Jailbait (6 page)

“Whatever.” I mean, how should I know if Fred would like fondue or not? Besides, it's a moot point, since
Shirley hasn't cooked a real meal since TV dinners were invented.

“Your father is such a meat-and-potatoes man,” Shirley goes on. “You can cook meat in it too. Maybe I'll try that.…” Her voice trails off.

“I'm going to start my homework,” I say, turning to leave.

“Can you change the channel?” Shirley points at the TV with the tip of her cigarette. God forbid she should get off the couch and change it herself. “Put on channel two. I want to see who's on
The Mike Douglas Show.”

After I change the channel, I go upstairs to my room and put a Janis Joplin album that Mike left behind when he went off to college on my record player. Then I flop down on my bed, but before I even have time to take off my sneakers and relax, Shirley yells up the stairs, “Andrea! Turn that screeching down!”

“It's not screeching. It's singing,” I yell back before I turn the volume knob a hundredth of an inch to the left. I wait a minute, and when Shirley doesn't yell again, I lie back down on my bed, shut my eyes, listen to Janis, and think about Frank. Oh my God, I can't believe what happened to me today. A guy—no, a
man
—whisked me off and had his way with me. Well, sort of. You have to admit what he did was pretty weird, but he didn't hurt me or anything. He just ran the tip of his finger down my stomach like he was checking to see if it was dusty. But who cares? He was really sweet and gentle, especially when he put his arms around me over by the window and we just stood there being quiet. It felt peaceful, like when I hang
out by the fence with Bessie. Most people don't know how to just be still like that. I'm glad Frank does.

I reach over for Snowball, my favorite stuffed animal, and hug the soft white cat to my chest. “Do you think Frank and I will fall in love and live happily ever after?” I whisper into her ear. Then I move her head up and down like she's saying yes. Hey, don't laugh; it could happen. Donna Rizzo is totally convinced she's going to walk down the aisle with good old Donald Caruso. I wonder if Frank is even the marrying type. He strikes me more as the living-together type, which is no big deal. I don't care about a stupid piece of paper, though believe me, it wasn't the greatest idea in the world to tell the Parental Units that.

It was a Sunday morning, and the three of us were sitting around the kitchen table eating bagels spread with this putrid low-fat cream cheese that Shirley insists on buying, and reading sections of the
New York Times.
Shirley was reading the wedding announcements and Fred was reading the obituaries, which tells you something, but I don't know what.

“So guess who's getting married?” Shirley asked out loud.

“The Pope?” I asked back.

“Very funny.” Shirley shook her head. “Fred, take a guess.”

“I give up,” Fred said.

“Karen Blumenthal. And her picture's right here in the
Times.
Isn't that something?”

“Who's Karen Blumenthal?” Fred and I asked at the same time, though neither one of us really cared.

“Alice and Sid's daughter. You know, they live over on Garden Lane? That's going to be quite an affair.” Shirley licked her lips as though she could already taste the high-calorie fancy food the Blumenthals were sure to serve. “They certainly can afford it. But don't worry, Andrea,” Shirley added. “When the time comes, we'll go all out for you.”

“I'm not getting married,” I said, reaching for another half a bagel, but Shirley stopped me cold with one of her “you don't need that” looks.

“What do you mean you're not getting married? Of course you're getting married. Everyone gets married.” Shirley's voice went up a zillion decibels as she went totally bananas.

“Okay, okay, don't wig out, I'm getting married,” I said, just so she'd get off my case. “But I'm going to be barefoot and have wildflowers in my hair and my dog will be the ring bearer and it'll be up on top of a mountain and…”

“Andrea.” Shirley let out this huge sigh like the entire world had just come to an end. She took a big gulp of her coffee, which was a disgusting shade of gray from the skim milk she puts in it instead of cream, and then addressed my father. “You're going to have a lot of trouble with your daughter,” she said. As opposed to saying
our
daughter. Like Fred gave birth to me all by himself.

I put Snowball down, turn over Mike's Janis Joplin album, which is skipping—no wonder he didn't take it up to Buffalo—and start my homework. But even though I have two French lessons to go over and a ton of math
problems to solve, I can't force myself to pick up a pencil. All I can do is think about Frank.

Let's say, just for kicks, that we do get married, or at least wind up living together. What will I tell our children about the day we met? “Well, kids, your father pulled off to the side of the road and I got in his car and he took me to this empty house and drew a big fat X on my big fat stomach.” So much for telling them not to talk to strangers, like Shirley and Fred are always telling me. Which makes no sense because everyone's a stranger until you talk to them, right? So if you never talked to strangers, how would you make any friends? I'll give you an example: last year Shirley and Fred went on a cruise to the Virgin Islands, which is a weird name for a place— what do they have there, a bunch of girls who haven't done it yet, like me? Anyway, there they were on a boat in the middle of the ocean with a bunch of strangers and they all started talking to each other and by the time they got off the boat they were all the best of friends. When I said to Fred, “But that's talking to strangers,” he said that was different, but I didn't see what was so different about it. Just because they all have money and are on the same cruise ship doesn't mean they can't be lunatics or criminals or killers.

It's useless to even pretend I'm doing my homework, so I get up from my desk and flop down on my bed again. The question that's going around my mind is: why did Frank pick me? I'm not exactly a prize or anything. Like I already told you, I'm kind of chunky, and I'm not exactly the smartest kid on the planet.

I wonder how old Frank is. Not that it really matters or anything. I'm just curious. If he's around thirty, he's fifteen years older than I am, which isn't as big a deal as you might think. I mean, when I'm eighty, he'll be ninety-five, and who cares by then? Frank would probably kill me if he knew I was only fifteen. I know I look older on account of my boobs. I'll be sixteen soon, in December.

I jump off my bed—I just can't sit still today—and look at myself in the full-length mirror behind my door. Slowly, I unbutton my sweater and lift up my T-shirt, trying to see what Frank saw. There's my stomach, white and flabby as ever. I don't know what I expected, maybe that it would be marked or something, but it's not. I suck it in and wish it would just stay like that, but I have to breathe eventually and then it pops back out. Maybe I should lose a little weight so Frank will like me better.

I go over to my desk, take a piece of paper out of a drawer, and write
Frank and Andrea
on it inside a little heart with an arrow going through it and the whole bit. It takes me a minute to remember, and when I do, I crumple it up, take out another piece of paper and write
Frank and Vanessa
instead. Vanessa. God, where in the world did I ever come up with that one? “Sometimes you just kill me, Andrea Robin,” I say out loud to myself. “You really, really do.”

The problem is Bessie. Now that I actually have somewhere to go after school, I won't have a chance to hang out with her. So I decide to see her before school. It means
I have to leave a little earlier in the morning, but I don't care and the Units won't even notice. Fred usually leaves for the office at the crack of dawn before I'm even up, and Shirley doesn't rise and shine until after I leave for school because, as she puts it, she needs her beauty sleep.

I set my alarm twenty minutes earlier and I'm up and out at the ungodly hour of quarter after seven. Though why they call it ungodly is beyond me. If I believed in God, I'd think it was kind of godly right now, with everything nice and quiet for a change and the sky all blue-gray like it only is before the day begins.

Bessie's in her field, and when I call her, she comes right over like she isn't surprised to see me at all. I pull up some grass and let her take it out of my hand.

“Listen, Bessie,” I say as she chomps away. “I can't see you so much anymore because now I have a boyfriend.” She gives me this look like she doesn't believe me or maybe she does but she doesn't really care, and then she goes right on chewing. For some reason, this makes me incredibly sad. You'd think I'd be happy, for God's sake; I mean, something exciting is finally happening to me, somebody finally
likes
me, which is a total miracle, but I actually get all teary, like we're really saying good-bye.

“Listen, Bessie,” I say again, ripping up more grass for her, “we'll always be friends, right? You know that. It's just, well, you know.” She takes the grass from my hand, and I swear to God, she nods like she does understand, and that makes me a million times sadder than I already am. So I just stand there, petting her back and letting the tears roll down my cheeks.

“Frank and I…” I drop my voice to a whisper even though no one's around to hear. “Frank and I just need to be together, you know? I mean, I'm almost sixteen, I have to have some kind of life besides talking to a cow.” All of a sudden I have this mad urge to just haul off and belt her one, I really do. Why should I care about some stupid old cow? So I give her a good shove just to see if I can make her fall over, but nothing happens. It's like shoving a brick wall. I expected her to go down in a heap of old bones but she doesn't move an inch.
Stubborn as a mule
, I think, which is how Shirley describes me. Maybe she should really say stubborn as a cow.

I give Bessie another push, but my heart's not in it and she just looks at me with those big brown eyes of hers like I'm a real imbecile, which I guess I am.

“Look,” I tell her, “I have to go.” I pull up one last handful of grass and hold it out to Bessie like a peace offering. She takes it and chews it up while I walk away without looking back.

Frank's waiting for me after school like he promised. I see his brown Volkswagen as soon as I turn the corner, and for some reason half of me wants to run to the car as fast as I can and the other half of me wants to turn around and run the other way. I don't know what's wrong with me. I mean, a guy finally likes me, so what is my problem?

I walk right over to the car, open the door, and fling my knapsack into the backseat like it belongs there. Then I get in and Frank pulls away before I close the door without saying a word. No
Hello.
No
How was your day
,
dear?
I don't say anything either. I just listen to this crazy song going round and round in my head:
Over the river and through the woods, to nobody's house we go.
That is, I assume we're going to the same place we went yesterday, since I haven't been told otherwise.

I wonder if I should say something to Frank, but what? It's funny—I always wanted to find someone I could just be quiet with, somebody who didn't fill up every single second with stupid small talk like Shirley. And now that I have found someone, all this quiet makes me nervous.

While Frank drives, I pick up a strand of my hair and start searching for split ends, which is what I always do when I'm feeling antsy. I know it's a bad habit, but at least it's not going to kill me, like smoking. I split a few ends and then decide I'll wait until we go through three traffic lights, and if he doesn't say anything by then, I'll say … what? I don't know. God, I feel like a dumb blonde except my hair is brown, which is just another example of how I can't do anything right.

We go through one green light and then another one and then when we get to the third light it turns red, and Frank shifts gears, comes to a stop, and puts his hand on my leg, which feels comforting, like when you put your hand on a dog's head to reassure it. Only I wish it wasn't Frank's right hand, which is the one that has the weird pinkie. I try not to stare at it, but then I force myself to because I have to get used to his finger being all messed up if I'm going to be with him. I wonder how it happened, but I know better than to ask.