I didn’t want her to have that, not with Jason. I felt so third grade, like I wanted to push Lee to the ground and say
I knew him first
.
“Right,” I said. “It’s Jason. And it’s not like you’re going to marry him. I mean, eventually you either break up or marry or move in together or whatever, right? Which do you think it’s going to be with Jason, honestly?”
Lee looked up at me, her face red. “You don’t have to say it like that.” A tear slipped out of her eye and my heart squeezed.
I wanted to take it all back and start the conversation over, but it was too late. If it had been anyone but Jason, anyone, maybe I wouldn’t have made such a mess out of it, but I just kept talking, pulling little chunks of foam out of the booth seat and flinging them on the floor.
“You want my advice? My advice is that you’re not missing anything and in a couple of years you’ll go to college and me and Jason will be here in Pathetica working crap-ass jobs and hanging out at Denny’s, so why waste your time? On either of us.”
More tears. She had to take a napkin out of the dispenser and hold it up to her face. I should have gotten up, slid into the booth next to her and put my arms around her, hugging her the way she hugged me every time she saw me. I’d say I was sorry, that I was just jealous and to forget what I said. I’d ask Michael for the night off. We’d walk home together in the foggy summer night and I’d tell her about sex; the good stuff, like how it could be warm and exciting — it took you away — and the not-so-good things, like, how once you showed someone that part of yourself, you had to trust them one thousand percent and anything could happen. Someone you thought you knew could change and suddenly not want you, suddenly decide you made a better story than a girlfriend. Or how sometimes you might think you wanted to do it and then halfway through or afterward realize no, you just wanted the company, really; you wanted someone to choose you, and the sex part itself was like a trade-off, something you felt like you had to give to get the other part. I’d tell her all that and help her decide. I’d be a friend.
I couldn’t be that person, somehow, no matter how much I wanted to. She was inside me; I could see her and picture her, hear her. But who was I to
be
her? I was Deanna Lambert, eighth-grade slut forever; Tommy’s funny story; my dad’s biggest embarrassment. I got up and left Lee crying at the table with, “Have fun on your camping trip.” I walked into the back and stayed there until I was sure she was gone.
I ignored Tommy the rest of the night, which was pretty easy because we hardly had any customers and he worked in the back, doing inventory with Michael.
After work, I waited out front for Stacy to pick me up after her shift. I said nothing in reply to Tommy’s, “See ya on the flip side, Dee Dee.”
Michael waited with me again, sighing his cigarette smoke into the night. “So how’d your friend like my pizza?”
I shrugged. It didn’t matter; it wasn’t like Lee was ever going to talk to me again.
“That good, huh?”
A beat-up Mustang roared by us and through the parking lot, chased by a newer Civic with tinted windows. I watched their headlights whip around the corner and disappear. Across the lot, outside the closed donut shop, a man and woman drank beer from cans. That would be me someday, I thought, stuck in strip mall hell, freezing my ass off in the summer and getting smashed with some Tommy-like loser who would probably be my only friend.
I turned to Michael. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Be my guest,” he said.
“You’re, like, an adult with freedom and money, right?”
“In theory.”
“Why would you choose to live
here
?”
He laughed. “Are you kidding? I love this town!”
“Why?”
“It’s got everything: the beach, a video store, Safeway, rent I can almost afford. It’s quiet, but I can be in San Francisco in half an hour anytime I want.” He swept his arm around through the damp grayness, cigarette glowing. “And the fog! Don’t you love the fog?”
“If when you say ‘love’ you mean ‘hate with a white-hot passion,’ then yeah, I love the fog.”
“Oh, Deanna. You’re so adorably cynical.” He flipped the collar of his jacket up and chuckled. “I guess it is a little chilly.”
Stacy pulled up; I said good-bye to Michael and jumped in. When we got to our street, she brought the Nova to a dead stop and looked at me. “We should go out,” she said. “Girls’ night, you know? We never do that. Drinks and jukeboxes and acting stupid, right? You’re not a kid anymore,” she said, getting more excited, “we could get you a fake ID, easy. I could call Kyle Peterson . . .”
I looked at her to see if she was serious. She still had on her Safeway smock and her hair was pinned back, no sign of the crazy Stacy she’d been when Darren first met her. “What,” I said, “like, leave Darren at home with April and just go buck wild in a bar? Like that’s going to be okay with him?”
“Once in a while, sure. Not every week.” She lifted her hands and then let them fall back on the steering wheel with a smack. “Forget it. It’s just an idea.”
We sat at the corner until a car came up behind us and honked.
“Shit,” she said. “I guess we’re going home.” She turned down the street and we pulled up to the house.
I imagined a time not too far off when she and I would be pulling up to a different house, a different door. It would be a place we’d look forward to going to. We wouldn’t be able to keep from relaxing into the seats as we pointed the car toward home. In a place like that, I’d be able to reach across whatever it was that couldn’t let me be the kind of friend Lee needed that night, or to be the kind of daughter my dad wanted. I’d reach across and grab the hand of that other Deanna and say come on, it’s okay now. You’re home.
The next morning, I stayed in bed, under the covers, until Mom and Dad and Darren had left for work.
Night on the ocean was a world apart from day.
Endless dark, enough to make the bravest afraid.
The girl started to wonder if anyone would look for her.
I reread everything I’d written so far. It sucked. It all just sucked. It wasn’t a story, it wasn’t a journal, it wasn’t a poem. It wasn’t anything. I put giant X’s through the pages, shoved the book behind my bed, and went downstairs to watch TV with Stacy, feeling bad for blowing off her girls’ night idea. For about three seconds I thought I might tell her about Tommy, but she would have thought it was her duty to tell Darren and the shit would hit the fan.
She sat on the floor looking through a magazine while April slept. I got into the bed, which was still warm, and scooted closer to Stacy so that I could look at the magazine over her shoulder while half watching
The Young and the Restless
.
“Jack Abbott is using some serious hair products today,” I said.
“No doubt.”
We sat like that for a while, reading up on celebrity dating and fashion and watching TV. I noticed Stacy’s fingernails were short and ragged, with just a few chips of red from a month-old manicure. “Want me to do your nails?”
“Oh, hell yes.”
I got up and rummaged around in the bag of makeup she kept under the bed. At the bottom of the bag was an old box of hair dye. “Did you know you have a perfectly good box of Copper Sunset in here?”
“Huh?”
I held up the box. “I thought you’ve always been a blond?”
“I have.” She took the box from me and studied it. “I got this a long time ago. Thought I needed a change. Then I got pregnant and that was enough of a change for me.”
“Maybe you can exchange it at the store for blond highlights or something.”
Stacy was quiet, still staring at the box. “Or Darren could come home tonight and screw a redhead.”
“Gross.”
“Oh please. How do you think April happened?”
“I don’t need a visual, thanks.”
She stood up and checked on April. “She’s still asleep, believe it or not.” She waved the box at me. “So are you going to help me do this or what?”
“Seriously?” But I didn’t have to ask. The old Stacy was there in her eyes. Before April, Stacy would try just about anything once, including running topless through the Golden Gate National Cemetery at night, and flipping off the principal on her graduation day. Maybe this is what our lives would be like when we moved out, Stacy and me like sisters, doing each other’s hair and nails and sharing secrets. . . .
I followed her into the tiny basement bathroom, with the cheap peel-and-stick floor that had never been lined up right and the half-burned Christmas candle on the back of the toilet. Stacy took off her top so it wouldn’t get messed up, and I mixed the dye. When I’d gotten half the bottle onto her head, she said, “Darren is going to
freak
.”
“We can rinse it out right now,” I said.
“No. It’s just hair. Who cares?”
When I’d gotten Stacy’s hair totally covered with dye, April woke up. We hung out in the bedroom, played with the baby while we waited for twenty-five minutes to tick by. “What if you hate it?” I asked.
Stacy shrugged, sitting cross-legged on the bed in her bra and jeans, dabbing polish remover onto her nails. “I already hate everything else about my life, so what’s one more thing?”
I stopped playing with April and looked at Stacy. “You don’t hate
everything
about your life.”
“Yeah, pretty much.” I wanted to ask what about Darren and April, what about me, but something stopped me. Maybe I was afraid to hear what she’d say. “Time’s up,” she said. “I’m gonna rinse.”
I held April, looked into her eyes and saw Darren and Stacy and parts of her that were just April. She smiled at me and held onto my finger and I stopped thinking about Stacy saying she hated everything about her life. I stopped thinking about Tommy and my dad, or Lee, or Jason. All I could think about was how small April was, and how her skin was so soft and new. She was like a perfect pink little cupcake, fresh out of the oven.
“Oh my God. Come here,” Stacy called from the bathroom. I put April back in her crib. When I saw Stacy I covered my mouth. Her hair was wet. And red. Well, not red, but Copper Sunset. It made her look older and more serious; it made her look smarter, like a college student or someone who worked in a bank.
“Whoa. You totally do not look like you.”
She stared at herself in the mirror. She didn’t seem unhappy with it. All she said was, “Yeah. I could be anyone.”
When Darren got home I followed him down to the basement so I could see his reaction to Stacy’s hair. I don’t know why I was so excited, practically dancing down the hall, pushing him ahead of me, telling him we had a big surprise.
“What’s your damage?” he asked, laughing. “Are you on something?”
“You’ll see!”
Stacy stood waiting in the room, dressed head to toe in black, with heavy goth-style eye makeup and a wicked grin. “Hey, baby,” she said, winking at Darren, “what’s
your
name?”
I don’t know how Darren turned so dumb all of a sudden, but he just kind of slipped off his Safeway jacket and said, “That looks great, babe! I’ve always wanted to kiss a hot redhead.”
He grabbed her for a hug, playful, but she pulled away. “Don’t. God.”
“What?”
“That’s all you can say?” She put on a fake dumb-guy voice and imitated him.
“I’ve always wanted to kiss a hot redhead.
”
Darren backed away, holding up his hands. “What’d I do?”
“Just forget it.” Stacy did her move. April started to cry. I didn’t know what to do — pick up April? Leave before they remembered I was there? “Never mind,” Stacy said, going to April. “It’s just hair.”
Darren laughed. “That’s what I’m saying.”
“Okay then.” Stacy sat on the edge of the bed with April and it seemed like the fight was over. Darren looked at me and shrugged, then went into the bathroom to shower.
As soon as the door closed, Stacy muttered real low, “Fuck you, Darren.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. Of all the ways I’d imagined Stacy and Darren and April and me as a family, I never pictured this.
I almost didn’t go to work that night. Dealing with Tommy, seeing the booth where I’d crapped all over Lee’s friendship, and facing customers all seemed like too much on top of the weirdness between Darren and Stacy. I wanted to walk over to Jason’s, but I was afraid. I mean, what if Lee had told him about how I’d treated her? If he was forced to choose between her and me . . . well, I just wasn’t ready to hear which one of us it would be. So when it was time for Stacy to leave for work, and she knocked twice on my door and said, “Let’s go,” I went.
She didn’t talk on the ride over. Instead, she rifled through her CDs while attempting to drive, putting one after the other in the CD player, finding her favorite songs, and blasting them at full volume. I noticed also that she’d squeezed herself into her tightest jeans and left the dark makeup on.
“Did you and Darren, like,
talk
?” I asked between songs.
“About what?”
Okay, I thought, if she’s going to play it that way then just forget it. In twenty-four hours she’d gone from wanting to take me to a bar to treating me like an annoying little kid. When we got to Picasso’s, I got out without saying anything and slammed the door, trying not to think: What if
this
was the life in store when we moved out together? It couldn’t be like that. It had to be okay; it was probably just Stacy’s postpartum hormones making her act this way.
It was a busy night. The summer softball leagues had started up, and all these middle-aged guys trying to relive high school came in, their big bellies packed into dirty softball shirts, ordering pitchers of beer and basically acting like jackasses. We didn’t work too bad together, actually, when it came down to crunch time. Tommy prepped the crusts and ran the oven, I took orders and did toppings, Michael handled everything else.
“Push the salad bar,” he told us. “We’re running low on pepperoni.”
“I
think
they’re gonna know the difference,” Tommy said.
I took orders, saying, “The salad bar is only $2.99,” about nine hundred times. “It’s all you can eat.”
Still, Michael had to run out at ten to buy more pepperoni and ground beef. The softball people started to clear out, and I bused their tables while Tommy cleaned up the pizza line.
That’s when a parade of people from my worst nightmares walked through the door: Jake Millard, senior; Anthony Picollini, senior; Jolene Hancock, graduated; and her brother, Mike, senior. All of them had been at Terra Nova with Tommy. All of them were in his circle of friends.
Jolene was the first to spot me and start laughing. “No way! Deanna Lambert works here?” She called over to Tommy, “That must be convenient, huh?” Like I wasn’t standing right there; like I was nobody.
“Hey, Lambert,” Mike said, “just can’t stay away from Tommy? I guess he’s as good as he says he is.”
Tommy came out from behind the counter, grinning. “They always come back for more.”
I carried my trays of garbage into the back.
“Aw, don’t be like that, Deanna,” Jake called after me. “We all know Tommy’s a shithead!”
They laughed. I leaned against the dishwasher, warm on my back, and closed my eyes.
This is my life, I thought. This is it. When I’m thirty-five years old picking up tampons and a loaf of bread at the store and I run into Jolene Hancock in the express line, she’ll look at me and when she gets home she’ll tell her husband, “I saw Deanna Lambert at the store. She’s this girl I knew in high school. Kind of skanky. Slept with this gross junior when she was only thirteen.”
I didn’t know if I had any friends left. I didn’t know if Darren and Stacy were going to make it. I didn’t know if my dad would ever be able to look at me and not think of that night at Montara Beach.
“Are you okay? Deanna?” I opened my eyes. It was Michael, holding a giant bag of pepperoni. “Are you crying?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t know. Sorry.”
He put the pepperoni down. “Do you want to talk?”
Michael was nice. Sincerely nice; the nicest person I’d met in a long time. I liked his face, strong and interesting, with deep lines and the kind of skin you get when you smoke for twenty years. He knew the deal. And he didn’t judge me, at least I don’t think he did. But I couldn’t talk to him, or anyone. The words just weren’t in me.
“I’ve got a headache is all,” I said, busying myself with loading the dishwasher.
“It has been a long night. Tommy’s friends just left,” he said. “In case you were wondering.”
I pulled the lever to close the dishwasher, and pushed the start button. The sound of water spraying against metal kept me from having to answer.
Stacy didn’t show up after work. Michael waited with me for a while and had a smoke, but at quarter to twelve said, “Look, I’ve got a hot date with my dentist early tomorrow morning. Are you going to be all right? Do you want a ride?”
“It’s okay,” I said. “My brother’s girlfriend works over at Safeway. She probably just got delayed or something.”
“Come on, I’ll give you a ride to Safeway then.”
“It’s okay, I’ll walk. It’s just, like, a block.” I didn’t bother explaining that maybe Stacy was mad at me and that’s why she hadn’t shown up.
Michael threw his cigarette butt down and twisted it under his boot. “No, you’re coming with me. I can just imagine explaining to your parents why I let you walk when they find your dead body in a ditch.”
I followed him to his car and we drove over to Safeway. “There’s her car,” I said when I spotted the Nova. “Thanks.”
“Okay, kid.” He looked at me like he was going to say something else, something important, and all I could think was,
Please don’t be nice to me right now. Don’t be understanding, don’t be deep.
He must have read my mind, because his face changed and he only said, “See you tomorrow.”
I went into the store looking for Stacy and asked a girl at one of the registers where she was.
“Oh,” she said. “She left early. Wasn’t feeling well.”
“But her car is in the lot.”
“Really? That’s weird. She left around nine thirty.”
I walked back outside and sat on a bench under the lights. The only thing I could figure was that Stacy had gotten so sick that she couldn’t drive, and Darren picked her up with my mom’s car or something and they forgot about me. If she was that sick, it might explain why she’d been in such a weird mood. It pissed me off a little that they wouldn’t think about how I’d just be left hanging in the middle of the night, but I didn’t want to call Darren’s cell and rock the boat. And I didn’t want to call my parents, obviously.
The stupid SamTrans bus didn’t run at night, so I started walking home, wishing I still smoked. A cigarette always felt a little like I had company, plus I figured I could use a lit cigarette as a weapon if someone tried to attack me.
Fog clung to me with the kind of damp cold that soaks through your clothes and skin and goes right to your bones. I tucked my hair under my jacket and walked different — with my hands in my pockets and my shoulders hunched over — like Darren had taught me, so that I’d look more like a guy in the dark. After I’d walked for about ten minutes, a car slowed down alongside me. I started walking faster and looking for houses that still had lights on in case I needed to run somewhere. The car stayed with me and then I heard that easy voice, “Hey, Dee Dee.” I didn’t stop. Tommy kept driving next to me, talking out of the open window.
“Dee Dee, come on. You need a ride? Hey I’m not going to jump you or anything. Unless you want me to. But seriously, get in the car, will you?”
I was cold and tired and had another fifteen minutes to go before home. Tommy was a lot of things I hated, but I knew it was true what he said, that he wouldn’t do anything. That would screw up the image he had of himself as a stud that girls flocked to on their own, though I’d never personally seen that happen. I stopped, opened the car door, and jumped in while the car still moved along slowly.