Dazzling White

I learned of Julie Clarke’s passing in the Costco parking lot on a Thursday afternoon. As my car was heating up and I rubbed my palm against cracked knuckles, I heard a ding from the bottom of my bag and the message I read made time stop.

Do you remember Julie Clarke? She fucking died!

What a funny question: Do you remember Julie Clarke? I didn’t know how anyone could forget her. 

What do you mean she died?

I mean she fucking died! The bitch ODed!

As it should be, middle school is mostly a blur. I have some clear memories of the teachers who disliked me and the subpar musicals I wore crew black for, but lessons, quizzes, and school dances are muddled in my mind. I was a weird kid when I hung around my friends and I never spoke in class, but I wouldn’t say I was a victim of bullying. It was just natural for me to never get noticed by my own peers. I had friends who I fought with, but we survived our acne-scarred years together. We’d go to the mall and fold our Cinnabon napkins into fortune tellers and pool our remaining bills together to buy a bottle of nail polish one of us would inevitably end up losing before the next sleepover.

It was a small school, only 60 kids per grade, so people knew who we were, and we unfortunately knew everyone else. I met Julie in sixth grade social studies. She was a firecracker with good grades and a large group of friends and was a starter for the girls’ volleyball team. From the outside, middle school seemed to breeze past her. I caught her smoking a cigarette once in the teacher’s parking lot and I played that story over and over again in my head until I wasn’t sure what was real anymore. She sucked down the whole stick in one breath. She got out of a teacher’s car with her shirt inside out. She looked me dead in the eyes with an icy stare that said, try me, bitch.

            I envied her in ways I never understood. She was always the center of attention, something that sounded abysmal to me, but from the moment I met her I wanted insight into the life she was living. I didn’t make the Instagram account that called her a two-faced bitch, though I very well could have. I was a suspect in the case. I sat in the vice principal’s office with Julie’s mom and the guidance counselor because apparently, I was seen texting in class which unwittingly made me the mastermind behind @greendale.middle.g0ssip.girl. I didn’t cry when they were questioning me which only proved their theory right. My name was eventually cleared and I never found out who the real offender was, but I was still out of the vice principal’s good graces. His cop-like voice would call me out of German class every three or so weeks to clean up spills my friends made at our lunch table, which he always blamed me for.

Julie was the farthest thing from two-faced in my eyes. She kept her friends close and didn’t touch her enemies. I never wanted to be one of her enemies but as I used the same mildewy rag to clean up mixtures of cookie crumbs, milk, and marinara sauce, my thoughts began to sour. Maybe those Instagram posts were right. Maybe she was two-faced. Maybe she was a backstabbing bitch with the sex drive of a rabbit. Maybe she humped her boyfriend in the Denny’s parking lot and let him fuck her in the ass. She did have the charming, scrunchy nose of someone who’d do anal.

It took me two minutes to find her obituary and one minute to read it. I could hear every tear its writer shed between lyrical depictions of the life Julie led. They painted a picture of an angel. They wrote that she passed peacefully, like her final moments weren’t spent clawing for air and drooling next to the stray pubes on a black and white tiled floor. I don’t know why I saved the obituary in a Word document. It just felt like the right thing to do.

In seventh grade, a boy who I hated had a crush on me. He made fun of me for drawing hearts and skulls and checkered patterns on the toes of my Converse and would snap all my pencils in half every time I’d leave the classroom. Even though I hated him, there was still a part of me that liked his attention. He said my face looked like a pig’s butt and I knew that meant he thought I was pretty. He slammed my school-sanctioned laptop shut as I was typing and I wanted him to do it again. On the last day of school, he stole my yearbook and drew Xs over Julie’s eyes in pen and used a red sharpie to draw her vomiting blood onto the kid underneath her. I hated that her picture was ruined, but at least it was my yearbook he was defiling.

They dated that summer and I saw picture after picture of them at the pool and the movies and at the fucking state fair. I wanted to hate her. I wanted to hate how she stole him from me, how I was supposed to be the one he was in love with. But I couldn’t hate her when I hated him so much. I hated him for taking up her time and buying her Starbucks frappuccinos instead of breaking her property and pouring Gatorade on her lunch when she got up to use the bathroom. I’d lie awake at night picturing him pulling her arm or scratching her face, doing anything to make her despise him as much as I did. They broke up at the end of the summer and ignored each other for the entire school year. Nothing I heard in the rumors made it seem like he hurt her. They just grew apart in the two months and eleven days they were together.

The last time I saw Julie Clarke was five months before her passing at a dive bar uptown. I’d been seeing the bassist in the band playing that night for a couple months. He was like a ginger Kurt Cobain with stubble that scratched when he went in for a kiss. But that night, Julie took front and center stage. She hung back by the bar, sipping her cocktail through a tiny straw with chewed up ends. We locked eyes and she smiled and that was the first time I realized we had never had a conversation before.

There was one time in high school after taking the SATs when we were sitting on the same bench in the school’s courtyard. There were six of us, including mutual friends I didn’t realize we shared, complaining about the questions and the lack of bathroom breaks and why that big study book is so fucking expensive. At least, there were five people complaining as I sat in silence and tried not to bite off my hangnails. Julie lay down on the bench, hair draping over the armrest like a waterfall and white polished toes inching closer and closer to me. The electricity in the air felt stronger the closer she got, and I prayed to a God I’m not sure even exists that maybe she’d rest those everlasting legs on my thighs. She sat up to grab a hair tie from her bag and I fell asleep that night with a hand down my pants and white nail polish in my Amazon cart.

Julie made her way over to me, gliding around the sweaty bodies moshing next to the stage. She started the conversation, asking what I’d been up to. Ten years had gone by since I saw her smoking in the parking lot, and while you might say I’ve aged since then, you would definitely say Julie had matured. She still had a youthful glow and dressed like a sophisticated young woman in a tight black jumpsuit and stilettos I would break my neck in. I dressed like a mom, with loose packets of Stevia in the pockets of my capris and salsa staining the breast of my t-shirt. I told her about work and she offered me a hit of her pen which I took not because I liked weed but because the mouthpiece was stained with her cherry red lipstick. She said her brother was in the band. I didn’t say the bassist was bad at cunnilingus.

Five months later and her sister’s Facebook timeline is nothing but Julie. Julie at six at her piano recital. Julie at eleven on the first day of middle school. Julie at fifteen at her best friend’s quinceanera. Julie at eighteen with a diploma in her hand. Julie in her volleyball uniform. Julie in dance costumes. Julie in a prom dress. Julie in a bikini. Julie in a bikini. Those everlasting legs are a deep tan and so silky smooth you just want to take a bite out of them. In the pictures, she’s smiling. In the pictures, she’s happy. In the pictures, she isn’t popping pills or snorting glittering lines under hazy nightclub lights.

A bartender found her passed out in the bathroom of the same dive bar. Her brother’s band had broken up at this point, as had I with the bassist. The barman found a bottle of painkillers spilled under the sink and Julie lying in a pool of her own vomit. That was all I’d heard through the grapevine, through friends I hadn’t spoken to in nearly a decade who claimed they’d forgotten about her, like when you forget to dot your I’s as you jot something down. She was just a detail. A detail about middle school. A detail in that bartender’s memoir. A detail that I could never get out of my head.

Julie’s funeral took place six days after I’d heard the news. I wanted to go, but I knew that I couldn’t. I could only picture myself crawling into the casket with her—resting my head against her bosom and wrapping my arms around her so she wouldn’t feel so alone. I wondered what it would be like if her boyfriend really did hit her the summer before eighth grade. She’d hate his guts. Maybe she’d see how much I hated him and we’d talk about it. She’d tell me that he’s a bad kisser and has a skinny penis. We’d start eating lunch together and go to the movies and have slumber parties. She’d paint my nails a dazzling white and maybe we’d break out the ouija board and hug each other tight when we got too scared. We’d struggle through AP classes and she’d ask me to do her makeup for prom. Maybe we’d go to the same university and room together. We’d share a chore chart and a whiteboard calendar and we’d hold each other’s hair back after throwing up dining hall food and trade off ordering from Uber Eats. I’d drag her to the library and she would drag me to parties and tell me to take a shot, and it wouldn’t really be peer pressure, but that kind of nudging only close friends can get away with because of course she’d only have my best interests at heart. Afterwards, we’d change into sweats and slippers and while taking off our makeup she’d say I should have fucked some guy or another who smelled like Old Spice and expired creatine. I’d laugh her off and make us ramen, and together we’d fall asleep in front of an open Netflix browser, her head on my shoulder and strands of her hair in my mouth.

photograph provided by author…none of us and I mean none us have a foot fetish here…possibly.

Nora Marcus-Hecht (she/they) is a writer from Ithaca, NY. A life-long lover of stories, she has been writing for 20 years and holds a B.A. in Writing from Ithaca College. Nora’s work has appeared in On the Run Fiction and Buzzsaw Magazine. She currently resides in Burlington, VT where she lives a double life as a preschool teacher and finds herself saying things like “we don’t put crayons in our mouths” far too often. To learn more about Nora and her writing, visit https://noramarcushecht.wordpress.com/.