Divine Intervention
I guess I was like his lip-ring: a journey of self-discovery. Then he made his discovery.
Note: I’m shocked and mortified to welcome you back to this modest, defective series. Salvaging what works from what anyone with eyes can see clearly doesn’t is an ongoing process that sort of stalled in the early part of the summer. Clearly I think these are fine in parts; but a sum I’m comfortable with will take shape only as willpower dictates. That could take a while.
“There’s something about Rice Krispy squares,” Vanessa says holding aloft one of a multiple she’s eaten from the plate laid in the middle of Kelly’s basement, “that makes me feel regret—even loss.”
Kelly’s face tenses as the inevitable outcome she’d anticipated all afternoon was now, by all accounts, manifesting. She murmurs, “You don’t like them?”
“Oh God, no! They’re epic.” Vanessa takes a bite, and with full mouth she continues: “A good snack makes you regret those times in the past where you could have had them but didn’t.”
“Is that for all snacks?” asks Katie. “Would a blondie cause the same reaction?”
“Depends on the person. A snack I don’t like, like lemon squares, is like being at a party you were forced to attend and can’t leave. Like a wake for someone else’s grandma; or a bat mitzvah for the kid of your dad’s work friend.”
“I’ve always wanted to go into a bakery and get a birthday cake just because.”
“You mean when it is not your birthday or anyone else’s?”
“Yeah, to me that’s freedom. That’s happiness.”
“One person’s happiness is another person’s chaos, Katie. You’re a chaos agent in the making.”
“Should we,” Kelly sheepishly interjects, “start the meeting?”
“That meeting has already started.”
“Yes, a good meeting always goes off topic within the first five minutes. This is something that neither Angela nor Danielle could abide.”
“Don’t forget, Vanessa: their moms are consultants.”
“So is my mom. But I choose not to be imprisoned by my creator’s choices.”
“What does your mom do, Kelly?”
Kelly looks down nervously at her satisfactorily diminishing mountain of Rice Krispy squares. “She’s a decorator.”
“For, like, houses?”
“Houses. Spaces. Yeah.”
“She seems to do a lot of traveling for that,” Vanessa says.
“I guess.”
“I hope by giving you charge of the decorations for the Ball that we are not imprisoning you.”
“Yeah, I think you have good instincts for it. But we want to make sure you think so too.”
“We need the gym to be decorated to be as un-gym-like as possible. So we want you to express yourself.”
“But there are limits, right?”
“Well, we want to make sure everyone feels included.”
“But not so much that they overshadow the Queens, whatever color they end up.”
“It’s really a privilege to be on this committee. Because it’s so close to how real life works. Always trying to balance the aspirations of the group with their projection through the individual. It’s like the whole fulcrum of adulthood.”
“Careful, Vanessa, you’re sounding pretty close to Danielle.”
“Shit, did I not use ‘fulcrum’ correctly?”
“Maybe, I don’t know, but we’re among friends here.”
Katie looks over at Kelly who nods affirmatively, if too readily. The moment of pleasant consensus is shattered by Vanessa’s gasp at the appearance from the stairway of a skinless ghoul who, going by their school sweatshirt and leggings, is actually Amber, who has been here this whole time but is something of a nonentity, in narrative and social terms, with whom we need not concern ourselves too deeply.
“Cool mask, Kelly,” Amber trivially remarks.
“Where did that come from?” Katie asks in a sudden shock of amusement.
“The bathroom … you know, where I was?”
“Oh.” She looks over at Kelly again but for a different sort of affirmation. “I didn’t take you for the Halloween type.”
“Well,” Kelly reluctantly begins, “I’m not, generally.”
“So you just have this to frighten your guests?” Vanessa says with regained composure.
“It’s mostly for me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well,” Kelly stammers to silence, hesitating. They’ve all stopped partaking of the Rice Krispy squares. Have they gone stale? “You promise to be understanding if I explain it?”
They all nod in agreement.
“And once I explain it that it stays in my basement?”
“We’ve already anointed your basement as a chamber of secrets. Like Katie’s desire to eat an entire birthday cake alone.”
“I never said I’d eat it alone.”
“Not even the craziest dumpster diver finds that appealing. Anyway …”
All attention returns to Kelly.
“I bought it after Josh Porter’s party over the summer. I met Darren Cline—“
“Darren Cline … of lip-ring fame?”
Kelly chuckles. “Yes. He came up to me and told me how cool it was that we never got caught passing notes in Engels’s American History class. We were in that class, though I had no clear memory of passing or being passed notes. ‘Engels is pretty dumb, huh?’ he said. I nodded ‘yes’ even though I have no strong opinions about Mr. Engels as a person or a teacher. I’m not sure why I thought that, or said it. But next we were making out by a wood pile at the farthest edge of the yard. At some point things took a turn. Maybe the moon was shining in a certain way, because he became silent and cold. He had this stoney look on his face—”
“He was stoned?” Amber asks, still wearing the mask.
“No it was … well maybe before, but this looked sobering. Like something blurry was coming into focus and he didn’t like it at all. I’m pretty sure that he confused me for someone else. I actually think he thought I was Peggy Cromwell. Because I saw him making out with her on the couch as I was leaving.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“What a pig.”
“I guess I was like his lip-ring: a journey of self-discovery,” Kelly’s voice becomes mournful. “Then he made his discovery. Anyway, I felt strange, like I was something else, like my face had disappeared and I was this grim spirit for him. This omen. I felt bad about it, then kind of empowered, then bad again. So I bought this skeleton mask as a way of, like, compartmentalizing those feelings.”
“Does it work?”
“It’s cheaper than therapy.”
“I think you can afford it,” Vanessa says looking around her spacious basement.
“Don’t listen to her,” Katie counsels. “Darren is a confirmed shithead and creep, and Peggy sucks too in some way. But they’ll get theirs.”
“Katie, it’s not a good idea to wish ill on people. You’ll always be disappointed.”
“Well, they do say living well is the best revenge. Live a little!”
Vanessa glares skeptically. “People only say that because they want you to move on. The only good revenge is revenge with effort. You can’t just wish it. I tried that, believe me.”
“When was this?”
“Last year, after Teresa Barker definitely jabbed me in the stomach with her stick at field hockey practice on purpose, despite her apologies. She left the biggest bruise, I couldn’t do crunches for two weeks. So I went to the nearest church, the Unitarian one or whatever, and prayed to God that she would get a rash from her facial cleanser.”
“Did she?”
“Of course not. If anything she was exfoliating even better than before.”
“Did you at least feel better after doing it?”
“I felt like garbage. And a failure.”
“What if you tried like a small thing?” Amber, still masked after all this time, asks.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, like, whenever my brother makes me mad I put salt in his Coke.” She pauses for a moment. “You could steal her underwear or something while she showered.”
Vanessa regards Amber as if she was a foreign tourist getting bad directions. “I guess divine intervention’s appeal is in its lack of evidence trail, not in its effectiveness or catharsis. God would never tell on me.”
“You’re in God’s DMs?” Katie says snidely.
“I just know, Katie.”
“I swear, Vanessa, if we make it out of high school alive you will grow up to be the most lethal fucking cult leader.”
“And you, Katie,” Vanessa exalts, beaming as if she rather than her overseer had won a pageant. “will make an aces eminent domain abuser.”
“Aw, babe!”
Without getting up, they reach over to each other and embrace. Amber reaches to get a Rice Krispy square but finds the skeleton mask she is still wearing an impediment to her enjoyment.