Authors: Emma McLaughlin
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Coming of Age, #Contemporary Women
“Didn’t you get the memo? We’re all supposed to look fourteen now.”
“Kristi Lehman would be so bummed.” I flip through midriff-baring sweaters. “She didn’t even look fourteen when she was.”
“She’s running the mini-mart out in Fayville now.”
“Shut up!” I spin around and give her a shove. “Shut up! How do I not know this?”
“What?” Laura smiles, savoring my reaction. “We never go out that way. Sam had to install some equipment in Clarkson and stopped to get gas. He said, and I quote, she looks…tired.”
“Tired!” I shake my head.
“Tired!” She throws her arms up, her purse sliding up to her shoulder. “Merry Christmas!”
“God, right back at you.” We stare blissfully at each other. “Crap, what time is it?” Laura asks, checking the clock on her cell and immediately pivots me forward.
“Twenty-eight minutes, move.”
Damp with sweat, I grab anything that looks remotely spectacularly grown-up-and-over-you. Laura throws her own selections on the pile, which is soon higher than my sight line. I follow blindly as she leads us, snaking around circular racks of velveteen and faux fur, to the hallway of dressing rooms. She stops abruptly and I tip forward, the pile slipping. She catches it in her arms as we take in the long line of miserable women balancing their heavy coats with their potential purchases and pulling at their turtlenecks.
“This is ridiculous.”
“I say drop to your skivvies or we’re going to be here all night.”
I do, taking more and more off beneath each item until I’m down to my underwear and mom’s knee-high argyle socks. Laura, sitting on the makeshift cushion of her down coat, pulls her hair back with her scarf to better keep up with rehanging the heap of discards as she gives me her vote. “Uh…. no.” “No.” “Nope.” “Do you missworking with Sonny?” “Definitely not.” “Out of the question unless a revival of
Carousel
comes to town.” And she finally collapses in giggles, managing to snort out, “You…look…like…Charo!”
I slump down in front of her and drop my head into my hands. “I’ve done this all wrong.”
Laura dries her eyes, “No! No you haven’t. But, Kate, come on, why do you care
so much
what you’re wearing?” She takes a wistful breath. “You’ve had great boyfriends. I mean, you date fabulous men—”
I snort.
“You have big sex.” She pushes the remaining outfits off of her.
“Sometimes,” I concede, unzipping myself from the velour bustier. “You have a husband,” I volley back.
“A very very tuckered husband. You’ve got this great career doing important altruistic things. You fly to Buenos Aires at a moment’s notice.”
“I was on a plane, in a hotel, in a factory, and then back on a plane. I could’ve been in Cleveland.”
“With framed pictures of Eva Peron behind every cash register?”
“No, probably not. That part was cool,” I concede. “I had to keep reminding myself they were portraits of the actual woman and not Madonna.”
“See? You’ve had an adventure.” She pulls out a pack of gum and pops a piece from its foil pocket. “And the farthest I ever got is visiting you in Charleston.”
“Okay, you’re not eighty—‘the farthest I ever got’—and you have a
family!”
She crosses her arms over her belly. “You still have your body.”
“Which I work at for the express purpose of some day having what you’ve already achieved, which is a man who’ll pledge to love me when I’m senile and two—three great kids! Laura, if I told you, in three hours, you could have a face-off with Rick Swartz, what would you do?”
Her eyes glaze over. “Take out a second mortgage…get Chanel to whip something up for me to drape this and minimize that. Get every square inch, new square inches included, highlighted, waxed, buffed and polished so I’d look so fucking great that all of mankind would be stopped in their fucking tracks and little Rick Swartz would have no choice but to regret his entire fucking existence.”
“Right, and all he did was tell the seventh grade you made a phone call.” I hand her the angora shrug.
Her face refocuses with renewed resolve. “Okay, let’s just try to find you a decent pair of jeans and then get you some makeup. Here.” She reaches into the bottom of the pile and tugs out an array of denim. I stand back up. “So, what are you going to say to the little shit anyway?”
“What would you say to Rick Swartz?” I push the first aborted pair off with my socked feet and she hands me another.
“I told you I think he’s in prison now, delightfully enough.”
“Merry Christmas to you.”
“That was last year’s present. Ah, Croton High, the gift that keeps on giving. But should I deign to visit him and address that whole chlamydia—”
“Malaria,” I correct her, swiping another pair.
“Right, malaria. Oh my god, chlamydia, can you imagine? Anyway, I would purse my perfectly lined lips and ever so slightly push out my currently humongous cleavage and tell him the whole thing was
so not cool.”
“Yes.” I turn to show her where the majority of my butt-crack is exposed. “Basically along those lines. There will most definitely be a not-very-subtle theme of So Not Cool.”
“You don’t have an exact plan? Really? We didn’t pack some notes or bullet points in that bag?”
“I don’t want to talk about that bag and it’s been forever since I’ve given this any serious thought. Thank God. I mean, there was Plan A.” I tug the denim from her arms and she gives, letting me fall back a step. “We’d hear he’d been spotted singing for quarters on the sidewalk in L.A. beside his empty guitar case.”
“Sadly, no go.”
“Plan B, One-Hit-Wonder. He’d fade into total pathetic obscurity, only resurfacing to appear gray and bloated on
Where Are They Now?”
“Plan C,” Laura continues as she stretches up to stand with one hand on the mirror and the other supporting her back. “Straight-up O.D. You’d arrive at the funeral in a stunning, yet tasteful, black sheath, your Nobel prize on a grosgrain ribbon around your neck, and his mother would take your hand, look into your eyes, and tell you—”
I zipper up the final pair. “You know, dear, although he had such success, he never knew a minute’s true happiness after he left.” And I would squeeze the old crone’s hand and say, “I’m sorry for your loss.” And, “Was he really found naked in his own feces sucking his thumb?”
“Oh, I did love Plan C.” Laura studies the fit in the mirror over my shoulder.
“Yeah, well, last we left Plan Negative Z involved locking eyes with him across the aisle at your wedding. Late that night we’d meet at the gazebo, I’d be in a sexy little nothing—apparently with butterflies on it.”
Laura grimaces. “I still,
still,
don’t know why Sam thought he’d come back for that.”
“Because those boys always want to believe the best about Jake.” I sigh.
“Well, believe me, that well’s run dry. Anyway, cut to mad passionate almost.”
“Cut to him regretting his entire existence,” I pick up her cue. “I get on with my fabulous life. There. That was the plan.”
“And
those
are the jeans. What about on top?”
“It’s not here; there must be something at home that’ll work.”
“Great. Come on, we’ve got six minutes for makeup. You run to the Lancôme counter and I’ll pay for these. Break!”
We both step in opposite directions before I spin back, “Lor—”
She turns, her blue eyes scanning me. All I can manage is a goofy smile as my own are suddenly moist. “I know,” her voice softens. “You, too.”
“You guys have your own rage, I totally defer to that.”
Her expression darkens. “You know how his label just got bought out by Bertlesbrink?” I nod. “Well, they’ve hit us with a cease and desist. They threatened, quote,
aggressive
legal action if we don’t drop it. We got the letter Monday. So Merry fucking Christmas.”
“Jesus. What are you going to do?”
She shakes her head as she cradles her tummy. “Sam says we can’t afford to keep pouring money into this.”
“And you?” My eyes go to the small tremor beneath her hand.
“I sat there in that fucking basement,” she says, her face taut with anger, “right alongside you, while my husband wrote the melody for the longest-running number-one of the ’nineties. So I can’t let it go, I can’t—the second we cease it’s like saying what he did is okay.” Closing her eyes, she takes a steadying breath. “I can’t get this upset.” My heart going out to her, I squeeze her arm and her eyes open. “So if you can make Rockstar Fuckhead’s evening even a little less fabulous it will be a total success as far as I’m concerned. Okay?” I nod. “But not looking like that.”
“Right.” I run my hand through my hair. “I love you.”
She smiles shyly, her cheeks flushing as her Scandinavian side gets embarrassed by the declaration. “Shucks, okay, I have too many hormones to do this now. Go!”
“Okay!”
“I mean it.” She waves me away. “You’re kicking his ass for all of us. I don’t want you doing it with puffy eyes.”
“Sam, you’re
so
retarded,” JenniferTwo declares wearily as Sam slides our minivan’s rear door shut, catching his Charger jacket in the hinge.
My eyes fly to the back of the driver’s seat, but her offense did not make it to Dad’s good ear, which is angled toward the dashboard. Thank God NPR is more fascinating than a bunch of fourteen-year-olds. That we are listening to a droning debate about Nicaragua, and not my new Guns N’Roses tape, was a requirement hotly negotiated in exchange for his chauffeuring our group date. Final compromise: misery[,] but only on the front speakers.
“Are we going to make the two forty-five?” I ask over the whir of Sam dragging the heavy door open and shut again, the “ajar” bell dinging steadily.
“Out and over, Sam.
Out
and over,” Dad twists back to instruct.
“Katie, I told you.” JenniferTwo reapplies her Clinique Black Honey gloss in the backseat, the first coat already making her lips flake off in dark red chunks. The fact that she shared a lifeguard chair with Kristi this summer has doubled her wenchiness, as if she has to quick use her new status in case it fades like her tan did. Not that Laura and I aren’t using it, too. It
did
make this date happen. But at least
we
don’t have attitudes. “If we don’t make
Indiana Jones,
we’ll hit the three o’clock
Pet Sematary.
Don’t be retarded.” This time she’s loud enough for Dad to catch my eye in the rearview, his nostrils flaring to convey that he does not in any way approve of the teenage misappropriation of the term. I nod right back to convey that, of course, this is unacceptable, but it’s just something people say so can he please just keep driving and continue with his silent protest, silently.
“Any more stops for you charming young folk?” he asks as the door clicks closed.
“Jake’s, Fifty-three Bluebell.” Sam slumps back with Benjy and me, absentmindedly wiping the greasy black streak on his jacket, clueless to Dad’s sarcasm. Laura glances back from the passenger seat, panic passing between us on an invisible current over the cup holder.
I’m going to be sitting in a car with Jake Sharpe?
I ask her with my eyes.
Yes!
she replies with her eyebrows.
Oh my God!
I shout with my forehead.
“He said he’d be waiting—” Sam suddenly yelps as Benjy grabs his blond head and a noogie love match erupts. “At the!…End of the!…Driveway!”
“There. That’s him, Mr. Hollis,” JenniferTwo resumes orchestration of this date. Her status, her coordination, her Black Honey lip-gloss on our lips. Flaking off them. My stomach knots as I see Jake in his leather jacket kicking wet leaves into a pile on the curb. He doesn’t
look
heartbroken. Maybe Kristi dumping him for Jason has made not just me, but also Jake, a stronger person. Maybe he feels like everybody else does about the whole thing, that Kristi and Jason at long last going out is like a fulfilled destiny for the entire freshman class. That, somehow, now that these two have paired off, the universe might actually be able to focus on the rest of us for a change.
Sam, utilizing his newfound expertise, slides the door open and he and Benjy jump out to pull Jake inside “abduction style.” Dad sighs as Jake tumbles onto the seat, his huge high-tops landing in my lap on a wave of damp chilled air.
“Sorry,” Jake Sharpe speaks to me for the first time ever as he whips his feet off my lap and then crams against my side. Benjy and Sam pile in next to him, head to head, Jake’s dark brown hair completing the Neapolitan.
“Aw, you reek!” Benjy tents his jacket over his nose.
“My dad’s burning leaves.” Jake flicks Benjy’s forehead.
We crane to see the smoke from the field bordering the lawn, where a man leans on a rake beside a reddening blaze.
“That’s not your dad.” Benjy scowls.
“The guy who cuts our lawn or whatever.”
Benjy flicks Jake. Sam flicks Jake. Jake flicks them both at the same time, his elbow narrowly missing the bridge of my nose and I don’t even care.
“One of you boys is going to have to get in back,
now.
Everyone needs a seat belt.” Dad’s losing patience.
Havepatiencedadhavepatiencedadhavepatience.
The flicks turn to shoves.
“Sam?” JenniferTwo extends an invitation and to a round of mock girlish
“Saaaaaams”
he gets into the backseat, bright pink stains spreading over his freckled skin.
“So gay,” JenniferTwo tosses under her breath to my snorting seatmates.
“Seat belts or we aren’t going anywhere,” Dad orders. A bead of sweat slides down my chest.
Oh my God, please. Please Dad, let’s just run the risk, live on the wild side, chance it. So much better than ordering these guys around—traction, losing limbs, dying—all tiny prices to pay for being able to show up at school on Monday and not hear about you being a total—
But everyone clicks their belts without attitude and I’m jolted by the reminder of their behind-the-scenes lives, with parents who insist on socks and bedtimes and finishing milk.
Dad pulls onto the highway and the boys talk about the
Appetite for Destruction
album, currently banished to the glove compartment—“Sorry, our cassette player’s busted,
isn’t it,
Dad?” Overcome, Sam finally whips his Walkman out of his jacket and plays it on 10, all of us leaning to hear the tinny echo dancing out the padded earphones atop the grumble of the Sandinistas. Straining to listen, Jake is at last still and his body solidly borders mine from heel to shoulder. Touching. The feeling of his shoulder, arm, thigh and calf. Just suddenly right here, next to me. Weird. Completely weird. As weird as touching the TV screen and feeling warm skin on Kirk Cameron’s face would be.
“Take me down,”
the guys cry out together while Laura and I sit in frozen anticipation of what the afternoon holds. Vibrations move through my arm as Jake starts nodding his head to the beat and soon Jake and Sam are air-guitaring as Benjy drums the back of Laura’s seat, his hands and feet working in synchronicity.
“I figure if I pick up another shift after school, I’ll have enough saved for the drum kit by the end of next summer,” Benjy says in rhythm, his head slamming back and forth.
“Our band’s gonna rule,” Sam declares, “Just like GNR.”
Jake takes a deep breath and then blasts Axl’s chorus into Sam’s face.
Benjy and Sam join in, shouting the response. Dad turns up the volume on the dashboard.
“Anybody found a bassist yet?” Jake asks the car.
“Um,” Laura swivels from the passenger seat, peering around the headrest. “Todd Rawley plays for Mrs. Beazley in choir sometimes?”
“Jake, you should check that out,” Sam says. I see Laura blush from the taken suggestion as she swivels back, sinking into her coat. Having nothing to offer I just let myself be rocked by Jake’s motion as I look down at the scuff mark left on my thigh and replay his first word to me, searching for some deeper, encoded message.
But it doesn’t happen until we’re in the theater, as we collectively squirm to our right to gain at least an armrest’s distance from JenniferTwo kissing Sam like it’s the next thing on her To-Do List—that I feel this thing take root in my stomach, this rubber band thing as Jake Sharpe comes back from the concession stand. A twinge tells me to turn around and, sure enough, he has just walked in the doors at the top of the dark aisle. The band tightens as his narrow silhouette approaches. Then, when he slides past I tuck my legs up on my chair and our eyes meet, stray kernels tumbling onto my lap—and it is taut between us. Loosening again as he plunks himself at the other end next to Benjy, who lunges for the tub of popcorn. I slide my hand to the center of my chest while staring up at the screen. This thing is different from living down Jake Sharpe, different from avoiding Jake Sharpe, even different from knowing Jake Sharpe thinks about what I look like. This new Jake Sharpe thing is happening inside me, all the way at the core.
People shriek, Laura dives her head into my shoulder, but I watch unflinching, my mind not connecting to the images—the old man grabbing his blood-spurting ankles, or even the gnarled spine of the dying girl. I am piano-bench straight, every inch of me realigning to this new state, this Jake Sharpe Compass I have just become.
“I’m going to kill my mother.” Laura runs her hands down the back of her thighs, smoothing her oversize letter jacket under her as a barrier against the cold curb, and sits.
“What’d she say?” As cars pull in and out circling for rest, I stare across the dark lot to the food court carousel’s twinkling lights, visible through the mall’s atrium. Jake Sharpe leans against the brick wall of the Cineplex. About twenty feet behind me, to the left.
“She wasn’t there. Just my sucky brother, who bit my head off because I’d woken him from his sucky nap.”
“She’ll be here soon.” I pat her knee reassuringly. “Let’s just hope JenniferTwo brings her sex slave back before she gets here.”
“So disgusting.” We squint into the tall trees lining the edge of the parking lot where JenniferTwo marched Sam off as soon as she saw that Laura’s mom wasn’t waiting. It’s what we’re all not talking about. With the exception of Benjy screaming, “Don’t forget to swallow!” met with the screeching, “You wish, asshole!”
The chilly October night blows through us and I withdraw my hands into my sleeves, wishing I could be wearing the ski hat Mom made me tuck in my pocket.
“All that calling and picking out outfits for
this.”
Laura waves her hands around at our pathetic clusters. “Ugh.” She stands and steps out into the lot, peering up to Route 14A. “I’m going inside to try her again.”
“I’ll keep guard,” I volunteer.
“I’ll guard for bloodthirsty toddlers back from the dead.” Benjy extracts the straw he’s been chewing for three hours and waves it like a scalpel, showering spittle on the concrete.
“I feel safer already.” Laura backs out of mucus range.
“Actually, I have to take a whiz.” He grabs the theater door as she drops it and follows her into the purple-carpeted lobby.
Jake drums the top of the garbage can. I focus very hard on the rippling outline of the mall carousel’s horses because now it is just the two of us and the band is getting tighter, tighter until his high-tops are next to me. “Stupid.”
My eyes fly up.
“The movie. Pretty stupid.”
“Yeah.” I nod, the wind blowing into the coat I can’t zip up, must keep off my shoulders like I’ve just shrugged carelessly and couldn’t be more comfortable this way even though I can see my breath. His toe nudges an empty can of Squirt soda off the curb. He rolls it lightly to my ankle and back again.
“All that from burying a cat. Seems kind of extreme,” I offer.
“Yeah,” he laughs. I’m riveted by the lolling hot pink letters under his red rubber sole, seeing if I can anticipate the direction it will go next. A test. “You see
Big?”
he asks. “That was pretty cool.”
“I loved
Big!
Where he has to say good-bye to Elizabeth Perkins because he has to grow up and she has to let him. Oh, it was so good.”
“…Yeah.”
Wrong! Wrong! What else happened?! What else?!
“And the whole thing where he plays the giant keyboard, that was cool.”
“Totally!” Yay! “It’d be awesome to get all that stuff without having to live with your parents or finish school or go to college or any of that. Just stick a ticket in a machine and bam! You’re there. Wicked pad. Cool job doing cool stuff. Hot girl.” The can slips out and his foot falls onto my toes, pain shooting up through my leg and I bite my lip.
The Heller station wagon honks, approaching through the maze of mall stop signs, and I wave. Then his feet are opposite mine, toe-to-toe, his hands dangling in my face. He flicks them in insistence and I realize what he wants. I push my numb fingers through my sleeves, our shivering skin meeting. He grips my wrists and then leans back, pulling me up. I arrive just beneath his face, looking into the break in his oxford at the tender hollow of his exposed neck.
“Thanks,” I breathe as he releases me, no idea if I got out any actual sound.
“Katie, hon,” Mrs. Heller rolls down her window to speak to me. “P & C was a zoo. Where’s Laura?”
“She went to call you. I’ll go get her.”
I reach out to the leather covering Jake’s arm. He looks down at my hand, his face surprised. “Sam.” I withdraw my palm to gesture to the trees. He nods and I move toward the glass doors, the band stretching the length of the parking lot as he jogs to the edge of the pines.
At the sight of Jake’s bike rounding the corner I rise to standing on the warped steps of the Whiteforest Settlement Historical House and quickly pull my hands from my coat pockets. I press my lips together, making sure my gloss hasn’t evaporated in the November wind as Jake hops off at the edge of the gravel and walks his bike up to the front stoop. “I didn’t even know this place was here.” He looks over my shoulder, up the steps to the little gray clapboard house. “It’s only like a ten-minute ride from my house, too. Weird.” He smiles, effortless cool.
“I know, I didn’t even know we had so many historic sites in Croton…which, I guess, was kinda the point of the assignment.”
“I’m glad you called.” You are? “I totally would’ve left this till the last minute.”