“That’s okay,” I said. “I can handle him.” I didn’t know if that was the truth. The only thing I knew was that I needed the money.
“You’re going to stay? Oh thank God.” He pulled some papers out of his file. “Let’s do your W-4 and emergency form, then I’ll get you started, okay?”
“Okay.”
I managed to avoid Tommy most of the night, staying by Michael’s side while he showed me how to make a pizza (harder than it looks), how to run the dishwasher (not exactly brain surgery), where we kept stuff in the walk-in refrigerator (a.k.a. a disorganized mess), how to stock the salad bar (moldy side down), and how to run the slicer (
without
cutting off your hand). When he got a phone call and disappeared into the back room to take it, I busied myself wiping down the salad bar and all the tables.
Tommy leaned on the cash register and watched me. “You’re not even going to say hi to me, Dee Dee?”
His voice shot through me. It’s amazing, the things your body will do just when you don’t want them to: heart speeding up, fingers aching. I’d always liked his voice, low and laid-back, the kind of voice that made you listen, a voice that still caused me to teeter when I heard it saying my old nickname.
“Nobody calls me that anymore,” I said.
“I do.”
A declaration.
“Well, don’t.”
“Okay, Dee Dee.”
I went to the back and into the walk-in, where I sat on a bucket of sliced tomatoes. It was cold in there, obviously, but quiet. I could think. It’s not like I hadn’t seen Tommy since that night with my dad; I’d seen him driving around a couple of times, and once at a party. But those times were more like seeing a vision or something out of a dream. Here he was, living and walking and talking — talking to me like he used to, calling me Dee Dee.
Come on, Dee Dee. Come on.
I remembered exactly how it felt when he wrapped my ponytail around his hand, pulling it back until I got the hint that he wanted me to go down.
Come on.
He said doing that wasn’t really sex, that I’d still be a virgin. Then after a while, being a virgin somehow didn’t matter so much.
My hair was in a ponytail now because Michael said it had to be up. I tucked it into a bun and went back out into the dim restaurant.
“Oh, there you are,” Michael said. “We’ve got customers. Go ahead and help Tommy with the pizzas.”
I grabbed a pizza crust and joined Tommy at the counter. He glanced at me and smiled. “Where’s your ponytail, Dee Dee?”
Something in me surged again, and I should have told him to go to hell but I didn’t want to give him anything, not one single hint that he could still make me feel things, even hate.
Michael waited outside with me after Tommy left. Darren was supposed to pick me up at eleven thirty; at ten to midnight he still hadn’t showed. There were maybe eight cars left in the entire Beach Front lot, fog creeping in over the asphalt.
“I’m about to turn into a pumpkin,” Michael said, checking his watch. “Do you need a lift?”
“He’ll be here. You don’t have to wait.”
Michael sucked on his cigarette. The man was a nicotine fiend. “So, was it awful? Are you going to come back?”
“I need the money.”
He nodded. “Why else would anyone work here? I know it’s a dive, but it’s
my
dive.”
Darren’s Nova pulled into the lot. “There he is.”
Michael patted me on the shoulder. “Okay, see you tomorrow.”
I got in the car and as soon as I closed the door, Darren asked, “Who’s that guy?”
“Michael, my boss.”
“He’s after you already?”
“God, Darren.” Ever since Tommy, Darren was a little on the overprotective side, always watching guys watching me, more than once threatening to kick the ass of anyone who looked at me too long.
“Well? I mean, if it’s gonna be like that you should just quit right now.”
“He’s gay.”
“Oh.” Darren glanced in the rearview mirror to watch Michael getting into his Toyota. “How come he’s touching you, then?”
“Because he’s nice. It’s called affection. You may have heard of it? Anyway, if you were on time, he wouldn’t
have
to wait with me.” It was sort of funny how suspicious Darren was of Michael, given the fact that if he knew Tommy worked there he’d shit himself.
“Yeah, yeah, smart-ass,” he said. “Stacy can get you from now on, straight from work. So how was it? Where’s my free pizza?”
“I ate
my
free pizza on my break. Work was okay.”
“You stink like onions.”
“I know. It’s gross.” There was tomato sauce under my nails and this greasy film all over me and I reeked like the inside of the pizza oven. “What’d you guys do today?”
“We drove into the city and shopped for some clothes for Stacy and hung out at the beach for a while. Looked at some places for rent.”
The smell of my own pizza-stink, the sound of Tommy’s voice in my head, and what Darren was saying overwhelmed me all at once and I felt like I could throw up. I rolled down my window; cool air washed over me.
“I thought you guys had to save up, like, a couple thousand dollars,” I said. “For first and last, and the deposit and everything.”
“Yeah, basically. We’re thinking about asking Stacy’s mom for help.”
No.
No, no, no.
If Stacy’s mom helped them, they wouldn’t need me.
I talked fast, like Mom did when she was nervous. “She’s not going to help you. Her and Stacy have barely talked since April was born. God, why would you want anything from her anyway? You’ll just owe her for, like,
ever
.” I was practically yelling. I took some deep breaths and looked out the window, let the fog blow on my face and form little droplets of salty water on my skin. I felt Darren looking at me.
“Calm
down,
” he said. “We probably won’t ask her. All we did was talk about it.”
We pulled up to the house and Darren got out. I stayed sitting in the front seat for a while, staring out at the street. All the garbage cans were out for morning pickup and a few neighborhood cats prowled around, darting from front yards to the curb, under cars, slinking across the street.
I did the math in my head. How many paychecks, how many weeks of scraping cheese off the counter, how many hours of Tommy’s eyes on me would it cost to buy my way out?
Darren stuck his head in the passenger window and I jumped. “You coming in, or what?”
I got out of the car and followed him into the house: just a building I lived in while waiting for something real to happen.
I hated Mondays. Mom worked, Darren worked, and Stacy took the car to do errands, which left me home alone with Dad, who had the day off. It was bad enough during the school year when I had a couple of hours between school and dinner to kill alone with him in the house; in summer it was impossible to deal with. I had to get out.
I called Jason. I needed to tell someone about Tommy showing back up in my life. It could have been Lee that I called, but I wasn’t up for the kind of pep talk I would get from her. And, okay, I knew that she was taking a pottery class with her mom on Monday mornings for the next few weeks and it was a chance for me to have Jason to myself. I pictured Lee, sliding exactly one-third of her special boyfriend cookie over to me, and felt a pang of guilt.
“Hey,” I said into the phone.
“What up?”
“I need to get out.”
“Okay. I don’t have any money, though. You?”
“What do you think?”
“Just come over,” he said, the sound of his voice calming me down already. “My mom is working from home today, but she won’t bug us. She’s got a Clint Eastwood marathon on TV.”
“How is that ‘working from home’?”
“I don’t ask questions.”
“I’ll be there in ten.”
I grabbed my jacket and tried to slip out without being noticed, but Dad was out front working on his car. He looked up. “Where are you going?”
“Jason’s.”
“With Lee?”
“No. Just me and Jason.” I could have lied and avoided what came next, but I had nothing to hide.
Dad wiped his hands on a greasy rag and came closer. “Why?”
“Because Lee can’t come.”
“Why not?”
“Because she’s busy.”
“You can’t stay home for one day?”
And do what? Sit in my room and wish I was somewhere else? “Jason’s mom is going to be there.”
Dad went back to the car and stuck his head under the hood. “Lee doesn’t mind you being alone with Jason?”
My face got hot. Usually Dad didn’t just come out and say stuff like that, stuff that told me without a doubt what he thought of me. Most of the time it was what he didn’t say that hurt. I walked away without answering him, down the driveway, down the block, toward Jason’s. The farther away I got from the house, the better I felt.
His mom answered the door. “Hi, Deanna, can’t talk. Clint’s about to crack the case . . . Jason is in his room,” she said, darting back to the TV.
I walked down the hall to Jason’s room, over the peach-colored carpet, a path I’d walked practically my whole life, from when it was brand new to now, a throw rug covering the spot where Jason spilled model paint in fifth grade. Jason’s room has a smell, too, that’s never changed. It’s this citrusy, sweaty boy smell. It isn’t rank or anything, just sort of dark and deep, like orange peels left in the sun.
Jason was on his bed. I sat on the floor. I imagined my dad watching us on a surveillance camera, staring in surprise as we innocently watched TV instead of making out or snorting coke or piercing each other’s nipples or whatever it was my dad thought I did with my spare time.
During commercials I told him about my job, thinking that any second I would tell the part about Tommy working there. It never quite happened. Maybe because I wasn’t ready to talk about it, or maybe because just being with Jason was enough to make everything feel okay.
“
I
should get a job,” he said. “On the other hand, maybe I should spend all summer sleeping and watching TV. Yeah, that sounds good.”
We raided the fridge and ate leftover spaghetti and corn chips at the kitchen table. “I don’t want to go home,” I said.
“So don’t,” Jason said. “You can crash here.”
I used to do that all the time when we were kids, just stay over at Jason’s like he was any girlfriend, the two of us in our sleeping bags, side by side on the living room floor. We’d shine flashlights on the ceiling and get graham-cracker crumbs all over the rug.
“I don’t think so.”
“My mom doesn’t care.”
“My dad does.”
He finished off his spaghetti. “I think there’s some cake. Want cake?”
“Lemme think. Okay, yes.”
See, that’s what I needed. Not a pep talk, not a big speech about my low self-esteem, not a two-hour reliving of the whole Tommy Era. Just cake, and the familiar feel of Jason’s carpet under my feet, the smell of his room, his face, the history of our friendship everywhere I looked.
The next night, Tommy cornered me in the walk-in while I refilled a tub of pizza sauce. He stood right up close to me, all in my personal space. My body did things again, nerves awake, something not quite good and not quite bad creeping over my scalp.
“Hang out after closing,” he said, confident, like I wouldn’t say no. “I’ve got some burnables.”
Sitting around an empty pizza place and smoking pot with him should have pretty much been my idea of hell. I should have laughed in his face. But this is what I did not expect: Near Tommy I felt thirteen again: childish and inexperienced, a little afraid and a little excited. Especially there in the closeness of the walk-in, which was too much like where I first met him.
He’d been at our house hanging out with Darren — me, in the bathroom playing with a bunch of makeup I’d just bought. The door wasn’t closed all the way and Tommy walked right in on me. He leaned in the doorway so that I couldn’t get out unless I pushed him out of the way, which I did not do.
“How come you’re putting that crap on your face?” he asked, pointing to my little pile of drugstore eyeliner and mascara and lip gloss.
Tommy was cute. Taller than any of the boys at my junior high, definitely, with a scar on the left side of his face that gave him a tough, sort of dangerous look that I thought was cool. The main thing, though, was the way he looked at me. Like I was being seen for the first time.
“It makes me look older,” I said, barely getting the words out.
Tommy looked at me in the mirror. “It makes you look trashy.”
Him saying that made me feel small and dumb. I should have walked away, but at that moment I wanted more than anything for someone to keep looking at me the way he did. I stared hard at myself and decided maybe the makeup didn’t look so good; not trashy like he said, but like I was trying too hard. Like a little kid playing dress up, which is basically what I was. So I washed my face while Tommy watched.
“You think guys like that,” he said, “all that makeup and shit. But really, the thing that’s a turn on?” I tuned into Tommy then like I’d landed on a new radio station that was going to tell me everything I’d ever wanted to know about myself. He stood behind me at the sink and we looked at each other in the mirror. The makeup was off, the hair around my face damp. “Is when a girl is clean and fresh, like she just got out of the shower. Yeah. Just like that.”
When he said that, he put his hands on the sink on either side of me, with his body sort of pressed up against my back. He was warm, a kind of warm I’d never felt. And he was telling me I had something,
me,
that could actually have an effect on another person.
“See? You’re real pretty now,” he said in that confident, easy voice; a declaration. “Just like that.”
It happened right then; he looked at me and it was the thing I’d been waiting for but didn’t know it. I don’t mean anything corny like I fell in love or even into a crush or anything like that. It was more a feeling like when I’d get picked first for volleyball or find one of those stupid school candygrams in my locker. It was knowing someone else thought about me for more than one second, maybe even thought about me when I wasn’t there.
We stared at each other in the mirror, something crackling between us.
Then we heard Darren coming down the hall and I grabbed my makeup and pushed past Tommy to get out of the bathroom and into my room. I remember lying on my bed for a long time after that, thinking about Tommy and what he said and how he said it, the way the hard muscles in his arms were shaped as he leaned into the sink, over and over and over until I fell asleep with this warm, restless, achy feeling.
And that’s how I felt again, there in the walk-in with Tommy up close, even after everything that had happened, everything I knew about who he was.
“Come on, Dee Dee,” he said, his voice low. “It’ll be fun. It’s not like you have anything better to do, right? I know you don’t have a boyfriend.”
“How do you know that?”
He shrugged and smiled. “Just a hunch.”
I came to my senses then. Tommy was still a jerk who thought those hours in the car with him summed up my life.
“Don’t call me Dee Dee. I told you.” I held the pizza sauce between us. “Stacy is picking me up at closing. If she sees you, she’ll tell Darren, who will then proceed to kick your ass.”
“I’m so scared.”
Michael showed up outside the walk-in. “Tommy? You’re supposed to be on the register. Sometime today, I’m hoping.” Tommy grinned and walked out. “Is he bothering you?” Michael asked. “Tell me if he’s bothering you.”
“No,” I said. “He’s nobody.”
I sat on the floor of my room, with my back against the door so no one could walk in. The comp book was open on my lap, my pen hovering over the paper.
Tommy leaning into me.
Tommy locking his eyes on mine in the mirror, declaring.
Tommy in the walk-in. His voice, his eyes, his scar, his arms.
My body, his body.
This is the last time, the girl thought, that she would remember these things.
If they floated back to her again, she would paddle away.
Belonging to someone, something.
The way my dad used to look at me; the way he looked at me now.
When the remembering was done, the forgetting could begin.