ch.3

I wasn’t always The Weird Girl. Ok…I’m lying…I was. I was that chick in middle school that sat in the corner reading Jack Kerouac and waxed poetic about Andy Warhol. I was the one who, when I got a car, had everything from The Beatles to Eminem to Leona Lewis lying in the floorboard, and would pop them in almost at random. I was the one, whose hair color changed as often as most men changed their socks; the one who was always quiet, until I began talking about something and made everyone sit up and listen. I moaned and complained about The Preppie Girls, with their ponytails and bubblegum, trying to be all cute and virginal like Britney Spears (Hello, girls, that was the nineties. Get with the times or go all out and get frosted tips and dress in grunge like every other wannabe did in the nineties! Besides, Britney Spears wasn’t even a virgin in the nineties.) And hung out with the Punks, the Metal Heads, the Flirts, and the Tortured Poets. I was the one cracking jokes and laughing loudly at the lunch table. The only thing is that there’s a difference between being the Weird Girl Who Still Has Her Best Friends and being the Weird Girl Who Has Nobody Except that Crazy Voice in Her Head.

            Movies lie. Almost every movie that I’ve ever seen where the main character Has A Problem (which means anything from drinking too much to having too many piercings to sneaking out of the house at night- I’m sorry, I thought that was called Being a Teenager. ) has That Scene:  The Angry Teenager, coming home from a party at three in the morning or walking into the house with a black eye from an abusive boyfriend or stumbling around the house drunk/stoned/bleeding/pregnant,  facing her Tearful Parents who ask her What Happened, What They Did Wrong. Things turn tearful between all of them and the teenager, Overwrought by the Pain That She Has Brought upon Her Family, promises that things will be better.  But, in real life, there is no such scene. What happens can spring from anything: magazines, movies (really, the fat people are always the funny, ugly, fat friends? And this is supposed to mirror real life? Whose real life is this?!), family, even an off handed comment. Mine came a little bit from all.

            When I was in fifth and sixth grade, I lived with my father. Up until the time that I moved out, he was Daddy, the man who sang to me when I was little; who made all of my birthday cakes from scratch; the one who, over Christmas and for my birthday, took me to the bookstore, handed me a hundred dollars and told me to get whatever I wanted; the one who took me out for coffee (or hot chocolate in my case) at least once a week.  But, after I started developing, our relationship went downhill fast. I was built like my mother- all hips and thighs, with little on top (and then only after I turned sixteen), and for some reason, my dad didn’t understand this. I wasn’t fat by any means; I had the tiniest waist compared to the rest of my body and usually gained weight in my hips and thighs. I was never the girl that could wear a bikini, but was the one that could wear a short skirt, since my legs were one of the most muscular places on my body.

            One day I had gone out shopping with my friends, coming home with shopping bags full of clothes. It was about two weeks until our sixth grade graduation into seventh grade, and my best friend Keisha, was taking a group of us to the beach the next day after the ceremony. All of us had spent four or five hours trying on all kinds of outrageous outfits, with her finally settling on a cute little blue and green bikini and me finding an adorable black bikini top with red boy shorts. When I excitedly pulled this out, though, I was greeted with a disgusted look.

            “It looks really cute on, Daddy, I swear. Here,” I grab the bag and walk into the bathroom but, standing under the harsh fluorescent lights with the idea of criticism instead of encouragement waiting for me, I feel nauseous. Pulling the suit over my head and stepping into it, I stare into the mirror, pinching my side, feeling the years of fries and burgers, or late-night sundaes and pieces of leftover pumpkin pie and stuffing, I feel disgusted. The fat is spilling out of the top, I had gained five pounds of pure fat just on the ride home. I feel the bile rising in my throat, the fat spreading all over my body, covering the muscle with dimples and dimples of cellulite, the muscle dissolving, screaming in agony as the fat covers it. The fat smiles up at me, taunting me, while I pinch at it, wishing that it would just go away. I haven’t eaten that much, have I? I’m not that fat, am I? Yes, it seems to cry into my face, yes you are.

            I’d heard about eating disorders, of course. The Internet is what everyone blames for being anorexic, for learning the tricks and shortcuts of the trade,  but I rarely ever used the Internet for my information. I didn’t need to. I had something that was better, more accessible. Something that no one could monitor or change: the girl’s locker room. It was the place where everything flew between the lockers: stories about who was doing what (or who) in the woods behind the gym, gossip magazines, perfume, hair clips, the hottest, the newest, the sexiest, the sluttiest, the coolest, the funniest. It was where girls stood in front of the mirrors in their padded bras and bikini panties, pinching the insides of their thighs and complaining about how much they had eaten yesterday (like, oh my god, Becky, I ate three whole French fries! I’m such a pig!) . It was where girls traded tips, diet pills, excuses, laxatives. It was a dirtier place than any hovel in the ghetto could be, because it was much more accessible, and the prices were fair: if you didn’t tell anybody where you got what you had, if you lost the weight, if you found something better, if you shared and had the tips and tricks that made everybody else look like the Victoria’s Secret catalogue models, everyone would share. Now who said that my generation didn’t know how to share?

            The locker rooms were always freezing in the winter time: the windows stayed open in the vain hopes of diffusing the smell of sweat and the overpowering reek of twenty or thirty different perfumes, body sprays, and deodorants. Add to this the fact that many of the showers only sprayed a dribble of water so cold that it was a miracle that it didn’t come out as hail. I was one of those people that felt like if you could step out of the shower without your skin looking like you have just had the top two layers of your skin scrubbed off, then it was a waste of time to take a shower in the first place. But, seeing as how the gym was always twenty degrees hotter than the rest of the school and the gym teacher (a closeted lesbian like so many are down south; during the first few months of school, while all of the girls were changing, she would walk in, blow her whistle to get our attention, and then walk around, through all of the half-naked girls standing and staring at her.) decided that this week was the week that we were all going to learn to play volleyball, I had to shower, or else sit in the very back of my next four classes of the day and constantly feel like I reeked.

            Stepping out of the shower, I slide along the sides of the lockers, trying to get back to my locker as quickly as I possibly could without having to run in to anybody along the way. I clutch my towel to my (nonexistent) breasts, hearing the echo of my wet feet slapping the tile floor. It must be later than I thought; the locker room is almost empty. There are still a few people in here, but most of them are getting finished, shoving books and magazines into overstuffed backpacks, bumming pads and cigarettes, slamming lockers and twirling the dials, complaining about teachers, wondering if they can steal a kiss or two (or four or ten) from their boyfriends before their next classes, some girls lingering in the showers to steal a kiss or two from their girlfriend before class, making sure to hide carefully to keep away from being the newest scandal. I step into my panties quickly, hook my bra behind my back, and run my fingers through my wet hair, riffling in my backpack for a rubber band to pull my long, curly hair back with. Pulling my uniform skirt up over my knees, I hear two voices, so low that I wouldn’t have been able to hear them if they weren’t sitting in the next bank of lockers. Slowly, I put my backpack back on the floor: I was invisible, yes, but if anyone knew that I was in the locker room, they wouldn’t bother to finish their conversation, instead deciding to torture me- the freak.

            “Well, I noticed that I wasn’t losing much this week.”  I knew that voice. It was the voice that would sit behind me in Biology and poke me in the neck with her pencil, laughing when I jumped out of my skin. It was the face and the lips that would wrap around the Man of My Dreams (whose name, ironically, I don’t even remember now). Her name was Brittie  and She Was Perfect. Thin and blonde. The one girl that everyone- girl, boy, teacher, principal, police officer, straight, gay, questioning, a little bit of each- wanted to do. “So I told Daddy that I needed tampons and went to the CVS and asked the pharmacist. Said I was writing a paper on how girls our age lose weight. It took a little bit of flirting, and I had to kiss him in the back of the store, you know, give him a little feel to loosen up his morals,” I could almost hear her grinning, “and tighten up his pants, of course. Then he told me about this amazing prescription that he said would literally make you drop like twenty pounds in a week. The really really gross overweight people use it. I think it’s got, like, crack in it or something.” Oh thank god, I thought, for a few minutes there Brittie was sounding a little too intelligent. “But, anyway, he said that you weren’t supposed to buy it till you were, like, thirty or something. Until you were really old and fat and ugly and nobody would care if you were fat anymore because you were so damn ugly. But I got Rosita to go buy it for me. She’d do anything for her little Nina.”

            “What’s that mean?” he crony, a wannabe named Carmi (yes, they did all have names that ended in an “I” or a “y”.  Yet another reason we all thought that they were just clones of one another- increasingly more desperate, uglier copies of one another) whined. I slowly slid around the side of the lockers, peeking through the slats in one of the empty lockers that the teachers kept open after someone used one to store their pot on day and we all got busted. Carmi was sitting on the bench that ran in-between the two rows of lockers, pouting and smiling into her compact and squeezing the zits that congregated on her chin, making it always  look like pasta sauce just as it was bubbling on the stove, even under the two inches of makeup that she always wore. Her limp, dyed blonde hair was hanging in strings over her shoulders, the roots dark brown for at least two inches down from her part to the top of her forehead, her face plastered with makeup like oil paint. She looks up at Brittie, trying to smile and ending up looking like she was having menstrual cramps.

            “I don’t know. Like, beautiful or something. I think it’s like, German or something like that.” She replies, flipping her hair over her shoulder and reaching into her purse. She waves her hand: That Isn’t Important. “Here, you could use some of these, Carmi.” She passes a silver packet across the bench to Carmi, who takes it and sticks it in her purse, a complete copy of Brittie’s (except Carmi’s is just a really good knockoff). “Don’t take more than one every day. “

            “Why do you think I need these, Brit?” She whines.

            Brittie’s voice gets a mean edge in it, a razor blade hidden in a cupcake, “I saw you in the lunchroom he other day. Sloppy Joe day? If you keep scarfing them like that, hon, then you’re not gonna fit in those jeans that I got you for Christmas. You’ve already got rolls spilling over your shorts. You don’t need any more.”

            It was called a Slim Spray, a mystical mix of Hoodia, Chromium, and green tea that was supposed to suppress your appetite and reduce your food cravings. Just one little spray or one pill a day and you were good for hours! They were set up by the cash register at the JC Penny when Mom took me shopping for new school clothes. While she was off flipping through a rack of sizenegativezero jeans, I sidled up beside the register, grabbing one and slipping it across the glasscovered countertop to the sneering face of the cashier. She glances at me, then at the innocent looking red bottle in her hands, and raised her eyebrows. I shrug, LikeSheDoesn’tWantToLoseSomeWeight? FatUglyCowJudgementalOldBitch. When we got home that night, when Mom was snoring in her room, chainsawsnoringsoloudicouldhearitthroughthewalls, I got onto the computer, typing in the bottle’s name. There were websites-literally thousands of hits on Google in one tenth of a second- full of testimonials, thousands of them, telling how wonderful and convenient this spray was. Some of these women would post pictures; some of the men did, too. It seemed ironic to me that at the time, we were talking about the concentration camps of World War Two, because this is what the pictures reminded me of.

            The lights were off in Mr. Hershner’s class, which seemed to be all the license that some of the others in the class needed. Some were talking, whisperwhispers soft as the scurry of mice feet in the corners of the school; others were passing notes, slipping them into each other’s hands with just an occasional flash of white between the intertwined fingers. Three of the boys were having a contest to see who could hit various objects in the room with spitballs and, by the end of the class, the face of the clock, the chalkboard, desks, and, oddly enough, the ceiling were all plastered with the small white and blue striped balls of paper. Some of the other boys were having a farting contest, seeing who could literally gas us out of the room. At one point, it got so bad that I thought for a second that I could see the haze floating an inch off of the ground, looking just like the fog when I went running in the mornings, before the sun had come up. But something told me that it would take more than a few hours of sun to burn this haze off.

            I was sitting by myself in the back corner of the room, huddled in Lee’s track sweatshirt, pulled down over my knees, the sleeves pulled down almost to my fingernails. Trying to concentrate in this class, the last one before lunch, was almost impossible, and some days Mr. Hershner didn’t even try, instead popping a video that only distantly related to anything that we were studying in class at the time, into the VCR player that made us all think of Jurassic Park, and propping his feet up on his desk to surf the internet for, we all suspected, gay porn sites. (The man wore way too much hair gel and had fantastic fashion sense- need I say any more?) The fact that it was one of the only classes that I didn’t have with Lee, and that it was an extended period to fit in the three lunch periods made it even harder to concentrate. But today, I was having almost no problem paying attention as the camera panned across the worst concentration camp, Auschwitz, taking in the skeletal faces and emaciated bodies of the men and women that were rescued. Brittie and Carmi were sitting in front of me, paying attention as well for once. Before the video was even on, they were pulling their small travel-sized bottles of nail polish out of their rip-off designer purses, already trading them back and forth over the small faux wood tops of the desks, wondering which shade would look best on their skin tones and moaning about the sad lack of true colors for cool skin colors with yellow and blue undertones (whatever that meant) these days (as if they knew any other days). But as soon as the announcer said something about the rescued, who were fed little by little because they were so thin, the two perked up. It was almost like seeing our English Springer when we took him out in the field and he heard a bird, his head coming up, and his ears perking to stand straight up on his head. If the two girls were dogs, their tails would be wagging. As the camera panned over the chain-link fence with the emaciated men and women lined up behind it, I swear I heard Carmi sigh. Looking up, I could see the reflection of tears in her eyes in the dim light of the TV screen, “Beautiful.” She whispered, softly, her eyes gazing at the screen like it was a long-lost lover.