
When My Eighth Grader Asks “What’s Worse Than Ghosting?” by Kirsten Kaschock
A banging—glass rattling against glass.
At the end of the bus line idled mine, number 23. M’s brother and two other boys had him smashed against the emergency door. The side windows were open, it was September, I heard my name. The boys were French-kissing the filthy glass—their lips like beef livers under the foggy display in the deli aisle. Your Nana never bought that stuff—Pap-pap hated liver.
The twins had moved in that spring. Their house was a few blocks from ours, down the crick, closer to the Susquehanna. I was in the 7thgrade. M and C were beautiful, all lanky loping grace. Their longish brown hair swooped and feathered. They wore bright white hightops and acid-washed jeans and Members Only jackets. They had easy smiles. I picked a favorite, the one with the quiet eyes—M.
Our trip to school each day took nearly an hour. On the way to his seat, M sometimes accidentally met my gaze and my heart back-flipped. I was trying to perfect the whole-body move with a harness and a spotter at my dance studio—I studied ballet, tap, tumbling, baton. Every afternoon some mother from the studio’s carpool picked a group of us up after school, so I saw M only on the morning ride.
In June, after school ended for the summer, I started dragging your Aunt Rat on walks past the twins’ house. If they were out playing basketball on the driveway, we’d scurry back up the street like frazzled squirrels. Had I outed myself? I knew I was strange. Girls didn’t want boys like that. It wasn’t my job to pick an object of desire, just to pray I could—through tanning regimes, make-upping, and meal skipping—become one.
Unlike you, I took no pride in my weird. There was simply no denying it: I was smart and awkward and not as shy as I acted. In fact, part of me was distinctly un-shy, and that girl liked ink. So I saved up my allowance to buy fancy paper at the fancy paper store in the strip mall the next town over. I liked the rough stock that made my nib scratch and the sensuous, spidery threads that bled from anywhere I’d let my peacock blue felt-tip pen linger.
Rat didn’t want to slip the envelope into the void of tilting black mailbox. “You’re the one who’s goo-goo for them.” I corrected her, “Him.” They were identical twins, but I thought—not really. The third time around the block she gave in. Later, I bought her a rocket pop from an ice cream truck driven by the algebra teacher everyone mocked. I heard a neighbor say “fucking pervert” once, when the truck’s faint jingling announced twilight from around the corner. This was the neighbor who mowed the lawn in his electric-blue speedo, his uppermost thighs the color of milk.
That summer, Rat delivered three letters for me. By the last, I’d confessed the depth of my feelings and, in M’s silence, read a kind of soft assent. Our relationship as I imagined it was progressing—if torturously slowly. I couldn’t wait for school. Late August sauntered, and I dizzied myself with fantasies. He’d call my name. I’d turn. He’d say, “About those letters…”
My first day outfit was a long spinny skirt and a deep-necked sweater I wore backwards. I got sent home later that year for the unorthodoxy: it revealed my lack of the mandated yet wholly unnecessary bra. But on that first day of 8th grade, I was not a slut-in-training, I was a vision. And I was rewarded for my efforts: the clothes, the smoky navy eyeliner, my epistolary wooing of the boy next door. In last period study hall, a note fell onto whatever science fiction thing I was reading, maybe Stranger in a Strange Land, maybe 1984—because it was. After launching a football-triangle across the space between us, C whispered loudly, “M gave me this. It’s for you.” Yes I know, I thought, why else would you flick it onto my desk? But despite my silent wit, I felt like vomiting. I hid the note, lest the teacher confiscate it. Handwritten messages back then were precious—singular, artifactual. I waited for the bell. A shuddery warmth was blooming in my chest and I held it there. It burned like peppermint.
Out by my locker, amidst the slammings, brush-pasts, and general shrieky preteen end-of-dayness, I slowly unfolded the paper. “Meet me afterschool,” it read in bleary pencil, “by the plum tree.” That was where 8th grade couples stood to kiss before climbing onto their mustard-hued chariots.
I was petrified.
M liking me was all I wanted from the world. Therefore, by the logic of long suffering, it could not be happening. I read the note again. I hurried to the bathroom. I splashed water on my face, dabbed my eyes with a gray paper towel, removed my retainer and—trembling—applied lip-gloss. Tangerine, maybe. I remember hating cherry.
My books pressed tight to my chest, I stepped outside. I counted the cracks in the concrete as I walked. When a dance friend yelled—did I forget we had class?—I pretended not to hear. It was only after I reached the patch of green hidden from strolling teachers by a low-branching tree that I lifted my head. There were a few couples there on the lawn, magnetically drawn to each other and repelled from the others in a latticework of young love. But no M.
It was then I heard them—the boys, banging.
When I turned towards the ruckus I saw him, held against the back of the bus by C and two squat bullies from down the block, wrestlers. M wouldn’t look at me. His brother did though, and the others. In between jeers they pressed fleshy mouths against the glass, leaving behind sweaty signatures of mocked kiss. C was ugly-laughing: hyena-faced, a nightmare-clown, twisty. He shared that face with his brother, but on him it was awful. How had I missed this shift—that the same face could be made hideous like that, cruel?
On hot days, tears feel hotter. Summer still sputtered, the student body released from un-air-conditioning into a more open oppression. I stood staring for so long the twins’ untwinned faces seared into me, these two responses to my inept efforts, one mean and one mortified, neither returning my ache. By the time the bus pulled away, my whole neighborhood was there at the back, watching me grow small.
A few minutes later I crammed myself into a station wagon with four other ballerinas-to-be, though even then I knew I didn’t have the correct body type. Madonna blared, the wind whipped the hair we hadn’t yet slicked into buns, and my face dried, salted stiff.
You asked me what could be worse than being ghosted? Maybe a public shaming that points at, then wriggles wormy fingers into you until you aren’t sure who is rotten. I don’t know if M wrote that note, or if it was C. The truth is: the twins I hated and loved are fictions I taped together from obsession and thin air. I’ve never stopped rewriting my desire into something more acceptable, trying to accept it, and me.
I know your friend stopped texting. I know it hurts. But maybe don’t hate them for needing to vanish. And don’t hate yourself for reaching out into the void. Rusted mailbox, digital ether: these places hold magic, which means they can withhold it too. Not-knowing how a person, or the world, will respond to your particular brand of strange is terrifying—I know it is.
But it’s also the peppermint part.
Kirsten Kaschock, a Pew Fellow in the Arts and Summer Literary Seminars grand prize winner, is the author of five poetry books: Unfathoms (Slope Editions), A Beautiful Name for a Girl (Ahsahta Press), The Dottery (University of Pittsburgh Press), Confessional Science-fiction: A Primer (Subito Press), and Explain This Corpse (winner of Blue Lynx Prize from Lynx House Press). Coffee House Press published her debut speculative novel—Sleight. She has recently transplanted herself to Baltimore.
20 October 2022
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