The Adults Part 3

"Just like everything in science," she said, writing SCIENCE on the board, "beauty has evolved over time. Beauty is real, but it is also crucial to keep in mind that it is equally an ideal established by the culture in which you exist. Beauty in the eighteen hundreds was much different than what we think beauty is now."

The Other Girls were fascinated, the first time all year they had visibly reacted to something Ms. Nailer had said. One of them raised her hand and wanted to know what was considered beautiful back in the day. One of them couldn't imagine a world where Brittany Stone wasn't the most beautiful girl in school. Brittany Stone said she couldn't imagine a world where Ms. Nailer was the authority on all matters of beauty. Neither could I really. Every day, I tried to be surprising in my footwear, and Ms. Nailer did not, standing in front of the cla.s.sroom, fully formed in her ugly suede flats and her two-piece suits that she probably got from Talbots, where we sat on benches outside the fitting rooms in snug tubular dresses that made me feel like a hollow tube of toothpaste, picking our scabs, watching Janice's mother try on mustard suits that were too broad in the shoulders.

"Back in the day," Ms. Nailer said, "scientists used a mathematical formula to decide who was beautiful and who was not. There was such a thing called the Facial Angle."

"Huh?" asked Ambrose, the albino boy who sat in front and answered most of Ms. Nailer's questions with, "According to Satan."

"Richard," Ms. Nailer said. "Please come up here."

Richard looked around, nervous. He rose from his seat. Ms. Nailer got out two rulers from her desk and Richard halted in front of the cla.s.s rabbit.

"I'm not going to hit you," Ms. Nailer said. "Come closer."

Richard walked toward her. She put two rulers to Richard's face and measured him vertically and horizontally, the two rulers intersecting at his ear.

"The angle that the two rulers create determines if a person is more human or more primate," Ms. Nailer said. "This is obviously an imprecise measurement, but I'm getting one hundred degrees!"

"Richard's a primate?"

"Actually, no," Ms. Nailer said. "Far from it. One hundred degrees was approximately the angle you will find in the faces of cla.s.sical Greek art."

Richard smiled as though he had known it all along. People booed.

"Scientists theorize that people are attracted to other people with similar facial angles. Meaning, Richard is most likely attracted to women who best represent the ideal of cla.s.sical Greek beauty."

"That's racist," someone said. "Richard's a racist."

"It's not racist," Ms. Nailer said. "It's evolution."

"My dad said evolution is racist."

"People picked partners based off similar facial angles for thousands of years, but subconsciously. It wasn't until recently that people started to understand attraction through the lens of science."

"Measure my face!" Brittany Stone shouted out.

"And my face!" Martha Collins said.

I knew Martha from elementary school, but we stopped being friends in the sixth grade when she asked me if I wanted to play this game called Cats in the House, which required taking off all our clothes, including our socks. When I protested, she said, "You don't see cats walking around the house with clothes on, do you?"

"I just don't see why we have to be naked," I said. I left her house and the shame of it all kept us from speaking for three years, until we ended up in biology together. She was the only person I knew sort of well, and it seemed that when you were a freshman walking into a cla.s.sroom, you saw only a string of people you couldn't sit next to for some reason or another: girls who didn't know you, girls who thought your angular features were obnoxious, or Richard, who spent his whole life battling me for Mark's full attention and publicly exposed my armpit hair in the fifth grade. He had pointed at my armpit in the lunch line and said, "Ew, look, she's got armpit hair." "That's just dog fur, you idiot," I had said. Richard laughed at me and shouted, "Emily is growing dog hair."

"Why don't you pair up and measure your lab partner's face?" Ms. Nailer said. "More efficient that way."

We took out rulers and began to measure. Martha put the ruler to my cheek. "I don't know how to tell you this," she said, "but your face is three inches on the left side, and two and a half on the other side."

"What?" I asked, getting hot. "You're doing it wrong."

"No," she said. "I double checked."

"Holy s.h.i.t! ABOB's nose is almost four inches!" Richard announced from the other table. "That's almost a finger! That's almost a Twinkie! That's twice the size of Ernest Bingley's di-"

"Noses!" Ms. Nailer shouted, and wrote NOSES on the board. I wrote NOSES in my notebook. "If you could believe it, they have their place in history. The black nose, the Jewish nose, the Irish nose, the Italian nose, the syphilitic nose. So many different noses. Right now, the Irish nose is in style, but in the early 1900s? The Irish nose, the tiny stub, meant you were an immigrant, poor, most likely diseased, unable to work. Many Irish people underwent aesthetic surgery to look more 'American.'"

"I don't think this is right," someone said.

"To be honest, I think this is a little bit racist."

"Shut up," Richard said to the cla.s.s. "Just because you aren't cla.s.sically beautiful doesn't mean you have to cry about it."

"Hey, hey," Ms. Nailer said. But it was too late. A girl threw an eraser at Richard's head. Ernest Bingley's c.o.ke exploded when he opened it. One of the Other Girls tried to free the rabbit but he just sat there in his opened cage. Ms. Nailer saw two girls whispering from desk to desk. She put her hair behind her ears and made nervous jokes about syphilis. One of the Other Girls leaned over to me and said, "Isn't the point of syphilis that it's not funny?"

I agreed too quickly.

This was the girl who had smooth firm calves that made the rest of us feel Unf.u.c.kable. This was the girl who said she wanted to stay Unf.u.c.kable for as long as one could remain Unf.u.c.kable. She said it was more f.u.c.kable to look Unf.u.c.kable, "like one of those paradoxes."

"Well, you can probably stay as Unf.u.c.kable as you want for as long as you want," said the girl who ate meals only on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Sat.u.r.days, and major commercial holidays and never muttered a complimentary, "Just kidding," after she was cruel the way I did.

Ms. Nailer gave us the vocabulary to turn cruelty into a legitimate science, something we didn't have to apologize for, a formula we pa.s.sed along to the school as proof that we had been on to something. Certain people truly were more f.u.c.kable than others! People walked down the hallways and said, "Of course they're going out, their facial lines are structured the same way." "Of course they boned, they both have European noses." "Of course they want to get married, they want to have a symmetrical baby."

In biology, I watched Richard measure Annie's nose with a ruler, and Brittany leaned over to me and said, "ABOB's nose is so long, n.o.body will ever be able to kiss her." Boys pulled her long red hair, drew her body on pieces of paper in the backs of cla.s.ses, and discussed what it would be like to have s.e.x with her in exaggerated, excited ways, but girls were the ones who wouldn't even look at her as she pa.s.sed, as we spread secrets about her, like ABOB got her period when she was five, ABOB once had s.e.x with an alligator. She was more similar to a monument than a person, and our insults splattered on her face like pigeon s.h.i.t. It was impossible, then, to understand how really alive she was.

4.

Our new princ.i.p.al Dr. Killigan sat the school down in the auditorium and told us what it meant to be partic.i.p.ants in a Hug-Free School.

"Hugs are supposed to be handshakes from the heart," he said too closely into the microphone. "But most of the time, these hugs I see taking place in the hallway are not that innocent."

Dr. Killigan said all the hugs did was cause traffic jams in the hallways when other students needed to get to cla.s.s. All a hug did was allow boys to press against pairs of b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He said, Girls, boys are just using hugs as devices to get to you. He said that if we really gave it some thought, it wasn't all that logical to press our genitals together as a form of greeting. Asians bow, he said, and why would the Asians do something so random like that, like bow?

"There's a reason for everything," Dr. Killigan said.

The auditorium booed, someone shouted out, "Drugs not hugs!" and everybody laughed. I started to get worried. High school was not going very well. Why did Janice immediately gravitate toward the Other Girls? Girls who caked their eyes in grease. Girls who looked good even when they looked like they stuck their face under the hood of a car. Girls who sat on boys in the parking lot like they were nothing more important than a piece of leather, and I'd watch Janice steal Richard's Yankees hat every single day. She'd hold it behind her back and he'd reach around her body for it. He'd accidentally hit her breast and they'd smile. They would hug. Everyone would hug. Hugging became a new form of rebellion. "Press against me!" people would laugh in the hallways. "Press your genitals to mine!" People would make plans to meet in the stairwells. "h.e.l.lo, genitals!" they would shout as they greeted each other.

Janice and the Other Girls made it a game to chase after the young male teachers, especially the ones who played soccer with the freshman boys after school, boys who made me sick, who were suddenly unworthy and uneducated and followed us around the halls like they had nothing better to do than stare at our a.s.ses and write c.u.n.ts 'R' Us on the girls' bathroom door while they waited for their beards and bodies and brains to grow in. We popped bubblegum in our mouths on the sidelines of the football games that n.o.body actually cared about, where Janice would cheer for a boy, sometimes Peter Barnes or Ben Mulligan or even Richard, always as a joke, screaming, "Woo!" That was another thing: enthusiasm had to be fake. When you were caught genuinely excited over something, it was worse than getting caught with your pants down. An older couple in matching navy blue fleeces, parents, turned to look at Janice, a girl all crazy for a guy, and whispered to each other. I could tell they thought she was dumb. That was just something you could tell by looking at Janice. You looked at her and thought, That girl is probably dumb, but in reality, she was the only person in our geography cla.s.s who knew that Mississippi was a Southern state, and Missouri was a Midwestern state. She knew that women were supposed to stick mints in their v.a.g.i.n.as so they wouldn't taste so much like v.a.g.i.n.as, and bleaching the l.a.b.i.a was important too. This was what she told me at two in the morning that August night I called her crying after I saw my father kissing Mrs. Resnick. Janice leaned her bike against the side of my house. "Want to try?"

I laughed. She put the hair behind my ears and said, "Now, don't you feel better?"

"No," I said. "Bleaching your v.a.g.i.n.a is sad, I think."

"That's why I brought this," she said. She held up a container of yogurt.

"What's that for?"

She grabbed my hand, and we walked toward the Resnicks' house. She opened up the yogurt and took a spoon and started flinging the yogurt at their windows. "It's all I could find," she said, apologetic. "Try."

I flung the yogurt at their window, and while this didn't necessarily make me feel any better, it was nice to know that Janice really was my best friend, and when I asked her things like, "Do boys want our v.a.g.i.n.as to taste like mouths?" she always knew the answer. She knew things n.o.body else did, just as I knew things n.o.body else did, like if Janice had to be a lesbian she'd do it with ABOB since ABOB was the manliest girl she could think of, or that Janice was five pounds under the normal weight for a five-foot-six girl, but that she still believed herself to be twenty pounds overweight, and whenever she thought she was getting fat she fasted and cleansed, stirred lemon and cayenne pepper and mola.s.ses into a tall gla.s.s of water and drank it all-her only meal for two days-then ground her teeth at night, wearing away the enamel, not to mention building up a fluid in her jaw that hurt when it got below freezing.

I knew that her dermatologist grabbed her b.r.e.a.s.t.s once to "look for skin cancer underneath." I knew her father practiced witchcraft in the secrecy of their bas.e.m.e.nt. I knew that she cried whenever Sneaker Pimps came on the radio because theirs was the song she m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed to for the first time (wrapped a carrot in Saran Wrap and inserted it inside her), and while "6 Underground" was blasting in her room, her younger brother Ed fell down a flight of wooden stairs. He was knocked unconscious, and Janice had no idea, until her mother got home from the grocery store and flung open Janice's door, finding her, carrot and all. She called her a "dumb s.h.i.t," a "filthy wh.o.r.e," and I knew this was what Janice still believed about herself (though she would never tell the story in this way).

Before I introduced Janice to the Other Girls, I had always referred to them as just that: these other girls in my biology cla.s.s who liked to swear excessively in casual conversation. At lunch, it was f.u.c.k green beans, f.u.c.k milk, f.u.c.k eating for the sake of eating, f.u.c.k everyone in line-"Would you?" one of the Other Girls asked Janice. "Would you f.u.c.k everyone in line?"

Janice laughed. She took to them immediately. There was nothing that anyone could ever say that would shock Janice ("Your brother will never walk again," the doctor told them all), nothing that anyone could ever do to make her open her mouth in surprise. Janice had always been bolder and brighter than me-even her eye shadow seemed to scream as she walked down the halls-always discovering the world one second before I did, even drew me a map of my own v.a.g.i.n.a once so I could put in a tampon for the first time, and I was in the bathroom wide-eyed, saying, "Not the pee hole?" and she was arms crossed, on the toilet, saying, "Of course not the pee hole."

Janice admired what she called the Other Girls' "enterprising speech patterns," while I feared them, and we both felt we had to resort to mockery in order to survive the day. Janice called me after school and said, "h.e.l.lo, my f.u.c.king friend."

I laughed.

"Let's go to the f.u.c.king beach so I can wear my new f.u.c.king bikini," she said. So we went to the beach nearly every day that September, and Janice wore her new f.u.c.king bikini that was purple and had white f.u.c.king flowers adorning the bottom.

"It's still so f.u.c.king hot," Janice said. We were sitting in the back of her mother's car like professional pa.s.sengers, French manicures on our toes, hemp bags across our chests. We were freshmen now. This meant no more pink, no more looking good on purpose, and no more laughing too hard. Half of our new friends starved themselves for religious reasons, though they never went to church and prayed only before a history test, and if we had religious thoughts, they were only worries that we would die while wearing our retainers and then have to wear them for the rest of eternity. "Isn't it f.u.c.king fall?"

"Technically, not until the f.u.c.king autumnal equinox," I said.

"Girls," her mother scolded. We laughed, then apologized.

We didn't let our mothers stay at the beach with us anymore because my G.o.d, we were grown women with b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and standing around in our bikinis was like standing around in our underwear, and we couldn't act naturally at the beach, or anywhere really, with our mothers looking at our bodies.

Instead of staying, our mothers dropped us off with the same warning: "Don't stick your head under!" and a newly added, "Don't talk to any of the boys!" This was always Janice's mother though, as my mother was at home watching The People's Court. Her only warning before I left the house was, "Emily, don't ever lend your cheating boyfriend your brand-new Pontiac."

"Okay," I said. "Noted."

"Actually," she said, "don't ever buy a Pontiac new."

This was supposed to be a sad joke, but I was impressed. My mother knows things about cars, I thought as I ran out the door.

"Aha!" Janice said, pointing her finger. "There they are."

We sat down with the Other Girls. They were in striped bikinis. One of them was peeling the skin off an almond with her teeth. One of them had pubic hair coming out the side of her bottoms. One of them looked like a young Barbara Walters, which was Martha, chomping on a hot dog.

"G.o.d, Martha," said one of them, her teeth grating at the almond.

"What?"

"You're so fat in your intent sometimes."

"Huh?"

"You're like, not actually fat, but you desire all the things fat people desire, like hot dogs and ice cream," she said. "So really, you're, like, fat in intent."

The Other Girls, of which there were six including Martha, were thin with arms that looked like needles. They could p.r.i.c.k and deflate you with one word. They were the kinds of girls I desperately wanted to like; life would be so much easier if I just liked them, I thought.

One of them licking salt off a rice cracker asked, "Uh, what's a tenor sax?"

I got up and walked to the edge of the beach. The water cooled my shins.

There were certain things I could see more clearly now. The Sound sat at the margin of the Atlantic to collect things. Nitrogen levels were on the rise. Mercury was being dumped, and the jellyfish were growing like tumors in pockets along the sh.o.r.e, the clear ones that slipped into our baggy bathing suits and made us scream for no reason.

I could still hear the girls from their towels.

"This is how you know a guy is a liar," one of them said. "He shrugs his shoulders a lot and creates an obstacle between you and his mouth."

"Like a fence?" another one of them said, to which I heard Janice exclaim, "Wow, that's so true actually. Mr. Basketball always puts a c.o.ke can up to his mouth, especially after we've slept together."

The Other Girls laughed. Mr. Baskette, a teacher at our school whom Janice started calling Mr. Basketball for fun, was the most f.u.c.kable teacher at Webb High, determined by poll. He had an Irish nose, a cla.s.sically Greek jawline, and so did Janice. Janice belonged with him, everyone decided, at least facially; "Your kids would have the best faces," Brittany said. But he had eyes like mine, I thought as I submerged myself in the water. I could feel the fish mutating at my feet, the insecticides nesting between my toes. My hair spread out around me. The water flooded my ears until it felt like an invasion.

5.

On Sundays, Richard and Mark chucked crab apples at each other across the street. From my window, I was able to see the objective of the game: they were trying to hurt each other.

Five years ago, Richard, Mark, and I would have been at the cold spring that ran through our woods, where Richard held one of my Barbies facedown in the water until I was positive it had drowned, until I said, "Richard! Stop!" and he looked at me and said, "Emily, it's just plastic." Richard was the boy who knew things like this, and I was the girl who didn't realize that the things I chose to love were never meant to be seen in any real, human way. Mark, who always just wanted to get along, was in the background and said, "Why do you guys have to fight all the time? I don't understand why you have to fight."

Inside my house, n.o.body was home, except everybody, but it was easy to feel like those were one and the same. My mother was watching television. My father was in the bas.e.m.e.nt. My father was on the verge of leaving us. He didn't say it like this. In fact, n.o.body said it like this. We weren't allowed to speak of his distance. It only upset my mother. We just watched him move slowly out of the house one box at a time, as though it were becoming a tiresome project to leave this life behind, an operation that required way too much packing tape. I was at the window, or outside on the driveway, or somewhere else entirely, and if anybody bothered to ask what I was learning in school, this was the answer I was preparing: a person can feel equally alone anywhere; you can be just as lonely in biology cla.s.s holding a rabbit as you can standing next to a window in the middle of September as you can watching older people on television take each other's clothes off.

My mother and I watched Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman at eight. Touched by an Angel at nine. Every Sunday we decided something different. We decided we probably wouldn't watch Touched by an Angel if it didn't come on right after Dr. Quinn, if they didn't show a small preview before we had time to lose interest. We decided we liked eating grapefruit, but then my mother declared that the labor of eating it was too demanding for a snack. We decided the hot one on our favorite after-school soap opera was never going to find out that his brother, who was blind with a heart condition, was having s.e.x with his lover and we decided that you could never justifiably get mad at someone who was sleeping with the blind, considering the woman who was doing so also had amnesia, and we decided we had enough energy to tolerate this tease of a story line. We decided it didn't matter who made their beds when. This meant we were finally liberated.

"From what?" I asked my mother.

"From linens," she said. I had never felt particularly oppressed by linens, so it made more sense to me when my mother added, "From rules, from intolerable mornings, and that includes linens."

At some point, my mother would ask, "What's new?"

"The right side of my face is smaller than the left," I said, munching on a pretzel.

My mother laughed. "That's ridiculous."

"It's true. We measured it in science cla.s.s."

"Who measured it?"

"Martha."

"Well, Martha obviously doesn't know how to measure correctly."

"How would you know?" I asked. "You don't even know Martha."

"I'm your mother. I've stared at your face for fourteen years."