Chapter 4
Chapter Four
“For the love of chartreuse, can we please listen to something else?”
“No.”
“Please oh please oh please oh please.” She sounded so anguished and tortured.
“No.”
“Damn it, Elizabeth. I’ve dropped three stitches, and had to rip out two rows of this shawl. I can’t listen to one more prepubescent boy say the word ‘girl’ or ‘kiss’ when you know he wants to say ‘whore’ and ‘fu-’.”
“Fine.” I tightened my fingers around the steering wheel. “Pick something else.”
Sandra bolted upright, placed her pile of knitting to the side, and grabbed my iPhone. “Oh, God, thank you so much. I know I said I wouldn’t make fun of your music, but I honestly do not know how you can listen to that. I could feel my vagina shriveling with each neutered verse.”
“Oh, come on!” Laughing, I glanced at Sandra from the driver’s seat. “I saw you mouthing along with the last song.”
“Yes, but much like a schizophrenic mouths wordlessly to themselves, or how you feel after stepping off that annoying ride at Disney World with It’s a Small World After All stuck in your head for the rest of the day.
” She thumbed through my albums, and her brow drew downward with each pass.
“Well—you are a complete crackhead. Every single album on here is boy band shitzterhozen .”
Sandra, making no attempt to hide her disgust, pulled the audio jack from my phone and dumped it in the center console.
She pulled out her phone, and simultaneously plugged it in while searching for music.
When she pressed play and a sultry, soulful voice reverberated over the speakers, her head fell back against the headrest and she closed her eyes.
“Oh, yes. God, that’s the stuff.” Her fingers flexed and unflexed on her knees in something akin to ecstasy.
We were just crossing the Mississippi River, heading west on I-80. I promised Sandra that we would stop at the World’s Largest Truck Stop so she could purchase an ear-flapped trucker hat. Part of me wondered if the truck stop was the main attraction of the trip for her.
Acres of what were usually cornfields were barren on either side of the interstate.
Large silver silos, red barns, and picturesque farmhouses dotted the landscape.
Tall, leafless trees lined the road, stretching to the sky like brown bottlebrushes.
It was near fifty degrees outside, and the sky hadn’t yet decided if it wanted to be gray or blue.
“So…” Sandra’s voice beside me was relaxed, almost dreamy. She recommenced knitting. “Is there anything I should know?”
I shifted in my seat. “About what?”
“About your high school dynamics. Is there anyone you’re hoping will be there? Anyone to avoid? Who was prom queen, and do we hate her?”
“Well…let me see…” I shifted again in my seat and forced myself to loosen the grip on the steering wheel, and then I told a little white lie. “I don’t really know.”
If I were being honest, I would have said, I hope everyone is there.
“Don’t know which part?” Sandra’s head bobbed in time to the music.
“I don’t really know about the high school dynamics.” This, at least, was mostly true. I hadn’t paid much attention to popular-people dynamics during high school. But I did know that I’d been universally invisible.
In my peripheral vision, I saw her head swing toward mine. She paused for a moment, then said, “I call shenanigans.”
I gave her a sideways glance. “It’s true. I was kind of a—well, a loner.”
And by loner, I really meant that I’d been a mean-spirited cranky-face who avoided my peers at all costs.
“Then why do you even want to go? We could blow the whole thing off and drive to Vegas instead.”
“I did have some friends.” I tried to defend myself, my face growing hot with the now grayish lie.
I did have some friends—or, more precisely, acquaintances—in high school, but I wasn’t sure whether any of them would show up.
The truth was, I really wanted to go to my high school reunion, but I couldn’t tell Sandra why because most of my reasons were ten out of ten on the petty-insipid-twit scale.
Granted, part of me was curious.
However, a much bigger part of me wanted to go because I’d worked my ass off, and was now a medical doctor.
I wanted to lord it over all the people who were popular, beautiful, and barely knew I existed in high school.
I was sure—crossing my fingers—that they were all failures of some sort.
I wanted to introduce myself as Elizabeth Finney, MD—as in Medical Doctor.
I practiced doing this in the mirror a few times before I’d left Chicago, and felt good about my delivery.
My pretend conversation usually went something like this:
Them, surprised: “Elizabeth? Is that you?”
Me, caught off guard: “Oh—hi. Yes, it’s me, Elizabeth.”
Them, amazed and in awe of my beauty: “Oh, my gosh—you look totally different.”
Me, humble smile: “Aw, thanks!”
Them, interested and dazed by my good looks: “What are you up to now? Where are you working?”
Me, politely responding with an air of modesty: “What? What do I do now? Well, I’m actually a medical doctor.”
Them, completely blown away and fumbling over their words: “Oh, my God! That’s so fantastic! That’s so impressive!”
Me, laughing off the praise as though it makes me uncomfortable: “Oh, I don’t know about impressive, but—ha ha ha—I get by. What are you doing now?”
Them, looking uncomfortable and ashamed: “Oh? Me? Well…I pick through trash outside people’s homes looking for recycled materials to take to the dump.”
It didn’t matter if they were a materials scavenger or a train-hopping hobo; in my fantasies they were always less successful than I was. But mostly I wanted to go to my reunion because I now had C-cup boobs—ok, so they’re a C cup on the third week of the month.
In high school, I was both short and impressively scrawny.
Add to that my belligerent personality, and I was a double dose of teenage-girl fail.
When I was fifteen, most people thought I was an eleven- or twelve year-old boy; my nickname—Skinny Finney—didn’t help matters.
New kids thought Finney was my first name.
Now, I had boobs. I was enormously proud of my boobs. I’d waited so long for them. But when they finally arrived with a vengeance after my sixteenth birthday, the summer before my senior year of high school, I was too despondent to notice or care.
I couldn’t tell Sandra the true reasons without sounding like the raging, self-absorbed, shallow twit that I actually was at that time in my life.
Instead I said, “And I wasn’t really into that stuff—group activities, team sports, and popularity contests.”
“Well, what stuff were you into? Living under a rock?”
I wrinkled my nose. “I was a tomboy in high school.”
“Well, no shit, Sherlock. You’re still a tomboy now, except that you listen to tween music and have long hair. You’re lucky you don’t need to wear makeup. But you must’ve noticed which cheerleaders were hos and which guys to put onto your spank naughty and spank nice lists.”
I rested my left elbow on the sill of the door and tugged at my bottom lip.
If I were with Janie, I wouldn’t need to explain that the reason I was detached during my last two years of high school—and any Days of Their Lives-type drama from ten years ago—was because of Garrett.
Janie was the only person I knew in Chicago who knew my story.
Perhaps now was a solid time to test the sharing waters with Sandra.
I cleared my throat and repositioned my hands on the steering wheel. “So, there was this boy….”
“Ok, ok—good—good—this sounds promising.” Sandra put her knitting aside and rubbed her hands together.
A small, saddish smile tugged one side of my mouth upward.
“There was this boy; his name was Garrett, and he had big brown eyes and blond hair and just the best, warmest smile. He moved to my town when I was in fifth grade, right after my mother died, and I just…I just….” I swallowed. “I just fell for him.”
“I didn’t know your mother died.”
“It happened when I was nine. Garrett really helped me through it.”
“In fifth grade?”
I nodded once. “This isn’t a happy story.”
Sandra was quiet for a moment; when she spoke again, her voice was softer. “Go on.”
I recognized it as her shrink voice, the one she used when speaking to someone upset and emotionally fragile with whom she was trying to reason.
During one of our knitting nights out on the town, she used the voice to convince a hoity-toity ma?tre d’ that he, indeed, had lost our reservation, and that he, indeed, needed to set the thing to rights as soon as was humanly possible.
It worked.
We were impressed.
I was impressed.
She was using the voice on me now, and it was working.
“I fell in love with Garrett. I skipped a grade in elementary school, so he was a year older. But he was so easy to be around; he made me feel good, like I was important to him—you know? So gentle and kind, and sensitive. He was really there for me—you know? I just always wanted to be around him. We were childhood sweethearts, just like my parents were, and we were going to get married one day. But when he was fifteen, he….”
I started tugging at my bottom lip again.
“We went to a party and both of us drank. He only had, like, two drinks, but afterward, he had severe pains in his neck and sides so his friend—uh—Nico—drove Garrett to the hospital. They discharged him almost immediately after he was admitted. I think they thought he just had too much to drink. But,” I sighed, “a few months later, at the end of summer break, he was getting sick a lot—fevers with no other accompanying symptoms, that kind of thing.”
I paused, waiting for the sting of tears that usually accompanied this part of the story, but to my surprise, when I spoke again, I was able to do so without a chin wobble or a voice waver.