AUGUST 19, 2009

I outline my eyes with a pencil call Smolder, then smudge most of it away. I brush on a blush called Orgasm, so that I look barely flushed. With every stroke of the lip liner pencil, every puff of blush, I imagine Tyler staring back. I realize that this is delusional, which is why it is so important that absolutely no one knows that I am trying. Not Tyler, not any of my old friends in band, not my mom.

Especially not my mom.

Thinking about her and her freakish CSI ability to analyze everything about me, from the way I am breathing to my tiniest facial twitch, makes me rub off most of the lip gloss and blush. If she knows it is all for a football player she will implode. It will be like one of those FLDS Mormon girls in the Little House on the Prairie dresses telling her mom she is crushed out on Snoop Dogg. Even making an effort for Parkhaven High would worry her. Which it does anyway, because, when I appear, she analyzes me for so long that I am certain she knows everything. I feel like she is X-raying me and all the bones of my skeleton are spelling out, “She likes a football player!” and “BONUS REVELATION: She’s thinking about betraying you by being Facebook friends with the ex who ruined your life!”

Then I feel her passing judgment and it is like being held underwater. So when she finally says, “Wow, pretty dressed up, aren’t you?” I am already sputtering for air.

“Why? Just because I’m wearing a skirt? In case you haven’t noticed, it’s like a thousand degrees out there and skirts are not as hot as jeans.” I know she is going to bust me on my “tone.” But if I don’t tone her a little bit, she is like that robot annihilator in Terminator 2. Run him over with a semi and all his quicksilver innards just slurp back together and keep coming at you. I am already too nervous to deal with that level of unstoppability.

“Sorry. You look nice is all.”

“Uh, it is the first day of school.”

“God, bite my head off. All I said is that you look nice.”

“And all I said was that it’s the first day of school.”

I cannot wait to get my own car. Not just so that I won’t be the only senior who doesn’t have one, but so I don’t have to start every single day of my life being laser-scanned to make sure I match someone’s standards. And, P.S., thanks, Mom. Way to destroy my confidence.

The entire first day of school, I feel like I am looking through a pair of binoculars turned around the wrong way so that everything is happening far, far away. All the people jamming the halls are like extras in a crowd scene as I search for Tyler’s face. The teachers introducing themselves and passing out their grading policy sheets and either trying to scare us or charm us seem like someone is making them play charades and they all want to lose.

After school, I find a spot in the shade at the very edge of the field where the band marches and right next to the adjacent field where the football team practices. The team hasn’t come out of the locker room yet, but most of the marching band is on the field, gathered around Mr. Shupe, who is passing out permission slips for trips.

I sit with my skirt spread out around me in a half circle and my legs swept under it. I imagine my father, hidden away behind the bleachers next to the football field spying on me and wondering … what? If I have any legs? Realizing that I look like the Little Mermaid, I reposition and just sort of sprawl. Tyler especially has to believe that I am a casual person with lots of options who hasn’t thought twice about him. Mr. Shupe finishes handing out the forms, catches sight of me languishing on the sidelines, and waves me over, yelling, “Lightsey, double-time it! I need you to work with Johnson on field blocking!”

I don’t move.

“Lightsey!”

I don’t look up. After trying to get my attention two more times, Shupe gives up, orders the drum major, “Johnson, get them started on ‘Joy,’ ” and walks over to me.

The thought of marching up and down a field with the words “Jeremiah was a bullfrog!” playing in my head makes me even more certain that, even though I don’t know how to have a new one, I can never, ever, ever go back to my old life.

Shupe’s big, puffy white sneakers appear beside me. “What’s the deal, Lightsey? You’re section leader. We covered for you during band camp, but we need you out there now. Do we need to talk about electing someone else?”

It is almost funny that he thinks that the threat of being replaced as section leader is going to make me leap to my feet and run for the plumed hat. “Actually,” I say in a weak, whispery voice, “the doctor says …”

He can’t hear me, so Shupe squats down in front of me like he is Jeremiah the bullfrog. The up-close view of the Shupe crotch helps me sound woozy. “The doctor says I can’t be out in the heat yet. So I am just going to sit here in the shade and, you know, take notes on the formations and stuff.”

“But it’s hotter than …” I appreciate that he stops himself and doesn’t say “balls.” “It’s really hot out here.”

“Uh, actually, the doctor says I can be out. I’m just not supposed to march.”

“But you’re section leader. These jabonies”—he jerks a thumb back to the chaos that is the first week with a bunch of incoming freshmen—“need a lot of work. A lot of work.”

“Maybe you should just go ahead and tap Wren. Or Amelia. They both know the drills as well as I do.”

“What? You told me that you’d only need a week to recover.”

“Well, yeah. That was the initial diagnosis. But the doctor says it’s more serious than he thought at first. One more degree and there would have been permanent brain damage.” Three years of working in the attendance office is paying off. I know exactly what to say and even how to say it to make a teacher start worrying about lawsuits. I squint like both the sun and his questions are making my head hurt.

Shupe bounces a little on the balls of his puffy white shoes, and I go on even whisperier, as if all the talking is wearing me out. “Actually, the doctor says that I might never regain the ability to regulate my body temperature.” I slump a bit to help him imagine me with a pointer strapped to my head, blowing into a tube to control my wheelchair.

Shupe exhales and puts his hands together like he is going to ask me to pray with him. But he just looks over his shoulder at the mob scene, winces when LeKeefe Johnson yells, “Left face!” and all the returning people go left and smash into all the freshmen who have turned right. “When did they stop teaching left and right? Is that too much to ask of our educational system?” He stands up. “We could really use you out there, Lightsey.”

“OK, Mr. Shupe.” I pretend to try to struggle to my feet, letting my head flop as I do.

“No, no. Keep your place.” He waves his hands over his head to signal LeKeefe to stop, orders me, “Get well,” and runs off without even asking to see the doctor’s note that I’d carefully forged using the wide variety of forms I have amassed while working in attendance. I guess that after three straight years of my not being anything—not emo, not Christian, not prep, not jock, not ghetto, not punk, not hipster, not skank, not prude, just a half-assed band geek—no one can believe I’d do anything so well defined as lie. I like my new superpower.

Out on the field, Shupe yells, “Band! Ten-HUT!”

LeKeefe tweets his whistle, holds his right foot up high, and orders, “Mark time! Mark … AND!” He brings his foot down, trying to get everyone to hit the first beat together. They don’t. They really don’t.

“T-bones, arc it up! Arc it up!” Mr. Shupe runs onto the field to make certain that the trombones do the choreography perfectly so that, from the stands at halftime, they will all look like very talented ants forming into triangles and figure eights.

The brass players are swinging their instruments up and down, the drummers twirling their big, padded sticks with each beat, everyone just working it as hard as they can.

Do any of them even know that they are playing “Fat Bottomed Girls” by Queen? Have they watched the YouTube video of Freddie Mercury? I did, and from that moment on, all I could ever think about when we played that song was this skinny guy in a stretchy unitard thing singing about how fat-bottomed girls make the rockin’ world go round. You can’t erase that image and get back into believing that you and Wren Acevedo and LeKeefe Johnson and Amelia O’Dell and all your other band friends are really, secretly cool any more than you can believe that girls of any bottom size made Mr. Mercury’s rockin’ world go ’round. You just can’t.

The football field is still empty, but the aluminum bleachers set up next to it are filling in with the girls who Mom and Dori call the Parkhaven Princesses. They are all wearing Nike running shorts, flip-flops, and weirdly uncool T-shirts that they make look cool. And, somehow in the swampy humidity, they all have hair straight and shiny as Christmas tinsel. Flatiron hair. My whole life Mom has told me that I am “just as good as any of those Parkhaven Princesses.” Which, until she mentioned it, I had never really considered, but the instant she made a point of telling me I was just as good as them, I saw that the whole question was open to debate and she was cheering me on because I was on the losing team.

I suddenly wonder why I ever hated these girls and realize that I don’t. I never did. My mother does. Dori did. Or they hate whoever their version of them was in their high schools. But why should I hate them or idolize them or feel anything at all about them? They are just being who they were born to be. Exactly like I, only child of a semideranged, quasi-hippie single mom, am being who I was born to be.

Everyone on the bleachers claps when the team runs out. The players have on their video-game-predator pads and helmets. Tyler is so encased in plastic that all I can identify is his number. The only sound is a clatter when the players ram together.

In the end, it doesn’t matter that I have worn a skirt. Tyler never looks my way once. Which is good. I am dressed all wrong.