Swish by Joel Derfner Page B

the gym, but every once in a while I made it for my favorite aerobics class. I cooked my boyfriend dinner a couple times. I knitted a sweater for a collaborator’s newborn son. I bought a garbage can. Small accomplishments, yes, but when you are at the bottom of a pit, any movement toward the light is a victory.
    A year passed, and my days were no longer the bleak emptiness they had seemed for a time. And I figured that, if I no longer wanted to throw myself in front of
every
passing subway train, then I had to be doing something right.
    But I couldn’t go back to Cheer New York. One late October afternoon I sat down to draft an e-mail to Princess and explain the whole thing to him, but, as soon as I typed the salutation, the pixellated Garamond characters on my computer screen rearranged themselves to depict cheerleaders laughing and tumbling and sucking their teeth and the hateful Laura and Katie and Melanie and Jessica cheering altruistically and Andy and Gian about to throw somebody else into the air. I stared at the blank e-mail window for a long time and then I shut my computer off and went outside to get a Diet Mountain Dew.
    As I walked toward the drugstore on the corner I looked up and saw several pigeons roosting in one of the trees lining the street. They looked at one another every once in a while but they didn’t coo and they didn’t fly anywhere. I stopped to watch them—according to the cashiers I was the only person who ever bought Diet Mountain Dew so it’s not like I was worried it would sell out—but they stayed put. I watched them for a long time and occasionally one of them took a couple steps or hopped a little bit but none of them left the tree, and I couldn’t decide whether it was because they didn’t want to or because they couldn’t. Eventually the sun set but I stood rooted to the sidewalk, looking up in the dark at the birds I could no longer see. Finally I went back home and went to sleep. I dreamed that I was falling, and in the dream my eyes were shut tight, because I didn’t want to open them and see that there was no one there to catch me.

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    O ne afternoon near the middle of summer, the counselors at the Jewish Community Center Day Camp announced that the next day would be Backwards Day and that, in order to express our wild sides (we were six), we should show up dressed as unusually as possible. I could barely contain my excitement; I instantly began a mental list of funny ways to wear my clothing, and by the time I got home my parents had to talk me out of altering my mother’s wedding dress to make a pair of long, trailing socks.
    I had thus far led a disappointingly typical camp experience—friends, rivals, crushes, just like everybody else—but I was growing increasingly uncomfortable with this state of affairs. I belonged in the center of attention. My attempt to get there by convincing my animal group to change its name from the Eagles to the South American Giant Anacondas had been thwarted by the other children’s cowardice, but I realized that with a striking enough Backwards Day ensemble I could thrust myself into the spotlight without needing to rely on anybody else. I got to camp the next day with my shirt on inside out, my hair disheveled and sprayed to immobility, my father’s shoes on the wrong feet, my mother’s makeup covering my face in bright geometric patterns, and my pants hiked up far enough to risk future sterility, only to find all the other kids wearing normal clothes. I’d misunderstood the counselors’ instructions; Backwards Day wasn’t until the next day, and today we were going on a field trip to the zoo.
    The geometrically applied makeup almost hid the flush of my mortification. The other children didn’t act any differently than they usually did, but I knew that inside they were shrieking with laughter. At the bus’s first rest stop, one of the counselors helped me put my shirt on right side out and wiped the blush off my