Freaky Green Eyes

I

CROSSING OVER

ONE

how freaky green eyes got her name

Later, I would think of it as crossing over. Maybe it was what my mother was doing, too. Crossing over. From a known territory into an unknown. From a place where people know you to a place where people only think they know you.

Like there’s an actual river you swim across, an unpredictable, treacherous river, and if you make it to the farther shore, you’re a different person than the one you were when you started out.

It began with me a year ago this past July. A few weeks after my fourteenth birthday. When Freaky Green Eyes came into my heart.

The stuff between my parents hadn’t started yet. Well, probably it had but I wasn’t picking up signals. Wasn’t wanting to.

I hooked up with this older guy at a party, and it was a bad episode or would’ve been except for Freaky.

Where Freaky emerged from, I don’t know. I’ve never told anyone about this, not even Twyla, who’s my closest friend and what you’d call a calming influence on me. I never told Mom, though this was a time when we were still pretty close and I guess I should have told her, looking back on it.

The party was at some rich people’s place on Puget Sound north of the city. My family (except for my older brother, Todd, who hadn’t come with us) were house guests at the home of neighbors of these people, also very rich with a spectacular house on the Sound. The crowd was entirely made up of people I didn’t know, mostly college age. A girl from my school in Seattle, Forrester Academy, invited me along with a bunch of her friends, and when we showed up it was painfully obvious that I was like the youngest individual in the room. With my milky, freckled skin and carroty-red hair pulled back in a ponytail that sort of exploded out in frizz and static electricity halfway down my back, and a scared look, plus the skinny pink tube top and flip-flops, and no makeup, definitely I gave signals of being the youngest.

The girls I’d come with dumped me in record time.

It was a mile at least back to the house my family was staying in, and along a busy shore road with no sidewalks. Still, I wanted to turn and run out of that party the first few seconds I stepped into that scene.

Franky Pierson, climbing to the high board. Poised to dive, then freezing.

Except it was no diving event. I might have been invisible; nobody so much as glanced at me.

The music was so loud, I almost couldn’t hear it. Hard heavy-metal rock? Right away my heart began beating fast with this music, the way my heart tends to do in any nerved-up situation. My dad liked to say that though I look like my mom, I take after him: he’s a former athlete, a pro football player, and he says we take our cues from the immediate environment, like birds and animals do. If you’re challenged, it’s FIGHT or FLIGHT.

Definitely, I wasn’t in a mood to FIGHT. But FLIGHT didn’t appeal to me much either.

After a few minutes it was weird—I began to like the music. I mean, basically I hated the music, but I began to like the nerved-up sensation.

People were jammed into a long living room with glass walls overlooking the Sound. In midsummer the sun sets late in the Pacific Northwest, and it had nearly fallen beneath the horizon now, flamy red streaks on the rippling water, but nobody at this party was paying any attention to the landscape.

I drifted at the edge of the party, trying not to be jostled by strangers with dangerously sloshing drinks. By the smell of the room, it was beer they were drinking. Like flotsam, I was pushed along and found myself in another long glass-walled room, this one even bigger than the other, overlooking a dock with a tall, sleek sailboat and a large yacht moored at it. Everywhere were people I didn’t know, good-looking guys, glamorous girls, years older than me and showing lots of skin. It was like a pane of opaque glass was between us: they were in a dimension I couldn’t enter. Yet I was stubborn; I didn’t run away.

Thinking of my mom, complaining it was a strain on her, being with people most of the time who only want to meet Dad, the local celebrity Reid Pierson. They almost totally ignored her, she said, or spoke to her in a condescending way. ("Oh, and what do you do?") Mom said she felt as if she didn’t exist, and this was the way I was feeling, embarrassed yet excited, too, hopeful. I was glancing around the party with a pathetic little smile of expectation, anticipation—like at any second someone was going to come up and hug me.

Some good-looking guy, a senior from Forrester, pushing through the crowd saying, "Francesca? Hi."

It didn’t happen that way. Not quite.

Instead, I located a bathroom, gleaming white tile like pearl, a fancy Jacuzzi with brass fixtures, and in the mirror my flushed-cheeked face, and baffled/hurt/stoic green eyes. I was embarrassed to see myself, but who else did I expect?

It was only about a year since I’d started my period. (Started my period: what a dumb-ass expression!) I’d been pretty much a tomboy before that; now I didn’t know what I was, exactly. A girl, sure. But not a girly-girl.

Or maybe that’s what I am. Francesca Pierson, not Franky. And I’m fighting it.

Denial, it’s called.

When Mom was my age, she said, she’d been obsessed with her looks. And with guys. She told me she’d done some pretty reckless things that might’ve messed her life up permanently except she was lucky. (More lucky than smart, Francesca.) So I worried sometimes maybe I resembled my mother more than I wanted to think I did. That I would become obsessed with my looks in high school like just about everybody else I know.

"Francesca, hi."

I wink at myself in the mirror. Shake out my ponytail. Decide I look okay. Not glamorous, but okay.

Hi.

Don’t ask me how, or why: a guy appears out of the crowd nudging into me by accident, then decides to pause, and check me out, and smile. I’m grinning back like a lighted Halloween pumpkin. It’s perverse how my nerved-up state subsides—I’m playing the role of a girl who isn’t excited/scared/thrilled-to-bursting. You’d think this was a movie party scene, I’d played this role before.

This guy who’s smiling at me, who seems actually to like me, is shouting in my ear that his name is Cameron—I can’t make out the last name. He’s a freshman at USC—I feel really stupid asking what is USC (University of Southern California). He asks my name, and I tell him Francesca—suddenly Franky sounds juvenile—and I kind of mumble where I go to school. Cameron says that his family lives on Vashon Island in Seattle, his dad is an executive at Boeing, they have a summer place on the Sound, and he’s crazy about sailing, and what about me? I can smell the beer on his breath, we’re standing so close. Getting jostled by people, which pushes us even closer together. I hear myself tell Cameron, practically shouting into his ear, that my family lives in Yarrow Heights, and we’re staying just for a few days with friends on the Sound, not giving details like who my father is, and whose house guests we are, because the name of my father’s friend is pretty famous. (Not for sports or TV like my father, but for high-tech computer patents.) It’s fine with Cameron, he can’t hear me anyway, or if he does, none of this makes much of an impression. He’s in a revved-up party mood, leaning close to me and smiling.