Into the Wild Nerd Yonder (9 page)

Tempted, but flashing back to the one time I did drink beer (which I had to drink a lot of to get past the puke/piss taste) and the vomitous aftermath. “No thanks. I’m good.”

Char sips and nods to the “beat.” Guys pass us and give Char the up-and-down, undressing-her-with-their-eyes look she must be so used to. I get an occasional glance, but I think mostly because people are drawn, like bugs, to my shiny skirt. After about fifteen minutes of this and no sight of Van, I’m over it and ready to go. Char has made casual conversation (which amounts to very few, very loud words to be heard over the blasting music) with about thirty boys of various punk incarnations during this short time. I was particularly impressed with the guy who looked to be about forty, a bull’s ring through his nose and the word “Mom” lovingly tattooed on his freakishly large bicep.

“Where’s Bizza?” I ask Char between visitors.

“With Van.” She gives me some look with her eyes that I know is supposed to mean something I don’t even want to think about. “You’ve been really cool about this whole thing, Jessie. Better than I would be.”

“What do you mean?” I assume Char is referring to this crapass party.

“You know, letting Bizza have Van, even though you liked him for practically forever.” I feel both relieved that Char is finally acknowledging this and pissed that she didn’t bother to try and stop Bizza.

“It’s not like I let her
have
him; he chose her.”

“Hardly.” Char laughs and sips her beer. “Bizza’s been stalking the guy all summer. How could he possibly say no? I mean, shit, she’s not even wearing a shirt tonight. How much easier can she make things?”

Things. Ick. I cannot think of those things or I might heave all over the floor and some poor, unsuspecting mosher could slip and fall.

With her perfectly assy timing, Bizza appears through the dancing punks. She thuds herself down on the couch in a small space between me and Char. Her bare leg is warm against mine, and I slide over to avoid more contact. “Can I have some of that?” Bizza points to Char’s beer. “I need to clear my throat.”

“You
didn’t
?” Char asks in an excited, naughty way. Bizza just smiles and grabs Char’s cup. She chugs it until there’s a thin foam left.

“Didn’t what?” I hate that they are in on something, again, and I’m the dork trying to figure it out.

“I was upstairs.” Bizza turns to me. “With
Van
?” She says this like a question, as if that’s supposed to tell me anything. I’m already grossed that Bizza did, in fact, make it to one of my dream destinations, and then she makes things even grosser. “And I needed to clear my throat?” Another question.

But this time I have the repulsive answer.

“You blew Van?”

I don’t need to look at her to feel her nod. Thank god I didn’t have a beer because I would be full-on blowing chunks right now. It’s a combination of a million things—Bizza in Van’s bedroom, Bizza and Van period, the blow job. . . . She’d really do that. With Van. Then I remember Barrett and his Krispy Kreme talk, and I almost laugh. It’s gross and stupid and so Bizza at the same time. Pathetic. She comes to a party in her bra to blow some guy who she’s been stalking all summer.
The
guy. The never-was-but-will-always-be
my
guy. Not that I think I’d do what she did with
my guy
, but I’m speechless that my “best friend” (huge, freakin’ finger quotes) would stoop so low. Pun absolutely intended.

The silence annoys Bizza, because she asks, “What’s wrong, Jessie? Are you mad?” I want to detect a hint of fear in her voice, but the music is so loud I can’t tell.

“Why would I be mad?” is my passive-aggressive answer. Why, after weeks of her lusting after my secret-ish crush, would I be mad?

“ ’Cause of me and Van,” she says cautiously.

I flip my hand up and scrunch my lips in an “And . . . ?” gesture.

“Well, I know you like him. Or liked him, at least. I thought you might be a little jealous.” She’s part cautious and part cocky, and I can’t stand it. Is she kidding? Of course I’m jealous! And not just of this. I’m jealous that she can get away with looking like an ass-hat but thinking she’s so cool. I’m jealous that she gets every bit of attention that someone smarter and funnier and nicer than her—i.e., ME—deserves. And I’m jealous that Bizza can somehow be so oblivious to other people’s feelings that she doesn’t care how many people she shits on, even her oldest, best friend.

“You know what, Bizza?” I stand up, looking down at her. “You’re a bitch.”

I storm out of the party and walk until I’m far enough away that I don’t hear any more bass. I’m not crying. I’m swearing. Swearing and cursing the crap out of Bizza and her stupid, selfish fuzzy head. When I finally have enough of walking, I pull out my cell phone and call Barrett.

“Can you come get me?” I yell into the phone wildly the second he answers.

“Jess, I’m out with Chloe. What’s up?” I swear I hear soft rock playing in the background.

Crap. I forgot about Chloe. “Never mind. I don’t want to interrupt.” A quick image of Barrett and Chloe in the backseat of his car, pom-poms flying, pops into my head.

“No, it’s okay. We can come get you. Are you still at Van’s?” I tell him what corner I’m standing on, and he says he’ll be here soon. What am I going to do next year when I’m stuck at a party and need a ride home? Call Doc Mom or Dad? Not likely. I can just hear Dad blabbing on about all of the parties he used to go to in high school and how I have to rise above peer pressure and . . . god. I’m boring myself just thinking about it. Thankfully, my ex-besty betrayed me while Barrett’s still home. Silver lining, right?

While I wait for my savior, I relive Bizza’s final questions to me. Am I mad? Am I jealous? And the worst part of it all, that she knew I liked Van and still did all of this.

A few minutes later, Barrett pulls up with Chloe Romano in the front seat. She really is pretty: shiny black hair, crystal blue eyes, a genuine smile. I climb into the backseat, embarrassed to barge in on their date. Barrett looks back at me, concerned. “Jessie, this is Chloe. Chloe, Jessie.”

“Nice to meet you,” I say in an obligated, little-kid way.

“Same here.” She smiles. “Barrett talks about you all the time.” This makes me perk up a bit.

“So can I ask what happened?” Barrett’s driving now, away from the scene of the slime.

“As long as you don’t freak out on anyone,” I warn.

“Why would I freak out?” Barrett says, freaking out. “What happened?” He still wants to believe that any problems I have are about Barbies and Transformers.

“Um, it’s kind of gross.” I don’t know if I should be saying any of this in front of Chloe Romano. “Kind of personal.”

“You’re not making me any less freaked out by not saying anything, Jess.” He sounds like he’s trying to keep it together in front of Chloe Romano. He looks at me in the rearview mirror, and I point with my head toward her, like maybe this conversation doesn’t need to happen in front of company.

I guess Chloe senses my hesitation because she says, in a surprisingly friendly, easygoing manner, “It’s okay. I won’t be offended. Or grossed out. And I won’t tell anyone. Or I don’t even have to listen. No worries.”

I really don’t want to have to wait, so I take a deep breath and bust out, “Bizza gave Van a blow job even though she knows I like him. Or I
liked
him.” The faster I speak, the faster I get the humiliation out of the way.

“Dick!” Barrett yells, then looks over at Chloe Romano. “Sorry,” he mutters. Chloe shrugs like she doesn’t care. “She’s just a kid. No offense, Jess, but shit. He can screw any girl he wants and then he forces my kid sister’s friend to suck him off? He’s so freaking dead when I see him on Tuesday.” The protective-big-brother thing is both comforting and scary.

“I don’t think he forced her. I mean, she didn’t seem upset.”

Chloe responds, “You should ask her what
she
got out of
it. It’s one thing to have oral sex with someone you know and trust, but now every girl thinks the way to popularity is through blow jobs. I had this huge talk with my little sister about this. If a guy is only going to like you because you’re the girl who says yes to putting his dick in your mouth, then forget him. And why is it always about girls giving something to guys? It’s never the other way around, you know? So many double standards.”

I’m stunned at how openly Chloe Romano is talking to me about not giving guys blow jobs. I guess there’s a part of me that believes that if a girl is gorgeous and superpopular, she must be kind of a ho. What am I supposed to say, though? It’s not as though I’ve ever sat around theorizing on the gender inequalities of oral sex. I guess it makes sense when you think about it, but I haven’t really thought about it.

Chloe must notice the foggy look on my face, because she turns around and says, “My mom teaches Women’s Studies at UW Madison. She’s raised me not to succumb to all of the bullshit pressure society puts on females. I try, anyway.”

Barrett looks back at me in the rearview mirror with a smile that says,
Now do you see why I like her?

Barrett and Chloe drop me off at home, and I wave as I watch them drive off. If Chloe Romano can be a surprise feminist, then what other people are out there who might surprise me in a good way? I’ve been
un
pleasantly surprised enough.

MONDAY IS FILLED WITH RINGING telephones and lame excuses on voice mails that I delete before they’re finished. I throw myself into making a new skirt, fancier and more complex than my others due to all of the buttons I’m sewing onto it. I call it my Frog and Toad skirt, like in the kid’s book where Frog and Toad go searching for Toad’s lost button, but all they find are wrong buttons. In the end, Frog gives Toad a sweater covered in all of the found buttons. Or was it Toad gives Frog? Either way, that’s what a real friend would do.

I listen to a new audiobook,
Elsewhere
by Gabrielle Zevin, about a girl named Liz who dies and lives her death in a place called Elsewhere, aging backwards until she turns into a baby again and travels back to Earth. The reader has an elfish voice, which I first thought might annoy me, but now it seems perfect. Liz is all pissed because she’ll never get to be able to do all of the normal teenage stuff, like driving and prom, and she misses her friends. I slap myself away from the thought that maybe I’d be better off in a place like Elsewhere. Not dead, of course, but if I aged backwards, then all of this horrid friend
crap would be a thing of the past. And I’d know what a traitor Bizza is ahead of time, so I could find much better friends to spend the rest of my impending childhood with. A skirt and an audiobook, and I still can’t get Bizza off my brain.

Barrett comes into my bedroom with the phone held out in front of him. “Phone. It’s Bizza. Again!” he yells the last word into the receiver.

I announce in a voice loud enough for anyone on the other end to hear, “I am not taking any calls today or EVER from said caller.”

Then Barrett puts the phone back to his ear and says in an overly soothing, breathy voice, “I’m sorry, Jessica is unavailable right now. May I take a message? Hey! She hung up.”

He sits down on my bed and watches me sew buttons. “So what did you think of Chloe?”

“Chloe Romano?” I tease him. He doesn’t even bother to respond. “She seemed really cool. Smart. Not at all what I expected.”

“I know,” he says dreamily, and falls back onto the bed. “I’m going to marry her.”

“What?!” I stop sewing. “When?”

“Not soon or anything. After college, of course. She’s amazing. Perfect. She’s my Sloan Peterson.” Barrett has been obsessed with Ferris Bueller’s girlfriend, Sloan Peterson, since he saw
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
in sixth grade. He used to talk about marrying
her
, saying how excellent it would be that her married name would be “Sloan Sloan.” Chloe Romano must
be pretty special. “I’m thinking of asking her to homecoming.”

“Yeah, I think homecoming would be a better first step than marriage. But since when do you go to school dances? I thought you hated that crap.” I sew on a strawberry-shaped button I found in our kitchen junk drawer and wonder where the other strawberries are.

“Technically I still do. But Chloe’s been hinting at it. Like, ‘As last year’s homecoming princess, I’d hate to go without a date.’ ” He says this in a la-ti-da girl voice.

“Doesn’t that go against all of her feminist principles? Beauty contests and ho-ing it up in a fancy dress?”

“She explained it to me like it’s some social experiment. She figures it’ll make a great thesis when she’s in college.”

I feel a pang in my chest with the reminder of Barrett’s eminent departure for college. How will I make it through two more years of high school without him here to drive me around and make fun of my crappy friends?

“You know,” I say, “with Chloe Romano as your homecoming date, you could be homecoming king.” Barrett lets out a scream of terror.

I work on the Frog and Toad skirt until my mom calls me down to dinner. We usually have pizza bread on Sunday nights to soften the blow of going back to school/work, but since we
didn’t have school today, pizza bread has been shifted to Monday’s schedule.

“TGFPB,” my dad declares, his dorky way of saying “Thank God for Pizza Bread.” He says this every week. I think pizza bread may be his religion.

After dinner I finish up the last of my homework. As I wash my face, I’m surprised at how unbad I feel about the whole Bizza/Van thing. Maybe it’s just the Zenlike state of precalc. I mean, of course I feel sucky, but not so much because of the betrayal as because I might have to run into them and that’s going to just be totally uncomfortable. In fact, I can truly say that I would be absolutely fine if neither of them were in my life ever again. Char, too. Even though she didn’t technically do anything to me, she didn’t
do anything
. Tell me or tell Bizza before this turned into what it did. That’s almost as bad.

I fall asleep thanking god that my parents made me smart so I don’t have to be in classes with my idiot ex-friends. Tomorrow, my quest for new friends begins. I hope they keep their shirts on.