13 Why Can't I Be You?
There were two photos of Adam, mugging for the camera like Brian Slade as painted by Gil Elvgren, drunk and wearing six-inch Versace stiletto platforms but moving nevertheless with the ease and fluidity of someone who had sex eight days a week; underneath it said, "The camera adds ten pounds precisely where it's least necessary—in the case of body divine Adam Harlow, 21, it's his ego!"
He was at a party attended by his father, for high-profile members of the Pokémon League; a disdainful Agatha Keen, formerly of the Elite Four, looked on with brows pursed and lips furrowed. How typical that Adam only now showed up in an American tabloid, now that he had left the country. It was really quite disgusting that he could afford to buy a pair of $900 women's shoes to wear once as a joke.
Her intention in showing this to Irwin was just to maybe have a bit of a catty laugh at Adam's expense and say something like "never, ever drunk" and then move on with their lives.
Instead, Irwin took it horribly seriously. "He's the biggest idiot on the face of the planet," he sneered bitterly. "You know why girls like him so much?"
She certainly did know why girls liked him so much, but she wasn't about to say so to Irwin.
"It's because he doesn't give a shit," Irwin answered himself. "He plays it cool. He doesn't care. Why, that stupid photogenic big-nosed JERK doesn't even like girls! He's bored of them, he's desensitized. Those pretty boys only have eyes for themselves."
"Yeah, well."
"I know I'm not the best-looking guy in the world," said Irwin, "but I'm sure you've gone out with worse-looking guys than me, right?"
Delilah wasn't sure what to say. There were so many things wrong with what Irwin had just said, not least of which was the presumption that she regularly dated ugly boys.
Irwin looked at her. "I said, I'm sure you've gone out with worse-looking guys than me," he repeated. "Haven't you, Delilah?"
She hadn't. She pretended to think very hard and said, "Um...hmm..."
He laughed dutifully, but immediately said, "Really, though."
"Irwin..." She sighed, unsure what to tell him. "I hope I haven't given you the wrong impression," she said carefully.
He looked at her. "What do you mean," he said tonelessly.
She found it hard to look at him. "No offense," she said, "but...I have no interest in dating..."
"Except for Adam, right?" he said, still weirdly flat. "You do have interest in dating Adam, don't you?"
She blinked. "What? What does...?"
"You do, right?" he said relentlessly. "You like him? You probably want to screw him, like every other girl in the world?"
She made a face of confusion mixed with slight derision in an attempt to convey the fact that she wished not to talk about it. "I don't see how that involves you," she said. "I mean, sorry if I'm no longer worth your friendship, but the activity of my libido is really none of your business..."
He looked scornful. "I can't believe you like him, Delilah," he said. "He's just a huge boner that's developed cognitive thought. Actually, I can totally believe you like him! Five million lays can't be wrong, right?"
"Irwin, shut up," she said, rolling her eyes. "I'm not going to apologize. And who said I like him? I hate him, but that doesn't stop him from being good-looking—"
He made an indignant noise, but dropped it.
Was that how Irwin saw her? Somebody confusing physical urges for romance, overlooking the fact that what she wanted was right in front of her all along? She didn't think she was being deluded about it. It wasn't like she thought Adam would be a great boyfriend. Did Irwin just assume that she wanted a steady relationship? She could see how it would be annoying for Irwin, that she would effectively say, "I don't mind kissing Adam, but I would never want to date him." Did that make her a slut? Was that such a bad thing to be?
What did Irwin think he could offer her in a romantic relationship that would be any different from their current friendship? Was romance just a fancy word for friendship with a sexual overtone? Is that what it came down to? Or was Delilah missing something? Was there something wrong with her? Was she something cold and emotionless, who could appreciate friendship and sex but could not comprehend the idea of romantic love being more than a combination of them?
It wasn't Irwin's fault, but Delilah was not attracted to him. He was not ugly or even badly-dressed, but she had no desire to interact sexually with him, so why should she have to argue her own taste? If she were ever to have sex, it would be with somebody she was sexually attracted to, because that was just logic. And of course it wasn't Irwin's fault that Adam made everybody else look like clumsy bags of impotence, but it wasn't Delilah's fault either. Even if she did have a crush on Adam, she didn't think she was stupid enough to believe that it was less than 97% sexual.
In June when she was in New York for the nationals she realized for the first time that it was an actual possibility for her to win the whole thing. The chance had always been there, but being on an entirely different coastline where the states were smaller and the cities were older it dawned on her that she was one of the top trainers in one of the biggest countries in the world. How had that happened? She hadn't had to struggle with prejudice or a dead mother or bitter winters or slavery or poverty; why did she deserve it?
"...We know it's been a journey," said the speaker, an older man who had been the US Champion in 1984. "The League has been with you every step of the way. There are many more gyms and pokémon centers now than there were twenty-five years ago, which really opens up communication between trainers and the League..."
He had been talking for ten minutes.
"...This year marks the 104th anniversary of the International Pokémon League"—Delilah applauded hollowly with the rest of the stadium—"and it has grown so much over the decades, since its inception, with the Kanto Indigo League still functioning today..."
It was so boring that Delilah had an out-of-body experience.
"...Today there are Leagues from Libya to Lebanon, and as we continue into the future the Pokémon League hopes to continue increasing communication with its registered trainers so we can help you be the best trainers you can be..."
Delilah glanced around at the other state champions and yawned, not caring too terribly much if a camera passed over her at that moment.
"...It's really wonderful how involved the League is with its trainers as individuals," he continued remorselessly. "When you laughed, we laughed. When you cried..."
"We laughed," Delilah said in a low voice to the boy next to her.
He laughed. "Shut up," he muttered, but he was smiling.
At the end of the month she went to the Johto County Fair on her sister's eleventh birthday, where she had a rather horrible time thanks very much because she only went on one ride for an outrageous price of six tickets per person where her dress blew up and she broke a fingernail. The ride was built to resemble lady wrestlers somehow and the operator actually had to dictate where everybody sat because whenever someone stepped onto it the whole thing shook.
The only thing she had wanted to see at the fair were the animals, but even though she had somehow heard a phantom ampharos bleating in her ear for ten minutes and could clearly smell the presence of farmyard animals, she ended up being dragged around the art and collection exhibits for two hours, and at the end of the day her legs hurt and she had a sunburn across her shoulders and the tops of her breasts.
How unlikely was it, she wondered, for her to have become American Champion and defeated the Elite Four? Well, she figured, "unlikely" was still a chance. In any given match that didn't draw, there would be a winner. Then that winner would face another winner and in that match between winners one of those winners would win again, and so on. Out of fifty State Champions, plus Puerto Rico and DC, one of them would become the National Champion after not losing once. It was equal opportunity, as much hers as anybody else's.
Nevertheless, she couldn't help but think that it was sort of meaningless for her to keep winning. If her life were a film, a TV show, a young adult novel—it would be important. What if she beat someone who had been training for years and years because he always dreamed of being the best trainer in the world because his dead relative was a pokémon trainer, and he had to struggle to get out of his parasitic old-fashioned middle American town and then he had to battle racism as well as pokémon and it was all very symbolic and epic on his journey toward achieving his singular goal in the world which was the only thing keeping him going.
And then she beat him. Delilah was just a lucky white girl who liked shoes and lipstick and entered the competition because she had nothing better to do. Her life couldn't be a book or a movie because it just didn't matter to her. It wasn't a good story because she didn't care.
She won anyway.
She was Pokémon League International Champion, and if she beat Lance Siegfried she would be the new World Champion. Why did this keep happening? It wasn't that she didn't want to win, but it didn't make any sense. Delilah wasn't a naïve tomboy who was secretly in love with her best friend's brother or her brother's best friend. She didn't dream desperately about being a pokémon master or even a lawyer or doctor or teacher or something. She had to doubt that Irwin would one day rescue her from a burning stable because her soul was calling to him after they ate pizza and the melting cheese got stuck together as a symbol of their hearts yearning for each other and she realized she was in love with him all along but had been afraid of ruining their friendship because it would change everything.
Delilah didn't have a special story about courage or loyalty or hope or strength or pride or compassion or spirit or dreams or love. All she had was talent, and it meant nothing to her. Was that supposed to mean that she couldn't accomplish anything? Was she too stoic, too different, too unlikely to be an important character? It seemed that an acceptable heroine would be of middling skill, but make up for it in heart. She would be average, innocent, and plain, so the majority of viewers could relate in some way, but she would be sweet and lovable and have good intentions and admirable ideals so that in the end she would save the day, learn the lesson, snag the cute guy.
Why was Delilah different? She was talented, smart, and pretty. Was that unrealistic? Did that deprive her of a happy ending? Was she barred from success by merit of an improbable and unsympathetic cup size? Was she supposed to be left unsatisfied, because other people couldn't relate to her?
"Do you want a drink?" Lance Siegfried asked her at the swanky brunch held the day before their match.
"Oh...I don't really drink," she said.
"Come on, you're old enough here," he said, smiling winningly. "Besides, it's your birthday today, anyway."
"I don't really need to be any stupider or clumsier than I am," she said.
He laughed, and handed her a mimosa. "You'll still be able to walk," he assured her.
It was the first time she had been on a plane by herself, coming to battle Lance in Kanto, the Pokémon League's historic center. The only people she actually knew at the party were Adam and his parents, but Adam gave her a weirdly chilly reception; it took her a little by surprise, since they hadn't left each other on particularly icy terms, but she reasoned that Adam was just moody like that. He was given a rather wide berth by the other guests, and Delilah noticed that Agatha Keen was not present.
She shrugged it off; there were a number of other people interested in talking to her anyway, although being the new kid on the block made her a little bit nervous. In attendance were a few present and past Elite Four and gym leaders, and it felt a little bit like they were measuring her up, judging her behind their Irish coffees.
"So how long have you been doing this?" asked a gym leader named Lt Surge. "You're just a kid, aren't you?"
"I've been collecting badges since last summer," she said. Over the past couple of months she had answered this question about five hundred separate times.
"About a year, huh?" asked the lieutenant, chewing on his cigar and examining her. "Just how much do you know about this little game, sweetheart?"
"Nothing," she said. "I'm only here because of a clerical error, so don't tell anyone 'cuz everybody thinks I'm great."
He laughed.
She did try talking to Adam, since he was the only person she really knew, but they just ended up sniping at each other about nothing and he went the usual route of challenging her to a pokémon match.
His Bloody Mary looked very boozy and grown-up next to her mimosa; in his eyes was the eerie ice of an emerald in a museum, and she became aware of feeling a certain revulsion.
"Okay," she agreed with intimidated lust.
She was getting kind of sick of pokémon matches but at least this one had the distinction of taking place behind a greenhouse instead of in front of cameras and thousands of people. When he lost he was very upset, and she almost felt bad until he sneered nastily at her that "I wouldn't expect you to understand".
She made a face of amused skepticism and said, "So you lost at pokémon—big fucking deal, Adam. What do you accomplish by being mad about it?"
"Hey, knock it off, Adam," called Lance, appearing suddenly. "Are you bothering her?"
Adam rolled his eyes. "Yeah, bothered," he said, watching him approach, suddenly aloof and remote.
Lance came up next to Delilah and frowned with mingled pity and disdain. "Would it kill you to show a little respect?"
Adam smirked and she wanted to wring his smug sleazy neck. "Probably not, but why run the risk?"
"You are really obnoxious, Adam," Lance observed objectively.
Adam's cool green eyes flicked over to Delilah. "You had better win tomorrow," he humphed, and slinked away.
They watched him go and she sighed exasperatedly, "I can't win."
"Don't let him get to you," said Lance, taking her literally. "He's just jealous, he just wants attention."
"Yeah, well." She shrugged. "I just meant I'm never right according to him."
"Just don't pay attention to him," he said. "You're a great trainer."
He patted her shoulder. She wasn't sure how to respond so she just said "thanks".
Delilah really didn't know what to think of her relationship with Adam; it seemed so anomalous. How many people in the world hated somebody like that? Plenty of people hated somebody, but they would never say so. She had never known two people to be as outwardly antagonistic as she and Adam were to each other. That was something that happened in movies, and books, with the nice main character and the bitchy cheerleader captain. People weren't like that in real life...real people were passive-aggressive, and didn't want other people to know if they hated someone, because it made them look bad. Mean people generally had the "decency" to pretend they weren't mean when in front of others.
Her victory over Lance the next day was slightly overwhelming; there was a split second of silence before the crowd exploded. It was the single loudest thing she had ever heard. She didn't notice Lance had left his platform until he was standing below hers with a bouquet and a gentlemanly hand down, and she couldn't hear herself laugh.
At the reception after the match a woman who was apparently a long-time supporter of/donor to the Pokémon League clasped her hand and gushed, "How beautifully you battle! Look at you, you are so young and beautiful! Do you realise whom you're replacing? Those are big shoes to fill!"
"Well, yes, I mean, gosh, Lance is wonderful, I mean—"
"Oh, sure, I love Lance, he's very talented too, but you are young and talented! It's thrilling to have such a young Champion again, and a girl!"
A girl.
She was the first girl World Champion.
She thought it was a little overzealous to say that she was "so young"—Lance was only in his twenties, so he wasn't that much older than she was—but was it really her sex that was the first thing people noticed when they saw her?
It seemed that way; almost every magazine article's headline referenced it in some way, the only exceptions being the ones in very dry pokémon magazines. The more mainstream the interview, it seemed, the more likely it would be prevailingly about her gender rather than her pokémon. Most of the world saw her as a girl trainer. She would not deny that that was what she was, but why was that qualifier necessary?
The reality was that as Pokémon League World Champion she felt quite stupid and inadequate. Not because she didn't think she deserved it, but because everyone seemed to expect her to have inclusive knowledge of pokémon history minutiae like, "What do you think of the Fucilerei Technique, made famous by the magnemite of Armando Cipriani, Pokémon League Champion of Italy and Malta, 1974?" or maybe, "I notice you have taught your dratini to use a variation of the Akvumi Maneuver, introduced by Taylor Roman, Pokémon League World Champion from 1934 to 1938, when executing Slam, the signature move of Roman's carnivine—given amphibians' metamorphosis process throughout life, do you think you will encounter a greater or lesser effectiveness in the future with this method?"
Delilah didn't mind these questions, and the people were usually very nice about explaining what they meant, since they were interested in her answers, but it really shook home the fact that she wasn't actually very interested in pokémon battling. She was very good at it and sometimes she knew what they were talking about, but she just was not a fanatic, and sometimes it made her feel like a hipstery inept dilettante. She didn't eagerly anticipate matches, her own or others', and in fact found pokémon battling quite boring to watch. It was like playing chess or putting together a jigsaw puzzle. These were fun activities but she would never want to watch them from the sidelines.
"It's not like I'm campaigning for women's rights or anything," she said in an interview. "I mean, female pokémon trainers I guess are a minority, but...it's a sizable minority, and not an oppressed one. I mean, the thing is, women were never, like, barred from entering pokémon tournaments. You know? I'm not trying to like make a political statement."
"So, you think there is dramatisation at work?"
"Um, yeah. I mean, the Pokémon League has been in operation for a century, and there were never laws about who could or couldn't participate. Women could be registered trainers before they could vote. I mean, it would be one thing if...say, there were legal restrictions on entering the League, and women weren't allowed, so I like dressed up as a boy and made a name for myself going through the championship process, and then when I was fighting Lance I stripped off all my clothes and, like, made a speech about menarche."
He laughed.
"But, if you missed it, I didn't," she said. "It's just that by coincidence there's never been a woman Champion before me. Pokémon training just attracts more men than women, so with more men in the pool, it's more likely that one of them will be the Champion."
"Why do you think pokémon training attracts more men than women?"
"Um...well, I don't know," she said. "I guess it could be any number of things. Social...norms, maybe. If a woman wants to have children I'm sure it makes it more difficult to take care of a full team of pokémon as well, because women biologically invest more in childbirth than men do. For full competition, I mean, a full team is six pokémon, and that's quite a lot of responsibility..."
Delilah Peerenboom, new World Champion and only just nineteen, has trained her pokémon with such attention to the very technical nature of pokémon battling, something which allows them each a lot of freedom to adapt moves to suit their specific personalities and skills, that each animal has a sort of clever individuality. Peerenboom herself calls attacks directly, which really seems like genius next to the delicate sophistication that comes from allowing her pokémon the freedom of being trained around the bare bones of a move.
There are many trainers whose style seems to be made up of a lot of pieces of other people's styles, by emulating those trainers they admire. Peerenboom's style is quite stripped and is therefore wholly her own, as her and her pokémon's personalities take form around the moves at their artistic minimum, rather than attempting to adjust a move's aesthetic complexity to better suit personal statistics...
This, she thought, was a very pretty way of saying that she didn't care about pokémon at all.