Lauren Holmes - Barbara the Slut and Other People

He ordered Chinese, and when it came I ate all of the scallion pancakes. I sort of wanted Silas to take care of me like he had the night before, but I suspected that my body language was instructing him to steer clear. I wondered what I was going to tell my dad’s girlfriend. She probably wasn’t going to get me any more babysitting jobs, but I was fine with that. I didn’t want her to think it was all my fault, but I wasn’t sure whose fault it was. Silas and I watched TV and the more I thought about Timmy and Susanna, the worse I felt. I thought maybe I should apologize either way, even if it was Susanna’s fault.

“You bummed about those pictures?” said Silas.

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “And I feel bad about the kid.”

“Well,” said Silas. “Not all deaf people can be friends.”

We kept watching the TV. I couldn’t decide whether Silas was actually kind of wise, or a total fucking idiot.

“Okay what about this?” he said a little while later. “My friend’s landlord was a total dick and totally dicked him over, so before my friend moved out he superglued all the lightbulbs into the sockets.”

“What?”

“Get it? You can get the job back and then you can do that. They’ll never know it was you. They won’t even know anything happened until the lights start going out, probably in like months, maybe years, and their apartment will be fucked. That’s the definition of a perfect crime.”

I thought through what that would mean, and imagined Susanna in the dark, trying to change the light, the bulb bursting in her hand.

I got up and went into the bathroom and locked the door. I took a shower and put my underwear and tank top back on and got into bed. When Silas got in, I pretended I was asleep. It was the first night we weren’t going to have sex, and I didn’t think it would be the last. I let him spoon me, but when I felt his breathing slow and his body get heavy, I climbed over him to the far side of the bed and tried to fall asleep there. I couldn’t wait to leave the summer behind.

They called me Barbara the Slut. It started in eleventh grade, and they called me other names, too— ho, whore, skank, Barbara Lewinsky, sticky-fingers Murphy —but mostly they called me slut .

Maybe I wasn’t hard to get, but I did have standards. They were: good teeth and good skin and big hands. And I needed to know that boys were honest, which most of them were. Even the boys who thought they were tricking me were honest in bed. They were honest when they touched me, more honest when I made them come, and the most honest when they made me come.

At the beginning of eleventh grade I slept with a boy more than once and it made him dishonest. It made him want to do it all the time and it made him do dumb things like have his hands on some other girl’s butt all day and then want me to give him a blow job before practice. So now it’s one time per boy, and when I run out of boys it’ll be time to go to college.

When SLUT got spray-painted in pink letters down the front of my locker at the end of junior year, I had to go to the school therapist to talk about my feelings. I kind of liked the color and I would have been more upset if it had been black or something, but those weren’t the feelings the therapist wanted to talk about. She asked me if I thought I was promiscuous and I said no. She said in that case the other kids were just jealous of me being so smart, and I should try to forget about them. She said she didn’t need to get in touch with my parents because it was just a misunderstanding. I don’t think she was very good at her job. She told me again to try not to think about it. It was easy not to think about girls, but what about boys?

• • •

If I heard of a Barbara the Slut, I would think she was nerdy because her name was Barbara, and that she wasn’t pretty enough to be popular, so she decided to be a slut instead. I don’t know what it takes to be popular, but I don’t think being a slut is runner-up to being popular. The truth is that I am nerdy, and maybe it’s because my name is Barbara and maybe not. Maybe people who think it’s funny to name their kids old-people names like Barbara and George also raise their kids to like numbers and marine mammals more than they like other kids. But the truth is also that I am pretty. My parents are weird but they’re good-looking, and my little brother and I got good combinations of their genes. I got my mom’s olive skin and dark hair and I got my dad’s green eyes. I got my mom’s runner’s body except with bigger boobs. My teeth are kind of big, but it’s not like they’re horse teeth or anything. George got the same green eyes but the light skin and the red hair, and we were the same size for a long time, but then all of a sudden he turned into a giant.

• • •

George started going to my high school my senior year. He had high-functioning autism and went to special ed, and if he were my kid, I would have sent him to a special school. The kids at Ashwell were really mean. But my parents wouldn’t listen. They said they wanted George to have a mainstream experience, like that’s a good thing to have. They acted like nothing was wrong with him, or like it was fine that he was autistic. They didn’t even notice for the first three years of his life — they noticed that he was slower than me, but they didn’t think that meant anything. Sometimes I feel like I should have noticed, but I was three when he was born and six when he was diagnosed. Now he was doing much better. But I still didn’t think he should have to go to my school.

As far as I knew, nobody called George any names on the first day, and nobody called me a slut either. I thought maybe they forgot over the summer. It was good timing because I wasn’t going to have sex until my college application was due in November.

I was applying early decision and my GPA was better than perfect and my SAT score was almost perfect, and I was going to write a perfect essay about how math changed my running game. I calculated my average sweat rate and electrolyte loss, converted electrolyte moles to milligrams, and so determined my nutritional needs to eliminate muscle cramping and fatigue. I did all the calculations over the summer and shaved forty seconds per mile off of ten-mile runs. Anyway, I still had to write the essay, and I wanted to take the SATs one more time. I couldn’t afford to be distracted by boys.

On the second day of school Nick Caruso asked me if I wanted to go for a drive. Nick was nice enough but one of his teeth was rotten, and also I don’t do it in cars, and also I was temporarily abstinent as explained. I told him that I had to take care of my brother, but really George went to the after-school program. More boys asked me that week and I said no, and it turned out that no one had forgotten about the slut thing.

In October I turned seventeen and got called prude for the first time, which was funny. I submitted my college application early and my parents took us out for pizza to celebrate. In the parking lot when my mom thought we weren’t looking, she stuck her tongue in my dad’s ear. Parents of autistic kids are supposed to get divorced, but my parents are still obsessed with each other and it’s disgusting. George thought the tongue in the ear was the funniest thing ever and he tried to do it to me and I had to fight him off.

No one had told George about me going to college, so he didn’t understand what we were celebrating. My mom explained that I was going to go to a different school, like when we went to different schools last year.

“Except my new school is in New Jersey,” I said.

My mom elbowed me.

“Where is New Jersey?” said George.