Hey, ‘Bones,’ ” my brother, Parker, asked me, "what are you going to be for Halloween?" The elementary school party started at 7:00 PM. The winner of the prize for the most original costume got two free tickets for the Sunday matinee. Parker was dressed and ready to go. I watched him parade in front of the mirror in his pirate costume. He's so handsome, I thought. All the girls in the fifth and sixth grades were madly in love with him. I'd spent the afternoon defending myself from his rubber dagger.
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" I'm not going!" I replied.
" Why not?"
" No costume."
"That's dumb," he said. "You hardly need a costume. You're already a perfect scarecrow!" I was used to these observations. Furthermore, he spoke the truth. At twelve, I was already six feet tall and weighed eighty-nine pounds. Tack on red hair and freckles and it added up to one thing: I was a scarecrow.
School days were charged with searing taunts. "Down in front." "How's the weather up there?" "Are those skis or shoes?" It was hard to smile back, and even harder to make friends.
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I tried plastering my hair down flat on the top of my head and prying the heels off my shoes. I took scalding hot baths, hoping I'd shrink. In bed at night, I put my feet against the footboard, hands against the headboard and pushed, hoping to press myself back together. Nothing worked. So I saved nickels and dimes in a cider jug to pay the future surgeon who would find fame in Ripley's Believe It or Not by cutting six inches of bone from the legs of the tallest girl in the world and making her the same height as everybody else.
"When I grow up," I told Parker, as he brandished his cutlass in front of the mirror, "I'm going to live on an island where there's no one to stare." My brother raised his eye patch and looked at me hard.
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"Sounds awful," he said, and left for the party.
Alone, I listened to the cheerless night and pictured the costumes my classmates had bought. I had tried on a few, too, but nothing fit. I could picture my classmates in their costumes, having a wonderful time. As I wandered about the house, I remembered happier days-before Mommy and Daddy were separated. When Daddy lived with us, he always made me feel loved and wanted. Seeing him now for short visits wasn't the same. The more I brooded, the more my self-pity grew.
Then I spotted a broomstick standing in the kitchen corner. Maybe I could make a costume, I thought. Outside, a sheet and pillowcase billowed on the clothesline. I could be a witch or a ghost. Then my gaze fell on the back of the cellar door. My father's old plaid work shirt, faded overalls, jacket and cap were hanging right where he had left them.
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"I could be a hobo," I murmured as I buried my face in the dusty clothes. But Parker's taunt kept coming back at me. "You're a scarecrow." As much as I hated to admit it, he was right. Well then, a scarecrow was what I'd be. The closer I got to the school, the louder the cheers and clapping became, and the more my fears grew. What if they laughed at me? Worse still, what if they didn't do anything? Hiding behind the tool shed next to the gym, I pulled everything out of the pillowcase and started to dress. Because I was so tall, I could peek through the high window and see everybody taking turns on the stage in quest of the coveted prize. Ghosts, princesses, monsters, cowboys, soldiers and brides-they were all there, clad in store-bought costumes, fragile dreams for one night. My teeth were chattering. Would they clap for me? Would they whistle and cheer? My stomach ached from anticipation.
I'll run home! I decided. No one would know I had been there. But Parker came on stage and glanced at the window. It was too late. He had seen me. If I left now, he'd call me chicken. I watched him bow to the audience and listened to the squeals from the girls as he leaped on chairs and tables and parried with his sword. Next, a small gorilla climbed on top of a ladder and ate a banana. Lincoln gave a brief address. Cleopatra danced with a rubber snake in her hands, and a soldier marched and twirled his gun. Only Tarzan remained.
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Maneuvering carefully through the entrance, I went in, held my breath and prayed, Please, God, don't let me make a fool of myself. The applause was so loud for the King of the jungle when he gave his call and swung on a curtain rope that no one seemed to notice me walk slowly to the center of the stage. A pillowcase covered my head. With arms outstretched and hands clutching the broomstick inserted through the sleeves of an old plaid shirt, I wore a felt hat and faded overalls stuffed with straw. The room was suddenly still.
Nobody clapped. Nobody cheered. The only sound I heard was the hammering of my own heart. I'm going to die, I thought, right here in front of everybody. The world was tilting, and my ears were ringing when the hood slid down my nose, just enough so I could peer through the eyeholes. And that's when I saw my classmates for the first time, as they really were. Petite blonde fairies with golden wands-and steel braces on their teeth. A baseball hero with a bat and mitt-and bottle-thick eyeglasses. A boxer with fighting gloves-sitting in a wheelchair. Someone asked, "Hey, who is that?" "Parker's sister!" They looked at one another, surprise brightening their faces. Clapping and cheering filled the room.
Page 1 of 1
cheering filled the room
#2
Posted 23 November 2009 - 01:24 AM
I'm the Only One
She was my sister and she was sleeping late. She's a lot older than me and at the time she was about to break into films, directing them, so everybody was indulging her. She was the only girl, too. If something didn't wk out in her life and she had to come home f a while, it was a big deal. It mattered me than if I fucked up in one way another. When Kelly was at home you had to creep around the house and keep your voice down even if it was in the middle of the afternoon. Our mother's Canadian - I don't know why I say that, except maybe it helps explain her opinion about Kel: Smarts Needs Special. It was this crappy little phrase that she had made up and it meant that clever people.wow power leveling, People with special talents, need special treatment. Like they have a disease. You have to meet the Canadian side of our family to understand how cute she thinks that phrase is. I remember thinking that it was bullshit when I was fourteen and it still smells bad now. But to my mother, Kelly was this asteroid that had landed in our lives and no one knew how she got there what size hole she was going to leave. I've never been very good at school, and Pete, our older brother, is the same. Then along comes Kelly. So my mother has us all pussy-footing around like a family mime troupe, waving our hands, taking our shoes off.replica rolex,
I'm thinking of a particular mning, I was creeping around trying to make a silent breakfast, opening cupboards quietly, acting like I didn't exist. I'd been doing it f a couple of weeks since Kelly got back. It felt like I'd been doing it my whole life. The situation came about because earlier in the year Kelly had moved in with this guy called Aidan. They bought furniture, the whole wks. Then she cheated on him and he left her. Apart from Kelly being back in our house, it was also a shame because Aidan was the only man she ever went out with, befe since, whom I've had any time f whatsoever. Aidan was a top, replica rolex,man, a good guy. The thing I like about him was that he was smart, but he didn't need much of this special treatment. He was Irish, from Dublin, and he could be funny, he could talk football and he liked to see other people's mouths open and close besides his own. It was good knowing someone like him. I needed it; what with dad not being around, Pete married and gone; and me in a house full of women. That was the year I was praying f a few me inches on my height and shaving the bare space under my nose hoping that something might turn up. So it was good to know Aidan, six foot three and hairy as a bear. He was hairy back and front and Kelly would tease him about it, and he would laugh her off tell her she could do with losing a few pounds which, between you and me, was nothing but the truth. She was a fat little thing back then. And he went and told her, straight-up; didn't care that she was almost, st of, famous. He told it how it was. That was the way he loved her. She never appreciated it, replica rolex,though, and then she had this fling with some pretty boy in the film industry. But you could see she realised what she'd lost when he left her because she slunk back home and holed herself up in Pete's old room that I'd been using f weights. She took it over and lay in there all day in the dark curled up in a stinking duvet watching old black-and-white films. I remember asking her, 'Why can't you use your own bedroom?' She had a small bedroom upstairs that used to be covered wall to wall in her school friends' graffiti until she went off to university and mum whitewashed the whole thing. I asked her again, 'Why can't you use your own bedroom, that's what it's there f.' She said, 'I can't sleep and wk in the same room. I need a study.' She said it as if a study is one of those things you can't do without, like clean water. I said, 'But I need to exercise.' She said, 'You're fourteen. Your body isn't even developed. The only thing you need to do is stop beating the bishop befe you go blind.' This was classic Kelly. She always knew how to make you feel four inches long in every direction.
replica rolex,
So she came back, and I had to move out all my weights and spread them around the house wherever there was space. I put the bench press in my room along with the free weights. I put the Abdominizer in the lounge. I stuck the chin-up bar at the top of the stairs which lead down to the front do. And even though I was pissed off with Kelly f taking the spare room, having the weights all over the place did make it me like circuit training and doing circuits made me feel like I was Rocky. It's what they do in the middle of Rocky movies; a two-minute sequence to show that over a number of months he got fit and pumped up. You pray f that kind of speedy, magic-time when you're wking out, the same way you wish your adolescence would pass like it does in a TV serial: a school scene, a sex scene and graduation. It's slower and faster than that. And some events become still and solid, and turn into a thing in your life, an object like a lampshade an ironing board. They hang around; you could reach out and touch them. This day I'm trying to tell you about is like that.
So: my exercise. I'd start in my room, and do about four sets of twenty. Then I'd run downstairs and start on the Abdominizer. If you've never seen one, they're like half of something fun, half a bike
replica rolex, half a swing. You lie down in them and you do sit-ups. You spend good money trying to make sit-ups something else. In the end, a sit-up is a sit-up. But I'm a big a mug as anyone and I'd try and do two hundred sit-ups in that thing in sets of fifty. The pain was very bad. So I'd think of something that pissed me off, usually Kelly, and the anger would help me push out the last fifty. I wanted to show her that I could develop if I wanted to. Because there was always this thing between her and me that we were both kind of overweight, and always telling the other one that they were obsessed with it.So if Kelly didn't eat lunch,
I'm the Only One
She was my sister and she was sleeping late. She's a lot older than me and at the time she was about to break into films, directing them, so everybody was indulging her. She was the only girl, too. If something didn't wk out in her life and she had to come home f a while, it was a big deal. It mattered me than if I fucked up in one way another. When Kelly was at home you had to creep around the house and keep your voice down even if it was in the middle of the afternoon. Our mother's Canadian - I don't know why I say that, except maybe it helps explain her opinion about Kel: Smarts Needs Special. It was this crappy little phrase that she had made up and it meant that clever people.wow power leveling, People with special talents, need special treatment. Like they have a disease. You have to meet the Canadian side of our family to understand how cute she thinks that phrase is. I remember thinking that it was bullshit when I was fourteen and it still smells bad now. But to my mother, Kelly was this asteroid that had landed in our lives and no one knew how she got there what size hole she was going to leave. I've never been very good at school, and Pete, our older brother, is the same. Then along comes Kelly. So my mother has us all pussy-footing around like a family mime troupe, waving our hands, taking our shoes off.replica rolex,
I'm thinking of a particular mning, I was creeping around trying to make a silent breakfast, opening cupboards quietly, acting like I didn't exist. I'd been doing it f a couple of weeks since Kelly got back. It felt like I'd been doing it my whole life. The situation came about because earlier in the year Kelly had moved in with this guy called Aidan. They bought furniture, the whole wks. Then she cheated on him and he left her. Apart from Kelly being back in our house, it was also a shame because Aidan was the only man she ever went out with, befe since, whom I've had any time f whatsoever. Aidan was a top, replica rolex,man, a good guy. The thing I like about him was that he was smart, but he didn't need much of this special treatment. He was Irish, from Dublin, and he could be funny, he could talk football and he liked to see other people's mouths open and close besides his own. It was good knowing someone like him. I needed it; what with dad not being around, Pete married and gone; and me in a house full of women. That was the year I was praying f a few me inches on my height and shaving the bare space under my nose hoping that something might turn up. So it was good to know Aidan, six foot three and hairy as a bear. He was hairy back and front and Kelly would tease him about it, and he would laugh her off tell her she could do with losing a few pounds which, between you and me, was nothing but the truth. She was a fat little thing back then. And he went and told her, straight-up; didn't care that she was almost, st of, famous. He told it how it was. That was the way he loved her. She never appreciated it, replica rolex,though, and then she had this fling with some pretty boy in the film industry. But you could see she realised what she'd lost when he left her because she slunk back home and holed herself up in Pete's old room that I'd been using f weights. She took it over and lay in there all day in the dark curled up in a stinking duvet watching old black-and-white films. I remember asking her, 'Why can't you use your own bedroom?' She had a small bedroom upstairs that used to be covered wall to wall in her school friends' graffiti until she went off to university and mum whitewashed the whole thing. I asked her again, 'Why can't you use your own bedroom, that's what it's there f.' She said, 'I can't sleep and wk in the same room. I need a study.' She said it as if a study is one of those things you can't do without, like clean water. I said, 'But I need to exercise.' She said, 'You're fourteen. Your body isn't even developed. The only thing you need to do is stop beating the bishop befe you go blind.' This was classic Kelly. She always knew how to make you feel four inches long in every direction.
replica rolex,
So she came back, and I had to move out all my weights and spread them around the house wherever there was space. I put the bench press in my room along with the free weights. I put the Abdominizer in the lounge. I stuck the chin-up bar at the top of the stairs which lead down to the front do. And even though I was pissed off with Kelly f taking the spare room, having the weights all over the place did make it me like circuit training and doing circuits made me feel like I was Rocky. It's what they do in the middle of Rocky movies; a two-minute sequence to show that over a number of months he got fit and pumped up. You pray f that kind of speedy, magic-time when you're wking out, the same way you wish your adolescence would pass like it does in a TV serial: a school scene, a sex scene and graduation. It's slower and faster than that. And some events become still and solid, and turn into a thing in your life, an object like a lampshade an ironing board. They hang around; you could reach out and touch them. This day I'm trying to tell you about is like that.
So: my exercise. I'd start in my room, and do about four sets of twenty. Then I'd run downstairs and start on the Abdominizer. If you've never seen one, they're like half of something fun, half a bike
replica rolex, half a swing. You lie down in them and you do sit-ups. You spend good money trying to make sit-ups something else. In the end, a sit-up is a sit-up. But I'm a big a mug as anyone and I'd try and do two hundred sit-ups in that thing in sets of fifty. The pain was very bad. So I'd think of something that pissed me off, usually Kelly, and the anger would help me push out the last fifty. I wanted to show her that I could develop if I wanted to. Because there was always this thing between her and me that we were both kind of overweight, and always telling the other one that they were obsessed with it.So if Kelly didn't eat lunch,
I'm the Only One
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