Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

One day when Justine’s pack of friends was not with her at the end of the day, she found herself a bare three feet from Emotional, both of them in the act of closing their lockers. Justine couldn’t help it; she turned her head and held the other girl’s flitting glance. “Hi, Cheryl,” she said.

They left school together and continued walking for a few blocks before they had to part. Justine did this because it was late and she didn’t see anyone she knew and because the novelty of talking with this outcast was too fascinating to let go of quickly. But mainly she walked with Emotional because when she allowed contact to occur between them, she was touched by her in a way she had no experience with and therefore no resistance against. Every aspect of Emotional’s body — the shy ducking motion of her head, her injured eyes, her small steps, her arms held protectively close to her body, her soft dislocated voice — was the manifestation of a deep woundedness which Justine, without the harsh interference of her friends, felt acutely. She wanted to salve this wound, to shield it. It was a feeling she hadn’t had for a long time, not even for herself, and it was such a tender feeling that she wanted to prolong it.

That night as she lay in bed, she fantasized about standing between Emotional and the whole brutish world, protecting her, creating a little place between them where she’d be free to like her hillbilly music and wear her uncool clothes and nobody would mind.

She unexpectedly got the chance to act out this fantasy when the next day, before school, she was confronted during the usual pre-class homeroom melee by Debby, Deidre and another girl with terrifying big black hair. They wanted to know: “Are you friends with Emotional?”

She was only telling the truth when she said “No,” but then they wanted to know if it was true she’d walked with her.

“I just wanted to see the queer kinds of things she’d talk about. I just wanted to know what weirdos say. I was pretending to be nice, but she could tell I hated her.”

Later that day she and Dody were alone, ratting their hair in the rest room after school. “Do you really hate Emotional?” Justine asked.

Dody stopped in midrat and stared. “Of course I hate her, what are you, some kind of retard?”

“No really, why do you hate her?”

“Because she’s retarded.”

“Yeah but if she’s retarded, shouldn’t we help her? Shouldn’t we be nice to her if she can’t help being weird?”

“God, Justine, sometimes I wonder about you.” Dody produced a compact and vigorously ground some pink grit into her skin.

The next day Justine had to put up with a lot of sarcastic comments. But she found that once she’d begun expressing what she felt, it was hard to stop; she became reckless, irritated by the choke collar of public opinion. Although she was frightened, she couldn’t help yanking against the restraint, and the more disapproval she got, the harder she tugged against it. A tough little person within her rose and asserted itself. She stuck by what she’d said, more and more vehemently, until finally she exploded. “I don’t care what you douche-bags do. I’m not gonna hate Emotional anymore so just shut up, okay?” The other girls stared at her, shocked.

They began savaging poor Emotional even more viciously than before, especially in Justine’s presence. But there was a lack of confidence in their voices as they picked and abused. After a few days it became half-hearted and then stopped. The subject of Emotional was all but dropped in the lunchroom, where Justine sat in her usual place among the others, defiantly eating her dried-up burger and fries.

It was during gym class that the miracle occurred; the girls were dividing into teams, the most popular ones ritually selecting their team mates, when Debby suddenly bawled out, “I want Cheryl! Cheryl Thomson!” There was a moment of silence, and then someone on the other team said, “Aw! I wanted her!” in a voice usually used to coo over the cuteness of babies and bunnies.

Emotional took her place on the team looking like she’d been hit in the head with a brick and was stoically preparing for another blow. She played her usual clumsy but serviceable game, and every successful move she made was wildly cheered with greeting-card enthusiasm while her fumbles were loudly excused in the same awful tone. Her expression throughout was the same as when she was abused: hurt, bewildered, remote. Did she have any suspicion that she was a new fad?

It lasted for a few weeks. In the lunchroom, in the halls, on teams of all kinds, Emotional was the hip thing. Her presence was demanded everywhere although she didn’t say or do much but stare, sad and frozen. This was further proof of her exotic idiocy, and they cooed and twinkled over her as if she were a wounded animal in a box.

Justine didn’t know what to think. She felt ashamed and angry. The sound of the others “being nice to Emotional” was even worse than their cruelty — her cruelty — which at least had been a clear, consistent message, potentially refutable by its recipient. This insulting mockery of friendship hadn’t been what she had imagined when she’d resolved to be kind, but she was afraid to interfere again.

Mercifully, they soon got bored with it, and the gym teacher had once more to force a reluctant, groaning team to accept Emotional. There was some change, however; after such an elaborate show of friendship and kindness, it was hard for them to revert completely to all-out sadism, and all but the meanest kids pretty much ignored her. She finished out the school year as a lumbering ghostly presence, her humanity unknown and unacknowledged.

When Justine started seventh grade in the new junior high, Deidre, who had breasts and hair between her legs, began seeing a boy from the eighth grade. He went to a different junior high school across town; she had met him while sitting beside the copper cube fountain in the mall, smoking a cigarette alone. His name was Greg Mills. He had a concave torso, thin legs, narrow eyes, long lank hair, and red pimples which only added to his lurid charm. He wore a black vinyl windbreaker and spoke in monosyllables. Justine was secretly uncomfortable around him and wondered why, if he was so cool, he didn’t have a girlfriend his own age.

Deidre described going with him and his friends to an empty housing development, breaking into one of the finished houses, and throwing a party with their transistor radios, smoking, drinking, making out, and doing it, leaving ashes and stains on the bedspread of the display bedroom. It shocked and thrilled Justine to picture them sitting in the cold deserted rooms with their jackets on, smoke and alcohol in their throats. She imagined Deidre pulling her ski pants off, her bottom on the bedspread, the mattress naked underneath. She would be all goose flesh and tiny leg hairs sticking up, her feet clammy, her genitals hairy and weird between her big thighs. Did Greg pull her legs apart and look at her or did he just stick his thing (reportedly hairy itself) inside her in the dark? Did he take off his pants and show his butt or did he just unzip? Justine would look at Greg and decide that either way was nasty and exciting. She admired Deidre tremendously.

Deidre began asking if they wanted to come with her some time. “Not to some scuzzy development,” said Justine. “I don’t wanna freeze my butt.” Neither did anybody else until one Saturday Deidre called Justine and Dody and told them Greg’s parents had left for the day, that he was inviting over some really cute eighth grade guys, did they want to come?

Greg’s house was just like Justine’s and Dody’s and everyone else’s. Greg and Deidre were on the couch, and there were two other boys, one of them with the empty pretty eyes of a TV star. Justine saw, with a rush of excitement and fear, that they were drinking alcohol mixed with Coca-Cola. She didn’t want to drink it, but she didn’t want to say no in a prudish way, so when one of them offered it to her, she turned it into an occasion for sexual tension, saying, “Uh uh, I know what you guys are trying to do!” “Yeah,” said Dody, taking her cue, “you wanna get us drunk and make us do things.” She smiled in fake innocence, fake sophistication, and real sexuality. Her gold eyes were half-lidded and glinting.