22

Every morning at 7:20 sharp, Pete would park his full-sized ’80s Ram van on the road just opposite our boat and honk. He’d keep honking until he saw me get off the boat with my backpack and start walking down the dock toward the parking lot. By the time I got up to the parking lot, he’d be waiting there, engine idling, the air blasting if it was hot, the heat if it was cold. Pete had been enlisted by my parents to take me to high school. Marilyn couldn’t get up early enough to take me, and my grandfather couldn’t drive. So Pete got the job. At first I hadn’t liked riding with him because he tailgated other cars, bringing the snub nose of his van right up against people’s bumpers or swerving suddenly to pass. I wasn’t sure if he could hear the other cars honking at us; he was deaf from being around engines all his life. But after a few weeks, I’d gotten used to him and the van. I liked the way it smelled of Old Spice and engine grease, clean laundry, and just a hint of gasoline. What’s more, Pete was always cheerful, even when his leg hurt or he hadn’t slept well. He was steady. I didn’t have to try to read his moods the way I did my grandfather’s.

Every morning, almost like clockwork, he’d ask, “What’d you learn in school yesterday?” as if I were still in fifth grade. “D’you make any friends yet?”

“A few. I eat with them at lunch.” There were only a very few.

“You got a boyfriend yet?”

“No.”

“What’s wrong with them boys?” He’d snort in disgust.

I thought it obvious that the problem was what was wrong with me, not them, but it made me feel better when Pete said things like that. Pete had a grown daughter; he knew how to take care of girls.

“Well, don’t you worry. You’re only a freshman.”

It took forty minutes to get to school, driving through San Pedro and over the peninsula to Palos Verdes High School. The drive in Pete’s van on my way to school became my favorite time of the day. Sometimes we took the coast road that wended around the peninsula’s undeveloped coves and cliffs, and I looked at all the different colors the ocean made, white foam on bright green and blue, blue so dark it almost looked black, blue like sapphire, like steel. The empty land at Portuguese Bend stretched for miles, and the early morning dew made everything seem fresh. It reminded me of a fairy tale Marilyn had read me once, of a princess who tried to make a necklace with the morning dew, stringing the pearls of water with a thread and needle.

And I liked talking to Pete. He’d tell me stories from when he was young, chasing watermelon trucks to catch the falling fruit, or going to the Long Beach Pier as a teenager, or his days training for the Air Force in World War II, although the war ended just before he was deployed.

“I was all ready to go too, and they canceled the darn war on me. What the heck were they thinking?” he’d ask, winking to show the joke.

Then, suddenly, we’d be on the road that overlooked the high school. Pete dropped me off there because the main entrance was always choked with parents dropping their children off in shiny Nissans and ’Benzes or with students driving their own cherry Mustangs and Miatas, gifts given for all As or sweet sixteens. I’d get out of the square van and sling my backpack over my shoulder.

“Have a good day, Pumpkin,” Pete would call to my back. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

A set of one hundred stairs descended from the road to the school; they were a bridge from my world to everyone else’s. At the top of the stairs I was carefree, happy to see the ocean stretched out beyond the peninsula, the sparkling swimming pool, the Spanish red-tile roofs of the school buildings, the seagulls circling above. By the time I reached the bottom of the stairs, my shoulders were tense and my eyes darted to the front and the side, waiting for the first cruel comment of the day. I wasn’t lying when I told Pete I had friends at school, but I also didn’t tell him how completely at sea I was.

The classes themselves were fine. In English, we’d read To Kill a Mockingbird, and I’d fallen in love with Scout and Harper Lee. Geometry homework was fun, the proofs like puzzles, although I slept through Mrs. Maas’s transparencies. History was horrible, but that was mostly because burnt-out Mr. Miller spent each and every hour showing us slides of the animals he’d killed on his African safari. But like geometry, if you worked on your own and read ahead, history wasn’t boring at all. If you read history, you could learn where the ideas you took for granted actually came from and, what I found oddly reassuring, that the world had absolutely always been a terrible mess.

What I dreaded about school was what happened between classes in the breezeways or in the shuffle and hum in the classroom just before the teacher started: The way guys asked to copy my homework before class, then called me a bitch when I refused. The way the pretty girls seated on either side of my desk carried on conversations over my head, without ever including me. The way someone in the back would make a gagging or sucking noise when I raised my hand to answer a question. The way my teachers heard them make fun of me and did nothing to stop them.

After eight years of school uniforms, I didn’t know how to dress. I wore relaxed-fit Lee jeans with elastic waistbands while everyone else wore Levi 501s or Gap. I borrowed Marilyn’s pumpkin and turquoise camp shirts—shirts that made me a target against the crowds of tight Billabong tees and cable-knits from J. Crew.

“Nice shirt,” girls sniggered in the hall.

“Hey, I think my mom has those jeans,” a boy would call from his locker.

It got worse the harder I tried. One day, I wore black leggings and a bright orange tunic, again borrowed from Marilyn, and a white cloth headband. I thought I looked trendy. Instead, even Mr. Miller joined in making fun of me before class.

Sometimes when I asked Marilyn for new clothes, she told me I was a “real clothes horse,” even though her closet was twice the size of mine and she used the coat closet by the stairs to keep all the clothes that didn’t fit her. But occasionally she’d take me to the mall to go shopping. We never went to the stores like Gap or United Colors of Benetton, where the popular girls bought their clothes. Instead we went to department stores or small boutiques that went out of business shortly after we shopped there. I always loved the clothes we chose together, colorful blue-plaid bodysuits and crinkly broomstick skirts or floral dresses. But no matter what we bought or how excited I was about it, when I wore it to school, I’d always realize the minute I got to the bottom of that long stairway that it was exactly the worst thing I could have picked.

After a few weeks, I’d almost started to get the hang of lockers and changing for PE, but I still felt self-conscious in my baggy shorts and Day-Glo tee. No one else wore Day-Glo anymore. As we waited for Coach Milosovic to make his appearance, I’d sidle up to Julia, the only girl in PE I spoke to. She wore clothes as inappropriate as mine: pleated khaki shorts and baggy tees with pictures of Jesus’s bleeding hands and Bible verses. I avoided the other girls and would never meet their eyes.

I did this because of the way Chrissie and Meghan, two freshmen like me—only popular and pretty and already with upperclassmen boyfriends—looked at me in the PE locker room and smirked to each other. The school must have assigned the lockers alphabetically, because Chrissie’s hall locker was next to mine too. She was the one I had asked on the first day of school for help with the lock, and she had helped—perfunctorily and silently, staring at me like I was the stupidest person on the planet—while Meghan and some boy looked on over her shoulder and laughed. My face burned as she speed-dialed my combination and loudly clunked the lock open; I barely managed a thank-you. I didn’t know it then, but I’d asked for help with something everyone else had learned at the beginning of junior high; we’d never had lockers at Le Lyçée. I was marked from that first day, and every PE class I changed under Chrissie’s and Meghan’s cold gaze, their sniggering at my clothes, my spray deodorant, my knee socks.

From Chrissie and Meghan and the rest of PV High, I learned a form of racial profiling: Pretty white girls were always mean. Ugly white girls, nerdy white girls, fat white girls, white girls with bad skin, pretty or ugly Japanese, Korean, Indian, or Chinese girls, as well as Latina and black girls, could be trusted, most of the time, to be decent human beings. I held this prejudice with me all through high school and college, scared of white, beautiful people and their narrow judgments. Sometimes I still feel the same way.

Everyone in high school looked through me as they passed me in the halls, unless it was to laugh at me, except for the few girls I’d managed to make friends with. Our lunch group was composed of misfits like me: a drama nerd, a fat kid, a Latin geek, a granola-hippie, horsey girl. We spent whole lunch periods having fun and feeling safe—until the next apple core or half-empty soda can was thrown at us, accompanied by a gale of laughter. I was grateful for these friends, but still, I couldn’t even tell them where I lived.

Sometimes I wondered what my mother had been like in high school. I thought about the way her death certificate said her last place of employment was Hollywood High. Was she popular? I supposed the answer all depended on how pretty she was and if she wore the right clothes or knew the latest bands. I wondered if she was smart, if she liked math or English or history. I wondered if she had a boyfriend or got asked to dances. But as hard as I tried, when I thought about my mother, I couldn’t imagine the answers to my questions. That was how little I knew. There were thousands of possible answers. If my mother were a geometry problem, the sum of the things I knew about her would be zero. She would be the x in an algebra problem with too many unknowns to solve. When had she run away? Was it really because of Dee and Spence, or was it something else? Was it because she was miserable in high school too?

• • •

Boys, especially, looked through me, and most of the time, I looked away from them. So I was surprised when one day in PE, two were looking straight at me. One was tall, his shoulders too thick and sloped for the rest of his thin body, his long hair draped across them like a cape. The other boy was small and skinny, his faint mustache showing up black against his pale skin like the black soot on the white paint of our boat. They looked at me, then looked at each other, whispered, laughed. My shoulders tensed. I looked more firmly to the ground, waiting for the taunts and laughter that were surely going to follow.

Coach Milosovic blew his whistle, and as we gathered in a circle around him, I noticed the two boys looking at me again around his back. I inched closer to Julia. We moved together to the track to begin our jog, she to my right, both of us to the far edge of the outside lane so that the faster students could pass us.

I hated running. I hated how my shorts always bunched up between my legs, revealing more of my jiggling thighs. I was so embarrassed that I ran with my shoulders hunched up, my arms stiff alongside my hips, my eyes on the ground ahead of me. Back then, I thought it was a particular moral failing that I didn’t like to run. If I would just learn to run, most of my problems would be solved—being fat, being ugly, being ungainly and awkward, being a dork. I sometimes set out to try to run at home. I’d lace up my sneakers and jog along the dusty road that led from the marina to the railroad tracks, dodging the APL trucks lined up along its side to wait for their loads. I’d be doing okay, perhaps just hitting my stride and finally feeling comfortable, when a semi driver would lean out of his cab and shout something about my ass. Or Wade or Bob would drive by, toot their horn, or slow down the car and say something to me—usually words of encouragement but sometimes hoots of appreciation. I’d wave at them and smile wanly, but I’d already tensed, my gait once more awkward. I stumbled, I slowed, I gave up and walked the rest of the way.

As Julia and I jogged slowly around the track, I heard heavier footfalls behind us, as if some particularly oafish wildebeest were pursuing us. They slowed as they came close; it was the boy with long hair. He loped beside me, his hair swaying back and forth as he ran.

“Hi,” he said to me.

“Hi.”

“What’s up?”

“Um, nothing.” I hated that question, “What’s up?” People always asked it when it was completely obvious what was up. We were running, duh.

“Running sucks, man,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, although I also knew that running was potentially less embarrassing than other sports: volleyball, basketball, softball, soccer.

“Hey, what kinda music you like?”

I’d already been asked this a few times since the beginning of the year, and I’d figured out that the true answer—nothing, really—was one that made people profoundly uncomfortable. Everyone listened to some kind of music, didn’t they? The next year I would make a dedicated attempt to like new music like Morrissey, Stone Temple Pilots, Green Day, or at least to fake it. I’d fail miserably.

“All sorts of stuff,” I answered, hoping he wouldn’t ask me “like what?”

“Like what?”

“Just stuff.”

“So, hey, what’s your name?”

“Kelly,” I said. “That’s Julia.”

Julia, whose arms were also stiff against her side as she jogged, bent her hand at the wrist, the tiniest wave.

“I’m Devin.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Oh, okay, well. I’ll see you around later, maybe,” he said and jogged on.

As he lurched on, I realized that nothing had happened. He hadn’t made fun of me. He’d just talked to me. What was wrong with him? Julia and I jogged on without saying anything.

Later that day, after the bell that released us from the last class had rung, as we were all hurtling, like schooling fish, through the halls to our lockers, I heard my name ring across the hall. I turned and it was the guy from PE.

“Hey,” he said as caught up to me, “can I have your number?”

“No!” I said, startled.

“What?”

“I mean, I don’t know you.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, can I have it anyway?”

I wrote it down, mostly to get rid of him so that I could get to my locker. That evening he called to ask me to the school luau on Friday night. I said yes, but not because I wanted to go anywhere with him; I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

“Great. I’ll pick you up. Where do you live?”

“I’ll just meet you there.”

“No, seriously, I have a car. I’ll give you a ride.”

“No, it’s okay. I’ll just meet you there.” There was no way he could come to the boat, and I didn’t want to bother Josette.

The night of the luau I tore through all the drawers beneath my bunk, searching for something to wear. The only bathing suit I had was one designed to mimic a ladybug, which I’d bought at a swim shop that catered to “mature” women. I had no cutoffs or cute tank tops like the other girls would be wearing. I found a pair of Marilyn’s baggy, white cotton shorts with a drawstring to put over my suit and a coral-colored bandana-print shirt of my own from REI.

When I got there, Devin said, “You look cute.” I didn’t believe him.

Music throbbed. Hundreds of high school students were splashing around in the pools, making out in swim trunks, tiny wet T-shirts, Daisy Dukes, bikinis with lots of cleavage. If you looked at the other girls, there was no way you could possibly call me “cute” and mean it.

After a few minutes of disastrous, stilted conversation, where it became clear that he liked death metal and I didn’t, that I was “book smart” and he was barely passing class, he asked, “So what do your parents do?”

“Um,” I said. “They have a meat market in the ’hood.” (It just came out that way.)

“Oh. Okay. Hey, let’s go swimming!”

I couldn’t have been more relieved. At least there would be something to do besides talking. Unfortunately, the something Devin had in mind, once we got in the water, was to pull me close to him and stick a huge, probing tongue into my mouth. It felt like a slug with epilepsy, hell-bent on slithering down my throat. And it tasted bad. I’d never been kissed before. Although I knew tongues were involved, I had no idea they were that involved. I pushed him away, his soft arms slick in the water.

“Don’t worry,” Marilyn reassured me when she picked me up that night, after I’d told her the whole story—about the tongue, the stultifying conversation, the way I didn’t fit in with anyone. “The boys get better in college. In high school they’re all a bunch of idiots. And the girls pretty much are idiots too.”

We drove down Channel Street from Western and rounded a bend. Suddenly the whole harbor was spread before us: the lights of shipyards and container yards, the Vincent Thomas Bridge.

“I thought it was just me,” I said.

“No, honey, it’s not you. It’s them.” But I knew it wasn’t really them—the boys, the people who made fun of me—it was me.

That first year of high school, it became apparent that there were two kinds of families: the one I lived in and everyone else’s. No one else lived on a boat with six cats who trailed cat litter, bits of feces, and tapeworm larvae onto the dining room table and kitchen counter. No one else had to pat down their sheets and blankets before they went to sleep to be sure a cat hadn’t peed on the bed. No one else’s father made half-hour phone calls to Omaha Steaks to order boxes of frozen steaks or chicken cordon bleu delivered to their boat or, in fact, had their own personal Omaha Steaks agent because they were such a good customer. No one else had to pull socks over their dad’s calloused, elephantine feet. No one else had to watch their dad eat dinner with his testicles lying sloppily on the dining room chair, grease from the meal dribbling down his chin, and then give him a shot of insulin. No one else had to worry if their clothes smelled of cat urine, bilges, must, cigarette smoke, diesel. They didn’t have to lie about what their parents did for a living. They didn’t need to pretend not to see the boxes covered with penises inserted into women’s asses as they walked through their mother’s bedroom. They didn’t have to lie to their friends about where they lived.

I didn’t know then what I know now: that there are almost as many “weird” families as there are normal families; that “normal” isn’t really normal; that we all have stories to tell about where we come from. And I didn’t know then what I know now—that Marilyn really was right. It was them and their age, just as surely as it was me and mine.