Confessions of a Not It Girl (8 page)

Do not let me get out of this cab.
"I'm glad I ran into you," I said.

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"Yeah," he said. He was smiling at me in a way I couldn't quite identify. I could see the meter ticking out of the corner of my eye.

"That way we didn't each need to pay for a cab," I said.

"Yeah." He was still smiling.

"Well, I guess you're still paying for a cab, aren't you?"

"I guess I am," he said. In the light of the cab I could see his flawless skin, his beautiful green eyes.
I
love you I love you I love you.

"But we did save gas," I pointed out. "And that's good for...fuel emissions and, you know, the greenhouse effect." I was starting to sound like National Public Radio.

"True," he said.

"Well. Good night."

"Good night."

As I got ready for bed, I replayed the cab ride in my mind. Okay, true, we'd sat in complete silence for almost twenty minutes, but maybe that was a
good
thing. I mean, at least nothing hugely embarrassing had been said. Maybe he'd even start thinking I was a deep, introspective person, the kind who actually thinks before she speaks. While other girls were satisfied to string together banal observations along the lines of
What a great party!
and
This sure is some cold beer!
I felt no need to utter a word unless it was a pithy, insightful observation about the human condition.

When I went into the bathroom to wash my face,

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things with Josh became clearer. Looking in the mirror I saw I had lipstick smeared across my chin. Running down the center of the smudge was a thin line where Tom's drool must have proved too strong for the staying power of Bobbi Brown.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

I don't know if it was the phone ringing or the yelling that actually woke me, but by the time I was fully conscious I could tell that (a) my mom was on the phone with my brother, (b) they were in the middle of a
major
fight, and (c) the only way I was going to get back to sleep was to go someplace quiet, like the runway at Kennedy airport. My mom's study is right above my room, so I could hear what she said whenever she raised her voice, which was most of the time. My dad was up there, too, on the extension in their room.

The first words I actually deciphered were, "I can't believe you would want to go to her house for Thanksgiving when you
something something something.''''
Then my dad said,
"Something
family
something."

"A girlfriend is not
something something.
You have a
something something."
There was another pause, and he said, "I don't see how you call that an adult
something."

Until he went to college, my brother and my parents always got along; by third grade I'd probably had more fights with them than he'd had all through high school. He was on the squash team at Lawrence, first JV and then varsity, so every day he pretty much just went to school,

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played squash, came home, and did his homework. He had a match or a tournament most weekends, and he wasn't around a lot. So I guess you could say their relationship was only as good as it was because he was never home, but that wouldn't account for how when he
was
home he didn't do stuff like leave his dirty clothes all over the place or forget to write down phone messages the way I apparently did.

Basically, he was the good child and I was the bad child, a duality confirmed by the fact that on the day he got accepted to Yale, my parents received a letter saying my French grade was "in danger of being compromised" by my "failure to attend class."

But then Rogier started Yale and got a girlfriend, and everything changed between him and my parents. As far as I know, Rogier never even kissed anyone in high school, but he was hot and heavy with this girl Heather from, like, day one of freshman orientation. They stayed together for the rest of the semester, but then in January he broke up with her and started going out with this
other
girl, Jamie or Julie or something.

None of us ever met the Julie person because before school ended he got a third girlfriend, Larissa. Over the summer, Larissa and Rogier came up to our house on Cape Cod, and one afternoon my mom
walked in on them by accident.
I don't know if she actually
saw
them, but either way, the entire thing is simply too gross for words. It turned into this gigantic fight, with my mom screaming at Rogier about how whenever he comes home he treats the family like he's a guest and we're the

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servants, and how he can't just do whatever he wants wherever he wants to. I was kind of psyched because that's the kind of stuff she's always yelling at me about. But
then
she started yelling at Rogier about how he has a little sister to think about, and how he can't behave around me the way he behaves around his college friends, and he said, "Well, Mom, she's hardly in kindergarten." So then my mom says, "I'm not saying she's in kindergarten, I'm just saying she doesn't have to feel pressured into doing things she's not ready for because she sees her big brother doing them!"

The only thing worse than having no sex life is having people scream at each other about your hypothetical sex life while you're in the next room listening.

I guess I should be glad Rogier's become such a Don Juan since it means there's hope that my sex life will improve next year. I definitely don't remember any girls at Lawrence ever liking him except for this one friend I had back in eighth grade named Tanya. She moved away sophomore year, but until then she was always asking me a million questions about Rogier and begging to come over to my house after school. Once when she was over, he came home from squash practice and walked from his room to the bathroom in a towel. I thought she was going to pass out.

"HELLO!" I shouted at the ceiling. "Some people are trying to get some SLEEP around here."

I pulled a pillow over my head and lay in bed replaying the end of last night. I started with when we were on Clinton Street and ended with closing the cab door,

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focusing exclusively on lighting. I was pretty sure it had been too dark for Josh to notice my lipsticked chin while we were out on the street, and during the actual ride it was pretty dark, too. That meant there were only a couple of brief minutes when he could possibly have seen that the bottom half of my face was dripping with saliva and Plum Berry! Objectively, how bad could it have been? Maybe he hadn't even noticed. I mean, everyone knows guys are completely oblivious to things like makeup and fashion. Maybe Josh just assumed I was experimenting with a new style: the Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey Circus-gone-psycho look. The door opened.

I lifted the pillow high enough to see my mom standing in the doorway in her green corduroys, a flannel shirt, and no makeup. Rebecca told me that in France, ancient secrets of fashion, perfume, skin care, and seduction are passed down from mothers to daughters. Looking at my mom, it was no surprise I was about as much of a femme fatale as Tinky Winky.

"Your dad and I are going into Manhattan. Do you want to come?"

I rolled over and pulled my pillow back onto my head. "Haven't you heard of knocking?" You'd think after what happened with Rogier this summer she wouldn't come near one of her kids' rooms without a written invitation.

"Look, Yahn, I'm sorry I forgot to knock. But it's not necessary for you to use that tone of voice with me."

"Well is it
necessary
for you to wake me at

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dawn?" I took the pillow partway off my head, but I didn't turn toward her.

"Yahn, it's eleven-thirty!"

"Studies show teenagers need to sleep later than other people. It's in our BIORHYTHMS!"

"Nobody needs to sleep later than eleven-thirty." She was using her I-know-you-need-to-be-patient-with-teenagers-but-this-is-ridiculous voice.

I put the pillow back over my face. "Well, I'm sure the Nobel Prize committee will be thrilled to hear about your groundbreaking research on teenage sleep patterns."

She walked out and shut the door. I wanted to shout
No wonder Rogier wants to spend Thanksgiving with his girlfriend!
but I had the feeling she was in the mood to punish one of her children, and I didn't want it to be me.

I pulled the covers up to my chin and lay on my back, perfectly still, trying to go back to sleep, but every time I closed my eyes all I saw was a lipstick-covered chin floating against a dark background.

Eleven forty-five on a Sunday morning and nothing to do all day but contemplate suicide.

I called Rebecca's cell.

"Hey," she said, even before I said hello. "Why didn't you let me wipe that stuff off your chin last night?"

"I was experimenting with a new look," I said sarcastically.

"Were you upstairs fooling around with Josh?"

"Okay, I guess we can make it official: you have
no
future as a detective."

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"Why are you pissed at me? I
tried
to warn you." I told her about Tom and about taking the cab home with Josh.

"That blows," she said.

"Clearly. Do you think I should call him?"

"Tom?"

"Josh!"

"And say what, exactly?"

"Well, I was thinking I could call and ask him about the English homework and then slowly work the conversation around to how I'd probably had lipstick smudged on my chin when we were in the cab because I always try to rub my makeup off before I get home because my parents won't let me wear any since they're Amish."

"I really don't think you should say that," said Rebecca.

"But I don't want him to think my lipstick was smeared because I was fooling around with another guy. Then he'll never ask me out."

"But he's not asking you out anyway."

"Thank you
so much
for reminding me."

"Sorry. Listen, I have to go. My mom's pretending to care about my welfare, so we're having a day of beauty at Estée Lauder."

"When my mom wants to show me she cares about my welfare, she yells at me for not doing my college applications."

"Yeah, well. Some people have all the luck. I'll call you later."

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"Bye."

I needed to stop thinking about last night. I needed to stop thinking, period. I hung up the phone and looked around my room for something to distract me. My backpack was crouched threateningly on my desk. There, a mere five feet away, lay hours and hours of distraction. I crawled to the edge of the bed, unzipped my bag, and got out
Romeo and Juliet
and the sheet with the essay questions. The second question was,
"Romeo and Juliet
is, in some ways, really a play about Juliet, who changes far more than Romeo does. Trace her evolution from child to adult over the course of the play." I had already decided to write on that one. Given my current situation, I couldn't help relating to a character whose love life gets so screwed up she fakes her own death.

The essay was due Monday, and I hadn't started it. I went back to the beginning of the play and started rereading scenes with Juliet in them, but returning to the scene of the original crime was not exactly getting my mind off Josh. Not to mention the fact that every time I blinked I was assaulted by the image of...

I
had
to focus on Shakespeare.

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

Which mannerly devotion shows in this;

For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss....

To call or not to call? Wrong play, right question.

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Sophomore year Rebecca and I took a sociology elective called Gender Roles and Courtship Rituals. After reading about Aborigines in Australia and the Bushmen of the Kalahari, the class used magazines like
Cosmo
and
Maxim
to determine what rules govern modern American courtships. It didn't take long for us to conclude that the motto of the women's magazines is,
Let men pursue you or they'll think you're a desperate slut,
while the motto of men's magazines is,
Women who pursue men are desperate sluts.

Twelve-thirty. Why shouldn't I call? Fact: Josh describes himself as "shy." Fact: I am not shy. Fact: If women ever hope to be liberated from the oppressive models provided by our misogynist culture, we must grab the mantle of power. I wasn't calling Josh for me, I was calling him for women everywhere. For our daughters and granddaughters. For our great-granddaughters. I picked up the phone, dialed, and hung up before it could ring.

I would never have a great-granddaughter. I would live with my parents until they died, and then I would grow old alone, wearing tacky, pseudo-vintage clothing and eating cat food. I could not seize the mantle of power. I could not even seize the training bra of power.

I considered sending Josh a message via telepathy until I remembered my recent use of extrasensory communication indicated the universe had gotten its wires crossed. Unless I wanted a call from Tom Richmond, I'd better not start trying to reach Josh via ESR

I reopened Shakespeare.

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O my love! My wife!

Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath

Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.

I picked up the phone and dialed.

He answered on the first ring. "Hey. Sorry I couldn't talk before."

"Josh?" My voice was strangely high-pitched.

"Leslie?"
Leslie?
LESLIE? Who was Leslie?

"No, it's, um, Jan." My hand was sweating. The receiver slid around in my palm.

"Oh, sorry. I thought you were someone else."

"Leslie." I wedged the phone between my ear and my shoulder and wiped my hand on my comforter.

Josh laughed softly. "You're sharp." Actually, with my sweaty palms and complete lack of a reason for calling, sharp was pretty much the last thing I was feeling. Dull would have been a more accurate description. Dull and drippy.

"So, what's up?" he asked.

"Not much." Actually my heart rate was pretty "up." Maybe this could become a whole new way to burn calories: calling the guy you like for no reason at all. A few more minutes on the phone and I wasn't going to have to worry about my butt being too big anymore.

"What's up with you?" I asked after a pause.
Extremely original, Jan. Extremely.

"Well, since you last saw me, I'd have to say zero," he said, laughing a little. His laugh sounded easy and natural, exactly the opposite of the forced giggle I

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responded with. "You know. Sleep. Shower. Breakfast."

"Same here," I said. "Well, except for the shower breakfast part."

"Sleep well?" asked Josh.

"Can't complain," I said.

There was a click.

"Hey, that's my call waiting. Can you hang on just a second?"

"Oh, yeah. Sure." I leaned back against the pillows. My hand wasn't sweating as much anymore. Actually, this conversation wasn't going so badly. A little chatting, a little banter. By now we were only about two innuendos away from a romantic comedy.

Josh clicked back.

"I gotta go. Were you calling for my mom?"

"Yes!"
I said a little too loudly. I sat up. "I
was
calling for your mom. I was calling for your
mom."
There was a slight chance I might have been overdoing it a bit.

He waited a minute and then asked, "Um, anything in particular? Is it about Hannah? I think that Margaret person who usually baby-sits her is better."

"What
a relief! Because the reason I was calling is I can't fill in for Margaret anymore. I have a thing next weekend and it's, um, just a big thing I can't get out of."

"No problem. She's not home now, but I'll tell her about your...thing." I wished I could tell if he was smiling or not.

"Great! I
really
appreciate it. Your telling your mom for me." Why couldn't I just stop myself? "No problem. Well, I gotta get going."

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"Leslie, right?"
Leslie? Are you kidding? Like I'd ever get off the phone with
you
for some person named Leslie. It's my dad calling collect from Tokyo.

"Right."

"Okay. Well, bye." With the hand that wasn't holding the phone, I gave a little wave to the opposite wall.

"Bye."

I hung up, wondering if it was too late to drop out of Lawrence and get my GED.

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