Things I’ll Never Say (6 page)

My friends and I ordered our sea breezes and sex on the beaches and brought them back to our table. We didn't care about getting drunk. Drinking wasn't our thing. We were there for the boys, for that sweet moment when a boy homed in on us, when we knew that this night might matter, that
we
might matter in some greater way.

And that is when Mr. P. walked in.

I didn't alert my friends. I watched him walk up to the thick wooden bar. He had a friend with him, some guy who was taller and thinner and just generally more attractive than he was. My whole body was on fire, vigilant. I was certain he was there because of me.

“Oh. My. God.” One of my friends squeezed my arm. “You will never guess who is in here!”

I tried to act nonchalant. “It's no big deal,” I said.

“No big deal?”

Our other friends — there were four of us in all — craned their necks to see who we were talking about.

“It's Mr. P.!” the first friend screamed, and they all freaked.

“Shhhh!” I tried to control them. None of this mattered to them. They still giggled and whispered when he walked by at school. It was different for me. My feelings about Mr. P. had changed. I wanted his attention. I wanted him to want my attention. I needed them to shut up and stop acting like teenage girls. But before I could control them, Mr. P. turned, scanning the booths and tables for girls, and for a moment his eyes met mine.

And then he quickly looked away.

Without thinking, I stood and went to him. I heard one of my friends say, “Kerry!” I couldn't deny that Mr. P. took a few steps backward, like if it weren't me, someone he had to see every day, he would have just turned and left.

“Hey,” he said. He glanced at his friend. “What a coincidence.”

“And who is this?” His friend smiled at me and put out his hand.

I shook it.

“I forgot they let underage kids into this place,” Mr. P. said to his friend.

“You forgot?” I asked.

He turned so he was mostly facing his friend and leaned on the bar. “One of my students,” Mr. P. said.

“Oh, man,” his friend said and laughed. “That's unfortunate.”

A few moments passed. I crossed my arms over my chest. Then Mr. P. said, “Why are you still standing here?”

My face grew warm, and I feared they could see it growing red. Mr. P. turned so his back was to me. I felt sick, unreal. What could I do but go back to the table? My friends squealed.

“What did you say to him?”

“Oh, my God, you are my hero!”

“Dude, you have balls!”

I tried to laugh. “I think I made him uncomfortable.”

They all giggled. I tried not to let them see what I was really feeling.

“He's scared he'll wind up in bed with all four of us,” I said, and they squealed again.

When I walked into his class on Monday, he stood facing the board, scratching out dates with chalk. He didn't turn around, and when he did finally, he avoided my eyes. He walked back and forth with his hands in his pockets.

“What was the significance of the Battle of the Bulge?”

A few hands shot up, but Mr. P. passed by them and looked right at me. “Kerry?”

I widened my eyes, sat up a little straighter.

“I don't know, Mr. P.,” I said. “What
is
the significance of the Battle of the Bulge?” A few students snickered. I hadn't done the reading, hadn't done much regarding school at all lately.

“You don't know.”

“No.”

We stared at each other a moment, the tension thick. Then he walked right over to my desk so only I and perhaps a few others could hear what he was about to say.

“You know, Miss Cohen,” he said quietly, “you might consider someday focusing on school instead of boys. That might serve you better in life.”

My breath caught. The room was silent. I didn't dare look at my friends in the class, one of whom had been at the bar that night. I thought about the fact that he'd asked me whether I gave blow jobs, considered briefly that I could fling that back at him. Considered that I could even tell on him. I could get him fired. I sat red faced, furious, but I could also feel the tears pressing at my eyes. I got up and left the room before they came. He didn't watch me go, but I could feel his awareness of me.

I had to keep going to his class, of course, if I was to pass the year. And I would pass, always slipping by under the radar so nobody would ever see that there might be something wrong.

In his class I tried to pay attention to his lectures, but mostly I spent the period glaring at him, hating him, wishing him the worst things that could befall him — disease and loss and abandonment. I wished most for him to feel like he'd made me feel, as though I were worthless, needy, as though all the things I most feared about myself were true. All the things I feared made me undesirable.

When I walked through Dorrian's doors now, the pressure to matter there was like a heavy cloak I couldn't pull off. My friends and I sat as we had before, smiling and conversing, sea breezes sweating on the table. I couldn't keep my eyes steady. I scanned the room each night, searching, my desperation unmoored. I was surer than ever that there was a rule to this game, that if I were just more beautiful, simply said the exact right thing or wore the right outfit, I would get what I wanted. The stakes were higher now. If I didn't find a boy tonight, if a boy didn't acknowledge me, I would cease to exist. Meanwhile, my friends spotted hot boys from boarding schools in the city and said, “That one is so fine” and “I dare you to smile at him.” For them, this was still just for fun.

The outcome remained unknowable. Sometimes a boy came to me. Sometimes he didn't.

After one of those nights at Dorrian's, I fell asleep in Mrs. Jefferson's class again, and I wound up back in the shared faculty office after school. I stepped into that dark, echoing room and felt some sense of loss, as though Mr. P. and I had shared something real in there, something worth remembering. I saw him. He was hunched over, grading exams. Not that long ago, he'd made me feel wanted. The sight of him there, at that same desk, in that same chair, sent an electric current from my coccyx up my spine. I walked by him and sat in a chair next to Mrs. Jefferson's desk to wait for her. She came in and gave me a pile of handouts to copy. I sauntered past his desk again and again. Not once did Mr. P. look at me.

The next afternoon he didn't, either, but I was sure he sensed me there. The following day it went the same way. But on Thursday, Mr. P. leaned back in his chair, and our eyes met across the room. My heart skipped. For a moment I was at Dorrian's again, and this time his friend wasn't there, my friends weren't there; it was just us. He turned away.

Ruthie Kepner carried a Hello Kitty pencil case. She asked teachers questions just before the bell rang at the end of every class. And she had no idea that Kurt Cobain had just left America a suicide note. In April 1994, when Ruthie and her mother moved to Teaneck, New Jersey, from Mississippi, we were between national tragedies. My friends and I had been born too late to remember Kennedy's assassination or Vietnam, and 9/11 was still years away. The Berlin Wall was down and stocks were up, and the girls at Watson Junior High found only two passionate causes to unite them: mourning Nirvana's handsome lead singer and making fun of Ruthie.

My seventh-grade classmates shared the same styles, the same friends, even the same opinions. Ruthie was different. We called her “Crazy Kepner,” and from the day she transferred to our school, we found the divide between us both astonishing and threatening. A group of girls who've known one another forever, who think and act alike, will sometimes turn, hive-like, on a newcomer. Will leave her out of every game and conversation. Will laugh and point and gossip. That's what we did that spring.

If she minded, Ruthie didn't show it. She moved in an envelope of childish goodwill, smiling at us when we mimicked her slow drawl, ignoring the way our ranks closed against her at recess. Day after day, she floated by our tight-knit circles, her neon kneesocks a badge of courage, her untamable cloud of hair shooting careless wisps into the air.

I never questioned my allegiance to our cruelty. I was only eleven then, a whole year younger than most of my class, and I was in constant fear of talking, walking, or acting differently from the sleek, giggly girls who ruled my world. I didn't look very different from most of them, so it was only a matter of camouflaging my interior life: I kept the song lyrics I scribbled hidden in a notebook in my closet, and I never confided my secret to anyone, never shared my desperate dream of being a rock star. While my friends announced their futures as nurses or teachers or anchorwomen, I pictured myself a bitter poet-songstress like Courtney Love. If you had adored Kurt, of course, you were not supposed to like his loud and funky widow. But I was mad for her, and all my songs, like hers, were tortured howls about death and underwear.

Did you see the outfit Crazy Kepner wore today? Would you believe those sneaks? Where'd she get that hair?
It was easy to make myself one of the Chosen by talking about Ruthie, by repeating the things I heard my mother whisper to my father.
Mrs. Kepner lost her job in Jackson, and they got kicked out of their apartment. It's for sure they're on welfare. Guess how many wine bottles were in their garbage last week?

I owed such privileged information to the fact that Ruthie lived on the same street I did. But this slight edge was outweighed by the deep embarrassment of Ruthie herself. Because I was the only other girl in our class from her neighborhood, she decided, apparently, that we were friends. Even when I scattered books on all the chairs around me and told her they were saved, she tried to sit by me at lunch. She picked me for her partner in gym. And worst of all, she asked me over after school. Every afternoon she would devise some new temptation, some culinary or cultural pretext for my visit. “Hey, Cynthia,” she'd yell at my back as I raced away from my locker. “Wait up!”

In a shameless effort to avoid her, I would walk faster. Sometimes I was out the front door and around the corner before she caught up with me. “There's rocky road in the fridge,” she'd tell me, panting. Or “We got cable yesterday — all the premium channels.” Whenever Ruthie invited me over, I made excuses, winking and smirking at the girls who overheard us. I had a dentist appointment one day, a dance lesson the next. My mother needed me after school. I had to babysit, clean my room, do my math. I'd take off at top speed then, racing home to shut myself in my room and give air concerts in front of the mirror. I couldn't play the guitar and I wasn't inclined to learn. But I felt brave and experimental, wailing and gyrating in front of the glass. Courtney wasn't about music, anyway, I decided, so much as she was about living hard and traveling light.

The next day, Ruthie, who clearly couldn't take a hint, would try again. I wasn't sure if it was because she liked me or because she hoped that if I came home with her, the others would follow and the golden circle would open for her. Whatever the reason, Ruthie kept upping the ante: She promised we'd go to the mall. She told me she knew how to ride horses and that she would teach me. At recess, as I hurried over to the clutch of girls I always stood with, she would race behind me, waving movie tickets. At lunch, she dug into a wrinkled paper bag and unearthed timid offerings — Three Musketeers, Ring Dings, Mallomars, laying them without comment by my elbow.

As the bribes grew more tempting, I felt my resistance weakening. But it wasn't until Ruthie offered to trade seats with me in science that I gave in. The trade would put me right in back of Maynard Owens, the most popular boy in seventh grade. (He was wasted on Ruthie, anyway, who sat behind him all period, her round apple knees crossed above those awful socks, without ever passing him a note or breaking her pencil so she could ask him for a new one.) Okay, I agreed. I'd walk home with her after school. But just once. And only for a few minutes.

Lenore Kepner didn't own their home. She rented from a family who had moved out of the blowsy Victorian three blocks down from my corner. Those three blocks saw the houses change from neat colonials, with yards as leafless and bright as the plastic ones beside model railroads, to places my mother called “run down and left to die.” In the upper corners of the Kepners' wraparound porch, the gingerbread trim was full of holes like missing teeth. The porch itself was freighted with so many ancient appliances and pieces of abandoned furniture, it had the cockeyed, festive air of a permanent garage sale. In the backyard a seatless swing set rusted beside the carcass of a Dodge Charger.

Ruthie took me around the front of the house and let us in a side door. We went straight upstairs without hanging up our coats or stopping in the kitchen for snacks. I surveyed the dark living room as we passed, peered cautiously down the hall outside her bedroom. “Where's your mom?” I asked. My own mother had a strict rule: no guests unless she was home. She had other strict rules, too, including no shoes on the furniture, no eating in bed, and no running like a hellion.