“You are too,” I say. “It’s like you’re embarrassed for them because they’re going to die before you.”
“God, I’m not even thinking about them dying! It’s more like I’m worried that I’m not, uh, you know, up to expectations—that’s what it is—”
“Bix! Bix! Hang on! It’s—”
Crackle, crackle.
“No! No! It’s fine! No!” His eyes are wide. He’s freaking. “Okay. Yeah, it’s totally fine. It’s like you’re arguing with me, but I’m not arguing. It’s fine.”
I nudge Frankie. “That’s his ex? Her name’s Bix?”
She nods, listening to her dad.
“Is that her real name?”
She shrugs.
“Yeah. Right. No problem. She’ll be fine with it. Okay. I’ll tell him. Yeah—I’ll call him. Okay, fine. You call him. Okay. All right. Bye.” He hangs up and leans against a cupboard with his eyes closed for a second. Then he shakes his head hard and opens his eyes. “Wow!”
“Dad?” says Frankie. “Is Bix her real name?”
He looks at her for a second like he doesn’t speak English. Then he figures it out. “Oh. No. Sarah. You didn’t know that? Sarah Bixby Beele.”
“Why’d she go with Bix?” I ask.
He’s surprised. I think Frankie doesn’t ask him very many questions. “Her brother always called her that, and she liked it. Better than Sarah, anyway. So when she went to college, she told everyone her name was Bix.” He smiles at me. He’s handsomer than most dads. Like what you think of when you think of A Handsome Man. My dad is older than him, I’m pretty sure. “Sharon!” he calls. “Where are you, anyway?”
I nudge Frankie and whisper, “What’s Bix look like?”
“Blond,” she whispers. “Pink face. Tense.”
Unlike Frankie, I love asking questions. I like finding stuff out about people. That’s why I would’ve been a great spy. My parents ruined my life.
In comes Sharon. She has amazing skin. She could be in one of those Radiance at Any Age ads. She and Tom are talking, and I’m paying attention to my pancake, when Frankie says, “Wait—what?”
Her parents turn around, surprised again. It’s like grown-ups think we’re not listening if they’re not talking to us. “Well,” answers her dad. “Bix called.”
“I know,” says Frankie. “Remember? I answered the phone. But what about Lee?” Lee’s her half-brother. He’s seriously fucked up, and not in a fun way. “Is he coming for Christmas?” She sounds stressed. I would be, too.
“No,” says Sharon quickly, and Frankie exhales. “No, Lee and Bix are going for a”—she glances at Tom—“cleanse in Vermont for two weeks during Christmas, and it turns out that Max wants to bring home a friend for the whole vacation and Bix is upset because she doesn’t want to tell him he can’t, but she doesn’t want them in her house alone, so she’s asking if Max and his friend can stay here for a couple weeks.”
“Oh,” Frankie says, relaxing against the back of her chair. “That’s cool.”
“Yeah, it’s fine,” her dad says. “But Bix has to turn everything into a conflict. Have I ever objected to having Max? No. Have I ever objected to Bix having Max? No! She wants to take him to Mexico for three weeks, do I say, One of those is my week? Of course not! I say, Have fun.”
Speaking of people who turn things into a conflict.
Sharon is murmuring soothingly and I’m swishing my pancake around to soak up more syrup and planning how I’m going to eat salad for lunch, when I glance up to see an extremely bizarre look on Frankie’s face. “What?” I say.
She tilts her head toward her parents. “So?”
I stare at her. What is she talking about?
She wiggles her eyebrows at me.
Oh. Max and friend. College guys. Give me a break. “Loser,” I say to her.
She kicks me under the table.
After breakfast, we try on about thirty outfits, and I end up in this adorable maroon striped shirt of Frankie’s that I dibs if she dies (and which, since she’s probably not going to die, I’m going to try keeping until she forgets about it), leggings, and my new favorite thing, Crocs and socks. I saw this friend of mine on Instagram, Jane, wear Crocs and socks together, and since she’s in, like, New Zealand or something and won’t ever find out, I copied.
Frankie is wearing leggings and a blue shirt that says EDGAR on it. Frankie looks better in leggings than I do. The problem is, I’m short. Mostly, I don’t mind being short. In fact, I like it. But I think maybe leggings look better if you’ve got more leg. Just facing facts here.
It’s not like I’m not pretty. I am honestly speaking pretty. I can’t believe I wrote that. I have long brownish-blondish hair that’s wavy and thick and nice if I use conditioner a lot. Also brown eyes, and you know what I think is the best thing about my eyes? The whites of my eyes are really super-white. It looks good. It cracks me up that no one notices this. They all say, Oh you have such beautiful eyes, but it’s not the color or the shape or anything—it’s the whites. My skin is not so hot. My dermatologist is Russian and a total hardass, and she’s always saying that my skin would be better if I didn’t wear makeup, and I’m, like, Easy for you to say, you don’t have to walk around looking like a seeping wound. My mom says it’ll clear up soon (actually what she says is “This too shall pass”). In the meantime, I’m wearing makeup. Mouth, good. Brows, very good—it’s like nature did me this one huge favor: they’re perfectly symmetrical and winged. Nose—what can I say? I like it. I like big noses. I think small noses look weird. When I was little, I felt sorry for people who had small noses, because I thought they could only take small breaths. I still kind of think that.
While we get dressed and do our makeup—Frankie just got a white eyeliner for accents, and it looks amazing—we each get about two hundred texts from people asking us what we’re doing, so then we have to send two hundred texts back telling everyone we’re going Christmas shopping and then another two hundred to figure out where to meet up, etcetera, etcetera, all of which makes us really late, so we don’t get to the mall until almost two thirty and I’m hungry again, but I’m not going to eat anything because I can’t spend money on food. I only have, like, fifty dollars, and Christmas is in two weeks! I have to buy presents for Mom and Dad and Ollie, for sure, and also for Frankie unless we decide we’re not. And there’s Noony and Gaby, who are super high-up on the friend scale, so I should really get them something. But if I get them something, am I leaving out poor Eden? She probably won’t notice. But no matter what I do, there’ll be some loaf who ruins my life by buying me a present when I haven’t bought her one. Whoever she is, I hate her.
We meet up with Gaby outside Panda Express (gross!), and we’re heading down to the Body Shop (Absinthe Body Butter for Mom?) when we run into
1. Soren and Devon, the guys Frankie kind of suggested were gay last week. Maybe they are gay. They keep slapping each other on the head. Whatever. They try to act all hard around us, saying shit like “I flexin’” and “He doin’ the most.” Yeah, right, whiteboy.
2. Talia, who’s in French with Frankie and chem with me. She’s got, like, six shopping bags full of stuff. Maybe she’s rich. We say come on and hang with us, but she can’t because she’s with some other kids.
3. Dominic with—get this—Amelia! She’s a bitch and he’s an asshole—what a perfect couple! She pretends not to notice us and is making out with him on the benches in front of Sur La Table. Good thing I didn’t eat.
4. Maia H. with her mom and two little kids who are probably her brothers or sisters. She just waves.
5. A girl named Chloe I don’t know but Frankie does. They hug.
6. Vlad, probably the coolest guy at Arteaga, who you hardly ever see, he’s so famous. He’s a rapper, but not in a stupid way—he’s actually done videos with real artists like BTB, and Gaby says he’s signed (which is cool even if it’s some label in, like, Oakland, not LA). But Vlad’s coolness is bigger than just rapping. He
’s also some kind of piano genius. At the winter concert, he played this ass-kicking thing that hardly anyone can play, which caused grown-ups to lose their shit and Channel 4 News to come and interview him, whoo-whoo. So: fame.
But. Also. Raging hot.
And—oh my god—he’s walking toward me and Gaby and Frankie, and he lifts his chin at us and says, “Hey.”
And we fall down dead.
No. We lift our chins and say, “Hey.” So, not exactly life-changing, maybe, but we are now touched by Vlad-level cool. No more than thirty seconds after it happens, I get a text from Cora: you’re friends with Vlad? It’s so fun not answering. It says, Sorry, I’m too busy hooking up with Vlad inside the PacSun dressing room to text you back.
7. Kellen, who’s trying to find Cora but can’t, so he’s all, “Hey, come hang with me, Frankie!” But Frankie is now so touched by Vlad-level cool that she says, “Sorry, busy.” He looks surprised. Guess no one’s ever turned him down before. Get used to it, douche.
After that, we run off, giggling and snorting, and practically impale ourselves on this row of bizarre, four-foot-high plastic stockings filled with plastic presents. What the hell are they for? Frankie goes off on this thing about how they hide little bitty security guards inside, so we bang on them and then a real security guard comes and yells at us, and we go running off again, giggling and snorting some more. The mall is stuffed with gazillions of people: a million families wearing identical fuzzy Santa hats, a million little kids in stroller lockdown, a million middle-school girls buying candles and squealing at a million middle-school boys, a million old people with dogs, a million perfume-squirter ladies, a million uninterested guys selling phone cases, and a million hand-holding couples trying to figure out how much they’re supposed to spend on each other for Christmas. The noise is incredible. Everyone’s yelling about they want this or they want that or they don’t have enough money or I told you to stay right there or I’m hungry—and on top of it all, Christmas fucking carols. I hate Christmas carols (unless it’s actually Christmas or it’s in church or—I’m not a total bitch—little kids are singing them) and the Christmas carols I hate the most are the jazzy ones they play at malls, like gross old boozy guys singing about I’ll Keep You Warm on Christmas. Gag.
When we’re done in the Body Shop (I don’t think my mom would like Absinthe Body Butter, really) we head toward H&M (a shirt, maybe?), and we think we’ll try on these cute T-shirts, but the line’s too long (I don’t see anything my mom would wear except a blouse, and it’s twenty-eight dollars), so we give up on that and go to Francesca’s (not for me, but Gaby and Frankie have sisters) and we see a bunch of kids we know there but I’m not going to write out who they are, because I already did that and I’m tired of it. Gaby finds some earrings for her sister, yay, but the line’s crazy, so Frankie and I decide we’ll go over to Urban while we wait. But that turns out to be depressing because the store is full of displays that say, “Party Like You Mean It!” along with these really cute party dresses and skirts, which makes it pretty clear that everyone but us is going to fabulous, exciting parties every single night. We are losers. We are knock. The last time I needed a party dress was in eighth grade, during the Bar ’n’ Bat Mitzvah era. That was two years ago.
So we depressedly leave Urban and depressedly walk along a row of little stores that are too expensive for us, and I am just depressedly texting Gaby where we are, when Frankie says, “Check that out.” She nods toward a dress in the window of a store called Nostalgia.
It’s a dress, a black velvet dress with a satin off-the-shoulder neckline. It’s vintage and I guess it’s elegant, but it’s for someone old. I say, “Yeah. Cool.”
“I’m going to try it on,” says Frankie, and pushes open the door of Nostalgia. Of course, I follow, but I’m thinking, This is pointless, you can’t get it anyway. I mean, first of all, it’s black and wearing all-black is emo. Rawr XD. You get a lot of shit if you wear all-black (unless you’re Priya Lo or something). Second of all, as I just finished saying, the last time we needed party dresses was two years ago, and even if we did get invited to a party, it wouldn’t be the kind of party you could wear this dress to. This is a cocktail party–type dress. Third, it is definitely out of our price range. And fourth: it’s a dress for, like, a woman, not a kid. It’s outside the boundaries of our context, just like Ms. Heath (that’s my English teacher) says about everything. So why bother?
But Frankie, after, amazingly, speaking to the saleslady (who must buy foundation in gallon jars) goes into a dressing room with the black dress, so I stand by, watching the saleslady’s face. I wonder if she has to reapply during the day. Maybe she just re-powders. Then I wonder how stores like this stay in business. The mall is total madness, stuffed with shoppers—and in here, there’s just me and Frankie. And it’s not like we’re going to buy anything.
Frankie flings open the curtain and I squeak. Honestly, I squeak. Because she looks unbelievable. I can’t even describe it. She looks like she’s maybe twenty, and if her hair were up, she’d look older. She also looks amazing. Glamorous. Nobody our age looks glamorous. She looks like she has ten parties to go to, and she’ll see if she can fit them all in. She looks like a model. She looks like what my dad would call a knockout.
“I know,” Frankie says. She turns to look at herself in the mirror. “I look old.”
“You look incredible.”
She doesn’t bother to deny it. She just keeps on looking at herself with this funny expression on her face. She’s not posing or fake-modeling, the way I’d probably be doing if I was wearing a dress that made me look like that. I wonder what she’s thinking, and I’m about to ask her when the saleslady comes to look.
“My,” she says. “That’s definitely your dress, isn’t it?” But she knows we’re not buying, so she goes away.
“How much is it?” Frankie whispers, trying to reach the tag on the back.
“A hundred and fifty-five.” Whew.
She nods. “Take a picture of me.”
I do.
“Send it to me.”
I do.
We look at her some more, and then she sort of sighs and goes back in the dressing room. “Gimme your phone,” I call while I wait for her to get dressed.
“Why?”
“Shut up and give it to me,” I say. So she hands it out. And in about twenty seconds, the picture is flying through air molecules toward Frankie’s mom with the message: Frankie wants this for Christmas. Plus where it is, and even how much it costs.
I am Santa’s elf.
After something like twenty texts, we figure out where Gaby is, which is—oh little fucking town of Bethlehem—still in Francesca’s. There are about fifty people squashed in there, so Frankie and I wait outside, but outside is directly under a speaker, so it’s like we’re being hosed with Christmas carols.
“If they don’t stop playing that song, I’m going to scream,” I mutter.
Frankie starts up, “Ding-dinga-ding, ding-dinga-ding, hey it’s lovely weather for a sleigh ride together with yoooouuu.”
I scream.
Gaby sticks her head out of Francesca’s. “What happened?”
“Char’s screaming because she loves Christmas so much,” says Frankie, but here comes that same dang security guard again, and I guess you’re not supposed to scream at the mall—although, I have to say, under the circumstances, screaming seems pretty reasonable. Anyway, we cat and meet Gaby a few minutes later at the Alamo, which is the piercing place and the only really cool store in the entire mall. We wander around, looking at studs and rings and gages, and Gaby wants her nose pierced, bad.
“Should I just do it?” she asks. “My mom’ll kill me if I do.”
“Same with my mom,” says Frankie. “Even a tiny stud will cause instant death.”
My mom says that if I want to have my boogers come flying out the side of my nostril when I sneeze, it’s okay with her, but this is one of those things I don’t mention to Gab
y and Frankie. Instead, I say, “I know! For Christmas, you guys could give your mom the gift of not getting your nose pierced. Like, write it on a card, and that’s the present!”
“Nice!” says Gaby.
“Well, it’s what she wants, right?” I say.
“Hell, yeah!” says Frankie. “I’m doing it. Total savings of probably twenty-five dollars I would have spent on her. You’re a genius, Char.”
Gaby looks at her phone and has a seasonal freak-out. “Oh my god, it’s five! Come on, you guys. We have to get serious about this.”
We get serious, and I am now broke.
God Forbid You Should Actually Learn Something
Almost. Almost. The last day of school before Christmas vacation moved like mud. Frankie’s geometry class alone had lasted twenty years. Even lunch break went on too long—all the kids who had gotten wasted in the bathroom were screaming and throwing their Secret Santa candy canes at each other, and all the kids who hadn’t were opening gift bags and hugging each other. And then it went limp; everyone was tired and screamed out, and there was a lot of too-loud laughter about stupid jokes. Frankie was secretly glad when the bell rung.
Well, maybe not glad, Frankie thought. Glad would be going too far. She locked her jaw against a yawn and looked at Miss Mathers’s clock for approximately the twentieth time since the class had begun. 2:37. Oh my god. Thirty-three more minutes.
Miss Mathers was definitely not the type to have a Christmas party on the last day before vacation. Oh no, Miss Mathers was the type to torture them by having what she called a “Literary Round Table” instead. That’s where everyone—everyone!—had to say something they found “thought-provoking” in the book they were supposed to be reading, The Free Throw Line. Which in addition to being amazingly hard to say, was also the most depressing book in the history of the world. English-class books were always pretty bad, but this was worse than usual: poor Mexican kid named Javier tries to cross the US border but gets caught and sent to a camp/prison, where his incredible basketball skills are seen by a guard who adopts him to cash in on his talent. He becomes a basketball star! Except then his dad back home gets killed by drug dealers, and Javier returns to Mexico to help his mom, but the only job he can find is working for the cartel as a runner. One day during a drop, Javier by mistake kills his best friend—the guy who taught him how to play basketball in the first place—goes crazy, shoots himself in the hand, and can never play basketball again. The end.