Counterpoint
Part 2

( Part 1 )

Middle school was no more angst-ridden for Tria, the girl with the horn, than it was for her classmates. One day, she was called to the girls’ restroom by her friend Madeline, whose track-marked tears gave her face a zebra quality. Madeline—the shy white girl who hit puberty first—washed her face clean with the bagged soap in the rotting dispenser. She rose up to face Tria and held back more tears. “I’m horrendous!” she yelled, as if a teacher wasn’t squatting in the first stall to the right of the sinks.

Tria never thought about it, but it was pretty rare that someone came to her to discuss personal appearance issues. She could only attribute her subsequent reactions to what she saw other people do, so she reached out and wrapped her arms around Madeline, who just continued crying, on Tria’s shoulder.

Sure, Madeline’s horrifying problem was a small, barely noticeable zit just above her right eye, but if it was the end of the world to her friend, it was the end of the world to Tria.

* * * * * * * *

There were boys in Tria’s seventh grade class. Granted, there were boys in Tria’s class every year, but it was the first year there were boys in the carnal sense. One boy in particular made Tria’s horn throb with a throb it never throbbed before. She had a new throb and she knew that was something special.

His name was Jeremy. Jeremy Piper. He was cute, with blue eyes and shaggy blonde hair, with a lip piercing that was obviously fake but nobody cared. He was the class nomad, in a sense, moving about in every form of transportation a boy his age could muster. He’d ride his skateboard to school one day, roll in on roller skates the next, scoot up with a scooter on Wednesday, pile out of the backseat of his older brother’s car on Thursday, and round out the week on a rocket pack or something. He usually got in early on Fridays, so nobody knew for sure. In reality, he just walked, but fast and early.

Tria liked the way he laughed sincerely at the teacher’s puns, but then batted an angry eye at math class, remaining cool and mysterious, like some kind of cigarette-less, approachable James Dean. He would doodle endlessly in his notebook at times, pass notes at others, and just stare blankly at the closet for minutes on end. The closet door was shut, without even posters hanging on it, but he would stare. Either something heavy was going on inside his head or, more likely, nothing at all.

* * * * * * * *

On a Friday in early autumn with an ungodly massive pile of leaves mounted outside the classroom window, Jeremy talked to Tria, quickly, about homework, and then brushed past her on his way out of the classroom. The brush came dangerously close to Tria’s chest and her horn felt like it was about to curl back up inside of her, to sit in the corner and phone breathless calls to its friends.

She ran home fast that night and locked herself in her bedroom, surrounded by pinups of actors and old art her grandmother gave her, mostly knitted pictures of animals with some watercolors thrown in. Falling backwards into bed, her horn erected toward the sky, Tria tried to regain control of her breathing, in and out, slowly, in, out, in, out. What she couldn’t control was her horn, a throbbing mess of an appendage that wouldn’t slow no matter the mediation or yoga or Maharishi maneuver.

Tria reached up, and touched it gently, hoping to force it into a slowed state. Rather, the opposite happened and her touch energized the horn, sending shock waves through her head, body, and out her toes. It was pure pleasure, a feeling Tria had never experienced. She touched the horn again, and then a few more times, and in a sense effectively caused herself to orgasm for the first time. It wasn’t quite the same as an orgasm from actual sexual contact, but the pleasure the horn gave Tria was unprecedented and would provide a fitting outlet for a young repressed girl without much controversy for her eternal soul.

* * * * * * * *

Exactly three weeks later, around mid-morning, when all the students weren’t yet hungry for lunch but had lost any energy their sleep once provided, the seventh graders took a short break and Madeline confessed to Tria that she had an unobstructed, strawberry passion red crush on Jeremy and that she had kissed him under the bleachers with his unkempt shaggy hair fallen out of his eyes when he turned to her, entirely to stare at her striking and obvious cleavage. She came to school that day in a pink tank top with a thick white shirt underneath, a mom-friendly turtle hiding in a seductive shell. Of course, Madeline dropped the act, and the white shirt, and found Jeremy under the bleachers after school, where his friends normally smoked, but never him.

He kissed her back, and reached out shakily for the cleavage before fearfully releasing and returning his arm to his side like a sadomasochistic rat who had a taste of electricity, liked it, but couldn’t sustain the pain.

Tria didn’t much respond and the topic of Jeremy disappeared until high school, when his head grew into his hair and Tria’s face filled out, almost giving her horn the illusion of an accessory, a bright one that glowed much less and functioned much less independently, but still throbbed and ached when the most intense physiological feelings were conjured. Jeremy went back to his life of skateboards and some homework and church on Christmas and Easter, while Madeline and Tria giggled and read about young detectives and high school girls.

Around mid-morning of a May day winding down freshman year, Madeline and Tria walked the hallway, Tria not even noticing the random upperclassmen stealing glances at the horn, some snickering, some nodding in a strange agreement—Tria had always ignored her dissenters. Jeremy was being scolded by the principal, an assumption anyone could make thanks to a wagging finger and a head held down shamefully.

“Think he’s okay?” asked Madeline. “Think he had pot?”

He had started smoking pot.

Tria opened her locker, a surprisingly clean mess of books, dribbling along the sides in perfect columns with a backpack wedged in the middle, a case where the bookends are the books. “Probably,” said Tria in a droll elevated whisper. “That’s pretty much daily now.”

Dick, the dick in the letterman jacket, left tackle, laughed at Jeremy, passed by him and pushed himself up behind Tria. As usual, he shouted, “I’m horny!” and then cackled like a slow witch and wandered down the hallway, aimlessly and aggressively.

Tria rolled her eyes.

“And nobody says a thing to Dick,” said Madeline, adding a sigh and twirl of her ever-growing hair.
“Jeremy’s a good guy. Jesus, he’s on the debate team.”

* * * * * * * *

Tria joined the debate team first thing after her first steps through the school doors the next morning, finding Mrs. Tallman, the debate couch, proceeding down the hallway, arms struggling to hold the tower of books and the open coffee mug. Mrs. Tallman said practice was that evening, Tria was welcome to come, and please go away until she’s had her coffee.

* * * * * * * *

Practicing debate felt to Tria a bit like practicing for an unidentifiable natural disaster. You could go ahead and be prepared for anything, but if it ends up being a meteor rocketing directly into your face no amount of prep work would help.

Tria’s first time at team practice was spent mostly in confusion. It started off well, with her finding the open seat closest to Jeremy outside of a close circle of other borderline popular kids and total losers—the potheads, she figured—the ones that interact with the jocks and cheerleaders quite a bit, but only in shadows, alleys and spirit.

The team was in the middle of a debate that began at the previous practice, continuing the intramural squabble without reiterating what each side was defending. One kid that Tria recognized from Biology started off, talking about either stem cells or organic farms, and after four minutes Mrs. Tallman put her hand in the air and the student scrambled his speech, words spoken over words, until he finished his argument exactly 60 seconds later. The next kid started, a girl Tria had never seen before in her life, and said something about whatever the other kid was talking about that made everyone laugh. By this point, Tria had just begun staring at the back of Jeremy’s head, wishing to be as close to him as a horn. The debate ended, someone won, something else, who knows.

Snapped back into action by the calling of her own name, Tria looked up at Mrs. Tallman, who was motioning toward her, and suddenly every head in the room turned to her, Jeremy’s included.

“Tria? Hello?” said Mrs. Tallman. “Did you want to tell us anything about yourself?”

Tria nervously shook her head and caught Jeremy smirking at her. It was a gentle smirk, but enough for Tria to feel a little too alive in her own skin. Her horn blushed and she suddenly wondered if, to Jeremy, she was just the girl with the horn.

* * * * * * *

It seemed like the other members of the debate team did not think much of Tria’s horn, or even notice it enough to make comments. They learned to respect her for her hard work, and the way she could slip subtle jabs into her debates, making each of her most scathing arguments pierce her competitors without them even noticing.

On abortion: “I see your point about how abortion gives women the opportunity to be promiscuous, especially married women—you know, the demographic that make up 60 percent of abortions—who apparently like to sleep around with their husbands.”

On Hamlet: “Clearly, the king has nothing against Hamlet, as most murderers are very well-balanced.”

On cell phone use in schools: “As there’s no doubt everyone at this school is going to end up being a rocket scientist, the more distractions the better.”

She was snarkier than she had known herself to be, but there’s a degree of acting and characterization she was taking on when she stood in front of the crowd. The comments were written by her, but spoken by someone else. It was a give and take, the kind a lifelong giver cherishes in small breaths.

Madeline did not talk to Tria as much as she once did. Debate was a new, more interesting friend and Madeline couldn’t compete with debate’s blonde, pierced avatar. It was becoming painfully more obvious that Tria had feelings for Jeremy, so it was likely best that Madeline kept her distance. Madeline never even talked to Jeremy after the incident under the bleachers, and Tria surely didn’t mind. Besides, Madeline had found solace in the arms of a different pothead, with shaggy black hair and a bad heavy metal band t-shirt of evil angels or something else with dark wings. Madeline was happy and it made Tria happy. It was another liberating chunk cut off the tip of her horn.

* * * * * * * *

The day came at the very end of the school year, the first weekend in June, a week before the seniors graduated and a night after the last debate team meeting of the year was adjourned. It was the final match of the debate season, even though most debaters wondered why it was still called a season if it ran from September to June and this wasn’t one of the Earth’s Poles. So impressed with Tria’s jabs and quiet confidence, the team elected her up to bat. It was nerve-racking to say the least, especially as tradition dictates the final meet of the year be improvised. No topic given ahead of time, just kids with blank index cards and overly stuffed minds.