Girl, Hero Read online

  “Your boobs are.”

  “Jesus!”

  Nicole laughs. “You can run.”

  “Not fast.”

  “Yeah, you can.”

  I throw my stuff away and sit down again. Running fast scares me. I can do it. I can do a mile in six minutes and twenty seconds. They timed us in eighth-grade gym, but to do it I have to pretend that something is chasing me, something scary and awful, and this feeling sucks into me as I run, this feeling of no escape. Everyone laughed at how fast I was, because I’m so short. “I’m not joining track.”

  I’m not. Riding a bike is so much better. With the wind in my hair I can pretend I’m flying a bomber in World War II, saving the world, or I’m riding a horse across the range, rescuing my family from bandits, or I’m in the streets of Massachusetts warning everyone that the British are coming. Running is not like that. Running is fear. Biking is power.

  Nicole chews her bagel, thinking. “Do you want to be popular?”

  “Sure.”

  I guess I do. I mean, I don’t know. I’m not sure if I care, at least not the way Nicole does. In no-man’s-land there’s no such thing as popular, is there? Out in the desert, it’s just you and the cactus and sun-bleached bones. I imagine jumping on a horse and walking the cattle across the prairie. I gaze across the cafeteria like it’s my path through the fields. Who are the people to watch? Who are the cattle thieves? Who are the heroes? A football player by a table near the soda machines throws a Coke can at his friend like it’s a beer in a saloon. The friend catches it in his hand. Bang. Smile.

  Mary Bilodeau walks by with her bag lunch. She waves at me and smiles. I give her a little wave back. Nicole snorts out her disgust.

  “You don’t want to be a big loser all your life?” Nicole asks me. When I don’t answer, she says. “Hello, Lily. This is earth.”

  “No, of course not,” I say and try to pay attention. I spread my thumb and first finger on my forehead. “Do I have a scarlet L on my forehead?”

  Nicole laughs like I knew she would and says, “No, but you might if you don’t join track and keep smiling back at Mary Bilodeau.”

  “Is this according to your brother?” I’m angry now. I pull change out of my pocket to see if I have enough for a Coke. That Coke machine waves at me like a giant red oasis in the middle of the Nevada desert. I’ve got a sore thirst. “He’s not in track, is he?”

  Hannah Dustin’s daughters had five brothers. I don’t have one. I can’t imagine being Nicole and having someone there all the time leaving jock straps everywhere, shaving and burping and tormenting my old Barbie dolls, maybe shooting at crows with a BB gun.

  “Yes,” Nicole says. She fidgets with her hair, pulling strands of it over her ear. “I’m joining.”

  “No offense,” I say and look over at where Nicole’s brother is sitting with Travis Poppins at a table of eleventh grade jerks. They shoot quarters across the table at each other, two of their fingers on each hand forming pretend hockey goals. “But your brother isn’t exactly the most popular boy in the whole world.”

  “It’s by choice,” Nicole says, flipping her hair back over her shoulder. “He’s above that.”

  “Oh, right. And I’m not,” I say, and Nicole opens her mouth to answer but I get up to get a Coke. I have enough money. In fact, I have a nickel extra. I murmur, “Saddle up.”

  When I walk by Christopher, Nicole’s brother, who I do not want to walk by, Travis nudges him and he says in this stupid cowpoke voice, “Hi, Liliana.”

  “Hi.”

  “You popular yet?” Travis Poppins asks. I’m so close to him I can count the pimples on his nose: seven.

  “More than you,” I shoot back. Bang.

  It’s like you said in Rio Bravo, Mr. Wayne: I don’t like a lot of things. I don’t like it when a stupid boy makes fun of me. I don’t like it when people know what I want. I don’t like it that Nicole told her brother we’re trying to be popular and that he told his friend. Some things people do should just be kept to their fool selves.

  I make it to the Coke machine and punch the button to get the Coke. When I walk back to the table, I take the long way around. I see the boy who had the red pants, Mr. Fire Man. He smiles at me. I smile back. Next to him is Paolo Mattias. He smiles at me too and says, “Hi.”

  My heart stops, but I give him a slow nod the way you would, Mr. Wayne. I am cool. I am not a cowpoke. But I’m squeezing my Coke can and with each squeeze, I’m thinking, “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  And my feet are having a hard time not doing some happy little Irish jig on the ugly over-waxed linoleum floor.

  Must be cool. Must be cool.

  When I sit down Nicole asks, “You mad at me?”

  “No,” I say, smiling big because I’m not any more. But I don’t tell her about her beloved crush, Fire Man, with his hair that looks like a gaggle of pigeons nested in it, two tables down from us, breathing the same air we do, maybe. Since we’ve never seen him before, he must be from Hancock or Trenton or Aurora, one of those feeder towns that come to our high school because they aren’t big enough to have their own.

  And I don’t tell Nicole about how I felt inside when Paolo Mattias said hello.

  Maybe, if my father is gay, he wouldn’t care? Maybe this boy has more going for him then I’ve given him credit for. You’ve got to let a man show his worth, right, Mr. Wayne? You’ve got to give him room to do the right thing.

  Josiah Murphy, a junior football player, starts hooting and jumps up on the table to do a little pelvic salute to the fluorescent lights. He dances in a circle and stomps while the other guys all holler out, “Get a babe. Get a babe.”

  They try to pull Caitelyn Crowley up on the maroon tabletop with him, but she shrieks and runs away, which is good because now I don’t have to save her.

  But the football players don’t give up.

  “Get a fag. Get a fag,” they start chanting and Josiah points to Daniel Labelle, who everyone has known would be gay since he turned up at first-grade show-and-tell in Mrs. Kinsley’s class with a Barbie and Ken doll set, and he’d made them matching white disco outfits all by himself. Ken’s outfit had more tassels on it than Barbie’s.

  Anyway, Daniel doesn’t want to be saved.

  Daniel shrugs and waves and yells, “Hi girls” to the boys. But before he gets yanked up on the table, the lunch monitor comes and Josiah jumps back down and laughs. His friends each give him a buck and high fives.

  Yeah, like Paolo Mattias wouldn’t care, Mr. Wayne? Sometimes I think I’m more deluded than a fat member of the Donner party.

  Saddle up.

  After the Students for Social Justice meeting, I get a ride home with Sasha Sandeman’s sister, who is a senior. Olivia wears Indian-print shirts and batik skirts and sandals. She drives a Volkswagen bug, lavender, which is probably the coolest car ever. She calls it the Love Mobile.

  Yes, I know, it is not exactly a John Wayne car. I can’t imagine you even getting your legs inside of it, but I’m short and it seems perfect to me. I am a girl.

  All the way to my house, we talk about Darfur, Iraq, China, and theater stuff. Their mom’s the director at the Palace Theater. Sasha’s one of those really peppy people; she’s pretty popular, actually, in a hippie-cute kind of way. She has black hair and freckles. My mother says she’s perky. Not her breasts. Her personality. We weren’t really close when we went to middle school, but we always said hi and everything. She’s in a couple of my classes now.

  When I climb out of the car, Olivia says, “Are you going to go to the Amnesty International meeting on Wednesday?”

  “Yeah,” I say, leaning over Sasha to talk to Olivia.

  “You have nice breath,” Sasha says and smiles. I don’t know what to say. Sasha’s always blurting things like that, tiny compliments, like you have eyes
the color of peonies, or you have the best socks. It’s part of her Spreading Kindness Campaign.

  “Want a ride home from that too?” Olivia asks me.

  “That would be great.”

  “Cool,” Sasha says. “We could just give you rides every day so you don’t have to do the bus thing, which is way too bourgeois for you.

  “Cool.” I shut the door and they turn their car around at the top of the driveway. Cool, I think. Cool.

  They honk the horn and I wave. The car has a cute horn, just a little tooty beep. I want a car like that. Back in middle school, Sasha and I had the same homeroom in seventh grade and we used to salute the world when we were supposed to pledge allegiance to the flag. We’d put our hands on our shoulders and mumble that we pledged allegiance to the world, to all countries and people, for peace and justice. No one ever noticed. I should start doing that again. I wonder why we weren’t close in eighth grade. Different classes, I guess. It’s crazy how what classes you have determines your whole life when you’re in middle school. And it’s all so arbitrary, just some principal randomly picking names and potentially ruining your whole year, if not your whole life.

  But I don’t care about this now because I’m in high school, and you can pick classes and clubs yourself, sort of. Well, you can as long as Nicole’s not barking over your shoulder like some feral dog about being popular and how Students for Social Justice is lame and just for wannabe hippies.

  I am almost skipping when I skedaddle up the walk to the back porch. The trees in the yard look like they’re getting ready to turn colors, to turn brilliant. Maybe I will be like those leaves. Maybe I’m about to change from ordinary green to something exuberant. One of the granite slabs of the walk isn’t level and I stumble a little and almost fall, like some giddy five-year-old. Imagine if I skinned my knee. It serves me right for being happy. I think of my sister’s face and my father’s blue tights. I think of my mother’s man coming.

  All the happy fizzles out.

  Inside, I put my backpack on the kitchen table and think about calling Nicole. Fire Man was in the Social Justice club and I know his real name: Tyler Reed. He seems pretty nice too. Not Nicole’s type. She usually goes for sturdy jocks, football types not the leaner soccer players, guys whose arms fill out the tops of their shirt sleeves and make them seem like they’re going to rip.

  The phone rings and I jump, my fists up and ready to fight. Then I feel stupid, because I’m ready to haul a little nasty on a telephone. I pick it up. It’s probably Nicole.

  “Liliana?”

  It’s my grandmother. My father’s mother.

  “Hi, Grammy.”

  Grammy is eighty-seven. She lives with my dad.

  “I want you to be nice to your father, Liliana.”

  “Uh-huh.” I look around. I turn to look out the window. There are no bandits out there, skulking behind the trees with their rifles ready. Darn.

  “He loves you.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He’s a good man.”

  “Yep,” I say and twirl the phone cord between my fingers, think about getting a knife and cutting the line.

  “He loves you.”

  “I love you, Grammy.”

  “Oh,” she says and this stops her for a minute. “Next time you see your father, have him bring you to the house. I’ll make you a pie.”

  “Okay.”

  “Remember, he’s a good man.”

  “I know, Grammy.”

  “Good. He sometimes tries to call you and he gets the numbers mixed up and quits trying.”

  “Okay.” I yank my fingernails out of my mouth because I’ve been biting them.

  “And sometimes, I know, he forgets to feed you.”

  “Yep.” I twirl the phone cord around my index finger and pull it tight so that it makes marks, little grooves to remember it by.

  “Men are like that. It means nothing. It means nothing about love.”

  And she hangs up. I look at the phone in my hand. There’s nothing on the other end. She’s always like that, just hanging up. She thinks that if she says goodbye that someone will die, whoever she’s talking to, she thinks. Because if there is a God, which she doubts but then thinks is possible when she looks at the beauty of nature, God would make sure it was she who wouldn’t die, because God knows she wants to, and needs to; she’s just an ugly burden to us all.

  Actually, Grammy isn’t ugly at all. She’s old, and her skin is like tissue paper that’s been crumpled up after Christmas and then flattened out to use the next year, easily ripped and full of wrinkles, but her eyes are violet and beautiful. She reads two books a day and can quote almost anyone, Milton, Nietzsche, Goethe, political scientists I’ve never heard of, you name it. My father says it’s hard to be the dumb son of a bright woman, but that it’s harder for his mother, who has no one to talk to now that she won’t leave the house because she thinks she’s too ugly and old for the world to see.

  Grammy is always calling and saying things like this. Or else she just calls and cries into the phone, telling me she’s too old to live, she wants to die. No one should have to live this long. I like it better when she gets on me about my father. She says she’s Moravian. We all have depression in our genes. It’s the melancholy of the Czech region, of mountains blocking the sun and invaders ready to run down into villages, striking down anyone in their way and changing their country’s name.

  After I hang up with Grammy, I look for a snack. On the refrigerator, a note waits. I’ve attached it here, Mr. Wayne, so that you can analyze my mother’s handwriting if you want to. Although I’m sure you have better things to do.

  Liliana,

  Please polish all the glasses if you have a chance. I want them to look nice when Mike comes. I love you. I’d tell you to do your homework, but I know you will. Please thaw some meatballs for supper.

  Love, Mom

  Polish glasses? How do you polish glasses?

  I have been working on my report.

  Hannah Dustin was born Hannah Webster Emerson. She named her first daughter Hannah too. That seems pretty egotistical to me. Imagine if my mother had named me Rita. God, my whole life I’d be condemned by my mother’s name. Jessica had it bad enough. No one is named Jessica anymore. Although maybe I shouldn’t be blaming the mothers; maybe it wasn’t Hannah’s choice. Maybe it was her husband’s idea.

  I could see it being your idea, if you were her husband. You would see the baby, pick her up in just one of your big hands, and smile. The camera would close-frame your face and the baby’s. The baby would coo or grab your finger with her tiny digits.

  “Beautiful just like her mother,” you’d announce. “We’ll name her Hannah.”

  She couldn’t argue with that.

  But how do they know which Hannah her father called for when he ran out of the house with his children? Did he yell all his children’s names as he ran? When he yelled “Hannah!” did the first Hannah, the mother, know that it wasn’t for her he was yelling? She was too sick from childbirth to run. She would slow them all down. Sacrifice them all. Did she tell him, “Go. Go quickly without me. Leave me here to be slaughtered. Save yourself. Save our children. Go.” And did they kiss a long kiss, even in front of all those children, knowing it was their last? Or did he say, “Come, Hannah” and she stayed in bed because she didn’t know which Hannah he meant?

  When I was a really little kid, I used to think that I wasn’t human somehow. Maybe I was a changeling baby like they talk about in Ireland. You know the whole thing. Fairies sneak into the hospital and switch babies, snatching the human baby beneath their wings and leaving in its place a fairy baby. Or maybe while she was sleeping, my mother was artificially inseminated by a UFO alien and I was the result: half human and half alien.

  That’s how I feel now, trying out for Sout
h Pacific: half alien. Like I don’t belong on this planet and everyone is about to discover what I really am: a freak.

  I can’t believe this is supposed to make me popular. Although I guess it worked for you, Mr. Wayne. Although you were a big football star first. Right? But before that, before all that, you were just Marion, a boy with a paper route who had a dog named Duke.

  Nicole is not trying out.

  She glared at me in English class. “Are you kidding?”

  “Why not?” I asked her. “You’d be good.”

  She rolled her eyes and leaned over across the aisle, and spoke to me like I was a mentally deficient five-year-old. “If I didn’t get a part, I would be an automatic loser. That would completely derail the popularity train.”

  I stared at her. Stuart Silsby, who sits in front of me, turned around and gave me disgusted eyes and sang really loud, “Love, Love, My Poo.”

  “Oh, mature …”

  He laughed. “Liliana eat a banana.”

  “Brilliant. Stuart is capable of rhyming,” I said, shaking my head.

  He switched to a manly man voice. “I’m capable of a lot of things, baby.”

  I shuddered, and when he turned around Nicole said, “He so likes you.”

  I eyed him.

  He turned his head so we could make eye contact, and mouthed “eat a banana” again.

  “Bananas have too many calories,” I told him.

  “Like you need to worry about that,” he snapped back. He patted his stomach. “Me, on the other hand …”

  Nicole hiked up her skirt to show more thigh. Stuart noticed and rolled his eyes. I tried not to laugh but it was hard. Nicole glared at me, like it’s all my fault. I leaned towards her.

  “Try out with me,” I begged her.