My Stupid Girl Read online

  Lucy tried to run away from the crack but just fell lower with each step. Running on the blades of her brand-new ice-skates looked almost impossible for her. I started to panic as I saw her plunge down, not totally under water, but pretty close. The ice she’d been standing on was buoying her up, but I knew that wouldn’t last. Her arms started flailing as soon as she started falling and she began screaming that high-pitch panicky scream people only get when they’re really, legitimately scared.

  As soon as she screamed, everyone in the area turned toward Lucy. Almost instantly (as soon as they realized what was going on) the herd of cows started heading to her. I swear someone mooed. Amazing. Just what the situation needs, more people on the ice.

  Her dumb boyfriend was making things worse by standing at the opening trying to grab Lucy. He kept backing up as his weight made the hole bigger. He was making the whole thing worse while she was trashing around, making herself more tired. It had only been a few seconds, but she had to be freezing already. Mike (Mark?) grabbed Lucy’s hands once but almost fell in and flew back, away from the hole, without her.

  I knew in that moment that I had to do something. I couldn't just let this girl drown right in front of me. My feet started moving before I even gave it a real thought. I was running toward the ice. People went flying as I pushed through the crowd of gawking faces. Lucy’s frightened face was sinking lower, her arms were slowing down, and her fingers were losing their grip on the ice. She was disappearing slowly out of view. Mr. Perfect was now standing to the side like an idiot. His mouth hung open as I raced by him toward the hole. A regular Prince Charming. With a frog for a brain, apparently.

  As I ran, I yanked my belt off. When I got to the lake itself, I dropped to my stomach and belly-crawled towards Lucy. I was surprised at how fast I was moving and at how big the hole was. They had done a number on this thing “trying” to get her out. I yelled at someone to come grab the other end of the belt but they all stared at me. One or two people stutter-stepped, but no one seemed willing to step onto the ice. I pulled a big knife that I kept in my boot (for no other reason than it was cool) and plunged it into the hard ice. Then I took the belt that I had slipped off and put the metal buckle around the hilt of the knife. My hand clamped around the other end of the belt. Hopefully one of those dumb cows would figure it out; I didn’t trust an old knife stuck in cracking ice. I focused all my attention on the partially-glazed, panicked eyes of the beautiful girl sinking away from me.

  Lucy’s stupid snow suit had probably weighed ten pounds before she had gotten soaking wet. No matter what I grabbed, sleeves, shoulders, chest, the soaking, half-frozen fabric slipped right out of my hand. I was already starting to shake from the contact with icy water. I could only imagine how insanely cold Lucy was by now. It was crazy that she was still able to move or focus on me. Her arms reached toward the fingers of my free hand and I was able to grab under her elbow. I tried to pull her up but I couldn't get more than her chest out of the water. She weighed a ton; every inch of her that left the hole added a huge amount of weight to what I was pulling. I really needed two hands but I knew that, without the dumb knife-and-belt setup, there was a good possibility that I would fall in with her, and we would both be toast. I paused for half a sec before I spoke to her.

  "I am going to let go...”

  "No!" She tried to scream at me, but her voice cracked from the cold. Terror registered in her eyes. I didn't blame her.

  "Listen, I am going to let go and put my legs in. I will pull you up." I couldn't believe I was about to try this.

  "Don't leave me," was all she said.

  "I won’t leave; I’m going to grab you with my legs, okay? You just hang onto the edge, get both elbows up there." She didn’t answer but she tried to fold her elbows up onto the ice, like she was resting them on a counter-top, and nodded her head. Her chin jutted out like she was determined to do what I said if it killed her. Which, I realized, it might.

  Another adrenaline rush. Like I didn’t have enough pumping through me right now to power the entire city.

  “I'm letting go." I pulled her elbows onto the icy shelf but they slipped right off the second I let go. After several minutes she was losing all motor skills.

  Big blue eyes and puffed out cheeks sank away from me quickly. She was going down fast. I spun my body around and put my legs in the freezing water. Even though I’d been expecting cold, I still lost my breath from how crazy-cold it was. I felt Lucy’s body with my legs and locked my boots around her waist. A million freezing daggers were attacking my skin. Also, I had a 200 pound whale anchoring me to the bitterly cold hole of doom.

  I pulled my legs up as far as I could with soaking wet skinny jeans in sub-zero water. I think I was losing that one argument I had with myself about snow suits and the purpose they served. As Lucy’s blank face neared the surface, I managed to grab under her arm with the whole right side of my upper body. She gasped for air and, like a magnet, clung to my neck. Holy cold. Lips and nose were facial ice cubes, digging into the inside of my neck. I imagined it felt warm to her but I was really not enjoying it. At all. I still wasn’t sure I was going to be able to lift this stupid girl out of the hole by myself. But then the girl’s friends were there, pushing themselves on their bellies towards us. It looked like an army of colorful penguins was coming after me. Thanks for nothing guys.

  "Hurry!" I yelled at them. It was unlike me to raise my voice, especially in a crowd, but I was desperate. A chaperone-looking guy grabbed Lucy from my now-frozen arms and shimmied her out of the hole and got her onto solid ice. Then many hands grabbed her and rushed her to a car in the parking lot, hopefully with the heater blazing. Mark (Mike?), aka Mr. Perfect, grabbed my hand and pulled me away from the hole.

  Then he picked me up and ran me to the same car.

  I think I preferred the deathly ice-trap than being held like a blushing bride being tenderly held by Romeo himself on her honeymoon night.

  As we neared the car, I saw them stripping Lucy out of her clothes. She looked waxy and was alternating between shivering uncontrollably and not moving at all. That was bad. That meant that her temperature was so low it couldn’t get up on its own. Through concern for the girl came the thought that they were going to try to do the same to me. If I hadn't been freezing to death I would have run away as fast as I could. As it was, I couldn't move.

  They sat me next to her in the back of the big Cadillac, Driving Ms. Daisy style. It was so warm in the car that it almost burned my skin. Blazing heat made the air almost soupy, it was so thick. I could feel the heat hit my lungs as I breathed in and instantly warmed from the inside. The crowd around me started taking my shoes, socks and jacket off, then whipped off my layers of shirts and proceeded to take off my jeans. And maybe the theoretical long-johns.

  "S-s- top!" I managed to stutter. "I choose dea-ath!"

  I was being completely serious. I heard a snort from the frozen, bright-faced girl next to me. As I turned to look at her, I realized she had what looked like a duck down comforter wrapped around her. Jealous.

  "Put the b-b-blanket around y-you and then take offff…" she couldn't finish the sentence. Her lips were frozen shut; it was probably painful for her to speak. I could appreciate her discomfort, but what she was feeling was nowhere near as painful as letting those kids undress me. Not that I was arguing with the basic point. Like I said, I paid attention in PE and I had to get the cold clothes off of me. Even if I hadn’t paid attention, my legs were so cold my bones hurt. I wanted out.

  My reaching for the blanket was the sign; the sign the crowd was waiting for. It spurred them into action. Two solemn guys wrapped me with a big comforter like the one that was encasing Lucy. Then I felt someone take off my pants…and everything under my pants.

  Isaiah was going to love this.

  I had no doubt that my friends were all watching this and taping it with their cell phones. My frozen face would be on YouTube in hours. The title, no doubt, would be something amazing
ly creative like, “Christian Diving.”

  The guys who’d wrapped me had to tug a few times but eventually got my extremely tight, wet pants off. Weird. But I instantly felt warmer. I curled up into a ball in the Caddy’s long back seat, wrapping the big blanket as tightly around myself as I could. A frozen goth burrito.

  "Mike," (ahh, it was Mike) some grownup said to Mr. Perfect, "You’re going to have to drive the van and get everyone home. You can come to the hospital afterwards." He had his hand on Mike’s chest, holding him away from the car, and was talking fast. Not fast enough if you asked me.

  "I think I should take her." Mike’s brow was knit. His voice was concerned, and he stood there shuffling the snow back and forth with his feet. I bet he felt guilty for being so useless while his girlfriend was drowning. But he looked wet and cold himself, and no one was even paying attention to him except to get him out of the way. I had to give it to the guy, he did try when no one else was. Granted, he was a complete idiot and almost killed them both, but he obviously cared for the girl.

  "Mike, buddy,” the counselor must have realized Mike’s concern as well, “I have to take her, it’s my job. Please just take everyone home." He didn’t wait for an answer from the guilty teen, just walked around to the driver’s side of the car and started to climb in. Mike, eyes still furrowed, leaned into the back seat, to talk to his ice queen before she vanished.

  "Don't worry, there is a hospital a few miles away," he said with slight panic in his voice. He knew he was in trouble. Mike had been responsible for his gal and, with his own dumb actions, got shown up by one of the town rejects. Yours truly. Superhero reject.

  "I'm no-ot worried," I heard her say through frozen lips. Mike’s shoulders relaxed a little but he glanced in the rearview mirror twice before pulling back from the car, trying to figure out what to say or what to think about me. Thankfully, he wasn’t able to come up with anything.

  Another counselor settled in the front, buckling quickly. Random hands slammed the back doors shut from the outside. I nervously flattened my hair against my face then realized I was pretty much leaning on the girl next to me, who didn’t even seem to notice. She looked really bad.

  "Put the blanket around your neck and head," I told her. "That’s where most of your body heat escapes." Thank you, PE class.

  She opened her eyes and looked at me but didn't move. She probably couldn't. She just lay at an awkward angle against the seat, shivering sporadically. Her lips were blue and her eyes were bright red. The white down comforter was actually a nice touch, very patriotic. I freed my arms and pulled the blanket around her face till nothing but her eyes and nose were sticking out.

  "Try to relax," I said to her, “shivering and locking up your muscles uses up energy and you need that to keep warm." She didn’t respond, but a corner of her frozen eyebrows wrinkled into a “yeah, right” smirk. Might have just been muscle spasms, though.

  I couldn't remember, ever in my whole life, talking this much to one person. Even though she hadn’t responded, I could feel her trying to control the shivering and relax. It took a few minutes but she seemed to loosen up a little. We sat there in silence as the huge vehicle lumbered toward the hospital. My seatmate kept going in and out of shivering spells. The passenger counselor turned around every once and a while to check on us. Never saying anything. We were still breathing.

  I closed my eyes and wondered what on earth I had just done. I couldn’t believe all that had actually just worked. A knife and a belt, seriously? How was I alive right now?

  "Hi," I heard a whisper coming from the seat next to me. She was looking at me, I could feel it.

  "Hi," I answered back quickly.

  "Thank you." She was still whispering. I could barely hear her through that comforter.

  "It’s okay," I shot back, willing her to shut up. When I woke up this morning I never would have thought that I would be riding in a car, basically naked, talking to the prettiest girl in school. Overload. I snuck a glance at the abominable snow girl.

  She smiled at me. The blanket had slipped down so I could see her whole face, though she was holding it shut around her neck. She had a pretty smile.

  I closed my eyes and I tried to hunch my blanket over my head. Disappearing was my goal, but the dumb comforter wasn’t doing very well at swallowing me whole like I wanted it to.

  "Are you ok?"

  This girl really wanted to talk to me. "I can’t feel my toes."

  She laughed. She had a loud, obnoxious laugh that sent sparks flying thru me. I had heard it before and my body had the same reaction to it then. Both the counselors spun around to look back at us, startled by the laugh. They faced the road again when they saw us talking to each other. They seemed relieved.

  "I'm Lucy." I guess she didn’t realize I knew who she was. I just nodded at her. A little hand poked out from the folds of her blanket, ready for a shake.

  "I just saved your life, I think we have passed the point of shaking hands." I sunk deeper into my blanket. There had to be a trap door in this car somewhere. Didn’t mobsters drive Cadillacs?

  She let her arm fall and her head went down a little. I felt bad for refusing her. It wouldn't have hurt to shake the girl’s hand, it’s not like she didn’t deserve it or anything. She was just trying to be nice, and besides, she was one of the only people at school who never looked at me like I was a walking plague. I tried taking my hand out of my blanket-cage but apparently I had succeeded in disappearing. She looked back up at me, eyebrows lifted hopefully, when I moved. Stupid down-comforter cocoon.

  I felt the cloth that was wrapped around my neck and face move slightly, and then there was pressure on the top of my head. Immediately, I stopped moving, afraid of what was happening. I looked over and saw that her bare arm was completely out of her blankets. The girl put her fingers through the back of my hair and stopped at the base of my neck. I was torn between snapping at her fingers like a wild turkey or completely melting through the non-existent trapdoor in this non-Mob car.

  "Thank you," she said again, looking straight at me, forehead bent toward me. And she gave my neck the slightest pull for emphasis. This chick would not allow herself to be ignored or shrugged off. My throat had mysteriously lost all moisture, so I just nodded to her. It was either accept her thanks or get strangled, apparently.

  She tucked back into her blanket, closed her eyes and put her head back against the seat. I felt myself being drawn to her. She didn't shy away from the way I looked, or flinch when she touched me. I felt a wall around a little room in my heart beginning to collapse; I tried to mentally reconstruct it but it continued to crumble. This was the most absurd thing that could ever happen to someone like me. I save some beautiful girl from drowning in a frozen lake, with a crowd of well-meaning people looking on (doing nothing), and then she turns around and cuts through every mental defense I’d built over years in, like, two seconds. Soulful eyes and the threat of death by strangulation are my kryptonite, I guess.

  "Yeah, you’re welcome," I said quietly as the Caddy slid into the ER parking lot.

  She kept her eyes closed, but smiled.

  2. IT’S A PARTY

  Life is funny.

  Not haha funny but what-is-happening-to-me-right-now kind of funny.

  We were carried into the emergency room like two newborns, bright red and swaddled in blankets. They hooked the two of us up to heart monitors in the same room, on two hospital beds separated by a thin curtain. They put these disgusting gray heated blankets on us, wool socks, and great big hospital-issued beanies. We had heating pads under our armpits, our knees and on our feet. I was waiting for someone to walk up to me with a cup of hot chocolate.

  A husky woman with little smile-wrinkles fanning out from the corner of both eyes walked in with a small white box in her hand, singing, “let’s get those temps!” I was in the bed closest to the door so she stopped hesitantly in front of me. I opened my mouth and looked away, ready for the “don’t talk, keep it under you
r tongue” spiel, but she recoiled when she saw me which made me snap my mouth shut like an irritated rattle snake. Denied.

  "No, Hun, it’s an ear thermometer," she smiled at me for a second and then walked around the bed, to my left ear, the side with less hair in her way. I heard a little giggle from the other side of the curtain. Nice. I jump into a freezing lake to save the girl’s life and she laughs at me.

  "Okay sweetie pie, rate how you’re doing for me, on a scale from one to ten. One is the worst, ten is the best.” She busied herself by checking monitors and scribbling in my chart while she spoke.

  "I feel fine," I answered her.

  "What’s your number dear?" She still didn’t look at me. A part of me seriously wanted to mess with her. "How can you put a number on fine? It means I’m feeling fine." Her head snapped up and I made sure to glare at her but she smiled, ruffled my hair, and then glared right back. “Oh, are numbers too hard for you, dear? Do you need me to show you the smile chart?” She started to grab for a laminated sheet with a row of faces on it, ranging from frowns to smiles. “If you want you can just point to the face that looks like how ‘fine’ feels to you. We normally only need to pull this out for small children but if you’re having a hard time with numbers…” I assessed the situation, especially with the smile-chart hanging in front of my face, and realized how uninterested I was in dealing with this person anymore so I just decided to answer.

  "One..." The smile chart whipped away from my face and went back onto the shelf. Nurse Evil put a big check mark on her paper and opened the curtain between our beds. I saw Lucy briefly; she looked like her head was tilted towards us. Eavesdropper. She wasn’t at all ashamed at being caught. She just looked at me and smiled brightly. The nurse pulled the curtain closed behind her, shutting Lucy’s bed out like it was the law and it would protect the two of them from the angry punk kid.

  "How you doing, sweetie?" Nurse Evil said, all chipper and sweet. I heard the thermometer beep and the "number" question. She didn’t offer the smile chart.