37
meg
My ass hurt from sitting on the ground, even on top of the two blankets Laurie bought from a vendor. The ground was hard and the spot we chose to sit down on was more dirt than grass, but I was having a good time. Jo and Laurie had obviously agreed to date each other, and he was everywhere she was. When she was eating truffle fries with a fork, his eyes followed up and down, and when she dropped one, he caught it with a napkin.
I thought maybe his obsession was with the fries, because, girl, were they good. But then he stuck the flake-covered fry between her lips, and she gave him a sheepish grin, and that grin widened as he moved a little closer to her. His legs were so long that they stuck out past hers, and his foot almost touched Beth’s flip-flops. She was lying on her back, staring at the sky. I didn’t want to bother her; I knew the crowd size had to be intimidating to her. She, unlike me, hadn’t been through the madness that was Sephora on a Black Friday near an Army post. I figured that she needed the break.
“Is that Bell Gardiner?” Jo asked, her mouth full of potato chunks.
She grabbed a napkin and wiped her chin and lips. I looked across the grass, scanning the crowd for Bell, and found her after only a few seconds. She was wearing cutoff shorts with rips in them, flip-flops, and a dark orange tank top with a shawl over her shoulders. A shawl, really.
“Go say hi,” Beth teased from the grass. I leaned over her and she closed her eyes, smiling.
“Should I?” I turned to Jo.
“Hell, no. No way. She was a total dick the last time she saw you and never even apologized. Don’t even give her the satisfaction, Meg.”
Beth added that I should only talk to Bell if she approached us. I wiped off my dress and straightened the ribbon choker around my neck. I tugged on one of the satin strings to even the two ends out. I ran my hands over the top of my hair. This heat hated my hair. The humidity in the New Orleans area was a good conversation starter for every week from April to August. When I first started working for Mrs. King, I complained about the frizz-causing humidity and she laughed and said, over a glass of pinot noir, “Oh, wait until August. This is nothing.”
And, boy, was she right. But the weekend of the French Quarter Festival was only April, and my hair was already curling at the scalp. I had spent almost an hour pulling a flatiron through sections of my dark hair. Jo always hated the smell of heated hair, but I would burn candles of it.
I pulled a little bit of my hair over both of my shoulders and unsnapped my bag to get out a gloss for my lips. Beth was back to staring at the sky, and Jo was looking at Laurie’s phone screen with him. I had the late realization that Amy would have been better to drag along to this type of festival than Beth was. Not only because Beth hated crowds, but also because Amy would have gone along with anything I wanted to do. I could have convinced her to do a lap around with me, and she would have gone up to Bell and her friends right beside me. Granted, it would have been lame as hell to have my twelve-year-old sister on my back, but Beth would find a way to avoid the confrontation altogether. I would go ahead and say that Beth was the smartest, most thoughtful of us Spring Girls.
The sun was starting to set and the grass area in the front of Jackson Square was getting more and more crowded as the light disappeared. Out of all the, I don’t know, thousand people on the grass, we got mushed up against a group who looked to be my age at first glance. I scanned over them but didn’t recognize anyone except one guy with white hair grown just a little past his ears. I couldn’t remember where I knew him from and wasn’t about to ask, so I just turned to Jo and made conversation.
“What are you two talking about?” I asked Jo and Laurie.
She laughed and shoved his cell phone to me. “Amy.”
I read the messages on the screen and looked up at Jo and Laurie. Laurie looked a little uncomfortable, and Jo was smiling at me.
“Bad timing,” she joked.
“It’s not really funny, Jo.” I took the phone and erased the messages. I looked up at Laurie when Jo acted like she didn’t understand why it wasn’t comical to show Laurie what Amy had sent her.
“What?” Jo’s heart-shaped face tilted sideways and her lips pouted out.
Jo looked like a girl who would have been a model in the nineties, with full natural lips and thick eyebrows. Her legs were long and she walked like a pigeon on them, but had charm coming out of her ears. Understated beauty, a model for Calvin Klein or Guess.
“Laurie, cover your ears,” I said.
He looked at Jo and didn’t cover his ears.
“He can listen. It’s just her period. It’s not that big of a deal.” Jo leaned forward and crossed her legs under her body. She stuck her flip-flops under the balls of her ankle bones so they wouldn’t touch the ground.
“Just a period? Jo.” I lowered my voice when Beth turned her head to listen to us.
“Meg. Seriously? You’re censoring Laurie from hearing about menstruation? Half of the world are women, and they have periods. Including his mom. Plus, the boys in Europe aren’t as sensitive to such a natural thing. Right, Laurie?” Jo looked over at him.
He didn’t seem like this was a conversation that he minded having, but that wasn’t the point.
“It’s fine,” Laurie assured me.
“What’s fine?” Beth sat up and dusted the dry grass strands off her back.
I filled Beth in on what was happening and saw Jo roll her eyes. “Amy started her period while out with Dad and she’s mortified.”
“She didn’t say she was mortified,” Jo added.
I held the phone up and tried to read the deleted messages again. I bitterly wondered why Amy would text Jo about starting her period over me or Beth. Jo and Amy could barely stand each other, and I was the one who taught Amy how to curl her hair and put on eyeliner. I gave Amy her first bra when Meredith thought she was too young for one. But Jo was the sister Amy shared that moment with.
“She said”—I read off the screen—“ ‘I’m so embarrassed Jo. I bled through my pants had to tie dad’s shirt around my waist. Kill me please.’ ” I popped my eyes out at Jo.
“It’s just a period, Meg,” Jo said.
I groaned. I was all for Jo’s liberal, free-spirited mantras and everything, but sometimes she passed things off as too unimportant when they deserved more attention. I knew that Jo was writing off Amy getting her monthlies because Jo had that mind-set where if you ignore something or are careful not to overreact, society will join in your belief. But Jo was only sixteen, almost seventeen, and she had no idea how boys who weren’t like Laurie acted over a little blood. Not only the boys; the bitchy girls in school were much worse than the boys most of the time. Jo always sort of floated under the radar at school, whereas I was the beacon who couldn’t stay under the radar if I fucking tried. I always ended up in the middle of drama, always. Like in eighth grade, when I bled through my gray gym shorts and a group of girls in my class drew angry red scribbles on a pack of oversized pads and stuck them to my desk.
“It’s not just a period, Jo,” I told her again, and hoped she would be able to go through her life always thinking periods weren’t a big deal.
“Anyway, enough about periods.” Jo laughed, and Laurie still looked unfazed by our conversation.
Beth lay back down on the grass despite the crowd surrounding us, and Jo started talking about her writing and that she’d almost finished a piece she was sending to Vice. I listened to her and Laurie bouncing back and forth in conversation, and I pulled out my phone and checked my notifications. I had stopped looking for John’s name on the screen a day or two ago. He was in the field, which meant I wouldn’t hear from him for days. I swiped up and cleared out a text from Meredith and one from Reeder, along with a text from Mrs. King. She needed me to come to her house early to do her hair before some kind of meeting being held there.
Mrs. King lived in a world from a television show where she held meetings and events for things I had never heard of. Either way, I needed the hours and always wanted to be a part of her kind of life. I sent her my reply and pulled up Facebook. I scrolled through pictures of my cousins on my dad’s side’s newest kids and pictures of my old neighbor’s dog and her newly born puppies, while Jo talked to Laurie. I heard bits of it between my scrolling and got the gist of how much it pissed her off that the majority of people associated the French Quarter with booze, beads, and boobs, when the unique culture of the city was so much more than that. Laurie made a joke that I didn’t hear, and Jo’s chin turned up and she smiled at him so brightly that I almost said something to her. Instead, I turned back to my phone.
How was I struggling to keep a relationship and Jo had a boyfriend? Even though Jo would never let me categorize Laurie as her boyfriend, that’s basically what he was. He was always sitting on the couch, and I always tripped over his long legs, stretched out all the way to the entertainment center. My dad started to get annoyed when he would try to roll his chair by. It was already a struggle to move the wheels over the rug, let alone with Laurie stretched out and asleep on the couch. The Laurence driver even took Jo to school most days.
I wondered how the next year of Jo’s life would go. The animated look in her eyes when she talked to him with her hands, and the way Laurie stared at her lips—maybe reading them, maybe thinking about fucking them—when she spoke to him made the romantic in me weep but the realist in me prepare for heartbreak. I didn’t have the best dating résumé, but it was extensive, so I did have experience.
I wondered if Jo would end up staying at Fort Cyprus if she and Laurie made it through the summer and her senior year. Long distance was hard; I knew that for sure. John and I jumped into a long-distance relationship, and look how that was ending up. It had only been a few months since I saw him last, but it felt much longer than that. I knew he was adjusting to his new duty station in North Carolina, but I had hoped my invitation to join him would have come by now. He was contacting me less and less, and I knew what was happening—I just wasn’t ready to admit it.
Seriously, with every disappointment I felt from the guys around me, from River to even John, I felt my bones wear a little more, I felt a little more seasoned by the world. I knew plenty of women in my life who bounced from one disappointing man to the next, finding their identity in them and wasting away while catering to their husbands. It was especially common in military communities. Mrs. King wasn’t like that; she married a law student when she was too young to know what marriage was and stayed with him, supporting him, helping Mr. King become the mogul that he became.
At nineteen, I would have been fine with that. I wanted that more than I wanted to become a makeup artist. I loved makeup, but I really wanted someone to go through life with me. Was that so bad? I knew Jo felt like I was abandoning my womanhood by dreaming of a family and a life full of family vacations, teaching little versions of me and my husband to be decent humans, and spending my holidays in a warm house that would smell like cinnamon and honey and be packed wall to wall with laughter and conversation. I’d spent my life having awkward family events. Meredith and Aunt Hannah always fought, no matter if it was someone’s birthday party at a skating rink or Christmas dinner in my nana’s dining room.
Once, after Amy pushed Jo into a pool at our aunt Hannah’s apartment building in Texas, Meredith told me that she and Aunt Hannah never got along until they were both in their twenties. But even then, Meredith was always having to bail Aunt Hannah out of the trouble she got herself into, and lately there was this weird tension between them.
So, my sisters and I were different. Each of us was a completely different creature, and I couldn’t wait until the day my family would go visit Jo in New York City, and she could show me her big, fancy office with marble desks and the latest Apple computer. I was genuinely excited to see Jo grow up and try to conquer the world, and I would do the same, but my world would just be different from hers. I knew she would understand that someday and end her misjudgment of roles of women.
“Meg?” Jo’s voice broke through my thoughts.
I blinked at her as I came out of the little fog inside my head. “Huh?”
“Do you want a water? We’re going to get one.”
I lifted my hand to shade my eyes from the falling sun. “Yeah, please. Beth? Do you want a water?” I turned to my sister, who was possibly asleep on the dry grass.
Jo answered instead. “I already asked her. Man, you were out of it.” Jo laughed softly. “What were you dreaming about?”
I shook my head. Just about you and I being completely different people, you know? “Nothing.” I looked at Laurie. He was sitting behind her, running his fingers over the feathery tips of her long hair.
“Mhmm,” Jo joked, and stood, brushing off her butt and legs. “We’ll be right back. Don’t move, please.”
Laurie followed behind her and they disappeared into the crowd.
I stared into the crowd and heard one of the festival organizers telling people to sit down before the concert began. The group that had been close to us a few minutes ago was even closer now, and Beth was still lying there decompressing with her eyes closed, so I looked at my phone again.
I was scrolling for a few seconds before I realized that I was on Shia’s Facebook page. I brushed it off as an impulse due to the months I racked up cyberwatching him. I would just have to break that habit. It would be hard, but I was only torturing myself, and now that we were Facebook friends, it felt even more intrusive for some reason. I could see even more of his life once I approved the friend request he sent me right after my dad came back from Germany. Now I could see his status and other posts he shared. I could also see pictures he was tagged in by Bell Gardiner, and I tried my best not to let them make me throw up the strawberry yogurt I had for breakfast basically every morning.
“Shia’s there,” I thought I heard a voice say.
Damn, I was getting to be a little on the paranoid side. I thought maybe I should have deleted him from my Facebook, but I told myself that would make things awkward since we were supposed to be keeping things civil. We wanted to be in each other’s life, though at a distance.
“No way. Let me see,” a girl’s voice said right next to my ear.
“Swear!” another girl replied. I looked over, and they both were staring at a cell phone. I couldn’t see what they were looking at, so I turned back to my phone. My skin was a little prickly as I continued to listen. It was like I had a sixth sense.
“Damn, whose tits are those?” a man asked. I looked up at him and he wasn’t a man; he was a boy with scruffy brown hair so overgrown it almost covered his eyes, wearing khaki shorts rolled up just above his knee. His boat shoes made me think he was rich, probably from Lakeshore or Lake Vista. He smelled of privilege and Armani cologne.
“Some chick from—”
“Did we miss anything?” Jo’s voice drowned out the response, and I turned to her. Paranoia took hold of me. I felt like everyone knew something that I didn’t know. It made me itchy, and my heart was starting to pick up its beat.
“Not really. The music is about to start.” I debated whether to mention something to Jo, but when I thought about it, I didn’t have anything to say. I would seem insane. Completely.
Jo handed me a bottle of water, and it soaked my hand. Beth got hers, too, and I settled in my spot on the blanket and stretched my legs out in front of me. My hair was so frizzy, I could feel it when I touched it. The humidity was worse than in the morning, and my skin felt sticky and warm. I rubbed the beads of water from the outside of the sweating bottle over my legs spread out in front of me, and the group next to me was still talking about whatever was on that phone.
“How desperate do you have to be?” a girl whose voice I thought I recognized said. I could barely see her because I was sitting down and most of her group were still standing—despite a festival worker’s request to sit the hell down.
“Well, she is a Spring Girl, and that whole family is nuts.”
The words hit me straight in the throat and ached all the way down to the pit that was eating away in my stomach. I felt like I was being picked away at with a chisel as the group got more and more rowdy and the comments kept flooding.
“The one is like being held captive or something.”
“Meg is a whore, and the little one is growing up to be just like her.”
My body quickly turned to them, but not one of them even noticed. I was torn between knocking one to the ground and hoping for a domino effect, or leaving. A masochistic part of me wanted to sit there and just listen to the hateful shit they were saying about me and my sisters so I could obsess over it enough to start to think it was true.
“My mom said they’re getting kicked out of their house because their dad’s getting kicked out of the Army.”
Whose voice is that? I knew it for sure . . .
It only took me a few seconds to find Shelly Hunchberg sitting on the grass a few bodies down from me. I felt the flame of rage flickering inside me.
“Jo,” I said just as the crowd started to cheer over me with the first band coming onstage. Great timing.
“Jo,” I said louder. Neither she nor Laurie heard me.
“Josephine!” I half shouted. and Laurie and Jo both snapped their heads toward me.
“What?”
I scooted closer to her and explained what was happening. The best I could.
Jo’s eyes went wild. “So, they were looking at those pictures? I’ll go over there right now—” She was half yelling, but the sound of trumpets was so loud that she might as well have been whispering.
I hadn’t even thought about the cell phone and what they were looking at on the screen. I think a part of me knew before Jo stood up and it was why I was feeling paranoid, but the rest of my mind didn’t want to go there.
“Don’t.” I reached for Jo’s arm and pulled her back down by her wrist. Laurie sat up more and was immediately alerted.
“Why not? If they’re showing those pictures . . .” Jo’s cheeks were red and she was talking through her teeth.
If they were, who was the source? How did those damn pictures travel from Texas to Louisiana?
The internet, that was how. It had to be.
My chest felt like it had caved in and smashed my heart as I tried to think clearly.
Was it actually happening? Yes, it had to be. They said names. I stood up, not knowing what else to do. I should have just left, but of course I didn’t. Jo, Beth, and Laurie were on their feet, too. Before I could decide what to do, I heard an unmistakable voice from the group.
“And even John Brooke can’t stand her. He’s trying to break up with her, but she’s so desperate.” She laughed. “I heard Shia’s mom talking about Meredith Spring being a drunk now.”
Bell Gardiner. Her voice dripped honey and stung like a wasp.
I thought about the time I was at the pool in sixth grade and saw a wasp cut a honeybee’s body in half and fly away with the lower half of its body, leaving its head just sitting there.
I thought about how Bell Gardiner was a cruel insect of a woman.
“What the fuck?” I said when I stepped into the little circle of bodies they had formed.
Jo was at my side, with Laurie and Beth behind her.
Bell’s eyes didn’t go wide; they turned into little slits like a serpent’s eyes, and she came floating toward me like a ghost. She moved so slowly, like even if she was surprised to see me there, she wasn’t about to show it. I could see a little hint of anxiety over me being there, but it wasn’t as obvious as I would have been if caught red-handed talking shit about someone.
“Meg.” She smiled a slithery grin at me, her eyes going from me to Jo to Beth to Laurie and back to me. “Hey.”
Bell nudged the girl next to her and someone shushed us.
“What the fuck, Bell?” Jo’s voice barked next to me.
“What? I didn’t start it. It’s not like everyone hasn’t seen your sister already.”
The voices around us got quieter, but the band onstage seemed to be getting louder by the second.
I didn’t exactly want Jo to start a fight with Bell, but the realization that a group of strangers were passing around a phone with my naked body on the screen and talking about it less than five feet away from me was sinking in fast. I started sweating, and the air felt a little too thick. Everyone was starting to home in on me and realize what was happening.
Between the whispers of the crowd and Bell’s faux-innocent face, I wanted to scream.
“What’s your problem, Bell? Who the fuck do you think you are digging that shit up and passing it around!” Jo waved her hands at the group of Bell’s friends.
Bell didn’t seem to know what to say to that.
“Oh my God,” I heard someone say from somewhere behind Bell, and then Shia was there. I felt immediate betrayal. Of course he was in on it—how else would Bell even know there were pictures of me in the first place? “What’s going on?”
Jo responded, “Your fucking girlfriend is passing this around.” Jo snatched the phone out of Shelly Hunchberg’s hands and shoved it into Shia’s face. He barely looked at the phone before he backed away from Bell.
“The rest of you can go away now!” Jo shouted, waving her hand like she was swatting flies.
Beth looped her arm through mine, and Laurie stood behind Jo with a pissed-off look on his face. I hoped he would punch Shia right in the damn throat.
Sadly, he didn’t.
“What are you doing?” Shia asked Bell.
She fidgeted a little, pulling the thin strap of her tank top up her shoulder. She looked a little less put together and a lot more worried, and I was trying to fight the burn of tears in the back of my throat. I couldn’t cry in front of these assholes, especially not Shia and his bride-to-be.
“We were just joking around.” Bell’s voice was soft.
“It’s not a fucking joke!” Jo shouted. I knew I looked pathetic letting my little sister fight my battles, but I was frozen in place and stunned into silence.
“Whose phone is this?” Shia held it in the air.
Shelly Hunchberg raised her hand and stepped forward.
“Really, Shelly?” Beth snapped. “Let’s go, Meg.” She pulled at my arm.
When I thought about it, there wasn’t much I could do. I could either stand there and be humiliated as Bell acted like it wasn’t a big deal that an entire group of people were mocking me and looking at my body, or I could leave.
I grabbed Beth’s jewelry bag from the ground and turned to leave. I didn’t even look at Shia. A woman with a baby strapped to her chest bumped into me, and her baby started to scream. It felt like a sign from the universe. A big, shiny Fuck you from the universe.
I heard Jo still yelling, and I heard Shia’s voice calling my name as Beth dragged me through the crowd. All of the faces around me looked like River, like Bell, like Jessica Fox, who was supposed to be my best friend in Texas but taped a printed version of one of the pictures to my front door so that Amy found it when she came home on the bus. I remembered the look on my dad’s face when he got back from “talking” to River’s parents. My dad wanted to press charges for distributing child pornography, since I wasn’t eighteen and River was, but I didn’t want to deal with the humiliation and consequences at school.
Everyone loved River, and I was just a whore who gave boys blow jobs in the backseats of their cars to make them like me more. I was the girl with the big tits and the horny mouth. I got it. I sent pictures to my boyfriend and was going to be shamed to the end of the halls of Killeen High School for it. Well, apparently, I was going to be shamed on the streets of New Orleans, too.
When we neared the street, I remembered the fury that had radiated through Meredith when she stormed through the halls of my high school, demanding that every computer be wiped clean. I remembered the day I walked into the computer lab and Jessica Fox had set my boobs as the wallpaper on half of the monitors.
The air in my lungs was burning and I was out of breath. I stopped for a second.
Beth looked at my face and said, “Let’s stop for a minute.”
“Hey!” a girl’s voice called to us from behind a booth.
“Shia’s coming,” Beth told me, and waved to the girl behind the booth.
“Get me out of here,” I begged Beth. I didn’t want to see Shia, and I only had about thirty seconds before the tears were going to be unstoppable. I was so mad, so fucking pissed at myself and the world for being so stupid. I should never have told Shia about those stupid pictures.
“Are you okay?” the girl in the booth asked. Looking over, I saw she was like some manga Gypsy princess, rivaling Vanessa Hudgens for Coachella queen. Her body was dripping with jewelry, and I realized the booth was full of the rings that Beth had bought.
Beth was talking to the girl, and I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Beth told me to come behind the booth and sit down. The moment my butt hit the chair, I let myself cry.
Shia walked on by without seeing us.
When we got home, Amy and my dad were sitting on the couch. Meredith was in the kitchen heating up a covered dish. We would never have to cook again, it seemed.
“How was it?” Amy asked. “It looks so cool online, how was it?”
I looked at Beth. “It was fine,” she lied for me.
I loved her for it.
She pulled open her bag from the jewelry booth and distracted Amy with shiny mood rings.
“I’m going to take a shower,” I announced to a roomful of people who all said “Okay” to me like they didn’t know why I was telling them in the first place.
I made it up to my room and collapsed onto my bed. I felt like a bucket of pig’s blood had been dumped on my prom dress. I felt so dirty.