Audrey, Wait!

by Robin Benway

  My cell phone was ringing in the break room—Victoria’s ring. I’d have known it anywhere. James kept giving me funny looks and I kept my head down, cheeks on fire, trying to scoop and serve and get everyone the hell out of there. “She couldn’t believe what she heard at all!” I heard Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground singing on my cell phone. “You know her life was saved by rock and roll!”

  Lou Reed, you liar.

  By the time James and I got everyone served and out the door, I was ready to take up smoking and drinking and whatever vice I could get my hands on without being arrested. “Oh my God!” I screamed at him, and he took a step backwards. “What was that? Did you hear that!”

  “It sounded pretty good,” he offered. “That’s cool your name’s in a song. My mom’s name is Mandy and so everyone always asks if that one Barry Mani—”

  “It’s not just my name, it’s about me!” I shrieked. Two customers who looked ready to enter the store saw me freaking out and turned around to leave. Wise move on their part. “And it’s on the radio!”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s my ex-boyfriend’s band and he wrote it about me and it’s on the radio and I’m wearing a Scooper Dooper T-shirt!”

  “Um, do you think maybe you should sit down?” James pointed to the stool by the register. “You look a little upset.”

  “I’m a ball of rage right now, James,” I told him. “Sitting isn’t gonna do much.”

  “At least it’s a good song,” he pointed out. “It’s really catchy. I liked it.”

  “How many people do you think were listening?” I asked him. “Like, a thousand? Ten thousand?”

  “Maybe more.”

  “More?”

  James looked like I was about to shoot him. “It’s a popular show. Maybe fifteen thousand?”

  “Fifteen thousand???”

  “Maybe?” Then he actually winced. Perhaps he was waiting for me to explode all over the Scooper Dooper.

  All I can say is this: Thank God for Victoria. Across the mall and out the glass doors, I saw Jonah’s car swoop up to the curb. Victoria jumped out and started running toward me in all her pink-Mohawked glory. And let it be said that Victoria does not run. She failed P.E. freshman year because she refused to run the mile. Maybe if her house was on fire or something, she’d hustle, but it’d take an act of God or nature to make her move her ass.

  Or a song on the radio.

  Her boots were clomping on the mall floors as she came running, and James’s eyes widened. “Wow,” he said. “She’s on a mission.”

  “Audrey!” Her face was flushed as she charged into the store like she was in Spain, the bulls nipping at her heels. “Did you hear that?”

  “James here thinks that fifteen thousand people heard that!” I cried.

  “I tried…calling…and you…didn’t answer.…Why?” She bent over to catch her breath and I heard her wheeze a quiet “Fuckin’…hell…”

  “I was scooping for the Glee People,” I told her.

  “The…who… People?”

  “Some choir thing. Do you need water?” Leave it to Victoria to get winded and possibly pass out during my crisis.

  She waved off the water and sank down in a chair. “This is huge,” she said once she caught her breath. “Everyone at school heard it.”

  I sank down next to her and pulled off my hat as Jonah ambled into the store. “I just got the el presidente of parking spots,” he announced. “Hey, Aud. Pretty fuckin’ crazy about that song, huh?”

  “Um, Audrey, I think we gotta close soon and I don’t think they’re allowed—”

  “No worries, kid, we’re not here to take the loot,” Victoria said over her shoulder. Then she turned back to me and whispered. “Did you hear all those complete sentences?”

  I feigned amazement. “You’re right, Victoria,” I whispered back. “Now would be the perfect time to pick up a guy. Will you focus for a minute, please! How do you know everyone heard?”

  “I got, like, a million IMs and two million text messages. It almost crashed my computer.” Her eyes were wide and shocked. “Audrey. It sounded so good on the radio! You’re going to be famous!”

  “No, I’m not,” I hissed. “It’s just a little college station—”

  “They stream their broadcast live online,” she pointed out.

  “No one outside of our school is going to care that it’s about me.”

  Across from us, Jonah was eyeing both the ice cream bins and James. “Hey, man, what’s up?” He offered his hand to James for one of those complicated guy-handshake things, but James had no idea what he was doing and got it all muddled up. Someone could have lost an eye.

  Lucky for him, Victoria missed the whole exchange. “Sharon Eggleston texted me that she was up visiting her sister’s sorority house at USC and they all heard it and Sharon told them that she was friends with you and everyone started freaking out.”

  I paused. “There’s so much wrong with that sentence that I don’t even know where to begin.”

  “Like?”

  “Sharon Eggleston’s sister got into USC?”

  “I know, right? Apparently her parents are alumni.”

  “And when did you start texting with Sharon?”

  “Just today. I guess she got my number from someone else after she couldn’t get ahold of you.”

  “Sharon told her sister we were friends?” I asked.

  “I know, it’s crazy, she obviously drank an entire keg last night or something. But Audrey! People really love that song!” Victoria’s eyes were shining just like Sharon’s lip gloss. “I bet your cell phone exploded from all the messages. I could barely get through half the time.”

  James was scurrying around behind the counter, rinsing scoopers and starting to close the register. “I gotta help him,” I told Victoria.

  “Just think,” she said, sinking back in her chair, “everyone is gonna be kissing your ass at school.”

  “Oh, joy.”

  “And Sharon Eggleston is gonna go batshit crazy.” Victoria clapped her hands together with glee. “Oh my God, I cannot wait. Monday is gonna rock.”

  “Sharon Eggleston?” James said. “That’s the girl that always comes in here.”

  Victoria and I glanced at each other. “She always comes in here?” I asked. “Really?”

  “Yeah, usually on your days off. She’s the one with the…I don’t know, the flippy hair, I guess you could call it.” James mimed tossing his hair over his shoulder.

  Victoria and I exchanged another look: Oh, really?

  I snorted as I went around the counter and began counting the change in the register. “Sharon Eggleston had a huge crush on Evan before I started going out with him,” I told James. “She’s probably plotting my imminent demise. Be prepared to find my body in the freezer.”

  “Uh…” James’s eyes widened.

  “I’m kidding!” I told him. Apparently the word sarcasm had never entered his lexicon. “Only kidding, I swear.”

  “Aud has a weird sense of humor,” Jonah pointed out to James. He was still eyeing the ice cream and I stopped counting my register long enough to scoop him a cone of Choco-Nuts-a-Lot. “Awesome.” He grinned. “Thanks, Aud.”

  Then I threw a rag at Victoria. “Here,” I told her. “Please do something useful so I can get the hell out of here.”

  She wrinkled her nose, but started wiping down tables anyway. And when she was in the middle of the third table, and after I counted the change in the register twice and it still wasn’t balancing out, the song came on the radio again. “This song is already on its way to being number one on tonight’s countdown,” the DJ said. “And you heard it here first on KUXV, 98.5!” But we only heard the first few bars because I reached up and turned the stereo off.

  The silence in the store was even louder.

  After we closed and locked up and James almost got the key stuck in the front door and we had to wedge it out, I walked with Victoria and Jonah to our cars. “So, th
e second-most exciting thing that happened today?” Victoria said. “James.”

  “James?” Jonah and I both asked.

  “He was really talking to you a lot,” Victoria pointed out, and nudged me in the ribs. “At least he can say he knew you before you were famous, right?”

  “Vic-tor-ia!” I cried. “I’m not famous! Remember that one girl last year who got a perfect 2400 on her SATs and she ended up in that article in the L.A. Times? She’s more famous than me.”

  “Perfect 2400? Pfft.” Victoria waved her hand in front of her face. “I could do that in my sleep. Besides, cool sells better than brains.”

  Jonah laughed and nodded. “She’s right.”

  Victoria grinned and linked her arm with his. She loved being right. “Anyway, I’m just saying that James kept looking at you all night.”

  “I think it’s his lazy eye.”

  “Did he talk to you out of his lazy eye, too?”

  Okay, that one made me laugh, I admit it. “When the song first came on the radio,” I told them, “I totally froze behind the counter and he came up to me and said, ‘Scoop now, think later.’”

  “Words on a bumper sticker,” Jonah said, nodding his approval.

  “Embroidery on a hand towel,” Victoria added. “See, he’s very calm, very Eastern philosophy, very Buddha-like.”

  “He couldn’t be more Irish,” I pointed out.

  “Buddha-like in spirit. When everyone asks you how you stayed humble, you can say it was because of James.”

  I shot her a look, but couldn’t really hide a smile. “How I stayed humble?” was all I said.

  “Gimme a break, I’m still giddy with excitement. I’ll come up with a better example later.”

  After they walked me to my car, I got in and locked the doors and waited to see them drive off. I could see that Victoria had scooted closer to Jonah and he had his arm around her shoulders, and he was laughing about something (probably the Buddha comment). They both looked so happy.

  The inside of my car was really, really cold.

  I reached into my bag and, for the first time that night, pulled out my cell phone. The message light was flashing like a strobe and I flipped it open and saw that my text message box was full. I only recognized half of the names, but they almost all started this way: “OMG HEARD SONG CALL ME!!!!! LOL!!!!!” I didn’t even bother checking the voice mails.

  But what I did do was scroll through my phone book and stop on one of the most familiar names in there. Evan Dennison. Although I hardly remembered any phone numbers besides my own, I knew all of his by heart. And then I wondered why I had never deleted him, why he was still taking up this space, why he was still everywhere.

  I acted before I could stop myself. I dialed his cell phone number from memory, just to see if I could, and then I let it ring. My heart was in my ears and toes and everywhere except where it belonged, and after four rings, I braced for his message. I wondered if it was still the same, that low stoner laugh followed by the words “If you don’t know who you’ve reached, don’t leave a message. Otherwise, talk.”

  But that cold animatronic voice came on: “The number you have reached is no longer in service.” And my hands were shaking and for some reason—or maybe for too many reasons—I wanted to cry.

  So I did.

  Afterwards, I drove myself home in silence past Halloween decorations and lit pumpkins and dried my face and checked my eyes in the rearview mirror before going inside. My parents were on the couch and Bendomolena was still in the exact same spot on the staircase. When I walked in, everyone except Bendy looked at me expectantly. “Well?” my dad said.

  Oh Jesus, they had heard the song. They had heard the song and listened to the lyrics and then got totally paranoid and hacked into my email account and figured out that Evan and I had slept together, and now I was going to have to sit through some intervention where my parents talked about sperm and condoms and responsibility and teenage pregnancy statistics. And then they’d probably ship me off to one of those wilderness camps where they give you a name like Little Running Bear and make you scavenge for food to build up your self-esteem until you swear to be abstinent for the rest of your natural life.

  I’ll tell you this right now: me and nature? Not so much.

  “Um, yeah?” I said. I kept my coat on just in case there were two burly men waiting to drag me off to some nameless desert camp.

  My dad held up a spoon expectantly. “Where’s the Coffee Dream?”

  Oh. Ice cream.

  Right.

  4 “Making islands where no islands should go…”

  —Death Cab for Cutie, “Transatlanticism”

  I SPENT MOST OF SUNDAY not returning any phone calls, not writing emails or text messages, or on that note, doing any of my homework. Instead, I ate whole-wheat pancakes with my mom, sat in my room and cut up two magazines, then made a very explicit playlist and CD case for my “Suck It Up!” mix. A random sampling:

  Track 3: No Doubt, “Just a Girl”—You can never have too much sarcastic girl anger too early in the morning.

  Track 11: Jay-Z, “99 Problems”—Unlike Mr. Z, I only had one problem, not 99 of them. (But either way, it’s super awesome for driving.)

  Track 8: Bob Marley & the Wailers, “Trenchtown Rock”—Because the opening lyrics are “One good thing about music / When it hits, you feel no pain.” I mean, c’mon. Do you really need me to explain further?

  All of this took some time because my phone kept ringing every two minutes or so and of course I had to look at the caller ID. By the fifty-seventh ring, though, I realized that I barely recognized any of the numbers, so I turned it off. Victoria knew my parents’ number, so if something urgent happened, like if Sharon Eggleston lost all her hair in a tragic oil spill or if Evan got nominated for a Grammy, I knew Victoria would know how to find me.

  Bendomolena waddled into my room later on and settled herself on top of a pile of magazines, suffocating the cover photo with her stomach. “Why couldn’t you do that to Evan?” I asked her. “You had plenty of opportunities.”

  Bendomolena never liked Evan. That was my first inkling that things weren’t cool. My second inkling came during one of our marathon phone conversations. Actually, calling them “conversations” is generous. They were more like monologues by Evan, during which I said “yeah” and “uh-huh” and watched Steven’s Untitled Rock Show on Fuse with the sound off while Evan went on and on about why his drummer sucked.

  Finally, one night, I got bored. And fed up. And annoyed. So I did a little Evan experiment. “Hey,” I said casually. “Bendomolena’s on fire.”

  “Cool. So yeah, Jon wants to do a drum solo and we were just like, ‘Dude, no.’”

  I looked across the room at Bendomolena who was, quite obviously, not on fire, and was instead lolling on her back. “Wow, she’s really flammable,” I said, and Bendomolena opened one eye. “Who knew something that little could burn up so furiously?”

  “I know, right? So get this. He said—”

  “Hey, Ev, I better go get the fire extinguisher. She’s toasty.”

  “What? Fire extinguisher? What the hell are you talking about, Aud?”

  I sighed and avoided the stony gaze of Bendomolena, who sensed she was a pawn in my game. “Nothing, I’m just kidding. But I gotta go, okay? My mom needs me for something.”

  So of course I called Victoria right after we hung up. “I told him that my cat was on fire and he didn’t even hear me!” I cried. “On fire, Victoria! And he didn’t care!”

  She paused for a minute. “Aud,” she finally said, “that is so fucking twisted that I don’t even know where to start.”

  “Okay, I know, but it had to be drastic.”

  “That’s not drastic, that’s sadistic. You’ve got your -tics mixed up.”

  “Will you please focus on the issue at hand? Evan doesn’t listen to what I’m saying!”

  I could hear her sigh loudly. “And this is news?”

  “Sh
ould I break up with him?”

  “Do you want to break up with him?”

  “I don’t know.” I did my best dramatic sigh. “Distract me from feeling miserable.”

  “Umm…ummm…I got new shoes.”

  “Woo.”

  “Wanna come over and try them on?”

  I kinda did. “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I said, and my trouble with Evan was forgotten for the moment.

  Evan and I had spent hours on and in my bed while my parents were at work. Sometimes we’d sprawl opposite each other while he’d strum his guitar and try to think up words that rhymed with Bendomolena. The only time he actually succeeded was when he accidentally stepped on her tail and then spontaneously burst into song: “Bendomolena! / I didn’t see ya!” And I was like, “Hi, you almost severed my cat’s tail, thanks.”

  What kind of guy writes a song about stepping on your cat while she’s yowling in pain? I should’ve known then.

  But it wasn’t all bad, of course. I mean, I had loved him, I really had. There were better times, the quiet moments when no one was talking and even our breath was the same, rising and falling under our tent of blankets like we were made to breathe with each other, for each other. It’s funny how bed and pillows and covers can change a conversation. Words turn quiet and you mean more and say less. It’s like you can build your own little world, Population: 2.

  Evan would play with my hair and wrap it over his wrist and reel me toward him until our lips touched. They were small moments but I could only hold them like water in my hands before he was slipping away, pulled back by melodies or friends or rehearsals, leaving my hands empty and my heart too full to hold alone.

  5 “To readjust you’ve got to trust that all the fuss is just a minor thing.…”

  —Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Minor Thing”

  ON MONDAY MORNING, I pulled a little illegal trick and drove to school wearing headphones so I could listen to the “Suck It Up!” mix as much as possible to psych myself up for the day. (My car’s speaker fund was steadily being drained for the “Ooh, I want that CD!” cause.) I couldn’t even handle the radio, since KUXV was playing “Audrey, Wait!” almost every hour. (Okay, I cheated a little and listened to the nightly Top 5 countdown—the song was number one—but you would’ve done the same.) The night before, when I was supposed to be sleeping but instead was lying awake looking at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, I tried to think of how long the song’s popularity would last. Maybe it was a one-week thing, a novelty that would wear off as soon as the next big band broke. It wasn’t like Evan was on MTV or in Teen Vogue or anything like that, right? This was just a local thing, a hometown boy making good.