Laura Ruby - Good Girls (3 page)

"Sure, guys," I say. "Anytime."

They all let out a whoop as I push past them. Morons.

I motor toward the gym. Out of the corner of my eye I see a finger pointing my way and hear someone laughing, but when I turn, all I see is a row of backs. I start to get a weird feeling, of the weight of eyes, of newly focused attention. In gym, as me and Joelle are

29 pretending to concentrate on the basketball drills, Jeremy Braverman, who has said all of three sentences in three years, says, "I love how you dribble those balls, Audrey," over and over again, until Joelle gets shrieky and hysterical and beans him in the head with one of them. I get a note in French class: "Sur vos genoux!" On your knees! I turn around to see who wrote it, but no one will meet my eyes. The French in my book blurs into incoherent babble. Did Luke blab to his stupid friends? Did he tell them what we did? No. No! He never talks about his hookups. Don't ask, don't tell, he'd say. That was always his deal. So what was going on?

By lunch I can't take the snickering and the weird- ness. I make Ash take us to the McDonald's just to get out of the school. "I think someone's spreading rumors about me. I'm getting all these looks. It's making me crazy."

Ash steers the car around to the drive-through win- dow and orders us fries and Cokes. "Really? I haven't heard anything," she says. "Maybe Pam Markovitz is shooting her mouth off. You know what she's like. And she was so jealous of you at the party on Saturday. Pathetic."

"What should I do?" I say.

"Oh, who cares about a bunch of ho's and dumb- heads?" Ash tells me. "They'll be babbling about some- thing else by sixth period." Because I forgot to bring

30 cash, she pays for the fries and Cokes and pulls out of the parking lot.

Just as I'm about to open the white bag, my own cell phone buzzes and I scratch around the floor for it. I flip open the phone and check the screen. "Picture mail," I say.

"Maybe Joelle is sending some of the shots she took at the party," says Ash, smashing a fry into her mouth. "I don't know why she bothers. They always suck."

An image pops up and I scroll down to see it. At first I don't understand what it is. And then my insides turn to ice.

"Ash," I say.

"What?"

"Someone took a picture of me."

"Yeah, so?" She looks down at the phone, frowns. "What is it?"

"It's me, Ash. Me and Luke. We were . . ." I trail off, staring at the screen. Luke's head is cut off, but the pale skin of his chest and hips glows in the dark, and his hands clutch fistfuls of the bedspread. Between his knees, a cascade of waist-length blond hair striped with black.

Ash pulls the car over to the side of the road and slams on the brakes. She grabs the phone. "Oh, God," she says. "Who took this?"

"I don't know."

31 "Where were you?"

"Upstairs in one of the bedrooms."

"Audrey, why didn't you close the freaking door?"

"We did!" I say. "Someone must have seen us go in. Someone must have opened it."

"You didn't hear anyone? You didn't see anything?"

I try to think. The music was so loud--you could hear it coming through the open windows--and then there was the noise that Luke was making. "No," I say. "I didn't hear anything. And I had my eyes closed. I guess Luke did, too."

"Schweinhund," she says. "Do you think he planned this?"

"Who?"

"Luke!"

"What? No, I . . ." My head is shaking no no no, but I'm not controlling my own muscles.

And then it hits me all at once. Cindy Terlizzi's slow smile in study. The pointing in the hallways. Pete and the rockheads. Jeremy Braverman, braver than he'd ever been before. "Ash, it's the picture." My stomach does liquid flips and I thrust the fries from my lap. "Someone's been sending around this picture."

32

T he parking lot of the school. I don't want to

get out of the car.

"Look," says Ash, "let's skip the rest of the day.

I don't care if we get in trouble. We can hit the

movies or something."

Movies? I can't think, I can't concentrate. I can't

understand this. Who took this picture? Who sent

33 it? The return-mail address on the message meant nothing to me. Ash says we can trace it, but I say, Who are we? The freaking FBI?

The phone is still open on my lap. Everyone who gets this picture will know it's me. No one else has hair like this. I wish I'd hacked it off long ago, but I didn't because it was the only thing that made me special. Real special, now. My stomach is locked down so tight that I can't even throw up.

"Say something," Ash says.

This is my private thing, and now it's porn. I feel like someone stole my diary and read it out loud over the speakers. Except that I don't keep diaries. I don't even have a blog. "What am I going to do?"

She doesn't answer, just takes my hand and squeezes it. I would cry if I had any moisture in my body. My throat is dry and scratchy, my tongue a dustrag.

"So do you want to cut for the rest of the day?" Ash asks me.

I want to cut for the rest of the day, the rest of the week, the rest of the year. I want to cut till I go to col- lege. But I have a history test in the afternoon, and if I cut, I'll miss it. The history test was important before, but now it seems like the most important thing in the world. I have to take that test. I have to ace that test. It's the only thing I can do.

"No," I say. "I've got a test."

34 "Audrey, come on--"

"No," I say again. "If I cut today, it will be worse tomorrow."

"Okay," she says. "I'll walk you to your locker."

We get out of the car and walk to the back doors, the doors to the senior wing. The sun has stopped shining, but the air still feels oddly warm and heavy and damp. I'm slogging through molasses, or through dense foliage in some hot, stinking jungle. We push open the doors and immediately the eyes are on me again, the hands hiding wide, smirky grins. It must be all over the school, the bits and codes and ones and zeros flying from one phone to the next, assembling themselves into skin and hair, hands and knees. A hundred blondes between two hundred legs. Me. And me and me, and on and on.

The people part before us and line up on either side of the hallways to watch us go. I hear someone murmur something, and Ash's head whips around. "Shut up, Arschloch," she hisses.

We get to my locker and I go through the motions of getting my books. Calc, English, history. We are doing the Constitution in history class, and I run through the amendments in my head. First, free speech and freedom of the press; second, the right to bear arms; third, the right of a property owner to keep soldiers out of his home; fourth, the right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. Unreasonable

35 seizures. Is this a seizure? It feels like one. Someone has ripped my skin off, and all my arteries are hanging out. I can only imagine what they're thinking, what they're saying. Her? Man, who knew the honors chicks were so easy?

There's a collective hiss from the crowd in the hall. I hear "Luke! You didn't answer your phone, dude. You have to check this out."

I don't want to look, but I can't stop myself. I turn and see Luke surrounded by a clot of guys, one of them brandishing a phone.

"What is it?" Luke says. He takes a long, lazy pull on the milkshake he must have bought at lunch.

"Just look at it!"

Luke shrugs and takes the phone. One of the rock- heads points at the picture helpfully. "This has got to be Audrey Porter," the rockhead says. He says it loudly and clearly. He doesn't care if I'm ten feet away. He doesn't care if I hear.

Luke suddenly stops walking, and the rockhead rams into him. Luke blinks at the picture, his brows beetling as if he's annoyed. Then he thrusts the phone back at the rockhead. "You don't know who that is."

"Come on! That's Porter. Gotta be. Is that you with her?"

Luke walks quickly down the hall toward me. He's not looking at me and Ash at all. His eyes are trained

36 straight ahead, at the doors at the end of the hallway. "You can't see their faces," he says. "That could be any- one."

"No way," says the rockhead. As the group passes by, he jerks his head toward me. "Look at the hair."

"Whatever," Luke says. He doesn't turn my way, just keeps walking. He flicks a hand at the phone. "You guys can find way better stuff on the Internet, if that's what you need." The group floats down the hallway, around the corner and out of sight. I can still hear the gurgling sound of Luke's straw as he polishes off his milkshake.

Pam Markovitz saunters over, with Cindy Terlizzi bringing up the rear like an overeager Maltese. Ash tenses up, waiting for one of them to say something, anything, so that she has an excuse to cut them down. But Pam tips her head, sucks on one of her incisors, and smiles with her kitty-cat teeth. "That was cold. Kind of makes you wish you were a lesbian, doesn't it?"

Oh, yeah, I wish I were a lesbian. An away-in-the- closet, never-had-sex, never-admit-it-to-myself les- bian. Instead, I'm me in calculus, where we are doing limits and continuity. One must be able to calculate limits for the integers x and y. Ms. Iacuzzo's drone could put a coke fiend to sleep, but our calc book is enthusiastic. It has exclamation points. Pick values for x and y! Guess what you think the limits might be!

37 Test your conjecture by changing the values! The book says calculus is fun! And! Useful! It is useful today, to the uncloseted unlesbian. I'm so busy pick- ing values and testing my conjectures that I can't think about who took a picture of me going down on Luke at Joelle's party; I can't think about Luke himself, his lips so warm when he kissed me and his face flat and frozen when he passed me in the hallway. x is 2 and y is 3. x is 19 and y is 40. x is � 435 and y is zero.

In English, Mr. Lambright hands back the first drafts of our Much Ado About Nothing papers and there is much ado when the people see all the red marks tattooed on them. No fair! I can't even read your handwriting! I worked for two weeks on this draft! Ron Moran, our probable valedictorian, sits smugly at his desk, looking out the window, his paper branded with the customary "EXCELLENT!" Mr. Lambright likes my ideas but thinks I need to work on smoother transitions, I need to link this thought to that thought, one foot in front of the other, like when I walk down the hallway from English to history and I see the faces staring and the mouths snickering and Pete Flanagan shaking his hips and sloooooowly unzipping his fly.

History class. I sit in the back of the room, but I've forgotten about Chilly sitting right next to me. See Chilly snicker. See Chilly stare. See Chilly clap his hands to his cheeks in pretend shock. Hear Chilly say, "Who

38 knew you were such a ho?"

I know what I should say: With anyone but you. But I can't bring myself to do it, my mouth is too dry. I don't look at him or look at anyone else; I focus on the amend- ments, one, two, three, four, five. I sing the Preamble in my head, the way it was sung on the old Schoolhouse Rock CDs my parents bought me when I was a kid. "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, estab- lish justice, insure domestic tranquility-e-e-e." After the bell rings and Mr. Gulliver passes out the tests, I start scribbling. The answers come hot and fast, filling my head. I write until my hand cramps, till the bell rings.

Chilly says, "Ho, ho, ho!"

Chilly says, "Saved by the bell."

Chilly says, "Girls gone wild!"

Chilly says, "Oh my goodness! What will your par- ents do when they find out?"

I fling my test on Mr. Gulliver's desk and run.

I don't wait for Ash. This little piggy runs all the way home, the whole mile, pack banging into my back with every step. I know what I'll find when I open the door: my mom, sitting at the kitchen table, laptop in front of her, staring off into space or staring into the screen.

But this is not what I find. I open the door and my mom is standing by the kitchen sink, frowning into it.

39 I should say something. I say, "Hey."

"Look at this," she says, pointing down. "Is that a cricket? Or a grasshopper?"

I look down. Brown bug, big eyes, long legs made for jumping. "Why doesn't it jump out of the sink? Why is it just sitting there?"

"I don't know," my mom says. "It's dumb?"

"Maybe it's dead."

"Poor bug. We'll leave it in peace for a while. A little monument to nature." She pats me on the head--I'm taller, but she still pats--and opens the fridge. She pulls out a Fresca. She lives on Fresca. Grapefruit soda with no calories. I tell her about the carbonation causing bone loss in perimenopausal women (hey, I watch Dateline NBC), but she says that since she can't smoke or drink caffeine, what's a little osteoporosis? She tries not to take me too seriously. She tries not to take anything too seriously. She says we have one life and we need to cele- brate every day. Her new book, called Do You Know the Muffin Man?, is about a cheerful but murderous baker. She's been researching all sorts of muffin recipes and tries them out on us.

She holds out a plate. "Cranberry-orange-oatmeal," she says. "A little gritty, but good."

"No, thanks," I say.

She breaks off a bit of muffin and pops it into her mouth before setting the plate back on the counter. "Are

40 you okay? You look a little peaked."

"I'm fine."

Mom raises her brows but says nothing. She'll wait me out. That's what she does best. Waits. It took her ten years to get a book published, but she never seemed to mind. I like them, she'd say. Maybe someday someone else will like them. And then someone did. Small pub- lisher, but good enough. Patience is a virtue, she says, but I'm not like her. I can't wait for anything. I'm six- teen, but I'd rather be twenty-six or even thirty-six, free and out in the world, a place where you could sue peo- ple for taking pictures of you, a place where people pay for what they do. But then, maybe I am.

She takes her Fresca back to the kitchen table, which is strewn with papers and books and Cat Stevens. "Anything happen at school today?"

I think about my mom's books. No one has ever done more than kiss in any of them, and that was only once. "Not much," I tell her. "I had a test in history. The Constitution, amendments, blah blah blah. I did fine. And I got my draft back from Mr. Lambright."

"Transitions again?" my mom asks.

"What do you think?"

"You never liked transitions, even as a baby. You went from crawling right to running."

"Walking was too slow," I say. "I had places to be." It's an old joke, but this is what we do, so I do it. Her

41 laptop is set to purr every time she gets an e-mail, and it's purring now. She has her own website, Elainepenceporter.com, and her e-mail address is right there for anyone to find. Anyone can write her. Anyone can send her anything. And I know they will. Why wouldn't they?

I sit down at the table. Cat Stevens gently gnaws on my fingers; he loves fingers. I'm not sure if he thinks they're food or what. My mom taps a few keys, scrolls down, taps another key or two.

I wait for the other shoe to drop. Or is it the axe? The knitting needles? The muffins? "Anything interesting?"

"Nah," she says. "Not unless we need a new mort- gage or some Viagra."

I try to laugh and instead make a sort of strangled sound. "Is Dad still at the store?" My dad owns a formal- wear shop--wedding gowns, party dresses, that sort of thing.

"When isn't he at the store?" my mom says. "He should be home about seven or seven thirty." Angel is also her store--they opened it together fifteen years ago. She still works there on weekends, and so do I when I don't have too much studying. Dad never leaves. And even when he's not working, he's working.

Her computer purrs again. More mail. Click, click, click. Frown. "What?" she says, more to herself than to me. But of course I know what.

42 "It's a picture, right?"

She glances up from the computer and considers me in her careful way. She tips the screen so that I can see what's on it. Two striped kittens, with the message "My new babies, Bastet and Vladimir!"

"Oh," I say. "Cute."

"You were expecting something else?"

I should tell her. I want to tell her. I don't know how. What are the words? Mouth? Head? Me? I say, "No."

"No?"

I shrug like I don't know what she's talking about. Silly mom!

"Uh-huh. Well. I'm assuming you have a mountain of homework to do, yes?"

"Yeah. I've got to work on those transitions for Mr. Lambright. Otherwise I won't get an A."

"Oh, my!" she says, with mock horror. I sigh, and her expression softens. "It's your senior year. I think you can relax just a little."

"Like you?" I say, pointing at her computer.

"Don't you worry about me, I relax plenty," she says. "It's you I'm concerned about."

"You should worry about Dad," I say. "He's the one with the high blood pressure."

"Which you'll have before you're eighteen. You're just like him." She smiles at me. "Audrey, I think you can start having a little bit of fun. So you don't get an A

43 this once. So you get an A minus. Is that really the worst that could happen to you?"

I can't look at her when I answer. "No. I guess not."

I go up to my room and throw my knapsack on my bed. I feel sort of itchy all over, and I'm not sure what to do with myself. First I go over to the toothpick village. It is what it sounds like it is, a village built out of tooth- picks and Popsicle sticks. I've got houses, a couple of churches, stores, roads, a windmill, whatever--all painted and mounted on a slab of wood. I started build- ing it when I was nine, right around the time I got sick of Barbies. Every once in a while, I work on something new. It's a totally twisted, pathetic hobby, I know, but I've always loved building things. It's sort of like medi- tation, except for, you know, the toothpicks.

But today, the toothpick village isn't cutting it--I can't think of a single thing that I'd want to add, and it seems like nothing more than a kindergartner's art proj- ect or a load of firewood. So I sit at my desk. I flick on the computer and the machine hums to life and starts pinging, meaning I've got about four thousand instant messages. I don't even want to read them. I start delet- ing them, but I can't help but see a few, mostly from IM names I don't recognize: