Tales From My Closet (27 page)

“
Would someone please explain what’s going on here?
”

“You planned this, didn’t you?”

“No.”

“And what exactly are you trying to prove?”

“Would someone please tell me what’s happening?”

So we did — both of us — Emma Beth narrating the crucial bits of information, which basically boiled down to the fact that we both had summer internships at Libby Fine at the same time — and me providing the footnotes, like how Libby Fine was my friend’s godmother. And when we were done, Daphne, in her blunt way, said: “What’s the beef between you two, anyway?”

“Jesus, Mother!”

“And why didn’t you tell me that you knew my daughter?” Daphne said, turning to me. “Don’t you think I might have wanted to know?”

Instantly, I felt like two-day-old cafeteria food: crusted-over macaroni and cheese, perhaps, or ancient boiled canned green beans. So much for showing Emma Beth up! So much for being fabulous in my Libby Fine
pajama pants
!

“I’m really sorry,” I said, blushing to the roots of my hair and then some. “The truth is, I didn’t want to let you down, and then when you said her name, it was already too late. Oh God! Sorry.” Once again, I’d blown it. Once again, I’d be out of a job. Once again, I’d humiliated myself in front of Emma Beth, and even worse, Daphne would never want to see me again! When the heat began to drain from my face, I asked her if she wanted me to leave.

“Oh, dear,” Daphne said.

“I totally don’t understand what’s happening here,” Emma Bitch said.

I was so embarrassed that I just wanted to dig a hole in the floor and crawl into it. Then it just kind of burst out of me, like I had no control whatsoever on what was happening inside my own mouth, like I had lost control of my tongue, and all I could do was drool: “I just want people to like me!” I said. The next thing I know, I’m dribbling tears and snot all over Becka’s beautiful Libby Fine.

“Here, hon,” Daphne said, handing me a box of Kleenex.

“
Mother
,” Emma Bitch said. “What the . . . ?”

Stroking my shoulder, Daphne said: “Okay, girls. Enough. What on earth happened last summer at Libby Fine? What’s your issue with each other?”

“I should have never even been there!” I cried. “Everyone was right! Mom was right! I can’t do this! I’ll never make it in fashion! I ruin everything I touch!”

“Nonsense,” Daphne said. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself!”

“I’m not,” I wailed anew. “It’s true. I suck! And everyone knows it!”

“Oh God,” I heard Emma Beth say impatiently.

“Fine,” Daphne said. “You suck. What about you, then, Emma? Do you think Robin sucks?”

A pause. Then: “No.”

“I see. I don’t, either. But I do think that something happened between the two of you last summer.”

“Whatever, Mother. Why don’t you ask
her
?”

“Do you have an explanation for me, Robin?”

“Not really,” I blubbered. “Just that Emma Beth was — well, she was the real intern. I just got that job because my best friend’s mother is friends with Libby Kline!”

“So what?” Daphne said. “How do you think Emma got through the door? That’s right — connections. In her case, me. I do a lot of business with Libby Fine. In fact, I was one of the few boutiques that really supported Libby when she first began. But both of you, listen to me, and listen good.
Neither
of you got to Libby’s because of connections alone. I know Libby, and she won’t hire you, even for a summer internship — even to do nothing but step and fetch — if she doesn’t think you’ve got the stuff. No one will. It’s just the way it is.”

“Really?” I said at the same time that Emma Beth burst out with: “Oh my God, Mother! Do you have any idea how embarrassing you are?”

As the two of them headed off into their own squabble, it began to dawn on me that perhaps, just perhaps, I hadn’t made as big a fool of myself at Libby Fine as I’d thought I had. But before I had time to really think it through, Emma Beth turned to me and, her voice shaking a little, said: “You were like — like a little mascot or something, in your funky weird pajamas and your braids! And my God! Look how tall you are! I’m so short I look like a midget!”

“
What?
”

“Don’t you get it, Mother? All my life, you’ve told me that the thing that matters most is hard work. But it isn’t! In the end, even if I work harder than anyone, it’s always people like your new little friend here who get the goodies — just look at the pants she’s wearing! They’re Libby originals! God! Libby loved her so much that she was ready to adopt her!”

I don’t know what possessed me, but maybe it was Ben. I said: “She can’t adopt me. I already have parents.”

And for some reason, the minute I said that, I started cracking up. Not only was I channeling Ben, but I’d turned into him, too, with no ability to stop, and no borderline between being funny and just being stupid. “Get it?” I said. “I have parents already. Only, you know, my father’s a total alcoholic. And my mom — she dresses like a bag lady. Or she used to. She actually bought some decent clothes so she only looks like a bag lady half the time now. Also, she’s a control freak. Oh, and I have a twin brother, too? He’s the one everyone thinks is going to grow up to be some huge success. I’m the one who everyone thinks is too stupid to do anything but work with two-year-olds.”

“Two-year-olds?” Emma Beth said.

“Like in a day care?”

“I hate little kids,” she said.

“Me, too.”

“Only my mother here always made me babysit. I had to work in the store and babysit, too. She said I needed to learn the value of money.”

“Me, too,” I said. “Once, a little boy I was babysitting put Cheez Whiz in my hair.”

“A girl I babysat wet her pants on me. She was sitting on my lap.”

“There was this kid who hid my cell phone and wouldn’t give it back to me until I let him be Facebook friends with me.”

“I once babysat this kid who stole the toilet paper from the bathroom just before I went into it.”

We fell into silence.

“I told you you had a lot in common,” Daphne at last said. “You’re both a mess.”

“I think I ruined my outfit,” I said, but Daphne assured me that tearstains wash away clean.

And maybe she was right, because after Dad started going to AA meetings, Mom let him move back in. He went to so many meetings that he was hardly home at all. But he was. I knew because every night, every night when he came home, the first thing he did was come upstairs to Ben’s room, and then, a minute later, to mine, where he stroked my hair and kissed me good night.

F
or the first time ever
, I wasn’t freaked out about moving. But that was because, for the first time ever, we were only moving a mile away: to an apartment building on the same block as Polly’s, in a part of town filled with antiques shops and cafés and a lot of little old ladies and dogs. It had three bedrooms, a big living and dining room, a forties-style kitchen with black-and-white tiles, and a view of the small park across the street. I pretty much liked the apartment about a million times better than I liked Homely Acres, except for one small detail: my room. Which had pink-flowered wallpaper. PINK.
FLOWERS
. Barf. My. Brains. Out. Even so, it was a whole lot better than any house we’d had since three houses ago, when we lived in Germany for a couple of years. In short, I was cool with it. The only part — the only part at all — that made me a little bit sad was that I was going to be on the other side of town from Becka.

Yes, I really did say that.

She wasn’t so bad after all.

But I didn’t know that until later — after the for sale sign went up, and after I gave Becka that scarf; after it came out that Robin’s dad had hit Robin (my dad wasn’t exactly the world’s greatest, but one thing I knew was that he’d never lay a hand on me) and that Ann didn’t actually have to duplicate her sister’s utter nerdhood-slash-perfection, that Polly’s father had AIDS, and that Becka’s mother made my own hover mother look laid-back. Because that was when, one day, she actually came over and knocked on our door, and when I answered it, she said: “Sorry I called you ‘Um.’”

As usual, as I looked up into her dazzlingly perfect beauty, I was struck stupid.

“You are?” I finally managed to squeak.

“Look,” she said, glancing at the tips of her perfect black boots, “the problem wasn’t really you, okay? It was my mother. She — well, it’s complicated. But — well, she writes about me all the time.”

“She does?”

“Except for, like, movie stars, I’m the most famous teen in America.”

“You are?”

“She’s made a career out of writing about me.”

“She
has
?”

Like I said, I was struck stupid, but then suddenly, I wasn’t.

“That sucks,” I said.

“Half the time, I feel like a walking, talking doll. Like a giant Barbie, made of plastic, but empty inside.”

“That
really
sucks.”

“By the way,” she said, “that scarf you gave me? I love it.”

That was the day I stopped being afraid of her. And the day that, weeks later, she said that she wanted to help write the blog was the day that I began to feel that life in West Falls would turn out to be okay after all. Not that we’d ever get around to writing it again. But it was a nice thought.

It was her idea to change the name of the blog. “
Fashion High
is okay,” she said, “but kind of cutesy. You don’t want to be cutesy, do you?”

“Do I look like a person who wants to do cutesy? I don’t even like
cute
.”

“Exactly my point, J-bird. So we need to find something more on the funky side of life.”

“Since when do you do funky?”

“Since now,” she said, closing her huge liquid blue-green eyes. (Really, it kind of sucked getting along with her even more than it had been being enemies, because every time I was with her, I felt like Miss America’s homely cousin.) Then her eyes popped open: “I know! Let’s call it
Five Groovy Chicks and a Dude
.”

“Who’s the dude?”

“Weird John.”

“Weird John is
not
on this project.”

“He told me he was.”

“He lied.”

It was getting to be a pain, how, ever since I’d showed up, in desperation, at his house, he followed me around. I already had one pathetic male in my life — that would be my father — and the last thing in the world I needed was another one. Who knew that the guy would turn out to be so, er,
loyal
?

Dad, however, wasn’t so loyal. What he was, was pissed off. Like it was my fault when Mom finally confronted him. Like if only I’d been a better daughter, Mom wouldn’t have been so furious, and hurt, and miserable. Like it was my fault that he’d fallen for some divorced thirty-year-old with a nose job and hair the color of a hot dog. Whose name, he told me, was
Ruby
. “Like the stone,” he said.

“Like I could care.”

“Can’t you at least try to understand?” he said.

“Don’t talk to me.”

Of course, eventually I
had
to talk to him. And listen, too: about how he hadn’t meant to start up with — kill me now — Ruby, how at first he really had thought that the job in New Jersey would be better both for his career and for our family life as a whole, and a bunch of other stuff I didn’t believe. I didn’t not believe it, either. It was just that it didn’t really matter what he said. What mattered was that, in the end, it was Mom’s decision to leave him. Which meant that I had to listen to her, too —
endlessly —
as she explained that she didn’t want to do anything to make things even worse for me than they had been, but that she just didn’t think she liked herself anymore. “I used to be someone,” she said (over and over as Skizz rubbed himself against my ankles). “I want that back. I want to be someone again. Someone you can be proud of.”

“Can you stop talking now?”

“What do you say that, instead of looking for another house, we get an apartment?” she then said.

“I thought I asked you not to talk.”

“I’m serious, Justine. Would an apartment be okay with you?”

“Honestly, Mom, just so long as it’s not pink, I don’t care where we live.”

“But I thought you loved your room.”

“I hate my room.”

“You do?”

“I hate pink.”

“What color
do
you like?”

I pulled out my winter coat, the one she’d given me for Christmas. “I like this color,” I said. “I like blue.”

Two days after Mom and I moved to our new apartment on George Street, the doorbell buzzed: It was all four of the girls, along with Weird John. The girls were all dressed the same, in shorts and T-shirts and sneakers. WJ had on his usual black-on-black assemblage, complete with butt-crack visibility and bright-green fingernails.

“Reporting for duty!” he said.

“Hi, kids!” Mom said, popping her head out of the kitchen, where she’d been unpacking. “All the stuff you need is already in Justine’s room. Go to it — and thanks!”

Earlier, Mom and I had gone to the hardware store and bought two gallons of high-gloss blue paint, along with buckets, rags, and paintbrushes, and as my friends started to paint my room, I realized that the color I’d chosen was the same blue of my dreams, with a hint of gray-green in it, like the sky over San Francisco when it was about to rain in the spring, and the color of my mother’s eyes when she was happy, and how I thought about Eliza, when I missed her, and all the people who’d ever been kind to me, or took me into their confidence, or let me be sad. And when, later, we walked to the head of the trail that was to take us up to a waterfall, I saw that my blue was also the color the rocks made when they glittered in the sun.

“You mean there really is a falls in West Falls?” I said as we hiked up through the woods in the hot afternoon. I was wearing the same thing as all the other girls, shorts with a T-shirt — in my own case, the same Gay-Straight Youth Alliance T-shirt that I’d been wearing the first time I’d met Becka.

The girls laughed at me.

“Of course there’s a falls, J-bird,” Becka said.

“It’s the best thing there is about this whole town,” Polly added.

And suddenly I looked up, and there it was: a bright, crashing, roaring waterfall, dropping at least twelve feet from its pinnacle into a deep green pool before quieting down to join the quick, dancing flow.