Authors: Jonathan Bernstein
I
t's a shopping bag. But it's not just
any
shopping bag. It's the sort of posh shopping bag you expect to see dangling from the arm of someone who spends their days and credit cards on Rodeo Drive. It's covered in brown and pink stripes. The handles are made from thickly braided black string. I cannot believe how excited I am. I can literally feel my heart beat as I get close to the bag. It actually takes an effort to restrain myself from jumping up and down and clapping my hands.
Which is totally what I want to do.
I open the door, take the stairs at a gallop, charge into
my room, plop down on the bed, and peek into the bag.
Stuff!
There's
stuff
in the bag.
Presents. And an envelope.
Relief and guilt wash over me. Why would my family torment me like this? But why would I not trust them to come through for me? It's a complex issue, which . . .
Oh my God, they got me an iPhone!
I yank the black rectangle from the bag. Who should I call first? Joanna? (“You know who's next to go in the Report? People who think their phones are awesome!”) Perhaps not. Mom. I try to call Mom but there are no icons. No buttons to touch. Just a black screen. I look inside the bag for a charger. Nothing. I get it. I'm going to have to endure a lecture about how the phone is not free, how I can't call my friends in Zimbabwe, how I'll have to agree to use it responsibly before Mom and Dad will activate it. So annoying. But still, I've got an awesome phone! And an envelope. I tear it open and find myself holding a card inviting me to a sale. A special invitation-only sale at a clothes store named Image Unlimited. Or, as it says on the card, IMAGE UNLTD. It promises me up to 50 percent off selected items. This must be Natalie's caring and compassionate way of calling me a slob who slobs around in slobby tracksuits.
What else is in my brown-and-pink treasure chest? Lip balm. A yellow tube of smoky pearâflavored lip balm. I try to pull the top off. It's stuck fast. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks for keeping the family tradition of worthless joke gifts alive. Funny it's the only tradition you remember to keep alive. But thanks, anyway. There's more. Tic Tacs. Green Tic Tacs. My unfavorite candy. Dad. This is where Ryan gets his incredible sense of humor. And just to prove that I can take a joke, my first call on my new phone
will
be to Zimbabwe. And it'll be an all-nighter. Ha!
Is there more? There's more. I pull out a glasses case, open it, and find a pair of glasses. Thick, severe, black-rimmed glasses. To make me look like even more of a dork and target for Brendan Chew's abuse? Or to create the illusion that I am a smart person capable of deep thoughts? I think Mom might be behind this present. I remove my oval wire frames and slip the new glasses on. Everything's a blur. These lenses aren't my prescription. Yeah, that mother-daughter bond was
totally
a figment of my imagination. What else? A USB thumb drive. Who cares? Finally, I reach inside the bag and fish out . . . keys. A set of keys. I jangle them from my fingertip. A car? My mind races. A secondhand car they're restoring
in time for my sixteenth birthday? No way. But maybe.
I think back to Christmas three years ago, when Dad was all gloomy and he said times were hard, the economy was in trouble, and we'd have to make sacrifices. And then he woke us up on Christmas Eve and drove us to the airport, where we got on a flight to Hawaii. Fantastic! And a total surprise. He completely faked us out. So I'm thinking: Are the icky green Tic Tacs this year's hard times and tight belt? I think they are. At this moment, I could not love my devious dad more. And then I hear the low rumble of his voice from downstairs and I realize I'm wrong. I love him a lot more.
I scramble from the bed and go hurtling downstairs. Dad's in the kitchen talking on his Bluetooth, something about chasing down the crooks from Accounts. I pounce on him and wrap my arms tight around him. “I'll play along.” I laugh. “I'll pretend I'm mad that all you got me was Tic Tacs. But I know. I get it. And I can't wait.” Dad looks down at me like I'm a candy wrapper a strong wind has whipped into his face. He mumbles, “I'll talk to you later” into his headset and then untangles himself from me. He's got this expression that's halfway between surprise and annoyance. He's keeping up the pretense he doesn't know I know. “What's going
on, Bridge?” he says. Oh, he's good.
“Nothing much,” I shrug, playing along. “I guess I should stop expecting birthdays to be a big thing in this family. I guess I should just be grateful for a few green Tic Tacs.” He starts to pull off his jacket. Then he stops and looks at me. He looks at me exactly like Joanna did this morning. Except he doesn't hide his surprise. His eyes widen. He turns to the calendar stuck on the fridge door. When he turns back to face me, his expression is mournful. “Oh, Bridget,” he sighs.
“I'm so sorry.” He slumps down heavily on a stool. “Get it together,” he says to himself, almost under his breath but just loud enough for me to hear. He shakes his head sorrowfully. “I've got no excuses, Bridge. I would have hated it if this had happened to me when I was your age. But I promise I'll make it up to you. Where do you wanna go? What do you wanna do? Pick a place to eat and a movie you want to see. Call Joanna, see if she wants to come with. Then we'll go into the office and get you a gift card. A sixty-dollar one. And again, I'm sorry.”
Dad gives me a consoling hug and a kiss on the forehead. He leaves the kitchen and, as he heads upstairs, I hear him talking on his Bluetooth. “We are officially the
worst parents in the world. We forgot Bridget's birthday. We're taking her out tonight. Buy her something on your way home. Like balloons or a unicorn or something.”
His voice fades away. Now I'm confused. He's not playing one of his pranks. He forgot my birthday for real. They all did. So where did that bag come from?
I
t doesn't come up. The subject of the brown-and-pink-striped bag and the contents therein does not come up. It does not come up because I do not bring it up. It also does not come up because we do not go out as a family-plus-Joanna to the street dance sequel I have picked for us to see. We do not go out after the movie as a family-plus-Joanna to dinner at my favorite restaurant, Leatherby's Family Creamery. We got ready to go out as a family-plus-Joanna but then Mom received a last-minute call from her head office that there was a van filled with wigs that should have been delivered to a wig
store but was still in the depot and the wig-store owner was furious. “Flipping his wig,” I cracked, but no one was listening. Mom had to go and put out that fire. She promised to join us as soon as the wig crisis was over. Ryan didn't show. No message. No excuses. So it was just me, Dad, Natalie, and Joanna.
Dad slept through the movie. Joanna ate three bags of popcorn and then spent the duration of the movie picking kernels out of her teeth. Natalie tried to turn off her phone out of courtesy to other moviegoers but texts from her many, many friends kept flooding in and she felt it would be rude to ignore them. Dad didn't turn his phone off, either. It woke him twenty minutes before the climactic dance-off, which I never got to see because the call was from Ryan. We had to pick him up from the police station. (He had nothing to do with throwing eggs at a bus filled with nuns. It was the people he was with.
Right
.) The evening ended with me sitting in the back of the Jeep Compass squished between Natalie and Ryan, who was talking about his regular visits to the holding cell in Reindeer Crescent's police precinct.
“You're taking a man's freedom away, that's a tough pill to swallow,” reflected Ryan of his forty-seven minutes of incarceration. “But they're just walls, walls and bars. They can't cage the kid's soul.”
Natalie stopped replying to the newest batch of texts. “I'm going to start writing to prisoners,” she announced.
“You're not,” said Dad.
“They need to know someone cares,” she said.
“What if you started writing to a serial killer who likes wearing little girls' skins?” Ryan laughed. “What if you invited him over for Thanksgiving?”
“He's not coming for Thanksgiving,” said Dad. “We've already got Grandma Jean to deal with.”
“I'm going to write to prisoners, I don't care what you think,” said Natalie. “Everyone needs to know there's someone out there who's listening to them.”
“Thanks for coming out for my birthday,” I said.
Ryan kept laughing at Natalie, who kept arguing with him and Dad. Joanna kept digging for buried kernels. I don't think anybody heard me.
Meanwhile,
no one took responsibility for the birthday bag. Outside my immediate family, my prime suspect was Joanna. She's never said or done anything nice for anyone. Not even me and I'm her best-slash-only friend. But what if she had hidden depths? What if there was a sweet, nice, warm, generous person hiding deep inside her, desperate to come out but scared of how she'd be received? So, a couple of days after the Birthday That
Never Was, while we were walking to school, I waited for Joanna to take a breath between
I-hate
s and tentatively asked the question.
“Did you . . . leave something outside my front door?”
Joanna responded with one of her
What are you, a moron?
squints. “Yeah,” she replied, oozing fake sincerity. “I left a baby in a box. I want the Wilders to bring it up as their own. 'Cause they did such a stellar job with you.”
I returned her squint with a stare of disbelief. Splotches of red appeared on Joanna's face, indicating she was aware she went a step too far. “I mean . . . ,” she started to say. “I wasn't . . .”
I let her flounder for a moment. “So that's a no,” I finally said.
After I crossed Joanna off the list, I was left with distant family members. Uncle Leo and Aunt Anne. Doubtful. They still owe Mom and Dad money. Buying me presents instead of paying back the loan would trigger a huge family rift. Of course, there is another option. It could be one of my bio-parents. I mean, wouldn't that make sense? The bag was dumped anonymously on the doorstep. It's a gesture but an impersonal one. Thing is, if I go down that road then I have to think about talking to Mom and Dad about the contents of the bag. Which
means a discussion about whether I'm ready to meet the people who gave me away. And the contents of the bag suggest that whoever packed it does not know me at all. So I bury that option.
I let four days of
maybes
and
what-ifs
go by. More and more, I feel like the victim of a cruel prank. What did I end up with? A phone that doesn't work. Lip balm I can't open. Glasses I can't see with. Tic Tacs I've no interest in sucking. And keys. Useless keys. Oh yeah, and the invite to the sale that's probably a fake. But who would want to mess with me like this? And then it hits me. Brendan Chew. Of course. Obviously. If he gets laughs with Midget Wilder, what's he going to get with this goody-bag prank? But how far would he really go to embarrass me? I sit down at the computer and Google search IMAGE UNLTD's Reindeer Crescent store. It has a very fancy-looking site with music and videos and pictures of crazy-expensive dresses and tops.
Brendan Chew put in a lot of work to make me look stupid
, I think. I call the number on the site. “Hello, Image Unlimited, how may I help you?” breathes a female voice on the other end. I hang up. Weird. It's a real store. Or it's an incredibly complex prank. Either way, I need answers.
I hop off the bus at Reindeer Crescent's single-story mall and walk inside the shopping center with as much
confidence as I can muster. I see midafternoon shoppers milling around the Gap. Women come out of the brow-shaping salon. A boy and girl walk hand-in-hand into the Pretzel Choice. What I don't see is IMAGE UNLTD.
Then I spot it. Nestling between Aéropostale and Forever 21. The one shop in the mall that's not trying to draw attention to itself. The window is all black except for the silver letters I and U. I can already tell this is not the kind of place where I'll feel comfortable. (I tend to like shops that
are
drawing attention to themselves.) But I've come this far. So I walk up to the tinted-black door and give it a push. Bright white light spills out. I take another cautious step inside. The whiteness seems to stretch out forever. The walls, the floor, the ceiling. There are clothes on display and a few other customers. But the whiteness swallows everything else up. I feel like I'm in heaven. That feeling does not go away as a girl wafts toward me. A very tall girl. A very tall, very, very beautiful girl who might be in her late teens or early twenties and who is smiling at me like I'm a long-lost relative.
“Hi,” she says, sounding genuinely excited. “I'm Xan. With an X.” I would have replied that I'm Bridget with a B but strangely, right at this particular second, I can't seem to remember my name. It's a combination of the whiteness and the Xan. Instead, I brandish the
invitation that has been folded over many times and still bears the clammy warmth of being clutched in my hand. Xan with an X takes the invitation, glances at it, and then smiles at me. The light radiating from her insane veneers suddenly makes the rest of the store look like the inside of an old shoe. “Oh my God, Bridget,” she says. “I've got something that is so right for you. It'll change your life. Do you trust me?”
I want to say
Trust you? I don't even know you
, but once again, close proximity to Xan with an X seems to have robbed me of my power of speech. She slips an arm through mine and guides me across the whiteness. As I trot alongside, taking three steps to her one, she plucks items from the white walls. The deep red of her long sharp fingernails stands out in stark contrast to the surrounding whiteness. I follow her to the far end of the store, where she points me to a changing room. “Let me know when you're ready,” Xan says, handing me the clothes she's picked out. “I can't wait to see how these look on you.”
“Um . . . I'm not sure I can afford all this,” I say as the door begins to close.
“It's a special promotion,” Xan replies. “And you're a special customer.”
No one's ever called me special before. At least not in the positive way she's saying it.
“So does that mean it's . . .”
“Our gift to you.”
And then I'm alone in the spacious white changing room. That's when I see the outfit Xan with an X thinks is so me. It's a black tracksuit. Black with gold stripes. Much like the ones I wear seven days out of any given week. I'm disappointed. It's not that I really believed Xan had seen me through different eyes or that she was going to remake me in her own blindingly beautiful image. (Except I did. That's exactly what I believed. I don't need Brendan Chew to make me feel stupid. Not when I'm so good at it.)
Shut up
, I tell myself.
You got a free tracksuit
. There's a knock on the door. It opens a crack. “My eyes are closed,” Xan singsongs. “I just wanted you to try these on. They're so you. If you like them, consider them part of the gift.” Xan slides a shoe box into the changing room. I open it. Sneakers. Black-and-gold-striped sneakers. Much like the ones I wear seven days out of every given week.
Shut up
, I tell myself.
Free sneakers.
“If you need any help I'm right out here,” Xan calls.
“I'm fine,” I mutter.
“I can't wait to see you. I'm so, so excited!”
Now, I know it's Xan with an X's job to say things like that and, years from now, I can totally imagine Natalie working in a place like this and saying the exact same sort of thing, but it's been a long time since anyone said they were excited to see me.
So I change into my new black-and-gold tracksuit. It feels
fantastic
, warm and luxurious. I get actual tingles running up and down my arms and legs as I put it on. Zipping the jacket, I get the strangest sensation, as if the whole suit is
molding
itself to my body. Which is to say, it feels
nothing
like the slobby suits I generally slob around in. I squeeze out of my old beat-up Pumas and into the fresh pair. I feel like I'm walking on a cloud. I look at myself in the changing room mirror. Ordinary-looking girl. Five foot four. Little on the pale side. Dark eyes, almost black. Due a haircut. You could park an SUV in the gap between her teeth. But black and gold might be her colors. That girl in the mirror is smiling.
“Knock knock,” sings out Xan.
I open the changing room door. Xan's smile almost gives me sunstroke.
“Oh, Bridget,” she breathes. “You look so . . .” She can't complete the sentence. She flaps her hands at her eyes.
“That bad, huh?” I joke. But even though I know
she's exaggerating for effect, I feel like I look okay.
“Don't change,” she says. “Wear them home. Get used to them. Get used to the new you.”
As with every other command she's given me during my time in IMAGE UNLTD, I do exactly what she says.