Disgruntled: A Novel Page 10

  “I heard she has a boyfriend in New York,” said Zaineb, her eyes going soft at the prospect. “That’s pretty much the opposite of being a lesbian.”

  “But she totally looks like a guy,” said Lolly.

  “Maybe that doesn’t mean anything,” Kenya said. “People are not how they seem.” Kenya had recently begun making several versions of this statement. It was all she could bring herself to say about Teddy Jaffrey. She had not told anyone about what had possibly not happened the Saturday night after the roller-skating party. The only person she could imagine telling was Zaineb, but Zaineb was not a vault. She was just an eighth-grade girl who sometimes ran out of things to talk about just like anyone else. Kenya could easily hear her saying, “You know Kenya’s mom’s boyfriend?”

  She had not told her mother. She had not put into words why, not even in her journal, where she had written only “Teddy Jaffrey.” Kenya loved her mother and her mother alone. It was a variety of images, scenes from possible outcomes, that kept Kenya silent. She imagined her mother saying an enraged and tearful goodbye to the dazzlingly handsome Teddy, throwing an accusing glance back at Kenya, who’d sent him away. She imagined her mother living out her days as a single woman, enjoying an occasional can of beer, wearing the same clothes year after year, like some of the unmarried teachers at Barrett.

  Yes, it would be Teddy’s fault. But really it would be Kenya’s.

  Then there was the image of her mother, face contorted in pain, clutching her bleeding shoulder, the one in which she’d been shot. Kenya’s fault, too.

  All of this was bad. And there was another scene that sometimes intruded upon her, one where Sheila asked “But did he do anything to you?” and kept asking until Kenya had to say “Wasn’t that enough?” Where would they be then?

  Nor did Kenya mention to her mother that she had been having trouble sleeping. That would mean explaining that she was trying to stay awake just in case Teddy Jaffrey came into her room again. She negotiated a later bedtime, which sometimes meant that she stayed downstairs after Teddy Jaffrey and her mother had retired. She went up dutifully at 10:30, but instead of sleeping she lay in bed imagining a conversation where she asked Sheila for a lock on her door. In the imagined conversation, her mother would frown slightly and ask, Why? To which Kenya would say, You know I’m getting older, just for privacy, and her mother would ask, Why? Why do you need a lock on your door? Then, instead of telling her why, Kenya would start the reel in her head from the beginning. Mom, can I please have a lock on my door?

  * * *

  It was not clear whether the popular girls tired of Devi Warren or she tired of them. In any case, after winter break, Kenya encountered Devi in what was traditionally her seat with the other girls at lunch. Kenya usually sat next to Zaineb and across from Lolly and Phyllis at one of the long tables at the edge of the room. Now she had to sit on the fringes of the group, the last in an ungainly row of three. Across from her was Dorrie Futter. Kenya thought that Devi would quickly move on to another, more interesting group of girls so she could reclaim her seat. But she came and plopped herself down day after day for a week. The other girls listened to her talk about her life back in New York with rapt attention. Kenya thought she was, as they used to say when she was growing up, “on herself.”

  Zaineb had an unusually alert expression on her face as she listened to Devi complain about the Upper East Side, which she’d hated, as it was full of snobby old ladies and little dogs. Her best friend in the neighborhood was a bum named Artie, to whom she used to give part of her lunch money. She had gone to a school called Dalton, which was, she said, a “rich skank pit.”

  “We moved just in time. They were about to kick me out—just because I didn’t fit in with those moronic rich sluts.”

  Kenya tried to catch someone’s eye—Zaineb’s—because, again, wasn’t this someone rich pretending otherwise? But of course she had never discussed this issue frankly with Zaineb, whose family was rumored to own several luxury hotels in Europe, though she always said her father sold rugs. Besides, she knew the look on Zaineb’s face as she listened to Devi. It was hunger.

  “Did you ever go to, like, Greenwich Village?” said Zaineb, trying to put a shrug in her voice. Kenya thought that if Zaineb ever succeeded in getting Devi into her house, she’d first have to take down all of her New York posters, including the map of Greenwich Village.

  “It’s Gre-nich, silly,” Devi said. “Yeah, I was actually born in the Village. We lived there until I was five. It’s cool. That’s where all the gay boys are.”

  “Don’t a lot of them have AIDS?” asked Phyllis.

  Lolly hit Phyllis. “God, Phyllis! Shut up!”

  Phyllis’s eyes glistened briefly as she caressed her injured shoulder. “God, Lolly!”

  Devi pushed her hair back. “I guess a few of them do. It’s actually really sad.”

  “Not all gay people have AIDS, Phyllis,” said Zaineb.

  Kenya thought of Teddy Jaffrey and her mother watching a news special about the disease. Teddy Jaffrey had declared that it wasn’t just prejudice anymore; he could now decline to shake a faggot’s hand for health reasons. “Don’t say faggot in front of my daughter, Teddy,” Sheila snapped, standing abruptly from the couch and walking into the kitchen. “I was just kidding,” Teddy muttered to no one. Finally he, too, went into the kitchen and Kenya held her breath, waiting with excitement for her mother to deliver him a tongue-lashing. Instead there was a long silence followed by giggling.

  Looking at Devi, Kenya asked, “Why didn’t you fit in at your school?”

  “A lot of reasons,” Devi said.

  “Like what?” Kenya said.

  “I don’t know, Kenya,” the girl said in a nasty voice, “why don’t you fit in at yours?”

  Later Kenya would think that what happened next was very weird. She had never in her life so much as hit anyone, and of all of the cheek-burning, stomach-sinking things people had said to her at Barrett, this was hardly the worst. Yet, barely missing a beat, Kenya got up, went around the end of the long table, and tried to pull Devi out of her chair by her raggedy collar.

  “What the fuck?” Devi screamed. The startled expression on her face gave Kenya a lightning thrill. Then the girls were hitting each other amid squeals of “Oh my God” and “They are totally fighting.” It drifted through Kenya’s mind that there had never been a fight at Barrett in the whole time she’d been there. Then Mademoiselle Lambert (Lom-behr, Kenya knew to pronounce it, after nearly four years at Barrett), the tiny but powerful French teacher, who also taught dance, had each of them by the ear.

  “Are you the crazy?” she asked. “We go to Matron Wells’s office. Now!”

  In the waiting room outside of the office, Kenya heard loud breathing that she eventually realized was her own. Am I here? she wondered.

  “What did you mean by that?” she said to Devi. “How do you know whether I fit in here or not? You just got here.”

  Devi sighed for a long time. “Duh, Kenya. Hello? I’m part black.”

  “No you’re not,” Kenya said.

  Devi laughed. “Are you ‘the crazy’? Why would I lie about that?”

  “I’ve seen your parents. Are they somehow black, too?”

  “Ever heard of adoption?”

  Kenya twisted her mouth to the side in a way she’d seen her mother do when in doubt.

  Devi folded her arms. “Fine, don’t believe me. I don’t give a fuck,” she said, hitting fuck just as the matron’s door was opening. She regarded Devi and Kenya and cleared her throat. “Mrs. Appleton,” she said to her smirking secretary, who sat in the outer room, “can you get Mrs. Warren’s and Mrs. Price’s telephone numbers?”

  “So tell me what this is about,” the matron said when the girls were seated in the two hard chairs in front of her desk.

  Kenya’s bottom lip trembled at her proximity to the displeased matron, a tall woman who might have been a stern female John F. Kennedy. There was no point in
trying to defend herself. She had tried to dump the new rich transfer student out of a chair and beat her up.

  “I started it,” said Devi before Kenya could speak.

  “Yes?” asked the matron.

  “Kenya said something kind of mean about my old school. But it wasn’t her fault—she just said—well, implied that maybe it wasn’t as good as Barrett.”

  “Kenya, why would you speak that way?”

  Devi spoke again hurriedly. “Well, it isn’t, Matron. It isn’t as good.”

  “But Dalton is a fine school. Excellent, in fact. Kenya, I have not heard you speak yet.”

  Kenya had been stunned into silence. The new girl was lying for her. She looked over at Devi again. Her nose definitely looked broader and her blonde-streaked hair curlier. Kenya wondered if everyone else at Barrett knew that she was black. White people were extremely bad about this sort of thing. That slut Cindalou had told a story about working in a meat plant where the white women she sat near had felt free to say all kinds of nigger-this and nigger-that because she was, as she put it, “a little yellow.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kenya said. “I shouldn’t have said … what I said.”

  “You’ll find,” the matron said, “that you build nothing up by tearing others down.”

  Kenya felt Devi trying not to laugh.

  For a few weeks after that, Devi and Kenya circled each other. Devi continued to sit at their table, but she now recognized Kenya’s seat and moved down one, taking Dorrie Futter’s seat, displacing her to an empty table by the window. Kenya continued to study the new girl for signs of blackness. Some days she thought she saw them. She realized she finally believed her when she found herself wondering at the fact that she, Lolly, and Devi all belonged to the same anything at all. Race, she thought, race race race, until the word became strange.

  * * *

  “Sometimes I just wonder, would it be so bad to be dead?” asked Devi.

  It was a chilly spring morning and girls were running the perimeter of the middle school athletic field in their gray gym kilts, their knees goose bumped.

  Kenya was intrigued. “So instead of waking up and getting on the school bus, just waking up, like, dead?”

  “But you’ll go to hell if you kill yourself,” said Lolly.

  Devi clarified. “I didn’t say anything about killing myself. I just wonder what it would be like to be dead.”

  “It wouldn’t be like anything. You’d be dead,” said Zaineb.

  “It would probably be better than gym,” said Kenya.

  “You guys are so maccabee,” said Phyllis.

  “I don’t think that’s how you say that,” said Zaineb. “In fact I’m sure it’s not.”

  Kenya remembered the failed suicide with the mangled face and his motivational speeches. She told Devi, who thought it was terrifically funny. “Don’t miss,” she repeated gleefully. Zaineb tried to laugh. Lolly and Phyllis ran ahead, giving each other a look.

  “How would you do it?” Kenya asked Devi at lunch.

  “I said I wouldn’t.”

  “I know, but if you did.”

  “Well, I saw a movie once where a guy ran a really hot bath and then slit his wrists. I could totally take a hot bath even while my parents were home and no one would notice until—oops!”

  Kenya found herself laughing. “But you’d have to cut your own arm a bunch of times. What about poison? That seems much easier to me.”

  “That shit—I mean crap,” Devi said, scanning the room for Mademoiselle Lambert or some other enforcer, “totally burns up your insides. And who knows how long it would take you to die? It could be hours.”

  “You guys are talking about this again?” said Zaineb, who had stopped genuflecting before Devi and her life in New York. (“I just think,” she had said to Kenya in Algebra, when Devi was not around, “that she’s, like, disturbed.”

  (“Like Damien in The Omen?” Kenya asked. Zaineb had once confided in her that The Omen had given her nightmares for weeks.

  (“Yes, Kenya, just like Damien in The Omen. Don’t be an A-hole, okay?”)

  Kenya knew Zaineb was jealous. She and Devi were getting closer every day. They had even talked about the fight—Devi had admitted to being bitchy because of missing her boyfriend, who was friends with the guy who managed Run-DMC.

  Devi had also confided in Kenya that while she could stand Zaineb better than Lolly and Phyllis, she was a little “tightly wound.” Kenya found Zaineb, despite her jealousy, calm and reasonable. But she told Devi that she totally agreed.

  * * *

  “Am I going to what?” Kenya asked. It was August; light streamed in through the glass walls of the sun porch at Devi’s house, illuminating Devi’s mother from all angles. Sun dripped off her oddly stiff, long, dark hair; it seemed to shine out of the sharp bones of her neck. She wore a black wrap dress that appeared coated in light. The sun even seemed to stream out her eyes, a bruised purple color that looked like Devi’s. She had asked a question in her strangely high voice, a voice that might be described as sunny.

  Kenya and Devi sat at a glass table nibbling at brownies that tasted strange to Kenya until Devi clarified that they were sugar-free. A black dachshund called Sally paced hopefully underneath the table. Kenya was vaguely worried, having heard somewhere that chocolate was poisonous to dogs.

  “Get married before the rapture?” the woman repeated. Devi sighed. She picked up another brownie but put it down when her mother looked pointedly at it.

  “What is the rapture?” asked Kenya.

  “My goodness,” said Mrs. Warren, in a laughing voice. “I’m sure glad you came here today, Kenya.”

  “Mom,” Devi pleaded.

  “Mom, what? Devi, will you tell this smart, beautiful young lady about the rapture already—you know, before it happens?”

  “Can we talk about this later?” Devi asked. “I think we’re going to go get ready for swimming.”

  Though she didn’t make a sound, Mrs. Warren’s face changed. In Kenya’s memory of this moment later, clouds briefly eclipsed the sun, the porch went dim, and Sally barked. Though the serene, sparkling pool was only on the other side of the glass, it suddenly looked very far away.

  Devi sighed. “The rapture is when Jesus comes back to earth to claim his true followers and take them to Paradise.”

  “And the rest will perish,” Mrs. Warren continued, smiling again. “So you see why it might be important to get married before that.”

  “Oh” was all Kenya could muster.

  Kenya had been all over the Main Line. In her first couple of years she had visited many of the girls’ houses. She had not specifically been invited back to a lot of those homes once everyone’s curiosity was satisfied, but there were always parties. All told, she had done a thorough tour, and she had gradually gotten used to the many things that seemed wrong. At Trinity Howell’s house, she had eaten something that she seriously suspected was a pork chop and pretended to herself that it was chicken. Cynthia Malder’s older brother and sister called each other cunt and dickface. In several of the girls’ basements, where parents never seemed to go, she had watched R-rated movies involving naked teenage girls and once, at Tuff Wieder’s house, part of a porno, which Tuff helped narrate while her cut-buddy, Sharon McCall, giggled. Kenya had helped make prank calls to local boys and, to Sheila’s horror, eaten doughnuts for breakfast. She was often the only one who took a shower the morning after a sleepover. None of that made the floor tilt as much as this.

  Though Johnbrown sneered at Christianity, Sheila had made Kenya understand that being fanatically religious was a reasonable choice for black people who didn’t know any better. (“I don’t buy it,” Sheila had once said about the six churches in a three-block radius back in their old neighborhood, “but I get it.”) Less seemly, but no less predictable, was the rabid Christianity of tacky white people, mostly in the South, generally fat and flushed, who gave money to Tammy Faye Bakker with her mascara-scarred cheeks. But Mrs. W
arren was a thin, stylish, and exceptionally rich white woman in the suburbs of Philadelphia who lived in a house with six bathrooms (and counting). Kenya found the incongruence terrifying.

  “So just consider it,” the woman said. “You know, getting married before all of that goes down. And in the meantime, I may join you both for a dip if that’s okay.”

  “Sure, Mom,” Devi said in a flat voice.

  But up in her room she said, “Maybe we should just climb out of the window and never come back.”

  Kenya glanced at her first actual best friend. By the time that school year had ended, they were speaking on the phone every night and trading Led Zeppelin cassettes back and forth. They sat together whenever they could; during one assembly they gripped each other’s hand, using their nails to keep from collapsing in ugly laughter at the kids from the special school down the road performing a concert. Kenya imagined herself and Devi in an edgier version of the “best friends” McDonald’s commercial.

  Kenya had told Devi things about her life that she hadn’t told anyone else at Barrett. She had broadly sketched out the Seven Days and mentioned during one late-night summer phone call that her parents had never married. But Kenya hadn’t told her everything, which now seemed fortuitous, because, frankly, Devi had left out a lot of important details when it came to her own situation. Here is what Kenya knew: Devi hated her parents—but didn’t everyone at Barrett? She hated her mom more than her dad (but again, didn’t everyone at Barrett?) but was stuck with her a lot while her dad traveled for his job. Her mom used to model in Paris, which was the only cool thing about her. She didn’t even know why her parents had adopted her. Devi had never mentioned that her mother was what Johnbrown had called an Atonist, let alone to such an intense degree. Kenya had been to Devi’s house before, but Mrs. Warren had never been there. This time she was.