The Blonde of the Joke (14 page)

Francie sat down in the middle of the sidewalk and covered her mouth and nose with her hands. The street was completely empty; it was just us. “Francie,” I said. “Are you okay?” She didn’t answer. She sat there like that for a few minutes, then gathered herself up, and we headed on our way.

When we finally sat down on the subway, Francie couldn’t look me in the eye. “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know what happened. You saved my ass.”

And I knew I should have tried to comfort her. But I didn’t want to. She had disappointed me. “I told you you looked like a hooker,” I said. “Maybe you should have listened to me.”

“I’m sorry,” Francie said. She was crying now. “I should have listened.”

A
t ten o’clock, Max was outside my bedroom window throwing rocks.

“You know, they invented cell phones for a reason,” I whispered when I met him at the back door. “You should have just called. This is some
Leave It to Beaver bullshit.”

“I don’t have your cell number,” said Max. “Or I would have called. I’m just glad that was your window and not your parents’. I had to guess.”

I led him upstairs to my room and turned on some music to cover our voices, then pulled the computer chair away from my desk for him and sat on the edge of my bed.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I smoked a J and decided to go for a bike ride. And now I’m here.”

“Don’t you have parents?” I asked.

“No one has parents around here.”

“True,” I said.

We sat there looking at each other for what felt like a really long time.

“So what’s up?” I asked.

“Not much,” Max said. “You look different or something. Every time I see you you look different from before.”

“Thanks.” I took it as a compliment.

“You
seem
different,” he said.

“Well, maybe I am.”

And he rolled his chair across the wood floor and kissed me. He just did. I kissed him back. What else could I do?

Kissing Max was pleasant, but not, like, out of control or anything. I had never kissed anyone before—besides Francie, who didn’t count—and I have to admit I was expecting it to be more exciting. When I had kissed Francie, it had been a solemn agreement between the two of us. Like pricking our thumbs and rubbing the blood together. But with Max, it was all spit and wiggling tongues. I thought of a quiz I’d once taken in
Seventeen
magazine. “Are You a Good Kisser?” With Max’s open mouth against mine, his hand inching up my thigh, I wanted to know: What is the difference? What would a good kisser be doing that I wasn’t? I tried to think back to the quiz, but all I could remember was something about sweaty palms. My palms weren’t sweaty. Was that good or bad? I couldn’t remember.

“So what’s your phone number, anyway?” Max asked when I broke away. “It’s kind of weird that I don’t actually have it.” I gave him the number, he tapped it into his phone, and then he disappeared.

Weird,
I thought. And I stood up and looked at myself in the mirror and smoothed my hair.
So that’s what it’s like.

After school the next day, Francie was in the bleachers, alone, clutching her cigarette like it was heavier than her entire body. It was spring, and 70, and from where I stood on the sidewalk, the blossoms that had fallen from the trees were whirling everywhere in little eddies of wind. I watched her for a few minutes from across the football field before walking in the other direction. She didn’t see me.

L
iz came to take me out on a chilly Sunday afternoon, gray and overcast, at the end of April. I wasn’t expecting her. The thing about Liz is that while I definitely admired her, and appreciated all the clothes she let us steal, I didn’t exactly like her. She had a way of making me feel uncomfortable. Given a choice, I probably would not have chosen to spend an afternoon with her.

You don’t always get a choice. When Liz came to pick me up, she was dressed like an old-fashioned movie star, with a silk polka-dotted scarf tied over her head and red cat’s-eye sunglasses. But her lips were chapped, and puffy bags peered out from the lower rims of her glasses.

I tried to think of an excuse not to go with her, but I couldn’t come up with one. So I got into her little blue
Volkswagen, which had probably been paid for with hocked Gap merchandise, and we drove off.

She took me ice-skating at the mall. “Just you and me,” she’d said. It turned out that Liz had been halfway decent at skating once, when she was my age, but she’d given it up because her parents weren’t about to pay for coaches and tutus and everything. It was just as well, Liz said. Who wants to be fat, insane, and broke, all for the sake of one double axel at age sixteen?

“I’m moving to Australia soon,” she informed me when we were on the rink, just skating around and around, me grabbing her hip every now and then for balance. She had taken off the scarf and sunglasses as soon as we’d gotten out of the car. I guess she had realized for herself how absurd she looked.

“What are you going to do in Australia, of all places?” I asked her.

“I’m gonna break into the soaps. They’re big there, you know.
Neighbors
and all. They call it
Naybas.
Maybe I’ll meet a man with an Australian accent. It’s all I ask.”

“That’s dumb,” I told her.

“I know,” she said. “Ridiculous, right? But something ridiculous is the only thing left to do. And I love kangaroos. So cute.”

“When are you going?” I wanted to know.

“After…you know.”

“After Jesse dies.”

“Right.” She gave me an apologetic shrug, did a little
pivot on her skates, and suddenly she was skating backward, facing me. “I mean, he’s the reason I even came back from LA in the first place, obviously. It hasn’t done much good. I don’t see him any more than you do. I think he’s avoiding me for some reason. But at least he knows I’m here. If he needs me, I’m here.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked her.

“I guess I just wanted to say good-bye. Because when it happens, there’s not going to be time. We’re all going to be preoccupied with other stuff.”

“I guess.”

“It’s going to be soon,” Liz said. She looked at me hard. “I want you to be prepared. You remind me of myself, I think.” She took my hand and twirled me under the strong arch of her bicep. “I thought I could save him, but I couldn’t. You can’t, either. You know that, right?”

We’d done twenty or thirty laps of the rink at this point. We had passed this spot so many times that it seemed like we hadn’t ever left it.

“I’d stay, but I can’t,” Liz said. “And anyway, what good am I? I couldn’t help Jesse. I spent years trying to help him, if you want the truth. Even before he got sick. Look where it got him.”

“What is he even sick with?” I finally asked. It was the question that everyone always avoided.

“I think he’s just bored,” Liz said. “I mean, that’s as good a guess as any, right?”

“Last I checked, you couldn’t die of boredom.”

“What, I look like a doctor?”

I shrugged. “It just seems like a dumb reason to die.”

“Well, obviously it’s more complicated, but you know what I’m saying. And really, the important part—the true, actual thing of all of it—is that it does not fucking matter. Jesse has made his own choices, cowardly and pathetic though they may have been. It’s all on him, okay? None of us could have done anything. I told you, I tried. I even went to a witch doctor in New Orleans and bought a crystal and tied a piece of his hair around it and threw it in the ocean.”

“Sucker,” I snorted.

“Tell me about it. That crystal was really fucking expensive.”

Then she left me, wobbling on the ice, to skate out to the eye of the rink, where there was a circle drawn for fanciness. There, Liz twirled and leaped while some schlocky old song played, narrowly dodging little kids and red-jacketed guards, while I retreated to the bleachers and bummed a Marlboro Light from an old lady.

I watched Liz skate. She had gone off like a bomb—detonated by a sequence of familiar twitches. She’d thought she wouldn’t remember how to do it; she hadn’t skated in years. But her body still knew, I guess, because she flew through the air with an instinct so killer that I was almost afraid to watch.

Liz stabbed the ice with the picks on her toes, threw her arms like helicopter blades before liftoff. Flakes of ice sparking from her feet. It reminded me somehow of Francie. No—of myself. I wondered if I’d always remember how to steal. I pictured myself years in the future, reclaiming that sneaky art with a screaming baby in one hand and a bag of cat food in the other, in the crowded aisle of a supermarket. It would always be with me, I realized. When I was ready, I could let it go.

But I wasn’t ready. Not quite yet.

I watched Liz spin and spin in the center of the rink, that girl a cold blur of fury and resentment and determination. She was spinning faster and faster, and then, just like that, she transformed. She was all ice. She was like me. And I realized suddenly that I’d been mistaken all along. I had been relying on Francie. But Francie would never be enough. It wasn’t her fault—no one else could ever be enough. If Liz had taught me anything that day, it was that I had only myself to rely on.

Anyway, Francie was less extraordinary every day. Something had caused her illusion to fray at the edges, and it seemed that it might begin to unravel completely at any time. As for me: there in the bleachers, burning through that Marlboro Light, I knew that I was only growing stronger. I was more beautiful with every breath. Francie was not going to rescue me, or my brother, or anyone. I had to do it myself. It was so obvious. I don’t know how I’d ever seen it any
other way. I was not ready to give up yet. I was more beautiful than ever.

The next day, Monday, I passed Francie a note in the class that was no longer Ms. Tinker’s, telling her I couldn’t go to the mall.
Too much shit to do,
the note said. She just turned around and shrugged.

I went to Jesse’s by myself, just because, bearing a pair of cheap drugstore sunglasses as a tiny offering. By then it was tradition. The route to my brother’s place was becoming as familiar as the one to the mall, and when I got there I didn’t even say hello, just climbed onto the couch next to him and curled up, perched the sunglasses on his brow.

“I’m not sure if we’re both going to fit like this,” he croaked. He was right. My ass was hanging off the edge.

“I’ll scrunch.”

“Robin Hood,” he murmured, “you are, like, so full of fearlessness that I can hardly stand it.”

“And all this time I thought you knew what you were talking about,” I said.

On Jesse’s couch I felt like a fetus, all pink translucence and no fingernails. He was so much older than me. Old enough to be dying.

We just lay there, my arms wrapped around his chest, his body suddenly as fragile as the little piece of vibrating tissue paper in a kazoo.

Francie could not save him. All she had done was cast
one of her many illusions. But I didn’t need Francie anymore. I was going to accomplish what she had failed.

Have you ever done that thing where you take a hand mirror and hold it up to, say, the mirror on the medicine cabinet, and turn it an inch in this direction, an inch in that direction, until you’ve got the angle just right so that you see an endless string of yourself reflected back in front of you, into infinity? That was how I felt looking at Jesse that night. He was my brother. If I had been nine years older, we could have been twins. We could have been the same person. We were mirrors, pushed together face-to-face on his threadbare couch, eyes open, my hand on his shoulder. And looking at my older brother that night, saying nothing, there was a spark of understanding, and instantly I could see both myself and him, reflected back in a mysterious, repeating line that stretched through all the years. All the versions of ourselves that we had ever known, an infinite loop.

That night, I fell asleep with my brother on the couch, my face planted in his armpit, the ceiling fan whizzing steadily in time with our breathing. And I drifted off that night with the surest feeling—the most unwavering, irrational certitude—that everything was going to be okay.

S
ometime later, it was midnight, and Max was over again.

He had started showing up more and more lately. Sometimes he showed up at night. Other times I’d tell Francie I had to study and he’d come over straightaway after school. He had been here last night, too, and three nights before, and the afternoon before that, too, never with any clear purpose beyond the obvious. He wasn’t usually that intent on the obvious, either.

In some ways it was actually pretty annoying. I had things to do: homework, a shower, um, sleep. Yeah, I was, like, somewhat in love with him, or whatever, but that only goes so far. It would have been different if we’d had anything to talk about. But Max’s secret late-night visits were usually about
75 percent silence, 24 percent chitchat, and 1 percent makeout session. Sometimes we snuck out to the backyard and smoked a bowl, and didn’t talk out there, either.

Sometimes I wanted to say,
Max, it’s a school night.
I wanted to ask,
Max, what do you want from me, anyway?
Or
Why don’t we cut this bullshit here and get right to the good part?

But there were things I liked about him, too. He was sort of funny. He was smart, and weirdly tough. Despite his pathological distractability, I knew that he had the best intentions. Plus he was hot. It was all of that.

Of course, that stuff’s not all that important. Anyone can be smart and funny and a slightly good person. Actually I would say that most people probably are. Others are hot on top of it all, too. It’s rare, I guess, but not, like, anything to get all excited about.

No. What I liked most about Max was this: he was him and I was me. He wasn’t trying to change anything. He didn’t want me to be anything more to him than a sort of girlfriend. He expected very little from me. I could walk away at any moment—he could walk away—and neither of us would take a piece of the other with us. He was just Max. I was Valentina Martinez.

That night he was lying on my floor, amid laundry and CDs and year-old fashion magazines. He had his arms flung over his head, T-shirt riding up to reveal the tan, flat stomach, the thin line of darkness leading into his jeans. He
seemed to be staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, even though the lights were on and you could barely see him. I was staring at him. We were both staring. He was beautiful.

And this time when he kissed me, I was ready for it. We had kissed a lot since his first visit a few weeks ago. It never lasted for more than three minutes, give or take two and a half minutes. He sat on my bed, with his hands on my hips and mine on his shoulders, and inched his way up to my boob as we chewed on each other’s lips. Even though I know you’re not supposed to open your eyes when you’re kissing someone, I let my lids drift open, and I saw him staring back at me.

We stared at each other like that for a few seconds, pupils only millimeters away, and his tongue down my throat the whole time. Caught in the intensity of his glance, I felt nervous. I had to laugh and pull back.

He grabbed my wrist and pulled me back on top of him.

“Let’s have sex,” he said. “I brought a condom.”

It felt like my eyes might pop out of my head.

“Uh, no!” I said.

“Why not?”

“We can’t even figure out how to kiss right. And now you want to start doing it?”

“We were kissing fine.”

Max pulled his shirt off. His body was tan and muscled and perfect, his collarbone jutting out from between his
shoulders in a smooth and undeviating ridge. I wish I could say that I kicked him out right there, that this was the final straw. But I couldn’t help faltering. Max on my bed looking at once predatory and unbearably vulnerable. His lips half parted, blue eyes wide and implying a million things all at the same time. He ran a hand through his hair self-consciously, but didn’t try to move any closer.

He looked sexy, okay?

“Come on,” he said.

I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Max seemed like the kind of person whose feelings were easily bruised. But I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t that I was being precious about my so-called virginity, because really, the thing to do about
that
seemed to be to get it over with. It was something else.

“You don’t really want to,” I said.

“Yes I do. Why would I be sitting here like this if I didn’t want to do it?”

“I don’t mean it that way,” I said. “It’s just that if I have sex with someone, I kind of want it to have something to do with me. I’m not sure that this has anything to do with me at all.”

“That’s the most retarded thing I ever heard,” he said. “How could it not have to do with you? If it didn’t have to do with you, I’d just be jerking off, right?”

It was no surprise that he didn’t get it. “Just put your shirt on.”

He didn’t move at first, but then he stood, and then,
arms across his chest, he was dressed. He turned his back to me.

“Don’t be mad,” I said.

He tilted his chin in my direction, but he was still only half facing me. “You want to know what I think?” he asked. All I could make of his expression was a flicker of eyelash.

“What?”

“I think this has to do with Francie,” he said.

“It’s just…” I started. But I didn’t know how to finish the thought. He had caught me off guard.

“Am I wrong?” he said.

“I’m not a lesbo,” I replied.

Max rolled his eyes. “You don’t understand what I’m saying at all.”

From my window I watched Max’s bike drift through the night, a lazy arrow of unformed intention shooting toward a target that neither of us could know. I wondered if I would ever see him again, and then realized that with Max, the uncertainty was in itself something of a guarantee.