August 21, 2002: Dire consequences await Librans who begin new adventures today. Go with your natural impulses as a creature of habit and lay low. I spasmed when I read my horoscope this morning. Honest to god, “Mammy, fetch the smelling salts” spasmed. I don’t believe in any of that stuff, not really, but what’s a girl to think when she looses a battle with the snooze button only to roll over, grab her copy of Madame Seraphina’s Star Signs and see that? Last Tuesday Madame Seraphina could have written those words at me until she was blue in the face—or whatever it is that you get blue in from writing too much—and it wouldn’t have mattered. Next Tuesday, it probably won't matter either. But today? The squared-off, glowing numbers of my alarm clock cast dizzy shadows all around, highlighting just exactly how not my room my room is. Even in the dark I could see the foreign, pink-flowered wallpaper going about its pink flowered morning, and even in the dark it made my stomach turn. I could hear my mom across the hall, starting her day’s ritual totally unaware that her only daughter’s life had just been declared over by America’s most esteemed psychic. (Madame Seraphina’s Star Signs said that right on the cover, after all, under the big picture of Janet Jackson’s sister.) “I'm worse at what I do best...And for this gift I feel blessed ” Whatever she sings in the shower, my mom somehow manages to turn into a church song. You wouldn’t think that would be possible with Nirvana, but it most assuredly is. Three months ago, moving had almost seemed like a good idea. I was sick of Massachusetts, and even sicker of the entire eighth grade at Newton Memorial. Déclassé is far too good a word to waste on the likes of them, but I can’t think of anything else even vaguely appropriate. Cowering under my stiff, too-new sheets and watching the numbers of my clock spiral onward, it suddenly became clear that I’d wasted my entire summer. I had done nothing but daydream about how great life would be in Hanover, and about how I finally wouldn’t be the only person in my class who had read Jane Eyre in the fifth grade. After all, when I met Mr. Harding, Hanover High’s principal, he had said that practically everybody enrolled in my new school was the kid of a Dartmouth professor. And so they’d be smart, I had concluded. They would understand the horror of sharing a life with a woman who cared more about Sappho than Oprah, a woman who left dog-eared copies of the histories of Herodotus lying around the living room, open right to the dirty parts. Maybe what I should have done with my summer was save money so I could have booked a flight to Hollywood and become a cast member on the WB. If not that, then at least I could have spent my time making contacts at the circus so I could have quietly slunk out my window and run off to travel around the country as a carny. If only I’d thought ahead, I would have gotten to spend the rest of my life in places decidedly less dangerous than your average high school—on the trapeze, say, or in a lion cage. The shower finally rattled to a stop. (It would only follow, of course, that my classics professor of a parent wouldn’t get the charms of fully functional modern conveniences, or frivolous little things like plumbing and cable modems.) Reluctantly, I hauled myself out of bed and took stock. Two legs. Two arms. Four eyes. The same old girl who had gone to sleep last night, happily wrapped in an old concert tee, starry eyed at the prospect of finding a town full of her bookish, non-athletic kind. Good morning seemed an inappropriate thing to say, so when I passed my mom in the hall I informed her of my plans. “I’m sorry, but Madame Seraphina says I can’t go to school today. Probably I could pencil it in for sometime early next week, though.” Clutching a worn, purple-stripped towel tight to her bosom (or boobs, as the rest of the world would call them), my mom didn’t even pause before replying. “Madame Seraphina is a crackpot, sweetie. We don’t listen to crackpots. Today’s the day, and you have to go.” “You're telling me that I have to go? If I shouldn't listen to crackpots I guess I'll go get back in bed, then.” Even at 7 am, I’m such a wit, aren’t I? “Magda…” Ah! The exasperated, “how dare my husband marry his secretary and leave me alone with this monster” tone came out to play early today. “Maggie. Can’t we just for once pretend that you don’t hate me and gave me a normal name?” “Your grandmother’s name is Magda, you know. It wouldn’t hurt you to show a little respect.” Always one to be prepared, my mom had laid out her clothes before getting in the shower, and her plain black comforter was a mess of lacy panties and green silk. “Notice, if you will, that your mother’s name is Magda and yours isn’t. Do you suppose that’s because Grammy realized the hell it is to be a Magda in a world of Jordans and Briannas?” We have this argument about twice a week, and I think we’ve both got it pretty much memorized by now. Falling into its comfortable rhythm, we assumed our classic morning positions: my mom dripping dry just inside her closet door and me sitting on whatever piece of clothing she’s left on her bed that I think most likely to wrinkle. Of course, this new closet is tiny, which would explain the extra entertainment value of my mom nearly braining herself as she shrugged into her robe. “In her day it would have been a world full of Sarahs and Bettys, but point taken. Maggie.” I think the best thing about my mom is how she always smells—like old books and Bath and Body Shop moisturizer. (Well, that and her strawberry shortcake.) Today’s moisturizer was Vanilla Pear scented, and as she uncapped the bottle I could smell it all the way across the room. “Haven’t you ever wondered what would have happened if Julius Caesar had ‘beworn’ the Ides of May? Maybe the whole world would be different. Maybe you’d be putting on a toga right now.” It was a low blow, I knew, but desperate times call for desperate measures. “You owe it to history to let me stay home.” “Actually, I know exactly what would have happened if Caesar had listened to that prophecy.” A long silence, broken only by…well…silence. In all the fourteen years I spent Newton, I don’t think I can remember even a fraction of a second of real, true silence. There was always the low buzz of the freeway, the murmur of a radio in the next apartment over, the sounds of people and life and crowds. But here? There’s nothing. This New Hampshire thing is going to take some getting used to. “Well?” I whined in my best impersonation of a four-year-old. “They would have killed him on the 16th.” “That was just exactly what I needed to hear, thank you so very much.” We slipped back into the silence for a moment, my mom focusing on her necklace and me focusing on my fate. “I don’t think I can do this.” I hated the seriousness that crept into my voice, and the way I really believed what I said. A new school full of seven hundred people I’ve never met before, no doubt each and every one of them looking forward to a chance to pick on me. “I know that you can. I can just feel that this is going to be your year, Mags. You’ll see that because you’re coming out of your awkward stage, everything will be different.” Tugging sullenly at a loose thread on the skirt she was trying to pick up off her bed, I grunted. “You’re my mother. You’re supposed to say that I’m wonderful and perfect and that you love me. Not that I’m awkward.” “Even you have to admit that wearing a Hanson shirt every day for two months was a bit on the awkward side, huh?” Fully clothed, mom turned her attention to her hair, carefully untangling and fluffing. “No fair. That was like two years ago! I was twelve, for god’s sake.” With a crook of her eyebrow, my mom laughed. “Oh yeah?” I won’t look down, I vowed to myself. No, I most certainly will not look down. “I’ve always wanted to be Zac Hanson’s mother-in-law, but for a while there I was thinking I’d never get a chance. He probably wouldn’t give a girl with his picture on her chest the time of day, after all.” I looked down. And right into the Albertane tour-era, caramel-brown eyes of Zac Hanson that stared blindly from the battered cotton of my t-shirt. “Do child stars really need diplomas? Because I’ve been thinking about how Dawson’s Creek could use a new female lead…” “Get in the shower, Magda,” my mom commanded, smoothing on dark red lipstick. “The rest of your life is about to begin, and you’d better be ready for it.” If I
hadn’t known that there are monks and nuns that go entire years without speaking, I
would have thought that I set some sort of record today. But I did speak, at least a
little— twelve words, over and over all day: “My name’s Maggie Voss, and I
just moved here from I said it in front of sleepy-eyed homeroom classmates; in front of drafty history classrooms decorated with wildly-outdated globes that had been sharpie-corrected to quasi-currency; and in front of forty-five awkward fourteen-year-olds in gym shorts on the bleachers before phys ed. I’m beginning to suspect that the leaders of the Spanish Inquisition probably started off with “why don’t you introduce yourself to everyone?” before deciding that treatment was too inhumane even for the worst of sinners, and moving on to thumbscrews and iron maidens. The entire day
amounted to nothing more than a horrible blur of foreign places and strangely alien faces.
I’d believed—well, hoped—that people here would be different. They’d
be rugged outdoorsmen, skiers and artic explorers and J.D. Salingers in self-imposed exile
from the civilized world. What they turned out to be was all the more shocking: dead
wringers for the kids I thought I’d left behind forever in Walking through
the sunny, window-walled main lobby after school, it felt like each and every conversation
stopped as soon as I came into earshot. Not one single person talked to me all day: not
one “Hey! I’m in your fifth period lunch. Why don’t you sit with me and my
friends?” Not one “Nice shoes.” Not even one “you’re standing in
front of my locker. Move.” In I hovered awkwardly by the front entranceway, unable to stand quite still. The recently-waxed floor was still slippery, and for a minute or two I just concentrated on the weightless feeling of my Steve Madens sliding with my every weight shift. After awhile, the conversations interrupted by my mere existence began again. Snippets of
words, of sentences, of connections between people floated in my direction. “We spent
the summer at my grandparent’s cottage on the An industrial
sized clock across the lobby confirmed my worst fears when I dared cast a peek at it: Back in When
my parents first started fighting, my dad had come to fancy himself something of a
daring adventurer. He hiked the We didn’t
spend much time together in those days, but for my thirteenth birthday he talked my mom
into letting me learn how to scuba dive. I thought that I’d never experience the
feeling of it again: the weightlessness, the blindness, the lack of control. Floating
thirty feet down in the murky, gray-green water of That’s what it was like, though, standing in Hanover High’s crowded lobby as the minutes ticked by. I was in the middle of a crush of a hundred kids, but for all it mattered to me, they might as well have been ghosts. When I was thirteen, I had made my dad take me home right after we surfaced. But now? This is all that I have left. There’s no more home to go to, and no more dad to take me there. When I walked out of the lobby, I don’t think anyone even noticed. The hallways were deserted, and it was all I could do to hold myself back from a full-out run. Instead I walked slowly, head down and counting each institutional linoleum tile that I stepped on. I made it to 546 before anything beyond the increasingly easy rhythm of my steps registered. By the time I realized there was anybody there, I had almost stepped on the girl who was sitting cross-legged in the exact center of the hallway. She didn’t seem to mind that her ridiculously long brown hair was brushing against the floor in a semi-circle around her, but she definitely minded when I tried to step away and to continue on my blind journey. “You’re the new girl.” I guess I should have been grateful that someone was finally saying something to me that wasn’t required by law, but my whole day was starting to seem pretty absurd and I wasn’t in the mood to make nice. “Thank you, captain obvious.” “I’m Melissa Fairchild.” She made her name sound sharp and hard, like a dare. “My name’s Magda.” I was halfway through figuring out how long it would take me to walk home before she responded. “I know. This isn’t such a big school.” The girl was shuffling an oversized deck of cards on the floor before her as we spoke, and she kept them moving in a continual blur punctuated with a crisp cascade of sound. “Are you waiting for a bus or something?” Just beginning to cool down from my recent hysteria, even I wasn’t self-absorbed enough not to realize that something was up with her, something big. Her motions were truncated and abrupt, and as she worked the cards she kept staring darkly at a closed classroom door down the hall. “My brother was supposed to give me a ride home.” Again her words sounded like a challenge, like she was just waiting for me to say something she half dreaded and half needed. “I’ve been waiting a wicked long time.” “Oh.” Interpersonal relationships not being my strong suite, I had no idea what to do. But in spite of the attitude, she seemed nice—like her anger had turned her into a kindred spirit. Melissa cast me a measuring glance. “You want to get out of here, Magda?” “Like you can't even imagine.” There’s a
fine distinction between quaint college town and Disney outpost, and Downtown Hanover has
quite obviously crossed over into the latter. As Melissa and I headed toward Melissa and I didn’t talk much until we left the cursed school behind, and even then silence followed along between us. Every so often we would pass a soccer mom in the larval stage, wheeling her Dartmouth-shirted progeny in a Mary Poppins-style stroller. You just could tell just by looking at them that in their houses the stroller would actually be called a “pram” with a straight face. “So how
long have you lived in “Forever.” “That ice age must have been rough, huh?” She laughed a little, shrugging her hair into her face to hide her smile. She was really pretty in a giraffe-meets-pixie sort of way, and I found myself wondering what was wrong with her. Yeah, yeah. It sounds horrible, but you know what I mean. Tall, pretty, athletic girls who wear the right clothes and carry $70 L.L. Bean backpacks are not unpopular. That’s the way high school works; Fourteen-year-olds are too predictable for anything else. “I guess it only feels like forever. I was born all of ten miles from here, and I’m sort of paralyzed with fear that I’ll die all of ten miles from here, too.” It’s obvious that despite all of the good, socially acceptable adjectives that fit Melissa, “unpopular” fits, too. Not that I care—I’ve always enjoyed my unpopularity, and fully intend to hold onto it for the long haul. I’d rather be who I am than who other people think I should be. “I used to be afraid of the same thing, but now I’m jealous.” We passed pink-painted Ben and Jerry’s, my mom’s second favorite place in town (after the library, of course), Anne Taylor, and Hilde’s Hardware, all in a quiet state of camaraderie. I should have been back at school, probably just about lining up for the bus to whisk me off home, but I didn’t even consider turning around. I could find my mom, I reasoned, and get a ride from her. “Wanna sneak into the movie theater?” No idea, not even the nobel prize winning kind, has ever been announced in quite such a giddy rush of breath. Melissa obviously liked the idea, some inner devil pleased with the rebellion. “We
totally can’t?” I couldn’t help giggling, half-incredulous, half-thrilled.
Sneaking into a movie theater sounded like a fabulously interesting thing to do, no matter
how stupid and pointless. I had fourteen bucks in my pocket, more than enough for a
matinee in “We totally can. I’ve done it a hundred times. Come on.” “I’ll miss my bus, though,” I muttered, pulling away as we neared the deserted looking theater. Meek, meek, meek. I can say with
all honesty that I’ve never done anything outright bad in my entire life, and as I was tugged down Considering
that it fancies itself the Martha Stewart of cute little “My mom will give you a ride home.” Then we were there, shadowed from the suddenly too-hot sun by the overarching ivy that hung so low that it brushed, smooth and cool, against my bare arm. Following Melissa’s lead, I sidled up to the theater’s open back door. “All we need to do is slip right through here.” Having spent many a bored Saturday night this summer at the movies with my mom, I recognized the passageway that she gestured to as the theater’s main exit. “But that goes right by the ticket booth, doesn’t it? Someone will see us!” I hissed, pulling back. “You wouldn’t make much of a secret agent, would you?” Melissa was ignoring my hesitation, leaning further and further through the doorway until I suspected she could see the person taking tickets. “I would be completely spectacular. Who would ever suspect me of anything?” I knew that this was true, deep down in my bones: I had it in me to be the best secret agent in the history of the world, even if my heart was pounding a thousand holes clear through my chest with its every frantic beat. After all, as those most common amongst us know the one perk of being completely average is being completely forgettable. “So come on, then. It’s safe.” Impatiently shoving aside an ivy branch, Melissa led the way into the thick, air-conditioned chill of the theater. The guilt didn’t begin until it was clear that we were actually going to make it in, not until after a breathless scamper down the long main hallway and a frantic turn into the nearest open door. Then, it was crippling. “Melissa, let’s just go. This is stupid.” The tiny theater was empty save for an ancient looking couple sitting in the back row, their silvery-white hair brilliantly piercing the darkness with reflected light from the hallway. Their glow felt like a spotlight on my skin, a screaming beacon that would at any moment summon an employee to throw us out of the theater and into jail. What sort of punishment would a crime like this merit? They wouldn’t do anything inhumane, like force us to watch Freddie Prinz Junior movies, would they? “Don’t worry about it, seriously. It’s not a big deal.” Melissa scooted in a seat from the aisle before sitting down. “After the movie, we’ll catch my dad at his office.” “Right.” If we weren’t napstered out of existence in a flash of thunderbolts rained down by the doubtlessly vengeful god of cineplexes. “Why did
you move to “My mom
moved us up here to take a job at If she noticed me squirming with nerves, Melissa paid no mind. “Nice. Was it fabulously interesting to move? I’ve spent my whole life in the same house. My room is still covered in the same hideous Mother Goose wallpaper my parents hung when they found out my mom was pregnant with me.” Relaxed as could be, she settled down for my story, sliding down and swinging her legs over the seat back in front of her. “It was mind-numbingly horrible, really.” I shuddered at the memory, but hovering back in my mind was the fact that once upon a time I had thought moving would be cool, too. “The movers screwed up, and my mom and I ended up sleeping on the living room floor for two weeks.” “It would be an adventure. Like camping, only with carpeting.” Obviously not a girl who’s ever awoken mired in the fear that her face might be indented permanently in a charming tile pattern. It felt wrong to be sitting there, talking so casually, and doing something wrong—something illegal and senseless and stupid, even if only minorly so. “Not exactly.” The theater slipped into darkness around us, and the screen flickered to life. Short of one of us getting up, dancing the Macarena out to the ticket booth, and screaming “I snuck in! Ha ha!” there was no way to get caught, but judging from the prickles dancing at the base of my spine I was obviously not going to enjoy one tiny second of this movie if I didn’t do something. And fast. Leaning over as the first preview began, I whispered “I have to go to the ladies’. I’ll be right back.” “It’s out in the lobby, through the second door on your right and then down the stairs.” Melissa hissed, earning a sharp snort of annoyance from the direction of the grandparents in the back row. I didn’t bother to answer back that my lack of an actual, quantifiable social life had left me quite aware of the bathroom’s location. Slipping up the thickly carpeted aisle, I kept my head down and pace rapid. My absolute horror at the situation was stupid, and I knew this even as I burst out into the brightly lit hallway and charged to the ticket desk. No one would ever, ever find out, and even if they did it’s not like sneaking into a movie at 15 has ever come up at the last minute during a nationally televised debate and cost anybody the presidency or anything. The only person in the lobby was a college aged-looking guy sullenly working his way through a king sized bag of M&Ms behind the snack counter. He paid me no mind me with such complete and utter totality that I began to wonder if he spent a lot of time sitting at home in front of the bathroom mirror and ignored himself for practice. “Hey.” I finally demanded his attention, shifting nervously from one foot to another and feeling as jumpy as Michael Jackson in a room full of paparazzi. “Hi.” “I need to
buy two tickets to the “You’re here with Melissa, aren’t you?” His words were slow and searching, like he suspected there was a punch line hovering just beneath the surface of my words, if only he could find it. Oh god. He knew. She was a habitual offender and we were both about to be carted off to juvie. Trust me to take no more than eight hours to fall in with the bad crowd in a new town. “She didn’t tell you?” His meaty features rearranged themselves in something of a wicked sneer. “Tell me?” “That her
parents own the theater. She comes and goes as she pleases.” Not
to be judgmental or anything, but bitch.
Back in the theater I nudged Melissa and tried to avoid sounding psychotic. Or I guess it
was too late for that, but really. “How come you didn’t tell me your parents own
the theater?” She had no way of knowing that “You
didn’t know?” She whispered back, casting a fleeting glance over her shoulder at
the scanty non-fifteen-year-old girl audience. I just shrugged. “How else would I
have just randomly known the movie schedule? I mean… Good point, that. The movie dragged on, long and foreign and boring, but we stayed silent. There’s no doubt in mind my that the ending—involving a dog, a martini glass, and a swooning dive from the top of Notre Dame—was intended to be a tear jerker, but Melissa and I were in the middle of a full-out giggle attack by the time the credits rolled. “If nothing else, the movies we get here have imagination. There’s an actual Sony theater right across the river, so my parents have this strategy about showing arty movies. Where they stand on quality is a bit fuzzy, obviously.” “Actually, I’d have to say that where they stand on quality is pretty clear.” My mom was probably having a heart attack at that moment, standing in our still only partially furnished living room across town and barking out directions to the national guardsmen assigned to my abduction. Apparently God decided to smile on me at least once in my pathetic life, because when we headed into the lobby the popcorn boy was gone. Other than a few fellow late afternoon movie-goers, the joint was empty. Melissa led the
way down a narrow stairwell and to a door inscribed with an oddly inappropriate legend:
“Hanover Improvement Society.” In theory, bad movies would probably make I was stumbling to keep up, but for a change it wasn’t because of my stubby little runt legs: I was too transfixed by our surroundings to focus on anything mundane, like trying to avoid slamming into stationary things like doors or walls. The tiny hallway leading away from the lobby was positively choked with movie posters of every conceivable variety, all papered over each and every available centimeter of flat space. They swirled all around us in riot of colors and fonts and pictures, a modern day Tut’s Tomb to my staggered Howard Carter. “I never
once in my entire childhood went to a babysitter,” Melissa was saying, blind not only
to the vintage-looking Mary Pickford poster (nobody would have put that stain there on purpose, would they?) hanging just above her left
shoulder, but also to my doubtlessly glazed expression. “I came here instead. While
everybody else was watching “This is amazing, Melissa. Seriously.” “I guess I don’t notice it so much, coming here all the time and all.” Without even pausing in her explanation for not appreciating bizarre wonders of the theater, Melissa absent-mindedly reached out to press a hand against one of the higher posters. The years had blurred it, staining it sepia-yellow around the edges, but I can’t believe that anything could have dulled its focal point: a pair of blazing dark eyes that seemed to bore furiously into the dim hallway, even across the space of decades. “Who’s
that?” How come my family aren’t the cinema magnates of “Rudolph Valentino.” Even in the dim hallway I could see a blotchy red blush spreading across Melissa’s cheeks. “He was Elvis-y, only without the fat and ugly Nixon years. My Grandmother was like a ten-year-old Backstreet Boy fan about him.” “Well, there goes my theory about the Backstreet Boys’ fans being the first step in the decline of Western civilization.” “Not the first, maybe. But the worst.” His office cave-like and his person caveman-like, Melissa’s short, furry father was sitting at a pitted wood desk surrounded by stacks of paper, magazines, and books. The piles teetered so high that they eclipsed what little sunlight might have filtered in through the room’s one tiny window, and left the whole place awash with a film-noir grayness. “Ladies.” Think of the highest, squeakiest voice you’ve ever heard, multiply it by a power of ten, and then have it suck helium for a few hours. Now you know exactly what Melissa’s dad sounds like, and you can probably imagine why I was suddenly fully occupied with the self-restraint required not to entire hysterics at that voice coming from the troglodyte across the room. |
