All You Never Wanted (3 page)

Hunched in the twilight, the phone frozen in her hand, she feels a sudden mild but familiar cramping. No, impossible. She doesn’t even carry anything in her purse anymore. But yes. It is that. Still she doesn’t move. Allows the pain to roll in like a slow
tide. Watches the trains pull in and depart. She might be stuck here all night. “Girlfriend” is a taunt knocking in her head.

Minutes pass. She is a shadow. She feels the cramps tightening and relaxing and tightening again, stronger. Twenty miles away, a gangly boy is gathering up his homework and shoving his books into his frayed nylon backpack. Checking the wall clock one last time before he stands up and snaps off the light.

Alex tries not to think about it, and it’s all she can think about.

But back to the jealousy. Since I swear I’d never been jealous of Alex before. In all honesty, I’d spent most of my life being proud-by-association of her, and savoring her fuss over my whatever “talents,” like hockey and English.

So when envy found me, it took me by surprise. A kiddy fury, like getting playground-pranked. Remember those? Call it one part Indian rug burn, one part nipple cripple, one part Hertz doughnut.
Hurts, don’t it?
Some boy gave me a Hertz doughnut, in second grade. Right on the top of my thigh. Troy DiBruno. Kids said it was because he liked me. If that was true, the big purple bruise he left was my only evidence.

Joshua Lee Gunner was the name of my new bruise. He’d been going out with Alex since last October and he was now in our kitchen, snarfing up dinner from a plate in his hands. Too hungry to use a fork. As I watched him, he looked over, causing me an immediate shame-flash that my lips were bright with Rouge Coco plumping lip color, and that I’d done some Gia the Mannequin Goddess poses in my bathroom mirror right before he got here.

“What’s up, Thea? You look a million miles away.”

“Oh, just thinking.” I snapped my fingers. “I’m back.”

What did that mean? With the snap? Ugh. I was an idiot around Joshua. I paid him too much attention. I was too hurt
when he saw me as the tagalong kid sister. I wanted him to see my Gia self. And mostly I felt like a girl made from glass. A girl who would shatter from the breath of his rejection.

But my Lord, if you had to wish for anything, wish for Joshua Gunner. Five foot nine by his own word and five seven by mine. Not a big guy but a man to the core. With homegrown delicious forearms and wide-set animal-green eyes that stared off-kilter and right through you. I’ve hashed out Joshua’s flaws a hundred times: his shortish legs, his longish nose, and anyone could see he thought too hard about his haircut. But he had something, Joshua did. Like a kind of defiant joy in himself. Like a guy who was waiting—a touch irritably—for everyone to give him a prize, to kiss the ring.

“Maybe she just misses her mommy.” Half whispered, half sarcastic.

“Not likely.” Although … I hadn’t seen Mom since last week. She was always gone. Skiing and golfing and shopping and soireeing. Doing everything that Arthur did.

“Where’re your folks again?” he asked, as he inhaled another mouthful of whatever chicken-plus-sauce item Lulette had made for dinner. I never ate that stuff. I lived on Multi-Bran Chex, yogurt and salads—more like a resignation to diet food than because I was dieting. Not that I was morbidly obese or anything. But I guess I was hanging on to the hope that one day I might accidentally whittle down to my inner toothpick.

“Los Angeles. Business trip, Arthur. Arm candy, Mom.”

“When they get back?”

“Sunday. Hopefully with that pair of boots from Fred Segal that I’m coveting.”

Those eyes, oh God. They sandbagged me, they really did. “You still thinking about throwing a party here Saturday?”

“Well, durr.” I nodded. “It’s an opportunity. Nobody’s around.”

“Told your sister?”

“Not yet. But it might be the cure for what ails her, y’know?”

“Sure. Buncha drunk juniors going wild, breaking the furniture.”

“Seniors, too. No drunks, no breakage. I know how to host a decent party, Joshua.” Even if I’d never done it before, I was pretty confident that this was true.

“Yeah? ’Cause the thing is, that might be a help to me.” He rinsed his empty plate and set it in the dishwasher.

There was a blade sunk in this moment now. Joshua had as good as told me what I already knew. That if I had a party, he’d want to use it to deal. Josh’s business was strictly lo-fi, dime bags to schoolkids. It’s not like he’d ever get to park his private jet in the backyard off his profits. But everyone knew Joshua didn’t pay his junior college tuition on a Ten Pin Alley paycheck. Especially since it was going under, or so I’d heard.

And now we were staring at each other. Sizing up the risk and trust factors.

“So maybe you talk to Alex.” I tiptoed carefully through the moment. “For both of us. She’s in charge while Mom and Arthur are gone. She’ll listen to you.”

“Then. What I’ll need to tell her,” answered Joshua, equally deliberate on his end, “is that you’ll be inviting only the right crowd. Kids who don’t puke in the hallway or fall out windows.”

Aha. Funny guy. That was an oblique reference to my ex, Austin “Kezzy” Vasquez, who got so shit-canned at a lax party last
year he fell off a roof, and (for unrelated reasons) has since moved to Flagstaff, Arizona. Kezzy was a prankster, and I could tell by his Facebook that he was now bringing his special brand of Kez-razy to Sinagua High School. Honestly, I hadn’t thought much about him since he’d left. I had sort of evolved past him.

Joshua knew I couldn’t claim Alex’s social status at Greenwich. But he also knew what I had in me. Joshua wanted me to throw this party because I was smart enough and Gia enough to get it done. Not because he thought I’d cack it up.

“Who do I invite from the seniors?”

“Al can take care of that. I’m guessing it’ll be the rest of the Blondes, and then whoever they bring.”

“So, yeah. I’m game. Let’s do this thing,” I said. I was giving it my best, with a lazy smile like it was no big deal.

Instead of the biggest deal that had fallen in my lap all year.

Joshua’s smile turned over my heart. Truthfully, I’d have never refused him. I had a thing for Joshua Gunner, and Joshua Gunner had a dream, and who was I to question how he financed it? Especially since my own dreams were prepaid in full, thanks to my kindly bazillionaire stepdad.

But Joshua’s dream went something like this: next spring, after he finished his degree at Westchester Junior College, he’d migrate to Los Angeles and join up with Tom Savini, “the Godfather of Gore.” Savini did makeup and SFX for every kickass horror movie you’ve ever seen. Joshua had apprenticed for him during his SKiP last year while they shot the latest
Stab
(
Stab III: Bled from Within
) over in Locust Valley.

It had been life-changing. Savini had encouraged Joshua to go to college. To learn film. To dream bigger than bowling alleys.

The Savini thing might seem left-field, but only if you’d never witnessed what Joshua could create. Those gouged eye sockets and bumpy scar tissue were objects of gruesome beauty. His zombie transformations were so disgustingly awesome that our past two school plays—
Rocky Horror Picture Show
and
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
—had been mounted just to squeeze the most from Joshua’s genius.

Last spring, the Theater Department even did the unprecedented and threw him a farewell party. There wasn’t a single kid who didn’t know his name after that.

“No broke dick, okay, Thee?” he warned me now. “I’m speaking to you as a big brother. Don’t waste my time.”

“All amateurs will be unwelcome,” I assured him. “Promise.”
Big brother
. My smile felt tight as a noose.

“I’m thinking you invite Jack Gaffney and Harper Buck and the McBride twins and Fiona Levine. Can you handle it?”

“Um … 
yea-ah
.” I was trying for Gia, a purr in my voice and poochy lips. Hoping I didn’t sound stupid. “But
you
have to make sure Alex approves. If this comes from me, it’s an automatic no.”

“I’ll bring it up later tonight. If I can. The thing is, Alex isn’t feeling …” Joshua’s eyes cut to the ceiling. “Why’d you have to leave her today, anyway?”

“Leave her? I didn’t leave her.”

“She said you ditched on Elm.”

“Because that was the
plan
.” My nerves sparked. The “five minutes” plan. I thought I’d given Alex way enough time. I thought she’d been good to go. Guess not. And since when did Al sneak behind my back and rat me out to her boyfriend?

“She never made it to tutoring,” Joshua said. “She said she
drove to the train station and then turned around and came back here.”

“Her problem’s getting worse,” I said. “I’m worried about her.”

“Sure, you look like you’re losing plenty of sleep over it.” His smile was almost sad.

“I’m being totally sincere, actually,” I bit back. “Alex is the truest thing I’ve got. But what am I supposed to do? If she can’t leave her room or leave the house or drive her car or get out of—”

“Her head,” he interrupted, using two fingers to tap his temple. Like he knew all Alex’s secrets. Like I was simple. “Her head is the only place she can’t get out of. But she’ll beat this. You have to just think of it as … a losing streak.”

A losing streak
. Oh gee. Thanks, Joshua. That’s why Alex had dropped twenty pounds and was barely showing up for school, for home, for SKiP, for life. Because she was having an off-season. Gotcha.

Joshua Gunner might be the hottest thing since salsa verde, but when it came to my sister, he didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

She lies in bed with a hot-water bottle aproned flat across her sweatpants and she tries to pitch an ear toward the conversation downstairs. But Camelot is too well built, its fortress walls thickly insulated against weather. And eavesdropping.

Her brain is a speeding bumper car rebounding off a thousand thoughts. She can hardly move from pain. She hasn’t had her period in three months, and tonight, agony. The amount of blood had shocked her. As if every moment of every anxiety attack she’d ever had since January was now unstoppable.

She is surprised by these cramps. She feels them pulse below the painkillers. Her body is thudding like the muted drumbeat of a bar band that can be heard out on the street. Downstairs, Joshua and Thea are eating—or, more likely, Thea is watching Joshua eat, poor guy. It’s a mystery how his body turned out so fine, built on all that Ten Pin Alley deep-fry.

Joshua always ducks Alex’s concerns about his crummy diet with stories of how every Saturday his mom makes pancakes from scratch. A real mother hen. As if. Alex has met both of Joshua’s parents, sinusy Louise and loudmouth Vic. All those Gunner kids look like they were raised on Eggos and neglect, right down to that scrappy eight-year-old, the one with the dog name, Buddy, who can already bowl a 180.

“Excuse me do you work here?”

“No, I just really like to fold clothes.”

She and Thea had loved to play skits at Topshop. Reenacting the best moments of the mall-rat girls who came in clutching their Jamba Juices and reeking of free sample perfumes. Had it really been almost two years gone since they’d worked there? Paid in minimum wage and a homemade lunch compliments of Becky Frankel, the manager. Becky could whip up anything: spring rolls, cupcakes, ricotta-filled squash blossoms. Delicious.

Afternoons, when the UPS boxes got delivered, they’d form an assembly line. Steaming the new clothes, attaching the price tags and ink packs, locking up the leather, dressing the lippy center mannequin that Thea had named Gia after that tragic model that in the HBO movie a very young Angelina Jolie had played mostly naked with raccoon eyes.

Becky took night classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She knew everything about the designers that Topshop copied.

“You need to learn the fakes before you step into the ring with the real deal,” she told them. “Anna Wintour, Carine Roitfeld, Pip Arlington. I’d work for any of those brilliant dragons for free.” As Becky’s finger slid down the
Haute
masthead. “Only thirty-four names on this page. You gotta be ready. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.”

And dumb luck? That’s just opportunity
.

Her mind tumbles here and there. She’ll be in this bed all night. She shifts and the bottle sloshes like an empty stomach. Her actual stomach doesn’t bother with those sounds anymore. Her body knows better. Knows how to be silent as a stopped clock if it wants to please her. That’s why these cramps are so startling.
She prefers to contain nothing. No hunger, no desire, no pain if she can help it.

The policy isn’t foolproof. The last time she and Joshua had sex, Valentine’s Day, he broke down. Pulling out and away. Rolling into a fetal position, facing her with his head bowed so that she could only see the moonlit scrub of his hair. He’d looked so vulnerable. Miles from those nicknames—“Shady Sheriff” and “Hollywood Buckaroo”—that she and her friends had called him last year, when she’d mostly known him as that hottie senior. The theater guy with the silver skull ring and an infinite supply of black T-shirts.

Joshua had been the perfect antidote. Because even then, even before
Haute
, she’d been struggling for a toehold against the landslide of Camelot and everything in it. She’d imposed order. Her lists of tasks, too many to accomplish. Her six-mile morning run. Her clothes, aggressively folded à la Topshop. Her 2.5-minute cold water shower. Her health fads in
Cosmo
and
Self
that always left her hungry.

Depriving, sacrificing. Searching for the way to not-have.

Joshua’s life was one big can’t-have. They’d bonded on it. He never wanted handouts. She’d respected that. It had worked, the two of them, for a while. (Until
Haute
. When Alex realized that there’d been no toehold. No safe ledge after all.)

Whispering in the dark, Joshua had promised he’d love her exactly the same, his heart was all hers, but he couldn’t touch her anymore. No way, not that way. Not when she was only skin and breakaway bones. He’d said she was a different kind of Valentine right now. “I don’t want anything between us to be mechanical. I don’t want to do it just to do it.”