Confessions of an Almost-Girlfriend (17 page)

On Saturday morning, she hands me her credit card and says,
“Go to the mall and get yourself a dress. Something you love.”
And then she adds with a mischievous smile, “People like you
in blue. It brings out your eyes.”

I try to get more out of her but she won’t give me anything.
As I’m walking to the mall, I think about calling Tracy to invite her along for this unprecedented moment in my life when I
have my mother’s credit card and permission to buy whatever I
want. But I don’t call.

Now that I’m not editing The Sharp List anymore, I have
to go online if I want to see who she’s featuring. This morning
I logged on, and there was “The Sharp List: College Edition!”
Peter, of course, was her pick, which I find pretty ironic, given
that he’s currently not allowed to attend college. Plus, she totally cheated—she dressed him and took fake candid pictures.
I can tell because he looks like a J. Crew model, and there’s no
universe in which my brother could—or would—look like a
J. Crew model on his own.

When I get to the mall, I wander through all the usual stores,
but everything they have is normal, basic, boring—Union.
There’s one more store I can check, way at the end of the mall,
called Tried & True. It’s half vintage, half stuff that’s made to look
vintage. I went in there once in eighth grade—I didn’t see anything I liked, but I was also pretty much wearing only leggings
and sweatshirts back then, so that’s not saying much.

There’s a mannequin in the window of Tried & True wearing
a black sequin minidress and high, lace-up boots with spiderweb stockings. She has skull-and-crossbones tattoos drawn on
her arms, hot pink nail polish on her fingernails and bright blue
eye shadow. There’s a microphone on a stand in front of her, and
someone has positioned her arm so it looks like she’s about to
grab it and start singing.

I wonder if I could pull off that look as a lead singer with Angelo’s band. Of course, I have to get the gig first.
My audition was not the greatest. In fact, it was terrible. I tried
to sing “Cherry Bomb” a bunch of times, but I couldn’t do it the
way Angelo wanted. He kept stopping the band and coming over
to coach me, but I couldn’t get the style he was after. “She’s, like,
dangerous—totally wild,” he kept saying. “She explodes! She’s
on fire!” he’d yell as the band would launch into the intro again,
and again, and again.
I started to feel bad and sound worse. It wasn’t until Angelo
asked me if I was okay that I realized I wasn’t.
I had just told Jamie I loved him. I didn’t know I was going
to say it to him, and I’m not really sure I said it to him for the
right reasons, but I said it.
I’d never said it to anyone before.
And he told me that I didn’t love him, that he wasn’t worth it.
I think I went into shock.
When the audition was over—or maybe it was just when Angelo and the band couldn’t take it anymore—Angelo drove me
home. “What the hell was that, Sweater?” he asked in my driveway, giving me one of his famous shoulder punches.
That was all it took. I started to cry.
I told Angelo everything—almost. Regina saying she’d lost
her virginity to Jamie; me telling Jamie I loved him; Jamie telling me that I shouldn’t.
I didn’t say anything about Regina’s bruises.
It’s not the first time I’ve cried in front of Angelo, but it was
the first time he knew what to do.
“Look, Sweater,” he said to me, looking around like he was
afraid of getting caught. “I can’t really talk about this. But I’ll tell
ya one thing—if a girl says the L word to Forta? It don’t matter
whether he loves her back or not. Game over—he can’t deal.”
Then he practically shoved me out of the car, like he knew
he’d said too much. On my way out the door, he told me to watch
Cherie Currie singing “Cherry Bomb” on YouTube at least forty
times, because he wanted me to audition again in a few weeks.
It took me a second to realize he was giving me another
chance. As I was mopping up my mascara and blowing my runny
nose, I told him I’d kill it next time for sure.
And I meant it. As bad as my audition was, it taught me exactly what I have to do next time. I could feel that knowledge
inside me, clear and solid. It wiped away the embarrassment,
the shame, the doubt—and what was left was a plan of action.
When I got inside, I called Vicky and told her what I’d said to
Jamie, and what Angelo had told me. She asked me right away
if Jamie and I were having sex, like she was asking if he and I
talked on the phone regularly. I said no, and she said, “Take a
little piece of advice from a gal who got herself knocked up at
fifteen. Most girls lose it to someone who doesn’t give an armadillo’s ass about them. They do it just to get the guy and then it
blows up in their faces when the guy moves right on to someone
else. Before you do anything, you ask yourself if you can trust
this boy with your body and your heart. And don’t you go lyin’
to yourself about either one.”
Vicky kind of missed the point, but I kept thinking about
what she said anyway. I totally trust Jamie with my body—I feel
absolutely safe with him when he’s touching me. But I probably
can’t trust my heart to someone who says I shouldn’t love him,
no matter how much I trust him with my body.
I don’t know what to do with that, so I put it aside.
The door to Tried & True is propped open, and Sleigh Bells is
blasting from the store speakers. I go in and start poking around
the racks, which are full of awesome dresses. Everything in the
store is arranged by color—there’s a red section, a black section,
a green section.
I head to the blue section—it’s the least I can do for my mom,
since she gave me her credit card. I’m going through the dresses,
trying to figure out what this new me likes, when I hear, “Can
I help you?”
I am as surprised to see Regina as she is to see me.
Her face goes white. “What are you doing here?” she hisses,
like I’m going to get her in trouble or something.
“I— You work here?”
She points to her Tried & True name tag and folds her arms.
She’s glaring at me but she looks nervous—she wants me out
of the store, like, now. I look at her bright red 1950s dress and
matching cardigan with rhinestone buttons, and her hair in a
French twist. I feel like I’m in a parallel universe.
“I’m looking for a dress. A blue dress.”
She points to the rack I was already looking at and goes back
to the counter without saying anything else.
I start with the first dress, sliding it to the right. Then I slide
the second dress to the right, too. I go through about five before
I realize I have no idea what I was just looking at.
I’m standing in front of Regina at the counter before I realize
what I’m doing.
She’s stamping plain brown paper bags with the store’s logo. I
don’t say a word—I just look at her. It’s not a tactic. I truly don’t
know what I should say or do, but here I am, standing here,
looking at her.
For a second, as she looks back at me, it seems like she might
actually say something important. But she just reaches below the
counter and turns up the music. “You’re so weird,” she scowls.
I keep standing there, waiting for her to tell me to get lost. It
feels like an hour goes by. I have no idea where I get the courage
to keep standing there staring her down, but I find it somewhere.
Finally she stops, slamming the stamp facedown, getting ink
on the counter.
“It isn’t any of your fucking business.”
Her words are angry but not her voice.
She won’t look at me.
And that’s when I know I’m right about Anthony.
She grabs an armful of clothes that she has to put back on the
racks and leaves me standing there. I drift back to the blue dress
corner and start going through them again. I find a simple, dark
blue sleeveless chiffon dress with a pleated skirt that has a highbutton neck at the front and a super dramatic open oval in the
back. I take it off the rack and hold it up.
“Can I try this on?” I ask Regina, who’s as far away from me
as she can get while still being in the store.
“Knock yourself out,” she answers without looking.
I go into the dressing room and pull off my clothes.
Whatever it is that I’m trying to do would be easier if I could
tell Regina that I know about her father—she wouldn’t be able
to blow me off then. But it would probably just make her even
angrier to find out that I know something else about her that’s
so private, something that Jamie wasn’t supposed to tell anyone.
Something that makes her seem less like the badass she wants
everyone to think she is.
Well, she
is
a badass. Just not with all the people in her life,
I guess.
I wonder if Regina is mad at her father. I don’t know how
that works with people who get abused—are they mad at the
people who do it to them? Or does that happen later, long after
they’re gone?
Is it worse for her if she’s mad at her father, or if she misses
him?
And I thought it was confusing for me to be mad at
my
dad.
Caron was grilling me last week about being angry at Dad. I
admitted I was mad at him for not being here, for not figuring
out a better way to make money than going to Iraq, for not telling
me that he’d decided to stay longer. I didn’t bring up the other
reasons because I didn’t think I could explain how I get mad
thinking about how he used to say that I was beautiful because
now I know he was saying those things just to make me feel good.
When I think about Regina’s life, I feel like an idiot for being
mad at my dad for anything.
I pull the blue dress over my head, and it slips right on like it
was made for me. It’s totally different from anything I’ve owned
before, and I know I’m getting it the second I see my reflection
in the mirror.
I change back and step out of the dressing room. Regina is
behind the counter again, staring out the window into the mall.
Although the music in the store has gone quiet, I’m not sure she
even hears me come out.
I put the dress on the counter, take out my mom’s credit card
and wait.
Without looking at me, she picks up the dress and scans the
price tag.
“Tell Jamie,” I say.
I watch as she carefully folds the dress in thirds and wraps
it in a piece of tissue paper. She takes her time putting a sticker
with the store’s logo on the tissue paper, and then reaches out
for the credit card.
“If you knew him at all, you’d know what would happen.”
She swipes my card and together we wait for it to go through.
The machine starts whirring and churning, printing out the
credit-card slip.
“I bet you anything he’d rather you tell him the truth than
protect him from getting in a fight.”
She tears the slip off the machine and puts it on the counter
for me to sign along with a pen. I lean over and sign it, and then
separate the slips, taking my copy and holding out the store
copy for her.
She doesn’t take it.
I lay it on the counter.
“He’s done enough already,” she says. As we look at each other,
I can tell she’s trying to figure out how much I know. I don’t give
her anything.
“Please, you have to—”
Fire lights her eyes. “Don’t you tell me what I have to do. Stay
out of whatever you think this is, and don’t say a fucking thing.
I don’t need anything from you.”
She takes the wrapped dress off the counter and drops it
into a freshly stamped brown bag, which she shoves across the
counter at me.
“It’s wrong, what he’s doing,” I say.
Tears fill her eyes and she looks even angrier.
“What do you care,” she says, turning her back, pretending to
be busy with the computer on the desk behind her as she furiously wipes the tears off her face. “Get out.”
I pick up the bag and turn to leave, stopping in my tracks
when I see Conrad standing at the entrance. I have no idea how
long he’s been there, but he’s looking back and forth between
Regina and me, confused, worried, maybe even scared. “What
did you mean?” he asks me.
It’s the first time Conrad has ever said anything to me without sounding angry.
Regina spins around at the sound of her brother’s voice. Her
eyes shift to me and she goes still, waiting to see what I’m going
to do.
I
wait to see what I’m going to do.
“Something’s wrong?” Conrad says to me.
As I look at him, I see him on Valentine’s Day, his love for
Jamie laid bare by me, for better or worse…. I see Tracy using
her slut list fame to create The Sharp List…. I see myself trying
to blend and realizing that maybe I just don’t, or can’t, or won’t.
And I have what I think could be a moment of clarity.
Sometimes people help each other, and get messed up in each
other’s business; sometimes we stay out of it and let people find
the way themselves. It’s always right to offer help, but not all
help is right.
I will keep telling Regina that I know what Anthony’s doing,
and that it’s wrong, and that there are people who can help her.
But I won’t disrespect her by telling her brother—or anybody
else—about something she told me to stay out of. Regina has to
be the one to tell people. If she doesn’t, won’t she just end up in
the same position again with some other guy later?
I don’t answer Conrad’s question. Instead, I say, “I’m sorry,
Conrad, for what I said at the dance.”
Conrad looks stunned and even more confused than before.
I walk out of the store with my beautiful dress, leaving the Deladdos alone.
* * *
I keep getting glimpses into the restaurant’s gleaming kitchen
as tuxedoed waiters glide in and out of the swinging doors. A chef
uses a big pastry bag to put the last flower on a giant chocolate
cake sitting on one of the stainless-steel tables while an assistant
figures out the perfect spot for each one of my sixteen candles.
I could have skipped the first four courses of the meal Dirk
arranged for us—duck consommé and foie gras aren’t really my
thing, although to be honest, I don’t really know what they are—
and just had birthday cake. But after seeing
The Laramie Project
tonight, I decided that I could be polite and grateful and just go
with the flow for the night—even if it meant spending my birthday with Kathleen and Dirk, and Holly and Robert.
When my mother returns from her trip to the bathroom, Dirk
gets up from the table to pull out her chair, ignoring the giddy
hostess who rushes over to be of assistance the second he needs
anything. She’s been finding every excuse possible to come over
to our table since we got here, and I can tell that Dirk is getting annoyed. My mother, however, barely notices the hovering
woman. She’s just thrilled that this evening is actually happening.
I’m guessing my mother wanted to do something special for
my birthday, knowing that I’d spent my fourteenth at home
watching TV with her and my fifteenth recovering from mono
and crying in the kitchen, also with her. But I was pissed when
I found out earlier tonight that my mother’s secret plan—going
with Dirk to see Robert and Holly in
The Laramie Project
and then
out to dinner in New Haven—was actually Dirk’s plan.
The thing is, Dirk’s plan was kind of genius, because it’s super
hard to stay pissed off during a play like
The Laramie Project.
The play was beautiful and heartbreaking. It was about people who knew Matthew Shepard in Laramie, including the people who killed him and the people who tried to save him. It’s
about how what happened to Matthew changed all of them,
and changed what they believed about all sorts of things. Basically, it’s the kind of play that makes people want to be nicer to
each other. I guess it gives you perspective—I don’t think anyone walks out of
The Laramie Project
and still thinks that their
stupid fights with their friends and siblings are worth it. I bet
Dirk figured he could capitalize on that for my mother’s benefit.
Note to self: Dirk Taylor is not dumb.
Everyone in the show was good. Holly was as lovely as always,
and Robert did a super-solid job. Even Matt was okay—he said
his lines at the right time and didn’t intentionally mess anything
up, which was sort of a surprise. Clearly Mr. Donnelly is some
kind of miracle worker.