Ellie hadn’t been to public school with me since we finished the eighth grade, and in the four years since, she’d said, “Homeschooling is faster because there’s no repeating everything all the time,” about eleven trillion times to me. Maybe it was true. Maybe not. Seemed to me homeschooling was just another way to keep all those kids in the commune from seeing the real world.
I didn’t like the real world, but I was glad I knew about it.
Darla O’Brien didn’t like the real world either, so she stuck her head in an oven.
My dad loved the real world. He ate it up. Literally. He weighed two hundred and forty pounds now. Not a bad weight unless you were five foot four and 120 pounds when you started out.
Dad had never replaced the oven. Not even with an electric one. Our kitchen had never had an oven since Letter N Day. Just a freezer full of food that could be cooked by the microwave.
Everything tasted like radiation.
Ellie wouldn’t come to my house if we were cooking because she believed microwaves gave you cancer. She never could understand why we didn’t have a huge stove like they had on the commune—a stove that could pickle and blanch and reduce fruit into jam for the winter.
“It’s not like that could happen twice, right?” she’d said once. By that, she meant Darla sticking her head in the oven.
I’d answered, “No. No, I guess that couldn’t happen twice.”
But it could. Right? There were still two people left in my house. I was one of them. Whenever I thought about what Ellie had said, my guts churned. Sometimes I got diarrhea from it. Sometimes I threw up. It wasn’t as easy as it can’t happen twice. Anyone who knew anything about what Darla did knew it sometimes did happen twice because it’s often hereditary. But Ellie just said things without thinking. That was hereditary too.
Ellie’s mother, Jasmine Blue Heffner, believed that the microwave oven was no different from an atomic bomb because it was invented by defense contractors during World War II.
I figured by the time Ellie applied to colleges, she’d either be smarter than me from learning so much faster in homeschool, or she’d be so brainwashed by Jasmine Blue that she would score badly on her SAT because she believed a microwave oven was the same as an atomic bomb.
Ellie might have defended homeschooling to me, but deep down she knew what she was missing. From the day she stopped getting on the yellow school bus with me she started complaining about the commune. It was as if school was her one real-world connection, and cutting it off made her feel like a bird in a cage.
She asked about what other girls were wearing to school. She asked about makeup. She asked about boys, TV shows, social media sites, dances, sports games.
Mostly, she asked about sex, even though we’d just turned fourteen.
“Did you have health class today?” she’d asked.
“Yeah.”
“Did you get the rubber demonstration yet?”
“Today we learned about meth,” I’d said.
I told her that real sex ed wasn’t until eleventh grade and she looked disappointed. “I think that’s too late to learn about sex.”
“Yeah. By then, we know everything already,” I’d said.
We knew enough. I had the Internet at home. (Ellie did not have the Internet. Jasmine Blue believed the Internet was an atomic bomb full of porn and lies. In that order.) By fifth grade, we’d Googled it. First we Googled penis. We looked for images. That was the day we found the butter penis. A penis carved from butter—anatomically correct. We made jokes about it. What good is that if it melts? Bet it tastes better than the real thing. We wondered why anyone would sculpt a penis out of butter. But then we found penis cakes, penis candy molds and penis lollipops, and we figured adults were gross.
That’s as far as it went in fifth grade. Adults are gross. Nothing more to it.
We made a promise that day. We promised to tell each other the minute we had sex. Both of us doubted in fifth grade that it would ever happen, but if it did, we swore we would tell each other and talk about it.
In middle school, before homeschooling, Ellie became an expert, as if she was preparing for the most important event of her life. She got her friends to buy her the latest women’s magazines and she’d talk about orgasms and balls and how to please your man. She would sometimes give the magazines to me to keep for her. I had a box of her contraband under my bed. Mostly magazines and eye shadow. A condom that a random boy gave to her. A weekend section of the newspaper with a page of exotic dancers, with names like Leather Love, Lacey Snow, Shy-Anne, who would perform at the local lap dancing bars. I looked through the magazines sometimes, too. In front of Ellie I pretended I wasn’t interested. But I was.
In front of everyone else, I pretended I didn’t care about all the stuff girls start to care about in middle school—the right clothes, shoes, mascara, hair products, sex—but I did. I was interested in the why. Why? Why do we care so much about this?
I wasn’t sure why I cared about not caring. Or why I didn’t care about not caring.
I figured it had something to do with what everyone else was avoiding talking about, which was Darla. Maybe had Darla still been around, she’d have given me a direction. Or something.
Jasmine Blue’s homeschool sex education was contained in a simple mantra. If you do it too early, you’ll regret it. I watched as each mention made Ellie more curious and more rebellious and more determined to have sex just because she wanted to test Jasmine’s theory.
“What do you think it’s like?” she would ask me, even though she knew it made me uncomfortable to talk about it. I think she figured since she was fourteen and curious, so was I.
“I don’t know,” I’d say. “I don’t really care.”
“You don’t care? Really? Come on. You care.”
I didn’t care.
“What about that kid on the bus you used to crush on? Didn’t you ever think about doing it with him?” she asked.
“Markus Glenn?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t you remember? He was such a perv.”
She picked at a fingernail that was bothering her. “What’d he do again?”
“The porn guy.”
“Ohhh. Yeah. Him,” she said. “So, who do you like now?”
“Nobody.”
I never told her that after Markus Glenn showed me those pictures on his computer in seventh grade, he asked me to touch him there where his shorts were sticking up like a tipi. When I wouldn’t touch it and I told him I was going home, he said, “You’re never going to be a real woman acting like that, you know! Anyway, you’re flat as a board!”
I didn’t tell her that from that moment forward, I never even wanted breasts because then kids like Markus Glenn would look at them. I didn’t tell her that from that moment on, I sometimes didn’t know what a woman was really supposed to look like.
“You liked one kid in your whole life? I don’t buy it.”
“I told you. I don’t care,” I’d said.
I picked up my camera and held it at arm’s length and took a picture of myself not caring. I called it: Glory Doesn’t Care.