Sometimes
You Got To Make Your Own Fun
J.D.
Riso
My friend Shelly made it on the cheerleading team
with all the popular girls. She stopped talking to me for a
while. She went along with them, saying mean things to me, but
then they turned on her like they always do. Just like they
do to me. They accept me into their group for a short time,
and then go back to being their mean old selves.
Me and Shelly don’t hold it against each
other when we go with them. Like our parents say: you’ve
got to seize any opportunity for advancement in this life.
My Mom says that Shelly is a nice girl and all
the others in my class are bullies.
“I can’t believe fat girls like that
think they’re so cool,” is what she tells me as
she braids my hair. I have to wear braids because my hair won’t
behave. No matter what I do it sticks out all over.
“I wish I was as big as them,” I
say. All the boys like those girls because they have boobs already.
I still have to wear little girl clothes and I’m in the
sixth grade. I don’t have to shave my legs, wear a bra,
or use tampons. I haven’t even gotten my period yet. Neither
has Shelly, but we both agree that she will be the first. She
already has little boobies. She showed me the last time I stayed
the night at her house.
“Well, maybe one day you’ll develop
nicely,” my Mom says. “Let’s hope so. Then
you can rub it in their faces.”
Today is song practice for church. I slide into
the pew next to Shelly. The clique sits behind us. Every Thursday
it’s the same. They pull our hair when the teachers aren’t
looking. They yank. We wince and blink back tears. Father John’s
pumpkin head looms over the piano like a carnival clown’s.
Sister Benedict looks the other way.
I put my hands together and pray to Jesus to
make them stop. But he never listens. He doesn’t care.
I’m not praying to that buttface anymore. I’m gonna
get them back: Amy, Wendy, Debbie, Tammy and Cindy. I know it’s
sinful, but I don’t care. If they can get away with it,
then so can I.
Me and Shelly don’t say that we’re
best friends. As our parents always tell us: it’s always
best to keep all your options open.
“Let’s prank Zoann,” Shelly
says. Her parents are gone to some boring meeting so we’re
alone, except for Shelly’s older brother Bob who’s
alone in his room with no lights on listening to Black Sabbath.
He doesn’t care what we do.
Zoann is a high school girl who works at the
drugstore where me and Shelly used to go and look at fashion
magazines. Last time we went in there she came up to us as we
were looking at some makeup and demanded to check our pockets.
She said it loud enough for everyone to hear. Then she told
us to get out. Everyone stared at us like we were bad. We were
so mad we almost cried.
Now we take turns calling up the drugstore. We
force down our giggles and ask for Zoann. What a stupid name.
When we say it we sound like retards with a lisp. Zoann.
When she comes to the phone we say, “Brat”
and hang up. It’s so funny!
Shelly dials the number. “Hello, may I
speak to Zoann, please?” Shelly can sound so mature when
she wants.
She waits and then says, “You think you’re
such a hot snot, but you’re not. You’re nothing
but a cold booger in a Dixie Cup.”
Shelly is so brave.
When we stop laughing I say, “Hey, I want
to do it again!”
“Now? We never do it the same day. She’ll
be expecting it. Maybe she’ll tell her boss.”
“They’ll never know it’s us.
Who cares,” I say as I redial the number.
It’s Zoann who answers. I’d know
that snotty voice anywhere.
“Bitch!” I scream and slam the phone
down.
Shelly gets white for a second, and then we both
collapse into giggles. Swearing is a mortal sin, but a b-word
is what Zoann is.
The clique is in the same Girl Scout Troup as
me and Shelly. Every year there’s a contest to see who
can sell the most cookies. We never win, but this time we are
going to. We are so tired from riding all day, but we push ourselves.
We get to the creepy old farmhouse on the outskirts of town.
The one that everyone says is haunted.
“We have a lot of orders,” says Shelly.
“Maybe we don’t have to try here.”
“C’mon, Shelly, we have to try everywhere.
We have to beat them.”
Shelly gulps and then knocks. We wait a couple
seconds, and then turn to leave.
A man with a blond Afro opens the door. “Yeah,
what can I do for you young ladies?”
Shelly nudges me so I say, “Uh, we’re
taking orders, sir, for Girl Scout cookies. Would you like to
place your order?”
“Cookies! Yeah. Why not? Hold on. I’ll
go ask the others. C’mon in.”
We know we’re not supposed to go into a
stranger’s house, but we don’t want to seem rude.
Besides, we need his order.
“If he tries anything I’ll kick him
in the balls while you pull his hair,” I mumble to Shelly
as he walks into the other room. She nods.
“You think he forgot?” Shelly asks
after a few minutes.
We walk towards the living room and peek around
the corner. There are a lot of strange people in white robes
and Afros. They are walking in circles and singing boring songs
like the ones we sing in church, but we can’t understand
the words. The air smells like the cigarettes that Shelly’s
brother Bob smokes out behind their shed when he thinks no one
can see. My head starts to feel funny.
The man comes towards the kitchen so we hurry
towards the door. We grab the order sheet, say thank you, and
rush outside. I can feel like him spying on us as we leave.
“God, I feel like I’ve just been
slimed,” Shelly groans.
We climb onto our bikes and race for home.
“Maybe they’re a cult!” I say.
“Let’s go and spy on them one night,”
Shelly says.
“Yeah, let’s!” I say. There’s
nothing else to do in this dumb old town since we can’t
go to the drugstore anymore.
We didn’t win the cookie sales contest,
but we did tie for second. It’s better than we normally
do, but our parents were disappointed in us.
“You didn’t work to the best of your
abilities,” they said like they always do. We wonder what
they’d do if we got all A’s and won everything all
the time like Debbie and Amy. Maybe then they’d say they
were proud of us. We wonder what they’d say if they could
see us right now.
We’re at Girl Scout camp and the sun has
gone down. When the scout mothers go to sleep we tell the same
stories we always tell; we say the same dares.
“I dare you to go into the bathroom alone
and look in the mirror and say ‘bloody monster’
three times,” I say in a scary whisper.
The clique huddles together. Debbie says, “I’ll
go, but not alone. C’mon, Amy.”
They are in there for a few seconds, and then
Amy runs out blubbering. “I want to go home! I want my
mommy!”
They are soooo stupid. We do this every time
and they always fall for it.
“Me and Shelly will do it. Jeez,”
I say. We walk down the dark hall. Switch on the bathroom light.
“You know, we can just say we did it,”
Shelly whispers.
“No, I really want to do it,” I say.
It makes me kind of mad that Shelly wants to cheat. That would
make us no better than them.
We hold hands and take a deep breath. We can hear them listening
at the door.
“Bloody monster bloody monster bloody monster,”
we chant as we stare into the mirror.
Poof.
There’s no one but us in the mirror. It
was all just a bluff. And we won.
We can hear the clique scurry away like a bunch
of fat rats.
“So, what happened?” they ask when
we come out.
“You’ll have to do it for yourselves
to find out,” we say. Ha-ha on them!
As soon as we’re back in school it’s
forgotten. We always think we show them, and then the teasing
starts back up. Now it’s because we can’t feather
our hair like Farrah. We can’t roller skate like Olivia
Newton-John in Xanadu.
We’ve never kissed a boy. No boy has ever
wanted to kiss us.
“You are stupid so so stupid and ugly,”
they sing as they follow us around the playground.
We hate them so much that we wish they would
die. Our parents say that success is the best revenge, but we
don’t want to wait until we’re grown up to get back
at them.
What our parents don’t know is this: when
we spend the night at each other’s house, we sneak out
as soon as our parents are asleep. We soap the neighbors’
windows and egg their cars. One time we even glued a mean old
man’s mailbox shut. That was so funny. He was out there
for hours trying to pry it open. Nobody suspected us. We’re
known as the crybabies, the goody goodies. And now that’s
the way we like it.
That way we will never, ever get caught.
I dig through my little brother’s toybox
until I find the Halloween mask that I named Fred. I hid it
there because my Mom keeps throwing it away. Everyone is scared
of Fred because he looks real. He looks like that Alice Cooper
guy that Shelly’s brother Bob listens to. All white with
green stuff oozing from his eyes.
We sneak out of my house and hop on our bikes.
We're going to get Debbie good. We’ve planned this out
for days. We hide our bikes in the ditch and sneak up to the
house.
The light in Debbie’s room is on. She’s
sitting on the bed in her nightgown painting her nails. I nod
to Shelly and slip on the mask. Shelly gets on her hands and
knees. I step onto her back like we practiced. Ready, set, go.
“Unhhhhhh,” I groan just loud enough
for Debbie to hear.
She looks up and sees Fred glaring at her. I
stand totally still. (Me and Shelly agreed it’s more sinister
to be silent.) The blood drains from Debbie’s face. A
wet spot spreads across her nightie. She’s peeing her
pants! Oh, it’s so hard to not laugh.
Finally, she screams. We take off running.
Oh, that was soooo funny! We get to the ditch
and hide until the coast is clear.
“Now, let’s wait a few weeks and
then get Amy,” I say.
“Yeah,” says Shelly. “Let’s
get them all.”
We really did it this time! We went and spied
on the cult people! They were having a party where everyone
was doing sex! There were all these fat people grunting and
rubbing on each other! Then we saw Amy’s Dad! He was doing
it with a guy!
Shelly was so shocked that she screamed. We ran
and ran until our lungs hurt. They think they scared us off
for good. They think we’re scaredy cats just like everyone
else does. Boy, are they wrong.
Next time we spy on them we’re going to
bring a camera. Oh, what we can do with photos! That will shut
Amy’s fat mouth for good. We know we should tell our parents
about what we saw, but they’d only punish us for sneaking
out and spying, even though they always say: keep your nose
out of other people’s business, unless you can use it
to your advantage.
As me and my friend Shelly now say: sometimes
you got to make your own damn fun.
....
Bio: J.D. Riso was last
seen in the South Pacific. She maintains a modest website at:
www.jdriso.com
read acknowledgements by jd
riso
