The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death (13 page)

Then he handed me a paper towel to wipe the gel off, got up, and left the room without looking at me once.

Wait! I wanted to shout. Just give me time! I know I can do it!
I know it.
Whatever. What
ever.
And you know what? I don’t believe that no one else hasn’t gulped! It was like being waterboarded! It was like having a Dyson stuck under my nose—of course I gasped! I’m surprised brain matter didn’t fly out! It was like the car-wash vacuum. I
know
other people have gasped! It would be inhuman not to!

But I didn’t say any of that. I just sat there, with shiny laser gel smeared all over my face as everybody left the room but me. Then I wiped the gel, of which there was so much I looked like I had just been attacked by a space creature, off my face, and that took a long time, because I didn’t want the Heave Ho to walk out into the hallway and make her next appointment at the reception desk looking like a newborn Krispy Kreme rolling down the conveyor belt.

But apparently, news of my One Woman Chin Fringe show had already spread to the front office, and it was obvious as the girl who worked up there swiped my Visa and gave me an odd, insincere smile. She already knew. I smiled tightly, nodded to myself, and signed the receipt. Great. Three months of secret shaving in the shower only to have an even bigger humiliation in front of the charming and beguiling Dr. Wells, who I had once, approximately fifteen minutes ago, almost had a crush on. But no more, no more. No way. Obliterated like a follicle in the path of a laser beam. Vaporized. Dissolved! The receptionist had just handed me the receipt, and I was about to walk away, when suddenly Dr. Wells appeared and said something to the receptionist about a later appointment. This was my last chance, I knew, to show him that I wasn’t a nut and that I was just a normal girl with an extra hormone or two.

Be normal, I told myself. Don’t do anything doltish. Stay inside the lines. Be nice. Be normal. Smile big like nothing weird happened in there, like it was all cool and very routine.

“Thank you, Dr. Wells,” I said as he looked up to catch my big, normal, nice smile. “I’ll see you in six weeks!”

At first, Dr. Wells didn’t say anything. He just looked at me without any expression on his face at all, not really staring but looking and not saying a word, which I guess could be classified as staring.

See, I thought to myself, almost pleased and even a little bit surprised. I can still cast a man spell! I smiled wider.

“Yes,” he said suddenly, as if he just caught himself. “Yes, um, six weeks.”

And on that note, I waved slightly, then turned and walked away. Now I need to spend the next six weeks practicing holding my breath with a vacuum-cleaner nozzle under my nose, I thought to myself as I sashayed to my car, so I can show him that
I can do it. Because I know I can. I know I can.

Once I was in the front seat, I finally allowed myself to feel my chin and see just what a master Dr. Wells was, and as it turned out, he was a pretty good one. My chin felt smooth and stubble-free, just as I had hoped, so smooth and perfect, in fact, that I wanted to see it for myself.

I reached up to angle down the rearview mirror, but before I could study my beautiful new chinny chin chin, something caught my eye. Something reddish, something bold, and something that was covering every part of my face where the conducting gel had been. It was faint in some areas and stronger in others, across my chin, cheeks, my upper lip, my jawline, all over. It was spread like a virus, smeared to every inch of my lower face.

How could I have known?

It would have been impossible.

How could I have known that when you take conducting gel, mix it with pretty new and meticulously applied lipstick, and wipe it all over your face vigorously with a paper towel, you can make a nice, big red crazy clown mask with very little effort at all.

Very little.

“UUUUUUHHHHHHHHHH” was all I could manage.

Hit

W
e had just
sat down on the steps of the amphitheater where the Indian Festival was being held when someone threw a water balloon at us.

I looked up immediately and searched the crowd, looking for the culprit or a suspicious movement that would lead me to his trail, but absolutely nothing looked out of the ordinary. There was just a bunch of people milling around as several young girls did a Bollywood-type dance on the stage before us. It was if the perpetrator had simply vanished.

Both Jamie and I had been looking forward to the Indian Festival for weeks, and I had driven up to Portland, where my friend had just moved, to stay the weekend, in order to take in everything the festival had to offer. Our mouths watered at the thought of golden samosas lining every pathway, chicken makahni flowing like rivers, and mango lassis bubbling out of water fountains. Once we walked onto the square where the festival was being held, there was no doubt as to what we were going to do first, and that was to get ourselves some vittles. Everything smelled so good; wafts of garlic, curry, and spices made my mouth instantly water. I was so hungry. Jamie, her husband, and I had starved ourselves all day so we could be sure of gorging in nothing short of copious Roman amounts, but when we arrived at the food court, we were shamefully unprepared for the choices that lay before us. In every direction, lines for food grew by the moment, so we made a decision based on the apparent happiness of people leaving the booth with their food, and jumped in a line, watching it grow five more feet behind us in a matter of a minute.

“What are you going to get?” I asked Jamie as we squinted to see the menu far ahead of us.

“I think there’s a combo plate,” Jamie said, standing on tiptoe. “But I’m so hungry I’d eat anything!”

“I am ravenous,” I proclaimed.

“Ooooh,” my best friend cooed as a lady with a combo plate walked past us. “Look at that!”

“Even the smell is worth the wait!” I added. “I am
so hungry.
I think my stomach just shrank to the size of an empty balloon!”

“Hang on,” Jamie encouraged me. “We’ll get there, and when we do, we’ll be feasting on something like that!”

A man and his little boy passed by, their plates piled with steaming hot pakoras and samosas.

“Oh my God, that looks so good,” I whined. “Little boy, I’ll buy you a bike for a bite!”

“Look, the line is moving fast,” Jamie lied. “We’ll be up there in no time.”

It was a lie. She knew it, I knew it, her husband knew it. I tried to busy myself watching the crowds, clapping along with the little dancers onstage, but all I could do was smell incredible food and feel my stomach shrivel like a Shrinky Dink on a cookie sheet.

When we had been on line for a half an hour, Jamie turned around and whispered sharply. “I can hear you above the crowd! Maybe you should find a bathroom!”

“I am not farting,” I replied. “That is the sound of my tummy crying.”

Just then, a large family in front of us suddenly stepped out of line and there we were, at the counter. Face-to-face with the menu on a poster board. Within arm’s reach of what we had waited so long for. We placed our orders for three combos, and within seconds they were delivered to the counter, like a reward for our tested patience.

Delighted and excited beyond belief, we navigated through the crowd with plates in hand, careful, oh so careful, not to spill so much as a drop. We made our way up the narrow steps of the amphitheater, found a perfect spot on one of the landings right in front of the stage, and sat down.

It smelled
so good.
With fork in hand I dug in for the first bite and savored it, no longer obsessing about the half-hour wait. I looked at Jamie and her husband, and they were both smiling after their first bites, too, and we all nodded. It tasted as good as it smelled; it was everything I had hoped for, everything that I had starved myself for in anticipation.

And then, as I was going in for the second bite, I felt something wet splatter on me, and automatically recoiled.

It was the water balloon. My first response was to search the crowd for the wake of a fleeing perp, but there was nothing. No heads turning, no sounds of running feet, no after-vandalism laughter.

I turned to Jamie with a look that said, “Can you believe it?” and that’s when I saw that she had gotten the worst of it. Long, brown streaks covered her white T-shirt on the side closest to me. Brown, I thought to myself; why is the water in the water balloon brown? It was a mud balloon? How do you even make a mud-water balloon? How despicable! How sinister! How crafty! I’m going to have to try this at home!

The look on Jamie’s face turned from surprise to horror as she studied her own shoulder and arm, and I scrambled for a napkin to help clean it off.

“Who would throw a water balloon?” I said angrily. “I didn’t see anyone, did you? Did you see anyone throw it at us? Why would someone do that?”

And when I reached to get the mud-balloon residue out of her hair, I realized it.

My mind flashes to a college-aged Laurie who is sitting on a bench at Arizona State University, trying desperately to impress the guy she has successfully, after many months of trying to capture his attention, lassoed into being her Italian-language partner, when she feels a pinecone hit her in the head and the guy, duly impressed, begins to gag and then runs off, but not before uttering the words, “Rabies, typhoid and cholera.”

To a thirtyish Laurie eating lunch with all of her new friends from the newspaper at a Mexican restaurant with outdoor seating when she is suddenly struck in the temple with a water gun as her new pals immediately shoot away from the table, muttering phrases such as “meningitis,” “encephalitis,” and a personal favorite, “bubonic plague.”

And finally, to a scene in Laurie’s bathroom in which a tiny, trapped baby bird craps all over her toothbrush as if it were a pterodactyl, bird feces the consistency of Liquid Paper, which then turns crumbly, then quickly solidifies into a sort of poo concrete.

Like the stuff that was now hardening in Jamie’s hair.

“Oh my God,” I said as I sucked air in. “Bird flu!!”

But honestly, in the times that I’ve been a victim of the skies, it was from a pinecone and water gun roughly the size of a pigeon and not an even more foul, more dastardly, and more disease-ridden seagull circling, scouring the Indian Festival for just the right head to shit on.

Locating the shiniest and happiest head, the filthy seagull released its load on Jamie, who, to her credit, did not freak out the way you would suppose a person who’s been emptied on would. She just looked at me with disgusted eyes and said simply, “It stinks.”

There really wasn’t anything she could do; she just sat there as her husband and I tried to wipe the slime off of her, to very little avail. If you’ve ever been pooped on, you already know that your options are rather limited unless you have a bottle of Clorox, a wire brush, and some hair clippers at your disposal, although some radiation treatments would also be handy. Jamie had been a victim in one of the highest levels of a Conflict With Nature, only to be topped by a bear sucking the bone marrow out of your spine or a lion picking its teeth with your ribs. There is very little else nature can do to you to let you know that the human race is just another gobbling, roaming, feral group of creatures on this planet, and that where the universe is concerned, there is no first class. Everybody gets a fair shot with a pinecone to the head, a water balloon to the shoulder, and it can be when you’re trying to impress a boy or having lunch with your friends, although in my experience, two out of three bird poopings have taught me that you’re far more likely to encounter a free-roaming shitstorm when you’re eating delicious, ethnic food under a tree. Just my two cents.

As we wiped her down, Jamie sat there like a volcano, boiling inside but calm on the exterior, watching the little girls dance onstage and holding her plate of food that was no longer steaming.

Oh no, I thought suddenly as I grabbed her plate, studied it, then grabbed my own, which I had set down beside me.