation. I spent it in my room, working through a compendium of programming exercises and reading comic books about superpowered mutants, endowed with genetic gifts far beyond those of their parents, shunned by the fearful and the bigoted. We had Christmas dinner with my father, who announced over turkey cutlets and Stove Top stuffing that he was investing everything he had and everything he earned in the beverage company, divorce settlement be damned, and that the returns from this venture would soon enable him to fulfill his responsibilities to us in lavish style, and that my mother’s failure to support him in his ambitions was the reason he’d left her in the first place, and that apparently even divorce couldn’t free him of her carping and negativity. He finished this speech with the satisfied look of a man who has gotten something off his chest, then took a second helping of instant mashed potatoes. He stayed through dessert.

For New Year’s my mom and I went to a party at the Oberfells’: grown-ups standing around drinking, listening to Bruce Hornsby and the Range, talking about whatever grown-ups talk about. Bronwen was at a high school party, probably making out with somebody. “Stacey’s going to ask Bronwen if you can go with her!” my mom had said that afternoon, but I quashed the idea, for obvious reasons. And
so I wandered among the knots of chatting adults, drinking Pepsi, trying to avoid my mother and her sympathetic looks. Eventually I began hunting for a quiet place to reread
X-Men
issues 129 to 138, in which Marvel Girl, made omnipotent and insane by lust, destroys an entire planetary system.

Pete was in his room, identifiable by the stickers on the door: Garbage Pail Kids, skateboard companies, Ninja Turtles. He was kneeling on the floor with a curly-haired friend, surrounded by an elaborate arrangement of G.I. Joes. Pete was bigger than I remembered, and this made me feel like I was making insufficient progress, but I was glad to see him. Here was a person who might have some minimal respect for me, if only because I was older than him.

“What are you guys doing?” I said. I could imagine spending the evening playing G.I. Joe with a couple of ten-year-olds, justifying it to myself as a kind of charity work. He didn’t answer.

“Cobra 3 to Squadron Leader,” his friend said. “Preparing to execute Mission Danger Bomb.”

“Hypersquadron activated,” Pete said.

“OK, cool,” I said, and ducked out into the hallway, where a tall man in a blue blazer was saying, “So the guy says because of the soil composition, just to
excavate
is gonna be twenty grand, and then it’s another five to ten before anyone’s swimming.” Across the hall, unadorned, was another door: Bronwen’s. It was impossible not to slip inside.

Because what happens in a girl’s room, anyway? By what alchemy does this space incubate a child’s body and generate breasts and ovaries and beauty? These rooms have a lot of work to do, and that’s why they’re so ornately decorated, as though with the ingredients for a spell. Bronwen’s bed had a canopy of rough tulle, like a gauzy purple mist. Every inch of the opposite wall was covered with photographs: celebrities and models, friends in bathing suits or evening gowns. A collage compiled images of Bronwen and a skinny, dark-haired girl,
accompanied by the legend B
RONWEN AND
K
ATIE
spelled in letters clipped from magazines ransom-note style, along with the slogans, extracted from ad pages or pull quotes, W
HY CAN’T
I
HAVE EVERYTHING
I
WANT
? and I
T’S ALL ABOUT BOYS
! I looked for actual boys, but apart from Tom Cruise and the Beatles they were few and far between.

On the surfaces of the dresser and the nightstand were jewelry boxes and nail polish and hand mirrors and lipstick, more than I could believe. In the small attached bathroom I peeked at the shampoos and bath oils and skin creams, opened the cabinet to survey the contact lens solution and Q-Tips and Tampax. Everything smelled of fruit or flowers. Whenever I had thought about Bronwen over the past year, cringing embarrassment had burned away any other feeling, but here, surrounded by the paraphernalia of her self-invention, something tender began to stir. I felt as though I was backstage in the dressing room during a performance. In the bedroom closet I found the shoe tree, the nice dresses, the jackets. I tried the little top drawer of the dresser, and although I knew what was inside I was still startled by the profusion of underwear, a surprising amount of it in colors other than white. She had red underwear, gray, lots of purple. Like the bed: purple was a theme, it meant something. There were only a couple of bras—she didn’t really need bras. I listened for footsteps at the door, but I wasn’t confident I’d hear them over the party. I pulled out underpants one pair at a time, inspected the cotton panels and the soft gussets, tried to infer Bronwen’s body from their shape. I felt like the scholar-hero in the adventure movie, alone in the library at night, combing the leather-bound tomes for the clue he needs. The pair I was looking for wasn’t in this drawer, it was with Bronwen as she laughed with her friends, took sips from an older girl’s flask, positioned herself close to some boy at midnight, while I was stuck here with her underwear and her leggings and her sweet-smelling lotions, all the props she used to create the sublime
fantasy of her girlhood. Though I was far from the performance, I was closer to the truth than I had ever been. And that’s when Pete Oberfell opened the door and said, “What are you doing?”