Plastic Animals

(3-17-08)

In this vicious girl-vs-girl world where it’s always open season, another shot has just been fired. These things, little noises that come out of a person’s mouth, we call them words. These little words like fat, ugly, skinny, pretty, freak, geek, they’re like bullets, sometimes like slugs, all different and all deadly. They don’t tear a girl’s flesh off. They don’t blow a hole in your skull. They cause infections, rooted deep in cliques, rooted deep in us. These word-bullets, they’d be hot pink plastic if you could see them. Plastic poisoning. Symptoms include: bulimia, self-mutilation, anorexia, depression, increased Internet urges, promiscuity. These little pink bullets, sometimes they don’t leave exit wounds. Sometimes the symptoms are chronic.

In this vicious perpetual catfight where all of us wear our battle scars in the form of eyeliner and Hollister polo, razor burn and tanning oil, we’re always fighting to come out on top. All of us constantly jonesing to become the newer, better version of someone else. All of us trying to be the prettier, hotter version of ourselves. We call this battle high school, this round, lunch. We call this pattern life.

Right now we’re sitting eight deep at a round table made of thick matted plastic on metal legs. Eight pairs of ballet flats underneath, eight shades of perfectly tinted blonde, brunette, and auburn up above, bobbing and chatting and doing everything but eating. Eight sets of professionally manicured fingernails click sporadically on the tabletop. These are our claws. Eight catty pairs of eyes dart from face to face, our teeth baring in practiced smiles. In the center of the attention is a big gorgeous mane of corn starch yellow wrapped around super-symmetrical features so flawlessly brushed and painted that you can’t tell they’re out of proportion. A barking, snapping laugh like a hyena’s. Welcome to the jungle.

Mandy Hatfield pulls her flawlessly glossed blowjob thick lips into a satisfied smile. Across the table, Jessica, one of her fearless minions, turns a new shade of red and gets real quiet. So the lion strikes again. You know Jessica is going to go home, take a handful of diet capsules, and pass out. In the wild, dominant animals sometimes have to snap at their underlings to remind them of who’s in charge. Mandy does this by evenly distributing an array of subtle, devastating comments to her followers, whenever she feels so inclined. The dominant female marks her territory.

The rest of us, we wince hard enough to make it look like smiles, and we go back to sipping at our water bottles filled with 5-calorie powders in every color of the rainbow. And Mandy tells us how she, “Can’t believe that bitch,” and she, “Oh my gosh would never have thought that,” miss Angie Goddard, “would dare even put one dirty little fingernail on his ass.”

Angie Goddard, she eats lunch in the band room. Angie Goddard, she has bad acne on just one side of her face, and her hair is usually up in a ponytail, the ponytail falling to shambles. Angie Goddard, she used to be my best friend. For a long time. Before I switched from prey to predator. Before Mandy took me under her bloodstained wing.

And Mandy, she says, “You wait and see if she doesn’t get a nasty little surprise. You girls just wait and see.” And Mandy’s eyes twinkle with that pure animal joy that boils up in her just thinking about how to make someone else’s life more miserable. That toothy grin that surfaces with her just itching to make another girl’s life as pathetic as her own. And Mandy laughs, and the rest of us laugh, except for Jessica, because she’s still afraid to open her mouth. And Mandy says, “Jesus, Jess, I told you we don’t mind your gap. You don’t have to sew your mouth shut just because of those teeth.” Make that six diet pills, and probably a good cry, before Jessica passes out.

The shrill din above us signifies the end of lunch. The safari Jeep may now move on to our next exhibit; we like to call this one Chemistry. It’s a sophomore level class, is why I’m in it. You need to actually pay attention to pass it, is why Mandy’s in it. Again. As a senior. She’s sitting next to me in the back row and popping her pasty pink bubblegum every six seconds, while somewhere yards, or miles, away, an old underpaid woman is gouging away at a chalkboard. I scribble down notes verbatim with one hand, and listen to Mandy talk, talk, talk my ear off. She says, “I mean, honestly, did she really think he’d ever want to be with a person like her? I mean, he went out with me. Me!” she slams her dainty fist down on the lab table, and our teacher pauses to frown back at Mandy, who flashes her candy-coated smile, and then starts again.

“Josh doesn’t even like her. I know he doesn’t. We were practically about to get back together.”

When she pauses I remind her that yeah, they were, until she boned Bill Watson in the locker room last Friday.

And Mandy whines, “A girl’s got to live. I can’t spend all my time waiting for him to grow a pair and get back with me.”

And I say isn’t that a double standard?

And Mandy goes, “Sweetie, please, don’t go philosophical on me. Anyway, I know he’s just doing it to try and make me jealous.”

I ask, well, isn’t it working?

Mandy says, “How am I supposed to get jealous over…that?” And she flaps a flimsy arm over at Angie, three rows in front of us. She’s wearing a black turtleneck sweater, boots, ripped jeans, and her hair back in the awful ponytail, as usual. Angie is doodling something unhappy on her folder. Mandy watches me watching her and goes, “Exactly.”

And I ask, what is she going to do to her?

And Mandy gets real excited like a lion ready to go in for the kill, and tells me, real confident-like in a mouth-to-ear whisper so tight my ear is steaming up from her breath. She takes her time and then pulls back, smiling, proud. And in the back of my throat, I want to throw up. But I look at Mandy, my good old best friend Mandy who never even bothered to call me when I had pneumonia or thank me even once for all the essays I wrote with her name on them, Mandy looks at Angie, then at me, then she winks. I am going to blow proverbial chunks. Everywhere. Just like how wolf mothers feed their pups. Me, the animal. All of us, the animals. I feel like George Orwell is scripting my life.

Mandy tells me that for anything to work, we have to get Angie to Josh’s hotel party on Saturday. And we need me to do that. Angie’d never trust an invitation from the lion queen herself, nor from any of her minions. But maybe, coming from an old friend, we’d have a shot. All of a sudden Mandy’s plan has made the jump from I to We. All of a sudden I’m an accomplice.

The guy who sits in front of me is absent, and so is the chick that sits in front of him. When worksheets start going around, it’s Angie who has to stretch all the way back to meet my out-reaching hand, making the transaction across the gap. She catches my eye for a second as I take the sheet of paper, and shoots me a very confidential smile. It’s not that Angie and I ever fought or anything. One summer we just sort of… stopped talking. Mandy clears her throat very loudly, and Angie glares at her for a split second- looking at her not even like a person, but as some kind of disgusting growth that’s clinging to an otherwise agreeable organism. Then Angie stretches back to her seat, and again she’s just that ponytail to me.

It’s funny how people don’t change. They get to be more of what they already are. I remember in kindergarten, me, Angie, Mandy. Playing with those big clunky Smithsonian zoo animals that all the schools buy because they haven’t got any choke-on-able parts. Mandy prancing a she-lion around as if it were a pony, Angie attacking the toy ponies with her plastic crocodile, and me just kind of holding onto that heavy molded giraffe. What do you really do with a giraffe? In the wild, they just hang out with all the other animals, looking out, hollering when danger gets near. Giraffes really are the true bystanders of the animal kingdom; big enough to be left alone, strong enough to take care of themselves, but not smart enough to stay away from all the chaos.

I just held onto that giraffe until snack time. I remember after snack time, one time, this time, Angie taught me how to snap. It’s such a simple, useless thing, snapping your fingers. It’s only cool to snap if you plan on becoming a poet. There’s no place for poets in our society these days. But I always remembered Angie taught me how to snap. Years later, Mandy Hatfield showed me how to fold my skirt over to show optimal leg tissue, how to buff and gloss and powder away anything I didn’t like about myself. Mandy taught me where self-confidence really comes from and how an extra coat of mascara can help you cheat on a test. All of these, things that seemed so useful at the time. All these important things that got me all the way to nowhere lickety-split.

At the end of class, there are a few minutes left, and this is basically free time. Mandy, she tells me, “Now is the perfect time. Go, ask her, hurry before the bell.”

And I look at her, stupid.

Mandy, pouting, goes, “Come on. What are you waiting for?”

And I find that my head starts moving back and forth, and I have to tell her no, I don’t want to. And I’m not going to help her with this one.

And then the bell rings, and Mandy huffs and glares and stomps off down the hall without me. And I go to English. And Mandy goes wherever she goes. And I feel like I’m growing brown spots and little lumpy horns to match.

At the end of the day, Mandy shows up at my locker, like she always does, all wrapped up in her sassy black coat with her metallic clutch by her side. And she says, “I forgive you for earlier.” And, “I don’t know what that was about, but whatever.” Then she says, lower, “Anyway, I came up with a much better plan that I can work out all on my own.”

And Mandy smiles her evil Cheshire cat grin.

And I snap the lock shut on my ugly orange locker.

And I felt so awkward holding that giraffe. Like the real ones must feel, being giraffes.

Watching all the carnage from the sidelines.

And grazing while your friends and enemies eat each other.

Sometimes I can’t tell the two apart. Half the time I don’t even know what I’m watching.