Lauren Holmes - Barbara the Slut and Other People

We spent several weeks getting ready for the trip: going over the trains and making sleeping arrangements for the hostel. The girls’ dorms had eight beds each, and there were thirteen girls in the class. It didn’t end up being even because the twins picked six girls for their room, and the other five of us were in the other room — me, Ilona, Brigitta, Monika Biermann, and Natascha. Ilona had never recovered her rightful place with the twins, and instead she and I had become inseparable. We weren’t happy about being stuck in the second room, especially because of Natascha and how weird she smelled. We made jokes about how she was going to bring a whole suitcase just for her giant maxi pads.

On the train ride to the North Sea, I hung out with Benjamin. I wondered if maybe we were going to get back together. He sat with his arm around me and I sort of hoped we were because it felt nice to be close to someone. Then he said he needed to ask me a question and whispered, “Will you have sex with me?” I told him no, and I wondered what he would have done if I said yes, if he even had any idea what to do. Even though I knew all about sex from the magazines, it hadn’t occurred to me to have sex myself. But now I thought about how I wouldn’t be able to get pregnant because I hadn’t gotten my period yet. My answer was still no, but that was something that would have been interesting about having sex then.

When we got to the hostel, it turned out that Natascha did have a whole suitcase just for her maxi pads. It was a small suitcase but the package was the only thing in it — a maybe twelve-by-eighteen-inch package of the biggest, healthiest pads on the planet. Ilona and I died laughing. We couldn’t believe that we had been right. Natascha’s other suitcase was half clothes and half healthy food that her parents had packed her for the trip.

The five of us, but mostly me and Ilona, made a point to sound like we were having a lot of fun in our room. We laughed loudly all the time. One night we had a fake orgasm contest until the religion teacher came to shut it down. Natascha was trying to sleep with a pillow over her head and the other girls were giggling.

We spent the trip studying worms that lived in the sand, and on the last night we had a dance party in the basement of the hostel. Ilona danced with the boy she liked, and I watched her and everyone else for a while. Benjamin wasn’t talking to me again, because I said no to having sex with him and later in the week I refused to tell him my bra size. None of the other boys (or girls) were talking to me either. I didn’t want to leave but I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I asked the boy who was DJ-ing if I could help him, and he laughed in my face. I went and stood by the door for another minute, and then I went up to my room. Natascha was lying on her bed, reading a book and eating dried apricots.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” I said.

I climbed up to my bunk and got under the covers. I felt tears coming and turned over to face the wall. I tried not to make any noise. After a minute I heard Natascha get up. She patted me on the back two times, and got back into her bed.

• • •

When we returned to school after the trip, we did an exercise where we broke into groups and each group got a big piece of paper with an outline of a boat on it, and we were supposed to put our names in the boat according to our roles in the class. If we thought we were popular we were supposed to write our name in the very middle of the boat, if we were almost popular then close to the middle, and if we were unpopular then far away, at the edge of the boat. I knew I didn’t belong in the middle of the boat, but I definitely thought I had moved in from the edge. I thought maybe I was halfway between the middle and the edge. Then we were supposed to talk about how it made us feel to be in our part of the boat. But my group didn’t get to that because Benjamin was in it and he and I got into a screaming fight about which one of us was less popular. He said I was at the edge of the boat, I said he was standing on the side of the boat, about to fall off, he said I had already fallen off and was in the water, I said he was farther out in the water, and he said I wasn’t even on the piece of paper. I started crying because he was right. The teachers came over and said we could only put our own names in the boat. I left the room and they let me go. I would have taken a bus home, but my bus pass was in my bag in the classroom, so I had to wait until the class finished and go back in for the rest of the day.

• • •

In the spring, Natascha’s dad had a bike accident. He was riding in the bike lane, and someone opened a car door and he flipped over it. He was in a coma for two weeks, and then he died. Natascha didn’t come back to school for a month.

In the meantime, our class was turning a book into a play, and we were going to perform it when we were done. Our homeroom teacher asked for a volunteer to turn Natascha’s assigned chapter into a scene, and I raised my hand right away. It had taken me forever to do my own scene in German and it took me forever to do hers, but when I turned it in, no one seemed to care that I did it.

Eventually Natascha came back to school and she didn’t talk to anyone. No one tried to talk to her, and no one gave her any trouble. At the end of the year I moved back to the States. My mom and I were really happy to go home, but my dad and my brother had liked it in Germany. Later I found out that Natascha moved away that summer too. I bet everyone in our class missed us a ton.

New humans are here. I smell them. Everybody is barking.

I hear them and now I see them.

“Hi,” the female says. “You’re so quiet.”

They go away and they come back.

“She looks like a golden retriever to me,” says the female.

I thump my tail.

“Yeah, you’re pretty.”

I thump my tail some more. The female laughs.

“I thought you wanted a young dog,” the male says.

“I don’t know. All the other dogs seem so crazy.”

The female bends down and puts her fingers through the cage. I taste them.

“She’s so sweet,” says the female.

“She does seem like a nice dog.”

They go away. Eunice comes and opens the door. I wag my tail.

“Here’s your big chance, Princess,” she says. “Don’t blow it.”

We are outside and the humans are here. I wag my tail for them.

“Here she is,” says Eunice. “We don’t know what her name was before, but she just looked like a Princess to me.”

“Hi, Princess,” the female says. “I’m Jenna and this is Mike.”

“I know she’s dark for a golden but I think she’s a real purebred,” says Eunice. “Sometimes they can be reddish like this.”

The female kneels down and I lick her whole face. I like the way she tastes. She laughs and scratches me from my head to my tail, under my fur, right on my skin. The male has a ball. He throws it and I fetch it. He laughs and pets me, and I taste his mouth and the inside of his nose.

“Yay!” the female says. “You love her!”

“She’s a nice dog,” the male says. I wag my tail.

“Sweetheart, huh?” says Eunice.

“Such a sweetheart,” says the female.

“She hates it here, she hardly touches her food,” says Eunice.

“Yeah, she’s skinny,” says the male.

“Do you think she was abused?” says the female.

“You never know for sure,” says Eunice. “But I don’t think so with this one.”

“Poor thing,” says the female.

“She just said she wasn’t abused,” says the male.

“She said it was possible,” says the female.

She squeezes me.

“So she’s six?” says the female.