“Let me use that,” Willow said.
I handed her the gloss, dug in my purse for my brush, and fixed my hair.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
“Do I look ready?” I threw my head forward. My hair danced around my face, and I puckered up.
“Come on,” she said, and she opened the car door.
Everything was foreign to me. A stray dog wandered the yard. Weeds grew out of control up the path. There was no grass, only dirt and rocks. We walked to a narrow staircase, and Willow led the way up. I looked around as if on watch. The stairs were rickety, and I paid attention to each step. Willow knocked on the frame of the screen door. From a back room Pink Floyd played.
A boy with shoulder-length blond hair, who must’ve been about eighteen, came to the door. He wore blue jeans real low and baggy. A white tank top covered his long, skinny body but left his arms exposed. They were muscular and tan—smooth, too. I wasn’t used to that. My dad and all my uncles were covered like bears with fur, hair on their backs, inside their ears, and on their knuckles.
“Callie, this is Wayne.”
“Hi,” I said.
“Hello.” And I noticed how he dragged this out. In a hospitable southern kind of way, he said, “Welcome to our humble abode.” He stepped aside, inviting us in. Straight ahead hung a Dark Side of the Moon poster.
Willow strutted across the room, swinging her arms and swaying her hips as though she’d been there before. I walked behind her and stumbled on a bump in the carpet. I straightened myself quickly, and nobody seemed to notice.
The couch was low to the ground and lopsided. Willow and I sat on it. Wayne sat on a folding chair across from us. The coffee table was cluttered: an ashtray from Pat O’Brien’s, dirty shot glasses, empty beer bottles, and a pack of Marlboros.
“Hey, John,” Wayne screamed over the music. “Where are you? The girls are here.”
“I’ll be right there.”
“Y’all been living here long?” Willow asked in a long, slow drawl.
“No,” Wayne said, pushing hair from his face. “We just moved in two months ago. My stepdad’s an asshole.” He leaned forward, lifted the pack of cigarettes, and took one out. “He tried to run my life like he runs my mother’s. Don’t need that shit.” He sat back in his chair, and I watched as he allowed the cigarette to hang from the corner of his mouth, from the tip of his lips. I thought I’d never seen lips so nice before. He was cute, I had to admit. He lit up with a lighter he pulled from his back pocket. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and the smoke curled around his face. “So I left,” he said.
I looked down and tried to appear as if I understood this, as if leaving home were a normal thing to do. I was sitting there feeling kind of strange—you know, a little scared, I guess. And I wondered what his friend would be like. I mean, Willow met them first, so it was pretty much for sure that her guy would be cuter than mine. But just so long as mine was cute, it didn’t matter. That’s just the way it was with me and Willow; she always got the cuter guy.
The first thing John said when he finally came into the room was that he was sorry to keep two beautiful girls like us waiting. He meant it, too. He wasn’t trying to be all suave and stupid like those guys on TV. He was really sorry. He said he couldn’t find a clean shirt. I wondered about that, you know, living on your own, responsible for your own laundry, never having clean clothes. At my house the clothes were always put back in my drawers. JoAnne, our housekeeper, really knew what she was doing. The whites —real white, neatly folded or hung up. I could leave my clothes sprawled out across my bedroom floor, which I did, and it wouldn’t matter. I realized then that you never know how lucky you are until something like this reaches up from nowhere and grabs you, wraps its arms around you, and makes you think. Something as stupid as having your clothes picked up off the floor, cleaned, and put back in the drawer. Something as ordinary as having a mother and father, I mean, your own mother and father actually living in the same house together.
He stood right in front of me, put out his hand like a real gentleman, and said, “My name is John. Nice to meet you.”
I looked up at him and reached my hand toward his. “I’m Callie.” His hand felt big and strong, and I was glad to shake it. He was cute. Not as cute as Wayne—I mean he had brown hair, not blond—but it was long and wavy like Wayne’s, and his body was cool, all big and hairless and everything. But most importantly, I liked his eyes. He had real nice eyes, dark and large but mostly kind, the sort of eyes that make you feel safe even when you probably shouldn’t. You could know certain things, count on certain things from someone’s eyes. He had an earring in his ear and a tattoo on his arm—a lightning bolt. I thought it was cool. I’d never met a boy with an earring and a tattoo before.
He asked if we wanted anything to drink. Willow said she’d have a beer, so I said I’d have one, too. I didn’t really drink—didn’t really like the taste but I wanted to try. It was time. Everyone I knew had been drinking for a while already, and frankly I was feeling kind of nervous. I mean this was nothing too familiar for me and I needed something, like they say on TV and like I’d heard my parents say a million times, “to take the edge off.”
I watched John, watched him move, as he got the beer out of the refrigerator. He brought a six-pack back to the table, opened a can, and handed it to me. Then he opened another and handed it to Willow. He gave one to Wayne before claiming his own, and I was sure he was a real nice person. I took a sip of beer. I felt like getting drunk.
Willow asked where the bathroom was, and she left me alone with them.
“So where do y’all go to school?” I asked.
“School, what’s that?” Wayne laughed and leaned so far back in his chair, I thought he might fall.
“I dropped out,” John said.
“Really,” I said, shaking my head as if I agreed. I took another sip of beer and wondered if I was pulling this off.
“I left after eighth grade. Needed money, you know. Needed to get on with my life.”
I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t much of a conversationalist.
Wayne jumped up out of his seat. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Willow appeared next to him. “Where do you want to go?”
“Let’s go for a ride.”
The four of us got into my car and headed for the lake-front. Through the rearview mirror, I could see Wayne and Willow kissing. I tried to focus on the road but every once in a while, my eyes were drawn to them. I changed the radio station. John was a good talker, and I was thankful for that. He told me about how he met Wayne at the Red Lobster on Veteran’s Avenue. Wayne was a waiter there, and he always gave John extra shrimp, free. They became friends, and when they moved into the apartment near the gas station, John got a job there. He told me that he wanted to do something else with his life, but he wasn’t sure what yet.
By the time we got to the lakefront, it was completely dark outside. I’d never been there at night before. The grass was wet and so were my toes inside my Candie’s. I hated when that happened, but I kept walking as if I didn’t mind that or the fact that each time I stepped, the heel, like a drill, dug up the earth. There were lights in the distance from the grand water fountain—colored lights of purple, blue, and gold. But that was in the distance.