Beyond Blonde (20 page)

Luke pulled me to him again. “I know you enough to love you, Sophie.”

“Let go.” He didn’t. “You don’t love me, Luke. You love the
idea
of me.”

I finally took in a deep breath and exhaled, perfectly. The truth did that. “You never got a chance to love me.”

He let go.

“
We
never got a chance.” I put my hand against his chest. “And this … what you’re asking … I can’t. I’m too young to be so old.”

“Sophie—”

“I’m going to be seventeen next month,” I interrupted. “And there’s going to be a party. Bet you didn’t know about
either of those things. How could you? I’m going to be seventeen, Luke, and I want to be seventeen. Seventeen, not thirty-seven. I’ve been too old for too long, cleaning up after my dad, prison, the moves, Mama’s moods.” I pushed him away. “I just want to be seventeen, you know?”

He shook his head.

“I
deserve
to be seventeen!”

Luke looked gutted. I wanted to snatch the words back and throw myself into him, but instead I exhaled again. “You, because of her …” I waved my arms pathetically. “You have to be a grown-up now. Luke, you’re a
father,
somebody’s papa. You can’t escape into me.”

“I’m not escaping!” A bewildered little boy grabbed my arm. “I told you my dad’s got it all laid out.”

“This is wrong, Luke. We’re wrong, all wrong.” I shook my head. “Go home.”

At around 4
P.M
., he pulled me to him. “
You’re
wrong, Sophie.” He kissed my hair over and over. “Maybe it didn’t start out that way, but I
do
love you. I love you so much.”

I wanted to crawl into him.

“And you’re right.” He kissed my face, my eyes, kisses so sweet they could crush you. And they did.

“You deserve better,” he whispered.

I pushed him away at 4:05 P.M.

“Go.”

Lucas Pearson shoved his hands into his pockets. A boy with a heart full of hurt. He tried to smile, couldn’t, so he walked away. I watched him recede ever smaller, all the way to the far end of the park’s slope. Then Luke stopped and my
heart stopped with him.
Turn around. I take it back.
But he didn’t. Luke Pearson never turned around; he just disappeared over the horizon.

My heart began beating again. Mary, Mother of God, it was cold.

But not too cold to cry.

Auntie Eva was wrong. I cried all the way home, not caring who I startled or alarmed.

I heard the music as soon as I got off on our floor. Nat King Cole was crooning up and over swelling violins and out into the hallway. “Autumn Leaves”: not a good sign. Mama played that song over and over during the worst periods of Papa being in prison. I let myself in quietly and tiptoed over to her bedroom door. I couldn’t hear crying, well, maybe just a little under Nat’s velvety voice.

I should go in and check on her.

No. Whatever was going on between my mother and my father was between my mother and my father. It was enough that
I
had done the right thing. Luke, sweet Jesus, Luke. In my room, I lit my candle and made the sign of the cross. I could barely see the flicker through the blur of my tears. Dear God, Buddha, and Moses. If I did the righteous and good thing today, why in the name of all of you did it hurt so much?

I stumbled through
the next few weeks, alternating between feeling fiercely righteous and hollowed out. One minute I was proud of myself for stepping away from starring in a soap opera, and the next I was twisting with certainty that no one would ever love me again. One minute I felt sorry for Luke, the next, I felt way, way sorrier for me. I switched back and forth from these extremes on a head-spinning ten-minute cycle. You had to pay attention to the cycle. The Blondes, for instance, never knew which me was going to turn up and say something over coffee at Mike’s.

Yeah. I told them. All of it.

No one judged me. They were just there. I should have told all of them all of it right from the beginning. It’s what I push them to do all the time. Secrets blossom with shame. No one knows that better than me. I prayed a lot. I prayed before I went to school and the moment I got back and before I went
to bed. Mainly, I prayed for the hurt to stop. It seems that until it did, the Blondes had me under 24-hour surveillance. Either Sarah or Kit drove me home from school, and Madison called every single night. It was embarrassing and claustrophobic and pretty amazing.

“So, when all is said and done, it was a nothing,” said Sarah, interrupting one of my cycles. “Basically an innocent nothing!” Sarah of all people was undertaking Blonde damage assessment and Sophie guilt management at Mike’s. “It was a couple of kisses goodbye in a public park, right?”

“Right,” I said.
Right?

Dear Moses, that couldn’t be right. It felt like so much more, all those weeks. It/he was so massive in my head, my heart, the guilt and the shame, but she was right. In terms of actual point-blank sinning, there were my thoughts and not much else. How could that be?

Wow.

There was a lot of hand patting and sympathetic nodding over the weeks, but mainly the Blondes were seriously relieved that Luke was gone. And shockingly, day by day, week by week, so was I. Eventually, it just got too hard to stay in that basement with Luke. It got more difficult to feel gutted about my choice to not go back to
their
apartment. Then I’d get a solid hit of that fierce righteous thing going. The virtuous bits got longer and longer. Still, every so often, out of the blue, I’d get punctured by the image of Luke, hands shoved in his pockets, walking away and not turning around.

And sweet Jesus that hurt. But less so each time.

The Blondes couldn’t wait to redirect all their attention
away from Luke and onto the party. And so … somewhere in the middle of our costume fittings at Malabar, I actually got it. Somehow it dawned on me that this was
my
birthday,
my
party. It happened while we were looking to rent our poodle skirts. Poodle skirts were a fifties fashion staple. Massive fabric tenting and swinging out below the knees and cinched in tight at the waist with a shiny black belt. There is an actual poodle that is either appliquéd or embroidered onto each skirt. Kit was going to wear a powder-blue skirt and silk blouse with a Peter Pan collar, Sarah chose a lemon-yellow ensemble, and Madison picked out a baby-pink outfit. I reached for a pretty purple skirt, but Madison took my arm.

“No, sweetie, this is
your
party, and we are your handmaidens.” Madison trotted to the front of the store and re-emerged with a large bundle of tissue paper. “
This
is your skirt.” She pulled out a shiny black taffeta creation, which was held wide and flouncy by the acres of tulle fabric underneath it. A white silk poodle was embroidered on the front and white silk ruffles peeked out of the bottom of all that taffeta. It was gorgeous. Kit and Sarah beamed. You’d think they’d sewn it themselves.

“But?”

“And I took the liberty of buying you this dreamy white cashmere sweater as your birthday present. You can wear it after, for sure. Mummy got it at Creeds. It’s a bit of heaven, if I do say so myself.”

“Yeah, but, and thanks, but …”

“And we got the word out,” said Kit. “No other girls can wear black and white, just the birthday girl.”

“But …” My head was spinning. That the Blondes were bossy wasn’t exactly a headline; that they were willing to fade into the background, at a party no less, was.

“Feel it,” ordered Madison.

As soon as I touched the white cashmere, I was gone. It was like diving into the softest down-filled cloud. But way, way sexier.

“I’m in,” I said and I meant it, not just about the party, but about my life too. I’d kept them all at arm’s length all through the Luke thing. Enough. I had Blonde handmaidens, for God’s sake! I wanted back into my life with my friends, back to us being
me and the Blondes.

I had a party to star in.

We nixed saddle shoes in favour of black ballet flats and we bought pretty ruffled ankle socks. Mama arranged for Señora McClintock, Auntie Eva’s Spanish-speaking hairdresser-cumdress fitter, to do our hair for the big day. Since Mama had long run through her Mary Kay lipstick samples, she took us all to the Simpson’s makeup department where we bought “big girl” lipsticks in various heart-stopping shades of red. A week before the party and in a moment of stupefying weakness, I agreed to get my ears pierced.

Kit bullied me into it. I had resisted getting my ears pierced my whole life. Given my colouring and hair, I was convinced earrings would make me look like a dime-store gypsy. Kit knew that.

“Buttercup, you’re holding my life in your hands. I wouldn’t steer you wrong. You were made for earrings.”

“Speaking of life in hands …”

Kit groaned while the technician swabbed my earlobes with alcohol.

“Do you think you might want to tell them any time soon or …”

“I’m leaning toward the
or,
” she said.

“Oh.” Little dots were marked on my earlobes. Apparently, my earlobes offended the Ukrainian technician. I had chubby earlobes.

“You okay with that?” Kit asked.

“Sure,” I nodded, which only aggravated my Ukrainian earlobe person more. “It’s your secret.” What I really wanted was for her to tell so I could gauge everyone’s reaction and sort out how this would come back on me. And, of course, on Kit too, and Lord knows I was burning up with a need to talk about the whole lesbian thing with somebody, anybody— really, absolutely anybody. I looked up at her. She was holding my hand, supposedly giving
me
courage. “I mean it, Kit. Only when you’re ready.”

“Thing is,” she grasped on tighter while the Ukrainian loaded up her gun, “remember how Mike told you that lying about your old man in prison was just a ‘place-holder’ lie type of deal, until you, and the people around you, could deal with the truth?”

Damn. “Yeah, I remember,” I muttered. “It meant a lot to me at the time. That he got it, I mean.”

“I think I need some more place-holder time.”

“Honestly, Kit, I get it.” I nodded. And the Ukrainian slapped me. No kidding. She actually slapped my thigh.

“Don’t move, already, or I vill put an earring in your forehead!”

I believed her.

We disinfected my ears every two hours for almost a week and then, on the day of my party, we stuck in sweet little seed pearl earrings. Kit was right—they looked amazing.

We were pretty giddy prepping at Auntie Eva’s on the day of the party. That’s right
day.
It took hours. The Señora decided the only way to go was with very high, structured ponytails. The Blondes were pulled and yanked and tied while their ponytails were fashioned into one long sausage curl. It was quite a process trying to tame my hair into smooth slick order, but she did it, and then she let my curls go wild in the tail bit. No pain, no gain was our mantra. All of us got singed at least once by the curling iron, but the Señora was a miracle worker. When I saw them, Kit, Sarah, and Madison all done up, my heart lurched—they were that beautiful. My Blondes. “You all look like Sandra Dee in
Gidget
. What I wouldn’t give to—”

Madison grabbed my arms and spun me around to face the full-length mirror. “To look exactly like you do, Sophie. Look! Just look at you!”

“Wow.” Kit came up and whispered in my ear, “I take back what I said before. I defy
anyone
of any inclination not to find you irresistible.”

“He’ll melt,” said Sarah.

“Who?” I asked

But Mama and the Aunties blew in like tornadoes. “Chop, chop, let’s go!” Auntie Radmila teared up when she saw me. “Your Papa iz down the stairs vit za stretchy car.
Yoy!
” She pinched my cheek. “Even more too beautiful zen your Mama vas on za night she met your Papa!”

“Qvik, qvik!” Auntie Eva waved at us.

“Vait, vait, vait!” Mama fumbled around until she retrieved Papa’s old camera.

All urgency was swept aside. We spent the next twenty minutes in every possible pose and combination until Papa came bounding up the stairs. Mama gasped when she saw him. He wore an old-fashioned black tux, the kind with the shiny stripe down the legs, and a blindingly white accordion-pleated shirt. He looked like he should be on a stage somewhere. Mama floated over to him and carefully pinned a white carnation into his lapel. I knew in my bone marrow that she would have held that moment for many beats longer, but Papa stuck to the task of hustling us along. “Ladies?! Let’s go, ladies!” He clapped his hands until he saw me. Papa strode right over, took my hand, and twirled me around and around. “There will be no one else in the room but you,” he whispered. “Tonight is your night, Sophia. You deserve it.” He kissed the top of my head. Mama clicked.

And I will keep that photo forever.