Weird Girl and What's His Name Read online

  “I made it impossible? You think this situation is my fault?”

  “Not entirely, no. But you never could understand—” Janet said something else, speaking so quietly I couldn’t hear.

  . . . Pok!

  “At any rate, you’re right that this is different.” I heard the ice in Janet’s glass again. “But I think we have to give Lula some freedom. She’s been up there alone all weekend. You want some vegetable for a granddaughter, just lying around watching TV?”

  “Of course not. Why don’t you take her down to the Tennis Club or something?”

  “She hates tennis.”

  “Jan, when school starts, she’ll have plenty to do. I’ll take her and drop her off. And if she can behave herself, then maybe she can have her extracurriculars. But I don’t want her running all over creation, doing God knows what with God knows who.”

  Pok!

  “I think this requires a more delicate touch,” Janet said, so quietly I almost didn’t hear.

  “Delicate.” Leo grunted. He tapped the ball again. This time, silence. I guess he missed.

  WHEN YOU’RE A KID, HAVING A birthday in August sucks. You try to have a party, and everybody’s gone on their last-ditch vacation before school. Twice my birthday actually fell on the first day of school—that was the worst. And when you’re not all that popular anyway, birthday parties are kind of a joke. They’d been getting better in the last few years, small events, just me and Rory going on a movie bender at the Regal 7, or Leo driving us over to the roller rink in High Point. But of all the crappy birthdays I’d had, this one, number eighteen, took the proverbial cake.

  Janet and Leo thought their little surprise would be good for us. Rory actually wore a necktie. He looked miserable. This was the first time we’d seen each other since the night I left. Things had been weird between us ever since I first got back in touch with him. I called him from Santa Fe, and we had this strained conversation where I told him I was all right and he kept saying how he knew all along that I was going to be okay, and he was glad nothing bad had happened, but he kept almost-crying and then he hung up really fast. I emailed him a couple of times, but he didn’t respond. His phone always went to voicemail when I called. When I got back to Hawthorne, I went by his house three times, and there was never anybody at home. And now, finally, here we were at my favorite Chinese restaurant, Empire Garden, with the Pu Pu platter flaming away in the middle of the table, and Rory still wasn’t speaking to me. Leo wasn’t really speaking to me, either. So. Wow. Happy birthday to me.

  “So, Rory,” Janet patted his arm. “You must be excited. It’s finally senior year.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Rory smiled politely, tight-lipped. He didn’t say anything else.

  “Did I hear right, you’re on the football team this year?” Leo chimed in.

  “Yes, sir. I made the team. I don’t know if I’ll play any games, though.”

  “That’s big news, son. Good for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Unbelievable,” I muttered.

  “What?” Rory said. I cleared my throat.

  “I said it’s unbelievable. You. Playing football.”

  “What’s so unbelievable about it?” Rory looked squarely at me. “Unbelievable that I could play, or unbelievable that I didn’t ask your permission?”

  “No, it’s unbelievable that—” I couldn’t believe what I was about to say. Something really mean. I couldn’t believe it would even come into my mind.

  “Unbelievable that they’d have a fag like me on the team?” Rory said.

  “Hey, now,” Leo said, grimacing.

  “Rory!” Janet gasped.

  Wow, what I was going to say wasn’t that bad. I was going to say: Unbelievable that they’d let you on the team knowing that you’d rather read Jane Austen than Sports Illustrated. But whatever.

  “It’s nothing you all don’t know,” Rory shrugged.

  “They know?” I asked him. “You told them?”

  “You’d be surprised what all gets talked about when you’re not around.” Rory looked at me, his mouth a steady line.

  “Oh, is that the deal? You talk to everybody but me? Did my grandparents know about Andy before I did? That’s awesome. You three just hanging out together, sharing.”

  “Who’s Andy?” Janet asked.

  “Well, you haven’t exactly been available since last spring. Sorry I didn’t fit into your busy travel schedule,” Rory muttered.

  “Hey, you’re the one who told me to fuck off,” I replied. “So don’t be upset that you got what you wanted.”

  “Lula, that language!” Janet shushed me. Leo gritted his teeth. He never did have any tolerance for my severe potty mouth, even though I learned all my best swear words from him. Rory laced his fingers and pressed his fists against the table edge, like he was getting ready to pray. He looked at me. Then he looked at Janet and Leo. He cleared his throat.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Monroe, thank you for inviting me. I think I should go.” He stood up very quickly. “Happy birthday, Lula.”

  He laid his napkin neatly on the table, pushed his chair in, and walked out. A gentleman to the end.

  OF COURSE, THE FIRST THING JANET did when she heard I was coming home was head over to Hawthorne High to tell them I was coming back to school and make sure everything was copacetic. She figured all I’d have to do was pass all my finals from eleventh grade, and then I’d be all set for senior year. But it was more complicated than that. I’d amassed triple the absences allowed by the district, the Summer School session had already closed, yada yada. There was no way around it: I was going to have to repeat eleventh grade.

  “Repeat, my foot,” Janet told me she told them, and marched straight down to the guidance counselor’s office, which was empty, because it was summer. Once located, the guidance counselor, Mr. Peeler, suggested that I take the GED and spend a year at the local community college, making awesome grades and doing some awesome community service or working some awesome part-time job, maybe at an awesome non-profit, and then applying, with the rest of my appropriate age group, for some totally super awesome college, as if nothing un-awesome had ever happened. (No, my language skills haven’t suddenly devolved—Mr. Peeler literally used the word “awesome” more than a fourteen-year-old skateboarder. He thought it helped us relate to him. Or something.)

  So I took the GED. And suddenly I went from high school washout to—ta da!—college student. Even if it was just community college, Janet and Leo were pretty pleased. I only had three classes to deal with: Concepts in Earth Science, Intro to English Lit, and Intro to American History, despite the fact that English Lit, American History, and I had been introduced already, and we’d really hit it off. But mostly I was happy that I wouldn’t have to deal with the humiliation triple-header of getting the cold shoulder from Rory every day, having to retake Sam Lidell’s class, and having all my former classmates lord their senior status over me. As a newly minted college student, I was allowed to ride my bike again. And to hang out with my new friend, Jay.

  Jay was actually named Julia. Julia Fillmore. But everybody called her Jay. I met her in the school library on Orientation Day—she was a student, too, but she worked at the library as part of the work-exchange. She caught me staring at her tattoo when I came back to check out a book. Jay had two interlocking female symbols, in rainbow colors, on the inside of her right forearm. She told me I looked like that girl from the Missing posters, and I told her I was. “Cool,” she said. “I found you.” We talked for a while, and then she asked me if I wanted to come over and hang out sometime. She lived right off campus, and we could just watch a movie and drink some beer or whatever. I went over one afternoon, and next thing I knew, I was telling her the whole story. About Rory and Sam and how I ran away and all. I felt like I was reeling off this epic tale, but Jay seemed pretty unimpressed by the whole thing. She just cocked an eyebrow and said, “Interesting” or “I can see your point there.” Anyway, it was nice to finall
y have someone to talk to.

  Jay was biding her time, just like I was. She’d been right in the middle of getting her master’s degree in Art History from Smith College when she dropped out. She’d gotten into a messed-up relationship with one of her professors, a woman named Carol who had a kid. It left her so wrecked, she moved back home to Hawthorne, where she rented a crummy little factory house from her elderly aunt. Jay was trying to leave art behind completely and start over with a degree in psychology. According to Jay, my crush on Rory and my Incident with Sam was no big deal, and I shouldn’t even worry about whether I was gay or straight because my whole thing was less about sexual identity than it was acting out a whole psychological somethingorother, which Jay described using terms like Kinsey scale and gestalt that I only pretended to understand. At any rate, I figured Jay should know, since she was twenty-six and she’d had a whole, serious, life-altering relationship with this woman at Smith. This woman who had a kid.

  “Kids make it complicated,” Jay told me, exhaling smoke and looking sad. No, not sad. Jay had a great way of looking like she was too cool to care but like it was the heaviest thing and she couldn’t carry it anymore. She looked both ways at once.

  “How old was the kid?”

  “Seven. She was great, too. I thought I never wanted kids, you know? But then . . . ughhh.” Jay groaned and waved her hand. Conversation over. Jay could do that, just wave her hand and change the subject. It seemed like Jay was always in charge, even though she insisted that her life was a mess and she couldn’t believe she was back in this shithole town. Jay dressed like she couldn’t decide if she was a hippie or a punk. Like, she’d wear bellbottom jeans and Doc Martens with a ripped-up T-shirt that had some band name on it: The Slits or The Breeders or X-Ray Spex. Jay was tall and dark-haired and really pretty, but she never wore makeup because she said she hated all that beauty regime bullshit the media forces down our throats.

  Well, sometimes she wore eyeliner. And mascara.

  two

  SO I GUESS YOU MIGHT BE curious about my aforementioned epic tale of running away and generally behaving like a mixed-up doofus. All right, you asked for it. So here goes.

  Okay, so, basically, without going into the gory details, the Humiliating Incident of last spring was that I witnessed my best friend Rory, who I was kind of secretly in love with, bumping uglies with his gross boss, and I retaliated by going over to my badass English teacher’s house and making a pass at her, because I was also kind of secretly in love with her, too, but all she did was laugh at me and tell me to go write down all my mixed-up feelings in my journal, for crying out loud. And when I confronted Rory about the whole boss thing, he told me in no uncertain terms to butt out, even though we’re supposed to be best friends. Hm, come to think of it, maybe that’s Humiliating Incidents, plural.

  Anyway, since Rory and Mrs. Lidell were the only two people in Hawthorne besides my grandparents who gave me the time of day, I decided it was high time to get the hell out. I quickly formulated a plan. I would go live with my mom for a while. Simple as that. Except for the fact that I had no idea where she lived. Or if she would have me if I found her. I’d been trying to find out about my mom for a long time, and yeah, I could have just asked Janet and Leo, but the thing about Leo was he basically lived his life as if my mom no longer existed. He seriously wouldn’t even talk about her. No pictures in the house, nothing. So, trying to get any information out of him was going to be like trying to walk up to the CIA headquarters to politely ask what was really going on down at Area 51. It would only result in Pissing Leo Off, and no one wanted that. I had long ago made up my mind that, once I saved up enough caddy money, I would hire a private investigator to find my mom, and I would keep her whereabouts to myself. But, after the one-two punch of seeing Rory with Super Creep and the Humiliating Incident with Sam, I figured it was time to pack my bags and go. I was going to reunite with my mom, wherever she was. Because that’s where I was really meant to be.

  This is where Tracy came in. She always said I could come up and visit any time. We’d become friends at Drama Camp a few years back. She was really funny, always bursting into song from some musical. She turned me on to all these weird cult movies like Rocky Horror and Clue. When her parents split up, Tracy’s mom moved to Ohio, and her dad moved to Washington, DC—only a few short hours from New York City, where, I felt pretty sure, I’d find my mom. Tracy still lived with her dad while she studied theater at George Washington University. I didn’t realize it then, but the fact that her dad was kind of nutty was part of why everything got so crazy, with Janet and Leo thinking I’d been abducted and all. Tracy’s dad was phobic about computers and cell phones—he said they gave off beta waves that could fry your brain or something. So Tracy and I mostly kept in touch through postcards and letters via snail mail. When I packed my bag that night, I was moving fast. I could’ve copied down the return address and all that, but instead I just grabbed the whole stack of letters from my desk drawer, figuring I’d read back through them for her telephone number on the way.

  I’d planned to take the bus up to DC—it was cheapest—but before I got to the station I stopped off at the Flying J Truck Stop. In the dark arcade, by the light of the claw machine, I took out Tracy’s letters and looked for the one where she’d written her new cell phone number; last year, her dad had finally allowed her to have a phone for emergencies. I’d left my own phone behind, because, well, I was feeling kind of screw-you-guys when I left, and I didn’t foresee myself being in much of a mood to chat with anyone. Rory in particular. So I changed a few dollar bills for quarters at the change machine and headed down a smoky hallway toward the pay phones. Tracy’s voice was groggy, but she picked up.

  “Hi, Trace, it’s Lula Monroe.” My voice came out all high-pitched and squeaky. I was nervous as hell. “Sorry to call you so late.”

  “It’s all good. I’m up. What’s going on?”

  “This is kind of crazy, but . . . you know how you always said I could come up and stay with you if I was ever in DC?”

  “. . . Uh-huh.”

  “Well, ah. Long story short, uh . . .” Where did I even start? With a lie. Forgive me, Tracy—all will be explained soon. “Actually, George Washington is one of the schools I’m applying to, so I’m coming up for a tour. And Janet and Leo said I could go by myself if I was staying with a friend, so . . . I know this is short notice, but I was wondering if I could stay with you?” I was literally holding my breath.

  “Hell yeah you can stay with me. You’ve got my address, right?”

  “Yeah.” I exhaled. This was going to work.

  “Call me when you get here. Are you driving in, or flying or what?”

  “I’m uh . . . taking the bus.”

  “All right. Call me when you get here. You’re coming up this weekend?”

  “Actually, my bus gets in . . . tomorrow night.” There was a slight pause on the other end of the line. “I know, it’s totally last minute, it’s totally fine if you can’t—”

  “No, it’s fine! I’m psyched to see you. Just call me when you get to town.”

  “Okay. Thanks. Wow. Thanks. I’ll see you tomorrow!” I hung up the phone. The plan was underway. Now I just had to get to th—

  “Tallulah’s in tr-oouu-ble.” I jumped a mile. Around the corner from the pay phones, with his elongated, basketball player’s frame bent at crooked angles over a video poker machine, sat Trey Greyson. Professional Acid Casualty, and Janet and Leo’s former landscaper. So much for my covert operations.

  “Sorry, Lulu. Didn’t mean to startle ya, there.” He turned from the glowing jingle of the video poker machine and smiled at me, his eyes heavy-lidded, his white-guy dreadlocks tied back in a rubber band. “Where you catchin’ a bus to in the middle of the night?”

  “It’s Lula,” I corrected him. “And it’s none of your business where I’m going.”

  “Hey, you don’t look so hot,” he said. “What happened? Did that fat kid get you knock
ed up?” A laugh gurgled in the back of Trey’s throat.

  “I’m not pregnant. I’m leaving on a . . . college visit.” Like Trey Greyson needed to know the truth.

  “Leo the Enforcer’s letting you catch a bus by yourself in the middle of the night? And did he finally let you drive the Caddy, too?”

  “Fuck off, Trey,” I muttered, hurrying off down the hall. I had a bus to catch.

  “Hey, seriously. Wait up.” Trey was following me. Great. “Are you taking a cab? Because I know you don’t have a car. And the bus station’s way up on Northside—aka Crystal Methville. It’s not too safe, walking up there alone this time of night.”

  “Thanks for the safety tip, Officer Greyson. I think I’ll manage,” I said over my shoulder.

  “Dude, hey. Lula. For real.” Trey grabbed my arm. “You shouldn’t—”

  “Miss, is he botherin’ you?” The cranky old lady behind the counter put down her issue of People magazine. Trey held up his hands. “’Cause I can call the cops,” she said, giving Trey the death-glare from behind her thick glasses.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “He’s . . . my granddad’s yard guy.” The old lady gave us both the hawk-eye as I walked outside, Trey following at a respectful distance. She finally gave up and went back to her People.

  “Why don’t you let me give you a ride?” Trey lurched up alongside me. “I’ve got my car. I can take you to the station. Or, what the hell, I can take you wherever you want to go.”

  “I’m going further than you’re driving. And besides. I don’t get into cars with strangers,” I told him, making my way toward the halogen-lit island of gas pumps.

  “Hey, I’m no stranger,” Trey laughed gently. “I’m your granddad’s yard guy. You know me. Hell, everybody knows me.” And then, Trey Greyson proceeded to do the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever witnessed. He broke into song. “Trust Greyson Bacon, that’s the name, for crispy bacon, night or day! For breakfast, for lunch, or even dinner, Greyson Bacon—oink, oink!—it’s a winner!”