Trapped in Forever

53 ~ Two Pounds and Fourteen Ounces

When Roxanne and I spent our afternoons together, with our backpacks abandoned to the corners of bedrooms or slumped sadly against the metal barred backs of barstools, the white sheets of our homework forgotten and unanswered inside, it was mostly in her bedroom, with Michael Jackson singing in the background, either blaring to annoy her mother in the next room if she was staying at her mom’s, rubbing lotion between her fingers and rolling her eyes, shrugging off her blazer and draping it across the foot of her queen sized bed, or quietly, his voice just barely crooning through the holes of the speakers rested on her dresser beside her lava lamp, always unplugged, and a jewelry stand in the shape of a tree with golden chained necklaces dangling from its metal branches, if we were at her dad’s house, the one she called Her House. When she called me and told me to come over, she would either say to “my house” or to “my Mom’s.” Her Mom’s was a place she spoke about with an edge sharpening her words, disdain lacing her those two words, and she would occasionally through an eye-roll in there when she talked about her, about her mother, about her stepfather, as if they all belonged in the same category as chemical waste, cancer, and hurricanes. Her Mom’s was a formal place, a place that I felt hesitate to use the bathroom in, a place that Roxanne treated like a hotel, sitting on the edge of her bed instead of plopping down on it, creaking the springs of the mattress. The things she took with her there were things she always took back.

But we even spent our post-school afternoons and entire Saturdays there anyway, even if she was staying at Her Mom’s, but we didn’t always use to. She would flip on the blinker of her jeep, pull into their two car driveway, and then hop out, sometimes nodding for me to follow her—this was usually something she did after her and her mom argued, either about chalk, her outfits, or about her parents’ divorce—or she just walked up the stoop, blond hair swishing back and forth, without looking back in my direction, seating in the passenger seat of her jeep with the bobble Hula doll and Michael Jackson’s voice, and she would dump her backpack, change, reapply her make-up or something and come back and she would reverse out of their driveway and accelerate until she found somewhere for us to go, somewhere away from her mother and Kaleb, and we would stay there, wherever there would be. But then when they found about her pica, about the sticks of chalk that she nibbled on when she was angry or emotional, and started taping boxes of store brand chalk to her locker, we stopped leaving Her Mom’s. When they found out, Her Mom’s became that place she tried to hide within, choosing her over them, deeming her the lesser of two evils. She pretended that none of it mattered, but I knew better when I saw the torn shreds of cardboard from the store brand chalk packages tossed in her trashcan.

But Reese and those girls were different from Roxanne; they didn’t have shreds of cardboard chalk packages in their trashcans or dust in between their teeth, or healed, slender scars on the skins of their arms and legs that they always concealed with sleeves and denim jeans, and they weren’t torn by the people they tried to consider friends, torn between trying to prove that they weren’t weird, that they weren’t freaks, and being afraid of them, afraid of their harsh gazes and snickering voices that followed in their ears. The people they considered friends were friends—they weren’t afraid of the intensity of their gazes while still trying to earn their unstable approval, one that fluctuated with gossip and popularity—and it was starting to occur to me, when I sat in the backseat of Reese’s car, one that she complained was used but it smelled so sharply of New Car Scent that I wondered just how used it was, in the drive-thru of the Bean, trying to turn my usual French vanilla hot chocolate into an approving low-fat option, that maybe they were considering me a friend.  Reese would ask what my order was when we were a car away from the large, standing menu and pale yellow speaker with a cracked screen to display your order, and Veronica would ask if I wanted a stick of gum, which I took because I was afraid I would offend her, or them, if I didn’t, and Kara sat beside me in the backseat, the part of her seatbelt that would go across her chest behind her back, and she asked how pageant-ing was going, and grinned when I told her that I had won a small prize earlier in the week.