Dad waved his napkin. “It’s no excuse.” He liked Stacy about as much as he liked me.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Mom said, “I’m sure they give her a little leeway, being a new mother and all . . .”
I set my ice cream down and left them there to discuss Stacy’s career while I went in search of the one person in the house I actually
wanted
to talk to.
She was in her car seat on my parents’ bed, all mellow from her afternoon nap. “Hi, April,” I said, picking her up. I kissed her little face for a while and took her to my room:
my
ten-by-twelve piece of unoccupied territory,
my
piles of clothes and
my
CDs and
my
macaroni-art Thanksgiving turkey from third grade, still hanging over my bed. I spread a blanket on the carpet, laid April on her stomach, and sat next to her.
I was there when April was born. I didn’t really want to be. From what I’d seen in health ed and also in movies and on
ER,
with all the screaming and pushing and blood and slime and sweat, I’d just as soon wait to see the baby after it was clean and dried and fed and, most importantly, asleep. It was Darren who wanted me in the delivery room. He said it was because Stacy was upset that her mom refused to come, and she wanted another girl there. But I knew that Darren was nervous; he didn’t want to be there alone if anything went wrong.
Nothing went wrong. I didn’t actually see April come out, thank God. I stood up at Stacy’s head and stayed focused on her and tried to block out all the noises and smells. When Darren said, “Holy shit, she’s here,” I looked up and saw April in his hands, shaking all over and wailing like she was beyond pissed. It was amazing, really.
It took me a while to get used to her. All she did was cry and poop and sleep, and to be honest, she was kind of ugly. Plus there were so many rules about how to hold her and feed her; I was too stressed to enjoy it. Then she got less ugly and made more interesting sounds and wasn’t so fragile. And
everything
changed when she started to recognize my voice. There was something about the way she got quiet and turned her head to me when I talked that made me feel like maybe I wasn’t such a screwup after all.
When I was with Darren and Stacy and April, I could picture us going on forever. I imagined coming home from school to wherever we all lived — not at my parents’ house, obviously — and April would be waking up from a nap, maybe, and Stacy would say,
Hey, Deanna, thank God you’re home. I need a break and you’re so good with April. . . . Would you watch her while I go get Darren from work?
And I’d say,
Sure, no problem, take your time.
And I’d play with April, maybe, like, an educational game so that she’d get smart, and Darren and Stacy would come back and we’d eat dinner and I’d do my homework while we all watched TV. I mean, I knew it wouldn’t be perfect like that all the time, but it would be home.
This was my plan:
I’d get a job, right, and work my butt off all summer, then Darren and Stacy and me would pool our money and find a place. I hadn’t told anyone yet; it was all about timing. I wanted to wait until I had a stack of cash saved up. I already knew exactly how I’d tell them: I’d get all my money out of the bank — in tens and twenties, so that it looked like a lot — and go down to the basement to show Darren and Stacy. I’d do it some night when Dad was really off his chain, driving us nuts, and I’d throw it on the bed without a word.
Stacy would get all hyper and Darren would just count it, looking up at me like,
Wow, that’s my little sister.
It would be obvious, then. They’d see how much easier things would be with me around.
“Deanna Lambert is a total nympho
. Tommy would be at her house, right, hanging with Darren. As soon as Darren leaves the room, Deanna comes around and tells Tommy all this nasty stuff she wants to do with him. This one time? She told Tommy that she knew where Darren kept his porn magazines and she wanted Tommy to look at them with her. And do all this . . .
stuff
. Tommy’s like,
No way, you’re too young, I could get arrested,
but she begged him and begged him and finally he took her out. I heard that when her dad caught them, it took her forever to get out of the car because she was into getting tied up. What a slut!”
“Deanna Lambert is a complete psycho
. Tommy liked her at first because he thought she was sweet and cute. Then they started going out and she’d be cutting herself, or all cranked on meth, or coming up with crazy ideas like they should bomb the school or whatever. When he tried to break up with her, she was like,
I’m gonna kill myself if you leave me, Tommy
! What a nightmare!”
“Deanna Lambert is beyond pathetic
. Tommy first met her when he found her crying in the backyard at Darren’s house. She said no one loved her, no one paid any attention to her, and pretty soon she’s hanging on to Tommy like
he’s
the one who’s going to fix everything. Yeah, Tommy Webber. I know. Well, he felt sorry for her. He took her out for ice cream this one time when Darren wasn’t home, thinking it would cheer her up, but she acted like he’d
proposed
or something. She kept calling him and calling him and finally he’s like,
Okay, I’ll go out with you but remember I’m seventeen and if you want to be my girlfriend, well, you gotta
do
stuff.
She said,
Anything, I’ll do anything you want.
What a loser. I mean, get some self-respect.”
The stories in my head about the girl on the waves, the story I started that night with Tommy, didn’t get onto paper until I had Mr. North for English. One time in class he said we should keep a journal, and I thought, no thanks, that whole dear diary thing is so fourth grade. Then he said a journal could be anything, like drawings or poetry or lists or whatever, anything you wanted to say about anything and no one else would ever see it. Jeremy Walker said, “Then what’s the point? Are you saying we don’t get credit?”
“The point,” Mr. North said, sweeping a floppy piece of gray hair over his forehead, “is to have a place to express your personal feelings. You
do
have personal feelings, don’t you, Jeremy?”
Everyone laughed, ha ha ha, and Mr. North hardly ever mentioned journals again, but I bought a two dollar comp book at Walgreens and started writing down these little things about the girl, just random stuff. The girl on her surfboard, the girl with her family, the girl on the beach, whatever.
One day I read what I had and thought, God but that sucks, ripped out the pages and threw them away. I mean, Mr. North said, “Express your personal feelings.” He didn’t say, “Write a bunch of boring crap-ass nonsense about a made-up person doing nothing.”
The weird thing is, after I tore those pages up? I missed her. I missed the girl in my head. So I started in again, this time staying away from the once-upon-a-time stuff and trying to stick to “personal feelings.”
Personal feelings I didn’t want to feel, I gave to her.
Like if my dad spent yet another evening ignoring me and I started thinking about how I’d worshiped him when I was a kid, I might write:
The girl remembered running down the driveway toward him, cement cold under her tiny feet.
She’s been waiting, always waiting, for him to come home. It is the best part of the day.
I was working on some of that stuff the next morning, when Lee called to let me know she’d gotten back from Santa Barbara.
“It’s nice,” she said, “but I wouldn’t want to live there. Lots of tall, blond people with really white teeth. I feel like a troll whenever I visit. Oooh, look at that short person with brown hair! How did
she
get in?”
I studied the page in my comp book.
The girl thought of the sea, rolling and thick and dangerous.
The girl thought of the sea, flat and steely. Dead.
“That’s one good thing about Pacifica,” I said, closing the book and letting it drop to the floor. “You can be totally average and still look better than half the population.”
“Save me from my family, Deanna. My mom is having a ‘sing-along to Simon & Garfunkel while we clean the house’ kind of morning.”
I smiled into the phone at Lee’s deadpan delivery. The girl cracks me up. “I’m going down to Beach Front later to drop off job applications. Wanna come with?”
“Let’s meet at the donut shop,” she said. “I’ve been donut deprived. I don’t think people in Santa Barbara are allowed to eat donuts.”
I got dressed and went down to the basement to see what Stacy and April were up to.
Darren had left for work before I woke up; Stacy was in bed with April, watching TV. The basement room was small and not exactly what you’d call decorated. Two windows looked out onto the sidewalk — windows that had blackout shades but no curtains — and there were a couple of cheap pieces of furniture they got at Target, and the TV. The only other things were a few snapshots of Darren and Stacy and April tacked to the wall, and of course Stacy’s lighthouses. She was semiobsessed with them. On her birthday, right after she found out she was pregnant, Darren took her to this lighthouse down the coast for a picnic lunch and for, like, two weeks after that she could hardly stop smiling. She had all kinds of pictures of lighthouses that she’d torn out of magazines and printed off the Internet, and a big poster of one right over April’s crib.
“How’d she sleep?” I asked.
“Excellent. She woke up only once.” Stacy dug into the pile of clean laundry next to her. “Crap. I can’t find her purple thing, the thing, the jumper or onesie or layette or whatever it’s called.”
I sorted the laundry and found the thing Stacy was looking for stuck to one of April’s baby blankets. “Here. It’s a onesie. I think.”
Everything was kind of a mess. Stacy and my dad fought about that all the time. I guess you couldn’t really call it fighting since my dad is more the quiet-angry kind of person than the yelling-angry kind, but he kept making comments about Stacy’s housekeeping habits, along with her work habits and parenting habits, not to mention her clothes habits. She tended to dress, well, trashy.
I watched her as she put the onesie on April, remembering how scared I used to be of her before she and Darren hooked up. She and Corvette Kim owned the school back then, when they were seniors and I was a freshman. Not like the
school
school, not the cafeteria or gym or halls. Those were strictly the territory of jocks and cheerleaders and wannabes. Stacy and Kim and their friends were like the Mafia, lurking around in the parking lot and the upper soccer field and the strip of Terra Nova Boulevard between the flagpole and the tennis courts. It’s not like they’d
do
anything to you if you ran into them, not usually. But you didn’t really even want them to
look
at you. For a long time I wanted to be Stacy, that tough and cool and grown-up. I would have killed for that kind of power at school.
Stacy the Teenage Mother handed April to me and got up. “I guess I should at least make the bed. Hey, can you watch April for a couple of hours this morning?”
“I’m meeting Lee down at Beach Front to drop off some job applications,” I said. April grabbed a fistful of my hair and started pulling.
“Don’t let her do that,” she said, with that old edge of toughness she’d never lost. “I’m trying to teach her to stop.”
“I can watch her when I get back if you want,” I said, gently prying my hair out of April’s tiny hand.
Stacy shook her head. “She has a checkup this afternoon.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“No big deal. I just wanted to go to some thrift stores in the city to look for clothes. My old stuff still doesn’t fit. I feel like such a cow.”
April grabbed my hair again. “I read in one of those books that breast-feeding will help you lose the weight faster.”
“I read that, too,” Stacy said, “but obviously it’s not working. And now my boobs hurt.” She pulled on a pair of sweats from a pile on the floor and ran a brush through her bleached hair so hard that I could hear the bristles yanking follicles out of her skull. “So where are you applying? Maybe you should wait until Safeway has openings. I bet we could get you a job there, maybe next month.”
“Maybe. I want to see if I can find something sooner.”
She noticed a stain on her sweats and swore, taking them off and looking for something else to wear. April started whining and reached out toward Stacy.
“I can’t believe this. There’s not one clean thing in here that fits me.” She put the stained sweats back on and went to the mirror: black eyeliner, check; black mascara, check. Just like she used to do in the girls’ room at T.N. Only now a wet spot appeared on the front of her T-shirt. “Dammit. I’m leaking.
Again
.” She changed her shirt and looked at me. “I hope you know how lucky you are that Tommy didn’t get you pregnant.”
I did know. We hardly ever used anything. After Dad caught me, my mom dragged me to the doctor to put me on the pill, and after that we went straight to the drugstore where she bought a box of condoms. She shoved the bag into my hands without a word. She didn’t need to worry. I was done with sex for a while and still had the box of condoms in my dresser drawer, unopened.
“I can do some laundry while you’re at the doctor,” I said. April’s whining turned to crying and she squirmed around in my arms.
Stacy took April and sat down to nurse. “I don’t know why I even bother getting dressed. I always look like hell anyway.” She winced and looked down at April feeding. “God, kid. You don’t have to suck
that
hard.”
The funny thing about babies is that you know they’re harmless and innocent, but sometimes they seem to be purposely making things difficult. Like April; she could be so sweet, but when she wasn’t and all she did was fuss and cry, you wished you could ask her why and get her to stop. If
I
felt like that with April sometimes, it must have been a hundred times worse for Stacy. Or maybe not. Maybe if you were the mom it all seemed okay. But there were days I would look at Stacy and see how tired she was and wonder if she could really do it. Which was another reason for my plan to save up and move us all in together in our own place. Stacy and Darren and April, they needed me. I’d be like Stacy’s right arm, Aunt Deanna, always there to take over when things got too hard, even for tough Stacy.
But first, I needed money. “I’ll be around later if you need any help,” I said, squeezing April’s fat little leg before I headed out.
Lee sat on the wooden bench outside the donut shop, wearing Jason’s black Metallica hoodie, leaning with her chin in her hands the way she always did. That feeling came again, like when I’d see them in the hall together at school. The hoodie meant there had been a moment: Lee and Jason alone, the sweatshirt changing hands. Did he give it to her? Did she ask him for it? Did she pretend to be cold, wrapping her arms around herself, so that he’d offer it?
She stood up and gave me a hug and I felt like crap for thinking that stuff, for being anything other than happy that they were happy. Lee is a hugger, and you can’t really stay mad at a hugger. I’d never had a friend like that before. Jason isn’t the type to hug anyone he isn’t dating; neither is Darren. My mom is hardly ever home because of working so much and I don’t think Dad has touched me since puberty, even before Tommy. Lee’s mom, who I see, like, twice a month, hugs me more than anyone in my own family.
I pulled my jacket tighter around me. “I bet you at least saw the sun in Santa Barbara,” I said. “It’s like fifty degrees out here.”
“Ah, summer in Pathetica!”
You’d think the fact that Pacifica is only about twenty miles away from San Francisco would make it cool or at least interesting, but all it is is foggy and lame and ten years behind the city in clothes and music. If you didn’t get out after Terra Nova, you’d probably be stuck here your whole life, pumping gas or working at the video store or bagging at Safeway, until you’d forget there was this whole other world just fifteen minutes away.
We went in and got hit with that wave of bakery warmth and sugar and vanilla that’s so incredibly good for about twenty seconds, after which point it starts to make you sick. The place was always empty except for one table in the middle, surrounded by old men in canvas hats and pastel jackets, complaining about everything, and I mean
everything,
from how no one knew how to talk about politics anymore without starting a war, to how women didn’t know how to act like women anymore, to how no one knew how to make a decent donut anymore. Apparently the world was perfect in 1958.
We ate on the bench outside so the old guys wouldn’t hear every word we said and start complaining about how young people today don’t know how to use the English language.
“That donut was, like, two cents in the good old days,” I said in a cranky old man voice.
“I have no complaint with my twenty-first–century donut,” Lee said.
Caitlin Spinelli pulled into the mall parking lot and drove by us in her new Jetta, with the window down. “Must be nice,” I said, watching her head bob to a rap song cranked to ten on her stereo. “She does realize that she’s white, right?”
“Jettas and rap music,” Lee said, “the perennial favorite of the suburban oxymoron. My first car will probably be my stepdad’s El Camino. Now that’s a car you can rap in.”
I finished off my chocolate old-fashioned and showed my teeth to Lee. “Any chocolate droppings?”
“Nope. You’re frosting free. You look nice,” she said, getting up. “Like a serious job applicant.”
“That’s good. Because I feel like a loser.” I’d dressed like some kind of conservative sorority girl in black pants and an actual blouse instead of my usual jeans and T-shirt. Suddenly I was nervous. I didn’t know how it worked, this whole being hireable thing. Like, how do you convince someone you’re not going to steal everything or drive away customers? This had to work; I didn’t have time to waste.
We stopped at Walgreens first and I handed my application to a skinny young guy at the register.
“Someone will call you to set up an interview,” he said, glancing at the application. He started to turn back to his register. “Wait. Deanna Lambert . . . I know that name.”
Right, I thought. Which version of Deanna Lambert do you think you know? “When will they call me?”
He studied my face and I felt the donut in my stomach like a rock. I didn’t recognize him from school, but he could have been some nameless geek from Tommy’s year.
“We get a lot of applications,” he said. “It might be a week. Do you go to Terra Nova?”
“Yeah,” Lee said, her voice startling me. “Hey, I think you were in my drama class last year, right?” Lee didn’t even go to Terra Nova then.
“I never took drama,” he said, staring at me.
Lee leaned over the counter and got louder. “Were you on the swim team?”
“Can you just put on there for them to call me as soon as possible?” I grabbed Lee’s arm. “Let’s
go
.”
When we got outside, she said, “Okay, next?”
“He knew about me. I could tell.”
“You’re paranoid.” She pulled me along past the boarded-up stationery store, and the shoe place that had been having a going-out-of-business sale since I was in sixth grade. Lee lowered her voice to say, “One of these days you should just look one of them in the eye and say, yeah, that’s me, and so what? At my school in San Francisco, no one would even care.”
“Yeah, well, this is Pacifica. One high school, one grapevine, one feature story: me.”
“What about Dax Leonard getting caught with that love letter to Madame Rodriguez in French?”