Gabriel Roth - The Unknowns

“So what do you think of this class?” she asked me. I cast about frantically for the correct answer, until she stepped in to help me. “It’s OK, I guess, but there’s way too much homework.”

“Yeah,” I said. We were walking through the hallway to the cafeteria, having a conversation.

“So where do you live, Eric?” she asked me.

“Sheridan,” I said.

“Neat,” she said, waving hello to Becky Busch without breaking stride. “So, I’m running for student council.”

“Oh,” I said.

“The election’s in eight days,” she said. “Yikes!” She held up her hands and wiggled her fingers in a little pantomime of anxiety.

“Wow,” I said. There must have been a better response but I was unable to imagine what it might be or how anyone might be able to calculate it in the time allotted.

We had arrived at the cafeteria. It seemed that we were about to sit together, and it occurred to me that by the end of lunch I might have thought of something better to say than Oh or Wow . “So where do you want to sit?” I said. I had neglected to inhale for a few minutes, and my voice came out sounding strangulated and glottal. Tara’s eyes scanned the room, then lit up as they landed on Michelle Kessel and Louise Treadwell, over by the big windows.

“So wish me luck in the election, Eric!” she said, then hurried off, smiling and greeting people. I waited in line for lasagna, found a seat alone, and took out my notebook. Next to Tara’s name I drew a little asterisk to signify that I had talked to her.

I voted for her, of course. She came in a very respectable third, after Dean Hoestetler, who had locked up the endorsements of the after-school clubs by sending pizza to their meetings, and Heidi Weir, who was immense and wore headgear and was the subject of a sarcastic write-in campaign.

From there my notes on Tara expanded to take up most of a page. After her defeat at the ballot box she began an equally vigorous campaign to become Michelle Kessel’s best friend. For almost two weeks she and Michelle and Louise were together constantly — in the cafeteria, in class, going into the girls’ bathroom — but Tara’s place in the group was never secure. She was more earnest than the others, and she lacked the talent for exclusivity: during her abortive political career she had made too many acquaintances.

And then one day in biology Tara’s eyes were puffy and red, and she sat apart from Michelle and Louise and stared straight ahead. Mr. McCallum called on her, and when she gave the correct answer—“To increase surface area?”—Michelle and Louise broke into a laughing fit, pitched just below the threshold of acceptable classroom noise. At the end of class they left without her, whispering. Tara took her time assembling her belongings and walked out alone, her back stiff, like a finishing-school girl balancing a book on her head. I followed her out and caught up with her.

“Are you OK?” I asked her. She looked away, with an expression so vulnerable that, for the first time since Bronwen Oberfell had awakened me to the strangeness and terror of love, I was able to talk to a girl without feeling nervous.

“No, it’s fine,” she said. “It’s totally fine.” She hauled a smile into place as if by powerful hydraulics, but as the corners of her mouth reached the apices of the parabola the whole arrangement collapsed and she began to sob. I had never seen a girl cry, but I’d seen my mother cry many, many times, enough that Tara Pulowski’s tears were a lodestar. In uncharted territory I could use them to navigate.

“It’s all right,” I said. “You can tell me about it.” I felt a thrill of sincerity as I spoke, as though the feelings I’d had in the past were a child’s toys and Tara’s grief the first harbinger of adult life. We were standing by the bulletin board, in front of flyers announcing auditions for the musical and meetings of the Italian club. Students flowed past, parting around us, their voices and footsteps bouncing off the cinderblock walls.

“Why are people so mean?” she said, and I had to lean in to hear her. “It’s like, how is it that you can feel so close to someone and then all of a sudden find out that you don’t really know them at all?”

I had no idea what the answer was, but it seemed that what was called for was wisdom, and so I did my best with what I had. “Sometimes people are really mean,” I said. “Some people don’t care about anyone but themselves, and are just out to see what they can get.”

She nodded at me, her eyes wide. She was waiting to hear what I would say next, and it seemed important that I somehow shift into a higher register. “But sometimes, when people act in a mean way, what it really means is that they’re scared,” I said. I don’t know where that came from. Probably TV.

She took it in humbly, as though it were really valuable. “I want to talk to you more,” she said, and inside me something leapt in the air and punched the sky. “But I have to go to math.”

“I could meet you after school,” I said. It did not occur to me that my mom would be waiting for me after school.

She said nothing for a minute — whether evaluating my offer or lost in her misery I couldn’t tell. Eventually she said, “Meet me at the side entrance, by the trash cans.” No one would see us down there, which suggested either that she wanted our encounter to be private and intimate or that she didn’t want to be seen with me.

She was waiting when I arrived. We walked away from the school, down Randall Street, on a grass-lined sidewalk beside a wide, extravagantly cambered road. A commuter suburb at 3:45 on a weekday is a ghost town. We headed for the little playground two blocks down, its jungle gyms and swing sets hardly scuffed. Families here had their own play structures in their backyards.

“So what happened?” I said.

“It wasn’t like this at my old school,” she said. “At my old school, people were… there wasn’t this pressure , you know? Here there’s all this pressure to, to hang out with the right people and stuff. I used to”—she paused and looked down—“I used to be really into My Little Ponies, OK? I mean, I know, it’s dumb, whatever.” I smiled as if to say It’s OK, I know all about embarrassing childhood passions . “But I had sixteen My Little Ponies and I loved them.”

“Sixteen?” I asked, wondering what you could possibly do with sixteen My Little Ponies. Tara looked hurt, and I regretted it immediately.

“Yeah, I know, it’s totally dumb,” she said. “Whatever. Never mind.” She was about to shut down.

“No, I just mean, I never had any My Little Ponies, because I’m a boy,” I said. “So I don’t know what you’d do with sixteen of them. Like, did they each have a different name and everything?”

“They each had a different personality ,” she said. “And they liked to be fed at different times.”

I had no idea what to say to this, so I kept quiet. We had arrived at the playground, and we made our way across the sand toward the swings, the kind whose seats consist of a strip of black rubber suspended between a pair of metal chains. We sat on adjacent swings and flexed our knees, propelling ourselves into tiny, ironic arcs.

“Anyway, I know it’s totally stupid and everything, but I still have them in my room,” she said. “And then there was this slumber party and… I can’t talk about it.”

She was about to disclose something that happened among girls, something that might be important. “No, tell me,” I said.

“Michelle and Louise and Emily were all at my house,” she said. There were two Emilys in my notebook, neither of whom had been linked with Michelle, Louise, or Tara. “And I was so psyched that they were there, because it was the first time they’d been to my house, so I was really nervous but I was really psyched too. I made my mom promise to stay out of my room and everything. And we were talking about who we liked, and Michelle said she knew who I liked, and I was all, Cut it out, you do not ! and she was like, No, I do, I do , and I was so worried because I thought she knew I liked Leo Garson.” This information appeared with no special emphasis, like a man who brushes past you in a crowd and slides a knife into your stomach. “And then she was like, And the person Tara likes is right here in the room with us right now ! And I knew it was a total lie, but I started getting really creeped out — like, what if Leo is in the closet, you know, what if they sneaked him in to embarrass me? And then Louise was like, He’s in the closet, and I’m going to go get him ! And I was really freaking out — I mean, I was trying to be all, No way, whatever , but really I was freaking out. And then she went into the closet and she came out and she was holding Sparkler, who was like my favorite My Little Pony. And she was all like, This is who Tara likes, and she — she does it with him every night ! Even though Sparkler is a girl; all My Little Ponies are girls. And I was like, Don’t be stupid, how could you do it with a My Little Pony ? And they were like, You totally do, here’s how , and they started saying just this really gross stuff? I mean, I can’t even say it, is how gross it was. It really made me ill; it makes me ill just, like, talking about it.”