The Adults by Alison Espach Read Free Book Online Page B

then, to understand how really alive she was.

4

    O ur new principal Dr. Killigan sat the school down in the auditorium and told us what it meant to be participants in a Hug-Free School.
    “Hugs are supposed to be handshakes from the heart,” he said too closely into the microphone. “But most of the time, these hugs I see taking place in the hallway are not that innocent.”
    Dr. Killigan said all the hugs did was cause traffic jams in the hallways when other students needed to get to class. All a hug did was allow boys to press against pairs of breasts. He said, Girls, boys are just using hugs as devices to get to you. He said that if we really gave it some thought, it wasn’t all that logical to press our genitals together as a form of greeting. Asians bow, he said, and why would the Asians do something so random like that, like bow?
    “There’s a reason for everything,” Dr. Killigan said.
    The auditorium booed, someone shouted out, “Drugs not hugs!” and everybody laughed. I started to get worried. High school was not going very well. Why did Janice immediately gravitate toward the Other Girls? Girls who caked their eyes in grease. Girls who looked good even when they looked like they stuck their face under the hood of a car. Girls who sat on boys in the parking lot like they were nothing more important than a piece of leather, and I’d watch Janice steal Richard’s Yankees hat every single day. She’d hold it behind her back and he’d reach around her body for it. He’d accidentally hit her breast and they’d smile. They would hug. Everyone would hug. Hugging became a new form of rebellion. “Press against me!” people would laugh in the hallways. “Press your genitals to mine!” People would make plans to meet in the stairwells. “Hello, genitals!” they would shout as they greeted each other.
    Janice and the Other Girls made it a game to chase after the young male teachers, especially the ones who played soccer with the freshman boys after school, boys who made me sick, who were suddenly unworthy and uneducated and followed us around the halls like they had nothing better to do than stare at our asses and write Cunts ’R’ Us on the girls’ bathroom door while they waited for their beards and bodies and brains to grow in. We popped bubblegum in our mouths on the sidelines of the football games that nobody actually cared about, where Janice would cheer for a boy, sometimes Peter Barnes or Ben Mulligan or even Richard, always as a joke, screaming, “Woo!” That was another thing: enthusiasm had to be fake. When you were caught genuinely excited over something, it was worse than getting caught with your pants down. An older couple in matching navy blue fleeces, parents, turned to look at Janice, a girl all crazy for a guy, and whispered to each other. I could tell they thought she was dumb. That was just something you could tell by looking at Janice. You looked at her and thought, That girl is probably dumb, but in reality, she was the only person in our geography class who knew that Mississippi was a Southern state, and Missouri was a Midwestern state. She knew that women were supposed to stick mints in their vaginas so they wouldn’t taste so much like vaginas, and bleaching the labia was important too. This was what she told me at two in the morning that August night I called her crying after I saw my father kissing Mrs. Resnick. Janice leaned her bike against the side of my house. “Want to try?”
    I laughed. She put the hair behind my ears and said, “Now, don’t you feel better?”
    “No,” I said. “Bleaching your vagina is sad, I think.”
    “That’s why I brought this,” she said. She held up a container of yogurt.
    “What’s that for?”
    She grabbed my hand, and we walked toward the Resnicks’ house. She opened up the yogurt and took a spoon and started flinging the yogurt at their windows. “It’s all I could find,” she said, apologetic. “Try.”
    I flung the