Kristin Hersh - Rat Girl

I get that. But I still disagree with them.

Even childhood takes place inside buildings now, which doesn’t make sense—we shove kids indoors, make them sit still and be quiet when they should be going outside to run around and make noise. At least college classes allow for breaks when you can race out the door and breathe. I think I hold my breath when I’m in a classroom, “learning.” Learning to hold my breath.

This university let me enroll a few years ago, before I was old enough, because my philosophy-professor father, who teaches there, told them they should. He sent them my records and then I had to have a meeting with three administrators in which I was expected to carry myself in collegiate fashion.

My dad coached me on the way to the meeting. “Sit up straight. Lie. Smile.” I told him he was making me nervous. “Oh yeah, and don’t be nervous,” he continued. “Make eye contact. But not for too long—no piercing stares. And when they ask you a question, lie some more.”

“About what?”

“You’ll see.”

“That’s unpossible,” I said. “I can’t lie.”

“Oh. And don’t make up any words.”

I squinted up at him. “I make up words?”

The three administrators I was meeting with, through glorious coincidence, all had flippy hair in the shape of yak horns. What’re the odds? They also looked angry. Three angry yaks.

Everyone in the world calls my father “Dude” except for these three yaks. An old hippie with weird-ass white-blue eyes and big, curly hair, my dad looks like a Dude. The yaks called him “Dr. Hersh,” though. I would’ve snickered if they hadn’t already looked so angry.

“Very impressive grades,” the yak man said to me with a threatening glare. His flippy horns were tiny, right at the top of his forehead, and he was neck-less.

“And test scores,” added the yak woman, grimacing. When she moved, her shoulder-length curls did not.

The yak person of indiscriminate gender and chin-length horns frowned. “I think Ms. Hersh will be extremely happy here.”

I sat up straight, made brief eye contact and assured them that I would be extremely happy holding my breath inside those buildings. I used only real words, as far as I know. The whole time, I was thinking Dorks always get straight A’s … do they not know this?

“They weren’t so schmanky,” I said to Dude, walking down the hallway after the meeting, “but you don’t look like a Dr. Hersh.”

“What do I look like?” He stopped and posed while I stared at him.

“You look sorta like Dr. Who… ”

“Hmmm.” He stopped posing. “I wonder if I could get people to call me Dr. Who ?”

“That’d be cool. It might be weird to suggest it.”

“Yeah. I’ll stick with Dude.”

Now Dude makes me take all the groovy classes he teaches, to pay him back for getting me into college before I belonged there: Dream Symbolism, Native American Mythology, Yoga. “I’m trying not to grow up into a hippie,” I told him.

“Good luck with that,” he said.

One of our housemates holds a brown and white guinea pig in his hands for me to pet. “Don’t be afraid. The guinea pig is the gentlest of all creatures,” he says kindly. “All he wants is peace.”

The guinea pig looks at me suspiciously and makes strange, underwater sounds.

“Humans enslave each other and fight wars,” he continues, pushing his long brown hair behind his ears. “Guinea pigs want nothing to do with governments or violence. They’re our brothers in peace. Go ahead, you can pet him.”

I reach out to touch the guinea pig’s twitching nose with my finger. It bites me.

Dude introduced me to Betty one afternoon outside his office, as college students who looked like college students chatted in the hallway, balancing books, backpacks and cans of Coke. “Kristin Hersh? Betty Hutton,” he giggled. “Betty Hutton? Kristin Hersh.”

Betty had white hair that day, which curved in around her jawline, framing her pink lipstick. She wore blue cowboy boots and sunglasses, which she removed to reveal enormous drag queen eyelashes. Dude cried gleefully, “It’s perfect! Kristin, you’re too young to make any friends here and Betty, you’re too old!” Betty and I both cringed.

“I’m sorry,” I said, putting out my hand. “He’s not a tactful man.” Betty shook her head and then roared with laughter, pulling me into a bear hug. Over her shoulder, I saw Dude beaming. Then Betty pushed me out in front of her and growled, “Nobody can fuck with us, right, Krissy?”

“I guess not,” I said, and she hugged me again. “Wow!” I mouthed to Dude. He just stood there, smiling.

Now Betty says we need each other. That the two of us have to stick together because we’re “boy-girls,” independent and gender-free. I think she means “humans,” but I’ll take it. Betty is a shiny beast, a warm heart in a cold world, and I’m lucky to know her. She also has a great life story: she says she spent a fatherless, poverty-stricken childhood in Detroit, dancing and singing for drunks in her mother’s speakeasy, and then became a rich, famous movie star in Hollywood.

I’ve never heard of her, but it doesn’t matter. I love the story too much to question it; I don’t care if it’s true or not. I honor it as the pink, sparkly Hollywood tale with the dark Hollywood underbelly that we all need to hear at least once. I hear it all the time because Betty can talk and I really can’t. Like most quiet people though, I’m an excellent listener.

This is a Catholic university, so there’re a bunch of nuns around, though most of them disguise themselves as regular women, so it’s hard to tell who’s a nun and who isn’t. Betty and I actually have a favorite nun, a baffling sister who takes her marital vows to Jesus very seriously—she and Jesus actually sleep together. “And we don’t just sleep,” she revealed in a lecture, after which she was granted an immediate, possibly permanent, vacation.

I saw her in the locker room at the Y soon after this. She wore a huge, puffy shower cap and a bright rainbow-striped towel, and held a shower brush the size of a tennis racket in her hand. I was naked, about to step into the shower. I probably stared at her outfit a minute too long while I waited for the water to warm up, ’cause she caught my eye from across the room, waved her shower brush in greeting and whistled at me! What a nun.

Our favorite nun name , however, is: Assumpta Tang.

Suddenly, Betty appears from behind an enormous old tree, walking carefully over the dirt in prim heels. She waves maniacally, like people do in old home movies, and I wave back tiny. Everything about Betty is huge, bigger than life. I’m smaller than life—so unremarkable that I’m practically invisible. We make an odd couple.

“ Mahnin! ” I call to her.

“Sweetheart!” she says breathlessly, juggling textbooks and pressing her pantsuit into place. “I overslept! Did you do your workout?”

I make a face. “I don’t call it a workout .”

“Well, I do! Did you do your workout?” she asks again, piling her books up neatly on her arm.

I laugh. “Yeah.”

“Oh good,” she says. “So you’ll be able to sit still for a little while.”

We walk up the stairs together, Betty chattering loudly, ignoring glares from people who’re trying to study. Because she’s loud and I’m shy, Betty and I both love the library bathroom. In the bathroom, she can talk as loud as she wants and sing and guffaw without librarians giving her any shit, and I know I don’t have to see anyone but Betty ’cause the door’s locked.