A Vignette of What it May Have Been Like to Attend Bethlehem Central Senior High School Liking Sweaters
By, Jake Routhier
Undone was playing from the stereo out on the porch, where her classmates surrounded four hockey players throwing ping-pong balls into cups. But Rachel was sitting by herself on the living room’s biggest plush couch. God what was she doing? She stared at herself in the large mirror, at the oversized yellow sweater that she had spent hours trying to find at the back-to-school sale, that she had spent the previous week ogling over on Pinterest, that she was sure was going to bring her better friends and a better boy and a better life.
She knew what she was doing here. The girl that she said was her best friend so many times and so loudly that she thought it might be true had asked her to come before chasing a boy into the woods and leaving Rachel to find her way to an empty couch in an empty room where she wouldn’t have to notice her classmates not noticing her.
She sipped on the Coors Light she had grabbed from the kitchen on her way in. Maybe she should just drink until she was fun. No. Fuck that. Drinking had never made her fun or the conversations more interesting, it had only made her standards lower and her head hurt the next morning. And fuck waiting in Stevie DiMartino’s parents’ living room for her friend to find her. Her sweater could barely keep up with her as she bee-lined towards the door.
As Rachel pulled out of the driveway she took a deep breath from the cold night’s air rushing in the open windows. She wasn’t sure if it was an inhalation of things to come or a sigh of relief to be out of such a stale environment, and as much as she wanted to believe the former she couldn’t help thinking it was the latter, which made her think of her own stuffy house that she was driving towards. Her mother would definitely ask her about her night, and she definitely didn’t want to engage with her mother over how her best friend didn’t seem to care about her feelings and the other kids largely ignored her. Her father would definitely not ask her about her night, because he was spending another week away for work and Rachel simultaneously liked that her father assumed that she was just like all of the other kids and hated that her father didn’t seem to notice the ways in which she wasn’t.
Rachel pulled off the main drag into a diner parking lot. She wasn’t hungry, but she also wasn’t ready to go home.
She noticed that some kids who went to her school were occupying two booths in the back, so she took the closest booth to the door and sat with her back facing them. She wasn’t in classes with those kids—they had all been placed into accelerated everything and Rachel struggled with even the simplest homework assignments—but because they had all grown up in the same suburban town she knew who they were, and was sure unexcited to see them here. God why can’t she just get away? Get away from the same routine where nothing ever changed and the same people walked right by her in the hallways and the living rooms and the strip malls. Wow. That was actually a really good impression of Ms. Lippincott, the school’s most hated dean. The one who looked and sounded like Gwyneth Paltrow. It must have been Rob. He really nailed it. But Rachel wouldn’t let herself smile. She got the joke, but she wasn’t part of it. So she turned the corners of her mouth down, and dealt with the internal struggle of letting herself get caught up in these near-strangers’ conversation about the students and the teachers she knew intimately and staying in her own head, trying to figure out who she was and whether she was happy about it.
When the waitress came to take her order, Rachel inadvertently pulled her big yellow sweater over her mouth. She hadn’t talked to anybody in hours, and realized that she was surprised that even somebody who was paid to talk to her would choose to do so. From behind her sweater she ordered a black and white milkshake and a calzone—a black and white milkshake because they always made her happy and a calzone because it took the longest to prepare.
She held her breath as her classmates walked out the door. One by one they left without noticing her hoping not to be noticed. When the door closed she tilted her eyes up towards the heavens.
“Rachel? I’m sorry for not coming over when I saw you come in, but we were just asking for the check.”
“Oh. Hi Rob. I didn’t even see that you were here.” Rachel turned.
“Anyways, I’m bummed that we’re not in any classes together again this year. I don’t think we’ve actually been in classes since that Christopher Columbus skit we wrote for Mrs. Connolly in social studies. Which is too bad, especially because your sweater game has been totally on point this fall.”
“Yeah. It’s too bad. That was a fun skit.” Rachel nodded.
“Well, just wanted to say hey. Have a good night.”
“Thanks Rob. You too.” Rachel smiled.
And if it was anything like that, I dare say that it was a success for everyone involved.
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