Weird Girl

By KP Vogell

It was a Friday night at Borders, almost closing time, and the weird girl was stalking. She prowled the sale bin, snatching up a DVD and holding it near the flap of her messenger bag, as if titillating herself with the idea of shoplifting. In the CD section, an underfed teenaged boy, the pretty, pale kind, stood at one of the listening stations with the headphones on and his mouth half open. The weird girl crept slowly through the adjacent aisle until she reached the station directly behind him. She tugged the oversized headphones over her ears and grabbed a CD at random to scan. Smacking her gum, she stared so hard at the back of his head that she went a little cross-eyed.

            The weird girl was too big. She got called all the names: fatso, lardass, butterball. Gordita supreme with extra sour cream. On top of that, she was too tall. Only an already too-tall girl would wear combat boots that buckled forty times on the way up to her knees. Her stomach fat and waist fat and back fat blimped over the waistband of her low-slung jeans.

            She was glorious.

            Her pink baby-T gushed “90% Angel” in sparkly red script. The tail of the “g” in “Angel” looped back on itself and ended in a devilish point near her left nipple. Her long hair, wet and in two uneven pigtails, stuck to the shirt in front and behind, leaving darker pink spots. Though too long and too thin, her hair was a pretty, complicated color. Wormappley gold. Microbrewed Latvian pumpkin ale. Ancient Mycenaean shieldcopper,

            She was a white girl and her face was spotted with freckles and the red remains of high school acne. Her mouth bristled with stainless steel, rubber bands, and tartar; her eyebrows, it could not be disputed, were one entity rather than two. Her lower jaw jutted as she sat, reading, in one of the store’s cushy black leather armchairs, the strap of her messenger bag dragging between her breasts, her baby-t bunching over her stomach, still smacking her gum like there was no tomorrow.

            She was the creature to whom we gravitated as we somnambulated around Borders, re-shelving books, misspelling phone orders, giving the wrong amount of change. We were like stingless baby jellyfish. We would have starved if the ocean didn’t breathe our food through us with the utmost watery gentleness. We were like those sad whiskery plants the mer-people get turned into in The Little Mermaid, calling out for help in high, unsubstantial voices, feebly waving our raggedy planty arms. We floated on, from Lesbian Studies to Particle Physics, wearing our uniforms of dyed-black hair, facial piercings, and whiteboy flaccidity, following the sun of her. She was our Ariel. She made us feel alive.

 ~

The only whiteboy among us who was not flaccid had been hired for that very reason. He was, we snickered to each other, our manager Lisa’s I-haven’t-worked-in-food-services-for-three-years present to herself. His name was Freddy Mae Mowry. Twenty-three years. 9.75 inches.

            Lisa, who had just tipped into her thirties, had rescued Freddy Mae from a tight spot after he had lost his job as assistant manager of the Quiznos on Fairisle Loop, where Lisa herself had worked—and writhed and moaned—under him. Freddy had screwed his way through most the franchise’s languishing female thirtysomethings with relative success when he made a fatal misstep—he screwed the Lifer.

            As assistant manager, you inherited the responsibility of picking up the Lifer, who had never learned how to drive, from her apartment every morning and taking her to work. You inherited the responsibility of, at the annual bowling night, naming the Lifer, for the eighteenth year in a row, Most Valuable Employee, thus ensuring that she did not make some drunken attempt on her own life by sticking a spatula coated with rat poison down her throat. And when she did make the attempt, say, while you were in the bathroom cleaning your dick after you had idiotically decided to screw her—for the Lifer is easy and has surprisingly lovely legs—you did not scream at the sight of her lying unconscious in a puddle of your cum and her vomit, jump into your truck, and drive off, leaving her for dead. (Happily, she survived.) That got you fired.

            Newly out of work, Freddy had considered working in the oilfields with his older brother, Marty. Marty made bank and wow, was the health insurance terrific. But one night, at the bar of the newly-opened California Pizza Kitchen, Freddy ran into Lisa, who was celebrating her promotion to Borders manager. The aqua sequins on her tube top scattered the low light, casting everything with a bluish sheen that looked to Freddy like hope. He didn’t want to work in the oilfields. He wanted to memorize the top 10 best-selling mysteries of the week and provide impeccable customer service. Lisa, in turn, missed those heated moments in the back room at Quiznos. At Borders she could have Freddy right where she wanted him, captive in a fishbowl of eunuchs.

            We were shocked and offended by Lisa’s callous introduction of Freddy Mae into our fragile sea-monkey ecosystem. He wasn’t one of us. Sure, he dyed his hair, like us, and had tattoos, like us, but he was from the opposite end of the dyed-hair-and-tattoos spectrum. While he painted his spikes with blue dye, we, pretending we had some mysterious Latin blood in us, dyed our hair black and kept it limp and straight, with a side part and greasy bangs over the eyes. As for tattoos, he had fake tribal patterns on his shoulders and his last name, Mowry, tattooed in huge Old English capitals across his belly, which was surprisingly doughy, given that the rest of him was so hard and mean. We snickered because, the first time he showed us the tattoo, we thought it said “MORON.” We had stars on our forearms, flourishes on our hips, bass and treble clefs on our shoulder blades. He gave us so much crap about the stars that we never rolled up our sleeves to show him the broken-hearted robots that brooded on our flabby biceps, even though the inking had really hurt, probably just as much as MORON had.

            Right away, like he owned the place, Freddy Mae wanted to take Death Cab off the store speakers and play Blink-182. His favorite noun and adjective was fag. He mooched cigarettes relentlessly, then harassed us because they were American Spirits.

            “Faggot-ass cigarettes,” he would mutter on smoke breaks, the cigarette crushed between his shuffled front teeth. “How am I gonna get enough goddamn nicotine?” As he puffed, he leaned back against the store window next to a cart of clearance coffee-table art books. His brows furrowed in a sad thoughtful way as he surveyed the parking lot, as if he were a rancher who, leaning against his hacienda and looking out over his holdings, didn’t like what he saw.

            “You don’t know what it’s like,” he continued, squinting into the dusk. We wondered what he was referring to. Screwing a rat-poison spatula lady? Having MORON tattooed across your stomach in letters four inches tall? He spat and said, “Man.” Then he turned to us, his trusty, if effeminate, cowpokes. Or cows. We were huddled around in a clump, pigeon-toed feet snug in checkered and argyle slip-on Vans, sweating silently in our soft evergreen and maroon and navy sweaters. We pulled on our faggy cigarettes with trepidation, cringing under his hillbilly-blue gaze. He said, “So any of you fags going to Ozzfest this year, or what?”

            When we complained to Lisa, she told us Freddy Mae was just sensitive. “You know, his ex-girlfriend, Lisa—yeah, her name was Lisa too—she really ripped him a new one,” she confided, gazing at him with fond pity as he slowly set about alphabetizing the New Age section. “Cheated on him and everything. He was so burnt. So you know what? I’m just not judging right now. I’m just living and letting live. Showing him how good a woman can be. You know he still has nightmares about her? Sometimes he talks in his sleep, says her name. Like just the other day I was trying to wake him up and he says, ‘Lisa, you goddamn whore, I wouldn’t touch you with a ten foot pole, unless it had some herpes on the end of it.’” Lisa sighed. “So much hurt, and so much healing to do.”

            Poor Freddy Mae. He was sensitive about his soft belly and his mixed-up teeth. And he was very sensitive about Otty Mowry, the uncle who helped raise him while Freddy Sr. was recovering from his drinking problems in Idaho and Momma Mowry was shacked up with a Mexican. Lisa said that Uncle Otty was the one who came up with the Mae of Freddy Mae.

            Our ears pricked up.

            “Otty, his uncle, he was, you know, well, gay,” Lisa said. She paused and looked at us all very seriously as if we were her second grade class and she was trying to teach us why a disgusting sea-urchin was one of God’s precious creatures. When none of us laughed or even cracked a smile, she continued, “That’s why he has all those homosexual tendencies.” (The fags among us threatened to explode.) “It was Otty’s strict upbringing that did it. Freddy’s clean, see. Likes being clean. Showers twice a day. You know what deodorant he uses? Well, Dove. He uses Dove. Works better and smells better than any man’s deodorant, he says to me.” One of us who couldn’t hold it any longer ran to answer a jangling phone. She glared at us and said, “Now, you know I’m just telling you because I want you to know where he’s coming from. I want you to make him feel comfortable here. He could use some nice friends like you boys. He’s just so sensitive, especially about his name. Mae West was Otty’s favorite actress.” She shook her head at the tragedy of it all. “If only Otty had been a little more normal, maybe Freddy would be Freddy Brad.”

            The next day she promoted our violently homophobic sea urchin to assistant manager, then bought him a brand new pair of white skate shoes to celebrate his unexpected good fortune.

            ~

We loved the weird girl because she was ugly, like us, but she didn’t give a shit about it. And we loved her because she had a life outside Borders. After Freddy Mae’s intrusion, it occurred to us that there were things we wanted to know about this girl. What kind of socks did she wear underneath the combat boots? What awful strength of spirit compelled her to chew gum nonstop, in spite of the complicated metal apparatus grasping each and every tooth? Did she still live at home with her parents, and, if she did, how and when did she masturbate?

            These were all questions close to our hearts. Hopeless of answering them, we paid attention. We stirred ourselves. We noticed.

            She came in on Wednesday and Thursday nights at eight. Fridays she didn’t come in until ten, just an hour before close. Henry Dickie, who worked in CDs, came back after two weeks of careful reconnaissance and made an announcement. On Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, between the hours of eight and eleven, he always found Six Ugly by Dir En Grey out of its designated spot.

            “What’s Dir En Grey?” we asked Henry Dickie.

            “J-Rock,” Dickie replied mysteriously. We nodded at each other.

            Later that week, we began to say things like, “Henry Dickie, he’s pretty cool.” We began to start sentences with, “Henry Dickie, our man in CDs, told me…”

            We snooped around the racks and discovered that Dir En Grey was a (not very good) sexually ambiguous glam-metal sextet from Japan who favored bloody wedding dresses and sharply angled purple bangs. We listened to all eleven tracks on Six Ugly, a name we figured referred to the members of the band. One of us even bought the CD, we noticed one night while taking inventory.

            “Come on, now, which of you bought the fag Japanese CD,” said Freddy Mae, who had begun to take an interest in our interest in the weird girl. “I know it’s one of you faggots. That fatass chick never buys nothing and no one else even listens to that crap.”

            None of us squealed, although we suspected Henry Dickie. Normally we would have jumped at the chance for a little excitement—maybe Freddy would round up his cousins for the shaming, and there would be beer in it for us—but Henry Dickie was no longer just that scrawny blond theater techie who suffered from chronic pinkeye and stank vaguely of old grilled-cheese sandwiches. Henry Dickie was Our Man in CDs. We walked a little taller in our slip-on checkered Vans that day. Even our sweaters seemed to fit us better.

            We toyed with the idea of chumming up to the employees of the Krispy Kreme and the Chipotle across the parking lot, for a glimpse into secret animal ways: did she use the green or the red Tabasco, could she possibly like sour cream donuts. We never went on with this plot, however, due to our inborn disdain for food services people. Ralph Gutierrez, Our Man in Coffee, told us the weird girl liked to read in the café but almost never bought anything there. When she did, she ordered a small chai tea—which she mispronounced, stubbornly, “kai”—but never one of the sandwiches. (“Good old Ralph,” we began to say.) From this we deduced that she was cheap. From this, but not her occasional shoplifting of trinkets—a tiki party kit that could fit in the palm of your hand, a tin of fancy spiral paperclips. That was just boredom. Our kind of boredom. We noticed but didn’t interfere; more often than not, she held onto the item for an hour or two while walking around the store, then sneaked it onto a back shelf before leaving. Some say that Henry Dickie then whisked these objects to the men’s room and licked them, hungry for traces of goddess sweat. We shouldn’t put it past him.

            One night during close, we found out just how far behind we were in getting to know her. Close always took at least twice as long as it should have. By that hour of the day, few of us had any sort of consciousness left, and we had to be nudged constantly in the right direction, like pukey drunks being herded towards a toilet.

            Borders had big glass windows all along the front of it, so that during close we could look up and see how empty the parking lot was, how dark the sky was. The sight would have made us nauseous with longing if we’d had anything better to do, or perhaps a decent-looking girl or boy waiting for us to call them so they could come over, and fellate us, and read our new poem that said they smelled like our mothers’ lilac bushes. But we didn’t have that boy or girl, and so we were thankful for the work, for this bright glass box, for companionship and ISBN numbers and checkboxes.

            Ralph Gutierrez had just walked up with a pot of day-old coffee (at Freddy’s orders) and was pouring it out into paper cups like wartime rations. Our Men in the Trenches. Freddy turned to us and said, “Y’all know that lardass girl who’s in here all the time?”

            From the way Freddy said it, we knew he was in love with her, too. But we continued taking inventory. We were stoic. We ran our fingers along the spines of books, stared hard at the titles so we wouldn’t faint, waiting for what Freddy would say next.

            “I ran into her the other night. Talked to her a little bit.” We continued tallying, checking boxes. He paused. Those of us who could do so without being caught glanced at him surreptitiously and were stunned by the look on his face. It was the look of a dog that has just brought to your door a festering pigeon, or rat, or hind leg of a possum. He wanted to be Freddy Mae Mowry, Our Man in the Weird Girl.

            And then he came out with the prize: “I’m gonna take her to California Pizza Kitchen this Friday.”

            That’s when the truth of it all washed over Ralph Gutierrez, who was holding the coffee pot in front of him. He dropped the coffee, crushing Freddy’s toes and spraying his pristine skate shoes and the Borders carpet with that new Fair-Trade roast no one liked.

            Freddy howled and cursed and shoved Ralph in the chest, then took off his shoes and repaired to the bathroom to clean them. As he stalked off, he said, his voice snarling louder as he got farther away, “Just thought you might wanna know what she’s like since ya’ll are obsessed with her or some shit. Hey, maybe if you buy her a burrito from Chipotle she’ll be yer fag hag.”

            All of us looked at Ralph. We remembered that he had been the one to coin the weird girl’s Gordita Supreme with Extra Sour Cream epithet, one giggly still-high Saturday morning at the café. We subjected this epithet to a close reading—Gordita Supremes with Extra Sour Cream are a spiritual level of delicious. We decided it could mean nothing less than love.

            We ran to the café for paper towels to clean up the mess, but by the time we got back the stain was gone. Not a trace. That was some industrial carpet. Still, we hunched about sympathetically with the paper towels. Ralph just stood there, staring silently in the direction of the men’s room.

            “I’m going to kill him,” he said. You could tell he wanted to say it with quiet strength that gave you pause. We did not pause in our hunching. We felt for him, both for his derelict love and 135 pounds of helplessness. Besides, she had already chosen Freddy. Maybe, if we had all dropped our coffees in unison, we could have prevailed against the chemical engineers and materials engineers and plastics men who had invented this wondrous unstainable carpet, just for Borders. And then we would be able to say, from then on, “Here ye, here ye, gather round—this is where Freddy Mae Mowry told us he was going to date the weird girl. Observe—stain.”

            At that moment we subsumed our love for the weird girl in Ralph’s. Because Ralph Gutierrez was Our Man in Coffee. And let’s not forget his cute little sister, Lucy Gutierrez, who was in love with Bob Dylan. Sometimes she came into the store to visit Ralph. She went to the community college and wanted to be an independent filmmaker. We thought this was sweet, and we reasoned that if she could love Bob Dylan, who is at least as ugly as we are, maybe she could also love us. Maybe we could even help her with her screenplays. When we masturbated through our insomnia, we imagined bringing her coffee at her typewriter late at night. We liked to think about the brand of the typewriter. About buying the ink. We liked to think about trips to typewriter repair shops in hidden nooks of old European cities and the fragrance of heavy typewriter catalogs coming in the mail to our residences. But that night we did not think of her. We thought about the plastics men responsible for the unstainable carpet. Few of us were able to come.

—

About Author

KP Vogell is an artist, musician, writer, and Californian. KP’s fiction has been published in PANK, Digging Press, Cheat River Review, Evocations Review, The Good Life Review, and The Festival Review. Follow KP on Instagram @komischevogell and read more at their website here.