I'm Down: A Memoir (11 page)

“Mishna,” she said. “You can watch this movie with me if you want. This movie is a classic!”

And as the opening credits rolled, she unwrapped a Blow Pop, put it in her mouth, and sucked it in between sips of her beer. She said it made her beer taste better, and I believed it did.

I walked over to the couch and remained standing as I checked out the opening credits.
Why not?
I thought.
If I don’t like it, I can stop watching. Besides it’s rated R
. At my school R-rated meant “Rated Really Cool.”
I’ll just see what all the fuss is about
, I told myself.
Like a rated-R scientist or a rated-R investigator
.

“Okay,” I said. “But this is my first scary movie.”

“Well, you picked a good one to start out with,” Dominique said. “Have you heard about
The Exorcist
?” I shook my head as Dominique said, without taking the Blow Pop out of her mouth, “I’ve seen it seven times. Never gets old.”

“How scary is it?” I asked.

“It’s less scary,” she said, “and more a classic.”

“Okay,” I said, and plopped down next to her.

I sat next to Dominique in the dark of the living room trying not to pee myself and by the time Father Merrin arrived at the MacNeil house, I was in the fetal position.

Dominique took the Blow Pop out of her mouth and laughed. “Girl, it’s just a movie!” Which helped, but not enough for me to open my eyes. So she leveled with me, “Listen. There are no real demonic possessions.” But I had seen Dad get mad in traffic and I was inclined to think that there were demonic possessions all the time.

Still, she had a point, it was just a movie and with some deep breathing I managed to calm myself enough to open my
eyes and sit upright on the sofa.
I am a rock, I am a mountain
. But when Regan’s eyes rolled back in her skull, I jumped up off the couch and announced, “It’s time for me to go now!” and ran to the bathroom, locked the door, and stood with my hands over my ears, humming, “The Sun Will Come out Tomorrow.”

When I got to school the next day I took a quick survey before roll call and deduced that no one in my class had seen
The Exorcist
, though everyone had heard of it. And by the time we had our first recess it didn’t matter that I had seen only the first third of the movie. I had become an
Exorcist
expert.

At recess, I held court on the playground, halfway up the jungle gym, picking and choosing from the crowd below who was allowed to hear my recounting of the epic, and making up the parts of the movie that I was too scared to watch.

“So . . . ,” I said as Matt Johnson, Zachary Stein, and Catrina Calder sat with rapt attention, “the girl Regan had a devil in her stomach. And it busted out and killed her mom.”

“Dude,” Matt said.

“I know,” I said. “And there was this priest, who comes over to fight the devil in the amulet. The priest knew kung fu, and he wasn’t afraid to hit a girl.”

“That is insane,” said Zachary. “I have to see this movie.”

“Yeah,” I said, “you do.” Given his name was embroidered on the inside of his coat and his mom picked him up so he wasn’t late to Hebrew school, the likelihood of that happening was pretty bleak. “But dang,” I added. “Your mom would never let you.”

“Mine, either,” said Matt.

“My mother only lets us watch
National Geographic
and one hour of cartoons on Saturday.”

“Bummer,” I said. “That’s harsh.”

______

For the next week I fielded
Exorcist
questions like, “Can a grown-up be infected?” Or, “Did the priest have throwing stars?”

Even snotty Christopher Scott came up to me at lunch to ask, “So if she had a flying bed, why didn’t she just fly away from the people that were trying to get the devil out of her?”

To which I casually replied, “Look, it’s just a really cool movie.”

And the scary movies just kept coming. Over the next month, I saw the first twenty minutes of
Hellraiser
,
The Omen
, and nearly half of
Prom Night II
. I would end each viewing in the same way: bathroom, hands over ears,
Annie
. But the next day, I’d walk into school, just busting with excitement. It was better than Christmas Eve. It was better than my birthday. I would wait till Mrs. Lewis had finished attendance and we were working “independently,” then I would drop a bomb to whoever was close by.

“So . . . I saw
Hellraiser
last night.”

Math was over. It was Mishna time.

I reassured myself that it wasn’t lying so much as filling in the spots I missed. Besides, my renditions had to be at least as creative as the movies themselves—maybe more.

About a month after I first saw
The Exorcist
, I was approached on the playground by a girl in my class named Lilith Gardner. She wasn’t the most popular girl in the third grade, but she was the leader of her group. She strode up with Violet, Kirsten, and the rest of her crew, who looked like normal eight-year-olds, but were about four to six years away from becoming the goth kids. They all thought elves were real, and they were a little too interested in the morbid side of science class—constantly buzzing about dissection.

I was alone on the turning bar when Lilith walked up. And when I saw them coming, I stopped spinning.

“Hi, Mishna,” Lilith said.

“Hi!” I said.

“Can you draw?” Lilith asked, cutting to the chase.

“Draw?” I asked.

“Yeah, draw.”

“Like what?” I asked.

Kirsten explained for her, “Like, elves or horses.”

“Or lesser demons or wizards,” Lilith continued. “That kind of stuff .”

“I don’t know,” I said. They were asking for some pretty advanced stuff .

“Well . . . ,” Lilith said. “Okay.” She was just standing there deciding whether or not to walk away and never talk to me again.

“Okay . . . yeah,” I said. But what I was thinking was,
Please ask me to join your drawing club. I will learn to draw whatever you want! I will work hard and practice till I know how to draw the best horse ever. I will learn what a demon is. Just, please don’t walk away!
But Lilith stood there saying nothing.

It was Violet who said, “Draw with us next recess.”

And Lilith shrugged. “You saw all those horror films, right?” Lilith asked.

“Yeah . . . ,” I said. “Like
Exorcist
,
Hellraiser
,
Prom Night
. . . yeah.”

“Well,” she said. “Try to draw some of that stuff, too.”

And I did, and every recess after that. Initially, I wasn’t a good-enough drawer, and I couldn’t even come close to drawing Pinhead from
Hellraiser
. So I traced things out of books, and added my own flourishes so that I could call them my own. And after a while, I could draw the two or three things that I traced. I sat with my new friends on the playground filling a notebook with eighty versions of the same brown horse. Brown
horse as a unicorn, brown horse as a pegasus, brown horse as a brown horse. I was even invited to my first sleepover at Lilith’s house, where we spent the night playing
The Legend of Zelda
and asking the Ouija board about math. And all of this added up to me sort of having a crew. Granted these weren’t the princesses on the foursquare court, but I saw them as a bridge clique. Sort of a stepping stone on my way to bigger and better friends.

But soon my little bridge clique dropped a bomb on me. Lilith, Violet, Kirsten, and I were drawing what we all deemed to be a very important series of female vampires, when I said, “Hey . . . have you guys started this stupid book report?”

It got quiet for a second—like a needle scratching across a record player. And then Violet said, “I finished it last night.” I thought I heard her wrong.

“Finished?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Lilith said. “It’s due Friday.”

“Wow,” I said. “I thought I’d just do it Thursday night, or something.”

Violet rolled her eyes. Then Kirsten said under her breath, “That explains a lot.”

“What?” I asked. I was getting really infuriated. “What, are you all mad at me or something?”

“Well,” Lilith said. And by the looks of everyone’s face, she was speaking for the group. “We all sort of think . . .” Nods all around. “Well, you kind of act stupid.”

Kirsten softened it. “We don’t think you
are
dumb, or you wouldn’t be here.”

Violet finished her thought, “But, you really act dumb and it’s hella lame.”

Wow!
I thought.
Time to stop saying “hella.”

Lilith continued, “It’s not that we don’t like you, but we’re
all going to MIT and we don’t want to get too attached to someone who’s not also going to MIT.”

Then I said the most honest thing I had said since I got to IPP. “You guys . . . I don’t think I can do the work.”

“What do you mean?” Kirsten asked.

“I mean”—I was trying not to let anyone see how upsetting it was to me—“I just look at like the instructions for the structure of our book report and I don’t get it.”

“Well, what don’t you get about it?” Violet asked.

“I get none of it!” I said. “It’s like looking at instructions on how to build a rocket ship.”

“Listen,” Lilith said, “just try.”

What they were asking seemed impossible to me. We had like three hours of homework a night, and with the added burden of not understanding most of it, that translated to even longer.

“Well, why don’t you ever call me?” Violet asked.

“Isn’t that cheating?” I asked.

“Um . . . no,” Violet said. “You should call me when you get stuck.”

“What,” I said sarcastically, “like every night?”

“Yeah, sure,” she said. That was a great idea, but Dad hadn’t paid the phone bill again so I couldn’t dial out . . .

. . . But I could receive calls.

“Violet,” I said. “Will you call me at night this week? And next week I’ll call you, like a game?”

“Okay,” Violet said. “Whatever you want.”

“I want you to call me,” I said. “This week.”

So that week Violet called me every night, and the next week I spent at Mom’s, under the new arrangement, and I called Violet every day. It was in those two weeks I started to notice that when Lilith, Kirsten, and Violet weren’t talking about druids
or trolls, they talked constantly to each other about what we were working on in class—I guess up till then I had sort of tuned it out. They didn’t get all this schoolwork done ’cause they were magic—they had a really cool trick. When they didn’t understand something—rather than close the book and run to the garage to sniff gasoline—they
asked
each other for help. And sometimes we even sat and worked on schoolwork during recess. Although I felt like deadweight in the group, I was starting to find ways here and there to contribute. And occasionally, when the teacher asked for an answer, I raised my hand with everyone else. And, surprise—our schoolwork wasn’t completely boring. And I started to think,
Hey, I’m not terrible at this school stuff. And this school isn’t totally awful either. . . . Too bad my stupid neighborhood is where I live
.

Then one night, I was over at a barbecue at Dominique’s parents’ house with Dad and Anora. Dominique had a huge extended family and her parents lived in a big old house that was able to fit tons of people. It was the kind of house that I thought was beautiful, if only it weren’t covered in plastic.

I asked Dominique, “What’s the plastic for?”

“My mom keeps it on the carpet and furniture to keep it nice.”

“How would they know it’s nice,” I asked, “if it’s always under plastic?”

“Oh,” Dominique said. “They take it up for company.”

I wasn’t sure I understood. I kinda thought we were company.

“Who comes over for company?”

“Why you so nosy?” Dominique said. “Jeez.”

And I walked off thinking,
I just wanted to know who I have to be to get into the living room
.

Anora was doing her thing. I watched her walk up to Dominique’s sister, blink her eyelashes, and say, “Do you like my dress?”

To which she responded, “Oh yes.”

A minute later she was saying to Dominique’s sister-in-law, “I wish I had pretty long nails like yours.”

Or to her dad, “Do you want to see me do the running man?” and Dominique’s relatives pulled candy out of their asses to give to her. Dominique’s uncle, who didn’t have any candy, reached into his wallet and gave her a dollar. That’s how cute she was.

I made my way across the room and stood next to Dominique’s older brother, trying to look like I wasn’t thinking about how I looked. He was sitting in the La-Z-Boy surrounded by Dad, Dominique, and a couple of other adults, telling everyone about his time in ’Nam.

Dad said, “I almost lied about my age to go.”

“Serious?” her brother asked.

“Oh yeah,” Dad said. “A veteran in a wheelchair talked me out of it.”

Dominique’s brother shook his head and said, “It was the dumbest thing I ever did—get on that plane. I’m telling you, if you offered me a million dollars today to go back to Saigon, it’d still be no.”

I jumped in. “Especially since there’s no Saigon anymore.” We had been studying Southeast Asia in school and I was sure the grown-ups would think that was interesting. Nope, silence and stares. I backpedaled, “’Cause it’s not called Saigon anymore.” Still silence, still stares.

“What was that?” Dad asked in his scary voice.

It was then I realized I was talking way out of turn. And I practically whispered, “Ho Chi Minh City.”

“Why don’t you go on downstairs? The grown folks are talking.”

“Okay,” I said, and I slumped away, both embarrassed and unsure of how much trouble I was in. I headed to the basement where Dominique’s nephews were playing video games.

I sat down in the wood-paneled TV room with three of Dominique’s nephews and one niece, who ranged from my age up to fourteen. They were playing Nintendo, and I knew there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of them giving me a turn. So I decided to watch. They were laughing and carrying on and having more fun than I had ever seen any kids milk out of a one-foot-by-six-inch machine. When Dwight the twelve-year-old died in
Super Mario Brothers
, he jumped up and acted out his death.