You cover your ears with your hands. You say, No, No, No, No. You cry. You take it. You deserve every last insult. You beg. You fall on your knees and stain your uniform in the wet grass. Your classmates walk by, shaking their heads. You almost throw up into the dirt. You say, Please, Beth. No, please.
Beth picks you up off the ground by your armpits. She hugs you like she means it, like she’s the first person who has ever wanted to take care of you. You do not understand why, not yet, but no one has ever been more kind to you than Beth.
Beth tries to be your friend for the rest of high school, but it’s not the same. You are a slut and you know it. You can’t be trusted and you know it. Soon, you only occasionally wave to each other from across the halls.
No one ever speaks of Chad again, not once he graduates. Clarissa told Beth what you had done—It was the right thing to do—and, entering high school, the two of them become best friends.
You deface both of their pictures in your yearbook.
You sleep with the book in your arms.
You tell Chad, Clarissa, and Beth that you’re writing an essay about them. They all give you permission, tell you to rename them however you’d like.
I am so deeply honored that you would write about me, Chad says. Although I’m sure your portrayal of me will not be glorious. He has had a spiritual awakening, and he sends you a YouTube video about it. He asks if you are religious. He feels bad for you that you’re not. He compares you to a plant growing in the shade. He wants to know if you’re single.
You are not sure why you are even talking to Chad, what you think he can tell you.
Was there anyone else? you ask him. Other girls our age—besides me and Beth?
One name, and then another. And another. He lists four right then, though there will be more later (That car, one will say. I can still feel the air-conditioning inside of that car). These are girls you knew, liked. A girl from the school play. A girl who once made you a friendship bracelet out of telephone wire. Other girls everyone wanted to be.
Chad says, My life up to this point has been … not so much fun. You could say I was paid back one hundred times over for what I did to you or anyone else. Does that make you feel better?
Does it? I still don’t know.
All of us in the same car, outside the same mall. All of us girls, now women. All of our hands reaching for a door.
PART II
THE GREETER
COUSIN CINDY
There goes Cousin Cindy again. She looks like Betty Boop, with the same red lips and hair. She’s a tween but looks older—strapped up in all the right places—beloved. Men pay attention.
Here, in the Disney park, grown men in animal suits take their heads off to whisper animal things into Cousin Cindy’s ear. They want to take care of her, bite the skin behind her knees. They want to make like Aladdin and show her the world. They call her princess and duchess, and she leans in to hear them better, a Firecracker popsicle rounded out in her mouth—What’s that, Mister Nice?—her sweating, budding chest against their fur. She pulls her shorts up by the belt loops, lets the perfect moon-curve of her ass hang below the frayed denim and bounce there.
My Grandma Sitchie always says Cousin Cindy got the looks and I got the brains, the sweetness. I’m the sensitive one, she always says. A yolk to my heart. If I could combine the two of you, I’d have the perfect granddaughter. Grandma Sitchie is my father’s mother. She’s Jewish; she gets her hair set at the salon twice a week; she hates my mother; she’s the reason we’re in Boca Raton.
She’s a bitch, that Cindy, dumb as a gnat, but prettier than Hepburn, Grandma explains one day while eating a Bundt-mold of savory Jell-O. She points the wet spoon at me for emphasis. Lucille Ball’s laugh crackles through the kitchen.
I want to be Cousin Cindy when I grow up. I tell my Grandma Sitchie I’d trade in all my brains and sweetness to be a little more like her.
It’s true, she says, nodding, that life gets on much easier, much better, if you’re pretty.
Cousin Cindy, babysitting me in North Carolina. It’s the summer I turn eight. Yesterday the whole family went white-water rafting down the Watauga River. We played Red-Neck-Bingo with homemade score cards—checking off satellite dishes, yard art, tires and couches on roofs—as we shot past the country homes.
Our rafting guide’s name was Alphonso, and he joked that he could sink our very raft with the weight of himself, depending on which way he leaned. He kept biscuits under his armpits and between the rolls of his skin to keep them warm and dry. Cousin Cindy loved this, sat on his lap, ate the biscuits from his big, meaty hands, laughing. When Alphonso threw my sandal into the river, Cousin Cindy snatched it up between her acrylic nails, slapped him across the face with it, said, Don’t mess with my baby, you bad boy, you.
Now she is babysitting me in my family’s cabin, turning off my bedroom lights, telling me to nod off already, go to fucking bed, Jesus Christ, I take it back, I didn’t mean it or anything, but for real can you go the fuck to sleep, aren’t you tired? No? Seriously? Not even after all that rafting, the food I made you, Jesus I never want a kid, and what kind of kid eats so much even? How many boxes of Velveeta can you chow? Is that your Chinese side? Why’s your nose always bleeding, it honestly freaks me the fuck out, do I need to do something about it?
Cousin Cindy presses her hands together like she’s praying. She says, I’m sorry, but when you’re seventeen you’ll understand. She closes my door.
I’ve been reading Harriet the Spy and keeping my very own spy journal. I decide there is no better time to write, to report, than tonight with Cousin Cindy. I crawl to my bedroom door, lower the brass handle. I push it open and breathe into the triangle of light. Cousin Cindy is standing at the dresser mirror, next to the front door. She paints on black lipstick with a tiny brush, teases her curls with a pick. She clasps a big silver cross around her neck so Jesus hangs squeezed between her breasts. She sprays perfume from a diamond-shaped bottle into the air and walks right into it, spins three times.
There’s a knock on the door. It’s Alphonso, in real clothes. No life vest, no biscuits. In our house, he’s just a college boy—an Appalachian State University sweatshirt, tattered camouflage pants, a beeper clamped to his pocket. Cousin Cindy kisses him long and hard, like they’ve been waiting for this moment all their lives. She walks backward and pulls him by the sweatshirt until they reach the plaid couch. She pushes him onto it, kneels down, unzips. Alphonso doesn’t know what to do with his hands, so he holds them up by his face. I think, this is what Alphonso must have looked like as a child—this face widened with shock and awe—a boy who tripped over his sandcastle, who peeled open the eyes of a newborn kitten, a boy who just destroyed something for the first time.
I write down what I see. Their limbs tangle, and the two of them fall asleep like this. I am jealous of Alphonso, seeing my cousin this way, this other view of her body. I want to be closer. I want this image of a woman all for myself.
My parents walk in soon after. What the from the raft? our daughter, where? / the biscuit boy?
I never see Alphonso again.