Elaine
I know I’m pretty. I’m not gorgeous like some movie star, but I’m pretty. I’m noticeable. I’ve got long, dark blonde hair that I don’t have to wash every day, and it still turns out nice. (Of course I still wash it every day.) I have green eyes, which makes me stand out in a cool way instead of a weird way. I’m 5′5″ which seems like the perfect height for a girl, because I’m not going to tower over some guy but I’m also not going to be so short that a basketball player feels weird asking me out. And my skin has always been really clear to the point where I’m actually sort of freaked out that I’m going to wake up one morning with fifty enormous zits on my face just because I’m overdue.
The one thing is my body. I’m curvy. I’ve got sort of big boobs (not crazy big or whatever, but big enough that by fifth grade I definitely needed a bra). My butt is sort of big, too, or I guess you would say it’s really round, but in my best moments I don’t really think that’s such a bad thing. I actually think I have a pretty good body.
I mean, if I didn’t, I don’t think I would have so many boys always wanting to ask me out or come to my parties. Including The Party.
It was actually sort of a last-minute thing, and months later I still think about how everything that happened this fall happened because of this random party I never even anticipated throwing. Even that afternoon, I wasn’t planning on throwing one. I walked downstairs to find something to eat and I found my mother in the kitchen, staring into the refrigerator like she was waiting for the orange juice to talk back.
“Elaine,” she said, pulling out a plastic bag full of grapes (Weight Watchers points = 0) and digging around for some, “you know what I’m thinking?”
I rolled my eyes because I totally knew what was coming.
“You want to join Weight Watchers again,” I told her.
“How did you guess?” she said, which is so ridiculous because how could I not guess? Every time my mother stares into the refrigerator like a prisoner of war about to be shot, it’s time to go back to Weight Watchers. Every time my mother whines about her jeans being too tight, it’s time to go back to Weight Watchers. Every time we order a pizza and my mother picks up a third slice and then puts it down and then picks it back up and eats it with a frown on her face, it’s time to go back to Weight Watchers.
If my mother goes back to Weight Watchers, I have to go back to Weight Watchers. It’s been that way since I was fourteen, and I hate it.
My mother has lost the same twenty pounds so many times I could make an entire extra mom out of all the pounds if you added them up. I’ve lost the same ten pounds just as many times, and I know from the way my mom is staring at those grapes what’s coming. Meetings on Saturday mornings where I have to sit and listen to some old lady talk about her Greek yogurt (Weight Watchers points = 3) or how she can’t find time to work out even though she’s totally retired. Weighing in behind a curtain and trying to hold my breath in case it makes me weigh less. Calculating the points of everything I eat so that I can’t even look at a Snickers bar without doing high level algebra (Weight Watchers points = 8).
Then my mom will take all our special Weight Watchers food and use a black Sharpie to label it with point values and store it on one shelf in the fridge and one shelf in the cabinet, and if she’s feeling totally nuts, she might even put a Post-it note on the shelves that says “MOM’S AND ELAINE’S SPECIAL FOOD—DON’T TOUCH!” which is totally stupid seeing as the only other person who lives in the house is my dad and he wouldn’t touch our SPECIAL FOOD even if it meant the Healy Tigers were guaranteed a winning football season for the rest of his natural life.
“So, honey, will you come with me?” my mother asked. “This time I know I’m gonna keep it off.”
I poured myself a huge bowl of Corn Flakes and then went to the sugar bowl and dumped half of it on top of my cereal (Weight Watchers points = Who freaking cares).
“Mom, do I have to?”
“Elaine, it’s so much more fun when we go together, you know that. And you want to watch your figure, too, babe. Dance squad is starting up again in the fall, and you don’t want to look funny in your uniform in front of everyone.”
Funny as in fat.
“Okay,” I said, and I jammed a spoonful of milk and sugar into my mouth and let all the sugar dissolve, like a real slow goodbye.
Then my mom told me she and my dad were going over to her sister’s place in Dove Lake for dinner and they’d just end up spending the night and did I want to come? Which meant she and my dad were probably going to drink too many beers and wouldn’t want to drive the twenty miles back to Healy.
“No, I think I’ll just stay here. Can I have some people over?”
My mother popped a grape into her mouth and eyed me.
“You mean like a party?”
“No, I mean like people.”
My mom isn’t dumb. True, she’s given Weight Watchers so much money it probably could have paid for my college education by now, but she’s not dumb about most things. She went to Healy High and she knows there isn’t anything to do around here except drive to the Healy High parking lot and drink beer, so maybe she figured it would be better if we just drank the beer in our living room.
“Elaine, I just don’t want it to get too crazy, okay? And nobody goes into the bedrooms. This is strictly a family room and kitchen affair. And nobody leaves drunk.”
“Okay, fine,” I said, and I knew she knew she owed me one because I was going to do Weight Watchers with her again.
I finished my cereal and went upstairs and texted the usual suspects and told them to come over around 9 o’clock that night and invite whoever, and I figured out who could get alcohol. I talked on the phone with some of my girlfriends about what to wear, I texted Kelsie Sanders back and told her not to worry if she was too sick to make it because it would probably be boring anyway, and I read Brandon Fitzsimmons’s texts asking me if I had enough beer lined up. I texted back that we could always use more, then briefly entertained the idea of messing around with him at the party. We were totally off again at that point, but still, sometimes it was just fun to mess around. I really couldn’t understand how my mother thought I was too fat when I had a serious history with the hottest and most popular guy in the school. Besides, guys like curvy girls. It always says so in Glamour.
At 9:30 p.m. everyone was there. By everyone I mostly mean the twenty to thirty people in the upcoming junior class and the twenty to thirty people in the upcoming senior class who were cool enough to be invited to my party. There was also a handful of former Healy High students who were heading back to college in a couple of days, so that’s why Tommy Cray was there. And, last and certainly least, there were a few token upcoming sophomores who were probably the coolest kids in their class, which is why they were invited to my party, and they were sitting around sort of nervously sipping their beers like they couldn’t believe they were actually lucky enough to be there.
“Elaine, where do your parents keep the whiskey?” Josh Waverly said to me from the kitchen. I could only hear his voice, not see him.
“They don’t drink whiskey,” I said, which is a lie. I’d taken all the hard liquor and hidden it in the attic. If I didn’t want my mom to kill me, we had to stick to the cans of Natty Light and Bud Light that people stole from their parents’ refrigerators.
“Aw, Elaine, you know you’re lying. Where did you hide the whiskey?” Josh whined. “I really need some whiskey.” You could tell he was already kind of drunk.
“You need to get laid,” Brandon Fitzsimmons said from the couch where he was drinking his fourth beer. For a second I remember the first time we did it in my room during winter break of tenth grade. Even now I remember everything cute about him. How he was so cut, clear-skinned, clear-eyed, with that perfect jock attitude that I love. Like he could win the Super Bowl and make out with me for hours in the same day.
“What the hell do you know about getting laid?” some dumb sophomore football player said, walking into the room with no shirt on and fat free Reddi-wip sprayed all over his bare chest in the shape of a penis. I mean he had honest to God squirted on balls and a big dick right there on his chest. (Weight Watchers points for fat free Reddi-wip = 0!)
“Oh my God,” my friend Maggie said, hiding under a throw pillow, but you could tell she was loving it just like everyone at the party.
As for me, I had a couple of beers—enough that I was buzzed but not wasted, having fun but not totally out of control. I wandered from kitchen to living room to backyard deck, talking to people and getting the latest gossip and going to get another beer, etc. At one point I spotted Alice Franklin in the corner with Brandon. She was sitting on his lap and laughing. I mean, honestly. Sitting on his lap? For a split second I remembered the eighth grade dance when Brandon and I had been on again and I’d found out the two of them were fooling around in the coat closet. Tonight she was wearing a tight raspberry T-shirt that made her raspberry lips look brighter and her perfect boobs look bigger. Alice was just as pretty as she had been in eighth grade. Prettier, actually.
I wanted to smack her.
I pushed her and Brandon out of my mind and drank another beer. I followed Maggie out to the porch and took a drag of someone’s cigarette. It was getting late when I decided I should try to keep an eye on what was going on upstairs. It was actually turning into a pretty crowded party even if it wasn’t approaching teen movie party status, and I was freaking out that people would end up having sex in my parents’ bedroom. Before everyone arrived, I’d shut the door and taped a sign on it that said “STAY OUT OR YOU’LL NEVER GET INVITED TO ANOTHER PARTY,” but signs don’t always work with drunk people.
Upstairs was cool and quiet compared to the level of noise downstairs. The floorboards squeaked under the new carpet my parents had put in all the bedrooms at the beginning of the summer. The chemical smell was still hanging in the air. I knocked on my parents’ bedroom door and then slowly opened it. Empty and dark. Their bed was made up nice and neat, and the hall light shone onto my mom’s stack of O magazines sitting carefully on her nightstand.
Then I heard voices coming from my room. I headed down the hall and opened it without knocking this time, and I saw Brandon Fitzsimmons sitting on my bed. Standing next to the bed was Alice Franklin. She had this weird, uncomfortable look on her face.
“Hey, Elaine,” she said with this little gasp, like she was wishing I hadn’t just walked in on her.
Then I noticed Brandon was holding a notebook open on his lap, and he was reading from it with a smirk on his face.
“When I had to start wearing a bra in fifth grade, my mom told me it was a blessing,” he read out loud in a sing-song voice, like he was trying to sound like a girl. “My butt is pretty round, I know, but I think I look good in clothes.” Then he looked up from the book to my face. “Damn, girl, I know that’s true. But you look good without them, too.”
Brandon was reading from my diary—the black-and-white composition book I keep under the mattress. Usually. Only I must have left it out or he found it or something because he was reading from it. Out loud. In front of Alice. In front of me.
My off-again, on-again, off-again guy—the guy I had lost my virginity to—was reading about my fat butt.
Brandon continued, “I’ve gotten naked in front of the mirror and really looked at myself, and I don’t think I look bad that way either.”
Oh my God.
“Give me that!” I screamed, and I reached for it, but Brandon grabbed my wrist and wrestled me to the bed. He was so strong he could hold me down with one hand and still keep the open book in the other.
“I know I have big boobs but so do all the women in our family, including my mom,” he read, his eyebrows popping. “Your mom has big tits? I’ll have to look next time!” He was laughing that big, loud, so-sure-of-himself jock laugh that I normally loved but right then made me sick. He tossed the book aside and pinned me down, his hands on my wrists, his knees pressing up along my outer thighs. I couldn’t move if I tried. I’d done it with him here, on this very bed, and that had been nice. Sweet even. But this Brandon was scary as hell.
“Let me check out your big tits,” he said, gasping for air. “You know I’ve seen ’em before.” He was totally, ridiculously drunk. His face was super red, and little drops of sweat were seeping out around his hairline. And Alice Franklin was just standing there next to us like she’d paid to watch a show or something.
Finally she said, “Brandon, let’s just go.” Her voice sounded really small and embarrassed.
Brandon looked me in the eyes, and for the tiniest, weirdest second they were just … empty. Like there was nothing there. No emotion, no feeling, nothing. And then a second after that it was like he’d decided I’d bored him or something. He pushed off of me and stood up, the bed bouncing under me once or twice, the coils of my mattress squeaking like mice.
“Come on, Elaine,” he said, his trademark cute football player face returning. “You know I love you, sweetheart.”
“Elaine, I’m sorry,” Alice said, and she leaned over and picked up my notebook which Brandon threw on the floor.
“What is this?” I said, taking the notebook and motioning at the two of them with disgust. “Eighth grade part two?” Brandon stumbled out of the room, taking Alice’s hand, and she followed him.
I stayed in my room for what felt like forever, completely and totally too embarrassed to go downstairs. What if Brandon and Alice told everybody what I’d written? I took my diary and jammed it in my closet on the top shelf, hiding it under the box of report cards and school projects my mom had made me keep. I never wanted to see it again.
I kept waiting for someone to come up and find me, but not even any of my best girlfriends did. I must have nodded off or something because suddenly I woke up and looked at the clock: 12:45 a.m. Shit. I said a quick little prayer that the downstairs wasn’t trashed.
It was. There were bottles and cans everywhere, and I could see a corner by the television where someone had spilled an entire can of beer and hadn’t even tried to clean it up. My head was totally pounding and my entire body felt fuzzy.
I decided I’d never have another party.
“Where were you?” my friend Maggie said from the corner of the couch where she was curled up, her head in Josh Waverly’s lap. Josh was fooling around with his phone. There were a few other kids around, most of them sipping what was left of the beer or sleeping or watching MTV on low volume.
I saw Brandon Fitzsimmons sitting on the floor, his back against a wall, his phone in his lap. He was still wasted, his eyes staring out at nothing. Alice wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
“I fell asleep,” I said, picking up a few bottles to take to the kitchen. “Y’all are gonna have to leave or help me clean up.”
As I headed for the trash, I heard a yelp from Josh Waverly.
“Are you serious, dude?!”
I carefully placed the bottles on top of the mountain of bottles already in the trash can and headed back into the living room. Josh was looking at his phone and then looked across the room at Brandon, who had half a grin pasted on his face. He shot his eyebrows up twice, real quick.
Josh asked something again about Brandon being serious.
Brandon shot his eyebrows up twice again and grinned all the way this time.
“What the hell?” Maggie said, and she reached up from Josh’s lap and grabbed his phone to see what had caught Josh’s attention. Then she called Brandon a pervert.
“What are you freaking out about?” I asked, and I glanced over Josh’s shoulder at the text that had just arrived from Brandon.
tommy and me banged alice franklin upstairs.
That was all it said. Seven words that would change everything.
I read the text from Brandon again.
tommy and me banged alice franklin upstairs.
“Who went first?” Josh asked with a snort, and for a second I thought Josh was grossed out, but then he grinned at Brandon like Brandon had just thrown him a touchdown pass.
“Dude! Like you even have to ask?” Brandon answered, holding both his arms out wide like he was preparing to accept all the praise he had coming to him.
Maggie rolled her eyes and she pulled out her phone to start texting. All of Healy High would know what was up by sunrise.
By the time school started a few weeks later, it was all everyone talked about. How Alice Franklin slept with two guys in one night in my guest bedroom. Two guys in one HOUR. The thought of it was enough to make me want to puke. Honestly, what kind of girl does that?
I just kept picturing her at the party, sitting in Brandon’s lap and looking all perfect, and I kept picturing her standing there next to Brandon as he read from my diary, her skinny, cute body with the amazing boobs and butt. She was probably totally enjoying making fun of me when Brandon found the notebook. I could picture her making him read it out loud. And then she actually pretended to be sorry when I walked in. She even picked it up off the floor and gave it back to me.
And then she went and did it with two dudes in one night.
Seriously. Here’s a girl who messes around with a guy when that guy is on again with another girl, and here’s a girl who sleeps with two guys in one night, and here’s a girl who messes around with random dudes at the pool. I mean, it’s like she’s just this insult to girls.
And even though she acted like nothing was up, how could she NOT have known everyone was talking about her behind her back? I mean, even the incoming freshmen knew what went down.
Dude, did you hear about that junior girl Alice and the two guys at that party?
That junior girl Alice slept with Brandon Fitzsimmons and that other guy this summer.
OMG that Alice Franklin girl is so slutty!
Even the adults started talking about it. One Saturday when we were on the way home from another Weight Watchers meeting, my mom turned to me when we were at a stoplight and all of a sudden asked, “I keep hearing these stories about Alice Franklin. Are they true?”
“That girl is a total slut,” I said.
My mom gripped the wheel and told me not to use that word, but then she started asking me all these questions, and I told her what I could. I thought my mom was going to be really pissed that all this went down in our house, but you could tell she was way more interested in what everybody was saying about Alice and did Alice’s mom know and blah blah blah.
At the Weight Watchers meeting she’d gained two pounds, so maybe she just wanted to take her mind off everything with some super crazy gossip, but I had a feeling my mom would have been interested even if she hadn’t gained weight.
And then Brandon Fitzsimmons died.
The news that Brandon died spread faster than the news about Alice, and the news that he crashed his car because Alice was sending him gross texts spread even faster than that. Nobody knew what the texts said exactly, but we figured they were disgusting and they were desperate, and of course they had to be both of those things because they were coming from Alice Franklin, who didn’t come to school for a week after the news got out about what she had done.
Healy High freaked out after Brandon died—everyone was crying in the hallways and the English teachers tried to get us to write about our emotions and everyone wore ribbons with the school colors for, I don’t know, a week. They brought in grief counselors, and the next game against Dominion was, like, mandatory attendance for the entire town. They hung a banner reading “BRANDON FITZSIMMONS * HEALY HIGH TIGER FOREVER” at the front entrance of the stadium, and Brandon’s parents came out onto the field during halftime and announced the Brandon Fitzsimmons Scholarship Fund, and Josh Waverly was in his uniform on the sidelines even though he couldn’t play yet. Even the players from Dominion bowed their heads during the moment of silence, and it was almost like they let us win. That they knew how bad it would look if we lost to them.
Alice came back to school eventually, of course.
It was weird how we were all sort of connected after Brandon died—the ribbons with the school colors, the moment of silence at the all-school assembly, the stories in the paper that people cut out and put up in their lockers. Even after all of that sort of calmed down, people still needed something to hang on to. I mean, things were kinda back to normal—the cafeteria ladies asked us if we wanted a fruit cup or a yogurt, the janitors dumped the pink powder on top of people’s puke, the teachers gave out their boring homework assignments and their pop quizzes about nothing we’ll ever actually need in real life—but I think people needed something that made them feel, I don’t know … like we were all still in it together.
So we picked on Alice Franklin. A nobody, a slut, a killer.
And then the craziest thing happened this afternoon. Maggie and me and some of our other girlfriends were sitting in the bathroom cutting French class or Chemistry class or whatever class we had that period. I was sort of trying not to think about the fact that I was starving because I’d only had a granola bar for lunch. Kelsie Sanders was with us. Now I could sort of tell that Kelsie was feeling really super tentative about hanging out with us—I mean, she was Alice’s best friend. I think she was worried that maybe we wouldn’t accept her, but Kelsie’s always been cool with me. She’s always been super sweet and everything. You could just tell, though, that she was thinking that any second we were going to tell her to get lost. Like the way she hesitated before talking. Or the way she laughed a little too hard at everything I said. It’s weird, the feeling of power you get sometimes when you’re popular, but I guess I try to use my power for good, not evil. So I’ve been letting Kelsie Sanders hang out with us.
Anyway, so this afternoon we were all sitting there talking about whatever when Kelsie suddenly said all dramatically, “Okay, so I have to tell you something. About Alice.”
“What, she did it with the entire football team last weekend?” I said, fishing in my purse for my lipstick.
“No, it’s way worse. I think she got an … abortion.”
Kelsie lowered her voice to a whisper when she said the word abortion. I let my lipstick drop.
“What the hell?” I said, and before I could say anything else, Maggie said, “Oh God, did your mom make you protest again?” Maggie goes to the same totally whacked-out church as Kelsie, so I guess she figured out what was up.
“Yes,” Kelsie said, rolling her eyes. She told us how her mom was always dragging her and her little sister to the Women’s Care Clinic in the city to protest abortion and how she tried to get out of it whenever she could, but on some Saturdays she found herself standing behind the gate of the clinic, holding up posters.
“Like, ones with dead babies on them?” somebody said, and Kelsie shuddered a little and said yes.
“So, what? You saw her go into the clinic?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Kelsie said. “Last weekend. With her mom. She didn’t see me. They just rushed in there.”
“Well, maybe she was just going for a check-up?” Maggie asked.
I arched an eyebrow. “Like they don’t have doctors in Healy who do check-ups?” Naturally, everyone agreed with me.
“Do you think it was from … that night?” someone else asked.
“Do the math,” I said. “My party was what, close to three months ago? Perfect timing. I’m sure it was from that night.”
“And the really gross and scary thing is…” Kelsie continued, and for a second I could see how much she was loving this, just getting to be in the center of our little group with all of us listening to her, “… I mean, she would have no idea who the father is. Tommy or Brandon? Isn’t that so totally skanky?”
“Totally,” Maggie whispered.
“I can’t even believe she used to be my friend,” Kelsie said. “It’s just, like, that was another time in my life, you know?”
“Totally,” I said.
“So you don’t miss her?” Maggie asked. “You don’t even feel a little sorry for her?” I thought Maggie was acting weird. I mean, Alice was responsible for Brandon Fitzsimmons dying. And it wasn’t like Alice had to sleep with him at my party.
What Kelsie did next really surprised me. We were just standing there in that girls’ bathroom with the green-and-white tile and the scummy sinks and instead of answering Maggie, Kelsie searched through her bag until she found a black Sharpie, and she opened up the stall next to us, the middle one. She uncapped the marker and wrote right there on the wall to the left of the toilet in letters that were at least two inches high.
ATTENTION!
ALICE FRANKLIN IS A HO SLUT WHORE WHO DOES IT WITH EVERYBODY!!!
We all laughed, all of us, and then I said, “My turn.”
ALICE FRANKLIN HAS GIVEN 423 BLOW JOBS!!! NOW THAT’S A LOT OF DICK!
I stared at the graffiti and watched how quickly the shiny Sharpie writing dulled into a permanent black stain. The other girls behind me lined up to take their turns.