11:46. the lights on the clock glow in the dark of my bedroom when I roll over, not able to sneak, being too excited. For the last three years, I have done everything in my power to keep away from all of the “extracurricular activities” that my peers were busy doing. While they were out parked in their boyfriend’s cars, I was sitting in the floor of my room reading next week’s assignment. While they were thinking about how they could sneak out to see that hot new Ashton Kutcher movie at midnight, I was thinking about if I could write my paper on Keats instead of Hemmingway this year. When everyone else was screaming the chants along with the cheerleaders at the pep rally, I was tucked into a corner of the library banging my head against the wall trying to figure out Geometry proofs. But tonight, the week before my last week as a senior, I was going to finally be one of Those Kids.
It was tradition at the school for the seniors to have a prank. Every year, the pranks became more and more elaborate, the years before locked in perpetual sibling rivalry for the attention of the faculty. The ultimate goal, I suppose, was to be threatened with a withheld diploma. Supposedly, this was better than any other recognition during high school. Oh, you were the captain of the football team? Ok, well, that’s good, I guess. You were published in a nationwide newsletter of high school writers? Oh, great. You got threatened with a withheld diploma because of a high school prank?! Dude!! That’s freaking awesome!
How I got sucked into this, I’m not quite sure. There was a meeting after third period, and at first it was just because Lee dragged me to the meeting, promising that it would get me out of ten or twenty minutes of the most boring class on the planet- PreCalculus. So, perched on a rat-gnawed lab stool in the back of the Biology classroom, batting away Lee’s hands from giving me a gyno exam under the table, I listen as the class president outlines the ideas for the senior prank, and we all vote. Then, I watch in horror as I raise my hand to volunteer to help.
Quietly, I slip out of bed and pull on the outfit that I’ve had laid out on my bed since five o’clock last night. Black t-shirt, black jeans, black hoodie and hat. Tiptoeing down the hall, I slide the door open and smile, looking out to see Lee leaning on the hood of his Jeep, grinning at me, doubled over against the cold. We slip into the car and drive to the school, where most of the senior class has congregated outside of the school, looking just as nervous as I’m feeling. Looking around in the half-light from the lights on in the front of the school, we all look as if we’re five years old, playing dressup in our older sibling’s clothes, fear at being found out and excitement painted on our faces at the same time. Silently, the president pulls a key out of her jacket pocket, the silver glinting in the moonlight, and smiles. The vice-president moves among the group, dividing us up into the groups that would take over the different parts of the prank. Even though I’m holding on to Lee’s arm for dear life, he taps me gently on the shoulder. “Lil, can you help with the tree? It’s not heavy, I swear, but there’s not many that would take that.” I look up, horrified, doeeyes pleasepleaseplease don’t separate us. But he looks at me, expecting me to comply. Come on, Lil, get it together, you can live for a half hour without your boyfriend attached to your hip. But I’m not so sure anymore, stuck in front of the school, vulnerable with his hoodie wrapped around my once-again ever-shrinking waist.
Jeffery is the goody goody of the school. The All-American Boy: basketball player, track runner, sophomore and Jr. Year class president, SGA class president, the Best and the Brightest of the School. I get paired up with him and Joshua, one of The Bad Boys who I sat next to in our Anatomy class last year. I smile at him. He laughed at the word “penis”.
Breathe fogs up the air in front of me, making it opaque in front of me. I lean my head back and breathe into the air, making the clouds puff up between me and the stars glittering like diamonds above us. Jeffery and Joshua stand in front of me, smiles pasted on their faces, looking at me curiously, not quite sure how to react to this strange girlwoman in front of them that they’ve never had much contact with and ending up looking a bit uncomfortable at the idea. “C’mon, Lil. We got three or four trees that we gotta get outta here or else the rest of the class is gonna have our heads. So here’s the plan…” they both crouch down on either side of the tree, grasping it by its trunk and the bottom branches, and braces their feet. “It’s not that heavy so with the three of us it should be fine. We’ll make short work of this and you can go find your boyfriend.” They grin, trying to make me feel better about myself, trying to make me think that everything would be ok, little did they know.
“On three, y’all.” Jeffery calls to the two of us. “One…two….three.” We all lift, rising from crouchingonourkneestakeakneesomeone’shurt position, and I immediately feel the lightness in my chest, that feeling like someone has just taken a scalpel to my chest, cutting me open like the frogs that we dissected three months ago, letting all of the cold air into my insides, freezing my heart, my lungs, the blood pumping through my veins, all in one fell swoop. I feel my legs give out from under me, and roll back onto my butt to try not to break anything when I go down, curling up into myself. I lay on the ground, feeling it pressing up to meet me, inviting me to come curl up under it and be warm, to leave everyone who’s rushing to me, to leave Lee who’s dropped the duct tape and let go of the ladder that he was holding as soon as he heard me hit the ground and started sprinting so that he could be the first one to get to me. To leave, to curl up and be warm, to curl up and just let everything drift back into place, like the Red Sea after the Hebrews walked through it, the gravitational pull of the earth pulling the hole that I would leave closed.
The grass is wet beneath my back, soaking into my t-shirt and making the cut from where I fell the other day sting. My hair is sticking everywhere, my cheeks, my back, my neck, where ever it touches, it sticks. The earphones are blaring in my ears, blocking out everything else in my mind, for once making Miranda shut up and leave me alone. I’m staring at the stars, glimmering in the sky like the dioramas that we made when I was little and we were learning about space. I almost suspected that if I were God, I could look down into the little box that was earth, with the flashlight set up behind the black piece of satin that had holes punched in it with a sewing needle. The kitchen window is open and Mom’s voice drifts out of it. She’s singing to the radio while she cleans up the kitchen, making believe that for once she didn’t have a fuck up of a daughter that she always had to sit and watch: sit and watch when she wakes up in the morning to make sure she showered without “accidentally” cutting her legs or under her arms in the shower; watching as she weighed herself to make sure that she wasn’t cheating or lying about how much weight she had gained; watching as she packed her bags for school and watching as she dressed to make sure that she had what she needed and that she would be warm enough going from class to class. Watching to make sure that she swallowed her vitamins and medications and that she had something in her stomach- both so that she wouldn’t get sick from the medication on an empty stomach and so that she wouldn’t pass out and get into an accident on the way to school. Watching when she came home, to make sure that she was ok and hadn’t had a bad day; watching the calendar to know when the time was to take her to see her therapist, her nutritionist , her counselor for school. Watching to make sure that she ate when she got home and that she ate at dinner. Watching to make sure that she didn’t break something from a small fall on the ice outside of the door, or the puddle that most people would just dust themselves off from. Watching to make sure that the doctors ran the right test to make sure that The Incident wouldn’t happen again, that she would be able to watch her baby grow up and move off and get married and have babies. Constantly watching, it’s no wonder that she needed a break- even if it was just a twenty minute break while she washed the dishes, peering out of the window every so often to make sure that her baby was still ok, laying in the grass in the front yard, staring at the sky like an infant with a pair of diamond earrings.
The music is so loud in my ears that I don’t hear Lee come up, I see his shadow fall across my stomach, my chest, my neck, engulfing me like it feels when we’re in my bed and he’s forgetting everything, forgetting to be careful and letting himself go like he did before I had The Incident. He smiles down at me, his teeth glittering in the lights from the porch light, and lays down beside me, plucking my earphone out of one ear and putting it into his. He runs his hand down my arm and pulls my hand into his paw of a hand that can engulf my entire hand without even trying. I shiver, like I always do when someone’s interrupted me- it’s like my mind automatically drifts off when I’m alone, going over the philosophical things that all of the girls told me they thought of right before they tried to check out, their minds “drifting” or “going AWOL” for a little bit- and I have to snap back from wherever my mind has been. It’s a very discombobulating experience and I don’t like it. Not one bit.
“Whatcha thinking about, Lil?” he asks, “You looked like you were a million miles away from me.”
“Do you ever think about what happens after we die, Lee? I mean, do you think there’s really a heaven or a hell and that someone judges us to see which we go to?”
“I don’ know, Lilla. I think that I got fed too much Southern Baptist fire and brimstone shit to believe in anything now. I’m the only man in my family that hasn’t considered a vocation in the church.” He’s quite for a bit. “I don’t think that anyone’s really evil, though. I mean, of course, there’s some exceptions- Hitler and Mussolini- you know people like that….”
I shiver a bit, “My father.” I whisper.
Lee nods, “Yeah, people like that. The people that you read about or hear about that you think ‘how is that one person so evil? What happened to make them that way?’ So, yeah, I guess in one way there is a place that those people go, maybe it’s to heal, maybe it’s to pay off a debt that some deity believes they owe for the evil that they inflicted when they were here on earth. But the regular people that are “evil”…” he makes the air quotes, “No, I don’t think that they would go to the same place.”
“Dante thought that there were seven levels of hell.”
“Now, when the hell did you read Dante?”
I shrug, “I had a lotta time when I was in recovery. I read Dante ‘cause Ms. Strauss said that I’d find them mentally stimulating.”
He laughs, wrapping one arm around my waist, “You read so much, baby girl, and you should be a lit critic.”
I laugh, “Yeah, right. If I ever make up my mind I’ll probably stay away from that- too much pressure. You know me, I want to make everybody happy, and that job requirement calls for people that really don’t give a fuck what others think about them and what they say.” I sigh, “But, really, I’ve gone in circles about that and couldn’t ever come up with an answer.”
“Well, we know that theologian or priest is out for you then.”
“Never know, if Sinead O’Conner can do it, I think that I could too.”
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