Strange but True (15 page)

Stacy takes a step closer to Melissa, her dyed green heels clicking against the peeling linoleum floor, her dress more garish than ever beneath the unforgiving glare of the bare bulb. She puts both hands on Melissa's shoulders, and Melissa thinks briefly of a game they used to play when they were little that they called Mirror. They'd sit face-to-face and imitate each other's movements, pretending to brush their teeth, put on lipstick, comb their hair, and a dozen other motions. The one who fell out of sync first lost—that person was almost always Melissa.

“Stacy,” Missy says when her sister takes another step closer. “If you're going to kiss me, I think I should inform you that I already have a date tonight. And if you want to play Mirror, I think we're a little old for that.”

“Ha, ha. Missy, this is serious. You are going to get mad at me when I say this. But I love you and I'm going to tell you anyway.”

“What? What? What?” Melissa shouts, stomping both her heels against the floor. “Come on! Spit it out!”

“You can't go.”

Melissa shakes her sister's hands off her shoulders and pulls her purse closer. “Go where?”

“You know what I am taking about, Missy. Chaz told me what you and Ronnie are planning. And you can't go through with it. I won't let you. Mom and Dad will make your life a living hell. Not to mention mine.”

Melissa has one thought: I am going to kill Chaz. Then she thinks, No, I am going to kill Ronnie. Why did he open his big mouth when he promised he wouldn't? This was supposed to be a secret. Our secret. She considers denying the whole thing, but it's obvious Stacy knows, so that would be pointless. Instead, she says, “Think what you want, but I'm going.”

“Missy, you have your whole life ahead of you. You have so much to look forward to down the road—”

“Thank you, Oprah Winfrey, for your empowering message. You're an inspiration to us all.”

“I'm serious, Miss. Why would you want to spoil your last summer before college, especially when you'll have all the time you want with Ronnie at Penn in the fall? Think about it.”

“I
have
thought about it, Stacy. As a matter of fact, it's pretty much all I've thought about for the last month. I am so sick of Mom and Dad and their stupid rules. Most girls our age have been screwing their boyfriends for years. I want to have sex with Ronnie. No. I want more than that. I want to fuck his brains out. And I don't want to do it here in Radnor. I want to go away. I want it to be special.”

“Well, I think you should wait,” Stacy tells her.

“Wait to go away? Or wait to have sex?”

“Both.”

It used to be that Melissa and her sister talked about everything. But over the last year Missy had imposed a distance between them, because she wanted to be her own person for once in her life without dragging a stunt double along for the ride. As a result, what little she knows about her sister's sex life comes from the things Chaz has told Ronnie, and Ronnie has told her. “You mean to tell me that you and Chaz have never done it?”

“Not officially,” Stacy says.

“What do you mean, ‘not officially'? Either you have or you haven't. Besides, that's not what I hear from Ronnie. Chaz tells him that you guys do it all the time. The two of you are like friggin' rabbits.”

“Well, you heard wrong, Missy. And if you didn't shut yourself off to me this last year, I might have told you what we do.”

With her sister standing so close still, Melissa has another flash of that Mirror game. She sees a younger Stacy pretending to put on a pair of earrings, open a tube of lipstick, and spread it on her lips. Back then, so much of their make-believe had to do with pretending they were grown women—best friends who lived next door, teachers at the same school, cashiers at the same grocery store, secretaries in the same office, saleswomen in the same department store. Now here we are, Melissa thinks, all grown-up and arguing with each other in a storage closet on prom night. “What do you mean, ‘what we do'?” she asks.

“Never mind. It's none of your business.”

“Come on. Tell me. What?”

Stacy's eyes dart around the room, from those unlabeled white tubs to the milk crates full of glass ashtrays and salt and pepper shakers to that bare bulb, which casts slashes of shadows in all the wrong places on her face. Finally, she says, “I let Chaz do it to me another way, you know, so I am still technically a virgin. You know what I mean.”

“You keep saying ‘you know.' And actually, Stacy, I don't know. What are you talking about?”

Her sister uses her thumb and index fingers to spruce the petals of the gruesome green flowers on the corsage Chaz gave her. Without looking up, she says, “I'm sure you can guess.”

“In the mouth?” Melissa asks.

“Well, yeah. But that's not all. I mean, that's not the main thing.”

“In the—” Melissa stops when she realizes what her sister is saying. “Eww! You are sick. That is the grossest thing I've ever heard.”

“All right, Mom. Lots of girls do it that way. So don't be shocked.”

“Like who? Who's ‘lots of girls'?”

“Seneca, for one.”

“Well, that doesn't surprise me. I'm sure she charges extra for that service too.”

“There are plenty of other people, Missy. Laura Mills and Eva Talbot.”

“Those girls are all sluts. I'm surprised they even care about being technical virgins, or whatever you called it. I mean, if you're going to do that, you may as well just go all the way.” Melissa stops and leans against the wall. The steady throb of music vibrates her body as the band howls to the end of that Ricky Martin song. Melissa tells herself to forget this bizarre, unexpected tangent and get back to the reason they came here in the first place. “Stacy, I can't talk about this right now. It is just too strange. It's freaking me out.”

Her sister stays silent, still picking at those green petals on her corsage.

Melissa goes to the window and thinks about what to do next. As she stares out over the parking lot, she spots a group of drivers standing around one of the white limousines, huddled together, talking and laughing, flicking the ashes of their cigarettes to the ground. She scans the group in search of their driver—a rail-thin Asian man who'd been polite, though oddly quiet as he held the door when they got in and out of the car—but she doesn't see him among the others. This is what Melissa decides: first, she is going to find Ronnie and give him hell for telling Chaz. Then, they are going tonight. No matter what, they are still following through with their plans. The limo will take them to Ronnie's house, where they will get into his Mercedes and drive to Rehoboth, Delaware. By midnight, they'll be checking into the room they reserved in his name. Even more than having sex for the first time, the thing Melissa has been looking forward to is sleeping beside Ronnie, cuddling close to his warm body all weekend long. Once she has settled the matter in her mind, Melissa turns back to her sister and repeats an abbreviated version of the plan. “I am going to find Ronnie. And when the prom is over, we are leaving. Tonight, we are going to have sex, the way normal people do.”

When Melissa steps past her sister toward the door, Stacy blurts, “Missy, if you go I'll tell Mom and Dad exactly where you're staying.”

Melissa spins around and stares at her sister—at the mirror image of her moss green eyes, her shiny blond hair, her delicate nose—and she wants nothing more than to shatter that reflection once and for all. She wouldn't do it, Missy thinks. She is just bluffing. Besides, she probably doesn't know where we are staying. Maybe she knows the name of the town, but Ronnie wouldn't have told Chaz the name of the inn. Why would he?

Stacy must read the doubt on her face, because the next things she says is, “You have a reservation for three nights at the Archer Inn in Rehoboth, Delaware. And in addition to calling Mom and Dad, I'll also call the inn and cancel the reservation before you even have time to get there. Now do you believe me?”

With that, Melissa erupts into a litany of questions. “Why are you doing this to me? Why are you being such a major bitch? What is wrong with you? Don't you have enough going on in your own life, you have to butt into mine?”

In a calm, even voice, Stacy says, “It's
our
life, Missy.”

“No, it's not, Stacy. You are my sister, but you are not
me
. We are two separate people. Get that through your head. It's
my
life, and I get to make
my
own decisions.”

Now it is Stacy who steps toward the door. “Like I told you before, I am doing this because I love you. Because you're my sister. And because I know how completely miserable Mom and Dad will be to both of us if you do this. So even though you think we are two separate people, and you've done everything to prove that you don't need me in the last year, our parents still treat us like a single unit. If they punish you, it is bound to affect my life too. And personally, I want to enjoy my last summer before college. So like I said, you're not going. Even though you're mad at me now, I feel pretty certain you'll thank me later.”

When she is finished, Stacy steps out into the hallway and heads back toward the reception room even as Melissa screams after her, “You're two minutes older than me! Not twenty years! Why are you acting like you're my mother?”

Stacy keeps going without looking back.

Melissa is so angry that she slams the door and stands dead center in the confines of that room, clutching her purse and fuming. What the hell was Ronnie thinking, running off at the mouth to Chaz? she wonders as that drumbeat on the other side of the wall grows louder. It feels as though the sound is seeping under her skin and filling her with rage. Melissa thinks of that paperback she picked up at one of the church fund-raiser book sales,
Carrie
. She imagines her own fury taking supernatural form—bolting doors, bursting pipes, flooding the place, electrocuting every single person dancing on the other side of that wall. When she feels ready to explode from the sheer intensity of her disappointment and disgust with this evening—an evening she has looked forward to for months—Melissa plops down on one of those unmarked tubs and starts to cry.

I hate this prom, she thinks as a list of all the people and things she despises at the moment unfurls in her mind: I hate my dress. I hate wearing this corsage. I hate this stupid closet. I hate this ugly inn. I hate those depressing murals on the walls. I hate Ronnie. I hate, hate,
hate
Chaz. I hate my parents. And most of all, I hate my sister.

When she can't think of anyone or anything else to hate, Melissa's thoughts go back to her parents. They are the root of this problem, after all. If it weren't for their stupid rules, Stacy wouldn't feel the need to get in the way of her plans tonight. Melissa thinks of all the restrictions she's had to abide by all these years while the rest of the people her age were out having fun:

No phone calls after eight.

No cable TV.

No profanity.

Two hours of flute practice a night.

Three hours of homework.

Church on Sunday.

Prayer group on Tuesday.

Family visits to sick people whenever her father damn well decides he's in the mood.

Melissa can't stand it anymore. She simply cannot stand it.

As angry as she is at Ronnie for telling Chaz, her thoughts go to his family next. When the limousine stopped at his house earlier tonight, Ronnie's mother came out on the front lawn, all smiles and laughter. She snapped her way through three rolls of film and bantered back and forth with Ronnie, who was trying to tell her how to take a better picture while posing at the same time. Mrs. Chase talked about
normal
things, like a
normal
parent. She told them she was hosting a big-deal author reading at the library tonight. She told them how much she loved dressing up for special occasions. Even Ronnie's dad, who was on his way to work at the hospital, came outside and acted like a
normal
father too. Instead of lecturing them about curfews and drinking, he told a funny story about going to a dance in high school and getting kicked out for making out on the dance floor with his girlfriend, another about his watch getting caught in Mrs. Chase's veil at the altar during their wedding. As he got ready to leave, they even gave each other a little kiss right there in front of everybody. Melissa can't even remember seeing her parents kiss. Ever. Finally, Ronnie's brother came outside to see them before leaving for his job at the Olive Garden. Melissa had never met Philip before, but back when she was a freshman, she came across an oversize dictionary in the high school library, where someone had brushed globs of Wite-Out next to the words,
loser, faggot, sucker, homosexual, odorous, ugly
, and dozens of others. In blue pen, where the definitions should be, the person wrote:
See also: Philip Chase, Class of '95
. Despite all that, Melissa thought Philip seemed
normal
too. He told them they looked nice and to have a good time, then he got in his car and drove away, minding his own business—unlike her sister.

It is as though thinking of Ronnie's family somehow summons Ronnie himself, because the next thing Melissa hears is his rushed, energetic voice calling her name down the hall. “Missy! Melissa!”

She doesn't answer, because she is too pissed off to talk to him right now. But he pushes open the door and finds her anyway. “Stacy said you were down here. What's—” Ronnie stops when he realizes she is crying. He steps inside, closes the door behind him, and sits beside her on one of the tubs. “What is it?” he asks, wrapping his solid arms around her. “What's the matter?”

“You ruined it with your big mouth,” she says into the bulk of his shoulder.

“Ruined what?”