“Well, they didn’t have ‘Good Riddance, Fucko’ in stock,” said Tristan. “So this seemed like the next-obvious choice. Now hop up in here, little lady. Uncle Tristy is going to take you and this here balloon on an extravaganza of exciting adventures. Yes, that’s right, I said extravaganza!” He swooped his arm. The balloon bounced some more.
“That sounds so fun, Tristy. But . . .” Lucy looked up where Olivia, Liza, and Gil were still standing by that car. Gil had her hand raised up to her eyes and she was squinting toward them. When she spotted Lucy, she waved. “I . . . can’t come.”
“Okay,” Tristan said easily, the way he said everything. “Whatcha doing?”
Lucy wanted so badly to tell him the truth. Oh, how much, how very, very much she wanted to. The words were flinging themselves against her cheeks, trying to slip their way out between her clamped lips. Lucy swallowed hard, forced them down. “I’m supposed to do something with them.”
She pointed to where the three girls stood.
Tristan craned his neck to see.
“You are?” He sounded confused. Which made sense. Lucy could not remember the last time she’d had an after-school plan with someone other than Tristan or Alex. It wasn’t that she was a complete social outcast; it’s just that she was sort of invisible. Every so often she’d make a plan with another girl from one of her classes. Usually the plan revolved around doing homework. Once a couple girls from her homeroom had asked her to go shopping but she got a stomachache and couldn’t go. Tristan was basically her only friend.
“Yeah, the short-haired one and I had a class together last year. They asked me to hang out with them after school.” Lucy bit her lip. It wasn’t exactly a lie. But it wasn’t exactly not a lie either.
For a moment they both stared at the three girls standing by that beautiful, old car. It looked like the sun was shining brighter on them than it was on anything else.
Tristan turned back. “That tall one is mmmf.” He waggled his eyebrows and stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth, a joke imitation of the kind of guy who would do that and mean it. “Wanna do something tomorrow?”
“Yes, please,” she said.
He held out the balloon. “I believe this belongs to you, graduate.”
Lucy turned toward the girls, then looked to the balloon, then back to them. She imagined herself walking up to them with that balloon and started to blush.
Tristan nodded, understood without her saying anything. He smiled. “Have fun, kiddo.”
“Thanks.” She forced a smile back.
Tristan opened his fist. The balloon rose up out of it. “It’s better this way anyway,” he said. “Balloons really hate being tied down.”
Lucy wasn’t sure what to say when she got to the car, so she pretended to cough until they noticed her.
Gil reached out and squeezed Lucy’s hand. A jolt of friendship went all the way up Lucy’s arm into her chest where her empty heart soaked it up.
“I hope your fake cough isn’t contagious,” said Liza.
Olivia gave a sly half smile. She got in the driver’s seat. Liza took shotgun. Gil pulled Lucy next to her in the back.
“Swap time,” Olivia said. The three of them took out their phones and passed them clockwise. Then they started scrolling through each other’s messages.
“Jason M misses you and wants to know your shoe size,” Liza said to Olivia. “Pete wants to make sure we’re coming Saturday. Clarkson says, ‘hahahahahahaha’ with about ten exclamation points. Kyle says a friend of his is having a party tomorrow and that also he is reading a book he thinks you might like and wants to know when he can meet up and give it to you.” Liza turned toward Olivia and rolled her eyes. “And some guy from a three-one-oh number can’t stop thinking about you. Who’s that?”
“Three-one-oh’s L.A.?” Olivia shrugged. “No idea.”
Olivia was looking down at Gil’s phone. “Gilly, Rowan wants to know if he bought you a ticket to visit him in Australia if you’d use it. Jason says he’s sitting next to someone really smelly and that you’re lucky smell-o-texts haven’t been invented yet. Mikey wants to know what you’re up to this weekend and if you like paella. Ethan sent you a heart emoticon, but he did it wrong, used an eight for the top instead of a three.”
“Oh, that’s sweet,” Gil said.
“It’s not. It’s ridiculous,” said Liza.
Gil shook her head. “Sammy and Ian F want you to come to a party on Saturday. Evan says he bought you something that he thinks you’ll like and then he wrote a wink face so I guess that means it’s dirty. And Scott called you sixteen times. And . . .” The sound of lightning striking filled the car. “Now seventeen because he’s calling you again.” Gil handed Liza her phone. Liza tossed it in Lucy’s lap.
“Tell him I’m not going to make it this afternoon. Imply that I might be with another boy.”
Lucy looked down. SCOTT—NOT BROKEN YET was blinking on the screen.
“It’s a phone,” Liza said. “Pick it up.”
Lucy lifted the phone to her ear. Hit TALK. Her palms were already sweating.
“Hel—” she started to say.
“Oh, thank God.” The voice coming through the phone was deep, not a boy’s voice but a man’s voice. “I’ve been calling you and calling you. Did you get any of my messages?”
“He-hello?”
“You’re still coming this afternoon, aren’t you?”
“This isn’t . . .”
“Sorry, sorry. That came out wrong. I don’t mean to sound demanding . . .” The voice paused. “It’s just that I planned something special for this afternoon and I wanted to make sure you . . .”
“Um, this isn’t Liza.”
Pause.
“Oh.” The voice coughed. “Who is this?”
“This is Lucy, Liza’s . . .” She paused. “I’m Lucy. Liza wanted me to . . .” Lucy looked down at her lap; she could feel them watching her. “Liza wanted me to tell you that she can’t make it this afternoon.”
“Tell him about the other guy,” Liza whispered.
“Oh.” There was a long pause. “God. Okay. Right. I should have figured that maybe. Uh, what’s she doing?”
“I don’t know. She just said that she can’t make it. She’s . . .” Lucy felt her heart squeezing for whoever this was. “She’s sorry.”
“Oh,” he said. “Um. Oh. Well. Okay. I left her a voice mail and emailed her and stuff too, but I’m not sure if she got it. I think my phone’s been weird and you know how unreliable email is and everything. Can you tell her that I left her voice mails and that I’ll call her back again later?”
“Okay.”
“Promise me you’ll tell her that?”
“I promise.”
“Did she get the bunny cake?”
“I don’t know.”
“The orchid?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did she like the singing telegram? I wasn’t sure if she was one of those people who was scared of clowns or not. . . .”
“I don’t know.” Lucy could feel Liza glaring at her. “I’m sorry.”
“Sure,” the voice said. He sounded crushed. And then, “Hey, did something happen with her mom again? Is that what’s going on?”
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Lucy said. “I . . .”
“Tell him about the other guy!” Liza hissed.
Lucy looked down.
“Give it to me.” Liza reached out and grabbed the phone. Then she pressed what looked like a blue ice cube against Lucy’s neck. Lucy felt a sudden intense coldness in her throat.
“. . . think she’s out with some friend of hers, Justin something. I don’t know. Tall, muscle-y, do you know him?” Liza said into the phone.
Lucy stared and her mouth dropped open. Liza was talking in Lucy’s voice. Lucy tried to speak, but no words would come out. She brought her hand to her freezing throat. Liza continued. “She said she’ll be back late. I’ll tell her you called tho
ugh. Byeeeee!”
Liza hung up.
“There,” she said.
Olivia turned toward Lucy. “I’m really so sorry, sugar lump, that should not have happened. We do not use our magic on our potential sisters.” Olivia looked at Liza. “Liza will not do anything like that again.”
“What?” Liza said. “She was messing it up!” But she sounded like a little kid arguing with her parents when she knew there was no point in trying to fight.
For a second the car was silent.
“So what did he say to you?” Liza asked.
Lucy opened her mouth. She felt her heart trying to pound its way out. Sweat sprung out all over her body. Her throat was still so cold. She couldn’t speak.
“Liza!” Olivia said sharply.
Liza reached out and tapped Lucy’s throat again. Lucy felt a melting and then her words came. “He wanted to know if something happened with your mom,” Lucy said. Her hands were shaking.
What had Liza done to her?
“He what?”
Lucy flinched.
“How the hell does he even know . . .” Liza shook her head. She bit her lip and looked out the window. “Anything else?”
Lucy was breathing in tiny little gasps. “He-he also a-asked me to tell you he called and texted and would call you tomorrow. He asked if you got the flowers he sent and the . . .”
Liza shook her head. She laughed. “God, how pathetic.” She looked at Lucy again. “Who told you to tell him I was sorry? Do not tell a guy that I said I am sorry unless I tell you to tell him I said I was sorry. What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m sorry, I . . .”
Olivia glanced at Liza. “Is Scott ready?” Her words were laced with meaning.
“Almost.” Liza nodded, then went back to her phone. “Tall Chris put us on the comp list to see some band on Friday night. But it’s like some emo band. And emo-boy-heartbreak tears are hardly worth anything. Whatever.”
Lucy put her hand against her throat. What had just happened? “What did you do there?” she said. “What did you do to me?” But Liza didn’t answer.
Olivia flipped on the radio. A song Lucy knew came on and Olivia turned it up loud. Lucy felt her whole body sizzling. Lucy sang along quietly to calm herself. She closed her eyes, the wind blew her hair. These girls are magic. If she’d had even the slightest hint of a doubt left, she didn’t anymore. They had power. They could destroy her. Or they could give her everything she wanted.
Ten minutes later they pulled up in front of a bunch of row houses a couple of towns away from their clean, little suburb. The lawns were all bare and the paint on most of the houses was peeling. A woman was pushing a pink baby stroller toward them. As she passed, Lucy realized the woman was no older than Lucy. They got out of the car and walked up to a blue house. There was a guy with a shaved head and a goatee sitting on the stoop. He looked like he was in his forties. He had a can of something in a paper bag.
Lucy could feel the guy on the stairs watching them with sleepy eyes. He gave Olivia a nod, like he knew her. Olivia walked inside. And when Gil passed he smiled and said, “Babybabybaby,” but it was sweet somehow, not skeevy.
And Gil said, “Herbiiiiiee,” and he caught one of her small hands in his big ones and brought it to his lips and kissed it. Gil squeezed his shoulder and then walked inside too.
When Liza was standing next to him he didn’t say anything, just stuck out his brown-paper-bagged can. She grabbed it, raised it up to her lips, and took a long, slow swallow.
Liza handed him back the can. The guy held it upside down and a few drops sprinkled out onto the steps.
“I owe you a beer,” Liza called out behind her.
And the guy, he just opened his mouth and laughed. His teeth were perfect, movie-star teeth, the kind that people have when they have unlimited money to devote to the inside of their mouths.
Lucy stared at the man on the stoop with his dirty hands and his beer can and the sun streaming down on him and his head tipped back and his lovely teeth all lined up in a row and Lucy thought about how Alex would probably have liked to take a picture of him.
Lucy’s phone buzzed in her pocket. Her heart leapt.
She wondered if it was Alex reading her mind!
But it was Tristan.
He’d sent her a photo of a balloon with GOOD RIDDANCE, FUCKO written on it in Sharpie. He was smiling next to it, giving a big, cheesy thumbs-up.
When Lucy looked up, the other girls were already inside.
“And oh,” Olivia called out, not turning back, “by the way, this is a test.”
“A test of what?” Lucy said. “What am I supposed to do?” But no one answered.
Lucy hovered in the doorway.
Three guys were in the room in front of her looking like they belonged in an ad for surf gear or skateboards. There was one sitting on the couch leaning forward, tan arms wrapped in leather bands, one lying down on the couch with his shoes off, and one cross-legged on the floor, sun-bleached hair flopping in his face. They were beautiful, all of them, and had that ease about them that implied not that they didn’t know what they looked like, but that they knew and didn’t care.
Lucy just stood there blushing.
There was, Lucy had long ago realized, an art to entering into rooms where groups of people were already having fun. One joke, one question, one clever observation was all one needed to cross the invisible line between person-by-the-door and person-in-the-room. This would have been hard for Lucy even on a good day, but then, with the wounds of a broken heart festering inside her chest, it felt completely impossible.
“Oh no, no you don’t!” Gil said sweetly. Gil sat cross-legged on a giant blue cushion on the floor, holding a video game controller. Projected on the wall in front of her, a guy in a silver space suit was fighting a many-headed monster. He was projected so big that he was the size of an actual person. One by one she was making the spaceman knock off the monster’s heads. The screen flashed. The monster screamed and fell off the cliff. The game was over.
“Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeyat,” Leather Bracelets said. “We’ve been trying to do that for like a month.”
Barefoot Lying on the Couch sat halfway up, “JACK! JAAAACK!! You owe Gil a hundred bucks.”
“Damn it!” a voice called from the other room. Lucy realized then that Olivia and Liza were nowhere in sight.
Gil laughed and shook her head.
Liza walked back in from the kitchen. Behind her was a tall guy wearing jeans and a short, pink bathrobe with frills around the neck. He was holding two frosted martini glasses, both full.
Leather Bracelets looked at the martinis and raised his eyebrows.
“Liza asked for one,” Bathrobe said. “She came in here and said, ‘Where’s my martini?’ Just like a mean husband from the fifties.”
“Dude,” said Sun-bleached. “That wasn’t asking, that was demanding.”
“She’s a demander,” said Bracelets. “A demandstress.”
But they were smiling. What was Lucy supposed to be doing? Whatever it was, she was quite sure that hovering in the doorway was not it.
“Where I’m from,” said Lying on the Couch. He had a slight southern accent. He crossed his legs at the ankles and stretched out his toes. They were very long, like fingers almost. “Where I’m from we just call that a bitch.”
Liza smiled. “Where you’re from, honey, they’ve just started walking upright. I don’t think they’ve gotten around to inventing words yet.” Then she raised the glass in his direction, like she was toasting him and they all laughed. She brought the glass to her lips and tipped it back.
“How is it?” Bracelets asked. The glass was empty. “Was it . . . ?”
Liza wiped a few droplets of liquid off her lower lip with her middle finger. It looked both suggestive and mean. “Vile.” She licked the tip of her middle finger and gave him back the glass.
“Speaking of . . . things,” said Bathrobe. He turned toward the big video screen
where the end-of-game sequence was still going—now the spaceman was standing on a pedestal with fireworks exploding behind him while one at a time hot lady characters walked up and tossed their bras at him. Bathrobe shook his head slowly, then turned toward Gil and bowed low. He pulled a fistful of bills out of his bathrobe pocket and held them up over his head.
Gil just laughed. “I don’t want your money, Jackie.”
Bathrobe/Jack shook his fist in the air. “No, no, you have to take it. Otherwise I will feel like a bet welsher. Which is even worse than being broke.”
“Take it, Gil,” Liza said. “Or these assholes will make fun of him forever and the pharmaceuticals he’ll need to get over it will cost way more than a hundred bucks.”
Bathrobe/Jack grinned and stuck his tongue out at Liza through his teeth.
“The girl’s right though,” said Lying on the Couch. “We assholes will do that.”
Gil took the crumpled-up bills. “Okay. Okay, okay.” But she was shaking her head.
Lucy leaned her head against the door frame. She did not even need to know what she was being tested on to know that she was failing.
Olivia walked slowly back toward the kitchen. “Come on, Gilly,” she said. Gil got up and followed; so did Bracelets and Sun-bleached and Liza. And then it was just the three of them, Lucy in the doorway, Bathrobe/Jack holding the martini, and Lying on the Couch.
There was paint chipping on the door frame; she picked at it with her pinky. A little flake came off and she pressed it into the pad of her thumb with her nail. It split in half. No one was saying anything. She looked up.
Bathrobe/Jack was watching her. He rubbed the top of his head. “We haven’t offered anything to our guest.” He tipped his martini toward her. Liquid sloshed out onto the floor. “Maybe she wants this delicious handcrafted imbibe-able.”
“Um,” Lucy started to say very quietly. She was staring down at the floor. “No thank you.” But when she looked up, she realized they hadn’t heard her.
“Well, our guest hasn’t even come in the room yet,” Lying on the Couch said. “She’s just been standing at the door watching us. A little creepy if you ask me.”