Rose of No Man's Land (3 page)

Kristy made it into the cosmetology shop because that’s how life goes for her. She tends to get whatever she wants, which is why she’s now going after
The Real World
, that TV show. She’s positive she can be the teenaged-hairdresser-from-an-impoverished-New-England-town character, and she’s been obsessively putting together her audition tape. Kristy’s got this natural bossy sunniness that makes people think she is more capable then she really is. She’s a know-it-all who actually doesn’t know that much, and one thing I’ve learned from her is that if you say something in the right tone of voice hardly anyone will challenge you. Another thing I’ve learned is that in the event of a challenge you just stand your ground until the other person becomes exasperated, filled with doubt, or plain bored, and poof, you win. Kristy’s great at that. Like that period pill argument. I am certain that the period pill — the one they have those commercials for, with the woman flipping out over something stupid like her shopping cart getting tangled in the other shopping carts — is just a huge dose of Prozac. I’ve given up trying to convince Kristy that it is not some genius new medicine, that it is just another way to sneak more people onto antidepressants. It is irritating to see Kristy gloating like she won the debate, but it’s simpler than fighting about it forever. What the fuck do I care anyway. It’s not like I’m going to take the stupid pill.

Kristy learned that Kim Porciatti tried to kill herself because she does Bernice O’Leary’s hair and Bernice manages the Ohmigod! store at the mall. It is sort of sad to think that you can be the actual manager of the most popular
store at the mall and still you don’t make enough money to get a proper haircut. You have to drive out to the Voke — way out in East Bumfuck, the middle of nowhere, by a swear-to-god
lake
— and pay a stoned high school student three dollars to cut your hair. It seems unjust. There are two different hair salons at the mall: Jungle Unisex, which is sort of old, with a jungle motif; and Hair Universe, which has an outer space theme and a lot of neon. You’d think that the actual owners of Ohmigod! would pay for their managers to get a fancy haircut since it’s such a big frigging deal to work there. Ohmigod! sells miniskirts and fake-flower hairpins and anorexic-looking sandals. It’s very bright and plays old music from the ’80s and it’s supposed to be really fun, like some sort of disco circus. Everything that isn’t striped is polka-dotted, so it truly seems like a clown place, but it’s very popular anyway. More people are caught shoplifting from Ohmigod! than from any other store at the mall. Which might only mean that the girls who like those clothes are, on the whole, dumber than average and more likely to get caught. Kim Porciatti works at Ohmigod!, which is how I knew who she was in the first place. It’s how I knew she went to Saint Joan, the all-girls high school, and how I knew that everyone thought she was just the greatest. Even if you don’t shop at Ohmigod! — and I don’t, I think those clothes are nauseating plus they’re wicked expensive — you wind up knowing all about everyone who works there and what their business is. It’s the sort of useless information you’re always picking up in life, against your will. Kim Porciatti. I have seen her a handful of times. Her hair is always blond, maybe too
bright to be real, and don’t Italians have dark hair, naturally? I’ll have to ask Kristy, who now knows everything there is about hair. Kristy is now officially a hair expert, in addition to an expert on period medications and the mechanics of getting onto a reality television show. Kim is blond and she always has a tan even when the world is nothing but dog-pissy snow and clouds and coldness and scrawny bare trees. It must be that spray-on tan but it looks pretty good on her. I’m trying to be fair about the whole Kim thing. On the one hand it pisses me off the way someone can get this whole little cult around them just because they look good in a fake tan and have a lawyer dad buying them cute shoes and stuffing them into a good all-girl’s high school where their life isn’t destroyed by guys. I mean, what did Kim do to earn all this adoration? You couldn’t even say she worked particularly hard to get hired at Ohmigod! because she was popular already when she applied and that’s exactly why Bernice hired her. And she didn’t need the job in the first place, ’cause her parents have money and she just worked there ’cause it’s cool, like being paid money to hang out in a nightclub with a bonus discount on fancy clothes. It’s just not fair. Like why not decide that MaryAnn Baxter be popular? Why not select her to fall down and hyperventilate over? MaryAnn Baxter has a really fucked-up face. She got between her mom and her dad when they were having a fight and her dad flung something awful into her face. I want to say it was hydrochloric acid because that’s the terrible thing people are always getting splashed in the face with on television, but who knows if hydrochloric acid is even a real thing?
MaryAnn Baxter looks like she got hit in the face with pure fire. Her skin is a lot of different colors, like a car that’s been stripped and primed for painting. It’s sort of patchy and in certain places looks melty, like a wax candle. Thick and droopy. If you have half a brain you can probably guess that MaryAnn’s not the most popular person in her high school, which happens also to be my high school. People say mean things to her in the hallway, call her “freak,” write things on her locker. I swear, it’s like an after-school special. Only on an after-school special everyone would learn something, and MaryAnn’s humanity would be exposed and whoever was being an asshole would suddenly get a clue and life would be better. I guarantee that is not going to happen. But if life were fair, MaryAnn would be the popular one. Everyone would want to be around her because she really survived something. Like someone in a movie, she stood up for justice and got horribly wounded but carried on. She would be our hero and we would all want to help her out. Plus there is the curious dizziness that comes with looking at her face for a bit. I had one class with MaryAnn Baxter this last semester and can testify that if you stare at her for too long this certain tingly lightheadedness can overtake you, a sort of drunken feeling. I don’t know why, but it’s true, and why not add that to the list of reasons to be good to her: she is like a strange drug. Maybe if everyone in the world got their periods at the exact same time MaryAnn would be universally accepted for about a minute. But not even, ’cause then there’s still all the guys.

Bernice O’Leary came to Kristy on her last day of shop, for her regular fluffy hairdo, and she was all bent out of
shape because her prize employee Kim Porciatti was unavailable for work and now that schools were letting out it was truly summer inside the mall and there were boxes of overpriced plastic-wrap bikinis waiting to be stocked. And then, said Kristy, Bernice started to tear up. Kristy thought it was the fumes from the perm solution that a student who’d just been smoking pot in the bathroom was liberally squirting onto the head of an old lady. This student was just dousing the lady and laughing and her eyes were all bloodshot and Kristy was thinking, Jesus, she is wicked high, and then she noticed that Bernice’s eyes were all red too and maybe the perm sauce was getting to her and when she began to ask, Bernice toppled from sniffling into straight-up crying and confessed to Kristy that she didn’t really care about the bikinis, she was just so concerned about poor Kim Porciatti who had actually tried to kill herself.

She was really upset
, Kristy told me.

Really? It sounds lousy to be skeptical of such a thing, I know, but everyone loves when something like this happens. Anytime someone tries to kill themselves or crashes their car up drunk driving, they’re suddenly everyone’s best friend. And I felt a bit of dread, because everyone was already trying to be Kim Porciatti’s best friend and now that she’d gone and tried to kill herself I knew it would be unbearable. How’d She Do It? I asked.

I think she cut her arms.

Which Way? I asked. The Phony Way Or The Real Way?

Kristy rolled her eyes.
Everyone knows about that
, she said.
I’m sure it was the real way. No one cuts their wrists
except cutters.

Maybe She Was Just A Cutter, I suggested. Maybe Her Parents Caught Her Cutting Herself And Got The Wrong Idea. I sort of liked that theory. I know the whole cutting thing is very trendy right now but still, it gave Kim Porciatti a dark side I hadn’t thought she had. I shared my theory with Kristy.

Oh, suicide isn’t dark enough for you?
she asked. She had an unfriendly look on her face.

It’s So Showy, I said. A Cry For Help. I had to resist the pressure to feel upset about it. No doubt every high school in the area was about to declare a regional day of grief at the very idea that someone as cute as Kim Porciatti could feel emotional pain. Then I remembered that high school was out now, and such mourning would play out at the mall if anywhere, and I thought it was poor planning on Kim’s part to make such a dramatic statement when no one was really around to take notice.

You’re cold
, Kristy said.
Hard.

Don’t Blame Me, I said. Blame The World.

The Square One Mall is our mall. If you think about it, it’s a crummy name for a mall. Like, “back to square one.” It’s where you go when your really big, visionary plans don’t work out. What I really like is that at the side entrance there’s a great, lit-up neon sign propped above the doors that glows, “MALL.” It’s generic, yet glamorous. Square One’s got the regular things that most malls have. There’s an Ohmigod! and then stores that sort of aspire to be Ohmigod!, places like Eternally Eighteen and Tight Knit. These stores should be embraced for generously offering cheaper versions of the crap on sale at Ohmigod!, but everyone is so frigging self-loathing it’s some sort of social crime to buy the cheaper outfits.

There’s a Lotions & Potions for natural skin stuff and
a Dark Subject that sells clothes for kids who want to make you think they’re really dark, scary people with tortured inner lives. There’s a bunch of other weird places I’m not really interested in, like a hobby store, stuffed with miniature vehicles, that I’ve never seen anyone go into. Sometimes a Mr. Rogers-looking guy with a button-up sweater stands at the edge of this shop and peers out into the greater mall. A little track of scalp is displayed by the side part of his neat, nerdy hairdo. He looks like he time-traveled into Square One from some gentler year. He stands before his hobby shop and looks over at the giant video game store where all the boys are having a big testosterone fest trying out various games in which they street fight, run over hookers, and in general make some mayhem. His little ships and gluey planes are no match. It’s too sad, really. There’s a craft store where mom-looking women shuffle around putting bouquets of plastic flowers and pipe cleaners into their shopping baskets. A dull bookstore. They have a giant shelf when you first walk in, all the covers are every different shade of pink, from the faintest fingernail-pink to a more brassy, unnatural fuchsia. Those are books for females. They have pictures of high-heeled shoes on them, or caricatures of little dogs, or ladies holding teacups or martini glasses, and the pink is whimsically accented with bits of lime green or jolting orange.

There’s a food court in the middle of the mall with a lot of top-rate crap-ass options. There are carts throughout the place that sell really useful things like cell phone covers that have pictures of girls who look like Kim Porciatti in Budweiser bathing suits, or miniature wigs you somehow
stick into your hairdo for maximum hair effect, or imitation designer pocketbooks that don’t fool anybody and still cost a bunch of money.

I went to the mall on the evening of what should have been my last day of school, to assist Kristy in the scoring of a job at Jungle Unisex. I’d stayed in my bedroom all afternoon, going quietly crazy in my head. I was filled with rage at my jackass family and also starving, but would not go out into the kitchen and face the torn-open packages of ramen, not to mention the slack, crusty face of Donnie and his concubine, my mother. It’s true — I laid around and felt very sorry for myself. An activity I could expect to dominate my summer. When Kristy came home from her last day at the Voke we had a gigantic fight. Kristy had been working on the videotape audition that she hoped would get her onto the cast of
The Real World.
She ingeniously stole a video camera from some media room at the Voke no one even knew was there. She found it while looking for the storage room that held the bulk 40 volume peroxide. So as if life isn’t hard enough, she’s been sticking that camera into everyone’s face, filming our home, getting every single sick and dysfunctional element onto video so that some stupid MTV person fascinated with white trash people will see that Kristy is the real thing, stick her on the show, and wait for her to say ignorant things to the black person and the gay person. She’d been in my bedroom that morning, taping me oversleeping as a symbol of family laziness. It’s so deeply unfair. I may not have such a clear life plan as Kristy, with her
Real World
aspiration and cosmetology career, but I am not our Ma and I do not enjoy spending
the day in bed. I would have loved for Kristy to wake me up so I could not miss my last day of school, but I guess that didn’t really support the angle of her video: the one ambitious person in a welfare family, please save her.

We had a big fight, and Kristy promised to be more fair and let me speak for myself in her dumb video if I came with her to the mall, because Donnie doesn’t let us drive his car alone. That’s how I wound up in the food court, my ass plopped on a molded plastic bench, getting sort of carried away with my thoughts. I thought, how would I like to be represented in Kristy’s video? Perhaps as a quirky sisterly sidekick. Maybe as a brooding and mysterious person with an artistic disposition. I’ve never done anything artistic, but it seems that being an artistic type can excuse you for being abnormal. I thought that maybe
The Real World
would enjoy having an actual, blood-related pair of sisters on the show. What a great way to ensure a dysfunctional family-style household. But there’s no way Kristy would go for it. She was trying to escape, after all, not bring a fragment of her own screwed-up family along with her to Los Angeles or Miami, wherever they set up those fancy houses with the pool tables and swimming pools and beanbag chairs for the stars to slump their skinny, hungover bodies in.