“
Annabel
and
Sophia
,” Birdy said. “How grand! Maybe they’re destined for great things.”
Mr. and Mrs. Allard smiled uneasily, and J.D. could tell that they thought Birdy might be making fun of them. He saw it in their eyes. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew the Allards had great hopes for their girls. J.D. also knew Birdy wasn’t making fun of anyone, and he had an urge, like an itch, to straighten it out. He searched the Allards’ faces to see if he’d misread them, but they sat stiffly on their folding chairs, spooning beef stew up to their mouths. The Allards were grown people with sleeping children down the hall. It was disturbing to think he understood something they didn’t.
Then Annabel poked her head into the living
room, with her finger to her lips. She gestured for J.D. to come to her. He slipped off the couch and rounded the table of dinner guests, who ignored him, and made his way down the hall to the bathroom, where Annabel sat glumly on the rim of the tub. She had a crust of sleep in her eye.
“I was thinking,” she said. “Maybe next time I could pop out of the closet. I could say ‘I have traveled so far!’ I could wear the goggles and helmet. Wouldn’t that be good?”
J.D. smiled at her. “You could say, ‘Let me tell you about the places I’ve been and the things I’ve seen.’”
“Oh!” she said, thinking of possibilities.
It was clear there was nothing Annabel needed. She just wanted to talk with someone and be up past her bedtime, this little girl in her flannel nightgown.
“Why aren’t you sitting at the table with them?” she asked.
“I’m the babysitter.”
“So you just sit on the couch?”
“Yup.”
She stood on the rim of the tub and raised the window. Cold air blew in. It had started to snow, and the wind swirled the flakes against the darkness. “Tomorrow a cold pocket of air is coming down from Canada and we could get…” She shrugged. “Four feet of snow!”
He stood next to her and looked out the window. She was fibbing. Tomorrow a warm front would move into the area, and it was expected that the temperature would rise for the next few days at least.
I
T WAS HARD HAVING A LOUSY PERSONALITY
. Robin would rather have been cursed with a weight problem or a bald spot or thick glasses, or better yet a missing finger. Instead she was stuck with her personality, which was a non-personality, a blank sheet of paper she kept trying to write on. Case in point: here it was Friday night, and she was hiding out in some little kid’s bedroom pretending to care for Lila, who was a slut and was passed out on the gingham bedspread with chunks of puke dotted down the front of her shirt, while downstairs a party went on without them.
It was becoming boring, sitting on the bed and staring at Lila, who breathed rhythmically through her slack mouth, putting Robin into a stupor. Robin
moved to the corner of the bedroom, where a naked Barbie doll was spread-eagled over the breakfast nook of the beach bungalow. Robin dressed the doll in a fringy cowgirl outfit and was deciding between boots or Jesus sandals when her friend Janet popped into the room, guzzling from a bottle of wine.
“What are you
doing
?” Janet said.
“Lila’s sick here.”
“Lila’s a slut,” Janet said. “Why are you hiding? Have
you
talked to three new people?”
Robin set the Barbie doll on the roof of the beach house, placing the sleek, smiling head up against the Barbie telescope, which was aimed at the lavender wallpaper beyond which were the hedges where Robin had parked her bike an hour earlier. In her mind’s eye, she could see the bike there, awaiting her.
“The thing is—” Robin said.
“What? Speak up!”
“It’s just that parties—”
“Oh, I know what you’re going to say: ‘I don’t like parties.’ But if you don’t like parties then you can’t really like people and if you don’t like people then you’re an antisocial.”
“I like people.”
Janet sighed. She was a junior and a year older than Robin. She had an underbite and would have her jaw broken, realigned, and wired shut one day in the distant future. She was the first and only friend
Robin had made when Robin’s family moved here last year. Janet, who worked on the yearbook and school spirit committees, had knocked on her door last summer just days after Robin’s family had moved in and had taken Robin on a walking tour of downtown. “Here’s Friendly’s, where you can get a chocolate Fribble,” she’d said. “Lots of kids hang out here. I mean it’s fine when you’re in eighth grade but when you’re our age it just sucks, bites, and blows. Here’s the movie theater where the floor’s as flat as a pancake. They’ve been showing a lot of love stories, which are my favorites, but if you get a large head in front of you it just sucks, bites, and blows. Here’s Trimmings Salon where, trust me, all you’ll want to do is get a trim. If you’re looking for a new hairdo you’ll have to get your butt on New Jersey Transit and head into the city. God, you have gorgeous hair,” she said, grabbing a handful of Robin’s long, dark hair and holding it up to her own head. “My hair’s decent but some days…” She rolled her eyes up to the True Value Hardware sign, which glared green above them. “Isn’t this place the worst?”
Janet now plunked down on the bed next to Lila and stared hard at Robin for several seconds. “It makes me so unhappy, Robin, that you won’t try to be a more popular person.”
Robin reached for Janet’s bottle and sipped long and hard. The wine tasted like rotten fruit—overly
sweet and funky—and thinking this made her start to gag and she handed back the bottle.
“Listen, I hate to be boring,” Janet said in a low voice, “but there are some things you obviously don’t know.” She looked up to the ceiling, as if thinking, and from where Robin was sitting on the floor Janet’s underbite looked really, really bad. “We live in a highly structurized society,” Janet began. “Friends don’t grow on trees. You can’t go
pluck
one. You have to make friends. If you just set a little goal to talk to three new people tonight that could be three more friends for you. Don’t you see? It’s not enough to be pretty and just stare into space. You have to act the right way. I’ve had to work at developing my excellent personality.” Janet slid onto the floor next to Robin, her boobs jiggling into place. “Take Lila here,” she whispered, pointing up to the bed. “If she fooled around like a normal person she’d be fine. But no, she’s so obvious that everyone knows her business and so she’s just a slut.
Bor
-ing. I mean, who wants to be her friend? Well, I’m her friend, but you know what I mean. I’m going to be honest because I care about you, Robin; the thing is that sometimes you can be embarrassing…I haven’t hurt your feelings, have I?” She looked at Robin deeply. Janet had enormous eyes fringed with sparse, stubby lashes; they were the eyes of a strange, graceful sea creature gliding peaceably over coral reefs.
Robin quickly shook her head. In Janet’s presence, she often felt slow and clumsy as the sparky shower of Janet’s words rained down on her. Now she found herself jittery with gratitude and rage. “I can talk to three people.”
“See,” Janet said. “Really, I’m just trying to help.”
“Thank you, Janet.”
Janet nodded. Then she stood and frowned at Lila and wandered toward the door. “Coming?” she asked.
“Yep,” Robin said, unable to move.
“Good,” Janet said, disappearing into the hallway.
Go, Robin told herself.
Go now
, she commanded, otherwise she might be afflicted with her lousy personality for the rest of her life. She stared at Lila, who was snoring into the kid’s pillow. Yes, Lila was a little sloppy and slutty but she also had a zesty life.
Be a normal girl
, she commanded herself. Growing angrier, she loped down the hall and down the stairs until she found herself in the middle of the party surrounded by a roomful of lively kids, holding beer cans and waving cigarettes and talking, talking, talking. Robin’s anger instantly fled her body, and she felt deserted, standing there with a dried-out mouth and a twitchy eye. Directly in front of her was a loveseat. She made a beeline for it but two senior girls beat her to it, and she teetered for a second. A wall, a wall; she needed a wall. She quickly moved to the corner of the room, where she sat on the arm of a couch and let her
hair fall over her face like a dark curtain. Then she waited for what might happen.
“Are you sleeping?” a guy sitting on the couch asked, giving her a poke.
“Nope,” Robin said, opening her eyes.
“Just checking.”
Robin smiled, feeling herself blush and grow warm. The guy turned back to the girl beside him, cocking his head and grinning as she twirled a strand of hair around her finger. They were having a conversation in which they said things like, “I did not,” “Yes, you did,” “When?” “Come on, you know.” They kept at it for the longest time and Robin wondered how these bits of nothing, like dust, kept the two of them tied up with each other for so long. Soon they wandered away, and Robin realized that if she just sat here, in the corner, on the arm of the couch, she’d be all right.
A girl across the room who had been furiously whispering with two other girls veered toward Robin’s couch and plunked down. She looked like a fly. She had short black hair that hugged her head like a helmet and heavy eyelids, and Robin had often seen her zipping down the halls at school. She now turned to Robin and said in a low voice, “Would you be friends with someone who called you an asshole for no reason?”
“I definitely wouldn’t,” Robin said, elated. She
slid off the arm of the couch to sit beside the girl.
“Well, I wouldn’t either…but I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Who called you an asshole for no reason?” Robin whispered into the girl’s ear, which wasn’t very clean.
“It’s very discouraging,” the fly went on, “when you’re the type of person who goes out of your way to do nice things for your friends and you learn that one of them doesn’t even give two little shits about your feelings. I call that very discouraging.”
It sounded very discouraging. Maybe she and this fly could be friends, Robin thought. “I bet it was the redhead,” Robin whispered. “She looks like a creep.”
The fly turned to her head-on. “Not
her
. The
other
one.”
“Oh,” Robin said.
“It’s very discouraging to hear you call my very best friend creepy.” The girl gave her a fishy look, popped off the couch and returned to her little circle.
Robin sat there, trying not to stare at anyone and hoping no one was staring at her. Then George from her geometry class joined her on the couch, tapping his foot to Nirvana. He had the bluest eyes, so blue you couldn’t help but think he was a nice person, even if he was stoned most of the time. “Robin!” he said and smiled. She smiled back. He held out his hand, fingers splayed, and for a panicky second she didn’t know what he wanted her to do. He didn’t
seem to be looking for a high five. Did he want to shake, or what? He was stoned, she could see that. He had a rubber band around his wrist. She had the urge to flick it. A little flick. She would’ve liked to do that, but somehow couldn’t. He took back his hand and looked at her funny, and then he was tapping his foot again, and the moment was gone. George bounded off the couch and disappeared into the room.
Well, Robin thought, that was three, sort of: the guy who asked her if she was sleeping, the fly, and George from geometry. She headed downstairs where it was darker, louder, and more crowded and stood next to Janet, who was talking to Nolan Fry. Nolan Fry was the prettiest person in the entire school. He had smooth pink skin, a flop of dirty blond hair hanging over his forehead, and he was very tall. Every feature—his thin nose, full lips, heavy eyelashes—was perfect in and of itself, but, as Janet had often said, all together on the same face was almost a crime. It was hard, Robin decided, to look at him head on. Worse yet, he knew
how
to be pretty. He wore his prettiness like a smart jacket. Janet was staring up at him as if in a trance; her eyes had gone soft and she wore the faintest smile while Nolan talked to the air above her head. Neither one of them looked at Robin, but when she reached for the wine bottle Janet released her grip. Robin gulped and when she handed it back, Janet’s fingers expertly
closed around the bottle. Robin wished she knew how to be pretty the way Nolan did. She’d only recently become pretty and often needed to look in the bathroom mirror to be reminded. She slipped through the sliding doors into the cold air, where she got on her bike and raced home.
They had a drug problem at school. Lots of kids smoked pot, but it seemed they also had some sniffers who inhaled stuff like Drano and paint thinner. The school now held weekly seminars in the auditorium ever since one jerky sophomore had suffered some brain damage. Everyone plodded into the auditorium, weary and dead-eyed. Janet waved to Robin and pointed to the seat she’d saved her.
This week’s seminar featured a dramatization of several kids gathered in a bathroom while Britney Spears’ “Oops!…I Did It Again” played in the background. One of the actors played a reluctant kid, who sat on the lid of the toilet bowl while several other actors tried to pressure him into putting a plastic bag over his head and sniffing some Aquanet hairspray.
Janet scribbled on a piece of notebook paper and handed it to Robin. “I think U R too dependent on me,” it read.
The lights dimmed, the actors froze and a voice from outer space said, “Rule number one: Think of your future. Remember your hopes and dreams.
Brain damage is not cool!”
“Exasperating!” Janet whispered. “If you’re a big enough moron to sniff hairspray, then you should get brain damage.”
The actors unfroze and the reluctant one said, “Hey, listen, sniffing household substances isn’t cool. They can mess up your head. I have algebra homework, and in a couple of years I’m going to college.”
Robin underlined the words “too dependent” and scribbled, “How?” She stared at Janet’s profile, waiting.
“Not any 1 thing,” Janet wrote. “HOW can a ♀ go thru h.s. w/ only 1 friend?”
The actor who wouldn’t sniff the Aquanet leapt off the toilet seat lid, and a spotlight zeroed in on him. The outer space voice said, “Cool Kid.” Cool Kid smiled broadly and donned a graduation cap and then galloped offstage. The outer space voice then said, “Jackasses.” The spotlight zoomed in on the hairspray sniffers, who were wearing donkey ears and braying as they wielded the Aquanet and pulled plastic bags over their heads and banged into the toilet and the tub. There were snickers and yawns.
Lame
, a boy behind them called out.