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Authors: Nancy Kelly

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“High school. All right, I stand corrected,” Daphne said. “High school doesn’t really count.”
CeeCee said, “ I want to hear the rest of this.”
Kristl settled in. “About a week ago this fabulous-looking guy comes to the Pink Elephant and we strike up a conversation and I end up telling him my dilemma.”
I was interested. “You really told this new guy about Brandon? And all the ex-husbands?”
“Okay, okay,” Daphne interrupted. “All right. I was wrong. This is when you
definitely
don’t count them all! Never say how many men you’ve slept with to another man. It doesn’t matter if it’s only four. They can’t hear about
anybody
else. It makes them insane.”
CeeCee agreed tiredly, “It’s a male thing.” She shrank further into her chair. A guy wearing chains hanging from his pockets cruised by and they locked eyes but neither made a move. “So, what happened?”
I was intrigued and worried at the same time. Kristl wasn’t known for her plodding, thoughtful nature. She was rash, impulsive, and swept away at the least provocation.
“I really liked this guy,” she continued. “He was so amazing. Just kind of straightforward and smart and listening to me. Not like most guys, y’know? And being with him practically knocked Brandon out of my head, which is amazing that it could happen that quickly.”
“I once fell in love over a bowl of edamame,” CeeCee revealed. “He was a poet.”
We all paused for a moment, visualizing. With effort, I pulled my attention back to Kristl. “So, it sounds like Brandon’s out.”
“That’s what I thought. So what if he possesses this big dick and knows just how to use it? So what if he whispers all the right things—words of love and what I do to him in bed ... and how amazing I am. You know the kind.”
We all remained silent, collectively wondering if we did.
“Go on,” Jill insisted, intent on the story.
Mr. Chains strolled by again and CeeCee climbed out of her chair to meet him. They went outside for a cigarette. I briefly thought of Nate and felt a pang.
Kristl inhaled and exhaled. Leaning closer, she said, “All of a sudden I just wanted this other guy. Right there. It was wild. I couldn’t think about anything else. I swear, if he’d asked, I’d have stripped naked and gone for it on the bar.”
“Isn’t Pink Elephant really crowded?” I asked.
“Blue.” Jill closed her eyes, long-suffering.
“And all these thoughts were just running around in my brain and I felt like Jell-O and I walked around the bar and sat beside him and I think I might have even slipped my hand onto his crotch.”
“Bold,” I observed.
Jill gazed hard at Kristl. She was hanging on every word. I was, too, for that matter.
“Were you drunk?” Daphne asked.
Kristl said deliberately, “I’m a bartender there.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Yeah?” I pushed. I’d been at the Pink Elephant a time or two. When things got rocking, the rules got bent from time to time.
“I
was
a little buzzed,” she admitted. “He kept buying me drinks.”
“You were working?” Daphne asked, scandalized.
Kristl gave her a look.
“Then what happened?” Jill asked a bit breathlessly.
Kristl’s lips tightened. “Then this beautiful—I mean
beautiful
—blonde sits down beside him. Long hair, you know, with those streaks and just so California-perfect and she said, ‘Hi, Jackson. Long time no see,’ and he looked at her and it was all over.”
A prickle ran over my skin. “Jackson?”
“Jackson Wright,” Kristl elucidated, shaking a gasp out of the rest of us.
I couldn’t believe it! The universe is just full of these nasty little surprises! Jackson Wright seemed to be floating around on the air waves, hovering over me at all times. My friends looked shell-shocked. I know my lips curled in an imitation of Liam Engleston’s. Wouldn’t you know it. Wouldn’t you just
know
it!
But Kristl was momentarily oblivious. “So, I took my sorry self back to Brandon and now he’s talking about moving to Seattle—he’s been offered a position at some Microsoft subsidiary in the area—and he wants me to go with him and you know what that means.”
A funereal rendition of
Here Comes the Bride
circled inside my brain. “You’re not thinking of going, are you?”
“I don’t know ... I think I hate him,” she answered, reaching for her raspberry Cosmo and dropping it down her throat.
“Brandon?” Daphne asked.
Jill groaned. “No. Pay attention.
Jackson Wright.
She hates Jackson Wright.”
“We all do,” I pointed out, tipping up the remains of my stinger—which hadn’t been half-bad and gently shaking the last, reluctant drops of alcohol into my mouth.
I am so very classy.
 
 
It was strange coming home to an empty apartment. Kristl had gone off to her job at Pink Elephant, and Nate had packed up enough items for his temporary move-in with Tara to make me feel forgotten and discarded despite my earlier resolve to sweep him from my life. Oh, there were still a lot of his belongings lying around, and I knew his chair—my favorite chair—would be one of the first things to go once he got permanently resettled. I sat down in it and leaned my head back.
I felt ... well, blue. Endings aren’t fun. I wondered how long it would take before I experienced what I’d briefly felt this morning in the bathroom: the euphoria of being alone. Now that I’d had solitude thrust on me, it didn’t seem quite so great.
I sighed and considered having a glass of wine, but I was about drinked-out at this point. The cocktail hour had started deteriorating the instant Jackson Wright’s name was invoked. Kristl had looked around perplexed, waiting for an explanation. None of us jumped in to tell her, so she turned to me.
“You know him? Jackson Wright?” she demanded.
“Jackson and I went to high school together,” I explained. Someone else I had neglected to mention from good old Carriage Hill High.
“We
all
know him,” Jill added repressively.
Daphne sighed. “Blue tried to warn us about him, but we didn’t listen. CeeCee actually slept with him.”
“So she says.” Jill wasn’t about to let that one go by without a challenge. “But CeeCee isn’t totally honest when it comes to men.”
“Yes, she is,” Daphne disagreed. “She’s just ...”
“Skewed in her perception,” I finished. CeeCee didn’t look at relationships, sex, or even friendship quite the same way the rest of us did. Someone had once asked her if she was from a different planet and I swear she’s made a point of proving that theory correct ever since.
Kristl looked in the direction CeeCee had gone, and I could tell she really wanted to quiz her about Jackson. I set my empty glass down and glanced around for our waiter.
“You’re probably lucky Jackson took off with the blonde,” Jill stated. “You could be in a worse mess than with Brandon.”
“I don’t want to move to Seattle,” Kristl said.
“Don’t,” I said. Then I asked, because I had a feeling she might be heading north despite her words, “When’s he leaving?”
“Soon.” She twisted her fingers around the stem of her glass.
“Why not try a long-distance relationship?” Daphne suggested. “Seattle’s not that far. A quick two-hour plane ride or so.”
“Two of my marriages ended because they became long-distance relationships,” Kristl revealed. “I’m not good at ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder.’ It’s more like ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ ”
We collectively nodded. Who among us hadn’t cheated on an out-of-town boyfriend? No one at our table.
“Brandon was out of sight for ten minutes and look what happened. Now I can’t get Jackson out of my head.”
“Jackson Daniels and Coke,” Jill called to the waiter as he cruised by. Kristl gave her a sharp look. I yelled my own order, “Ketel One vodka martini!”
“Think he heard us?” Jill asked.
“Doubtful,” I said.
Daphne asked, “What happened to the third marriage?”
Kristl made that “bombs-away” explosion noise, the kind young boys seem to learn through osmosis but which I’ve never been able to master, no matter how hard I try. I regarded Kristl with true admiration. “It blew up,” she added unnecessarily. “One day we just lost it with each other and neither of us looked back.”
I nodded sagely, but inside I was asking myself why things never worked that way for me. I
always
looked back. To my detriment, to be sure. I was half-looking back at Nate already and somehow a pair of rose-colored glasses were perched on my nose. I would have to be careful or I’d be begging for a second chance before the week was out.
“Leo started dating someone else at work,” Daphne blurted out. “We’d barely kissed goodbye and he was flirting and making goo-goo eyes and it was all I could do to keep from crying. That’s my bad day. That’s what I’ve been waiting to say!”
“Goo-goo eyes?” I asked. “What does that mean?”
“Don’t get all semantic on us, Blue,” Jill said. “Don’t tell me Leo was goo-gooing that mousy-looking blonde.”
Daphne looked miserable. “How’d you guess?”
Jill made a strangled noise in her throat. “Don’t you wish they’d go for brains over beauty just once?”
“Thanks a bunch.”
“You have a brain,” Jill pointed out. “That’s all I meant.”
“Maybe he’s an equal opportunity dater and he’s already filled his quota for cute brunettes,” I said.
“Nice try.” Daphne wasn’t about to be consoled.
We lapsed into silence.
Kristl dug through her purse, pulled out some money and laid a few bills on the table before climbing to her feet. “I need a cigarette,” she explained, exiting quickly. I watched her hunt down CeeCee, who was deep into conversation with Mr. Chains. CeeCee accepted Kristl’s arrival, but I could see her expression cloud over at whatever Kristl was saying. Had to be about Jackson.
After that, everything kind of broke up. I had wanted to tell them about Nate, but the words stuck in my throat like a fish bone. Now, as I climbed out of Nate’s chair and looked around the empty apartment I felt like I might do something rash, like throw things or cry or call him on his cell phone and demand, “Why? Why?
Why?
” when I knew I didn’t want to be with him. I just wanted the last word.
“And Dr. Dick thinks I’m frightfully well adjusted,” I said aloud. My voice echoed throughout the empty condo. I didn’t like it one bit. Switching off the lights, I locked the door and determinedly marched up to bed and to the suddenly wide-open spaces of the king-size mattress.
I lay in the darkness, staring at the ceiling. The jacaranda tree outside my window was dancing in a stiff breeze. Bathed by the riot light from the building next door, its leaves flittered across my ceiling in tiny, darting shadows between the stripes made by my jalousie blinds.
I drifted into a troubled sleep.
I would have expected to dream about Nate, or Jackson, but instead I found myself back in high school with Charlie Carruthers. Only it was kind of like college in the dream, as I was living on my own. I was freaked out the whole time because I’d missed the cutoff date to drop chemistry, the reason being I was banging Charlie under a blanket in a little garret-style attic room while his roommates smoked dope in the corner and totally ignored us. Charlie and I were trying to keep things quiet, as if his stoned friends would even notice. Between fretting about chemistry class and keeping quiet during sex, I worked myself into an all-out nightmare, and I woke suddenly at the sound of my own hoarse yell—which had been me crying out in the dream when Dr. Dick suddenly entered the room and caught me in the sex act.
My heart was pounding wildly in fear. Half asleep, I searched my feelings for what had scared me so badly and was surprised and a bit worried to realize it was Dr. Dick’s disappointment in me. Frightfully well adjusted? I feared it was all an act that he, as my shrink, might well discover some day.
I punched my pillow and buried my face in it.
Sleep eluded me. Charlie hung in my thoughts. Persistent. I wondered if his sexual technique had improved with age. He was the quickest, most self-centered lover I’d ever encountered—and that’s saying a lot. But it was high school, after all, and the jury was out on whether that counted or not.
My vote was for not ... because otherwise Charlie was Ex-File Number One.
Chapter
3
D
aphne called the next morning from work and woke me from a deep sleep. When I’m not on a job I tend to sleep in, and after a night of roiling about Charlie, I could have used some more. But I tried to be coherent, offering ums, and uh-huhs, and ohs where appropriate. She didn’t seem to notice. She was on the Starbucks early shift, which conflicted today with an audition for a chewing gum commercial, and she was bummed.
“Last time I went on a chewing gum commercial I got a callback,” she revealed. “This guy and I were in this fake car and we kissed and kissed, passing the gum back and forth.”
In the background I could hear people ordering coffee and the whir of one of those machines that pulverizes coffee beans to grounds. I squinted one eye open in the morning light. “And you’re sorry you’re missing that?”
“We weren’t actually supposed to pass the gum, just make it look like it. But he was really, really cute.”
I tried to look beyond that, but my Seinfeldish self reared its ugly head and all I could see were myriads and myriads of germs settling in all the little folds of the chewed gum. “He’d have to be really, really cute.”
“He was.” She sighed. “I’m hoping to reschedule for this afternoon.” Her voice shifted to a tone of accusation, “I hardly got to tell you about my bad day yesterday. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise with your friend Kristl and then Jill’s engagement.”
Is Jill engaged?
I wondered briefly, but then decided I didn’t want to revisit that conversation. Carefully opening both eyes, I was momentarily dazzled by the sunlight coming through my blinds. I took a moment to admire them. Wood overlaid with a white plastic coat of some kind of fabulous product that looked like paint and wore like iron. Really cool. I’d paid a small fortune for them but it made my bedroom seem far, far better than it was. And no Nate ...
I cleared my throat, trying to get my voice to work. Half the time I can’t talk at all before—I checked the blue numbers on my clock’s LCD—nine A.M., especially if I’ve been out. And although I’d gotten home early last night, it felt like I was suffering a hangover. Nate’s doing. Breakups are pure shit.
I wondered if Kristl had come back in the wee hours after work. Even with my restless night I hadn’t heard her. If she was with Brandon it was a bad sign.
“Leo is just so distant. Like he doesn’t even know me. God, it’s awful. I feel just like a teenager who’s been dumped after sex!”
“You had sex with him?”
“Didn’t I just say so? Oh, God. There he is.” I heard her rustle with the phone, then apparently she was in a safe nook because I could make out every syllable even though she was whispering. “He hasn’t even looked at me once today,” she moaned.
“Which date was it? The third?” I stretched my mouth. I didn’t want to think about what it tasted like.
“Does it matter?”
“No, it’s just we were talking last night and—”
“It was the first date, okay? I know what I said, but it was the first date.” For a moment I really did think she was going to break down and cry, so I jumped in quickly.
“It’s okay. No big deal.”
“Then why is he doing this! He’s with her now!”
“The mousy-looking girl?”
“Oh, God, Blue.”
“Maybe Leo’s just—just ...”
An asshole, like Ian,
I wanted to say.
“Just what?”
“Not ready—for someone like you.”
“Well, he was certainly ready when we were in bed,” she reminded me as if I were extremely dense.
“I mean he’s unformed. Most men are unformed. Their brains don’t work the same way. They’re more prehistoric. I’m not kidding. I read that somewhere.”
“So, because he has a prehistoric brain he can’t be nice to me after having sex?”
I paused. “Yes,” I said.
“Well, that’s crap.”
I grimaced in commiseration. I knew how much she liked this guy even though I’d met him once and thought he was a Huge Waste of Time. Leo possessed that shaggy California blondish hair that looks suspiciously as if it’s been forgotten to be combed after a day out surfing. This is a disguise, however, because I’ve known guys who spent too much of their hard-earned, or ill-gotten, disposable income on this “do.” It boggles the mind.
“
I
thought it was a potential boyfriend evening,” Daphne said, sounding choked up.
“How was the sex?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“Sure you can. Was it bad sex?”
“No.”
“Okay sex?”
“It was GREAT sex! Great sex. Totally, totally GREAT SEX!”
I wondered how much of that hit the coffee drinkers’ ears as I had to yank the receiver away from mine. “And now he doesn’t even look at me!” her faraway, tinny voice accused. “For God’s sake, Blue, what is
with
men? Are they all just moronic juveniles who only want us for a roll in the sheets?”
I actually debated answering that one, but then realized it was probably meant to be rhetorical. Instead, I mumbled something about giving him some time, not dwelling on it too much, how she was better than he was, and how it was always best to be the bigger person. A whole bunch of platitudes that had the effect of reducing her to tears. “Can I come over later?” she asked in a small voice. “I really need to talk.”
“Sure,” I said, just managing to hide the inner groan. I needed coffee. I could practically smell it wafting over the line, but it was as far away as the moon. I didn’t, in fact, have any coffee in the house, I remembered.
“And you can tell me about Charlie,” Daphne slapped on. “I know it was high school and I said that didn’t count, but maybe in your case it does.”
“I don’t want to talk about Charlie.”
“Well, you brought him up last night.”
“I didn’t mean to, believe me. I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t count him.”
“You don’t count that actor guy, either. Really, Blue. They either exist or they don’t.”
“They don’t!”
“Oh, God, there’s Leo! And he’s still talking to Heather!! What am I gonna do?” she wailed and hung up.
Dropping the receiver, I covered my eyes with my palms and took several deep, cleansing breaths. I didn’t want to think about Daphne and Leo. And I sure as hell didn’t want to talk about Charlie. What gave her the idea I wanted to talk about him? Just because she was feeling low, vulnerable and miserable in her pseudorelationship didn’t mean I wanted to talk about any of mine. Okay, so Charlie’s a member of the Ex-Files. Fine. I’ll accept that. Charlie’s the founding member. Okay.
But I sure as hell didn’t want to talk about him or anyone else in that not-so-illustrious list.
Throwing back the covers, I padded to the bathroom. I brushed my teeth with alacrity, then splashed water on my face. I stared at my reflection. The grim set of my jaw reflected my thoughts.
Charlie ... Charlie Carruthers. His name was wedged into one of my brain tracks and I was going to take a ride down that path whether I wanted to or not.
I’d originally given him the nickname C.C. But now that I had a friend of the same name, I couldn’t go there anymore. He was simply Charlie. My first, and worst, lover.
We had gotten together the night of the Homecoming game, a rivalry between Carriage Hill High and Western that bordered on lunacy. I was bored out of my skull and wondering if I was the last virgin left in Clackamas County. I was seventeen and I’d read enough
True Sex Stories
and watched enough R-rated movies to be convinced that I was missing something truly spectacular. All the secrecy. All the whispered gossip. Pammy Gracefield had been caught doing it in the back of her parents’ minivan and Mr. Gracefield had yanked the offender—what was his name? Oh, yeah, Richie Moltano—by his leg right out and onto the cement driveway. Richie’s pants encircled his ankles and Mr. Gracefield was so infuriated he bellowed at Pammy to get the hell out of the minivan loud enough that their nearest three neighbors turned their lights on. Or so the story went. To add to the tale, Pammy got pregnant and was sent away. The Grace-fields moved out of the area the end of that year and Carriage Hill High settled back down to soccer, football, a dance team that went all the way to the state finals, and, of course, the requisite schoolwork. I was deep into SATs and wondering why I didn’t have this incredible urge for higher education that everyone, kids and parents alike, seemed infected with. At the time Mom was really working on becoming the real estate maven she is today, so I was kind of left to my own devices. Not that she wasn’t there when it counted, but I had plenty of time to get into trouble, especially since I’d been pretty much a dream child up until my senior year. It was like I woke up one day and thought, “What the hell am I doing?” I really worried I was going to miss the whole “I was a teenage terror” thing, so I set out to drink, have sex, smoke, whatever.
I decided to start with sex, because I had the most interest in it. I wanted to get laid and get it over with. I know this isn’t the most romantic view of the whole thing, but it was becoming such a BIG DEAL that I could hardly stand it. I wanted to KNOW. As Joel Goodson said in
Risky Business,
“College girls have knowledge.” Well, I wanted that knowledge and I wanted it before my first days of college, so I was sort of obsessed with the whole thing when Charlie Carruthers threw a wadded up test at me and gaily yelled, “Flunked another!” to the room at large. Everyone laughed, myself included. I’d managed a C. Terrible class, chemistry. Couldn’t imagine why I was taking it. Something about it looking good on a college resume. All it’s done for me is given me bad dreams.
I picked up his test and surreptitiously stuck it in my book bag. Later, I smoothed it out to realize the reason Charlie had flunked was because he hadn’t bothered to answer half the questions. The ones he had answered were all correct. This prompted the question: had he simply choked? Been unable to answer them? Or, had this been some sort of Machiavellian way to undermine his own chances of getting into a good school? Maybe he was an iconoclast, breaking down established barriers.
I immediately decided to fall in love with Charlie. He was my kind of guy. Never mind that I hadn’t been able to stomach him the year before because of all his gross, crude jokes and stupid, juvenile teen-guy ways. Sure, he was no Jackson Wright, but after my bedtime tête-à-tête with Jackson that had resulted in my Mom’s shock of white hair and no real sex—okay, I hadn’t been
perfect
—I was glad Charlie was simply who he was. I decided he would be the one to deflower me.
This sounds a lot easier than it turned out to be. I mean, where were all the guys with raging hormones? Whose moral compasses couldn’t find magnetic north if they were standing at the pole itself? Here I was, ready, willing, and able and possessed of decent-sized breasts—all right, fine, they’re a bit on the small side but they’ve got a nice shape, okay?—and the only viable deflowerer in my sight was Charlie. This was skewed logic, but I was seventeen and not inclined to second-guess myself.
Anyway, I decided to fall in love with him. At seventeen these kinds of decisions seemed to just pop into my head randomly. Like the time I was temporarily a vegetarian, a state I announced loudly to all and sundry at any given opportunity for about three and a half days until the smell of a sausage dog at a stand outside Costco—one inch in diameter and just shy of a foot long, grilling and sizzling away—did me in. I smothered the thing in mustard, ketchup, sauerkraut and a mound of rather suspect chopped onions—how long
had
they been sitting there?—and dug in as if I’d been starved for a month. It tasted so mouth-wateringly good I still mentally flip back to that moment upon occasion.
But I digress. Falling in love was easy. Once the idea took root I simply had to make my plan. There are rules to this kind of thing. A nice girl, even one who’s hellbent on losing her virginity, can’t go up to a guy and say, “Hey, there, I just realized I love you, and so therefore it’s okay that we have sex, so let’s just skip the preliminaries and start thumping.” Even my teenaged logic knew that wasn’t going to fly. Sure, I might get sex out of it, but I would definitely be labeled a total wacko-hot-pants-slut-ho, so I had to run through a modicum of courtship to convince Charlie that he was the love of my life and then, and only then, could we have sex. As it turned out this courtship played out mostly in my mind because when my chance arrived, it came down to a do (me) or die kind of thing.
There were, as it turned out, several drawbacks to my plan. Obstacles to this path of romantic bliss. Drawback one: Charlie had a girlfriend. Drawback two: She was someone I actually liked.
How could that be?
I had moaned to myself. How come I didn’t know? But I was utterly determined to have Charlie for myself, so I devised a series of plots to break up the happy couple and worm my way in.
This is the lowest kind of behavior, I know. But to be honest, there was just no one else at Carriage Hill High worthy of my attention. As I’ve said before, I wouldn’t have Jackson Wright on a dare. Not that he seemed to want me after our aborted fumbling, but hey, I liked believing I was in the driver’s seat.
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