Sarah Dessen (20 page)

She sighed, wiping her face with the back of her hand. It was hot, and the black asphalt of the driveway made things seem positively steamy. Monkey, however, sitting between us in a plastic baby pool up to his haunches in cold water, was totally content.

“Get his front feet,” I said to Chloe, squeezing more shampoo into my hand and lathering it up. “They’re really dirty.”

“All of him is dirty,” she grumbled as Monkey stood up and shook again, sending soap suds and dirty water over both of us in a wave. “And have you looked at these nails? They’re longer than Talinga’s, for God’s sake.”

Monkey stood up suddenly, barking, having spied a cat working its way through a row of hedges on the edge of Chloe’s yard. “Down boy,” Chloe said. “Hello? Sit, Monkey.
Sit.
”

Monkey shook again, dousing us both, and I pushed down on his butt. He sat with a splash, his tail flopping over the side. “Good boy,” I said, even though he was already trying to stand up again.

“You know, if my mother were to show up now I’d be homeless,” Chloe said, spraying Monkey’s chest with the hose. “Just the sight of this mangy beast within spitting distance of her prized Blue Category Chem Special would give her an aneurysm.”

“Blue Category What?”

“It’s a kind of grass,” she explained.

“Oh.”

Chloe had first given me a flat-out no when she opened the door to see me on her front porch, shampoo and dog in hand, before I’d even begun my hard sell. But after a few minutes of wheedling, plus a promise to buy her dinner and whatever else she wanted to do that night, she’d relented, and even seemed to warm to Monkey a bit, petting him cautiously as I got the baby pool—a Wal-Mart bargain at a mere nine bucks—out of my car. I’d planned to wash the dog at my house, but Chris had co-opted our hose to rig up an elaborate watering system for the lizards, which left me with few options.

“I still can’t believe how low you’ve stooped,” she said now as I finished the final rinse, then let Monkey leap from the pool and do a series of full-body shakes up and down the driveway. “This is total girlfriend behavior.”

“No,” I said, steering Monkey away from the grass before Chloe had a chance to freak out. “This is a humanitarian act. He was miserable.”

Which was true. Plus, I’d been spending a fair amount of time with Monkey lately, and okay, there was a certain odor to him. And if all it took to fix things was a five-dollar bottle of dog shampoo, some nail clippers, and a quick trim, what was the harm in taking action? It wasn’t for me, anyway. It was for Monkey.

“I thought you weren’t getting attached,” she said as I pulled the clippers out of my pocket and sat the dog down again.

“I’m not,” I told her. “It’s just for the summer. I told you that.”

“I’m not talking about Dexter.” She nodded at Monkey, who was now trying to lick my face. He stank of citrus now: all they’d had left was an orangey citrus scent. But we’d trimmed the hair over his eyes and around his feet, which made him look five years younger. It was true what Lola said: a good haircut changed everything. “This is an additional level of commitment. And responsibility. It’s going to make things complicated.”

“Chloe, he’s a dog, not a five-year-old with an abandonment complex.”

“Still.” She squatted down beside me, watching as I finished up one paw and switched to the other. “And anyway, what happened to our wild and carefree summer? Once you dumped Jonathan I thought we’d just date our way to August. No worries. Remember?”

“I’m not worried,” I said.

“Not now,” she said darkly.

“Not ever,” I told her. I stood up. “There. He’s done.”

We stood back and surveyed our work. “A vast improvement,” she said.

“You think?”

“Anything would have been,” she said, shrugging. But then she bent down and petted him, running her hand over the top of his head as I spread a few towels across the backseat of my car. I liked Monkey, sure, but that didn’t necessarily mean I was up for picking dog hair out of my upholstery for the next few weeks.

“Come on, Monk,” I called out, and he sprang up, trotting down the driveway. He just hopped in, then promptly stuck his head out the back window, sniffing the air. “Thanks for the help, Chloe.”

As I slid into the front seat, the leather hot under my legs, she stood and watched me, her hands on her hips. “You know,” she said, “it’s not too late. If you go ahead and break up with him now you’d still have a good month’s worth of quality single-girl time before you leave for school.”

I stuck my key in the ignition. “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

“See you around five-thirty?”

“Yeah,” I told her. “I’ll pick you up.”

She nodded, then stood there, one hand shielding her eyes as I backed out into the street. Of course it would be that cut-and-dried for her, how I could end things with Dexter. It was the way we’d always operated. Chloe was, after all, my twin in all things concerning boys and relationships. Now, I was throwing her a curve, veering off in a way she couldn’t understand. I knew how she felt. Ever since I’d met Dexter, things weren’t making much sense to me either.

“My job involves so much more responsibility,” he’d sniff every payday, snatching up his check. “All you have to do is basic math and be able to alphabetize.”

“Ah,” Dexter always said, smartly adjusting his name tag in a model employee fashion, “but I alphabetize very, very well.”

Actually, he didn’t. He was constantly losing people’s pictures, mostly because he’d get distracted and stick the
R
s in with the
B
s, or sometimes glance at the labels wrong and put them under people’s first names. If he worked for me, I wouldn’t have trusted him with anything more complicated than sharpening pencils, and even that only when supervised.

So while Ted, working at Mayor’s Market, could score some bruised but edible produce, and John Miller was jacked up on coffee constantly from his job at Jump Java, Dexter and Lucas were left with little to contribute. That is, until they started making doubles of the pictures that intrigued them.

They
were
boys, so of course it started with a set of dirty pictures. Not X-rated, exactly: the first one on the wall that I saw was of a woman in her bra and panties, posing in front of a fireplace. She wasn’t exactly pretty, however, and it didn’t help that right in the back of the shot, clearly visible, was a huge bag of cat litter with the words KITTY KLEAN! splashed across the front of it, which took away from that exotic,
Playboy
-esque quality that I assumed she and whoever took the picture had been going for.

As the weeks passed, more and more pictures were added to the collage. There were vacation snapshots, a family posing en masse in front of the Washington Monument, everyone smiling except for one daughter who was scowling darkly, her middle finger clearly displayed. A few more nudie shots, including one of a very fat man spread out in black underwear across a leopard-skin bedspread. All of these people had no idea that in a little yellow house off Merchant Drive their personal memories were being slapped up on the wall and showcased as art for strangers.

The day I washed Monkey, Chloe and I brought him back about six, and Dexter was already home, sitting in the living room watching PBS and eating tangerines. Apparently they were on special at Mayor’s Market, and Ted was getting a discount. They came about twenty-five to a case and, like Don’s Ensures at home, were everywhere.

“Okay,” I said, pushing open the screen door and holding Monkey back by the collar. “Behold.”

I let him go, and he skittered across the floor, tail wagging madly, to leap on the couch, knocking a stack of magazines to the floor. “Oh, man, look at you,” Dexter said, scratching Monkey behind his ears. “He smells different,” he said. “Like you washed him in Orange Crush.”

“That’s the shampoo,” Chloe said, flopping into the plastic lawn chair next to the coffee table. “It’ll stop stinking in, oh, about a week.”

Dexter glanced at me and I shook my head to show him she was kidding. Monkey hopped off the couch and went into the kitchen, where we heard him gulping down what sounded like about a gallon of water without stopping.

“Well,” Dexter said, pulling me into his lap, “those makeovers sure make a man thirsty.”

The screen door opened and John Miller walked in, tossing the van keys onto a speaker by the door. Then he walked to the middle of the room, held up his hands to stop all conversation, and said, very simply, “I have news.”

We all looked at him. Then the door opened again, and Ted came in, still wearing his Mayor’s Market green smock, and carrying two boxes of tangerines.

“Oh, God,” Dexter said, “
please
no more tangerines.”

“I have news,” Ted announced, ignoring this. “Big news. Where’s Lucas?”

“Work,” Dexter said.

“I have news too,” John Miller said to Ted. “And I was here first, so—”

“This is important news,” Ted replied, waving him off. “Okay, so—”

“Wait just a second!” John Miller shook his head, his face incredulous. He had been born indignant, always convinced that he was somehow being wronged. “Why do you always do that? You know, my news could be important too.”

It was quiet as Ted and Dexter exchanged a skeptical look, not unnoticed by John Miller, who sighed loudly, shaking his head.

“Maybe,” Dexter said finally, holding up his hands, “we should just take a moment to really think about the fact that we’ve gone a long time with no big news at all, and now here, simultaneously, we have two big newses all at once.”

“Newses?” Chloe said.

“The point is,” Dexter went on smoothly, “it’s really impressive.”

“The point is,” Ted said loudly, “I met this A and R chick today from Rubber Records and she’s coming to hear us tonight.”

Silence. Except for Monkey walking in, dripping water from his mouth, his newly clipped nails tippy-tapping very quietly on the floor.

“Does anyone smell oranges?” Ted asked, sniffing.

“That,” John Miller said darkly, glaring at him, “was totally unfair.”

“A and R?” Chloe said. “What’s that?”

“Artists and Repertoire,” Ted explained, taking off his smock and balling it up in one hand, then stuffing it into his back pocket. “It means if she likes us she might offer us a deal.”

“I had news,” John Miller grumbled, but it was over. He knew he’d been beaten. “Big news.”

“How serious is this?” Dexter asked Ted, leaning forward. “Just-making-conversation-I’ll-show-up-to-see-you, or definitely-I-have-pull-at-the-label-I’ll-come-see-you?”

Ted reached into his pocket. “She gave me a card. She’s got a meeting tonight, but when I said we usually started the second set by ten-thirty she said she’d make it by then, no problem.”

Dexter slid me off his lap, then stood up, and Ted handed him the card. He squinted at it for a good while, then handed it back. “Okay,” he said. “Find Lucas. We have to talk about this.”

“You know this could be nothing,” John Miller said, still smarting a bit. “It could be a bunch of smoke up your ass.”

“And it probably is,” Ted replied. “But it also could be that she likes us and we get a meeting and before the summer’s out we’re in a bigger place, bigger venue, bigger town. It happened to Spinnerbait.”

“Hate Spinnerbait,” John Miller said, and they all three nodded, as if this was clear fact.

“Spinnerbait has a deal, though,” Dexter added. “And a record.”

“Spinnerbait?” I said.

“They were this band that started playing the bars near Williamsburg when we did,” Dexter said to me. “Total assholes. Frat rats. But they had this really good guitar player—”

“He wasn’t that good,” Ted said indignantly. “Totally overrated.”

“—and their original stuff was tight. They got signed last year.” Dexter sighed, then looked up at the ceiling. “We hate Spinnerbait.”

“Hate Spinnerbait,” John Miller repeated, and Ted nodded.

“Okay, get ahold of Lucas,” Dexter said, slapping his hands together. “Emergency session. Band meeting!”

“Band meeting!” Ted yelled, as if everyone who was in the band and could feasibly hear it wasn’t within a two-foot radius. “I’m gonna go scrub up and we reconnoiter in the kitchen, twenty minutes.”

Dexter grabbed the cordless phone off the top of the TV, jabbed in some numbers, and then left the room with it pressed against his ear. I could hear him ask for Lucas, then say, “Guess what Ted scored at work today?” Then a pause, as Lucas offered a theory. “No, not tangerines . . .”

John Miller sat down on the couch, crossing one leg over another and leaning back so that his head hit the wall behind him with a thunk. Chloe looked at me, raising her eyebrows, then shook a cigarette out of her pack and lit it, dropping the spent match in an ashtray already overflowing with tangerine peels.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” I said finally. “What’s your news?”

“No, now it’s completely anticlimactic,” he grumbled. He still looked so much like a little kid to me, all red haired and freckled, like a grade schooler you might see on TV in a peanut butter commercial. It didn’t help that he was pouting.

“Suit yourself,” I said, and picked up the remote, turning the TV on. It wasn’t like I was about to beg him or anything.

“My news was,” he said slowly, lifting his head off the wall, “that she agreed to come to Bendo tonight.”

“She did.”

“Yes. Finally. I’ve only been asking her for
weeks.
” He reached up and scratched his ear. “And it was a very big deal because I was beginning to think I was going to make no progress at all with her.”

I said to Chloe, “John Miller is in love with his boss.”

Chloe exhaled loudly. “At Jump Java?”

John Miller sighed again. “She’s not really my boss,” he told us. “She’s more of a coworker. A friend, really.”

Chloe looked at me. “This is Scarlett Thomas?”

I nodded, but John Miller’s eyes shot open. “You know her?”

“I guess,” Chloe said, shrugging. “Remy knows her better, though. She and Chris go way back, right?”

I swallowed, concentrating on flipping the channels on the TV. I’d known about John Miller’s infatuation with Scarlett back when it was just curious interest, then watched—along with the rest of the employees at various Mayor’s Village businesses—as it progressed to puppy-dog-esque devotion before finally reaching the ridiculous level of romantic pining that was its current state. Scarlett was the manager of Jump Java, and she’d only hired John Miller because of Lola, who she still owed a favor to for her last cut and color. And while I’d listened to John Miller sing her praises, I’d managed to keep it quiet that I knew her more than just in passing. Until now.

I could feel John Miller looking at me, even as I pretended to be completely engrossed in a news story about structural problems with the new county dam. He said, “Remy? You know Scarlett?”

“My brother dated her,” I said, in what I hoped was a no-big-deal kind of voice. “It was ages ago.”

He reached over and took the remote, hitting the mute button. The dam remained on the screen, holding water back just fine, it seemed to me. “Tell me,” he said. “Now.”

I looked at him.

“I mean,” he said quickly, “can you tell me? Anything?”

Across the room, Chloe laughed. I shrugged and said, “My brother dated her toward the end of their senior year. It wasn’t serious. Chris was still in his pothead thing, and Scarlett was way too smart to put up with it. Plus she already had Grace, then.”

He nodded. Grace was Scarlett’s daughter, who was three now. She’d been born when Scarlett was a junior, causing a minor neighborhood scandal. But Scarlett had stayed in school, finishing during a summer session the credits she’d missed, and now was taking classes part-time at the university while managing Jump Java and, apparently, putting up with the besotted John Miller passing longing glances over the muffins about twenty hours a week.

“Isn’t Scarlett a little out of your league?” Chloe asked him, not unkindly. “I mean, she’s got a kid.”

“I am wonderful with children,” he said indignantly. “Grace loves me.”

“Grace loves everybody,” I told him. Just like Monkey, I thought. Kids and dogs. It’s just too easy.

“No,” he said, “she especially likes me.”

Dexter stuck his head through the doorway and pointed a finger at John Miller. “Band meeting!” he said.

“Band meeting,” John Miller repeated, standing up. Then he looked at me and said, “A little help tonight would be greatly appreciated, Remy. A good word, maybe?”

“I can’t promise anything,” I said. “But I’ll see what I can do.”

He seemed happier, hearing this, as he headed into the kitchen. I got up and grabbed my purse, finding my keys. “Let’s go,” I said to Chloe. “Band meeting and all.”

She nodded, stuffing her smokes in her pocket and walking to the front door, pushing it open. “I’ll call Lissa from the car. See if she wants to meet us at the Spot.”

“Sounds good.”

As the screen door slammed behind her, Dexter walked over to me. “This is big,” he said, smiling. “I mean, maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’ll be a crushing disappointment.”

“That’s the right attitude.”

“Or maybe,” he went on, pulling his hands through his hair the way he always did when just barely able to contain himself, “it’s the beginning of something. You know, when Spinnerbait got that meeting with the label, they immediately got an in to the bigger clubs. We could be in Richmond, or D.C., easy. It could happen.”