Lauren

Paula liked to talk about how different boys kiss. The senior, captain of the lacrosse team, who did it like he was slurping soup. The sophomore on the Model UN team, who thrust his stiff long tongue in and out, like a dowsing rod, “like he could fuck with his mouth,” she said. When Paula described kissing, it was like she wasn’t one-half of the kiss. It was like the guys were sucking at the air or a mirror, and Paula was off to the side taking notes.

When she was having sex with a guy, Paula said, she would imagine him doing normal things—writing a term paper, standing in line at Mighty Taco. And sometimes when she saw a guy doing normal things, she would imagine him having sex. “But, like, it’s all normal,” Paula said to Lauren.

They were sitting across from each other at the big table in Tedquarters, sharing a bag of Doritos. “Why is it weird to have sex in front of people but it’s not weird to eat in front of people?” Paula asked. “They’re both totally regular, boring, gross sticky things that everybody does.”

“Not everybody,” Lauren said sheepishly.

“I mean, eventually,” Paula said.

Kurt Cobain was in one of Paula’s magazines with his girlfriend. He had cherry-red hair and an itchy blue cardigan; his girlfriend was kissing him in profile, her lemony hair waxy and curling like a doll’s. “She’s ugly,” Paula said, and she was so happy about it. Paula loved Kurt Cobain, lately seemed to think about Kurt Cobain all the time, and could work Kurt Cobain into any conversation, much like Mom could with Father Steve. “I think Kurt goes out with her just to piss people off,” Paula said.

“Or maybe he goes out with her because they like each other,” Lauren said.

“I bet she weighs more than Kurt does,” Paula said. “Did you know he’s so skinny he wears long underwear under his clothes? To stay warm and pad himself out.”

Lauren had started to wonder whether Paula made up all her stories of sex with boys, or at least some of them; if she placed herself in their arms the same way she placed herself inside Kurt Cobain’s head as he picked out his clothes in the morning.

“Is Kurt Cobain an Asshole, a Creep, or an Unspeakable?” Lauren asked. Paula and Lauren had categories for all boys and men, famous or not. Assholes were usually extroverts, Creeps were introverts, and Unspeakables were unable to be fully comprehended in their assholishness, their creepiness, and/or their dreamy perfection. Stitch Rosen was a Creep. Andy Figueroa was an Asshole, and so was Rajiv Datt, who was Stitch’s best friend. Assholes and Creeps tended to pair off with one another. Brendan Dougherty, a quiet junior, with his pale-blue eyes and choirboy singing voice, was an Unspeakable.

“Kurt Cobain is Unspeakable with Asshole tendencies,” Paula replied, swallowing the word asshole as Mr. Smith entered the room. Instead of heading toward his desk, Mr. Smith sat down at the big table, next to Lauren and across from Paula. Their elbows touched for a moment.

“I would have guessed Unspeakable leaning toward Creep,” Lauren said.

“He’s an A-hole who wants you to think he’s a Creep,” Paula said.

“Wouldn’t you have to be a little bit of an A-hole to be the lead singer of a band?” Lauren said. She rustled the bag of Doritos. “You need a lot of confidence.”

“He has a stomach condition,” Paula said. “Maybe it’s because all the attention stresses him out. Maybe he’s a Creep after all.”

“I think when you’re a rock star, I have a stomach condition really means I do a lot of drugs,” Lauren said.

“You can cut out the middleman and just say I am a rock star really means I do a lot of drugs,” said Mr. Smith, pulling a sheaf of papers from his satchel. “It’s a good illustration of the transitive property.”

Paula thought that Mr. Smith was an Asshole, and Lauren thought he was a Creep. He was the only teacher they disagreed about.

“Maybe Kurt Cobain does a lot of drugs because he has a stomach condition,” Paula said. “But I hope they’re not doing drugs, because they want to have a baby. They say so in this interview.”

“If they can get heroin, they can get birth control,” Lauren said.

“That’s why they call it a drugstore!” said Mr. Smith, making a flourish with his red pen.

“My mom put me on birth control as soon as I got my period,” Paula said, darting a glance at Mr. Smith, who sighed loudly and started to murmur aloud as he read his papers.

“Me too,” Lauren said, without knowing why.

“But isn’t your mother super Catholic?” Paula asked. Paula knew the answer. She was saying this just for Mr. Smith’s benefit.

“Your mom goes to church, too,” Lauren said.

“But she doesn’t make me go.”

“My mom doesn’t make me go to church, either,” Lauren said. “Not anymore.”

Paula stared at Lauren so long that Lauren looked away. “People are complicated,” Lauren said, rustling the Doritos bag again.

“I have to go to studio art now,” Paula said, standing up. “What a very interesting conversation this has turned out to be, Lauren.”

Lauren pretended to highlight some important passages about the Treaty of Versailles in her Global Studies textbook as Paula walked out.

“Will we see you at tryouts for the spring musical soon?” Mr. Smith asked, not looking up from the papers he was grading. Their elbows touched again.

“Maybe, I don’t know,” Lauren said. She thought about moving to where Paula had been sitting, across the table from Mr. Smith, but she wondered if he would be offended by this, or if the doubtful sensation of inappropriateness hanging over them would only become concrete if she acknowledged it by moving, or if he was waiting for her to move and would become frustrated that she didn’t, and as these thoughts talked past one another and canceled one another out, she remained still and glazed in her chair, as if she weren’t thinking at all.

“What could be Uhh, maybe, I dunno about it?” he said.

“What’s the play again?” asked Lauren, who knew that Bethune’s 1992 spring musical would be Grease, according to the posters advertising the upcoming auditions that hung all over school. Paula had designed the posters herself in the studio art printmaking shop while Lauren sat beside her studying for an algebra test.

“It’s Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera The Mikado,” Mr. Smith said, turning a page.

“What?” Lauren asked. Mr. Smith always had these references ready to go, like he had a filing cabinet full of them and he chose five at random each morning to spread like bread crumbs through the halls and classrooms of Bethune.

“Lauren,” he said as he made a note in the margin of the essay he was grading, “you know that I know that you know what the play is, and your too-cool-for-school act is ironically quite befitting of Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s classic musical in its portrayal of teenage rebellion as manifested largely in a wholesale rejection of the state academic apparatus.”

“Uh-huh.”

He was so smart, and she would be as smart as him one day, but she wasn’t yet. He’d had more time to learn the words, the names. All she caught was too cool and act and rejection. Or rebellion? But she wasn’t acting cool, and she hadn’t rejected anything. She was just sitting here. What was she doing that she didn’t know about?

“The pose you strike, of the disaffected, eye-rolling adolescent alienated from the opportunities extended to her, and to a great extent alienated from speech and language itself, is spot-on,” he said.

Mom hated it when Lauren rolled her eyes. She said that nobody wanted to be around that kind of negative energy. That was the threat—that everybody was looking at Lauren and nobody liked what they saw.

“Too good to talk to me now, huh?” Mr. Smith asked.

Lauren breathed faster. His joking tone was a warning. She needed to explain herself, to say something he couldn’t criticize or argue with.

“I need to be home more, these days,” she said. “Might not have time for the musical. I’m sorry. I—I’ve told you about it—my situation at home.”

Mr. Smith frowned at his papers. “Don’t I remember you trying to get out of the fall play, too? You don’t mean it.”

“No, I mean it. I need to be around more to help my mom with my adopted sister.”

“And how is that going?” Mr. Smith asked, putting down his pen and turning to look at her. “You’ve said that it’s been challenging.”

“It’s good. She’s good. It’s just a lot of work for my mom.”

“Your adopted sister has tantrums?” He was turned ninety degrees in his seat to face her fully, Lauren staring straight ahead.

She shrugged. “Probably like any kid. I don’t know. It’s not such a big deal, I guess.”

“I thought you were in the middle of explaining to me why it is such a big deal.”

“I don’t know.”

“What does your mom do when your adopted sister has a tantrum?”

“Different stuff. She just deals with it.”

“You are incredibly difficult to talk to.”

A pumping in her throat, in her ears, rings of sound, gold rings, rattling, visible.

“Just deals with it? How?” he demanded.

“Sometimes she holds her tight.” A metallic ringing at the front of her head, behind her eyes. Gold spotting her vision, like she’d won a prize.

“How do you mean?”

“She just tries to hold her close. My mom puts her on her lap, turned away, so they’re both facing the same direction, and she wraps her arms around her from the back, like this”—Lauren wrapped her arms around an invisible child on her lap—“to stop her moving around so much, to calm her down. She wraps her, like swaddling a baby, and she rocks her like a baby, too. Sometimes Mirela hums, like she is singing to herself. And they just hold and rock like that until she calms down.”

“Your mother learned that from a licensed professional?”

Lauren suspected she had said too much, or said the wrong thing, but she didn’t know what. It was hard to hear her thoughts over the ringing, to see her thoughts through the gold spots. “I think it’s just instinct. She calls it the squeeze.”

“Why is your voice shaking?”

“I’m nervous.”

“You’re nervous? Because you’re concerned about your adopted sister?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s okay.” Mr. Smith was rubbing her back. Mom used to do that. Blood pounding in her ears. The gold spots turning black at the center, the black blooming, the gold a dying outline. But she also had a warm pooling feeling in her chest, a pleasurable sadness.

“My mom said when I was two I had an ear infection,” Lauren said, “and the medicine I had to take gave me crazy tantrums, and she would hold me like that and I would calm down.” There was a creak in her voice, like after sobbing or like when PJ and Sean would do frog-monster voice, like Lauren was fake-crying in an All My Sons rehearsal. “It was bright pink medicine. I liked how it tasted. I don’t remember that, though—it’s what my mom told me. I think she just goes on what feels right.”

“What feels right.” He was holding her hand with one hand and rubbing her back with the other. He played variations: rubbing circles and then up and down, tracing ticklish patterns and pushing with the heel of his hand.

“Yeah, it’s just—sometimes my adopted sister is out of control and she needs to calm down and be in a safe place.” She tried to talk in a higher voice, like she could put her voice out of reach of the creak, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t stop faking.

“That sounds hard,” he said, his hand low on her back.

“It’s okay.”

“Okay. So you can’t try out for the spring musical because your mother is taking care of your sister? And you can help her, somehow? Is that right?”

His rubbing hand traced an oval near the base of her spine, just under the waist of her jeans.

“Well, there’s also . . . to be honest, I can’t sing,” Lauren said, shrugging again.

“That’s just another put-on,” he said, squeezing her hand.

“No, I can’t.”

“Ah, come on,” he said, leaning in so their heads were pressed together, “try me.” He had coffee breath.

“No, it’s true,” she said. “That’s why I used to play the flute, to get out of singing.”

“And how was your embouchure?”

Lauren blushed. The bouch puffed against her ear. A cloud of coffee grains in her eyes, in her nose. She was dizzy. She squeezed his hand back and pulled away.

“Maybe I can help Paula out with the props, if she does that again,” she said, standing up.

“Mm-hm. Just be aware,” Mr. Smith said, taking his pen and looking down at his papers again, “that I’m onto you.”

Her stomach flipped. “What do you mean?”

“That business from before about the birth control,” he said, licking a finger and turning another page. “You and I and Paula all know very well that’s yet another put-on. You’re just full of put-ons today.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Lauren said.

“Lauren, give me a break.”

“I wasn’t putting anybody on.”

“There is no way,” Mr. Smith said, head down, voice dropping although they were alone in the room, tapping his pen on the desk, “that your very proper, very Catholic mother would do that.”

“She’s only Catholic for herself,” Lauren said. “She doesn’t force anything on me. I’m not even getting confirmed.”

It was odd to be standing over him like this, talking down at him. He was the one who’d started it.

“These are my people you’re talking about, too, you know,” he said.

“It’s none of your business,” Lauren said.

“You made it my business by bringing it up,” Mr. Smith said, looking up but not in her eyes, “and as your teacher, it is certainly my business if a student is lying to me.”

Her body buzzed with the old thrill, a tingle that traveled up her neck and spidered across the top of her scalp. She stood at the gate between telling a lie and making it true.

“I’m not lying,” Lauren said. “How much do you want to bet?”

“Wagers of any kind are prohibited on school property,” Mr. Smith said. “Did we learn nothing from the strip poker controversy of last fall?”

“I can prove to you that I’m not lying.”

Mr. Smith put his hands up. “This conversation needs to end here.”

“Why?” Lauren asked.

“Because it’s not appropriate,” he said with an air of finality, twirling his pen. “You are being inappropriate.”

“You mean it’s inappropriate for me to lie to you, which I am not doing? Or it’s inappropriate for us to be talking about birth control pills?”

“Stitch, Rajiv, how nice to see you both,” Mr. Smith said as the boys cartwheeled into the room.

 

These days Stitch and Rajiv moved around Bethune by means of cartwheels and pogo jumps and froggy hops and single axels, thanks to their shared interest in the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the women’s figure skating program in the Albertville Winter Olympics. Sometimes, in mid-conversation, Stitch set his mouth in a perfect line and began whipping his head around in the manner of the band’s jumping-bean bass player, then he would pick up the thread of the conversation he was in as if nothing had happened, and no one commented or criticized him, just as no teachers told him off for boing-boinging in a zigzag down the passageway between the yearbook office and the math department, slashing at his air guitar, screwing up his eyes and working his lips in a rubbery ecstasy.

“What a little punk-ass bitch,” Rajiv was saying.

“Rajiv has a case of the Mondays,” Mr. Smith said in an exaggerated pouting voice, and everyone cringed.

Rajiv was upset about the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ appearance on Saturday Night Live that weekend. Lauren had watched it at Paula’s, flopped next to Paula on her bed. Lauren hated that band but didn’t say so, because Stitch and Rajiv loved them. Stitch and Rajiv talked a lot about the band’s “musicianship” and their “influences,” which Lauren knew nothing about. She did know that all their songs were about fucking—they wore barely any clothes onstage or in their videos, probably because they wanted to be ready at any time to do all the fucking they sang about—and even the songs that weren’t about fucking seemed to be them trying to prove they could write a song that wasn’t about fucking, like the cheesy ballad that Stitch and Rajiv would yell-sing down the hallways. They were big dumb naked red-faced fuck machines, except for the guitar player. John. John was the one. Sad brown eyes, ridiculous cheekbones. Paula had a picture of John smoking an emotional cigarette taped to the headboard of her bed. In the video for the cheesy ballad, John wore a Kurt Cobain outfit, cardigan and baggy grandpa trousers and a knit hat with a pom-pom on top, and maybe the outfit was like an upside-down distress flag to show everyone that John was in the wrong band and he needed out, and the outfit would look stupid on anyone else, but on John it looked cool, the same way whatever Stitch did was cool because it was Stitch who was doing it. On Saturday Night Live, John didn’t wear a shirt on the first song, but it was more like he had forgotten to wear a shirt, or he was too sad to put on a shirt, or like the lead singer had ripped off John’s shirt to force him to fake being the rebel fuck machine he so clearly was not. John hunched over his guitar on the far side of the stage, looking cold and hungry, doing the bare minimum. Falling asleep on his feet like a horse.

“John is so depressed,” Paula said. “He can’t handle the fame.” Paula talked about all her rock stars like this, like they were her friends who confided in her, but in cryptographs through the pages of Kerrang! and Spin, and now she was gossiping about her famous pals behind their backs. She talked about Kurt Cobain’s mysterious stomach condition like she was his personal physician.

John did look depressed up there on the Saturday Night Live stage, but pointedly so, focused and industrious in his depression, like he was studying for the depression SATs, and the lead singer was so infuriated with him by the end of the first song that he kicked John right in the ass—flung himself to the ground and spun around on his back and brought his knee to his chest and punched his foot forward and awp! It was like something PJ would do to Sean, except then Sean would have sat on PJ’s face and farted in vengeance. John just took it. Lauren and Paula looked at each other to confirm that the kick had really happened. Paula was taping the show, and when it went to commercial she stopped and rewound the tape so they could examine the kick, frame by wobbly frame. When the band came out for their second song, the cheesy ballad, John had put on his Kurt Cobain outfit and he was playing the familiar notes of the song’s introduction but in the wrong order, backward, slowed down, bent, in a different scale, or de-tuned, his arpeggios a vortex, a drain that his bandmates were circling, and as the song reached what should have been its apex and John, poor dear scrawny gorgeous kicked-in-the-ass John, stepped up to the mic to sing the climactic chorus that was also the title of the big hit cheesy ballad, he screwed up his face and instead of singing the words, he went, “WOOOOOOO!”

Paula burst out laughing.

Again, higher-pitched this time. “WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

John sounded like a girl, like a fan. Paula flung herself back on her bed and bicycled her legs in the air for joy and laughed some more.

“Why did he do that?” Lauren asked Paula, but she knew why. No one knew how much power John had until he decided to use it to say no, to reject what was happening and create something anarchic and better. He said no without saying it. It was startling and childish, and that’s why it was beautiful. At the end of the song, the lead singer glared at John like he was a swiveling head in middle school, but it didn’t matter. It was done. They’d been in a war and the war was over and the big dumb fuck machine had lost and John had won.

“John is so lovely,” Lauren said, and Paula WOOOOOed in agreement.

“It’s so unfair to the rest of the band,” Rajiv was saying in Tedquarters now. “What an asshole.”

“And what a choice of insult, Rajiv!” Mr. Smith said.

“But we’ll always remember that he did that,” Lauren said. “Would we be talking about them right now if John had just shown up and played like normal?”

“Like you know anything about music,” Rajiv said. “Name one song of theirs that isn’t on the new record.” Stitch stopped-dropped-and-rolled to a spot just behind Rajiv, drew his knee to his chest, and extended his leg until his foot pressed on Rajiv’s backside.

“I just think it’s cool that he took a risk and did something crazy that we would all remember,” Lauren said. “I bet he was scared.”

“Answer me—name one song,” Rajiv said, shimmying his ass against Stitch’s heel. Lauren was always in the witness box when Rajiv got started on music.

She looked at Stitch on the carpet, his foot grinding into Rajiv’s backside. Stitch screwed up his face and hit the note exactly as Lauren could hear it in her head: “WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

The tape that Stitch had given her the night of The Man in the Moon was a copy of Gish, by the Smashing Pumpkins. She liked how the music on Gish sounded literally like metal, as if someone had translated into music the sound of metallurgic processes that she was vaguely aware of through factory field trips and reading Johnny Tremaine in eighth grade. Casting, forging, extrusions. A gleaming sound that hinted at a gruesome suffering beneath it, like Johnny Tremaine’s mangled hand were at the mixing board. But the singer was trying too hard to be hard, nasal and sneering, like he was mocking the listener for her poor judgment in listening to him, or for thinking she was good enough to listen to him. She could imagine Stitch singing the songs instead.

After Gish, Stitch gave her a cassette with Nevermind by Nirvana on one side and their other record, Bleach, on the other. All the songs written in pencil, each word individually underlined. Lauren had listened to Gish and Bleach enough to be able to speak with Stitch about them in a knowledgeable way, but Nevermind was the one she listened to over and over. Everyone was listening to Nevermind. Danielle Sheridan had a Nirvana T-shirt, and Rajiv gave her endless shit about it. For Lauren, Nevermind offered freedom in an enclosed space. The space could be Abby’s car on the way to Delaware Park or to the record stores and cafés on Elmwood Avenue, or the space could be the width of two headphones on the days when Lauren took the bus to school. Or at night, to drown out Mirela screaming.

“I don’t really pay attention to lyrics,” Stitch said, which struck Lauren as a radical idea. “I pay attention to production.” Stitch was interested in how a sound was constructed, compressed, how it scrambled the air around it. He wasn’t interested in words because they didn’t mean anything without the sound—an isolated lyric couldn’t bear to stand all on its own. There was a song on Nevermind, “On a Plain,” about not having words and not making sense. It made fun of itself for trying to have a message. Stitch had read that Kurt Cobain just dashed off the lyrics right before he recorded himself singing them. It was strange to be so careless about words that millions of people would hear and think about. But the emotions in the song were clear: restlessness, irritation, but also humor and not taking yourself seriously. The song was about caring about not caring. It had the feeling of marking time just before something big was going to happen. In class, Mr. Smith called this “liminal space,” and told the students to watch out in their reading for characters having important conversations on thresholds or staircases or through the windows of trains departing the station, one person on the train and the other left behind on the platform.

Kurt Cobain liked R.E.M., who had a big embarrassing hit record out when Lauren was in eighth grade, but Stitch said they had a lot of older records that were okay to listen to. He said Reckoning was the best R.E.M. record because the band wrote it very fast and didn’t have much time to think about it. A lot of second records were like that, he said—Nevermind was a second record.

That night, Lauren lay in bed listening to the tape of Reckoning that Stitch had made for her. Mirela was asleep, so Lauren could listen to the music chiming out of the small speakers on the tape deck, nothing to drown out. The most unfinished song on Reckoning was “Second Guessing,” because the entire chorus was “Uh-oh-oh, here we are,” over and over again. The song was stupid in a Smashing Pumpkins way, like it was daring you to become bored and frustrated with it, but it also made Lauren think of Kurt Cobain saying “Here we are now,” like he was in liminal space, like party guests standing in the doorway announcing themselves, bringing big expectations that they were expecting to be disappointed. Lauren imagined everyone she liked standing in this doorway, singing along with Nirvana or R.E.M. or the Pixies: Abby, Deepa, Stitch, even Claire. The only friend she couldn’t see there was Paula.

The phone rang, and Lauren knew it was Paula, like she was calling to ask why she wasn’t included in the doorway, and Lauren yelled, “I got it!”—remembering Mirela too late, hoping she wouldn’t wake up—and grabbed the receiver. “Hello?”

A click, and someone lightly breathing. “Hello?” a voice asked, and it took Lauren a moment to place it.

“Hello? Who is this?” Lauren asked.

“This is—wait, you called me,” the voice said.

“No, I didn’t.”

“I’m confused. Hello.”

“Stitch? Is that you?” Lauren asked.

“Yeah. This is weird. Uh, who is this?”

“This is Lauren.”

A crush call. They were back in middle school.

“I don’t get it—what happened?” Stitch asked. He sounded lost but so close, inside her head. Like there were doors opening inside her and he was walking through them, not knowing where he was. For the second time that day, Lauren felt the old thrill. She wanted to play—she hadn’t realized how much she missed this.

“What happened is that you called me,” she said lightly, like she was the one in charge of the joke.

“I didn’t—this is crazy,” Stitch said.

“It’s okay,” Lauren said. “If you’ve changed your mind about talking, that’s fine.”

“What?”

“Thanks for calling, Stitch,” she said.

“Wait—”

Lauren hung up the phone and sputtered a laugh like someone was watching her. She started to pick up the phone again to call around, try to figure out who had done it—but no, on second thought, better not to seem interested in a kiddie prank.

She switched off the lamp on her bedside table, and then she was alone in the dark with Reckoning. There were songs on Reckoning that felt ancient and bottomlessly sad, a sadness as old as a riverbed. Listening to some of the songs made her imagine sitting on the banks of a creek where a classmate had drowned—not a best friend, maybe someone you knew was nice and said “Hi” to and had always meant to get to know better, and now you never could.

She wouldn’t tell Stitch that sometimes she put on Crowded House at night as she fell asleep, because Crowded House wasn’t the type of band he would think was okay to listen to. They were too old and sweet, too nerdy. But the harmonies and the organ, the chimes of the guitars, created the same warm pooling feeling in her chest that she felt listening to Reckoning or in Tedquarters or at the sleepover at Abby’s: the pleasurable sadness, like the lush sadness of autumn leaves, the sense in autumn that everything was full with loss and longing, with memories so beautiful that they couldn’t be spoken before they were washed away with winter’s thaw, and the spring would begin unaware of all that had been lost. These sentiments were too embarrassing to be put into words, too melty and mushy to be pounded into shape. She probably couldn’t tell anyone about them. They could only travel through chord progressions, vibrations through hollow chambers, compressed air through pipes. They were secrets and needed to be enjoyed in secret, like the nighttime car trips she used to take with Mom. The best and realest parts of life were unspoken, or unable to be spoken, the things that no one would tell you about—you had to teach yourself the language alone, and it had no words. You had to be in the right place at the right time, and paying attention. You had to be with the right people in the right doorway.

Crowded House had a new song called “Fall at Your Feet,” and to Lauren it naturally paired with Billy Bragg’s song “Trust,” because both songs had lines about a man being inside a woman. Weirdly, in the Billy Bragg song, the singer—a man—was singing from the perspective of the woman, and on top of that, she was pregnant. “He’s already been inside me,” Billy Bragg sang. So much of the character of his voice was located in the damp thrusting of his lips. The voice, the words, and Billy Bragg’s adenoids pressed against her wet and close, a squeaking-squishing that Lauren found almost unbearable and that she kept rewinding and listening to, squirming, because it was so strange and obscene and she wanted to understand it.

“I feel like I’m moving inside her,” the wimpy nice guy from Crowded House sang in “Fall at Your Feet.” She squirmed at this, too. He feels like it? Or was he doing it? That nerdy little noodle of a guy? What would it feel like? How would he know?

She thought about Mr. Smith. She felt his hand on her back from the afternoon. She’d been trying not to think about it. She put her hand between her legs so it could all overcome her and she could go to sleep. She thought about what he was like when he was alone, or alone with his girlfriend, if he had one—Paula had asked him if he did, and he’d shaken his head vehemently and said “No, no,” in a manner that left ambiguous whether he was denying having a girlfriend or denying Paula’s right to ask the question, and certainly left no space for clarification. During the school day, he could use up all his jokes and puns and sarcasm, alternate them as offense and defense as he dealt with all those dumb kids like Rajiv and Andy Figueroa, and by the time he came home he would be drained of anything that wasn’t serious and compassionate and ardent. That was a word Lauren had learned from him, ardent: overcome with admiration, loyalty, and passion for the one you love. Stunned by her. When he was alone and only one other person in the world was looking—a person that hadn’t been foisted on him but the one he wanted—that’s when you could see who he really was.

 

“Where’s Jamie Lee?” PJ asked as he and Sean piled into the back of the dragon wagon. Mirela’s car seat was empty and Lauren was in the front passenger seat. Sean and PJ’s latest nickname for Mirela was Jamie Lee, after the actress who screamed through the old horror movies they taped off HBO.

“Where’s who?” Mom asked.

“Jamie Lee is PJ’s special name for his binky,” Sean said. “Where’s your binky, PJ?”

“Oh, I remember, I left it up your butt,” PJ replied as they punched each other in the arms, laughing at how much it hurt. Throwing their heads back, thrilled with the pain.

Mom turned up the car radio over PJ and Sean chanting, “Kill! Kill! Kill!”, which was a key line from a Jamie Lee movie called Prom Night. A woman on a call-in show was talking through her nose, her voice echoing behind her on her own radio that she’d forgotten to turn down. “I’m not pro-abortion, I’m pro-life,” the woman was saying. “I think abortion is wrong. I want to be clear about that. But what is also wrong is these out-of-towners coming in here telling us what to—”

Mom turned off the radio.

Lauren flipped it on again.

“—when this is about overwhelming our local police, overrunning our local court system, spending taxpayers’ money to—”

“Even the people on your side aren’t on your side,” Lauren said.

“Don’t be smart,” Mom said. “It’s not just out-of-towners who will be participating in the protests. Is Father Steve an out-of-towner?”

“Yes, he is!” Lauren said. “He just came to our church a couple months ago, and you act like you’ve been best friends forever.”

“Well, wherever they’re from—good people can disagree. I want to listen to all sides.”

“That’s why Mom turned off the radio!” PJ said from the back seat. “So she could listen to all sides!”

“The mayor invited them, after all,” Mom said. “It’s not a crazy fringe thing.”

“A federal judge has ruled we have to keep a minimum of one hundred and fifty feet from the clinic doors,” a voice on the radio said. “But it is our constitutional right under the First Amendment to provide sidewalk counseling to—”

“This is not primarily a free-speech issue,” another voice interrupted.

“Is that what you do? Sidewalk counseling?” Lauren asked.

“Okay, well, that—that is an out-of-towner thing,” Mom said. “They try to talk the patients out of what they’re doing. I—we don’t do that, in our group.”

“Whatever it is you’re doing,” Lauren said, “please, seriously, Mom, don’t do anything to embarrass me.”

“We’re not doing anything to embarrass you,” Jane said. “We are doing it to save children. None of this is about you, Lauren.”

“I’m doing this to embarrass you, Lauren,” PJ said, and blew an enormous fart between the heels of his hands.

“No, it needs to sound wetter than that to really embarrass me,” Lauren said. “Try it in the crook of your arm.” Lauren, PJ, and Sean blew farts into the crooks of their arms for the remainder of the radio segment.

“You still haven’t told us where Mirela is,” Lauren said to Mom as the station switched to the weather report.

“Dad took her long enough for me to pick you guys up and drive you around to all your stuff, which is my absolute favorite thing to do when I’m not driving Mirela around to all her stuff,” Mom said.

“Mom, Mirela thinks there’s a ghost who lives in the trunk of the car,” PJ said.

“She yells and points her finger at the washing machine when it’s turned on,” Sean said.

“And she tries to go to sleep in it when it’s turned off,” PJ said.

“She puts my shoes in the refrigerator,” Sean said.

“When it rains she says it’s her birthday,” PJ said, and goose bumps came up on Lauren’s arms.

“When she goes up the stairs she holds on to the bannister like somebody’s trying to push her off, and she gets angry at them, but there’s nobody there,” Sean said.

“When she goes down the stairs she just lies down,” PJ said.

“She gets upset if she has to wash her hands, but she also gets upset if her hands are dirty,” Sean said.

“She pooped in the bathtub and washed her hands in the toilet,” PJ said.

“She thinks my bike is alive,” Sean said.

Mom turned the dragon wagon onto the driveway of Paula’s house, and Lauren got out without saying goodbye. She heard Sean and PJ pummeling each other trying to claim the front seat as she approached the front door, tapped on the screen, opened the door halfway to pop her head through. “Hello?” she called. “Mrs. Brunt?”

Paula’s mom was inches away, sitting on the couch in her nurse’s scrubs, watching Oprah. “Hey, honey,” she said dreamily. “It’s nice to see you. Paula isn’t home yet—she’s at a meeting, I think? A club?”

“Yearbook,” Lauren said, smiling.

“Do you want to wait for her here?”

“If that’s okay?” Lauren asked.

“Sure, honey. Are you hungry? Do you want a sandwich or something?”

“No, thank you, Mrs. Brunt.”

Lauren shut the front door behind her with elaborate care and walked up the wooden steps to the second floor of Paula’s house. Lauren closed the door of the upstairs bathroom, turned on the taps, knelt down, and opened the bottom drawer beneath the sink. There, inside a shoebox-sized plastic tub, were rows and rows of small rectangular boxes. Lauren peeled open the seal on one box. In it were six trays, each as thin as a pack of matches and sealed with gold foil. She took out a tray, which held twenty-eight tiny pills, each packed beneath its own clear dome. Iridescent opals retrieved one by one from the bottom of the ocean. Lauren peeled the foil back. A pill popped into the palm of her hand. She slipped the single pill under her tongue, then took it out and put it into her jeans pocket instead.

Lauren slipped the tray back inside the box and the box inside her backpack. She arranged the boxes remaining in the plastic tub so that there were no conspicuous gaps between them. She slowly closed the drawer, biting down on her lip and shutting her eyes as the wheels on the rail squeaked into place. She hoped that the running tap masked the noise. She flushed the toilet, counted to three, switched off the tap, and opened the door. She was alone.

She shouldered her backpack and went into Paula’s bedroom. The ceilings on the top floor of Paula’s house were too low; more than once Lauren had bumped her head on their sloping sides. The skirting boards had been torn from Paula’s bedroom walls. A crack in the ceiling snaked down the wall and behind a 10,000 Maniacs poster. Lauren sat down on the edge of Paula’s bed. It was big enough for both of them. Flannel sheets, periwinkles on white, the same as on a nightgown Mom used to wear. The sheets were musty, dank like the air in the room. “Like you own the place” was something her father said to Lauren and her brothers when they were messy or rude or loud or taking up too much space for his liking, but Lauren did, in fact, act like she owned Paula’s place, coming and going when she pleased, eating the Brunts’ food, using their shampoo and electricity, leaving stray hairs and motes of skin and oil on their bedsheets for Paula’s mother to launder. Drool on her pillowcases, probably. She kept a toothbrush in the bathroom that Paula shared with her brother, a change of clothes on one shelf in Paula’s closet.

Paula and Lauren moved about freely with each other, as if they were alone and unseen, unacquainted with shame or inhibition. They got changed in front of each other, peed in front of each other, reported to each other in forensic detail about their periods and shits. They admitted to each other that they made themselves come although they didn’t tell each other what they thought about when they did it—that was a boundary. And Lauren didn’t do it in Paula’s room, only in the bathroom with the door locked. Another boundary. The other night they’d taken off their underpants, squatted over compact mirrors, and described to each other what they saw, mixing floral anatomy with the raw ruddy language of the butcher’s shop. The reflection was objectively frightening: marsupial pouch, hungry eyeless mouth—if you pulled back the lips you could see if its teeth were coming in. The dark hair thin and flat as Mr. Koslowski’s comb-over. She tranquilly observed the thought that even Mr. Koslowski, who was married and had kids, had had his head between somebody’s legs at some point, perhaps even recently. You reached a certain age and that became part of your life, somehow.

When Paula came home from yearbook, Lauren was going to practice her number for tomorrow’s spring musical auditions. A silly old show tune that stuck in her head from the days when she took piano lessons. Lauren had sung it to the tiles of the shower that morning as PJ and Sean barked and banged outside the bathroom door. She sang the song to herself as she sat on Paula’s bed, tracing her sock along the floorboards. Downstairs, the television droned. Lauren would know that she sang her song badly if Paula grunted and nodded and avoided meeting her eye, and that she sang it passably well if Paula flared her nostrils and smiled and said something acerbic.

Sometimes Lauren thought she trusted Paula more than anyone else, and sometimes she thought it wasn’t a matter of trust, but rather that she didn’t care what Paula thought of her. Maybe she had found a perfect, safe intimacy with Paula, or maybe Paula was just a receptacle—that is, mostly a dump, which is once in a while a place where useful things can be fished out and taken without consequence or remorse. Maybe Lauren served that same function for Paula.

Lauren turned on Paula’s television, like she owned the place, and stared at MTV. There was a new U2 video that was boring-on-purpose: black-and-white footage of buffalo galloping in slow motion, alternating with pictures of flowers and various translations of the word one. It was sort of transfixing in how boring it was, or just in how different it was from any other video. Mom or Dad would say the video was “arty,” which was maybe the same as boring, although Lauren suspected that you developed a taste and preference for arty things the same way you developed a taste for vodka. Until today she hadn’t watched the video through to the end, when it froze on an image of buffalo hurling themselves off a cliff, their bodies seconds away from breaking against the rocks below. One of the buffalo was upside down, its hooves poised daintily in the air, comical and ghastly. Lauren felt the purposefulness of how boring the rest of the video was in a new way. It added another layer of horror to know that galloping toward your own certain death could be tedious.

Lauren pressed play on whatever tape was in the deck. It was still the Red Hot Chili Peppers on Saturday Night Live. She rewound to the beginning of the cheesy ballad and waited for John to do the WOOOOOOO, and when he did it she forgot herself and laughed out loud. At the end of the song she rewound to the beginning and watched it again. It was a stupid waste of time to just lie here watching something she’d already seen, laughing at the same joke like she was hearing it for the first time, but if Paula walked in right now Lauren wouldn’t be embarrassed. Paula would just sit down and watch with her. They wouldn’t even have to talk about it.

Lauren wondered what Mirela was doing now. Mirela was why Lauren was sitting here, alone, in another family’s house, which was funny since Lauren was always telling Mom to try leaving Mirela alone. “Just let her be,” Lauren said. “Give her some room to breathe.”

“She doesn’t truly want to be left alone,” Mom said. “Not deep down. It’s just that being left alone is what she’s used to. She is comfortable with neglect and isolation. And that’s unfair to her. No child should have to get used to that. We have to break her of the habit. We have to teach her how to love us and how to be loved, how to accept love.”

Lauren understood why Mom took it personally. Mom told Mirela she would never leave her. She said it over and over, like one of her prayers. Mom thought Mirela was afraid she’d be left alone. But maybe Mom had that all wrong. Maybe Mirela was afraid that Mom would stay.

 

“—I’m a little lamb who’s lost in the wood—”

“Okay, Lauren, we get it,” Mr. Smith called out.

Lauren squinted out into the seats from where she stood on the auditorium stage, beside the piano and Deepa, who was playing for spring musical auditions.

“What?” Lauren asked.

“What?” Deepa asked.

“We’re good here,” Mr. Smith said.

“I just started—I didn’t even get to the bridge—” Lauren said.

“You told me you couldn’t sing,” Mr. Smith said. “Remember? I’m taking you at your word.”

“I don’t get it,” Lauren and Deepa said in unison.

Mr. Smith showed his teeth in a rectangle, like he’d just smelled something rotten.

“Should I run lines with Stitch now?” Lauren asked, glancing over at Stitch, who was waiting in the wings. “Isn’t there a—dance component? To the audition?”

Mr. Smith clapped once and jabbed his thumbs toward the exits. “Lauren! You’re done! Goodbye!”

Lauren threw up her hands and walked offstage, Deepa calling after her to take her sheet music.

“What an asshole,” Stitch whispered as Lauren passed him, and she laughed loud, hoping Mr. Smith could hear her. She hoped he could see that it was Stitch who had made her laugh.

She arranged a tight smile to screen off the surprised faces of the students waiting outside for their own auditions: Andy’s smirk, Claire’s pitying pout, Paula’s piggy smile. Lauren couldn’t have been onstage more than five minutes before Mr. Smith ordered her away. She grinned and shrugged as she walked past them—strolling with stringent casualness toward the front entrance of Bethune and, just beyond it, the sunken cafeteria—and the performance didn’t feel fake. It felt great—she would not have to be in the stupid musical! She would not have to spend weeks slouching around in Tedquarters, slimy Domino’s pizza boxes strewn around, listening to Andy bitch about his costume or his fellow castmates’ poor vocal modulation! She would not have to pursue Mr. Smith’s erratic approval except for English class, and in a few short weeks she would have the option of switching out of his class for Mrs. Bonnano’s poetry module, where students got to go to Delaware Park to write sonnets. She could be composing lines on the landscape architecture of Frederick Law Olmsted instead of trying to figure out why Mr. Smith was paying her so much attention today, or why he was ignoring her today, or why he’d forced her to rewrite her quite fine essay on the first half of The Things They Carried (“This is so bad I can’t bring myself to grade it”) or why he’d given her an A+ on the bad essay she’d written on the second half of The Things They Carried the morning it was due (“Loose yet incisive—love to watch you think!”), or what she had done this time to make him mad, and whether or not she would escape consequences for making him mad, and if he thought that not casting her in the musical, after pressuring her so intensely to audition, was some kind of consequence, a punishment—well, she had escaped granting him that satisfaction, too. She could try out for spring track instead, or swim laps in the afternoon so she wouldn’t be out of shape for summer swim club, or she could do both, if she was feeling ambitious—and maybe she was! Or she could spend afternoons with Dad at his new development, like he was always asking her to, learn about the family business. Or she could do some of the volunteer work that Mom used to do but couldn’t anymore because of Mirela.

Or she could help Mom with Mirela. She could take the lie she’d told Mr. Smith and make it true. Mom was having such a tough time, and whatever mistakes Mom had made, Mirela was with them now, she was part of the family, she was Lauren’s sister—she’d never thought she’d have a sister!—and Mirela deserved better than a sister who was always hiding from her playing make-believe in a school auditorium or watching MTV in Paula’s poky house. They all made fun of Mirela for running away, but really Lauren was the one running away from Mirela, from all of them. And that was about to change.

“Lauren!” Paula was following her. They stopped at the edge of the cafeteria pit. “What happened back there?”

“Eh, wasn’t my day,” Lauren said, throwing her hand like she was shooing a fly. A brave smile, the smile of someone who rose above. “You should go back—you’ll lose your place in line.”

“Okay—do you want me to meet you at my house after?”

“You know, I should probably spend some time at home. Good luck!” Lauren grinned wider and walked out of school.

 

The cast list for Grease was posted just outside Tedquarters on Friday afternoon, just as classes let out for the weekend. Lauren breezed by to take a look, just out of curiosity, and she saw that Andy was chosen for hotfooting greaser Danny, and Julie was goody-two-shoes Sandy, and Stitch was auxiliary greaser Kenickie, and Deepa was sweet, stupid Frenchie, and Abby and Claire were in the chorus as secondary Pink Ladies—as they explicitly wished to be, as a low-time-commitment senior-year lark—and Lauren, incredibly, was wisecracking Rizzo, de facto head of the Pink Ladies.

“You? Again?” Andy blurted behind her. Lauren knew who he meant. Without turning to acknowledge him, or the several voices murmuring congratulations to her, she walked down the hallway, past the band practice room, and out the door, like she couldn’t care less about any of it, like she hadn’t noticed all the attention she was getting.

“Another lead!” Mom exclaimed when Lauren got home. “And only a freshman. Lauren, you’re an absolute star. I’m so proud of you!”

To celebrate, Mom sent Mirela to Nana Dee’s for the night and rented Grease from Blockbuster for the rest of the family to watch together. They ordered pizza and wings from Bocce’s, with extra celery and blue cheese for Mom. Dad came home from work on time like he used to. Mom went to kiss him hello and he put his hands on her shoulders—a feint at an embrace, but really a defensive block—as he thrust one cheek at her, saying something about needing to brush his teeth after having Ted’s Hot Dogs for lunch.

“I haven’t seen this in so long,” Mom said as the movie began with Danny and Sandy kissing on a beach, which PJ and Sean found very upsetting.

“Suck my kiss!” PJ said through a mouthful of Sean’s ear. The Red Hot Chili Peppers had infiltrated the area middle schools.

“This movie was huge when Lauren was a baby,” Mom said.

“All I remember are the songs and the leather pants Olivia whatshername wears at the end,” Dad said. He was sitting up quite straight on the couch, not picking at the bottoms of his bare feet like he usually did after a long day. Like he was a guest. He hadn’t gone upstairs to brush his teeth like he’d said he would.

“Is Lauren Olivia whatshername?” Sean asked, wiping his ear on PJ’s pant leg.

“No, Lauren is Ritzy,” Mom said.

“No, Rizzo—like Ratso Rizzo,” Dad said.

“Like Fatso Rizzo,” Sean corrected him.

“Yes, I have to sew my own fat suit to be in the musical,” Lauren said.

“You won’t need one!” PJ yelled, pinching the skin above her knee, and Lauren smacked him on the arm and PJ ululated and turned a somersault on the carpet and their father pounded his fist three times on the arm of the couch.

“I don’t think of Dustin Hoffman as fat,” Mom said.

“Rizzo is the one that gets pregnant,” PJ said from the floor. He was eating a wing and bicycling his legs.

“No wings on the carpet,” Mom told PJ.

“Wait, how have you seen this?” Lauren asked PJ.

“No, Rizzo is the gay hooker,” Dad said.

“Who?” PJ asked. An orange globule of wing sauce arcing through the air.

“PJ, the carpet,” Mom said.

“Fatso Rizzo,” Dad said.

“A pregnant hooker,” Sean said.

“No, Lauren is the pregnant hooker,” PJ said.

“Only in the movie, I bet,” Mom said. “They probably clean it up for high school.”

In the movie of Grease, all the high school students looked twenty-five except for Rizzo, who looked thirty-five. Sean thought Movie Rizzo was a teacher’s aide who just liked to hang out with kids. “Like Steff in Pretty in Pink,” he said.

“Like Mr. Smith,” Lauren said.

“You’re always talking about that guy, but nobody knows him and nobody cares,” Sean said through a mouthful of chicken, in a tone more observational than critical, and Lauren smiled and pretended to yawn, stretching her arms above her head for enhanced effect. She felt her muscles opening, her fingers laced and limbering against one another, and remembered daybreak at Abby’s house, that same embracing joy of belonging. The fake yawn became a real one, and she sat back on the couch, closer to Mom.

“She looks too pure to be pink,” Movie Rizzo said of Sandy. Dad whistled low through his teeth, and Mom laughed.

The phone rang and rang. “Are you going to get that?” Dad asked Mom.

“Let it go. Let’s just have a night,” Mom said.

“What is going to be left of this script once they cut out all the sex stuff for the school play?” Dad asked as a high schooler lay prone on the bleachers, leering up a classmate’s skirt, while PJ and Sean, repeating the patter of one of the secondary greasers, yelled, “She puts out? She puts out?!” They continued reciting this for weeks, at any provocation and no provocation at all.

“‘Model of virginity’?” Mom asked. “They’re not going to let anybody say that in a high school production.”

“Are you allowed to come up with your own substitute lines?” Dad asked Lauren, who shrugged.

“Wholesome times infinity,” Mom said. “Master’s in divinity.”

“Cops in the vicinity,” Dad said.

The phone rang and rang.

“Rizzo is a bitter old hag,” Lauren said, to her brothers’ screeching approval. “Even her big musical number is just about dissing some poor girl she barely knows.”

Lauren did admire how Movie Rizzo could manipulate the people around her into doing what she wanted them to do, like when she contrived a scene between Sandy and Danny at a pep rally that left both of them feeling confused and down. Movie Rizzo’s biggest problem was that she was always bored, like her boredom was a low-grade illness brought on by being a thirty-five-year-old still in high school, and the boredom made her do things that were impulsive and self-defeating, like climbing down a trellis to meet up with five guys—five!—or throwing a milkshake at Kenickie, or engaging in unprotected intercourse with Kenickie, a character whom Dad thought had some kind of endocrinological disorder. When Movie Rizzo said that she felt like a broken typewriter because she had missed a period, Mom objected, not because Rizzo was possibly pregnant and that would say something about her moral compass and the inappropriately adult themes and situations of Grease, but because “defective typewriter” wasn’t a strong metaphor.

“How many things could ‘I’m a defective typewriter’ mean?” Mom asked. “Aren’t there better typewriter jokes they could come up with?”

“I got my ribbon in a twist,” Lauren said.

“I couldn’t find any space at the bar,” Dad said. “The space bar.”

“A fight broke out at the Star Wars Cantina and a starship pilot broke a typewriter,” PJ said, as Sean did the splits in a handstand and PJ knocked him over.

“‘I skipped a period’ is not really a joke, it’s more like a bad crossword clue, where you have to have most of the letters already before you can figure it out,” Dad said.

“Yeah, it’s like the feeling when the clue to eighty-five across is ‘See eighty-five down’ and so you look at eighty-five down and it says ‘See eighty-five across,’” Mom said.

“Locking in on a punny crossword clue should feel like the teeth of a zipper coming together,” Dad said, steepling his fingers, as lights in their driveway flooded the den windows and reflected off the television set. Nana Dee’s Saab. Dad hit pause on the VCR as Mom went out the front door to investigate.

“Fuck,” Dad blew through his teeth, peering out the window.

“Mother fuck?” PJ whispered.

When Mom came back, she looked harried and resigned. “We’ll have to finish up movie night another time, everybody,” she said. “Mirela’s having a rough one.”

 

“I don’t want to keep playing the old lady,” Lauren complained to Mr. Smith after English class.

“Maybe you’re just an old soul,” he said.

“I watched the movie,” she said.

“Don’t go by anything you saw in the movie. Everything gets edited for the school version.”

“Rizzo is a hag, and I’m not.”

“Didn’t we have the same conversation about All My Sons? I’ve told you before: the audience wants to be told what to see.”

“Mr. Smith—” Lauren began. Her hands were trembling.

“Speaking of old ladies, Mr. Smith is what my mother calls me,” he said with a grin. “When class is not in session, you can call me Ted.”

“But class is in session,” she said.

“Are we not in fact between classes?” he asked. “Does Bethune not lack walls and doors? To be a teacher or a student here now is to stand poised in a threshold space, where convictions blur and identities mingle. Like the balcony in Romeo and Juliet—we are both inside and outside, lending our every encounter a jolt of the uncanny.”

“Real fast—I have something to show you,” Lauren said. Her hands shook so badly that she had trouble unzipping her backpack. The zipper caught on the fabric, and she felt the shuddering in her ears as she worked the cloth out of its teeth. She reached into the bag, looked quickly around her, flashed a single tray of birth control pills in front of Mr. Smith just long enough for his face to change, and dropped them back inside.

Then she said the line she’d rehearsed in her head a million times. “Unlike a broken typewriter, I’ll never miss a period,” she recited, zipping up her bag and striding away without looking behind her, a small secret smile on her face. She was in a movie walking into her close-up, hitting her mark. She could turn on her heel and cue a popular song. Other students would leap onto their desks, tap heels clicking, jazz hands in formation.

“That line is not in the school version of the play, by the way!” Mr. Smith called after her. The punch line in the movie.

 

The first rehearsal was short: permission slips, announcements about costumes and fund-raising, an abbreviated run-through of the big ensemble song, “We Go Together,” with Mindy, the choreographer, who ran the ballet school in the Bells strip mall. Mr. Smith didn’t even hang around to watch. Paula was home sick, officially, although Lauren suspected she was home sulking about having been made property mistress again. Walking home, Lauren cut through Stitch’s yard, reached the weeping willow, looked through the kitchen window. Nobody home yet. She passed PJ and Sean shooting hoops in the Schecks’ driveway three houses up from home. Lauren walked through the front door and into the living room, pausing a moment when she saw Mirela asleep on the sofa. Mirela was taking Ritalin, which was something she had in common with Andy Figueroa. Her morning dose wore off in the late afternoon, making her ravenously hungry. She could eat a sleeve of Chips Ahoy! in a sitting, half a box of Hostess Powdered Donettes, great heaping BLTs, a tall glass of orange juice and half of another. Sedated by food, she would then fall asleep anywhere, almost like she was unconscious. Lauren tiptoed past her into the kitchen and saw Mom sitting at the table alone, hands folded in front of her, staring intelligently at nothing.

“Lauren,” she said, her voice just above a whisper. “Come sit with me.”

Lauren maneuvered carefully into the round-backed chair opposite her mother. It was pulled too close to the table, but she didn’t dare push it back, in case the scraping sound stirred Mirela. It felt as if a hushed and jumpy team of surgeons huddled over the girl in the next room.

“So,” Mom murmured, letting out a half sigh, half laugh, “what’s new with you?”

Lauren shrugged and looked out the window that faced the backyard. “How is Mirela?”

“The same,” Mom said.

“I was thinking of how I might be able to help you more with Mirela,” Lauren said. There was a cardinal in the beech tree. Mom and Dad would get so excited when they saw a cardinal in the backyard—they always wanted everyone else to come see. “I wasn’t expecting to be in the musical, and I’ll have a lot of rehearsals, but—maybe after it’s over—this summer.”

“That’s sweet of you, Lauren. Don’t worry about Mirela. That’s my job. How are you?”

“I’m good.”

“How’s school?”

“Good.”

“How’s the play? The musical?”

“Good.”

They sat in silence for a while. Watching the cardinal preen and tic and nod and go about its business, Lauren felt the warm pooling feeling in her chest.

“How’s your friend Paula?”

“She’s home sick today. But she’s good.”

“Good,” Mom said, and they both laughed almost noiselessly under their hands.

“She’s a little negative,” Lauren admitted. “Negative energy.” Mom didn’t like negative energy.

“Does she have stuff going on at home?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“It must be hard for her.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, she . . . she didn’t win the lottery in the looks department. And you’re so pretty. It could be that she wants what you have.”

“No. I don’t think she cares,” Lauren said.

“Your friend Skip Rosen is in the musical with you again?”

“Stitch. Yeah, yeah, I know, you hate his dad.”

“I don’t hate anybody.”

“He’s a doctor, Mom. He helps people. He doesn’t hurt people.”

Mom sighed through her nose and rubbed her eyelids. “Andy Figueroa, too? He’s in the musical?” she asked. This was something Mom did when she was straining for conversation—she would pose factual statements as questions, as if she didn’t know the answers.

“Yeah, he’s playing Travolta,” Lauren said. “He has laryngitis, although Mr. Smith thinks he’s faking.”

“Oh?”

“Or not faking, but he says it’s—it’s psycho—psychodramatic?”

“Psychosomatic.”

“Yeah. It’s anxiety. Or that’s what Mr. Smith says.”

“His vocal cords work, but he thinks they don’t work, so they don’t work, because he’s nervous.”

“Something like that. But he didn’t have it during auditions, when it would make more sense to be nervous. He only has it now that he needs to practice.”

“They used to call that hysterical blindness. Happened more with girls, supposedly. So Andy has hysterical laryngitis.”

“I wish I had that excuse,” Lauren said.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think I’m a very good singer. Or dancer.”

“Malarkey—you wouldn’t have been picked for the musical if that were true.”

“I stepped on my own foot when we were running through a song today. And Andy kept glaring over at me whenever I sang with the group, so I lip-synched.”

“Ignore him. He sounds like a fruitcake. Much as I like his mother.”

“I think I’m going to be the worst one in the whole play.”

“Mamie Figueroa. She always has been such a nice woman. She asks after Mirela. She wants to know how to help.”

“Mr. Smith asks, too,” Lauren said.

“You like him a lot, don’t you?” Mom asked with a big smile, her chin in her hand.

“I guess so.”

“It’s nice to have some younger teachers in there. Someone closer to all of you in age. That youthful vim.”

“I don’t know,” Lauren said. “He’s weird. Moody. He, um—he just wants to be everyone’s friend all the time.”

“Oh. What’s wrong with that?”

“I don’t know. It’s creepy. It’s kind of pathetic.”

“Lauren, that isn’t very tolerant. Maybe you have been spending too much time with Paula.”

“You’re the one who said—” Lauren stopped. The warm pooling in her chest was turning cold. The cardinal flew out of the tree, and Lauren felt a new quick strange pressure on her sternum, a little phantom shove, like the cardinal had pushed and lifted off her chest to take flight, and then a ridiculous sadness, one she could not articulate or admit to anyone, and it occurred to her with a dull thud to the head that it would always be possible to feel this way, for the rest of her life she would be stalked by this panicky sorrow, even a stupid bird could bring it on, that it wasn’t the bird but it was her, it came from inside her, she was the one who was doing it.

“I’m sorry,” Lauren said. The o on sorry quavered like a soap bubble.

“What’s wrong, honey?”

Lauren stared into the wood grain of the table. Something was spilling over, and she didn’t know what it was. She didn’t have words for it. It was a tearful harmony over an organ line. Use your words was something Mom used to say to Sean when he was little. Or Mom said it to all three of them, but Lauren could only remember her saying it to Sean. There must be so much that she’ll never remember.

“You can tell me anything, honey.”

“Mom?” Lauren asked. “Do you remember my birthday party?”

Mom laughed. “How could I forget it?”

“I wasn’t—I wasn’t nice to Mirela at my birthday party.”

Mom put up a hand. “Lauren. You are so sweet. Don’t worry about it. It’s so long ago now. And it was perfectly understandable.”

“No, I—”

“Anyone in your place would have been frustrated with how she behaved. That should have been your day. It’s okay, honey. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

“But the thing is—”

“The important thing is—”

The phone was ringing, and Mom leapt up to get it. Often Mom let calls go to the answering machine, so she could screen the caller. The other night she didn’t answer it at all. Maybe Mom was worried now that the ringing would wake Mirela. But she jumped up so fast to answer that her chair scraped the floor.

“Mom, could you—”

Mom held up a hand with a confidential, apologetic smile, as if she was going to get rid of the caller as soon as possible. She beeped the new cordless phone awake and put it to her ear. “Oh, hello, Dr. Zeller.” One of Mirela’s therapists, Lauren guessed. She couldn’t keep track of them all, and they all eventually disappeared anyway, so it wasn’t worth learning their names. Lauren could learn them all this summer, when she had more time to help out.

She held eye contact with Mom for a beat. Mom looked up at the ceiling and twirled her finger in the air, pantomiming her impatience. She held the phone to her cheek with one hand and, with the other, raised the antenna.

“Could you tell them you’ll call back?” Lauren asked, but before she could finish, Mom turned her back to face out of the kitchen, toward the foyer.

Lauren panted. Like a dog, she thought.

“Yes, I see,” Mom was saying. “Well, what about—right, right.” She was walking slowly into the foyer, her head bowed in consultation with the voice on the phone.

Lauren, still sitting at the kitchen table, heard the weak groan of the carpeted stairs beneath Mom’s feet. She walked into the foyer to the bottom of the stairs and watched her mother climbing to the top, the tip of the phone’s antenna scraping against the ceiling.

“Mom?” Lauren asked.

“In a minute, honey,” Mom’s silhouette said as she closed the bedroom door behind her.

“Mama,” Mirela said from the living room.

“Mom,” Lauren said, more insistently, to no one.

“Mama mama mama,” Mirela called. The syllables were sticky, like she was dreaming and trying to talk herself into waking up.

 

Now that Paula had quit the show and was refusing to spend study hall in Tedquarters, it meant that twice a week, from 2:10 p.m., when Mr. Smith usually walked in after his post-lunch staff meeting, until about 2:30 p.m., when Stitch and Rajiv came somersaulting or skateboarding in after Phys Ed, Mr. Smith was usually alone in Tedquarters. Lauren wondered why he was always in there, why he never spent any downtime with his colleagues in the English department office, picking up some gardening tips from Mrs. Bristol or catching up on back issues of the New York Review of Books that Mr. Treadwell stacked in his carrel.

“It’s so cute how you can get all that alone time with Ted,” Paula said. “I bet he always sits down right next to you.”

“Whatever,” Lauren said.

“You two are so close,” Paula said. “It’s crazy that you could get a lead role without really even trying out. I guess it’s just that he knows you so well.”

Depending on the day, if Mr. Smith had seemed moody in English class, if he’d waved Lauren off when she raised her hand, she then had twenty minutes in Tedquarters to try to fix it, to convince him with a perfect offhand comment that she really had done the assigned reading, no matter what he thought or assumed. And if English class had gone well, in Tedquarters she could, as Dad would say, “capitalize on the win.”

“I had an idea,” Lauren told him. It was a bit awkward to have conversations at the big table, facing their books and paperwork and not each other. “I was thinking that Paula and I could switch places, and she could play Rizzo and I could be the property mistress.”

“Paula quit,” Mr. Smith said.

“No, I know, but she could come back, couldn’t she?”

Mr. Smith continued marking papers like he hadn’t heard her, like their elbows weren’t touching.

“I think that would make her happy,” Lauren said. “And I wouldn’t mind at all.”

“No, I’m sure that’s an issue of utmost prominence in your life right now, Lauren—just how ecstatically happy you can make your good friend Paula,” Mr. Smith said. “You’d give it all up for her, wouldn’t you?”

“Paula is a good singer. I’ve heard her,” Lauren said.

Lauren hated Rizzo like she was a person. She had a dream that she was suspended from school after arguing with Rizzo in the cafeteria—Lauren shoved her across a table, sending Stitch’s brown-bag lunch spinning onto the linoleum, and Mr. Smith had to intervene. In another dream Lauren surrendered Midnight to an animal shelter because Mirela wouldn’t stop pulling her tail, and when the door shut on the cage, Lauren realized that Midnight had Rizzo’s face.

Mr. Smith flicked his pen onto the table and rubbed his eyes. “You wear me out, Lauren,” he said. “You keep trying out for my plays and you keep trying to weasel out of them and it’s just a lot of drama for one Drama Club.”

Lauren hated Rizzo for her curdled crudeness, her spiteful pride in being the unpretty slut. These traits came through even in the sanitized school version of Grease, although it got rid of the sex jokes and jeering puns and Rizzo’s pregnancy scare. “I can’t sing,” Lauren said quietly. “And I can’t dance. And I definitely can’t do them at the same time.”

“I doubt that.”

“You didn’t come to the first rehearsal,” Lauren said. There would be weeks and weeks of rehearsals. “And you barely let me try out. That’s why you don’t know that I suck.”

Mr. Smith sighed, and put his hand on Lauren’s back. In the usual places, rubbing up and down in the usual rhythms, covering the usual distances. His hand on her back was apologizing for being so tough on her, but also it was underlining, with feathering fingers and knuckle-presses, that he was so tough on her in class and in rehearsals because she was different, she was special, he had higher standards for her, and anyway they had an understanding. His head was low and leaning into hers.

“Sing for me,” he said. He took her hand with his free one.

She looked at his hand on hers and did not say anything.

“Come on, try me, sing.” A cooing whisper. His coffee breath. “What’s the song? I know you know it. Everybody knows it. It was a big hit when you were a baby.”

Lauren laughed and shook her head, and her hair brushed against his cheek.

“You’re the one that I want, doo, doo, doo, honey,” he whisper-sang.

Lauren laughed again. Her whole body laughed like a seizure, like his tuneless croon was tickling her sides.

“You’re the one that I want, doo, doo, doo, honey.”

A knot in her side tightened as if it were about to pop open. She forced herself to stop laughing and pulled her hand away. “I’m gonna go now.”

As she stood up, his hand on her back held its position in space, caressing down her spine and landing on her ass. “Excuse you,” he said as she maneuvered past her chair and then his.

“Oops, sorry,” Lauren said, her hair falling in her eyes as she shambled to the door. Stitch and Rajiv were in the hallway trying to do the splits, and she was relieved that they hadn’t seen her in there and she was hopeful that they wondered why she was in such a hurry, why she was so flushed and happy.

 

The Bethune auditorium. Another rehearsal. Lauren sang a line of her solo, “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee,” raised a hand, then she was supposed to go to the next line and the next hand motion, but she saw her hand still suspended in air, a beat too late, and tried to move it to where it was supposed to be, and as she did that she forgot the next line of the song. “Ugh!” she exclaimed, stamping her feet in frustration. The girls looked away. The boys licked their lips and stared. Her shame and embarrassment were a confession to Rizzo’s shame and embarrassment. Rizzo was messy, and Lauren made a mess of playing her. She was stumbling through the worst version of her real life while a smooth fictional production swirled around her, elegant and vigorous as a ballet. She was an isolated lyric. Rizzo’s song was about pretending to hate a perfect girl, but the whole thing was a front for hating herself. Eye-rolling and jealous and so ugly. Negative energy. Sour and stinking.

Mindy said, “You know what, Lauren, let’s not worry about the dance steps for now. Okay? You can just stand still and concentrate on this important song—let the others worry about the dancing.” Lauren hated Mindy, too, for trying to be kind, for letting the effort show.

“Lauren is a Method actress,” Andy Figueroa said. “You run lines with her and you catch an STD.”

“I hear herpes gives you two left feet,” said Brendan Dougherty, in a strangulated duh voice, like Lauren wasn’t worth the effort of a proper joke. Scattered laughter.

“Jesus, Brendan,” said Claire, shielding her eyes with one hand. She wasn’t defending Lauren so much as protesting her own discomfort. Before Grease, Lauren had seen Brendan as a pretty void, flat as a poster of a boy-band heartthrob on Danielle Sheridan’s bedroom wall. It turned out that he was a person, too.

“Guys,” Mindy said in an admonishing tone, but she wasn’t a teacher at Bethune, so she had little authority, especially when Mr. Smith wasn’t around. Or what authority she did have derived from how likable she was. The boys would think Mindy was likable so long as they also thought she was fuckable, but that could go wrong if the boys started to get an inkling that Mindy herself also thought that she was fuckable.

Lauren was too incompetent to be fuckable. Mingling with the sour and the stink was a scent of pity, the close air of a funeral. Something had died. Lauren stared at her sneakers, which were bolted to the stage. She watched herself wielding a chain saw, slicing at the section of stage her feet were bolted to, carving out two snowshoe-sized wooden blocks, clomping out of the auditorium atop her great big stage clogs, and throwing herself into Lake Erie. Except wood floats, she thought. Even her fantasies of erasing herself were incompetent.

“Lauren dances like she just shat her pants,” Brendan said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Andy said, revving up, “and she’s moving around real careful so—”

“—so it doesn’t run down her leg!” Andy and Brendan yelled together, and they fell all over themselves laughing.

“You guys are fucking assholes,” Julie fumed at the two boys, and this was what brought tears to Lauren’s eyes. Of all of them, she was maddest at Julie, with her rich pirouetting voice. Julie’s pity gave the taunts their meaning. Inside herself, Lauren ripped a chunk of the stage off her feet and dashed her head against it.

 

After rehearsal she locked herself in a stall in the bathroom farthest from the auditorium, behind the studio art workshop. She sat on the edge of the toilet hugging herself, eyes closed, humming to cross out Brendan’s voice, Andy’s voice.

Nevermind was about the length of a class period, if you didn’t count the long silence and then the secret thrashing song that came after it. The song woke Lauren up if she didn’t remember to switch off the CD player at night. If she ran each song through her head before she allowed herself to unlock the stall, that would buy her forty minutes. She would sing every word, hum every guitar line, tap out every beat, but quietly, quietly, she’d have to listen out in case someone came in and heard her, and by the time she got to the end everyone would have gone home. Rehearsal had run late as it was, she wouldn’t have to face them again until tomorrow. She pressed her fingers against her eyelids and watched the bluish-reddish shapes pump and drift, an amoebic wash of strange living things buoyed and eddied by the submerged guitar lines.

“Memoria,” she whispered to herself. “Memoria.” The chorus of the second single, the one that sounded like it was recorded underwater. She didn’t know what it meant. Memory-ah. She made up what it meant, to help pass the time: the memory of Maria, the phantom of an Italian mob widow who lived long ago, who only wore black mourning garb, black lace and veil, after her husband was killed with a pistol—by her own hand, people whispered, but she always denied it, blaming the local Black Hand, as anyone would. Memoria was the word you used, three times fast, to ward against her vengeful ghost. Maria dropped the gun in the ocean, off the coast of Sicily. Lauren would recite this story to Paula, tell her it was the origin of the song, that she’d read about it in one of the music magazines.

Lauren had gotten to the second-to-last song—I’m on a plain, I can’t complain—when Carl, the school custodian, called out from the doorway to the bathroom and said whoever was in there had to leave. He sounded apologetic; he probably thought she was having woman problems.

Lauren could hear Stitch’s skateboard before she pushed open the side doors to the Bethune parking lot. She saw he was alone and exhaled. It was cold and wet and the light was thinning out, down to a bruisish purple.

“Hey,” he said, looking down as he flipped his skateboard. It spun twice, spiked the ground on one corner. He watched it roll out of his reach, not moving after it. “I was wondering where you went. I was waiting.”

“I didn’t ask you to wait for me,” she said.

“I wanted to ask if you liked the last tape I made you,” he said, his hands in the pockets of the red buffalo-plaid jacket he wore every day.

Lauren stared at him. “Are you kidding me?” she asked.

“No. The Replacements. Did you like it?”

He watched her patiently. His eyes always seemed faintly rheumy, as if he used special drops that unlocked a blurry fourth dimension, visible just over her shoulder.

“You waited an hour in the parking lot to ask me if I like the Replacements?”

“It hasn’t been an hour,” he said. He shrugged and skip-hopped toward his skateboard. “I’m just practicing,” he said, rolling back toward her.

“You aren’t—you’re making fun of me, right? I don’t get it.”

“What?” asked Stitch. He stopped pushing the wheels forward and back with one foot and squinted at her. Mouth open like no one was watching, like he was alone with himself. “I’m not making fun of you. If you get a chance to listen to it, let me know what you think.”

“Okay. I’m sorry,” Lauren said. Her tongue and lips were numb and slow, like she’d been out in the cold for too long. “I did listen to it.”

“What did you think?”

“I liked it. It feels very—close. Like they’re playing live.”

“Like you mean the production?”

“They leave in the mistakes, the missed notes. But in a good way, like they’re excited to be playing for a crowd. Like they practiced, but they’re nervous.”

Stitch nodded. Both of them were looking at the ground. “The drums speed up and slow down sometimes.”

“I like the singer’s voice.”

“Paul Westerberg,” Stitch said.

“Yes—and I liked—I liked how I feel like I’m in the room with them. And the singer is talking to someone he knows very well. Like, sometimes the other person is there, and sometimes he’s pretending they’re there, like he’s getting up his nerve to talk to them later. And sometimes he’s mad at them, and sometimes he’s mad at himself and taking it out on the other person.”

“Why are you crying?” Stitch asked.

Lauren wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her coat. “Why are you asking me that?! You were there! At rehearsal! You know—you saw what happened.”

Stitch shrugged and said nothing.

“God, it was so embarrassing,” she said.

“Don’t pay attention to them,” Stitch said.

“How can I not pay attention to them?”

“I don’t. It’s a waste of time.”

“They’re your friends.”

“Just because I’m around them doesn’t mean they’re my friends.”

“What do they say about me when I’m not around?”

“Probably nothing, because they can’t hurt you when you can’t hear what they’re saying.”

Lauren laughed and wiped her nose with her other sleeve. “That’s clever.”

“I didn’t say it to be clever.”

“Please don’t feel sorry for me.”

“I do a little bit. I’ll try not to. Are you sure you don’t want me to walk you home?”

Lauren nodded at the ground.

“Suit yourself. I hope you feel better. See you, Lauren.” He began to turn away.

“Hey—why did you—that one time, why did you call me and act like you didn’t?” Lauren asked. Her sadness had given her permission to be a brat, a middle schooler.

Stitch stopped and looked back. “I didn’t call you,” he said. “Do you want me to call you?”

Lauren shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, do what you want.”

“Okay. I’ll call you later.”

The skateboard faded out, and Lauren was alone, still staring at the ground. Her body rotating like a drill, pounding like a jackhammer through the top line of tar into the roadbed, into the stones, down to the earth, until she hit water, until she could hear the submerged guitar from the memoria song again and she could know she was alone. Not alone in this parking lot, in this place that she knew, where the people who knew her would return tomorrow, but alone in a place where she could not be found or known or remembered, the songs looping in her head for company.

Stitch just felt sorry for her. He wasn’t going to call her later. She didn’t want him to. He would call her and whatever they said he would just go and tell his friends.

She went through the gap in the chain-link fence, over the shallow line of trees, crossed Fox Hollow Lane, cut through the Reillys’ yard and then the Rosens’, waved at Dr. Rosen through his kitchen window. Across Sycamore, then the overground pool, across Northridge, then the O’Tooles’ yard—careful to keep an eye out for their anxious shepherd, Ireland—and into her own. The late afternoon light had almost completely leaked away, like the light had liquefied and was puddling into the part-crunchy, part-soggy ground. Lauren stopped short at what was more or less her family’s property line, placing one hand on the trunk of the old beech. She could hear Mom yelling, “No, no,” then a clattering explosion. Lauren could picture it: Mirela had figured out how to climb up on the kitchen counters, and now she was emptying the high cabinets of their bowls, casserole dishes, tumblers. Crash after crash. Dad was home, bellowing. Knives in his voice, ricocheting off the walls with Mirela’s screams. A pause, the crashing stopped, and now Mirela was laughing. Someone was crying. Lauren didn’t wait to listen out for whether it was Mom or one of the boys. She turned back, cut through the O’Tooles’ yard again, ignoring Mrs. O’Toole’s wave and taut disapproving smile from her back porch. Northridge, overground pool, Sycamore, the Rosens’, the Reillys’, Mr. Smith’s.

She was in Mr. Smith’s backyard, under the canopy of maples and pines. It was odd that she had never done this before. She turned around in the center of the yard, a full 360 degrees. Juddering in her throat, in her ears. Yet she felt hyper-calm, her surroundings supersaturated despite the darkness and tree shadow, intensely clear, outside of time. She took a pedantic interest in how marooned his little red house looked from behind, no patio or deck, just two steps to a back door and a rusty wheelbarrow slumped beside it. The little red house a crouched and thinking thing beneath the sighing trees, untethered to its neighborhood, poised to stand up on its legs and collapse again atop her. Her reflection scattering yellow on a back window.

The grass inhaled and exhaled, breathing her feet off the ground. The darkness was milky and changeable, like you could move your finger through the air and write a story.

She walked around to the front of his house. A curving path, pachysandra and stunted hedges in front of his windows. She knocked softly on his door. Her breath came shivering. The door opened.

“Lauren, what are you doing here?” He seemed almost angry at her, or angry at the unseen conspiracy that had dropped her on his porch.

“Um,” she said. She ducked her head and scratched the sole of her shoe on his front step. “I just—I need—I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, just—come in—but wait—are you okay? Shouldn’t you be at home?”

“I don’t want to go home,” Lauren said, her eyes filling with tears. “I want to be here. I want to be with you.” She pushed through the doorway and into Mr. Smith’s chest, hands on his shoulders. The door tapped shut behind her, and he wrapped his arms around her.

“It’s all right,” he said.

“Can I stay here for a while?” she asked.

“Lauren—you aren’t—are you all alone?”

She nodded and sniffed into his shirt. His arms tightened around her.

 

She had known that what happened next was a possibility. She didn’t expect it, exactly. It wasn’t what she said she wanted. But she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t pictured it. Of course she had. She thought about it all the time. She made herself come with it. And she wasn’t stupid. She had friends who were seniors. She still decided. Her decision belonged to her.

It was like he was trying to get something over with. Her dad used to watch boxing on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, and she remembered a fight where one of the boxers obviously had the upper hand, but he was holding back, round after round, maybe waiting to tire out his outmatched opponent. Maybe he was trying to be benevolent. But then in the eighth or ninth round, the guy who was winning just went nuts—combination after combination, blow after blow to the kidneys, on the ropes. A controlled frenzy. Like he’d gotten bored, like he wanted to finish the other guy off, get it over with. But he couldn’t and he couldn’t. The other guy just stood there and took it.

She just took it. She decided to. She came here on her own. It was on his couch in his living room, ten feet from his front door. Every image sharp and discrete: the last light almost violet through the half-drawn shade, the Stranger Than Paradise movie poster tacked to the particleboard paneling, the nubby seams of couch cushions bearing into her lower back, the twelve-inch television set on the egg crate topped with worn, softened paperbacks. The pictures cycle through relentlessly, like an automated slideshow, shuffle and click, shuffle and click, a crunching snap as each image turned, like the same photograph taking itself over and over for the rest of her life, and the clearest picture was not something she could see or feel but rather the presumption, the unspoken assertion that this would be the thing that they would be doing now. That a person could jam himself inside another person, without consulting her first, should not have seemed so remarkable to her. She should have taken it for granted. He had a lot of trouble getting inside, which made him more frustrated and more excited. There was no more room and no more room and then he found it and he was all the way in. The stretching and straining and pulling became all at once a burning pain, like a pop of sizzling grease, and it was funny and it hurt and she cried out and he clamped his hand over her mouth, only for a second, like he was afraid someone could hear them but there was nobody there.

He’s already been inside me

Was her body her own, just then? That’s the thing she would always wonder. Who did she belong to? To herself? To her parents? To him? Did he take her, or did she give herself away?

She decided to.

“Lauren says things just for effect,” Mom would say. “She does things for effect.”

Here, then, was the effect.

She remembered afterward wanting to comport herself with a dignity bordering on primness. She cantilevered herself upright. She willed herself to look fluid, casual, offhand, like she was strolling out of Grease auditions. She walked around his couch into his bathroom and closed the door. She sat to pee, and observed the pink jellyfish-like consistency of what was on the toilet paper before she dropped it into the bowl. She wasn’t sure if this was her period or something else. Her period wasn’t regular enough to keep track yet. She observed the pinkness of the water in the toilet before she flushed it. On the tile she saw the end point of a trail of blood dotting the fifteen-foot path she’d taken. She stepped outside the bathroom door to see him slumped in a reclining chair, his body evacuated. Yet it was her body all over the floor, clotted and textured in spots. She put on her underwear and jeans, went into the kitchen to find paper towels and liquid soap, returned to the living room to wipe up the mess. There was blood on the couch, and she went to work on the stain.

“You don’t have to—it’s all right—” He didn’t move.

“I’m almost done,” she said.

When she was finished, she sat down on the floor by the front door and put on her shoes. “Lauren,” he said from the reclining chair, “this is our secret. There would be trouble if anyone found out about this. No one—they wouldn’t understand.”

“I know,” Lauren said as she tied her laces.

“Lauren, I’m serious.”

Lauren looked up at him. He wouldn’t meet her gaze. “I know,” she repeated. “It’s okay. You don’t have to worry about anything.”

She decided to. She was still deciding.

She left his house through the back door, took the usual route back to her house. Her legs, dumb as lumber, moved her through the yards and her head, a balloon, floated slightly above her. She didn’t know what she expected. An announcement. A card or certificate, some kind of witness, her mom ordering pizza and wings. When she got home, she remembered dully the chaos in the kitchen. She went straight upstairs without saying hello to anyone.

“Lauren?” Dad calling from their living room. “Your friend Stitch-’em-up called.”

She closed and locked the bathroom door. She had to pee again. It stung, and there were rusty stains in her underwear. She stared at the stains. This was the witness. More soap and water was all.

She reached into the pocket of her jeans, in a lump on the floor. She’d been wearing this same pair of jeans every day for weeks. She used to think that was gross, but Abby and Deepa and Stitch all did it with their jeans, too. The single, tiny pill was still in the pocket.

She took a shower, turning the handle hotter and hotter until she could barely stand it, got used to it, then hotter. Whenever she ran the water now, she thought she could hear Mirela screaming beneath it. She could turn it off, stand dripping in the silence, turn it on again and then she’d be sure this time, she’d be absolutely sure she could hear the screaming. Off, nothing, on, off, nothing. She watched herself melting down the drain. She dried herself. Avoiding the mirror. Wrapped in only the towel, she climbed under her bedcovers. She remembered stupidly that she had unfinished homework. Knees drawn to her chest, her hair burrowing a warm damp patch in her pillow, she saw her mother in the spotted darkness of the dragon wagon, her profile backlit by the streetlamps, before the other pictures began cycling through again, shuffle click crunch, and she lay in the dark with her eyes wide open for a long time, enough time for the slideshow to go around once, twice, again, each thick click like the smacking of lips, but when her eyes did close she slept within seconds.