Fear and Laundry (12 page)

“What did you just say to me?” I was watching her near me again and vaguely wondering how many people would show up to my funeral, when a toilet flushed. A stall door opened and Paige stepped out.

“You must be deaf, Eugenia,” Paige told Ridley, “’cause
I
clearly heard her tell you to bring it.” She sauntered between Ridley and me, approached the sink and pumped at the soap dispenser.

“Well if it isn’t reform-school Sally,” Ridley growled, crossing her arms. Penny and the others tittered.

Paige leisurely lathered and rinsed her hands, not bothering to look into the mirror to meet Ridley’s glare. “Tell me, Eugenia.” She extinguished the tap and shook excess water from her fingers, dried her hands carefully on a paper towel. “You ever hear why I got sent to the joint in the first place?”

When Ridley didn’t answer, Paige bunched up the wet paper towel and tossed it at her. As it bounced off Ridley’s chest and landed beside a drain in the floor, Paige produced, seemingly from thin air, a switchblade that shot open with a click. Ridley’s eyes widened and I saw that yeah, she’d heard that story about Paige, too. Then, almost as quickly, her eyes narrowed again.

“Yeah, right,” she said, flipping her hair over her shoulder. “You sliced someone up and they just let you out again. Sent you back to a regular high school?” Behind her, the other girls laughed again, albeit more nervously this time, their eyes trained on the knife.

Paige leaned against the sink. She touched her finger to the tip of the blade and twisted it back and forth. “What can I tell you? The juvenile justice system’s hilariously screwy that way.” She paused and then took a quick step forward, stabbing the knife at the air in front of Ridley, who flinched and jumped back. Paige laughed.

Ridley’s mouth twisted. Then she sniffed and inexplicably wished me “Good luck getting home.” She turned and, with a gesture, summoned her gang out of the bathroom. Penny was the last to exit, pausing to knock my backpack off the shelf by the sinks.

When the door shut behind them, I let out a breath. Before I could thank her, Paige put her knife away and left without a word.

***

I
stayed in the bathroom a few minutes, washing my hands and splashing water on my face in an effort to calm myself. When I finally felt a little better, I scooped my book bag from the floor and made my way down the hall to the nearest exit.

As I rounded the corner and neared the bike rack, I was only faintly surprised to discover my bicycle lock had been cut and my bike apparently pulled into the street, backed over once or twice by a car and then tossed back onto the sidewalk, where it lay knotted like a pretzel.

Good luck getting home
, Ridley’s voice jeered in my head.

***

T
hough the building had mostly emptied by the time I went back inside, I hoped Lia would still be around. Maybe the
Dracula
auditions had run late. When I knocked at the auditorium’s backstage door, a student let me in and pointed me down a hallway.

I found Lia in the girls’ dressing room, wiping stage makeup away with a glob of cold cream. She looked up when she heard me at the door, her gaze meeting mine in the mirror above the vanity. She’d gone all out for the audition, twisting her hair into a bun and wearing a costume Victorian gown from the drama class’s collection.

“Jesus. What happened to you?” She turned around in her seat, draping her arm across the back of the chair.

“I’m gonna need a ride home,” I said. Then I caught her up on what’d happened since I last saw her, telling her about Penny, Alex, the confrontation with Electric Torch in the bathroom, and the destruction of my bike.

“It was Ridley,” said Lia when the words had finally stopped tumbling out of me.

“You think?” An armoire hung open near the dressing room door, costume bits poking out of it. I plucked anxiously at a feather boa trailing out of an overstuffed drawer. “What am I going to do?” I lamented as feathers fluttered to the floor.

Lia told me to calm down, but I told her she didn’t get it. Not all of us had gotten cars for our sixteenth birthdays. Some of us, in fact, were not even allowed to drive unsupervised. I needed my bike, was pretty well screwed without it.

“Maybe you can use your laundry money to buy a new one,” she suggested, referring to the pittance I’d be getting for helping Alma the week before. She asked me what I’d earned.

Besides Alma’s undying gratitude and bleach stains on my favorite jeans? Hardly anything. Mom had promised me minimum wage, but after taxes there wouldn’t be much left. I’d already mentally spent most of it on back issues from University Comics.

“Don’t worry about it. I can drive you to school,” Lia volunteered, sighing the way my mother did whenever she was sick of hearing me complain. I told Lia that while I appreciated her offer, there was no way such an arrangement could work out for very long. Lia was obsessed with being at school on time (“punctual,” she corrected me). Two or three days of getting to the Biology lab late and she’d be ready to make me walk, and I’d be right back where I started.

“We’ll figure something out,” she said, letting her hair down and shaking it out with her fingers. “Chill. And back up to what happened after your Spanish class. Did I hear you say Alex Kalivas asked you out?”

“I said he might’ve. I couldn’t tell.”

“Tell me exactly what he said,” Lia demanded. Leave it to her to focus in on what I now considered the least significant event of the day. I took a breath and did as she asked, trying to recall the precise words Alex had used.

“So you think it means something?” I asked.

She looked at me as though I were dense. “Don’t you?”

I shrugged, annoyed.

She stepped over to me and turned her back, sweeping her hair aside so I could help her out of her costume. Buttons ran all the way up the gown’s high-necked collar. “You should go to the show tomorrow night.”

“I don’t know,” I said, getting to work on the buttons.

“Why not?”

“What about band practice?”

“We can practice on Sunday. You should go to Lynch’s and have a good time, see if this Alex thing pans out.”

I didn’t answer.

“Unless you’re not interested in him?” she asked.

“He’s cute,” I said. But I didn’t know much else about him.

That’s why I should hang out with him, Lia prompted. When I still seemed reluctant, she told me I “could do a lot worse” and reminded me I already had. “You should go,” she repeated, turning and holding the now-open dress against her body with her arms. “I’ll come with you.”

Now I was suspicious. I scrutinized her, trying to discern some ulterior motive. Because I doubted she was only this concerned about my love life. “You’re hoping Ridley’ll be there, so you can start shit with her,” I accused. It wouldn’t be the first time Lia’d been in a real fight, though it’d been a while.

She smiled coldly. “She’s the one who started it,” she said. “I just want to finish.”

I knew it was a bad idea I should probably try and talk her out of. But I was too drained. She told me to wait outside and she’d take me home when she’d finished changing.

***

L
ynch’s may’ve been quiet during the day, but on show nights it came alive. When Lia and I arrived there Saturday night, the parking lot was so crowded we had to park in front of Mr. Lee’s and walk from there. As we crossed the street, I spotted Jake and Paige milling around on the sidewalk with Trent, Katrina, and some others. Paige was talking, Jake’s head bent so he could hear her. She stood too close to him, with her chest thrust out.

“There they are,” said Lia, pointing. She hadn’t told me until the ride over that, with rehearsal called off, Jake and Paige had decided to come to the show, too.

“I see them,” I said, watching Paige hook her arm through Jake’s. She huddled against him as a cold gust of wind blew down the street, sending trash bouncing down the gutter.  Not seeing us, the two of them turned and went inside before we could reach them.

We’d catch up to them later, Lia said. “Wonder where Alex is?” Her eyes darted around the crowd.

“Please. We both know you’re really looking for Ridley.”

She didn’t answer.

“I don’t need you to do this, you know,” I said.

“Do what?”

“Defend me. I can take care of myself.”

She chuckled. “Since when?”

“You weren’t there in the bathroom yesterday and I handled it just fine.”

“You mean Paige handled it for you, with a little help from her arsenal.”

The wind hit us again, prompting Lia to wrap her flannel shirt tighter around herself. Ducking her head, she trailed a group of people hurrying into the building and motioned me after her.

It was so warm in Lynch’s teeming game room I shrugged out of my own flannel almost immediately, knotting it around my waist. When I looked back up, Lia had disappeared into the crowd. Glancing around for her, I saw April hunched on a stool by the entrance to the dining room, collecting cash for the night’s cover.

“Love your hair,” I said, approaching her.

She fingered the fall of thin, bright purple braids spilling over her shoulders. “I put blue on top of the pink,” she told me, wrinkling her nose to keep her glasses from slipping. “And this is what happened.”

“Well, it looks good,” I smiled. Carreen High’s dress code forbade anyone from dying their hair any “non-human” hair color. But April was home-schooled by her artist dad and did what she wanted.

I dug a couple of dollar bills out of my jeans pocket and pressed them into her palm. She stuffed them into a collection box, marked an X on the back of my hand with a black Sharpie and waved me into the dining room, where the opening band was still setting up their equipment. The place reeked of both tobacco and clove cigarettes. Through the curtain of smoke hanging in the air, I scanned the crowd standing around the stage and saw Jake talking to Trent and some other, older guy. Paige wasn’t around. I was about to head over and say hello when someone touched my arm.

“Hey Veronica.” It was Alex. “Glad you showed.” He beamed at me, all perfect white teeth and bronze skin. He really was good looking.

I forced a smile and mumbled something about being glad to see him, too. With another quick glance back, I let Alex take my hand and lead me to a table in the corner.

***

W
hile the band warmed up, Alex bought me a Diet Coke and told me a bit about himself. I’d remembered correctly. He did play soccer, although a knee injury was keeping him off the field this year. I learned he and Melina were the next to youngest of eight siblings. He tried to describe what it was like to be a twin, and to grow up in such a large family. He also told me about a trip to Greece the entire Kalivas family had taken last year for a cousin’s wedding, and about how he’d rock climbed on and sailed along the coast of Crete. He’d read and liked the copies of
The Blank Slate
Lia and I’d given him, so we talked about the zine for a while, too. But when he asked me about myself, I didn’t know what to tell him. I didn’t have any exciting adventure stories to share, or even any funny sibling anecdotes.

I was playing nervously with a pair of earplugs, casting about for something to talk about when Dave Crippen, a guy I recognized from school but didn’t really know, walked up and spoke into Alex’s ear. Alex cocked his head to listen, and then excused himself for a minute. Relieved, I told him to take his time.

I sat there alone, sipping at the now-lukewarm soda and trying to generate a mental list of topics to cover with Alex when he came back, when someone tapped me on the shoulder. Turning one way, I saw only a blur of movement. Turning the other, I saw Jake.

“Hi,” I said when he sat down beside me. He wore a Racket t-shirt that looked brand-new, the creases still visible where it’d until recently been folded and displayed at the band’s merch table in the front room. By contrast, his torn-up jeans looked ancient. His hair was a mess.

“How’s it going?” he asked. “Better than yesterday?”

“You heard,” I said, flashing on a mental image of my ruined bike and assuming Lia’d told him what’d happened.

“Nic and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day,” he said.

I had to smile.

“So, you need a ride to school now?”

“Yeah. Why? You offering?” I joked.

“Sure. I’m at your service.”

“Right.”

He looked away into the crowd, to where Alex stood chatting with Dave and a group of other people I only vaguely recognized from school; he ran in an almost completely different circle than I did, I realized.

“So who’s this Kalivas kid?” Jake asked, and again I had to assume he’d heard Alex’s name from Lia.

“Guy from my Spanish class. He works at the Kopy Shak.”

“You like him?”

“I don’t even know him. We’d never really talked before yesterday.”

He didn’t respond to this, only glanced off into the crowd again. This time he seemed to be looking at Paige, who stood surrounded by four guys hanging on her every word.

“So, uh,” I said, “You’re here with Paige?”

“We rode together,” he said impassively.

“Lia said the two of you were getting along pretty well,” I ventured.

He turned back to me. “She is something, isn’t she?” he asked.

“Oh, she’s something,” I agreed. I felt a hand on my arm and looked up to see Alex leaning across the table.

“The show’s about to start,” he told me, smiling tentatively at Jake. I noticed Jake didn’t smile back. “You want to get a spot near the front?”

“Go on,” Jake said to me. “Have fun.”

***

R
idley never showed. Still, Lia found it hard to be disappointed. It turned out Yamir Bandi was a Racket fan and turned up for the show a few minutes after we did.

After The Racket’s set, Lia skipped up to where Alex and I stood near the stage and waved her fist triumphantly in my face, showing me Yamir’s telephone number inked unevenly on the back of her hand.

“What about Addy Chandler? The oboe virtuoso?” I reminded her of Yamir’s supposed betrothal.