Lovesick Little

by Leslie Phelan

  Erica had a question. “So, [and this is just for my own clarification,]” she began, “In order to get even with the girls who called you a slut, you went on a slutting spree, and with their boyfriends?” Everyone at the table chuckled, except Ava’s parents, who glanced at each other nervously.

  “Precisely,” she replied coolly. “If those bitches didn’t think I’d find a way to have the last laugh, then they obviously didn’t know who they were screwing with,” she said triumphantly.

  “Well at least their boyfriends got to,” said Veronica, smirking, taking the only chance she’d ever gotten to bag on Ava the way she does her. Ava’s eyes flickered mischievously as she glanced up at her old adversary.

  “Nicknames are a funny thing,” began Ava. “Some are kind, some are cruel . . . Veronica, what did you get called when you were a young lady?” she asked smarmily. Veronica, taken aback, responded casually. “Nothing quite comes to mind,” she said, hoping to dodge the subject.

  “Oh come on, Ronnie. There’s hardly a ginger alive that hasn’t been dubbed some kind of nickname, perhaps in reference to that sizeable mop of fiery red hair?” Ava smirked. “I could’ve sworn I read your nickname in your old year book . . .” Veronica narrowed her eyes but was so steaming on the inside, she could think of nothing to say back.

  “Ava, stop bullying Mrs. Von der Klaasen,” instructed her father sternly. Veronica turned away with crossed arms, looking to see where her husband had run off to. There he was, at the far window standing with his binoculars pressed against the glass like an embarrassingly unabashed travel nerd. Except he wasn’t watching otters or island coastlines, he was checking out his new yacht from all angles. Veronica hated the way he insisted on wearing that captain’s hat everywhere he went since purchasing that boat. She wouldn’t have minded so much if he actually committed himself to the captain look and wore lots of white and gold, but that was definitely not the case. He wore pastel purple shorts with beige socks pulled halfway up to his knees. There was hardly a thing about her husband that didn’t irritate her.

  “Anyway, I’m dying to hear more about Erica’s trip!” continued Cliff. “How did you love Roma and Umbria?”

  “Those places were beyond stellar!” she exclaimed with eyes sparkling. “L'Italia è conosciuta come un paese dall'eccezionale bellezza sia architettonica che natural.”

  The table all stared at her, gaping. “Well I wish I had something clever like that to throw back at you!” said Cliff. “Unfortunately, we were only out in the countryside for a Thursday night wine tour. We saw the coliseum, but only from the outside because the lineups were outrageous. Back at our hostel, our German roommates kept stealing pages from our Lonely Planet to use as rolling papers, so we missed a few key landmarks. And our shower water source was right next to a sulphur deposit so we pretty much smelled like poo the whole time. But it is the magical place where Lucia and I met!”

  “That is so romantic!” gushed Erica. “How did you two hook up, initially?”

  “Well . . . it was muggy and blistering hot, that summer in Rome. Gelato melted down the wrists of every man, woman and child . . .” started Cliff.

  “He was popping wheelies uphill on a rented scooter, I was hopelessly lost trying to find the gateway to Vatican City,” added Lucia.

  “I spotted her there, struggling with her tourist map. I watched her for half an hour before I finally worked up the courage to ask her if she needed a lift somewhere,” said Cliff.

  “Once I trusted him enough not to take me someplace ghetto and sell me into white slavery, I jumped on,” added Lucia.

  “And as it turned out, we were staying at the same hostel. Even weirder still, we were booked into the same room!”

  “No way!” said Erica incredulously. “Is that total serendipity or what?”

  “Complete and utter serendipity,” said Cliff with a serious nod. “Things like that make you know, if you didn’t already know, that there are forces at work we have no idea about.”

  “I never heard that story before,” said Gabriel curiously.

  “You never asked how we met before,” answered Cliff. “If you had, I’d have told you all about our blistering hot Roman holiday.”

  Lucia smiled flirtatiously, still giggling for her husband the way a happy girl giggles at a clever joke on a first date with a beautiful boy. “Perhaps it was just the teensiest bit presumptuous of us,” she said, “but we made a pact that summer to spend every summer together for the rest of our lives.” “And how is that working out for you?” Erica asked.

  “Spotless record!” she answered, winking at her husband. Ava rolled her eyes.

  “And then of course when the kids came, we jumped them in on the pact as well!” said Cliff.

  “I doubt you had to twist any arms,” said Erica. “But now that everyone’s growing up, it’s a bit harder to maintain a pact like that, no?”

  “Not really. See, we told them years ago they won’t inherit a dime from us unless they are present and accounted for every summer,” said Lucia. “The rest of the year is fair game for travel and other pursuits, but every summer we expect them here. And while they’re here, we expect them to be active, creative, and to be busying themselves with whatever it is they love. That way, family time doesn’t have to end just because everyone eventually grows up.”

  “But what if someone gets a job that doesn’t let them take summers off?” asked Erica, not challenging the arrangement but genuinely wanting to know more about how they make it work.

  “Well you’ve been gone a long time so I guess you haven’t been filled in, but the kids are already doing quite well for themselves without ever having had to take a job!” said Cliff proudly.

  “That’s fantastic!” said Erica, surprised and excited by the idea. Of course, she didn’t have to work either because the life insurance policy her parents had taken out combined with her banked inheritance was more than enough for her to live on quite comfortably, but she was still very interested in how these her old playmates with two live parents were accomplishing the same, at such young ages. “Pray tell! How?”

  “Well, it’s quite simple, actually,” began Lucia. “We just encouraged them all to do what they love every day until they got so good at their respective hobbies, they could begin to capitalize on them and support themselves.”

  “I’m just a surf bum that gets paid to do it.” said Gabriel. “Don’t be so modest!” his proud mother urged, and went on to tell his story for him. “When Gabriel was sixteen, he had his eye on this tricked-out, thousand-dollar mountain bike so he began teaching surf lessons to tourists to save up for it. As it turned out, he had a knack for teaching and before long, he was signing up full classes and doing private clinics all up the coast! Eventually he got so busy, he had to hire an entire staff of instructors.”

  “That’s so great!” said Erica, for whom Gabriel just got even sexier. “You just get paid to splash around all day. Sweet!”

  “Yeah but I haven’t been teaching a lot lately ‘cause the team has got it covered. I’ve just been honing my own skills…”

  “Gabey is a sponsored rider!” said his proud little sister. “He has shots and spreads in surf mags around the world. He takes home mad awards, wins comps with his eyes closed, and gets all his clothes, shoes, and watches for free. He’s famous within the neoprene mafia.”

  Erica was so impressed. She told him how she remembered going out on foam boards with him when they were little, never guessing he’d make a career out of it. She felt proud of her old childhood friend, but at the same time, felt exceedingly attracted to the handsome surfer/entrepreneur sitting across from her, whom she’d always known would grow up to do special things. His pecs looked strong and cut under his white shirt, and he was the most scrumptious boy she had ever seen up close and in real life. “So where have you surfed?” she asked him, trying to play it cool.

  “Everywhere,” said Gabriel. “So far this year I’ve been to the Maldives and Grenada. L
ast year I surfed Indo, Nica, the Gold Cost of Australia. It’s been a pretty swell gig!”

  “I’ll say!” said Erica. Arielle’s jaw dropped as she realized all the days she wasted waiting for him at his home when she should have been out combing the waves in exotic equatorial locales around the globe. “So what about you, Ava?” she asked. “What is it that you are successfully offering to the world?”

  “I started a fashion blog a few years ago as a platform from which to protest saggy jodhpurs.”

  “You mean like, riding pants?” Erica asked curiously. “Because I wear those sometimes . . .”

  “Yes, but no. I mean, jodhpurs as fashion. The saggy kind. Those pants that were for a brief time inexplicably trendy among the dirty hipster set.”

  “I think I know the ones,” she offered. “Loose and diapery around the butt, but tapered in the leg?”

  “. . . and make women look like they’ve just shat themselves, yes!” Ava answered, nodding. “My work began as a crusade against such atrocities, as a forum from which to oppugn anything I found to be equally objectionable and upsetting in the world of fashion. As it turned out, a lot of people shared my views and before I knew it, I had a huge user-submitted pic gallery and was getting, like, a thousand hits a day. Before long, people started offering me lots of money to fly ad banners on my page.”

  “That’s hilarious! So you’re like peopleofwalmart.com, then? You collect pictures of people wearing ridiculous things and post comments on them?”

  “Kind of. We’re set up pretty much the same way but while they’re simply about the entertainment value of mocking motley Wal-creatures, the goal of my site is to proactively shame style offenders into thinking twice before stepping out looking like an aging Thai fisherman who couldn’t find a butt rag he hadn’t already soiled.”

  “Here, here!” said Erica, definitely agreeing but also making an effort to be agreeable with the ever-mercurial Ava. “It’s like I once read, ‘Style is optimism made visible. It presumes that you are a person of interest, that the world is a place of interest, and that life is worth making an effort for.’ I don’t know who originally said that, but it’s stuck with me.”

  “Exactly. People who don’t bother with themselves drag down the average for all of us.”

  “Ava’s blasts have all the effect of a modern-day stoning,” explained Gabriel. “It’s like ‘comply with my idea of style or your blundering faux-pas may be immortalized on the intraweb.’”

  Veronica, who had been biting her lip while Ava was speaking, said shyly, “Of course, there is more than one definition of style, Ava . . .” But Ava just waved her off, muttering, “She’s just disgruntled cause she’s positively famous on idsoonerdie.org.”

  “We made you take those photos down!” said Lucia, sticking up for her friend.

  “Gone but not forgotten,” said Ava solemnly.

  Erica turned to little Demetra and asked her if she’d given any thought to what she would end up doing with herself. “I’m already doing it!” was her chipper reply.

  “Even you?” asked Erica in disbelief.

  “Especially Demetra!” said Gabriel, who then explained how three summers ago, Demetra started writing and making illustrations for her own series of children’s books that were currently selling like hot cakes at elementary school book fairs across the country.

  “Very impressive!” said Erica. “I can’t wait to see them! What are they about?”

  “Pugs, mostly,” she replied, then explained how she had started painting the family’s five smoosh-faced, curly-tailed pets and then started writing storylines to go with them until they were books. “I made so much dough last year, I was able to donate a huge stack to the pug rescue network. It’s all been very fulfilling, both creatively and charitably. ”

  Erica was speechless; she had been expecting to find a little girl not yet even ten, and here sitting beside her was a published and paid young author and philanthropist. “You guys are all blowing me away!”

  “So what else have you been up to, Erica?” asked Lucia. “Besides traveling, of course. What are your greatest loves and interests?”

  “Well, lots. For one thing, I got this ink done a few months ago,” she said, rolling up her sleeve to reveal a big silver-grey moon tattoo on the inside of her forearm.

  “La lune!” exclaimed Veronica, always trying to sound exotic. “Whatever inspired this?”

  “After my parents died, I received incredible amounts of support from everyone I knew. I appreciated it, but it got kind of exhausting to feel like everyone was trying desperately to distract me so I’d forget I was an orphan. Every day was an endless parade of fun activities, gentle therapy, home-cooked meals and freshbaked treats. They were trying to create ‘normalcy,’ whatever that is. I appreciated it all very much, but found myself on most days looking forward to the nighttime, when I could finally be left alone with my thoughts and memories. And no matter where I was, I would curl up beside a window and stare out at the moon, looking for my mom and dad in its face. Over the years, the moon has come to represent them for me, and the precious, fleeting hours of dark night when I’m free to miss them and remember them,” she said while running her fingers along the design on her skin.

  “I’d never get a tattoo,” said Ava, snobbishly. “It’d be like throwing a bumper sticker up on a Mercedes. Fail.”

  “That’s one way to look at it!” said Erica, laughing. “But I think of tattoos more like hanging a picture in a nice house with bare walls. Kind of like, something pretty to complement the architecture.”

  Arielle was transfixed; she had not noticed the pretty moon picture on Erica’s forearm but thought it was magnificent, for she had never seen a drawing so vivid on a person’s skin before.

  It was almost sundown by the time they got back to their side of the island, riding fast and smooth in the shiny new but nowdeflowered yacht. Just like the night before, the skies were awash in a berry red. Gabriel carried Erica’s bags from the yacht and set them down in the trunk of his Jeep. When he hopped into the driver’s seat, he found Arielle already buckled in sitting shotgun, smiling happily with her hands folded in her lap. Seeing Erica walking up close behind, Gabriel thought to make one minor seating adjustment.

  “Actually Arielle, what do you think about letting Erica be copilot this time? Would that be okay?” He asked it like a question, but it was a question for which there was only one answer, lest she appear difficult. Erica grinned; she thought he might do that for her, but Arielle did not appreciate her demotion to the back seat. Deflated and not quite sure how to take it, she crawled over the console and into the back, fastening her seat belt while Erica thanked her breezily and occupied the spot next to Gabriel, who was fiddling with his iPod for an appropriate playlist.

  On the way home, Arielle kept her eyes fixed on Gabriel’s right hand as he shifted gears. As he kicked it into fifth, the back of his hand brushed Erica’s thigh. Erica felt it, brisk and gentle, and in dwelling on it, her cheeks blushed to mauve. Bitter and beginning to experience what it is to be envious, Arielle couldn’t help but feel robbed. That’s my seat, she silently pouted to herself. And my HIM.

  When they arrived at the house, Gabriel grabbed Erica’s bags and, chatting engagingly and excitedly with her while they caught up after so many years, carried them up the stairs to the cosy room above the boathouse that Lucia and Cliff had set up for her, since all the bedrooms were taken.

  “I still can’t believe it’s you,” he said as he set her bags down of the floor inside. She spun around to face him and giggled. “I know!”

  “You knew and didn’t tell me,” he said. “I refused to ruin the surprise!” she said unapologetically. “That was positively wicked of you,” he said, taking a step closer.

  “And it was worth it just to see the look on your face today!” She couldn’t hide how thrilled she was at how perfectly it all seemed to be working out.

  On a more serious note and in the spirit of getting
everything out of the way, Gabriel sat down on the end of her bed and asked her why she never came to live with his family after her parents died, since, after all, his parents were her godparents and the ones charged with caring for her if anything tragic ever happened. “It was tempting,” she answered. “Cliff and Lucia are the greatest. But I knew if I came to live here, I probably never would’ve left.”

  “And would that have been the worst thing?” he asked.

  “It would definitely not have been the worst thing,” she said. “It’s just that something inside me compelled me towards adventure and wouldn’t even hear about settling in, anywhere. I ran with it. But I always knew I would end up back here one day.”

  The two continued to catch up, feeling themselves flit between adoring each other as old friends and feeling attracted to each other as hot-blooded adults whose worlds were echoing with a resounding click. Their minds kept returning to the sweet kiss they shared on the beach that morning, and both wanted to have that kiss again. But neither wanted to move too fast because to rush would be to fail to stop and savour.

  “You know, after your parents’ accident, Dagmara and I were really shaken. Like, up-all-night frightened nine-year-olds, thinking our parents were going to die in some freak accident too. We were terrorized. We could barely wrap our tender heads around the situation… but you should know that we were humbled by your bravery. I continue to be humbled by the girl who fearlessly took on the world, all by herself.”

  “That’s sweet,” she said. She paused for a moment, and the corners of her lips curved up as he watched her. “Did you know I liked you when we were little?”

  A smile crept across Gabriel’s face as he remembered his chubby childhood playmate. “Maybe a little,” he said, “but I was never sure. Boys are dumb at that age and girls are vague; I don’t think it ever occurred to me to wonder.”