and Ned will go to that school over there, whatever it is… you know.”
“Miwok Butte?! Oh, GOD! I can’t go to MIWOK!!”
“Oh, come on, it’s just a high school. How bad can it be? Maybe next year, we’ll get that New York thing together.”
“I hate you,” Liza curdled, looking down at the dark, polluted trench her mother was coiled in and having a vivid idea of exactly how bad high school could be.
“Yep, I suppose you do.”
Liza felt a rising disgust; the smell of unlaundered nylon, old cigarette butts, and beer-marinated carpet made her suddenly gag. She ran from the room.
“Close the door,” Peppy grunted from her floor-nest.
It slammed, leaving Peppy in the dark.
A hole the size of a garbage-can lid had just been blown out, below Liza’s rib cage. She wandered zombielike onto to the abandoned stage. The late, cold afternoon gloom tinted the mess a dead blue, making it look even filthier. Liza shivered. An intact can of generic beer lay on its side near a pile of waterlogged and mildewing curtains; Liza opened it and took a sip. It was warmer than she was.
“Liza?”
Ned’s voice came from what used to be the lighting booth.
“What?!” She expected her brother to hassle her about the beer.
“You’re perfect there. Stand up.”
“Why?”
“Just stand up!”
“Why?” Liza rose to her feet. “Are you going to throw something at me?”
She heard a pouf and found herself in a blinding flood of sharp, greenish white light, the color of glow-in-the-dark bones on Halloween skeletons.
“Ha HAH!” cackled Ned, delighted.
“Whooo!” Ike’s voice came from the back of the theatre. “Man! Is that beautiful! It’s looks like she’s standing on the moon!”
“Liza! Do you know what you’re standing in?” Ned was tickled. “A light?”
“A limelight. A real one… I made it! You look amazing!”
“Sing something!” enthused Ike.
(It should be explained that Ned did make an actual limelight, with Ike’s help and resources pilfered from the community college glass-blowing and welding departments, based on this diagram of “Mr. Goldsworthy Gurney’s Blow-Pipe,” from The Boy’s Playbook of Science by J. H. Pepper, London 1860:
Ned was able to replace the “bladder of mixed gases” with a decent oxygen/hydrogen welding torch; for the lime itself, which in the olden days was constructed like a spool, Ned covertly chiseled a small chunk of limestone off of the staircase to the community college admissions office. From there, all that was needed was to empty the scorched bulb out of one of the blown-out PAR cans, fashion a wire holding-device for the limestone, and shoot the oxy-hydrogen flame through the can at the rock-chunk. “The hardest part,” Ned would say later, “was stealing the gas tanks from the school”)
Liza’s pale face squinted. She looked at her arms; it was like being a ghost, or in a black-and-white movie.
“You’ve only got about one minute to do your thing,” said Ned. “Yeah, make the most of it!” yelled Ike. “You’re probably the only person you’ll ever know who’s been in actual limelight!”
As if the glare had bleached out all of the color contrast inside her skull, Liza’s mind drew a complete and total blank, like the joke about the “drawing” on a white sheet of paper— it’s a polar bear, standing next to an igloo, in a snowstorm, eating marshmallows. See?
(A Teen Sex Farce)
In whych Liza suffers the Paynes of an Horriable Hiye School Experience, sacrifices all Virtue on the Tyre of her Selfe-Esteeme, and is Generally Humiliayted for being A Pathological Liare and Slut Alsoe.
BY THE BEGINNING OF SEPTEMBER 1981, Liza was firmly embittered. She had been running into ex-Theatre Camp girls who would ask, with mendacious semisweetness: “You mean you’re not going to the High School of Performing Arts after all?”
“My agency didn’t want me to leave town,” Liza lied, inspecting her chipped glitter nail polish. “I have too many commercial opportunities coming up.”
“Oh really? What kind of ‘opportunities'?”
“You’ll see,” Liza snarled.
What Liza hadn’t counted on was her level of celebrity even before the first day of school. Her reputation preceded her as the daughter of Peppy, who was by now a Town Character. Girls she’d never seen before walked up to Liza in the 7-Eleven to ask, “Your mom is that lady with the wigs who wears, like, those really low-cut pink pantsuits, right? You live in the scary old firehouse, right?”
You will all pay. I am Liza Normal. I am more talented than you. When I am famous, you will come to beg autographs from me, and I will remember this day. My bodyguards will drag you into the alley where I will look at you coldly, and spit.
“… And you did that really weird, gay version of, like, Sound of Music, right? And then your house burned down?”
“It didn’t burn down.” Liza would grab her Slurpee off of the counter and stomp out, giggles searing her back.
She was not greeting the prospect of four years at Miwok Butte High School with unbridled enthusiasm. Ned was equally reluctant. He dreaded the idea of having to rely on the maturity of his classmates to be treated decently—the odds were that they would be just as assholic and insensitive as the other local teens. Peppy’s game plan of having Ned conceal his freak eyeball by never taking off his sunglasses probably wouldn’t fly too well in the classroom proper.
“We may be screwed,” Ned said glumly.
“Every man for himself,” said Liza.
Cloaked in these perilous doubts and presullied reputations, Ned and Liza stepped out of the filthy Honda and stood before the flagpole of Miwok Butte for the first time, amid the squall of voices and faces that would be their peers. Cliques had already been established among those who had endured local grade schools together; drifts of teen girls jounced by in matching tightnesses of pants, their hair identically tormented. Elite jock-boys flaunted the latest incarnation of pricey running shoes. Rich kids of the nonathletic variety wore the signifiers of the Ivy League: khaki pants, penny loafers, plaid scarves, French ski-sunglasses. Heavy-metal burnouts displayed long-handled plastic combs in corduroy back pockets.
