LITMIR.BIZ

      RESEARCH

      AT TIGHT-LACED, BUTTONED-UP DALTON, I COULD disappear into my new blue sport coat, school tie, and wool pants. I’d brush my hair in a new way and say “cool” in a low, rumbling voice when I meant yes. The Dalton Handbook mandated “soft conversation” between classes, so if I could just think of a few witty things to say in the hallways or during lunch, maybe I’d never be popular, but I could blend in with the walls.

      So I did research.

      I bought a copy of Sports Illustrated and skimmed the articles about Michael Jordan or Mike Tyson, then compared the taut bodies of underwear models to mine. I wanted to linger longer over those ads, but finally I forced myself to put down the magazine, feeling both turned on and engulfed by despair.

      I borrowed Dad’s mini cassette player, recorded my voice, and played it back. Horrified by what I heard, I attempted to speak in lower tones, like a bullfrog.

      And in karate, I squared my shoulders in front of the mirror, threw out my non-existent chest. I practiced walking as if I were a gunslinger in a Western, like Sensei Brad. Between exercises, I did modified bent-knee push-ups and dreamed of doing real ones.

      I listened to hits by Paula Abdul, New Kids, Vanilla Ice, and Janet Jackson. I tried to like their songs, but the words and the musical notes were tiresome and repetitive, as if glued together by machines for the listening pleasure of other machines. The messages of the songs were always the same. I’m so cool. You’re so hot. I get laid a lot.

      Mark could have breezed through my self-imposed training regimen without breaking a sweat. He knew all the right movies to see and sports to watch and songs to listen to and video games to play as well as the right things to say about them (like “Sweet!” with the “s” pronounced as an “sh,” ergo “Shweet!”). He was fluent in the language of boys. Of course, he had the advantage of being spectacularly unkind, taking relish in crude insults that on first hearing seemed startlingly original, though they always amounted to the same thing: girls were sluts, and boys were girls.

      The Sunday before my Dalton debut, my father told me to grab my karate uniform and get in the car. Brad was opening the school early, just for us two, a private lesson.

      Dad didn’t put his new Springsteen tape on the stereo as usual. He was strangely quiet as our car crunched down our snowy driveway onto Maggie Lane.

      Most of the subdivisions in Bloomfield had streets with distinguished-sounding names like Haverford or Maplewood, with pleasant pretensions of being British. However, as a lame joke, the builders in our sub had named the streets after their all-American daughters: Jenny Drive, Stacy Court, and our own Maggie Lane.

      Turning onto Jenny Drive, Dad said, “I heard from Detective Marten.”

      “Oh?” I said, digging my thumbs into the seat cushion.

      “They went before a judge.” My father, like me, never said Mark’s name aloud. “They talked about, you know, juvenile hall, but there was the problem of kosher food. You know, the dad’s a big rabbi. So they’re sending him to a strict Jewish boarding school in Toronto. He can only come home for closely supervised visits.”

      But the Rabbi was never home, and I’d seen Mrs. Taborsky in her red ski jacket struggling to walk their yappy terrier, pulling at its rhinestone-studded leash. If she couldn’t handle some dumb dog, how could she restrain her son?

      My father concluded our conversation with some advice: “If that monster ever manages to get into our house again, you lock yourself in the bathroom. It’d take a sledgehammer to bring down that door.”

      That’s when I understood: Dad was afraid too.

      At our special karate practice, Brad blasted Guns ‘n’ Roses while demonstrating how to hit someone’s nose with my open palm. “The nose is vulnerable on anyone. Even if you’re as big as Hulk Hogan, you can’t build any more muscle on your nose.”

      “Thanks,” I said.

      “I taught this to all my girls. Even a girl can throw a grown man to the ground that way. No man’s going to mess with them in some dark alley, I can promise you.” My ears flushed a deep crimson. Was that how he saw me, a girl who’d been messed with?

      For an hour, we practiced the same three moves, block, block, and pow, right to the face. I followed Brad’s instructions, feeling the anger surge under my forearms. I imagined what it would be like to make real, powerful contact with someone’s smirking face, soft warm skin masking a hard, solid jawbone.

      At the end of class, Brad drew a stripe in black marker on the tip of my white belt. “Keep it up,” he said, “and you’ll get to yellow belt.” As Brad clapped my shoulder, I caught a whiff of his aftershave, a mix of pine needles and car wax.

      Both Brad’s and Dad’s eyes grew misty, and then mine did too, just a bit.