IT IS JANUARY 21ST, AND I am sitting in French class, next to Carrie, when I hear about Todd Mayer being dead.
We are “making verbs,” as Madame De La Fontaine calls it. “Making verb sheets.”
“Kate manges un gommes avec,” Carrie says, writing on the group worksheet with a ballpoint that’s running out of ink. Carrie’s fingers are long and thin. Her nails are painted with clear polish she picks off when she’s bored. She twirls her pen around her fingers, thinking. “Avec who?”
“How do you chew gum together?” I ask. The classroom smells like sour-cream-and-onion chips.
Carrie is super blanche. Super white. Let’s say this is possibly why Carrie used to be really popular, and I, being half Asian, have never been.
Which may or may not have something to do with being Asian, I’m not an expert on these things obviously.
Also Carrie is pretty loaded, or her family is, which, because this is an all-girls private school full of rich kids, is a thing. Also the white thing is a thing here.
Up until almost a year ago, Carrie was best friends with this girl Shirley Mason, who is the most popular person probably in our whole school, also super white, also rich. For most of the time I knew them, Carrie and Shirley had the same hair, same barrettes, same book bags. I think they used to take horseback-riding lessons together or something.
Then, suddenly, beginning of this school year, they stopped talking to each other. I have no idea why.
This September, when everyone was choosing their desks, instead of sitting next to Shirley and her crew, Carrie walked to the back of the classroom and stood behind the desk next to mine, which used to be the desk of a girl named Lena Hornbee.
Carrie pointed at the seat. Like I somehow had any say in the matter. I shrugged. Carrie sat down, careful like she wasn’t sure the seat would hold. I sat down. Then Carrie looked at me and pointed at the top of her head and said, “I like your piles.”
By which I think she meant my two somewhat ear-shaped top buns I started wearing my hair in this year. Kind of an ode to a modern Princess Leia. Or not.
“Piles is something you get on your butt,” I said. “It’s like hemorrhoids.”
Carrie didn’t even widen her eyes. She just shrugged again. “Well then, I like your head hemorrhoids.”
And that was it. Suddenly, Carrie Harper and I were friends.
(Meanwhile, for reasons seemingly only chair-related, Lena hangs out with Shirley and her crew now. That’s how ridiculous life is.)
So now, months later, winter term, French class, leaning over her desk, which is next to mine, as all our desks are now, Carrie smiles a pea-sized smile. She has drawn two heads and draws puffy cheeks on them next to the text. “See? Deux persons manging the gum.”
“That’s just deux persons,” I note. “How are they chewing le gomme?”
Carrie nods. “Right, right.” She draws a big bubble coming out of one character’s mouth and then draws a line into the other head’s mouth. Carrie smiles. She has perfect teeth.
“See,” she says, tapping her pen on the drawing.
“Okay, I see now,” I say. “Bon.”
Then Madame De La Fontaine walks in after being gone for, like, ten minutes (which is not strange, I’m pretty sure she goes behind the school to do le smoking while we do le verbs).
“Les filles,” she says. She clears her throat. Madame De La Fontaine is one of the youngest teachers at St. Mildred’s. She has long blond hair, and some days she wears jeans and an interesting T-shirt with a blazer, which feels kind of unteacherly to me. She looks like she should be talking to adults for a living. Maybe that’s just a bias all the other teachers have created by wearing floral-printed polyester dresses and pantyhose all the time, like it’s a rule.
I like Madame DLF because she almost never yells, which I appreciate.
Currently, she is twisting her wedding ring, turning it around her ring finger as she steps over to her desk. “Les filles. There is a subject, an incident, I know some of your classmates have been discussing dans les messages texte over lunch. And, it is very sad news, and the school has decided that we should make an announcement. So please put your pens and pencils, tes stylos et tes crayon, down, s’il vous plait.”
Carrie puts her pen down with a soft click.
Then someone behind me whispers, “Some kid was murdered.”
Which Madame De La Fontaine doesn’t hear. She puts her hands by her sides, like she’s trying to stop messing with her ring, because it’s not especially authoritative. “A boy. A boy from Albright, whom some of you might have known, has been found … dead. His name was … Todd Mayer.”
…
Never heard of him.
Some girls in the classroom cover their mouths and look at each other. Some girls clearly feel better because they already knew some kid got murdered. One girl looks like she’s going to throw up. Another girl on the other side of me gasps, “Oh my God!”
“Oh my GOD!”
It is impossible to say if any of these girls actually knew Todd or are just being dramatic because the girls at this school are kind of prone to dramatics. Like when we had an earthquake and three people went home with anxiety.
It was like a .0004 or something. Like a ground fart. Someone else passed out and had to be taken to the hospital.
You want to say this means girls are softies, but these same girls crush bone on the field hockey team so clearly it’s complicated.
Madame De La Fontaine tells us this is a tragedy and if anyone would like to go to the nurse’s office, they can.
Two girls, the usual suspects including Lena, immediately raise their hands.
“That’s my brother’s school,” I say, later, after not doing anything for the rest of French, and not doing a ton of work or paying attention for the rest of the school day. “What grade was he in?”
Carrie digs in her pockets for what she’s always digging in her pockets for, gum. “Twelfth, I think.”
“That’s Mark’s grade,” I say.
Carrie raises her eyebrows. “Oh yeah, your brother goes to Albright.”
After school, we go to the food truck with the weird painting of the old man made out of French fries on the side, and we buy a floater of fries to share. The French fry guy looks like someone who would rape you if he found you alone in an alley. That’s what I’ve decided anyway, because I watch a lot of Law & Order Special Victims Unit, a show where someone died once by having a banana shoved up their butt (which is obviously deadly). Fry Guy has long white hair that sprouts out of his head in the same arc as a fern’s leaves and a mustache that any normal person would shave off because it looks like an old rug stuck to his face, like a mustache a disinterested five-year-old would draw on a face. And it makes him look, as I said, like a felon.
In my humble opinion.
But his fries are three dollars for a small. So I’m willing to overlook that stuff.
Carrie is skinny and can basically eat anything and it will never affect her body size. Carrie said her mom was the same way when she was younger but now her mom is huge.
“Like a walrus who only wears boots,” Carrie says, eating a fry with a tiny wooden fork. “So when I’m twenty, I’m going to have to decide if I want to stop eating this crap or be a walrus.”
“I think walruses are cool,” I say. “Sturdy. Reliable.”
“Not ALL walruses,” Carrie adds. “It’s like … not all beavers.”
“Sure. Obviously not ALL walruses are cool.” I concur, popping a fry in my mouth, open-mouth chewing so the cold air keeps my mouth from burning.
It’s freezing out but if we walk and eat fries it’s not too bad. The grease works its way into your veins and warms your blood.
I hold my fry on my fork in the cold air and watch the steam rise up from the potato horizon.
“So a kid is dead,” I say, shoving the fry in my mouth and chewing. “That’s fucked up.”
Carrie chews, steam huffing out of her mouth and into the air. “It’s fucked up to be murdered.”
“Was he murdered?” I stop walking.
“If he died of cancer, they wouldn’t say ‘found dead,’” Carrie notes, speedwalking.
“True,” I say, jogging to catch up. “Maybe a pervert did it.”
“Sure.” Carrie shrugs.
I’m thinking of saying that maybe it was the French fry guy but it feels too soon.
Carrie tosses the empty cardboard tray into the trash and pulls out a wrapped stick from one of her many gum stashes.
We round the corner and, with the motor skills and speed of a practiced pickpocket, Carrie pops three pieces of gum from three different packs into her mouth. I shove my hands into my pockets. The air is getting colder with every step. It’s like someone’s watching us walk and turning down the lights and turning off the heat the closer we get to being in between warm school and warm home. It’s so weird that it gets dark so soon after school. I know it’s the season, but it still feels unfair.
Most of the girls at our school our age have cars, presumably warm cars, and several rip past us, tearing through the layer of slush on the street. Shirley Mason drives a select group of girls home every day, blasting music and singing with her pack. Shirley Mason has a new SUV. Why does someone who is sixteen need a new SUV?
To me, it suggests a general disinterest in being anything useful in the world. But that’s just me.
I wonder if it’s, like, triggering for Carrie to see these SUVs full of rich girls who used to be her friends.
I also wonder why Carrie, whose parents are loaded, doesn’t have an SUV.
I pull my mittens out of my pocket and push my greasy fingers inside. It’s weird how mittens are cold when you first put them on. Mittens need you to warm them up.
We walk in silence for a bit. Carrie doesn’t wear boots, ever. Not even if it’s raining. Her school oxfords are so worn they’re not even black anymore, they’re the color of a really old cat, like when the fur wears away and you can see the little bits of cat skin.
I wear boots outside because I don’t like cold feet. My boots make me sound like I’m dragging myself across the sidewalk. It’s a creepy sound.
Scuff. Scuff. Scuff. Scuff.
My boots are my brother Mark’s old boots, which I got hand-me-down year because he got this part-time job shoveling walks so he had to get fancy new boots that are like the SUV of boots. Mark’s old boots are big, but I kind of like them being too big. I feel like a robot in them. A winter robot. With warm feet.
At her bus stop, Carrie stops and tilts her head at me.
Then she says, “Hey, remember in French class? How two people can’t eat gum?”
“Yeah?”
There’s a woman at the bus stop with a tiny poodle in a knapsack perfectly sized for a tiny dog. The poodle’s head is sticking out like a doll.
This is what I’m thinking about when I feel cold, wet, sticky fingers on my lips. And I taste orange and mint. A mix of what I’m guessing is Dentyne Ice and Bubblicious Orange. And something else.
I’m chewing Carrie’s gum.
It’s a thing that affects my whole body. Like my whole body is now focused on what is happening in my mouth. On what just happened. That is 100 percent who I am for three seconds.
I look over at Carrie, who is licking the residue off her fingers, not even an eyebrow raised. NOTHING. She turns and steps into the bus. “Later.”
“Later.” My lips are sticky. And vibrating.
I don’t watch Carrie’s bus pull away. I divert some of my body’s resources from my gum-filled mouth to my legs and walk home. I walk so fast my heart pounds in my chest like a gorilla.
How can two people chew gum?
Snow is falling. White flakes float into my eyes and stick to my lashes like squirrels on a fence.
My face buzzes, even more every time I bite down into Carrie’s gum.
I walk home feeling like one of those bobblehead dolls with the big head on a spring. By the time I get to my house, I’ve chewed Carrie’s gum a hundred times.
Dentyne Ice, Bubblicious and … Juicy Fruit?
Todd Mayer is dead, I think, chewing. Murdered.
The only information I have about murder is from TV, which is that people tend to be murdered by people they know. Often husbands. Angry husbands. Or vengeful wives (which my mom has pointed out is inaccurate). I’m pretty sure Todd had neither.
Still, as someone who’s spent seven years in an all-girls private school, a school where, in grade six, Shirley Mason renamed me Garbagia, a name that stuck for three years, I can see that proximity could up your chances of wanting to kill someone, if that someone was an asshole. Consistently.
I get home as the winter sky goes from gray to black, Carrie’s gum like a penny on my tongue.
Mark is standing in the kitchen when I get inside, layered up in his arctic winter coat that makes him look even bigger than he is, and he is a wall of muscle. His hair is all sticking up in his man ponytail he puts his hair in when he’s at home (but he always takes the elastic out before he walks out the door).
“Hey, G,” he says, a half a banana in his mouth.
“Hey, Mark,” I say, shaking off my coat as the heat of the house hits me like a tidal wave.
My mom keeps the house at a balmy seventy-five degrees at all times, and she’s super into “bundling up.” Neither my brother nor I has ever owned a winter item of clothing that’s less than six inches thick, a layer of down between us and what I would say are not necessarily arctic temperatures.
As a result, I feel like it’s possible that I will never truly understand cold or winter.
“Holy cow.” I lightly kick at Mark’s bear-sized gym bag with the toe of my boot. “This thing is HUGE! It looks like you have a body in there.”
“Quit it.” Mark flips the garbage bin open and tosses in his peel. “You’re getting salt shit all over it.”
With our matching big boots, we make twin Scuff Scuff Scuff (me) Scoot Scoot Scoot (Mark) noises as Mark grabs another banana and I grab crackers from the cupboard. My mom would kick our asses if she saw us in our boots in the house.
“Don’t you wrestle in your underwear? What do you need a huge bag of shit for?”
Mark grabs another banana and shoves the whole thing in his mouth in a way that is both fascinating and gross. From what I’ve seen of Mark eating, and granted it’s a limited study but still, it is truly amazing that teenage boys don’t die from choking on food every day.
Mark frowns because I’m staring at him. “It’s just stuff I need. I got a lot of stuff. That okay with you?”
I wince at the view of banana-pulp-in-mouth. “I guess.”
Mark never asks me how school was. Or any other kind of small talk. I also never ask Mark how his school is, but I assume it’s fine because I’m pretty sure Mark does not have to deal with people giving him crappy nicknames because he’s a big boy jock who looks like he could pound you into the earth with his pinky.
Mark grabs yet another banana from the seemingly endless supply in our tropical temperature house and stuffs it in his pocket.
“You’re like ninety percent banana,” I say. “Who knew the key to muscle was banana?”
“Yeah, well, you’re ninety percent carbohydrates.”
“Yes, I am.”
Mark hoists up his bag, mouth full. “Tell mom I’m at Trevor’s.”
“’Kay.”
Scoot. Scoot. Scoot.
When I was younger, I wished Mark and I went to the same school so he could help make me cool, but now I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works. Now I think it would have possibly been worse because he has too much dirt on me.
“You’ve seen me in a bonnet,” I told him once. “I don’t know if I should allow you to live.”
“Like I give a shit that you wore a bonnet,” he said, as he effortlessly shoved me into the couch so hard it knocked the wind out of me. “You also used to shit your pants.”
“Everyone shits their pants,” I yelled back. “You probably shit your pants, too. I just wasn’t alive to see it.”
“Yeah so,” Mark frowned. “Whatever.”
“You’re a genius.”
“You’re a bonnet wearer.”
Scoot. Scoot. Scoot.
“BYE!” I scream, from the kitchen.
“LATER!” Mark screams back from the front hall.
Scoot. Scoot. Scoot.
The door slams before I can ask Mark about Todd.