Princess Idiot

I didn’t know Jenny was an orphan until I was eighteen. Back when I knew her, we lived on the same block and my mom worked with her aunt at the library. Jenny and I mostly sat at the bus stop covered in snow and huddling over thermoses full of coffee. By sixteen, we’d both led pretty unhappy lives. We just didn’t talk about it with each other. My mother kept trying to get me to take things more seriously and Jenny kept undoing it all. Now I feel sorry for my mom, but then I was just mad.

Jenny talked about sex when we waited for the bus. She had a boyfriend. His name was Nick, but she called him Nickel. I’d seen him around school in the hallway, usually all over her. Jenny and I didn’t talk at school. Only before and after the bus ride. After school, Jenny would usually smoke with Nickel, but sometimes if I was lucky she’d invite me over for cocoa. Those were good days. Later she started walking everywhere.

‘You can’t walk everywhere,’ I said one morning. The telephone poles looked down on us shivering in our oversized coats.

‘Yes I can.’

‘There’s no sidewalks here.’

‘Fuck this place,’ she said. ‘I got in trouble for making out with Nickel in the boy’s bathroom.’ She laughed and took a big sip of coffee. ‘Fine, today I’ll ride the bus with you.’ Jenny’s misfortunes were more or less about how she came into the world. Mine were about wanting to get out of it. My mother encouraged me to play the violin more so I could get into a decent college and make something of myself. She thought I should be a music teacher. Part of me wanted to give it a shot. I thought I could go to the University of Minnesota. Jenny told me she’d be lucky if she made it out of high school in one piece. She already worked and she often asked me when I was going to get a job. I always deflected. Some nights I saw her lugging her stuff in a bag to get to the diner and serve truckers. She would be riding high on caffeine and trying to study between serving burgers and fries and sludgy coffee. When we drank cocoa together, we always sat on her couch and watched black and white reruns. She smoked constantly, letting the cigarettes burn down to the filter between her fingers. ‘It’ll get me warmer faster,’ she smiled.

‘That’s bullshit,’ I said.

‘Nick and I fucked at the movies on Friday.’

For all the cigarettes she smoked, I don’t know how her skin was so clear. Some girls are just lucky I guess. I never was. I always stood in front of the mirror trying newer and stranger serums and scrubs. That always seemed to make it worse. Jenny was one of the few people who told me I was beautiful.

Nobody at school wanted me. Not that it mattered, no girl was ready to swing around. It wasn’t a large enough town for that. I’d seen enough It Gets Better campaigns to be disillusioned.

My dad had been hitting my mom. She moved out when I turned thirteen, hoping we could both get on with life. I didn’t tell her what dad had done to me. My mom ended up getting a job at the library and doing pretty well for herself. But she worried about me associating with Jenny so much.

‘She’s not going to college,’ my mom said.

‘So?’ I practically screamed.

For all Jenny’s misery, she was one of the only people I knew at that time who had desires. Unlike the other sixteen-year-old girls I knew from orchestra, she wanted things. And she got them too. The rest of us sat studying and pining, thinking and journaling. Jenny fucked and talked about it in a sorta clinical tone. She wasn’t one of those people who fucked just to be cool or to be in the know. She just talked about most things as if they were facts, which only made us want to be like her even more. She was the one who started all the trends at our high school, even if the popular girls wouldn’t admit it. Jenny wasn’t popular. She was a slut, a brain, and poor in equal measure. She probably made half the school lesbian without knowing it.

Jenny was the one who broke the silence a week after we kissed. We hadn’t spoken about it. She was smoking a cigarette and watching Lucille Ball and Groucho Marx mime each other on TV. ‘Maybe you can help me study a little…’

Moth to the flame, I sat up and looked at her. Her hazel eyes looked as bored as ever. She tied her bleached hair back in a ponytail.

‘And maybe I can show you some things,’ she flashed her teeth, two rows of jagged pearls. I didn’t want to admit how turned on I was so I shuffled in my seat and took a breath. ‘Like what?’

‘Well, Nickel has a friend I could set you up with.’

‘You don’t have to set me up.’ I sat on my hands and watched her pick up another cigarette, transfixed by her fingers.

‘I know I don’t. I just figured you might want some life experience.’

I tried to back out with a few words, but failed.

‘He’s your kinda guy. He reads and has feelings.’

It dawned on me that it was probably the best I would get and I should take it. ‘He’s really nice,’ she said, dismissing him as someone who could live or die without her taking much notice.

‘Fine.’

‘It’ll be a good time.’

I had a sinking feeling it wouldn’t be.

Meeting him at his house while his mom was at a prayer meeting felt disgusting. Like I was being led to slaughter. We talked for exactly ten minutes while drinking bourbon out of mugs. Then he kissed me. It was a soft kiss, like he was yearning for me to give him something. I guess he was. I just didn’t know if I wanted to give him anything.

But there was a moment and I decided I would. I tried to imagine his body as something gentler, not so angry and blotchy. He told me he liked me and asked if I wanted to have sex.

‘Ok,’ I said.

He licked the wrapper after he put the condom on. His lips had tasted like salt and sugar only moments before. I hated most of it, but some of it I liked. He listed a string of men he’d fucked at our school. I laughed at him, I knew half of them were straight. Or maybe I didn’t. I thought about Jenny as he kissed me.

We spent an hour afterward watching cartoons and he served me a proper meal: bourbon and cereal with cold milk. Downing the awful heat, I tried to make small talk. He was more well read than he’d let on at school. He even told me he had written a poem once. He couldn’t remember it.

After we sat for a while, he asked if he could show me something.

‘Sure.’

He told me to wait a few minutes and come into his room again. I rolled my eyes. ‘It’s not what you think.’

‘Ok, sure,’ I said, finishing the bourbon. Bad girls deserve surprises. I waited a few minutes watching a tiger chase colors across a screen before getting up off the couch and heading back to the scene.

He stood in a small white dress and heels beaming at me. I smiled in spite of myself. ‘Hello princess,’ he said softly.

‘Hello princess,’ I said.

After I lost my virginity, I saw Jenny less and less. She said it wasn’t related. I believed her, for the record. I still do.

Jenny started reading with the appetite of the starved. She picked up all sorts of books, classics, novels, local poetry anthologies, Idiot’s Guides to…, and biographies. I watched her helplessly. Often she would arrive at the bus stop deep in a book. We talked less and less. I asked her for chapstick once and she gave it to me without looking up from The Iliad. I called her pretentious.

‘You don’t understand that,’ I said.

‘Do you?’

I shut up, tightening my jaw and sipping my coffee. Her eyes were red that day, whether from tears or drugs I didn’t know. Apparently whatever I’d taught her when we studied together had found its way in. She didn’t need me anymore. I tried to accept the new parameters of our relationship.

I hung out with Bourbon-and-Cereal more, who told me to call him Ash. We talked about Jenny sparingly but if we did it was mostly to make fun of her. If we went to the diner we didn’t sit in her section so that I could feel her not making eye contact with me. Eventually she started taking a different bus.

Ash and I tried to date around as best we could, both acting as the other’s cover story. A decade later, Ash told me about moving to Philadelphia and going on estrogen. I wonder sometimes if I knew back then but just didn’t know with words.

Junior year I had two meteoric affairs, both of which lasted about a month and both of which required about four months of recovery time. It was easy to be neurotic and sad. We drank bourbon or tequila or vodka and went hiking on the weekends.

By then my mom had her suspicions. She yelled at me to keep practicing music. I was desperate to get out, but it still took me a while to put the puzzle pieces together. She was probably just scared. I found out later she’d seen one of my dad’s friends at the grocery store my junior year. Nothing happened but it scared the shit out of her.

Life kept piling on, it wasn’t sweet and it wasn’t exactly fun but at least there were hues to it.

April of my junior year, I spent some time working at the movie theater. I snuck my friends in and listened to Liz Phair while I swept up popcorn. When I had time I practiced driving with my mom. She’d seen I was taking violin seriously and was trying her best not to offer me too much advice. Of course, she was also the one who ribbed me into getting the job. One day when we were driving she asked me about Jenny.

‘Where’d she ever go?’

I shrugged trying to concentrate on the road.

‘She was nice.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’re practically in the other lane.’

I maneuvered us back. My mom got the memo. No Jenny talk.

I was busy that summer. Violin. Driving. Work. I barely saw Ash. I tried not to think about the girls who’d left me in the dust for their obnoxious cross country boyfriends. The few friends I did see were the studious type who didn’t ask a lot of questions.

It wasn’t until the fall and we were applying to colleges that I heard about Jenny again. She’d been in an accident. She was walking along the road to work one day and a car had swiped her. My mom set a cup of cocoa before me and sighed. ‘She’s not doing well. Her aunt called me.’ I didn’t understand what she was saying. ‘I think you should go visit her.’

I realized how long it’d been since I’d seen her. I’d half-convinced myself she was hiding from me, like I was a huntress.

I drove to the hospital alone. I didn’t want any distractions. If there were going to be any holy epiphanies or awful surprises, I wanted to swallow them whole. My mom would’ve tried to comfort me or take me to get shakes after. A bribe against the horror of the world. I didn’t turn the radio on or anything. The tree-lined streets felt claustrophobic in the silence. I pulled into the parking lot of the hospital and sat still for a few minutes, not ready to walk into the hospital looming in front of me.

The nurses seemed translucent as I walked by them, pale watery people in a white paper cut out building. The sterile smell drove me crazy. I didn’t stop wincing until they led me to her room.

There she was. Laid out in a bed with her eyes closed and scratches all over her face. My skin was breaking out that morning when I’d observed myself in the mirror. I was glad she couldn’t see me. I didn’t want to be remembered in heaven as an acne queen. I tried to clear my throat to say something but the nurse just smiled and left us alone. I sat in the plastic chair across from her bed. My phone buzzed. I silenced it and turned my attention back to Jenny, her eyes still shut tight.

Somewhere nearby I heard monitors beeping and doctors yelling. I waited for it to pass, trying to collect my thoughts. I wanted to reach out and hold her hand but something held me back. I folded them in my lap and looked down for a minute. Another woman came in, smiled as if she didn’t want to, checked Jenny’s stats, and left. I sighed and walked over to the window. It looked out over the river that cut through town. Cars were driving over the bridge. In a few weeks there would be another big blizzard but I didn’t know that yet. I just looked out at the sky from the fluorescent hospital room and waited for Jenny to wake up.

‘Hi Jenny,’ I said, staring out the window. I didn’t know where else to start. I wiped my eyes with my hoodie and tried to stuff it down.

‘I love you,’ I said in a whisper. I told her all about my family and finally asked about hers. I told her how my dad hit us, how his mom had hit him, how we’d moved here to start a new life, and all the rest. How I wanted to go to college so bad, but I didn’t have the spark for music. I liked it and I could play the scales but it wasn’t going to work out. When I left the room, I saw Nickel. He was coming to visit her too. He was practically sobbing. I gave him a hug despite the pull of my own grief.

‘We broke up a few months ago.’

‘I know. I’m sorry…’ The whole school knew. There’d been a blowout fight between them in the cafeteria. ‘She’ll be fine,’ I said. I didn’t know if she would be, but it felt like the comforting thing to say. I wasn’t going to make up some bullshit about heaven or Psalms or shepherds watching over her.

‘We were going to move to Minneapolis.’

She did turn out to be okay, or as okay as someone who had been swiped by a car could be. She recovered and went back to her job at the diner. I briefly mumbled a ‘Glad to see you again’ when I went in with Ash sometime during the fall of our senior year. She nodded at me and went back to work. She hardly even stopped to say hello. I’m sure the hospital or her aunt or someone told her I’d visited. Everyone had seen her and Nickel lurking around that fall. Clearly they’d gotten back together. Nickel could’ve vouched for me. But he didn’t, or Jenny didn’t care, because we didn’t speak until Christmas Eve.

It’s always the holidays that make everyone lonely feel like saying their piece. My mom had gotten a letter from my dad’s mom. Sometimes I called her ex-grandma out of spite. Ex-grandma told my mom she hadn’t told my dad where we were, but she’d found us and wanted us to go back to him. My mom burned the letter. She always hated checking the mail after that. I didn’t blame her. I know I felt foolish too. I thought we could have a normal life away from him.

Mom had made us a special dinner for Christmas Eve. She wanted us to go to church. She seemed to think she could pray dad away. The reality was, my mother explained, we would have to move again. I would commute for the rest of my senior year.

We finished the dinner of ham and assorted casseroles and were about to start on the golden-wrapped chocolates when Mom asked me to take out the trash. I smiled and got up to take out the scraps and paper and the last few pictures of my dad. She was serious that time. I left her as she focused intently on arranging the cheap candy on her nice plates.

I walked outside and looked around at the cookie-cutter houses with their Christmas decorations lighting the block. Giant Santas and skeletal reindeer in the blue snow. I tried to imagine them all as magical friends, but instead, in that moment, I felt acute panic. I wanted to drop the garbage off in the trash can and scamper back inside. But I didn’t. I just stood there for a few minutes feeling dizzy.

I went around to the side of the house where we kept the garbage. Our house reminded me a lot of my ex-grandma’s house actually. I only went a handful of times and usually it was stressful because my mom was shaking and my dad was asking us to ‘keep up appearances.’ My ex-grandma’s house was small and had this creepy all-yellow room. It had wicker furniture, a treadmill she never used, and a lot of old journals. She even had secret rooms I wasn’t allowed in. Maybe it was just where my mom and dad went to fight. I spent a lot of time in that yellow room listening to fights while I dug through Christmas decorations and photo albums. My dad looked so innocent as a child, I thought, looking through the albums.

Maybe that’s why I was terrified. I don’t know. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be out there any longer than I had to.

‘Hey.’

Jenny was smoking a cigarette across the street in a faux leather bubble jacket. She was smiling, all her pearls glittering.

‘Hey.’

‘I’m moving in with Nickel next week.’

‘That’s great.’

‘I heard you got into some colleges,’ she said between blowing smoke.

‘Yeah.’

‘I’m happy for you.’

‘It’s not for music though,’ I said kicking the snow. We were talking too loud for the night. It felt all wrong.

‘College is college. If my mother and father were still alive maybe I’d have gone but…’ I nodded. That was the first I’d heard of her parents being dead. She blew some smoke and looked down at the street.

‘I heard you. When you came to the hospital.’

She took a step toward me, but stepped back at the last minute.

I blinked once or twice but didn’t know what to say. I just stood there like an idiotic princess.

‘Merry Christmas,’ she said quickly and walked down the block towards her aunt’s.

And that was that. I never saw Jenny again, never even tried to look her up. When I went to college, I went to Iowa, too far from Minneapolis to consider looking her up. My mom begged me to go in-state but I’d decided against it. I wanted as much distance as I could get. Iowa isn’t that far away but it was enough for me. I’m telling you now because you asked me if I’ve ever been in love before you. I didn’t want to lie to you before we got more serious, so I’m telling you. It’s obviously over. It never was. But I wanted to be honest because sometimes when it’s Christmas and all the reindeer lights are up and I’m walking down the street, I start to get a weird panic, and I think about what it would’ve been like.