Jo responded, “Your fucking girlfriend is passing this around.” Jo snatched the phone out of Shelly Hunchberg’s hands and shoved it into Shia’s face. He barely looked at the phone before he backed away from Bell.
“The rest of you can go away now!” Jo shouted, waving her hand like she was swatting flies.
Beth looped her arm through mine, and Laurie stood behind Jo with a pissed-off look on his face. I hoped he would punch Shia right in the damn throat.
Sadly, he didn’t.
“What are you doing?” Shia asked Bell.
She fidgeted a little, pulling the thin strap of her tank top up her shoulder. She looked a little less put together and a lot more worried, and I was trying to fight the burn of tears in the back of my throat. I couldn’t cry in front of these assholes, especially not Shia and his bride-to-be.
“We were just joking around.” Bell’s voice was soft.
“It’s not a fucking joke!” Jo shouted. I knew I looked pathetic letting my little sister fight my battles, but I was frozen in place and stunned into silence.
“Whose phone is this?” Shia held it in the air.
Shelly Hunchberg raised her hand and stepped forward.
“Really, Shelly?” Beth snapped. “Let’s go, Meg.” She pulled at my arm.
When I thought about it, there wasn’t much I could do. I could either stand there and be humiliated as Bell acted like it wasn’t a big deal that an entire group of people were mocking me and looking at my body, or I could leave.
I grabbed Beth’s jewelry bag from the ground and turned to leave. I didn’t even look at Shia. A woman with a baby strapped to her chest bumped into me, and her baby started to scream. It felt like a sign from the universe. A big, shiny Fuck you from the universe.
I heard Jo still yelling, and I heard Shia’s voice calling my name as Beth dragged me through the crowd. All of the faces around me looked like River, like Bell, like Jessica Fox, who was supposed to be my best friend in Texas but taped a printed version of one of the pictures to my front door so that Amy found it when she came home on the bus. I remembered the look on my dad’s face when he got back from “talking” to River’s parents. My dad wanted to press charges for distributing child pornography, since I wasn’t eighteen and River was, but I didn’t want to deal with the humiliation and consequences at school.
Everyone loved River, and I was just a whore who gave boys blow jobs in the backseats of their cars to make them like me more. I was the girl with the big tits and the horny mouth. I got it. I sent pictures to my boyfriend and was going to be shamed to the end of the halls of Killeen High School for it. Well, apparently, I was going to be shamed on the streets of New Orleans, too.
When we neared the street, I remembered the fury that had radiated through Meredith when she stormed through the halls of my high school, demanding that every computer be wiped clean. I remembered the day I walked into the computer lab and Jessica Fox had set my boobs as the wallpaper on half of the monitors.
The air in my lungs was burning and I was out of breath. I stopped for a second.
Beth looked at my face and said, “Let’s stop for a minute.”
“Hey!” a girl’s voice called to us from behind a booth.
“Shia’s coming,” Beth told me, and waved to the girl behind the booth.
“Get me out of here,” I begged Beth. I didn’t want to see Shia, and I only had about thirty seconds before the tears were going to be unstoppable. I was so mad, so fucking pissed at myself and the world for being so stupid. I should never have told Shia about those stupid pictures.
“Are you okay?” the girl in the booth asked. Looking over, I saw she was like some manga Gypsy princess, rivaling Vanessa Hudgens for Coachella queen. Her body was dripping with jewelry, and I realized the booth was full of the rings that Beth had bought.
Beth was talking to the girl, and I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Beth told me to come behind the booth and sit down. The moment my butt hit the chair, I let myself cry.
Shia walked on by without seeing us.
When we got home, Amy and my dad were sitting on the couch. Meredith was in the kitchen heating up a covered dish. We would never have to cook again, it seemed.
“How was it?” Amy asked. “It looks so cool online, how was it?”
I looked at Beth. “It was fine,” she lied for me.
I loved her for it.
She pulled open her bag from the jewelry booth and distracted Amy with shiny mood rings.
“I’m going to take a shower,” I announced to a roomful of people who all said “Okay” to me like they didn’t know why I was telling them in the first place.
I made it up to my room and collapsed onto my bed. I felt like a bucket of pig’s blood had been dumped on my prom dress. I felt so dirty.
38
beth
The morning after the festival, I woke to Jo’s and Meg’s loud voices down the hall. Ever since Jo was a kid, whenever she got angry, her tone went a few octaves deeper. Meg was the opposite; her usually soft voice became a screechy kind of noise, a lot like the sound of Mrs. King’s little dogs.
“You could have told me!” Meg yelled at her. “Weeks have gone by—and nothing!”
I threw my leg over the bed to get up. To go mediate whatever the hell was going on with my sisters. I was always the mediator. I was so tired, though; the festival noises, smells, chaos—it was exhausting. My entire body, mind included, throbbed when I lay in bed last night. Still, no matter how tired I was that morning, it wasn’t that important. Not as important as whatever was happening down the hall.
“Don’t blame me! You’re always the victim!” Jo yelled back.
I closed my eyes for a second and stared at the ceiling. Nothing would change in the next few seconds. The day before had started so differently than it had ended. When it started, I was anxious, sure, but it was nothing compared to the end of the night, walking Meg through a crowd, hiding her in the mood-ring girl’s booth . . .
I couldn’t hear what Jo and Meg were yelling about anymore. I lifted my hand into the air, studying the stone on my finger, which had turned a light blue. The lighter shades of blue were supposed to indicate that I was relaxed. I wasn’t sure that I believed mood rings really worked.
A door slammed, and Meg continued to yell. I got out of bed and followed the noise. In the kitchen, Meg was crying, leaning her shoulders against the fridge. Jo was gone, and the back screen door was swinging open.
My dad wheeled himself into the kitchen. “What’s going on?” he asked Meg, who didn’t answer. She only cried out, covered her face, and ran off to her room.
My dad and I both stared at the now-empty hallway for a few seconds before he said, “What is happening around here?”
I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t know, either, and I didn’t know how much of last night my dad was even aware of. He had so much going on already himself, it was selfish to add another rock to his shoulders.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll work it out, whatever it is.” I looked at him. “Want some breakfast?”
My dad looked at me, at the door, and then down the hallway, slowly. He sighed, his thin shoulders visibly dredging up and right back down. He was wearing a gray T-shirt with a small hole in the collar. His outfits never varied much, just different-colored T-shirts and sweatshirts. Sometimes he would wear a button-up shirt, when we went to restaurants or my sisters’ school functions. And even more rarely, he would dress in his Class A’s when there was a military ball or ceremony of whatever sort.
I always loved when there was a military ball for my parents to go to. Meg had done Mom’s hair and makeup for the last few years, and she would always take us to the mall and let us help her choose a dress to wear. That was one of the few times a year we got to shop at the mall. It was pretty fun helping my mom try on dresses;
somehow, the JCPenney’s dressing room would become the set of Say Yes to the Dress. Meg would have Mom twirl and turn and bend down and stretch up, showing off every inch of the dresses. We would always go to Friday’s for lunch, and sometimes even to Starbucks beforehand. My dad would get my mom a corsage, and Amy would make kissing noises when he slid it onto her wrist. Mom almost always poked his chest with the boutonniere pin due to his habit of making her laugh at the worst times. The memories I have of them are mostly fond, but sometimes it’s hard to square up the dad in my memories with the man sitting in the wheelchair before me.
I checked the cabinets and fridge to see what I could make for him. His appetite had changed since coming home. He says the cocktail of medications the Army put him on made him too nauseous to eat.
“What was all that noise?” my mom croaked, walking into the room. She slid behind my dad’s chair and sat down at the kitchen table. The table was the oldest thing in our house, given to us by my nana, before she and my mom stopped talking. I wondered if Aunt Hannah talked to her still . . . I couldn’t be sure, no matter how much intel I had on the adult stuff around us. The table was scratched, beat-up, and broken during our PCS from Fort Hood to Fort Cyprus, and my mom’s elbow was resting right in the deep splinter of the glossy dark wood. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days, even though she just woke up. She had been watching The Twilight Zone on the couch, a cup in her hand, when I got up to pee in the middle of the night.
“Meg and Jo were fighting over something,” my dad answered.
When Mom asked for specifics, I shrugged and popped open a can of biscuits and started making everyone’s meal.
Several minutes later, Meg came back into the kitchen right as I handed my mom her plate. Meg was calmer now, if a bit disheveled.
“Want some?” I asked.
She nodded, and her puffy red eyes focused on my mom, who was swallowing the pile of biscuits and gravy on her plate and washing them down with milk. A faint white milk stain colored her bottom lip as she chewed. I wasn’t sure what she was looking at, but something on the wall behind me seemed to be entertaining to her.