Nice panty lines, Pudge. Bra strap’s showing, Pudge. Bad complexion day, Pudge? Whether Margo is telling the truth or not, you can’t help but start to believe it. Not once have I not double-checked my shoulders for a stray bra strap or wrapped a sweater around my waist to cover a potential panty line or run my fingers up and across my T-zone in search of telltale bumps. Lately, despite what I know, this nickname has me rubbing my curvy hips in the hopes that friction might shrink them down. Mom’s done the same crazy thing for as long as I can remember. Like mother like daughter, I guess. Now there’s a disturbing concept. If womanhood means turning into a forty-something divorcée on the prowl, then God help me. And that’s where Pudge, however inappropriate a name, is powerful. Not because I’m worried about being fat (which is probably what a stick figure like Margo is counting on), but because the nightmarish probability of my turning into Mom is unbearable. I think I’d rather have my bra dangling alongside the American flag than turn into Mom.
The Lincoln hallways are Margo’s territory, and for the past six weeks, I’ve been treading lightly. Miller’s, however, is my space. Photos of our family are nailed to these walls. The first dollar I ever spent is taped to the side of this register. My last name is painted in bold red letters across the storefront window. I try to ignore the click of Margo’s heels and her popping gum by focusing on Gossip’s weekly red carpet dos and don’ts, but concentration is impossible. Not even the shots of Amy Reasoner, singer-songwriter extraordinaire and my personal inspiration, can break me out of Margo’s toxic aura. I grab the metal nail file from the radiator like I usually do when I’m disconcerted, but it burns my fingers as if to remind me that today is hardly usual. The file has wedged itself under the shelves behind me, and when I resurface from below the counter, Margo is front and center and smiling, empty-handed. She shifts her weight from one foot to the other, making clunky sounds with the high-heeled wedges of her new ankle boots that I don’t dare let her think I’ve noticed. Those and the cool pants with a zipper down the side that makes for an extra-tapered leg. I can’t tell if they’re denim or that new stretchy, raw-silk fabric that all the hip stars are wearing.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hi, Margo.” I swallow down the acid that has trickled upward from my stomach and make a point of staring into her blue eyes that shimmer under the display lights. The remaining snowflakes sparkle in her hair like diamonds. I swallow down more sour goop—can people can die from acid reflux?—while Margo strikes up what seem to be the makings of a civil conversation.
“I can’t believe this snow.” She bunches up her shoulders and nose.
“And school’s not canceled,” I say, shaking my head.
“I didn’t bother to finish my short story for the Log Cabin Diaries until this morning.”
I stare blankly into her orange buttons that are speckled with a silvery gray.
“LCD. You know, Lincoln’s literary publication.” She pauses to pull her cell phone from her coat pocket. “You should submit something. They’re always looking for new talent.” She taps on her screen. “I can totally help you if you want. You know, with a submission. Fiction’s the easiest.”
“I don’t know.” I close my literature-unfriendly mag and try to slip it under the register without her noticing.
“Just think of someone harmless you know and turn them into the devil incarnate.”
“Makes sense.” I shrug nonchalantly, despite the fact that I have no idea what “incarnate” means. But this doesn’t matter. What does matter is that for the past twenty seconds, we have been conversing like normal people. The thought is premature, I know, but there is no other reason for Margo to be here except to make amends. And with the simple idea of restitution come an all-encompassing wave of forgiveness and a short list of feasible friendship options. Given our recent history and her noteworthy mean streak, of course. Cautious friends? Frenemies? Hallway-hello friends? Classroom comrades? Off-school-property friends? Textable friends? Strictly face-to-face friends?
“Take that cross-country supernerd Robbie Rodriguez,” Margo says. “With a little imagination you could turn him into a convincing serial killer.” She throws open her cell-free hand like a magician. “Voilà!”
“I’ll never look at skinny little Robbie in the same light!” But my words are too enthusiastic, my smile a little too wide.
Margo frowns at my expressive liberty. “By the way, you don’t mind, do you.”
There’s not the inflection that typically ends a question, but I let it slide because I don’t bet Margo Price asks a lot of questions.
“Do you, Charlotte.”
I am about to accept her Pudge-free apology with feigned reflection when she pulls one of the straps of her leather bag off her shoulder. Inside sits three protein bars and a sixteen-ounce bottle of Perrier. She yanks a bag of gummy candy from the counter display and drops it into her tote.
“You don’t mind.”
I shake my head a millimeter in either direction, in deadpan shock.
“Didn’t think so.” She pulls the strap onto her shoulder. The blue shimmer of her eyes has turned a flat black. Her lips have pinched into a sneer as tight as a kitchen cinch sack. I stand by, speechless, as our enemy status is confirmed, rubbing my fingers over the dollar bill taped to the side of the register. At four, I’d become a proud paying customer here. I remember reaching up on my tiptoes to hand the dollar to my mom at the register and the sensation of her slipping it from between my fingers. I remember the cha-ching of the old register when it opened and the three cold coins that Mom placed in my hand as change. I’m letting that four-year-old girl down with each second of silence.
Margo twists open the Perrier and it hisses as she walks out the door. No, Margo, I really do mind.
The bombshell of six weeks ago ripples through my train of thought about as smoothly as an earthquake. That horrifying nonevent is the reason why I’ve got a nickname that makes no sense, and it’s the reason why Margo was just here. I breathe in deep and pick my cuticles at record speed.
“What the hell was she doing here?”
I gasp before I know better.
“I came in through the back. Didn’t you hear me?” Jarrid’s got that smug smile across his scruffy face when he pulls the carton of chips into view and slices it open to stock.
“Snacks.” A part of me wants to tell him what just happened, but putting words to the images flashing through my head might turn me to dust. It’s embarrassing enough that he heard her call me Pudge in the hallway last week.
“You should’ve pushed her right out the door. ‘No shoes, no service’ kind of thing,” he says. “But maybe that’s the testosterone talking.” He flexes his muscles and winks.
“Testosterone,” I scoff, pretending to tidy the till. Truth be told, at a muscle-bound 6’3”, Jarrid’s the only guy I know who can pull off uttering the T-word. Maybe if he weren’t a store employee, I could appreciate this fact. What I do appreciate, though, is that he listens to my drama. I mean, here’s a guy who’s about to graduate and go to college, a guy who just won a regionals wrestling competition, a guy with the real world knocking on his door with a big fat scholarship. High school is just a puny, algae-encrusted fishbowl next to all that.
I hear an engine roar past, and I twist toward the window to glimpse the black Mustang.
“There goes Todd,” I say. “Time to get going.”
People are like clockwork, they really are. Jarrid kicks the empty chip box to the side and grabs his featherweight backpack.
“Don’t you do homework anymore?”
“Senioritis.”
“Hope you survive.” I start to rein in my backpack loaded with three textbooks and a pile of notebooks onto my shoulder when Jarrid takes the strap out of my hand and drops it over his left shoulder. An iota-size part of me wishes I could fall for someone like him.
&nbs
p; The door chimes close behind us, and I gaze up the hill through the snowy fog at the Mustang, trying to determine whether there is a certain someone in the passenger seat.
“You’re pathetic,” Jarrid says.
“Curious.”
“Fine. We’ll call your obsession with the private-school dropout ‘curiosity.’” He pulls his wool hat more firmly over his ears when we step outside. “So back to Margo Price.”
“Drop it, Jarrid.”
“She’s suddenly got it out for you for no apparent reason, and that sucks. But Margo Price is a hottie.”
“Thanks for that.”
“If it’s any consolation, all girls are some degree of hot.”
I am flustered because “all girls” includes me. “Too much honesty first thing in the morning.” I sneer in disgust.
He pulls up the collar of his jacket. “Live and let live, as my mom says.”
“Your mom’s a hippie shrink, Jarrid. Everything she says is borderline crazy.”
“Or don’t live and let live.” He nudges my shoulder and, without looking, I know he’s smiling.
“The world can’t let mean girls get away with everything.”
He gives me another nudge and pouts his bottom lip. “No feeling sorry for yourself this early in the morning.”
“That’s not very ‘live and let live’ of you.”
But Jarrid is too busy eyeing the black Mustang to acknowledge my quip.
“Todd’s been suspended from the wrestling team because of missed practices.”
“He probably can’t take the fact that you qualified for regionals and he didn’t. That you’re the top wrestler now.”
“Maybe.” He pauses and wipes the snow from his forehead.
“The guy’s a loose cannon anyway.”
“The rumors about him aren’t true, Char. The one about him almost killing a guy on the wrestling mat? Never happened. It’s all an act. Scares the shit out of his wrestling opponents, though.” Jarrid frowns, thinking. “He’s just a normal guy.”
“The neighbor of a serial killer couldn’t have said it better,” I say as an image of Robbie Rodriguez flashes through my mind. “And the ex-teacher he got pregnant?”
“Probably not true either.”
“Yeah. I mean, what woman would date a hottie like him?”
“Touché.” He nudges me again as his phone chimes. He pulls it out of his back pocket and stares into the palm-size black screen. “Speaking of wrestling, I’m getting interviewed by that sophomore kid for the school paper tomorrow. He’s meeting me at the store at closing. I’m guessing your dad won’t mind?”
“I guess,” I shrug, trying to get a rise out of him. Of course Dad wouldn’t mind. No, Dad will be thrilled to think that he may have had a little something to do with Jarrid’s success. And I can totally appreciate Dad’s need to outsource when it comes to paternal pride. I mean, I’ve got no article-worthy accomplishments on the horizon. Zip.
We get to school and he loops my backpack over my shoulder. I feel the added weight and walk up the steps to the entrance. Jarrid turns right and heads through a different door without a goodbye. If we were a couple—in other words, if Jarrid were someone else—would he walk me up Rose Avenue with his arm around my waist? His hand in my back pocket? Would we kiss before heading to class? As for Jarrid, he’s way too much of an open book for my taste. There’s no mystery with him, nothing to discover. The fact that we’ve known each other since we were practically in diapers nips any potential attraction in the bud. When I look at Jarrid, really look into his dark brown eyes, a time line of awkward moments unravels before me. His lemon-juice-bleached hair from two summers ago. The black eye from his sixth-grade bully. And the zits! A whole year lost to zits! And then there’s a flash of him hunched at the freezer crying after his retriever, Turtle, died. I never told him that I saw him that day huddled in front of the Popsicles.
And what Jarrid knows about me, if it were ever to get out, would most probably condemn me to a life of spinsterhood. I cringe at the thought of what horrid images must flash before him when he looks at me. My middle-school brace face fully equipped with headgear and rubber bands? My pre-contact Coke-bottle glasses? My Doc Martens phase with the blood-red lipstick? I’ve got experiences and images so painfully embarrassing that when they flash across my consciousness, I break into a cold sweat. It’s a mental exercise, forgetting, and I wish I were better at it. I wonder if that’s why Mom left Dad after almost twenty years. Maybe there’s too much that she wanted to forget. That sad thought pops into my head clear as day and I shoo it away, because never, not ever, will I try to understand why Mom broke Dad’s heart. Our hearts.
I am almost at my locker when the guy in front of me slips and falls. And because I’m rushing and right at his back, I have nowhere to go. My whole weight lands on him and he groans. Yes, groans. Jesus, I’ve probably broken every bone in his small body! I roll off his back to the floor, screeching the yellow “Danger Wet Floors” sign to the side in an effort to anchor my feet on the ground and muster some pathetic brand of grace under pressure. It’s like we’re in our own little world down here on the floor. The halls are bustling before the bell, but people are stepping around us or over us, their conversations not interrupted for a split second by the two-person pileup they’re walking over. I stretch through a sea of moving legs and pull one of his notebooks over to me. I look at the right-hand corner and see written there “Algebra 2/Trig” and below that “Alex”—as in the private-school dropout. I gasp right about the time that my victim speaks up.
“This freaking slush,” he mutters. “Thanks, Charlotte,” he says, as I try to wrangle in some rogue pencils.
My cheeks flush when he says my name. As I lean in to pick up a homework sheet, we bump heads. His hair smells yummy, like vanilla cake batter.
“After landing on you like a pile of bricks, it’s kind of the least I could do,” I say.
He smiles as we twist to our feet. It’s when I hand him his notebook that I notice it. That look. Despite his adorable crooked smile and the spark in his eye that could probably set me on fire, there’s freshness in the way he sees me. His eyes tell me I’m a clean slate, and that means about as close to perfect as you can get. And with this thought, butterflies, the good kind, flutter through my chest. A crush is blossoming, I can feel it.
“I’d better get to class,” I say.
I’m so discombobulated that it takes me three tries to open my locker. I pinch open the flimsy metal door and catch sight of Margo at the end of the hall. Our eyes lock as she walks toward me, her stare slowly immobilizing my butterflies. I lift up my heavy shield of nonchalance and oblivion to safeguard the bit of me that she hasn’t yet destroyed in her anti-Charlotte crusade.
* * *
Change can be insidious. Sometimes you don’t notice it until it’s too late, at which point it catapults you into a new reality without warning. When I walked into Herod’s Diner six weeks ago, I was unwittingly stepping into a giant catapult sling. I guess my postdivorce anger and subsequent concerted efforts at mother-daughter disengagement had blinded me to Mom’s transformation. I mean, I should have seen it coming. You don’t go from a uniform of jeans, crewneck, and boots to frilly scarves and heels without a damned good reason. The streaks of blush and eye shadow had slipped under my radar too.
That night, I settled into our usual booth, pulled out Gossip, and waited for Mom, who was late as usual. I turned to a blurb on Amy Reasoner but couldn’t concentrate. Instead my mind was on what I’d been burning to tell Mom for months but hadn’t yet found the guts to say. Comments like: “Mom, I hate the way you flit in and out of the store like you still belong there, like it’s not breaking Dad’s heart every damn time.” And “Mom, drop the singsong voice that screams I’m happier now than I ever was with you. I know Dad’s noticed it, and I’ll bet he feels like a real sch
muck because you were never this singsongy with him.” And finally, “Mom, you don’t know what it was like to watch Dad, my own dad, fall apart those first couple of months.” There’s always one D-bomb survivor left with more scars. As far as my parents are concerned, that’s Dad. That was why I’d chosen to live with him. As I hovered over “Starz R Like Us” shots of Amy Reasoner tying her shoes in a parking lot and another of her eating a Gray’s Papaya hot dog, I prepared to give Mom an ample helping of the truth and the guilt trip of her swinging new life.
“Put away the magazine, sweetie.” Her hand over mine and her soft whisper startled me. “This is our special night out,” she said.
The word “special” introduced some additional talking points for the evening: “Mom, the same overcooked hamburger in the same corner booth at Herod’s every Tuesday for the past twenty-and-a-half months isn’t ‘special.’” And “Why is it that ever since the divorce, togetherness is suddenly something ‘special’?” That last one, I remember thinking, would cut like a knife.
Hold-Up Page 3