CRACKED UP TO BE*
*(COURTNEY’S VERSION)
Imagine four years.
Four years, two suicides, one death, three rapes, two pregnancies (one abortion), three overdoses, countless drunken fuck-ups, active shooter drills (one active shooter), spilled food, theft, fights, broken limbs, turf wars—every day, a turf war—six months until graduation and no one gets a medal when they get out.
But everything you do here counts.
High school.
“Seriously, Jules. Just feel around in there. Tell me if you have one.”
“Fuck off, Chris.”
“Then tell me where it is. The exact location.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“Hey, Parker!” He reaches out and grabs me by the shoulder, ropes an arm around me, stage-whispers in my ear. “I don’t think Jules knows. And I think that’s very fucking sad. What about you? Do you know? You’re my last hope.”
I shrug, shrug, shrug him off.
“Do I know what?”
“G-spots. Their exact location.”
“No thanks to you.”
“Ouch. How about a redemption round?”
“Pass. Try Cosmo, December ’94. The sex issue. Came with a map and everything.”
“That’s incredibly specific. You bullshitting me?”
“Found it in your mom’s bedroom. Unforgettable night.”
He grins. “Welcome back, baby. You look good today.”
“That’s so sweet, Chris. You bullshitting me?”
“I respect you too much to do that.”
I look like shit today for a variety of reasons, but let’s start with the muddy running shoes on my feet. Running shoes: expressly forbidden to wear with the school uniform but hell if I know where my docs disappeared to between now and yesterday. Kilt and polo shirt: enlisted from the bottom of the growing mountain of dirty clothes on my bedroom floor. I guess I could’ve brushed my hair if I’d wanted to forego the bus ride to walk all ten miles to school but supposedly if I miss any more classes, I won’t graduate.
“Shoes, Fadley!” Principal Henley. “Kilt. Polo.”
“Shoes, kilt, polo.” I point to each. “What do I win?”
“A uniform infraction. You really want to start the week like this?”
“I would actually really like to start the week with some positive reinforcement,” I tell her, prayer-hands up. “What have you got for me?”
“You’re due at the guidance office in five minutes.”
“Fantastic.”
“Brush your hair.”
“You got it.”
I flash a smile. A flash of something across her face that’s not a smile. I turn, elbowing my way through a mass of people to get to my locker because there’s something immensely satisfying about the toughest part of my arm connecting with the softest part of everyone else.
“—I just bluffed my way through it. Hey, Parker?”
Becky Halprin. Cheerleading captain. Cheerleading captain Becky Halprin. Becky Halprin, captain of the cheerleading squad. Her gaze wanders over my whole situation while I contemplate the long, lean muscle she’s turning into and how tired it makes me.
“You get that essay finished for Lerner?” she asks.
Fuck. “Yeah.” I open my locker.
“You didn’t.”
“Why do you care?”
“Aren’t you like, three strikes and out?”
“Did you know if you were like twenty percent less obsessed with me, Becky, the squad wouldn’t be such a fucking disaster.”
“Bet you fifty bucks you’re fucked.”
“You serious? I can do a lot with fifty bucks.”
She laughs and heads wherever she’s heading. Not practice. Too early. Lerner’s essay. Fuck. I have a vague memory of that assignment nestled in the pile of assigned shit I was supposed to do over the last three weeks. The bell rings. Guidance office. Fuck. I grab my brush and race against the bodies headed toward homerooms and make it to Grey’s office while the bell’s still ringing. Plastered to the wall next to her door is a poster with Jessie Wellington’s beautiful face radiating out from its center.
I stop.
I reach my hand out.
“Parker?”
I sit across from Grey in her office, brushing my hair the whole time, and she’s looking so disappointed about it, like this is something I’m doing at her and not to myself, but the thing is, I can’t stop. Sorry, I can’t stop, I want to say, but I don’t.
I don’t think I’m actually sorry about it, either.
“Why haven’t you taken the posters down?” I ask.
“Why would we?”
“Because.”
“Parker.”
“So anyway.”
I set the brush on her desk and stare at all those fine brown strands, torn free. Well-adjusted people are not assigned Grey’s office. No one emerges from Grey’s office well-adjusted. She looks like a bird, a dead-eyed sparrow, and the most she can do, and knows she can do, is ensure the school is not ultimately culpable for whatever slit-wrist ending is on the other side of her door.
“No cutting,” she says. “No missed days, unless your parents have called in for you. Off-campus lunch privileges are suspended—”
“I know.”
“Faculty’s reporting directly to me and Principal Henley. We expect you in class on time. We want to see you engaged with your peers and with your work. We want you handing that work in when you’re meant to. Friday, you’ll meet with me and we’ll go over your week, make sure everything’s as it should be, and if it’s not, we’ll strategize until it is. Always remember we’re here to support you.”
“I need some support.”
“Really.”
“I think I deserve a grace period.”
“What?”
“I just think it’s kind of unfair to expect me to be so on it, you know? It’s just a lot of pressure. Why pressure, and not grace?”
She leans across the desk, her dead eyes showing a rare sign of life. It freaks me out so much I have to look away.
“This is your grace period, Parker.”
Homeroom.
Mr. Bradley makes a point to glare at me when he marks down my attendance and I feel very supported. I pause at Chris’s desk and tap my fingers along it until he looks up from the math homework he’s scrambling to finish.
“What?”
“Becky knows where it is.”
He laughs. “Becky? You talkin’ to her now?”
“About G-spots. At length. She’s an expert.”
“Okay. Send her up.”
“You kidding? I don’t talk to Becky.”
“But you just said—”
“Jesus Christ, Chris. Those legs are wide open.”
He considers it, considers math, shrugs, and exits stage right. I slide into the seat next to his and reach down into the front pocket of his bookbag. Find his phone. Unlock it easy because his pin is still, of course, his dog’s birthday. I scroll through his contacts until I find the one I’m looking for. I have to hurry. I can sense the energy behind me shifting, Chris and Becky winding it up. But it wasn’t meant to last longer than it takes me to thumb out
die guilty, you piece of shit.
Send. I shove it back in his bag, and then he’s beside me and I’m up again.
“Parker,” Chris warns. “What,” I say as I head to the middle row, where Becky’s alternately painting her nails and the cover of her binder with sparkly red polish. A nail here, a red heart there. I slide in the seat next to hers and jerk my chin in Chris’s direction. We study the back of his head. Chris is popular because I don’t fuck losers, but neither of these things mean much to me now. It’s Becky who’s seeing him the way he wants it seen and it’s all so boring from here. Let’s just say height covers a multitude of sins and money covers more.
“He’s such an asshole.”
“That’s like, your entire dating history.”
“He asked me out. Friday. I mean, like. A group thing.”
I pretend the shock of it is such it causes a minor loss of motor control. My hand jerks across the desk, hitting the nail polish bottle which somersaults off the edge of it and onto the floor. Red everywhere. “Goddammit, Parker.” Then she’s up. She crosses the room to get some paper towels and I flip open her binder and find her essay for Lerner’s class, an analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper, which I had no idea we read but am resigned to the fact I can’t bullshit my way through as effortlessly Becky probably has. Since I’m confident she can do it just as effortlessly again, I rip its pages from her binder, fold it in half, and tuck it neatly into the waistband of my kilt, concealing it with my polo shirt. The sad thing is, she won’t even notice it’s missing until Lerner’s class, and she’ll have been so consumed by the prospect of Chris, of Friday, it won’t ever once occur to her I took it.
“Gonna go?” I ask.
She crouches, trying and failing to sop up the sticky polish with a dry paper towel.
She glances at Chris, who glances back at us—me.
“Are you messing with me?” she finally asks.
“No.” But he is. “You should go.”
“Really? Because it’s weird that you’re saying that.”
“Maybe,” I say. “But you should still go.” She looks skeptical. “Fuck him, Becky. I don’t care. But I hope you have that fifty on you because I’ll need it for after school.”
I copy her essay between classes, my own binder stretched across the sink in the girls’ room, exerting myself with a little creative rewriting so it sounds authentically me. The bell rings while I’m giving her closing statement a little more narrative panache, and when I emerge, the halls are filtering out. That’s when I spot the new kid. He’s doing that confused stumble that makes it painfully obvious he has no idea where he is and I bet his parents are real assholes, to make him transfer in the middle of the year.
“Hey,” he calls at my back. “Can you help me?”
“I’m late.”
“I just need to know where Mr. Norton’s class is.”
I stop.
“I have no time.”
“You’re just standing there,” he finally says.
“Yeah.”
“Seriously?”
“Looks like.”
“Okay, well. Thanks a lot.”
“You’re so welcome.”
“They all like you around here?”
I wave over my shoulder and resume the walk to my next class. Art with Mr. Norton, who gives me a long, assessing look before directing me to my seat, which is next to Chris’s because Norton believes in the alphabetical order. Ellory and Fadley. I watch him scribble something down, and I know that’s going to come up on Friday, what self-destructive behaviour I might’ve engaged in for the five minutes I wasn’t in class.
“You’re late,” Chris mutters. “Where were you?”
“If I told you, I’d only disappoint you.”
“Not funny.”
Norton talks us through a brief history in automatism, which is about letting go and letting God or whatever, and then he hands out some paper and charcoal and tells us to get to work doing both. I frown at the white space, pressing the charcoal pencil to it, trying to relax from the shoulders down. I press a line across the page, but I feel the intention guiding me from one edge of it to another, which is not what I’m supposed to do.
Let go, I think, and my grip tightens.
“There was a new kid,” I say, after a while. Chris tackles his page like it’s interpretive dance. “He asked me directions.”
“Why’d you sic Becky on me?” he asks.
“Because when you’re horny it’s everyone’s problem.”
“That’s not it. But we’re going out. Friday night.”
“She said it was a group thing.”
“First half. What do you think?”
“I think your names sound stupid together.”
“What?”
“Chris and Becky. Becky and Chris. It has no flow.”
“Yeah, well, you broke up with me.”
“I know. I was there. Chris . . . Becky . . . Becky. Chris. Becky, Chris—Rebecca, Christopher?”
“Are you drunk?”
“I fucking wish.”
Enter new kid. The door flies open and everyone quiets at the scent of fresh meat. He’s flushed and out of breath like he ran all the way here, which tells me he got real turned around after he talked to me. Norton harumphs.
“Better late than never. Gardner?”
“Yessir. I got lost.”
“Late slip?”
“I barely found my way here.”
“Take a seat, help yourself to some charcoal and paper and Ellory will explain the assignment. I expect you to be on time tomorrow.”
“That’s not the guy you gave directions to, is it?” Chris asks.
“I didn’t say I gave him directions, I said he asked me for them.”
Gardner slinks over to the table next to ours, his eyes widening when he notices me.
“You’re in this class?”
“Hi!”
Chris reaches past me, extending his hand and they shake. “I’m Chris Ellory. Welcome to St. Peter’s.” Gardner looks relieved they’re not all like me around here. He says his name is Jake. “It’s nice to meet—” his eyes flicker from me to Chris. “You.”
Jake and Chris talk through art and there’s an easy connection there, a light crackle of electricity between them that gives me no choice but to imagine them kissing and my automatic drawing suddenly takes on the vague contours of two mouths and at the end of the period, Norton surveys our work and he gives me this look like he knows. The bell goes off. The bell goes off too much. We shuffle out of the room and Chris asks Jake if he wants to hit the fast-food strip for lunch and Jake says hell yeah he does, then Chris turns to me and says, “What about you, Parker?” He covers his mouth in mock horror. “Oops! Forgot you’re not allowed off grounds for lunch anymore.”
I want to bite him.
There are five posters of Jessie hanging in the school. One in the chapel. One next to the guidance office. One by the gym. One in the library. One across from the nurse’s office. I have to touch them all. One across from the nurse’s office. One in the library. One by the gym. One next to the guidance office. Chapel. Guidance office. Gym. Library. Nurse’s office.
I have to touch them all.
“Parker?”
I’m outside the nurse’s office snapping my fingers against the sick, prickling crawl across my chest.
Snap.
“Parker? Do you need something?”
Snap.
“Parker, are you all right?”
Snap.
I’m not right. I have to go again but I don’t think there’s time.
Snap.
I look from the poster to Mr. Munro.
Snap.
“I’m fine,” I say.
The bell rings and I get caught up in the current. Bodies everywhere.
Last period. English. Becky is freaking out and flipping through her binder while Lerner looks on and I don’t know what she’s so worried about. Lerner likes Becky. She’s golden. He’s even telling her, “No worries, Halprin, just get it to me by the end of the week,” and she’s going, “But I did the essay! I had it right here.”
“Friday,” he says. “I know you’re good for it.”
Becky looks like she’s going to cry. Lerner moves to me.
“I don’t even have to ask, do I?”
Lerner likes me too. Not as much as he used to. I like Lerner because he’s been teaching so long, he knew to readjust his expectations of me the first time I miscalculated how many shots of vodka you could down without going to class completely wasted.
“I think you should,” I tell him.
“Well, I’m afraid to now.”
Oh, Becky hates this. She hates it, hates me, hates everything about the day she is now having. When I hand the essay to Lerner, he stares at it a long time, unable to articulate what he might suspect is wrong before giving me the win, tucking it away with the other papers he’s collected. Becky rounds on me.
“When the fuck did you do that essay?”
I hold out my hand. “Fifty dollars, please.”
“I was joking, Parker. It was a fucking joke.”
But I won’t let it be a joke, so when the last bell finally, mercifully rings, I’m a half-step behind her down the hall, yelling, “Becky! Becky! Hey, Becky! Becky Halprin!” until she stops. At one end of the hall, her squad. My former squad. At the other end, me. She thinks about it for a minute, sighs, and heads in my direction. It’s weak, I want to tell her. What will they think of you now, capitulating to a past captain fuck-up like me.
“Your date or whatever with Chris,” I say. “Pull his hair a little.”
“What?”
“He likes that.”
“Parker—”
“He’d never say it. Pull his hair a little. I really want this to work out for you. You would make him so happy,” I say and she flushes, not because she believes it, but because she wants to and likes the idea of it. Making Him So Happy.
“Whatever,” she says.
“Becky,” Sandra Morris calls and she turns to Sandra.
“Becky,” I say and she turns back to me. “If you’d won the bet, would it have still been a joke?”
Becky closes her eyes briefly and then digs into her book bag for her wallet, then digs out her stale in-case-of-emergency cash from it and hands it, grudgingly, to me. We always made her spend it, squad sleepovers. Whatever it could pay for, it did. And she’d just give it over like a fucking fool.
“Hope your essay turns up.”
“Thanks.” She pauses. “You know, Jana quit while you were out. We’ve got an alt position open.”
I flip her off. Cunt.
“See you tomorrow.”
“Hey. Hey. Excuse me? Hey.”
I rap my fist against the window of the red sedan that is ever-parked outside of St. Peter’s after last bell for reasons we have all decided are very sinister and incredibly perverted owing to the fact it only seems to linger as long as it takes to absorb the entire stream of girls in kilts and thigh-highs pouring from the the front doors.
“Hey.”
The window rolls down.
“I need a ride,” I say.
“Who the hell are you? I’m not a fucking taxi.”
I show him the bills. “You sure about that?”
After a long moment, he unlocks the doors and I round the car, slipping in the passenger side. I give him the cash and tell him where I live. My gaze travels over the crumpled fast-food and lotto tickets scattered across the dash. The school gets smaller and smaller in the rearview, until I can’t see it at all.
“Your parents ever tell you about taking rides from strangers?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“What’d they say?”
“Maybe I’d get killed.” I look at him. “Unless that costs extra?”
He edges, as much as he can, away from me.