Getting Over Jack Wagner (16 page)

Shameless, I know. But it worked. From the corner of my eye, I saw Jordan Prince slip off his shades. He stared at me for a long, slow moment, and when I turned to him, those blond brows were furrowing for me alone. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Where's your dad now?”

 

Once I'd discovered the potential rock-star dating power of Lou's abandonment, I couldn't believe I hadn't capitalized on it before. I didn't have to manufacture angst. I had angst. I coined angst. I owned angst. Over the years, I have perfected angst into a minor art form, one of precise timing, tone, pace. I should have been an Oscar contender for my nuanced performance one night in a damp corner of Sigma Pi, where I had a frat brother dabbing at his eyes with his toga. Yes, it might seem callous and selfish and mean, but here it is: if my father chose to abandon us, I chose to benefit from that abandonment any way I damn well could.

Saturday night, a week after the band bash/function, my mother found me in the bathroom layering on midnight black mascara. The room was strewn with damp towels, clogged with steam, throbbing with the sounds of
Licensed to Ill
from the boom box I'd propped on the fluffy toilet seat cover.

“Where are you going?” Mom asked. In high school, most of my interactions with my mother revolved around these questions: “Where are you going?”, “How are you getting there?”, “What will you do for dinner?” and “Won't that get infected?”

“Out,” I said. This was one of my standard replies, along with: “Don't know” and “Maybe. What's it to you?”

In the patch of mirror I'd wiped clean with my fist, I could read my mother's face exactly: one part interested in my plans for the evening, one part worried about my plans, two parts appalled by my sloppy technique with a Wet 'n Wild wand.

“I was hoping you would eat with us tonight,” she said, folding her arms across her chest. “Harv's here, you know. For dinner.”

This was not news. Harv was always there for dinner. I hated eating dinner with Mom and Harv for several reasons, including Mom, Harv, and dinner. Mom, because she was always too eager for Harv and me to make friends. Harv, because I was convinced he had some kind of rare digestive-auditory problem that made his intestinal functions much too loud. Dinner, because the menu was always something along the lines of: slab of meat with meat sauce on a bed of meat.

“I can't,” I said, penciling a thick black line under each eye. “I have a date.”

Mom stiffened. “With whom?”

Normally I resisted giving any personal information to my mother, especially after she used good grammar. But for the past week, I'd grabbed any excuse to say Jordan Prince out loud.

“Jordan Prince.”

Mom took a step into the bathroom. “Isn't he going to come around to the house?” Her crossed arms quickly disentangled and she began wringing her hands. Literally: the woman wrung her hands. Whereas she used to plant them on her hips, now the hands crashed into each other in midair, clung and fumbled. “Aren't you going to introduce him to me? And Harv?”

“Why would I introduce him to Harv?” I said, yanking open the medicine cabinet. I wanted to avoid looking at Mom's reflection, which was starting to make me edgy. As I scoured the shelves for something useful, I found myself staring instead at a short history of my family: Cherry Chapstick and Stridex (me). Lilac-scented body wash and body splash (Camilla). Oil of Olay (Mom, now). Sleeping aids (Mom, then). Maalox and Tums and a generic-brand stool softener (Harv?). I grabbed a pair of tweezers and slammed the mirrored door.

Behind me, Mom was picking up my towels from the floor. She centered each one on a towel rack, making sure each edge was equidistant from each rod. “Who is this boy?” she asked, as if Jordan was a vagrant who had just wandered into our lives off the Pennsylvania Turnpike. “What do we know about him?”

“What do we want to know about him?” I rubbed at my eyeliner with a fingertip, watching in the mirror as Mom winced. If I hadn't been running late, I would have penciled on some moles, just for kicks.

“I just want to hear about him. I want to meet him. Is that so wrong? Camilla always used to bring her friends around to the house for me to meet.”

I should have known. “In other words,” I said, capping the eyeliner, “you want to know if he's acceptable. If he gets straight As. If he shovels snow for the elderly. If he runs for president of the student council.” I felt bad dragging Ivan into it, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. “Actually, Mom, he's a pimp from outer space.”

“Eliza.” She was going for motherly exasperation, though I know part of her was terrified this was in some way true. “Please.”

I leaned into the mirror, smearing on dark red lipstick. “He goes to my school,” I conceded. “He's a musician. He plays the sax in the stage band.” In the mirror, my mother's face seemed closer now, like a moon hovering over my shoulder, clenched and pink. I could practically feel her breath on my neck. In that moment, all I wanted was for her to get away from me, my life, my friends, my thoughts. Everything she touched seemed to get screwed up or disappear completely.

“And,” I said, snapping the lipstick shut, “he loves jazz. Just like Dad.”

I hadn't planned to say it. I instantly wished I hadn't said it. In the mirror, I saw my mother about-face and walk from the room without a word, her steps quick, rigid, as if stepping on hot coals. A guilty sweat crept up the back of my neck and crawled under my hair. I kept my eyes fixed on my pale reflection as I listened to her padding downstairs. My heartbeat echoed the sound of her footsteps, faster and more frantic as she neared the bottom of the staircase.

But when I heard the footsteps stop, followed by the low, consoling rumble of Harv's voice or Harv's large intestine or both, I stopped feeling so guilty. Why should Mom care if I was dating a guy who liked jazz? She wasn't lonely. She wasn't unhappy. She had Carnivore Harv for company. Besides, it was her fault Dad left us in the first place. I turned up the Beasties, picked up the tweezers, grabbed an eyebrow hair and yanked.

 

Jordan Prince would, in fact, meet my mother. I would, in fact, meet Jordan Prince's mother. Mrs. Prince would, in fact, turn out to be one of the few mothers in rock star history not to pull something grossly embarrassing. I chalk this up to the fact that, in high school, rock stars are still young enough that mothers aren't so nostalgic. Mothers are still playing tennis and joining book groups, picking up their rock star's banana peels and gym socks. And girlfriends are still relatively harmless, a pretty face in a prom photo.

Had we made it that far, I wouldn't have been surprised if Jordan Prince and I had gone to “prom” (a lack of article I refuse to accept, and #2 on my list of words to outlaw if I were president). We probably would have done the whole mainstream, color-coordinated corsage-and-boutonniere thing. Because, unlike Z Tedesco, Jordan didn't have a lot of angst. He “went with the flow” (and was actually known to use the phrase “I go with the flow”). It wasn't that he was particularly attached to proms and corsages, he was just mellow about things. His voice was mellow. His gait was mellow. Even his kissing style—dry and slow, unlike Z's propeller tongue—was mellow. He seemed biologically incapable of things like tension, reflection, moral/spiritual self-examination, or holding opinions in general. The only consternation in his body was in his furrowing forehead—the inspiration for my summer opus, “Sweet Brow 'O Mine.”

On occasion, Jordan's “flow” could make me uneasy. Jealous, actually, much as I hated to admit it. For example: a July day at the Jersey shore. Jordan is turned on his stomach, carefully tanning. (I would later learn there is a certain breed of male for whom tanning is a sacred, timed event, and realize that Jordan Prince was one of them.) I'm propped on my elbows, getting a haphazard sunburn, flipping through
People
and listening to Sinéad on my Walkman. All is well when yet another girl in a bathing suit comes along to threaten our relationship: this time, a red-white-and-blue bikini with the (swear to God) Budweiser logo plastered across the butt. She kicks sand onto Jordan's feet.

“Oops!” she giggles, pausing at the foot of his towel.

I let my Walkman drop around my neck. Jordan rolls over.

“Sorry,” she says. “Didn't mean it.”

Like hell you didn't,
I spit with my eyes.

“No problem,” Jordan smiles beneath his shades.

“It was an accident,” the girl smiles back, flipping her hair over one shoulder. I might as well have been a beach umbrella. “So I'll see ya around?”

“Sure.”

And that was that. She pranced away, all beer and patriotism. Jordan rolled back over. There was no comment, no reflection, no reaction. Jordan glanced at his Swatch, probably worried he'd missed valuable seconds of back-tanning time.

I stared at the blond back of his head, willing him to turn around. He did not.

“She
likes
you, you know,” I informed him, through clenched teeth.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

Oh.

From then on, instead of getting jealous, I tried to match Jordan's laid-back 'tude. This is easier in the summer, of course, when you don't have to deal with all the school stuff: where to sit in the caf, whether to hold hands in the hall, how to cope if you have the misfortune of ending up in the same gym section. Instead, most of what we did was music—or done
to
music. Jordan talked about jazz bands, we listened to jazz bands, I listened to him talk about listening to jazz bands. We went to third base on his bed with a black-and-white poster of sweat-drenched Miles Davis inspiring us from above.

There was only one musical topic we avoided and that was The Big C: Concert Band. The few times the subject came up—once on a mini-golf double-date with Hannah and The Boom, once over milkshakes in McDonald's when “Nadia's Theme” trickled over the Muzak—it was unnerving. I'd always assumed c-band was just something Jordan tolerated, another opportunity to play the sax (or, as he unfortunately called it, the “'phone”). But when he talked about it—using words like “awesome,” “righteous,” once calling the bassoonists “dudes”—you'd think he belonged to some super-cool frat house. It seemed he was actually oblivious to the band's low rung on the York High social ladder. I began to suspect that being in band was a form of being brainwashed. Existing in a world unto itself. Like the chess club, or the Amish.

I tried to ignore Jordan's concert band comments and banish any association between my boyfriend and “Rock Me Amadeus” from my mind. By August, I had almost managed to convince myself he wasn't in band at all. Until it came time for camp.

“What do you mean, camp?”

We were in the food court at the Blue Horn Mall, eating gluey cheese fries from Cheesesteaks, Etc. “You know,” Jordan said, prying two fries apart like a wishbone. His tone had the same kind of cheerful but terrible quality I recalled from being told I needed braces. “Band camp.”

“Oh,” I said. Oh no.

“We go away for a week.”

Oh no. Oh no.

“To the Poconos.”

Make it stop.

“To practice songs and…”

For the love of God!

“…drills.”

I felt something burst inside me then. Hope, maybe. Faith. Trust. The innocence of youth.

“Right,” I intoned. “Drills.”

“It starts on Monday,” Jordan explained, stuffing a clot of fries in his mouth. His brow furrowed over his shiny shades, both of which were starting to look much less cute. “I thought you knew.”

“Must have forgotten,” I shrugged, and noted the traces of Velveeta gathering in the corners of his mouth.

And that was all the band camp info I asked to know. Maybe it was because I'd finally absorbed Jordan's live-and-let-live attitude. Maybe it was because I trusted his judgment so completely. Or maybe it was because, on some level, I wasn't ready to acknowledge what I already knew was true.

On Monday morning, when I went to his house to say good-bye, I couldn't deny the truth any longer. I walked upstairs, opened his bedroom door, and there was living, breathing confirmation of my deepest fear: Jordan Prince in polyester.

This person was no rock star. This person was preening in front of his full-length closet mirror, humming some kind of awful show tune/band march hybrid. He was adjusting the cuffs and buttons of his marching band uniform as if getting ready for a society dinner. He was wearing sunglasses and a plumed hat. All I could do was stare, numb, as he secured the hat on his head and fastened the chin strap. In that moment, I believe I knew how women must feel who suddenly discover their husbands are polygamists or running from the law.

Jordan walked over to where I was clutching at the bedroom wall. He cupped my face in both hands, gazing through his shades and into my eyes. He might have been going off to war.

“I'll see you soon,” he said, softly. His eyebrows rose on the “see” and the “soon,” which struck me as idiotic. “I'll be back on Saturday.”