Girl by Blake Nelson

Chapter 7

Sunday morning in Sunset  Park was lawn mowers revving and basketballs bouncing and Mom talking to  Mrs. Crenshaw in the driveway and Lizzy Rosen tanning next door with  her Walkman on and Dad reading The Sunday Oregonian and  Rob Dickerson washing his car across the street and just the whole  suburban thing. But not me. Not this Sunday. Thriftstore Apocalypse was  playing at Outer Limits at four o'clock and I was getting ready and  listening to a punk tape Cybil gave me. The band was called Girl Patrol  and the singer was snarling her words and sounding super tough. And I  was fixing my hair and practicing snarling and then I tried putting some  black eyebrow pencil on my lips and smearing it in with my lipstick and  it turned purple and looked sort of vampire-ish like the deathrocker  girls at Metro Mall. And then I wondered if Marjorie would come to the  show and I felt sorry for her because she had pretty much vanished from  everything and you barely ever saw her at school. She would be good at  snarling. The trouble with me was I didn't really hate anything that  much. I mean, I guess I hated Scott Haskell for being so sexist. And I  sort of hated Renee Hatfield. And of course I hated Hillside because it  was my high school and I hated all the suburban stuff and the malls and  everything even though I still shopped there. And Sunset Park was  stupid, obviously, and Mrs. Crenshaw was a gossip and Rob Dickerson had a  gross mustache but so what? I didn't care what they did. They could do  whatever they wanted.

So then I got out my  thriftstore dress and fiddled with the zipper and tried to figure out  why it fit so badly and if I should wear it to Outer Limits. Then Darcy  called so I talked to her while I worked on it. She told me about the  rest of the party and how Scott Haskell threw up in the kitchen sink and  how Mark Pierce came back from the hospital and everybody cheered him  and did beer bongs and then afterward Renee invited a few select people  to her pool to go skinny-dipping. Then Darcy asked me where I went and I  told her I went downtown with Kevin. She was like, "Downtown? With  Kevin?" So I told her the whole story and she couldn't believe it. And  she was like, "That guy with the horn-rims? Is he gay?" I said he went  to Learning Center and she said, "Well, that explains it." And then she  wanted to know if I was going to break up with Mark Pierce and all of a  sudden I got so mad and I was like, I never even said I was going out  with him and it was everybody else who said I was his girlfriend. And  then I said how Renee Hatfield and stupid Scott Haskell were such jerks  and Darcy said, "You don't mean Scott Haskell," and I said, "Yes,  I especially mean Scott Haskell." And she said he wasn't that bad and I  said, "You should have heard what he said about Cindy!" And she was  like, "What did he say?" So I told her and she got totally defensive and  said there was no way Scott did it with Cindy because he had told her  every girl he had done stuff with and sworn on it and she was getting  mad at me like I had made it up. And I was like, "Darcy, I'm not saying  he did it, I'm saying he said it." But she was still being weird and  blaming me and when I hung up it was such a relief. And I turned up my  tape player and started bopping around to Girl Patrol and I was so glad I  was going to Outer Limits and getting away from the Hillside crowd. And my parents had already told me I could use their car since it was Sunday afternoon. And I put on my dress and looked in the mirror and practiced sneering and looking bored and I was ready!                                      

But then I went downstairs and my mother was like, "Where did you get that dress?" And she yelled for my dad to come look at his daughter and it was totally ruining my mood. I tried to tell them it was the style and my stupid mom said, "What's the style? Wearing rags? What is this stain on the back?" And my dad said, "What happened to your lips?" and I looked in the toaster reflec- tion and I still had the black stuff on my lips. I tried to rub it off with my finger and then my mom picked up my hair and let it drop with disgust and I said, "It's the style!" And my mom asked my dad if I should still get the car and my dad shrugged and said there was no law against driving a car dressed like a clown. And then my mother looked at the zipper of my dress and said it was ripping out and I thought she wasn't going to let me wear it but then she threw up her hands and let me go.