Why Can't I Be You (9781101602843)

by Larkin, Allie

  When I left Nordstrom, I called Aberly Cadaberly to make sure I wasn’t holding Myra up. Nancy told me that the phone call with Blackberry had proved to be epic and Myra needed to finish up a few extra sketches before the afternoon FedEx run. “Tell Jessie I’m sorry!” I could hear Myra yell in the background.

  “No problem,” I told Nancy. “Tell her I said good luck!”

  I hung up and stared at the red circle that told me how many voicemail messages I had. It was up to six now. All from my mother.

  No matter how much I wanted to ignore them, I had a sick, nagging feeling in my stomach. I called her voicemail number, instead of her home phone, and left a message. It was one of my better tricks. She still hadn’t figured out why she never heard the phone ring.

  “Oh, hi, Mom,” I said. “I guess I must have missed you. Hope everything’s going well. I’m on that business trip I told you about. My cell phone isn’t getting great service out here, so I’ll have to give you a call when I’m home again. Love, love. Bye!”

  I hung up and deleted the messages without listening to them. I knew what they would say. Every single one would expand on the great theme of her life: how everyone everywhere, especially me, was letting her down in some colossally crippling way.

  I decided to walk back toward Myra’s store. Maybe grab a cup of coffee to kill time. But walking in super-sexy, sky-high, toe-cleavage heels proved to be a lot more challenging than just standing still and admiring them in the mirror. The world looked different with an extra four inches, and I couldn’t manage to get my bearings. A few blocks from Myra’s store, I crossed the street, failed to pick up my foot high enough to clear the curb, and barely caught myself on a lamppost.

  My ankle throbbed. I clung to the lamppost for dear life and surveyed my surroundings. Three stores down was a salon beckoning “Walk-ins Welcome.” I was in desperate need of a haircut, and a place to sit down, so I took it as a sign.

  “Just make it different,” I said to the hairdresser, when I sat in the chair. “I don’t want to look like me anymore.”

  I was under the dryer, reading People magazine, with some sort of high-gloss chestnut-colored dye marinating in my hair, when the hairdresser came running over with my purse. “Your phone is ringing,” she shouted over the noise of the dryer. “Do you want me to answer it?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She reached in my purse and held the phone up to show me who was calling. It was a 206 number, which I was pretty sure was Seattle. “I didn’t catch your name,” the hairdresser said.

  “Jessie Morgan,” I told her, without even a moment of hesitation. It fell out of my mouth so easily.

  I felt guilty as she answered, saying, “Jessie Morgan’s phone!” But what could it hurt, really? I mean, it’s not like I’d ever fly back to Seattle to get my hair cut. I’d pay in cash. I’d tip her well. And she’d never know the difference.

  She hung up and dropped the phone back in my purse. Then she shut the dryer off and pulled back the plastic shower cap on my head to check on the dye.

  “That was someone named Myra. I gave her the address. She’ll be here to pick you up in about twenty minutes.” She pulled the plastic cap all the way off. “Which is perfect timing actually. Let’s go wash this out.”

  The floor around me was soon covered in dark brown hair. I went from having limp, lifeless locks that fell past my shoulders, to a short, sexy bob cut just below my chin, with bangs that slid seductively in front of my right eye, so I could push them out of the way.

  “Oh my God!” Myra said, when she walked in and saw me, just as the hairdresser spun my chair around so I could see the back of my head in the mirror.

  I could see Myra in the mirror too. She held her hand up to her mouth, and I thought for a second that maybe the haircut gave me away. Maybe something about it made it completely obvious that I wasn’t Jessie Morgan, but then she said, “God, I always wanted your cheekbones, Jess. Killer.”

  We left the salon, and I silently promised myself I would tell Myra. I opened my mouth to say the words about six times over, but Myra was so excited about her call with Blackberry, and I didn’t want to spoil it.

  “So, they were, like, completely worried I wouldn’t want to do a line for them.” Myra unlocked her car. “Can you believe it?” she said, when we’d both climbed in. “Can you even believe it? They were nervous to talk to me!” She was beaming.

  “Well, of course,” I said. “You’re a brilliant designer.”

  “Really? You think so? It just means so much to me.” She told me all the details of the line she was planning, and I wanted to listen, but my heart was thumping so hard at the thought of telling her. I couldn’t quite catch my breath.

  I would confess when she dropped me off. Not before then. I wouldn’t want to find out I had some stranger in my car while I was driving on the highway with them. It would be scary. I didn’t want to scare Myra. I didn’t say a word. I tried to listen to her talk about the sketches for Blackberry, how she was thinking navy and pops of color and “like a modern take on forties beach clothes.” I watched the scenery and tried to figure out how far we were from the hotel, how much time I had before I needed to come clean. I tried not to imagine her reaction, but I kept picturing her big brown eyes filling with tears, the disgust that would edge into her voice, the panic. My hands shook. I hid them in the sleeves of my blazer.

  Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe if I stayed calm, she would too. I’d just say that I wasn’t Jessie and I was so sorry. I’d keep it simple. I would give her the red dress back and then she could drive away or go set up for the reunion and call her friend Heather and tell her about the insane Jessie Morgan impersonator she ran into, and it would be some kind of epic story that they’d all laugh about for years to come.

  But even though I only knew Myra, and I didn’t know the rest of her friends, the idea of them laughing at me stung. The idea of not getting to go to the reunion made me feel the same way I did when Ronnie McCairn invited every girl in our fourth-grade class except for me and Marta Combs to her roller-skate, pizza birthday party. Everyone knew Marta Combs picked her nose and ate it. Everyone. So it was basically like every girl in the class except for me got invited, because who was going to invite a known nose-picker to her birthday party? That’s the way I felt, thinking about not going to the reunion—like I was being left out all over again, which is silly, because I didn’t know these people. I didn’t know anything about them. I was left out because I didn’t belong. If they all decided to laugh at me for years to come, I deserved it. Who pretends to be another person? Like not even to steal their credit card numbers or get a fake passport. Who pretends to be another person just because they’re lonely and tired of being themselves?

  Me, apparently, because when we got to the parking lot, Myra parked her car and grabbed one of my bags from the backseat and said, “Oh, I can’t believe I didn’t even see all the clothes you bought! Come on!” There was the promise of girl time and maybe room service and wine and laughing and gossip (even if it was about people I didn’t know), and I decided it made more sense to just leave the dress and a note for her at the front desk after she went home. I decided it would be less upsetting for her if she didn’t have to hear the words come out of my mouth, if she could just read them and process everything on her own time.

  Writing her a note was the kindest way to do this. I’m sure if Dear Prudence ever wrote a column about how to confess to someone that you’re not actually a long-lost childhood friend, she would have completely agreed with me on this.

  Myra helped me carry my bags up to the room. There was a bottle of champagne on ice waiting for me on the dresser.

  “Ooh! Who is this from?” Myra squealed, putting the bags she was carrying down to reach for the card next to the champagne bottle.

  I almost jumped over the TV stand to grab it from her
. What if it was from Deagan? What if he wanted me back? What if the card said, To Jenny? She opened it before I could get it away. I felt like I might vomit.

  “Wait,” Myra said, looking at the card and then at me. Sweat beaded on my upper lip. The walls felt too close. “Who’s Monica?”

  “Oh,” I said, trying to take a deep breath without it being obvious that I had just been on the verge of hyperventilating. “Monica! My boss. She was supposed to take this trip, but she had to go to a wedding.”

  “Lucky you!” Myra said. “Should we open it?” She grabbed the bottle and went into the bathroom to grab a hand towel.

  “Sure,” I said. It was probably fine. It’s not like I was going to trek Monica’s bottle of champagne back to Rochester with me, and there was no point in it going to waste.

  “Do you want to do the honors?” Myra asked.

  “Go for it,” I said. I’d never opened champagne before and assumed it would be a big messy explosion, like in the movies.

  Myra twisted the metal cage off and then held the towel over the cork and twisted it until we heard a pop. She lifted the cork and the towel carefully. A thin mist curled up from the mouth of the bottle. “Perfect,” she said, and poured the champagne slowly into the waiting glasses.

  “To us,” Myra said, handing me a glass and clinking hers against mine.

  “To us,” I said. I took a careful sip. I wasn’t much of a drinker. Plus I was starving and didn’t think champagne combined with a fake identity was the best of ideas. I grabbed the room service menu.

  “Hungry?” I asked.

  “Always,” Myra said, laughing. We studied the menu like dinner was the most important decision we would ever make. We settled on smoked duck, beet salad, tuna carpaccio, grilled prawns, and a cheese plate.

  I called in the order and didn’t even blink when Ashley at the front desk asked me if I’d like to bill it to my room account—the account that went straight to my company. Monica told me to expense my meals, but the old me would have ordered the cheapest thing on the menu and still felt like it was more than I was worth. Jessie Morgan, I was sure, would just order what she wanted to eat. Jessie Morgan wouldn’t worry about being an imposition. Myra hadn’t spent the past thirteen years missing a friend who tried her best to blend in and never make waves. There was a reason no one I went to high school with missed me.

  While we waited for our room service order, Myra pulled all of my purchases out of the shopping bags and laid them across the bed to get a good look.

  “Try this,” she said, handing me the beaded black sweater and a gray skirt made from recycled wool.

  I felt weird changing in front of her. It was another one of those things I’m sure girls who grew up having close girlfriends didn’t think twice about. I tried my hardest to act like I was comfortable as I swapped my shirt for the sweater and my pants for the skirt as quickly as possible.

  “Okay, you have to wear your hair pulled back with that sweater to show off the boatneck,” she said, squinting at me. She snapped a black hair elastic off her wrist and handed it over.

  I pulled my newly short hair back into a stubby ponytail with one hand. “This?”

  “Yeah,” she said, nodding solemnly and straightening out the shoulders on my sweater for me. “Perfect. Kind of a minimalist thing. Let the sweater do the work.”

  I would have killed for a friend like Myra in high school. Someone to help me pick out things to wear and tell my secrets to. The kind of girlfriend who feels like a sister. I would have given anything I had for her.

  Myra stood back and studied me, while I wound her elastic around my ponytail. A thick bunch of bangs wouldn’t stay in the elastic and fell over my eye. It looked so much better than when I used to put my hair in a ponytail and little frizzy flyaway strands would sprout up.

  “You know what?” Myra said. “That skirt needs a brooch. Like an antique brooch, right at your hip to balance everything out.” And then she rummaged through her purse, pulled out an actual antique rhinestone brooch, and pinned it to my skirt in just the right place.

  “You just happened to have an antique brooch in your purse?”

  “Occupational hazard,” she said, shrugging.

  “I’m not sure I’ve even ever actually said the word ‘brooch’ out loud before this.”

  She laughed and picked a stray thread off my sweater.

  I studied myself in the mirror. The new hair, the new shoes, Myra’s perfect outfit—I didn’t know I could look so polished.

  “You’re brilliant, Myra,” I said. “I can’t wait to see your new line!”

  I’m pretty sure I saw her blush, and maybe her eyes teared up a little. They were shiny at least. It must be a funny thing, I thought, seeing an old friend all grown up.

  When the food arrived, Myra and I camped out on the bed with the plates in front of us and shared everything.

  “Oh my God,” Myra said, with a big forkful of smoked duck in her mouth. “This is heaven!” She fell back on the bed dramatically and chewed. “I wish everything I ever ate tasted like this.”

  “I know,” I said, stabbing a prawn with my fork. I waited to lie down until it was safely in my mouth, so I wouldn’t get anything on my new sweater. I should have changed back into my salad-dressing-stained blouse, so I wouldn’t mess up my new clothes, but it had gotten pretty rank. Plus maybe the new me could be someone who wore nice things without spilling food all over them. Stranger things had happened.

  “Good food,” Myra said, looking over at me and smiling. “And it’s just so good to see you.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “you too.”

  “Oh my God!” Myra said. “You know what this reminds me of?”

  “What?”

  “Remember that time you ran away from home and stole your dad’s credit card and stayed at the Four Seasons in Seattle and Fish drove us out to see you?”

  “Oh my God!”

  “I know! God you had balls. Like an iron pair. You, me, Fish, Karen, Heather, and Robbie all camped out in your suite, daring each other to eat escargots. Remember?”

  “That was crazy,” I said. I couldn’t imagine ever doing something like that. I would have spent the whole time worrying about what would happen to me when I got caught.

  “Oh, your dad was so mad!” Myra said. “There was, like, almost actual smoke coming out of his ears.”

  “Well, I deserved it, I guess. That’s not even just pushing the limits. That’s like—blatant rebellion.” I was such a Goody Two-Shoes as a kid. For everything they put me through, my parents had it easy. My biggest indiscretion was hiding a failed math quiz or watching TV past my bedtime. Once, when I was really acting up, I told my mom I was going to my dad’s house after school, so I could go to the library and read Judy Blume books. Maybe that’s what this is, I thought. Maybe pretending to be Jessie is my blatant rebellion. I missed that stage when I was younger and now I’m playing with fire to make up for lost time. Maybe everyone needs to rebel.

  “Oh man, it wasn’t even you at your best,” Myra said, taking a big bite of tuna. “Mmm. Not even close. But your dad just had to swallow it and move on. You had him wrapped around your little finger.”

  “I can’t believe I got away with that.”

  “Well, I mean, since you knew about his affair and all, and your mom didn’t . . . ,” Myra said. “We all wished for that kind of leverage. I mean, not for the affair part, because that was awful. To walk in on them . . .” She shuddered. “It’s not like you’ll ever be able to un-see that. But to get away with everything you did . . . I was always in awe.”

  She grabbed a piece of cheese. “Oh my God,” she said, with her mouth full. “Try this. What is this?” She shoved the rest of the piece into my mouth.

  “I think it’s Gruyère,” I said awkwardly, covering my mouth whil
e I chewed.

  She was so at ease with me. I felt like an alien, and it wasn’t even because of the whole Jessie Morgan thing. I didn’t quite know what to say or how to act or how to just be in the moment the way Myra did. I wanted sleepover-party, hair-braiding, trying-on-clothes-together girlfriends so desperately when I was in high school. But I didn’t know how to be that kind of friend. Those girls were a different breed of people. Those kinds of girls, the ones who called each other girlfriends and talked on the phone to plan outfits, they had a different lineage, like they were created and raised to be friends with other girls. Their moms had girlfriends too, and knew how to raise them to be that way.

  I almost had girlfriends the summer before high school. We could all walk to each other’s houses. We stopped over unannounced, helped ourselves to food from each other’s fridges without asking, and told silly secrets, like which boy we thought was cute, or where we were when we got our first period.

  My mom was doing well then. There weren’t wine bottles around. She played happy mom when they came over and served teenager food like ridged potato chips and onion dip. When I told her that Rachel K. had a nut allergy, she called her mother to make sure we didn’t have any unsafe foods in our house. And my mom and I made a special batch of Toll House cookies minus the walnuts, just for Rachel K., singing along to Carly Simon while we baked.

  When it was my turn to have everyone over, me and Shelia and the Rachels camped out in the living room, poring over issues of US Weekly, Teen, and Seventeen that I’d saved my allowance to buy because Sheila’s mother wouldn’t let her read “trash.” My mother brought us snacks on the fancy serving dishes from her wedding registry that had never really been used. We had soda in cans—diet and regular—and we each got our own, even though Regular Rachel never finished hers. My mother acted like it was nothing for us to have food in the house. Like it wasn’t strange that she was playing the perfect mom all of a sudden. And by August I had finally let my guard down. I believed that this was our new normal. I was happy.