One Of Those People
You are sixteen. You are on your way to an exchange program in the south of France. You are taking a weekend in Paris before you and your fellow students go off to your separate houses. For the first time in your life, you are more than a phone call away from your parents. For the first time in your life, you are free. It feels as though you can be anyone, do anything. If you chose to run now, down the spiral staircase, out the hostel doors and into the cobblestone streets, if you chose to hop the metro and ride it to the furthest corners of the Earth, they would never find you. They wouldn’t even know where to look. The thought is thrilling and impossible at the same time.
Joanie is at the balcony window, smoking a cigarette she bought from the front desk in broad daylight. Your age means nothing here. There is a bottle of smuggled champagne cooling itself in your mini fridge. Nothing is off limits to you here. It gives you the feeling of having aged a decade over night. Joanie is not what you would call pretty. She is deathly pale, with red henna dyed hair, long tapered fingers that make her look like the silhouette of a skeleton against the smoke, against the backdrop of the night. She wears converse and totes an old fashioned polaroid camera on a strap around her neck. She is your basic hipster, some would say, but they’d be missing the point. You never saw the way she looked at me, you would want to tell them, smooth and calculating as a cat. Like she was always trying to find the best angle from which to tear you down.
Joanie is Lane’s friend, not yours, but you needed three to a room. Lane is jet-lagged, her back flat against the carpet. She watches the ceiling fan spin round in its rotations. Lane is a sea of freckles and fire hair. She is your best friend on good days, the only person in the world you can tolerate on the bad. A copy of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in Hugo’s original French, lays face down, pages splayed and spine cracking inches from her fingertips. It’s impossible to read when Joanie starts talking like this. There’s nothing in the world that could drown it out.
“So we just ended up having sex in the movie theater,” Joanie tells you, like she isn’t bragging, like this was an obligation that had to be fulfilled in the most inconvenient way. She is dating a RisD student, tall, pimply and altogether unremarkable. You want to make a comment about how at least it was dark, at least she didn’t have to see him naked, but you keep it to yourself. You don’t want to draw her attention.
“But you know how that is,” she says. “It’s just so difficult to find a place to do it.”
Lane nods in commiseration. She is dating a skinny junior who parts his hair down the middle. The cross country girls whisper that they know he must smoke weed in the parking lot during study hall. At the time, this is shocking information for you. You are young and naive. It makes him seem like a burnout, like the highest form of criminal. He might as well have been snorting lines off the computer lab keyboards. In time, you will become so much worse than this kid could ever be, but for the moment, you have seen so little of the world that it makes you judge Lane. It is driving a rift in your friendship. Your mother whispers that Lane is starting to hang out with a bad crowd, that maybe it is in your best interest to stay away from her. This has more to do with the fact that Lane’s mother has stopped hanging out with your mother recently because of your mother’s tendency to judge people. But you can’t see this yet.
Somewhere below your open window, a girl named Norma is purchasing dirt weed from a local. Her French is bad, but the man in the alley doesn’t seem to care. He is definitely overcharging her. The dime bag is definitely laced. You want to judge her, you want to say out loud what a mistake she is making, but part of you thinks, hey, at least she is living. At least she knows what she wants. Not like you, afraid to even open your mouth most days.
“I don’t know how it is,” you say, stupidly. Joanie locks her eyes on you like a target. You don’t have a boyfriend. You are not sleeping with anyone. You never have. You don’t really want to. The idea of having a naked dick that close to you actually seems terrifying, disgusting. For you, sex just seems like something you have to get through when you’re older so that you can have babies. You’re not sure you want the babies either, but you have been spending all your spare time at these appointments, so you guess that it’s expected of you regardless.
Joanie licks her lips, like a jungle cat going in for the kill. You know you have said something wrong. You twist the bed sheets between your fists. You stare at the tiny packets of Nutella on the dresser top, the sparkling outline of the Eiffel tower out the window, anything but her eyes. You think about how many other hands have run over these sheets. You think about how many other people have sat on this bed, in this room. You think about the honeymooners seeing nothing but perfection in each other. You think about adulterers dipping in for an hour at lunch on a weekday. You think about backpackers, college students, seeing nothing but everything ahead of them. You are none of those people. You are not loved, you are not free like that, not really.
“When are you going to have sex?” Joanie asks, as though there are a dozen guys lined up at the door right now, just begging for the chance, as though the moment is yours for the choosing. You run your fingers through your pixie cut so she can’t see your face bloom red. You don’t want her to see that she’s gotten to you.
“Like probably after I’m married,” you say. Because you are a good Catholic girl, because this is what you are supposed to say. She rolls her eyes, flicks her cigarette off into the night.
“Oh,” she says. “You’re one of those people.”
“Like maybe not until I’m married,” you say, backpedaling, because you’re not sure what one of those people is, but you are certain that it’s not something you want to be. “But like definitely not right now.
“I wasn’t talking about right now,” Joanie says, chuckling. “I mean, we’re not lesbians.”
Her eyes narrow, as she gestures to Lane and herself. She doesn’t include you in this generality. Your eyes flit to Lane, where she’s laying on the ground. You think maybe if she had said something, anything in that moment, things would have been different. The whole course of your life could have shifted on its axis. But instead, she just smiles lazily up at the ceiling, picks up her book again. She pretends not to hear. In later years, you won’t blame her. She will admit that she didn’t know why Joanie was being so cruel, she will admit that she didn’t know what to do about it. But in that moment, it feels as though you are drowning, it feels as though she saw your head bobbing beneath the surface and chose to look away.
“Neither am I,” you sputter, even though you don’t really know what you are. Joanie arches an eyebrow, as though she doesn’t believe you. She latches the window closed, pops a stick of gum in her mouth. The room is flush with the smell of secondhand nicotine and artificial watermelon. The conversation is over. She has nothing more she wants to discuss with you.
You all grow up. You leave this hostel room behind. You’re not sure if it’s a memory that anyone else totes around with them, but you find yourself carrying it like baggage, year in and year out. So little of what was talked about matters. Lane becomes a mom, you become a mom. You get married. Whether or not someone had sex in high school becomes an unimportant fact when you spend your days changing diapers. You realize that it never really mattered to begin with. Everyone ends up in such ordinary places, regardless of hookups in movie theaters or on parent’s beds. Joanie goes off to art school in the Big Apple. She fucks professors and grad students now. The two of you never really see her again. The world swallows Joanie whole and you let it. She becomes irrelevant as though she never existed at all. With the exception of her voice still playing in the back of your head. Oh, you’re one of those people.
You know nothing about me, you had wanted to say then. No one does.
You never really let anyone get that chance.
Aliza Dube is a Maine novelist/memoirist. She has a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maine at Farmington. Her first memoir, The Newly Tattooed’s Guide to Aftercare was published in the summer of 2020 (Running Wild Press). Her stories have appeared in publications such as The Sandy River Review, The Truth About the Fact, Prairie Margins, Water for Soup and many more. Aliza works as a children’s librarian when she is not writing. She is currently seeking a literary agent.