Dehlia and I bonded over making fun of Lexus. She was beyond fat. Think enormous to the point that she stank like rotten fruit, that sweet-sour stench of sitting out in the sun too long. Worse, her odor really came out to play in the afternoons when we rode the minibus home from school. And me and Dehlia, we taunted her. The poor girl was begging for our meanness, and she seemed to know it, accept it. She’d sit staring down at her lap, her greasy hair spilling over her oily face that collected red shiny bumps. I wonder now, why had I poked fun at a girl who did nothing?
It all started on a particularly hot afternoon, one in October, and Lexus smelled extra bad. Everyone could smell her as we ran down the hall to board the buses home. Bull Paris, an eighth grader and the most popular boy in middle school, with his JNCO jeans and Vans shoes, along with his promising basketball career, said, “Would someone tell that Lexus Bordeaux to bathe.”
I happened to be next to Bull Paris and giggled at his comment. He smiled at me. Me, a sixth grader. Talk about the shooting stars in my stomach! and I found myself saying, “At least you don’t have to ride the bus home with her.”
“Oh yeah,” Bull Paris said with an upturn of his nose. “You ride that Retard Bus.”
How my shooting stars sputtered out. The kids who rode the regular- sized buses called the minibus the “retard bus,” trying to imply those who rode it had special needs. Really, the minibus drove us few kids to the rural side of town where the houses thinned and trees thickened and the roads went all narrow and twisted. The minibus was more equipped for such roads.
Yet, before I could figure out how to defend myself and my bus in front of Bull Paris, I heard another voice scoff, “Nah, it’s the party bus. And don’t I know how to smell fun.”
I glanced over and met Dehlia’s eyes. She looked at me, not at Bull Paris, as she spritzed some peach mist on her wrists. It seemed she did this for me, for an approval, and in that moment, our eyes connecting, our camaraderie connecting more, I knew I wanted to sit by her on the bus that day. Usually she slumped in the back seat, snapping gum and listening to her Walkman. She wore dark eyeliner, ripped fishnet stockings, and army boots, and talked about bands like Skinny Puppy, Marilyn Manson, and Nine Inch Nails. Last year she got suspended for bringing a pot pipe to school, and I’d spotted her with Hunter Berling and the druggie kids, smoking cigarettes out by the abandoned mobile home behind the school. Over the summer, she’d gone from saying she was a Karuk shaman to cutting her long black hair boy-short and doing her goth thing. Either way, I didn’t understand her, but that day, that day of the heat and poor Lexus’s body odor, we saw each other. Neither Lexus nor Bull were in on the secret alliance between Dehlia and me, two girls eye to eye in the moment.
After boarding the minibus, I went to the back seats, past Lexus and her greasy sweat, and sat beside Dehlia before she slipped on her headphones. That year, she’d secured the backseats for herself, after scaring one too many kids with her witch doctor threats. But I didn’t want our alliance to end. We were on a level beyond the others.
I said in a lowered voice, “Whoa, I say we give Lexus a bar of soap.”
Dehlia laughed at this. “Would vanilla suit her? Or maybe black licorice.” “Musk,” I blurted out, only because I remembered it was something my mother wore. Dehlia laughed even harder. “Musk?” she asked. “Musk? That’s deer cum, you know.”
Then she stood up and leaned over the bus seat in front of us, her short skirt showing her undies trapped beneath the fishnet stockings as she rapped Lexus on the head, saying, “Hey, what’s your favorite smell?”
Lexus’s reply I couldn’t hear, I was giggling so loud. I didn’t know why. What was so funny about making fun of another girl’s body odor, or body for that matter? But let me tell you, it was funny at the time. We kept at it, taking turns guessing Lexus’s choice of perfume, anywhere from sweet pea summer solstice to Bambi sex to Michael Jordan’s armpit to a big crap after a night of binging on Ben and Jerry’s Wavy Gravy ice cream. We had a riot. For once I didn’t want to get off the bus. All the while, Lexus dipped her chin further and further into her chest, only showing her parted hairline, stark white, chalked with dandruff.
At our stop, Lexus shuffled off the bus fast as her waddling body would allow, with me behind her, gesturing that I was choking on the smell, as Dehlia cracked up in the back seat. When I jumped off the bus, something in me felt empowered, vain, happy like I could crush the world with my wit, and although Lexus trudged forward with furious military steps, I had no guilt. If I could live off her misery, I would. I did.
Even if she’d never done anything to me. She lived in the house with the mossy roof and scratched off paint along the dirt driveway that led to my house at the end. In the mornings, she’d always be waiting for the bus before I got there, even in the dark hours, when snow covered the ground, and breath came out like frost. But we barely exchanged words. On the way home, we’d walk together for a short distance, and sometimes a need would overcome us, and we’d say, “School’s so boring,” or “You watch Even Stevens? New episode on today,” or “I don’t know what to do this weekend.”
One time, she even offered me a puppy, a blond fluffy mutt. I ran all the way home to tell my mom, but she said no, so I ran all the way back. There was Lexus still standing there holding the puppy, waiting for me, only for me to say, “Sorry, I can’t.”
She shrugged, put the puppy down and it pounced gleefully about in that stupid irresistible way puppies do. Without a word she turned away. A separation formed as I watched Lexus head back to her house with the puppy.
Later all the puppies died. They got that puppy sickness: the parvovirus.
And whenever I remembered this, I’d have this desire to slap myself. But being around Dehlia diminished all that. The bus rides continued with the two of us in the back seat ripping burn after burn on Lexus while she sat, chin buried in chest. It wasn’t just smell we touched upon. It was fat (Oprah’s got a diet for you); it was grooming (Herbal Essences should do wonders for your hair, dear Lexi, and Crest toothpaste: 99 cents); it was clothes (The Salvation Army don’t have sizes for you); it was careers (There’s a call for Pillsbury doughgirl); it was dating (Virginity, do you take this awfully ugly wife). Weren’t we having fun, me and Dehlia.
Although, who knew what Lexus thought. She was in eighth grade, older than us. Maybe she just considered us dumb pipsqueaks. Maybe she knew we’d both be leaving soon. Dehlia’s mom wanted to move to Orleans where more Karuk lived, and my mom spoke of moving to San Francisco. In my bed, I’d overhear her and my father talking at night after he’d just come back after driving big rigs loaded with crates of cabbages and tomatoes up and down Central Valley.
“I’m sick of it,” Mom would holler. “How long are you going to do these scant jobs. Leaving me and your daughter alone in these mountains. I want to go back to San Francisco.”
“Just be patient, Milly. I’ll get a steady job soon.”
“There’s no jobs in this town, though! Why can’t we move? In the city, there’s so much more, and think of our daughter. Her future. What can she do here?”
“I grew up here. Don’t go saying this town isn’t good enough. Besides, it’s not my fault the Clinton Administration closed the mill,” he said. “Cares more about trees than hardworking folk.”
“Oh, so blame the Democrats again,” Mom raised her voice, “when you’re too proud to ask for unemployment.”
“I will not rely on the government to provide for my family,” Dad snapped back, “something you lefties seem so happy to do, like welfare is the answer. Hell, I can’t wait for the day California is divided in half, and I live in the Jefferson state.”
“Ah, just what we need, another red-wing state, tax breaks for the rich. Republican politicians don’t really care about people like you.”
The two of them escalated, getting way off topic, no longer about jobs or moving, no, they’d digress into politics. This was becoming their norm.
And Lexus’s humiliation was becoming my norm. After a school year of bus rides full of me and Dehlia’s jabs, she never tried to improve herself. She still looked the same, smelled the same, acted the same, didn’t speak.
Sure, Dehlia and I talked about other things, boys and MTV and our periods, although I pretended mine had started when it hadn’t, and I secretly envied Dehlia’s already well-formed breasts that required a bra. Yet when she started blabbing about giving head to high school guys and smoking pot, I felt uneasy. We didn’t hang out other than our bus rides, she the bad-ass, me the goodie-goodie, yet I still wanted our friendship, our fun, the silly fat Lexus jokes. I wanted Dehlia to myself.
So, there I sat on the bus beside Dehlia as she told me how big this high school senior’s dick was and that it made her jaw sore and tasted like salty pineapple, details I didn’t want to hear, and I had to end all this, these grown- up images in my mind, Dehlia with some older boy.
I pinched her on the arm and said, “Hey, want to hear a secret?”
“Ow, what?” She rubbed her arm but was smiling, her black eyes glittering bright. I had her attention.
“Lexus kills puppies,” I whispered.
“Nuh-uh.” Dehlia shook her head. “Come on. Lay off her for once.”
“No for reals. I saw her.”
“How?”
“She strangled them,” I blurted out and once it was out, how could I turn back? I added, “She held them against her fat stomach, her hands around their necks, suffocating them.”
My voice grew louder, more desperate to amuse Dehlia as I went on with the story, how I tried to stop Lexus, but her dad was there. He had a shotgun. She was choking those poor puppies, wriggling helpless in her big old murderous meaty hands. And you know what? She was laughing as she did it.
“Stop,” Dehlia said. “That’s not funny. You’re lying.”
“I’m not lying. Go ask her. Go ask her. Say, hey Lexus, are you a puppy killer?”
Dehlia smirked, “You’re crazy.”
But she stood up in her seat and called out, “Yo, Lexus.”
Lexus did her usual chin burying, her oily curls covering the side profile of her face.
“You a puppy killer, Lexus?” Dehlia asked. The other kids on the bus went silent, the wind rushed through the bus windows and I couldn’t let Dehlia slip away from me, especially after I went this far. I stood up next to her, shook my fist and said, “Yes, look at her. She’s a puppy killer. I saw her. She smothered them in her fat.”
Lexus lifted her head, stared straight at me, her eyes gleaming the kind of light that shines off knives, and she said, “You could’ve saved one, but you didn’t.”
I lost my voice when she said that. It felt hard to stand anymore, hovering over Lexus. The image of her in the center of the dirt driveway, holding the fluffy blond pup, waiting for me with the answer, came back to my mind, how I told her, no, I couldn’t take the puppy, and left her, and maybe if I’d taken the puppy, he would still be alive, and we could’ve been friends, me and Lexus and the puppy, instead of this now, me standing above her bus seat telling lies.
And worse, Dehlia and the other kids took Lexus’s comment to mean she did indeed kill puppies and began to yell at her and call her terrible things. But I remained silent, too afraid to stop what I started.
Over spring break, Mom and Dad had a big fight—something about the Oklahoma City bombing and Timothy McVeigh, misguided activists in my dad’s eyes, a terrorist in my mom’s, and does John Doe Number Two exist? Plates were broken, appliances thrown, and the next day Mom told me she and Dad were getting a divorce. Rather than be angry or upset, I greeted the news with a numbing relief.
That summer, Mom and I moved to San Francisco to Grandma’s. She lived in a three-story Victorian house, converted into apartments in the Sunset District. We arrived at cramped rooms, cramped streets, the whole city cramped even though the vast ocean waited beyond, hidden in fog. Golden Gate Park was a mile away, but when I walked there it felt contrived, a falseness in the primped trees and trimmed grass and sidewalks, like some childish giant’s garden where I was being swallowed among strangers who just shoved on past and slipped into the mist and narrow alleyways. Sure, I got used to this crowded aloofness, people packed in so close they became unfriendly, yet I still longed for my town, the river’s endless rustle, the pinewood’s unplanned growth, the familiar faces I knew since birth.
“Better education here,” Mom kept reminding me, “and we are reaching a new era.”
She was hopeful Roberta Achtenberg, a feminist and gay rights activist, would win the mayoral election. Achtenberg was another thing that Dad disapproved of. He believed that homo promiscuity was what spread AIDS.
“Good thing he’s not around to spread nonsense,” Mom liked to say. And I knew she was right, especially when I thought about Dehlia. Yet, I felt torn between loyalties, Dad at home, Mom in the big city.
She’d tell me, “There was a time when I saw in your dad this rustic truth, how he could spear fish, chop wood, butcher deer meat. But turns out, it wasn’t my truth.”
Mom realized staying in the Cascade mountains along the Klamath—a once-wild river dammed four times over until the life around it began to die— was not what she wanted for me. She enrolled me in A.P. Giannini Middle School, a highly rated school, where I joined the choir, the girls track team, took ceramics, culinary arts, and was part of the debate team, all activities school back at home didn’t have.
Even though I’d go visit Dad on weekends, I never saw Dehlia again. She’d moved to Orleans. But, through the years, I heard rumors she’d been arrested several times for possession of meth, petty theft, and domestic assault. When hearing such news, I always shook my head, sighing pity, the response distanced to save myself.
And nearly ten years later, I did happen to run into Lexus. I was in town for Dad’s fiftieth birthday, his latest girlfriend throwing a BBQ complete with grilled venison backstraps and blackberry pie. I headed to Jerry’s Market to pick up more beer, and, at the cooler section, I spotted Lexus over by the dairy. She was big as ever, her hair curled and shining around her smooth round face. She wore a floral dress that did nothing to conceal her breasts pushing out, her swell of belly, her wide hips. Yet, she had an air of wholeness I couldn’t grasp. Beside her, seated in the grocery cart, was the most beautiful baby, cherubic cheeks, big long-lashed eyes, ringleted hair.
“Mama, Mama,” the baby giggled, pulling on Lexus’s shirt for attention. Then a man (someone I didn’t recognize), a lumberjack straight out of a Dickies ad, came up to Lexus and gave her a kiss on the cheek, saying, “Hey, babe, the deli is out of Jojos. Got the onion rings instead.”
“An upgrade,” Lexus said with a laugh. She placed several gallons of milk in the cart while the baby tried to tug on her hair.
Next, the family was walking toward me. I looked down at the rows of sour creams, cottage cheeses, and yogurts, avoiding any eye contact, my face heating up, heart beating, how, how, how? How does a person find another and stay? I held my breath as Lexus moved on past, leaving a faint whiff of rose perfume behind.
J Saler Drees was born in and has lived all over California, currently residing in San Diego. MFA in Writing was earned at Pacific University, Oregon. Previous works have been published in Bitterzoet, Blue Lake Review, Broken Skyline: An Anthology, Change Seven, Fictive Dream, OxMag, West Trade Review, and more. Forthcoming works can be found in Evening Street. And to you readers out there: much love and many thanks!