Liberate
Chapter Three

by lena

There are faces, faces everywhere.

That is only natural, of course, since this is a party. What would a party be, without faces, and the bodies attached to them? But are the bodies attached to the faces? No, the faces are disembodied, the bodies are unfaced, limbs and hands separated from torsos, feet moving without regard to the rest. The faces are leering, they’re shadowed, everything is shadowed. Hands rise, matching beer bottles to mouths thrown open in grimaces, or graphic, grotesque grins. Chests press up against other chests. Legs swivel and sway, slinking to slide up the slippery slope of a thigh. Everything is painted red, blood red, and shadow gray, smashed brain matter and skull detritus on a sidewalk to nowhere.

Even the music is separated. The bass pounds in disconnected segments from the guitar riffs. She’s lost, there is no one here she knows, no one who knows her, and she shouldn’t be here. Shouldn’t be here shouldn’t be here shouldn’t be here. She begs for wakefulness, pleads for consciousness, as another beer is pressed into her hand and someone yells, “Drink, new girl!”

She is too young for this. They are all too young for this.

---

The air outside has finally cooled. September has come and gone, and has been brushed into the dust bin of months that have overstayed their welcome. October moves lethargically into its preordained place amidst jackets that have been taken from winter clothing storage and sneezefests wherein at least ten minutes of every class is taken up by whispered bless yous and you’re welcomes. Marit wonders at the polite veneer that sweeps over the school in the season of head colds; at any rate, she blesses no one and they do her a similar kindness. Sticking to one’s own company leaves less room for contracting the flu, anyway.

Lockheed High School has been overtaken by a fury of green and gold. She learns that these are the school’s colors, in accordance with the mascot, the Lockheed Leprechaun. She is possibly the only person within the school who does not find the “getting lucky” at football games to be a hilarious school in-joke; that it means more than just scoring touchdowns or winning games is implicit. Nonetheless, she finds herself wandering into a classroom on the second floor, conforming out of utterly morbid curiosity to the announcement that blared over the speakers just before the lunch period: “Blah blah, seniors, please report to such and such classroom to discuss decorating your Homecoming parade float; juniors, please report to blah blah—”

She sticks to the fringes of the senior crowd out of necessity. Lockheed is not a particularly large school, but neither is it small, and the room is crowded and hot despite the cool air outside. This classroom is too white, and Marit obligingly lowers her head and squints, a participant-observer, absurdly reminded of Ms. Ainsley. The breathing bodies within cluster around desks according to clique statuses, their susurrations giving red, red veins to the white room, giving it corded muscles. The room is a beating heart within Marit’s chest, and it is full to the point of explosion. She edges closer to the wall but does not dare to touch it, as it may, indeed, touch back.

Beside Jenny Silverton, whose garish face, as always, appears inconsistent with the flaxen hair that frames it, and the gentle-sweet bone structure that composes it, the willowy brunette with the knife-edge mouth, who’d stared so unkindly at Marit that she still can’t forget about it, stands a bit straighter, clearing her throat and urging the beating heart of the room to quiet. She detaches from Jenny’s side and moves toward the teacher’s desk with a swagger of authority that is nonetheless undermined by her long legs and platform wedge shoes. For this girl, every move seems to be made very much on purpose, if the way she leans against the desk is any indication; her skirt climbs her thigh like a ladder with the motion.

Though it is an attention-getting method that does nothing for what the girl is saying, and everything for what she looks like, it still works. “For those of you who don’t know me,” she begins, with a tone of censure that says if you don’t know her, then you should take your offensive presence elsewhere, “I’m Janette Benning, the captain of the cheerleading squad.” There is a resounding hoot from the section of the room claimed by the football players, and Marit winces, wishing she hadn’t decided to attend this meeting. She shuffles her legs quietly, leaning her weight onto one and dragging the toe of the shoe attached to the other leg down the thin line marking the boundaries of the floor tiles. It’s impossible to escape now; the doorway is crowded by her peers.

Janette Benning continues, with a practiced flick of her dark hair over her shoulder. “We’ve decided that the theme for our class float will be decorated to resemble a Lucky Charms cereal box.” A round of aggravated murmuring rises from the crowd of kids who don’t belong to the more popular circles, as it becomes obvious that they’ve been perfunctorily excused from the decision-making processes. The bourgeoisie versus the proletariat, Marit thinks, attempting to disappear into the wall without drawing much attention to herself. She should have known…

“Quiet!” Janette barks, her pretty lips drawing into a snarl. After the murmurs subside, she continues, in much nicer tones, “We’ve decided to meet at my house this weekend—Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at 5PM each day—and work till whenever we decide to quit.” She pauses for a minute, her chin lifting in the air and her mouth twisting into a smirk. “My mother has headed the fundraising drive on behalf of the athletic teams and the cheerleading squad to enable us to buy the materials, and we’ve got everything in the barn behind my house. We’ll need people to paint and people to put it together. I’ve got a sign-up sheet right here.” From her purse, she produces a pen and piece of paper, and sets them on the desk beside her. “Just sign up for whenever you’re available, and leave a phone number. Oh, yeah—and don’t steal my pen.”

The room becomes a tidal wave intent on crashing the teacher’s desk to pieces; Marit hangs back till the wave of bodies scatters, and only when Jenny Silverton and her elitist entourage leaves does Marit creep forward with the rest of the stragglers, peering at the piece of paper. She checks it twice for familiar names, and decides on a sudden whim to attend Friday, beneath which the only recognizable names are Jenny Silverton and Janette Benning. She ignores the judgmental gaze, doubtless from Janette Benning, that she feels on her neck, and adds her name and phone number to the list beneath Friday, which is written in puzzling, girly bubble letters, matching perfectly to Janette’s signature. She is nearly astonished to note that the “I” in Friday has been dotted with a heart.

“Ridiculous, isn’t it?” comes a male voice behind her, and Marit flinches before she’s unable to stop the involuntary response. She turns slightly, and beholds the freckled face of Jeremy, the plaid-toting rockstar wannabe from Art. Nodding just barely, wondering if he hasn’t spoken to someone else, Marit shies to the side so that he can peruse the sign-up sheet. But, no—he’s eying her in an affable manner with half of his vision, as he devotes the other half to glancing over the piece of paper. “You’re Marit, from Art, right? I thought you looked familiar. Maybe I’ve seen you outside of school before? I really liked your self-portrait.” He scrawls his name and number in a nearly illegible fashion beneath hers, and moves to the side, folding his long frame against the desk beside her.

“Thanks,” Marit replies faintly, wondering at her own absurdity. He’s harmless, she tells herself, he’s friends with that dark-haired girl, Marley, with the flashing gray eyes—

Jeremy smiles, and Marit’s heart gives a sickening lurch before she realizes that his smile holds nothing behind it but platonic intent. She relaxes her leg muscles, unaware that they had tightened. “Maybe I’ll catch you there,” he says, eyes dancing conspiratorially. “It’ll be nice to see a familiar face. My friends don’t do this kind of thing.” He gives her a nod and unfolds himself from the desk, easing through the lingering crowd and exiting into the noisy hallway.

---

Friday appears with less fanfare than it would otherwise, as, Marit learns, the football team doesn’t have a game scheduled. She survives this school day as she would any other, by keeping her head down. The library has become something of a sanctuary for her, a place to retreat during the boisterous lunch hour, from girls with gleaming eyes and cat-sharp claws, and boys with indecipherable stares and alien desires. Her hipbones grow sharper and her voice grows quieter, and no one knows enough about her to remark upon the change.

She arrives home with much the same air that a soldier would have after disembarking from a battle-zone; her backpack seems to grow heavier with each front porch step she conquers. She drops the heavy thing in a living room armchair and shuffles to the kitchen, where she finds Marilyn cheerfully humming to an oldies tune on the radio, decadently resplendent in pajamas and sleep-mussed hair in the slanting afternoon sunlight. It must be her day off.

“Hey there, kiddo, how was school?” her mother asks, smiling prettily over her shoulder as she benevolently guards what appears to be lasagna in the oven. The mere smell of it makes Marit’s knees go weak, and she plops bonelessly into a kitchen chair, resting her chin on the tabletop as her hair falls to curtain her face.

“It was okay,” she answers softly, directing her comment to the salt shaker. This time Marilyn halts her by-the-second peeking through the oven window, turning and pulling out the chair opposite her daughter and dropping into it gracelessly.

“Just okay? Don’t you have some project to go to tonight? Something for homecoming?”

Marit raises her head from the tabletop and nods, glancing out of the perpetually open kitchen window. “We’re making a float for the parade,” she reminds her mother gently, and Marilyn makes a noise of recollection. “I guess I’ll just help them paint or something, they’ve got all the football players for the heavy lifting—”

Marilyn nods sagely. “You’d blow over in a stiff wind. And I have just the remedy for that,” she says, voice bright, just as the oven timer goes off. She rises from the chair and grabs her oven mitts, while Marit automatically stands and begins to set the table. It is almost a ritual now.

She eats silently, picking through the layers of cheese and pasta, avoiding the meat product like the plague. Marilyn chatters about work between—and sometimes during—bites, little snippets of amusing conversation and little biographies of the interesting people she meets. When they are washing up the dishes, Marilyn asks, “Do you want a ride, sweetie? I can change into some non-sleepy clothes and take you where you need to go.” Marit silently ponders the possibilities of where she needs to go before she nods, and Marilyn disappears from the room, heading upstairs.

Bob Dylan presides over the car ride to Janette Benning’s house, and Marit is okay with that; the scenery dissolves into greenery as they pass beyond the town limit into the large spread of land just outside Lockheed that is devoted, as far as she can tell, to the houses of the wealthy. Again, the division between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is stark; small-time rich folk don’t have gated houses, certainly, and it’s nothing worthy of MTV Cribs, but it’s still about five steps up on the scale of luxury from her own little house. Trying to remember the directions foisted on them by Janette herself, she scans the spacious residences before spotting the correct one just ahead. Its driveway is littered with conspicuous vehicles of the expensive type, and even more telling is the gathering of her peers on the lawn, seeming to mill around without any direction in mind.

“Here,” she says, and the tone is filled with such regret that her mother’s eyes swivel from the road ahead and latch directly onto her daughter, eyebrows raised in concern. Marit clears her throat. “Janette’s house.” This time, her words emerge from her throat in a more normal tone, and Marilyn nods accordingly, pulling just to the side of the road.

Marit reaches for the door handle, and Marilyn says, “Call me when you need me to pick you up, okay?” Marit nods, eyes still fixated on the congregation on the lawn ahead, and exits the car without further ado.

It occurs to her that this isn’t her scene. It occurs to her that she is unwelcome here—indeed, she has already unwelcomed herself, as she begins the trek up the paved driveway and into the Benning property proper, anxiously scanning the crowd, ears attuned to both the noise of the crush of people and the sound of her mother’s car fading into the distance. Retreat, it seems, is not a viable option, and she stiffens her shoulders against the brisk October wind.

When she reaches the edge of the crowd, Marit spots a familiar freckle-spotted face, and the body attached to it seems quite relaxed in its distance from the others. Jeremy, she recalls, and wanders over toward him, skirting the boundaries of the crowd. He spots her before she reaches him, and waves one large hand in greeting. “Nice to see you here,” he calls, and she nods quietly as she sidles up beside him. For a moment, silence washes over them, and they stand there, on the periphery, surveying the jocularity of the kids with enough balls to show up at Janette Benning’s upper middle class domain. In a moment of ludicrous association, Marit is reminded of her first and last party in Lockheed, wherein a drunken Janette had been yelling at “loser kids” who had tried crashing the party to remove themselves from the festivities, calling out, “My daddy’s a lawyer—what’s yours, a plumber? You don’t belong here!”

Before anything else can be said, however, Janette herself emerges from the double doors of the ivy-covered brick façade, resplendent in whatever brand she’s chosen to deck herself out with—Hollister, American Eagle, Marit can’t tell at this distance, because they all look the same. The willowy girl puts her fingers to her lips, and the ear-piercing whistle that ensues catches everyone’s attention. “Let’s go to the barn,” she says, and without lingering to see if they obey, she marches off in a diagonal direction from her house, leaving behind the pavement for cool autumn grass. Janette obviously takes it for granted that everyone will follow her, and, of course, she is not disappointed.

The trek is longer than Marit could have suspected, and she ponders this as she and Jeremy traverse the acreage of the Benning property, bringing up the rear of the moving body mass. She stays silent along the way, as does he, but he provides an oddly comforting companionship. She ponders this, too; at least, until they reach the Benning barn.

Strangely enough, there is another barn near it, a newer-looking one, and Marit remembers suddenly that Janette’s family owns horses. The old barn, however, has been gutted of its stalls, and all that is left is the foundation for the senior class float, paint tins, and various tools to accompany the assembly of the float. Immediately, Janette marshals the body of students into groups and tells them their tasks; it seems that she excludes her close group of friends from the rest, instead telling them to walk around and make sure everyone is doing everything as they are supposed to. This surprises no one.

Marit finds herself painting the marshmallows alongside Jeremy, who has, it seems, elected to make a friend out of her. As they work in silence, once more instating the peculiar comfort of his easygoing presence, she observes Jenny Silverton making her supervisory rounds, correcting an angle of assembly here, or righting an errant stray of a painter’s brush there. The brush feels unwieldy, phallic, within her grip; uneasy with paints, she prefers the smooth touch of a pencil, or a piece of charcoal or pastel. As time creeps by, she ponders the sacrifice of a cool fall afternoon to a school she doesn’t feel a part of, to a school to which she feels only barely made welcome. The tide turns, however, when Jeremy casually breaks their tacit vow of silence, questioning, “So, I hear you’re from the city, right? Do you like it here?”

Doubtless it is a query meant to pass the time, or to perhaps engage Marit so that they might continue onto more interesting, personal commentary, but she pauses for a long moment before answering. The question, to her, turns serious as Jenny Silverton blows by, Janette Benning following, towing behind them the faintest scents of high-end perfume. It is difficult to wrap her lips around a polite answer. “I haven’t really made any friends—”

“But that’s not true,” Jeremy interrupts, gently. “I remember where I’ve seen you before. You were at the mall, I think, with our lovely Director of Preppy Artistic Intent. Sometime before school started.” He nods toward Jenny Silverton, who has bent slightly over a kid she would no doubt term ‘computer geek,’ lecturing him, it seems, on his placement of a finished marshmallow. “Did you get tired of the conversation?” He invokes a light-hearted tone to it, to take away offense to either Marit or Jenny herself.

Despite herself, Marit smiles down at the rainbow marshmallow she’s working on, to demonstrate that she takes no offense. “She doesn’t live too far from me, and she came over to say hi and to show me around. Like a welcoming committee or something. I just—guess we didn’t click or something—”

He nods, perhaps to save her from any hilariously excruciating memories, but her statement is so vague that he figures there may be more to it. It isn’t hard to see that Jeremy and Jenny Silverton would never click, anyway; his clothes are a bit too flannelly, his devotion to rock music of the nineties a bit too obvious. Marit is well aware that she’s viewing that contrast through the eyes of a high school student who has been well-schooled in clique politics, but perhaps Jeremy is different; he obviously doesn’t mind showing up to these school spirit events, despite his flannel. “Well, that’s all right,” he says peaceably. “Some people just don’t.”

Silence reigns for a few minutes, a relaxed pall on the conversation, while around them, the other busy workers scramble to please and appease their Queen Bees. Quick workers both, Marit and Jeremy, along with their fellow painters-of-marshmallows, make their way through the assembled stack of three-dimensional cereal-box design rip-offs. Marit ponders scribbling, in a tiny, unseen corner of her completed paintjobs, No Pre-Assembly Required, as the only work the senior class has to do on their float is to put the thing together: doubtless the parents of Janette Benning, Jenny Silverton, and others of their ilk—kind? species?—procured the materials and designed the general layout themselves, not trusting that delicate sort of work to the peons whose manual labor would eventually birth the float into existence.

“If your welcome to Lockheed wasn’t sufficient,” Jeremy speaks into their silence after that short pause, “you should come hang with me and my friends sometime. We’re not quite as glamorous as your original welcoming committee, but we do all right.” Despite herself, Marit’s brows hike in faint surprise. She ponders the politics of his statement for a moment before dredging up her own curious response.

“Who are your friends?”

He glances toward her for a moment, perhaps to see if her question is a way to deflect his original invitation. But he must see the genuine interest in her eyes, or something at least resembling it, because he warms to the subject. “Oh, some of them are in our Art class. Marley, the girl with the dark hair? She’s asked about you a couple of times, she really liked your self-portrait. And this girl named Lee, she’s kind of our resident genius. There’s Annie, there’s Matt, Damien—Matt’s in Art…”

He trails off into the yawning abyss of silence again, and it takes a few moments before Marit realizes that she should respond. Her paintbrush stills in her hand, the bristles making a soft scrunching noise against the Styrofoam-y material of the marshmallow. “Thank you.” Her voice is unusually sluggish in her throat, as though it must swim through a tiny sea of molasses to push the words out of her mouth. “Where do you hang out at lunch?”

“Usually the Art room.” Her evidenced interest in the subject matter seems to perk Jeremy up; he is warming to her, and, just like the unwieldy paintbrush fallen flaccid in her grip, she has no idea what to do with it. “So you should stop by sometime. I’ll introduce you—it won’t be weird, promise.”

There is nothing alarming about it. Her paranoia exists solely within the darkened closet of her mind, sealed up tight, with no way to push outward into the world; she is jumping at harmless shadows. Her memory rockets back to the lunch period in which she had signed up to help with the float, when she had first spoken to Jeremy—she had shied away like a frightened equine, only to have her fears assuaged by his laid-back, friendly demeanor. There is nothing alarming, she repeats to herself: there is nothing to be afraid of.

“All right, it sounds like fun—” she begins, with just a touch of caution, because she can’t help it, but her statement is drowned out by the arrival of several large, muscular figures sporting letterman jackets, who appear from around the barn’s wall and beeline straight for the clustered group of well-dressed girls standing on the other side of the float. Her heart leaps into her throat, and she slams it down with such force that her mind is left reeling from the blow. Jeremy is forgotten: Marit’s memory takes her back to that classroom, that lunch period, that sign-up sheet with the dotted-heart Friday, and she recklessly peruses her recollection. They aren’t supposed to be here.

She is jumping at shadows again. But she can’t help it, because the lasagna she’d had for dinner comes burbling back to haunt her, her stomach roils, and she drops the paintbrush on the plastic covering on which her half-unpainted marshmallow rests. Against the backdrop of the old barn’s wall, just on the other side of the annoyingly bright float, the annoyingly colored “Let’s get lucky, Lockheed!” already painted by some industrious soul on the float’s side, she spots a tall, muscular figure among others of its kind, a head with wind-tousled light brown hair, a cruel, careless smirk as he addresses his fellow football players and the cheerleaders who flock around them. No.

“I have to go,” she says, lurching to her feet. Jeremy, who has, to her horror, noticed, abandons his own painting and watches her in mild alarm. He starts to phrase something, perhaps “Are you all right?” but she’s already heading away, pulling her cell phone from her pocket and dialing her mother’s number. Her feet have a mind of their own, and their thought pattern is not oriented toward politeness at the moment; she calls over her shoulder, “I’ll see you Monday, thanks!” And she’s gone. The dying grass crunches, unheard, beneath her shoes.