Confessions Of An Angry Girl

envenom (verb): to make bitter, to fill with bad feeling

(see also: Regina’s specialty)

6

TRACY'S HALLOWEEN PARTY already sucks and it hasn’t even started. She decided to throw the thing as soon as she made cheerleading last month because apparently it’s important for the new girls to kiss up to the older girls. She doesn’t put it that way, though—she says the younger girls have to pay their dues by hosting parties and things like that.

She keeps talking about how pretty the cheerleaders on “the squad” are, like being pretty is the most important thing in the world. When I roll my eyes, she just shakes her head like I couldn’t possibly understand how important all this stuff is. And she’s right—I don’t. I don’t think we should still have cheerleaders that prance around in short skirts repeating stupid rhymes, flashing their underwear to cheer on boys without doing so much as a cartwheel. It’s the twenty-first century—shouldn’t we be more evolved than this?

If Tracy weren’t my best friend, I wouldn’t be here hanging decorations for a “cheer party” while she and Stephanie finish putting on their costumes and looking for the key to Tracy’s parents’ liquor cabinet. I’d be home, probably, secretly wishing I were still allowed to go trick-or-treating and watching something on HBO without permission while my mom was locked away in her office writing up her notes on all the crazy kids she listened to that week. Or I’d be… I don’t know where else I’d be. I spend all my time with Tracy, so it’s kind of hard to know what I’d be doing if she weren’t my best friend.

This is the first time Tracy’s parents have ever left her home alone, and I know it will be the last. I tried to tell her that this party is a bad idea and could get her into serious trouble, but I don’t think she actually hears me when words come out of my mouth anymore. Her house is beautiful and her parents collect antiques. Like, real antiques, shipped over from England and Portugal. When I mention this to Trace, she just says, “That’s why we’re having the party in the basement! There’s nothing valuable down there.”

I refrain from asking her if she’s going to lock everyone in, making them come and go through the little windows that are high up near the ceiling.

Something tells me that the two of us are not going to have an easy year.

We had a big fight earlier, when we were making chocolate-chip freezer cookies for the party. She told me that she and Matt were going to do it tonight. I told her that I had finally decided that fifteen is too young. She didn’t like that at all. She changed the subject, saying that I need to find an activity, or a group, or something so that people will know who I am. “Like, you know, I’m known as a cheerleader now,” she said. “What are they going to say about you? And don’t say, ‘She plays French horn in the orchestra’ because, I’m sorry, but that’s just lame.” I shoved some candy in my mouth to stop myself from saying, At least playing French horn takes some talent. Instead I said, “I’m a runner” to which she replied, “Not on a team, you’re not,” to which I replied, “Well at least running is a real sport, not like cheerleading,” to which she replied, “It’s good enough for Regina and she’s Jamie’s girlfriend.”

I almost punched her.

She hasn’t mentioned Jamie in a long time, probably because the last time she brought him up, I still wouldn’t tell her anything. That made her so mad that she started texting someone on her stupid phone right in the middle of our conversation, which she totally knows makes me crazy.

Of course, what she doesn’t know is that there’s nothing to tell about Jamie. Except maybe that a few weeks ago he watched me run laps around the track during tryouts, according to Robert. But now that Jamie and I don’t have study hall together anymore, we never talk. If he makes eye contact with me in the hall, maybe he’ll give me a little nod, but that’s it. I wonder if he’s freaked out by our last conversation. I guess I can understand that—I mean, we don’t even know each other, and I basically asked him how many people he’s had sex with. Dumb.

“Rosie, where’s your costume? It’s almost time,” Stephanie says, coming downstairs to the basement where I’m about to fall off a ladder, hanging fake spiders from the ceiling. She’s dressed as Lady Gaga. Or maybe Katy Perry. I’m not really sure which, since they both like crazy wigs, corsets and stupidly high heels.

“Um, I don’t… I’m not dressing up this year.” As I hang the last spider, I notice the blue nail polish I put on in honor of Halloween is already chipped.

“You have to! Oh, my god! Tracy will kill you if you don’t!”

“I’m not staying, Steph. I’m not in the mood for a party.”

Stephanie sort of shuffles her patent leather platforms around on the floor and then squints up at the orange-and-black streamers that run the length of the ceiling, twisting around each other with the spiders poking through. She takes a single blue M&M out of a bowl on the food table and pops it in her mouth.

Stephanie is truly one of the nicest people I know, which means that she gets caught in the middle a lot. Tracy and I met her in middle school last year, when she moved from southern Illinois with her mom after her parents got divorced. She’s more Tracy’s friend than mine, especially since she started dating Mike over the summer. I’ve wanted to ask Tracy for a while now why she and Matt didn’t set me up with anyone this summer, but I’m not sure I want to hear the answer.

“Are you leaving because Tracy’s mad at you?” she asks.

I have to think about that. Is that why I’m leaving? I think I’m leaving because I don’t feel like having Tracy flaunt her new friends in my face as if I’m not worth anything anymore. And because she’s making a big mistake by having sex with her stupid boyfriend when she barely even knows what sex is. And because he’s a jerk who is probably already doing it with half the girls’ swim team when she’s not looking.

Matt morphed into something gross this past summer. Tracy didn’t notice. But I did.

“Tracy’s mad because I told her I don’t think she should do it with Matt tonight.”

Stephanie shuffles some more and yanks down her purple-and-black striped skirt, which rides up every time she inhales. Or exhales. Or moves. Or thinks about moving.

Am I a prude? I wonder.

“You told her that?”

“I mean, Steph, isn’t fifteen, like, young to be worrying about this stuff?”

“Not really. It seems like everyone has had sex already, except us.”

“Everyone who? Who’s everyone?” I ask, a sick feeling flooding the pit of my stomach. Am I completely behind, and I don’t even know it? Am I totally out of the loop with no idea who’s doing it and who’s not? Part of me shrieks, Who cares? and the other part of me whispers, Chicken....

“Well, like, Tracy says all of Matt’s friends, and, like, most of the cheerleaders—”

“But they’re all—” I stop myself from saying, They’re all older, we’re just freshmen, because that argument has gotten me nowhere, especially in my conversations with Tracy. I guess I’m not supposed to be a freshman. I’m supposed to pretend to be older than I am at all times, I’m supposed to want to do things that don’t even make sense to me yet.

“You know what?” I finally say. “I don’t care what Tracy or her new friends do.”

“Come on, Rosie, Tracy’s your best friend. You don’t mean that.”

“She should do it or not do it, but either way, it’d be great if she’d stop making such a huge thing out of it. Why is it such a big deal?” I listen to my voice falling flat in the unfinished cement basement and realize I sound like a whiny, jealous brat. What is wrong with me?

When I hear Tracy trying to navigate the basement steps in her ridiculous spiked heels, I just know she’s been standing at the top of the stairs for the previous thirty seconds, listening. I’m suddenly very tired of myself. I need a lot more candy if I’m going to make it through this night.

She appears, looking an awful lot like Stephanie. Maybe they’re both supposed to be Lady Gaga or Katy Perry—again, I can’t tell. She takes one look at the table covered with the “spooky” Halloween tablecloth I brought that suddenly looks like it’s for two-year-olds and starts rearranging everything to cover it. She turns, looks right through me and asks, “Steph, did you get the vodka?”

“I almost forgot,” Stephanie says, practically running toward the stairs. Then the doorbell rings, and Stephanie stops in her tracks, screaming in unison with Tracy, “They’re here!” Tracy flies up the stairs behind Stephanie, yelling over her shoulder, “Get dressed, Rose! Now!”

“I am dressed,” I shoot back, but she’s not listening to me. She never is.

I hear the front door open. There’s a lot of high-pitched squealing that makes my ears hurt even though I’m still in the basement. The cheerleaders have arrived.

I need to get out of here.

I can practically hear Tracy’s voice in my head, calling me a snob. She’s always called me a snob, ever since we were five and I told her the Wiggles were dumb. I’m not a snob, I just don’t feel like spending the evening with Tracy’s new best friends.

The entire squad starts making its way down to the basement, and my first instinct is to find a place to hide. But I freeze when I hear Regina’s nails-on-a-blackboard voice say, “Put the keg over there.”

A familiar pair of construction boots descends the stairs behind the gaggle of pop-star wannabes in wigs and heels. Jamie appears, carrying a keg. It didn’t even occur to me that he would be here. I’m so happy to see him that I smile and wave before I actually think it through. Regina is standing two steps away, and I don’t want to give her any reason to ask why I’m waving at her boyfriend. My hand freezes in midwave, and he looks at me, slightly puzzled. I stop smiling and turn away as the girls coo over how great Jamie is for getting the keg with his fake ID.

Matt comes down wearing a baseball hat with horns on it, carrying a tub of ice. He looks me up and down and says, “Scary costume. What are you supposed to be?”

I’m about to tell him to shove it when Stephanie runs in with a huge bottle of vodka and goes straight to Tracy, carrying it like it’s a beating heart needed for a transplant operation.

“Here it is!” she squeals, jumping from one foot to the other, nearly falling over with excitement and balance problems, thanks to her shoes. Stephanie is an extremely enthusiastic person.

Tracy takes the bottle and holds it up like a trophy while everyone in the basement—except Jamie and me—cheers like morons. I’m not sure why a bottle of vodka is so much more exciting than a keg, but then again, I’m not much of a drinker.

Tracy unscrews the cap and starts pouring the vodka into a bowl of punch.

“Don’t pour the whole thing in there, Trace—save some for later!” screeches Regina, slapping her hard on the arm. Tracy laughs her embarrassed laugh while rubbing her arm. Someone jams an iPod in a dock and the Crash Kings starts playing so loud that I can feel my skull vibrating. I stick my fingers in my ears and realize that I’m acting like an old lady.

Regina screeches again, making some sort of weird, unearthly cheer call that reverberates off the concrete walls, and suddenly the cheerleaders turn on Tracy like a coven of witches who just happen to wear tight spandex skirts and push-up bras. They grab her, cackling as they pin her down on the table. Regina takes a plastic funnel from her bottomless bag. For a second, I can’t figure out what she’s going to do with it—at my house, we use funnels to transfer maple syrup from a huge tin canister into a carafe that looks a lot nicer on the breakfast table than the canister does. But there’s no maple syrup transfer going on here.

Regina jams the funnel in Tracy’s mouth while Kristin, her evil little freshman protégé and kindred spirit, lifts up the punch bowl and starts pouring it into the funnel. It takes about two seconds before Tracy can’t swallow it fast enough, and it spills all over her face and costume. She starts choking, which makes the witches laugh even harder.

I look at Stephanie, who is tugging on her skirt and twirling a lock of her red hair—peeking out from under her purple wig—which is what she always does when she doesn’t know what to do. I look around for Matt to see if he has any plans to help out his girlfriend, but he’s in the corner flirting with Lena, a junior, and has no clue that Tracy is being force-fed vodka. Or maybe he just couldn’t care less. I stomp over to the punch bowl table and yank the funnel out of Tracy’s mouth, knocking over our platter of cookies and sending punch flying. It splatters across everyone holding Tracy down.

“What the fuck?” says Regina, staring at me as if no one has ever taken anything away from her before.

“You’re choking her!” I yell.

“This is her initiation, bitch, so back off,” she says in a quiet, scary voice.

Even though I can tell Regina is about half a second away from ripping my eyes out, I stand my ground. Tracy turns over, still coughing and spitting out punch, her eyes watering, her triple-action mascara running down her face. The other cheerleaders are frozen, looking at Regina—who is staring at me—waiting for their cue to do something. Kristin is watching me like she’s never seen me before, even though we’ve been in all the same classes for almost two months now. For some reason, she’s not dressed as a pop star. She looks more like a demonic fairy princess, with iridescent wings sprouting from her shoulders and a nasty scowl on her face.

I reach over and whack Tracy on the back a few times, trying to help her get the vodka out of her lungs. But her choking turns into giggling, and she whirls back around, yelling, “Hit me again!” The banshees scream and throw her back down on the table.

And suddenly I can see the future so clearly I can’t believe I couldn’t see it before. There is no room for me in this world of vodka and cheer-witches, which is fine, because I don’t want to be in it anyway. At least, I don’t think I do. But is it possible that, even though we’ve been friends since before we could read, Tracy and I might not make it through this year?

As they jam the funnel down Tracy’s throat again, Matt and Lena sneak up the stairs, not even bothering to go separately so no one gets suspicious. Regina leaves the funnel ritual to her minions and plops herself down on Jamie’s lap on the couch, shouting instructions to the girls. My heart sinks. I didn’t want to believe that he was with her, but if he wasn’t, he probably wouldn’t let her do that to him. Not to mention that he wouldn’t be in Tracy’s basement in the first place.

Jamie is watching Tracy’s initiation, looking like he’s confused about what he’s doing here and wondering if he should attempt to stop the madness. I understand the feeling. And then, without any warning, he looks up at me.

I can’t look away. And of course that is the very moment Regina stops squawking for a second, turns on Jamie’s lap to say something to him and then follows his gaze to me. She looks at me for a good long time, as if everything is clicking into place in her brain, and then she turns back to him and forces him to kiss her. Literally. She grabs his head and pastes her mouth on his, wrapping her arms around his neck as if she wants to suffocate him. I keep looking. He doesn’t really kiss her back, but he doesn’t not kiss her, either.

I want to rip her stupid bustier right off in front of everyone. Instead, I grab my stuff and head up the stairs, waiting for Tracy or Stephanie or someone to call after me and tell me to come back. For a second, I even imagine Jamie calling my name, but when I think about the fact that he’s got a girl on his lap making out with him, I’m pretty sure he’s forgotten all about me. And suddenly, the reason I’ve been so mad at everyone and everything for the past few weeks is very clear to me: I don’t understand any of this. The rules of high school are completely, entirely, disturbingly mysterious to me.

But everyone else seems to get them.

I let the door slam shut behind me.

execrable (adjective): very bad; deplorable; appalling

(see also: Peter)

7

AT FIRST, IT'S just a normal Saturday morning after a bad Friday night. I’m sitting on my bed with my laptop, watching an animated short about photosynthesis for a biology project. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, I’m doing a search for my dad.

I’ve typed his name into the blank box a few times before, but I’ve never had the courage to hit the search button. I was afraid of what I’d find. Would a picture of him I’d never seen before pop up? What if someone posted footage of the explosion that they’d taken with their phone? What if I saw a photograph of him dead? I already had plenty of images in my head—did I really need more?

Today, however, before I take any time to think about it, I type in “Alfonso Zarelli” and hit Search.

Too quickly, the photosynthesis cartoon vanishes, replaced by a results page. Google claims that there are about eight thousand “Alfonso Zarelli” results, but most of those results beyond the first few pages won’t have anything to do with my dad. As I scroll down, I see links to articles on news sites about the explosion and pages from his old company’s website where his name is still listed. Nothing weird or unexpected—until I see the memorial sites.

At first, I’m confused about why his name is listed on pages for other people who died—I don’t want to take in what’s right in front of me. But I can’t stop looking and reading, and as I do, I realize that these are the soldiers and contractors who died with my dad. Their friends and families built websites for them and took the time to list the names of everyone who died in the explosion.

How have I gone this long without even thinking about these people? I didn’t know any of them. I don’t even know if Dad knew them—he could have just been riding with them, like people on a train or a bus who, if they met tomorrow, would have no idea that they’d actually seen each other for the first time the day before. So should I feel bad that I never thought of them until just now?

Yes, I decide. I should.

I click on a site dedicated to a twenty-one-year-old sergeant. There are three photos of him on the home page—his graduation photo from a military academy in California, a picture of him in uniform sitting next to a girl who seems to be laughing at something he said, a photo of a memorial service that his unit had for him, a rifle jammed into the sand, a helmet resting on the butt of the gun. There’s a link to letters from his father, his sister, his best friend—some were written while he was still alive, some after he died—and an email he sent to his sister the night before the explosion. And then there’s a page with a description of what happened to his unit the day he died, and a list of the people who were killed alongside him.

My dad was one of those people.

I close my laptop and push it away from me on the bed. I look at the clock. It’s time to call Peter. We always talk on Saturdays around eleven.

Usually when we’re on the phone, I can tell he’s fishing for information about how I’m doing. He never seems to believe it when I tell him I’m fine. But I get it—I don’t believe him when he says it, either.

Sometimes he’s not awake when I call, so I leave him a totally random, incomprehensible message in the weirdest voice I can come up with, and he calls me back later. But today he answers right away, on the first ring, which is good because I don’t have it in me to come up with a weird voice right now.

“Rosie?”

“Hey.”

“You don’t sound so good,” he says, coughing a little, his voice rough.

“You sound like you just woke up two seconds ago when your phone rang. Did you go out last night?”

“Friday nights in college rock, Rosie. So do Thursday nights. And Saturdays. And the rest of them. It’s awesome,” he says. I can tell he wants me to believe what he’s saying, but the way he sounds, he might as well be talking about doing his laundry.

“It sounds awesome,” I say, playing along anyway. I realize that even though I’m fourteen, and I’m supposed to be into the idea of going out every night of the week, I have no desire to do so. Zero. Zip. None. I guess that means I’ll be a social loser in college, too. Something to look forward to.

As Peter tells me about the party he went to last night, I lie back on my bed. The corner of Peter’s old PSAT book digs into the back of my head, and I yank it out from underneath me and start doodling on it with a blue marker I find under a pile of crap on my nightstand. My room is a mess, but my mom doesn’t say anything about it anymore. She used to tell me all the time that a messy room shows a lack of self-respect. But I don’t think she’s even set foot in here since the beginning of summer. My walls are neat, but that’s just because there’s nothing on them. After Tracy made the squad, I ripped down all the posters she’d made me buy of bands and boys I would never like in a million years, and I tore them into shreds. The shreds are still lying on the floor. I like the way they crunch under my feet when I get up in the morning.

I look at my bare walls and have the sudden urge to draw on them. I wonder if my mother would notice that. Without thinking further, I take the blue marker and draw one petal of a tiny daisy—because it’s the only thing I know how to draw—on the wall next to my bed. I wait. Nothing happens—the wall doesn’t collapse, no alarm bells go off—so I draw the rest of the flower and start to color it in while Peter continues to talk. Drawing on the wall is oddly exciting. Which means my life is pretty sad and pathetic. But I knew that already.

I look at the green light blinking slowly on and off on my closed laptop, and I think about the sergeant still on the screen. Has Peter ever done a search for Dad? I’m just about to ask him when he says, “What did you do last night?”

“Nothing.”

“You stayed home?”

“No,” I say, pausing. I know he’s not going to like it when I tell him about leaving Tracy’s party. He thinks I need to be more social; I think that’s the last thing I need. “I went to Tracy’s Halloween party.”

It’s quiet on the other end, and then I hear what sounds like a long exhale. My blue marker freezes in the middle of filling in a petal as I place the sound.

“Are you…smoking?” I ask.

“You didn’t stay, did you,” he counters.

“Are you smoking?” I ask again.

“Yeah. It helps me wake up.”

“Gross,” I say, completely thrown off by the image of Peter with a cigarette in his mouth. “Dad would kill you for that, you know.”

“Yeah, well, he’s never going to find out, is he?”

My marker falls out of my hand and down into the space between my bed and the wall. I expect him to say he’s sorry, but he doesn’t say anything at all, and the silence is weird, like he’s waiting for me to call him out for talking like that. But I can’t. I can’t even believe he said it in the first place.

“So why’d you leave Tracy’s?” he finally says.

“Because I hate her,” I say, not meaning it.

“What happened this time?”

I was expecting Peter to say, What did she do now? His neutral response pisses me off, and I immediately want to make things sound worse than they are.

“She’s become one of those idiot girls who turns her back on her real friends, and who’s obsessed with all the wrong things.”

“Like what?” he says. I can practically hear him rolling his eyes. This conversation isn’t going how I pictured it at all. Peter is always on my side, no questions asked. But now he just sounds annoyed.

“Like sex, and vodka funnels, and being a cheerleader.”

“That’s called fun, Rose. Look into it. High school is short. So is fucking life, I guess.”

I can hardly believe my ears. My brother—the guy who was so worked up about me being safe and taking care of myself and not doing anything stupid—is acting like I’m a dud for not partying like Tracy, who’s probably going to end up pregnant or diseased or both by the end of the year.