Luckiest Girl Alive: A Novel Read online

  It seemed like an eternal agony, but then I heard “All right, guys,” and watched as Mr. Larson jogged up the rest of the stairs, all the way to the landing until his wide back blocked Dean and Peyton from my view. He was saying something to them, impossible to hear over the noisy protest of my lungs, but I caught Dean’s “Awww, come on, Mr. Larson.”

  “Pat!” Mr. Larson yelled, waving the boy’s soccer coach over. “Sic your dogs.”

  “Barton! Powell!” Coach Pat’s voice launched like a cannonball from across the gym. “Get your butts over here!”

  I was a few steps from the top now, and I heard Dean’s words clear as if they were spoken into my own ear. “Someone’s marked his territory.”

  Mr. Larson’s shoulder blades pinched together in outrage, and then he was inches from Dean, hand wrapped so tightly around his arm I could see the white halo of his fingertips in Dean’s skin.

  “Hey!” Dean raged, twisting.

  Then Coach Pat was there, his mouth hot in Mr. Larson’s ear, and the whole scene dissipated as quickly as it had escalated.

  “What was that?” I tripped over the last step and smacked my shin into the concrete. “Ow,” I moaned.

  Mr. Larson turned to look at me with such concern that for a moment I thought I’d cut myself when I fell and just didn’t realize it. I patted down my legs, but there was no sign of injury or blood.

  “Tif, you okay?” Mr. Larson reached for my shoulder but quickly drew his hand back, scratching the back of his head instead.

  I wiped sweat off my upper lip. “I’m fine. Why?”

  Mr. Larson dropped his head, revealing the perfectly centered crease in his thick slab of hair. “Nothing. No reason.” He put his hands on his hips and looked out at the soccer players dancing around the ball, spinning wildly on the polished hardwood floors. “Girls, let’s move this into the weight room.”

  I found out later that Dean got detention for what he said to Mr. Larson. The next day, Hilary asked me to eat lunch with her. Somehow, these events were connected. I didn’t know what that connection was, and I was too impatient to claim my rightful spot at their table to care.

  Arthur was distraught over my new cafeteria zip code.

  “You’re playing organized sports and now you’re breaking bread with the HOs,” he lamented after English class. “What’s next, Dean Barton is your boyfriend?”

  I made a gagging noise, more for Arthur than for myself. “Never. He is truly a grotesque human being.”

  Arthur took the stairs faster than I did, his breathing troubled at the top. He got to the cafeteria first and gave the door a two-handed shove. It gasped open, clanging sharply against a metal folding chair. “Well, I could rip his cock off and choke him with it.” The door swung back, slamming my shoulder and cutting Arthur off for a moment. I nudged it open to see him still standing there, grinning nastily. “I hate pretty much everyone, you know?” He let that linger there for a moment before walking away. I stooped with hurt but pretended it was just so I could prop a chair in front of the door, because Mr. Harold, the history teacher, was always jiggling with the latch and huffing, “Goddamnit!” when he let go, thinking he had fixed it, only to have the door snap shut with a defiant clap. “This is a fire hazard!” he warned the students not listening all around him, pinning the chair against the door to hold it open. When I looked up Hilary was waving at me from across the room. “Finny! Finny!” What they’d all started calling me. Delight bloomed on my face, and I followed the sound of my new nickname like the nascent little lemming that I’d become.

  “I’ll be back at nine thirty to pick you up.” Mom pushed the gear stick into park, and the car rocked back on its heels with a wheeze. The check engine light had been on for a month. The mechanic told Mom it would cost eight hundred dollars to turn it off, and when she asked him if he thought she’d been born yesterday he just repeated himself. “You really need to get it fixed,” he said, and it was Mom who flushed red as the car.

  Never, in my life, had I arrived at a dance alone, and the idea of walking into the gym without a friend flagging my side made me nauseous for Leah. But just a few short hours ago at lunch, Hilary and Olivia had asked if I was going to the Fall Friday Dance.

  “I wasn’t planning on it, but . . .” I held my breath. Waited for one of them to fill in my sentence, to invite me to her stately home, thousands of ivy arms hugging its brick body, so we could try on outfit after outfit, vetoing each one until there were clothes strewn all over the floor, sweater arms and legs twisted at excruciating angles, a series of dead body chalk outlines.

  “You should.” Hilary managed to make it sound like a warning. “Ready, Liv?” They rose from the table and I did too, even though I had half a wrap in front of me and my stomach was writhing for more.

  I couldn’t go to the dance in what I was wearing, and it would be tough to manage cross-country practice and then get home, change, and get back to Bradley in time. I told Mr. Larson I wasn’t feeling well and he said, so kindly I had to look away from him, that I should just go home and get some rest. I didn’t want to lie to Mr. Larson, but I also thought that it was unfair I had no one to approve my tank top and jean skirt except Mom, and that I had a right to do everything within my power to change that.

  “You look very nice, sweetheart,” Mom added, when my fingers stilled on the handle of the door. For a moment, I wished we could just peel out of the parking lot, go and split a mushroom and artichoke quesadilla at Chili’s. We always ordered honey mustard sauce to dip it in, and the waiter always looked at us funny when we asked him to bring us a side.

  “I think I’m too early though.” I forced a tone of confidence so Mom would see I knew what I was talking about, and I wasn’t just stalling. “Maybe we should circle around one more time.”

  Mom shook her watch free from her sleeve. “It’s seven forty-five. I’d say fifteen minutes is just the right amount of fashionably late.”

  It will be worse if you don’t go. The handle clicked before I even realized I was pulling, and I nudged the door open with the fat wedge of a Steve Madden.

  The world inside the gym vibrated with TRL’s top ten and strobe lights, shifting rhythmically in shades of pink and blue and yellow. I just had to locate a group to slip in with quickly, I strategized, before anyone realized I was here alone.

  I saw the Shark, hanging outside the rainbow glow of the dance floor with a few theater kids.

  “Hey!” I shouldered my way into the fold.

  “TifAni!” The Shark’s pupils were predatory in the perimeter’s shadow.

  “What’s up?” I shouted.

  The Shark launched into a tirade against dances (“Just an excuse to dry-hump”) but added that she came because Arthur might be able to get us pot. I found myself wishing I had eyes located on the sides of my head, like her, so that I could scan the bodies on the dance floor without making it glaringly obvious that I was only talking to her until I didn’t have to anymore.

  “How can you not like dances?” I gestured to the room, an excuse to take inventory of the crowd. In the five seconds this afforded me, I didn’t see Hilary or Olivia, or Liam, or any of the Hairy Legs.

  “I’d like dances if I looked like you.” The Shark’s eyes lingered on the dangerous hem of my jean skirt. I’d lost six pounds in the three and a half weeks since I’d joined the cross-country team, and all my clothes were smiling low on my hips.

  “I’m still so fat.” I rolled my eyes, thrilled.

  “Well, well, well.” Arthur’s frame blocked the dance floor from my view, and this made me angry enough to forget how much his rant had hurt earlier. “Are you going to show us all how to slow-dance with enough room for the Holy Spirit?”

  I snapped, “They don’t actually do that, you know.” At first, I’d been relieved by Arthur’s fascination with Mt. St. Theresa and all its holy contradictions. It gave us something to talk about. Now I wished he would just let it go. Only he never would. It seemed like innocent ri
bbing, but I saw it for what it was: his way of keeping the curtain up on me, reminding everyone—reminding me—who I really was and where I really came from.

  “Were you even allowed to dance?” Arthur kept at it. In the neon belly of the gym, he looked like he was sweating droplets of fruit punch. Arthur was always sweating. “Isn’t that the devil’s pastime?”

  I ignored him, shifting my weight to the right to peer around him.

  “The HOs aren’t coming.” Arthur said.

  I reared back as though he’d hit me. “How do you know?”

  “Because only losers come to these things.” Arthur grinned, his swollen cheeks glowing triumphantly with facial oil.

  I canvassed the room for evidence to prove him wrong. “Teddy’s here.”

  “Because Teddy wants to get his dick sucked.” I followed Arthur’s eye line to Teddy and Sarah, dancing as though their pelvises had been sewn together in home ec.

  Not wanting Arthur to see me cry, I mumbled that I had to go to the bathroom, ignoring him calling after me, insisting that he was just kidding. I rounded the corner of the gym, pep-talking myself the whole way. They would come. They would.

  I froze at the top of the stairs to the locker room, when I saw who was ascending them, having just returned from the bathroom.

  “Feeling better?” Mr. Larson was wearing jeans. I’d never seen him wear jeans before. He looked like a guy in a bar. A guy with grown-up intentions. I crossed one leg over the other, concerned he could see up my skirt from where he stood, a few steps be-low me.

  “A little.” I took the reach out of my voice like a sick person would, so that he saw only my lips moving around the words.

  “Come on, TifAni.” Mr. Larson’s voice was so chastising, so typically adult, that my body tightened in teenage outrage: How dare he turn on me like that? “You know you can’t skip out on practice. What happened?”

  I knew if I lied and told him I’d gotten my period that he’d leave me alone, but the idea of talking about my period with Mr. Larson made me want to throw up. “I wasn’t feeling well. But it passed. I swear.”

  “Well then.” Mr. Larson smiled, and not sincerely. “I’m happy for your miraculous recovery.”

  “Finny!” The voice behind me turned the night on its side. Hilary’s skirt was so short that I could see a flash of cherry red underwear. Hilary dressed the way I was trying to train myself not to dress, but because she did it as a form of rebellion, rather than out of habit, it worked for her rather than against.

  “Come on.” She curled a hot pink fingertip at me.

  “If you girls leave school property I have to alert your parents.” Mr. Larson’s voice was closer now, and I turned back to see him just one step below me.

  “Mr. Larson.” I bulged my eyes at him. “Please. Come on.”

  For a little bit there was just a beat of some horrible song, and then Mr. Larson sighed and said he never saw me.

  A navy Navigator idled by the curb. The door swung open to reveal three rows of Hairy Legs, Dean and Peyton included, Olivia perched gleefully on Liam’s lap. Jealousy corkscrewed in my chest. It’s just because it’s a full car.

  Hilary settled in and smacked her hands on her thighs. “Sit on my lap,” she sing-sang. We could have fit if we just scrunched up next to each other but as I folded myself in the L shape of her body, I smelled the gin, and understood her affection.

  I addressed the group. “Where are we going?”

  “The Spot.” The driver met my eyes in the rearview mirror. Dave was a senior with arms so thin and devoid of body hair this rabid Italian girl envied him. They called Dave the Hammer behind his back, he was such a tool, but cars are currency in high school, and he had one.

  The Spot was nothing but a lone patch of land, fenced in by resting dogwoods, their fleeting bloom still three quarters of a year away, and voluminous, untamed maples clustered close enough together to block the road in the front and the Bryn Mawr College dorms in the back. Bradley kids had claimed the property years ago as a place to drink Natty Ice and give the occasional blow job.

  It would have been faster to walk. Cut through the brush behind the squash courts, cross the sleepy, one-way street, and we would have been there in five minutes. But Dave circled the perimeter of the Bradley campus, found a spot to park on an active street several hundred feet from the rough opening in the forest. We filed out of the car, clumsily, giggling, and gathered by the curb. Dean took the lead, helping me navigate the path even though it was clear and well-worn. The trail ended at the base of a miniature vista, and in the far corner, I made out a sawed-off stump. I wove toward it, patting my hand on the surface, making sure it was dry before I sat.

  Dean reached into his pocket and held out a beer. “I can’t,” I said.

  It was too dark to make out Dean’s face, but his form loomed, challenging. “You can’t?”

  “My mom’s picking me up in an hour,” I explained. “She’ll smell it.”

  “Lame.” Dean snapped the can open for himself and sat next to me. “My parents are away next weekend. I’m having a few people over.”

  The prong of a car’s headlights illuminated our pen, just long enough for Dean to see me smile. “Cool.”

  “Don’t tell the HOs,” he warned.

  I wanted to ask why, but Peyton sauntered over. “Dude, you know you’re like sitting in the same place that Finnerman blew that little faggot.”

  Dean released a wet burp. “Fuck off.”

  “I’m serious. Olivia saw them here.” Peyton redirected his voice. “Liv, didn’t you see Arthur giving Ben Hunter a blow job right here?”

  Her words carried over in the dark. “It was nasty!”

  I traced my finger over the smooth wood surface, considering how sharp the chain saw must have been for the amputation to be this clean. There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask, but I didn’t want to draw attention to my connection with Arthur if he was more marginalized than I thought. This was a serious accusation. “Who’s Ben Hunter?” I asked, trying to stall while I worked out this new piece of information.

  Dean and Peyton laughed at each other, and Dean slung his arm around my shoulder. “Some little faggot who used to go here. Slit his little fairy wrists.”

  Peyton leaned forward. My eyes had adjusted to the dark, and his face was even more striking up close. “Sadly, he did not succeed in killing himself.”

  “Sadly.” Dean shoved Peyton with one hand. He stumbled, dropping his beer. The can rolled, hissing, on its side. Peyton muttered a curse and chased after it.

  “What happened to him?” I asked, hoping I didn’t sound as stricken as I was.

  “Aw, Finny.” Dean gave me a shake, harder than I was prepared for, and I bit down on my tongue. “You feel bad for him?”

  I swallowed, tasted the tin of my blood. “No. I don’t even know him.”

  “Well, I’m sure his boyfriend is devastated.” Dean sucked on his beer. “Watch out for that guy. Arthur. He’s a fucked-up kid.” His fingers dangled over my shoulder, absentmindedly brushed my nipple. “Don’t forget Friday”—our secret made his voice low and private—“and don’t tell Hilary and Olivia.”

  I was stupid enough to do as he said.

  The cabdriver who drove me to Dean’s party, unlike the ones who would later whip me up and down the West Side Highway on mornings I was late for work and nights I stayed past 8:00 so I could expense the ride, was a patient man. He watched in silent amusement as I piled a ten, nine ones, eleven quarters, six dimes, and one nickel into his palm. $22.40. That’s how much it cost to chauffeur me from school to Dean’s house in Ardmore. That’s how much I paid to lose my dignity.

  The sun was slinking behind the trees when I climbed out of the cab, my sports bag pulling one shoulder low. I was still wearing my sweaty running clothes, but Dean said I could shower at his house. I was terrified someone would burst in and discover the secret of what my body actually looked like, so once Dean led me inside and showed me th
e guest bedroom, the one with its own bathroom, I was in and out in record time.

  I ran a brush through my new blond hair and aimed a blow-dryer at it for a few minutes. I was years away from understanding how to “do” my hair, which was thick and wavy but would have answered obediently to a round brush and a straightener, had I known those were tools I needed to have. Fortunately, the look of the early millennium was a messy half loop high on the head, so I threw my hair into a damp knot and patted my chin and nose with Clinique concealer. Some mascara and I was ready. I’d begged Mom for money to buy new underwear specifically for this occasion, taking scissors to the pairs I owned and telling her that running was causing them to unravel at the seams. In the lingerie department in Nordstrom I purchased the sexiest thing I saw: three pairs of silk, leopard print bikini briefs. When I got home and tried them on I discovered the waistband came all the way up above my belly button—it was pre-Spanx control top, really—but I just shrugged and rolled them down to my hips, figuring the material and the print were all that mattered. Nothing sadder than the adolescent rite of passage to have sex before understanding what sexy is.

  “Hey-o!” Dean gave me a high five as I entered the kitchen. He was crowded around the granite island with Peyton and a few other guys, all soccer players, dinging quarters into cups of beer. I was the only girl in the room.

  “Finny, make a cameo for me.” Dean kissed the quarter. “You’re my good luck charm.”

  Peyton whispered something to his partner and they laughed. I knew it was about me. Probably something rude and sexual, and I burned with pride.

  I had no technique, just the momentum of the moment, and I angled the quarter, the edge closest to me facing down, slamming it against the sticky marble of the countertop. It bounced high, spun in a dizzy blur, and thunked into a glass, the beer erupting into angry bubbles.

  A roar from the crowd and Dean slapped my hand again, this time clamping his meaty fingers around mine when our palms met, pulling me toward him and hugging me so hard I could smell the spicy deodorant he’d generously applied in lieu of taking a shower after soccer practice.