The Mostly Unfabulous Homepage of Ethan Green

I was hoping Lorri would give me a ride home but she didn't offer and I didn't ask. She went walking off with Nina. I heard them talking about the weekend they were going to spend together hiking in Red Rock and hanging out at Zuma's Electronic Café. I could have asked to come along, I suppose, but if they had said no, that would have sucked. Making friends is such a formal thing. It would have been so convenient if we all drank. Puking is great bonding, holding your friend's head over the toilet seat is kind of an intimate act. Puking friends come and go, though, at least that was my experience in junior high.

I went to my locker by myself, still in volleyball clothes. I got my books and walked across the crowded campus lawn, through the parking lot full of people already starting to party near chosen cars. It wasn't right to be alone.

Full of habit and routine, I took the usual route even though I didn't want to go home. I didn't want to go anywhere except with Lorri to her car to go to wherever. I stopped and leaned against a tree, a private gesture of protest at my situation.

Across the street a girl was sitting at a bus stop alone. She had black hair pulled back in barrettes and a little ponytail on the top of her head. She wore an old black lace dress, too small, like a doll's, ripped in places. Necklaces weighed down with heavy pendants hung over her pale chest. One arm had bracelets up to her elbow. She looked like a sandbox doll abandoned by some immoral kid who cut her hair, fed her Lysol, and tossed her in the corner next to the Lego and Power Rangers. Like some Twilight Zone character. I imagined her eyes popping awake, haunted.

She leaned forward with her chin in her hand, very at east with looking bored in an overenthusiastic crowd of kids walking home. She was beautiful, too, with dark eyebrows and deep-set eyes outlined in black. Her image was like sharp glass cutting into me, I rushed to the surface to meet her with an urgency bordering on hysteria. Someone get gauze and bandages. I'm falling out. She's some dream I had. She's got part of me I didn't know I needed.

I stared at her for the longest time, so much that I felt like a pervert freak. I'd seen cute girls who wore black before but she was different, more dangerous or something. I was sweating that peculiar rancid smell that comes from too much coffee, too much thinking. Introducing myself was not an option so I just pretended I was next to her across the street with my eyes and my imagination as if I had some invisible body I could just sent off to do things my physical body could not. Just sitting there, she woke something up in me.

She stood and started to walk, rearranging the barrettes in her hair with one hand and holding her dress in the fist of the other. Unexpectedly she turned and walked backwards for a moment as if to look back at a friend she's said good-bye to. When she turned around to go forward again it was like I got caught by a fishhook, part of me got pulled forward with her and I began walking, following her down the street. Her 360, a little fairy trick, had cast a spell. After walking a few blocks I thought of turning back to avoid craziness but I didn't. She got to State Street and I still followed her, watching the back of her move through the after-school crowd. She held her left arm close to her body while her right arm swung about with her hand picking at everything from leaves, brittle branches, to her own ear. She walked past a cement wall and let her fingernails scratch against its surface, dislodging little particles. When she walked into Zuma's Electronic Café, I stopped and waited outside, all adrenaline and liquid fear.

I was possessed with one image. A girl in a too-small dress walking down the street, turning to walk backwards for a moment, then in two bouncy steps, back around again to continue traipsing. I fit everything I'd ever been into that gesture, all my desire, my sadness, my thoughts on God, into that one image, the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. It could have been enough, right? It didn't have to break me open and leave me hungrier than I'd ever been. It could have been a little gift, just the right amount.

I was going to leave, I convinced myself of it, that I would just go home after that. But I didn't. My underarm sweat had saturated my shirt and the synthetic fabric was turning it into something posthuman. It was clear that I didn't have a socially acceptable expression on my face for a coffee shop -- nervous and desperate, like a homeless person -- but maybe no one would notice. I went inside anyway.

She was at a table with two other girls -- one fat girl, the other frighteningly thin. All wearing black, they sat, one on each side of her like opposing alter egos, props for her enigmatic persona. I ordered coffee, got a weekly paper, and sat down at the one table where I could watch them without being seen.

In the span of one hour, I drank three cups of coffee. People were working on the computers that lined the walls of the café, clicking away in a frenzy of cold focus. A large monitor in the corner was displaying information from the Web, a snake was slowly devouring an egg on the screen.

Everyone at Zuma's Electronic Café seemed to know her, which disappointed me for some reason. They came up and gave her hugs. Sometimes she'd linger, still hanging on the shoulder of some boy or girl she seemed to know intimately. Being causal seemed the most strange and impossible thing. Her two friends had bad allergies or colds or something, they sneezed and snorted, their noses red. I couldn't hear their conversation, just the shrieks that punctuated the hushed mumbles.

"I don't think so!"

"Not ever!"

"He's a rapist!"

Maybe I should have walked away. I was searching for some codes and signals but wasn't finding any. I walked close to their table to put my weekly in the stack with all the other old newspapers before leaving. She caught my eye.

"I saw you sitting at the bus stop," I said, suddenly becoming brave and stupid.

"Oh." She paused. "yeah." She was distant and very blank, her aura of hipness commanding silence as she practiced the sadistic law of cool.

I tried to manage a smile out of my stiff face, a little wave, then I walked out.

The coffee made me unwell, turned my blood to the lava that comes up in the throat during a liquid burp. I felt like I would never feel clean again. Walking down the sidewalk, I couldn't stop touching the oily film on my face. I'd scratch my skin and stuff would get under my nails. My thoughts turned metallic with obsessive repetition. Halfway home, I started to run fast, my backpack slamming into me with the rhythm of my feet landing on the sidewalk.

Copyright © l998, Bett Williams.

Read some more from Girl Walking Backwards

• Introduction: Read what people are saying about Girl Walking Backwards.
• From Chapter One: Runaways are romantic. Skye wants to save one.
• From Chapter Two: Skye gets outted to her mother, who takes it pretty badly.
• From Chapter Five: What makes a person gay? Skye's mother thinks she knows.
• An Interview with the Author: Bett Williams talks about writing, inspiration, and Marcia Clark's Hair.

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