by Robin Benway
All I can say is this: Bring Handi Wipes.
Our eyes met as he bent over to puke foamy keg beer on the boots that perfectly matched my go-go dancer costume. That’s how it happened. And Victoria never got over the fact that the boots were ruined. “They were vintage!” she moaned for six months afterwards.
My dad was carving a pumpkin when I came downstairs to wait for Victoria, nearly tripping over our cat, Bendomolena, and killing myself. I guess you could say that Bendy is a cat, but she’s not so much a cat as a hair ball the size of a suitcase. I’m not kidding. The mailman is terrified of her, which is so ridiculous because (a) she’s not a pit bull; (b) she weighs approximately twenty thousand pounds (Bendomolena couldn’t lunge for his ankles even if she wanted to); and (c) she’s scared of everything that didn’t originate in our house. One time Victoria brought her pet hamster Charlotte (the last in a long line of hamsters) over to run around in her little plastic ball, and oh my Lord. I don’t want to go into details, but let’s just say that Bendomolena had to temporarily go on anti-anxiety medication and Charlotte the Hamster refused to set paw outside of her plastic ball ever again.
“Bendy, away from the stairs!” my dad yelled as I managed to catch myself before falling to my death.
“Did you want her to move any time soon?” I asked. “Because it probably won’t happen until Christmas.”
“Ha ha, Miss Comedy.” He looked up from the pumpkin he was carving and straightened his glasses. “Nice shoes.”
“You think?” I did a little twirl in my flamingo slippers. They were so big that I had to waddle everywhere. Just like Bendomolena.
“They’re stylin’.”
“Dad, if you never say ‘stylin” again, it’ll be too soon.”
“Can I still say things are cool?”
“Not around me, please.”
“That’s cool.”
I sighed. “Where’s Mom?”
“Out buying candy for when the neighborhood kids come begging tomorrow night.”
“Um, she left you alone with the pumpkin?” My dad, well-meaning as he is, has almost been forced to retire from pumpkin carving, thanks to the dramatic and colorful Massive Blood Loss Incident of Halloween Three Years Ago. Let’s just say one should never carve a pumpkin while watching the Steelers lose.
As an answer, I got the Dad Look.
“I only ask because I love,” I told him. “How are we on Band-Aids?”
“Isn’t Victoria coming over?” Stab-stab-stab, slice.
“Any minute.” I sat down at the table and watched for signs of blood. “Y’know, I can make a tourniquet using a shoelace. I learned how in Girl Scouts.”
“I thought you dropped out of the Girl Scouts.”
“Not before the lesson on first aid. Besides, the uniforms were itchy.”
“Of course they were. How’s the pumpkin?” He turned it so I could see its triangle eyes and nose and crooked mouth. He’s a traditionalist like that. “Does it look even?”
“It’s just gonna get smashed in the street like every year,” I said as I ate some pumpkin seeds off the cookie sheet.
“Humor me, Aud.”
“Best pumpkin ever!”
“Your lack of faith is very distracting,” my dad pointed out.
I eyed the pumpkin, which had a few unintentional gashes where its ears should have been. “Believe me, Dad, I can tell.”
Victoria let herself in and came into the kitchen just as my dad accidentally shaved off one of the pumpkin’s teeth. “Hey, I thought your dad wasn’t allowed to carve pumpkins anymore.”
My dad pushed his glasses back up on his nose. “Hi, Victoria.”
“Hi, Mr. Cuttler.” My parents have asked Victoria a bajillion times to call them Henry and Carol, but she says it would feel too weird. “Still got all ten fingers?”
I waved the phone in her face by way of greeting. “Did you bring it?”
She pulled the bottle of Marvelous Magenta out of her bag. “Ready and waiting for you, my dear.”
“Dad, I’m going upstairs so we can dye Victoria’s hair. If anything happens, just remember to raise the cut above the heart, okay?”
Victoria was peering around my shoulder. “Does that pumpkin have ears?”
“Battle wound,” I told her.
“Oh. Pretty hard-core, Mr. Cuttler. I like that.”
But my dad was too busy trying to fix the pumpkin’s now-toothless grin to respond, so I grabbed her arm and pushed her toward the stairs. “Goodbye,” I told my dad. “We’re going far, far away from here.”
“Take Bendomolena with you,” he said as we trooped up the stairs, stepping over my land mass of a cat.
I love my room. Victoria loves my room, too, but she’ll never admit it. My parents don’t exactly love it, but they’ve decided to accept its fate as eternally messy. Well, not so much messy as busy. I have a very busy room. CDs are in every corner and on every surface, and there’s a bunch of cut-up magazines all over the floor, where I put them after hacking them up and making collages of all my favorite bands. I thought it would be really cool to have one whole wall be a huge collage, and about one-fourth is covered so far. I can do whatever I want in here, and sometimes when it’s the middle of the night and it feels like no one else in the world is awake but me and I’m cutting up another picture and an amazing song comes on the stereo, I could die happy.
Evan always said that my room creeped him out, that the walls were watching him or something. That’s so like him to think that everything’s watching him, waiting to see what he’ll do next. What an egomaniac. I hate him.
Victoria still hated him, too. “So…I believe it’s officially a year to the day since you met Fuckhead?”
I sighed. “You’re the most indelicate person I’ve ever met.”
“You mean except for the guy who ruined those beautiful vintage boots”—she still wasn’t over it—“and wrote a mean song about you?”
“The Song of Which We Must Not Speak,” I reminded her. “The Song That Will Die an Obscure Death and That No One Will Ever Hear Again.”
“Of course. So are you gonna burn anything in effigy to commemorate the day Ev puked on your boots? A Ken doll? Anything?”
I put on the gross latex gloves that came with the hair dye and shook the bottle a couple of times. “Nope. I have to work. You know that.”
Okay. I’ve been trying to avoid this part, but it’s not a secret anymore. It’s true. I work at an ice cream shop—excuse me, shoppe—at the mall. That in itself is not so bad, except for three things: (1) I hate the mall; (2) I hate all the customers; and (3) I’m forced to wear a bright pink hat and T-shirt that say…are you ready for this?
Scooper Dooper.
If there is any justice in the world, the first major meteorite to ever strike the Earth will score a direct hit on the Scooper Dooper. I might even become an astrophysicist just so I can help move that plan along. But until then, CDs and concert tickets and gasoline aren’t cheap, and my parents are into that whole “earn it!” mentality, so I work.
My job sucks the most suck that has ever sucked.
“Maybe you could burn the Scooper Dooper and pretend it’s Evan,” Victoria offered.
“That would require a lot more planning than I have energy for,” I said. “Tilt your head back.”
She did. “I can see up your nose.”
“Ew, gross! Stop looking!”
She squeezed her eyes shut and giggled. “Jonah and I are gonna go see The Exorcist downtown. You should blow off work and come with us.”
“Nah, I don’t like paying money to watch heads spin. Or to be the third wheel.”
“Shut up, you’re not the third wheel.”
“If you and Jonah were a school dance, I’d be the parental chaperone.”
“Yeah, except for the fact that you let us make out in front of you.”
“Which is great fun for me.”
She opened her eyes. “Do we make you uncomfortable?”
/>
Kinda. I don’t know. Maybe just lonely. “No, it’s cool. Besides, someone has to be there in case one of you swallows the other one.”
Victoria started to laugh. “Rest assured that there has never been, nor will there ever be, swallowing. Ever.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ, Victoria!” I cried. “So many details that I don’t need!” I tried to cover my ears but my gloved hands were covered in Marvelous Magenta.
“You love it—you know you do.” She was still laughing.
Have you ever been through a breakup while your best friend is, like, practically engaged to the guy she says she’s gonna marry? It’s awkward. I mean, on the one hand I love Victoria and Jonah to pieces and I’m excited to be a bridesmaid and buy little kid-sized drum sets for their sure-to-be adorable babies, but on the other hand…
There’s no nice way to say this: It blows like hurricane season.
“We just need to get you a date,” she decided after calming down. “You need to go up to someone in the hallway and make out with them on Monday.”
“Oh, yes, because the options are limitless in our school. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner.”
“Hey, school is where I met Jonah!” she protested.
“One out of fifteen hundred. What fantastic odds.”
Victoria settled back in the chair and I could see the wheels spinning in her head. Never a good sign. “What about James?” she finally said.
“James? James, the guy I work with?” She was too funny. “James who takes ice cream scooping more seriously than anyone should? James who almost had a nervous breakdown when the chocolate and rainbow sprinkles accidentally got mixed together? That James?”
“He has a good work ethic,” she countered. “And he’s cute.”
“Hello, I’m not thirty. I don’t want a good work ethic yet. I just want someone who can form complete sentences.”
“Which he can totally do! I’ve heard him! He says, ‘Hello, how can I help you today at the Scooper Dooper?’ It doesn’t get much more complete than that, Audrey.” She paused. “And he’s cute.”
“He’s a smidge of cute,” I acknowledged after a minute.
“No, Aud, he’s cute. One hundred percent cute.”
“If he’s so cute, then why don’t you make out with him on Monday morning?”
“Because, as I’ve pointed out, I’m already with the best guy in the world.”
I laughed through my nose. “That’s fabulous news for the rest of us.”
3 “She started shakin’ to that fine, fine music!”
—The Velvet Underground, “Rock & Roll”
THREE HOURS LATER, Victoria had a sorta-kinda Mohawk that she proclaimed her best hairdo ever; my dad had finished carving the pumpkin with only a small flesh wound; my mom had brought a dozen bags of grossly misnamed “Fun Size” candy bars home; Bendomolena had moved half an inch on the stairs; and I left for work with strict instructions to bring home a pint of Coffee Dream ice cream for my parents. (They seem to be the only ones benefiting from my employee discount, which is just another cruel irony in my life.)
The Scooper Dooper was empty. It was the end of October, it was starting to rain outside, and anyone with any sense was getting hot chocolate or coffee from the food court upstairs. Nobody wanted Misty Moroccan Mint in a waffle cone that day. (And between you and me, they shouldn’t want it on any day, because it’s just plain disgusting.)
“I already cleaned out the water wells and reorganized the overstock,” James said to me as I clocked in and tied on my apron. He always tucks his work shirt in, which makes me a bit nuts.
“And a happy hello to you, too,” I said.
“And I think we’re low on waffle cones, so I left a note for the manager to reorder some on Monday morning.”
“What a relief.”
My sarcasm wasn’t registering with him at all. “I know,” he replied. “You know how customers are about waffle cones.”
“It’s one of the great injustices of my life that I do know, James.” Okay, I even out-bitched myself on that one, I admit it.
It’s not that James is a bad guy. I mean, he’s not at all. He’s always polite and nice to little kids after they drop their double scoops on the floor. When the old people come in at five o’clock for their dessert, he always speaks loud into their hearing aids. But he’s just really quiet and only talks about work at work. I tried to fish around when I first started working with him, asking him about movies and books and stuff, but he just stuttered and stammered and finally said, “I think we need more butter pecan.”
What am I supposed to do with that?
He’s really skinny, too. Like, super model skinny. And super tall. Once I saw him running down the hall between second and third periods and I thought his legs would snap out from underneath him and he would shatter into pieces that would slide all the way down the hall to my locker. It’s kind of sad, though. I don’t think he has any friends. If I didn’t work with him, I wouldn’t know who he was. He’s the kid in the yearbook who everyone sees and says, “Who’s that? Does he even go to our school?”
But what can you do, you know? I tried to talk to him and all I got was “butter pecan.” There’s not a lot to build on.
So when I work with James, I try to pick tasks that play to our strengths. My job is Music Supervisor. He is In Charge Of Everything Else. We’re allowed to play the radio there, so I always switch it to KUXV, the college station that plays the good music. We’re supposed to keep it on the adult-contemporary station, but I can’t work at the Scooper Dooper and listen to Céline Dion at the same time. It’s just not gonna happen, I’m sorry. I have my limits.
I flipped the station as soon as I put my hat on, and I could see James already getting twitchy about breaking the radio station rule, but he didn’t say anything (just like always). Pretty soon I was humming along with the Ramones and “Blitzkrieg Bop”-ping to the register whenever somebody wanted a room-temperature Coke with a non-bendy straw. These customers are nothing if not picky.
We worked pretty much in silence for the next couple of hours as the sun set outside and the mall got more crowded with couples and families coming out of the movie theaters next door. Judging from the number of guys practicing their karate moves on each other, most of them had seen some kung-fu movie. The DJ on the radio was doing a good job of playing decent music, and James and I stayed at opposite ends of the store. A whole gaggle of kids and their parents came in around eight forty-five, fifteen minutes until the mall closed at nine. (It never fails that people will walk in at the last possible minute. I suspect it’s a major conspiracy to annoy me.) It was a normal Saturday—nothing too exciting, nothing crazy.
I really miss normal Saturdays.
The kids and their parents were all wearing bright blue T-shirts that said YOUTH CHOIR GLEE-A-THON! on the front, which just goes to show how little parents love their kids, if they’re willing to let them wear a shirt like that in public. James, who lives for this sort of scooping action, was already reaching for sugar cones, and I was about to ask the first customer if he wanted a free sample (said with a Scooper Dooper smile, naturally) when I heard my favorite sarcastic DJ talking through the speakers.
“Okay, someone just put this in my hand. It’s a new single—we got it on Friday. Local band, the Do-Gooders, blah, blah, blah. Call in and tell me if you hate it. I haven’t heard it yet. It’s called ‘Audrey, Wait!’”
The ice cream scoop fell out of my hand and hit the floor so hard that the handle broke. I could hear the first chords and even though I had only heard them strung together once before, I knew the song by heart.
“You said your piece and now I’ve got to say mine! I had you and you strung me on the liiiiiinnnnneeeeee!”
When I first heard the song at the Do-Gooders show last summer, I thought that was the worst moment of my life. Wrong-ola. This was the worst moment ever.
“Straw-berr-eee! Straw-berr-eee!” The kids were starting t
o chant in a non-gleeful way, completely unaware of the fact that I had gone numb. My Scooper Dooper smile was still plastered on my face and I couldn’t force it to go away.
James gave me an odd look, handed me another scooper, and said, “Scoop now, think later.”
“But…are you hearing this?” How could he be so calm! It was outrageous. “Do you know what this is?”
“Um, no. Just scoop now, think later,” he repeated, like he was the Dalai Lama of frozen dairy desserts or something. I wondered if he wasn’t aware of the whole dramatic situation and was just sharing his personal credo with me. “Hi, sir, how can I help you?”
I turned to the first kid in front of me and I could tell I was freaking him out. “What flavor?” I asked through my teeth, even as Evan’s words were spilling out of the radio and falling all over me.
“Audrey, wait! Audrey, wait! Audrey, wait!” It sounded as good on the radio as it had that night at the Jukebox. Goddamnit.
“Straw-berr-eee! Straw-berr-ee!” The kids were now singing the words in time to the chorus and I suddenly understood why people sometimes show up to work with a gun and a grudge. “Dad, this is a good song!” one of the littlest girls said, her pigtails flying every which way as she clapped her hands.
“It is,” her dad agreed.
“You crucified my heart, took every part, and hung them out to drrrrryyyyyyy!”
“I’ve heard better,” I offered.
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing. What size cone, sir?”
Three minutes and forty-nine seconds later (yes, I counted), the song was over and the Gleeful People were halfway served. I could barely hear the DJ over their noise. “Wow,” he was saying. “I gotta tell you, we get a lot of crap here at the station, but this was good. And you’re all calling in right now, too. I like this. I like this a lot. We’re gonna play it again next hour, stick around.”
So there I was, my ex-boyfriend on the radio, chanting my name like it was an insult; a gaggle of Glee-People in front of me; wearing a hot pink hat and shirt that had the words SCOOPER DOOPER written across my chest-in-training, with ice cream sticking to my wrists and arms.