Two Girls Fat and Thin (14 page)

These feelings were magnified by Emotional, who, within a few months, became something other than human. Justine always joined in the teasing, yet the sight of Emotional’s unhappy face brought darkness up from some thoughtless pit within her, made her turn away and frown when she should’ve been laughing. When she looked at Emotional she looked into the face of her most private fantasy, the victim crucified before a jeering crowd.

To Justine’s discomfort, Emotional began appearing in her dreams. The most outstanding of these dreams featured her and Emotional in the front-line trenches of a war. There were other people in the trench, but there existed between her and the class queer a deep unspoken friendship that was expressed in meaningful glances and, at one point, a fraught hand clasping. The height of the dream was reached when Justine lay injured and paralyzed from an enemy blast, and Emotional ran to her side, ripping off a piece of her blouse to bind Justine’s wounds.

It was perplexing: in many of the dreams Emotional helped or
even rescued Justine in various ways, which in real life she couldn’t possibly do. If anything, brooded Justine, she could help Emotional if she wanted to.
If
she wanted to. Of course, she didn’t want to, but what if she did? She began to nurse strange fantasies of advising Emotional on how to improve her wardrobe, even accompanying her to the mall for a shopping trip, sitting with her at lunch, walking home with her, hearing the weird things that doubtless went on in her mind.

Emotional reappeared in her dreams, smiling and waving.

One morning after a particularly mysterious and moving dream, Justine found herself in a gym class that had been divided into groups, each group performing various athletic acts. Emotional was in her group. As usual, whenever it was Emotional’s turn, the others would try to make her fail. When everyone had to jump over a pole held by two kneeling girls, all would finish their jump with a pause by a pole-bearer and a whispered “make Emotional trip!” Which they did; when Emotional made her jump, the pole came up mid-leap. There was an amusing facial wobble, a mid-air flounder, and Emotional thudded down on her hands and knees. She cried; everybody laughed and said, “God, Emotional!” But Justine, although she laughed too, felt unwanted remorse. This remorse became a secret weight of gentleness and sorrow within her which stayed, no matter how hard she tried to kill it. That afternoon she decided she was going to stop hurting Emotional.

She didn’t want to voice her new tolerance to anyone at school, but what good was it if nobody knew about it? If Emotional didn’t know about it? She would see Emotional and itch with curiosity about her. What did it feel like to be despised and victimized by everyone? How would Emotional react if she knew that in this nest of enemies she had an ally?

One day when Justine’s pack of friends was not with her at the end of the day, she found herself a bare three feet from Emotional, both of them in the act of closing their lockers. Justine couldn’t help it; she turned her head and held the other girl’s flitting glance. “Hi, Cheryl,” she said.

They left school together and continued walking for a few blocks before they had to part. Justine did this because it was late and she didn’t see anyone she knew and because the novelty of talking with
this outcast was too fascinating to let go of quickly. But mainly she walked with Emotional because when she allowed contact to occur between them, she was touched by her in a way she had no experience with and therefore no resistance against. Every aspect of Emotional’s body—the shy ducking motion of her head, her injured eyes, her small steps, her arms held protectively close to her body, her soft dislocated voice—was the manifestation of a deep woundedness which Justine, without the harsh interference of her friends, felt acutely. She wanted to salve this wound, to shield it. It was a feeling she hadn’t had for a long time, not even for herself, and it was such a tender feeling that she wanted to prolong it.

That night as she lay in bed, she fantasized about standing between Emotional and the whole brutish world, protecting her, creating a little place between them where she’d be free to like her hillbilly music and wear her uncool clothes and nobody would mind.

She unexpectedly got the chance to act out this fantasy when the next day, before school, she was confronted during the usual pre-class homeroom melee by Debby, Deidre and another girl with terrifying big black hair. They wanted to know: “Are you friends with Emotional?”

She was only telling the truth when she said “No,” but then they wanted to know if it was true she’d walked with her.

“I just wanted to see the queer kinds of things she’d talk about. I just wanted to know what weirdos say. I was pretending to be nice, but she could tell I hated her.”

Later that day she and Dody were alone, ratting their hair in the rest room after school. “Do you really hate Emotional?” Justine asked.

Dody stopped in midrat and stared. “Of course I hate her, what are you, some kind of retard?”

“No really, why do you hate her?”

“Because she’s retarded.”

“Yeah but if she’s retarded, shouldn’t we help her? Shouldn’t we be nice to her if she can’t help being weird?”

“God, Justine, sometimes I wonder about you.” Dody produced a compact and vigorously ground some pink grit into her skin.

The next day Justine had to put up with a lot of sarcastic comments.
But she found that once she’d begun expressing what she felt, it was hard to stop; she became reckless, irritated by the choke collar of public opinion. Although she was frightened, she couldn’t help yanking against the restraint, and the more disapproval she got, the harder she tugged against it. A tough little person within her rose and asserted itself. She stuck by what she’d said, more and more vehemently, until finally she exploded. “I don’t care what you douche-bags do. I’m not gonna hate Emotional anymore so just shut up, okay?” The other girls stared at her, shocked.

They began savaging poor Emotional even more viciously than before, especially in Justine’s presence. But there was a lack of confidence in their voices as they picked and abused. After a few days it became half-hearted and then stopped. The subject of Emotional was all but dropped in the lunchroom, where Justine sat in her usual place among the others, defiantly eating her dried-up burger and fries.

It was during gym class that the miracle occurred; the girls were dividing into teams, the most popular ones ritually selecting their team mates, when Debby suddenly bawled out, “I want Cheryl! Cheryl Thomson!” There was a moment of silence, and then someone on the other team said, “Aw! I wanted her!” in a voice usually used to coo over the cuteness of babies and bunnies.

Emotional took her place on the team looking like she’d been hit in the head with a brick and was stoically preparing for another blow. She played her usual clumsy but serviceable game, and every successful move she made was wildly cheered with greeting-card enthusiasm while her fumbles were loudly excused in the same awful tone. Her expression throughout was the same as when she was abused: hurt, bewildered, remote. Did she have any suspicion that she was a new fad?

It lasted for a few weeks. In the lunchroom, in the halls, on teams of all kinds, Emotional was the hip thing. Her presence was demanded everywhere although she didn’t say or do much but stare, sad and frozen. This was further proof of her exotic idiocy, and they cooed and twinkled over her as if she were a wounded animal in a box.

Justine didn’t know what to think. She felt ashamed and angry. The sound of the others “being nice to Emotional” was even worse
than their cruelty—her cruelty—which at least had been a clear, consistent message, potentially refutable by its recipient. This insulting mockery of friendship hadn’t been what she had imagined when she’d resolved to be kind, but she was afraid to interfere again.

Mercifully, they soon got bored with it, and the gym teacher had once more to force a reluctant, groaning team to accept Emotional. There was some change, however; after such an elaborate show of friendship and kindness, it was hard for them to revert completely to all-out sadism, and all but the meanest kids pretty much ignored her. She finished out the school year as a lumbering ghostly presence, her humanity unknown and unacknowledged.

When Justine started seventh grade
in the new junior high, Deidre, who had breasts and hair between her legs, began seeing a boy from the eighth grade. He went to a different junior high school across town; she had met him while sitting beside the copper cube fountain in the mall, smoking a cigarette alone. His name was Greg Mills. He had a concave torso, thin legs, narrow eyes, long lank hair, and red pimples which only added to his lurid charm. He wore a black vinyl windbreaker and spoke in monosyllables. Justine was secretly uncomfortable around him and wondered why, if he was so cool, he didn’t have a girlfriend his own age.

Deidre described going with him and his friends to an empty housing development, breaking into one of the finished houses, and throwing a party with their transistor radios, smoking, drinking, making out, and doing it, leaving ashes and stains on the bedspread of the display bedroom. It shocked and thrilled Justine to picture them sitting in the cold deserted rooms with their jackets on, smoke and alcohol in their throats. She imagined Deidre pulling her ski pants off, her bottom on the bedspread, the mattress naked underneath. She would be all goose flesh and tiny leg hairs sticking up, her feet clammy, her genitals hairy and weird between her big thighs. Did Greg pull her legs apart and look at her or did he just stick his thing (reportedly hairy itself) inside her in the dark? Did he take off his pants and show
his
butt or did he just unzip? Justine would look at Greg and decide that either way was nasty and exciting. She admired Deidre tremendously.

Deidre began asking if they wanted to come with her some time. “Not to some scuzzy development,” said Justine. “I don’t wanna freeze my butt.” Neither did anybody else until one Saturday Deidre called Justine and Dody and told them Greg’s parents had left for the day, that he was inviting over some really cute eighth grade guys, did they want to come?

Greg’s house was just like Justine’s and Dody’s and everyone else’s. Greg and Deidre were on the couch, and there were two other boys, one of them with the empty pretty eyes of a TV star. Justine saw, with a rush of excitement and fear, that they were drinking alcohol mixed with Coca-Cola. She didn’t want to drink it, but she didn’t want to say no in a prudish way, so when one of them offered it to her, she turned it into an occasion for sexual tension, saying, “Uh uh, I know what you guys are trying to do!” “Yeah,” said Dody, taking her cue, “you wanna get us drunk and make us do things.” She smiled in fake innocence, fake sophistication, and real sexuality. Her gold eyes were half-lidded and glinting.

The boys liked this. “You’d better be good,” said Greg. “We’re baby-sitting you seventh graders, and if you don’t do what we say, you’re gonna get it.”

The game was on. They sat on the couch, moving closer and closer, the boys getting drunk, the girls getting giggly and excited. They teased and flirted and made fun of each other, the boys commanding the girls to do things, like pick a piece of paper up off the floor. The girls would fiercely resist and then do it, pouting and flouncing. There was a thick current of feeling coursing through the room, a wide band of glittering yellow-gold that swept them off the floor and into another sphere. At first Justine stood aloof and looked at this process with wonder; then she let it move her.

Greg and Deidre left the room, disappearing behind a closed door. The two other boys became rougher and more demanding; one of them told Dody to make him a drink, and when she didn’t move fast enough, he grabbed her hair and pulled her toward the kitchen. “You leave my friend alone!” Justine yelled in the phony little-girl voice employed by sluts and whores the world over (and she an actual little girl!) as she leapt up to grab the boy’s shirt, pummeling his back with deliberate futility. She and Dody overpowered him and pinned him to the wall, greedily savaging him with
tickling fingers until his friend leapt off the couch and the girls ran screaming until they were cornered in a parental closet.

“You guys are really gonna get it now,” advised the blank-eyed boy. “You have to stay in here and wait while we decide what we’re gonna do. You have to stand back to back with your hands behind you.”

The boys left the room, and they did as they were told, standing and telling each other how afraid they were in thrilled voices. “Do you think we should try and run for it?” asked Dody. “No, we’d better not,” Justine said. “They’d really kill us then.” Justine thought of her parents sitting at the table eating dinner, her mother daintily picking an errant morsel from her teeth, and for a minute she actually did feel afraid. What if she really was in another sphere and couldn’t get back to the old one? Then she relaxed; but of course, it would be as simple as the times she lay in bed and, putting her hand between her legs, became a victim nailed to a wall, and then, as her body regained its tempo, became Justine once more.

The boys came back into the room. One of them said, “Okay LaRec, follow me.” And Dody sneering, “Oh, I’m really scared,” followed him into the bathroom, visible at the end of a short hall, leaving Justine to stare at this pretty-eyed creature with chiseled features, peachy skin, and no human expression. Her heart pounded. She wanted to sit down. He forbade her. He told her his friend was “going to strip Dody and finger her.” Her underwear became wet. She told him Dody was probably beating his friend’s butt, but no sound of butt-beating emanated from the bathroom. They stood silently, Justine’s breath getting quicker and shallower, every detail of the boy’s bored, sideways-looking face becoming larger by the moment. She felt as if he were right next to her, his breath filling her pores, his smell up her nose. The longer they stood the more genuinely afraid she became. The more afraid she became, the more bolted to the floor she was, her armpits damp, her throat closed, her pelvis inflamed and disconnected from her body, her head disconnected from her neck. She heard Deidre laughing in the bedroom.