Those Girls (8 page)

I stopped thinking and feeling, just sang and played and
smiled and took in the lights, the crowd, my friends, Fernando’s dark hair shaking behind his flailing arms, the twins’ onstage sureness that never came out in real life. The music hugged me, made me feel safe inside it, and protected us from anything the crowd could possibly do to us. It was all right. I sang some songs; Ned sang others. We sang together. I didn’t miss one note on the keyboard, and I hadn’t even lost the rose in my hair when it was all over.

We took our bows and bounced back to the sweltering office behind the stage. Sweating, laughing, panting, I felt like myself again.

“I can’t believe you did that to me!” I screamed, and punched Ned in the shoulder.

“Aren’t you glad I did?”

“Yes!” I said, unable to control my volume, my jumping, my adrenaline.

Fernando put his hands on my hips, steadying me, planting my feet firmly on the ground. “You were awesome. I knew you could do it!”

I smiled back at him, overwhelmed, unsure of how to feel, what to say, how not to scream or throw up. “I couldn’t have done it without you,” I said.

We hugged, moist polyester costume to moist polyester costume, heat radiating from our bodies. And just like that, right there in that stinky office, he took my sweaty face in his hands and kissed me.

I
t was my best friend onstage, but I felt like I was looking at a total stranger. All that makeup, the dress, closing her eyes and getting all emo into the mic like she was fucking Rihanna or something. I had no idea who this person was. Who this person thought she was.

And how could that bitch not have told me that she was the lead singer? I thought she just played the piano. She was a singer now? I had no idea why she was being so weird about this band stuff, and it was stressing me out.

The music wasn’t bad. It wasn’t mind-blowingly amazing, but it’s not like they were off-key or anything. There’s just something so cheesy about watching a bunch of teenagers taking themselves seriously playing Rolling Stones songs. They played mostly songs I didn’t know, but I don’t know if it’s because they actually wrote them themselves or if I’m just a moron, because
oh my god, I only listen to music that’s on the radio
—perish the fucking thought.

“Dude,” Sam said over the applause as the lights went up. “Alex is a rock star.”

He smiled and clapped. So did his friends.

“They were pretty good. I love their name. The mariachi thing is hilarious,” said Austin. “Are they going to dress like that all the time, or just tonight, because it’s Halloween?”

“That’d be fucking awesome if they did it all the time. If it was, like, their thing,” said Sam, cracking up, again, at his own dumb joke. How different life would be if Sam were actually half as funny as he thought he was…

“Your friend the singer is kind of hot,” said Austin. “Why don’t you bring her around more often?”

“You’ve met her, like, seven times. You’re probably confused by the fake mole and the twelve pounds of eyeliner.”

“How freakin’ good was she?” squealed Veronica. She and Drew were holding hands. So what, they were, like, dating now? Did Alex know about this? And more than that, if she did, how could she have not bitched to me more about it? More shit she doesn’t tell me anymore. I’d be livid, injuring people, screaming to anyone who’d listen about what a backstabbing whore my friend was. They were officially making out in public and openly acknowledging their togetherness? It was totally fucked up and not right.

“Did you guys know she was gonna sing?” I asked.

“No!” V screamed again over the rowdy crowd. “I had no idea she was so good! Did you?” The question was to Drew.

“Not like that,” he replied, still holding her fucking hand.

It was hot as balls in that dump of a suburban divorcée cougar pen. I wondered where they came up with this place. Was this the kind of place that “bands” played at all the time? Were all the tattooed, pink-haired, latex-wearing misfits in the crowd
the type of people who often did things like
check out bands
in their free time? I wondered if that was what Alex was going to start doing now that she was such a hipster rocker-chick.

“I’m gonna try to get backstage,” said Drew.

“I’ll come with you,” I said.

“I’m, like, overheating,” said Veronica, fanning her glittering cleavage. She was wearing a loincloth and pasties—I could see how that must have been really oppressive for her. “Can we get some air and smoke a cig first?”

“I’ll come with you,” said Sam.

What was she trying to pull? Since when did Sam go anywhere with her?

“You’re seriously too hot to come congratulate your best friend after her first show?”

She looked over toward Sam, who was already making his way toward the door.

“I’m, like, seriously about to pass out,” she said, pouting.

“Seriously? You’re wearing, like, no clothes. What the hell are you dressed as anyway?” I asked, like I thought she’d say
Oh my god, you’re right, I’m not that hot. I’m naked! Silly me, I’ll come with you
.

“I’m a Catholic school girl, get it?” And she twirled the cross at her neck around her finger.

“Because ya know”—the blood in my neck started to seethe—“that’s what
I
, an actual Catholic girl who goes to school, look like every day.”

“Well, what are you? A cheerleader? Because that’s what cheerleaders actually look like every day?”

I looked down at my soiled outfit.

“I’m a zombie cheerleader, whore. I was gonna come dressed as you, but I couldn’t fit seven dicks in my mouth.”

Drew and Sam snickered, and Veronica said
ha, ha
, stuck out her tongue, fanned herself again, and said she’d be backstage with us in five minutes.

I didn’t want her and Sam out there alone, but I figured Austin would follow and that she’d throw herself on him before she’d heave herself at Sam.

“Drew, let’s go be good friends.”

I followed Drew as he weaved through the crowd. I never realized how tall he was. It was easy to follow his little pinhead through the mass. I couldn’t remember the last time Drew and I had been somewhere alone together. In middle school, maybe. He, Alex, and I used to hang out all the time. Somewhere along the line, the two of them stopped inviting me to things. Or maybe Alex and I stopped inviting him. Or maybe I started hanging out with Sam and stopped inviting both of them. We’d made out once in, like, eighth grade, maybe seventh, but it was during Truth or Dare, so it didn’t count.

When we got to the creepy office door, Alex and the band were all huddled up, smiling, hugging. It was crazy to me that Alex had become so close with these people who I didn’t even know. Since I was five years old, I don’t think I’d ever hugged anyone Alex didn’t know.

When she saw me, she pushed away the band guys, came over, and hugged me. Her costume was soaked with sweat, and
her makeup was beginning to cake and congeal—but I’ve never seen her look so happy.

“You came!” she said, her voice cracked, as if she was maybe holding back tears. She smelled like melting plastic, like the pens Veronica always burned in chem lab.

“Of course we came!” I replied. She broke from me and hugged Drew.

“You were unbelievable,” he said, patting her slick shoulders.

“Really?” She still seemed out of breath. “Tell me the truth. I feel like I was totally off-key during that last one.”

“You were so into it, though!” I said.

“I know,” she said, wiping her brow. “I, like, forgot people were watching.”

“For a minute there, I thought you were going to keel over and fall off the stage!”

She laughed.

“Did Veronica leave?” she asked both of us.

“She was overheating. She wanted to get some air before braving the sweltering backstage.”

She nodded sarcastically.

The cute Latino guy left the other ones and came over to us. He put his arm around Alex.

“So,” he said. “You guys like the show?”

“You guys were so good!” I replied.

“Alex did great for her first time, no?”

Drew straightened his hat and put his hands in his pockets. “She killed it. Who knew she could sing like that?”

“We did,” said Fernando, then he kissed her on the cheek. Both Drew and I flinched.

I watched Alex talk to the guys in the band, and I felt like she belonged with them. Like they were now this little unit, and she and I were not. Alex and I had never not been on the same team before, never not come at something from the same side. I didn’t like what was happening here. It was hot in the office. My heart sped up, and I was starting to sweat and lose my breath.

“Well,” I said, interjecting myself into the band conversation, “maybe next time you guys can sing some songs that people actually know!”

They all snickered at one another, and they didn’t really laugh at my joke. And with their lack of laughter, the wall grew thicker. The more I talked, the harder I tried, I knew the wall would just get thicker and thicker, and it would become more and more obvious how different I was from them and how much closer Alex clearly felt to them than me. I had to get out of there.

And where the hell were Sam and Veronica? Were they a team now, too? Who was left on my team? What was happening to me? My cheerleader outfit was starting to stick to my skin, and I was finding it harder and harder to swallow.

“Drew,” I said. “Let’s go find Sam and Veronica.” He nodded and followed me outside.

T
he next Friday, we sat at our usual table in the lunchroom, and I watched Mollie destroy yet another innocent turkey sandwich. Mollie’s ingenious, personal brand of eating disorder was to destroy her food rather than consume it. I watched her pick slices of turkey out of her sandwich, then gnaw on some and discard others. She ripped the crust off her bread and poked at the insides with her nubby, pink pod-fingers. When she was done with a meal, most of her food was still there, it just appeared to have been attacked by wild, yet oddly anorexic, bears.

“Do you guys want to go bowling tonight?” I asked.

“Who goes bowling?” Mollie scowled. “Bowling is for fat eight-year-olds.”

“Drew suggested it. Mix it up a bit.”

“Pass,” said Mollie.

The loud cafeteria static clanged and clashed around the table in the back corner of the lunchroom. Harwin’s cafeteria didn’t look like your typical high school cafeteria, but rather like something out of a gothic novel. It was a rickety old room in the oldest part of the school. The once white walls had soured
and peeled around stained-glass windows over creaky hardwood floors, and Victorian arches framed creepy portraits of thin-lipped schoolmarms being choked by their collars. Wobbly wooden chairs circled paint-chipped round tables filled with squealing, complaining girls, in the process of explaining why frozen yogurt was
totally
a well-balanced lunch.

“V?” I asked. This was her test, time to officially see if she’d jump at the chance to hang with Drew after big public Halloween make-out number two or make up some excuse to go social climb, and blow lax players with Mollie.

“Did Drew actually say ‘invite Veronica,’ because we talked about hanging out this weekend, but he didn’t mention bowling. I don’t want to just, like, show up and have him think I’m, like, stalking him.”

“Aren’t you guys, like, dating now?” Mollie asked. “Wouldn’t it be normal for you all to hang out?”

Veronica rolled her eyes and leaned toward me, caging Mollie out. “You’re positive he said
invite Veronica
?”

“Yes.”

That wasn’t actually what he’d said. He said something closer to
so what should Veronica and I do this weekend?
He said that he wanted to take her on a date, but I told him that was premature and that we should all do something fun together—then I pulled bowling out of my ass, because it seemed asexual and low contact.

I glanced at Mollie and said, “Molls, last chance?” Just for fun. Knowing she’d never give up a night in the infamous Rizzuto basement (lovingly referred to by Sam and his Cro-
Magnon cohorts as the ’Zu, because they’re
fucking animals, bro
) for something so parochial as bowling with boys in her own grade who weren’t on sports teams (ultimate Frisbee didn’t count).

The ’Zu was just Lindsay and Tom Rizzuto’s basement, an institution and Greencliff legacy. All the “cool” kids from all the private schools partied at the Rizzutos’ and had for years. Lindsay was a senior at Harwin when we were freshmen. She was a legendary whore, but was one of those “knows everybody” and “friends with all the guys” types. Tom Rizzuto was a year older than us at Crawford. He didn’t seem to be anything particularly special or exciting, but people hung out with him because of his house and his sister’s cachet. Both Mollie and Veronica were weirdly obsessed with it. I had gone a few times and didn’t see what the big deal was. It was just a bunch of douchey guys and drunk girls vying for their attention. The only topic of conversation allowed there seemed to be either how drunk you currently are or how drunk you were when you were there last week.

I wanted to see if, just for a passing moment, I could make Mollie confront her own agenda and admit that going to the ’Zu was more important to her than hanging out with us, her “best friends.”

“Still definitely pass,” she said. “I told Sam I’d do the ’Zu thing tonight.”

V CAME OVER TO
get ready for our big bowling night. She tried on a million of my T-shirts, claiming she wanted to
go for my
chill, retro-chic
look, before inevitably, and predictably, going with the lowest-cut leftover baby tee from sixth grade she could find. I hated when she tried on my clothes. When she stood there, in front of the mirror, wiggling around in various items saying,
Oh my god, Lex, do these fit you? This can’t fit you! It’s huge!
They’re my clothes, whorebox. They fit me. Unlike her clothes, which were made for bulimic preschoolers.

I debated inviting the band boys, but I decided I needed to stay focused on running interference between Drew and Veronica, which was the whole point of my orchestrating this whole date insurrection in the first place. Despite my initial instinct to use Fernando to make Drew jealous, I decided that keeping a watchful eye on the progress of this bullshit relationship was more important. I couldn’t let a Fernando-type distraction result in another stolen kiss or back-alley tryst. I also didn’t need Drew’s reaction to seeing me flirt with Fernando to be a full-throttle plunge at Veronica. I wondered what I’d started here and if I had the stomach to see it through.

Drew texted me:
Hope you’re stretching and hydrating. You’re about to get schooled in the art of bowling.

I replied:
Game on.

I fought every impulse I had to check Veronica’s phone and see if he sent her the same thing. Or, worse, if he sent her something else—something cute and mushy or, oh god, sexual. I wondered how he talked to her, if they joked around or if they were earnest and romantic. An eerie panic rolled over me, and I left Veronica to rummage through my closet while I went downstairs for food.

My mom sat cross-legged at the kitchen table, her new super-hip cat’s-eye glasses perched at the tip of her nose. She was thumbing through the Arts section, as she usually did at this particular time in that particular spot. My brother stood at the counter twirling spaghetti in a Tupperware. My mom looked up at me over her glasses and proceeded to rattle off everything we had in the fridge, as if I hadn’t just opened it and wasn’t staring directly into its contents.

“There’s leftover spaghetti—and I bought that expensive cheese you like.”

I grabbed the fork and spaghetti out of Josh’s hands.

“I was done anyway,” he said.

I smiled up at him with my mouth full. The dynamic between us hadn’t quite adjusted to his growth spurt. I chose to ignore his new size and structure and continued to treat him like the snotty runt I always had. Even though sometimes I felt like I was standing next to a stranger, or worse, my contemporary.

“Where are you going tonight?” my mom asked, not looking up from her paper. “See if your brother wants to go.”

Her gray roots were growing in. She never had roots or holes in her sweaters or wore clogs when my dad was around, but she did now, all the time, and seemed to be pleased as punch with her newfound languor. She’d started smoking again, too, even though she wouldn’t admit it. She’d caught me with cigarettes a few times, and she was always completely unconvincing when attempting to scold me about the danger they presented to my health and general image. I could see the sides of her
mouth turn up when she called it
a disgusting habit
. I wondered when we’d both be able to come out of our bathrooms, untowel the doors, put away the air freshener, and be able to sit at the kitchen table and smoke together like two civilized adults.

“I can make my own plans, thanks, Mom,” he said, grabbing the Tupperware back.

“We’re going bowling,” I said as I gathered an armful of assorted snack crackers and baked goods to bring upstairs.

She burst into a loud guffaw, slid her glasses off her nose, and let them hang off her fingers.

“Bowling?” Sometimes she was way too amused by things that just weren’t that amusing. She dabbed her watering eyes with her knuckle. “Like when you were little? That’s a riot.”

Feeling patronized and belittled, I rolled my eyes and left the kitchen. Josh followed me up the stairs.

“Is Mollie going tonight?” he asked.

“No, she’s too busy social climbing with Sam,” I replied, not bothering to look back at him.

“Fuck that guy,” he said.

“Did she ever thank you for Veronica’s party?” I stood at the top of the staircase, he three steps below me, which allowed me to be taller than him again.

“No, but it’s okay.” He looked down at the tan specks in the navy carpet. “She doesn’t really need to. What was I gonna do, leave her there with that guy?”

I gave him a little pat on the shoulder. “You’re too good for her, Josh.”

“That’s a nice thing to say about your best friend.”

Veronica busted out of my room in a T-shirt and no pants.

“How do we feel about this top?” she said, pulling and twisting the T-shirt around her hips. “Oh my god, Josh! Whoops. Sorry!” she said, sheepishly covering her lady parts with cupped hands. Not running back into my room, or retrieving a pair of pants or anything of that nature—just standing there, half naked, in my hallway, in front of my fifteen-year-old brother, twisting and posing. He turned bright red and looked at the floor.

“It’s fine,” he said. “Don’t mind me.”

“Whoops!” she said again, before spotting the buffet in my arms. “Oh, yay! I’m starving.”