Home > This Is Not the Jess Show(2)

This Is Not the Jess Show(2)
Author: Anna Carey

   The thing is…she wasn’t wrong. It had all started the last week of August, when it was so humid you couldn’t walk from the car to the house without your shirt sticking to your back. I worked that summer at the Swickley YMCA, playing the keyboard for the Seniors Sing! choir, but on Thursdays and Fridays I was off. Those empty hours were filled with Saved by the Bell reruns and swimming in Amber’s pool, which was in-ground and heated to a perfect eighty-five degrees. We stayed in the water until our fingers were wrinkly and our eyes were bloodshot from the chlorine.

   Ty had called me that morning, bored out of his mind. Driftwood Day Camp had ended and so had his reign as assistant to the Music Director. He’d known Amber and Kristen almost as long as I had, but it wasn’t an obvious thing, me inviting him over to Amber’s house. I had to beep her, then wait for her to call me back so I could ask, and she said he could come if he picked up a bottle of Dr. Pepper on the way.

   He’d already started dressing differently by then, trading in his old polos for vintage tee shirts he’d found at Goodwill, ones that said ITHACA IS GORGES or ORLANDO in loopy, ’80s font. When he came through the back gate he seemed taller, and he was tan from a summer spent outside, his shaggy hair overdue for a cut. He was the same Ty I’d known for six years, whom I’d defended in gym class when people called him Fire Crotch or Bugsy Scruggsy. The same Ty who’d stayed up late with me, lying in the treehouse in my backyard after Sara was diagnosed with Guignard’s Disease. The same Ty who only said sorry, I’m so sorry, knowing that the silence was what I needed. But he was different, too. He came through the gate and hugged me, and something felt different.

   “I can’t believe you’re into Bugs, I mean, it’s Bugs.” Amber pulled her braids down in front of one shoulder. She’d worn her hair that way ever since Clueless came out—Dionne Davenport was her style icon.

   “He’s gotten so full of himself too,” Kristen said. “It’s painful to be around.”

   “I don’t think he’s full of himself,” I said. “Besides, this is high school. People reinvent themselves all the time.”

   I didn’t go on, but I didn’t have to. Just two years before, Kristen had gone through her own Love Potion No. 9 transformation, saying goodbye to her glasses and the vast majority of her body hair, and returning freshman year with boobs. She’d started September by making out with Kyle Sawicki, captain of the JV lacrosse team, as if that alone could announce: SEE, I’M DIFFERENT!! I never gave her shit for changing. But Amber and Kristen had distanced themselves from Ty almost as soon as he started working out. They kept saying he was conceited, and it felt like he was trying too hard, and didn’t I find it all a little annoying?

   “Where is everyone?” I asked, as we passed the tenth empty parking spot on our way inside the school. The lot was half empty.

   “Haven’t you heard? There’s some kind of flu going around…” Amber spun her pearl earring between her fingers.

   “Paul Tamberino has been barfing for three days straight,” Kristen said. “Fever, chills, the whole thing. We should be wearing hazmat suits.”

   She pushed through the back door, which had SPRING FORMAL fliers taped on it. She held it open just long enough for Amber and me to pass through, then rubbed her hand against the front of her jeans. It was seven twenty-six, just four minutes before first period, but the hall was practically empty. No Max Pembroke and Hannah Herlihy making out at the lockers by the auditorium. No sophomore girls standing in front of the vending machines, pretending to be engrossed in a snack selection as they waited for the senior guys to pass through. No Mrs. Ramirez telling people they needed to hurry up, get to class.

   “Half the school is out,” I said. “It’s a stomach flu?”

   “Just the regular one, but really, really awful,” Kristen said. “Things coming out of either end, nonstop. They said that—”

   “Ew, Kristen, repulsive.” Amber winced. “We get it, it’s bad.”

   “Jess asked!” Kristen turned left down the hall, then spun around and walked backward, pulling her tee shirt up over her face so it covered her nose and mouth, as if that alone could protect her from germs. “Stay safe out there.”

   “Just remember: Lady in Red,” Amber said, before starting toward her Physics classroom. “She was the same person she was before the dress.”

   “It’s not a Lady in Red situation. I swear.”

   But was it? There was something about Amber’s declarations that always made me unsure. Amber was the only one of us who’d dated anyone seriously. She and Chris Arnold had gone out for six months last year, and she’d decided to break up with him because he said “I love you” and she knew immediately she’d never say it back.

   I took the stairs down to the music wing. I passed a bunch of juniors I recognized, but it was as if all the underclassmen had vanished. I hadn’t seen the school this empty since the tornado in 1996, right at the end of my freshman year. It touched down one night in May, and my family huddled in the basement, listening to it barrel through like a freight train, exploding trees and cars and mailboxes in its wake. The entire block behind the library was destroyed, including Kristen’s house. I’d volunteered every Saturday for weeks, digging personal items out of the debris. I’d found Kristen’s third-grade picture under a bathtub.

   When I got to band, half the seats were empty, and Tyler wasn’t in the percussion section. Emily Hanrahan and Kima Johnson, two girls I’d known since elementary school, were the only flutes. The sophomores who sat behind them were out and most of the woodwind section was missing too. A woman with red glasses sat at Mr. Betts’s desk.

   I went to the music closet, but Tyler wasn’t there either. My mom had been on the phone all weekend, so I was only able to sign onto AOL for five minutes on Saturday, and he hadn’t been on. I hated thinking he might be sick too, that I might not see him for a whole week, maybe more. He didn’t stop by our house as often as he had when we were younger, and I looked forward to every class we had together—on Thursdays especially, when he sat next to me in study hall and we spent the period passing notes back and forth.

   My keyboard was on the top shelf and I had to yank it out inch by inch, sliding it across the wood so that it didn’t fall on my head. The band room had a grand piano that I sometimes played, but Mr. Betts preferred the keyboard this year, considering the medley we were performing. It was a mash-up of all these sitcom theme songs—Perfect Strangers, Friends, Full House, The Simpsons, and Family Matters. He liked how the piano solo at the beginning of Family Matters sounded on the keyboard. It was poppy, electronic, and closer to the original. I didn’t have a problem with the actual composition, but part of me knew he was going to make us do something cheesy, like wear sunglasses or shimmy our shoulders at the break. He was always adding what he called “dramatic flair,” even though it felt more third grade than eleventh.

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