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me that Shrimp and I were: just friends, just friends, just friends. Didn't that make side orders admissible in the court of platonic aggravation? Yet right as Alexei's lips were about to touch mine, we both pulled back at the same exact second. Alexei said, "You have Doritos breath." I responded, "You have Listerine Strip breath, which is worse." Alexei looked as relieved as I felt that our strange little moment had not materialized into an actual kiss.
Maybe that Noam Chomsky guy would say I experienced a moment of clarity, because what I realized was this: not that Alexei and I weren't into each other that way, but that maybe I am capable of having a platonic friend who's a guy. Just not Shrimp.
I said to Alexei, "So if you'll turn that damn Noam Chomsky video off and put the music back on--I'll trade you Sinatra for classic Aerosmith--I might listen if you want to tell me what's so great about going off to some dumb college, and, like, what you plan on doing with your life once you're finished there."
Alexei poured us fresh glasses of sparkling cider and said, "Make yourself comfortable, Princess. It's gonna be a long night."
"Good, because since you've got me trapped, you might as well tell me all about what happened with Kari, too."
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*** Chapter 24
With Josh's getting sick and getting left behind in San Francisco, the holiday season, and Sid and Nancy taking off with Ash for Minnesota to see dying Granny A, in all that chaos we forgot a very important date that falls the week between Christmas and New Year's: Josh's birthday. The whole situation, in my opinion, was very Home Alone meets Sixteen Candles, and I was Clueless on how to solve it. Josh's friends were all gone on Christmas vacation with their families, so it's not like I could invite them over for an impromptu party, and I was not about to pull a Nancy and take him to tourist trap Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. at Pier 39 for a birthday celebration. There was nothing left to do in this crisis except turn to the one person who could figure it out for me: Sugar Pie. And man, did she come through big time.
If you need to stock a last-minute party with guests who can't leave The City for the holidays, and who might love Harry Potter more than Josh, what better venue than a nursing home--excuse me, assisted living facility? I love old people. Who else would have the time and heart to decorate their party room for an HP-themed party, with an endless supply of fruit punch, Jell-O, and Boston Baked Beans subbing for Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, on just a few hours' notice?
During the car ride over, Josh couldn't figure out why I
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was wearing a McGonagall black tower hat, or why Alexei had bulked up his clothing so he'd look even closer to Hagrid size, until we led him into the party room, where an assortment of old-timers were milling around with Sugar Pie, Shrimp, and Helen and Autumn.
Not having the best collective vision, the party group didn't notice the guest of honor's arrival until about a minute after he'd knocked over a bowl of M&Ms in his sprint to retrieve the hastily created Nimbus2000 broomstick in the corner, but the smile on Josh's face when the group finally got around to saying "SURPRISE" in unison was big. His would not be a party with a piñata, and no one in that crowd was up for a game of Twister, but a party full of HP peeps, along with many treats and grown-up dancing to a collection of popular tunes (if you're 70-plus), could more than substitute.
Hmm, future career idea to DO something: create party-planning business organizing last-minute celebrations for forgotten birthdays.
Helen, who made for an interesting almost-bald-headed Hermione with square black geek glassless glass frames on her eyes, grabbed Josh's hand for the first dance under the paper lantern hanging from the ceiling. I doubt Josh knew who Benny Goodman was, but he had no trouble pulling off a postmodern robot dance with Helen to the WWII swing beat. Alexei took Cho Chang--that is, Autumn--off for a dance, while the tiniest Dumbledore ever, Shrimp, took my hand. I've always suspected there is some magic brew between Dumbledore and McGonagall, and our slow dance to the fast number, holding each other tight, my head on his shoulder, soulful silence between us, only proved that.
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Shrimp and I danced through several songs, oblivious to the dance partner changes happening around us, until You-Know-Who--Sugar Pie--cut into our dance. Shrimp took her hand, thinking she was exchanging Alexei for him as her dance partner, but she shot him her best Voldemort death glance and took my hand instead. The two dudes left partnerless by Sugar Pie's cut-in, Shrimp and Alexei, exchanged awkward looks but did not move forward to dance with each other. They gave each other the soul brother handshake followed by the obligatory shoulder butt, then they both hot trotted their separate ways.
Sugar Pie said, "That was an awful slow, tight dance you and Shrimp just had to 'Mack the Knife.' Since you didn't notice, I'll inform you for future dances: It's an uptempo number. So is it safe to say you two are back together?"
"We're not there yet, my friend, not quite there."
"When do you think you will be?"
"Did you bring your tarot cards down for the party? Cuz I would like to figure out the same thing. It's just so... nice... between us, so it's like neither of us wants to ruin that. We are disgraces to our teenage libidos. I guess we are supposed to have some Official Talk if we ever decide to officially get back together, but we've both either been too busy or we're just dodging the topic entirely. Sugar Pie, is true love a fallacy?"
The song ended and Sugar Pie and I took seats next to the Hogwarts-decorated dining hall table heaped with cake and candy and--someone was really forward-thinking-- bottles of Turns. Sugar Pie took a sip from her Dixie cup of grape Kool-Aid and answered my question. "Maybe you ought to stop worrying so much about some idea called true
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love, and think harder about the simple, plain reality of what love you have in you to give, and receive in turn. Love that's about the person--the real person, that lost soul boy whose future plans are vaguer than yours, the one too scared to admit how much he needs you because maybe he's afraid of losing you again--and not about some romanticized notion of who you thought that person was. Think about whether you have gotten to know this person well enough this time around to have earned the right to call it love."
"Do you love Fernando?"
"Yes, I think so."
"Is it true love?"
"It's better--it's real, which makes it harder, too, sometimes. Fights and handicaps and him taking off to Nicaragua for Christmas and not inviting this old lady along and all."
Ouch. I asked her, 'Are you mad?" Sugar Pie nodded. 'Are you going to break up with him?" She shook her head no. I wanted to know, "You're not dying, right? Because you said maybe you weren't planning on living here forever."
Sugar Pie laughed. "Not that my doctor has told me, baby. I may be getting on in years, but this lady isn't planning on going anywhere. Not just yet."
Josh arrived with a THUD on my lap, and banged his head against my chest. The sugar, dancing, and an engaged audience of people who knew the Hogwarts universe better than he had temporarily spent him. He whispered in my ear, "Your other family isn't taking you away, are they?" I looked down at his worried face and suspected this was the question he'd wanted to ask me since I got back from New York
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months ago, but maybe it was his special day and Sid and Nancy being gone that had allowed him to finally voice it.
I flicked his head, our usual custom. "No, silly," I told him.
For a love child who spent the better part of her life dreaming about her other family, I've barely given them a second thought since returning to San Francisco, except for Danny, of course, who is going to be the cause of my future carpal tunnel syndrome from all the cell phone text messaging I do with him to keep in touch. I did get a Christmas present from bio-dad Frank: a blue Tiffany box containing a chain necklace with a diamond heart-shaped pendant attached, like I am a girl who wears horridly precious trinkets like that. The card inside read, for a sweet sixteen of
a girl . Trust me, there is nothing about me that Frank finds sweet. I think the word he used to describe me was spunky. (Insert puking sound here.) Last year I might have been thrilled to get such a present from him, even such a sucky one, but this year--and by the way, Frank-dude, I'm seventeen, not sixteen--the necklace only confirmed how little he knew me. I set the Tiffany box aside to donate to charity.
Autumn and Shrimp approached our seats, carrying the birthday cake I'd made Josh, as everyone in the room sang "Happy Birthday." If anyone had told me last summer that my lifetime would witness an Autumn-Shrimp b-day duo celebrating my brother, at my request, I would have either collapsed in hysterics on the spot or possibly gone postal. To quote a great lady, Sugar Pie: "Life is funny, baby, and that's no joke."
After Josh had cut the cake, Autumn came over to sit with me while Helen snapped photos of the party and got
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the digits for at least three senior gentlemen, her latest flirt pals. She's promised me she's past Aryan, over it, done, finito, but natural Helen flirting, no matter the age of her conquest, could never be off-limits. Autumn said, "This cake is delicious. You made this whole thing by yourself?"
"Guess so," I said. "Not a big deal."
"I think a banana cake with chocolate ganache filling and the best buttercream frosting I've ever had in my life is a big deal. Thank your brother in New York for passing on the recipe, from my taste buds. So in all those colleges Alexei told me he's been going through with you, did you find any with a cake-baking major?"
All the college brochures and discussions have only confirmed for me what I already knew.- College is not a place for me. I hate school, simple as that. I tolerate it because I have to, but when I'm there all I think about is when the school day will end, the weekend come, vacation start, my life begin again. I would rather study European history by going to Europe, or Far Eastern religions by traveling to China and India. I'd prefer to learn the great works of literature by watching Shakespeare in the park, and understand geometry and algebra by jumping off a triangular precipice and determining the distance to the bottom by whether the resulting injury requires an Ace bandage or a trip to the hospital for X rays. Making it through my senior year of high school--the actual school part, not the hanging with friends part--feels like I am a runner standing at my mark for the big race, waiting for the starting gun to signal graduation so I can sprint off to my future and some place that is not not not school.
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"Nan," I said. "What about you? Did you finish your apps over the break?"
Autumn said, "Yeah. And I might even have snuck in a few dark-horse contenders."
"Where?"
Autumn's index finger and thumb did the zip lip gesture around her mouth. "I'm not jinxing it."
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*** Chapter 25
The only wedding I've ever been to was Sid and Nancy's, when I was five. They got married at City Hall, and the ceremony was brief, anticlimactic, and itchy--Nancy made me wear this horrible pink frilly dress that caused a rash to break out on my chest and back. I didn't know what to expect for Wallace and Delia's wedding, but I knew they were planning a double-dose party: a joint wedding and New Year's Eve celebration packed into one long, festive night. I assumed the night would suck--any event that requires that much planning, money, and drama is destined to be a letdown--but I was still eager to see how it turned out. Bonus.- Since Sid and Nancy were out of town, I could stay out as late as I wanted because Alexei had agreed to stay in the guest room next to Josh's room for the night, in exchange for my code of silence regarding certain sexual indiscretions he'd admitted occurred between himself and his former boss, Lord Empress Kari. Well, he also agreed because in addition to being a quasi-Horrible, he's basically a good guy. I've decided to look past the Kari thing anyway, because Alexei claims his older woman thing is not about age so much as that he's attracted to really smart women, who, according to Alexei, just tend to be older. Whatever, College Boy.
I did the unthinkable and raided Mrs. Vogue's closet for the occasion. Normally I wouldn't be caught dead
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wearing any pieces from her fashion mag wardrobe, but the wedding was a black tie/evening gown occasion, and Mrs. Vogue did have a small selection of passable dresses to go along with her puke princess ball gowns. Nancy had told me not to wear black or white to a wedding, so as not to appear somber or to compete with the bride's dress, so I chose a slinky gold lamé, spaghetti strap number that dipped low at the breasts and was cut high on the legs-- especially high on me, because my legs and torso are longer than Nancy's, so the dress fell only a few inches below my butt. I tried adding a pair of Mrs. Vogue's Blahnik Choo or whatever-they-are shoes, but I kept wobbling on the spiked heels. How does Nancy walk in those fuckers and make it look so effortless? I traded the couture shoes for a pair of flat gold-sequined slippers with red patch flowers that I bought at the dollar store next to Helen's family's restaurant on Clement Street. I twisted my long black hair at the back of my head and placed two red chopsticks from the same dollar store in my hair to hold the twist, applied the dark Goth Chanel Vamp lipstick to my mouth, and I was ready to go.
"No," Alexei stated when I came downstairs, where he was waiting to give me a lift to the hotel on Nob Hill because I promised paranoid Nancy I would not drive on New Year's Eve, which she considers to be like Halloween for drunk drivers. "Go back upstairs and change. You're not wearing that." Alexei would not look like a Horrible in a tux, I suspected, admiring his buff bod decked out in sweats for his big New Year's Eve boys' night watching movies and playing video games with Josh. I so need to find for him an older woman who is not Lord Empress Kari.
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I shoved Alexei's rock-hard chest. "Shut up," I said, walking out the front door toward the car. Alexei remained standing at the doorway, as if he expected that I would, in fact, return to my mother's room to choose another outfit.
Standing outside, goose pimples forming on my bare arms from the night fog and chilly Bay breeze, I said, "Seriously, Alexei, drive me or don't, but I am freaking freezing out here, and if you don't get out here now and put the heater on in that car, I am calling a cab."
Alexei, defeated, grabbed his keys from the hallway table, but then walked to the coat closet, rifled through it and pulled something out. When he came outside, he placed a long black pashmina wrap around my shoulders. "Modesty," he said as he opened the car door for me. "Learn about it."
In my eagerness to go to this wedding, I arrived way too early at the hotel, so I milled around alone for a while. I read a trashy celebrity tabloid in the gift shop, but that felt like bad karma so I left. Then I walked around the lobby fountain until I decided to kill the remaining time by taking a stroll around the little park across the street from the hotel. From the street at the top of Nob Hill, I could see the Bay Bridge and the Transamerica Pyramid, but what I particularly noticed was a familiar figure standing under a palm tree in the park, smoking a cigarette.
Wallace must have been nervous, because he is not a cigarette smoker. But how beautiful did he look in his tuxedo, his long brown hair falling in waves from his head, the front strands tucked behind his ears, and his big beautiful eyes staring off into space. If I were an artist I would have mummified him on the spot, to perfect him for eternity. Wallace whistled when he saw me. "Whoa! You sure
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weren't named Cyd Charisse for nothing!" He smiled, but the hand he held out to me, offering me a smoke, was shaking a little, and not from the cold Bay wind.
"You doin' okay?" I asked him, feeling a blush hot on my cheeks. I shook my head to the cigarette offer.
Wallace said, "I'm good. It's all good. Last-minute jitters, you know. How you doin'? Just think: A couple years from now, this scene could be you and my brother taking the plunge."
I've never thought of myself as being the marrying kind, but Wallace's comment made me realize that (a) Wallace thinks of Shrimp and me as a couple, not "just friends," and (b)
I am getting to be old enough where marriage wouldn't necessarily have to be this vague idea; it's something I could actually do if I wanted.
"Hardly," I said. "Marriage is stupid." Marriage to me is something that lonely people or pregnant people do. It's a nice enough institution, I suppose, for the right type of person, but not one with which I plan to bother. True loves don't need an official wedding license to validate their lives together.
"You're not helping," Wallace said with a laugh.
Damn me and my foot-in-mouth disease. "I didn't mean, like, stupid waste-of-time stupid. I meant I'm too young to think about it for myself." That was a lame recovery, but the best I could come up with in the moment. "Delia is a great girl, and I know you two will be very happy."
Wallace let out a little snort. "Happy, yeah. If we can ever get Iris and Billy out of our house. I tell ya, when the parents move back home... The slackers have no respect for the time and money it takes to maintain a household.
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Parents today--what are ya gonna do?" Wallace stubbed out his cigarette on the ground. "Guess I'd better head back in; it's getting to be show time. See you in a while?"
Wallace leaned over toward my face, like he was going to kiss my cheek good-bye, but instead his lips grazed mine for an electric second. The kiss was romantic but at the same time innocent, as if he was saying adios to his single life and I to my crush on him. The fact that Wallace is a perfect ten-point-ohhhhh on the babe scale forgave the fact of his cigarette breath. After he'd pulled back I took a tissue from my purse to rub the slight Chanel Vamp lipstick stain off his mouth. Then I gave him a playful slap on the cheek. He winked at me before taking off back to the hotel across the street.