The Adults Part 10

Lillian Biggs said she thought we were supposed to be answering questions while writing our papers. She said she thought that was the whole point of writing a paper.

"School is stupid."

"So f.u.c.king stupid."

"This is all so stupid."

"The next person who swears, to the princ.i.p.al's office," Mr. Basketball said.

"Tampon!" someone cried from the back. "That's not a swear."

Mr. Basketball sighed. I looked out the window, watched the sun slip behind a tree, and convinced myself that the world was ending.

Dr. Killigan knocked on the door and walked in with a student I didn't recognize.

"We have a visiting student today," Dr. Killigan said. "Do you mind if she looks in on your cla.s.s?"

Mr. Basketball looked around for an empty seat. The cla.s.s was full, so full in fact that Lillian Biggs had to sit on top of a table in the back of the room.

"Emily," Mr. Basketball said, "will you run to the bas.e.m.e.nt and grab another chair?"

I had become Mr. Basketball's errands girl. I didn't mind. Every time Mr. Basketball sent me to the bas.e.m.e.nt, it felt like an affirmation of his love for me, an I-trust-you-with-big-things gesture. Like when my father would unload the car after our trips to Long Island and he'd call to my mother and ask her to hold something for him. My father needed the help of another person and my mother had agreed to be just that until death did them part, even if she failed and dropped the laundry basket on the ground.

I got to walk the halls when other students didn't. I went to the art studio and ran my finger over other people's dried paint. I peered into cla.s.srooms that weren't mine. I learned that everyone was equally bored at all times. This was comforting. I went to the courtyard and saw Marianne Stein and Nick Ross making out. Their tongues crossed. I went to the bathroom and picked at my hair, applied lipstick. "I can't believe I am you," I said to myself in the mirror. "I am you." Sometimes, I practiced my lines from "The Waste Land." "You cannot say, or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images."

I rubbed the lipstick off as soon as another girl came in. Sometimes there were girls already in the bathroom when I arrived, and I had to pretend to use the bathroom. I stood in the stall, flushed unnecessarily, and walked out without was.h.i.+ng my hands because what was the point if you didn't even take your pants off, and I heard the girls in front of the mirror say, "Ew, she doesn't even wash her hands. Don't touch her or you'll probably die."

"I didn't actually mean my mom was gay," Mark said in the bas.e.m.e.nt after a long period of silence. I was searching for a stack of chairs. There was an edge to his voice, something alien about him. "She's not gay gay. But you know what I mean."

"I didn't think you meant she was actually gay," I said.

"You gave me a funny look when I said it."

"Did I?"

"If my mom was gay, then that means your father is a transs.e.xual."

"That's not necessarily true," I said, hoping to put an end to the conversation.

"I'm just joking. You don't know how to take a joke anymore?" I couldn't open my mouth without breathing in the entire bas.e.m.e.nt, the dust, the dead moths stuck to the dirty windows, the mold painted on books.

"Joke," he said. But we couldn't laugh or look at each other, not even in the dim bas.e.m.e.nt light that made everything look and feel and taste like a stale performance of someone's past.

Richard appeared out of a dark corner in the bas.e.m.e.nt, licking the top of a vodka bottle.

"Did you know that Socrates could drink a shot of vodka every hour and still perform basic tasks?" he asked. Richard stepped fully into the light from the half window and revealed a wide and sloppy grin on his face. "It's twelve thirty." He took a shot. He counted to three with his fingers. "One. Two. Three. Basic task."

I just stared at him.

"Do you want some?" he asked.

"I came down here for a chair, actually," I said.

"That's too bad," Richard said. "These chairs are ours."

"They aren't yours."

"The thing is, Emily, we spend three-quarters of the school day down here. And possession is nine-tenths of the law. You do the math."

Mark broke into a crazed laughter. "That makes no f.u.c.king sense, d.i.c.khead."

I walked toward the chairs, which were stacked in neat piles behind Richard.

"Oh, no, no!" Richard said, stepping in the way and blocking Mark completely from my view.

"Move," I said.

"Shake my hand," Richard said. He stuck out his hand.

"Why?" I asked.

"Basic task."

I shook his hand.

"Say you're sorry now," Richard said, his grip tightening around my hand.

"For what?" I asked.

"For what?" he mimicked. He stuck my hand under his s.h.i.+rt. I felt the scar from his burn all over his chest. Mark was still laughing, not even paying attention. "For this," he said. "Feel it. It covers my entire chest, you b.i.t.c.h."

"Richard," I said. "Let go of my hand!"

"Feel it."

"No," I said, kicking him away. "It was your own stupid fault!"

He pushed me against the wall. I pushed him back. He cupped his hand around my throat.

"Don't be stupid, Emily," he said. "Do you know what I could do to you?"

"I'm not scared," I said. "You're pathetic!"

He laughed. His hair fell in front of his eyes. The bas.e.m.e.nt door swung open.

"Hey," Mr. Basketball shouted, the light flooding the room. Richard released his grip. "Emily, cla.s.s is over! Where are you?"

Mr. Basketball walked closer until he could see us, and then Richard and Mark ran up the stairs and out the door.

"It smells like smoke down here," he said, walking closer to me. "You know, Emily, this is a smoke-free zone."

"I wasn't smoking," I said, my neck red around the throat.

"Sorry, sorry, I was just kind of joking," Mr. Basketball said. "You all right?"

"I wasn't smoking," I said.

"I believe you. What was going on down here?"

"Nothing," I said, looking at my feet.

"Oh," he said. "Well, what do you say we get you out of here, huh?"

Mr. Basketball held out his hand and stepped closer to me. If Mr. Basketball really was sleeping with Janice, this must have felt normal to him, his face close to mine, his gritty stubble compared to the youth of my cheek. I knew that if I reached out and touched him, the way I touched him on the stoop, he would step even closer, press himself against me. He would lift up my s.h.i.+rt and slide off my bra. He would put his mouth on my breast, and everything would feel soft again.

I was shaking. Inside my shoes, my toes were cramping.

Then he did the most unexpected thing. He laughed.

"It's all wildly confusing, I know," he said. Then I laughed too, like we had some kind of understanding. I took his hand and we walked out of the bas.e.m.e.nt. We walked back to cla.s.s so I could get my bag. On the way, Mr. Basketball explained how adolescent confusion was a prerequisite to knowing something absolutely when I was older.

15.

When I got home, I was relieved to find a note from my mother saying she was shopping for my birthday dinner. I took off my s.h.i.+rt, bit into an apple, and put the radio on.

The phone rang. It was Mrs. Resnick.

"Hi, Emily," Mrs. Resnick said. "I'm really sorry to bother you, but I need to go to a doctor's appointment and I just don't know where Mark is. He was supposed to watch the baby. Will you come over and watch Laura for a bit?"

Laura was tiny. To be expected, I suppose. In her crib, she was wrapped in a pink blanket. She had eyes and a nose in reasonable distance of each other, but the most surprising thing about her was that she looked like n.o.body, some kind of generic baby you'd see on television.

When I first stood over her miniature body, I didn't know what to say to her. I picked her up, looked her in the eye, and said, "Your mother slept with my father." She didn't blink. So I tried playing peekaboo with her and that was when she started crying. "Peekaboo!" I said, and popped my head up over the crib. She kept crying until she tired herself into sleep.

I stood in front of Mrs. Resnick's bed. My feet were soft on the burgundy carpet as I walked around the mattress, staring at the plaid bedspread, trying to imagine if my father had ever slept here, if they rolled around and touched each other's thighs and laughed about their stupid, stupid families. I lay down, turned on the television. The People's Court was ending.

It turned out, I never cared who won. I got bored. I searched through the desk drawers. Stamps, pens, paper clips, cough drops, Post-its, Mr. Resnick's death certificate. In her closet, I tried on all of Mrs. Resnick's shoes and kept the red silk high heels on my feet as I walked toward a brown box on the floor of the closet. It was the kind of box that held secrets: love letters from Mr. Resnick in college, kissing you in the elevator, still taste it on my tongue. A pair of dirty baby shoes, and then bills, tons of unpaid bills. Bills from Stamford Hospital and the psychiatric clinic and checks for thousands of dollars from my father.

In her dresser drawers, Mrs. Resnick's underwear was mostly nude and cotton like my mother's, except for a few lace orange and red pairs with bows on the back that didn't have much a.s.s coverage. I imagined she wore these only when she slept with my father. I picked up one of her bras and wrapped it around my body to see if it fit.

"I'm home, I'm home I'm home, Mom!" Mark shouted loudly, walking into his mother's room. "Oh," he said, horrified to see me holding his mother's bra.

"What the h.e.l.l is Emily doing here?" Richard asked behind him, eating tuna right out of the can.

"Playing dress-up," Mark said.

I was so embarra.s.sed I stood there and waited to perish. Richard sat on the bed.

"So if tuna is the chicken of the sea," Richard said, turning over the tuna can in his hand, "does that mean chicken is the tuna of the earth?"

"Richard, shut the f.u.c.k up," Mark said.

"Jesus," Richard said.

Mark walked over to Richard and took the vodka. He walked toward the closet. He ran his hands over his father's pants.

"Remember when my dad would call us up to his room and count his pants, Emily?" Mark asked.

"Yes," I said.

Mr. Resnick had an unreasonable amount of pants. That was one of the things I remembered most about him. "Look at my pants," Mr. Resnick would say to us. "That's an unreasonable amount of pants. I haven't changed pants size in twenty years. You know how many pants you collect in twenty years? This many pants." He pointed to all his pants. "That's an unreasonable amount of pants." Mark and I would run to his room and laugh until we were sore.

"The night before he killed himself, he called me upstairs to say it again," Mark said. He took a blue pair off the hanger. He put his feet in the holes and pulled them up to his waist. "He had so many pants!" Mark repeated. He hunched over like his father, shook his arms, one hand holding the vodka, and kicked out his legs as he walked in circles in the closet. "Mark. Son. Look how many pants I have!"

Richard broke out into hysterical laughter from the bed.

"s.h.i.+t," Mark said, sitting down on the floor of the closet. "Dad. You were just a collection of f.u.c.king pants."

It sounded cruel, but I knew what he meant. When my mother was volunteering at Stamford Hospital two or three days a week, she put me in charge of handing out the lollipops in the oncology ward when she couldn't find a babysitter for me. There were always sick children walking by and they'd be bald with illness. It seemed to me, standing there with a strong immune system and a fistful of candy, that illness stripped the youth right out of their bones, and there I was trying to hand it back to them. I was too afraid to approach the sick children, so I waited for them to come to me, these tired little people with bloodless faces and tiny sneakers, Jean or Harriet or Betsy who already seemed dead to me. Jean or Harriet or Betsy would usually smile at me, and ask for one of the lollipops while her mother was talking to one of the doctors. "Blue, please." Jean or Harriet or Betsy was still alive enough to know what color she always wanted-children, it seemed, were creatures of favorites. I gave out a blue lollipop and she smiled as she tore the plastic off with one hard tug. A few months later, Jean or Harriet or Betsy usually died, and n.o.body ever announced it or told me, I would just have an abundance of blue lollipops left in my hand at the end of the day and that was how I knew they were dead.

Mark opened the vodka and looked around for a cup. He couldn't find one, so he just drank out of the bottle. "Want some?" he asked me. He handed the bottle to me.

I looked at them both, smiling at me. These were my childhood friends. Bark and p.r.i.c.kard, captains of the s.p.a.ce Rock, my sledding partners, the boys who buried me in leaves, and tugged on my pigtails, and lent me their water guns when mine had run out of water. I didn't smile back, but I took the vodka. It was my birthday after all. If everybody was planning on being drunk for it, so was I.

I swallowed a mouthful. It burned down my throat but it felt surprisingly good. I took another one. "Happy birthday, s.h.i.+ny Forehead," Richard said.

Mark kicked off his sneakers, and they hit the wall. This woke Laura up in her crib under the window and she started crying. Richard licked the bottom of the tuna can with his tongue.

"That's f.u.c.king nasty, p.r.i.c.khead," Mark said. "Do you know how much bacteria is on that s.h.i.+t?"

I walked toward Laura.

"Hey!" Richard said, throwing the tuna can, jumping in my way.

"Don't be stupid, Richard," I said. "She's a baby."

Richard's eyes were red. His nose was runny. "Exactly. She's just a baby."

Mark laughed.

"To the f.u.c.king baby!" Mark shouted. "Cheers!"

Richard took a shot. And then Mark. And then me again.