Rebecca Schiff - The Bed Moved - Stories

“Then someone from the Board will say a few words,” said the rabbi.

“Don’t be heartbroken,” said my father on the drive home, “but I think we’re going to quit the temple after your bat mitzvah.” I had the backseat to myself and was frantically trying to memorize the opening prayers.

“It’s very expensive,” said my mother.

“Why am I doing this, then?”

“That rabbi is so pompous,” said my father. “People kept getting sick, and someone had to tell them how to clean and quarantine so they would stop transmitting disease. It’s not moral decay, it’s common sense!”

My father snorted, and I sort of understood, but only enough to wish I had gotten a passage about miracles. The garage door rolled open. He dragged the garbage to the curb. She boiled water. I trudged up to my room, where I conjugated, masturbated. It wasn’t hard. The young adult books were crisper then, their pages unbent, promising girls reflected in mirrors, girls with scoliosis, girls looking forward to the kind of loss that only hurt a little.

SPORTS NIGHT practices in the lobby. I watch them from the hall. They practice next to trophies from real sports. They practice, and detention lets out, and they are still practicing. Sports Night has no sports, only dance moves that require a thousand afterschools of practice. It’s a lot of practice for one night, a lot of crying. Someone’s always getting paper towels for them to cry in. I never see them be done practicing. I have to go back down the hall. I’m on Newspaper. We get out later than detention, Sports Night, Abstinence, and every real sport.

Abstinence inflates balloons for when they throw the worst party of the year. Newspaper reports on it.

“Proud virgins,” we caption them.

We are ashamed virgins. We own condoms for no reason. We get As on our Sex Ed quizzes, the ones Abstinence is petitioning to get rid of. I pen an op-ed saying the school should keep the quizzes. While we’re taking them, I watch girls who do Sports Night remember blow jobs they gave down by the quarry, if this town even has a quarry. I don’t know where the blow jobs are. They could be anywhere.

I may not be an expert in local geography, but I do know local history. Sports Night was invented in 1948, when girls weren’t allowed to play sports. Sepia-toned girls ran relay races and dodged balls in skirts past the knee. We’d beaten the Nazis. The town needed its girls to prove they could pass a baton fast enough to birth an empire. When the daughters of those girls started competing in real sports, Sports Night became more of a pageant, but kept the name that had given the town so much joy.

Sports Night has dances. It has skits. Last year’s theme was Underwater Enchantment. The whole town came to see lip-synched ballads about mermaids who resented their fathers. Spandexed, bejeweled sophomores showed off months of choreography, flicked their hair around shell bras, lowered themselves into splits between legs coated with glitter. Every character was sexy. It wasn’t just the mermaid. They had sexy lobsters, sexy squid. They keep one character not sexy to cover up the few fat girls who don’t know they’re not supposed to audition for Sports Night.

I know I’m not supposed to audition. I don’t know how I know — nobody tells you you can’t — but there are conflicts. Newspaper, for instance, and a club where kids without friends meet with the principal to discuss how to improve the school. Why students of different races sit separately in the cafeteria is one of our concerns, as well as Abstinence being mad that the cafeteria windows get decorated every Christmas for HanuKwanzaa but we leave out the infant Jesus. Sports Night gets a window, too. They stand on cafeteria chairs in leggings they don’t mind getting paint on, and reveal their theme the first Monday of every December.

This year’s theme is the decade when their moms were pretty. The costume is easy if the mom kept her clothes, if she was the same size as the girl. My mom was pretty, too, then, but I’m not pretty this decade. I thought about doing a skit about it, a dance. One of the colleges I’m applying to lets you do dances about your mom for credit. It lets you do dances about the girls who did dances in your high school. That’s why I’m watching them. I’m going to need their moves later, when I’m taking Interpretative Dance II with people like me.

—

SOMEBODY set off the smoke alarm and now all the clubs are waiting on the field behind the school — Chess, Newspaper, Suicide Awareness. Sports Night keeps practicing. They lunge, clutch grass. Editors nudge me, as if I made this happen. The editors look worse outside. At Newspaper, they’re in charge, ordering pizza, editing last year’s Band trip article to fit this year’s Band trip needs. Out here, they’re just a group of kids who brought their backpacks in case there was really a fire.

Chess brought their chess sets with them. During a smoke alarm last May, somebody moved a rook and disrupted a championship game. Now they bring the sets outside, balance them like pizzas while they wait on the grass. I’m impressed by Chess, the interracial makeup of its nerds. I like their little timers.

“Should we do an article about Chess?” I ask a Josh with a backpack. The Josh’s backpack has his initials on it — JAG — so he doesn’t get mistaken for any of the other nerds of his race. “They seem ignored.”

“Chess doesn’t want not to be ignored,” he says.

Textbook corners frame his initials from inside his backpack. He carries all his textbooks with him at all times, like he was never assigned a locker. I have the same textbooks — AP Physics, AP American, AP Foreign-Language-Not-Spoken-Since-Ancient-Times.

“We did a double issue for Sports Night,” I say. “We had pictures of all those lobsters. You interviewed Lindsay.”

“She was a captain,” he says.

“Well, she’s a captain again, but I’m not interviewing her,” I say. Sports Night is doing rib isolations. “Fuck it, I’m interviewing Chess.”

“We can’t put pawns on the front page!” he yells after me.

“Can we put suicide?”

JAG’s the reason I’m not editor in chief this year. Around the time of last year’s Band trip, he and I interviewed for the same job. He wore a tie. I found my evaluation sheet after, and it said, “Leaves the pub shop during production and we don’t know where she goes.” I could have told them if they had asked. I break into the Abstinence office and spray it with contraceptive foam. I practice Sports Night moves in an empty classroom. I watch the sun set out a suicide-proof window and remain firmly inside what’s supposed to be my life.

—

MY MOM picked me up the night I found out I didn’t get chief. I was crying. I would have to be on Newspaper another year, taking orders from someone my own age with a giant backpack.

“Did you put the paper to bed?” she asked. She liked to picture me tucking the newspaper in.

“They can burn in hell,” I said.

“Just being on the masthead of a respected weekly is enough, Li,” she said. “You can still put Argus on your applications without the headache of being in charge.”

“I would have taken the paper in a new direction,” I said.

“Maybe people like the old direction,” she said. “Why don’t you drive home?”

Her offer let me know she was sorry. My driving skills were not getting me into college. I had crept up many curbs practicing my K turns, had gone down one-way streets in a new direction. My parents took turns not taking me out.

Now I drive fine. Not everyone on Newspaper can say the same. Some of their moms still pick them up on Production Night, though they hold the title of chief.