Kelly

Kelly made me jealous. I detested her long thin face and sad limpid eyes. They were chocolate set into an old knowing frame. Kelly's limbs were so long and thin she was lanky like a teenaged boy and she leapt at Corey almost every day to retrieve what he'd stolen from her even when she wasn't wearing a headband. Her dignity was snapped up as soon as we huddled by the door leading to the playground. This was futile and he sneered, jerked back and leered at her. At the end of each lunchtime, though, she got her headband back, or whatever of hers it was that he was hiding. Except for her dignity. He kept it bruised and malnourished.

Kelly squawked, the monkey in the middle of hurtled insults. If the other kids didn't hurt her feelings Corey threatened to hurt theirs. Nobody cared about Kelly's feelings because nobody wanted to be like her. Years later she had rhinoplasty to shave away Corey's rottenness. Her smaller nose reminded me of Corey more than her jutting bridge had. “See, I'm pretty now,” she would say, barely a teen. “My nose was ugly! I'm not ugly anymore. My nose is normal. Remember how beaked it was? It's not like that anymore!” She'd preen, sleeking back her hair, folding her legs onto her couch. Her parents were never around.

I had to fight Kelly inexhaustibly. There was no time to rest. She chose her words like thorns. She knew Corey needed an outcast and scrambled to push me into his crosshairs before I could toss her there. In second grade, Kelly was my biggest threat: she was Christie's other best friend. Proving to Christie that I deserved the honor of staying her first best friend took up as much time as I had in the deaf classroom that wasn't spent spewing the sewage that kept Corey's fists from raining blows. I was in first grade and Miss Pardick was nice to me. Christie and I had nothing in common.

Kelly had dirty blonde hair and pretty shirts. She had a pool party. The rest of us didn't have pools! It was an aboveground pool with a bright blue bottom and legs dangling into the cool water as we lazily kicked at a beach ball and chattered excitedly. It was her birthday and even Corey was invited. He was polite and his snout was smooth and boyish. His eyes danced. The mean things he said slipped out occassionally without his usual grimace.

There was nothing else connecting me and Kelly. Christie pitted us against each other smugly. They had matching hair which, Christie boasted, was proof that they were sisters. They were both tan with brown eyes. Kelly was the real best friend, obviously, Christie grinned, because on top of all that they lived closer to each other. I wasn't grown-up enough to close the gap that had opened when Christie had left Gerri and our blue cots and big aluminum saucer for Miss Pardick. Kelly had been new that last year of naptime and Christie had abandoned her each time I'd returned from kindergarten.

When Corey realized I was the biggest threat ever posed, I passed that right along. I pointed out that Kelly was stupid and ugly as confirmed. Her hair was greasy and limp; she was obviously the poorest of us. The shirts and headbands were distractions. Her waving claws and squawking protestations were clearly signs of deficiency. “NO!” she howled. “I'm best friends with Christie! Stop it!” She usually won, so I had to run from a litany of fists every lunchtime. Kelly was exhausting.

Angela

I'd met Angela when I was three. She suddenly appeared, an elegant vision in loose sweaters, like an angel with two tortoiseshell halos. We rode the bus together in silence until, annoyed with the preschooler with curious eyes, she poked fun at me. Once I opened my small busy fists her jaw dropped. “You're really smart!” she remarked, eight and the most beautiful person I'd ever seen. Her last name was shiny and red like a Ferrari.

Her mom let her wear make-up already. Her hair was burnished rose gold and her strong nose divided two eyes so blue the sky strove to match. Her smile and laugh were so infectious I cuddled up to them every morning and afternoon, waiting for her to finish pinning up her hair at the sides when she didn't tease it into wings above her perfect ears. Her thick spider eyelashes done, her Maybelline mascara tucked back into her purse, Angela carefully applied pearly lipstick so pale it was like pink ice. Once she asked if I'd like to wear some to school. I wanted it more than I didn't want the cold sores Mom warned me against. Her eyelids were lovingly pigmented. Then it was my turn: we talked and talked.

Angela was bored. I was a great conversationalist but I was three. She sparkled when she asked, “Do you know 'fuck'?” I sure didn't. It was the middle finger showing the world it was a happy loner. “Fuck you” was approximately the same, only it made sure everyone else knew to stay away. Asshole was usually two As butt-slapping twice and then opening into a final clap. Sometimes it could be an F with its hole rimmed by my other index finger. It was for someone I hated. Bitch was the I-love-you sign turned inward with the thumb folded over the middle fingers, horns mocking someone I really thought was awful. Shit, my right thumb extended from its fist, was expelled from the tight snail of my left fingers. Preschool was boring; Angela was a more fun teacher.

Once, my ass freezing on the cold grey-beige linoleum between the gym and front doors, I sat and conferred with my friends, switching between gossipy, chatty circles. As I shivered in my sweatshirt, the cold seeping into my pelvic bone, I espied a ring with paste jewels on Jenny's finger. “Let me see! I wanna try it on!” I exclaimed. I wasn't old enough for jewelry and the sparkling stones entranced me. How fancy, how expensive! A golden band and faceted stones like Grandma's and Aunt Annette's!? I needed it badly. What did a ring feel like on a finger? I was six and in the first winter of kindergarten.

Denied, I fired back, “Fuck you!” Now I knew what it meant. I wielded it beautifully. It glowed with the fire glinting off the ruby facets despite the dim fluorescence overhead. Angela, sitting Indian style in the pretzel-legged group of older kids I knew, next to Alex with his chipped front teeth, had prepared me well. “Fuck you” was very useful in cases of extreme disappointment and anger. Suddenly, an aide swooped down on me, curly brown mullet and gold hoops quavering with her voice as she signed, “Did you just say something?” I blinked back, bewildered. “What? No. Me?” I understood then just what it meant to swear. “I saw you say something. What was it you said?” I stared innocently into the earnest, pudgy face looking down at me, its attached hand clutching my blue sleeve. “I said, 'I like your ring! I wanna try it on this finger,' and I stuck my ring finger out, see, like this. I had to show Jenny my finger so she could slip the ring onto it because she wouldn't let me.”

That was how I ended up in the principal's office in preschool. I squirmed in the vinyl-covered seat as the secretary bustled with errands and the fax machine in between her tan telephone and the vice principal's office. Whipping around, I settled onto my knees, my sad nose pressed against the chicken wire-spined glass, the children huddled together, the aides standing in a cluster of laughter, their backs toward me. “Fuck you,” I pressed against the glass, more astute than ever. “Fuck you.” The school was still dark.

Over the next year or two Angela and I played together a lot. She lived half a mile away one block behind a hair salon with a black sign in its window advertising a white pair of scissors. Her house was bigger than ours with an upstairs and dirty carpeting. Her family was warm, friendly and seedy. We preferred my house with the dress-up clothes in the basement and were captured in black and white wearing head scarves, heels and my tutu, purses cleaving our arms. Angela always clutched at me, terrified, as we slipped down the stairs. She froze on the stairs; she never let me turn on the light until we were all the way down, the murky black yielding to gray at our feet. The huge steel rotary saw was always whirring, she insisted, the blade hissing underneath its mint-green head, unattended in the dark. It waited for us, I assured her each time, to slice us into murder victims. This was Angela's concoction and I wasn't allowed to dispel the myth. We quickly snuck around the bottom stair and opened the box of clothes out of sight of the cruel saw. Upstairs in our elegant attire we had lemonade, Hi-C or Hawaiian Punch and our beaming faces negated onto rolls of film.

Several times we had a substitute bus driver Angela despised. She told me stories about a horror movie in which the Rat King slew humans by the dozens and was worshipped by bloodthirsty rats. Our sub, thin with a pointed nose, a weak chin and light eyes that seemed as kind as his smile when I clambered up the steps, was the Rat King, she confirmed, her eyes suddenly harsh and cold. Her mouth tightened into a suspicious moue. The only Rat King I remembered was the one from The Nutcracker but, no, this was a more sinister one, she assured me.

One day the Rat King, whose job didn't pay very well so his navy blue jacket was grubby as it hung off the back of his seat, presented me with a mini Reese's peanut butter cup! I marveled at the kindness but Angela knew better. Shrewdly, she called me over, sharp and protective. Her blue eyes widened and razored as she looked over the wrapper on our candies. “Aha!” she pointed, triumphant. “See this?” I peered at the gold foil and, sure enough, there was a tiny sepia center with a thick aura of oily bronze. “Maybe it's old,” I ventured.

“People poison candy from the bottom, see,” Angela settled into her first cautionary tale. “This happens all the time. Kids die from it every Halloween. There are razor blades in apples and pins in harder candies.” She glared balefully at the Rat King, who smiled back hopefully, his fine brunette curls softening the evil within. “He probably has a whole pocketful ready to poison a whole bunch of us. That fucking asshole, he stealthily kills kids and switches school districts! What they do is they get poison or cleaning spray and suck it into a syringe like this, filling the chamber by pulling out the stopper, and then they stick the needle into the bottom of a soft candy, like these peanut butter cups, and inject the poison into the center. He wants to kill us.”

She stuck her head back up and glittered judgment at the Rat King, who had both paws on the large black steering wheel with ridges all around its bottom. He had sad eyes when he wasn't trying to make us like him. Ducking back down, her knees lodging into their usual position on the pebbled green vinyl before us, she giggled, “Boy, is he ever gonna be surprised when we come out of our houses tomorrow! Gimme your candy again,” and dutifully I dropped my two-cent chocolate into her hand. “Follow me; we're gonna get rid of this real discreetly,” and I slipped across the aisle as she swung into it.

We crept row by row toward the back of the long empty bus. Sometimes we had retarded kids with us but only when their regular bus couldn't take them. The bad kids also only got to ride with us sometimes and Angela protected me from teen penises I didn't understand yet. The old black woman with milky blue eyes that always scanned the sky for God in two different directions wasn't in the front seat that day. The Rat King watched us in the rearview mirror serenely.

Angela stuck her strong fingers into the white plastic wells and squeezed her arms together, the small window so dense it tried to plop down onto its lower half but gingerly, gently lowered so noiselessly our hearing aids picked up nothing but the hum and jumble of asphalt and debris. “Watch: we do this while he can't see us. He's gotta watch the road, and we slip—whoosh!--each candy out good and sneaky. The wind steals them good and fast and he'll never know we didn't eat them. Thank him for the candy and always, always turn it over to me. He'll keep trying to kill us and we'll thwart him at every turn. We're gonna be alive when he finally leaves and he's gonna be really pissed!”

The Rat King smiled at me after school and gave me soiled Tootsie Rolls and peanut butter cups. My young stomach felt as greasy as the poisoned wrappers. I felt bad for such a desperate killer. He looked so much like Willy Wonka I wanted to be friends back. He was so sad I wanted to love him forever and ever and eat his friendship in equal measure. He was the Rat King so I had to let Angela help me outwit him. She had such blue eyes and was in fifth grade so she knew these things.

Corey

Corey was big, bad and freckled. His eyes were the exact color of mean. His nine-year-old self was so bloated it fit into a twelve-year-old's body despite the laxity of the Red Wings jersey he wore most days. Corey, ice-white and sprinkled with orange, always had a well-groomed mullet that curled in the back. He was two grades ahead of me and overripe.

First grade introduced me to Corey. Everyone else was already under his dominion, even Joyce. Miss Pardick taught the lower grades in Wilde Elementary's deaf program. Corey was the leader every recess; he was bigger, badder and his pink fists were the size of honey-baked hams. Once his nose started to scrunch a new decision was about to overturn the current rules. Screwed up, it served as a warning not to get pummeled.

He would make Kelly give him her wide plastic headbands so he could wear them as visors, like Geordi, thin mod sunglasses. Clear tortiseshell, royal blue with lacy edging or linked pink figure eights. Kelly sure was sorry she'd taught us that trick! Every day, once Kelly's flat greasy hair was exempt from its tiara, Corey decided who was cool and who was vile, excluded from his playground empire. He beat up anyone who defied his rule. Every day everyone nattered nervously waiting for him to decide, savoring our last few seconds of freedom. Most days Kelly was the ugly, bad girl no one could play with: her nose was thin but hooked like the puffin's beak adorning the spine of many of my books.

Until the day Corey figured out that I was smarter than everyone else in the room. Even Christie couldn't save me from exile. Every day from then on, because I was in the hearing classroom almost all day and practiced syllable-catching by clapping along to each phonic break, I was breaching protocol and condemned. I got to learn Reading from a real book with pictures on the cover but dozens of words per page. Even Angela, who was in sixth grade, had a tiny thin book with simple pictures and single-sentence pages that read, “The car is _______ down the road.” The textbooks and workbooks were nearly indistinguishable from each other and color-coded by cover.

Angela couldn't protect me. We rode the bus together but she had after-lunch recess with the hearing kids in the upper three grades. I never told Angela about Corey anyway, and she had long auburn waves to attend to with tortoiseshell barrettes and bleach, her glossy lips ready for kissing. Her large hoop earrings accentuated her Italian nose and tan. She sat in the back with Alex and struggled to make the car “driving” instead of “the drive.” She was for after school.

Corey beat me up once. After that I knew better than to become a serf or try to lobby for a position as a feudal lord, protecting the snub-nosed and snarl-toothed king. Every day, Kelly's greasy honey tresses tumbling around an invisible line at her ears, Corey smiled leered, “Look at Ugly! Beth's so ugly and stupid! She's too stupid to be our friend, right?” Everyone else nodded, happy to play unfettered. My hearing friends couldn't be seen with me at lunchtime either; I was Special Ed. I was the ugly girl who chased David around the room after lunch trying to tag him into boyfriendhood before Mrs. Lavey opened the door.

One day on the bus ride home Steve, who was seventeen, told me I hadn't won when he didn't understand numbers well enough to beat me at Uno: “Haha, stupid, you lost! I win because I say so! This is my deck of cards, loser! You can't play for shit!” My crush on the only Asian I'd ever met evaporated, his pitted golden face receding under tight purple pimples. I refused to play another round. As I scowled I replied with the universal sign for “sore loser,” my tiny white middle finger exposed. Angela had already been dropped off. When Bob pulled up to my house, Steve rushed to meet Dad. Afterward, he bounced past me back to his seat, laughing with a squint that slit my throat.

In the dank living room, shuttered with the television running, Dad and his beer rankled. His eyes narrowed and his lip curled and tightened. “Bethie,” he bit off, “did you...say...a bad word?” His hands shook with each sign. “Steve told me what happened.” “No! I didn't!” I protested, thinking, I'm so fucking gonna get Steve back for this! All because he's ten years older and can't fucking beat a seven-fucking-year-old at fucking Uno! Shit! What an asshole! Does he even know what Dad's like?

“Well, because...Steve told me you gave him the finger. Did you stick out your middle finger at him?” Dad yelled harder and harder, trembling and white around the edges. His Budweiser sweated. I stayed cool: “No! I did this: I made a fist and raised the knuckle of my middle finger just a little.” THWACK! “Same difference!” Crying, I thought, What a goddamn asshole. Fucking baby. I beat you at Uno and you know it!

The next day I started fighting back. The weather was still warm, like butter running down corn at the cider mill, like the fresh unsugared donuts for dunking in the cider. My personalized sweatshirt was zipped up with the BETH crossworded diagonally. Corey continued to feint punching me, cornering me and hissing, but I squinted the way Steve had shown me to. I threatened Christie, Kelly Mike and Joyce with wily hurts beyond the physical plane and beyond Corey's duration at Wilde. They stayed my friends in the classroom and never managed to weasel out of it; Corey couldn't either. I was the smallest kid with the brightest eyes.

The Monster in the Closet

Joyce is a good hook-up. She's my age, seven. Our teeth have't yet been swapped. One of us wears a yellow T-shirt. Mom took us to Dairy Queen and our slushies taste like strawberry sunshine in the plush navy backseat of the station wagon, its wood veneer unpeeling. Dennis the Menace has fencing contests with himself. Joyce's tiny perfect teeth glow. Mom whispers, "Poor thing probaby doesn't get to go to Dairy Queen often, know what I mean?" before we swing onto the highway.

Mom drops me off with Joyce so we have a good two days' play. My house was different than hers. Board games, movies, closed captioning, sleepover food. A treasure trove of dress-up clothes. Sexy in heels stumbling over linoleum. Her house seems huge, it's so white. It looks like a hermit. The porch stairs sink with gravitas.

Her grandparents turrn their watery eyes on us as we walk in, oblivious before the invisible banging screen door. Summer wilting in wax cups, our fingers raisin in the white creaks under the dew. The studded yellow shrinks in terror, collapsed so the straws pop up the sides. The door's busted-through stars glare behind us, four pairs of eyes staring us down before smiles spread.

The entire atmosphere smoked a settled ochre gel, her father bulks soft from a distance. He looms gently. The refrigerator is swollen with gallons of juice. "Here," Joyce offers, "this is his cleanse. He has to drink vinegar mixed with cranberry juice." My lips screw up a violent tic on contact, and she pulls the cup away, grinning. "Imagine! He has to," eyes large and lips dropping, "drink this four times a day or he dies."Salami slices from the fridge. Long creaky stairs I envy in mahogany and shellac.

The bedroom is a vision, I think blue. My tunnel vision falls into the drawer she opens, "These are Grandpa's so don't tell," tiny copper BBs beading into each corner,  swinging down seams. "There aren't enough," and she runs to bring a milk container she's stolen from the school cafeteria. It's pint-sized, though, and red printed onto white, so I furrow my brow as she sets it down heavily. She peels back the seal into a V, then a diamond. A stream of copper tinkles and scatters. Her tiny alabaster fist grabs a handful surely. Her tiny freckled nose and earnest eyes shine, fervent. Her cheeks light up, pink with excitement. There is after all something her house harbors mine can't boast.

"Here," she thrusts at me, "this salami's yours. Don't eat it. Okay," scrabbling around, coming up crayons, breaking off bits of pink and orange and brown and blue and violet, handing me half of each stash joyfully. "This is his lunch, okay? What you do is you follow me."

"Okay," I nod delightedly. This is gonna be good. Joyce believes this with all her heart. In school she still can't write "I'm in school today." I'm learning idioms. And science. And not all in the deaf classroom, either. Joyce doesn't lipread well and mewls. Her parents sign a little. I interpret.

"See, he loves the BBs. They're his favorites, like candy. Right? The crayons, he nibbles them. He's kinda slow with them. He's gotta find each, okay, and eat all the grouped-up colors. They take a while to disappear. The salami is just, you know, it's to help. It's food." This is gonna be goo-ood. The evisceration of this friendship will earn me an ally on the playground, it's so absurd. Glee tugs my lanky shoulders loose and broad.

Joyce does exactly as she's instructed. She tears each salami slice into thirds, rolls them up and fists them, swallows a huge quaking gust, and slams the door of her bedroom closet open. The shirts and dresses are all there. She throws all the salami at once, slams the door shut and heaves against it, nodding at me. "He's in there! He sure is hungry!" She flashes frightened eyes at me, swiftly turning and knobbing the door open, a fistful of BBs clattering into crevices, a smattering of crayon bits emptying her pocket, the door is clam-tight again, and Joyce almost laughs with relief; she's alive! "Look, not even a scratch! You're gonna see him. He's nice today!"

I gulp and set my jaw, then quaver. The doorknob twirls too easily in my hand, the crystal betraying the bronze, which then reluctantly undimples from the frame. Criink. The bristly brush stripes vast nd white beyond my four-foot frame, the salami slices flung into a murky darkness swallowing blouses and shoes. 

"See?" Joyce breathes, breathless. "See him? Blue?" 

"Sure. Sure I see him. He's scary...sure!" and she's rapt as she points out: "His mouth is scary. Did you see his teeth?" 

"Oh, my!" and I root around for all the BBs I can manage from my pocket. Again with the deep quenching breath, the fear reaching my eyes this time. I think really hard and as the door unhinges, opens, try to conceive the maw with teeth materialized as I finally shriek. Loyal like Joyce, joy erupting through my body. The monster is nice today. He hasn't clawed me yet. I surge power, crayons scraping the far white corner, the monster dormant. 

Two years of knowing Joyce. This is her bedroom. We slink downstairs, scared of being caught keeping a monster in her closet. "Shh-hh-hh..." Joyce cautions as she crouches. "Don't want him getting taken away." The Vaseline air wades around her grandparents at the vinyl table, arms resting. Her mother's feathered hair and huge rose-tinted lenses are fresh, framing a tired face and a smile that still lights up the room, beige teeth luminescent within sienna rims. Her cigarettes link gold at the fingered V.