Roses, huh
? or
Yeah, how about Vicki Gordon’s tits
? or
You must be the lamest person in the world
!
I tried to recall every step I’d taken since the previous lunchtime, when, in the privacy of a third-floor toilet stall, I had added a datum about Karen Longnecker and Julia Mossman. (Many of the observations in the book, to my surprise, described the friendships between girls.) I thought I remembered replacing it in my backpack afterward, although in these situations it’s impossible to know whether you’re recalling a specific event or just appropriating memories of similar events from other occasions. I didn’t believe the backpack could have come open by itself: it was sturdily built, and the zipper was made by YKK, which is the sign of a reliable zipper.
I walked into homeroom with something large and fleshy in my throat but, to my relief, no one paid me any attention. By third-period English I found I could go without thinking about the notebook for minutes at a time, although eventually my thoughts would land on Gwen Vries or Nancy Chang and I would experience the urge to write something in the notebook and once again I would be filled with the dull certainty of imminent disaster.
Class ended, and we all joined the flow down to the cafeteria.Each stairway doubled back on itself at a landing; on a trip from the fourth floor to the cafeteria you changed direction seven times. Between classes this was chaos, since we didn’t self-organize into a file going up and a file going down, so every little flight of fourteen steps between a floor and a landing resembled two medieval armies colliding on a steep hillside. Before lunch, though, it was a different kind of chaos: the entire student body hurtling downstairs, gathering reinforcements at every floor. You could get swept down the last couple flights without effort, as if your feet had been lifted off the ground. One or two kids struggled upstairs like climbers in an avalanche.
I attained the cafeteria and looked around for somewhere to sit. Instinctively I took note of the four or five girls who were at the center of my narrowing researches. Ginny Oyler was sitting with Leah Toomey’s crowd, which was new. And there was unusual hilarity at Michelle and Tara’s table. Michelle’s back was to me; she seemed to be reading something to Tara and Louise and Becky Busch and Lisa Buonano. I wondered what the joke was. And then my eyes met Tara’s and she stopped laughing and began to make frantic shushing motions to her companions, patting the air with her hands, and the cafeteria seemed very big and very noisy, and I was sure there had to be some way to reverse one of the steps that had led to this moment, but of course there wasn’t. And Michelle turned around in her seat and scanned the room and finally gestured in my direction with the gentlest nod imaginable, and the entire table looked at me and broke into laughter, except for Tara, who stared down at her lunch with an expression that I was unable to read.
The bathroom in the school’s basement got very little traffic, and its heavy air smelled of damp cement. Warmed by the giant boilers next door, I sat in a stall and tried to reconstruct from memory my observations of 39 ninth-grade girls—not to preserve the information,which was useless to me since Michelle Kessel’s lunchtime reading yesterday, but to imagine it through the eyes of its subjects. What would Becky Busch think, for instance, when she learned that, next to her name, I had written
Never smiles
and
Insists that trees are not alive b/c they don’t walk around
? Or Nancy Chang, whose entry, in its entirety, read
Smells good:
publicly she’d be repulsed, but would she also, secretly, be pleased? Counting out the thirty-nine girls on my fingers I reviewed my useless notes, meditating on each in turn, in the hope that I could wring the shame from them. I could distract myself for brief periods by examining the shapes where the paint had
? or
Yeah, how about Vicki Gordon’s tits
? or
You must be the lamest person in the world
!
I tried to recall every step I’d taken since the previous lunchtime, when, in the privacy of a third-floor toilet stall, I had added a datum about Karen Longnecker and Julia Mossman. (Many of the observations in the book, to my surprise, described the friendships between girls.) I thought I remembered replacing it in my backpack afterward, although in these situations it’s impossible to know whether you’re recalling a specific event or just appropriating memories of similar events from other occasions. I didn’t believe the backpack could have come open by itself: it was sturdily built, and the zipper was made by YKK, which is the sign of a reliable zipper.
I walked into homeroom with something large and fleshy in my throat but, to my relief, no one paid me any attention. By third-period English I found I could go without thinking about the notebook for minutes at a time, although eventually my thoughts would land on Gwen Vries or Nancy Chang and I would experience the urge to write something in the notebook and once again I would be filled with the dull certainty of imminent disaster.
Class ended, and we all joined the flow down to the cafeteria.Each stairway doubled back on itself at a landing; on a trip from the fourth floor to the cafeteria you changed direction seven times. Between classes this was chaos, since we didn’t self-organize into a file going up and a file going down, so every little flight of fourteen steps between a floor and a landing resembled two medieval armies colliding on a steep hillside. Before lunch, though, it was a different kind of chaos: the entire student body hurtling downstairs, gathering reinforcements at every floor. You could get swept down the last couple flights without effort, as if your feet had been lifted off the ground. One or two kids struggled upstairs like climbers in an avalanche.
I attained the cafeteria and looked around for somewhere to sit. Instinctively I took note of the four or five girls who were at the center of my narrowing researches. Ginny Oyler was sitting with Leah Toomey’s crowd, which was new. And there was unusual hilarity at Michelle and Tara’s table. Michelle’s back was to me; she seemed to be reading something to Tara and Louise and Becky Busch and Lisa Buonano. I wondered what the joke was. And then my eyes met Tara’s and she stopped laughing and began to make frantic shushing motions to her companions, patting the air with her hands, and the cafeteria seemed very big and very noisy, and I was sure there had to be some way to reverse one of the steps that had led to this moment, but of course there wasn’t. And Michelle turned around in her seat and scanned the room and finally gestured in my direction with the gentlest nod imaginable, and the entire table looked at me and broke into laughter, except for Tara, who stared down at her lunch with an expression that I was unable to read.
The bathroom in the school’s basement got very little traffic, and its heavy air smelled of damp cement. Warmed by the giant boilers next door, I sat in a stall and tried to reconstruct from memory my observations of 39 ninth-grade girls—not to preserve the information,which was useless to me since Michelle Kessel’s lunchtime reading yesterday, but to imagine it through the eyes of its subjects. What would Becky Busch think, for instance, when she learned that, next to her name, I had written
Never smiles
and
Insists that trees are not alive b/c they don’t walk around
? Or Nancy Chang, whose entry, in its entirety, read
Smells good:
publicly she’d be repulsed, but would she also, secretly, be pleased? Counting out the thirty-nine girls on my fingers I reviewed my useless notes, meditating on each in turn, in the hope that I could wring the shame from them. I could distract myself for brief periods by examining the shapes where the paint had
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