The Real Real (3 page)
into the opposite towering plow bank lining the street.
“Glam-o-rama.” I heave my bag back up my arm, hug the dinner like a heating pad, and shuffle onward in the street-lamp-lit night. Following a row of windows optimistically displaying resort wear, the Corner Gallery, with its canvases of sun-bleached dunes, marks the abrupt conclusion of “town.”
I pause where the blinking traffic light spins in the wind like a piñata and run my thumb down the silver disk, scrolling for a tune that’ll conjure a heated car of my own.
Es . . . Fs—so over every song.
High beams suddenly flood my view, and I squint up at Jase McCaffrey’s matte-black Hummer swerving past. Matte, to match the set of gold teeth and Hotlanta McMansion
in his head
. A glowing cigarette flicks out the passenger window, and I catch a flash of long blond hair as a nervous laugh twitters over the revving tires. Unimpressed. By the tires, the hair, the vehicle burning enough gas to light a midsized country for a year. Looking back down, I see I’ve paused at Gwen Stefani. I press the arrow and “Hollaback Girl” thumps into my ears. Once the taillights have faded, I bump-sway into the snow tunnel abutting the darkened residential street. If I kept going straight, and broke through the southern tip of the Wordsworths’ orchid house, I’d be standing in the Atlantic in under a mile, which couldn’t be colder than what I’m walking through now. Sheets draped and shades drawn, every one of the estates hidden behind the fifteen-foot hedges 18
lining this “lane” have been sealed tight for the winter.
As the wind dies down and the snow turns to something more
Nutcracker
-ish and less assaulting, I roll up the volume and allow myself to fully bring it. Driveway lights on their nightly timers glow through the drifts, illuminating the intercoms beside each gate. I nod to them like the Harajuku Girls as I toss off a chorus of “B-A-N-A-N-A-S!”
I’m just adding the hip pops when I swing my head into a green windbreaker. “Aah!” I scream. An arm reaches out to steady me. I dart my eyes to the grip on my wrist as it’s released, and then up at the sweat-streaked, red-cheeked face of Drew. “Oh my God, you scared the crap out of me,” I say as I jerk my head back to toss off my hood, cursing the bag strap and zippered coat prohibiting a similarly casual move from releasing my trapped ponytail. If I was in charge, winter down would come with boy-sensing hair ejector.
“You mean interrupted you.” He smiles his half-smile, the one that’s been off the market for the last year. As he drops his ski-gloved hands to his knees, I realize he’s winded. Right before I realize that my floor show of the last block has been witnessed. By single Drew. And his half-smile.
“Oh, that? That’s for Spanish. We’re doing skits, and I was just going over my lines as a—”
“Stefani?”
“What? No.” My cheeks toast further. “Drug addict.”
What? Where did I come up with—? Well, the head jerking . . .
“Wow, in French we’re only up to ordering wine.
Une
bouteille du vin
.”
“Mrs. Gonzalez wants us to be prepared for everything.”
He laughs, and the nearby snowbanked driveway lights seemingly flicker brighter.
“Aren’t you freezing?” I ask as I point down at the basketball shorts clinging above his bare shins. Boys make no sense.
“No . . . boiling actually.” He swipes his bulky gloved hand across his forehead, streaking damp chestnut bangs to the side.
“Must be the gloves.”
“I was running. On the beach. Clears my head. And I didn’t get much of a practice in this morning.” He knows that I know he was dumped. And puffy-eyed. That everyone knows. He bites the inside of his bottom lip.
“Bringing my mom dinner.” Changing the subject, I hold out the bag as if he asked. “Last house on the left before the water.” Just as he’s giving me an
Oh, really?
look, I add, “She cleans it. Most of them actually.” I tilt my head to each side of the street.
“Surrounded by all that glamour?” He smiles. A full one. “How can she stand it?”
“That was pretty crazy today, huh?”
“Yeah. The guy interviewing me wanted to know all about my dad’s
glamorous
landscaping job. If you’re standing in fertilizer, cutting back poison ivy, even in Gwyneth 20
Paltrow’s garden, you’re still just itchy as hell and knee-deep in shit. And that’s in the summer. In winter, he’s camped in his Barcalounger with the heat down.”
I laugh. “It’s so insane to think of them filming at our school, isn’t it?”
“Do you think we’ll all be in the background?” he asks.
“With Jase’s flexing bicep front and center?”
“My mom was standing behind Courteney Cox in the
‘Dancing in the Dark’ video—you can see her for, like, a split second. I’m guessing this’ll be like that—an anecdote we can bore people with into our forties.”
“Cool.” His eyes warm; he nods.
“Yup.” I nod back, struck that he is, like, two inches taller than when I took trig with him last year, seated behind him, four rows back, two seats to the left, to be precise. We stop nodding and for a moment stand totally still, flakes of snow falling in the inches between us. His eyes are so brown, and he stares down into me, his brows knitting together and, through the cloud of attraction, I feel a pang of sympathy. “I’m really sorry about the breakup—”
“One of us has to back up—” he says over me.
“Right.” I look down, realizing there’s no way around each other in the narrowly cleared path. “I’ll just—”
“No, I will.” He steps backward, and I follow him as his sneakers crunch in the silence. “Don’t let me fall.” Half-grin.
Don’t let me
. And then we’re in the plowed driveway, still standing as close as we were in the foot-wide path.
“Too bad your coat isn’t red,” he says, the cloud of his breath warm against my face.
“Yeah.” To do: Get red coat.
“Like you’re going to Grandmother’s house.”
“I totally got that,” I lie. “That makes you the wolf,”
I recover.
“No way, I’m the woodsman who saves the day.”
My turn to smile. “Well . . . ”
“Back to your Spanish methadone clinic?”
“Look, you never know when you’ll need to do a needle exchange at the Barcelona train station.”
He laughs and for a moment I imagine the lights watt up so brightly a bulb could pop. I should leave first—on this high note of cute—wipe out the memory of me dancing. Leave! Leave first!! “Well, later.” I turn and walk reluctantly away.
“Hey, Jesse?”
I whip around, the width of the driveway between us.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for . . . ” He trails off.
For . . . my freak snow show? My down coat sexiness?
My faint aroma of warm garlic? “Sure.” I shrug, realizing from the flicker of sadness across his face that he’s referring to my attempted sympathy.
He tosses up his sweatshirt hood and jogs off, disappearing into the white.
Mom, Hampton High basketball star circa 1985, tosses the emptied Evian bottle over three rows of seating, and it rims the copper can under the Richardsons’ screening room wet bar before falling inside. I cup my hands to my mouth to do a fan roar.
“What does it mean, Jess?” She looks up from her club chair as she finishes the remains of the lasagna on her lap tray.
“Mom, you’re
always
asking that.” I drain the last of my milk.
“Well, you’re saying XTV is coming to your school to make a show, and I want to know what it means.”
“I don’t know! A new pool for the school and let’s see, 23
um, nothing for me. I’m not
that
.” I point up at the glossy bachelorettes on the wall-sized screen anxiously awaiting their rose. “What does
that
mean?”
“That’s not having clear goals and good values.” She lowers her tray to the floor and stretches her back as she stands. “That’s hitching your wagon to a millionaire who’ll leave you for the next model.” She fiddles with the remote until a green velvet curtain swings across the screen.
“No.” She presses another combination of buttons, and a matching curtain behind us opens to a wall of frosted windows lining the covered pool. “No again.” A different button and the lights come back on. “Thank you. Now, you, please.” She aims the book-sized device at the screen and the show clicks to black.
“Think somewhere in West Palm Beach Mrs. Richardson’s boobs were getting bigger and smaller?”
“Her brain, more likely.” She fluffs up her matching green velvet couch cushions and I do the same with mine, returning the room to its prior immaculate state. Mom pulls her checklist from her apron pocket, and I bend to pile my completed homework into my bag. “Do you want to use the bathroom before I do a final faucet polish?”
“I’m good.” I pull on my UGGs.
“Great, you take out the garbage and start the car, and I’ll polish while it warms up. Meet you out front in fifteen?”
“With a rose?” I bat my eyelashes, and her tired face breaks into a laugh.
“Zipper up out there.” She gathers the aluminum containers and hands me the shiny black bag. “And grab my rim shot?”
I pull out the Evian bottle. “Check.” I dump it into the bag. “We were never here.”
Mom sighs. “Your homework’s done, right?”
“
Yes
.” I pull on my coat and feel through the green velvet folds to the lock on the glass door. Gripping the bag of take-out containers in one hand and my coat closed with the other, I climb through the white drifts toward the Richardsons’ garage. The sky has cleared enough for the moon to peek through, allowing me to use the burlap-wrapped topiaries as guideposts to the edge of the property.
With the wind no longer blowing, I hear the ever-present distant waves and then something else. Yelling. A man’s voice. I round the corner of the cedar-shingled garage and see the growing bone structure of the new mansion on the lot abutting the Richardsons’. The garage’s lantern lights spill through a demarcation line of a low hedge onto a Sheetrocked guesthouse all of ten feet away.
“I don’t give a crap where you take ’em, take ’em to a goddamn hotel, but to mess with my business—”
“Dad—” another voice pleads.
“So now I gotta go down to the police station and explain that my construction site is secure—thanks for the call—just my shit-for-brains son screwing some slut on a sleeping bag like a homeless bum—”
“I’m sorry—”
I hear the hollow thud of a punch and then a tight growl. “No, what you are is pathetic.” A tarp-covered doorway flips open, and I crouch just as Mr. McCaffrey struts out in his Giants leather jacket and disappears around the building.
I quickly stand and raise the lid of the pine bin, using my head to prop it as I drop the bag into the can, wanting to get out of there as fast as possible. But I jerk up when I hear the tarp lift back again, and the lid slams shut. Before I can move, Jase steps out, raking a hand across his wet eyes as they land on mine. A shot of surprise and then his expression hardens, a drop of red trickling toward his chin from his split lip.
“He’s not going to tell my mom about this, is he?” a voice calls uncertainly. We both turn to where, teetering in high-heeled boots, the wrong blonde rounds the outside corner of the guesthouse.
“Get in the car, Trisha.” He flings his pointer finger toward the Hummer and, with a last look at me, follows her to it.
I stand there for a second watching them go before turning to trudge back to the house, thanking God I’m not in their orbit.
THE REELS
The next morning, I slide into my seat in calc, half a cold Pop-Tart tucked in my hand. The only two things that make this class tolerable are the knowledge that the time remaining in my life that I’ll have to waste in math is now measurable in a countable clump of hours—and illicit blueberry streusel. Streusel that almost goes down the wrong way when Mrs. Feinberg comes in trailed by a cameraman inches from her face.
“Good morning, class.” She is as red as the robin knit into her sweater. “I’ve been instructed to teach as normally as possible, so let’s just try to pretend our friend here is invisible and learn a little calculus, shall we?” She turns to the board to write out the equations we were working 29
on yesterday and then pivots to address us, knocking into the camera. “Sir! A little breathing room, please!” But she doesn’t get any. Nor is anyone able to pretend he isn’t there. Everyone, sporting four-step eyes or unusually clean clothes, depending on gender, speaks theatrically, which is impressive when they’re saying things like, “X equals . . .
seven
.” Every equation comes out sounding like a declaration of war or a deep betrayal.
The rest of the morning goes much the same. The bright lights atop the cameras crisscross one another in the winter-dark stairwells and hallways like searchlights on the ocean surface looking for survivors. I’m counting the seconds until AP Euro, the only class Caitlyn and I share. She drops her good bag at my feet, the Century 21
Botkier we found on last year’s So-Dan’s-Not-The-One post-breakup road trip to the city.
“Not you, too.” My gaze pans up the bare-legged goose bumps, past her favorite tank top, to rest at the false eyelashes.
“What? I want my grandchildren to see me as a loser with out-of-date jeans and underconditioned hair?” She sits down and opens her notebook.
“Our grandchildren will not be able to get past the fact that we are breathing unfiltered air. Our follicles will be of no interest.”
Caitlyn leans in, unsticking the ends of her curls from her lip gloss. “They filmed Melanie Dubviek, like, an inch from her face—”
“Yes, I’m familiar with their techniques.”
“—for all of English.
Why?
”
I push up the sleeves of my henley. “Uh, Melanie is very compelling when she thinks?”
Clearing his throat, Mr. Cantone stands from his desk with our papers on the Corn Laws. “I want to start out by saying I’m not impressed.”