Lauren Holmes - Barbara the Slut and Other People

When the cab came, we said good-bye.

“Thank you very much for everything.” He gave me a hug.

“No problem,” I said.

“Let’s keep in touch,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

He waved from the cab as it pulled away, and I smiled. It had probably been at least a week since he had seen me smile.

Upstairs he had left a bunch of empties, and a set of glasses from Ikea and some towels that he wanted me to give to a good home. I told him I didn’t want them, and he said, “As long as they go to someone who can use them, that’s the important thing.” I brought everything down to the garbage, and back upstairs I opened the wine product for the fruit flies that had been flying around the empties.

• • •

A few days later I forgot my phone at home and when I got back from school I had a million text messages from my brother.

“Hey.”

“What’s up?”

“How is everything?”

“Is everything okay?”

“Why are you ignoring me?”

“Write back so I know everything is okay.”

“I’m getting worried.”

“Write back or I’m calling Mom.”

“Write back or I’m calling the police.”

I called him. “I’m fine! Why are you freaking out?”

“Last I knew you had a strange man living in your apartment,” he said. “How was I supposed to know he didn’t kill you?”

“Swiss people don’t kill people,” I said. “If anybody had killed anybody, I would have killed him.”

“So he’s gone now?”

“Yeah, he’s gone. He left on Sunday. The happiest day of my life.”

“Why did you let him stay if you didn’t even like him?”

“I did like him,” I said. “Until I got to know him better.” I took off my pants and got into bed. Pearl jumped up and settled down with her body along my body, and her head on my shoulder.

“Please never do this again,” said my brother.

“I won’t,” I said. “I will never date again.”

When Pearl heard me say “bye” she thumped her tail. I snuggled into her, and she turned her head and brushed the side of my face with the tip of her tongue.

Ernesta

When we moved to Germany, the real estate agent said there were tons of girls in the neighborhood for me to be friends with. She also said that I could take the bus to school from the bottom of the street, but it turned out that that bus stop had been out of service for years and the nearest stop was a kilometer away, which was really far at six o’clock in the morning when I was still asleep, and again after school when I was starving.

Obviously the real estate agent also lied about the girls. There were only two girls in the neighborhood, and they were hard to find. One supposedly lived across the street but I didn’t see her for all of August. Her brothers claimed she was away. In the second week of August I found the other girl. I was outside watching my mom smoke a secret cigarette and pour beer on the slugs in the garden. A girl walked up to the gate and at first I thought she was older than me, and then I thought she was younger but a giant. She was very friendly and she spoke some English. Her name was Ernesta.

She invited me to go over to her house, which was four houses down from ours. I went back to my mom.

“I don’t even know her,” I said.

“It’s okay,” said my mom.

“You don’t even know her parents,” I said. “I can’t go over to someone’s house unless you know their parents.”

“It will be okay,” said my mom. “You’ll be a few houses away. I’ll be able to hear you if you scream.”

“Mom! It’s not safe.”

“Everything in Germany is safe.”

“How do you know?”

“Come on, Steph. Just go.”

I went out to the sidewalk and Ernesta smiled. I followed her down the street. When we got to her house her mom was in the living room, ironing underwear. She smiled at me and said some German things, and Ernesta translated that she was glad to meet me. We went to Ernesta’s room and played a game called Manhattan, where we tried to build the highest skyscraper with little parts of buildings.

In the next weeks we played Manhattan many times. While we were playing we had conversations using all the English words Ernesta knew and all the German words I knew. One day Ernesta asked me about the real Manhattan and if it was true that the models lived there. Ernesta said she might become a model because she was tall, but I wouldn’t because I was so short. I tried to tell her I was going to grow more, but either she didn’t understand or she didn’t believe me. I thought I had a better chance of being a model than she did. She wasn’t really pretty and also her name was Ernesta.

Lisa

At the end of August the missing girl came back. She had been on a teen tour to the UK. Her name was Lisa and she was tall and skinny and very tan. She spoke better English and had a better house than Ernesta. She had a huge room filled with magazines, and I spent the last weeks of the summer vacation looking at them. The only kids’ magazines I read back in the States were Ranger Rick and some Christian magazines that my grandpa’s wife subscribed me to. These German magazines were way better. They were for teenagers and they had “Fotoromane,” which were like comics but with pictures of real people, and the people were sometimes kissing and sometimes even naked. I could hardly read any of the words but it didn’t matter.

One day Lisa and I found an ad for a contest in one of the magazines. If you sent in a picture of your legs, you could win one thousand deutsche marks and a chance to be a model for a shaving cream company. We decided that Lisa should enter because her legs were tanner and more grown-up looking. She put on some very short shorts and I took pictures of her legs with a disposable camera. I didn’t think her legs looked shiny enough, so she put lotion on them. They still didn’t look shiny enough, so I suggested she put butter on them. Then her legs were super shiny. When we were done taking the pictures she tried to wash the butter off in the bathtub, but her legs were too slippery. She told me to go get her mom. Her mom didn’t speak English, so Lisa told me what to say in German: “Frau Schneider, Lisa hat Butter auf ihren Beinen.”

Brigitta

Finally it was time to go to school. Because my parents didn’t love me or my brother, they were sending us to German public school for the two years we were going to be in Germany. My brother could go to the elementary school in our town, but I had to take the bus from the faraway bus stop to a faraway city, thirty minutes away. My school was actually near the Mercedes-Benz offices where my dad was working, but he couldn’t drive me because we had to go at different times. A couple of days before school started my parents said they were going to find me a friend to go to school with on the first day. It couldn’t be Ernesta because she wasn’t going to go to the same school as me, and I hadn’t seen her much since Lisa got back anyway. It couldn’t be Lisa because she was going into ninth grade and I was going into sixth. It had to be a girl in my class who could show me around.

My dad called the school and they gave him two names, one girl in our town and one in the next town over. He spent a long time consulting the dictionary and writing out what he wanted to say, and then he called the first girl’s house. No one answered, so he left a message. The next day he called again, and on the third day he decided that they must be on vacation and he called the second girl. Her mom answered and said that her daughter would be happy to meet me and show me around. She said we could come over to their house the next day.