Someone I Wanted to Be (5 page)

The saddest thing about the cafeteria was that you pretty much knew where someone would be in five years just by their lunch table: jail, working at Walmart or the auto-parts store, community college, their parents’ basement, state college, residential treatment for the fourth time, alone with two babies in a dirty apartment, private college, potentially Ivy League. The potentially Ivy League kids never ate school lunches. They brought homemade granola and Italian ham on focaccia in reusable lunch bags.

Victoria sat in my place at our table. A state-college table. Kristy and Victoria smushed their heads together and took pictures with Kristy’s phone. I felt disoriented, like a planet that had been rudely kicked out of its solar system. I had a very brief fantasy of calling Cindy and saying, “I feel sick. Can you pick me up, Mom?”

LaTeisha Morgan would have let me sit at her table, where all the black girls sat, but it would have been too pathetic to ask. Especially since all the seats were taken. The girls laughed, stuffed their mouths with french fries, and played with their phones. LaTeisha smiled like a tolerant camp counselor, probably daydreaming about getting into Stanford. Ray Ramirez stopped by with his tray and kissed her cheek. The other girls squealed and beamed up at him. Ray looked like a tall Bruno Mars. His clothes were always ironed, his shirt tucked in. His dad was on city council and running for mayor. His big brother went to Boston College.

Kelsey Parker and her best friends — Kaylee, Brianna, Maya, and Alexis — arrived at the double doors. The five girls dressed identically in suede boots, black leggings, and black fleece jackets. Each had a blanket of long highlighted hair she’d curled that morning. They kicked two nerdy girls off a table and sat down with their phones, all of which had matching striped purple cases. Expensive private college.

I became self-conscious just standing there all alone, so I got in line. The pushing and shoving, the roaring voices, the smells of deodorant, acne cream, BO, aftershave, conditioner, and the heat from all the bodies almost made me throw up. The cafeteria lady snapped at me because I didn’t hear when she asked if I wanted nachos or pizza. I was distracted by the black hairs growing above her upper lip — they also made me want to throw up. I bought nachos with extra cheese sauce and two chocolate milks and carried my tray to the end of a nearly empty nerd table.

Down from me, the tall, skinny guy known as Stork and his only friend, a boy with bright-red cheeks and a big stomach, hunched over their trays. Jamie Lopez sat down by himself at the end. Jamie had dark-blue eyes and caramel skin, and was by far the best-looking guy in our grade. He had shaggy, dyed-black emo hair and wore thick eyeliner. He’d been lifting weights and kept his arms curled like a boxer’s. He was the only kid in our school who admitted that he was gay, and he’d been jumped six times.

I stared down at the greasy chips soaked in shiny yellow goo. It had started as a good day. I’d had a dream about Damien Rogers. The night before, I’d talked for fifteen minutes on the phone with a guy. On Saturday, Cindy had taken me to Marshalls and bought me three tops and a pair of jeans.

That morning as I pulled on my new top, I’d felt hopeful, as if good things were possible because of my new shirt. The week before, Kristy had worn the same shirt in a different color, but it didn’t work on her — she was too skinny. The lacy neckline looked good on me, and the deep-blue color made me look thinner. I breathed in the brand-new chemical smell. Thrift store clothes smelled different — weird, like other people’s gross laundry.

I was choking on a chip and coughing when Stork got up and stood next to me. Stork had freakishly long skinny legs. My eyes were level with a black belt pulled tightly through the belt loops of rumpled brown corduroys. He held out an unopened container of juice. His thumbnail was chewed halfway down.

“Do you want this?” he said. “I’m not going to drink it, if you want it.”

Usually, I would have looked up and smiled. I’d have said, “No, thanks.” Or I would have taken it just to be nice. But instead, I finished coughing and stared across the table. “No, Stork. Get away from me.”

The person next to me vanished. And after a moment of shock, the shock of being a total jerk, I felt even worse, like I was full of broken ribs that were cutting into my heart. I forced myself to look over — Stork and his friend were carrying their trays to another table. Jamie Lopez considered me, picked up his tray, and headed for the garbage cans. There was a long stretch of shredded lettuce, wrappers, and milk puddles. I was sitting alone at an empty table in the middle of fourth-period lunch. Kelsey Parker and her friends were two tables over.

I began sweating on my forehead and in my armpits, and got chills up and down my back. My vision got fuzzy. I thought I’d lose consciousness when something black moved into my field of vision.

A girl wearing a black leather jacket stood holding her tray. We’d ridden the same bus before Kristy started driving. The girl said, “OK if my friends and I sit with you?” She was followed by two thin girls dressed in black.

“I don’t care.”

The three girls sat down. I started to breathe again; my skin dried up; the buzzing went away. The cafeteria slowly came back into focus. The girl across from me had long hair dyed black, bangs that were cut in an angle across her eyes. She’d lined her eyes in black and wore three shades of purple shadow. She had a sharp, tan face. She looked at me and didn’t smile, but not in an unfriendly way. We didn’t have any classes togther but I knew her name was Anita Sotelo.

She shoved her tray into the middle of the table, opened a sketch pad, and hunched over it. As she drew, she held her bangs away from her face. The bell rang and I stood up with my tray. “You didn’t even touch your lunch.”

She looked up at me with calm brown eyes. “It’s slop. Anyway, I’m vegan. If you want it, help yourself. I practically get it for free.”

I walked away without answering. She was the only person I’d ever heard admit that they got a reduced-price lunch.

My last period was study hall in the library. I sat at a table and opened my chemistry text to the chapter “Acids, Bases, and Solutions.” We were having our first quiz on Thursday. I couldn’t concentrate. The words, formulas, and equations dissolved into black squiggles.

Across the room, Carl Lancaster sat alone at the end of a table. He leaned over his books and took notes in a notebook. Carl always wore cotton shirts that buttoned down the front, open at the throat, with button-down collars, very preppy. He had a pretty nice throat for a geek. Muscular, like a wrestler’s throat.

I watched him for a long time. I picked up my books, walked over, and stood there.

Finally he looked up, startled, then not startled. He waited.

“Carl, can you explain the difference between molarity and molality? I’m sorry, but my brain’s not working. . . .”

“Have a seat. It’s really simple, Leah.”

I sat down across from him.

After study hall, I had detention. Mr. Balke, the teacher on duty, ignored us and graded math tests. He scratched his scalp through his thin, frizzy hair as he stared with disgust at a test. He shoved his aviator glasses up with his thumb and madly marked the paper with a red pen. He wore a baggy gray sweater so big that the shoulders hung down to his elbows.

When I got tired of observing Mr. Balke, I doodled in my notebook. I wrote
Kristy is a bitch
fifty-eight times. I wrote
D and L
in different styles of handwriting. Very, very small, I wrote the name
Kurt King.
It sounded like the name of an actor.

Mr. Balke suddenly thundered, “Go home, future leaders of America!” Everyone jerked up from the desktops where they’d been sleeping or playing with their phones. Dan Manke yawned, lifted his leg, and farted.

Mr. Balke raised his eyebrows and smiled as if we’d lived up to his expectations. He put his hands behind his head and his feet up on the desk. He was wearing cheesy red-striped athletic shoes. As we filed out, he said good-bye to each of us by name. “Good afternoon, Mr. Manke. Good afternoon, Miss Lobermeir. . . .”

Stork, Carl Lancaster, and a few other boys were standing outside the biology room. Science Club had just let out. Stork was talking excitedly, but Carl Lancaster wasn’t listening. He watched me walk down the hall.

I left the building at the same time as Dan Manke. Dan Manke had a flat freckled face and wore a cowboy hat and boots every day. He lived in Mountain View Estates and had never ridden a horse, as far as I knew.

As we left the building, Dan Manke shoved a pinch of dip under his lower lip. “See you later, Fat-Ass.” The steel door slammed shut on my shoulder.

On the other side of a chain-link fence, the softball team, which consisted of Kelsey Parker and her friends, ran around the playing field in shorts, whistled, shouted, laughed, called to one another. It sounded like everyone in the whole world was on a team that I hadn’t been picked for. Corinne was better at softball than any of them. A hideous shriek of laughter seemed directed at me, the fat girl walking alone in the weedy ditch that ran alongside the road. The road ran straight toward the mountain.

I took a detour toward 7-Eleven, hoping in a terrified way that Kurt King would be there — my new jeans and blue shirt had gone completely to waste so far that day — but no one was there except for some junior-high boys. The boys oinked when I pushed out the glass door with a jumbo bag of hot fries, and two bottles of Brisk. I also had gummy worms and a king-size Kit Kat bar that I’d swiped and stuffed into my backpack.

As I unlocked the door to #3, my phone vibrated. It was Kurt King’s number. He said that he would call, and he called. It was like having a boyfriend. I shut the door, walked to the couch, and sat down. I put the drinks and snacks on the coffee table. I looked at the little glowing screen and held the phone to my ear.

“Ashley,” he said. “How you doing, Ashley?”

“All right. I had kind of a bad day.”

“Man, I’m sorry to hear that. A girl like you should never have a bad day. . . .”

“My mom’s really sick,” I said. “She might be dying.”

He was talking to Ashley, and he was talking to me. Ashley and I became the same girl. I laughed at his jokes, and when he said again that a girl like me should never have bad days, something warmed up inside me for the first time since that morning, and I believed him.

I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, we’d talked for an hour. Our long phone calls were so old-school.

“Where’d you say you lived at?” he said.

After I hung up with Kurt King, I started eating and couldn’t stop.

An hour later, I was curled under the blanket in front of a talk show. The pop, hot fries, gummy worms, and Kit Kat were gone. I felt sleepy and sick.

Cindy walked through the door, turned on all the lights, and set her purse on the kitchen table. Her pink polyester uniform was wilted. She yawned and glanced tiredly around the kitchenette. Even though she had dark lines crisscrossing her face and usually looked cranky, I thought she was beautiful, though I’d never tell her that. I called her Cindy instead of Mom because she was such a failure as a mother type, though she did wash my clothes every Sunday in the cobwebby laundry room.

She was skinny because she didn’t eat. She lived on salads, pretzels, and white wine. She had small hands with pink fingers that were always damp from washing. She was obsessed with her nails. She worked as a receptionist for a discount dentist. Her dream was to become a hygienist because they made tons of money. The dentist required that all his employees let him bleach their teeth. It looked like Cindy had a piece of paper stuck inside her mouth.

Cindy took a deep breath and turned to me; I watched her force herself to do it. “Hi, Leah.” She closed her eyes and put her hand on her forehead as if she was taking her own temperature. “Will you get yourself some dinner? I bought groceries yesterday.”

“I’m not hungry.”

She opened the cupboard doors and moved things around. She pulled out her “hope jar” and shook it. It was a mayonnaise jar she’d washed and decorated with sunburst stickers. It was about a third filled with coins, wadded-up dollar bills, and little strips of paper — every good fortune she’d ever gotten out of a cookie. Her boss, Dr. Dingle, had learned how to give Botox injections, and she was saving up. “Have you been in my jar? It’s looking kind of skimpy.”