In kindergarten, when the teacher asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up, I said, “A falcon.” I wanted to fly, to beat gravity, so that it didn’t own me.
What is my thing? I wondered. It had to be somewhere inside me, hidden like the room behind Lincoln’s head at Mount Rushmore.
“You’re beautiful,” said Brad, as if answering my thoughts.
Then he kissed the spot where my beak would have been if I were a falcon.
I knew he was too worried about a repeat of what happened at Scottie’s party to try and actually have sex with me now, but I also knew it was coming.
Maybe Brad wouldn’t be the worst person to do it with. I just hoped he didn’t try to light candles or anything like that. I didn’t think I could handle it if he tried to light candles.
The Groupies
A group of us went to the movies, to see Johnny Moon in his new role as Grigori Rasputin in Mad Monk. Since he filmed a movie here, people sort of took ownership of him and followed what he did, which was mostly romantic comedies and horror movies. This was his first big “serious role.”
The trailer had been playing over and over for weeks on the television in our kitchen. Sandra usually left the room when it came on.
It was opening night, and the theater was full. I couldn’t tell if it was just in my head, but I felt people’s eyes on me.
I sat somewhere near the middle with a box of Sno-Caps, between Susan and Brad. During the trivia, when the lights dimmed, Brad reached over and took my hand. I saw Susan watching. In response, almost like a reflex, she linked her arm through mine, on my other side, and rested her head on my shoulder.
“Who’s Rasputin again?” Susan whispered in my ear.
“A Russian guy,” I whispered back.
After I saw the trailer for the first time, I looked Rasputin up on the internet. He started as a peasant, then became a powerful mystic, close to the royal family. When I imagined meeting Johnny Moon, I wondered if my life would be anything like Rasputin’s rise to fame—you know, without the whole being-murdered thing.
“Yeah, but what did he do?” Susan whispered back.
“He healed people,” I said. “He was magical.”
The lights dimmed. Heather and Scottie were already making out. An old couple next to us glared at them, and for a moment, I felt a warm feeling of belonging. This was why being popular was good—it was nice to be part of the group that people glared at for making out in public, for being too loud, for having too much fun.
“It’s cold in here,” Susan whispered, burying her head further into my neck. My stomach clenched, and I felt warm all over.
Then Johnny Moon’s face appeared on the screen.
Sometimes it felt like nothing in my life was actually mine except for him.
He was really too young for the role, but they needed someone handsome, someone whose face was recognizable enough to impress the public with their makeup work, and to conjure sympathy in the average viewer. The long beard he wore in the film completely disguised his elegant features, and I cried when he healed Alexei Romanov.
Susan fell asleep before the movie was half-over—I felt her warm, steady breath on my skin. It smelled like cheap, plasticky chocolate. I wanted her to stay there forever.
I glanced at Brad, who was rapt by the movie. In the low light of the screen, his eyelashes made shadows on his cheeks. He was beautiful too. I was surrounded by beautiful people. On either side, their legs touched mine.
I looked back at the screen.
Most of the world thinks that Rasputin was assassinated for political reasons, but the details aren’t clear, which I learned when I looked him up. Historians and other people who study political things have different theories. Just like both Johnny Moon and me, Rasputin had a bunch of groupies. I knew that Bridget Murphy, the head of the wannabe group, and her friends were staring at me right now. Rasputin supposedly had sex with lots and lots of teenagers and charged tons of money to heal people. They paid. Many people believed that the reason it took so many tries to kill him was that he really did have healing power, and others thought he was an evil alien.
In the movie, Johnny Moon was shown in Siberia, exiting a church, when a prostitute, a disciple of the monk Iliodor, stabbed him and then shouted, “I have killed the Antichrist!”
Johnny Moon recovered from that, but after the stabbing, he became addicted to opiates. Later on in the film, he was poisoned, beaten, and shot four times, then drowned in a partially frozen river.
I knew this was Hollywood—maybe history was different. Hollywood didn’t bother with autopsies. It only cared about drama.
I couldn’t help but imagine myself with him. With a dad.
During the closing scene, Brad leaned over and whispered in my ear, “You look like him, a little. You guys have the same nose.”
In my dreams that night, and for many nights after, I saw Johnny Moon’s bloodied face and cold, still, fishlike eyes, his bluish body buoyant in the water, surrounded by jagged floating chunks of ice. I woke up with my hands shaking, sweat gathering on the base of my back.
The Plan
The last time I had nightmares, like the ones I’d just started having about Johnny Moon frozen in the river, happened in seventh grade, after Corvis handed me the note.
Do you think about girls the way Susan thinks about Brad?—C
I’d been carrying the note since she gave it to me, trying to figure out what to do with it. The night before, I dreamed that Corvis took my hand and led me to a Victorian castle full of girls, all beautiful, all with long braided hair. I woke sweating, with my hand in my underwear, and I knew I had to do something about it.
The next day, I gathered Susan and Heather in the middle school cafeteria, which smelled like dish soap and french fries.
“Come on,” I said, watching Corvis move forward in the line for sloppy joes. After she got her lunch, she was supposed to join us. She tapped her foot nervously, the sole of her Adidas sneaker jiggling.
We vacated our reserved table. Brad and Scottie and a couple of other boys from the lacrosse team were still sitting there—we were the only girls who sat with boys at lunch in seventh grade.
The rest of the cafeteria was separated by both gender and social status. Sitting with boys showed that we were mature.
The other tables were full of kids just a little bit less pretty, a little bit more gangly, a little more wide-eyed. At one table, everyone wore black and had faces full of acne scars. We called them the Death Brigade. Kristen Duffy was one of them. At another table, there were girls who looked like us from far away, but up close you could see physical flaws that their Abercrombie clothes couldn’t hide. A flat butt, a huge nose, limp hair, or a pear-shaped body. PJ Greenberg sat with them sometimes, but she was trying to move toward sitting with us.