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Authors: Cecil Castellucci

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BOOK: The Queen of Cool
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Unfortunately, I know exactly how she feels.

I love drinking beer in the rec room.

My mom and dad bought the keg. That is the concession that they made to keep me from going out into the wild world of New Year’s Eve. A keg is cheaper than the fake New Year’s Eve plan I proposed, which involved an unchaperoned trip to Las Vegas. I have learned that the best way to get what I want is to propose something wildly out of the question to my parents. Then they always say yes to the much milder Plan B.

My mom comes into the room. She points at the pile of shredded clothes.

“What are you kids doing?” she asks. She picks up a frayed sleeve. “Isn’t this the sweater I bought you for Christmas?”

“Mom. The theme is Fashion Deconstruction,” I inform her. “You must put together an outfit if you are to come in here.”

“Oh, Libby,” Mom says. “You are so creative.”

She rummages through the pile and pins a stray flower onto her dress before I give her permission to come in and check up on us.

Kenji follows right behind her and puts a stocking on his head like a cap. He looks like a pirate or a thug.

Whatever. He looks hot. I’ll definitely be doing more than kissing him at midnight.

Around eleven p.m., Tiny arrives. I didn’t think she would actually show up. Per our deal, she doesn’t bring anyone with her. I thought for sure this would scare her off. I mean, really, who shows up to a party alone?

“Hi!” she says, giving me a big wave. She goes all out and begins to pin together an outrageous-looking outfit. Everything in the clothes pile is cut up small, and yet it still looks too big on her.

She helps herself to a beer and makes her way over to me. She is saying hello to every person, introducing herself, shaking their hands when they’ll let her.

She’s so painfully friendly.

“Hi!” she says, all smiles. “I knew this party would be cool.”

“You made it,” I say, smiling but not really feeling it.

“How’d you get here?” Kenji asks. “I didn’t think you could drive.”

“Sheldon drove me,” she says. “I told him you lived up high in the hills, so he said he’d drive me and find a good spot to stargaze. I’m going to call him when I’m ready to go.”

“Oh, brother,” Kenji says.

He slides his hand into the back of my jeans and pinches me.

Perla joins us from the pile of clothes.

“I really like your dress,” Tiny says, pointing underneath the elements that Perla has added to make her ensemble.

If there’s one thing Perla likes, it’s to be flattered.

“Thanks! So this dress is
classic.
It’s vintage Patricia Field. From the
eighties.
I mean, my mom said that all the actresses want a dress like this. I’m
so
cutting edge.”

“Wow,” Tiny says.

Perla has this way, when she wants, of making you feel as if you’re the only person in the room. She’s doing it to Tiny now. She’s drawing her in, as though she’s telling her a secret. Tiny moves in closer; she can’t help it. No one can.

“I know, right?” Perla says. “I’m probably going to be famous.”

Tiny is now giving Perla that stare. She’s under the spell of Perla, the one where you want to be near her, the one where you want her to be your friend so badly no matter what comes out of her mouth, because she just looks so good.

And Perla loves the attention. She lives off the adoration. And as I am watching them together, I’m surprised to see that they are actually getting along. They are really talking, about actors, movies, and directors, stuff that I know nothing about. I am almost jealous of how easily they talk to each other.

Tiny is
my
freak. Not Perla’s.

I start listening again.

“Check it. I made this agreement with my dad,” Perla says. “I pass my classes and then he makes me a star. He wants to create a reality show for me. I’m thinking of calling it
Perla’s Party.

“Great title,” Tiny says.

“I know, right? And then, obviously, my career will skyrocket from there — roles in major movies, guest TV appearances, my own talk show. My father says the world is my oyster.”

“Wow,” Tiny says. “It’s so much easier for average-size people to get a break in Hollywood. Or anywhere, really.”

“Oh no. She did
not
just say that!” Perla starts throwing gestures around with her attitude hands and looking at me for an explanation.

I shrug. I don’t know what she’s talking about. I don’t know what just happened. I don’t know what Tiny just said to make Perla freak out.

So Perla turns back to Tiny.

“Did you just call me
average
?”

That’s the moment when everything in the room stops.

“Duh!” Tiny says. “You
are
average.”

Now Tiny looks over at
me
to back
her
up.

I am standing right between them.

I look at neither of them. I look at the half-empty cup in my hand.

The word
average
is just out there, hanging in the air like a big social mistake. Tiny doesn’t know what she’s done. She was just being honest.

“There is nothing
average
about me,” Perla says.

“Oh no, no, no. You misunderstood me,” Tiny says, laughing. “I said average
size
. . .”

But it’s too late. Perla moves on because she does not understand what Tiny is saying, and now any inroad that Tiny has made is gone. Evaporated. Finished. Perla will never see Tiny as anything other than a freak. A freak who thinks
she
is average.

I could save the moment. I could clear the air. Or I could speak up and say something cutting to Perla. Perla deserves it for being so dim. But I just can’t say anything without ruining my own night.

I guess I’m just selfish that way. So instead of opening my mouth, I take another big sip of beer.

I look at Tiny, who’s trying very hard not to break her happy face. She doesn’t understand why the attention Perla was giving her has suddenly been taken away. She doesn’t understand that she can’t be herself with these people. Nobody here understands her, or wants to.

But I think I do.

“Excuse me,” Tiny says. “All this beer, you know. I have to use the bathroom.”

“’Cause her bladder is so
small,
” Perla says to me, then laughs and moves over to the snacks.

I watch as Tiny makes her way down the hallway, but she passes the bathroom door and pulls out her cell phone. It’s pretty clear she’s not coming back into the party.

I know that if the shoe were on the other foot, Tiny would go out of her way to make sure I was okay. Like she did with Matthew, the Fat Boy.

“That little freak has a big set of balls,” Perla says, rejoining me with a plate of food. Pink cake, sugared doughnut holes, heart-shaped cookies.

I wish I could say, “For someone so beautiful on the outside, Perla, you’re ugly and average on the inside.”

But it’s too late to move now and do what probably would be the right thing. Tiny is gone, and the countdown begins. Now everyone at the party is too busy clinging to the person next to them as they yell the numbers backward down to one.

“HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!” I shout.

And then I grab Perla’s hand, squeezing it a little tighter than I should.

“When I was young, we all pitched in and cleaned up the day after a party.”

Dad has his cranky pants on because Mom said he couldn’t watch the Rose Bowl until he’s finished helping me.

“You were never young,” I joke.

But there is a certain new spring in his step as he scoops up plates and napkins and dumps them into the trash.

“Oh, I was, once,” he says. “One New Year’s Eve, I held a girl in my arms all night. Solange. I was in Paris doing my year abroad. She had the longest eyelashes.”

“Dad, you are totally grossing me out,” I say.

He brings over a tray of half-full beer cups, and we begin pouring out the liquid into the laundry room sink.

“When I was there, I lived in the Thirteenth, in the Parisian Chinatown. The restaurant next door to me was closed for the holidays and so they had given me bags and bags of fortune cookies. Solange and I must have opened up hundreds of fortune cookies that New Year’s Eve, just to get the fortune we liked best.”

“That’s cheating,” I say. “Only the first one counts.”

“You’re right,” he says. “Because my life was not filled with great fame and fortune.”

I suddenly remember that Dad has a tattoo of a fortune cookie on his shoulder.

He plugs in the vacuum cleaner, and if he has anything else to say about his youth, the words are sucked up by the noise in the room and the stupid grin on his face. Dad is lost in his warm memories.

He pushes the machine, forward and backward.

Forward and backward.

In the car I pick up my cell phone three times to call Perla to come shopping with me. And three times I hang up the phone before I finish dialing.

I know that she will talk about herself the whole time and not let me get one word in. She will tell me how the clothes I try on would look better on her. She will bitch and moan about boys, how they love her too much or they don’t love her enough. She will change the name of her reality show twelve times between the parking lot and the Forever 21.

When I hit The Grove, I immediately regret being there by myself. Everyone seems to be hanging out in groups.

And I can’t decide which sweater to get.

I cave in.

I call Perla.

She meets me within the hour.

“I just love having the whole day to myself,” Dad says. He’s reading the newspaper cover to cover these days, because with no job to go to, he has all the time in the world.

“Why don’t you try to do something useful while I’m at work and clean out the garage?” Mom suggests.

“Okay,” Dad says enthusiastically. “I’m on it!”

“And you,” she says to me, “I expect the kitchen to be clean when I get home tonight. Ever since we let Nastja go, I’m overwhelmed. I just can’t do it alone.”

Her voice has this pinched tone to it all the time now. It’s alarming, and I can’t finish my grapefruit. The acid just sours in my stomach.

She picks up her keys, briefcase, and packed lunch and heads out the side door to the garage.

Dad and I look at each other for a minute before he sighs and says, “I love all the freedom I have, but I can’t stand being stuck in the house all day. I miss having my company car.”

“Do you want a ride somewhere?” I ask.

“That’s nice, yeah. Can you drop me off on Vermont Ave.? Maybe I’ll browse around at Skylight Books.”

On the way there, I try to remember what it was like before I got my driver’s license, when I was stuck in the house with only my feet to move me anywhere in the too-big city of Los Angeles.

Dad sits in the passenger seat, looking out the window. Daydreaming. Just like a little kid.

BOOK: The Queen of Cool
11.05Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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