Frenemy of the People Page 3

  I wondered if a creepy predator would zero in on Desi as someone he could take advantage of. Who was I kidding, of course he would. You can tell right away when you look at Desi that she has Down syndrome, because she’s petite and has a snubby little nose. Her skin has a softer look, maybe because she has low muscle tone. When she’s thinking hard about something, sometimes she lets her mouth hang open a little bit. I don’t even know exactly what it is that makes someone look like they have Down syndrome, but I can spot someone who has Down syndrome from fifty feet away with their back turned, just from a glimpse of one ear. When Desi talks, her speech is a bit unclear. We look a lot alike—we both have a dusting of freckles across our noses and arched eyebrows that are darker than our hair, which give us a permanently surprised look. We both have brown hair, but hers is much nicer. Hers is extremely lustrous and shiny and has these streaks of honey color in it, like a shampoo commercial model, whereas mine is lank and plain brown. The highlights I put in myself are not as nice as her natural ones. She has glasses, though, and hearing aids, and I think people see those things first and think she’s homely.

  “Quit looking at me,” Desi said without turning from the window.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. I stared out the opposite window of the bus, hoping I would get my own car for my birthday this winter. I didn’t care if it wasn’t anything fancy as long as it wasn’t embarrassing. A Toyota Corolla would be totally fine. Desi had taken driver’s ed and had passed the written test, and she had been taking driving lessons for a while now. Most people with Down syndrome don’t ever get their licenses, but some of them do, and Desi really wanted it.

  I realized I wasn’t paying attention to where we were. I poked Desi, who was listening to her iPod way too loud.

  “Are you paying attention to the stops?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said too loudly because of the music.

  “I’m only coming with you this one time,” I told her. “You better learn the route.”

  She waved me off.

  I figured she was totally bs-ing me, but what could I do?

  Then I started worrying about the kissing thing again.

  I poked Desi again. “How do you know you like boys?” I asked her.

  She gave me a weird look. “What?”

  “How did you know you liked them? Before you ever started dating Bryan, before you ever kissed a boy.”

  Bryan is her boyfriend. She met him at this disco night for teens with disabilities. At first I thought he was a total loser, but I got used to him.

  “I just knew,” she told me, looking at me like I was stupid. “I always wanted to kiss a boy. I practiced kissing my Joe Jonas poster.”

  Luckily it turned out the place where Desi needed to get off the bus was really obvious, and I was sure she’d have no difficulty. The dance studio was in a kind of seedy shopping plaza where half the stores were vacant. I had my doubts about this whole endeavor. We went into the dance studio and introduced ourselves to the teacher. Then Desi went into the locker room to change, and I stepped back outside into the parking lot. I was not going to sit and watch a bunch of grown adults learn modern dance. I’m sure they wouldn’t appreciate having an audience either.

  I surveyed the small strip of stores. Mom owed me big-time for this. There was a drugstore, a run-down-looking store that seemed to sell balloons and watchbands but it was closed for the day, a Laundromat, and a head shop called Purple Haze.

  Then I saw Ramona Hoskins coming out of the head shop. Ramona Hoskins, who went by Ramone, had graduated from Parlington High School last June. She was the only other out lesbian I had ever met. Well, met in the sense of I knew who she was because she was in all the school plays and also mock trial. I’m not sure she knew me. She had dated that awful Lexie. They were both into left-wing things and being strident and frowny, but I got the impression that Ramone was basically a normal person, unlike Lexie.

  Here was my chance to get some girl action.

  She was heading toward a beat-up Ford Pinto. I had to intercept her before she left.

  “Hey! Hey, Ramone!”

  I had to sprint across practically the entire parking lot, yelling. By the time I got there, I was winded. She was standing in front of her car with her key in the lock, looking quizzical. She was tall and had a striking pale face, with high cheekbones and dyed red hair. She was holding an unlit cigarette in the other hand.

  “You’re Ramone Hoskins,” I said, panting.

  “Uh-huh. I am aware of that,” she said coolly.

  “I go to Parlington,” I told her. “I’m a junior this year.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  She wasn’t making this easy. Did lesbians have to be unfriendly? What was a good pickup line? I remembered one—Did your dad have sex with a carrot?—but that didn’t seem like a winner.

  “You have beautiful eyes,” I told her. Did she? Eh, they were okay. “Was your father a thief who stole stars from the sky?”

  “What?” she said, narrowing her supposedly starlike eyes. She opened the door of her Pinto.

  “No! Wait! That was supposed to be a pickup line, but I think I got it wrong,” I said hurriedly. “I was just wondering if you’d like to go out with me.”

  She smiled and looked more pleasant. “That is really sweet, and you are totally adorable, but I’m actually leaving for college in like four hours. My parents are driving me. I should have been there already for orientation, but I had a bad asthma attack. Peter Tosh says marijuana is good for asthma, so I decided to buy some supplies that I don’t know if you can get in Norton, Massachusetts.”

  I didn’t understand how inhaling smoke of any kind could be good for asthma, but I put that thought aside.

  “Well, maybe I can just give you a kiss then?” I blurted out. “A good-bye kiss?”

  She laughed and slammed the car door shut. “Am I even awake?” she asked herself. Then she took three steps over to me and kissed me on the lips.

  I knew right away I was totally bisexual.

  It felt completely different from kissing Slobberin’ Robert. I don’t know if it’s a boy-girl thing, or if everyone just kisses differently. Her lips were the softest thing I had ever encountered in my life. I felt as if I was having an out-of-body experience; everything was gone except for the kissing. She touched the back of my head and stroked my hair lightly.

  Then she released me. “Well, I’ll definitely never forget you, whoever you are,” she said.

  “I hope you like college.”

  She got in her car, slammed the door, and started it up. The engine coughed twice and then caught. She left the parking lot waving at me. I made buckle-your-seat-belt motions, but she still hadn’t done it by the time she was out of sight. I had a big stupid grin on my face. I was a real bisexual, and no mean girl could say I wasn’t.

  Chapter Four

  Lexie

  By the end of the first day of school, I had a plan.

  I would apply to Simon’s Rock. This was a college about an hour and a half north of here, in Massachusetts, that accepted sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. It was for people who wanted to go to college early and skip the end of high school.

  That would solve all my problems. I could even apply for the next semester. By January, I could be out of my stupid school and my stupid home and in some college dormitory. Perfect.

  There were only two potential stumbling blocks. They might not take me because of my spotty grades. Also, my parents might not agree.

  My parents wouldn’t get home until seven thirty p.m. at the earliest. What can I say, they’re hard workers. My mom worked in New York City at a too-big-to-fail investment bank and had a long commute. It kills me that my mom works for one of the most evil companies in America. You can see why I had to be twice as righteous to make up for the stain on my family escutcheon. My father used to work in New York City too, for Goldman Sachs, but then he became an arbitrageur and started his own company. His office was only a few miles away, but h
e just always worked late.

  They worked hard and they also vacationed hard. Three weeks out of the year, they went on exquisite trips. Zip lines in Costa Rica, wine tastings in France, bike tours in Holland. They used to take me until I became too pimply and difficult. When they went away, they would hire Mrs. Álvaz the housekeeper to stay with me. I know this sounds like the clichéd scenario of a poor little rich girl raised by her loving Latina housekeeper, but that’s not how it was. Mrs. Álvaz and I have a cordial but distant relationship. She was actually the head of a housekeeping empire and was putting her daughter through Yale, so she didn’t have time to get chummy with the customers’ kids. Also, don’t forget how pimply and difficult I was.

  I could not wait to go to college. It was immaterial to me what I would be studying. I wasn’t really that into studying. I just wanted to have a great time being difficult, all by myself. The roommate thing could not possibly be as bad as the parents or high school thing.

  Mom got home right at seven thirty and juiced herself some carrots and celery in the Breville juicer. I knew better than to greet her until after she drank it. She had to eat really healthy because she was extremely old. She was forty-four years old when I was born, making her now sixty. She was planning to retire in a few years. Still, for her age she was in great shape. A lot of other mothers are these schlubby, comfortable people in sweatpants. My mom was always rail thin, exquisitely tailored, and perfectly poised. Before I was born she had no less than three miscarriages, and so presumably she cherished me very much.

  My mom liked me to present her with important information concisely and immediately, the same way she received presentations at work. I had to talk to both my parents in a certain way that, frankly, was not normal. So as soon as she smacked her empty glass down on our Caesarstone counter, I told her, “My first day of school was fine. I have a permission slip for you to sign for a school trip, and I am planning to apply to Simon’s Rock, which is a very well-regarded college that accepts only sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds into its freshperson class.”

  “As a woman who has succeeded in a male-dominated industry, I see no point in these craven euphemisms such as herstory, freshperson, and server instead of waiter or waitress,” she said. She had a bit of green on the corner of her mouth. I indicated to my own mouth, and she wiped hers with a paper towel.

  “Duly noted,” I said.

  “This is for next fall you’re talking about?”

  “No, for the spring semester, starting in January.”

  “What gave you this idea? When did you come up with this?”

  “I went to the guidance office today and asked if there was any way to graduate from high school early. The guidance counselor—counselorette? she was a female—gave me a brochure.”

  I didn’t say that she also told me it was unlikely I would get in.

  “So, a well-thought-out plan then. We’ll ask your father. It’s up to him.”

  My father came home half an hour later. He had brought a big greasy hamburger for himself, a big greasy veggie burger for me, and lots of fries. He was always very thoughtful about bringing me my favorite treats. Except for me being a vegan now, we liked the same foods. Maybe that’s because he truly was biologically my father. I was technically not related genetically to my mom at all. I was the product of my father’s sperm and the egg of a woman of the highest pedigree, fertilized in a petri dish and then implanted into my mom. For my money, though, carrying a fetus for nine months and then giving birth to it makes you a mom, and my mom and I did have an authentic relationship. My relationship with my father was always a little more tenuous. I never knew where I was with him. My mom, I got her totally figured out. Love her or hate her, she was very consistent. My dad mystified me.

  I set the table with some nice placemats and dishes to eat our greasy burgers off of, because that’s one of my mom’s pet peeves. My dad tucked into his burger with abandon. He was a big man, and his nicely tailored suits couldn’t hide his belly. He was also going quite bald. He was only forty-eight and he was my mom’s trophy husband, if you will, but now gone to seed. I didn’t really believe in all these superficial judgments about personal appearance, but I knew what they were and that they were important to the world.

  “So, Dad, you know how you were telling me to turn my grades around?” I said.

  Actually, he just said, “This sucks,” when he saw my last report card. But I figured he liked when I implied that he was doing all this great fatherly stuff like encouraging me to do better in school and taking an interest in me.

  Actually, who was I kidding? I was the one who liked to pretend all this.

  He grunted.

  “I am absolutely going to get better grades,” I said. “And you know what else? There’s this amazing college that takes seventeen-year-olds. If I get in, I can start college in January. Isn’t that amazing? I’m going to start working on my application tonight. I could jump-start my whole life and really turn things around.”

  “High school—best years of your life,” he rumbled. He has this deep voice, and I could feel it vibrating through my chest.

  “Not my life, Dad. I think college will be the best years of my life.”

  “Then you’ll have to pay for it yourself,” he said. “I’m not falling for this scheme. You’re not going to college until you graduate from high school the normal way. I know you. You’ll drop out. Then you’ll have no college degree and no real high school diploma either.”

  “Thanks for considering this,” I said. “We’ll talk more.”

  I took my half-eaten veggie burger out to the backyard where I kept a compost pile. Our yard is huge, so I had to walk for what seemed like miles. But the compost was gone. My dad must have told Finbar the gardener to get rid of it. My parents liked to waste as much of everything as possible and use the most planet resources they could, so they hated stuff like recycling and compost.

  Disgusted, I tossed the veggie burger over the fence to the neighbor’s immaculately groomed yard. I would either hear about this until the end of my days, or I would get away with it. Then I went up to my room and put on really loud music and punched my pillows. I looked in the mirror. My clothes and my spiky blue hair looked tough, but my face looked wan and sad. What a pathetic-looking girl. Even the straight-edge tattoo I had on the back of my hand looked stupid. Usually it made me happy and proud to have a tattoo that proved I was punk rock and vegan, and didn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs. But I was too demoralized to be happy and proud.

  This fight was not over. This was just round one. I would make my parents agree to this. I hadn’t really expected my dad to say yes. Intellectually, I knew I had to be patient. But the rest of me, the nonintellectual part, just wanted to scream and cry.

  Now that I was older, I could see my parents weren’t really there for me. They were just harsh, uncaring people. It was getting more and more difficult for me to pretend my dad was a great father or that my mother had any feelings at all.

  Thinking about my parents wasn’t a good road to go down. I needed to think about something else stat. I fired up my computer and went on Facebook. I didn’t have a lot of friends in real life or on Facebook, but I liked to see what was going on with my favorite bands and post funny quotations from cult movies and photos of butterflies.

  The first thing I saw was a recent status update from Ramone:

  After I bought a bong, a beautiful girl in a pink Aeropostale shirt came up to me in the parking lot and asked me out and then KISSED ME PASSIONATELY. I have no idea who she even was!

  A girl in a pink Aeropostale shirt.

  No…no, it couldn’t be. I felt an icy ball of misgiving growing inside me.

  I looked at all the comments. Some of Ramone’s friends didn’t believe her. She responded: I am not making this up. She had long brown hair and was wearing a pink-striped collared shirt with the Aeropostale logo. She claimed she went to my high school. When I drove away, she made some kind of obscene gesture. Fo
r realz.

  God in heaven, it was that skanky abomination, Clarissa Kirchendorfer. What the hell? Was she trying to destroy my life? Kissing my ex-girlfriend just to break me down?

  Even though it was as over as could be with me and Ramone, I still felt overpowering waves of jealousy. I had known she would go off to college and get a new girlfriend. But to kiss a random girl in the parking lot and blabber about it on FB? And for that random girl to be insufferable Clarissa Kirchendorfer?

  Clarissa Kirchendorfer was my nemesis.

  I was going to make her pay—and pay big.

  Chapter Five

  Clarissa

  I was able to ride the high of kissing my first girl until lunchtime the next day, but the putrid stench of the hot dogs in the cafeteria did me in. Or maybe it was my supposed friends. I was eating lunch with Jenna and a bunch of other girls from equestrian, like I had so many times, but there was something awkward about it. They were talking about dress styles, and they were either excluding me on purpose or by accident. I couldn’t tell if I was being too sensitive and overreacting, or if they really wanted to give me the cold shoulder, but I felt very alone.

  Then Jenna touched my hand for half a second and said, “I completely understand why you’re not doing equestrian this year.” I didn’t understand her sympathetic tone, and I wasn’t sure if it was genuine. Even I didn’t completely understand why I had quit equestrian. So what did she mean?

  Then I spotted Desi putting her tray down at a table on the other side of the cafeteria, and I felt saved. Before I even knew what I was doing, I stood up.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “I have to go talk to my sister.”

  I brought my lunch over to Desi’s table. She was having bow ties with red sauce. A total mistake, because the pasta in the cafeteria was always overcooked. The smelly, rubbery hot dogs were actually better.

  “There’s something really important I want you to help me with,” Desi said, without even a hello. She had that shine in her eyes that meant trouble.