Diane Cook - Man V. Nature - Stories

I’m in line for lunch and Theresa comes up behind me, digs her plastic tray into my spine. I double over my ravioli.

“Meet Marni out front before fifth. Do it,” she bleats.

I sit next to Clara. Her whole look is skeptical. I don’t touch my food. The ten-minute bell.

“Clara,” I hiss. “Come to the bathroom.”

She startles like I’ve just woken her. Looking out the window is her form of sleep. But she follows.

First-floor bathroom. Lots of postlunch traffic. I peer under doors. The so-what smokers are enshrouded near the sinks. My eyes water.

I grab Clara’s hand, but she takes it away quickly, disturbed. Too close, she seems to say. I think I hate her. “Just stand guard outside the bathroom, okay? When the bell rings, text if you see Marni, Hill, or Theresa.”

“Why? Because you lied?”

How does Clara know a rumor? She’s a corner-sitter. “I didn’t lie. Just do it.”

I lock myself behind a stall door and crouch on the toilet. I can monitor through the crack. I wait.

Girls rush in, rake brushes through their hair, apply shiny gloss with wands, blot, spit into sinks. Cheap perfumes mist the air.

The bell rings; the room clears out. A drip glugs down a drain.

I text Clara a question mark, but I get no response. She’s probably wandered into some empty classroom to wait for her life to begin.

The door swings open. I smell Marni before I hear her, the fake coconut of her sunless tan. Hill and Theresa stifle awful snorting haws . They walk the line of stalls, kick in each door. They’re not wondering where I am. They know. I make myself into a small clump on the toilet seat. The whoosh of the door parts my bangs.

Hill pulls me out. “Nice try,” she mocks.

From behind the cracked door, Clara peeks. We lock eyes. I wait for a mouthed apology. She scans the scene and, incredibly, smiles before bolting. Have a nice day. I hate her.

Hill and Theresa each pull an arm behind my back. Marni smiles and knees me in the groin so hard I dry heave. They scoot to avoid my puke, but when it doesn’t come, Marni knees me again.

“Ooph,” I say and gasp for air. I’m not big like Marni. I’m misshapen, weak. My legs are logs, but my middle is bird bones, doughy, and her knee reaches the center of me.

I’m bent. Hill and Theresa try to pull me up but I pull down, not out of preservation or show of strength but out of defeat. I want to hug the ground. My legs tremble. Marni’s hands reach for my face and I let them guide me gently up because they’re her hands. I know their gentleness from when she taught me things, placed my fingers on guitar strings to press as she strummed, held me up on a bike. When she soothed me after my dad left. I look into her eyes and at her sweet, pink face. She wears more makeup now, and under all the coconut she smells stale, as though she smokes outside so that the smoke will blow away but it gets caught in all that hair. For a moment I think she’s going to smile, rub a smudge from my cheek, kiss me. But then, finally, her fist meets my face. I hear the crack, and now it’s the floor reaching for me. I see their smiles as I go.

Lying here, what I cry about is that not one of them speaks as they leave. There’s nothing to say about the downfall of unremarkable me. The only sounds are their different shoes on the tile: the click of too-grown-up heels, scuff of sneakers, clomp of daunting boots. They strut out the whining door and down the hallway, uncaringly late for fifth.

The tile is cool. Dirt shames my cheek. I have a bug’s-eye view of the bathroom floor, littered with snarls of long girl hair and dropped cigarette ash. A glittery popped-off stick-on nail lies almost close enough to touch.

I wake up in bed. My head hurts. I can’t breathe right. A rigid thing covers my nose. I tenderly pick. Crusty blood clogs my nostrils. I try to drink from a glass of water but the nose won’t let me.

The door creaks. Mom’s tentative head appears. Her eyes crinkle above her nervous smile.

“Oh good, you’re awake.” She perches at the edge of my bed, smoothes the hair across my forehead, and then I’m aware that I have a bump there.

“What happened?” I gurgle.

Her hand stops in mom alarm. “Don’t you remember?”

“Yes.”

The hand continues across my forehead. “Do you want to tell me who did this?”

“No.”

The hand stops, rests heavily on the protruding bump. It hurts. Does she know she’s hurting me? I think she does.

“I mean, I don’t remember. I mean, I don’t know.”

Mom sighs, disappointed. “Okay for now, Gabrielle. But we’re not done.” Then she brightens like she’s just been handed pages for the next scene. She says, “You have a visitor!” She straightens the sheet across my chest. “Honey, Marni is here.”

I tense. “Why?”

She smiles self-pityingly. Her daughter is strange. “To see you. To see if you’re okay. Isn’t that nice?” She pauses. “Marni hasn’t been by in such a long time. I didn’t think you two were still friends.”

“We’re not.”

“Well, then, it’s doubly nice that she came, isn’t it? Are you up for it?” She’s up for it, I can tell. She’s already fondling the doorknob.

I remember how Marni’s fist cut the smoky light shining through the cracked windows of that bathroom. It’s half-the-day-left light. It’s the kind of light here now.

I nod, and when Mom leaves, I pull myself up to a sit.

Marni tiptoes in, straight-backed and calm, her face friendly and serene. For a moment, I’m relieved. But when the door clicks behind, her body slouches into a threat. Hands on her hips. She looks at my face and snorts. “You look like shit.”

“Did you come to apologize?”

Her guffaw is from Drama. “No.”

“Did you get suspended?”

She guffaws again. “Why would I? We didn’t do anything wrong. They were helping me. It’s what friends do.”

I flinch. What a jab. “Then why are you here?” I’m acting tough.

Marni squeezes her hands together and looks around the room, everywhere but at me. She shrugs. “It didn’t work,” she says with fake indifference. “I need it to work. And now Terry and Hilly are spooked.” My stomach tightens at the nicknames, the intimacy. “That’s your fault, you know. So.”

“So what?” I yell it just enough, but not enough for Mom to hear, wherever she is.

“Finish it,” she yells back in the same way, but meaner.

“Why me? Why not Mack?”

Marni looks at me, disgusted, like I’m a horror under my fresh, flowery sheets. “I thought you were my friend.” Her chin quivers, and even though I know the logic here is wrong in that way that I almost choke on, I don’t care.

“I am.”

She waits for me to prove it.

But I concentrate on the feeling of air through my nose, in and out to slow the anticipation growing in my stomach.

“Fine,” Marni hisses. “Then I’ll do it myself.” She punches at her gut, her fists cluttered with cheap rings, barely denting her fat inner tube, hysterical.

“Stop,” I plead, and grab her hands. “You know that won’t work.”

She looks at me.

“I have to step on it.”

Marni nods.

I make a soft bed on the floor with my comforter and the quilt my grandmother fumbled her way through. It’s how I used to make Marni’s bed for sleepovers. She lies down; I cradle her head, place a pillow under it. Stretch her hair out around her like she’s floating in a pond. I know the pillowcase will smell of coconut after. I know I will let the scent fade on its own before I’ll wash it.

I fold her hands over her chest like she’s a dead person, and I see the slivers of scum under her nails. It’s the dirt from dirty things. It’s Mack’s back skin from scratching. She never cleans. Is that even how it works? I’m salivating.