Chapter 27
Mental toughness.
Mental toughness!
Mental! Toughness!
Jojo repeats the mantra so loud inside her head that she isn’t even aware that someone is rapping on the outside of the toilet stall door.
“Mental—”
“Hey, in there. Yo-hoo.”
Jojo freezes. She’s sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, rocking back and forth, her arms wrapped around herself in a tight hug, repeating the two words she knows make the difference between success and failure in everything in life.
She certainly isn’t being mentally tough right now, sitting in a bathroom stall with tears running down her cheeks. She snuffles.
“I’ll be out in a minute … there are other stalls, you know, empty stalls.”
“S’okay. I’ll wait for this one,” comes the voice from outside the door and Jojo is instantly reminded of her brother’s story about the day he was awarded his Trident pin as a Navy SEAL, how he had been so proud of it and so full of emotion that he needed to go somewhere to be alone.
He’d picked a bathroom stall, too, sat down on the closed lid and took off the pin that had just been affixed to his chest. He’d stared at it, admiring it, literally blew on it and then rubbed it on his sleeve in case it might be smudged.
Someone had knocked on the door then and he’d put the pin back on and walked out.
The man on the other side had been a captain, annoyed that he’d had to wait. “Hey, soldier, you don’t own the?—”
Then he saw the SEAL pin. The captain looked into Liam’s eyes, looked back at the pin, then snapped to attention and saluted.
Jojo lets out a ragged breath. She needs to face whoever is standing outside the door of this toilet stall and she seriously doubts that the girl is going to snap to attention and salute. Flushing the toilet to indicate that’s what she’d been doing in there, she opens the door.
Standing on the other side is a girl who’s in one or two of her classes—American history and maybe math in the afternoon, but she doesn’t know the girl’s name.
Her face is plain, stops short of being pretty but attractive.
She’s taller than Jojo, with long slender arms and legs like a basketball player.
Her hair is cropped short and spiky, and she has a nose ring … and a tongue stud!
In 2009, in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, a girl with a nose ring and a tongue stud is definitely making a statement of some kind—though Jojo doesn’t know what.
“I can give you a couple of pointers … if you want them,” the girl says, “to keep you from socially face-planting.”
Jojo has no idea what she’s talking about.
“For starters, learn your name, what you want people to call you. Practice it enough times that it rolls off your tongue, so it doesn’t sound like you made it up on the spot.”
Jojo’s cheeks flush. She hadn’t expected to be introduced to her first period class but as soon as the bell rang, the teacher turned to her and said, “Why don’t you stand up and tell us about yourself?”
Jojo had risen to her feet and said, “My name is …” Then she froze.
She’d been named after Joanna, one of the women in Scripture who found Jesus’s tomb empty.
But Jojo had decided that when she went out into the wide world, she would become what her brother Liam had called her.
She had stumbled and stuttered and finally managed to spit out, “Jo … I’m Jo-JO, Jojo Kaufmann. ”
The girl with the nose ring smiles. “Say it a couple of times. ‘Hi, my name’s Jojo … Hello, I’m Jojo, what’s your name? … Jojo’s my name, Amish is my game.’ It’ll get easier if you practice.”
Jojo nods dumbly.
“And the rest of it … today.” The girl pauses for a moment. “Look, I can help you out if you want me to.”
Jojo doesn’t know what she meant by “help you out,” but she certainly knows what she meant by “today.” Today had been the first day of gym class.
Jojo hadn’t known what to expect from high school, other than the fact that she would be the lone Amish person in the school, and that the English kids would almost certainly tease and ridicule her. And she’d steeled herself for that … mental toughness.
But she hadn’t put it together in her head that gym class would require her to take her clothes off in the bathroom and shower with the other girls.
For starters, Jojo had never taken a shower in her life.
She had bathed in a big clawfoot tub in water pumped into a bucket from the well outside and heated on the stove.
She knew what a shower was, of course, she wasn’t an idiot, but she’d never taken one.
And dear holy God, Jesus, Mary and all the disciples, she had never in her adult life taken all her clothes off in front of anyone! Oh, she and her sisters changed clothes in the same bedroom, but none of them stripped down buck naked, took off everything they were wearing and just stood there.
When the realization hit her that she was going to have to do that, she saw it for what it was. This was the initiation. This was the biggie. This was Navy SEAL training hell week.
Liam had told her all about it, how they pushed the trainees, wouldn’t let them eat or sleep, made them carry heavy things and swim through cold water, anything they could do to break them.
It didn’t matter how strong you were or how bright you were or how much muscle you had.
It mattered that you would stick to it no matter what.
What they were looking for in a Navy SEAL was an unwillingness to quit.
And for those who couldn’t take it, there’d been a bell in the middle of the camp.
Any soldier, at any time could go to the bell, pick up a hammer, and ring it—his admission that he was done. That high school shower was Jojo’s bell. If she refused to get undressed in front of the other girls, that would be ringing the bell, and she wouldn’t be coming back to school after that.
Gritting her teeth so tight it made her jaw ache, Jojo crawled down inside herself, tried to make her soul as small as possible, as she slowly stripped off her clothes, and then stood under the shower with water pouring down on her.
She soaped her body, lifted her arms and soaped under them, cleaned her privates—what you did in a bathtub only she did it standing up, and then let water run down over her to wash off the soap.
She was so absolutely mortified by her own nakedness that she wouldn’t open her eyes.
And that’s why she didn’t notice or understand what the other girls were sniggering about.
She finally peeked out through a forest of eyelashes and saw several girls looking at her and sneering.
She hadn’t exactly done an exhaustive investigation when the other girls were undressing, but as far as she could tell it didn’t appear there was some vast anatomical difference between her and the rest of them.
So what was …? Then she heard the word “armpits” and suddenly realized what they were laughing at. Jojo had hair under her arms. Amish women didn’t shave their armpits or their legs. Though she was aware that the English did, it never occurred to her that it was a big deal.
She had already blushed scarlet, but she suddenly felt blood rush to her face with such force she feared it might pop and splatter red all over the shower stall.
Somehow, she managed to walk out of the shower, dry off and dress—in her floor-length Amish skirt.
She left the gym and ducked into the first bathroom she came to, pushed open a toilet stall, sat down, and started to cry.
So what did this girl mean—I can help you out if you want me to?
The girl finally figures out Jojo doesn’t understand and holds up a small, zippered pouch. She opens it and inside is a little razor with a pink handle and a plastic clip with things on it Jojo supposes are the blades.
“You can keep it here in your locker. Nobody will have to know.”
“But I don’t know how …”
“Yeah, I get it.” The girl lets out a sigh. “Well, showing somebody how to shave their legs and pits is a bridge too far even for me. But I can coach you.” The girl is totally glib and unembarrassed. “It’s a simple thing. All you have to do is practice.”
She points to the small metal canister inside the pouch.
“This is the lather. It’s almost full and the razor packet is brand new.
Get your skin really wet, wipe some of this on it, and use the razor to scrape it off.
Surely you’ve seen your father or your brother shave, well, the part of their face they shave. ”
Jojo looks at the container and the razor and back up at the girl.
“A word to the wise—practice on your legs. It hurts like hell to cut yourself under your arm.”
Jojo still hasn’t said anything at all and knows that she should.
“Look, you don’t have to take it. You can come into gym class every day for the rest of the year with hair on your underarms and legs and eventually they’ll get tired of poking fun at you.
” The girl leans close. “But it would be my guess if you show up tomorrow with it gone, that’ll be the end of it.
You can keep this in your locker. I can get a new kit at Walmart.
Use it here. I don’t know how fast the hair on your legs grows.
That’s the kind of question you can’t ask somebody, and I’ve been shaving mine for so long I don’t remember.
But I do know you don’t have to shave every day.
I mean you can leave the razor here over the weekend and come in on Monday and you won’t look like there’s a tumbleweed under your arm. ”
Jojo actually smiles.
“Hey, there it is.” The girl points to her face. “That’s a smile. I knew you could. I’ve seen other Amish girls smile, not many and not often, but I’ve seen it so I was sure the muscles worked. They do, don’t they? Try it. I bet the muscles in your face need exercise.”
The girl stands in front of her and smiles, then relaxes her face, smiles, then relaxes her face, smiles again and relaxes again. “Now you try.”
Jojo smiles but she isn’t practicing.
“Hey, that one looked pretty natural. Keep at it and in a week or two you’ll have it down.”
The girl falls silent, just stands there expecting nothing and Jojo knows that something really profound has happened—that this girl might very well have been in her own ring-the-bell moment when she decided to reach out and help the Amish girl, the outsider.
“Thank you … so much.” The air Jojo breathes out has a bit of a sob in it. “I’m so grateful.”
“No prob, kiddo. Let me know when you need some new blades. They get dull after a while and for God’s sake don’t use a razor with a dull blade or you’ll hack your leg off.
Oh, and start on the sides of your legs not on your shin, that skin is paper thin.
There’s been a time or two I thought I’d cut all the way down to the bone. ”
The girl suddenly stops and an odd look crosses her face. “You do … know what it means when you get a period, right?”
What an off-the-wall question. Amish girls didn’t say it that way, but Jojo certainly knows what it means.
Before she can reply, the girl says, “I mean … you’re not gonna go all Carrie on me, are you? Start strangling people with fire hoses, throwing trucks off the road and shit like that?”
Jojo just gapes at her and the girl’s face relaxes. She cocks her head to the side.
“You got no idea what I’m talking about do you?”
Jojo shakes her head.
“You didn’t read the book, it was Stephen King’s first, or see the movie?”
Jojo doesn’t know who Stephen King is and has only seen one movie in her life, The Ten Commandments, and she isn’t about to admit that. She doesn’t have to because the girl is shaking her head.
“Of course, you didn’t, duh.” Then the girl nods her head firmly as if she’d made some decision. “Well, you’re going to. You can read whatever you want now, can’t you? See movies?”
Jojo manages to get out a few words. “Yes, I can but?—”
“Then we’re gonna do it, you and me.”
“Do what?”
“Watch Carrie. I’ll go to Blockbuster and rent the video. You come over to my house. I’ll even make popcorn.”
Jojo stammers. “I have to go straight home after school, there are chores?—”
“Fine then. Not right now. But someday! That movie will t-totally blow your mind. You in?”
Jojo is in. She has no idea what the movie might be about, but she doesn’t care. “I’m in,” she says firmly.
The girl holds up her right hand with a little finger extended. “Pinky swear?”
“What is?—?”
Taking Jojo’s hand, the girl hooks her little finger around Jojo’s. “Pinky swear?” The girl waits. “You got to say the words.”
“Pinky swear!” Jojo says.
She squeezes Jojo’s finger, lets go of Jojo’s hand, then says seriously, “You do realize that you have just pledged a solemn oath that’s as binding as a sacred vow.”
Jojo nods, not completely sure if the girl is serious.
“And if you break it, terrible things will happen to you—like your left leg will fall off or something.”
Jojo actually grins, finds her voice and blurts out, “Who are … what’s your name?”
“I’m Ali. Like the street behind your house where you put the garbage, but with an ‘i.’ Ali Dunn. I thought you knew who I was.”
“You’re in my American history class, right?”
“I’m in your math class and your science class, too. I must be infinitely forgettable.”
“No, no, it’s not like that, I just I met so many people?—”
“No worries, mate,” she says in a peculiar accent. “We good?”
Jojo smiles. “We’re good.” She stops there, doesn’t mean to continue but more words pop out in a hoarse whisper, “You are good.” She feels sudden hot tears sting her eyes, has to fight the urge to grasp the girl in a hug, but after a moment’s hesitation the girl hugs her, and Jojo hugs back as tight as she’s ever hugged anybody in her life.
At that moment, a friendship was forged that would survive the fires of hell itself.