NAMES by Laura Jok
The point of the game was for them to get to know each other. Mr. T tore sheets of colored paper into strips, wrote the name of a different animal on each piece of paper with a Sharpie marker, and taped a paper to the back of each student in his fifth grade class. He told them that they could not look at their own name and they could only ask each other yes/no questions to find out which animal they were. The masking tape made a coarse licking sound as Mr. T smoothed a strip onto the back of Lucy Furman’s sweatshirt.
Lucy hated icebreakers. She turned to the girl next to her, Dana Santana, and asked, resigned and disgruntled, “Is my animal big or – “
“Big, big, big! Really, really big!”
“Is my animal an elephant.”
“Yes! Now do me, do me!”
Lucy was the third fattest girl in the class at least, maybe the second. And she knew that her nose bent a bit, but now she could practically feel it bending, into a sickle, a chute, a ski jump, an elephant’s trunk. It had to be a coincidence, it was just a game, Lucy shouldn’t take it personally. Dana twirled around so that Lucy could see what was written on her back.
“He-llo? Lu-cy? Lu-cy? Do me? Do me?”
With her skinny arms and legs, circled with bangles of freckles, and her big brown eyes, Dana was what Lucy understood to be prematurely pretty, based on all the “Love Your Body, Love Yourself!” articles that she had read in Preteen Miss magazine that assured ten-year-old girls that their homeliness was only temporary: a natural part of growing up, something about caterpillars and butterflies, and chrysalises: chrysali? Dana chattered at Lucy through her small sharp-looking teeth. “Am I a . . . cat? Am I a . . . dog? No, no, howbouta . . . hamster fish bird parrot puppy kitten!”
“You’re a fox,” Lucy snapped.
“Ah hah! A fox? Really? Hah hah! A fox? A fox! Hah hah!”
Lucy pulled the neck of her sweatshirt up over her nose. Under the baggy material, she experimented with standing slant-backed, trying to convince herself that her stomach did not, in fact, stick out farther than her breasts. She stuck her shoulders forward, her torso back, her pelvis forward and stared down at her body, until Richie Timmon came over and informed her that she looked like she had wet her pants and was trying to look at it. Richie Timmon, the fifth grade’s fastest runner, wanted to ask her what animal he was, and she saw that he had been labeled “snail.” It couldn’t be true, then; the names couldn’t be true. It was just Lucy’s imagination. It was Lucy’s imagination, or it was ironic.
“You’re an elephant?” Richie said. When he grinned, the tip of Richie Timmon’s chin coiled into a cleft that was echoed in the blond ducktail that spiraled at his pate. Richie was always sweating from athletic exertion, and the skin under his chin was shiny. As he asked Lucy his questions, he swiped at his chin with the back of his hand, and it left a slick trail on his arm.
“You finally got it,” Lucy told Richie. “Snail.”
“Stop yelling,” Richie said.
“I’m not yelling,” said Lucy. “Am I yelling?” She rocked from side to side and stared down at her big feet.
Chelsea Brighton skipped out the door and skittered down the hall with the bathroom pass, showing all of them her back, her puffy chestnut ponytail twitching, the tail of a squirrel.
Mary Morton threw back her wooly head and bellowed. Some of her hair got in Lucy’s face. Her hair was such a dull shade of brown, it was gray. Her pointed nose thinned sharply, and asymmetrically, in the middle. One side sucked in more than the other did. Her yellowish amber eyes crossed glassily under glasses that magnified her beady pupils. Her thick unsexy eyelashes looked like they were heavy to lift or fake, like she was drunk or deranged. She stood up straight. She was a head taller than Lucy, broad and solid in her bright orange sweatshirt. Mary Morton was the fattest girl in the class; she was fatter than Lucy. Mary Morton was a moose.
“Moose?” Mary clomped her hands together and stomped her feet, “Moose!” Amanda Beal nodded and snorted behind her stumpy fingers. Amanda looked at Lucy, and Lucy giggled. Mary lumbered away with her uneven stride.
Amanda was Lucy’s next-door neighbor and best friend since the first grade. Today, Amanda wore an Abercrombie sweatshirt, and the tips of her straightened hair poked the hood, stiff as fingers. Amanda straightened her hair every morning, but she could not get it to lie flat. It projected straight out from the sides of her head, and indented, at her temples, at nearly a right angle. Lucy could detect the marks from the round brush and the Crisco smell of the styling foam. When the girls went swimming, Amanda’s hair crimped into an afro. When the sun hit it, Lucy could see that, instead of a flat shade of dark brown, Amanda’s hair was a rich, purple-grey near the part, black on the convex part of the waves, henna-red on the concave. “Hey,” Amanda would say, “hey, you made me get my hair wet.”
Amanda suffered from hay fever. When she snorted, it emphasized how her nostrils were round and pronounced, perfect, like the nosepiece of an ancient, ornate mask, and Mr. T had put “pig” on her back.
“Am I a farm animal?” Amanda asked Lucy. “Am I a pet? Do I have a tail?”
As Lucy watched, a curl extricated itself from under Amanda’s ear. Amanda bent at the waist, hands splayed on the desk in front of her, and let out a chesty cough that caused her nostrils to flare. Amanda hacked. The curl wiggled.
“Chelsea said I’m in Old McDonald. The song. Lucy?”
“Yeah . . . ?”
“I asked you if I’m a farm animal.”
“A pig is a farm animal.”
“Hey! You weren’t supposed to say!”
“Sorry.”
“Know what you are yet?”
Lucy walked over to Mr. T’s desk and asked him if she could borrow something to write with. She explained that she had forgotten her pencil case at home. She explained that she needed something to write with; it was for the game. Mr. T scooped up a handful of pens and pencils from the mug on his desk and held them in a fan in front of Lucy’s face. He held the Sharpie marker that he had used to write the animal names, she noticed, exactly in the middle of the fan, like people did when they knew that you didn’t trust them, knew that you would pick the pen on the end, the one that they seemed the least eager to give up. Lucy lightly plucked the Sharpie marker from the middle, ignoring the colored pencils clutched in Mr. T’s palms, and she said thank you.
It felt good in her hand, substantial. Lucy bartered a stick of Bubble Yum for a page from Dana’s Hello Kitty notebook, and sat down on the floor to write Amanda a note.
A weeping Mary Morton ran up to Mr. T, holding out the scrap of paper that said, “Moose.” Mr. T scratched at his nose. “I wrote them all ahead of time. They were random, I swear,” Lucy heard him saying. She had never heard an adult say “I swear” before. Mr. T paced in front of Mary. His chin jutted forward and back in contrary motion with his walking. More than a walk, it was a strut. He led with the small wedge of his nose. He was young for a teacher. His dyed blond hair spiked in front and separated into three distinct points, tips wet with gel, a zigzag bonnet around his small forehead and flat, beady eyes. His Adam’s apple puffed and sagged, highlighting the veins like gills that issued down from his ears. He had the class iguana on his shoulder.
“Wow. He sorta does,” Amanda wrote back when she had finished reading Lucy’s note, and Lucy, who was not satisfied with “sort of,” uncapped the Sharpie marker and explained, again, about the chin.
Lucy’s mother played the organ at the church. She had told Lucy to wait for her in the church gymnasium after school because today was a funeral. Lucy hesitated outside of the gymnasium. She took the Sharpie marker out of her pocket, uncapped it, and sniffed. She had heard that you were not supposed to do this. Down the hall, in the chapel, she could hear her mother’s organ revving up, a mechanical groaning that somehow managed to be musical. “Do not wait for me in the church today,” her mother had said. “Wait for me to come and get you after.” Lucy paced the hallway outside the Crying Room. The walls were decorated with construction-paper, Jesus fish inscribed, in glitter-glue, with the names of catechists. Lucy used the Sharpie marker to give one of the fish eyelashes. What if she wrote “Alive” on a piece of paper and taped it to the corpse? What if she did something that she knew to be impossible and inappropriate?
The organ music poured out into the hallway as Lucy opened the chapel door, throwing a cool breeze across her face. She stood in the back, behind the baptismal. As Lucy’s mother played, one by one, the mourners placed roses on the closed casket. Lucy had never seen a real dead person before. A car accident, Lucy’s mother had told Lucy the previous night, shaking her head at her hands as she wrung them through dishwater. A young woman, younger than Lucy’s mother. Knowing that there was a dead body in the room and that she could not see it, Lucy shivered with a thrill of uneasiness, as if she believed that the dead body could be hidden anywhere in the church. A baby wailed. The wailing became muffled, lower in pitch, like an ambulance siren, as the boy’s mother left the church and walked him up and down the hallway. In the front pew, a man wiped his nose on his pressed shirt cuff. He held his suit jacket open and lowered his head. His shoulders shook and the muscles of his back rolled under the navy tweed.
Lucy stuck her hands in the front pocket of her sweatshirt. She felt the Sharpie marker. She clenched her fingers around it, twisting the cap. She smelled acrid ink and incense and lemony wood polish and fermenting flowers, and she sat in a pew in the back of the church, dizzy. Behind the casket, a large framed portrait was mounted on an easel. The woman in the picture had a lazy eye and a doughy face. Lucy felt like the eyes of the glossy portrait were looking at her. The woman in the picture’s cheeks puffed out over her square jaw. Even though her lips parted in a broad smile, her mouth looked full, a benevolent pelican. She had the most beautiful smile.
In her eulogy, the woman’s sister said the same thing, in a choking voice: “She had the most . . . beautiful. Smile.” A chill traced its way across Lucy’s temple – satisfying but terrible – as if her thought had willed this to be true.
To her right, Lucy heard a small burp and a sigh. The woman with the crying child had returned and sat down next to Lucy. As Lucy turned to look at them, the Sharpie marker rolled out of her sweatshirt pocket and onto the pew, where the sniffling little boy snatched it up with both of his fat moist hands and put it in his mouth. His cheeks caved and his lips pursed around the Sharpie as he sucked. Lucy, worried that he would choke, reached out her hand to tap his mother’s arm. The organ stopped playing. The boy’s mother picked him up as she stood, and the drooly Sharpie marker fell to the floor and rolled under the kneeler.
The priest announced that the mother of the deceased had prepared something for her daughter that she would now like to read. The mother was a middle-aged woman with a very long neck. Her head looked small perched on top of it, shrunken by distance. As she took her place behind the lectern, her throat swelled with audible swallowing. She touched a fine point of tissue to each corner of both eyes, and then she wrapped the tissue around her pointer finger, reached her finger into each nostril, and rotated it. Her touch was so light, she could have been painting; she could have been licking a finger to wipe away a sticky spot of jelly on a child’s cheek.
When the woman said, “Poetry. For my Emily,” the prominent tendons of her neck trembled. Her voice resonated in the high church ceiling, shaky but keen, a grief so piercing that it was nearly euphoric. Her voice was something other than human. The woman rested one cheek on her curved shoulder and rounded her arms in front of her, holding her pages of poetry. She resembled a great cello playing itself.
Lucy felt a hand on her back. She turned around. The old woman in the pew behind her said, “Dear. You have something on your back,” pulled off the little strip of paper, ripped it in half, used one half to dab at the shiny oval of skin between her eyes, and spat a moist red lozenge into the other half.
“Hey,” said Lucy.
“Kids can be cruel,” the old woman said, and as the dead woman’s mother clutched her pages to her chest and descended from the lectern, Lucy shrank down in her seat, raised her hands, clasped them together, and folded them on her lap.
“Names” is Laura Jok’s first publication in a national literary magazine.