The Lit Report Read online

  When she didn’t laugh I yelled “Bueller!” again.

  “Shut up,” she snapped. “It’s not like that. I’ve been here all day, in bed, waiting for my best friend to return my calls.”

  “Are you sick?” I asked, suddenly feeling guilty for not answering her messages sooner. “Do you have cramps or something?”

  “No,” she said, “maybe I’ll never have cramps again.” Even for Ruth, that was a pretty sweeping statement.

  “Never have cramps again?” I said. “Cool. Where do I sign up? Did you go to a new doctor?” Ruth and I have been going to the same doctor since we were born. No way would Dr. Mishkin give her anything that affected her reproductive abilities, not without her parents’ approval, which they would never give. Not ever. We’re supposed to abstain from sex until we marry and then breed like rabbits. Birth control just doesn’t enter into it. We’re not even supposed to masturbate.

  “Shut up,” Ruth moaned. “There’s no doctor. It’s just that...” Her voice trailed off. She actually sounded sick, and I was getting more worried by the second. Maybe I’d dismissed the Reaper too quickly.

  “Just that what?” I said, sitting up in bed and creating an avalanche of chips and carrots.

  “I did it,” she muttered.

  “Did what?”

  “It,” she said. “You know—sex. I had sex with Rick Greenway. On Saturday night. At Sharon’s party. In the upstairs bathroom.”

  “You had sex with Rick Greenway on Saturday night at Sharon’s party in the upstairs bathroom?” I sounded like I was playing Clue.

  “That’s what I said, didn’t I?” Ruth was starting to sound less like a character from Steel Magnolias and more like my old friend. “What are you, a fucking parrot? We got loaded and we had sex and then I came home. And that’s about all I remember. So I can’t even tell you if it was any good. My first time and I didn’t even get a good look at his dick, so don’t ask.”

  “I wasn’t going to,” I said, although I couldn’t help thinking about it—Rick’s dick. Rick’s prick. And I didn’t even like the guy. I knew that Ruth had vowed not to be a virgin when she entered grade twelve, so she was right on track, if not a little early. “You weren’t raped, were you?” I asked.

  “Don’t be an asshole, Julia. Of course I wasn’t raped. I went to the party to get laid and I did. It’s just...” Her voice trailed off again.

  “What?”

  “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, that’s all. It hurt and it was over really fast.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve read about that—you know—in novels.”

  Ruth snorted. “Yeah, I bet Pride and Prejudice is full of stuff about dumb chicks who get drunk and give it up at parties to grade twelve guys with small pricks.”

  “How small are we talking about?” I asked, looking speculatively at a baby carrot on the floor. She’d obviously seen something. “Zucchini? Parsnip? Dill pickle?” There was a moment of silence. I wondered if Ruth had hung up on me. She does that a lot.

  Suddenly there was a loud cackle of laughter from my phone. “Gherkin,” Ruth announced. “Definitely a gherkin. With a side order of pearl onions.”

  “Wow!” I said. “Excellent image. Makes him sound like the deli special.”

  “Yeah, well, he wasn’t.”

  “Wasn’t what?”

  “Special. He wasn’t special at all.” Ruth sounded like she was going to cry again, so I said the first thing that came into my head, something my mom had first said to me when I was thirteen and had a massive unrequited crush on Brandon Portland.

  “There’s someone special out there for you, sweetie,” I said in my suckiest voice.

  “Yeah, right,” she muttered.

  “You deserve at least a Polski Ogorki,” I said. “Or maybe you’d prefer a plain old kosher dill—”

  “Shut up,” Ruth yelled. “You’ll be lucky if you get a pickled green bean.”

  Two

  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness...

  —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

  Don’t worry. I’m not going to start every chapter with a Dickens quote. Even I’m not that much of a nerd. But you have to admit, A Tale of Two Cities has an awesome first line. Most people have heard “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” even if they’ve never read the book. What they don’t know is that the sentence goes on and on for over a hundred words. Over a hundred words. There’s no way that Mrs. Hopper would have let old Charles get away with that. No happy faces for him. Anyway, in just over a hundred elegant words, Dickens gets the point across that it’s a good idea to look at things from as many angles as possible, since each person has a unique point of view. Or as my Nana used to say, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” Maybe that’s oversimplifying it a bit. Maybe “One man’s meat is another man’s poison,” another of Nana’s favorites, is more appropriate. She and Charlie D. would have been soul mates, although, now that I think about it, all her favorite sayings are pretty gruesome. Like, “Living is like licking honey off a thorn.” Gross. True, but gross. A Tale of Two Cities also has a really famous last line, but that’s a whole different thing.

  Everything went back to normal after Ruth told me about the party. She didn’t mention Rick Greenway (or his tiny tackle) again, and I didn’t ask for more details. I informed my mother that I could no longer eat anything pickled. When she asked why, I said it was something to do with deli food being unclean. When my mother became a Christian, which was when I was about three, she immediately joined a Christian book club, the aforementioned exercise class, a group that does devotional ikebana and a choir that sings only Christian country music. She’s backed off a bit since then—she dropped the choir and the book club—but she’s still so busy that she’s never actually gotten around to reading the whole Bible, so she believes just about anything I tell her. Like when I didn’t want to go to camp, I told her that, according to the prophet Jeremiah, log cabins were an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. Or when I didn’t want to take saxophone lessons, I told her that the playing of brass instruments was expressly forbidden by the Maccabees. I think that one’s actually true. Especially when it comes to the tuba.

  Ruth doesn’t have much luck when it comes to parents. For one thing, she lives with both her parents; I live with just my mom. My dad lives across town with his new wife, Miki, and he’s only been to church once that I know of in the past seventeen years. Ruth’s parents are certifiable religious lunatics; my mom is a legal secretary who speaks three languages (English, French and Italian), loves musicals and is famous for her Holy Trinity flower arrangements made out of irises, pussy willows and wisps of sphagnum moss. My dad is a nurse in the neonatal unit at the hospital where his wife is a pediatrician. Ruth’s father is a preacher, her mom is a preacher’s wife and Ruth says that what they don’t know about the Bible could fit in a flea’s asshole. My mom stopped going to Ruth’s dad’s church when she realized what a redneck jerk he is. She’s never come right out and said it, but that’s my interpretation of her switch from the Glory Alleluia Gospel Assembly (aka GAGA) to her current church, All Saints. She says the music’s better at All Saints, but I think what she really likes is that Father Shortwell doesn’t yell, “I’m in the business of saving souls for Jesus, and my business needs backers,” when he passes the collection plate.

  Ruth’s dad, or Pastor Pete as his parishioners call him, has some dandy tattoos left over from his days behind bars. And I don’t mean he was a bartender. The tattoos are all sort of blurry and dreary—knives and hearts and women’s names and an awesome Jesus dripping blood from a crown of thorns. Jesus looks suspiciously like Pete’s old cellmate, a biker named Two-Percent (because he’s not homo). Two-Percent has been a deacon at GAGA since his release five years ago. Peggy is always nagging Pete to have his tattoos lasered off, but Pete loves to “let the tatts testify,” as he puts it, although the old
er he gets, the grosser the testifying gets. But you’d be surprised how many women with big hair and giant boobs join his church after an encounter with Pastor Pete’s body art.

  IN EARLY DECEMBER, Ruth got sick and missed a few days of school. One Friday morning, Peggy called to ask me to bring Ruth’s homework over after school. Peggy still doesn’t understand that under no circumstances will Ruth do homework on the weekends. But of course I didn’t argue. I rarely argue with adults. It seems like such a waste of energy. In my view, childhood and adolescence are non-negotiable sentences. There is no appeal process. No time off for good behavior, no parole. You might as well just wait it out, make plans for your release and try not to piss off the wardens and the other inmates. It wasn’t hard for me to maintain a reputation for quiet piety; I’m smart, I like volunteering at the hospital and recycling my pop cans, and most of my elders are tolerable people. Pretending to be God-fearing was slightly more challenging, but I managed that mostly by keeping my mouth shut and going to church once a week with my mom.

  It was a constant source of annoyance to Peggy that I, an only child and the product of a broken home, was much better adjusted than either of her children. To hear Peggy tell it, Ruth has been in trouble since she was in the womb, what with the morning sickness, the premature delivery, the colic, the croup, the broken arm, the eczema, the night terrors, etc., etc. Ruth’s older brother, Jonah, was sent to a bible college in northern Alberta right after he graduated high school. Jonah isn’t like Ruth. He doesn’t smoke, drink or hang around with evildoers. Jonah’s crimes are cultural. He loves music, especially jazz and opera. He reads a lot of philosophy books and claims to be an existentialist. He bought himself a subscription to Gourmet magazine with his paper-route money when he was twelve. Which means, according to Pete and Peggy, that Jonah is gay and thus in mortal danger of eternal damnation. I know from personal experience that Jonah is definitely not gay. I’ve known since I was fourteen and he was sixteen and we fooled around a bit (okay, a lot) on a school camping trip. So Jonah got sent to Bible boot camp, where he’s supposed to be scared straight by bad food, worse music and mandatory participation in team sports. It won’t work. Jonah knows how to wait it out too. And besides, he’s already straight.

  When I got to Ruth’s house on Friday afternoon, Pete was putting up Christmas decorations on the front lawn. Even though it was pretty cold out, he was wearing a tight, white, short-sleeved, V-neck T-shirt and no jacket. I could see the spider web tattoo on his left elbow and the skull on his right forearm and a thorn or two of Christ’s crown peeking out of his chest hair. I was glad it wasn’t July. July means tank tops.

  “Hey, Julia,” he said, gesturing toward the grotesque inflatable nativity scene he was assembling. “Whaddaya think? She’s a beauty, eh?”

  “Sure, Mr. Walters,” I said. “It’s a marvel of ingenuity.” I knew he wouldn’t want to hear that the wise men, especially Balthazar, looked like sand-weighted drag queens, or that the Baby Jesus could use a little more air.

  “You should see it lit up, baby. Once I get the star on the roof—Praise Jesus! People will drive by and stop their cars and get out and fall on their knees!”

  “Sure, Mr. Walters,” I said again. Fall on their knees laughing, I thought.

  “Be sure and come by some night,” he said, turning back to pumping up the Virgin Mary. “Bring your mom. I miss her pretty face at the church.”

  “Sure, Mr. Walters,” I said for the third time as I went up the front stairs and rang the doorbell. It played the first few notes of “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus.” I shivered, but not from the cold.

  Peggy opened the door and greeted me with her usual warmth and charm. Peggy always smells as if she’s bathed in Mr. Clean.

  “Oh, it’s you, Julia. Go on up.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Walters. That’s a lovely apron.” I know better than to call her Peggy to her face.

  But she had already turned and was halfway to the kitchen before I started up the stairs to Ruth’s room. I’ve been in Ruth’s house so many times that I don’t even notice anymore how weird it is that the downstairs is immaculate and the upstairs looks as if the Hell’s Angels are having a sleepover. I guess the fact that Two-Percent was living in Jonah’s room didn’t help. Pete and Peggy’s spotless bedroom and gleaming en suite bathroom was downstairs in the clean zone. Ruth’s room was okay, though. Kind of dark, due to scab-colored curtains, and a bit smelly, due to the incense Ruth burns to cover up other smells, but still strangely cozy.

  Ruth had been decorating her room ever since she could hold a crayon, use a pair of scissors and jab a pushpin into drywall. She never takes anything off the walls, so her room is a giant collage. She calls it Installation One: Childhood, and she says that when she leaves home she’s going to rip everything down and burn it in the backyard incinerator. I hope she doesn’t. There are pictures of us at Bible camp underneath our grade five report about tree frogs; there’s Jonah’s recipe for key lime pie, a ticket stub from the first movie we ever went to (Babe) and a signed photograph of Billy Bob Thornton. Every time I go to Ruth’s there’s something new on the walls. Today it was a lacy Day-Glo orange thong, splayed on the wall like a giant butterfly.

  Ruth was lying in bed reading People magazine. On her night table was a yellow plate with toast crusts on it; beside the plate was a can of ginger ale. Beside the bed was an empty plastic ice-cream bucket. Ruth’s hair, which she had recently dyed blue, was pulled back in a ponytail, and she was wearing red- and white-flowered pajamas. Her face was very pale.

  I giggled and Ruth frowned. “Don’t laugh at me. I puked on my T-shirt,” she said, pointing at the pajamas. “Peggy made me put these on. They suck but at least they don’t stink.”

  I put Ruth’s homework on her desk next to her computer. The screensaver was a flying monkey from The Wizard of Oz with the words When monkeys fly out of my butt instead of a tail.

  “You feeling any better?” I asked, making myself comfortable in the desk chair and keeping my distance from Ruth’s puke-germs. There’s nothing I hate more than puking. Vomiting scenes in movies make me nauseous. Even the sight of the bedside bucket made me queasy.

  “A bit,” Ruth replied. “For a while this morning I thought I was gonna die, but it’s better now. Now I’m just bored. I can’t even be bothered to watch shitty TV. My energy level is, like, zero. No, it’s more like negative ten.” Ruth pulled her hair out of its elastic and sighed. “Plus, I feel all, kinda, emotional. This morning I cried watching Regis and Kelly with my mom. There was something about little homeless kids in Thailand and I just lost it. Plus, my boobs hurt. Like before my period.”

  “You think you’re PMS-ing?” I asked cautiously. If she was, I wasn’t going to hang around. A while ago, Ruth had thrown a stiletto-heeled boot at my head when I wouldn’t hand over the remote. Other girls get irritable and weepy before their periods; Ruth gets psychotic. I had to have three stitches in my forehead after the boot episode. I scratched the bump where the scar was. Was it really only a month ago? It seemed longer. A lot longer.

  “Um, Ruth,” I said cautiously. “You’ve had a period, right? Since, you know, Rick.”

  Ruth looked at me as if I was insane. “Duh,” she said. “You remember. Pizza Day. You freaked out ‘cause I took your last tampon. And then the next day your period started and you had to get a pad from the school nurse.” She took a sip of ginger ale and belched loudly.

  “Yeah, but—” I hesitated, wondering if she would figure it out on her own or if she was just in massive denial. Even Ruth can count to twenty-eight, but this was the first time she’d needed to. “Pizza Day was in October. November was hot dogs.” I pulled my agenda out of my pack, opened it and held it out to her. “Look. Pizza Day—October 18. Hot Dog Day—November 16. Remember?” Ruth took one look at the agenda, threw it across the room, leaned over the side of the bed and puked into the ice-cream bucket.

  When she was finished puking (it was mostly dry heaves, tha
nk goodness) she started crying, and I left the desk chair and got her a damp washcloth and a glass of water from the bathroom. I curled up on the bed with her and stroked her blue hair away from her sweaty forehead. That’s what my mom does when I’m sick and it always helps. I decided against asking her whether they had used condoms. It seemed like locking the barn door after the horse is gone, as Nana likes to say.

  When she finally stopped sobbing, I wiped her face with the washcloth and got her to sip some water. I had the idea, even then, that hydration was important.

  “I am so fucked,” she moaned.

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “We’ve established that.”

  She glared at me and took another sip of water. “It’s not funny, Julia. I mean, what am I gonna do? Pete and Peggy will kill me. Or send me away. Look what they did to Jonah, and his biggest sin was listening to Miles Davis.” Ruth gulped and reached for the bucket again. I looked away while she retched.

  “What about Rick?” I asked.

  “What about him?”

  “Are you going to tell him? That he’s going to be a father?”

  Ruth lay down and pulled the pillow over her head so her next words were muffled. It sounded as if she said, “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” I repeated.

  She sat up suddenly, her face flushed, her hands balled into fists. “I don’t know whether he’s the father, okay? We were really drunk and a couple of his friends were in the room with us, and I think I did it with at least one other guy, but I don’t know who. So, to answer your question, no, I won’t be telling Rick. Or my parents. Or Jonah. Or anyone else.” Her eyes filled with tears again, and she disappeared under the covers. I could hear her sobbing, but I left her alone. I needed to think.

  When we were about ten, Ruth and I had gotten into the habit of making all our decisions with the aid of a piece of ruled stationery with a wavy line drawn down the middle—pros to the left, cons to the right. Oh Henry! or Mars bar. Swimming or biking. Red shorts or blue. We were the Solomons of fifth grade, and by high school we were positively Delphic. Our classmates consulted us on everything. Is it okay to liberate cash from your mother’s purse? Absolutely not. Mothers, in our experience, cataloged everything in their purses—tampons, money, breath mints, lipstick. Should you have sex with your best friend’s brother? Probably not, although my objectivity was compromised by the huge crush I had on Jonah. Left to our own devices, Ruth made disastrous decisions and I made boring ones. But the paper oracle never let us down as long as we did it together.