Wild Child (32 page)

“After the Okra Festival.” They passed under the oak trees into the square. Mrs. O’Hara sat in the park watching her grandson, and Shelby waved.

“You’ve got everything you need for the book?”

Monica sighed, watching the kids splashing in the water fountain. One kid stripped naked and Monica laughed—the woman had the bawdiest sense of humor. Shelby turned left away from the center of town, toward the high school. “I do. I can make it work.”

“You know,” Shelby said, “it’s not really my business to say, but if you were ever interested in writing books for young adults, teenage girls … you’d be good at it. I think your wisdom and your experiences are wasted on adults. It’s titillation to adults. Kids, though … kids you might be able to help.”

“That’s a very nice thing for you to say.”

Shelby laughed, knowing a brush-off when she heard one. “Well, here we are,” she said when they reached the entrance to the high school.

“Right.” Monica looked up at the stone façade. Small but grand, like most of the public buildings. “This town has real delusions of grandeur, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” Shelby said. “But I like it. Why not go for grandeur, right?”

The parking lot was half full, and the high windows
of the gymnasium were filled with light. “What’s going on here?” Monica asked.

Shelby knew a thousand stray-dog looks. People from all over three counties dropped dogs out on the road past her house and barn. Abandoned dogs showed up on her porch all the time, and Shelby had to call Animal Control in Masonville to come handle them.

Monica had a stray look about her. Not the look of the angry strays, the ones who tried to bite the hand she held out to them, but the sad ones who wondered how they got so alone in the cold, dark night.

“You should come in,” Shelby offered, unsure of what Monica would do with the invitation but feeling like it needed to be made. No one should seem so alone. “The girls will freak out. In a good way.”

“Freak out, you say?” Monica asked, surprising Shelby. “Why not?”

Monica remembered with a potent mix of fondness and embarrassment her first forays into fashion as an extension of her personality. Her rebellion. There was the ripped flannel phase, followed quickly by the safety-pin year. And then there were the various and subtle variations on stripper clothes. Corsets with combat boots. The fakest black leather pants with white tank tops. But as she walked into the gymnasium, the dresses were variations on one theme: princess.

And for a moment, it was so simple, so exactly as it should be, that she felt emotion well up in her throat.

The girls did freak out, running over to her—only because she was the closest thing to a celebrity they’d encountered—in a rainbow array of sequins and sparkles. They tripped over their fluffy skirts, waddled in their too-tight skirts. It was a very awkward stampede.

“You guys all look amazing,” she told the crowd.

“All right, everyone spread out,” Shelby said, taking control of the situation. There were a few mothers there and they started unrolling elaborate sewing kits. “If you need hems, stand over here,” she said, pointing to the area under one of the basketball nets. “If you need straps adjusted, stand over there. Everyone else, hang out in the middle.”

The sea of satin parted, and Monica glimpsed sitting on the end of the bleachers a girl still wearing shorts and a tee shirt, her long blond hair hiding her face.

“I’m going to go talk to Gwen,” she told Shelby, who nodded in quick agreement, her mouth already full of pins.

Gwen, when she heard Monica approach, looked up and immediately blushed. “What are you doing here?” she asked, and Monica did not try to tease out the various strains of embarrassment in her voice.

“I’m the fashion police,” she said, sitting beside her. Monica finally shrugged out of her laptop backpack and it felt like she was dropping a thousand-pound stone off her back. Her tee shirt was stuck to her skin with sweat. Reba jumped up on the bleachers beside her. “Why aren’t you in your dress?”

“It’s … it’s lame.”

“Oh, how about you let me be the judge of that?” Monica joked. “It’s why I’m paid the big bucks.”

Gwen sighed and unzipped the black garment bag beside her just enough that Monica could see a cream strapless tulle dress embroidered with chocolate, mocha, beige, and metallic gold flowers. A pleated gold ribbon circled the bodice and waist.

“Oh my God,” Monica said, reaching out to touch it. “Is that vintage?”

“It was my mom’s. I found it in the attic.”

“Oh, oh wow.” Monica was actually starting to hyperventilate as she unzipped the rest of the bag, revealing
a full skirt with two layers of tulle underneath, one of them a full crinoline.

“It’s old-fashioned,” Gwen lamented.

“It’s amazing,” Monica gasped. “And you … oh, honey, you will look amazing in it.”

“But all the other girls—”

“Who cares?” Monica demanded. “Honestly, Gwen, do you care what the other girls are wearing? You’re different and you know it.
They
know it. You’re wearing that eye makeup so the whole world knows it. Why stop now? Let your freak flag fly, my friend, in this stunning dress.”

Gwen smiled shyly, and Monica nudged her with her shoulder. “Go put it on. I’ll be right here.”

Gwen left and was back in about five minutes, slinking along the edge of the gymnasium so no one could see her. But she was impossible to miss. The dress was a little too short, but that could be fixed. And a little too loose up top, but that could be fixed, too.

The color made Gwen’s hair look like gold, and her tanned skin was bronzed.

And while all the other girls looked like children pretending to be women, Gwen looked like a woman. A brand-new, beautiful woman with nothing but the best of life ahead of her. She looked like feminine hope brought to glittering, sparkling life.

“I look like an Academy Award statue,” Gwen said, as if that were a bad thing.

“You look like a woman,” Monica said, and Gwen’s eyes lifted to hers. Monica spun the girl around and zipped up the rest of the dress. “Like a beautiful woman. Gwen, you are gorgeous.”

“She’s right.” Shelby came up behind her, armed with pins and big office clips. In record time she had Gwen’s hem down and repinned, and then the bodice fixed with the clips.

Gwen transformed under the efforts, standing straighter and lifting her chin. Monica could feel the attention from all the other girls in the room. “You look awesome,” Ania said, wearing a sea-foam green mermaid dress that made her look like a little girl playing dress-up.

“Thanks, Ania,” Gwen answered.

“Here.” Shelby turned the girl around and force-marched her across the wooden floor over to the mirrors leaning against the Bishop Bulldog painted on the gym wall. Monica followed, happy to see Gwen beaming at her reflection. “Tell me you don’t look great.”

“I … look pretty great,” Gwen said.

“I’m going to keep pinning,” Shelby said, then walked off toward the crowd of girls with straps hanging down their arms.

“But it’s really old-fashioned, don’t you think?” Gwen asked, turning sideways.

“Vintage tends to be that way.”

“Do you think … do you think there’s a way to make it look more modern?”

Monica lifted her eyebrows and looked over Gwen’s shoulder at the girl’s reflection. “Gloves,” she said, and Gwen nodded. “Maybe the kind without fingers.”

“Cool,” Gwen sighed.

“And I have this set of three brooches, very glittery, very fake, but we could put them right here …” She touched Gwen’s waist, just above her hip bones. “That would be pretty funky.”

“Funky would be awesome.”

“We could do a modern beehive look, too, and some smoky eyes and nude lipstick. Very James Bond Girl.”

Gwen clapped, looking more her age than Monica had ever seen her, and Monica got caught up in the excitement. “I’ll go and get the pins and see what I have for earrings.”

“Can I come with you?” Gwen asked.

Monica nodded, and she unzipped the back of the dress a little so Gwen could do the rest of it in the bathroom. “Go change real quick, and don’t knock loose any of those pins or Shelby will kill you.”

Within ten minutes, Monica and Gwen were punching open the back doors to the school and stepping out across the football field toward the Peabody. As they walked through the tall grass, bugs buzzed up around them.

“So how are things going?” Monica asked, feeling stuffed full of feminine bonhomie. Honestly, nothing like a little dress-up to lift a woman’s spirits.

“Jay wants to have sex.”

Monica lurched to a stop in the grass and whirled to face Gwen, who was staring intently at her feet. “It’s been like a week and a half.”

Gwen shrugged, her fists shoved into the pockets of her cut-offs.

“You’re not thinking about doing it, are you?”

Gwen blushed bright red, and Monica realized she probably could have been a whole lot more diplomatic on that topic. “Are you … I mean … Do you even like him?”

“I don’t know if you know this, but you don’t have to love someone to have sex with them.” The sarcasm was unmistakable, and the words were so similar to what Monica had told Jackson about sex and marriage that she had to laugh. She started walking again, out of the grass and onto the track.

“Well, you should at least really, really like him.”

“Do you really, really like Jackson?” The girl wasn’t fishing. She knew, the same way she’d known the first time Gwen and Monica met that Monica was lying about the dog.

“How did you know?” Monica asked.

“Everyone’s talking about you guys on the
America Today
clip, and Jay saw him sneaking up to your room a few times.”

With no idea of what to say, Monica started walking a little faster. Gwen skipped to catch up.

“I’m not mad,” Gwen said.

“It’s not really your business to be mad,” Monica said. “Your brother and I are adults. And yes. I like your brother very much.”

“Why?” The word was loaded with such bias and confusion that Monica stopped again. Was Jackson blind, she wondered—did he really have no clue what the distance between him and his sister was doing, the alienation Gwen felt?

“Your brother is a really good man. But he has a hard time letting people close.”

“He let
you
close.”

Not close enough
. “Let’s get back to the important topic here. You are talking about having sex with a kid that a week ago you didn’t like very much.”

“He’s nice, and … I’m curious.”

“Curious is a bad reason to have sex. And trust me, I know all the bad reasons there are to have sex.”

“I … like him. A lot.”

“How do you know that after a week?” As the words were coming out of her mouth, she realized she’d known Jackson for only two weeks. Oh man, she was so over her head with this conversation! And part of her wanted to brush Gwen off, to play it safe and tell her to go talk to Shelby or something. But the truth was, Gwen had come to her.

And Gwen didn’t have a mother. All she had was Jackson, and there was no way Gwen would bring this up with him.

So Monica took a second and remembered what it was like to be sixteen, running away from her own mother and right into some bad sexual decision-making.
What would have helped her? she wondered. What advice might have saved her some heartache?

She stopped walking and put out her hand, and Gwen stopped too. “Are you really serious about this?”

Gwen shrugged.

Monica fought the desire to roll her eyes. Those shrugs, honestly—who was she kidding? Tortured teenage angst rolled off the kid; she was the farthest thing from indifferent.

“Do you know anything about your body? I mean … do you know how you like to be touched, or more importantly, how you don’t like to be touched?”

Gwen turned beet red and stepped backward, away from Monica. “Never mind, forget I brought it up.”

“Oh,” Monica said, smiling. “It’s only gonna get worse.”

She pulled open the door to the Peabody and there was Jay behind the desk. How incredibly fortuitous! Now she could say to Jay what someone should have told the boy she’d had her first sexual experience with.

At the sight of Gwen he just beamed, sunlight and adoration spilling out of the kid. That was a very good sign.

“Wait here,” Monica said and went up the stairs to her room. She grabbed the jewelry from her bag, as well as some clip-on fake diamond earrings she got from a thrift store in Chicago, and then from the bedside table she grabbed a strand of condoms from the box she’d bought a few days ago.

Downstairs, Gwen and Jay were deep in conversation. Or rather, Gwen was talking and Jay looked like he might spontaneously combust.

“Okay,” Monica said, approaching the pair. “Here are the pins and some earrings that might work.” She set them on the front desk and then put the condoms
down next to them. Jay jumped away as if she’d fired a gun. “Do you know what those are?”

She glanced between the two silent teenagers.

“Someone needs to say something.”

Gwen quickly gathered the condoms and shoved them in her pocket, looking around as though she’d been caught stealing. “They’re condoms,” she breathed through immobile lips.

“If this is the way you act at the sight of condoms, there’s no way you’re ready for sex,” Monica said. “But I also know that my opinion isn’t going to change things. I hope … I hope you guys take the time to get to really know each other and really know each other’s bodies—”

“I want to die,” Jay breathed, staring at his shoes.

“Now, should you ignore me and this amazing advice I’m giving you and decide to have sex: You. Must. Use. A. Condom. You must. Got it?” The kids nodded at her, unable to make eye contact, but that wasn’t good enough for Monica. “Jay, look at me.”

He groaned as if lifting his eyes to hers hurt. “Got it?” she asked.

“Got it,” he said.

“Me too,” Gwen said, and then she nearly ran out of the building.

Monica watched her go.

“Monica,” Jay said. “Can you … can you please leave now?”

She laughed. “See you later, kid.” And then, just to torture him, she lifted two fingers to her eyes and then pointed at him. A little Robert DeNiro, for
I’ll be watching you
.