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The sign advertises another Superman movie. I read it on the subway as I try to block out two singing kids sitting behind me. Their voices push through the stale, over-breathed air into my ear, an organ unfortunately designed to receive the most sound possible. I want to duct tape their mouths shut, not only them, but their mother as well, who is laughingly telling another woman that they are preparing to audition for a musical.
They exit a stop later and I remember what it was like to be that age, able to sing out loud. When I was ten years old, a friend of mine, whose father was an opera singer and mother a manager for the Philharmonic, told me that I should never sing in public because my voice was ghastly.
I get off a stop later. I am going to my apartment, with its collection of Superman stuff. Most of my Superman stuff was once hers, “her” being my friend Michelle, who had hair that was parted a little off-center every day. It was a rich walnut color that smelled like autumn. She wore fishnets and stripes, and had a crush on a comic book character: Superman. This only made her more eccentric.
“He’s perfect,” she had often claimed. “Sweet, holds a steady job, brave, looks good in tights,” as if guys like that actually existed. I scoffed at her. Told her he was a cosmic geek who needed to pick up on the principles of color use in fashion.
I personally preferred Batman. Not only was he mysterious, but he had gadgets and a story that was based on Earth. Superman was her favorite. What I saw as a cross between unbelievable and uninteresting, she was fixated on. A guy from another planet comes here and, because of the sun, has superpowers. But he chooses to be a reporter and do a primary-colors spandex-tights thing in his spare time. Why not exploit the powers for money or sex, like most other guys would? I know I would have used them to take care Michelle.
I know I’ll see the movie anyway. I owe her memory that much. One corner of my room is already an outburst proclaiming, “Supes Was Here.” My collection includes action figures and shirts; mugs and videos; behind-the-scenes footage; and signed photographs of Dean Cain and Christopher Reeves, before the accident.
When Michelle got crazy new friends, she shoved all these things into a box and put it in the corner of her closet. She cut her beautiful hair and dyed it purple. She wore thick glasses and bindhis, bright ruby spots on her forehead like she was bleeding. Her calls cut off over Christmas when she went skiing with her new friends, and never really resumed. I was a remnant of her “old image,” I once overheard her saying. When her friends introduced to Aaron, she stopped talking to me altogether, even in the halls.
Aaron was her first real boyfriend. He wore baggy camouflage pants with safety pins in them and shirts generally promoting animal rights or asking one to free Tibet. He had dreadlocks and wrote song lyrics in a small Five-Star spiral notebook. He sat behind me in US History and bit his nails. I was surprised to find that Michelle had become his girlfriend. I never got a chance to ask about it; I just watched them in the halls together, cuddling in their alternative clothes. According to a mutual friend, the parents of each didn’t approve of the other, and they were waiting for a time when their parents weren’t home in order to sneak a date. Michelle’s parents were upright bourgeois who expected her to always make honor roll and be the star of the play. I could understand why they didn’t want them seeing each other; he didn’t seem to have the bright future they imagined for their daughter. They complained about this to my parents at PTA meetings. I didn’t think he was anything special, either; but maybe that was just because I didn’t know him. I once tried to ask Liz, a mutual friend, about Aaron, because I was scared that their relationship wasn’t all the smiles I had seen in the hallway. “He seems okay to me,” she said simply, shrugging.
“He’s not some evil jerk who’s going to mess around with her?”
“I don’t think so,” she replied, screwing up her face. “He doesn’t really say a lot. But I think he’s an all right guy.”
In the subway, I pick my way between people and travel up the gum-mottled steps to ground level. Around me, everyone is wearing neutral blacks and grays. I feel like a peacock in a sea of pigeons, even have the height to prove it. I call for a taxi and think about the night Michelle left.
It was a hot, humid Saturday night in Georgian mid-April when they had their first date. I was lying on my bed in a bikini with the fan turned towards me. The doorbell rang and I was the only one home because my parents were at a PTA meeting. I pulled on a light pink nightgown and crept down the stairs, aware of the possibilities of what could be at my front door.
Looking in the watery glass to the side of the doorway was Michelle. We stood there, looking at each other, two girls who hadn’t really talked since Christmas break. I hesitantly pushed the door open, and she rushed past me, slamming the door behind me.
“Michelle?” I whispered. “Did you go on your date? How was it?”
Her face shone like rusted metal, gleaming in patches. She walked up the stairs in a flurry of dyed hair and smudged makeup. I slowly followed behind her, unsure of what to do. I wanted to grasp her shirt and ask her what she was doing in my house. I wanted to tell her she should have called first, called at all. Above all, I wanted to hug her; but I did none of these things. I stayed quiet.
When I reached my room, she was running my shower. I could hear the rumbling of the pipes through the walls before I even got to my room. Her clothes were strewn on my floor and the bathroom door was wide open. My shower curtain was a pink translucent deal and I could see her inside.
“What’s going on?” I yelled at her from the doorway, giving space to a girl who I used to think would be my best friend forever. She didn’t respond. I slammed my hand into the doorframe and glared her hurriedly scrubbing herself off. “Well? What?” I repeated.
I went downstairs to get myself a soda. When I returned, the door was locked. “What are you doing in there?” I asked, profusely banging at the door. “Open up.”
“Listen, please, just be quiet for a minute,” she replied. Her voice was cracking like an old radio.
“Explain what’s going on. Come out.” When I didn’t hear anything, I added, “Please?”
“I just want to be alone right now.”
“What? So you’re allowed to use me as a bathmat whenever you think it’s convenient?” I was exasperated. I could feel myself getting hotter.
She didn’t respond. I took off my nightgown, settled onto my bed, and watched the doorway.
Although I didn’t mean to, I drifted off and slept until one o’clock the following afternoon. I would have slept longer if it were not for my parents chatting loudly in the hallway about the meeting. Sitting up with a start, I registered that I was in a bikini and clothes that weren’t mine were scattered on the floor. The bathroom door was open.
I pulled on my nightgown again and raced out of my room. In the hallway, I asked my mother whether or not she had seen Michelle.
“Did you two have a sleepover, honey? I thought you were having a row,” my mom asked.
“Did you see her?”
“Your father and I were eating breakfast when she came down in clothes that looked like the ones you and I bought together last weekend. I asked her if she’d had a nice evening with you and she nodded, thanked me, and left. She’s such a dear, really; you two should spend more time together.”
“What clothes of mine? Which ones?”
“Blue jeans and the tank top with a butterfly on it.”
I turned around and raced up to my room. Yes, she had taken my clothes. She had left hers. I slowly walked down the stairs and out the door. Furious for reasons I could not pinpoint, I began to jog around the block, sprinting then slowly losing stamina. Outside my house was Liz, holding a newspaper. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was wrong about Aaron.”
The newspaper said that, in the outer reaches of my school district, a woman had heard a scream, and reported it to the police. They arrived on the scene approximately seventeen minutes later to find someone with purple hair running out of a house and into the darkened yard. Inside the house, a teenage boy in nothing but boxers was smoking a bowl of cheap marijuana. He was put up in the county jail for drug charges with some exorbitant bail, the amount of which I can’t remember now. He kept asking for his notebook.
When Michelle’s parents called everyone in her address book, including us, all we could tell them was that she was wearing my clothes. They called the police to tell them that she was the one fleeing, and she was declared missing. I went to Wal-Mart and saw her on posters. The police thought she had been raped because of the blood on Aaron’s sheets.
When we were younger, I’d once said to Michelle, “You’re going to have sex first because you have bigger boobs.” She’d replied, “You’ve got a thinner body.” We’d looked really alike, and apart from our hair color, these were our only differences. “Maybe because I’m older,” I said. “Maybe because my parents are never home,” she said. We laughed and said whichever went first would not spare a single detail.
In my apartment, I turn on the radio. I scamper into the prototypical little black dress and high heels. I am single, reduced to the party scene, the dull guys and the people who think they’re witty, important, or intelligent. Usually the best parts of these evenings are the parts I can’t remember. I walk to a pub down the block so I won’t have to do anything complicated while drunk to find my bed again.
I walk in and gracelessly drop into a seat near the back of the bar. Somewhere between three and four shots, I begin slow dancing with a guy I’ve never seen before. He is unattractive, with huge ears and acne, but polite. I realize I can never love this man, and wonder whom I am kidding. I hate doing this. Excusing myself, I settle onto a stool. A waitress asks me if I am all right and hands me a glass of water. I glance at her and smile.
She has red hair and a bindhi on her forehead.
“You,” I whisper, pointing at her awkwardly.
She looks at me unblinkingly. Her little nametag claims that she is “Rose.”
I twitter. My hand goes for her shoulder but lands on her breast. She steps backward, lifting my hand. I fear that I may be drunker than I realize.
“I missed you, you know,” I say. My mouth tastes salty and I think I’m crying. But she has a bindhi and blonde roots and LA is the city where I started over, too.
“I’ll get someone for you, hold on,” she says with concern as she turns to walk away from me.
I want to follow her but she is too fast. I know she will not come back. I know it’s not really her, because the real her turned up in the river a week later. She had been wearing my clothes.
Her friends cried at her funeral. They came as a clique and didn’t even have to change their clothes from their usual black to fit right in. I sat behind them, holding my mother’s hand, squeezing it until I feared I was hurting her. I was filled with fury then, at them, who stole her and didn’t watch out for her. I was angry because they must have known that Aaron wasn’t the poet he seemed. I hadn’t had the power to help her.