The Book of Beings: Beginnings (Episode One) Page 2

  Elias hesitated, pressing his lips together before he spoke. “Someone caught her.”

  This was news to me. I’d woken up lying on the floor with a bunch of people looking down at me in horror and pity, like I’d just been dragged out of a sewer.

  “Who?” Mrs. C demanded, like she didn’t believe him.

  Elias looked away, then back. He seemed like your average kid who’s uncomfortable being put on the spot by a grown-up. But for Elias, this was a very perturbed state. He ran his hand through his hair, then replied.

  “I did.”

  *

  If I hadn’t already fainted, that would’ve made me faint all over again. I decided I’d better lie down.

  I saw it suddenly, like we were that famous marble sculpture you see in posters sometimes. Me swooning in his arms, my form making a beautiful curve across the composition, his profile inches from mine, his anxious eyes searching my face for any sign of life.

  Probably it hadn’t been anything like that. Probably I’d gone down like a tottering bowling pin. Or he’d accidentally been in the way and couldn’t help it, or was even trying to get out of the way and had caught me by reflex.

  Maybe, once he caught me, I’d drooled. Maybe my eyes had rolled back in my head. Thank God I hadn’t peed my pants. I was going to have to pump Amanda for details.

  Elias catching me at least explained why Mr. Sturgeon had him walk me down to Mrs. C’s. The Sturge must’ve thought I was in danger of passing out again and needed a big, strong escort. Although Elias wasn’t exactly hulking. More like gracefully well-built.

  *

  “How long was she out?” Mrs. C probed.

  “Not long.” He was trying to look reassuring. “Less than 30 seconds.”

  “Did she have a seizure?”

  Elias shook his head and made a dismissive face, almost too confident, “No.”

  “All right, Elias. Thank you. Manon and I need to be able to talk privately now.” Did she have to emphasize that? “You can go back to class.”

  He didn’t look like he wanted to leave, but he didn’t have much choice. He allowed himself to glance at me, but only for a split second. He set his jaw firmly and turned to go.

  It was odd. I couldn’t begin to guess what was bothering him.

  4

  Once Elias was gone, Mrs. C closed the door. She was being all mom-ish. She gave me this we-both-know-what’s-wrong-with-you look. Her too? I thought. The whole thing was getting completely bizarre.

  “Honey, when was your last period?”

  I really hated it when they asked you that.

  The thing was, I didn’t keep track. I got the impression that I should, that all normal females did. I’d started a couple of times trying to put it on my calendar, but somehow it was beyond me. So I never knew what to say. Sometimes I admitted that I didn’t know. Sometimes I made something up.

  But I was flustered enough that I couldn’t effectively lie off the top of my head. I tried thinking back, and it did seem like it had been a while. The months flowed together in my mind. It was almost the end of October. Had I gotten it since school started?

  As I realized that I couldn’t remember, Mrs. C got this satisfied look on her face like that-confirms-that. She reached in a drawer and pulled out a packet with one of those sticks you pee on.

  “I’m not pregnant,” I said. “I can’t be pregnant.”

  She wasn’t convinced. “Lots of girls say that, but then they are.” She was already feeling sorry for me. “I’ve been doing this job a long time, and I can always tell.”

  “The thing is,” I said, grateful the door was closed, “I haven’t ever…” I waved my hand vaguely and grimaced to try to show how the sentence should end.

  I got another penetrating look for that. She was caught between trying to figure out if I really was a virgin and how I could possibly still be a virgin.

  But the humiliation wasn’t over. “Are you sure you know how—”

  “Of course!” I propped myself up so I could look at her. “I aced Health in eighth grade. I get the biology.”

  “So you understand that if an ejaculation occurs anywhere near the—”

  “Look!” I was practically screaming, and my head was about to explode. Then I realized that probably everybody in the office next door could hear me and I toned it down. “I haven’t even kissed anybody since I was twelve!”

  It had happened when we were paired off at summer camp and I wound up with Barry Lichtenstein, the kid who thought kissing was a form of mouth gymnastics. I’d walked off the end of the dock—at night, into the freezing cold water—just to get away from his tongue. It didn’t exactly help my attempts at not being the weird girl at camp that summer.

  Mrs. C looked taken aback, to say the least, though I couldn’t tell if that was because of what I’d told her or the violence of my response.

  After a moment, she managed to pull herself together and kind of sighed. “Wouldn’t you like to take the test, just to be sure?”

  “No,” I said forcefully. I couldn’t take the test. If I took the test, it would be admitting that maybe somehow I could be pregnant. I lay back down, crossed my arms, and looked at the ceiling. I just wanted the conversation to be over.

  “Manon, you have to promise me you’ll go to Planned Parenthood and have this checked out.” Mrs. C had lowered her voice. “Otherwise, when I call your mom, I’m going to have to tell her what I think is going on.”

  Now for some kids, that might’ve been a threat, but I happened to know that, since my mom pretty much lived at the Maitreya Buddha Monastery, Mrs. C would only ever get the answering machine at our house. And then a follow-up note supposedly signed by my mom, but actually forged by yours truly.

  So I lay there considering. The humiliation factor in going to PP—and then being told I wasn’t really knocked up, especially since I knew I wasn’t knocked up—seemed extraordinarily high.

  Mrs. C could tell I wasn’t going to go for it. She tried another tack. “Maybe there’s something else wrong with you, if you’re not getting your periods. You should get checked out.”

  This was an approach that was more likely to get to me. I wondered if she had guessed that I was a little bit of a hypochondriac.

  “Okay,” I agreed. “I’m overdue for a check-up anyway.”

  That was a stretch on my part. I’d actually never had one.

  5

  Apparently, in order to get an early release, you need to have an actual parent show up at school and sign you out. I could fake a lot of things, but I couldn’t fake that.

  So I had to lie there in Mrs. C’s office, while students came in every once in a while for meds and Band-Aids and stuff. I sat up a couple of times, as if I thought I was feeling fine and could go back to class, but then I acted woozy when I stood up so Mrs. C would insist that I lie down again.

  Not that that wasn’t completely excruciating. Fortunately, Bio was the second to last class.

  I “recovered” so miraculously during the final twenty minutes of the last period that Mrs. C let me go on my own just before the final bell, after plying me with Lorna Doones and apple juice left over from the blood drive.

  I scooted out the front door and almost ran as the bell went off. I didn’t dare go back to my locker for my homework or my jacket.

  I walked to work, past a bunch of suburban ramblers like the one we lived in, on my way to the area outside of town where the monastery was. I tried not to fixate on the thought that it would be impossible for me to prove that I’d never been pregnant. Because it was pretty common for girls to get pregnant in my upper-middle class private school (which I could only attend because I was on a full scholarship), but it was just as common for them to have abortions. Which meant that everyone would just assume I’d gone and gotten one too. It was completely unfair.

  I actually got so whiney and worked up, there in my own mind, that I started comparing myself to Hester Prynne, from The Scarlet Letter, which w
e had to read in tenth grade. At least she chose not to reveal the father of her child, whereas I was never going to have the choice not to reveal him because there was no father and no child.

  When I got to remembering how she had to stand up on that scaffold, though, I managed to reel myself back in.

  *

  Still, by the time I got to Ignacio’s, which was a regular stop on my route, I was definitely glad to be distracted from all my other paranoid, melodramatic, but non-literary thoughts.

  Ignacio’s was this little hole-in-the-wall convenience store. Like what a 7-Eleven would be like if it was in Mexico and things were way nicer in Mexico than they actually are.

  The unusual thing about Ignacio’s was that they had these plastic statues. A whole aisle of them. Jesus and Mary with her heart glowing out of her chest and all kinds of embarrassing stuff. The faces of the Virgin Marys looked like Marilyn Monroe done up by a drunk make-up artist.

  I wasn’t a religious person at all. My mom being a member of the religion-of-the-month-club when I was younger and my dad being the original scumbag televangelist who wouldn’t even acknowledge my existence had pretty much turned me off all religion.

  And I wasn’t attracted by the glitter or the angels with babies and unicorns. Me personally, I kept my hair pulled back and wore bulky clothes in dark colors, with little or no jewelry and definitely no make-up. You know, the uniform of the person who is trying to blend in with the background.

  You have to understand, my eyes were this totally bleah dark bluish-gray, and my hair had always been no particular color. I figured there was no point in trying to make something out of nothing.

  My fascination with the stuff at Ignacio’s was more like the fascination of a rubber-necker at an accident. The stuff was just so awful. At least that’s what I told myself.

  That fall, I’d been going in there and looking at the statues every day on my way to work. I couldn’t stop. They knew me after a while, and I guess they figured the weird gringa was harmless, cause they didn’t give me a hard time, even though I never bought anything.

  I mean, what would I’ve done with one of those things? Put it in my room? How humiliating. Maybe some people can get away with something like that as an ironic gesture. I wasn’t one of those people. I didn’t have enough attitude.

  Except that, being freaked out from having fainted and all, I suddenly had the feeling that either I was going to leave the store with one of those hunks of bad plastic or else my brain was literally going to melt.

  I realized that I had been unconsciously fighting the bizarre urge to buy one of them ever since I had started going into the store. Only that particular day, I didn’t have the strength anymore to fight.

  So I hung out for an extra-long time, hovering over the Virgins. One of them was standing on an upside down moon, which was funny because she had this fancy blue cloak sticking straight out around her that made her look like a rocket ship, and there were these clouds down below like she was taking off.

  Another one was, I think, a copy of a Madonna in a painting. There was plastic drapery flying everywhere around her, like she had been caught in a tornado.

  The least offensive was a Virgin of Guadalupe, which was big with the locals, so you’d see it all the time. It was pretty simple. Her dress was red and her cloak was dark blue and behind her were the orange and yellow rays of her holiness, or whatever. Except that since the rays were made out of plastic and all merged together, they made this oblong saucer that seemed to be stuck to her back.

  I grabbed one and headed up the aisle. After I paid for it, the guy at the counter put it in a plastic bag, which I realized was a good thing. I didn’t usually take plastic bags in stores (even though this was back before they started outlawing them), but I didn’t have my backpack, and I didn’t want to have to walk around holding the thing.

  Unfortunately, the bag was so thin, it was almost see-through. So on my way to the monastery, I tried wrapping it around the figure in a bunch of different ways in order to hide her, but nothing worked.

  I couldn’t take it into the kitchen. My mom, who worked in there with me, would spot it in a minute. We’d have to have a Big Discussion. She was always trying to have these embarrassing talks with me about my spirituality the way some parents try to talk to their kids about drugs or the facts of life.

  And my boss, Coco, who was partly crazy, had this whole big thing about the Virgin Mary for some reason. Every Christmas you would hear her muttering things like, “Virgin birth, virgin birth. Happen all the time.” Or, “You heard of Krishna? You heard of Kabir? Zoroaster? Quetzalcoatl? Happen all the time!”

  Which was why I decided to stash the thing in the garden.

  6

  When I say monastery, I don’t mean some classy European place with paved courtyards and old stone arches. With this particular brand of Buddhism, it was really more run-down-former-boy’s-camp-meets-the-third-world-with-weird-new-age-touches.

  Since the monk’s garden was on the way to the women’s hamlet, where I worked, I figured I could stash my package there and pick it up on the way back. Or on another day, if I hid it well enough. It seemed like a good place because there was almost never anyone in there.

  Technically, I wasn’t supposed to go into the monk’s garden. I wasn’t supposed to go into the monk’s hamlet at all. None of the women were. In fact, the men’s and women’s hamlets were about a half-a-mile apart, and the monks and the nuns didn’t hang out together except during public days. They were surprisingly uptight about that stuff.

  Plus, you’ve got to understand that all the monastics, both the men and the women, shaved their heads completely bald and only wore these boring brown pajama outfits. None of which was exactly sexy. I guess it made it easier for them to live their celibate lives.

  I found this all highly ironic. I couldn’t even get myself to talk to a guy, but I worked for a bunch of people who had to go to an enormous effort to make sure they didn’t have sex.

  *

  On that day, I figured my plan to hide the statue was a good one since, as far as I could tell, the monks were all distracted. I had noticed a Mercedes parked out front on my way past the monastery office. It wasn’t just any Mercedes. It was a big gold Mercedes SUV and the license plate read DEVELOP.

  It belonged to Mrs. Delaney, Lilli’s mom. I hadn’t seen it at the monastery before, but I recognized it from seeing her pick Lilli up at school. You weren’t supposed to take the word “develop” as a suggestion to become a better person through self-actualization. It meant develop as in “developer,” as in they made their money buying and selling land and putting deals together.

  Lilli wasn’t just rich and gorgeous. She was also used to getting her own way and therefore dangerous to others. I steered clear of most people, but I went out of my way to steer way, way clear of her. It didn’t matter that she’d never even looked at me. With some people, you just know.

  Mrs. Delaney and Lilli were a lot alike, so I figured that if Mrs. Delaney was there, everyone would be distracted. All the more reason to assume I could make it in and out of the garden unnoticed.

  Because of the deer, the garden was entirely enclosed by a fence. Like the rest of the place, the gate was falling apart, so it didn’t hang straight, but I didn’t have too hard a time getting it open and shutting it behind me. I made my way cautiously to the back corner, behind the compost pile and some bushes.

  I managed to survive the smell of putrefying vegetables back there and had gotten my Virgin stashed in a spot where I was sure no one would ever find her, when I heard voices out in the garden. Since I was hidden from view, I stayed where I was and prayed—non-religiously, of course—that whoever it was wouldn’t notice me.

  As they got closer, I realized it was only a single female voice, but that she wasn’t talking to herself. The first words I could make out clearly were, “Come on. You’ve had a woman, I know you’ve had a woman.” It was Lilli. She went on, almost purring, “Y
ou remember what it’s like.”

  Now, I had no reason to expect to see Lilli there. I hadn’t ever seen her there before. But if anyone was going to amuse herself by slipping off into areas she wasn’t supposed to be in and torturing celibate men, it would’ve been her.

  Lilli’s hair changed color. A lot. On this particular day, as she stalked her male prey down the garden path, it was sort of brassy and glinted like mad in the sunlight.

  My heart sank when I saw who she was talking to. It was brother Phap Hoa. They all had Vietnamese names, and most of them were Vietnamese, but brother Phap Hoa was one of the white people who had joined the group, like my mom.

  Unlike my mom, he had not settled in contentedly. He’d taken a vow of silence, even though he didn’t have to, and he was always bleary-eyed and disheveled, as if he’d spent the whole night, and probably part of the morning, battling his own private demons.

  He was really young, maybe only five years older than me, but he was the hairiest guy ever. He had hair everywhere, and although he shaved every morning, he had serious stubble by noon. I don’t know why that made him seem more tortured, but it did.

  He was backing up, sort of flinching as he went, and I soon got a good enough glimpse to see why. He was evading Lilli’s hand, as she kept teasingly trying to put it on his shoulder, his chest, or his face.

  He wasn’t supposed to touch a woman, and he was trying hard to avoid it, even as he kept silent. She, for her part, had a look on her face like she was a cat playing with a mouse. Neither took their eyes off the other.

  Finally, she had him backed up against the fence, and she reached her hand out again. Just as it would’ve come in contact with his cheek, his hand shot up and grabbed her arm firmly by the wrist.

  She looked surprised, then defiant. She reached up with the other hand, but he caught that one too before it got anywhere near him. For a moment, they stood staring at each other, less than a foot apart, both of her wrists grasped in his hands. I couldn’t, for the life of me, have told you what was going to happen next.