“Don’t let it happen again,” he said sternly.
Charlotte shrunk away from him and backed down the corridor, inadvertently smacking into Pam’s desk just as she was ending a call.
“What’s up with you?” Pam asked, surprised at Charlotte’s uncharacteristic nonchalance. “I think that new girl is rubbing off on you.”
“Her name is Matilda Miner,” Charlotte said peevishly. “And at least she’s close enough to rub.”
“What do you mean ‘close enough’? I’m your best friend over here.”
“What did you do last night?” Charlotte asked, seemingly out of the blue.
“Ah, nothing much,” Pam paused, giving it some thought. “Mr. Paroda came over to give me my piccolo lesson and Prue, Abigail, and Rita happened to stop by. It turned into a little recital.”
“Sounds like fun,” Charlotte said dismissively. “Sorry I missed it.”
“Charlotte, c’mon. It’s not like that. I know you’re frustrated about not getting calls and all the reunions, but that’s not our fault.”
“You know what I did last night? I stared up at the ceiling from my bunk.”
Charlotte swiveled her head around and stared at all the interns eavesdropping on her bitch session with Pam. As she did, each of them lowered their eyes and pretended to be working. All except for Maddy.
“Not that you really care,” Charlotte moaned to Pam and walked over to her desk. “Any of you.”
Chapter 3
Bad Connection
Fantasy love is much better than reality love.
—Andy Warhol
The idea of someone can often be much more attractive than the reality of that person.
That’s why long-distance relationships work. Your idealized romance remains untainted by bad breath, bad habits, and embarrassing parents. Your so-called soul mate is always the person you’d wanted and wished for. The major drawback is, your soul mate is never around. Trouble really starts when the long-distance relationship you are having happens to be with your own feelings.
At Hawthorne High, Charlotte’s best living friend, Scarlet, could barely keep her eyes open during last period history. After fidgeting with her vintage specs, she started pulling out wayward threads from her self-silkscreened Lick the Star tee while the marching band rehearsed a horrible rendition of Nick Cave’s Do You Love Me? She gave them points for desperately trying to make the trombone sound like his vocals, but after a while, it all started to give her a headache.
Mr. Coppola, her well-groomed, single, forty-something teacher, who still lived with his widowed mother, was reliving yet again the most interesting experience in his life: his appearance as a teenager on Let’s Make a Deal.
“Okay, people. Since you’ve all aced your pop quizzes yesterday, let’s just sit back and relish our successes, shall we?” Mr. Coppola said.
He motioned for the door to be opened as if he were going to unleash some sort of “Oprah’s Favorite Things” giveaway. Everyone let out a moan of recognition. They all knew what came next.
“What’s behind door number one?” he exclaimed as Sam Wolfe, practically on cue, wheeled in a rickety steel A/V cart with a dusty old TV on it. It’s as if they’d rehearsed it, and knowing Mr. Coppola as Scarlet did, this was not an unreasonable assumption. Still, she was always happy to see Sam.
“Do we have to watch Howie Mandel again?” a boy in the back shouted.
Mr. Coppola spun around as tightly as a professional ice skater and ran up to the boy.
“Howie Mandel?” he raged in disbelief. “It’s Monty Hall! There’s no comparison. Monty Hall is a legend — the gold standard of game show deal making.”
Mr. Coppola’s face had turned apple red by now, his eyes bulging and a faint lisp detectable through his tirade. He was tightly wound, Mr. Coppola was, and seeing who could raise his blood pressure to the boiling point had become a sport for every class since he’d come to Hawthorne. The most direct route was a full-frontal onslaught of Monty Hall.
“Now be quiet, and try to learn something,” he ordered, signaling Sam to begin.
The static-y third generation videotape rolled, and Mr. Coppola watched intently, waiting to see himself. Everyone sat there in the dark, watching the screen and waiting for Mr. Coppola to shout, “There I am!” And right on schedule, at seven minutes in, a young, mustachioed Mr. Coppola — dressed in a Xanadu T-shirt, tight running shorts, knee-high tube socks, and Adidas sneakers — appeared, for exactly two seconds, right behind Monty Hall, who was, as always, making a deal with some rube who couldn’t decide between a Cadillac and a donkey.
Seeing himself always triggered a pause on the tape and a story of how he had the Q-tip in his pocket, but the woman in front of him couldn’t make a deal because she didn’t have one. He then would get swept away by the way Monty Hall tilted his head to acknowledge him when he walked up the steps toward the woman. He thought, as everyone else surely did in the auditorium, that Monty was headed directly to him. For those few seconds, he thought he would be … chosen.
Scarlet tried to pay attention, even taking in the whole Let’s Make a Deal as Metaphor-For-Life, but she was worlds away. She and her boyfriend, Damen, had been on the phone all night talking endlessly about independent movies, new music downloads they wanted to check out, and concerts that they wanted to go to. She was a different person when she talked to him. Open and chatty, her sentences would unspool breathlessly. The adrenaline rush was so strong it would take her hours to fall asleep after they hung up, if she slept at all.
She was exhausted because, sadly, she wasn’t used to late nights like that anymore. With Damen away at college, and Scarlet working and finishing high school, it was getting really hard to find time for each other. Or, in her mind at least, it was getting harder for him to find time for her. Visits home and even phone calls had become more and more infrequent. They were in different places now, in more ways than one, and Scarlet was feeling that the distance between them was about more than miles.
Besides, she really missed him. They’d shared things together that she couldn’t, wouldn’t, have shared with anyone else in their little deadbeat town. Damen always made sure to share every single detail of bands he’d seen at The Itch and movies that played off campus, saving promotional mementos like posters and ticket stubs and snagging her some T-shirts from the groups that were playing in his cool college town, a world away from Hawthorne. At least he did for a while, she thought.
Scarlet was not naïve. She knew the dangers of not being together, not making new memories. It was death to a relationship. And if the end of last night’s conversation was any indication, she decided, the patient was sick.
“Well, I better let you go,” she recalled Damen saying. “You have to get up early for school… .”
He wasn’t exactly rushing her off the phone, but the passive construction of his goodbye, and seemingly generous tone — wrapping his signoff in a condescending little verbal pat-on-the-head — she thought analytically, might be hiding a deeper truth. He didn’t say, “I have to go.” He said, “I’ll let you go… .” In other words, putting the burden of ending the call on her, leading her to believe it was her decision when it wasn’t. She wasn’t done with the call, but apparently, he was.
Hang-ups were always awkward between them anyway, but why couldn’t he just say what he meant? This led her to the most worrying issue of all.
They had never said “I love you.” Not on the phone, not in person. They’d gotten close, but had never actually spoken the words. This troubled Scarlet because they’d been together for some time and surely each knew how the other felt, but neither could muster up the courage to say it first. Well, that was her take on it anyway.
Could it be he didn’t say it because he didn’t feel it? So much had changed in their lives over the past year. It would certainly be understandable for his feelings to have changed. Or maybe they had passed the point of saying it, which would be even worse. That would mean their relationship was just moving along on auto-pilot or … on fumes.
Her sister, Petula, who was prone to giving Scarlet little hurtful jabs in the guise of sisterly advice, had implied that maybe Scarlet’s relationship was just a fauxmance and that Damen had moved on while Scarlet was just a stupid, little school girl chasing after him. Scarlet knew exactly what Petula was trying to do. She was still carrying the torch for Damen, not to mention nursing the huge blow to her ego from when he dumped her for her little sister. That much was obvious, but her digs definitely let a little more doubt creep in.
When the loudest voice in your head is Petula, Scarlet thought, you know it is time to stop thinking. All this emotional excavation was very out of character for a head as cool as Scarlet’s, so before she posed any further threat to her own sanity, she took a deep breath and recalled what Damen had actually said, and not what she heard.
“I … love … you know … talking to you” were his exact words last night.
“That wasn’t soooo bad, was it?” Scarlet reprimanded herself, embarrassed at the ride she’d just taken on the crazy train.
“Well, I’m glad you aren’t just in it for my fame, body, and money,” Scarlet recalled joking, trying to take some of the tension off the wrap-up. Damen laughed for a second, then she heard a click in her ear, and the line went silent.
Scarlet’s big sister suffered from no such internal conflicts. Petula’s only debate that day was whether to sign in to school and then skip out for a pedicure at the Korean day spa or to just cut totally and give in fully to her need to primp. She was leaning toward the second option, not just out of irresponsibility but out of pure indifference. School had never meant much to her, except as a place to validate her superiority, and it meant even less now that she had been left back. The Fall Ball incident had mostly faded from Hawthorne High’s collective memory, but Petula was still being made to pay for her crime via an involuntary senior year do-over. Typically, however, she found the silver lining in this humiliating cloud and exploited it to her advantage.
In fact, getting left back turned out to be a blessing in disguise for her. She much preferred being a big fish in a little pond, and the prospect of starting her social climb all over again at some junior college was unappealing. She had few skills and fewer ambitions. She didn’t really mean anything outside of high school and she knew it. Her best friends, the Wendys, soaring to new heights of superficiality, held themselves back too, in sort of an homage to Petula. So, despite the setback, not much had changed for Petula.
Today’s pedicure was an urgent matter. She was beautifying for her big date with a younger man, Josh Valence — a senior from Gorey High — Hawthorne High’s biggest rival. Josh was the captain of their football team and quite a catch, so she wanted to be super perfect from head to toe. Snagging a jock was only half her motivation, however, the other half was revenge. She hoped that word would get back to Damen. He’d lost the big game last year to Gorey in a squeaker, and even though Damen never gave it a second thought, Petula, in her infinite pettiness, imagined that dating Josh would really eat him alive.
By the time she’d completed the parts of her beauty regimen she could manage on her own, she was already running behind schedule. She arrived a few minutes late to the day spa and was livid to find that despite the emergency appointment she’d made the night before, she still had to wait. She watched the seconds tumble away, drops of sweat popping through her cleansed pores and beading on her plucked brows.
She still had to go to the tanning salon, get back home, eat a few carrot sticks, shower, set her hair, and steam her new bratank, not to mention pick up Scarlet from school since she had borrowed her car, all while texting the Wendys her every move. She was stressing big-time, although the “picking up Scarlet” item in her daybook was very low priority.
She’d been waiting three whole minutes before she took her place on the pedicure throne and her nail tech began to scrub, scrape, pumice, massage, and clip. Ordinarily Petula would have required executive treatment and would never have bothered to speak to the help. But today she was growing more and more impatient and rushing the whole process.
“What are you doing?” she snapped. “I don’t want my cuticles pushed back.”
The nail tech looked up at her with a smile and resumed her work. Petula thought that she wasn’t getting it.
“Don’t you talky American? Me No Likey!” she railed ignorantly while pushing back the cuticles on her fingers as a kind of sign language. The tech nodded again, blankly this time, and Petula exploded.
“Chop, chop,” Petula bullied, again urging the tech to pick up the pace, her agitated feet splashing dirty water, flakes of dried skin, calluses, and toe jam all over the girl.
When her need for speed was still unacknowledged, Petula went totally Rocky 1 on her.
“Cut me!” she finally roared, pointing to her toenails.
The girl was moving as quickly as possible, trying her best to meet all of Petula’s demands, but with her hands nervous and shaking, she accidentally nicked Petula’s big toe.
Petula continued screaming at the girl and broadcasting her incompetence to the whole spa, so much so that people and clinicians were peeking their heads out of waxing rooms to see what all the commotion was about.
“Here, let me put some alcohol on it,” the girl said apologetically in perfect English, which made Petula even madder.
“I think you’ve done enough,” Petula barked. “This better NOT scar!”
Petula grabbed her things, hobbled outside still wearing her paper flip-flops and foam toe separators, and jumped in the car.
She was already pissed enough, but having to drive home in Scarlet’s dented and scratched jalopy, plastered with band and radio station bumper stickers and a hubcap-less spare tire, was almost unbearable. And the car was black, her least favorite color.