“You’re loitering.”
The Asian guy in the Sam Goody tee was technically correct. I was standing aimlessly with no intention to buy. But I also wasn’t bothering anybody either. Except, evidently, him.
“You’re loitering,” Sam Goody repeated. “If you step inside, another one of our sales associates can provide you with all the Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch merchandise your heart desires.”
With his pompadour, rockabilly boots, and black jeans rolled just so, there was no question who had put the Morrissey poster in the window. Maybe he knew why it had been removed.
“For your information,” I said, “I came here looking for Morrissey…”
Sam Goody spasmed with laughter.
“Oh, because you’re so deep?” he asked facetiously. “Because you’re so dark?”
“I am deep!” I protested. “I am dark!”
This only made Sam Goody laugh harder. He removed his thick-rimmed specs and wiped away pretend tears.
“Let me guess,” he said. “There’s a boy you like who doesn’t like you back. Boo-hoo-hoo!”
How did he know? Was the rejection written on my face? Had Troy turned me into such a plainly pathetic cliché? I had no time to ask because Sam Goody wasn’t finished mocking me yet. He was about to use the lyrics to one of my favorite songs against me.
“So you go home and you cry and you want to die?”
No ride.
So I couldn’t go home.
No plan.
No boyfriend.
No job.
Suddenly everything I didn’t want to think about was all I could think about. How dare this smirky jerk weaponize “How Soon Is Now?” to such devastating effect?
I refused to cry. And I didn’t want to die.
But as Sam Goody was my unwitting witness, I wasn’t too far off.
5
CHICEST AND UNIQUEST
I stood on the edge of the Wishing Well. My weary eyes imprecisely counted the coins that had come to rest on the bottom, each penny a wish that would never come true.
“Don’t jump!”
The warning squawk had the opposite of its intended effect. I slipped on the tiled lip and would’ve fallen in if a manicured hand hadn’t pulled me back from the brink. It was only a foot-deep drop so I wouldn’t have, like, drowned. But walking around in sopping wet penny loafers would’ve added a whole new and unpleasant dimension to my already sucky day.
“Oh my Gawd!”
The Wishing Well was located on the far border of the food court in Concourse G. In happier times, Troy and I called these crossroads Unz Unz Alley, after the thumping bass that originated at Chess King and reverberated across the intersection to the entrance of Bellarosa Boutique. It was at least five years since we’d last spoken, but I immediately recognized my rescuer as the latter shop’s owner, Gia Bellarosa. I was less sure if she recognized me.
“Hon, are you okay?”
I had a clear view of Drea Bellarosa, Gia’s daughter, in the display window, carefully adjusting a bustier on one of the mannequins. She stretched catlike in her catsuit, evoking the sexy feline villain from the groovy sixties Batman series I slept-watched during my recovery. Her real body was somehow even more unrealistically flawless than the fake, a prerequisite for upselling overpriced bimbo couture imported from Europe—though I supposed being the owner’s daughter also helped. Watching Drea, it was hard to believe we were from the same species, let alone the same graduating class. It was even harder to believe that once, so very long ago, we had briefly and fiercely pledged to be each other’s best friends forever in the way that only fifth-grade girls can.
Gia tried again.
“Are you okay, hon?”
I was too dazed to answer. Instead, I stared at the hand resting protectively on my arm, nails painted bloodred to match a sweater dress that would sell well among Bellarosa Boutique’s clientele. It was July, but the retail calendar was already well into fall. Outside the mall, humanity wilted in the muggy swelter of a South Jersey summer. Inside the mall, the temperature was just chilly enough to get shoppers in an artificially autumnal state of mind.
I wished I could fast forward through summer and get to my future already.
“No, I am not okay,” I finally replied. “I am not okay at all.”
This was the first hint of true kindness anyone had shown me all day. And before I could stop myself, I unloaded.
“I got mono, and my boyfriend of two years dumped me for a foaming-at-the-mouth mallrodent who tried to spritz me to death, and I lost my job, and I might be haunted by a ghost with a pierced tongue, and I don’t have any skills, and I doubt I could be hired by a sad, sad Scott Scanlon, and I was mocked by a Morrissey lookalike who accused me of liking Marky Mark and the friggin’ Funky Bunch and…”
Gia was totally unfazed—a telling testament to the certifiably insane shit she’d seen in her lifetime.
“Come on, hon,” she said, gently leading me by the arm.
Without hesitation or explanation, I followed her to Bellarosa Boutique, best described in the ad that ran weekly in the Ocean County Observer: “Jersey Shore glitz meets Manhattan glamour since 1984. Upscale sportswear and special occasion dresses for South Jersey’s chicest and uniquest clientele.”
The 90210 taxonomy did not apply to Bellarosa Boutique. The design and décor were an unapologetic celebration of eighties excess, all onyx and gold leaf, marble and crystal, velvet and jungle prints. It were the only store at the mall operating on a whole different system of measurement—the Dynasty Scale—where it would always and forever reign at the Alexis Carrington apex of fabulousness. By twelve years old, Drea carried herself with the confidence of a nighttime soap opera diva, a junior-high Joan Collins catwalking around the halls of Pineville Middle School in double-wide shoulder pads and starter heels.
It’s no coincidence that our friendship ended right around that same time.
“Drea!” Gia brayed as we walked into the store. “Quit getting paid to do nothing and come over here!”
Drea very slowly lifted her head from the Cosmopolitan magazine spread out on the counter. She was the very picture of glamorous nonchalance.
Until she saw me.
“Cassie Worthy!” Drea gasped. “I thought you were dead.”
It was so like Drea to take the rumors about my ill health to a more dramatic and morbid level.
“No, I’m alive,” I said.
Barely, I thought.
Drea jumped up and click-clacked her way over to us. With meticulously applied makeup and dark hair sprayed to exhilarating, ozone-poking heights, Drea looked older than she was, Gia younger. If I didn’t know better, I would’ve assumed they were roughly the same age—meeting somewhere in the middle around thirty. Neither mother nor daughter would ever correct such a mistake.
“Cassie here has fallen on hard times,” Gia said, giving my shoulder a squeeze. “She needs a job and we’re hiring.”
“We’re hiring?” Drea asked.
“You’re hiring?” I asked.
“We need someone on the books,” Gia answered. “You know, keeping track of inventory, making sure vendors get paid—”
“What about Crystal?” Drea interrupted.