Good Girls

“No, I mean, Oh, Scheisse, there’s Jimmy.”

  I whip my head around and see Jimmy and Cherry on the dance floor—not dancing, but yelling. “The first fight,” I say. “The prom has officially begun.”

  “I hate that guy,” Ash says. “I mean, wow. I hate him so much. And I know how to hate people, believe me. He never even said he was sorry.”

  “Yeah,” says Joelle. “Sorry for being alive.”

  “And Chilly! Who is that girl?” Ash says. “Who would come to the prom with him? Who’d go anywhere with him? Do you think she’s out of the sixth grade yet?”

  Ash says, “Do you want me to go break his legs?”

  I seriously consider this. The guy humiliated me, almost ruined my life, right? But then, my life doesn’t really feel ruined right now. And the biggest mistakes I made all by myself. “Nah,” I say. “Not worth the effort. Besides, I already decked him once.”

  Ash grins. “And tell me that didn’t feel awesome. Think I should go smack the Dreck out of Jimmy?”

  “Now, now,” says Joelle. “Save something for later.”

  “You know,” I say, “I thought this was a good idea until I realized that everyone else would be here, too.”

  “Everyone except for Luke,” Ash says.

  Pam swings her eyes back to me. “Have you talked to him?”

  “Not since the fight we had,” I say.

  “But you said you were sorry.” Ash says. “I mean, you did apologize for thinking he was screwing the planet.”

  “He might not have screwed the planet, but he did flirt with the planet. I had reason to be worried.”

  “Since when are flirting and fornication the same thing?” Pam says.

  “Okay,” says Ash. “He’s a flirt. It’s true. And that would piss me off. Still, you dumped him pretty hard. Maybe you could say something to fix things?”

  “Like what?”

  Ash drops her head all the way back so that she’s facing the ceiling. “Please help her, God,” she says, lifting her hands, “because she is so very stupid.”

  “Forget it,” I say. “It’s too late. He doesn’t want to talk to me.”

  Cindy looks up at the ceiling. “Who? God?” she says.

  “Ooh!” says Joelle. “Listen! I love this song!”

  “This is a song?” says Ash.

  “Shut up and dance with me!” Joelle says.

  The five of us go to the dance floor and make a little circle. Joelle starts doing this thing with her hips, something that she learned in belly-dancing lessons. It mesmerizes every male within sight. Recognizing genius, Pam immediately copies it, getting it down pretty well. The two of them wiggle around in the center of our circle, and then all around the outside. Cindy is a cyclone, kicking and flailing her arms like she’s in a mosh pit. Ash does her praying-mantis-shuffle-bug dance, where she pulls her elbows in tightly toward her body and jerks, keeping her feet in the same place. Of course, I don’t know what I look like, but I love to dance, love it when the music is so loud you feel it rather than hear it. Like kissing Luke, it turns my brain off and lets my body take over. We wiggle and kick and shuffle for five, six, seven songs until we’re all looking a little bit droopy around the edges. Then it’s time for a bathroom break, where we blot and fix and adjust and admire. We hang around the ladies’ lounge and make fun of everyone else’s really boring, unimaginative gowns.

  Joelle looks down at her sparkly, beaded, skim-the-body dress. “This was the best idea, Audrey. I mean it.”

  “And you didn’t want to do it,” I say.

  “Well,” she says. “I had all these birthday plans with O/Joe. But that’s okay. I figured something out.” She smiles wickedly.

  “What do you mean?” Ash says.

  “Oh, no!” says Cindy. “I’m not the only real virgin here, am I? Please tell me I’m not the only virgin.”

  “Don’t worry,” Joelle says. “I’m still a virgin. We just did, uh, other things.”

  Pam leans in close. “Oh?”

  “‘O,’ is right.” Joelle adjusts her spaghetti straps. “‘O’ for Orgasm.”

  “No!” I say.

  “Or. Gas. Um,” Joelle says, with the emphasis on the “um.” “Last night.”

  “How?” Ash says. “Details. Now.”

  “You are so touchy, Ash!” says Joelle. “Speaking of touching,…”

  “So he fingered you?” Pam says.

  Joelle frowns. “You make it sound so gross!”

  “Did he or didn’t he?”

  “If we’re being technical, yes, but it wasn’t like that. We were messing around and he, you know, was trying to do something down there, God knows what. I took his finger and said, ‘Rub. But not so hard. You’re not trying to erase it, you know.’”

  “Jesus!” says Ash.

  Pam is smiling so wide that her face looks split in two. “How’d it go?”

  “Pretty well. I mean, he did keep drifting off to the left for some reason, but after a while it worked!”

  “How long’s ‘a while?’” I ask.

  “I don’t know. A half hour?”

  “A half hour!” Ash yells. “Didn’t his hand cramp up? Is he in a cast?”

  “Hey,” says Joelle, stomp-stomp-stomping. “It was my birthday!”

  Back at the table, they’re serving the entrees. We were so busy with Joelle’s first orgasm, we’ve already missed the salad.

  “What is this?” Joelle says.

  I inspect my plate. “Chicken, I think.”

  “An animal was murdered to end up like this,” Ash says. “It’s so wrong.”

  “I’m not much for eating,” Pam says. “I’d rather smoke.”

  Joelle pushes the plate away. “I don’t want to spill any food on this dress.”

  Cindy, who was wolfing her mashed potatoes, puts her fork down.

  We sit at the table until the DJ decides to play something decent and we get up to dance again. This time, a premature and idiotic conga line charges through our circle; Jo gets carried away and drags Ash with her. Pam, Cindy and me dance and dance and dance until we hear some commotion on the other end of the dance floor. Pam uses her elbows to get us through the crowd, though we still can’t see what’s happening.

  “What is it?” I ask the guy next to me.

  “Fight!” he shouts, and holds up a fist.

  “Who?”

  “Who cares?”

  Then we hear someone scream: “Will you stop it, Jimmy!?”

  We look at each other. “Ash!”

  Now we’re really shoving. We push our way to the front of the crowd to see Jimmy and some other guy—Nardo?—rolling around on the dance floor, pounding on each other. In a cherry-red dress, Cherry stands on the sidelines, having such a fit that her boobs threaten to bounce right out of her dress. I scan the scene for Ash. She and Joelle are a few feet away from the wildly brawling Jimmy and Nardo, and Ash is…smiling?

  I poke Pam and Cindy and point. Ash sees us and waves like she’s never had so much fun in her life, so we run around the fight to get to her.

  “What’s going on?”

  “First,” says Joelle, “Cherry and Jimmy have a spat. Cherry marches off to find herself a new dance partner. Jimmy comes over and tries to give Ash all this you’re-the-only-one-for-me-huge-puppy-dog-eyes crap. She tells him to screw himself, he gets all pushy.”

  “Jerk tried to hug me,” Ash says. “That’s when Nardo stepped in.” Her grin outdoes the Cheshire Cat’s. “Jimmy got up in Nardo’s face and Nardo knocked him on his butt.”

  Two chaperones leap into the fray and pull Nardo and Jimmy apart. Jimmy’s nose is bleeding, and he’s already got a shiner cooking.

  “Wow,” I say. “Our little Jimmy doesn’t look so good.”

  “No, he doesn’t, does he?” Ash claps gleefully, like a five-year-old at a birthday party.

  As the chaperones drag Jimmy and Nardo off the dance floor, Cherry following, Ash grabs Nardo’s arm. “Hey,” she says.

&nbs
p; “Hey,” Nardo says.

  “My hero.” Ash’s lashes flutter, and her voice is tiny. Ash never flutters, and her voice is never tiny. “Um, maybe you can call me? If you still want to?”

  Nardo’s about to faint with joy. “Yeah, okay,” he says. “Tonight.” The chaperones haul him away.

  “Here’s where Ash would say something auf Deutsch,’” I say. “Except Ash has been replaced by an alien imposter and we’re going to have to destroy her with our ray guns.”

  “This calls for a cigarette,” Pam says. She grabs my arm. “You come, too.”

  “We still have more dancing to do!” Joelle says. Ash’s already bugging out to the next song, and Cindy’s flailing away.

  “When we get back, we’ll dance the rest of the night,” Pam tells her. “I swear.”

  I follow Pam as she crashes right through the crowd on the dance floor, ignoring the dirty looks. She cuffs Chilly upside the head and grins when he turns to glare at her.

  “That one,” she says to me, “was for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  Outside, the sky is deep purple streaked with a blinding orangey pink, like flavored lip gloss. Pam lights up. “Walk with me,” she says, strolling into the parking lot.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Around,” she says. “We’re enjoying this lovely evening. You want a cigarette?” She holds her pack out to me.

  “Ugh. No, thanks.”

  We walk. She finishes her cigarette and lights another one. I wonder how many she’s planning to smoke, because my feet are starting to hurt.

  “I never thought I’d like you this much,” she says. “I used to see you in school or at parties and I’d think, What a priss, what a princess, what a nerd. Who does she think she is?”

  I laugh. “I didn’t think I’d like you, either.” I thought about what Ash said to me in the car last winter. “I guess I was kind of jealous of you.”

  “You thought I was a slut,” she says. “Don’t deny it. I heard what people said about me.”

  I blush, and I hope she doesn’t notice. “What’s a slut, anyway?” I say. “Why isn’t there a name for guys who do the same thing?”

  “Player. Pimp,” she says.

  “Please,” I say. “Those are compliments.”

  “Anyway,” she says. “I was with a lot of people. That wouldn’t have been so bad if I was having a great time with all of them. Maybe there are girls who just have fun all the time—they’re like boys or something. But that wasn’t me. Some of the guys were bad, some were boring, some were just nothing. After a while, what’s the point?”

  “Well, that’s why you stopped. Isn’t that the point? Self-respect? Knowing what you want, blah blah blah?”

  She drops her butt to the pavement and grinds it under her shoe. “I have to tell you something. You’re probably going to hate me for it, and I won’t blame you. I did it before I knew you.”

  My stomach drops and I wrap my arms around my waist. Luke. She’s going to tell me she was with Luke. I wasn’t wrong, I’m not wrong. But, I remind myself, it doesn’t matter now. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”

  She digs around in her purse and pulls out her little digital camera, flipping through the pictures. “Here,” she says. “Look.”

  I take the camera. On the screen, I see Luke’s naked chest, my blond hair streaked with black. I blink, not understanding. What is this doing on her camera? I don’t get it, I don’t…

  Wait. “You took this?”

  She pulls another cigarette out of her purse. “Yeah.”

  I realize my mouth is literally hanging open, and I snap it shut. “But why?”

  “Because it wasn’t fair,” she says. “Everyone called me a slut, but then there you are, sneaking off with him every minute. We all knew what was going on, but no one called you a slut. No, it was just me. Cindy, too, and she’s a virgin. Cindy just because she’s friends with me.” Her hand is shaking as she brings the butt up to her lips. “At Joelle’s Halloween party, I saw you go upstairs, and I saw Luke follow you. So I went, too. I opened the door and took the picture.”

  “And then you sent it around to everyone?”

  “Only a few people,” she says.

  I grip the camera tighter. “But you sent it around.”

  “Yes, I sent it,” she says. “I told everyone that someone had sent it to me. I guess they sent it to all their friends, and then their friends sent it. Like that.”

  “My dad got this picture,” I say. “My dad.”

  She nods. “I know.”

  “I can’t believe this,” I say. “I can’t believe you’d be such a bitch.”

  One side of her mouth curls up, and she takes a drag on the cigarette. “Sure you can. It’s why you like me.”

  “Like you? I want to freaking kill you!” My whole body feels hot and clammy. “Do you have any idea what you did? The notes, the e-mails, the whispering, the staring? Mr. Zwieback found this on the library computers. Mr. Goddamn Zwieback! Even Ms. Godwin thinks I’m some kind of slut now. Do you have any idea what that’s like?”

  But of course she knows. “I was thirteen when I first went down on a guy.”

  “What?” I say. I’m used to her “sassy” pronouncements about sex, but now I have no time for any of it. “Never mind. I don’t want to know. I’m going back inside.” I whip around and walk away, still holding the camera. Pam’s behind me, talking to my back as if we were still having a pleasant conversation.

  “Seventh grade. Aaron Roth. It was at his Bar Mitzvah. Funny, you know? Getting a blow job at your Bar Mitzvah. Now, there’s a rite of passage.”

  I keep walking. She follows.

  “Here’s the thing,” she says. “I didn’t like it. I thought it was gross. But afterward, I felt so powerful. I couldn’t believe that I could do that to someone else. Make them lose control like that. I walked around the party, looking at every guy there, thinking, I could blow you and you and you and you and you. I thought I owned them all. I thought they were mine. I thought I was the sexiest girl in the world.”

  I’m still walking.

  “Aaron Roth did, too. For a while. And then he broke up with me and told everyone I gave bad head. Can you believe that? If I’d been two years older, I would have smashed his teeth down his throat for saying it. But I was thirteen. And I didn’t know what to do. Except maybe give more guys more head and try to get better at it. Prove I was sexy. Prove it to everyone.”

  That does it. I stop walking and turn around. “Are you insane? Do you really think I’m going to feel sorry for you?”

  Her face is veiled with smoke. “No. I don’t feel bad for me, so why should you?”

  I think she’s full of it, but I’m still too mad. I don’t want to care about what happened to Pam in junior high. Everyone on the planet has seen this picture, this picture that she took, a picture that she sent around. I didn’t do anything wrong.

  “It just got to me,” she says. “Everyone thought you were this nice girl, this good girl, but you were doing everything that I’d done. So why were you still good? And I’d quit guys. So why was I still a slut?” She stares off into the distance, at the lights from the hotel. “I know it wasn’t your fault. I know that it had nothing to do with you. It’s all me. I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”

  I think about Joelle’s party, what I said about Pam, what Ash said, what Joelle said, what we all said. Pam was a whore, she’d been with everyone, she’d do anything. We said it out loud, and it didn’t matter who heard.

  I try to stay angry, to hold on to it. You were humiliated in front of your parents and friends and the whole school, I tell myself. You had to live through Chilly taunting you and rockheads propositioning you and a doctor jamming his salad server inside you and your father shunning you.

  But, I think, even with all that, I’m okay. Partly because I have Pam for a friend.

  If I was looking for irony, I found it.

  “Go ahead, sm
ash it if you want,” she says, gesturing to the camera in my hand. “I’d smash it. It cost three hundred dollars and I bought it myself. If you smash it, it will make you feel better.”

  “It will make you feel better,” I say.

  She juts out her chin. “You want to hit me?”

  “Don’t be an idiot.”

  “You hate me, and that’s fine,” she says. “I was going to wait until after the prom to tell you, but I couldn’t stand it. All this stuff, these dresses; asking my mom over to your house. No one’s met my mom. Not even the guys I slept with.”

  I feel like a balloon someone’s pricked with a pin, my skin slackening, my breath slipping from me. “I thought you slept with Luke,” I say.

  “What?” she says, her eyebrows flying up into her hair.

  “I thought you were a slut and he was a player. Then Chilly told me that you guys had been together, so I broke it off with Luke.”

  “Chilly,” she says. “I should have hit him harder. I should have taken a baseball bat to his knees.”

  “Yeah, well. I blamed him for this picture.”

  “He’s a schmuck anyway.” Pause. “You really thought I’d been with Luke?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I wasn’t. Ever.” Her expression says it all: she thinks I’m a lunatic. “If you thought I was with him, why did you want to be friends with me?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “It’s not like I planned it, which is so weird because I plan everything. I just did it without thinking. Then, later, I figured we had something in common. And I thought you were funny. You weren’t who I thought you were.” It’s my turn to shrug. How do you explain those kinds of things?

  “I thought you were funny,” she agrees. “For a while, I almost forgot what I did to you. I felt like someone else, and you seemed like someone else, so…”

  “It was us, though. We were us.”

  “I can just say I’m sorry. I know it was mean. Really, really mean. More than mean.”

  “It was,” I say.

  “Yeah,” she mumbles.

  She seems like she might cry, and I won’t have any more people who aren’t supposed to cry crying; otherwise I might lose it for good. “So,” I say, “while we’re doing this born-again thing, this clean-slate thing, why don’t you delete it?”