Research: Journals
The Journal
Past Issues
27.1
Miriam Gershow
Little GirlMy best friend’s father fell in love with one of his students from the community college. We were sixteen then. The girlfriend was twenty-two. Polly called me when she found out.This is not about how much I love you, her Dad had told her. These things happen. They’re unexpected. We can’t plan for everything. His face, she said, puffed up while he was talking like he had the mumps. His nose turned red and started to run, and his fingers squeezed her knee until it hurt.
“Maybe you’ll get to paint your room,” I said.
When our friend Kathleen’s dad moved out, her mom let her paint her room any color she wanted. Divorce had become fashionable in our neighborhood. It was like a fever, starting quietly enough in one private corner of town, then spreading wildly through the streets. Separations. Court cases. Child support. Alimony. Weekend visitations. Dads living in antiseptic beige apartments in nearby cities.
Polly didn’t say anything. I could hear strained breathing in the phone.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was just kidding.”
“I don’t know what to do,” she said and then talked for a long time. Her parents had screamed at each other for three hours. Her dad could get fired, she said. Her mom was locked in the bedroom and wouldn’t come out. He’s leaving, Polly kept repeating. I tried to feel bad but I found the whole thing exciting, electric. Fifty-two pick-up; all of the cards thrown in the air, flitting down to the ground in a scattered mess.
In my own home, there was a lulling sameness. My father read The New York Times or thumbed through his classical music collection, blowing dust off the records as he pulled them from their sleeves. My mother sat working on one of her half-finished needlepoints, resting it on the couch cushions if she went to cook dinner or move the laundry to the dryer, the needle safely hooked through a few holes so it wouldn’t accidentally poke someone. They rarely fought. They rarely held hands. I listened at night to their heavy footsteps up the stairs to bed, my mother first, just past dark, then my father an hour or two later.
Dinners were a slow round robin of my father asking my mother about her day, my mother asking him back, both of them then turning to me. When I spoke, I watched their faces and wondered if they were doing the same thing I did in American history class, pressing their fingernails to the insides of their palms so they’d remember to listen. Sometimes, as I brought water glasses from the sink—ice for my father, no ice for my mother and me—I imagined myself as a waitress, these people as my customers. They would be the couple in the corner of the restaurant whom I would quickly forget as soon as I turned away. They would sit quietly, unprotesting and hungry, while I waited on noisier families and kissing couples.
“My mother threw a plate at him,” Polly said. “And then a coffee mug.”
“Where’s he now?”
“Left. Probably at his girlfriend’s.” With the last word, she started crying. I tried to imagine the whole thing, Mrs. Lastrem sprawled across her bedspread, shoulders shaking, red-faced, not even bothering to wipe the snot from her nose. Mr. Lastrem weaving in and out of traffic, his wet armpits leaving dark rings in his button-down, hitting his horn once, then again, trying to push the cars forward in his frenzied rush to his student’s house. The shards of china lying in a messy pile along the linoleum.
Our friend Kathleen had picked hot pink for her room. And she’d painted it herself, streaking the walls unevenly, with thick drops of dried paint everywhere, making the whole thing look speckled. A string of plastic beads hung in her doorway. The walls gave her a headache sometimes, but when she complained, her mom said, “Your bed. You lie in it.” Since her dad left, Kathleen’s mom wore tight denim dresses or shimmering tank tops and miniskirts. The skin of her arms hung wobbly and loose, and her legs had thick blue veins. But I liked how she piled all her hair on top of her head and held it in place with shiny gold clips and combs. Whenever I went there, the house smelled odd, like something had just been burnt. Both doors were usually open, even if no one was on the first floor, and the wind blew through the entryways, the screen doors rattling against the house. You had to yell “Hello? Hello?” until you found someone. One time, no one was home and the doors were like that. I didn’t close them on my way out, just left like I’d never even been there.
I wondered if Polly’s house would be like that now, a place where anything could happen.
Her breath steadied in the phone and she started to say something, but her mother yelled in the background. I couldn’t make out the words, but the sound was high-pitched and jagged. “I gotta go,” Polly said and rushed off the phone. After I hung up, my cheeks got warm and my chest tightened. I wasn’t used to being jealous of Polly.
~~~
The next day after school, she made me go with her to the community college, so we could sit in her car and point to girls walking along the grass, trying to guess which one it was. Polly kept picking the most beautiful, tall, long-haired blondes with halter tops and skintight jeans, chunky-heeled shoes. I thought it was probably a more bookish girl, one who held her bag across her chest, wore glasses, and tied her hair in a bun. Mr. Lastrem was not a good-looking man. He had a plump, pale face with dark half-moon bags under his eyes. Polly had his face. In elementary school, some of the boys had called her Pillsbury. Even in high school, no one had kissed her yet. Three boys had already been down my pants by the middle of our sophomore year.
“That one,” she said, picking a beautiful amber-haired
girl in a sleeveless red dress. The material was gauzy and flowing,
ending just above her knees. She had huge boobs. It was too cold
for the dress, barely any leaves on the trees yet, and the girl’s
nipples poked through the fabric like two fingers leading the way.
“Oh, right,” I said and laughed.
Polly looked at me liked I’d slapped her, eyebrows bunched together, her mouth in a small ‘o.’
I had to be careful with Polly. There was something about her flat smile, the way she licked her lips until they chapped, how she wheezed softly while she ate, that made me want to be mean to her. And she would let me. I knew that; the knowledge only made me meaner. One time I had stopped speaking to her for a week, because I liked the messy, urgent notes she sent begging for my forgiveness for whatever she’d done wrong. I would watch her watching me in the cafeteria, sitting by herself while I sat at a table full of other girls. I’d laugh extra hard, throw my head back and make a loud noise, flipping my hair in a way that made it bounce against my shoulders. I felt vaguely guilty, but more than that, I wanted her to keep staring at me from across the room. I didn’t know what to call it at the time, but in her panic and her need, Polly looked at me like someone in love.
The red dress girl was almost out of sight, moving quickly behind one of the long concrete buildings. I petted Polly’s leg. “Yeah, maybe that’s her,” I said. “She’s pretty.”
Polly’s eyes pooled with water. She’d started wearing make-up recently and the mascara clumped her eyelashes together. The blue eye shadow was a few shades too light. When the tears fell, they streaked her skin with a messy brown.
“It’ll be okay,” I said. It was hard for me to picture Mr. Lastrem, who taught calculus and came home with chalk in his hair, who wore faded suit jackets with suede elbow patches, who got spaghetti sauce caught in his mustache, as the cause of all of this. It titillated me, the idea of unknown passions and hidden drama, of Mr. Lastrem’s pudgy face buried in the breasts of a tiny girl as she called out his name.
Polly’s crying caught in her throat and she made a gasping noise. She brought her hands to her mouth, as if the sound had surprised her.
“It’ll be okay,” I said again, but Polly didn’t answer. She started the car and drove us back through the neighborhood. I knew I should have touched her, maybe stroked her hair or squeezed her shoulder, said something nice. But I couldn’t. It was like he was there between us, Mr. Lastrem, me looking at him from one side and Polly from the other, each of us seeing something completely different, neither knowing how to reach around.
~~~
At dinner, I said to my parents, “Polly’s dad is having an affair.” We were eating teriyaki chicken. My father had bought my mother an international cookbook for her last birthday, Recipes from Around the Globe, and teriyaki was one of her favorites. We had all been quiet for a while before I said, Polly’s dad is having an affair. I had repeated the sentence over and over in my head before I spoke. Practicing, because sometimes breaking through their quiet was like punching through a wall; it needed momentum. It was not an angry or sullen silence at our table. My mother often sat dabbing her lips with her napkin, my father cutting his food into small pieces. There was no tension. Quiet was how they liked it.
“Polly’s dad is having an affair,” I said.
My mother looked at me. “Okay,” she said.
“Okay?”
“How do you know?” she said.
“Polly told me.”
“Well, you can’t believe every rumor you hear.”
“It’s not a rumor. Polly told me herself. Her dad told her. Her mom threw stuff at him.” My voice was rising, getting faster and louder. “It’s one of his students. He’s sleeping with some twenty-two year old from his math class.”
My mother stared at me. My father was still eating his chicken.
Sometimes I spilled things on purpose, knocking over the gravy boat or a glass of orange soda. I liked how everyone jumped, all of us moving at once, hands and arms and voices jumbled together for a second, as color spread across the checked tablecloth. In that moment, everyone was as noisy and restless as me.
“Well, that’s too bad,” my mother said. I waited for more—even though I knew none would come—until we were all quiet again.
~~~
I brought Kathleen the next time we went to the community college.
“Why?” Polly had whispered when she saw Kathleen walking down the hall toward our lockers. Polly didn’t like Kathleen.
“It’ll be fun,” I said. I smiled big and shoved her shoulder. “Come on.”
Kathleen sat in the backseat, holding her cigarette out the window. “You can’t do that in here,” Polly had said when Kathleen lit the first one. Kathleen took a long drag before rolling down the window. Her hand rested just outside the glass, and most of the smoke blew back into the car. Polly didn’t say anything else about it.
“There,” Polly said and pointed. It was her typical choice. Thick blonde hair held back in two barrettes, light eyes, perfect posture, a pointy little nose. She wore a cropped cardigan over a tube dress. The girl swayed her hips when she walked in a way that made it look like she knew something about the world.
“How ‘bout her?” Kathleen said, pointing to a middle-aged black lady with a tall Afro. She laughed and I did too.
“Not funny,” Polly said.
Kathleen leaned her head into the front seat, her mouth smelling of smoke when she talked. “Why do you think he started banging her?”
Polly looked at me. She never knew how to talk to Kathleen. The only way to shut Kathleen up was by getting right back in her face. But Polly didn’t know how to, or wasn’t capable, or both.
“I have no idea,” Polly said, looking at her hands.
“Do your mom and dad still have sex? I mean, did they before all this shit started?”
Polly cleared her throat. For a moment, I thought she was going to say something, grew certain of it, but nothing came. I wanted to shake the words out of her; it was deadening, watching her do nothing. She put her hands on the steering wheel, at ten o’clock and two o’clock, gripping so hard her knuckles turned white.
“Sit back,” I said to Kathleen. “Your breath stinks.”
“Fuck off,” Kathleen said as she moved.
I smiled at Polly, but she was squinting out the window. I patted the hand at two o’clock, brushing my fingers over her knuckles. She kept staring. No one was walking by, but even so, she acted like there was something fascinating going on.
“There’s your boyfriend, Sara,” Kathleen said, pointing out the back window to a boy in the parking lot. He was tall and skinny with zitty red cheeks. Strands of stringy hair reached halfway down his back. He walked with his shoulders curled forward.
“I stole him away from you,” I said.
“I could rock his fucking world,” she said. “I bet he’s got a pencil dick though. There’s nothing worse than a pencil dick.” Kathleen had slept with a bunch of guys. She liked to talk about penises. She had a million names—cock dick prick rod stick shaft pole. For a while she called them cocker spaniels. I rode his spaniel for so long, she’d say, I could barely walk for two days. She showed me hickeys, running her fingers around and around the speckled bruises.
When the first guy, Seth Landry, went down my pants, I called Kathleen afterwards.
“How many fingers did he use?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know? Was it just his pinkie or a whole fistful?”
“Closer to a fistful,” I said.
“Did it hurt or feel good?”
“Good,” I lied. I didn’t want her to think I was a prude.
“Did he touch your tits?”
“Yeah.”
“How? Did he rub them or suck them or what?”
Her questions came rapid-fire. I liked answering, even though it felt stupid at first. Saying the words prolonged the whole thing, made it seem sophisticated and dirty and mine. Kathleen made approving noises when I told her details, like how he’d held his fingers under my nose when he finished, asking if I liked the smell. “Did you?” Kathleen said, nodding her head and grinning at me. She seemed hungry and unafraid to show it. “Sure,” I said and then told her his prick was stiff in his pants and he kept rubbing it against me. “His battering ram,” she called it and laughed.
Kathleen and I talked about it for days, different versions, different moments, until the story felt softened and worn, like a piece of paper kept in a pocket too long. There were some things I didn’t tell her. Before Seth started using his fingers, when he was still just kissing me and running his hands over the outside of my clothes, I had felt a fevered rush. Like being jolted awake by a dream of falling. All of my senses were alert but disoriented from his hot breath on my face and the taste of him in my mouth. I felt like crying, not sure if I was really happy or really sad. He kept whispering in my ear, You’re so pretty, and I liked how the puh sound popped in the air. When it began to hurt, I didn’t stop him because I didn’t want him to go away.
Kathleen lit another cigarette from the backseat, and Polly shook her head.
“Let’s find Polly’s boyfriend now,” Kathleen said, blowing smoke into the front seat.
Polly bit the inside of her cheek. She always did that when she was nervous, ate the inside of her mouth until it was bloodied and raw.
“Poll—” I said.
She was shaking her head, barely at all, only the tiniest of motions, but I could see. She started the car quickly, and when she backed out of the parking space, the tires made a sharp squealing noise.
“Whoa!” Kathleen yelled.
A girl on the sidewalk watched us, one hand to her throat, looking startled by the noise. She was short and slightly overweight and held a long corduroy jacket closed over her shirt. She’d combed out her curly hair, and it hung in frizzy chunks on both sides. In a crowd, my eyes would have passed right over her. I wondered what would happen if this turned out to be Mr. Lastrem’s girlfriend, if this was the type of girl he’d leave Polly for.
There were short black tire marks in the cement, angry streaks left in our parking space.
“I’m sorry,” I could have said to Polly. Neither of us spoke, and when Kathleen started her monologue about how many traffic accidents are caused by reckless driving, no one told her to quiet down.
~~~
Mr. Lastrem moved out. He backed a U-Haul into the driveway, Polly said, and shoveled his stuff into the back of the truck. Nothing was packed; he threw his clothes into garbage bags and carried books by the armful. His new apartment was in Leland Heights, three miles away, with a big brown couch that smelled of mildew and a television that sat on the floor and only got a couple of channels, even with the antennae. When Polly visited, they watched fuzzy PBS while Mr. Lastrem drank martinis and she drank seltzer since he hadn’t remembered to buy juice or pop or milk. She was afraid to open his refrigerator because the cool air reeked of rot.
In the beginning, her house didn’t seem different. The first time I went over, there was still the L-shaped couch in the living room, the fake wood entertainment center with the TV and stereo, the old kitchen table nicked around the edges, and the goldfish patterned shower curtain. In the hallway, though, there were blank spots where pictures used to hang, rectangles of clean white paint standing against the dingier gray of the rest of the wall.
“She took down all his pictures,” Polly said.
I had never realized how dirty the wall was before. The contrast was dramatic, and there was something satisfying about the whole thing. It seemed to me exactly how a wall should look after your husband moved out with one of his twenty-two year old math students. I wondered if Mrs. Lastrem had shattered the picture frames, ripped the pictures in half, in quarters, in eighths, then set them on fire in the backyard. I drew my finger over the dust, smearing a line of dirt into one of the white spaces.
“Don’t,” Polly said.
“What did she do with the pictures?”
“They’re in a box.”
“Where?”
“Under her bed, I think.”
“Let’s go look at them.”
“No,” Polly said, her voice high as she took a step back from me. She looked confused, crinkling her nose and squinting.
“Just kidding,” I said, putting my hands in the air in front of me, like it was no big deal. The tip of my finger was dirty, and I wiped it on my pants while we went into her room. “You should wash your wall,” I said, and Polly didn’t say anything back.
We lay next to each other on the bed trying to study, Polly breathing through her nose, making a low whistling noise. The sound bothered me. I wanted to talk about her dad.
“Have you met her yet?” I said.
“No.” She didn’t look up from her book. It was geometry, columns of problems to be solved, pictures of rectangles and triangles with numbers along their edges.
“What if Mr. Stanley had an affair?” Our geometry teacher was bald and shiny-faced. One of his pinkies was just a flap of skin, and it jiggled in the air when he wrote on the board.
“Gross.” Polly didn’t look up.
“Would you have an affair with him?”
“Shut up.”
“Are you going to meet her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think she stays at his apartment with him?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t want to talk about this, do you?”
Polly didn’t say anything, kept staring at her book, the whistling sound getting louder. I knew she couldn’t say no to me.
“Do you want to talk about it or not?” I said. Polly not being able to say no was part of what made me mean, what made me forget to be careful with her.
“Blow your nose,” I said.
She opened her mouth to breathe and the whistling stopped. The house was quiet around us. I could feel boredom washing over me in slow, lapping waves. We looked at our books a little while longer. I scanned the same sentences over and over, all the while trying to think of excuses to go home.
~~~
Kathleen invited me to a party at Jay Romano’s. When I said, “Can I bring Polly?” she was quiet for a minute, and I wished I hadn’t said anything, but then she said, “I guess.” Polly said “No way” when I asked her, in a voice that made it sound like no one would want to go to a party at Jay Romano’s, even though he was on the basketball team and two years older than us. At first I was pissed at her, but then I was just relieved because I knew she’d have a bad time anyway.
I borrowed a short black skirt and a pink halter top from Kathleen and tried putting my hair on top of my head like her mom’s, but Kathleen said it looked stupid, so I wore it down.
After we had a couple beers, Tyler Silber took me into Jay Romano’s bedroom. There was a floor-to-ceiling poster of Isaiah Thomas next to the bed. He wore his Pistons uniform and a sweatband around his head. He palmed the basketball in a way that made the picture look 3-D, like he was going to throw the ball right to us. Isaiah Thomas’s glossy brown eyes watched while Tyler Silber kissed me so hard, my teeth bit into the insides of my lips. Tyler’s stubble rubbed against my cheeks while his hands moved quickly down my body, at my neck, then my tits, then between my legs. He took both of my wrists in one hand and held them over my head.
“Tyler,” I said, and it came out like choking.
He stared down at me, his mouth curled into almost a snarl. The skin of his palms was rough as sandpaper. His dick beat like a heart, stiff against my leg. A feeling of heat moved through me, lava-like, burning my throat, my toes.
I was a part of things. I was at the center.
Someone opened the door on us. Tyler’s hand was up my skirt, my underpants around my knees. There was a sudden burst of music and voices, but we couldn’t see who stood there—a silhouette against the light—and Tyler Silber jumped on top of me so his body covered mine, and the person at the door yelled, “Fuck. Sorry,” and laughed and closed the door, and Tyler Silber stayed on top of me like that for a second, and I liked how it felt, his body blanketing mine, and I hoped the person who opened the door had recognized my face so they knew it was me back here with Tyler Silber.
~~~
I went to Polly’s the next morning, my head still thick from beer. Her house was starting to change. Laundry sat in unwashed piles in front of the machine. Dirty dishes floated in a sink full of water. Mrs. Lastrem lay on the living room couch, her hair dark with grease and pressed flat against the side of her head. She looked up when I walked by and there were spiny red indentations along her cheek from the cushion.
“Hi, Mrs. Lastrem,” I said.
She looked at me blankly and said, “Hi Sara,” before lying back down and closing her eyes. She used to be the pretty one, darker and thinner than her husband or daughter. When we were little, she would take us to the wave pool in the summertime, holding our hands while we jumped up and down in the water, screaming with us when we got splashed. Her bikini had a bright tropical pattern, and sometimes when we jumped, her breasts crept out the top of the suit, the dark red curves of her nipples escaping the material. Whenever she laughed, the sound was loud and unashamed, and sometimes I’d fall against her on purpose, just so I could feel her wet skin on mine.
Polly sat in her room, still in her pajamas.
“You missed a cool party,” I said.
“You look bad. Were you drinking? Look at your eyes.”
“Thanks, Mom. What did you do? Sit on your butt and watch TV?”
Polly didn’t say anything. The air felt warm and heavy. They needed to open all the windows and run some fans in here; the house was going stale.
“I got together with Tyler Silber,” I said. I was smiling.
“You’re going to get a reputation.”
I stared at Polly, her lips pursed like an old lady’s.
There were things I wanted to tell her. How my crotch was sore and moist against my underwear and I liked it. How I hadn’t washed my hair yet and it smelled spicy and dirty like the two of us mixed together. How there were red teeth marks on my earlobe.
But I didn’t say anything. Polly was shaking her head at me. I could already see her fading into the mess of this place. Reaching into the murky sink water to clean the dishes. Tiptoeing past her mother so as not to wake her. Sitting silently on the mildewed couch in Leland Heights.
And up until then, I’d been feeling sorry for her, really bad about her whole situation, but when she said, “You’re going to get a reputation,” I realized I was just tired of it and had been for a while now.
~~~
I started eating lunch with Kathleen. She wasn’t someone I usually saw in school. Her friends smoked pot and shotgunned beers in their cars during lunch. But it was almost as if she had just been waiting for me to get sick of Polly, because as soon as I asked her, she said yes, and then the next day she was there again as if this was how we’d always been doing it. Polly ate with us for a while but it was like Kathleen and I were the real ones there and Polly was only the audience.
“Sally Tremaine has scabies,” Kathleen said while she stirred the pasta on her tray. Steam rose from the noodles while she talked. “She got them from John Berke and he has herpes, too. I bet she’ll get herpes soon.”
“Sally Tremaine used to pick her nose,” I said. “In the middle of class. She’d rub them on her pants or eat them when she thought no one was looking.”
“What a skank!” Kathleen said.
Polly curled her nose like something smelled bad and stared at the far wall of the cafeteria.
“How was your history exam?” I asked her.
“Okay,” she said.
In front of Kathleen, our conversations seemed stupid and small, so mostly I didn’t talk to her.
~~~
We were standing at our lockers when Polly said, “You’re going to eat with Kathleen all the time.”
I looked away, into the mass of people moving through the hallway. They hurried by us, singly or huddled in small knots or yelling to each other in large, loose groups. Someone shouted, “Bullshit!” and other people laughed. Two guys were shoving each other against lockers, making loud, crashing noises each time they bumped against the metal. A half-circle of people stopped to watch. I wanted to be there.
Polly made a noise, an impatient-sounding “Huh?” Her eyes were wide and unblinking, her fists clenched at her sides. This was Polly trying to look determined, but it seemed more like an imitation of someone braver than herself. I stared as her chin began trembling, and something knife sharp grew inside of me.
“Kathleen’s my best friend,” I said. For a moment, I was breathless, as if I’d been sucker-punched. My mouth tasted bitter and my throat grew warm.
Polly was silent. She swallowed hard, blinking quickly. Her fingers moved to her temple. Her lips started to shake. The bottom lip was wet and red and it reminded me of a worm. I stood there watching it quiver and I didn’t want to know her. I grabbed my books quickly, and when she called that night I made my mother say I wasn’t home.
~~~
She left notes. I knew they would come. Crammed into the grates of my locker, the paper misshapen to fit between the metal. Remember how we used the Ouija board to find out you were going to have three kids? Remember pricking our fingers and rubbing the blood together? I read parts out loud to Kathleen at lunch. One time she laughed so hard, chocolate milk came out of her nose. What’s the matter? Polly always wrote at the end. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
She taped pictures to my locker, the two of us standing in our bathing suits at the beach, arms around each other, little girl bellies poking forward. Swinging on her jungle gym, my legs a blur from kicking. Fifth grade graduation. We wore hand-made cardboard hats and wrinkled white gowns that only came to our knees. The four parents stood behind us, both of mine resting a hand on my shoulder, hers hugging each other. Polly and I smiled big, our lips tight from saying cheese for too long. She wrote Remember? in blue pen along the bottom, the word pressed so hard into the photograph, I could feel the letters with my fingers. When I took it down, a thin blue line of paint peeled off my locker and stuck to the tape.
All of her attempts, they only made me bolder and more determined. I had been friends with Polly since we were seven. In fourth grade, I kicked Ryan Shepherd in the knee for calling her fat. The next year, I challenged two girls to a fight after they knocked Polly’s books out of her hands. All through middle school, I told people to shut up when they teased her in the locker room. Loving someone, I realized, could make you a fool, blind to how sluggish and desperate and dull a person might be. But looking at Polly now, I saw. I was not going back. I was no fool.
~~~
She called. And called and called. Two, three, four times a night. I would never answer the phone. At first my parents gave tentative excuses—“She’s asleep.” “She’s not here right now.”—until finally they gave up and said, “Polly, she doesn’t want to talk.” They spoke in low, hurried tones afterwards, and I listened through my door, satisfied by the frenzy of event, the odd chord of emotion in my mother’s voice.
She knocked on my door one night. Polly had called twice already. It was a Friday and Kathleen and I were going to steal beer out of her fridge and take it to the park where the boys played basketball. I was curling my hair in my mirror. “Sara?” my mother said, and it was funny to hear my name from her. Funny to then realize how rarely she spoke it.
She stood in the doorway. “This commotion with Polly has got to stop.”
I looked at her through the mirror. She picked at her fingernails while she spoke, looking up briefly to meet my eyes in the glass.
“What commotion?”
“You need to talk to her.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Young lady—” Her voice rose then wavered before she continued. “You are affecting this entire household with your behavior.”
“Am I?” I watched my lips as I talked, full and pink. Jay Romano and Tyler Silber would be there tonight. The tops of my breasts curved just slightly over the neckline of my tank top.
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not.”
My mother looked confused, the lines in her forehead deepening. Her mouth was half open but she did not speak. We had never been here before.
“Sara—” she finally said.
“What?” I was loud and suddenly brave. “What do you want?” I watched my breasts move as I spoke, tiny jiggles.
“Sara, what’s gotten into you?” Color rose in my mother’s cheeks.
“What’s gotten into you?” It was easy, this easy, to make noise. I had never known. “What the fuck?” I said.
A breath of air came out of my mother’s mouth, a noise like a squeak, like a cry, like someone getting hurt.
I watched myself in the mirror. I was large, large as a building, as a constellation. I was a super hero. A super villain.
~~~
Kathleen and I were at the mall when we saw Mr. Lastrem and his girlfriend. She was skinnier than I’d imagined. Her hair wasn’t styled, just straight and long and brown and hanging down the sides, over her ears and far past her shoulders. She wasn’t wearing any make-up and had lots of freckles. I could see her bra through her thin flowered shirt.
“That’s Polly’s dad,” I told Kathleen when they were still a few stores away.
She put her hand over her mouth, pressing so hard, her laugh sounded like a fart. Everything had to be so dramatic with Kathleen. I ignored her. It felt like a long time ago when we were all sitting in Polly’s car at the community college.
Mr. Lastrem stopped when he saw us.
“Hello, Sara,” he said, and his mustache had grown far over his top lip. He looked like a walrus. He and his girlfriend held hands, and hers was like a doll’s in his thick, stubby fingers. “How are you?”
“Fine, Mr. Lastrem,” I said. The girlfriend was shifting on her heels, staring at Kathleen and me through sleepy eyelids.
“This is Angela,” he said.
Angela said, Hi, and let go of Mr. Lastrem, offering her hand to us. Kathleen shook first, looking Angela up and down, making a clucking sound with her tongue, before saying, “I’m Kathleen.”
When I shook the girl’s hand, it was bony and cool, and it seemed like if I pressed too hard I could crush it. “Sara,” I said.
Angela smiled at me and her front two teeth were a little crooked, pointing in on themselves and making a V.
I was going to say, “I was friends with his daughter.”
When I let go, she took Mr. Lastrem’s hand again and I noticed how her fingers pressed tightly against his and how she shifted her weight, bending a knee and rolling her foot onto its side so her body was tilted as close to his as possible.
And instantly, I could see it all. In his classroom, the first time his eyes lingered on her face too long after she’d answered a question. The day she felt his breath on her neck as he leaned over her desk, pointing out an inconsequential detail from her homework. When he asked her to come to his office because there was some information he needed to clarify. The moment he closed the door and put his hand on her shoulder, just a quick passing touch. She saw the ring on his finger, the photo of Polly and Mrs. Lastrem on his desk. She knew the destruction that lay before her. And she liked it, knowing for certain, for the first time in her life, she wasn't just some little girl. He moved his fingers along her cheek. Over her lips. She was a force to be reckoned with. He moved over her thin shirt to her breasts. She did not stop him. There were lives in her hands. She could change the world. He slipped his tongue in her mouth. She was happy.
