Just in case she was gonna count what we took in, I rolled up a skirt in its hanger and squeezed it between several sweaters and shirts. Usually they just counted the tops of the hangers, Julie said. The skirt was totally hidden and my heart was racing.
This is so strange,
I thought. Kind of like watching yourself in a movie but you’re not really you, you’re someone else. Stealing was kind of like acting.
The old lady waved us off to separate rooms
without counting our stuff.
Oh man, it was too good to be true. I was in a little room across from Jennifer, and the old lady barely got up from her stool and her
National Enquirer.
Now we could come and go several times with different clothes like at Fiorucci, ’cause she didn’t know how much stuff we had.
Inside my dressing room, I tried on the skirt. It was charcoal gray, kind of shiny, almost silklike, with mother-of-pearl buttons down the front. It made a swishy sound when you moved, and the shape of it was very 1950s, like you’d wear to a sock hop. I totally loved it. I strutted out to the mirror to show someone. Jennifer Smalls was examining her chest in a tight angora sweater. At that moment, her name seemed pretty ironic.
“Does this make my tits look square?” she asked me.
“Um . . . a little. What do you think of this skirt?” I said, twirling.
“Groovy,” she said. Nobody I knew said “groovy” like they did in the 1960s, except Jennifer Smalls. She examined the price tag at my hip and her eyes got big. Two hundred and fifty dollars. She smiled and nodded knowingly, and we went back to our dressing rooms. I neatly folded up the skirt in the extra tissue paper I brought from home, then I put it underneath my sweater in the bottom of my shopping bag. I brought the other clothes back to the old lady. Without even looking at me, she waved toward a rack and said, “Put it there, please.”
I rapped lightly on Julie’s dressing room door. “Jule?”
“Uh-huh?”
“How ya doin’?”
“Done!” she said triumphantly, and flung her door open. She was fully dressed, shopping bag in hand, Chocolate Soup bag over her shoulder. Daisy and Jennifer said they’d meet us down at the Sixth Avenue entrance where Gordon would be.
As we walked outside, I felt the cold air on my face, and I listened hard for an alarm or something to go off, or someone to come running after us. But no one did.
At Aristotle’s Coffee Shop a few blocks away, we found a big booth in the back. As Gordon slid into the red vinyl seat, he asked for an ashtray. The waiter was putting down paper placemats.
I ordered a tuna-fish sandwich on toast and a chocolate ice-cream soda. I just had to have something sweet to celebrate. Julie ordered turkey and cheese and a big order of fries for the table.
The waiter had greased-back hair and a pencil-thin moustache. As soon as he took our order and headed to the kitchen, I said, “I can’t believe we just walked right out of the store like it was no big deal. Jesus, the people there are, like, totally asleep!”
“I know, right?” Jennifer said as Daisy was saying, “I told you Macy’s is the easiest.” She unwrapped a straw as the waiter put a Tab in front of her.
“Did you get that sweater?” I asked Jennifer, lowering my voice.
“Nah, I got a different one. Orange and blue cableknit,” she said, half pulling it out of the bag to show us. “It fit much better. I think it was like fifty dollars or something.” She grinned and took a slice of pickle from the dish on the table.
“Oh my God!” I said, giggling. “That is so cool!”
“Check you out, missy!” Gordon said. “Miss Silk Skirt.”
“Mr. Leather Gloves!” Julie and I said in unison.
“Shut up!” Gordon said, looking around, trying not to laugh. “You’re gonna make me paranoid.”
“What else didja get?” I asked Gordon, who took a long drag from his clove cigarette.
“Calvin’s . . .” he said through his nose, then exhaling. He pointed to the pack of cigarettes on the table, as if to say, anyone who wants, take. Daisy took one and Gordon put a pack of matches in her open palm.
“He collects them,” she said. “You’re up to thirty-three now, right?”
“Thirty-four!” Gordon said, smiling big.
“Oh my God,” Julie said. “I thought I had a lot.”
“Do you collect Calvin Klein jeans, too?” Gordon asked.
“No, Fioruccis,” Julie said, chewing on her straw. “Well, I don’t really
collect
them, I just have a bunch.”
“Ooh,
Fiorucci
,” Jennifer said. “I’ve never been. How is it there?”
“So easy!” I said. Then I realized I might be acting like this big professional when I’d really only gone stealing a few times. But no one seemed to notice.
“Yeah,” Julie said. “No one counts the stuff you take into the dressing rooms there. It’s really good.”
“Hey, are you guys doing ‘sense memory’ in Mrs. Zeig’s class?” Jennifer said. Jennifer, Daisy, and Gordon were all in Mr. Marat’s acting class, and so far they didn’t really like him. Sense memory was this acting exercise where you had to recall something like eating an orange or smelling your grandmother’s house and kind of act it out. The homework was to bring in some sense memory experience and perform it in front of the class.
“I have no idea what to do!” Jennifer whined.
“Totally!” Julie said. “Do you guys know what you’re doing?”
“I think I’m gonna do opening this jewelry box I got for Christmas when I was eight,” Daisy said.
“Ooh, good one, Daze,” Gordon said. “Do you think I could do smoking a clove cigarette?” he asked, exhaling smoke rings, and we all cracked up.
Then Jennifer had us cracking up even more because she did an imitation of this guy in their class, Mark Wilder, who thought he was God’s Gift to Acting. She made this totally serious face with her eyebrows all knitted together and recited some Oscar Wilde piece he did in, like, a fake British accent. And she imitated Mr. Marat telling him how great he was; meanwhile everyone in the class was, like, rolling their eyes. Gordon laughed so hard, he spit a big mouthful of coffee down his front and onto the table. Then we all cracked up about
that.
“So. Are we ever going to get to meet this famous Julie Braverman?” Mom asked me that afternoon as I was putting away the groceries. That was one of my jobs for my allowance. She was chopping parsley on the cutting board. It was almost dinnertime. I knew this would eventually come up.
“Um,” was all I could say at first.
“You’ve had a sleepover at Julie’s practically every Saturday night since school started,” Mom pointed out.
“Why don’t you invite her over sometime?” Dad called from the living room.
“I mean, we don’t even know what her parents do,” Mom said.
“Her mom’s a model and her dad’s in the music business,” I said kind of under my breath.
“What?” Mom said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I like going to her house.” I thought about our family eating dinner like we did every night. What if Julie found us ordinary and boring? Dinner at Julie’s meant we were free to make whatever we wanted or order pizza. Sometimes we ate with Mandy if she was around but hardly ever with Mimi. Mimi was at Harvey’s a lot. It was so great.
“Besides, you met her, Dad, when you picked me up at Caitlin’s Bat Mitzvah,” I said.
“Oh, Julie, I don’t remember. There were so many girls there,” he said.
“Let’s have her over for dinner next weekend,” Mom said. “I’ll make Peachy Chicken. . . .” she said temptingly. Chicken with peaches was my favorite dinner that Mom made, and when I was little I called it Peachy Chicken and the name stuck. Mom always made it for special occasions like my birthday. The sauce was made from Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup and canned peaches. It was the most delicious dish ever.
“I’ll think about it,” I told my mother.
I wasn’t sure why I didn’t want to invite Julie over. I mean, part of me did and part of me didn’t. Maybe it was ’cause she seemed so much more experienced and mature than me, and I thought my parents would think she was a bad influence or something. Or that they wouldn’t like that she just had a single mom who was a recovering alcoholic, and almost never home, not that they’d ever know those things. I was also scared my parents might get into one of their fights right in front of Julie, and I’d die of embarrassment. Then maybe Julie would think I come from a really screwed-up family and she would think
I
was really screwed-up.
Or maybe there was something about Julie and me that felt private, and I didn’t want to share it.
“I can’t believe you got that skirt,” Julie said later during our nightly phone conversation. “It’s amazing!”
“It’s probably the most expensive thing I will ever get,” I said quietly, getting comfy in my dad’s big easy chair in my parents’ bedroom. The other phone was in the kitchen, so their bedroom was the only place you could get any privacy at all. How I wished for an extension in my room. I closed the door and turned the clock radio on just in case anyone was listening, but my parents were busy watching TV, and Ellie was in her room.
“You could wear it to Kahti Fearon’s Christmas party,” Julie said.
Oh my God,
yes
! Kahti was a popular junior in the drama department who we barely knew, but we were totally psyched to get invited to her party. When she asked us in the hall on Monday after French, we said, “Of course we’ll come!” and then Julie dug her nails into my palm trying not to scream. She was especially excited because she had a crush on Rick DiBiassi—also a junior in drama and
so
Julie’s type. Dark hair, tall and skinny, leather jacket with lots of zippers. Total rocker look. Since he was in Kahti’s class, it seemed like a sure thing that he’d be at the party.
“What kind of tights should I wear with that skirt?” I asked Julie.
“Do you have any fishnets?”
“No.”
“Oh my God, have you ever been to Betsey Johnson?” she asked.
“No, what’s that?”
“It’s a store on Columbus Avenue. I have to take you there! They have the best stuff, and they have a really good selection of fishnets,” Julie said.
“Should I
get
a pair of fishnets?” I whispered. I was so paranoid that my parents or Ellie might be listening.
“Of course!”
“Okay! When should we go?”
“I don’t know, after school sometime? Or next Saturday?”
“Totally,” I said, and then we got into a conversation about Daisy and Jennifer Smalls and how at the beginning of the school year we didn’t really like them but now we did. When Daisy told us about her agent and the commercial she did, she wasn’t all conceited about it.
“Did your parents go to the parent-teacher conferences on Friday?” Julie asked.
“Of course,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Both of them did. They always go to my sister’s, too; they’ve never missed one. It’s so embarrassing.”
“No, it’s good, I think,” Julie said, her voice getting soft. “My mom forgot.”
“She didn’t go?”
“Nope.”
“What about your dad?”
“Are you kidding? He doesn’t even know what grade I’m in.”
“Oh,” I said. I didn’t know what to say. “Well, they’re just dumb meetings with the teachers. It’s not like anything important happens, really.” I didn’t know why I said that, ’cause I actually liked that my parents wanted to meet my teachers. They always came back making jokes like, “All your teachers say you’re not very bright, and you don’t work hard enough!” But then they would tell me they were proud of me. “Yeah.” Julie sounded kind of sad, and I couldn’t believe that there could be anything about my family that would seem cool to her.
“Listen,” I said, deciding to change the subject. “My parents think it’s weird that I’ve never invited you over, so . . . um . . . would you want to come over for dinner sometime?”
“Of course,” Julie said, brightening.
“Really?” I said. There. That wasn’t so hard. Hearing Julie sound into it surprised me, and I felt relieved.
“Sure,” she said. “Did you think I would say no or something?”
“I don’t know. We just always have so much fun at your place ’cause your mom’s not around. I didn’t think you’d really want to meet my parents, let alone spend an evening with them. And my sister.”
“Are you kidding? It’ll be fun. So when am I coming over?”
“How ’bout next Friday? Maybe we could go to a movie afterwards.”
“Okay,” Julie said.
Then Julie and I got absorbed in conversation again, and before we knew it we went through the entire junior class of guys in drama and could not find one who was cuter than Rick DiBiassi.
“What about Josh Heller?” I said. I always noticed Josh Heller in French. He had intense blue eyes and black hair.
“From French?” she said.
“Yeah, he’s always with that guy Tim Haas? I think he’s Josh’s best friend. Don’t you think he’s cute?” I said.
“Hmmm . . .” She thought for a second. “I suppose . . . but he’s short.”
Not for me. I was only four-foot-eleven.
6
From Intermediate to Advanced
It was totally blustery out the day Julie and I went to Betsey Johnson on Columbus Avenue. The style of the store was semi-punk. There were two floors, and the dressing rooms were up on the second level, on a balcony. It seemed like everything in the store came in only two colors: black and hot pink. In fact, the salesgirl who greeted us at the door wore hot-pink lipstick, a pink shirt tied at the waist, a black ruffly petticoat as a skirt, black fishnets, and combat boots.
There were black lacy body stockings—these one-piece leotards that you wore with a shirt and skirt or jeans over them. Probably too sexy for me to pull off, I thought, but Julie said, “C’mon, you gotta try one on.” There was also this hot-pink cotton dress with a low scoop neck and flowy skirt that I liked. I tried that on first but decided my stomach was too fat for it. Julie was always telling me I wasn’t fat, but I was self-conscious about my stomach anyway.