Janey and Lizzy

Janey and Lizzy

“The green dress symbolizes youth, innocence, and uncorrupted purity; he sees Sunny as a human with emotional depth. Her green dress reflects his desire to see her as inexperienced and untouched.”

“Thank you, Lane, that’s very astute,” Mr. Entwisle replied.

Lizzy and I made eye contact across the room, and Lizzy nodded her head at her laptop. She was sitting next to Lane, and looking at his screen. I shifted my tabs from Google Docs to Snapchat for Web, first checking to make sure my seat on the right side of the room made my screen invisible to Mr. Entwisle.

I opened up my chats with Lizzy:

Lizzy Holmes

“Lmao Lane actively just read off of sparknotes. Entwisle has dementia.”

“Bruh idk which one of them is more stupid tho”

Lane and I had known each other since middle school. We had made out in the playground next to the froyo place our middle-school friend group had made their parents drive them too on a Saturday night in the 8th grade. When we walked back to the froyo shop together, I paced quickly and crossed my arms. 

When high school started Lane became better than me: he wasn’t particularly attractive, but he was on the football team and ran around carrying a watermelon like a trophy as his “hazing.” We were in the same 17-person group chat, but there were “differentiators in high school” that I had explained to my mother when she asked why I was spending less time with some of my middle school friends. I liked that I was weird (I wanted to be the kind of person that people called interesting), but I hated that people had started calling me it.

The conversation had fallen flat and no one was participating. Molly Stevens was online shopping next to me, and texting Sammy G. “English is so boring links after?” in a group chat called “hotties of freshman year” that I was not in. 

“Jane, do you have something you’d like to add?”

Entwisle usually reserved cold calling for the kids that never spoke, so I turned bright red.

“Uhhh, yeah. I mean that might be true of the dress, I was more struck with how he talks about his virginity and wanting to lose it and justifying why he hasn’t on page 121 and then goes on to ask her to talk instead of actually doing it with her.”

“Let’s head there, good point. Try to focus on Catcher right now, class.”

I turned back to my laptop and saw a new chat from Lane Landauer. 

Lane Landauer

“Dork.”

“I did the reading!”

I swiped out and tried to pay attention. 

“And slut”

“What?”

“Bc u brought up virginity lmao”

“LOL”

“I’ll see u Saturday”

“Like at the dance?”

Was he talking about the winter formal? 

Stupid Entwisle asked him a question about the book and he stopped looking at his screen. Why would Lane be asking me? I was a semi-popular pariah now. Maybe he didn’t care? Everyone always said boys are less dramatic than girls, he probably couldn’t perceive our girl-group social strata as acutely as we all did. 

After homecoming, everyone found out about how Lane and Sofia W. “tried to bone, but it didn’t work right.” I started seeking Lane out. Sometimes we spoke but never in person, unless it was at one of the all-school parties that happened once a week or so. Then, we would sneak off into someone’s parents bedroom or a bathroom or a bush. One time Lane snapchatted me to come to the “transgender bathroom plsssssss” during lunch. He told me no one would find out because all of his friends were in detention. It was three months into the year, so we had talked quite a bit for people who only spoke at school when we had both ended up in the same group of students eating lunch or chatting after class; we were having less and less overlap, though. 

Across the room, Lizzy traced the edge of her computer with one finger, looking as though she had somewhere more important to be. Was I about to be asked to a dance for the first time? My mother would be so excited to post us on facebook. What would Lizzy think if I went with him? 

If it even happened at all. Lane was back on his laptop but hadn’t responded. Maybe he hadn’t seen it. I felt like I had swallowed a brick and it was sitting in my stomach; like I was on the frog-hopper at my country’s state fair and I was anticipating the great big fall. 

Lane Landauer

“def at the after? Go on ur phone and don’t tell anyone”

I opened the picture he sent under the desk and immediately turned it off.

Fuck you fuck you fuck you. The ride had released me downward, only this fall was muted, heavy, and slow, like I was melting into the linoleum tiles below me. 

The bell rang. Lizzy and I went up to the turf on top of the parking garage to smoke weed before field hockey practice.  

“I hate that class,” I said. 

“No you don’t, you love it.”

“I know, I got ahead on the book and finished it.”

“Too bad everyone in that class is illiterate. You should read A Perfect Day for Bananafish if you like Salinger."

I pushed Lizzy’s shoulder, gently, laughing: “You’re as pretentious as they say you are. If I have to read one more book about how childhood ends and everyone is fake, I'm going to be the one to go to the mental hospital.” She shoved me back and countered, “at least I can read.”

She pulled me back in toward her.

“Can I tell you something, Liz?”

“Yeah”

“Sometimes I snapchat Lane”

“Ew”

“He sent me a picture of his you-know what”

“What does it look like?”

“A banana”

“A perfect day for bananadick”

We laughed and coughed.

She shoved me again, but I tripped over a ridge in the turf and we both tumbled to the ground, laughing.