Surviving Valencia

“The same things that always happen. What do you mean?”

I rolled my window down and, mercifully, began throwing up before I could say anything more.

We headed back to Madison the next morning. I had been up all night, sick, telling anyone who would listen that I needed my stomach pumped. Adrian too was hungover and the miles passed in silence. The warm weather was gone and icy rain was coming down. My mother was upset that we were heading back in such rotten weather. “I have a work appointment in Madison this afternoon I can’t miss,” Adrian told her. It was a lie. Not that I minded.

Near Black River Falls, Adrian pulled off for coffee, and when we were back on our way he put in a mix CD that one of his fans had sent him. I looked at the case, a hand drawn cat and puffy, happy handwriting: To Adrian, I love your art. I heard Beyonce does to! Sierra Gladstone.

Sierra Gladstone’s mix CD was a compilation of music that probably predated her arrival on Earth. Old songs by Boyz II Men, Billy Ray Cyrus, Simply Red. This CD is Adrian’s current favorite and plays in the car, in his studio, on the back porch while he’s barbequing, and anywhere else he happens to be.

“This girl should be a DJ,” Adrian had enthused when he first listened to it.

“Are you sure you really want to touch that? What if she’s crazy? What if she did something to it?” I asked him.

“Relax. It’s not like I’m eating homemade cookies. It’s just a mix CD. What could she have done to it?”

“There could be subliminal messages on it.”

“She drew a cat. With a Sharpie. I think I’m fine.” He turned up the volume and closed his eyes. “When’s the last time you heard this song? I had forgotten it existed! This Sierra girl is great at putting the right song in the right order. Following ‘It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday’ with ‘Achy Breaky Heart’… I mean, it just works.”

Adrian loves music nobody loves. It’s pathetic really, and so out of character for someone who is usually cool. Perhaps this is that kind of coolness where you shun actual cool things and embrace nerdy things. I don’t know. For him, a really fun shopping trip is blowing twenty dollars on twenty CDs at the Frugal Listener resale store. Billy Joel, Wilson Phillips, Juice Newton, The Ramones.

Unless he is in the car with me, I am embarrassed to have Juice Newton blaring. Honestly, most of his music embarrasses me. But nothing embarrasses Adrian. I wish I could be more like him. I think it takes someone really brave to leave those CDs all over the front seat of his Audi.

Chapter 21

I was unable to change my parents’ minds, and together with Van and Valencia, they left for La Crosse. I didn’t even get to say goodbye to the twins, since they were at the hardware store with my dad when my mom decided to take me to Heather’s house.

“Quit sniveling. They’ll be home before you know it,” she lied.

When she dropped me off, I was crying like a baby. She only took me to the end of Heather’s long driveway, because she hated the way the farm made her car smell.

“I know it’s stinky but please take me all the way there. Are you really going to make me walk the whole way? This bag is heavy!”

“I guess you packed too much. And probably nothing old. See if you can borrow something of Heather’s. We’ve spent as much on clothes for you as we’re going to spend. Now give me a kiss goodbye. Do it. Give me a kiss before someone sees you acting like a brat,” she said, noticing Heather’s father nearby in a field on his tractor, watching us.

“No,” I said, slamming the door and not looking back.

My weekend with Heather and her family was atrocious. Jenny was over at their house most of the time. Their parents’ farms butted up to one another and their houses had been built on the inner edge of the property lines, making it possible to stand in one’s kitchen and watch the other buttering her toast. They were hardy farm girls who were immune to the smell and sounds of it all. I was not. I had a difficult time even eating while I was there, since everything was tinged with the aroma of the barn. They liked to play games like hide-and-seek in the cornfield and have goat milk squirting competitions. They casually used humiliating words like teat and udder in conversation. Dirty words like that got a person grounded at my house. That weekend made it more obvious than ever that I did not fit in with them.

Monday was our first day of sixth grade, which meant we had graduated from the elementary school to the junior high school, but they were oblivious to the magnitude of it. Heather was planning to wear last year’s clothes, a corduroy jumper that I had seen her in a million times. Jenny had new clothes, but they were stiff, bright kids’ clothes from a farm equipment store. I decided that I would ride the bus with them because I had to, and spend my first day smelling like shit, but once Tuesday rolled around I was flying solo, even if it meant I would never have a friend again.

When we got to school, I was ecstatic to learn that we had each been assigned our own locker. Just like high schoolers! Just like the girls in Seventeen magazine or in Sweet Valley High books. I looked into the tiny metal cavern, not seeing a nine square foot box but a world of possibilities. The first chance I got I was going to buy one of those magnetic locker mirrors with a little tray attached for lip gloss and ponytail holders. I would tape up a picture of Kirk Cameron! And John Stamos! Now I might find notes, love notes, shoved through the little slats in the locker doors. Probably having no locker in the past is what had prevented me from receiving such notes. After all, what were those little slats for if not for dropping notes? We each got a brand new padlock too.

While I had somehow forgotten that we would finally have lockers, the popular girls had not. Two minutes after I had located mine and hung my backpack and overnight bag inside, I looked around me and discovered that they had already decorated theirs. Puffy heart shaped stickers that changed colors if you touched them, letters spelling their names. (Kaci, Kari, Jessi, Keeli, Jami, Jenni – to be popular your name must start with a J or K and end with an I. No exceptions.) And of course there was plenty of the obligatory statement, “93 Rules!”

I walked past Jessi and Keeli’s lockers for an unneeded drink at the water fountain so I could get a better look. The decorations did not end on the outside. They each had locker mirrors. Jessi’s had a blue leopard print border and tray sticking out beneath it, to hold the necessary trinkets of popularity. I slowed my pace. If I knew the ingredients of popularity, I could buy them and create some for myself. Like a witch with a bubbling cauldron. Like the guy who created Frankenstein. I took a look from the corner of my eye. The little tray was overflowing with cool markers, scrunchies, tubes of lipstick, packs of gum…

“What are you staring at?” she asked me.

“Me? I wasn’t staring at anything.”

“Get your drink at the bubbler and move along,” she said, making a walking motion with her fingers.

She rolled her eyes at Keeli, who was attaching a magnetic message board to the outside door of her locker. A marker dangled from it on a little cord. If I did that, people would write “You suck bitch” or just steal it, but undoubtedly she would be receiving daily messages like “U R HOT” and “C U at practice, luv U like a Sis!”

/> I stuck my head in the ancient water fountain, squinting at the sight of other kids’ spit, catching a few meager drops of what tasted like pure rust. How was I going to become popular? They hated me. A new year had not changed anything. Now here I was, slurping rusty water because I had been told to do so. You are pathetic, I reminded myself, taking another drink. Just then Heather and Jenny came walking toward me. Heather had gone through puberty big time during the summer. She now had both a bigger mustache and bigger boobs than any teacher in our school. Jenny, in comparison, looked like she was seven or eight years old, with a huge horse mouth filled with crooked shark teeth.

“Where’s your locker?” Heather asked me.