Finally, there was the Fiona Deal. Fiona seemed more and more distant. I’d spent quite a bit of time riding my bike around various neighborhoods and school areas, scanning all the girls for any who looked even vaguely Fiona-esque. I got nowhere. Eventually, I just dropped it.
I still thought about “giving her the time,” of course. But she had faded into the background, almost to the point where she was more or less equivalent to all the other imaginary girls whose images I used as masturbatory props. She was as distant as a movie star. Fiona Schmiona. Maybe she went to OMH, maybe she had known who I was, maybe she had been a real fake drama mod, maybe not. Maybe everything she had said was a lie. Maybe I had imagined her. Or maybe she was madly in love with me, and was wandering the earth pining away but could never reveal herself because the Illuminati had kidnapped her parents and had sworn to kill them and detonate a nuclear device they had hidden at Disneyland if she ever made herself known. She was doing it for the children. All of these scenarios were equally plausible.
And I have to say I was starting to think I didn’t really care too much anymore. That was my attitude.
In view of this, I was floored by what Sam Hellerman said when he finally got to the point.
“I found Fiona.”
I dropped my coffee cup.
* * *
166
“She gave you a phony name,” said Sam Hellerman, once I had regained my (devil-head) composure and he had stopped laughing—for which I couldn’t blame him: I hadn’t planned it that way, but the momentary failure of my cup-holding abilities had asserted itself with near-perfect comedic timing.
“Her real name is Deanna,” he continued. “And she’s a little weird.”
He reached into his backpack and pulled out a large red book, which turned out to be last year’s yearbook from Immaculate Heart Academy in Salthaven Vista. He opened it to a folded-over page and pointed to a black-and-white picture. There she was: Deanna Schumacher. As I was silently kicking myself for not having considered the Catholic school option as a possible Fiona habitat, he told me what he knew.
Deanna Schumacher was the girlfriend of this guy named Dave, who was a CHS fake mod. She had probably made out with me to make him jealous, which was something she was known for doing. She was not a fake mod herself, but rather a generic Catholic schoolgirl, though she was in drama at IHA-SV. She was a little bit psycho and was always doing head trips on her friends and boyfriend. Oh yeah, and by the way: this Dave guy was looking for me and wanted to kick my ass.
She was no longer even in the area. She had moved to Miami with her family just the week before, when her father had suddenly and mysteriously been transferred.
“Miami,” I said dubiously. “Florida.”
“Or near there,” said Sam Hellerman.
I looked at the black-and-white yearbook photo of a dark-haired girl with glasses. She did look a little psycho. The glasses looked about right, though they weren’t exactly the 167
same—but people can have different glasses, of course, from year to year. All things considered, she looked quite a bit like the Fiona I remembered, though I don’t know if I’d have recognized her if she hadn’t been pointed out. My memory of Fiona was idealized and faulty, shaped by the fake fake mod costume and my own fantasies, as I had to acknowledge. In a Catholic schoolgirl uniform she wouldn’t, in a sense, have been the same girl. I felt as though I would have been able to pick her belly out of a lineup and to identify what Sam Hellerman would have called her left boobie by touch alone, but maybe not. Girls all have the same parts, basically, and so much of how they look depends on the attitude, expecta-tions, and obsessions of those who are looking at them.
The moving away to Florida part sounded very fake, of course. Maybe Sam Hellerman was just trying to help me “let go” with a little white lie that removed all doubt about her lack of availability. And I appreciated it, I guess. Fiona wasn’t real. Whatever. Like I could keep track of all the imaginary girls in my life.
But, see, the truth is, I couldn’t quite let go of the idea of Fiona even now that I knew she was fake. Even fake Fiona had a hold on me. I kind of lied about how it was all pure imaginary sex, and how I had stopped daydreaming about a Sex Alliance Against Society with her, even though she was now even more imaginary than she had been before Sam Hellerman showed me the IHA-SV yearbook.
I didn’t believe that Miami story for one second, of course. That was just Sam Hellerman trying to be clever and stage-manage my pain, like he does from time to time. He’s a born facilitator.
She still lived in Salthaven or Salthaven Vista and went to 168
Immaculate Heart Academy, Slut Heaven. Of course she did.
Except her name was Deanna now instead of Fiona.
Okay. Could there be a future for Deanna Schumacher and me? Well, no. But was it worth continuing to obsess over her anyway? Why the hell not? You know, I could track her down and she would fall for me and break up with her boyfriend and we could go away together. Deanna Schumacher and me, I mean, not me and the boyfriend. And maybe she could even dress up as Fiona for me from time to time. When you think about it, it wouldn’t be too different from how grown-up wives dress up in Catholic schoolgirl uniforms for their husbands, except in Deanna Schumacher’s case she’d be in her Catholic schoolgirl uniform to begin with and would have to take it off in order to put on the Fiona costume and then put it on again when we were done pleasing each other.
Or maybe I could just develop the school uniform fetish myself, so she wouldn’t even have to do the fake Fiona thing. I’m sure she’d appreciate that, with her busy schedule and so forth. And you know, once I articulated that thought, I was pretty sure I already had started to develop the school uniform fetish. This was promising.
I M B EC I LE!
Knowing her true identity and where she went to school put the whole Fiona Deal, which had now become the Deanna Schumacher Deal, in a new light. Instead of blindly obsessing and trying to spot her at random, I now knew where to start looking, and it felt like waking up in a new and better world.
Sam Hellerman had said I could keep the IHA-SV yearbook—
one of his CHS friends had stolen it from an older sister who 169
went there, and didn’t care too much about getting it back.
I made a note of the name, Wendee Foot, etched in gold lettering on the cover, just in case I needed to contact her for further information. The messages this girl’s friends had scribbled in it were pretty hilarious, and that was diverting for at least a while, but other than the photo Sam Hellerman had pointed out, I couldn’t find any information on Deanna Schumacher in the yearbook. She wasn’t on any teams or in any clubs, not even drama, as Sam Hellerman had indicated.
Well, she could have joined this year, I supposed. She didn’t even appear to have been in the group class picture—at least, I didn’t recognize her if she was.
Once I was back home, just to see, I looked up
“Schumacher” in the phone book. No listing. Well, that would have been too easy. I clipped out the little black-and-white photo and put it on my desk, trying to decide if it would be too sad to start carrying it in my wallet. I know, I suck. But you have to give me a break. It was all I had.
I spent the Saturday after the Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway meeting staring at Deanna Schumacher’s photo, moping, and playing the guitar. The next day was Halloween, and I spent that day doing pretty much the same thing.
When it began to get dark, I broke down and dialed up Sam Hellerman, but he was out. Maybe he was at another CHS party and hadn’t invited me this time because he didn’t want to risk another Fiona-Deanna fiasco? In fact, I didn’t actually believe that Sam Hellerman had gone to a Halloween party, though it was funny to speculate on what kind of goofy-ass costume he would have worn. A month before, I’d have said it was weird that Sam Hellerman hadn’t been home, that he was always at home when he wasn’t here, but 170