Read Online What She Saw... by Lucinda Rosenfeld - Free Book Online Page B

drivers and cocktail waitresses, the children of whom seemingly aspired to little more than ridiculing those members of Whitehead Middle (Phoebe included) who showed enthusiasm for activities other than getting high, building bonfires, attending rock concerts, purchasing beverages at Beverage Barn, and sitting around doing nothing.
    Moreover, as the Whitehead kids began to follow the lead of the so-called Riverskank, Phoebe found herself ostracized by her oldest friends, with her no-show at the Tom Petty concert at the Brendan Byrne Arena marking the beginning of her fall from social grace. Why didn’t she attend? 1) She had no particular affection for Tom Petty, never mind the Heartbreakers; 2) She’d just as soon have been home rewallpapering her dollhouse; 3) She imagined herself getting lost in a crowd of jostling teens only to wind up keeping disappeared Mafioso Jimmy Hoffa company in one of the Meadowlands’ infamous egg-carton and Dorito-bag alps; 4) She couldn’t imagine Roberta and Leonard ever allowing her to attend a rock concert. But she could have asked. She didn’t bother. That must have been obvious to her friends. Not a week later, at the Whitehead High Talent Show, while a heavyset girl named Naomi sang “The Body Electric,” Brenda Cuddihy, her lashes caked with electric-blue mascara, made it all too clear that she was embarrassed to be seen sitting next to Phoebe on the bleachers. She placed her matching blue ski parka between them. When Phoebe tried to move it aside, Brenda instructed her to “keep your dirty paws off.”
    Shortly thereafter, Phoebe was voted “Weirdest Dresser in the Eighth Grade” for purposes of the Middle School yearbook—was made to pose in a Miss America–style sash reading “Weirdest Dresser in the Eighth Grade, Phoebe Fine,” so the yearbook photographer could immortalize the insult, and all, presumably, because she’d once donned an embroidered smock top Leonard had brought her back from Guatemala City, site of the Trenton Philharmonic’s Christmas ’83 tour. Here she’d thought its decorative needlework would call attention away from the lack of development underneath. Instead, her classmates taunted her with cries of “peasant” and “hippie.” Her only comfort was the thought that it could have been worse; she could have been the new girl, Veronica Dunleavy, who eventually gave up protesting and starting answering to the competing nicknames “V.D.” and “Dog.”
    Even worse, she could have been Dolores Rodriguez, a certain oversized Riverskank who favored a certain brand of scoop-neck black leotard top that made it all too easy for Patrick McPatrick, Jr., to reach down her back and unhook her bra, time after time. Dolores’s protests were loud and impassioned. Once she even slapped her assailant across the face. But it was pretty clear she liked the attention. It was the opinion of her classmates that she liked the attention a little too much. They called her a slut and a whore. They made her cry on the bus back to Riverbank. Not long afterward, she surprised them all by overdosing on her mother’s sleeping pills a week after her mother went after her father with a carving knife implicated in the sudden death of a certain rooster living in their backyard—or so it was said.
    It was also said that Dolores Rodriguez had had her stomach pumped—Phoebe imagined an oil-rig-sized contraption siphoning the liquid content of Dolores’s stomach into an Alaska-bound pipeline—while Dolores’s mother had been sent to a loony bin. Needless to say, Dolores’s suicide attempt was an exciting thing to contemplate. Far more exciting, for example, than the anorexia nervosa that landed little Deirdre Sherman in the hospital attached to an I.V. dripping pink gunk into her arm while she slept. And upon her return to Whitehead Middle, Dolores was greeted with