ANTHROPOLOGICAL
OBSERVATION #11:

A public weeping and gnashing of teeth represent the traditional ceremonial climax of the high school bash.

Jimmy opened the door. I was so jangled that for a moment I couldn’t process anything. I took two deep breaths, and then my anthropological training kicked in — my observational skills, distancing me from the scene. I was merely an observer. And it was Margo standing there. She looked beautiful.

ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
A man in rural Zimbabwe often still must pay a roora, or bride price, typically ranging between five and ten cows, to the family of the woman he marries. The way she looked tonight, Margo would have gone for eleven cows at least.

From where she stood in the doorway, she couldn’t see me. I sat crying silently.

“Hey,” she said, leaning against the doorway and jutting out one hip. “Casey said you wanted to ask me something.”

Jimmy looked at Margo, then back at me, and then back at her again. And Margo saw me.

“What are you doing here?” I asked her, sniffling. “You told me you were sick.”

She hiccupped and turned her head away. “I felt, uhh, better,” my former best friend responded, “so I went to dinner with TR and Casey and Tabitha. You’d already left, Janice. I called your house. And we hadn’t really even planned to come by the party. It was a last-minute thing.”

“You could have called my cell phone,” I said.

Margo held up her hands in a gesture of exaggerated helplessness.

I wanted to throw up. First Jimmy had scorned me, and now my best friend had gone to dinner with all my sworn enemies? I couldn’t decide if I was more disgusted by Margo’s deceit, or by how impossibly clichéd it was — ditching me for a chance to hang out with the Beautiful Rich Girls. And then she happened to show up at Jimmy Denton’s bedroom door?! In the history of classic teen betrayals, how utterly unoriginal.

I swallowed and said the following words to Margo very carefully:

“I hate you.”

She looked at me for a few seconds. “Whatever,” she finally said.

Jimmy walked out of the room. Margo and I just stared at each other. My head was starting to hurt. I looked at the door and saw Margo wobble a little in her heels.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Dumbly, I followed her back downstairs, back to the blurred glow of loud voices near the bonfire. As we went by the keg, someone handed Margo another cup of beer, which she drank quickly. We passed faces I knew. A bunch of soccer guys chatting up two cheerleaders. Some Student Council Types and a few Softball Huskies ambling over for more drinks. A freshman in a pink skirt vomiting quietly by the bushes. Across the bonfire, Jimmy Denton hooked his arm possessively around some other nondescript girl in a skimpy dress. Everything flickered with firelight, the images drifting in and out of focus. It was unbearably sad.

Tripp Duffy, the captain of the MHS baseball team, sidled up to Margo and me, spitting dark tobacco juice on the ground between us.

“Ladies. You’re lookin’ lovely this evening.”

Margo and I stared at him. Tripp was good-ol'-boy handsome, with a nose slightly crooked from a baseball that had hit him in the face, and the collar of his pink shirt popped.

“My buddies and I, we were talking. We said, isn’t Margo lookin’ good recently?”

Margo laughed, spurting beer out her mouth and nose, spilling some onto Tripp’s shirt. Was she drunk? I wondered. Why would Margo be laughing at a compliment? Perhaps she had a case of contagious laughter, a psychogenic illness I’d once read about. She kept laughing, clutching her sides and guffawing at his great joke. Then I saw that she was also crying, tears streaming, and her face was contorted in a way that looked like pain rather than amusement. Even though I hated her now, I felt a pang of worry.

Tripp looked at Margo, looked at the beer spattered on his pink shirt, looked back at her, and sneered. “Dumb slut.”

Coughing, Margo stopped laugh-crying and stared at him.

“Yeah, that’s funny. Keep laughing. You gonna have a little brown baby soon too? Just like your big sister?”

And that was when Margo punched him. It wasn’t exactly a good punch. Her arm was slow and uncoordinated, and her fist made only a dull, clumsy thump on contact, but the cartilage of his nose crunched slightly. And then there was blood.

“What?! Margo, what —?” I said. Margo was still crying. I’d never seen her like this before.

TR and Tabitha ran up beside us. “What happ — Tripp! There’s blood! Coming from your nose!” TR shrieked.

“Stupid bitch hit me. What’s wrong with you?” he hissed, pointing right at Margo.

TR jerked Margo over to the side, her eyes flashing. She spoke in a low, barely contained growl. “Seriously, Margo. We liked you.” She actually looked wounded.

Margo shook her head, doubling over. It looked like she might bear-hug TR or put her in a wrestler hold or —

Margo vomited onto TR’s shoes. It was red and chunky and fermented-smelling. It made a loud splatter.

TR stared at her feet, appalled. Her lips twitched but emitted no sound.

I stared too, horrified, at TR’s shoes for a moment before Margo sank to the ground. Sitting cross-legged, she held her head in her hands and began to sob and hiccup.

I stood before my supposed best friend, chewing my lip, the sour smell of wine vomit rising. Tripp and the others had scattered the moment Margo began to heave. Finally I guided the sobbing Margo back to the house through the basement door. We felt our way into the bathroom. I got a cup of water for Margo, who continued to whimper. Her face was runny with mascara and snot. She’d be lucky to get two cows for her roora now.

“You lied to me,” I said from my darkened corner.

“Not exactly. Well, sort of,” she whispered.

“How could you do that to me?” I asked, my voice breaking. “How could you choose TR over me? And what,” I said more quietly, “were you doing knocking on Jimmy’s door anyway? Jimmy — my crush, remember?”

Margo sighed. “Okay, first of all, Casey said he’d asked to talk to me. That’s all. It was nothing. And second — honestly, Janice? I was annoyed with you. I didn’t want to come with you to the party. You’ve gotten tough to be around. Your whole ‘anthropology’ thing … I’m sick of it. You’re so negative. So tough on other people — so tough on yourself.”

“Come on, Margo! Seriously? Anthropology is all I’ve got,” I said. “That’s not negativity. It’s truthfulness. Accuracy.”

“I’m not talking about anthropology. You’ve got to keep doing that. That’s your thing,” she said. “I’m talking about actually trying stuff sometimes. Not being all wry and detached. Not always commenting on people’s weird habits or stinky breath and then comparing them to some tribe you’ve read about somewhere. You know?”

“No,” I said, my voice rising. Margo’s words had cut me like jagged pieces of glass, and now I wanted to cut her back. “I don’t know. What I do know is that my observations of you are one hundred percent correct, Margo. You’re the girl EVERYONE whispers about. You keep secrets from your SUPPOSED best friend. You flirt with guys even when you apparently also have some Secret Boyfriend. You think you’re so pretty and cool and blah blah blah, but you’re NOTHING. Nothing but a fake and a cliché.”

“And YOU, Janice, are a fraud,” Margo said, her breath hot and sour in my face. “You’re afraid to do anything but sit on the sidelines and judge everyone. And you call yourself an ‘anthropologist’ like it’s this great excuse.” She laughed a dry, hard non-laugh. “Ha. You don’t know the first thing about actual anthropology.”

We stood statue-still for a beat, just staring at each other. I blinked back tears. Then Margo walked out of the house. “I want to go home,” I heard myself whimper.

FACT:
I sounded like a small baby mammal on a nature documentary, calling for its mother.

I stumbled back up the gravel drive to my mom’s car, where I sat for a long time, crying, before I drove away.