The administration of the school needs to get some perspective.
While it was way bad that James got that tattoo in Canterbury, it was not bad that you’ve had a tattoo on your wrist for I don’t know how long. I can be sure that you did not get it while being chaperoned to another country. Your tattoo looks like a lovely flower bracelet, and it says something in another language that I don’t know but that I am sure has real meaning for you.
Since the spring break, we’ve all noticed that you’ve been covering up your tattoo with a bandage. What we all used to just ignore has become a hot topic of conversation. I will admit that my mind drifted during your class as a result of that bandage. (I listened to what you said about King Lear as best I could, I want you to know, but the bandage was a major distraction.) Why is it covered now? What happened? We overheard some other teachers saying you got in trouble because James got a tattoo and the administration thinks it’s your fault.
I can tell you right now that you weren’t the reason James got the tattoo. James doesn’t think that deep. He’s just a free spirit.
Is the administration using you as a scapegoat? I don’t want you to end up like Lee Harvey Oswald!
Teacher comments: I wanted you to focus on your experience on the trip. No need to obsess on mine.
*#1 GOOD SCHOOL JOURNAL* 3/28
(A real conversation with a classmate during the nutrition break)
While sitting alone at nutrition and putting the finishing touches on my NYC skyline that has turned in to a sweeping landscape across the table now that it’s this late in the year, Keira sat down next to me with her books.
“Hey, Danielle, whoa, you’ll have to sign that thing when you’re done with it. I hope you don’t mind if I sit here. I need to study and I need the vibe from someone smart in English so I can pass Harrison’s vocabulary test today.”
“No problem.”
“Yeah, yikes, Harrison and the tattoo drama. Wait, let me use a vocab word here. It’s scandalous.”
“Good word. I know,” I said. “We should do something, like, I don’t know, all wear wrist bandages in solidarity or something to make a point.”
“That is completely brilliant. I’m going to text everybody right now. We have to start doing that tomorrow. No question.”
“Great.” And I sat there as the most connected woman on campus contacted everyone and told ’em what’s up before she went back to studying her vocab. I am sure they all texted her back, “As you wish.”
*JUSTINE LETTER* 3/30
Letter from Justine to me
Dear Danielle,
How absolutely delightful to receive a letter from you! I just adore feeling a kinship with another part of the globe. It all feels so exciting. A girl like you who gets to take school trips to England from America must live a blessed life. You must take a moment right now to be grateful for such a thing.
Also, if you do find yourself lost in a melancholy field of thought from time to time, which I suspect may happen to the likes of you, please remember that it all moves. The sun comes up; the sun goes down. There is a rise and fall to all things. That is the journey of our lives. Journeys excite me so, which is why I love meeting wide-eyed travelers like you, those who embrace the experience with wonder.
Since you’ve left, I have given five more tours of Canterbury, but I have not met anyone as intriguing and special as you. No other pen pals are manifest. And, indeed, no one from any of the other groups got a tattoo down at Percy’s shop the way the young man from your group did. What an adventurer, that one.
Please write and tell me how your days are being filled.
With a smile on my face,
Justine
*CLASS ASSIGNMENT* 4/3
Essay Assignment #14: The Car Wash Fund-raiser
(The version I write for myself right after the events unfold, not the version I turn in, which is boring but I earn an A because I write everything a teacher would want to hear about altruism, group work, and school spirit. It’s so boring and fake, it can’t even go in my collection. Completing that assignment was a total act of will after this terrible, terrible, terrible experience.)
Danielle Levine
English 12
Ms. Harrison
Period 4
On Saturday, the entire senior class had to come to school to participate in a school fund-raiser for the prom. We had to wash cars all day. I tried everything I could think of to get out of this event. In front of my mom, I obsessively counted my snow globes out loud and then started arranging the sea of crap in my room into strange piles so she might think I was coming unhinged and had to stay home. All she said was, “Oh, now you want to clean up this place? Well, use that energy to wash some cars.” I told my father I thought today was a good day to stay in and read some medical journals together. He said, “I love you, Danielle. Get out of the house.”
A part of me really knew that today was going to be a disaster. “My fate cries out!” I put on the combat Chucks and a black conductor hat.
When my parents showed up to have their car washed, the boys there made comments about how hot Mom is. She is pretty, but it grosses me out and diminishes me totally that they notice.
Jacob arrived with Keira, Sara, Heather, John, and James around ten o’clock. He was dressed in a soft, solid-color, red T-shirt that makes him pop like a cutout figure in a fantasy book whose image is larger than the page can contain. Ms. Harrison left us for a while to go get doughnuts and drinks as we were doing fine on our own as she saw it.
As soon as Jacob got there and I saw him, I knew something was not right. His face was red, he was laughing, and he couldn’t control his movements like he usually does. A boy of such smooth presence in the world had become a teetering doll. It couldn’t have been clearer. He was drunk.
As I was taking him in, he pulled a flask out of his plaid shorts. “VODKA!” he screamed. A bunch of people took turns on the flask.
Jacob prowled around like the animal he was at this point. In some primal state, he started communicating with everyone as if they were the animals their essences exuded. He purred at Keira, who I was surprised to see drank from the flask, too. He lifted her onto a car while he kissed her, and a team of seniors sprayed them with the hose. They rolled in soapsuds. It was a triumphant, filmic moment—where the winners win, and are beautiful, and to keep the scales balanced and the cinema interesting, the losers must lose.
Everything from here followed in slow motion. Jacob grabbed his crotch in a display of manly pain and hissed wildly at James, who is, indeed, a snake. He grunted at Sara like an ape and then started moaning like he was a sick, dying animal; he pranced like a peacock amid a laughing gaggle of geesey-girl cheerleaders. For a second, I saw Keira look annoyed with Jacob, but I could tell, even she couldn’t stop the force that was Jacob at this point. All his charisma was focused on putting on this show, and it was not going to be stopped.
He barked cruelly at Heather, as if she were a dog, but she bit back, and he slumped away whimpering. Right then, I thought to retreat, too, but I stayed. Who knows why. But I guess I wanted what was coming for me. He darted in my direction and stopped in front of me. Everything stopped. I had this feeling one other time in my life. Both times it was like I knew something very terrible was going to happen to me, and the wheels of the universe slowed down just a bit, so the impact of what was about to occur could be survived, if even just barely.
Jacob smiled slowly . . . and then, very deliberately, with crazed energy . . . he moo’d. “Moooooooo. Mooooooooo! Moooooooooooooooo!!!!”
I have no idea how anyone reacted, but I imagine they all laughed. Everything, the whole world hadn’t come up to speed yet. I had loved Jacob for who knows how long, but a big fraction of my life, and here he was giving me the most honest communication he had ever given to me, and it was . . . disgust. The alcohol had erased all social constraints, and the God’s honest truth was screaming around the parking lot.
It didn’t matter that he thought I had cool eyes. It didn’t matter that he had said he would rather touch me than drink toilet water. None of what I thought mattered did. I was wearing a bell around my neck. I was being led up the winding path to the slaughterhouse, unaware of the truth that always was before me. I was a fool to have ever thought, even for a second, otherwise. Deep down, in a true, ugly place inside of him, he thought that I was a cow. I thought I was, too, but I saw then, that so did the world, even someone I loved who I kept making excuses for. The truth, with all its edges, cut its way out.
He moved away from me and jumped like a jackrabbit over to one of his friends, who is a known whore. He just kept moving and my head started swimming. No one changed anything. They didn’t stop washing, they didn’t stop spraying or laughing or talking or seeing. At least it seemed that way to me.
I was lost in an internal episode of my own creation. Inside me, my heart was breaking in a way I hadn’t known was possible, which was ironic because I thought when I was thirteen it had shattered completely, on that f*cking bullshit horrible night when I offered no protection. But no, my heart just cracked like an earthquake then, fragile and splintered and precariously wobbly like a Jenga game. Now it was obliterated. One last move and all the pieces came crashing on the carpet. Game over.
And I feel guilty as hell, I hate me, for caring so much about my own f*cking shatteredness when there are others who have had to endure so much worse still. Who am I?
Shards of my heart were scattered throughout the universe. My Tin Man self walked slowly backward into the girls’ restroom without anyone knowing I was even gone, without anyone realizing that I was tapping into a world inside myself that I didn’t know was there. It was dark and shadowy and scary as shit. The barnyard revelry continued outside in a world I had honored too much, that I had given the wrong kind of attention to. The dark abyss of my inside world was exploding so I would pay attention to it. I held on to the bathroom sink to steady myself while I shook uncontrollably. After the wave of terror passed, I reached into my pocket and felt my phone.
One of the first rituals Lisa had us do in social skills class was exchange phone numbers. That is what successfully social people do. I found Daniel in his proper alphabetical place in my phone directory, and I called him without even knowing why. We had this conversation:
“Hey, Daniel. It’s Danielle from your social skills class. Isn’t it kinda weird that our names are the male and female versions of each other?”
“Yeah. Lisa would be proud of you for starting the conversation in such a provocative way. What are you doing?”
“Oh, nothing. You want to meet me at the Galleria for lunch?”
“Sure. An hour?”
“Perfect.”
I’m sort of stunned at my utter calmness on the outside while an implosion was happening on the inside. It’s amazing that a human being can be this obviously dual. I decided to walk the short distance from school to the Galleria. I managed to write all this down before I left. Just getting it all down is a relief. Some things are so awful they don’t fit anywhere inside you. They deserve to just be symbols on a page instead.
*ME-MOIR JOURNAL* 4/4
After the car wash
After I had a day to hash it all out
I met Daniel at the Galleria right on schedule. We walked around and grabbed some lunch to go and sat down by the big outdoor fountain and ate. He said the only thing going on at his house was a pool party his stepdad was throwing for church friends. When his mom remarried, the whole family had to become Catholic. He had to do a lot of perfunctory standing, kneeling, praying, admitting, denying, and withholding. He told me he thought it was one of the funniest religions around and he’d go along for the comedy factor. Every Sunday he has to wait in line for someone to place a flat piece of bread on his tongue. He makes sure his tongue is filled with saliva, and his fly is open when he goes through this ritual. Sometimes he lets out the faintest, audible little grunt. Then, once a week he begs his stepdad to take him to confession.
Sal, his stepdad, thinks Daniel is really benefiting from the conversion and loves taking him to confession. Daniel, on the other hand, uses the confessional to have “secret boners” as he says. He wants me to go with him and sit in the dark box and see what it does to me because it gets him hard every time for reasons that defy explanation. He keeps a list of made-up sins he can tell the priest so he’s always got conversation when he’s in there. The more elaborate or creative the sin, the better.
One time he told the priest he had stolen money from the school cafeteria after weeks of planning and mapping out his heist—very premeditated—and buried it behind the scoreboard on the field. He went on to say he forgot to dig it up and had been home with the flu and was worried some a*shole would get to it before he did. (He had to say a litany of prayers for the theft and the recent swearing.) When Daniel went to school the next day, the maintenance crew was digging behind the scoreboard! So much for sinner/priest confidentiality.
I said that the priest may not keep secrets but at least he didn’t molest you! Daniel said he was hoping to get molested because then he could sue the church and go to college and live off the money for a while using some of it for therapy to deal with the shame. I said that was a super-sized serving of wrong, and Daniel said he knew that, but college was expensive and so desperate measures needed considering.
After confession and the prayers he has to say, he tells Sal he needs to go be alone in his room to contemplate all he’s done that week that was sinful. Then he goes to his room, locks the door, knows he won’t be disturbed, and “takes himself on a date.” He says confession builds up all this awesome tension he needs to release.
Sal really loves him, he says, and he likes the guy, too, but their relationship is based on a bunch of lies like so much is. If they told the truth to each other it would destroy this fiction that is working so well.
During dessert, I told Daniel about what happened with Jacob at the car wash. He said Jacob was an a*shole, which I already knew at that point, but no amount of icing on any cake could completely cover the twisted, complicated feelings I had. I would hate him, truly, for the rest of my life for the moo-ing, but another part of me still held on, not my heart—which had been obliterated because this person I had deified, honored, lusted after, all that crap, was not worth loving. Where would I go with all those emotions that I spent on him?
Daniel suggested that I spend them on me.
Huh?
“Look, your life has been hard enough up to this point. You are worth a million million Jacob Kingstons. You’re the ton of kings, not him. You just got a little confused and saw in him what you should have seen in yourself. Anyone would be clouded by reality when they’ve lived through what you did.”
“What are you talking about, Daniel?”
“You know.”
“No. I don’t.”
“Danielle, we went to the same school then, before we both moved. I know the deal. You know I do.”
“What school?”
“Cut the shit, Danielle. I was in your eighth-grade class at Jefferson Middle School down in Orange County. I lived there before my mom and dad split up. You remember, right? I knew you and Emily. I was really upset about the whole thing. I sent you that collage with the poem. Jesus, I thought that’s why you were so friendly to me in the social skills class, why you stared at me the first class. I thought you remembered me from before you moved and changed schools.”
From an even deeper place than where my heart had been, an energy of flight rose up. Before I even knew what I was doing, I got up and ran. I ran onto the sidewalk of Ventura Boulevard and kept running. I ran across every street corner without stopping for any traffic signals. I wished so much I could fly. I heard a car screech and a man scream at me. I knocked over a skateboarder who was in my way. I tripped on a magazine that littered the sidewalk, and I just got up and kept going even though my knee was cut and blood was dripping down my leg. The pain felt good. I screamed along with a song that was pounding out of a car stereo. I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed, swallowing air by the gallons and thrusting it out in loud chokes. I cried until my eyes burned and I couldn’t see a damn thing in front of me. I didn’t care. Nothing was worth seeing. It was all useless. “Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed. Things rank in nature possess it merely.” I ran nonstop for four miles and all the way up my hill until I fell onto the front lawn of my house. I started ripping out the perfect grass and the roses my mother prized so highly. I rubbed dirt all over my face. My hands bled along with my knee. I threw myself on my back and looked up at the sky and screamed louder than I thought possible.
I didn’t realize that Daniel had run the entire way behind me until I felt my mother, my father, and Daniel hold me in the grass. My father scooped me up and carried me to my room while he softly sang in my ear and rubbed my hair out of my face. I let all of me float along with his song until the melody took me to sleep.
*ME-MOIR JOURNAL* 4/5
About what happened after eating dirt
My mother made me breakfast this morning, the day after I came running home. She smiled at me as she cooked and it drove me mad. I hate when she feels sorry for me.
“Honey, you know how I name all the hummingbirds that come to feed? Well, there are a group of three new birds with fuchsia-colored heads. They are truly magnificent. I’m considering calling them ‘the fuchsia-head gang.’ What do you, think?” I knew she was trying to brighten the mood, but I ignored her.
“Well, is this what you expected when you adopted a daughter? Is this what you thought you’d get?”
“Danielle, in so many ways, you are so much better than I could have ever imagined.”
“Yeah, right.”
“We all have times in our lives where it is hard to keep it together.”
“Thank God Dad played rugby in college. Otherwise, he’d never have been able to carry me to bed.”
My mom smiled at me again.
“Your friend Daniel told us what happened at the car wash. I’m truly sorry. Jacob Kingston is a little shit, isn’t he?” I had never heard my beautiful mother swear like that. It was fantastic. I looked up from my lap.
“Yes, Mother, he damn right is.”
“Okay, lady. Let’s not push it.”
So we actually laughed a little, and then we went to yoga together. Toward the end of class, when we were all hot and in a zone, David gave one of his inspirational talks and today it really sank in there, in the empty place in me that I was going to have to refill with things more meaningful than before. He said things need to get really hot before they can be transformed. Anything in your life that can burn is worth burning.
Wow, there is so much inside me that is on fire and some things I strangely don’t want to burn. I don’t want to let my feelings for Jacob burn away. He gave me something to long for, to fantasize about, and I wanted to think he loved my eyes. I wanted to hold on to the fact that his hands had been where no one else’s had, even though I can’t think that for long because it makes me sick after it makes me blush. It is all a dull ache that is now going to be a scorching flame for a little bit. Well, I don’t really know for how long, but I’m hoping just a little bit. (I think I’m fooling myself for comfort and out of hope.)
But, and this is really true: I don’t want everything I remember about Emily to burn away. What kind of true friend would I be if I let all that I know and love about her disintegrate? But the way David said it, and the way it settled in the empty cavity that was once my heart, I know I am going to have to come to a greater understanding of what he means. I am going to have to let things burn.
My mother has never done this before, but she’s letting me take a week off school. She said that in exchange, I had to talk to Marv on the phone. So I did.
“Danielle, are you hanging in there?” Marv asked.
“I guess so.”
“I am sure it’s tough.”
“Yeah. I know you had a woman laugh in your face and throw furniture at you, but you never had the boy of your dreams moo in your face.”
“Indeed, Danielle. Indeed. Tell me how that whole experience made you feel.”
“Lost.”
“Hmmm. That is understandable and well said. You may not believe me, but you are in a very powerful place. It’s not until we are lost that we can be found.”
And now I am just sitting here for a minute trying to let his words settle within me and hoping a big burp of understanding rises about that and the burning.
*AUNT JOYCE E-MAIL* 4/6
E-mail from Aunt Joyce after she learns her niece is a cow
Well, Danielle, I’m just gonna be honest. I want to kill that kid you like. I know these aren’t adult feelings, but I don’t care for the moment. My very wise, adorable therapist once told me that Carl Jung said, “You can be a fool and fall in love or you can miss out on all life has to offer.” So you were a fool. Good for you. Bravo. Join the painful club I’ve been a part of for twenty-some years. How proud of you I am to have you as a member; I cannot find words.