Back-story

The real story isn’t starting yet.

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Chelsey likes things she shouldn’t like. This morning, while waiting for Lloyd to honk his horn outside her house, she stubs her toe on her armoire and finds the pain kind of nice. It’s uncomplicated, easy to fix. She likes the simplicity of it. This morning, as Chelsey waits, she picks up her yearbook. She does this instead of taking a shower. She takes a shower once a week, on Sunday night. She finds Miranda’s picture in the yearbook. She remembers the day in the locker room when Miranda took off her shirt and Chelsey saw the scars underneath the cups of Miranda’s brassiere. Chelsey knows that nobody else saw the scars. Chelsey runs her index finger over Miranda’s picture. What other secrets does this girl carry? Outside her window comes the honk of Lloyd’s horn. She closes the book. Today she will tell Lloyd she loves Miranda. She has to tell somebody. But she doubts Lloyd has any idea who Miranda is. It’s always been strange to her, how he does not recognize what Chelsey sees so easily.

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Miranda showers every day. She puts on makeup. She brushes and flosses her teeth. She blow-dries her hair. This morning, she gets out of the shower and looks at herself in the mirror. She touches the scars underneath her breasts. Nobody outside of her family knows about the reduction. Nobody in school remembers what she looked like when she was thirteen. Today is the day she will run at Lloyd. Today is the day she will finally break down the wall between them. She puts on Express jeans and a halter-top. She has a feather in her hair. She wears red lipstick. Her mom smokes a cigarette downstairs and tells her she looks beautiful. Show the boys what they’re missing, her mom says. Miranda trusts what her mom tells her, even as the old woman collapses into another coughing fit. Miranda believes that the first boy who she will make love to will be the boy who gives her a child. Lloyd has never said a word to Miranda. Lloyd is the only boy in school who walks by her and keeps his head down, refuses to look into her eyes. Miranda dreams about him sometimes, and in their dreams, they are walking together through a park and she holds a baby to her chest.

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Lloyd sees the grime in Chelsey’s hair. He is happy to be smoking. It will obscure the smell of her. Lloyd is sick to death of Chelsey. Sick of her smell, sick of how she sits with him at lunch every day, sick of how she tells him personal things that keep the two of them closer than he wants to be. Every secret she tells him is a step in the wrong direction. In the car on their way to school, Lloyd chain-smokes. All weekend Chelsey called Lloyd and knocked on his door. He didn’t respond. Chelsey asks him if he feels okay. She asks him where he was this weekend. He tells her that he felt depressed about his dad again, stumbling on some old photographs. He lies. Chelsey fidgets with her hair, wrapping it around her fingers. He throws his cigarette out the window as they pull into the school lot and park near the back so few people will see them getting out of the car together.

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At lunch, from across the room, Miranda notices Lloyd and Chelsey and stops paying attention to her kind-of-boyfriend, the guy she’s kissed a couple times without tongue who, instead of talking to her, mostly throws wadded up straw wrappers at his friends. First things first: Miranda will hold her eyes on Lloyd. Miranda will smile at him. Miranda will make him look at her, make him notice her. But the longer she watches, the more she begins to think this is futile. Lloyd never looks up from the table. Not once. Miranda wonders what Chelsey and Lloyd hold between them. They seem so comfortable with each other. Miranda’s kind-of-boyfriend throws a straw wrapper that bounces off his friend and hits Miranda in the forehead. She feels made of fragile glass, like this ball of paper might shatter her.

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Chelsey sees this from where she sits. She sees how sad Miranda looks but she doesn’t know what to do about it. She needs to tell Lloyd to preserve this feeling. Otherwise feeling something is just like letting a snowflake melt in your hand.

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Chelsey says, I want to tell you something. But he doesn’t want to hear it, so he says, Hold on, and decides to get something else from the lunchroom. He used to share secrets with Chelsey when the two of them were in first grade and both wore glasses, when it was safe to tell secrets, because there were no real secrets to tell. He passes somebody wearing a red shirt with a Nike logo on it. This guy gets in Lloyd’s face and pinches his nose. People have been doing this more and more often. In reference to Chelsey, Lloyd imagines. And they always crack up after this simple gesture. What does it feel like to tease her, to mock her? They laugh so hard. Would it give him pleasure too? Does it feel nice to cause another person pain? In the lunch line he puts his fingers in his mouth and touches every piece of pizza.

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Miranda thinks about where she wants to go to college. She wonders if she will ask her kind-of-boyfriend to come with her. She stares at the milk carton on the table that her kind-of-boyfriend has barely touched. She wonders if she will be able to breastfeed.

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When Lloyd returns and comes up behind Chelsey, he has every intention of sitting down and for another awful day listening to her tell secrets. But he notices Miranda staring at him, and he stares back, and Lloyd considers this might be the first time they’ve ever made eye contact. What does she want him to do? The same thing they all want him to do, he guesses, and that he himself wants to do: lash out. And Lloyd barely thinks about it. He pinches his own nose and makes a face like he smells something bad.

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Chelsey watches Miranda smile.

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Lloyd knows he cannot sit back down after this. Especially not when Chelsey turns around and sees him standing there, holding his nose, frozen in this gesture. But he knows, all at once, that she has seen who he is. That she will not be opening up to him again any time soon. So he leaves the cafeteria without a word.

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Chelsey is ashamed and looks away from Miranda. She wonders if she should follow Lloyd, kiss him on the cheek, tell him it’s okay, like she did that time after Lloyd’s dad died and he confessed one final thing to her: I don’t feel anything. She knows she should be angry. But she cannot rise herself into anger’s open arms. And when she looks back over to Miranda, she sees that Miranda has stopped smiling, and is looking at the door, almost as though she wonders where Lloyd has gone, and whether he will return. It’s as though, in this moment, Chelsey has floated up to watch the two of them, two people she loves, who have managed to clamber over jagged shorelines and into the water to meet each other in the middle of the ocean. And Chelsey cannot bring herself to anger. She feels at first some vague sort of sadness. Then she feels warm all over, like she came in from the cold and somebody put a blanket over her shoulders.

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Lloyd walks across the parking lot and knows he should feel bad, because he made a girl he doesn’t care about laugh at the expense of somebody he should feel close to. Does he feel close to her? He doesn’t know what closeness feels like. He doesn’t know what guilt feels like either. It’s not that he thinks he shouldn’t feel guilty. He knows that he should. He just doesn’t feel anything, except for the fear of not feeling anything, except that is a paradox. He doesn’t know what to do.

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Miranda’s kind-of-boyfriend puts his hand on her leg and kisses her cheek, and she sees Chelsey get up and leave the cafeteria. Miranda wants to be the one to follow Lloyd, but she isn’t close to him. Not like Chelsey is. She cannot defeat that. Their closeness is hard and real, like a smooth stone they hold in her hands. Her kind-of-boyfriend plays with her hair.

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They all feel their lives constrict. They all know they have to make a decision, but they don’t know what decision to make.

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Five years from now, Miranda’s story will reach a climax. She will have turned her kind-of-boyfriend into a kind-of-husband, and they will spend long hours held in their house, together in silence. One night, they will make love. They will have done this hundreds of times before. But this night, he will tell her to keep her shirt on. He will tell her afterward that he read something about the removal of scar tissue: some doctors can do it. She will get angry. But he won’t want to talk about it anymore. He will tell her goodnight and that will be it. This will usually be it. Even when she gets angry at him, he will not feel the same. She will never fully admit to herself what she understands deep down – that this man will never know her, and will never want to – but on this night she will come closer than usual to admitting it. She will sneak out at 1am and walk by the dog park, but she will not see anyone there except for an older woman who breastfeeds a baby, giving this child milk that Miranda can only imagine is polluted because the woman, in her cargo shorts with her legs and hair that look permanently unwashed, will seem so ravaged that there’s no way the milk is clean. And when she goes home and crawls into bed, she will look at her kind-of-husband and wonder, Is that what he thinks of me? That I am polluted? Is this why we have never mentioned the idea of a child?

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Five years from now, Lloyd’s story will reach a climax. He will drive along the boulevard and a woman will run up to his car. He will stop for her and she will be middle-aged and she will be crying. She will get in the car. She will tell him that she was walking late at night, that three young men grabbed her, assaulted her, that she got away, that she needs a ride home. Lloyd will ask her where to go. They will drive together through empty streets and she will tell him that he’s an angel, that he has saved her, that he is a kind person, and he will not listen to any of this. She will tell him that she lives up a side street and he will look in his rearview mirror and see the car behind him. She will tell him to turn down another street. He will do this, and then she will tell him to stop. He will stop, and in his rearview mirror he will see the car behind him stop too, and he will see the two men get out. He will look at the woman in the car with him, and he will try to see something in her eyes. He will see a great guilt, as though this feeling is a net she’s trying to cast over him. It’s for my child, she will say. I’m sorry but I have to. And Lloyd will say, You should have just asked me. You’re a good person, she will say. That doesn’t matter, Lloyd will say. He will have nothing when he gets home. No money, no car, no keys. He will have to break into his own apartment. He will not sleep well. He will think of the knives he has in his kitchen. He will think of how easy it would be to take one of them to his own throat. The feeling that he could one day do this will comfort him. He will want to find that woman again and talk to her. He will feel strangely close to her. He will think, Maybe it’s time to release the feelings from his body, to send them like slugs into the world. Maybe it’s time to fall asleep.

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But enough of these climaxes. One of these people must have a chance from the beginning…

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So Chelsey goes home after school that day and looks at Lloyd’s house to try to see if he’s there. She’s forgotten entirely about what she wanted to tell him this morning. Instead, she wants to tell him she saw the moment in the cafeteria, when these two people broke something down that was between them, and when, for just a moment, they felt less alone. She has seen the future, and it is Lloyd and Miranda, spending their lives together in love and safety. She wants to tell Lloyd what she knows about Miranda. She wants to tell him about the scars she saw in the locker room. She wants to tell him what she thinks he’s already starting to realize: that Miranda is worth paying attention to, that what he has to do is look deeper inside of her, that what he has to do is reach out for someone, reach out for her. The curtains are drawn and Chelsey doesn’t know if he’s home, although his car sits in the driveway. She opens his screen door and she knocks. She knocks three times. But she doesn’t hear anything inside. She decides to wait on his steps. If he is there, he’s too scared to come to the door. When will he stop being scared? She’s not angry about how they made fun of her. But the thought of Lloyd never getting over his fear fills her body with a fire. She slams the screen door, and when she does, she catches her thumb in it. But she sticks to the plan. She sits down on the steps. She holds her thumb as it swells like a balloon, and she tries to decide whether she still likes this kind of pain, the easy physical kind whose solution is nothing more complicated than a Ziplock bag full of ice. She sits, and she tries to make up her mind. When she makes up her mind, she will understand who all of this back-story will one day turn her into.

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Then the real story will begin.