The Taming of the Drew (33 page)

“Nope, don’t have the time” I said, “We can do three loads at once here, and the air-dry option in a dryer big enough to let a garment lie flat.”

“What if this stuff doesn’t fit?”

“Oh ye of little faith.” Then I relented, “Fact is, if these don’t fit, we’re out of money. So we’re screwed.”

He leaned toward me as I stacked quarters. “And then
my
mom wins.”

“I wouldn’t go counting my mother out of the race yet, not if I was you. Done that, lived to regret it.”

I slid the skyscrapers of quarters to one side, leaving a tiny pile in front of me.

“So,” I said, brightly wiping the tiny pile off the top into my hand and looking down at it, “want to split a churro for supper?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, a big smile on his face, “seems like a lot.”

“Yeah,” I said, equally nonchalant, “we could split a stick of gum, instead.”

“What the heck. It’s not like I turn eighteen every day. Let’s splurge on the churro.”

I didn’t trust leaving the leather coat in the laundromat, so I headed out to the sidewalk churro stand and left Drew with the tumbling machines.

I’d gotten my order and was counting to myself as I dropped coins one at a time in the churro seller’s hand (a very short and wide hunch-backed woman in a black dress with an impressive uni-brow and a million wrinkles). The warm sugary churro smell wafted up to me, as a guy’s voice said, “Hey, I’ve got something for you to put in your mouth.”

It was flabby-cheeked, pale-brown-haired sleaze-guy. The one who’d bothered me at Dino-Dog.

I ignored him. He moved to my side of the churro cart.
 

I dropped the last coin, turned to leave and he grabbed my arm.

I gave him a look and said, “Don’t you dare put your hand on me.”

His friends, all still on the other side of the cart, started that chuckle guys do in this kind of situation.

Everything seemed to go into slow-mo. Simultaneously, sleaze-guy narrowed his eyes, I could feel his damp hand tighten on my arm, I saw the churro lady reach under her counter, and Drew’s voice said, behind me, “Adrian. She
said
get your goddamn hand off her —”

Which is when the churro lady whipped out a fly-swatter and thwapped the sleaze-guy on the head.

That one thwap seemed to shift time back into normal speed and she thwapped, thwapped, thwapped his ear, head, and neck until he said, “OW! What is
with
you people?” And moved away.

I stood there, feeling heat on my cheeks and a tightness in my chest. The churro lady tucked her fly-swatter back under her cart and started serving the next person in line, like nothing happened.

Flabby-cheeked guy, moving away with his friends, turned and shouted back, “Dog — listen,
sorry
! I didn’t know.”

Drew slid his hand up my back to my neck and gave a gentle pull. I stumbled toward him, almost into his chest, and then we were walking back across the street to the laundromat, his warm hand still loose against the skin of my neck, under my hair.

When we got inside, he moved off like nothing had happened, but his mouth was white around the edges, and his jaw clenched.

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to say I was sorry, because I hadn’t done anything. Even so, it felt icky, knowing he’d heard what the sleaze-guy said to me, like anyone could say that kind of thing, any time they wanted to.
 

Drew said, jaw still clenched, not looking at me, “That’s the last time you’ll have to go through that. I guarantee it.”

Then he came back to where I stood. He slouched against the folding table, reached over to me, pinched off an end of churro and bit it, white powdery sugar on the side of his mouth.

I tried not to stare. “Really?” I said, and took a bite myself. “You’re that all-powerful?”

He gave me a look. “You want to bet me? But I warn you, this one’s
my
area of expertise.”

“What, sleazy guys?”

“Nope,” he said, getting up to check on the dryer situation, “the football team.” He voice echoed from inside the dryer, “And don’t say they’re the same thing, even though, in this case, they are.”

Chapter 10

Darkness had fallen and the party started before the clothes were finished. The only people left in the laundromat (besides us) were a tired woman and her three small kids. The baby in a pink stretchy sat in a car seat on a washing machine, big eyes getting bigger as the warm jiggling seemed to make her sleepier. The two-year old boy was fussy, running around in circles, and his older four-year old sister kept trying to herd him into a kid corner where there were broken odds and ends of dirty toys. As I went to change in the laundromat bathroom, Drew walked over and sat in a microscopically small kids’ chair next to them, which made them both laugh. Drew sat in the chair and curled the giggling boy like a bicep weight, over and over, the girl jumping and clapping and counting as Drew did each curl with exaggerated effort.

When I walked out the door, the mother raised her chin to get her daughter’s attention. Her daughter, seeing me, clapped a hand over her mouth, and I realized that, next to the little girl, Drew sat frozen, the boy half-curled up. The boy, his chest and tummy cradled in Drew large hand, each of his fists gripping one of Drew’s fingers, said, “Princess! Princess!” He wriggled down and the two kids started chanting it and bunny-hopping in a circle. Instead of shushing them, the way she had done before, their mother smiled down at the clothes she was folding.
 

I played ring-around-the-roses while Drew changed, both of the kids entranced by the sight of my dress puffing out into a multi-layered, deflating tent that threatened to bury all three of us when I dropped to the floor.
 

Then the bathroom door opened.

Drew’s hair looked damp, like he’d run wet hands through it. The pants fit him so beautifully that even I couldn’t believe I’d found them in a heap. The tan chamois was soft and clingy. You could see the muscles of his thigh shift when he came across the room and sat in the tiny chair, suddenly awkward.

His jacket gave him an edge he’d never had when he wore Uni-approved, predictable clothes. The jacket changed him, from a high school guy, to a man.

I sat on my heels with the dress poofed out around me, looking up at him. His face was a little pink, like he’d either splashed it with too warm water, or he was flushed.
 

We stared at each other and I said, after clearing my throat, “Let me see the shirt.”

It was tight across the shoulders, and it had that magical combination that only real, vintage rugby shirts achieve — stiff blinding-white collars and soft-draping shirt-cloth.

He shrugged the jacket back up on his shoulders, held a hand down to lift me up and said, his voice gruff, “So how do I look?”

The kids jumped and clapped behind us as we left, their mother smiling and looking years younger.

We walked in the spring night, and I said, “I don’t know how to put it. You look exactly like… you know all those Abercrombie and Fitch ads? All your Uni pals when they get dressed up? You look
exactly
like what they’re trying to achieve.” I smiled at him. “They’re a watered down, trying too hard,
imitation
. You’re it.”

His face was definitely red now. He said, talking to the sidewalk with his hands in his jacket pockets, “Um. I was expecting a ‘nice.’”

I smiled to myself. “Then don’t ask, if you don’t want to know.”

He opened the car door for me. “I can tell you one thing I don’t want. I don’t want to be the one to tell my mom she lost. Big time.”

“And I don’t want to be the one to tell my mom she won. She’ll be
impossible
to live with.”

“Mothers,” he said, cranking, “Can’t live with them…”

“…can’t be born without them.”

***

It got worse as we drove, this feeling like the way I imagine an asthma attack comes on. Sneaky at first, then you realize you can’t breathe so well, and by the time we were pulling up the circular drive to Sander’s house, I felt shaky and panicky. I had my knuckles pushed into the mass of my skirt.

What the hell had I been thinking, agreeing to this?
 

Kids were climbing out of Porsches, and BMWs and, good God, that meant there was a valet hired to park the cars.

Drew zoomed to the front, past the other cars waiting in line, threw the coupe in park and got out before I realized what he’d done. He came around and opened the door, put an elbow on the top of it, drumming his fingers like he’d already waited too long for me, and said, “Buck up, Kate.”

Which, of course, made me angry. Who was he to imply I was afraid? I tried to look haughty, swished my skirt to the side, put my pointy-toed go-go boot out and, mimicking Bianca, got a foot under me and did a one-leg lift from the low-slung passenger seat. Hey, it worked!

Drew seemed to be trying hard to not smile. Which is when I realized that the haughty, disdainful look kind of disappears if you’re mentally giving yourself a surprised high-five for not falling over.
 

Then he waited.
 

“You’re supposed to go on,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” Kids were piling out of cars in ones, twos and groups, walking toward the sweeping mass of steps that lead to ten-foot-tall double doors.

“I know how it works. I watch people. If you’re giving me a ride, you just walk in. Or we go in side-by-side. But this waiting so I go first and you follow behind, this is…” I looked away down the drive, where a couple of people were starting to pay attention to us. I whispered, “…this is like
date
behavior and you know it.”

He gave me a heavy-lidded look, “How would you know? I heard you’ve never dated.”

I could feel the mottled embarrassment breaking out in red spots all over my chest and shoulders. “Who told you that?” I said, aware that a few people were drifting closer to eavesdrop. Then I crossed my arms. “I am going to
kill
Tio.”

“Is it true?” he asked, and there was something in his voice.

“Of course it’s true! Are you
crazy
! I’m too tall and too weird and too opinionated for any guy in high school to ever…” I shook my head, “Don’t you change the subject. Why are you acting like this — this was
never
a date and if you don’t stop, you’re going to give people the wrong message. Act like I’m one of the boys.”

He hesitated, like he started to say something, then changed his mind. By now six people stood at the edge of the drive, watching us. He gave me a slow smile. “I bought you supper,” he said.
 

“Half a churro.”

“More like two-thirds. I barely had any.”

“Next time, get your own.”

“All right, then,” he said, putting a hand on my rigid back and pushing me forward, his voice humming with laughter, “Next weekend. It’s a date. As long as
you’re
buying.”

I was afraid to say anything, with all the people listening. I wanted to shake him and ask what he was doing. Drew now knew from Tio, if he hadn’t before, in excruciating detail exactly what a social misfit I really was. Had he lost his mind? A part of me also wanted to get back in the car and hide until this was over. Because this was too painful and too hard, pretending I didn’t care, pretending that a “date” was a joke between us. Pretending I didn’t know how doomed even friendship was, once Drew inevitably discovered his mother hired me.

But there was no way out. Of any of it.

We inched up the stairs in the crowd, everyone silent around us. Then we were standing in the double doors, where I could see masses of people in a huge, two-story, vaulted room, most of them turning to look at us.
 

That’s when Drew held my arm and turned me toward him, people bumping to a halt behind us.

“Here, you’ve got some powdered sugar,” he said, and ran his thumb along the edge of my lower lip. His eyes were a smoldery color and my breath seemed to hitch in my chest. “There.”
 

Then he put his hand on my back and gently, relentlessly, pushed me forward until we were no longer framed in the doorway and I was headed, much too late to turn back now, into the seething mass of Uni students.
 

***

Imagine there’s a webcam on my head. Here’s what it would project. I snake through masses of people, squeezing through a doorway, then into a room with a full-sized pool table, out the opposite door to a room with a eight foot by six foot screen, a row of rocking pilot’s seats up front, each with an attached, side table, and behind the pilot’s seats what seems like hundreds of bodies lounging around watching one in a series of classic movies (now, Fatal Attraction, box propped up to show what’s next, Blair Witch Project). Through the opposite doorway is a mini-kitchen and a glass wall overlooking a pool. A band with a singer plays outside, the volume so loud you can only talk by shouting, even in the glassed-in room. People in caterers’ outfits, older than any of us, weave through the crowds, offering plates of food, everything from gourmet, crust-less peanut-butter and grape-jam triangles, to what looks like sashimi tuna on hard rye crackers. You’d think I’d be starving, but my stomach is knotted into a fist. There’s no one I know. Not one set of friendly eyes, and since Drew is behind me, his hand still at my back, steering me through the maze, I don’t even see his.
 

Out the glassed-in room and into the open-night area of the pool, and forward toward the band. That’s where we see Sander, who shouts, “Dog! It’s the man of honor.” The song ends and Sander gets the band to pause so he can talk just by waving a hand at them. They stand, professional musicians, like robots that someone has disconnected from a power source, conserving energy until they can start again.

Sander shouts to all around, “It’s the Dog,” and a woof-woof chant starts at the edge of the crowd. Drew says, from behind me, at almost-normal volume level, “Sander, meet Kate, Katharine Baptista. She’s,” there is this little pause, “with me.” People have shushed the woofers into silence and you can hear, muttered around us, someone asking, “what’d he say?”