Bartholomew Baxter is the only boy who’s nice to me. He’s half a foot
shorter than everyone else, and chunkier—he’s shaped like Theodore from Alvin and the Chipmunks. His mom lets him go to Coco Exotique, the
tanning salon, where he glows neon in one of those alien ship beds, so he
can be the color of a roast turkey all the time. He’s allowed to highlight
his hair, which he parts in the middle and gels, so it sits on top of his
forehead like the two arches of a mustache. He got his ear pierced on the
upper part, on the left side, “the not-gay side,” he says. Sometimes when
you catch a spark of his smell, which is spearmint Chapstick and Acqua di
Gio cologne, there’s a clean moment, the only one you get all day.

Bart’s mom drives us home from school sometimes. She’s the same height as
him, and she puts blocks on the pedals of her minivan so she can reach
them. She blows smoke out the window from her long ladies’ cigarettes. A
couple of times she’s let Bart take some puffs from them right there in
front of us. He’s allowed to play whatever he wants on the radio—Toni
Braxton is his jam right now. In my parents’ car you’re only allowed to
listen to the Oldies. A few months ago my mom drove us home from the
Halloween dance and “Yellow Submarine” came on. Bart curled his lip and
gave me a look that said, “This is why. This is why you will always be a poser.”

Bart is good at charming my mom. His voice gets girlish and gossipy, and he
asks her questions like, “What color were your bridesmaids’ dresses?” or
“What fragrance are you wearing?” She acts all embarrassing when he does
this, and sometimes I think that—in this weird way—she likes him better
than me. He makes her laugh all the time, and I hardly ever can. But other
times I see that she’s concerned by him, because of his piercing, or the
cigarette smell she asks me about. Probably also because he used to get me
in trouble when we were kids—he’d get me to pull pranks with him. Once he
got me to glue this Special Ed girl’s books into her cubby. Another time we
threw her Babar doll into the mud, which made her cry so hard she turned
all red and lost-looking. I felt really bad about it, and we had to go to
the principal’s office. The principal yelled at us and called our parents.
At the end of it, she took me aside, and asked me, “Katie, how did you end
up here?” I shrugged while tears came out; I knew I couldn’t say that it
was just because I wanted to make Bart laugh. He has this way of laughing,
like a haunted house clown is taking over his body, and I always want to
make it happen.

*

The popular girls love Bart now—all of the ones in our grade, and even some
of the eighth graders. He stands around with them at recess, looking so
short and plump next to them, while they pose like pretty ponies. They blow
gum bubbles out of their mouths, which are ringed in brown eyeliner, and
they yank each other’s hair up into high, tight ponytails. They zip down
their hoodies to show off the new tits overflowing their bodysuits. Bart
calls them all “hussies,” but it’s a compliment—he says it like an old
timey lady in Louisiana—“husseh!” They perk up a little cocky when he says
it. He’s called me a hussy twice, and each time I got this little Pop Rocks
zip of pride.

In classrooms before the teachers arrive, the hussies take turns perching
on Bart’s lap. He’s their doll and they’re his, and through him they can
make the real boys think of sex, the boys who chuck baseballs to each other
and spit onto the sidewalk, trying to be real men; as if you’re nothing but
a pussy if you don’t launch hot, foamy loads of saliva all the time.

Those boys torment me, usually. They call me “pancakes” or they call me
“twig,” or they find some way of dissing what I’m wearing. In the classes
where Bart sits next to me, though, he protects me from them. They don’t
bother him, even though you’d think they would, because they know that if
they do, they risk pissing off the hussies, who they’re in love with. The
boys also know that Bart is smarter than them—that if they fling an insult
at him, he’ll only boomerang it back, but his words will be cleverer than
theirs, bratty spikes all around the edges. The words will come back at
them in a confusing way, from his confusing face, and it would be hard to
say whether or not they’d just been beaten by a girl.

I do Bart’s homework for him sometimes, but other than that, the only way I
know how to pay him back, for his protections and friendship is to
conspire with him in secret cruelties. We make drawings on loose leaf in
the back of the class: our teacher, Mr. Kirchner, who has a lisp, wearing
short shorts and a crop top, the word ‘FAG’ printed across it, tilting his
hand prissily. Or the two dweebiest girls in our school “lezzing” out
together. “Scizzoring,” Bart writes in his loopy cursive, and
points to an image of it with an arrow.

Bart doesn’t always let me be around him. Sometimes when we get to the
cafeteria, he does this thing where he gives me a pat on the arm, that I
can tell is really a push away, and I know I have to sit with Chrissy and
Sarabeth, my old best friends, who aren’t cool: Chrissy with her pants that
are too short, and rhinestone Keds like it’s fourth grade. Sarabeth, who’s
still obsessed with ballet, and has to use an inhaler or she coughs with a
honk. They hate me a little now that I’ve made it obvious they’re always my
second choice, but they put up with me while I sit across the table from
them, and they get to act like the things they do when I’m not there are
all so cool. As if the regular old multiplex is some sort of
amazing nightclub, and that their secrets are suddenly life-or-death
dramatic. They’ve invented their own inside jokes now—they use Australian
accents, or they riff about Tweety Bird, and I can’t play along. I used to
be the funny one, but now I’m kind of mute, lifting cafeteria peas into my
mouth, watching Bart and the hussies across the room, and trying to
understand why the nation of them seems so bright, while everything at my
table seems small and stuck in place, like an old doll’s bed in the corner
of a room.

The hussies are Kerri Alvarado, Nikki Kristakis, Jenna Caruso and Tracy
Sansone. Kerri looks and acts like Gwen Stefani—tiny but loud, and brave
around boys. Nikki is silent and always weaving her fingers through her
hair like a harpist, or crying over something in a calm, elegant way that
matches her steel gray nail polish. When she cries, all of the other
hussies go over to her to pet her and make her feel better. Jenna is a huge
slut but she doesn’t care, she brags about it. Once I heard her ask this
girl if she ever “did sex.” The girl shook her head no and then Jenna said,
“Well you walk like you did sex.”

My favorite of all the hussies, though, is Tracy. She’s the prettiest girl
in school, by far. Everything about her face and hair is as gorgeous as
sequins. She won the Miss Preteen New York pageant last year, and I think
about that a lot: what it must be like to stand on a stage with a big
bouquet and tiara, and be told you’re the most beautiful girl in the state.
This year Tracy started being sort of goth and got a boyfriend in eleventh
grade. He’s always zooming her off from school in a mean-looking Acura that
drags low in the back.

Tracy and Bart are together all the time—I think she’s his favorite hussy,
and his best friend—though he would never say that to the others. She’s
nicer than the other hussies, so Bart lets me join them once in a while.
Sometimes I think she maybe even likes me a little—mostly as a project,
though. She wants to go to beauty school someday and she practices on me.
Once when the three of us were hanging out at his house, they decided to
give me a makeover. Tracy put a ton of black eyeliner on me. She said the
most important part of the eye for eyeliner is the inside rim, and as she
said it, she breathed hotly on the pencil tip with her cinnamon breath to
soften it. Then she jabbed it really hard in there: that soft ledge of the
bottom lid that’s the color of raw chicken breast. It hurt more than I let
on. Then she did dark purple lipstick—I kept expecting it to taste like
grape, like a Bonne Bell would, but it was more like gasoline. She put it
on herself after that, and then Bart did too. We all looked in his mom’s
vanity mirror, and Bart held our three heads together with his hands, and
we made kissy faces. I remember how being there, in that triangle, felt
like making a witch’s pact, wicked and secret—in the woods, somehow, a cold
wind whistling through us.

*

One Friday in February there’s a snow day, and I get to go to Bart’s house
for the whole day. We watch a lot of TV, and there keeps being all this
stuff about JonBenét Ramsey. Montages of her photos, and video clips in
slow motion of her baby beauty acts on stage.

It’s weird to see JonBenét all the time. It’s been a long time since she
was killed, but she’s still everywhere. She’s on all the news shows, even
the Peter Jennings news, and on half the magazines at the grocery checkout.
She’s always staring at you from the middle of a cloud of curls, or wearing
a corny hat and winking at you. A lot of times she has this look in her
eyes that bothers me a lot, like she knew that all of this was gonna
happen. Not just the murder, but the way everyone is acting about it. Like
she knew that her whole life was leading up to this—all those times she had
to walk across the stage like a game show hostess or do a rodeo dance. It’s
like she was trying out for a starring role as the most famous little girl
in the universe.

I hate having these thoughts when I hear about JonBenét, so when they start
talking about her on Hard Copy, about how maybe the brother did
it, I change the channel to MTV. Singled Out is on, which I kind
of hate because of Jenny McCarthy’s huge boobs, but it’s Bart’s favorite
show, so I leave it on.

We have pizza for dinner. I’m surprised when Bart invites me to sleep over at his house. At first my mom won’t let me because it’s
“sleeping over at a boy’s house,” but then I convince her it’s not the same
thing—that other girls do it all the time—and I tell her to talk to
Francine, his mom.

“Oh Cathy, don’t think twice about it,” says Francine, chuckling. “I’ll
make sure there’s no funny business.” My mom says it’s OK.

I lie in a sleeping bag on the floor of his bedroom and stare up at the
ceiling at his glow-in-the-dark stars. He has a big canopy bed, and, behind
it, a photo mural of the skyline of New York City. He seems like a small
king up there, but he whispers to me in the dark, in the gentle, searching
tones of a cartoon mouse.

“When I grow up I’m gonna be an anesthesiologist,” he says. “I’m gonna make
a lot of money, and I’m gonna buy a big penthouse in Trump Tower.”

“I wanna live in New York City too,” I say. “But I want a loft in
Greenwich Village.”

“We have to go clubbing together!” he says. “We’ll be club kids. We’ll take
taxis. We’ll go to the Limelight.”

As we’re both getting sleepy, he says, “Sometimes I remember that Carly is
gonna die someday.” Carly is their white toy poodle. He clutches the one
stuffed animal he still keeps—a blue teddy bear. “It scares me so much. My
Nonna died last year, I still pray for her every day. I used to tell ghost
stories at sleepovers, but I don’t anymore, because what if she’s a ghost?”

We lay there quietly for a minute. I can feel night in the suburbs all
around us. The telephone cables in a resting hum, the parking lot empty at
the shopping center, my parents asleep a few blocks away. The cemetery next
to the hospital, where Bart told me you have to hold your breath as you
pass by, or you’ll die within the next seven years.

“Katie, will you please come up and sleep in my bed?” he asks.

It takes me a minute to make sure he’s being serious, but then I say OK. I
climb up there and get under his blankets, into his teal colored sheets,
which smell like his cologne.

“I’m so tired,” he says, and turns over on his side, but not before taking
my hand, lacing his fingers through mine, and placing them, the warm wad of
them, on his shoulder.

*

In March, the week before spring break, something happens between Bart and
me. We are in Kirchner’s class, learning about the layers of the earth’s
crust, when Bart hands me a drawing of JonBenét—naked, except for a tiara
and beauty queen sash. She is hung upside down from a Christmas tree with
X’s in her eyes, and her tongue dangling limply from her mouth. There’s a
line to show the slit in the triangle between her legs. A bandit is in the
drawing too—a mask like the Hamburglar, and a slick Musketeer grin on his
face. His penis points outward from his pants, looking huge and
cartoon-like, with the jagged triangles of an explosion shooting out from
it. Bart passes it over to me, snickering in his crazy way—his whole body
convulsing along with it.

When I see it, I tighten, the way it feels when you’re getting your hair
brushed and it catches on a snag. I think of JonBenét’s face on the TV
news. The face of a collectible doll. Everything purple and blonde.
Everything still, like the Virgin Mary cards they give you at a wake. The
way you can picture her sparkles off-screen—dresses with crinoline stuffed
into her closet on kid-sized hangers, and how you wonder who she would have
been if she’d gotten older.

Everything about sex comes together for me for a minute: having to draw the
bull’s head of a uterus and ovaries for health class. Madonna in black
leather in the “Human Nature” video; all those men grabbing at her crotch.
The age girl children reach when their nipples can’t show at the beach
anymore. The music on Unsolved Mysteries—its sinister beat. The
kit they use when there’s a rape. How I don’t know what a kit is. JonBenét
is in heaven. Children always go to heaven unless they haven’t been
baptized. I wasn’t baptized because my dad wouldn’t let my grandma do it.
Guilt swirls around me like a cold river until I am washed away by it,
tumbling numbly on its currents. Just draw a picture, I say to
myself.

I send a drawing back to Bart—the only thing I can think of—JonBenét in a
princess ball gown with angel wings. The X’s for eyes again, and hash mark
bruises of blue erasable pen all around her neck. It calms me a little to
draw the ball gown, something I’ve practiced at my whole life. I fold the
drawing in on itself: a fortune cookie of paper. I pass it to Bart and he
opens it with delight. His laugh hisses out of him again.

*

At night at home I watch reruns and eat my mom’s lasagna and tell my
parents how my day was. I don’t say anything about the drawing, even though
I kind of want to. Just to get it off me, the thought of it, like when I
was little and I’d run into their room after a nightmare. The only way I
could shake the fear was to tell them everything that had happened in the
dream: the snake or the witch or the wolf with teeth of flames.

Instead I tell them that we are reading Little Women in English
class. I don’t tell them that I love it so much that it embarrasses me,
though I can’t explain why. How I think about Beth dying and Claire Danes
being Beth dying in the movie and how Meg has to wear a muslin ball gown to
the dance instead of a silk one. How the whole story feels really nearby,
like a place I could go if I just walked back through a field of snow.

My mom has been on me for weeks to go down to the basement and sort through
all my old stuff—toys and books and notebooks from school, rolled up
posters and YM magazines, so I take a stab at it. I’m not very
good at getting rid of anything. It all smells like the way my room used to
smell, like Barbie hair and Tinkerbell perfume. When I move boxes out from
under the stairs I hear a small concert of sounds: baby toys that have
bells in them; trucks that make a clackety sound; dolls that have voices
when you crick their arms. It sounds too happy and it sounds too sad. Two
dolls are shoved together stomach-to-stomach in a weird way, and I think of
this time Tracy explained to me what sixty-nine is. “It’s amazing,” she
told me, as she straddled this ledge near the baseball field. “You have to
try it.”

I throw away a Kool-Aid telephone and some second grade paperbacks and make
a big show of it to my mom, and she’s satisfied.

*

The next day, Bart starts ignoring me, in a very obvious way. I’m not
really sure why, but it’s happened before, and so I know it means I’m
banished back to Chrissy and Sarabeth. It stings, but I’m resigned to it.
Like getting pegged in dodgeball as soon as the whistle blows, and taking
your usual stroll to the bench.

It’s not that bad though—seeing those girls once in a while. The thing
about it is that sometimes I miss them: how we used to ice skate and bake
cakes, and admit things to each other and know they would stay secret. It’s
just that most of the time I’m too busy obsessing about Bart and the
hussies to remember that—trying to understand how they all know what to do.
The glitter-glue outline of danger around them, and how I want all of it,
and how I’m ready for it.

*

The next week is spring break, and Bart still isn’t talking to me. I go to
Washington, DC with my family. Flowers are already starting to bloom there.
We see the Star Spangled Banner flag at the Smithsonian, big as a gym in
its tatters and soft colors. We go to the National Air and Space Museum and
watch an IMAX movie where an astronaut gets detached from his spaceship and
starts floating out into space. He gets saved in the end, but I think about
it the whole trip—how if he’d kept floating he would have either frozen to
death, or all the oxygen would have run out in his spacesuit.

*

We get back from break a week later, and Bart still won’t talk to me.
Sometimes I see him whispering something to a hussy when I walk by, and I
can’t help but think it’s about me. I think back on every loserish thing I
might have done—about some outfit I might have worn, or how my backpack is
from K-Mart. I think of how stupid I looked when I was growing out my
bangs, even though I did it because Tracy told me I should. I wonder if
maybe Jenna said something—I’m pretty sure she hates me, or at least she’s
embarrassed when I hang around. Once she asked me if I was queer because of
these blue sneakers I was wearing, and I never wore them again after that.

Bart starts sitting in a different seat in Kirchner’s class, even though
it’s next to this girl Bethany who he calls ‘Tub O’Lard.’ He and I have
never been in a real fight, so it feels like this whole new kind of lonely.

I start trying to adjust to the fact that I’ve lost the one cool thing
about me. It’s not at all surprising, really, but I feel like I’m floating
in the cold and dark now, just like that astronaut from the IMAX. The only
time I come back to earth for a minute is when a teacher calls on me and I
have no idea what’s going on. Or when I’m twisting my hair and find
somebody’s spitball in it, and a bunch of boys start cackling in the back
of the room. To try to forget about all of it, I do this thing where I
count down the years until I go to college, until I never have to see any
of them ever again. Eighth grade, ninth grade, tenth grade, eleventh grade,
twelfth grade. I can’t decide if it feels like tomorrow, or infinity.

*

One day, Bart drops a note on my desk at the end of Kirchner’s class. He
does it in a very somber way, and I think, “This is it. This is where our
friendship really ends.” It says:

Dear Katie,

I’ve been thinking about the things we did and what we drew about lil
JonBenét. I saw a

20/20

special about her and I realize now that she is an angel. She was a
beautiful child and it’s really the saddest thing what happened to her.
It’s a tragedy. I keep thinking that if my mom knew about what we drew,
how mad she would be. Because she is always saying what if it was me
who got murdered? I know that is the first thing she thinks about when
she hears about JonBenét. And so you can never tell my mom


or ANYONE and we can NEVER do that again. If we do we might burn in
hell. I’ve been praying to God for forgiveness, maybe you should too.

From, Bart

His words open up a small doorway of guilt in me; a door I’d shut. I have a
lot of practice now, shutting that door. I do it automatically, the same
way you always walk to the same seat in class, even though nobody told you
that you had to. I think of those cartoon lines of JonBenét on the loose
leaf, etched deep, in waxy ink. How that girl is dead and never coming
back. I think of the way Bart must feel about JonBenét. That it’s like the
way he used to stroke my doll’s hair when we were little, with more care
than I did, knowing he could only do it on borrowed minutes. As I finish
reading it, the bell rings for next class. Bart hustles out and doesn’t
look at me.

*

I spend the next class not listening to a thing about the men who signed
the Declaration of Independence while I try to think of something to write
back. Eventually I get something out:

Dear Bart,

You’re so right and I feel really bad too. I’ve felt so bad ever since
we did it. It’s so childish, and I wish it had never happened. We can’t
be evil like that ever again.

I debate about writing the next thing for the whole rest of class. Because
it feels like kind of a dweeby thing to say, and that’s the last thing I
should be right now. That’s the thing I’m worst at—knowing what to say that
isn’t something a loser or poser says. I’m always checking each word before
it comes out of my mouth to make sure it’s not completely embarrassing.

Anyway, I decide it’s something I want to say—that I’m very sick of not
saying it, so I do:

I miss you though. You’re my favorite person. Do you miss me?

From,
Katie

I stick the note in Bart’s locker. I don’t know if he’ll see it. It feels a
lot like the time Sarabeth forced me to put an “I like you, do you like me?
Circle yes/no” note into Anthony Lopez’s locker, and nothing happened,
until three days later his gross friend, Michael Camarra, handed it back to
me, in front of everyone. The word “no” was circled about a zillion times
in brown marker, and there was a wad of gum stuck in the middle.

*

The next day I am sitting with Chrissy and Sarabeth in the cafeteria.
Chrissy keeps bragging about the Stars on Ice show she saw that weekend.
Sarabeth nods attentively, slowly eating the sections of an orange, but I
barely bother to listen—the hussies are in the corner of the cafeteria, a
crowd gathered around them to watch them dance to the Puffy and Mase song.
Nikki is the only hussy not dancing, and she sits on Bart’s lap while they
both look on at the other hussies with pride.

They move with the bounce and coordination of a double Dutch team. Tracy
dances so well and looks so pretty, nobody would doubt for a second if you
told them she was going to be the world’s next Mariah Carey. I start
missing her too, along with missing Bart. But mostly I look on all of it
perplexed, every part of it so far outside what I can ever imagine
achieving that I don’t even feel jealous. Sarabeth looks over at them too.
She rolls her eyes and cleans the orange peels up primly. “They are so
conceited,” she says. I nod a little in agreement, but I do kind of mean
it.

*

That afternoon, I am walking home alone, when Bart’s minivan pulls up
beside me on King Street. I don’t know—I’ll probably never know—if his mom
made him do it, or if he decided on his own, but he opens the van’s door
for me to get in. Bart and Francine both have sunglasses on, and they flash
me big smiles. Bart swings his short legs forward and back and says
“Heeeeeyyy husseh” like nothing ever happened. I get into the van looking
up at him like I’m getting into a lifeboat or something, but his expression
doesn’t change.

We go to his house then do something we’ve never done before, which is go
for a walk. It’s a warm day, and the sun is melting a bunch of snow that
has built up. He has a cigarette that he stole from his mom, and at first
he makes it seem like we’re going to smoke it. I probably would, if he’d
made me, but instead we keep walking. Easter is coming and he wants to go
to the pharmacy. He wants to buy one of those kits to dye eggs.