Big Girl Small Part 1

RACHEL DEWOSKIN.

BIG GIRL SMALL.

1.

When people make you feel small, it means they shrink you down close to nothing, diminish you, make you feel like s.h.i.+t. In fact, small and s.h.i.+t are like equivalent words in English. It makes sense, in a way. Not that small and s.h.i.+t are the same, I mean, but that Americans might think that. Take The Wizard of Oz, for example, an American cla.s.sic everyone loves more than anything even though there's a whole "Munchkinland" of embarra.s.sed people, half of them dressed in pink rompers and licking lollipops even though they're thirty years old. They don't even have names in the credits; it just says at the end, "Munchkins played by 'The Singer Midgets.' " Judy Garland apparently loved gay people, was even something of an activist, but she spread rumors about how the "midgets" were so raucous, f.u.c.king each other all the time and drinking bourbon on the set. People love those stories because it's so much fun to think of tiny people having s.e.x. There was even an urban myth about how one of the dwarfs hanged himself-everyone said you could see him swinging in the back of the shot-but it turns out it was actually an emu. Right. A bird they got to make the forest look "magical." And what with the five-inch TVs everyone had in those days, the two-pixel bird spreading its dirty wings apparently called to mind a dead dwarf. In other words, people wanted it bad enough to believe that's what it was. Magical, my a.s.s. I know that small and s.h.i.+t are the same because I'm sixteen years old and three feet nine inches tall.

Judy Garland was sixteen too, when she made Wizard of Oz, but I'm betting she must have felt like she was nine feet tall, getting to be a movie star and all. I should have known better than to try for stardom myself, because even though my mom sang me "Thumbelina" every night of my life, she also took me to Sat.u.r.day Night Live once when we were in New York on a family vacation, and it happened that the night I was there they had dozens of little people falling off choral risers as one of their skits. My mom almost died of horror, weeping in the audience. Everyone around us thought she was touched, that all those idiots on stage must have been, like, her other kids. Like they were my beautiful Munchkin brothers or something, even though my mom's average-size and so are my two brothers. They'd even have average lives, if only they didn't have me. My mother's idea has always been to try to make me feel close to perfect, but how close can that be, considering I look like she s.n.a.t.c.hed me from some dollhouse.

Nothing on Sat.u.r.day Night Live is ever funny, but the night we went was especially bad. One of the little people even got hurt falling off those risers, but no one thought anything of it, except my mom, who made a point of waiting for an hour after the show was done, to ask was he okay. I was furious, because everyone who walked by us kept saying "Good show" to me.

I would never be in anything of the sort, by the way, because my parents don't believe in circus humiliation. That's what my college essay was going to be on, freak shows and the Hottentot Venus. Most people don't know that much about her, except that she was famous for having a b.u.t.t so big the Victorians couldn't believe it. So they made her into an attraction people could pay money to stare at and grope. I bet you didn't know, for example, that her name was Saartjie, or "Little Sarah," or that she even had a name. The "Little" in her name is the cute, endearing version of the word, not the literal little. Or even worse, belittle, which, by combining be and little, means "to make fun of." I think I would have included that definition as, like, the denouement of my essay, after the climax, where I planned to mention that after her nightmare carnival life, Little Sarah died at twenty-six and they preserved her a.s.s on display in a Paris museum. She was orphaned in a commando raid in South Africa; otherwise maybe none of those terrible things would have happened to her.

I have parents, thankfully. And they always tried to keep me private. I don't mean they hid me in a closet or anything, but they also didn't let people take pictures of me when we traveled or touch me for money. And when people stared, even kids, my parents stared back, unblinking, but friendly-like. The thing is, you can't blame kids for staring. Not only because I'm miniature, but also because I'm a little bit "disproportionate." That's what they call it when the fit of your parts is in any way off the mainstream chart: "disproportionate." Maybe your arms or legs are too stumpy or your torso is small and your head is huge. Or maybe you're just you, like Saartjie Hottentot, and it's only relative to everyone else that you're disproportionate. Maybe someday they'll think disproportionate dwarf is a rude expression and they'll come up with a nicer way to put it. I think most people know now that Hottentot is considered a rude word. Maybe not, though. Most people are stupid as h.e.l.l when it comes to things like which words are rude. And a lot of people, even once they find out which words hurt people, still like to use them. They think it's smarmy and "PC" to have to say things kindly, or that it's too much pressure not to be able to punish freaks with words like freak.

Anyway, my parents would never even let me audition for American Idol, even though I can really sing, because they know Simon Cowell laughs at all the deformed people. It's complicated, since my mom and dad would never admit that my "situation" qualifies, but they still have to protect me. Because of this quandary, they finally broke down and agreed to send me to a performing arts high school last fall for my junior year, which is what caused this whole hideous nightmare in the first place.

Maybe my parents should have admitted that dwarfs are better off cloistered or hanging in some forest of Oz, and saved me the humiliation of having tried to pretend I'm fit to attend a flashy school. My parents are five feet six and six feet one, but they're on every board of every dwarf a.s.sociation in the world, and they use the words little people like there was never any other way to put it. They take me to "little people" conferences and manage to blend right in. So maybe from their dreamy bubble, it seemed possible that my "stellar academic performance" and charming personality would earn me popularity and favor among the rest of the kids, that I'd be a beloved Lilliputian among the Brobdingnagians.

That's not how it turned out. I should say right here, though, that what happened is not my parents' fault, and that I don't blame them. They're probably frantic right now, or dead from ulcers or heart attacks. I know they're searching for me, and the thought of it makes me physically sick. I guess because I love them. But I can't come out of here yet, don't know when I'll ever be able to rejoin the world.

Because most of society, including Darcy Arts Academy, is nothing like my parents. You can get a sense of the difference if you take a look online. I'll give you an example. Google "little people" and you get 8 million hits, most of which are for stumpy Fisher-Price figures with no legs. If you look up "small people," you get under a million (but at least one of the first two is the charming lyric "short people got no reason to live," preceding a story about tiny ancient people who hunted rats and lizards near the Java Sea). Call it predictable, but if you search "midget," you get 21 million hits, about 20 million of which are YouTube videos of "midget fights," "midget bowling," or "midget Michael Jacksons." There's also the really nice website TinyEntertainer.com, with its "Rent a Midget" logo scrolling across the screen like breaking news ticker tape. And if you type in "midget girl," you get Maybe up in the big world it's difficult to understand why midgets might hate the word midget, but here, I'll help. The Little People's a.s.sociation explains it like this: the term has fallen into disfavor and is considered offensive by most people of short stature. The term dates back to 1865, the height of the "freak show" era, and was generally applied only to short-statured persons who were displayed for public amus.e.m.e.nt, which is why it is considered so unacceptable today. Such terms as dwarf, little person, LP, and person of short stature are all acceptable, but most people would rather be referred to by their name than by a label.

"Fallen into disfavor." I love that. So everyone can call me Judy, even after I get a job as a hot p.o.r.no midget escort, because there's nowhere else for me to go from here. It's funny how I've reached the bottom of something, but up is still not an option.

My parents named me Judy accidentally, by the way, without realizing that Judy Garland was a dwarf mocker. Judy has always been my mom's favorite name, and who doesn't love that Klimt picture of Judith holding Holofernes' head? Maybe someday there'll be a picture of me holding Kyle Malanack's head, although it'll be a smudged newspaper photo, ripped digitally from the security camera of a parking garage or something. I doubt people will produce millions of prints for dorm rooms. Although maybe they will. Some kids love a villain.

I was brilliant in school, by the way. You have to be smart as well as talented in some other, "artistic" way to get into Darcy. Maybe that will be the next story, when it breaks, when they find me here. The sequel. Lots of Darcy kids being like, "She seemed so, well, normal!" Except they'll have to stop themselves: "I mean, not normal, but you know, sweet"-except they'll have to stop themselves there, too, because I wasn't sweet, exactly, was kind of sarcastic, for a doll of a girl. "Well," they'll have to concede, "after what happened to her, I mean, who wouldn't lose it?" They all know what happened. It's too horrible to contemplate, and I wish I didn't know. What they should say is that I was too smart for my own good, that it would have been better to be an animal, not to know what I was missing, not to have been able to see my life. A little bit of ignorance would have saved me. What good is there in seeing your situation clearly if there's no escape from it? I'd love to hear the story of my academic genius, if there were any way of interpreting it other than that I've had to overcompensate every second of my life.

Here, news media, here's a sound bite for when you find me: if you're born saddled with a word like Achondroplasia, you learn to spell. If the first boy you dare love pulls the worst Stephen King Carrie prank in the history of dating, then you run and hide. Because who can love you after that? Maybe your parents. But how can you face them, when you've all spent so much time convincing each other that you're normal?

All I'm saying is, if you're me, and you can't reach a gas pump, pay phone, or ATM, and your arms and legs are disproportionately short, and your mouth is too impossible to kiss without it becoming a public carnival, then you don't get to be included in anything but the now obsolete, original meaning of the stupid word normal. Which, believe it or not, according to the OED, is rare.

So I'm the rare dwarf at the Motel Manor on the outskirts of Ypsi, close enough to my parents that they should have found me by now, and maybe in more danger than I can guess at. And you know what? I don't care. I hope the story ends here. It's fine if it does. I mean, that way I'll be the dream come true of all those hopeful Oz watchers, waiting for a dwarf to hang.

Thumbelina, Thumbelina, tiny little thing. Thumbelina dance, Thumbelina sing. Thumbelina, it makes no difference if you're very small, for when your heart is full of love you're nine feet tall.

2.

The hot pink eighties were already over when my parents moved from St. Louis to Michigan with my older brother, Chad, and opened a restaurant called Judy's Grill. It would be more touching if they'd named the restaurant after me instead of naming me after the restaurant, but whatever. I could pretend I was born before it opened, and was such an adorable baby that they couldn't think of a better name for the place where they'd throw globs of meat on a grill, but in fact, Judy's came first. My mother got pregnant the same spring they arrived, and stood behind the counter, with Chad in one of those mechanized swings that rocks a baby back and forth until he falls asleep watching animals rotate above his head. She poured coffee, served sizzling foods to customers just starting to become regulars, and loosened her ap.r.o.n ties more and more until she was too pregnant to work. Then she went to the hospital and had me. My dad found her s.e.xy, even bloated with the fifty pounds she gained pregnant; there are pictures of him leering at her giant ankles, even one of him grabbing her Hottentot a.s.s.

As for the birth, my mom was kind of a peasant about the whole thing. I mean, she spent only a week at home after I was born before she brought me to work, where she nursed me in the kitchen between s.h.i.+fts. Even though I had some medical problems, my mother stopped working only when I was actually being cut open like tropical fruit to have a trach put in because my tubes were too small to let me breathe right. I don't remember that, by the way; it happened when I was a baby. But my mom remembers it like it happened ten minutes ago, because every time I cough, I can feel her start running from wherever she is in the house. When I was healthy, she always had me at Judy's Grill with them. She was like the Chinese woman in that book The Good Earth that we read in eighth-grade English. The wife, I mean, who keeps getting knocked up over and over and going into the back room and giving birth by herself, gnawing off the umbilical cord and rus.h.i.+ng back to work in the fields the next day like a slave, with the baby strapped to her back. My mom's that type. Uncomplaining, I mean. I think it's a point of pride with her. I'm a complainer, myself. But I guess my mom was also desperate to get back to work with my dad. She likes work. And she likes my dad. She never stops moving, racing, doing-except at night, when everything she's had to do all day is done-and then she reads New York Times bestsellers. But not brand new ones. Older ones that she checks out of the Ann Arbor District Library. When she's finished with them, she leaves them on my nightstand with the due-date cards sticking out like reminders that I have a deadline. Sometimes I read them. Not usually.

My dad thinks it's cute that my mom keeps so busy. He's busy too, but in a kind of understated way. He smokes a pipe and listens to Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, and on his most hip days, Ca.s.sandra Wilson, who he found out about by watching a PBS doc.u.mentary about jazz. My dad is the kind of guy who will do whatever the rest of us want to do, which means when he's not working or fixing things, he's mostly watching Michigan football with Chad, wearing the "M Go Blue" sweats.h.i.+rt my mom bought him at parents' weekend. They're very proud of Chad for going to U of M and being a swimmer and so handsome and well-adjusted and smart. And even if they weren't, they'd still be the types to go to parents' weekend as if they had traveled from two thousand miles away, even though we live ten minutes from campus.

Maybe the busy hum of Judy's Grill was a relief for my mom, compared to life with me. She loves the grill with a pathological devotion; I wouldn't be surprised if she squirted her own breast milk directly into people's coffee mugs when she went back to work that first week after I was born. Maybe it was a happy, distracting refuge from the horrors of my babyhood. The grill is full of clutter, the smell of s.h.i.+mmering fries fresh out of the metal oil basket, the crunch of pepper grinders, chatter and smack of people eating. There's nothing to eat in hospitals; even when there's food there, it tastes like Lysol. And anyway, who has an appet.i.te in a place where the walls look so much like the floor that you're swimming even as you walk? The U of M hospital smells, looks, and tastes like an antiseptic nothing. Judy's Grill is a hot red place.

No mom loves watching her tiny dwarf baby get strapped to a gurney, but my mom is pretty tough. My dad still talks about how she cleaned my trach tube every ten seconds for the whole year and a half I had the thing in. He apparently could barely handle it, not because it was gross, he swears, but because he was so freaked out that he'd do it wrong. My mom has always claimed that she had never loved anything the way she immediately loved me. Chad is expected to live with that part of the family lore-I mean, he got a fabulous life so why can't I at least get to be our mom's favorite? Plus, I'm a girl, and the way my mom tells it, she really wanted a girl "for herself," the idea being that Chad was for my dad. And it's true that Chad and my dad are perfect for each other. Chad's as noisy and fun as my dad is quiet. He drags my dad out to play football in the backyard, scandalizes him with obscene jokes, and does a brilliant imitation of our mom: "Chad! Judy! Sam! I hear a riot! Someone's about to get hurt! And it's going to be Sam!" Her cute Midwestern accent, all nasal and young-sounding.

My mom grew up on a working farm, and she still lives on an animal clock, awake at the first flicker of light in the sky. She prefers ch.o.r.es when the air is still icy and silent, and makes us breakfast at dawn every morning before she and my dad take off for the Grill to feed dozens of other people all day. She also builds and fixes things-TVs, the roof on our house, the tiles in the bathroom. The only thing she leaves for my father to fix is the car, and she encourages him to do that as often as possible, even, I think, when it's not broken. For their anniversary once, she bought him a board with wheels on it so he can jack the car up a bit and roll underneath it. I think she finds mechanics s.e.xy, and my dad is game. I mean, he fixes the car sometimes, or at least pretends to. Fills it with oil or something. My mom keeps a framed picture of him on her nightstand, even though if she wanted to, she could just look over at him, sleeping next to her. In the picture, he's rolling out from under the car, grease on his hands and a monkey wrench held up victoriously above him like it's a weapon.

But even though my mom likes my dad, what she loves most is the three of us. And she went all the way with the claim that she loved me unconditionally-by having another baby after me. I take my little brother, Sam, as proof that my parents weren't scared off the project. And my mom was rewarded for her bravado, because Sam is the best person anyone has ever met. We all love him most. It's hard to explain except to say that he's a delicately wired twelve-year-old with buckteeth and braces, that he weighs less than sixty pounds, has no irony, and takes hip-hop cla.s.ses on the weekends at the rec center. He wears his Levi's so low they show his Hanes, and just generally tries so hard it's heartbreaking.

I can almost imagine Ann Arbor back before me and Sam, when Chad was a little baby and my parents were all hopeful and young. The place would have had more boutiques and fewer strip malls, the same stadium and roads, but I always picture it as an old-fas.h.i.+oned college town, music pouring out the windows of Hill Auditorium, dancers in the shadows at Power Center, the Brown Jug lit up on campus, open all night. That's where Michigan students sat drinking thin, pre-Starbucks coffee out of cream-colored diner mugs. Judy's Grill is right across from the Brown Jug, on South University. My mom and dad chose a red color pattern, pizza parlor lanterns, booths, and gingham tablecloths. Eventually they even got a jukebox, and sometimes students hang out there when there are no tables at the Brown Jug, listening to the c.r.a.ppy oldies my parents picked-like Journey and REO Speedwagon.

Not to romanticize too much, though, because it's usually old people in there, gumming meat loaf and sipping stew through straws. Retirees never put money in the jukebox, so my mom plays them "Happy Together" and the Beatles for free. They love it. And they love me; I'm like the everlasting infant mascot of Judy's Grill.

Sometimes I think the Grill must have been an absolute Norman Rockwell print before I arrived. And then wham! All of a sudden there was a spontaneous genetic mutation, maybe in her egg, maybe in one of my dad's sperm. It's too gross to contemplate that part, since we all know where it goes, but did a dwarf sperm swim up to an average-size egg and hit on it like, "I have other things to offer?" Or was the egg a little bit small? Anyway, there it was. Some famous doctor my parents once had examine me in a hotel room at a conference told them it's usually the sperm's fault when your baby's a dwarf. I wonder if that made my dad feel guilty.

My mom knew she was pregnant right away because of the constant barfing, but they didn't know about "that" until later, at twenty weeks, to be precise, when the docs noticed "foreshortened limbs" and something about my pelvis on the ultrasound screen. Maybe the technician at the U of M hospital was like, "Oh, let me get the doctor," because apparently you can tell from an ultrasound if your baby is "of short stature," which is pretty hilarious, because what unborn baby isn't of short stature? I mean, foreshortened limbs? Anyway, then my parents were probably like, "Is everything okay, technician?" and she was like, "I'll let the doctor explain," and the rest of their lives were mapped out from that moment: my dad's old-school-ness about the whole abortion thing, the baby they already had, how now his life would be affected by this s.h.i.+t, the deformed one taking up all the attention, the kinds of conversations they must have had, the final decision. Let's keep her anyway! Or maybe it's the way they present it now, like they didn't even consider putting me back. That my mom heard about my dwarfism and loved me even more. More than anything, even Chad, her lanky, healthy toddler. But it wasn't the Dark Ages. They had ultrasound technology, and when I first found out about that, in seventh-grade health cla.s.s at Tappan Middle School, I started asking my parents all the time if they had considered a do-over, but that's not the sort of question where you'll ever get the straight answer you want. Anyway, now I've ruined their lives by ruining mine. So even if they didn't regret having me then, maybe they do now. Health cla.s.s is the same one where our teacher once said, "Do you girls want to know the only thing you need to stay out of trouble?" and we were all like, "What, Mr. Katz?" and he said, "A dime," so we all looked at each other like, "What the h.e.l.l is he talking about?" and he said, "Take the dime and put it between your knees and hold it there, and that way you'll stay out of trouble."

Speaking of trouble, I once read that parents of kids with childhood leukemia suffer more post-traumatic stress disorders and recurring nightmares than the kids themselves do. I can see why. Watching your kid suffer has to suck at least as much as suffering yourself. If my mom could give me her legs, I bet she would. And I'd take them, too, because I'm that kind of person. I'd rip them right off, and use them to tower above and hop over everyone like I was on pogo sticks. It's a fact, even though it's hypothetical, do you know what I mean? If she could, my mom would give her legs to me, and I would take them. And that's why I can never go home again, because having to watch me die of misery over this Darcy scandal might be even more hideous for them than it is for me, if that's possible. The funny thing is, I'm not a totally bad person, and I know it because if I could choose to make my little brother, Sam, live my life and me live his, I wouldn't. I'd rather this be me than have to watch it be him, even though he's a boy. Because if I had to watch him go through this, that would kill me. I don't know why I feel that way about Sam and not my parents. Maybe because he's little and they're grown-ups.

The horror show didn't start right away at Darcy, by the way. I was the happiest I'd ever been before I became the unhappiest. I think people are all that way; if you have the capacity to experience huge, engulfing joy, then you can also feel its equal and opposite level of pain. My diary entries are like the lines on a graph, shooting up and up toward Thanksgiving and then rocketing off the page by Christmas. Of course it's not a very useful graph for drawing conclusions, since I didn't record them plummeting; they just disappear entirely.

My parents were nervous the summer before I started at D'Arts, talking in whispers and then changing the subject when I'd come in after swimming at Fuller Pool with Meghan, my best dwarf friend, who I met at an LPA convention in Florida four years ago. Those are where little people from all over the place get together and become friends. Our parents met there, too, and liked each other-they're all average-size, although Meghan has a little-person older brother, too, and an average-size older sister. She comes every other summer for a week, and then I go to her place in Northern California.

Whenever Meghan and I are together, we talk about how much we wish we lived in the same place. She's an achon too, so we look alike and everyone thinks we're sisters and that's okay, even though we hate it when people a.s.sume we're sisters with, like, every other random dwarf in the universe. At that first LPA conference where I met Meghan, there were tons of teenagers, but she and I were the only two twelve-year-old girls. The next year, there were a bunch of younger guys, but no guys our age, and when we were fourteen, there were, like, no teenagers at all. It's random. Last year, I met a guy named Joel who was kind of okay, and we danced a few times and even went swimming late at night, but I was embarra.s.sed that all the grown-ups there seemed to think that dwarf teenagers should get married right away in case no one else ever agrees to marry us. I mean, I danced with the guy like three times and tons of people were pulling my parents aside like, "I think they're a great couple, don't you?"

My parents, good on most things, said, "We're glad Judy seems to be making friends and having fun," and left it at that. They're not the types to try to match-make.

And even though they spent the whole summer worrying, my mom and dad gamely dropped me off on the first morning at Darcy, trying their best to comment cheerily on the "fabulous" student murals decorating the walls, and the "creative" vibe of the place. They kept up their tradition of staring the welcoming stare at anyone who ogled me, although I was finally like, "People are staring at me because my parents are at school with me. Please leave immediately." I told them I already looked like a six-year-old, could they please not make matters more unbearable by staying. But they didn't listen, and sat through the whole morning of meetings and orientations, including a private twenty- minute chat with the princ.i.p.al, Mr. Grames, and a school counselor named Mrs. O'Henry: "We have access to world-cla.s.s medical facilities and are committed to our students' physical and psychological well-being, Judy. I hope you'll contact me right away with any concerns or if you need anything at all."

At lunchtime, they swept me away from the possible horrors of the cafeteria: my legs dangling from a bench, no one to sit with, some movie-worthy bully slapping my sloppy joe tray into the air and stealing my milk money. They took me off "campus" to Zingerman's, where we all ate turkey Reubens. I chewed four pieces of spearmint Eclipse on the walk back and spat them out in the trashcan at the back entrance to the school. My parents insisted on walking to the door to drop me off, and tried to kiss and smother me as if I were leaving for a hundred years instead of three more hours of high school. But I fought them off and they left. I was desperately relieved to see them go.

Walking back in, I felt less sure of myself, though. The halls were bulging with kids hugging each other, throwing books into their lockers, slinging on fas.h.i.+onable backpacks, singing, leaping. It was like that old movie Fame, the one that has no plot at all and is just a montage of beautiful people in tights, alternately weeping and f.u.c.king and frolicking. I chewed more gum. One girl was crying, and an absolute soap star of a high school boy was hugging her. I thought Spring Awakening, just knew they serenaded each other and danced through fields together on the weekends. Their life was definitely a rock musical, and they were probably engaged, or at least "going steady." I felt sick, tried to focus on the student murals my parents had pretended to admire: swirling, spotted, punked-out zebras in rainbow colors, kids dancing, and a Greek G.o.ddess with her hair trailing all the way from one end of an orange hallway to the other. The lockers are all painted by students, too; one of the big bonuses of the place is that you're allowed to decorate the outside of your locker, not just the inside like at most regular schools. It's a big compet.i.tion, of course, and there are stories of the most famous lockers ever, like Sophie Armaria's. She graduated ten years ago but people still reminisce about how she painted herself naked on her locker, in thick, glistening oil, so that the combination dial was one of her nipples. The school didn't know what to do. Did they "censor" her or celebrate her artistic freedom? Grown-ups are so idiotic. I mean, who cares? Finally they asked her (I'm not joking) to paint a bikini on the thing. She refused, and Darcy put some tape over the locker's privates. Unbelievable. Sophie, apparently even more deeply in love with herself than ever before, wrote "CENSORED!" in black lettering on the tape. When I first started, people were obsessed with a senior named Amanda Fulton's locker; she created a mosaic on it out of beads and gla.s.s tiles and photographs of her friends. She spent, like, her whole four years at D'Arts working on the thing. The photos look all 3-D, because she framed them and then broke the gla.s.s, so each face had at least a few shards of gla.s.s over it. It was incredibly cool, actually. I wish I were Amanda Fulton. Or at least one of her friends, framed for eternity (well, four years of high school) on that locker. Some kids who can't think of anything better pretend to be above the whole thing and paint their lockers black. Others "tag" them with fake street graffiti. The truth is, the whole scene is a little fake, but I spent the whole post-lunch orientation meeting contemplating how I could amaze everyone with my locker decorations. Maybe I'd do something with tissue paper-make an enormous garden, blooming out into the hallway. Or a mint farm with boxes of Eclipse gum. Of course then everyone would steal it and chew it up. Maybe I would use marbles somehow. Was there a way to fasten marbles to a vertical metal surface? It was good I had this to think about, since otherwise the orientation was nothing but an excruciating, dwarf-peek-sneaking affair about "sensitivity to race and gender issues."

In other words, "We do not discriminate on the basis of gender, race, color, handicapped status, s.e.xual orientation, religion, or national or ethnic origin, so you shouldn't shout racial epithets at the two black people allowed in or refuse to pick the dwarf for your kickball team." Everyone kept looking over at me, especially these girls I later figured out were Amanda Fulton and Carrie Shultz. They were dressed alike in superexpensive jeans, with all the seams sewn on the outside, and b.u.t.ton-up blouses b.u.t.toned down enough that their black lacy bras were just visible. I tugged at the jeans my mom and I had bought in the children's department at Nordstrom's for my first day-they were the most expensive ones I'd ever had, $118. My mom had splurged, the whole time marveling with me over the fact that people would spend more than a hundred dollars on jeans for a six- or seven-year-old, who would presumably grow out of them in a month or two. Then we were both quiet, maybe thinking I'd never grow out of them, and what the h.e.l.l, we might as well spend thousands of dollars on designer jeans for me. I had on boots with heels, too, orthopedic but full of the effort to look stylish, a black T-s.h.i.+rt, and a dark pink cardigan. The truth is, in the mirror that morning, I'd felt pretty cute. I have good hair, is the thing-light brown with blond streaks in it, and a pretty good face, too. I don't have the mushed nose, broad forehead look, and my eyes aren't too wide apart. I have long eyelashes, which are darker than my hair even when I don't put mascara on. And my mouth is round and cute, with straight white teeth. Lots of people in Ann Arbor are used to me, by the way. It's not like I have no friends, it's just that I stupidly decided to leave my high school and go to Darcy so I could become famous and make everyone be like, "Remember Judy? We never thought she'd be the next-whatever, Peter d.i.n.klage."

But that first day at Darcy, I kept thinking of my friends, starting the year at Huron, only several miles away. Why had I left devils I knew for ones I didn't? I wanted to go to Darcy desperately, that's the funny thing. Darcy Arts is Ann Arbor's private school answer to LaGuardia High. It's for talented performing arts kids, so everyone wants to go. If you live in Ann Arbor, getting into D'Arts is almost like winning American Idol. Not to mention getting in for free. D'Arts has this friendly pretense that its scholars.h.i.+ps aren't need-based, so if you get one, everyone's supposed to be like, "Wow, she's even more talented than the rest of us stars." But I needed the money, so everyone else who has a scholars.h.i.+p probably did too. My parents aren't poor or anything, but D'Arts costs almost as much as college (everyone there is always mentioning that). And I guess poor kids do have to be even more talented, because there must be more of us applying than kids who can pay. By the way, you're allowed to call it "D'Arts" only if you go-who wouldn't want that? And I know I keep mentioning American Idol. It's not my dream or anything, it's just an example of giving teenagers a shot at what they want most in the universe. The stakes are very high, is my point.

My parents were shocked that I wanted to go to Darcy. But I thought it was time for me to break out. I mean, they've always been overprotective and suffocating. So I explained that it would be a "perspective broadening" experience for me, and the truth is, I kind of thought it would be exactly that. I mean, I was tired of the same hundred kids I'd known since Angell Elementary, even though there was something safe in staying on with them, even the meanest, like Scott Declan, who has pointed and laughed literally every time he's seen me. Which is roughly two billion, six hundred and ninety-three million times, since we've gone to school together since first grade. You'd think someone like that could eventually get a grip, but apparently not. At least I stopped caring what Scott did or said when I turned eleven. If only I'd realized how delicious that safety was. I thought an escape to a more sophisticated school might benefit me, and that maybe I could become an intellectual powerhouse or Shakespearean actor like Peter d.i.n.klage. Because I love Peter d.i.n.klage. I even have a picture of him from The Station Agent that I keep in my wallet. And like I said earlier, I can really sing. And I can sort of write, at least school essays. I knew they'd let me in anyway, because how cool would it be to have a talented dwarf on their brochure for the rest of time? And even if I was wrong about everything else I ever thought in my whole life, I was right about that.

Mrs. O'Henry, the school counselor, kept smiling at me from the stage during the orientation, and every time she said "Any questions?" she looked right at me all hopefully, like she was just so thrilled to have a real live special-needs victim there for her sensitivity demonstration. I was like the moment she'd been waiting for, except I didn't ask anything, because, for one thing, I was chewing gum, and you're not allowed to have gum so I was keeping my mouth closed. For another, I had already signed up for an arts education. I would have to sing and act and probably dance a dwarf jig in front of everyone in town-that would be enough attention for me.

As soon as the meeting ended, I scuttled up to the library on the fourth floor of the building and sat alone, the hunchback in a dollhouse bell tower, clanging away. I arranged my books in a stack on the desk, opened a notebook, took out my favorite pink pen, and wrote "Judy" and "D'Arts." Then I doodled patterns-tiny schools of fish, stars, and striped hearts-under my name. The silence echoed around me and I wished terribly to be in the car on the way home with my parents, or already at home, or even on the AATA bus up Washtenaw to our house. I clicked my orthopedic heels together, imagining the intersection where Washtenaw meets Stadium, the little dip in the road, the bike path, the left turn, down the hill, past the speaking-in-tongues church, to where our house is. I was climbing out of the car in my mind when I heard the voice. I turned, away from the dream of my brothers playing basketball in the driveway, and as soon as I saw who was talking I thought I'd been catapulted out of reality into that movie Mean Girls, because the girl standing there was so pretty and b.i.t.c.hy-looking that my bones froze and my blood fizzed through my veins like grape pop. She had streaky blond hair that looked all intentionally messed up, and was wearing black yoga pants, flip-flops, and a gray Darcy Arts hoodie sweats.h.i.+rt, an outfit that looked on her like it had cost thousands of dollars. She was probably five feet ten barefoot. She smiled.

"Um, hi," she said.

"Hi."

"I'm Ginger Mews," she said, sticking her hand down at me. I looked at it for a minute before shaking it with my stumpy paw. Her fingers were long and thin, but the nails were bitten down below the line, all ragged and scabby. Some of them even looked freshly bloodied. Maybe we could be friends.

"I'm Judy," I said, and she nodded.

"I know. I'm on the social staff, I mean, you know, the orientation staff. I just came by to welcome you to D'Arts and see if you needed anything, and, oh, to make sure you knew that there's a party this weekend at Chessie Andrewjeski's, so, you know, we hope you'll come."

"The social staff ?"

"Mmm. We just, you know, welcome new students and stuff."

We stood there for a minute, while I contemplated what to say. Only the dwarfs? Thank you? Had Mrs. O'Henry sent her after the meeting with my parents, and if so, what had she said to Ginger, "This girl needs your gorgeous, socially well-adjusted help"? I didn't know where to look, didn't want to stare up at her like a weird pet or a flower growing wildly toward the sun, but I also didn't want to just look away, lest she think I was rude. Mainly, I didn't want her to leave yet.

"You want some pretzels?"

"Sure," she said, glancing around. Food was forbidden in the library. I took a bag of Rold Gold out of my backpack and pa.s.sed it to her, so she could reach in and take a polite, obligatory pretzel and stick the dry thing into her mouth. It was a gesture of solidarity, and, after she did it, she pulled a chair over to my carrel and sat. Maybe we would be best friends. Now that she was sitting, eye contact was easier to manage. I relaxed about one octave, imagined asking her to fetch books for me from high-up shelves, watching her lunge into the chairs in my room at home. Maybe we'd have a love montage, sip from a shared shake at Judy's, my parents swooning in the background.

"So do you have any questions about Darcy?" she asked.

"Do you ever have dwarf-tossing contests?"

It worked. She laughed hard enough that I could see some pretzel packed into her back teeth, and I had another surge of the dream that we would actually be best friends. My hope was so great that sarcasm left me for a moment. Even if it meant I had to sell out my own dignity for all of time by making dwarf jokes, I was happy to do that if it meant Ginger would come over and laugh her huge blond laugh. Plus, at least I would beat everyone else to making whatever jokes were going to be made about me.

"Excuse me!" the librarian suddenly shouted. She was as skinny as a fireplace poker, with puddle-colored hair that looked like it had been poured over her head and then dripped down onto her shoulders. She wore frameless eyegla.s.ses and a plaid cardigan, b.u.t.toned all the way up. I wondered if she had gotten the job because she looked so much like a school librarian, or if she looked that way because she had gotten the job. Maybe we all eventually become calcified chunks of our own essence.

"There is absolutely no food allowed in the library, girls," she told us. "Put that away immediately, or I'll have to confiscate it!"

Ginger looked at me and rolled her eyes and made a chomping motion with her mouth, tipping the pretzel bag back toward her throat. This time we both laughed. The librarian had gone back to typing away on a huge, ancient computer. It seemed to me that a school with as much money as D'Arts could afford a desktop made this century, but maybe they reserved their funds for Broadway-style props and sets.

"You have AP history now, right?" Ginger asked.

I stuffed the pretzel bag into my book bag. "Yeah."

"I'll walk you." She stood up and shrugged, her long, messy hair falling over her shoulders. I caught a whiff of mint and lavender shampoo. Her life seemed perfect. I guessed she was the happiest person alive. She walked me to AP history and said good-bye at the door.

"You're not in this cla.s.s?" I asked, both surprised that she'd come with me just out of niceness and alarmed that I was about to be left alone again.

"I'm in r.e.t.a.r.d history,"she said, and then realized something-I don't know what exactly-that I might consider myself an actual "r.e.t.a.r.d"? That dwarfs and r.e.t.a.r.ds feel empathy for one another so she shouldn't use language like that around me? Some birds- of-an-off ended-feather-type thing? Anyway, she was like, "Oh my G.o.d! I didn't mean-I just, I'm-" and flushed a horrible, violent pink. She looked beautiful.

I put on my most casual expression ever, even though I don't like that word. "Don't worry about it. Please-hey-do you want to, maybe we can-"

I don't even know what I was going to say-have coffee? Schedule a playdate? Fall in love? Sit at lunch together? See each other again? Be best friends? But it didn't matter, because Mr. Troudeau banged his gavel of a hand on the table and I scurried into a desk like a squirrel, with Ginger already gone down the long hallway. I missed the first half of the lecture, some s.h.i.+t about how making the choice to remember and how we remember and write history makes us who we are-because I was busy making up my mind to go to Chessie Andrewjeski's party. I would wear my black corduroy miniskirt, pile my hair on top of my head, and make hilarious and sarcastic quips all night, until everyone at D'Arts recognized how much sophisticated fun I was. It would be the new, wildly popular me.

3 This goth girl at D'Arts named Sarah wanted to be my friend as much as I wanted to be Ginger's. Goth Sarah. She was one of those girls who feels like a freak on the inside and wishes to be one on the outside, so she can express or at least represent her inner self better. It's like the way some kids cut themselves, so they can feel a physical version of whatever psychological pain they either have or think they have. Sarah wasn't really super punk or dark; she was kind of watered-down angsty-looking. She was actually conventionally very cute, but had tried to mask it by dying her hair an oily seal black, puncturing every possible surface with hoops and studs, and ripping her fishnets. She looked riddled by bullets, but wore pink lipstick and striped polo jerseys.

I later understood that preppy-goth is a Darcy type, but Sarah was pretty original and seemed full of potentially interesting contradictions. When she smiled in precalc one day, I smiled back and then looked down quickly, in case I had misread her and was grinning ludicrously for no reason. But I wasn't-she really wanted to be my friend.

Goth Sarah told me once, right before Christmas break, that before she "really got to know me" she'd been amazed I was willing to go to parties. I liked her more after she admitted she thought that. I like those compliments, because they're true. I never like the kind that are like, "Oh, I didn't even notice you're three feet tall, because I'm disability and color-blind and you're such a great person." I prefer ones like Sarah gave, of the "You're so brave to leave the bell tower; I'd never have the b.a.l.l.s" variety.

I told her the truth in return, that once I got to Darcy, I started to like parties. Maybe I was just older, or the parties at Huron, the high school where I went for ninth and tenth grade, just sucked. Or maybe Darcy parties were all the same, and therefore safe and predictable. Because once I leapt out of the frying pan into the whole new-school fire, I longed for nonagonizing social situations.

Although that first party, the one at Chessie Andrewjeski's, was terrifying. That was before I knew anyone except Ginger, and she hardly helped. I remember that night better than almost anything else that's ever happened in my life, too, because it was the first time I ever saw Kyle Malanack. Sometimes I wonder-if I hadn't gone, would everything still be this mammoth disaster? I'm sure I would've met him eventually anyway; I mean, D'Arts wasn't that big and he was a huge star there. But maybe if I'd met him some other way, it could have happened differently. If we'd been in the hallway, or the lunchroom, or gym cla.s.s, if he'd been falling off the climbing ropes, losing a race, too exhausted to swim his final lap. But I met him at Chessie's. There was nothing special about the scene; it was any party full of teenagers anywhere, except the D'Arts kids were cooler-looking than the ones at my non-performing-arts high. Chessie's place was out on Scio Church Road and hard to find, so my older brother, Chad, who was a freshman at Michigan, drove me and said he'd have his cell phone on all night. I could call whenever I needed him to pick me up and he'd rush back. If I didn't have Chad around, I'd be even less well-adjusted, because we don't have the pedals in our car raised, so I can't drive yet even though I pa.s.sed my driver's test right away the first time. I mean, my parents would have had to drive me. It's unimaginable. My friends from Huron who can drive said they didn't want to go to a Darcy party. They were mad at me for changing schools, which is another story, and not that interesting. So I had no friends, no car, and obviously wasn't going to ask my parents to take me. They don't allow "parties where the parents aren't home"-as if there's such a thing as parties where the parents are home. But even if they had agreed to the party, they probably would have insisted on staying all night, like it was a sequel to my D'Arts orientation or something. I guess Chad's becoming more like them, because he's usually mellow and fun, but he was so nervous when he left me at Scio Church Road that he said, "Look, J, I'm just going to pull around the corner for twenty minutes, so if you need me to come back right away, I can. Why don't you go in and see if it's okay and then I'll-"

I cut him off. "I'll be fine. I have to go to high school on my own, even parties."

"I'm not saying I'll come in or anything. I'll just be down the road where no one can see me, until you call and say it's okay." For a moment, I contemplated telling him to come in and pretend to be my gorgeous boyfriend, but it was too Freudian and pathetic. So I got out of the car and went inside.

Chessie Andrewjeski, the girl having the party, was crying. Her parents were out of town, of course, and she had invited only a handful of people but the entire school had shown up, as well as dozens of kids from Huron and Pioneer and Community, the public schools. I felt annoyed that my stupid Huron friends had refused to come, even though there were plenty of people they would have known there, even a few I knew. Chessie was crying half out of genuine unhappiness about tras.h.i.+ng her parents' house and half because of the glee of being a surprise sensation, popular enough to fill an entire suburban farmhouse. There were teenagers scattered everywhere, across the lawn, having s.e.x in the upstairs bedrooms, someone pa.s.sed out on the back patio, all the doors open, two kegs in the kitchen, and a bucket of punch so alcoholic it smelled like it might blind you. People were dancing wildly in the living room, and all the furniture was pushed up against the walls, everyone crawling over it like animals. The rug was black with grime from people's shoes and spilled drinks. But if you looked under the "girls gone wild" surface, which was easy for me to do since I was sober and actually below everyone who formed that surface, you could see that it was just a bunch of insecure teenagers guzzling alcohol and Kool-Aid from Dixie cups and freaking out about how "stressed out" they were about SATs and APs and rehearsals and auditions and resume-padding efforts.

I'm lucky this way; being a dwarf may have ruined my life, but it used to mean I had a good shot at getting into a great college because my Little Sarah Hottentot essay was so potentially prizewinning. I had already used part of it to get my full ride to Darcy, and when I showed it to my AP English teacher, Ms. Doman, even though it wasn't for her cla.s.s and wasn't related in any way-I just wanted to show off -she said it was the best high school writing she'd ever seen and if it wasn't so original, she'd accuse me of plagiarizing some n.o.bel Prizewinning author. So that was a good thing that happened at Darcy. Ms. Doman was a good thing.

Kids are always so "stressed out," even when nothing stressful is happening. My brothers, Chad and Sam, are careful about this; they know that complaining about their glistening lives in front of a dwarf is unseemly, so they almost never fuss. They're also not bratty and ent.i.tled, the way most kids are, especially at Darcy, maybe because the culture of a school that's anything other than a regular "feeder" encourages colic. You're so privileged to be there, you feel like you have to complain about something just so you don't have to think constantly about how lucky you are. It's a kind of overcompensation, I think, when I'm feeling generous about it. Or, when I'm not, I think maybe it's just the basic requirement of being a teenager, feeling like you get to have everything be perfect all the time, and when you have an algebra test or a hangnail, the rest of the war-torn, poverty-stricken, deformed world ought to turn its attention to you.

When I first walked in at Chessie's, I felt less of the simultaneous buzz and chill than I had imagined I would inspire. Most people were already drunk, and maybe everyone had heard of me already. The ones who were in- the- dwarf-know looked down nonchalantly. One or two who hadn't been forewarned let a bit of shock flash across their faces. But in most cases, I was impressed with how fast even the most uncouth regained their composure.

These included three guys in the corner, one with puffy muscles that made him look like an inflatable parade float. The others were a sleek swimmer and a curly-haired fatty, all standing together in a corner laughing horribly loud, although whether at me, I couldn't have said. It did feel like they were looking over at me when they started laughing, but I try not to be paranoid. Reality is bad enough-why exaggerate it? Now I know those three were seniors, Chris Arpent, Alan Sarft, and Tim Malone. Elizabeth Wood, an anorexic junior with dark curly hair who had been cast as Juliet her soph.o.m.ore year, came over to their group carrying three beers for them, two of them clutched in one hand. She handed the single-clawed one to Chris Arpent, grinning up at him before splas.h.i.+ng Alan's and Tim's beers onto them.

"Oops! Sorry!" she sang out in a totally ridiculous musical theater way, and then snuggled up to Chris, the muscled action figure in a white b.u.t.ton-down s.h.i.+rt and jeans. He had short dark hair and light skin, and his eyes had a bruised, artistic look that some girls, apparently including Elizabeth Wood, really liked. She had huge b.o.o.bs, and I wondered how that was possible when she probably weighed less than a hundred pounds. Had she had a b.o.o.b job already? I once read that it's not a good idea to have cosmetic surgery when you're still growing, but I know for sure that some of the girls at D'Arts did it. I stared at Elizabeth Wood for a while. Her face was really pretty for someone so thin; she had a miniature mouth, like she was a kewpie doll, and her eyes were far apart from each other, almost on the sides of her head, which gave her an anime quality. In fact, she was incredible-looking. I had heard that she was the girl in the fall production of Fool for Love, the one that started rehearsing in summer. Everyone knew she was going to be famous. I wondered if her parents were worried, and what it felt like to be her, scary or hungry or maybe driven and fabulous. I couldn't tell. She wore red s.h.i.+ny patent leather heels with jeans, and they were supposed to make her look like a supermodel, but they only kind of did-they also made her look like a six-year-old playing dress-up, or Dorothy, wearing the ruby slippers after she crushes the witch with her house.

On the other side of the room, a crowd of people was gathered around a table, flipping quarters into gla.s.ses, drinking and shrieking. I saw Ginger among them, and she saw me. She waved, stood up, and made her way over.

"Judy! I'm glad you came! You want a beer?" she shouted, and then, not waiting for an answer, took off for the keg, leaving me alone again.

I looked around the room, trying to find a corner I could tuck into, and then settled on the bathroom, where I planned to lock myself in and breathe deeply. By the time I had squeezed through the throngs of legs, I reached up, grabbed the k.n.o.b, and shoved the door open without knocking. And that's how I met Kyle Malanack. Peeing.

He turned.

"Oh my G.o.d," I said, "I'm sorry-I didn't-"He readjusted his eyes from where he'd expected me to be to where I was, and smiled.

He made no move to yank at his zipper, and didn't seem alarmed that I'd barged in, seen him peeing, or turned out to be the size of a Cabbage Patch Kid.

"Come on in," he said, grinning and zipping calmly, slowly. "Here. I'll even wash my hands before we shake."

He turned on the sink while I continued to stand in the open crack of the door, mysteriously unable to move. It was like being electrocuted to the floor. I know that's melodramatic, but it's true, too.

He dried his hands off on a towel and held one down to me in a totally casual way. "I'm Kyle," he said.