Lulu was not the same when she returned from cheerleading camp in Vermont. She spoke without blinking and squinting, and her words were antimatter. She was distant and cheerless and she’d started smoking cigarettes.
September 1, 1984
Yesterday was the worst day of my life until today. Today Lulu acted like I was a total stranger. She wouldn’t tell me about Vermont. She wouldn’t tell me about anything. She won’t even look at me. Maybe she knows about the bras, or about me humping her pillow. Maybe she even knows about me sucking her nipples.
I was determined not to annoy Lulu. But in the end I was weak.
One evening when Lulu snuck out for a smoke, I followed her, and fell into stride with her along the shadow-dappled sidewalk in the direction of Joslyn Park.
“Do you hate me?” I said.
“Of course not. I could never hate you. I’m just not myself anymore.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not a matter of why. It’s just a bad case of the way it is. It’s nothing personal, William. It’s just that if I were you, I wouldn’t count on me anymore. Not like you used to.”
“What do you mean?”
Lulu puffed on her cigarette. I could tell she felt my eyes staring holes into her. She looked off in the other direction. “I mean, I don’t think I can be the same kind of friend to you anymore.”
“And what kind of friend is that?”
“I just want to be more like, I don’t know, I guess, like a sister, you know?”
I was eerily silent.
She stopped along the sidewalk. “What’s so wrong with that?”
I kept walking.
Lulu hurried to catch up, and threw her cigarette into the gutter. “Well?”
“Well, what? What am I supposed to say to that? I don’t even know what it means.” I was practically foaming at the mouth. “You’re acting all weird and distant and you won’t tell me why,” I growled.
“It’s like you’re trying to give me this whole breakup speech, and you won’t even tell me what I did.”
“You didn’t do anything.”
“Then what’s so wrong with me?” I picked up my pace and focused my sullen gaze straight ahead.
Lulu stopped again. “Nothing,” she said softly. “Nothing’s wrong with you. It’s me, William.”
Some dark cloud had settled on our household. There was a palpable tension between Big Bill and Willow, and Lulu and Big Bill, and Lulu and Willow. In short, between Lulu and everybody. It
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lled the dining room like bats. It hovered about the kitchen like a cloud of mosquitoes. Even meat could not appease it. It was a force of gravity that compacted words before they were ever uttered, a force so strong not even the twins were impervious to it. There was no farting at the dinner table. No wrestling in the stairwell.
I was so full of dread, so helpless and uninformed, that I actually looked to Big Bill for guidance. I caught him as he was packing his gym bag, a strapped canvas sausage that lay on the bed.
“Dad, what happened?”
“What do you mean, Tiger?”
“To Lulu.”
He started rummaging through his sausage bag. “Oh, just girl stuff. We’ve been over this already at least three times. You know how they are. Probably jilted by some polo player.”
“It’s not that. Something’s wrong.”
“Look, Tiger, teenage girls are moody. I wouldn’t read too much into any of this.”
“What should I do?”
“Nothing,” he snapped, but softened immediately. “Nothing.”
He set his massive hand on my shoulder. “Give her a week and she’ll be back to her old self.”
I think Big Bill really believed that. There was no use pushing him further. I’d only run into a short ending. I ducked his massive hand and turned to leave.
“Will?”
“What?”
“Well, son
…
”
“What already?
“Look
…
you’re
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fteen years old.”
“Uh, yeah?”
“I’m not exactly sure how to put this, but
…
Don’t you think it’s time to start
…
well, you know, spreading your wings a little?”
I was determined to make this hard on my father, though it was plenty hard for him already. “My wings?”
“Well, I mean
…
socially? Don’t you think that maybe you’re just a little too
…
attached to your sister?”
“She’s not my sister.”
“Well, it amounts to the same thing. You should make some friends, branch out, join a club or something.”
“A club?”
“Well, yeah, sure. An after-school thing. Chess club, or something. Debate club. Don’t they have a support group for vegetarians?
The point is, branch out. Give your sister a little—”
“She’s not my sister.”
“—give her a little space. Let her work through this stuff. How’d you like to start lifting?”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Why not?”
“
Why?”
“Okay, then. Fair enough. Just tossing that out there.” He zipped up his sausage bag. “But you better do something, Will. It’s time. You need to give her some breathing room from here on out. Otherwise, you’re going to suffocate her.”
He slung his sausage over his shoulder and patted me on the back on his way out of the room.
Come September, Lulu and I wound up with one elective together—
Sociology, with Kimball. Though there were empty seats both directly in front of and behind me, Lulu sat all the way across the room in the back corner. I must have craned my neck at least two dozen times per period to look back at her. Surely she felt my Martian eyes upon her, but she never let on. Then, craning my neck one afternoon, I caught her looking at me, just once, just for an instant, and I felt the tickle of a
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ame in my sternum, a dry lump in my throat.
The next day she wasn’t in class. I waited for her at her locker between third and fourth periods.
“Where were you?”
“I switched to Current Events.”
“Why?”
“Gaskil’s easy,” she said, opening her locker. “I had her for Civics last year. Besides, Mr. Kimball weirds me out.”
“You’re lying.”
Her face was hidden in the locker, where she rummaged about mechanically.
“What’s wrong with you, Lu? What did I do?”
“Just stop! You didn’t do anything, okay?” She shut her locker and turned to face me, but avoided my eyes. “Excuse me,” she said, pushing past me. “I need to get to Lit. Berringer’s on the rag.”
At home, sheer repetition managed to cut through some of the tension around the dinner table, but the dark cloud lingered. Lulu wore the same clothes three and four days in a row. She was forever locked away in her bedroom, often so quiet that Willow would tap on the door. “Lu, honey, are you in there?”
“Yeah.”
Two weeks before homecoming, she quit the cheerleading squad.
“Please,” she said. “Those girls are cheerful like sharks.”
She showed no interest in boys, or other girls, or dancing, or
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ying, or learning to drive.
“Drive where?” she said. “There’s nowhere to go.”
Even a Sunday trip to Cabazon could not awaken her appetites.
We had to coax her out of the van.
“Please, can we go now?”
And the farther Lulu drifted from all of us, the farther we all seemed to drift from each other.
Yet, through it all, her grades never slipped. She made honor roll junior year.
As for me, I may have looked studious in my twelve-pound glasses, but I couldn’t bring myself to study. I’d sit on my bed, a
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fteen-year-old atop Tony the Tiger sheets, surrounded by other childhood relics—action
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gures and View-Mast
ers and dented cylinders of Tin
kertoys—and I would gaze across the hall at the band of light leaking out from beneath Lulu’s door, and I wished I could go sit closer to it, wished I could set up camp in the hallway and warm my
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ngers in that stripe of light.
For the
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rst time since I’d known her, Lulu’s life was a complete mystery to me, and I was a complete outsider, and the more I accepted that fact, the more all of life seemed like a cruel mystery to me. And the more I sat looking at that closed door, the more it seemed that doors were closing all around me.
When my grades started falling, the guidance counselor called me into his of
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ce for a visit. His name was Mr. Pitts, Larry Pitts. The kids called him Harry Pitts. Not everyone was assigned to Harry Pitts; there were also two other counselors. I think Lulu was assigned Ms. Huson. Harry Pitts wasn’t a bad guy, really. At least he didn’t try to act like an expert on teenagers, he didn’t say things like awesome, or talk about when he was sixteen, back in the Bronze Age. When he talked to you, he seemed interested. Not concerned, like everything was a big deal, just sort of interested, like he’d never heard your story before, like you were a puzzle and he wanted to
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gure you out, even if it meant skipping lunch. He had thinning red hair, slightly wavy, which he swirled atop his bald spot like soft-serve ice cream. He wore
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annel dress shirts, even when it was ninety degrees out, and those desert boots everyone else stopped wearing in the ’70s. He was always kicking his desert boots up on the desk, and folding his arms, and looking at you as though the real answer to his question were written on the bridge of your nose.
“Everything okay at home?”
“Yeah. Everything’s
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ne.”
“Any changes around the house? Anything different between your folks?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Any recent transitions in your life? New house, new friends?”
“No.”
“Have you got a lot of friends?”
“Some,” I lied.
One of the things I liked about talking to Harry Pitts more than to most adults was that he seemed satis
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ed with short answers. He didn’t overextend a subject. He tried to draw you out in little yes-no increments. He was interested in hard data. He wasn’t one of those guys who was going to hand you a pillow and tell you to pretend it was something else.
“Why don’t you tell me about your F in history.”
“It’s boring.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s already over. What’s the use?”
“Hmm. Okay. I guess I can see that. What about the D in gym?”
“I hate gyms.”
“Yeah, me too. So then, what
do
you like?”
“Not much.”
“Girls?”
“Not really. Not in general, anyway.”
“A speci
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c girl, maybe?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you want to tell me about this person?”
“Not really.”
“Fair enough. You’re sure?”
Just how big a loser was I? The school guidance counselor became my friend. I talked with him three times a week. I ate lunch in his of
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ce sometimes. I was his favorite puzzle. He started
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guring me out after a few sessions.
“Any progress with the girl?”
“No.”
“Have you been giving her some space like we talked about?”
“Yeah,” I lied.
“That’s good.”
“What about History? How’s that coming?”
“The same. Maybe a little better.”
“How’s it working with Health instead of Gym?”
“Better.”
“Good. Still thinking about the girl a lot?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think she’s thinking about you?”
“How should I know?”
“Yeah, hard to know something like that, I suppose.”
“Okay, yeah, I think she’s thinking about me,” I said. “She has to be.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“I don’t know, the past.”
“You mean like your history?”
“Nice try, Mr. Pitts. It’s not old enough to be history. It was just this summer. And besides, it isn’t over.”
“So, why don’t you tell me how things are different now?”
“Uh, you mean, like she barely talks to me?”
“What is it you want to say to her?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I guess I’d like to know what happened, but I wouldn’t even ask her. I don’t want to have some big talk. I just want to talk like we used to talk.”
But there was nothing I could do to win Lulu’s favor back. No song or dance would arouse her slightest curiosity. I invented whole systems of logic to help explain what happened to us. How can I explain my compulsion, except to say that it was the most natural thing in the world, as involuntary as an itch. I checked the mail diligently. Lulu received nothing. No phone calls, either. I followed her at school, lurking around corners, staking out her locker between periods. I watched her eat her lunch from across the cafeteria—that is, when I wasn’t eating lunch with Harry Pitts.
One day I tailed Lulu from Current Events to Lit, then from the AV room to the portable behind the gym, where
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fth period she T.A.’ed for Mrs. Melendez in Special Ed. I pressed my face to the narrow rectangular window and watched Lulu drift around the room in her baggy sweatshirt, dispensing charcoal pencils, passing the math ball around the circle. While I was watching, Anna Burke, the big fat retarded girl who always smelled like papier-mâché and wore one of those furry-collared coats no matter what kind of weather it was, stood up from her seat and started blubbering. There was milk all over her face, and dried boogers all around her nose, and she was really going nuts about something.
Mrs. Melendez went over and tried to calm her down, but that only made her worse. She began stomping her feet and plugging her ears. She was screaming so loud that I could hear her clearly through the walls of the portable.
“Nooooo,” she was yelling. “Nooooo.” She was saying other stuff, but I couldn’t decipher it through all the snot and the screaming and the excitement.
Then, for a second while Anna Burke was freaking out, I thought Lulu saw me at the window, because she walked right toward me, until her face was only four or
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ve feet from my own. But all she did was turn off the light, and the room went gray, and Anna Burke calmed down immediately. Lulu went over and began stroking her big broad jacketed shoulders, and talking to her softly, so that I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but whatever it was, it had a soothing effect on Anna Burke. Within
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fteen seconds she was smiling. Lulu pulled An-na’s handkerchief out of her coat pocket, and I remember thinking it was probably crusty. And she wiped the boogers and the milk from around Anna’s face, and she kept talking softly to her the whole time.
Finally, Lulu gently coaxed Anna to sit back down, and then pulled a chair up next to her. Together they looked at Anna’s workbook.
I stood there for ten minutes fogging up the window, wishing I were retarded, and I sensed that the terrible day had
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nally arrived when Lulu could no longer feel my eyes upon her.
In the mad jumble of the corridor between classes, Lulu was always alone. She convened with no one at her locker. She ate her lunch alone. She walked to the bus alone. And I knew she was alone in her room. Clearly, it wasn’t somebody else that stood between us.
The conclusion was inescapable: It was me. She had outgrown me and all of my
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aws—my cowardice, my clinginess, my general lack of grace. Somehow she had managed to see past my veneer, straight through to my black little heart. The bigger world of Vermont had revealed something to Lulu. She had crossed some threshold and left childish things behind. And while she was away, she saw me for what I truly was: a toad.
“Have you ever considered that it’s not you?” Harry Pitts wanted to know.
“Yeah, I have.”
“And?”
“And I don’t know. What else am I supposed to think?”
“Well, have you ever thought that this girl is going through some uncomfortable changes of her own, and maybe she’s confused, or frightened?”
“Of course I have.”
“And?”
“And, if that’s the deal, I want to be there for her, because she needs me.”
To this day, I can’t see why Harry Pitts indulged my obsession. He must have believed me, or just been intensely curious. Or maybe he had an obsession of his own. He must have felt that there was something there to be recaptured, or rekindled, something worth saving, because he never went out of his way to discourage me, he never told me to wave any white
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ag.