“It’s probably sex,” Abigail hisses, then heads for the dressing room that has a hexagonal mirror and a bright pink feather boa on the door.
“Nah, I think I’m gonna save that for prom.”
“Prom sex! Prom sex!” Abigail chants.
“Shh, Abigail! We’re in public,” Hilary says. When she tugs at a knot in her hair, a few blue strands come out.
“Guys, help me respond,” I say, catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror: asymmetrical eyebrows, the skeletons of two pimples, and teeth just straight enough to justify the orthodontic hell of my middle school years. Yup, I’m on my game today. My phone dings again. “He says, Come over,” I report.
“Do it,” Abigail calls. That’s all the permission I need.
“But we just got here,” Hilary pouts.
“Sorry, gotta go,” I say, heading for the door. “But don’t buy your dresses without me! If we don’t buy them at the same time, it’ll be bad luck, and that is not the sort of luck I’m aiming for on prom night.”
“What if we find the perfect ones?” Hilary asks.
“Yeah, sorry, Cham, we’re not making any promises,” Abigail says. She comes out of the dressing room in a short, sleeveless dress, her fantastic boobs doing fantastic things below her gold necklace. I feel a jab of third-wheely-ness, but I’m trying to be less paranoid lately. Just because they both applied to state college (along with 75 percent of our class) doesn’t mean they’re going to get in.
“Good luck with your surprise,” the woman/girl behind the cash register says as I pass her. “And finding a prom dress.”
I smile, pushing the door open into the cold January sunshine. “I’m kinda hoping it’s gonna find me.”
Dear Universe,
These are the possible theories for Gene’s surprise:
• Cotton candy. A room full of sweet perfection, and we spend the whole night licking the walls and the furniture and each other. Blue tongues. Pink tongues. Sugar kisses.
• A quick trip around the world on a very fast plane positioned such that we’re always one step ahead of the sun, where it’s never tomorrow, living in the perpetual limbo of the last minute of every day.
• Doing it? Doing the dirty? Making love? Sexing on each other together? (If I can’t even pick a term for it, I probably shouldn’t be doing it.)
• Watching a movie and falling asleep on Gene’s shoulder while drooling on his track zip-up…
• Yeah. The last one.
Going to see Gene involves a thorough washing of all the parts of my body that touch him. I, for one, like my smells, but I can understand why others might prefer Fresh Ocean Breeze to Cham-Hasn’t-Washed-Her-Armpits-Since-Her-Eight-Mile-Run Breeze. When the cleaning ritual is complete, I go to my room/mini-universe, where the walls are painted black and a projector casts stars all over the ceiling, my bed, and the floor. With my best outfit on (leggings), I add a little mousse to my hair. It takes the frizzies from brainwashed misfits to rebellious corkscrews with excellent personalities. Even though I spend a fair amount of time in the mirror, I think what I really want is the sort of beauty that has nothing to do with what I look like: beauty that’s always there, even if no one’s around to see it.
Downstairs, all the lights are on in the kitchen. I hurriedly take a mint from the drawer full of things that aren’t mine and keep an eye out for my parents. The counters suggest that Mom was in the middle of making dinner—a box of rice, a pan half filled with water in the sink. Cooking was my dad’s domain before Mom took it over. At first I tried to get her to play Elvis in the morning and whip up pancakes for dinner, but it didn’t feel like home when it was forced.
“Hey,” I call, pulling open the sliding door that separates my parents’ part of the house from all the other parts. “I’m going to Gene’s!”
I used to ask them before I went places, but they kept saying no, so now I just offer my plans up as facts. Or prophecies.
“Wait,” my mom yells. Her voice is muffled by a closed door and whatever else separates us that we can’t see. “Come here, Cham.”
I drag myself down the hall, which is lined with proof of all my awkward stages: fifth grade with the four-braid situation; seventh grade with the braces so big you could pretty much straighten a leg; and freshman year of high school, where I basically look like I do now except I hadn’t mastered my Gill School uniform yet, so I had it buttoned up to my lower lip. Suddenly it smells so strongly of pee I have to breathe through my mouth.
“I was just saying that I’m going to Gene’s,” I say again, my voice sounding nasally as I pause outside the bathroom, where my mom’s bright yellow bucket of cleaning supplies waits. I think she and the bucket are in a codependent relationship, but I guess the lavender-tinged-bleach smell isn’t the worst thing to have seeped into our lives over the past few years. My mom opens the bathroom door, fully exposing my dad on the toilet: pants down, toilet paper in hand, everything private decidedly un-private.
“Judy!” my dad cries.
I slam my eyes shut as he pulls a hand towel over his lap. “Can you guys keep the door closed when you’re coordinating bathroom stuff?”
“Sorry, Cham!” my dad hollers from somewhere in the great abyss of relieving oneself. More quietly to my mom, he hisses, “You always forget about my privacy.”
“It’s okay,” I say with all the okay-ness I can muster.
“I’m sorry, Scott, but I wish you had waited,” she says to him in a voice I don’t think she means for me to hear. There’s a prickly feeling in my throat and my stomach. I think I swallowed a young porcupine. “You have to stay in your chair and wait until—”
“So can I go to Gene’s?” I ask, vision still a little scarred.
“Just a second, Cham,” my mom says impatiently.
I turn my back to her and the bathroom and the entire situation. On the wall behind me, there are younger versions of ourselves. In one picture, the three of us are outside when my dad was still landscaping. I’m naked as a duck playing in the hose while my mom cuts the heads off petunias in her garden. My dad is pretending to mow her flowers down and she’s laughing; they’re in their own world together, while me and the hose are getting along just fine in ours. I don’t know who took the picture.
“Cham, have you ever noticed how clean the cracks between the tiles of the bathroom floor are?” my dad asks. “Your mom does a stupendous job.”
“Yeah, stupendous,” I say, nibbling at my fingernails impatiently. I hear the toilet flush and a paper towel rip.
“Well, sounds like you guys are pretty busy in there,” I say, tiptoeing away backward. My feet have a feathery presence even on something as hard and unforgiving as the floors of our house. “I’m gonna leave you to it and head to Gene’s, okay? Thanksloveyoubye.”
I’m out of the hallway and through the sliding door like a comet. In the dark, overly ordered mudroom, where my mom basically alphabetizes our jackets, I put my sneakers on. That’s how it’s been going lately anytime I could be in trouble with my parents. I’m not complaining. If you think about the solar system and which part you’d like to be, you’d probably say the sun, but if you think about it better, you’d realize the sun blows up eventually, destroying everything and ending life as we know it. Planets like little old Pluto just drift out of the solar system and get forgotten.