Authors: Rachel Vail
THIS IS EXACTLY
why I am not romantic, I told myself as I rode home fast, flying. This whole crying thing, that’s why. This whole, I-think-I-just-blew-my-chance-at-having-this-boy-really-like-me thing. I don’t want this. I don’t want any part of this.
I dumped my bike in the garage with all my supplies still on the back, and charged up the stairs to my room. I ripped off my wig, threw it on my bed, and yanked my costume down hard. Damn. I hate hating myself.
I pulled on some sweatpants and a zip-up sweatshirt jacket, yanked my hair back into a ponytail, and smashed my way to the bathroom. It’s my own fault, I reminded myself as I layered cold cream on my face. What did I even want? What did I expect? Did I really think Carson Gold would see the girl behind the Tallulah the Clown getup as anything but a freak? Had I really become so gullible that I could con myself into believing he was really asking me to come straight from the party I was doing, so he could see what I do?
When will I ever meet that guy?
No, I do not allow myself to think like that!
I bent over the sink and scrubbed hard. I have always had a really strong feeling that out there somewhere is someone who would see me whole and wacky and particular, and would not just put up with all my personality, but would actively like it. He would encourage me. He would be somebody who doesn’t enjoy the tasteful, neutral beige of my mother’s decorating—he would be someone who likes neon plaid. Polka dots. Pink with red. I knew it would be a long wait; that’s okay. I am a patient girl.
But I guess the truth is, I let myself hope a tiny bit that maybe, somehow, ironically, that person could possibly be Carson Gold. I lathered myself up with Cetaphil for the second round of scrubbing.
The thing about getting your hopes up is that it is a phenomenally stupid thing to do. There is no upside to high hopes. That ant with the rubber tree plant was delusional. Please. Think about it: You let yourself hope for a thing. Okay, so if you get it, then it’s like anticlimactic: like, so what? I already pictured getting this thing I wanted, this boy or whatever, and here I am getting it. So no big deal.
I dried off and stormed down to the kitchen.
But if you don’t get the thing you were hoping for, I continued inside my head, let’s just say for the sake of an example a stupid, plastic, perfect boy’s love, you are devastated and need to eat an entire pint of cookie dough ice cream immediately, which can lead to a horrible ice cream headache and also to dirty looks from your mother, if your mother is a person who thinks your worth as a human being is inversely proportional to your weight.
On the other hand, if you never get your hopes up, you can go through life considerably less battered. You have to protect yourself; it’s just common sense. No animal would willingly, purposefully, put himself in a vulnerable position, right? So why would a supposedly higher-order animal like a human do it?
Right?
But that’s what we do when we hope, I reminded myself as I scrounged through the cabinets for more to eat. When we hope, we set ourselves up. In the Greek myth, Pandora let
hope
slip out last when she opened her forbidden emotion-box, and the moral of the story is that
hope
was like the antidote, the compensation for all those bad feelings like fear and lust. I don’t know,
fear
and
lust
seem like healthy emotions to me. They let the species survive. Hope, on the other hand, is a pointless emotion if I ever saw one. What good did hope ever do us? I think never expecting anything good to happen is a very healthy philosophy, and most of the time, I am proud to say, I am able to think the worst of most people and most situations. That’s why life doesn’t beat the stuffing out of me anymore. I have learned the trick.
But today I forgot. I messed up. I hoped. It’s my own fault that today I am like the peach you would never pick at the grocery store, bruised and passed over and sad.
I was forced to eat the plastic bag full of Swedish fish I got in my party favor earlier in the day. You have to love a host who gives the clown a loot bag—and cash.
“I wish you wouldn’t . . .” My mother, coming back into the kitchen, stopped herself mid-critique. She took a breath, then another. I ate a whole handful of Swedish fish at once. She looked away and started over: “I’m making flounder for dinner.”
“You’re cooking?”
If I were a kind person I would warn her to stay away from me right now,
I thought.
“Ew, please,” she said. “I’m heating. I got it from the place with the sign, you know. Near that horrible gas station?”
“Sounds great,” I said. Warning, combustible!
Her eyes lingered on the empty ice cream container on the counter. I watched her try to hold in her thoughts about my weight, my supposed lactose intolerance, my messiness—all the things that make her sigh when she looks at me, her little bundle of disappointment.
“New hairstyle?” she finally asked. “It looks kind of nice.”
“No. I just washed my whiteface off.”
“Ugh. Doesn’t that stuff give you pimples?”
I shrugged. I was doing my best to hold all the bile in.
“You used to be so terrified of clowns . . .” she said. “Remember when you wet your pants at the circus, soaked right through my skirt, and I had to carry you out, screaming, with everybody staring at us?”
“Everybody’s afraid of clowns,” I said, finishing off the candy.
“So why in the world would you want to dress up as one?” She forced a smile, as an afterthought, as if she were just kidding around.
I rubbed my finger and thumb together. “I make fifty bucks an hour. There are very few legal ways for a fifteen-year-old girl to do that.”
“Well, aren’t you the berries,” she said.
“I think so,” I lied.
I could never explain to her the real reason I like being a clown, doing kids’ birthday parties. She had never asked me why I liked it before, and this time it wasn’t interest, obviously—it was criticism. Money she understands. Money is power, she once told me, when I was really young and she was depositing money at the bank. Money is power, Josie, she said; a woman needs to make money. She might have forgotten telling me that but I never forgot it.
“If you need money,” she was saying, “all you have to do is ask me and I’ll . . .”
“I don’t need money,” I said. “When’s the last time I asked you for money?”
“Never.” She fluffed her hair. “You never . . . I’m not criticizing you, Josie.”
“No?”
“No. You seem so tense. All I’m saying is you would have a lot more fun if you didn’t try so hard to be . . . different.”
“Different comes easy to me,” I said. What I could never explain to my mother is that although the makeup does in fact give me pimples and the wig is itchy and the parties are absolutely exhausting, I love it. It is so incredibly cool to transform myself into Tallulah the Clown. Just like Carson, she thinks I do it to embarrass her. Right, Mom—it’s all about you. Not. And same to you, Carson Gold. Guess what, both of you? It’s actually about me.
It’s the magic that’s like a drug, an addiction for me, and I don’t mean the dumb tricks, pouring water into newspaper or pulling my stuffed rabbit, Hops, out of a mirrored box. I mean the real magic. Behind the clown makeup, I get to watch the kids’ faces change—from fear, to wariness, to acceptance, to joy. Hiding under the fake hair, behind the bright red lipstick smile, I can reach them, and I can watch them overcome something, and see them believe in magic. As Tallulah, I get to be different—more fun, funnier, more confident, way more lovable. At the beginning the kids clutch their mothers’ legs. By the end, they all want to hug me. Yes, it takes a lot of work. But it is the most worthwhile thing I do.
But it’s easier for my mother to think it’s for money, or rebellion. Just like it’s easier for Carson Gold to think I do it just to embarrass him. Fine. We’re all free to believe whatever nonsense we need to, to get through the day.
“Forget it,” Mom said, grabbing a Diet Coke and flopping into a chair. “I don’t know why I even try.”
I felt a little guilty then, so I said, “Neither do I.” It wasn’t her fault my day had sucked. This time. Also my mood was lifting a bit. I’m not good at depressed and angry. Also there was a lot of sugar coursing through my bloodstream.
“Mom, tell me the truth,” I said, sitting in the chair next to hers and propping my feet on her lap. “Does everybody know the hokey pokey is really about love?”
She shoved my feet to the floor and scowled at me, but I could tell she was holding in a smile. I drive her nuts but I don’t bore her, at least. “What are you talking about, Josephine?”
“All this time I thought it was just nonsense and wiggling. But then while I was working today I got to thinking, you know, you put your whole self in, you take your whole self out—that’s what it’s all about. That’s got to be about love, right?”
“Well . . .” she paused.
“This is a good talk we’ve been having, Mom. Thanks. I think we should . . .”
A car pulled into our driveway. We both looked quizzically, if not suspiciously, at each other.
“Is that Daddy?” Mom asked me.
“Daddy is in the living room, reading the paper,” I reminded her.
“Oh, yeah. So who’s here?” She checked her lipstick in the microwave reflection.
“Probably somebody lost, making a U-turn,” I said, jumping up to dance. “You turn yourself about . . .”
And then the doorbell rang.
“HEY,” SAID CARSON
when I opened the door. “You changed.”
“I’ll never change,” I said.
Mom peeked over my shoulder. It was weirdly parallel to our earlier moment at Carson’s door.
“Mrs. Dondorff?” Carson asked.
Mom pushed me to the side and extended her hand for Carson to shake. “Barb,” she said. “And you are . . . ?”
“Carson,” he said, shaking her hand. “Carson Gold.”
Mom smiled radiantly at him. I managed to control my gag reflex.
“I was wondering if Josie could take a ride with me.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
Mom looked past him to his little white sports car in our driveway. Mom has been looking up little sports cars on the Internet for months; I’ve seen the sites she visits. I try to mentally condemn her shallowness, but what can I say? I love his car, too. It’s a stick shift, it gleams, it’s got red leather seats. Even the little dent in the roof had started to give me a little charge. Though I have not, will not, ever admit that to Zandra and Tru.
“Um,” said Mom, sounding uncharacteristically uncertain. “Bill?”
“Hm?” answered my father, from behind the paper.
“Josie wants to go out.”
“I brought home the new shoes for her, for her arches.” I heard him standing up in the living room, shuffling his paper and lowering the footrest on his Barcalounger. “Josie?” he called. “Sweetie, I want you to wear these—your arches are really collapsing . . .”
“I thought maybe we’d get some ice cream,” Carson added.
Before Mom could explain that I am both on a diet and lactose intolerant, and had nevertheless already consumed a pint, and before my father could make it to the front hall brandishing the latest in his long line of orthotically engineered shoes to combat all that is wrong with my feet, I said, “Sure, love to.”
Pushing Carson back out the door, I grabbed my jacket off the hook and shoved my feet into the great old clogs that my poor podiatrist father wants outlawed.
“Don’t you want to change or something?” Mom called after me.
“She’ll never change,” Carson answered, and followed me down the steps.
I settled myself into the passenger seat and buckled up as he backed out of the driveway. “Your arches are falling?”
“Turns out I am deeply flawed,” I admitted. I considered saying I was sorry for earlier, for embarrassing him or whatever. I hoped maybe he’d get it, that admitting how flawed I am was sort of my apology. If I needed to apologize.
He shifted into first gear and checked his mirrors. “I like your hair like that,” he mumbled.
“Like this?” I had forgotten I had a ponytail in. “Really?”
“You don’t?” He shifted gears and kept his eyes on the road.
I shrugged. “It shows too much of my face.”
“That’s why I . . . what do you mean, too much?”
“My face is too flat,” I explained. “It’s too . . . never mind. You had a sudden ice cream craving?”
“I like your face,” he said. “You should wear your hair like that more often.” He pulled up to the highway entrance.
“Where are we going?” I touched the hair above my forehead, smoothing it down. He liked my face.
“Let’s just drive awhile, okay?”
“Okay,” I said. “You rescued me from my mother. No arguments. I’m just happy to be sprung.”
He waited for an opening in the traffic, tapping the steering wheel lightly with two fingers of his left hand, then bolted out into the stream of cars, smoothly shifting as he accelerated. I watched his hand on the gear shift, his long fingers relaxed on the knob.
“I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” I stated. “That’s not why . . .”
He shifted again, and released the knob. His hand drifted over and covered mine, on my lap. “I like your earrings,” he said.
I touched one of my diamond studs, with my free hand. “Thanks.”
“New?”
“No, old. I never take them off. They were my mother’s grandmother’s.”
He smiled a little. “Cool. What was her name?”
“My great-grandmother’s?”
He nodded.
“Josephine. I’m named after her. I’m supposedly a lot like her, which is apparently not a compliment.”
“Why not?”
“She was a big crusader for women’s rights, a doctor, the whole firebrand thing.”
“I like her already,” Carson said.
“She never took these diamond studs off. My mother got them after Josephine died, but she likes danglies. My mother, I mean. She was saving these for me, planning to give them to me when I turned eighteen. But I loved them. I wanted them. I convinced her when I turned fifteen I should have them, promised I’d never take them off, and eventually I guess I wore her down.”
“You always get what you want, too, huh?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess so. So far.”
“So far,” he repeated. “You have an interesting way of thinking.”
I didn’t know what to say to that so I turned on his radio, lowered my window and sang for a little while, but my heart wasn’t in it, so I put up the window and turned down the volume with my right hand. My left was still under his, which was warm and heavy.
“Why don’t you ever sing along?”
He checked his mirrors. “I can’t.”
“Of course you can. Come on. It’s just talking, spread out. Everybody can sing.”
“Not me.”
“Really?”
“Trust me,” he said, shooting a glance over at me.
Okay, that was even cuter than how he looks in his lacrosse uniform. He can’t sing. And his palm was starting to sweat, discussing it. A chink in his white-knight armor. “Someday I’m gonna get you to sing,” I warned.
“Never,” he said.
We drove north for a while like that, until he suddenly downshifted in an exit lane and we took a sharp right, glided through a stop sign, turned right again, and parked in back of a gas station near the air hose.
Carson yanked up the emergency brake, turned the car off, and leaned over to me. Oh, so that’s what he wanted. When he mentioned ice cream I thought he meant ice cream.
We made out for a minute.
“Josie.”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t . . .” he looked away, out the windshield toward the air hose. “Are you fooling around with other guys?”
“Not at the moment,” I said.
“You know what I mean.”
I unbuckled my seat belt, which had been strangling me, while I thought about how to answer. “None of your business,” I said.
He turned to me. “I want it to be.”
“Tough,” I said. “You’re fooling around with other people.”
He shook his head. “It’s Michael Addison, right?”
“What is?”
“Are you in love with him?”
“In love?” I was completely confused. “Michael is my neighbor,” I said. “He’s my . . . We’re friends. We, I mean, I like him, a lot, but. Wait. I don’t have to justify my friendship with Michael to you.”
“So that’s a yes. You’re in love with him. Okay. But then my question is, why are you messing around with me?”
“I’m not in love with him! Are you kidding? Why do people keep thinking I’m in love with Michael?”
“Other people think so, too?”
“No. They don’t. Michael is like, he’s, I mean, I love him. Sure. Of course I love him, he’s been one of my best friends since nursery school. He’s nice and brilliant and talented; we have a great time together, sometimes, although I have to say at some point today I considered going to his house and killing him slowly and painfully. But in love with him? That’s a whole different thing. He’s in love with somebody else, anyway.”
“Who?”
“Her name is Annabel. You don’t know her.”
“Where does she go? Sacred Heart?”
“She doesn’t . . . She’s a . . . Who cares?”
“You’re in love with Michael Addison but he’s in love with somebody else? Is that it?”
“No,” I said. “I am absolutely not in love. With anybody. Love is a brat, you said so yourself.”
“But you are fooling around with him. Not at this instant, I know, Miss Lawyer, but recently, recurrently. Right?”
“What are you, like, the morality police? You have to be in love with somebody to hook up with him? Hello? I happen to know from personal experience you are not waiting until you get married to hook up with somebody.”
“Is that what we’re doing then? ‘Hooking up’?”
“You didn’t notice?”
“So you do the same stuff you do with me, with Michael Addison?”
“None of your business!” This was without a doubt the weirdest day of my life.
He slammed the steering wheel with the heels of his hands.
“What?” I asked him. “You’re hooking up with half the school.”
“No,” he said. “Only you.”
“That’s a lie.”
“It’s true,” he insisted. “I swear it’s the truth. Since I first kissed you, Josie, I haven’t done anything with anybody else. I haven’t even thought about anybody else.”
No way. “Really?”
He nodded.
“What about Emelina Lee?” I clamped my jaw shut. I hadn’t meant to bring her up.
“It is totally over between me and Emelina,” he said.
“Whatever,” I said. “I don’t care. I didn’t mean to even bring it up. It’s not my business.”
Carson backed his seat up and turned toward me. “You have no idea, do you? You have no idea how pretty you are, how sexy. How smart and strong and independent and different you are.”
“Different I noticed,” I said.
“Me, too,” he continued. “Do you know how much I, I, how much I like you?”
“Because I wore a ponytail?”
“Yeah,” he said, rolling his eyes. “It’s definitely the ponytail. It had a magical effect on me, I guess. Must be my allergy to horses.” He touched my cheek gently. “You make me laugh.”
“Only by accident.”
“And I make you laugh.”
“Well, sure. A Wiffle bat as a weapon. Are you really allergic to horses?”
“Yes.”
“Do you get a stuffy nose?” I asked. “Or hives? Swollen eyes?”
“Josie.” He touched my lips with his fingers, shutting me up pretty effectively. “Think about it, okay? I want you, I want you to be mine. My girlfriend. I can’t share you with anybody else. It’s just how I am. I know there are a lot of guys who probably want to go out with you, and maybe it’s fine with them to share you. Maybe it’s completely unfair of me even to ask you for this. But I want you to choose me. Just me. Promise me you’ll think about it?”
I shrugged. Carson pulled my face close to his and we kissed a little more. He has the softest lips.
“Your mom hates me,” I murmured.
“Yours loves me,” he answered.
We smiled, and he turned the car back on. “Will you teach me to drive?” I asked him.
“Is that your price?”
“Forget it.”
“No, that’s fair. Name your price. I told you, I like to get my way.”
I watched him shift, and waited for his hand to make its way over to mine. “I don’t have a price,” I said, after a while.
“I didn’t mean . . .”
“I don’t want a boyfriend,” I said. “I am not looking to be half of something.”
“Half?”
“I’m not girlfriend material, Carson. You don’t know me very well, so you’ll have to take my word on this. Seriously.”
“What if you’re wrong?” he asked, downshifting. “What if I see you more clearly than you see yourself?” He pulled into my driveway. “Come by my locker before first period. You know where it is?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been coming to yours every day. Tomorrow come to mine. Okay? I’ll be waiting for you.”
“Don’t wait.”
He smiled at me. That killer smile. “Don’t make me.”
I ran up the steps to my house, and Mom threw open the door before I got to it. “So?”
“I had a banana split,” I said, on my way up to my room.