2004-11-12 - 11:57 a.m.
her name in twinkling lights

When they found her, howling and convulsing in her bed, her eyes rolling beneath fluttering eyelids, a yellowish cream coursing down her chin in rivulets and sputtering out in great arcing specks from between purplish lips, her whole face contorted into some ghastly mask that resembled the face of someone helplessly spiraling into paroxysms of uncontrollable laughter, oh, when they found her like that, they were more exasperated than bereaved, and that was truly the greatest shame of the whole affair.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” her father whispered. “Oh, Beth. We thought you were through with this nonsense.” And he called the paramedics. And only after they had taken her did he start to cry.

*****

She sat chain smoking in her Buick outside the library for a good hour and a half. She’d always been good at wasting time.

Of course, she was supposed to be working--her mother blithely operated under the supposition that when Beth said she was going to the library, she was going to preshelve and shelve and reshelve big dusty tomes with titles like Ohio Smiths, 1922-1980 in the Geneological section as a volunteer paige, and for each hour spent she was paid six dollars--but she never worked. She sat and smoked and read and ate chips, but she never worked.

She checked her cell phone for the third time that hour, telling herself that she needed to know the time. No missed calls. Not much of a surprise or even a disappointment, really.

Beth spent her hours at the library in perpetual fear that her mother might stop by to see her there, to make sure that she was working, as she was known for lying. She knew that if her mother did not find her in the Geneological Department, there would be a definite phone call, and that wouldn’t do. No, that wouldn’t do at all. Her mother had never shown up, though, and she doubted she ever would. There was just that little nagging fear that maybe she would this time, and she’d be exposed.

Again.

She didn’t particularly care that nobody else had called. She couldn’t allow herself the dalliance of caring. Instead, she took a large draw from her cigarette and casually puffed out thick blue smoke rings. She regarded them absentmindedly as they, in quick succession, swelled, distorted, broke, grew thin and finally evanesced.

---

Beth thought often and somewhat longingly of high school, as time does have a way of sweetening and dulling the past. She remembered inside jokes, fiery godawful love, great monthlong feuds, BFFs, her name in twinkling lights. She, of course, forgot much of reality.

*****

She had been reasonably popular, and a cheerleader for three years out of four to boot. As such she had been elected Homecoming Queen junior year. And there she had been, in the middle of the football field, wearing a crown--a goddamn crown!--and seeing BETH spelled out in huge, blazing letters across the field. The stadium had roared. Her handsome boyfriend, newly crowned Homecoming King, had pulled her tight, his smile showing all his big white teeth, and kissed her in front of everyone. She had waved and smiled and searched the squirming throngs for Stephanie.

---

After the game, after she had arrived at home and removed her silky purple dress and her makeup and laid the crown delicately on her desk, she had sat by the phone, begging it to please, oh please, ring. Please ring and please be Stephanie.

But there was no phone call that night, except from Michelle, who had wanted to discuss the purple dress--“You’re not actually gonna, like, wear that to the dance, right?” she had asked breathlessly--and some girl who Beth hardly knew being, like, such a fuckin’ ho-bag. At one o’clock that morning she hung up the phone, brushed her teeth, and sobbed herself to sleep.

---

Three days later at school Beth found Stephanie in the bathroom during second period. She cornered her there and shakily began her interrogation.

“Where were you, Steph?”

“I didn’t come.”

“Why? I wanted to see you.”

“Yeah, well you were with your motherfucking--” here Stephanie spat the word “--boyfriend.”

“Come on. You could’ve at least called.”

“You could’ve called me.”

“You know what? You’re being really fucking stupid about this.” Beth calmed herself, counted to five. “Why are you so mad at me?”

“I have to go to class,” Stephanie mumbled, averting her gaze and darting out the door.

---

That day at lunch it was unseasonably cold. Students gathered in the assembly hall to eat, sitting on the floor, hunched over their sandwiches. Beth was among her usual clot of friends, laughing loudly and draping herself over Mike, her boyfriend of three months.

Her friends had taken to calling her “Your Royal Highness,” and him “Your Excellency,” and she smiled so hard each time that her cheeks began to ache.

The loud laughter and excessive smiling and sloppy PDAs with Mike were mostly for Stephanie’s benefit, who sat, reading and occasionally glaring, alone across the hall.

Her friends. Her fucking friends. Even at the time, Beth was aware that these girls were not her friends. She was kept mostly for show, and she knew it. These compatriots of hers proclaimed her to be “beautiful” and “exotic” and sometimes even went so far as to call her “dead sexy,” with her long black hair, deep black eyes set at a piquant slant, dainty nose, and overall excellent bone structure, set in her cheerleader’s frame. Yeah, she was hot and her friends told her so and that’s why they kept her around.

The “exotic” part: she came from Lebanon. She had been born there and spent the first six years of her life in the city of J’bail. Babel, it had been in the early times. Her friends thought it was cool that she was from “Arabia” and spoke “Arabian.” She never bothered correcting them anymore.

*****

After high school, after everything she loved and cared about had disintegrated like a rain-sodden newspaper, after she had been exposed for what she was and had been very publicly broken up with, after she had slit her wrists (the long way, the supposedly deadly way) the first time, after the brief stint at the hospital and her first three years at community college, living all the while at home with her parents, smoking pot and getting fired from jobs and drinking rather too heavily and--well, she preferred not to think of all of that. No. She preferred thinking of inside jokes, fiery godawful love, great monthlong feuds, BFFs, her name in twinkling lights. She would not allow herself to remember any more than that.

---

Sometimes at night she remembered Stephanie’s lips fluttering lightly down her stomach.

Sometimes at night she remembered Mike’s big, clumsy hands fumbling with the button on her jeans.

Sometimes at night she remembered his voice, on that last terrible day, her personal day of reckoning: “You’re a fucking whore. You’re a fucking dyke bitch WHORE.” And the very public slap across the face, the slap that had stung and brought tears to her eyes and seemed to echo. And Stephanie’s smirk, just like everyone else’s in the gathering crowd.

Sometimes at night she remembered how much she enjoyed raiding the medicine cabinet.

---

She had been raiding said cabinet periodically ever since that day in April three years ago, and at first her parents hadn’t noticed, and then had pretended not to notice, and then had finally given in and demanded that she seek professional help.

So she did. She found a suitable psychologist who referred her to a psychiatrist who in turn referred her to another psychiatrist who prescribed various modes of treatment: Effexor, Celexa, Lexapro, Wellbutrin. And she got better. And she hid her scars and she bought her pills--Vicodin, Darvocet, Adderall, Klonopin, Elavil, Flexeril, Soma, etc.--from various dealers she had met through her bud hookup and she stole her vodka from liquor stores citywide. Nobody knew.

It didn’t matter what she took, prescribed or not. None of it fucking mattered. She couldn’t forget. She tried and tried and there was nothing to be done. She talked to the psychiatrist about it and he told her to go to the psychologist. The psychologist, after many frustrating, fruitless sessions, referred her back to the psychiatrist, who upped her dosage.

---

She drank Mountain Dew and stayed in bed for days at a time. Her mother wondered what was wrong with her.

*****

“Why are you mad, she asks. Why am I mad? I don’t know, Beth, why am I mad?” Stephanie shrieked into the phone the evening of the bathroom incident. “Maybe, oh I dunno, maybe it has something to do with the fact that you fucking betrayed me for that fucking pansy cocksucker? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that you’ve been lying to me? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that your motherfucking popularity is more important than us? You think?”

“Stephanie...”

“Fuck you.”

Click. Dial tone.

*****

Beth finished her cigarette and tossed it out the window. The sky was pink but she didn’t notice. A seagull shat on her windshield. She drove home. When she arrived the shit was dry.

---

“Hello, mom,” she called, disguising the shaking in her voice with a studied and precise air of weariness. “How are you?”

“Oh, fine, honey,” said her mother. She came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron. Beth endured the obligatory kiss on the cheek. “How are you?”

“I’m good. I worked about four hours today.”

“Okay.” Mother dug through her purse, found her pocketbook. Fished out twenty-four dollars.

“Thanks,” Beth said, and turned to leave.

“Where are you going?”

“The bookstore,” she said hurriedly.

---

Three hours later she returned with a copy of Vogue and a thin paperback, so her story would check out. In her purse was an orange perscription vial, label-less, completely filled with many and varied sizes and colors and effects. She had told her dealer that she’d pay him tomorrow after she got paid again. There was now about $150 on her tab but the guy thought she was hot so he let it go this time.

---

They found her convulsing. They found her choking on her vomit. They found her with an empty orange vial and a note that said, “Tell Stephanie I still fucking needed her.”

Beth’s parents looked at each other.

“Who’s Stephanie?”

- fin -

ok so that there's the story about which i've been griping for the past couple months. for those who may be confused: beth is based, physically and factually, on stephanie from high school (cheerleader, homecoming queen, lebanese, dead sexy). the rest of her is based on me. and stephanie in the story is based on me as well.

other topic: i ended up not getting to sleep until like four in the morning last night. which was okay, i guess, because this morning i had very little trouble getting out of bed and going to school and all that shit. i'm even in a rather good mood, which is odd. so this adderall--it's like meth, but without the rushing (which kind of sucks) and also without the crash (which is kind of awesome).

i owe like nine million books to the library, and i can find very few of them. this is unfortunate.

bali shag time.

- rachel

p.s. i can't get diaryland to get the motherfucking spacing right and it's pissing me off. why can't it break paragraphs where i tell it to fucking break paragraphs? goddamn.

ooh, you touch my tra-la-la... mmm, my ding-ding-dong