So Shelly (13 page)

Shelly could see that Hogg was reconsidering her “You’re not so psycho, Shelly” comment from earlier.

“So you
don’t
believe in God, then?” Hogg asked from square one.

“No. I mean, not really. Maybe. There might be some force or energy or something beyond my knowing, and the way everyone talks about God is just some metaphor. You know what I mean?”

By the look on Hogg’s face, metaphor was a bad strategy.

“Okay. Let’s say I’m more of an agnostic,” Shelly tried.

“Agnostic?”

“Yeah, agnostic. You know. I don’t commit either way. There might be a god; there might not be a god. There’s just no way of knowing. So why bother wasting so much time, energy, and effort on what might be, when there is so much curable pain and injustice around us that definitely is and that we can definitely do something about?”

Serious contemplation of Shelly’s pontification caused Hogg’s eyes to narrow and her face to pinch with genuine concern. “What about heaven?” she asked. “What happens when you die?”

The tone of Hogg’s voice had changed, as if she had conferred expert status on Shelly in regards to all things ontological, and Shelly’s answer to this question could completely discombobulate Hogg’s perception of her present and future in the universal space-time continuum.

Shelly’s pathological honesty demanded that she renounce that which she considered nonsense, such as the resurrection of the soul in some realm beyond the material, and she was about to do so when Hogg extended her upturned left forearm and said, “Look.”

Unsure of what she was supposed to look at, Shelly stared
in stupefied silence until Hogg pointed to a tiny horizontal scar across her wrist. “I did that in the sixth grade. I wanted to die and go to heaven, where everyone is thin, but I couldn’t cut through enough of the fat to really bleed much, and it hurt real bad, so I didn’t even bother with the other one.”

Shelley looked at Hogg’s wrist and weighed her own intellectual integrity against Hogg’s hope for a skinny afterlife, and compromised. There was no way she could bring herself to agree with the gibberish she’d been taught in school, but she couldn’t see the benefit of crushing Hogg’s hopes either. So she told a story of half-truths.

“I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone,” she began. “A couple of years ago, my friend Gordon was sent away to prep school. I thought I’d never be allowed to see him again. I was crushed and sadder than I’d ever been. I didn’t want to live without him. So I snuck into my father’s bathroom when he was at work and swallowed half of a bottle of the Vicodin he took for his arthritis. I went back to my room and lay down to die. I actually thought I did die because it seemed as if I’d gone to heaven.” (“Pharmaceutical suicide” is the trendy name for it.)

“How’d you know it was heaven?” Hogg interrupted, fully engrossed in the story.

“Well, I didn’t see a god or angels or my mom or anything like that, but there was a sweet and peaceful feeling that came over me.”

“What did it look like?”

“I don’t remember many details. Like I said, it was more a feeling than a place, but it was really bright and warm.”

“Who was there?”

“I can’t remember specific people, but everyone there spoke in rhyme.” Shelly smiled in the telling. “Even I did; it just poured out of me!”

“You mean like poems?”

“No. Just regular conversation. It was all in the most beautiful couplets of iambic pentameter.”

“What’d you do there?”

“That’s the oddest thing. I didn’t do much of anything. All I recall is sitting in front of a large white vanity with a tabletop mirror, brushing my hair.”

“You’ve got pretty hair.” She paused, then asked, “Why’d you come back?”

“I didn’t want to. I woke up in the hospital with a sore throat and a really bad stomachache. My father was standing over me, but he walked away as soon as I opened my eyes. He must have found me when he came home from work, and he called an ambulance.”

“That’s too bad,” Hogg said.

“Yeah, I know.”

With her worries somewhat eased, Hogg considered Shelly’s version of heaven, coupled with her new friend’s earlier expressed doubt regarding God’s existence, and said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Why do you go to a Catholic school?”

“That’s easy. Jesus loves me.”

“That makes a lot of sense,” Hogg said.

“I get that a lot.”

*    *    *

After their chance meeting in the restroom, Hogg and Shelly became fast friends. Hogg even joined us on the
Beacon
staff; she wasn’t much of a writer, but she was one hell of a salesperson. Our advertising income and circulation skyrocketed with Hogg on the staff. Remarkably, she had, thus far, emerged from the crucible of schoolhouse cruelty armed with a gentle, good humor; it was an evolutionary leap of survival that Shelly was never able to make. If the demigods of Trinity could have just gotten past their fat prejudice, which most of them couldn’t, they would have discovered a likeable, even attractive, young woman in Hogg—a reality, remarkably enough, not lost on Gordon.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” I heard Shelly tell Gordon as we sat in the
Beacon
’s office.

It was a Friday afternoon that had the expectancy in the air that only Friday afternoons possess: a feeling of the suspension of time between the accomplishments or failures of the weekdays just behind and the possibilities of the weekend just ahead. Adding to the sense of potential was that it was also the night of the Halloween dance, sponsored by the
Yearbook
’s staff. It was the best-attended dance of the school year because, unlike couples’ dances like prom or homecoming, dateless losers, like me, could mill about the periphery of the dance floor without being so conspicuous.

Gordon was supposed to be peer editing Shelly’s story
as she did the same with his, but his attention was clearly elsewhere. Since Hogg had joined the staff, the frequency of Gordon’s attendance in the
Beacon
’s office had risen sharply, and now he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off of Hogg. Shelly must have heard the calculations whirring in his brain and anticipated their ultimate sum.

Pulled from his musings at the sound of Shelly’s voice, Gordon said, “Wish I wouldn’t what?”

“You know I know what you’re thinking, Gordon. And I wish you wouldn’t. That’s all.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” he asked.

“Hogg’s my friend.”

“So am I,” Gordon said.

“If you are, you’ll stay away from Hogg.”

Hogg stood across the room looking out the windows and talking on her cell with potential advertisers for next semester’s edition, while I sat, brooding over one of my own pieces. I never allowed anyone to see my work before final submission; I’ve never exactly taken well to criticism, constructive or otherwise. It’s a common, if inexpedient, trait shared by many artists. Hey, at least I’m honest.

After my father’s funeral, I thought that Shelly and I might become more than friends, but with the addition of Hogg to the staff, Shelly seemed disinterested in tethering her flimsy sense of reality to me, instead choosing Hogg, whose weighty obtuseness served as a more reliable anchor than I. Hogg also served to help Shelly stave off the flights of fancy that she was prone to taking, which inevitably led to her crazy stunts and getting into trouble.

My existence still seemed to inspire little notice from
Gordon. By then, he had firmly established his place on top of the jockocracy of Trinity, no small feat for a swimmer, participating in what—despite the team’s success—was considered a relatively minor sport at Trinity. But even the football and hockey players—by far the most macho of all—couldn’t help but admire his Hummer, his family name, his authorial celebrity, his growing wealth, his popularity with girls, and even his ripped body.

With fewer than five hundred students, news travels fast and freely through Trinity’s corridors, classrooms, locker rooms, and cafeteria. I regularly overheard Monday-morning reports of weekend debaucheries spent by Trinity’s warrior class with Gordon. I’d see him with those Neanderthals at school and wonder “Why?” He was so much their better in every way imaginable. They were clearly hangers-on, members of an ever-changing entourage, using him for his ride, his family’s lakeside mansion with all its toys, and for the variety of fish (as he’d sometimes refer to girls) that he would find unsatisfactory and leave for them to devour.

But one day, when I watched him lead a pack of these knuckle draggers through the main hallway of the classroom building, I realized that I had it backward. They weren’t taking advantage of
him
as much as he was using
them
as background. It was the contrast between him and these unsophisticated, dull, and ordinary guys that made Gordon’s attractiveness pop. He needed their banality to frame him, to focus the admirer’s eye. An angel among angels is invisible, but an angel among men is a god.

That’s why, I believe, he enjoyed his “sympathy fucks” (his words, not mine) better than the encounters with gorgeous
girls and women whom he “banged” (again, not my word). He was incapable of overwhelming the beautiful ones with his own beauty; they all somehow felt that they deserved him by virtue of their own attractiveness and felt that, in their coupling, the sense of gratitude was equal. He must have hated that.

That was what led to Shelly’s pleading “I wish you wouldn’t.” But she knew there was next to nothing she could do to stop it.

The Halloween dance began at eight o’clock; I arrived at five minutes till. I wore a pair of green scrubs, complete with a surgical cap and mask, that I’d borrowed from the hospital where I volunteered. I paid Mrs. Hildebrand, the yearbook advisor, for my ticket. Admission was five bucks if you wore a costume but ten if you didn’t.

A heavy thumping of bass poured from the gymnasium doors; the song was old, like something from the nineties. The only words I could discern were “Jump! Jump! Jump around!” Multicolored lights flashed from around the DJ’s table on the portable stage beneath the basketball hoop. Two spotlights, borrowed from the drama department, were trained on a mirrored disco ball, gift of the class of 1980, which had been lowered from the ceiling; its reflected lights rotated throughout the gym space.

There were fewer than two dozen kids inside—all freshmen except me. Clearly, none of us had received the memo from Cool Central regarding fashionably late arrivals. Thinking me still too socially immature, my parents hadn’t allowed
me to attend the school dances the year before. I recognized a few kids as former middle-school classmates, but that was from two years ago—an entire epoch in teen aging. I considered leaving. But, instead, I climbed to the top of the bleachers and watched the gym floor fill as if I were peering through the lens of a time-lapse camera. From my perch, I could see that many of the arriving upperclassmen, including the girls, wore a red glow on their faces that I hadn’t noticed during school days. Many were sporting what my father would have called “shit-eating grins,” and they all were chewing gum. (I don’t mean they were costumed as chewing gum, but they were actually
chewing
gum.) Later, I learned that the reason for their late arrivals and strange appearances was that they had been drinking, filling up on the “liquid courage” that would enable the boys to talk to and dance with girls who they otherwise lacked the temerity to approach, and enable the girls to give the boys the kind of flirtation and access that they were other times too prudish, or caught up in appearing to be so, to allow.

Most of the guys had been less than imaginative in their costuming. Many simply wore their athletic uniforms; others came as nerds, punk rockers, and cowboys. The least creative simply wore rubber masks of presidents and monsters they’d purchased at Spencer’s Gifts in the mall.

The girls were another story; they were completely unrecognizable from those who walked the halls and sat in the classrooms of Trinity. Just about the only male sexual fantasy they failed to cater to was the Catholic schoolgirl one, which they lived every day. There were countless nurses, librarians, and French maids in impossibly short skirts and
cleavage-baring tops. And, apparently, every ingénue of Disney and fairytale fame had been an aspiring Victoria’s Secret model; costumed Cinderellas, Sleeping Beauties, Snow Whites, Ariels, Tianas, and Jasmines exposed more breasts and thighs than Trinity had seen since last spring’s sophomore-class-sponsored chicken dinner fund-raiser.

By eight-thirty, the gym floor was filled with bumping, grinding—basically dry-humping—teenagers. The outnumbered teacher chaperones had early on capitulated in their attempts to police the dancing and had retreated in defeat to the fringes of the orgiastic ritual. I began to enjoy my out-of-student-body experience. I felt Olympian, high above the mortals performing for my titillation and entertainment below.

I’m not sure how long they’d been there, intermingled with the masquerading multitude, but eventually I spotted Hogg and Shelly. Hogg wore an all-white man’s suit, including a white cowboy hat and a black string tie. A huge unlit cigar dangled from her lips. She was dressed as Boss Hogg from
The Dukes of Hazzard
. Shelly was the Jessica Simpson version of Daisy Duke in a blond wig, brown cowboy boots, cutoff jean shorts, and a short-sleeved red-checked button-down shirt tied off to show her midriff. Her hair was in pigtails, and she’d dotted her cheeks with brown freckles. I had to cross my legs and fold my hands over my lap to hide my “interest.”

Boy after boy, many of whom had made fun of her throughout their years at Trinity, and none of whom had previously shown the tiniest amorous interest in her, tried to pry her away from Hogg to the dance floor, but she successfully rebuffed each attempt. Even Brandon Sullivan, a senior
football captain, was initially turned away. I think that she was waiting for Gordon to arrive and be wowed.

And arrive he did.

Shortly after ten o’clock, with less than an hour left in the dance, a commotion arose near the gym entrance. A harem of barefooted silk-veiled belly dancers (all members of the girls’ swim team) ushered in Gordon, who was dressed as a Turkish sultan. He wore a satin three-quarter length aqua-blue robe with a black lapel and very short sleeves. A gold fringe ran the length of the bottom cuff; the robe was left entirely open, exposing his still tanned bare torso. The pants were a blousy black silk with an elastic bottom. On his feet were a pair of curly gold pointy-toed slippers that no one but Gordon could have worn without ridicule. The ensemble was topped off with a turban to match the robe, with a fake ruby centered over the forehead.