Issue date:
May 16, 1997

Tabloid

By Rebecca Corvino
Walla Walla (Wash.) High School

It isn't her secrets that I remember, just that she was always whispering them. She never tried to protect her words by cupping her hands over her mouth and whispering directly into my ear like a giggly schoolgirl. Instead she would duck her head down like an otter diving into the water and come up so close to my face that I could feel the hairs of our cheeks brushing against each other. Running her fingers through the barricade of her long hair and leaning her elbow on my desk, she would whisper against my temple whatever sacred thing she had to tell me. Often the sweet breath of her secret would float across my forehead and miss my ear entirely, but it didn't matter. The thrill of her cheek against mine and her low poetic voice in my hair was more important than the secret itself.

I knew her for only a few months at the end of my senior year -- we had calculus and American history together. I still smile when I think about the crazy stories she would tell me, like how her mother posed for pornographic magazines, and how her cousin lived in Australia studying different types of soil, and how her twin brothers ran away when she was 7 and they were 17 and now lived in Nepal sharing the same six wives. It was as if she was one big tabloid that you read while waiting to pay for your groceries -- every week she came out with some new story about herself, and no matter how wild they were, I would constantly catch myself believing them.

When she was upset, though, her imagination seemed to stop working, and her joy at being able to shock and impress people with her tales evaporated. She would cry for days, carrying this lime green umbrella -- even if it wasn't raining -- and wearing the same socks until she felt better. She told me once that her depression was like a rainstorm. Just like the rain, she said, her entire world was falling down. And when it did rain, she always got really happy. Finally she fit in with the rest of us because, we too, were being pelted by rain. On rainy days she would leave her umbrella at home and, instead of running for cover like the rest of us, she would stand in the middle of the football field and twirl in circles and fall on the ground, and then she would be all muddy for class, and it made her ecstatic, and the guys thought it was really something.

Although all the boys seemed to like her, she always managed to pick the worst ones to date. Most of them beat her and stuffed her full of drugs and alcohol like an overnight bag and took her to bed, but she kept on dating them and coming to school sick and beaten. It's a wonder she never got pregnant. It's even more amazing how easy it was for her to forgive the guys after they gave her black eyes and bruised her face and arms and tore open her skin with their teeth and nails. I used to try to talk to her about her boyfriends, but she always defended them and changed the subject. They were like the guys that her mother was always bringing home, probably the only kind she'd ever known, and she had done a pretty good job of convincing herself that they loved her and made her happy.

Beneath all her bruises and welts, she was unbelievably gorgeous and sexy. She had this face that I swear could have been on the cover of all the fashion magazines if she hadn't gone and let all those guys beat her up. Her skin was smooth and wheat-colored, with three tiny brown freckles above her right eyebrow. Her cheeks were thin and stretched across dangerously high cheek bones. She had a tiny mouth and soft peach-colored lips and a thin, straight nose. Her hair fell in deep brown ringlets all the way down to her hips and floated around her as she walked. Her whole body was as smooth and light as a ripple in the ocean and, unless it was raining and she was out in the field dancing, she walked around as if she were Jesus walking over water -- the Jesus who had been crucified and nailed to boards and beaten. She looked exactly like those pictures of that sickly beaten-up Jesus except she was a woman and her face was more feminine. She had tiny breasts, so that didn't make a difference if you were comparing her to Jesus, but then it didn't make a difference to any of those awful boyfriends of hers, either. They kept right on taking her to bed and giving her a whole bunch of free drugs.

When she wasn't out with one of her boyfriends, she would let me come with her to the library. She would read poetry to me, sitting on the cold linoleum in the middle of the poetry section. Her mother thought it was a waste of time to read and study -- she only wanted her daughter to get a high school education so that she could get a good enough job to support the two of them plus whomever her mother was sleeping with at the time. We didn't think her mother would like it if she knew about our trips to the library, so we kept them a secret.

She wrote poetry, too, and once she wrote a poem for me, just like a song, and I can still hear her singing the words in my ear in that same voice she used when she whispered one of her secrets. It was about a wheat field way out in the country and a little boy who sat in the field all day making daisy chains and drinking lemonade. She tried to convince me to skip school and sit out in the wheat fields across the highway with her for a couple of days. She thought it would be perfect if all she had to do was smell the wheat and drink lemonade and write poetry. But I was always worried about school and pleasing my parents, and she didn't think it would be as much fun to sit out there alone, so neither of us ever did.

We used to go for coffee at this dingy, smoky restaurant that she loved. The room was lit only by candles in red jars, and it gave the place this eerie red glow and reminded us a little of hell. She would sit across the table from me and stare at me over the tacky plastic flower arrangement and tell one of her tabloid stories in her breathy, spooky voice. The stories were often about her father -- how he used to travel around the world writing for magazines and how, before he died, he would send her letters from every city and country he visited and how he had been killed when he rushed into a burning building to save a little boy. Later I learned that her father had abused her when she was a little girl, and they had had to take him away. This made me really sad, and I wished that I'd never found out and had gone on thinking that he was a hero.

After she finished with her stories, she would drink her coffee and whisper some songs, and then we would walk each other home because we lived just two houses away from each other and just a few blocks from our favorite restaurant.

And then one day, she just disappeared. She didn't show up at school; she wasn't at the library; she wasn't home. I even checked in the wheat fields, just in case. It was only a short time before rumors started surging through the different groups at school that someone had murdered her, or she had been in a car accident, or she had had some kind of an attack. None of the rumors agreed, but in each case she ended up dead, so we all figured she was. But just last week I was curled up in the corner of an off-campus coffee shop similar to the one we used to visit. As I sat sipping coffee and nibbling on bread and thumbing through old newspapers, I came across a tattered, staple-bound poetry journal. I read through several of the poems, and then came to one -- about umbrellas and wheat -- that I know was hers. I'm beginning to wonder if maybe we just thought she was dead, and really she's out there writing poetry and thinking about rain and dancing in football fields.

Each of these students receives a $75 gift certificate for books or software. Sponsoring teachers get $50 gift certificates.