Lone Star (11 page)

Y
OU HAD TO GIVE IT TO HER.
L
ANG TRIED.
B
Y HERSELF SHE
took Chloe to apply for a passport. Turned out both parents had to be physically present to sign the application. With Jimmy in tow, Lang quickly filled out the papers while Chloe, bored and hungry and anxious because her mother was anxious, tried to distract her father. The scene would've been funny had her mother been less stressed out. Her dad, bless him, was barely paying attention to the words Lang was writing down, but when it came time to sign, he moved Lang's hand away from the paper so he could sign his name by the X at the bottom. That's when he casually glanced over the document.

“Mother,” he said, “why are you so careless? You're as bad as the incompetents in the school records department. Look, you've misspelled her name.” He turned to the postal clerk. “Dave, get us another application, will you? My wife here doesn't know how to spell her own daughter's name.”

“Sure thing, Chief.”

“Thanks, buddy. Careful this time,” Jimmy told Lang. “Want me to do it?”

“No, your handwriting is terrible. I'll do it.”

“At least I know how to spell.”

“Who can tell? No one can read it.”

He watched her.

Lang gestured to Chloe, who again tried to distract her father
with idle chatter about the upcoming prom, graduation, her dress, a limo, a chaperone. Lang said her pen was running out of ink; could Jimmy go get her another?

He went, but as soon as he returned, he peered over the top of her rounded shoulder.

“Lang! You did it again. What's the matter with you? I don't know what's wrong with your mother today, Chloe. Dave, sorry, I need one more application.”

Lang sighed and straightened up from the counter. Chloe stepped away. She made eye contact with Dave and shook her head, as if to signal him to wait, but also to scram because all kinds of crap was about to go down inside the peaceful Fryeburg post office on a weekday afternoon.

Lang placed her hand on her husband's chest, on Chloe's father, Jimmy Devine. “Jimmy,” she said mildly. “Wait.”

He waited.

“I didn't misspell it, Jimmy,” Lang said. “Look.”

She thrust Chloe's birth certificate into his face. Jimmy stared, perplexed. Plain as noon, printed in black, with a raised seal from the state of Maine confirming the official nature of the words was “Divine.” Preceded by “Chloe Lin.”

Jimmy understood nothing. “For eighteen years you knew the registrar's office misspelled our kid's name and you never told me?”

“Oh well.” Lang patted him. “Nothing we can do about it now. Let's sign and go.”

“Nothing we can do about it?” he bellowed. “Of course there's something we can do about it.”

“Not in time for her to get her passport for Europe.”

“She can't have a passport with her name misspelled in it, Mother,” Jimmy said in his best no-arguments-will-be-entertained chief-of-police voice. “A passport is good for ten years. But a mistake like this is forever. No.”

“Jimmy.”

“No! I said we will fix it and we will fix it.”

Lang did not raise her voice. “It's not misspelled, Jimmy,” she said. “That's what I told the lady to write.”

“What lady?” He was dumbfounded.

“The lady at the hospital who came to take the baby's name for the birth certificate. I told her to write
Divine
.”

“Well, the idiot clearly didn't hear you correctly. Chloe is not going to have the wrong name on her passport because of a typo.”

“It's not a typo, Jimmy. I spelled it out for her. I told her to write D-I-V-I-N-E.”

There was commotion at the post office. A man was taping a box shut, the plastic ripping off loudly. The metal door to the postmaster's quarters slammed, a phone trilled, somebody laughed.

Jimmy was mute.

“It's not a typo,” Lang repeated. “I wanted her to be Chloe Divine.”

“You made a mistake.”

“I wrote Divine on purpose.”

“But our name is Devine! With an E!”

“I know that. But not her name.”

Jimmy stammered. “What are you saying, woman? That you deliberately gave my daughter a different last name from her father?”

“Same name. One letter different.”

“That's a different name!”

“No. Just one different letter.”

“A different
name
!”

“Jimmy.”

Jimmy was hyperventilating.

Chloe tried not to laugh. She knew her mother was being disingenuous, for no one knew the power of a letter or two better than Lang, who could have been Lin, which meant beautiful, or Liang, which meant good and excellent, or Lan, which meant orchid, but instead she was Lang, which meant sweet potato.
Lang knew the difference between Devine and Divine very well, which is why she changed it in the first place, why she wrote it with an I, why she kept it from her husband for nearly eighteen years. She knew. Divine: altogether marvelous and lovely, celestial and glorious, of the gods, with the gods, exquisite, heavenly, limitless and great.
Divine
.

A
T THE END OF
J
UNE,
C
HLOE WENT TO HER PROM.
I
T WAS
held in the glass ballroom at the Grand Summit Hotel in Attitash, at the foot of the White Mountains. All the boys dashing, all the girls beautiful. Chloe tried not to judge through her mother's eyes: Who was on parade at a bordello? A few would've fit that description. Mackenzie O'Shea in particular. The trouble with Mackenzie was that she thought herself to be quite a tasty morsel. Chloe couldn't figure out why Mackenzie annoyed her so much. Plenty of girls at the prom were dressed much sluttier.

Mason did his best to match his gray cummerbund to Chloe's funky pewter jewelry and silk silver dress. Hannah, of course, was a tall glass of water in a clingy mango dress, almost like a slip, with shoulder straps and a bare back, but Hannah had nothing to reveal under her dress except skin, no folds, no fat, no breasts, no sags, nothing unseemly, nothing out of proportion, nothing to make her self-conscious. Her dress was low cut, but because she was so slim, she didn't look slutty, she looked royal. Chloe, on the other hand, couldn't wear anything low cut for obvious reasons, and she couldn't wear anything too high necked because then she looked like a retiring female politician. She couldn't wear an open-back dress because she required a full-back bra to contain what she normally contained under three or four layers of clothing.

After searching for most of her senior year, Chloe finally found something—a granite flapper dress, vintage and hand beaded in glass. It had a cascading fringe, a straight fall, and an almost modest V-neck. She wriggled into a square-necked black Spanx slip to cover up her cleavage, and after putting on black eyeliner and black satin sandals, was generally pleased with her almost Audrey Hepburn–like appearance. She left her hair mirror-shiny and down, and wore a red lipstick and a red rose corsage to contrast with the silver beads. She also contrasted well, she thought, against Mackenzie's pink tutu of a dress, against the girl's infuriatingly long legs and cheap stilettos. Mackenzie's straps looked ready to snap at any moment—on her shoes
and
her shoulders. What a mess that girl was. Why didn't the boys think so?

While Hannah and Taylor and Courtney spent the day fussing with their hair and makeup, Chloe was done by one. She then sat on her manicured hands and waited, dreaming about Europe and fretting about traveling from Riga to Barcelona.

“It's two thousand miles by train, Chloe,” Blake had said to her. “What's the big deal? In July a band of men travel two thousand miles up the French Alps on their bikes. It takes them three weeks. You're telling me we can't do the same sitting on a train?”

Chloe had been wrong about Blake. As soon as he heard of the new plan for Europe sponsored by Moody, he produced maps and atlases, guides on the Baltics, a Latvian–English dictionary, several
National Geographic
s about flying around the Baltic Sea, and a story on the last of the Polish Jews. Absurdly, he acted more excited about going to Riga than to Barcelona. He told her he had always wanted to visit Vilnius. Chloe corrected his geography, told him Vilnius was in Lithuania, not Latvia, and he corrected her right back, telling her that you couldn't get to Poland from Latvia without first going through Lithuania and the Gates of Dawn. Jostling Hannah, shaking her like a bear shakes a rabbit in his mouth, play-punching Mason, filling his notebook with
pages and pages of notes and facts and stories and asides about Riga and Vilnius and Warsaw, a thrilled Blake acted as if it was paradise already.

The girls had seen their boys in suits once before, at a funeral, before Chloe and Mason started dating, but tonight was different. Mason, of course, was groomed like a country-club lawn, but even Blake had made an effort to comb his hair and trim his stubble. It was funny how he tried to fit his all-over-the-place riotous self into a black tux and patent-leather shoes. Though he looked handsome, he didn't look as if he were born to it. After a dozen attempts to fix his crooked bow tie, Hannah gave up.

Chloe and Mason had been nominated for prom queen and king. The king and queen were voted on as a pair, and Chloe knew she was holding Mason back from winning. Without her he would have been prom king for sure, but she was never going to be prom queen, not even in a dress with beads shimmering and clinking like champagne glasses. It's an honor just to be nominated, cooed Taylor, trying to stay positive. The week the nominations had come out, Chloe had found an anonymous note stuffed into her locker.
How does it feel to know you are keeping that boy from winning what is rightfully his?
Chloe threw the note in the trash, but she thought about it now, on the dance floor with Mason. She could hardly ignore the thick impression that other girls thought she wasn't good enough for
that boy
.

Fed up with their (imaginary?) glances, Chloe excused herself. In the bathroom, she took off her dress and squirmed out of the suffocating Spanx. Her liberated breasts rose up in rebellion out of their gunmetal V. With full cleavage on display, she looked much less like Audrey Hepburn and more like a squat Sophia Loren. Perhaps this was a more fitting look for an almost prom queen.

She strode out into the ballroom where Mason was waiting. The way he smiled at her, it was worth it to overlook for tonight one of her mother's more critical mottos against wearing
inappropriately revealing clothing. Mom, she wanted to say, tonight my dress is appropriately revealing.

Mason was a great and special boy. Although he wasn't much of a dancer, he kept up with Chloe song after song, dancing alongside Blake and Hannah, doing the Macarena, seeing how low he could go under the limbo stick. Pretty low, it turned out. Lower than Blake. She touched Mason's face as they danced. She kissed him. On the dance floor she was allowed to do this. The Academy's six vile lunch ladies had transformed themselves into equally vile prom chaperones. They waddled between the tables like malevolent mallards, quacking their disapproval, but they stayed away from the dancers.

Although the occasion was jolly, Hannah seemed less jolly than usual. When they had a minute to themselves on the floor, Chloe pulled Hannah close. Keith Urban's “You'll Think of Me” was playing.

“What's the matter with you?” she said to her friend.

“Nothing. Why? Do I seem off?”

“Little bit.”

“No, I'm fine.” Hannah patted Chloe. “It's all good.”

“You look beautiful.”

“You too. Very va-va-voom.” Hannah sighed. “He's threatened suicide, you know.”

“Who?”

“Says he can't handle it. What am I going to do? How am I going to go to UMaine, knowing I'll run into him?”

“I don't know,” Chloe replied, a little too loudly and brightly, as if delighted by the possibility that Hannah might consider not going to UMaine.

“Maybe I should just join the Peace Corps.”

“The what?”

“Why not? I'm an idealistic young person. I'd like to visit Ecuador. They travel all the time. I'd meet new people. Experience different cultures.”

“Um, are you selfless and unobtrusive?”

“Sure, why not?”

“You know they don't get paid, right? They're volunteers. It's not like joining the army.”

“I won't need any money. I'll be in Ecuador.” Hannah's long arms draped over Chloe's neck. She smelled of Dior Poison. It drowned out Chloe's gentle musky scent. Chloe patted Hannah's bare back. She could feel the blades of her shoulders, like fence boards.

“The Peace Corps has been in the news lately,” Chloe said. “And not in a positive light. They may have forgotten their initial objectives.”

Hannah chuckled, pulled Chloe closer, ran her hand over Chloe's hair. “Silly girl,” she said. “I love how you're always trying to talk me out of bad choices. Don't worry, cutie. I'm not serious about the Peace Corps. Besides, I can't
not
go to UMaine. I'd never leave you there by your lonesome. So don't worry.” A pasted-on smile greeted Hannah when the girls disengaged. “Cheer up,” Hannah said as they made their way through the taffeta and satin jungle, searching for their dates. “Like you said, we're not Darlene Duranceau. Everything's still ahead of us.”

They got separated. Chloe remained at the edge of the pulsing, strobe-lighting floor. Somewhere on the other side of the ballroom, near white walls and glass doors, reflected in black windows and royal mirrors, Chloe glimpsed Mason, his spiky hair, smiling mouth, delight, bow tie, surrounded by a flurry of shiny silk snowflakes, a lake of reflected satin and soft flesh. In other words, encircled by the cheer squad, blonde hair and soprano giggles all. They were trying to ensnare him in their ribald karaoke routine. In the strobes Mason was being girl-handled, teased, laughed at, pawed. It all throbbed across in fractions of real time, two seconds of black followed by a neon explosion. Chloe couldn't even be sure it was him. It could have been nothing more than a flash of athletic-field memory. After school, she sits in the bleachers and does her homework,
while on the field Mason pitches and flirts with the flirty girls. But mostly he pitches, and mostly Chloe reads, and it's only for a fraction of an image between blinks and pages that Chloe thinks, is there something else there or is it just innocent adolescent fun? She barely even thinks it. She feels it, and in only two or three beats out of a whole minute of her heart.

“Chloe,” a voice says. She blinks and comes to.

Blake was in front of her, smiling, appraising her with his familiar eyes, soaking up her shiny baubles, glittering beads, perhaps other luscious things.

“Have you seen Hannah?”

“She's looking for you. Seen Mason?”

“He was over there.” Blake waved to the glassy parquet. David Bowie started up. Almost involuntarily their bodies moved up and down and sideways to the pulsing one-TWO, one-TWO of “Let's Dance.”

As they were already gyrating, they gyrated toward each other, looking around for Hannah, for Mason, Chloe trying to make her breasts bob less (not easy) and make her tacked-on smile less fake. Her ears ringing like the bells of Notre Dame, Chloe wished she could check her watch. David Bowie was so loud. Oh my God, she thought, am I really that old? Is David Bowie
too loud
for me at seventeen? Let's dance.

Maroon 5 came on, kinder, softer, better, lights flashing, bodies inching closer, and she and Blake inched closer with apologetic smiles. Sorry there's no one better to dance with to Adam Levine, their awkward expressions read. Then he opened his arms. She raised hers and stepped up to the Blakeplate. Placing one hand into his, she rested the other on his large tuxy shoulder. She felt the pressure of his palm low around her waist, felt his open fingers not just resting against the back of her flapper dress, but holding her.

“Look, I shaved,” he said into her ear. “Do you see?”

She saw.

“Do you like it better like this, or normal?”

What was the thing to say here? “Either way's fine.”

“Do you know this song?”

“What?”

He leaned down, toward her, close. “This song, Chloe,” he screamed into her perforated eardrum. “‘She Will Be Loved.' Do you remember it?”

She knew it well. Everybody knew it. The boys and girls sang it as they played volleyball in Gym, as they ran up and down the stairs, as they spring-cleaned the front lawn for field day, as they devoured their sandwiches at lunch. They sang it, they knew it. “She Will Be Loved.” She pretended she didn't hear him or that it was too loud to reply that of course she remembered it. She nodded in the general direction of his shaggy curly head.

“Are you excited!?”

“About what?”

“I don't think I've ever been as psyched about anything in my whole life. Riga! Vilnius! Warsaw!”

And
Barcelona,
she wanted to add to his litany of paradise, but there was no point—he wouldn't hear her. She tried to catch the floating threads of his voice. The music was so relentless. Where was the prom queen who didn't belong to him? He searched for the eighteen-year-old every day for miles. Your dress is pretty, Blake might have said. Very sparkly. You and Mason light up the floor.

“What did you say?” she yelled. Her heart was full.

“You smell so good,” he said, his head near her perfumed earlobes. “What is that?”

“Jovan Musk,” she yelled back. “And Love's Baby Soft!”

Where was Mason? She flew across the bodies, searching for this mysterious Mason, and found him entombed in a bevy of loathsome beauties dazzling him with their best cheer moves. Come hither, said the spiders to the fly.

“He's not happy,” Blake yelled, warm breath in her face, his
eyes merry. “No boy likes that kind of attention. Makes him feel like a hog at a fair.”

In a moment of swoony weakness, Chloe leaned her cheek against Blake's black lapel. His big hand tightened around hers. His palm opened wider against her back.

She caught herself, and blessedly “She Will Be Loved” was over.