How They Met and Other Stories

  “So, Gabriel…?”

  I can’t believe I’m doing this. I can’t believe I’m doing this.

  “You wanna—I dunno—get coffee or something sometime?”

  Justin smiled. “Not coffee. But yes.”

  “Not Coffee it is, then.”

  “Yes, Not Coffee.”

  As Arabella emerged from the bathroom, hands freshly washed, Justin ran for a pen, then came back with his number on a napkin. Untrusting of napkins, I entered it into my phone.

  “Tomorrowish?” Justin asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “Tomorrowish.”

  Arabella looked satisfied, but I couldn’t tell whether it was from what she’d just done or what I’d just done.

  On the way out, she gave me a hint.

  “You’re going to call him, right?” she asked.

  And I said, yes, I was going to call him.

  When we got to the first block, she took my hand. And for the rest of the afternoon, she rarely let go.

  That night, Aunt Celia got a call from Elise. Aunt Celia’s side of the conversation went something like this:

  “Hello, Elise…. Oh, it was fine…. Yes?…No! Already?…I see…. Yes, he’s right here…. That’s really amazing, isn’t it?…No, I’m sure he won’t…. I’ll make sure he does…. No, thank you, Elise. Talk later!”

  Aunt Celia hung up, then shocked the heavens out of me by saying, “I hear you’re going on a date tomorrow.”

  I still hadn’t called Justin—I figured waiting until eight was a good idea, for some arbitrary reason—but I figured that since it was going to happen, I could tell her, yes, I had a date tomorrow.

  “You know,” Aunt Celia said, “Elise told me that Arabella was good, but I had no idea she was that good. Three days!”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Oh, you’re the fourth of Arabella’s minders to have been set up by her. It’s remarkable, really. Maybe I should start taking care of her!”

  “She didn’t set us up,” I said—but immediately I started to wonder. I mean, I was sure I’d had something to do with it. But maybe not everything….

  “You’re not to quit on Elise, do you understand?” Aunt Celia continued. “The last girl, Astrid, did that. And that other girl—the one who ended up in India with her girlfriend. Poor Elise—she loses sitters faster than I lose umbrellas.”

  “I won’t leave her,” I promised.

  “And you won’t run off to India?”

  “Just Starbucks.”

  Aunt Celia grimaced. “Starbucks is so crowded,” she judged.

  “But you do what you want.” She gestured toward the take-out menus and told me to order what I wanted for dinner. “I won’t be back too late,” she told me. “Nor too early, for that matter.”

  I waited until she was gone before I took out my phone…and the green H&M wallet. I imagined myself filling it with lucky pennies and love notes and photobooth strips of Justin and me in playful poses.

  “You’re such a goofball,” I said to myself.

  I discarded the notion of waiting until eight and dialed his number. I already had my first line ready.

  “You’ll never believe this,” I’d say. Then I’d tell him the whole story.

  Except for the wallet. I wouldn’t tell him about the wallet.

  I’d save that for an anniversary.

  MISS LUCY HAD A STEAMBOAT

  The minute I saw Ashley, I thought, Oh shit. Trouble.

  You have to understand: I grew up in a house where my mother told me on an almost daily basis that until I got married, my pussy was for peeing. In her world, all lesbians talked like Hillary Clinton and looked like Bill, and that included Rosie O’Donnell especially. My mother didn’t know any lesbians personally, and she didn’t want to know any, either. She was so oblivious that she stayed up nights worrying that I was going to get myself pregnant. There was no way to tell her the only way that was going to happen was if God himself knocked me up.

  Luckily, I’d learned that the best defense against such hole-headed thinking was to find everything funny. Like the fact that all the sports teams in our school—even the girls’ teams—were called the Minutemen. All you had to do was pronounce the first part of that word “my-newt” and it was funny, like suddenly our football team had Tiny Dicks written on their jerseys. Or the fact that in the past calendar year, my mother had hit so many mailboxes, deer, and side mirrors that her license had been suspended. I chose to think she did it on purpose, just so I’d have to drive her around and hear her advice on boys, school, and how bad my hair looked. Hysterical. And, best of all for a quick laugh, there was Lily White—that was her name, swear to God—who certainly enjoyed kissing me in secret. But then when I brought up the idea of, hey, maybe doing it outside of her house, she shut down the whole thing and said to me, “None of this happened.”

  Well, I knew a punch line when I saw one. So the next day at lunch, when no one was looking, I spilled her Diet Coke all over her fancy shirt and said, “None of this happened.” And the next day, my bumper just happened to ram into the side of her daddygirl Cadillac. I left her a note: None of this happened. And it didn’t happen the next day, either.

  I, for one, was amused.

  It was hard for me not to feel a little stupid about Lily White. Not because it ended or that it had gone on for three months, but because I’d started it in the first place. Lily was the popularity equivalent of a B-minus student—never the brightest bulb in the room, but still lit. She never laughed at a joke until she saw other people laughing at it, too. Even when we were kissing, she never seemed to admit that we were kissing—it was like I was saying something she couldn’t hear, and she was just nodding along to be polite. The first time we got together, it had less to do with romance and more to do with Miller Lite. It took just two cans for her to turn playful. We kissed; it was nice. And for three months we pretty much stuck to that. The kissing was hot, but Lily was pretty insistent about not letting the fire spread. Every time I tried to take her clothes off, she suddenly had somewhere else to be. Every time I felt her up, she acted like my hands were cold. And every time I tried to go near her pussy, it jumped away.

  I could lie and say I swore I was through with girls, but really I figured I needed to find someone better than Lily White. When Ashley Cooper came to town, I was primed.

  She made one hell of an entrance.

  She was ten minutes late to homeroom, because in her old school homeroom was at 8 and in our school it was at 7:50. Nobody’d told us there was going to be a new girl; they never do.

  What I’m saying is: I wasn’t expecting her. Then suddenly there was this girl in front of our class, trying to explain to Mr. Partridge who she was, only Mr. Partridge hadn’t heard a complete sentence since he was eighty, which was a long time ago. He was telling her she was late, and that he was going to mark her down for being late. She made the mistake of asking him if he even knew who she was, and he shot her a look like she’d just told him that World War II was over. Then he shook his head and said, “Sit down, Antonia.”

  Man, she looked awesome. Short red hair, full full lips, shirt so tight you could check for tattoos underneath. Most of us put up with Mr. Partridge when we had him for history because at the end of each marking period we could steal his marking book, change the grades, and know we’d be getting A’s. But Ashley wasn’t the type to let it go. “Who’s Antonia?” she asked. “I’m not Antonia.”

  “Hell you’re not,” Mr. Partridge chided. “Sit down!”

  I thought she’d storm back out; she had that pose. But instead she turned to the class—we were all treating this like gossip unfolding before our eyes—and said, “Who the fuck is Antonia?”

  I was so snagged. There was no way I could say something to her. But there was no way I could ignore her, either.

  “Antonia’s my sister,” I said.

  Ashley walked over to me.

  “Do I look like her?” she asked.


  “No,” I told her—it was really the truth. “But I don’t look like her, either, and that’s what he calls me all the time.”

  “So he thinks I’m you?” She didn’t sound offended by this, which was a start.

  “He’s looking forward to the day that a man walks on the moon,” I replied. “Don’t take it personally.”

  “I try not to take anything personally, Antonia’s Sister.”

  I had looked at her eyes for a split second, but now I was looking at her arm. The light from the window was hitting it and I couldn’t stop staring. I’ll admit it—I have a thing for a little hair on a girl’s arms. Not head hair or anything like that—just that soft, translucent hair that looks like a spider wove it. She had that, and some freckles, too.

  “You’re new here,” I said. I mean, duh.

  “It shows?” she said in a dumb-little-girl voice. She tilted her head to the rest of the class. “Do they always stare like that?”

  “I’m not sure they’ve ever seen a nose ring before. They probably think you’re from MTV.”

  I don’t think Ashley was expecting me to joke. Her laugh caught even her by surprise. She kinda laughed like a barking seal. It wasn’t very cute, but it was definitely sexy that she didn’t care.

  “I’m starting to see why Mr. Ancient up there thought I was you.”

  If she’d asked me to jump her right then and there, I swear I would’ve. It’s like my mind and my body had the same voice, and they were both yelling, Hell, yeah. The only difference being that my mind, which knew a little better, added, Oh shit. Trouble.

  “So do I get your real name?” she asked as the bell rang and we had to head to class.

  “Lucy,” I told her.

  “I’ll be seeing you around, Miss Lucy,” she said.

  That sealed it. I was completely in danger of falling in love.

  Nobody’d ever called me Miss Lucy like that before.

  Only a certain kind of girl could make Miss Lucy sound tough.

  There’s some history here.

  With all due respect to my mother (although I’m not sure how much respect she’s truly due), Lucy has never been the right name for me. The role models were all wrong. Like Lucy from the Peanuts comics. Okay, so she was probably a lesbian. I mean, her brother’s gay (thumbsucker!) and Schroeder, the boy she pretends to have a crush on, is so gay it hurts my teeth. Plus she’s friends with Peppermint Patty and Marcie, whose relationship has lasted longer than my grandparents’. But even if she was a lesbian, I wasn’t going to be like Lucy. I didn’t want to be. You get a sense from watching her that she’s going to end up being somebody’s evil boss.

  And then, of course, there was Lucy Ricardo from I Love Lucy. I wanted to love Lucy, really I did. I kept waiting for the episode where Lucy and Ethel finally ran off together and made out. But eventually I realized that wasn’t going to happen. Lucy was scatterbrained like me, all right, and I could definitely relate to the way everything she touched turned into a complete mess. But I knew I’d last a whole five minutes with a guy like Ricky. Maybe not even that. I understood that deep down he was supposed to love her and all, but most of the time I found him to be a whining prick. I’d been there—thank you, Lily—and I had no intention to go back again.

  That left me with the only famous Lucy remaining: the one who had a steamboat. She came into my life in the same way she comes into most girls’ lives—at recess. I was in second grade, and the second-grade girls were sharing the pavement with the fourth-grade girls—the fourth-grade girls being, in my second-grade eyes, girls of infinite wisdom and certitude. I never would have gotten close enough to hear a single word the fourth-grade girls said, but Mrs. Shedlow, the recess supervisor, was a firm believer in democracy, so she’d lined us up second-fourth, second-fourth for the jump-roping. She took one end of the rope and Rachel Cullins’s older sister, Eve, took the other. My friend Grace was the first girl to jump, and the rhyme she got was a familiar one:

  Strawberry shortcake

  Cream on top

  Tell me the name

  of your sweet heart.

  Is it A…B…C…?

  Grace’s foot hit the rope on B, shackling her in eternal devotion to Barry Lefner for at least the next ten minutes. A fourth-grade girl got to R. But most of the second-grade girls couldn’t make it past Evan Eager. I don’t know if it was the fact that we were exhausting the alphabetically early boys, or whether it was because Eve knew my name since I was friends with Rachel, but whatever the case, when the rope started turning for me, the strawberry shortcake was sent back to the kitchen, and Miss Lucy sailed right in.

  Miss Lucy had a steamboat

  The steamboat had a bell

  Miss Lucy went to heaven

  And the steamboat went to

  At this point I tripped up in a downward direction, skinning my knee and coming way too close to smudging my favorite shirt. When the next girl went, the shortcake had returned. I walked over to Rachel and asked her who Miss Lucy was.

  Now, of all the Cullins sisters, Rachel was always the one to blush fastest. And I’m sure just the mention of Miss Lucy was enough to make her feel like the worst kind of sinner. There was no way she could share the rhyme with me. No decent girl would. My older sister, Antonia, certainly wouldn’t. She was already in junior high, planning her hypothetical wedding day.

  Luckily, a girl named Heron overheard my question. Heron was fairly new to our school, and generally untested. When Mrs. Park had introduced her to the class, she’d said Heron’s name was “Hero…with an n.” That set Heron back a couple of months. She wore clothes—even then—that seemed like hand-me-downs from when her mother had been in second grade. I didn’t know what to make of her.

  “C’mere,” she said to me now.

  Curious, I obliged. She told me to sit down with my legs making a wide V. (Don’t worry: I was wearing pants.) Then she sat across from me and touched her feet to mine. She started to make a patty-cake patty-cake motion, and I knew that I was supposed to clap my hands to hers according to a certain order. So far, so good.

  “It’s like this,” she said. And then she presented me with my last possible role model.

  Miss Lucy had a steamboat

  The steamboat had a bell

  Miss Lucy went to heaven

  And the steamboat went to

  Hello, operator

  Please give me number nine

  And if you disconnect me,

  I will chop off your

  Behind the ’frigerator

  There was a piece of glass

  Miss Lucy sat upon it

  And it went right up her

  Ask me no more questions

  And I’ll tell you no more lies

  The boys are in the bathroom

  Zipping up their

  Flies are in the belfry

  And bees are in the park

  And boys and girls are kissing

  In the D-A-R-K

  D-A-R-K

  D-A-R-K

  DARK DARK DARK

  It’s not a rhyme, because it doesn’t rhyme. It’s not a song, because there’s no real music. It’s not a limerick, because it’s not Irish. At some point, I guess I just started thinking of it as a biography.

  By the time I got to senior year of high school, I figured I’d run Miss Lucy’s story through my head at least a thousand times. In the beginning it was a source of endless amusement. Then it was one of my earliest pieces of nostalgia—when I was a sixth grader, I used it to remember the fond innocence of second grade. Then it became a place my mind went from time to time. Science class boring? Well, Miss Lucy had a steamboat. Dying to get off the phone with the friend who won’t shut up? Miss Lucy had a steamboat. Stuck in the car while Mom runs in for the dry cleaning? Miss Lucy had a steamboat.

  I had no idea what it meant. That was the beauty of it.

  I could relate to Miss Lucy because her life made absolutely no sense.

  I’d say I was itching to see
Ashley again after our first brief conversation, but an itch is something you can scratch, while absence is something you can’t really do shit about. She wasn’t in any of my classes; since I was in all of the average classes, this meant she was either really smart or really dumb. There was a slim chance she’d just decided this place wasn’t for her and had left after homeroom. But that wasn’t the option I was hoping for when lunch began.

  “You misplace your attention span?” my best friend, Teddy, asked when he caught me looking around.

  “There’s this new girl,” I said.

  Teddy snorted. “Now, that didn’t take long, did it?”

  Teddy was once the new kid, too. He was born in California, but he spent most of elementary school in Korea. Then his parents moved back to California when he was in sixth grade. In tenth grade, they moved again, this time to our town. That’s when I met him—the first day of tenth grade. I hated him almost instantly.

  His first words to me were “If you’re not a [not nice word for lesbian], you sure as hell dress like one.”

  I must’ve immediately looked miffed, because he quickly added, “Hey, to me [not nice word for lesbian] is an affectionate term. After all, I’m a big ol’ [rather sexually explicit word for gay man].”

  I wasn’t ready for terms, affectionate or otherwise, from him. I was still coming to terms with myself, dealing with the anxiety and disappointment and exhilaration of being into girls. I tried avoiding him for months. It didn’t work.

  “You got it bad, and that ain’t good,” he said to me now.

  “She called me Miss Lucy,” I told him.

  This made Heron, also at our table, perk up. She’d been reading. She was always reading. She was the only person I knew who’d gotten carpal tunnel syndrome from holding books for too long.

  “Miss Lucy is our thing,” she said. She wasn’t saying it out of jealousy or possessiveness. It was like she wanted to remind herself.

  “Where is she?” I asked Teddy. “Use your gaydar.”

  “You know gaydar isn’t like air-traffic control,” he tsked. “The person actually has to be in the room.”