Ruby Unscripted (12 page)

ME:
I think I'm purple.

I write to Frankie when I get home, once again so tired that it's hard to walk up the stairs to my room. I have homework and I'm hungry, but I know I need to talk to Kate before I sleep.

ME TO KATE:
Can you talk?

KATE:
So you don't like Nick now?

ME:
Yeah. I do.

Something's up with Kate, though her words make me realize that I haven't so much as asked about Nick in two days. And I never called him like I said I would. There was something Kate was going to tell me about him, and I never even asked.

ME TO KATE:
It's not easy fitting in here and keeping up with the old.

FRANKIE:
Purple huh? Like Prince or Barney the dinosaur.

ME TO FRANKIE:
Purple like me.

FRANKIE:
Hmmm. You know purple is sometimes considered the gay color.

ME:
Well, not that purple either.

FRANKIE:
Is there something wrong with gay purple?

ME:
Uh, I didn't mean anything by that.

FRANKIE:
LOL Kidding. So what are you up to, Purple? You're going to have to explain that by the way.

ME:
Unpacking my room, starting homework, and talking to friends online.

FRANKIE:
Busy busy.

I take a drink of Diet Pepsi and accidentally push a book and school papers that fall behind the desk. It takes wedging my feet against the wall and pulling to budge the heavy desk from the wall. As I pick up the papers, I notice that a board on the back of the desk is loose, with an edge of something sticking out of the bottom of the board. I carefully pull out an old photograph. It shows a woman sitting on a stone fence with the sea in the background.

I write to Frankie and forward to Kate:

ME:
I just found a really old photograph behind my aunt's desk.

KATE:
Cool. So you aren't going to say anything about what I said?

ME:
What did you say?

RE-SENT FROM KATE:
So we're the old? All of us in Cottonwood are the old and it's too hard keeping up with us?

ME:
Oh! I didn't mean that. Knock it off. You know I didn't mean it that way.

FRANKIE:
An old photograph in your aunt's desk? Maybe auntie has a dirty little secret.

ME TO FRANKIE:
It's an old photograph, like at least fifty years. And don't talk about my aunt that way.

FRANKIE:
Oh, a mystery for Nancy Drew. Hey, you could be Nancy Drew, that's a good title for you.

ME TO KATE & FRANKIE:
On the back it says To my beloved Beatrice. This one photograph I release from my collection to you. Thank you for coming to the shoot that day by the sea. May the future hold such wonder as our days in France. Yours always, E

KATE:
Cool.

That's about all the interest those two have in the photograph. As if they are the same person. I smile to myself as I consider that.

Kate and Frankie have to go at the same time. I'm distracted over the picture, staring at the woman's face—she's quite beautiful in that old-fashioned way—and wondering who she is.

I realize after she says good-bye just how strange Kate has been acting during our conversations. She must be mad at me, and I'll need to address that soon. Though usually she'll outright tell me she's angry. Quick and unexplained good-byes aren't like her.

I try to focus on my WWI workbook questions while only occasionally talking to one friend or another. Mostly it's the same catching up on the same details of Cottonwood: someone was in a fight and it's the big scandal, Randy is going to enter a snowboarding competition, Alisha's boyfriend is cheating on her but she doesn't believe it, Nikki picked out a yellow dress and Nick refuses to get a yellow tie for prom (and he still wants to talk to me, but I've been avoiding that conversation), Felicity agreed to go to the prom with Josh though she really wants to go with Harlen . . . stuff like that.

I keep looking at the photograph. It's distracting me from the 1918 assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb student in Yugoslavia. Finally I run downstairs with the picture in my hand.

“Mom, do you know a Beatrice or someone with the initial
E
?”

She's working on her laptop, sitting on the couch with papers spread all around her. The fire crackles, and part of me thinks to come downstairs and do my homework at the coffee table near her.

“Uh,
E
? There's Ernest Hemingway,” she says, her eyes not moving from the screen. Her reading glasses are inching down her nose.

“I mean in our family. Or someone Aunt Betty would know.”

“Hmm. Aunt Betty's name is actually Beatrice. Why?”

“Mom, Mom!” Mac comes running from outside. “Ruby, Ruby!”

“What, what!” I say.

“Come out here quick. You need to see this guy.”

Mom and I give each other a knowing look and sigh, then get up and hurry to the front door. Just then a guy makes a circle and waves, riding a sort of motorized unicycle with a headlight and what appears to be a solar panel rising above him on a metal bar. He tips his hat at my stare and is gone before I can wave back or smile or respond at all.

“Only in Marin,” Mom says.

Back inside, I show Mom the picture. She studies it and reads the back. “This is interesting.”

“Do you think this is Aunt Betty?” It's strange to imagine my quirky old aunt as this young, thoughtful woman.

“The photograph looks like it's from around the fifties or maybe older. So it could be her.”

“Did she go to France when she was young?”

Mom sits back on the couch and picks up her laptop, then pauses. “You know, I think there was some scandal with Aunt Betty when she was in her early twenties. She ran off to Europe or something. We'll have to ask her when she returns. If she'll tell us.”

I survive Day 4 of Marin High.

Lunch with Frankie and his friends helps a lot, except for Blair.

“So you're a Christian?” she asks with a short laugh.

For a second, I hesitate. Usually I might be embarrassed or intimidated by such a question, but she makes me want to fight back. “Yeah.”

“And why would that be? Why are you a Christian?”

Frankie comes to my rescue. “What are you, Blair, darling?”

“I'm Blair. I believe in me,” she says with confidence, and the conversation thankfully goes another direction.

Then I see Super Jock across the quad. He followed me around earlier, again calling, “Hey, New Girl.” When he sees me sitting with Frankie and friends, a surprised expression comes over his face. I think he'll leave me alone now.

A strange pride surrounds me as I sit with Frankie and friends at lunch. Maybe it's that I'm hanging out with the kind of people I'd be terrified to sit with before. Maybe it's just that I'm no longer sitting alone.

Hours later, when I arrive at work, I see a check with my name on it. My first job, my first check. It's for $87.50 after taxes. I want to kiss it and jump up and down. Instead I slide it into my purse and get my apron, already picking out things to spend it on.

The first three hours of work slide by. My favorite trio of old men is there, as usual. They sit around talking about their most recent marathons or news and politics or their aches and pains. And they love flirting with me, which is quite humorous since they're certainly all over seventy.

I'm cleaning beneath a small table where a cute little kid made a very uncute mess when I hear some girls talking at a table nearby.

“I've seen her before,” I hear someone say.

Wet globs of cracker are stuck to the table legs. The girls are looking at me. Do they really think I can't hear them from only three tables away?

“She just moved here from some hick town.”

“How do you know?”

“My mom knows her aunt. She wanted me to be friends with her or something.”

I hit my head on the table but keep cleaning.

“Her name is Amethyst or Emerald or something like that.”

“It's Ruby,” I say, finally standing. “Can I take any of those plates for you?”

“Ruby—that's like an old, old, old-fashioned name,” one girl says. She's blonde, beautiful—the stereotype for all those mean girls in every teen movie known to mankind.

I say, with the nicest of smiles, “Yes. Or Ruby for the slippers that Dorothy wore.”

She laughs with a mocking tone. “There's no place like home, there's no place like home. So, Dorothy, isn't it true that the customer is always right?” She glances at her friends with a superior air.

“I'm sure that depends on the business.”

“So does your boss tell you that the customer is always right?”

“Is there a problem?” I'm trying to take the lead from Aunt Jenna and only show cheeriness, and boy, it's harder than it looks.

One of her friends is hiding her laughter behind her hand.

Another girl nudges her and says, “Leave her alone. Come on, guys, let's go.”

“I have a complaint. My mocha is cold.”

It really is like one of those teen movies where the beautiful rich girls are picking on the normal girl who will someday rise above them all, get the cutest guy in the school, be voted homecoming queen . . . It's exactly like one of those—I hope. And somehow because it is so unreal, movielike, I find it completely comical, really, so wildly humorous and stereotypical . . .

And so I laugh.

It's not just a chuckle, not even from the start.

It's a true-blue guffaw.

The girl's mouth drops. Actually, all of them at the table look at me with expressions of shock, which makes me laugh all the more.

The girl stands so fast her chair falls over, which increases my laughter. She scoops up her Gucci purse and glares at me.

I sputter between my tears, “I'm sorry. It's not about you, really. It's just—”

“Let's get out of here. You're a freak,” she spits.

Two girls stand, but the others remain.

“Are you guys coming? London?”

“No, I'm gonna hang here awhile longer. I'll catch up with you later.”

The girl London was the one who told the mean girl to leave me alone.

I try going back to cleaning up tables, but I can't stop laughing. I turn away from the group, doing that silent laugh thing where your body shakes and any second you'll burst out and cause unknown havoc.

“Your employee is bad for business,” the girl calls out to my aunt.

I realize Aunt Jenna has witnessed the whole scene.

“I know,” she says with a wink at me.

The hours pass quickly after that. Near closing, I go downstairs in search of plates or cups left behind. In the main theater, I look up at the screen for a moment and breathe in the faint scent of popcorn. I have always loved the movies. This might be the first time I've been in a theater alone though. I sit down and lean back in the chair.

“Hey, could you get the lights?” someone calls behind me, and I jump to my feet.