Firsts (13 page)

“I’ve been through my share of those,” Faye says, twirling a strand of hair absentmindedly around her finger. “Most times they don’t live up to the illusion of a supercool college guy that you had in your head. Just to warn you. And you think they know what they’re doing, but they’re even worse than high school guys. Mostly the girls they slept with in high school didn’t know any better, so they just kept doing the wrong thing. Except by the time they’re in college, they think it’s the right thing and it’s harder to get them to change.”

I nod, hopefully not too emphatically. She’s right, and she has just reaffirmed why I do what I do. What I did. They have to learn it right the first time, because guys are impossible to change.

“Somebody ought to just tell them what they need to do from square one, huh?” Faye says. “There needs to be some kind of manual. Preferably, an interactive one.” She laughs.

I give her a tight-lipped smile and start to close the curtain, but she puts her hand on the curtain to stop it. For a minute I’m not sure what she is going to do, if she is going to get in here with me and shut us both in. But she just smiles at me, a different smile than the one she uses in public. And just like that, she’s gone.

I leave without buying the lingerie, even though I really like it. I don’t buy it because of Faye. For whatever reason, I don’t want her to think I’m buying lingerie with someone special in mind. I don’t want to take it home with me, because I will think of Faye when I look at it.

“Want to come over later?” Faye says when I wave good-bye. “We could watch a movie or something. Or just bitch about guys. I’m done with work at five.” She says it casually, but the invitation doesn’t sound like a whim.

I nod mechanically, wondering why I feel so strange. I guess Angela is the only person I have really hung out with on a regular basis. Faye is vastly different than Angela, and I feel different around her.

“Great. I’ll text you my address. See you at seven?” She winks and disappears into the dressing rooms.

Back at home, I spend an hour flat ironing my hair and choosing an outfit that is both casual and cute. I don’t know why I’m nervous for an evening that involves my clothes staying on, but I’m definitely on edge. I’m so used to planning for guys, dressing and undressing for them and trying to morph myself into their dream girl. I’m so used to it that I don’t really know where that girl ends and the real me begins. I suppose what it comes down to is confidence. I’m confident in that girl, the one who emerges from my walk-in wearing lingerie when I’m done getting ready. But at Faye’s house, I’m not going to be that girl. I’m going to be me.

Whoever that is anymore.

16

I end up getting to Faye’s ten minutes late, because her house is totally hidden from view of the street and dwarfed by bigger houses on both sides. Maybe the most surprising thing is that it’s small, unlike the majority of the homes in Rancho Palos Verdes. It’s plain and unassuming and doesn’t suit Faye at all.

When I pull into the driveway, I take a deep breath. My heart is pounding and I shake off the feeling that I’m nervous—nervous to go into Faye’s house, because that means something. This isn’t about school or chemistry tutoring or some sense of obligation. Faye wants me here.

When I walk up the front steps and ring the doorbell, I hear laughter coming from inside. Faye’s laugh, that seal-bark one. And another laugh that sounds familiar, too.

I don’t put it together until Zach opens the door.

“Mercy,” he says, stepping forward like he wants to hug me but stopping at the last moment. “You made it.”

“Welcome to my humble abode,” Faye says, appearing in the hallway wearing a frilly pink apron over her jeans. “Sorry if it was hard to find. Now you see why I had to get a part-time job.”

Zach laughs. “I hear you. That’s why I’m the guy making your sandwiches at the Submarine King.”

I look at him, but he stares at the ground.

“You make sandwiches at Submarine King?” I say.

A flush creeps into his cheeks. “Yeah—you should see how much of an artist I am with lunch meat,” he says, jamming his hands in his pockets.

Faye laughs again. “It’s so weird,” she says. “Zach and I work at the same mall and had no idea until today. I went to the food court after you left and there he was, wearing the cutest little outfit. This bright yellow hat—”

Zach’s face turns full-on red. “Come on—it’s not that bad,” he mumbles.

“I didn’t know,” I say dumbly. Zach won’t meet my eye, and I don’t know what else to say. I know what he’s probably thinking:
You didn’t ask.

“Well, let me give you the grand tour,” Faye interjects. “There’s not much to it.” She shuffles back down the hall and beckons for me to follow. “The bathroom is upstairs, and that’s the door to the garage. Which we don’t use to actually park because Lydia hoards all kinds of crap in there. She never gets rid of anything. She thinks it’ll all have value someday, even though it’s junk.”

“Who’s Lydia?” I say, slipping off my shoes and following her.

“Oh. My mom,” Faye says. “I just call her Lydia. She has always seemed more like a sister to me. She had me when she was fourteen.”

My heart starts thumping, and the distance to the kitchen feels like walking through water, where breath is impossible to find and every inhalation feels too heavy to take in. Luckily, Faye is turned away and doesn’t notice my silence or the fact that I feel like all the color has been sucked out of me.

“I’m a great cook,” Faye says. “But I’m a huge slob. I think I got some of Lydia’s tendencies after all.”

She’s not lying. The kitchen counter is cluttered with cereal boxes and stray papers and dirty pots and pans that don’t fit in the overfull sink. Kim would have a conniption if she stood in this kitchen for even five minutes—a kitchen that looks actually lived in. Even though Faye and her mom didn’t move here until just over a week ago and I can tell a lot of the house has yet to be unpacked, they still managed to put photos on the fridge. Kim loves her stainless steel too much to ever allow me to mar the fridge with photos and magnets.

“Is this Lydia?” I say, touching a photo of Faye with her arm slung around a blond woman’s shoulders, a woman who is a carbon copy of Faye.

“Yeah. She’s pretty, right? I always wanted to look just like her.” Faye fills a pot with water and sets it on the stove.

“You do,” I say.

There’s an awkward silence, wherein I realize Faye knows I think she’s pretty. I don’t know why I feel weird about that.

“I want to look like her, but I don’t want my life to be like hers,” Faye says. “I never knew my dad. He was a loser who walked out on her when she was knocked up with me. And the only work experience she has is bartending. That’s where she is now. If it weren’t for the money my grandma left us, we definitely wouldn’t be living here. This was our fresh start.”

Faye speaks quietly, which I realize I haven’t heard her do. She always has what Angela would call an “outdoor voice.” But I can tell by the way she is speaking now that her voice drops when she talks about someone she loves. It’s obvious that she loves and respects Lydia.

Faye clears a stack of newspapers off a chair and gestures for me to sit, then plunks a glass of water in front of me. I can’t help but notice that there’s already a spot cleared for Zach—how long has he been here, anyway? How much of Faye’s house has he seen? Has he been in her bedroom? Her grand tour didn’t extend upstairs, and I don’t know if I should be relieved or offended.

And I don’t know why I should feel either.

I take a long gulp of my water and watch Faye move fluidly around the mess in her kitchen, like she knows where every stack of boxes is by memory.

“I do most of the cooking,” she says, using a can opener on a jar of tomato sauce. “I like to think I’m a genius at cooking on a budget by now.”

“I should have offered to bring something,” I say. “Like a salad. Or dessert.”

Zach muffles a laugh. “You don’t cook,” he says.

I shoot him a withering stare. “How do you know?” I snap.

Faye looks at us and raises an eyebrow—and wisely changes the subject.

“How about you? What’s your mom like? Is your dad in the picture?”

I look into my glass, hoping the right thing to say is located somewhere at the bottom. I didn’t expect Faye to turn the tables on me. I’m usually good at avoiding questions like these, even with Angela, who lets me get away with a vague “Kim’s being Kim” answer. But I have a feeling this won’t work on Faye.

“My dad’s not in the picture,” I say steadily. I can say this without anger, tears, or any emotion. My dad ceased to be a person and became more of a memory the last time I heard from him, when he sent me a “Happy Sweet Sixteen” card on my fourteenth birthday. But Kim is a different story. She’s physically present but mentally absent, which is so much worse.

“Looks like the three of us have something in common,” Zach says slowly. “Single moms. Deadbeat dads.”

I don’t look at him, but I can tell he’s staring at me. I wonder what he’s thinking—that as much time as we have spent in my bedroom, we’re little more than strangers outside of it. I wonder if he’s pissed off that I can talk to Faye but not him.

“And your mom,” Faye continues, stirring pasta into the now-boiling pot of water and leaning against the oven, cocking her hip toward us. “What’s she like?”

Faye definitely isn’t letting me off easy. I press my hands together and think of the easiest way to sum up my mother.

“I don’t know,” I start slowly, looking at my hands. “She’s not around enough to let me figure her out.”

I don’t let myself look up. I don’t want to see pity on Faye’s face or curiosity on Zach’s. They can’t think I’m weak. For a long minute nobody talks, and I’m afraid I said too much.

“Parents really fucking suck sometimes,” Faye finally says. I let my eyes flicker up to her when I hear the tone in her voice. There’s no pity in her eyes, no curiosity, no malice. Just a very astute observation.

“There’s the truth,” Zach says.

“Seriously. I mean, Lydia and I are all tight and shit, but she makes the worst life choices. She has been through so many douche bag boyfriends that I lost count, and she keeps telling me she’ll never degrade herself like that again. But she still does it.” Faye shakes her head.

“I know what you mean. If Kim gets one more ‘cosmetic procedure,’ I think she might try to attend our high school. She already dates guys young enough.”

I wasn’t planning on saying that, but the words spill out, clothed in sarcasm, my favorite defense mechanism. Zach chuckles, but Faye throws her head back and laughs, that seal-bark sound that I thought would get annoying the first day I met her. I was wrong.

“Watch the pasta,” I yell, jumping out of my chair. “Your hair’s dangerously close to the burner.”

Faye grabs a fistful of her hair and bursts into another fit of laughter. “God, wouldn’t that have sucked? The only thing worse than hair in your food is burnt hair in your food.”

When we sit down to eat, there’s an awkward silence, punctuated by the sound of forks hitting plates. I feel the need to fill the silence, like it’s my fault it’s even awkward in the first place.

I work up the courage to ask the question that has wiggled to the forefront of my mind. “So, it must have been hard moving high schools in last semester,” I say, pushing pasta around on my plate.

Faye swallows and wipes the corner of her mouth with a napkin. “Not really,” she says. “Schools are schools. They’re not much different, wherever you go. Milton High is just a bigger playground.”

“But why now?” My voice comes out more bluntly than I intended. Faye’s shoulders stiffen, and I notice the way her grip on her fork tightens.

“We were done with Nevada. Lydia got a better job here, at a real restaurant. Not a crappy dive bar where she has to get groped by old perverts every night.” She winds pasta tightly around her fork and looks at her plate, a gesture I take as the end of discussion.

Faye is done with her meal and Zach has had seconds in half the time it takes for me to eat a quarter of mine. She filled our plates with heaping portions of pasta and tomato sauce, portions that would make Kim stick her finger down her throat before she even started. I was taught from an early age that carbohydrates were evil. “Spaghetti will make your ass expand like a balloon,” Kim had told me the last time we went out to eat together. I can never eat anything around her without feeling like her eyes are on me.

Faye notices my lack of appetite. “Don’t you like it?” she says. A crease has appeared between her eyebrows. I fight the urge to touch it with my finger and tell her that I love the pasta but hate eating in front of other people. Yet another way my mom has messed me up.

“I love it,” I say quietly. And to prove it, I do something I haven’t done for as long as I can remember: I finish the whole plate. I don’t want to be under Kim’s thumb when she’s not around to criticize me. I can imagine her shaking her finger at me, admonishing me for not following the “one-thirds” rule she instituted when I hit puberty, where I would be praised for eating only one-third of what was on my plate and leaving the rest. But tonight, I don’t care.

When I try to help Faye clear dishes, she waves me away. “This is the least I could do,” she says, shoving plates into the sink and running them under water. “Your tutoring probably saved me from failing chemistry.”

I feel Zach’s eyes burning into me. I wait for him to make his usual joke about being a lost cause, but he doesn’t. When I glance at him, he’s staring at his place mat, and he doesn’t look angry or upset, just sad. And that’s a lot worse.

After dinner, Faye asks what movie we want to watch. Turns out, she shares my hatred of chick flicks and romantic comedies. Oddly enough, it’s Zach who would rather watch some sappy love story than an action movie. Yet another thing I didn’t know about him—another thing that I won’t be able to forget, that will make it that much more difficult to keep our Wednesday lunch dates in their sealed little box.

“You’re outnumbered,” Faye says, plunking down between us on the couch and hitting the Play button. “Two against one. Not to mention, you’re a huge pussy.”