For Keeps

  “Did you bring bags?”

  “Shop-Co doesn’t provide bags?”

  “We do. We just try not to use them if we can help it.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  The girl juts her chin in my direction. “Reduce, reuse, recycle.”

  Now all eyes are on me—me and my canvas bags, which everyone I know carries. If you live within a fifty-mile radius of Elmherst, Massachusetts, you don’t have a choice. Keep Elmherst a Clean, Green Scene isn’t just a bumper sticker, it’s a commandment.

  But that’s not really the point here. The point is, Paul Tucci’s parents are looking at me, and I can feel my eyelid start to twitch—a little problem of mine whenever I get nervous.

  Why am I nervous? To Paul Tucci’s parents I am no one—just your average teenage girl in a Red Sox cap, virtually indistinguishable from any other teenage girl who might be buying school supplies tonight. So what if I have the same color eyes as them? A lot of people do. Brown eyes are a dominant trait. I learned that last year in bio, when we did a genetics unit.

  Anyway, they’ve stopped looking at me. Mrs. Tucci is muttering under her breath to no one in particular that the whole world is turning into a hippie colony. It never used to be this way. Nobody used to care what kind of bags you used. Blah, blah, blah.

  I would like to put a bag over her head.

  Mr. Tucci doesn’t say a word. He just pats her crisp white shoulder. Pat-pat-pat. As in, There, there, honey. Everything’s going to be OK.

  Is he used to her behavior, immune after so many years of marriage? I’m curious. Surely he knows she’s being a jackass. Does he not mind?

  It’s an enigma to me, how two people can stay together. Despite their flaws, despite their most annoying habits. I don’t get it, maybe because most of my friends’ parents are divorced. Maybe because—with the exception of Paul Tucci—my mom has never dated anyone for more than a month. Maybe because the only “boyfriend” I’ve had was in eighth grade. Dan Applegate. We were together for thirteen days. He broke up with me in gym class—correction, his friends broke up with me in gym class. “Dan wants to see other people” is what they said, which was fine with me. I was perfectly content not getting felt up in the baseball dugout after school, preferring to lie on the couch in Liv’s den watching VH1 Behind the Musicand eating raw cookie dough.

  So it’s weird, seeing Paul Tucci’s parents. Forget us being related, I mean the way they function as a couple. She orders; he obeys. She bitches; he pats. And somehow they manage to purchase three canvas bags, pack up their stuff, and stroll out of Shop-Co together, arm in arm.

  “Josie! Where have you been?!”

  Liv is standing on Melanie Jaffin’s pool table.

  “I’ve been waiting for you, like, forever!”

  She is wearing a black feather boa, a red velvet smoking jacket, and a bikini.

  “This place is insane! Did you see Michael Palamino?! No brain cells left! Seriously! Bumbling idiot! Get up here with me!”

  Liv, stone-cold sober, starts Riverdancing to Eminem, and she couldn’t care less what anyone in Mel’s basement thinks. This is why I love her.

  I have known Liv since we were six years old, when we first met on the swings at our neighborhood playground. She introduced herself as Olivia Sarah Weiss-Longo, told me she had two daddies, and said my hair looked like Snow White’s. How could we not be best friends?

  “I need to talk to you!”I’m screaming because it’s the only way to be heard. The music is so, so loud.

  Liv leaps off the pool table. “Is everything OK? Are you—wait!” She grabs my hand. “Follow me!”

  As we wind our way through the bodies, I notice how good everyone looks tonight, tan and happy. Lots of people stop to hug us and scream things like, “OHMYGODYOU-GUYS! HOW WAS YOUR SUMMER?! CAN YOU BELIEVE WE’RE JUNIORS?!” Rob Vantine decides it’s his mission in life to get us to drink the punch he made, with the orange slices floating on top, and the mango chunks stuck to the bottom. And, oh yeah, a gallon or two of vodka.

  We graciously decline.

  And press on.

  Finally we make it to the upstairs bathroom, where every surface is coated with shaving cream. Yup; it’s that kind of party. Melanie’s father, who bought this lake house after he ditched Melanie’s mother for his twenty-four-year-old paralegal, and who only gets to see Mel every third weekend, feels so guilty he lets her do whatever she wants.

  “Huh,” Liv says, looking around the bathroom. “Impressive.” Then, being the fantastic friend that she is, she grabs a towel to mop the shaving cream off the side of the tub so we can sit. “So, what’s up?”

  “Well,” I say, “there’s been a Tucci sighting.”

  “What?”

  “Yes.”

  “WHAT?”

  “I know,” I say. And tell her everything.

  When I’m finished, my feather-boa-wearing, pool-table-hopping, Riverdancing best friend puts her hand on my arm. “Holy shite, Josie.” (Liv prefers “shite” to “shit.” She thinks it makes her sound British.)

  “I know,” I say.

  “Do you think they moved back?”

  “What?” I shake my head. “No. I’m sure they’re just visiting old friends or something.”

  “How do you know?”

  “What?”

  “How do you know they’re visiting old friends?”

  “I don’t know. They seemed . . . I mean, all they bought was shampoo and honeydews, and milk, and, like, toilet scrubbers—”

  “Toilet scrubbers? ”

  “Yeah. So?”

  Liv raises an eyebrow. “When was the last time you bought toilet scrubbers as a hostess gift?”

  That’s when it hits me. “Oh, God.”

  Liv says, “Exactly.” Then she launches into one of her arguments, honed by many an afternoon of middle-school debate club. “Think about it, Jose. The karma. If his parents moved back, he has to show up sometime, right? For Thanks-giving or whatever? So unless you’re planning to, like, never go to North Haven again, which would mean, basically, never buying anything decent, you are going to run into your dad. Which, come on, isn’t that what you’ve always—”

  “He’s not my dad.”

  Liv nods. “OK.”

  “He will never be my dad.”

  “Right.”

  “He’s just the guy who inadvertently gave me half my genetic material. He’s . . . that’s all he is.”

  “Yes,” Liv says, bobbing her head. She used hot rollers tonight, and her curls are bobbing too.

  I know she’s humoring me. I know because the Paul Tucci argument is as old as our friendship. I know because the worst fight we’ve ever had was the time Liv e-mailed her hero, Dr. Steve, the world’s most annoying TV therapist, suggesting a father-daughter reunion show. I saw the e-mail on her computer, and I went ballistic. She didn’t do it to hurt me, she said at the time; she did it to help me. She threw out a lot of little gems like, Listen, Josie, it’s important to know the full story of where you came from. You may not like the choices your father made, but that doesn’t mean he’s not worth knowing. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t forge some kind of relationship.

  Relationship? How about an acknowledgment of my presence on Earth? Let’s start with that.

  “OK, Josie,” Liv says now. Her eyes are soft on mine. “Whatever you want to call him. I just think you should be, you know, mentally prepared to run into him.”

  She’s probably right, but I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t even want to think about it.

  Thankfully, this is the moment when Jamie Mann bursts through the bathroom door in her orange tie-dye tankini, both hands clapped over her mouth.

  “Incoming,” Liv murmurs, just as Jamie projectile vomits all over the floor, miraculously changing the subject.

  Two

  IT’S THE LAST day of preseason soccer. Coach is making us run until our feet fall off. School starts on Monday, and his torture sessions will shrink to
two hours, so right now he’s going psycho.

  Sprint, reach down, touch a line, reverse. Sprint, reach down, touch a line, reverse.

  “Gardner! You’re slacking!”

  I’m not slacking; I’m dying. Death by wind sprints.

  Sprint, reach down, touch a line—

  “Whaddja eat for breakfast, Gardner? Bowling balls? Come on! Get the lead out!”

  Coach has this habit of sneaking up behind you and barking in your ear until you’re going eighty. Usually it works.

  Not today.

  The problem is, I was up all night, and every cell in my body needs to be in bed. Bed, the one place I wanted to go after Mel’s party but couldn’t, because when I got home my mom was in the living room watching The Tapes. And that is never a good sign.

  Whenever she gets stressed about something (e.g., seeing her long-lost ex-boyfriend’s parents in Shop-Co), she busts out this box of ancient VHS tapes. Other people’s parents might drink, or smoke, or inhale a box of Twinkies to feel better. My mother’s drug of choice? Beverly Hills, 90210—the old-school version.

  It’s like some weird kind of therapy for her, watching angst-ridden teenagers act out their dramas. Who will Kelly choose—Dylan or Brandon? Why is Brenda such a bitch? Will Donna ever have sex with David? Even though my mom knows all the story lines by heart, she still watches the tapes over and over. She actually cares how things turn out for the characters, like they’re her family, the siblings she never got to have. Which kind of makes me feel bad for her.

  I felt especially bad last night, so even though I was tired after Mel’s party, I sat next to my mom on the couch and watched 90210, and ate the popcorn she made, and didn’t mention the name Tucci once. No sense whacking her over the head with it. There would be plenty of time to discuss the possibility that Paul Tucci’s parents have moved back.

  A possibility. That’s all it is.

  But now, running sprints, a trickle of panic juice seeps into my head. What if they didmove back? Will Paul Tucci show up? And if he does, will my mom be able to handle it? Will I?

  I am still thinking about this when Coach blows his whistle, signaling the end of practice.

  “Circle up, ladies!”

  We run to the center of the field. It’s me and Liv and Jamie Mann and Kara Ballensweig and Lindsey Ore, and all the other girls we’ve been playing with since fifth grade.

  If we want to make it to states this year, Coach has to push us to get there, so even though we’re gasping for air like beached fish right now, we kind of respect him for torturing us.

  “On three,” Coach says, and everyone puts their hands in the circle. “One, two, three—”

  “TEAM!”

  I remember when I first made varsity how I thought it was so cool to be shouting “Team!” instead of “Lady Hurricanes rock!” like we did in middle school. There I was, this skinny little freshman among seniors, shorts down to my ankles, bangs flopping in my eyes, feeling like I’d just won a spot at the Olympics. Now I’m one of the veterans. I’m also five foot nine—practically an Amazon—the second-tallest player on the team. If you saw me next to my mom you’d laugh. She’s five three. Do I really need to mention where the height genes came from?

  I try not to think about it, but sometimes, during a big game, when everyone else’s father is in the stands, I imagine Paul Tucci showing up. I don’t picture him waving to me or chanting my name or anything, just being there. I know it sounds stupid. And anyway, who needs a father when you’ve got a mother like Kate Gardner, the human megaphone? (Go, Josie! Goooooo, Josie! Shoot! Shooooot!). Or when you’ve got Liv’s two dads—Pops and Dodd—sitting next to my mom, banging cowbells like mad?

  Liv and I laugh about it now, but when we were in second grade—before we knew any better—we tried to convince my mom to marry Pops or Dodd so we could be a “real” family. We had the whole wedding planned. We would be the flower girls, of course; Liv’s brother, Wyatt, would be the ring bearer; and the cake would be three-tiered, white with pink roses. Whichever dad didn’t get to marry my mom would be the DJ and play the Grease soundtrack.

  Somehow no one else seemed to think this was a great idea, so Liv and I eventually gave up the dream of being related and settled for our parents being friends. Which they still are. They do things like cook dinner for each other on the weekends and bring in each other’s newspapers when it’s raining and drive each other’s kids around after practice.

  “Need a ride home?” Liv asks as we walk from the field to the locker room. She’s wearing the vintage ’70s soccer jersey she found in the bargain bin at Retro Ruby’s, with the green and yellow collar flapping out to her shoulders so it looks like she has wings. Her hair is braided and pinned up in two Princess Leia buns. Only Liv could pull this off.

  “Not home,” I tell her. “Work.”

  “Since when do you work Saturdays?”

  “Since Bob changed the schedule.”

  “Again?”

  “Yup.”

  Last year, when I first started working at Bananarama, I thought I’d landed the easiest job on the planet. I mean, how hard could it be to scoop ice cream? But that was before I realized Boss Bob’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Not only does he switch the schedule around every ten minutes, he also insists that the spoons be lined up in perfectly symmetrical rows on the counter and that every sprinkle be picked up off the floor before we close at night. Bob will have a hissy if I’m late for work, but right now I’m too thirsty to care.

  Liv and I stand in line at the water fountain to fill our bottles. When we’re finished, we start to enter the locker room, but something grabs our attention. It’s the boys’ team. Two dozen pairs of legs, sweaty and dirt streaked. Two dozen sets of cleats, clacking against the pavement.

  Look at us, the guys command. Ogle away. You know you’re powerless not to. That’s right, keep looking.

  And really, it’s hard to do anything else. Especially for certain members of our team—the ones who would rather talk about boys than play soccer. The Makeup Mafia, Liv and I secretly call them, because they actually care what they look like on the field.

  Right now Lindsey and Jamie and this other girl Schuyler are flipping their hair all around and sticking out their boobs because the guys are approaching. It’s kind of fascinating to watch, the way they fluff themselves up like peacocks whenever a little testosterone appears.

  Then there’s me, with the pit-sweat circles down to my waist, and the hair sliding out of its ponytail and sticking to my cheeks. And the gummy white stuff that I know for a fact is stuck in the corners of my mouth, but I refuse, on principle, to wipe away.

  So what if Matt Rigby is looking at me right now? So what if he’s a senior and his body looks like it was chiseled from pure marble like Michelangelo’s David?

  If Riggs is going to stare at me with those big blue eyes, I am going to stare back, but if he thinks I’m about to wipe the schmutz off my face just to impress him, he can forget it.

  “Hey,” he says, holding my gaze.

  “Heyyy, Riggsy,” Lindsey and Jamie and Schuyler chorus together. Their voices sound five octaves higher than normal.

  I say nothing. I just continue the staring contest that’s been going on for the past seven months.

  We have this history, Matt Rigby and I. Last year, when I was a sophomore and he was a junior, there was this New Year’s Eve party and I needed a ride home, so he drove me. Riggs had a girlfriend at the time, Missy Travers, a senior who was also my soccer captain. Not only was Missy beautiful, she was a great captain. Before every game, she would type up these little slips of paper with inspirational quotes on them, and we would stick the slips of paper in our shin guards. She would give us rubber bands to put on our wrists, and whenever we screwed up we’d have to snap the rubber bands to make ourselves forget our mistake, because if we dwelled on it then our game would be messed up.

  Everyone loved Missy. And because Missy and Riggs had been an established co
uple for more than a year, I didn’t give it a thought when he offered to drive me home from the party. Missy was in Quebec for a week, on the Canadian-U. S. exchange. It wasn’t like Riggs had anything better to do that night. He was just being a nice guy, I thought, walking me from his car to my front door. The sidewalk was icy. He didn’t want me to slip.

  It was also crazy cold, I remember, and I wasn’t exactly dressed for the weather. I had on the green silk shirt I’d borrowed from my mother, black leggings, and ballet flats. If I’d been wearing heels I would have been taller than Riggs, but because of the flats we were the same height. So when he smiled at me under the porch light, his mouth was right across from mine.

  I don’t know how it happened, exactly. One minute we were talking and the next he was leaning in, pressing his lips to my neck. At the same time, his fingers were tracing the outline of my body—shoulders to ribs to waist to hips to the tops of my thighs—so softly I shivered. He must have thought I was cold because he wrapped his arms around my back and kissed me again, this time on the lips.

  Matt Rigby is kissing me!That’s what I was thinking. Followed by, He is such a good kisser. How did he get to be such a good kisser? Followed by, Oh, God.

  That’s when I pulled away, which was not the easiest thing to do. (His lips tasted like cherry ChapStick, which I happen to love.)

  “What’s wrong?” Riggs said, innocent as can be.

  And I said, “What about Missy?”

  He looked me straight in the eye and said that he and Missy had “an agreement.” While she was away, the two of them could do whatever they wanted, with whoever they wanted to do it. If Missy wanted to kiss some guy named Pascal, for instance, on the ice at some Canadian hockey rink, that was A-OK.

  I didn’t think Missy would do that—I knew for a fact that she kept an eight-by-ten picture of Riggs in her locker, and she actually kissed it before practice—but I let myself believe what he told me. I let myself do all sorts of things that night. . . . Clothing was removed. . . . Certain body parts were touched. . . .

  Now whenever Riggs looks at me, I feel a little zing down my spine, a combination of hormones and guilt. Not that Missy ever found out what happened between us. I would have heard if she had; the Elmherst High School grapevine works fast. All I know is when she came home from Quebec, it was business as usual for the two of them—holding hands in the caf, cheering at each other’s games, prom. She probably never even noticed the way Riggs would look at me whenever our paths crossed, which is the same way he is looking at me right now. His come-hither look, Liv calls it.