London Calling
Red blush made her look like a hooker—that’s what her mom had always said. Lips pursed, Natalie set out all the blush powders she had on the bathroom countertop, and then shook her head. The pink made her look like she was nine, and with her naturally bronzed skin, anything in a tan or brown shade did nothing but clog her pores. Grabbing the fat brush from her make-up drawer, Natalie popped open the red container and dabbed the bristles in it, smiling wide in the mirror to make her cheekbones stick out.
Just before the brush touched her cheek, her mother’s voice danced from ear to ear.
“Koorva! You look like a koorva with that on your face!” It had the ugly Ukrainian bite to it, the accent that her mom laid on thickly whenever she wanted to make a point—the point usually being that modern American girls were too “free” with themselves. She rolled her eyes and snapped the blush packet closed, tapping the brush against the sink’s rim to knock the powder off. With the white linoleum was peppered in colour, she forced everything back in her plastic make-up bin on the shelf over the toilet and rinsed the sink clean.
How her mom thought American girls were too risqué was something she’d never understand. If anything, Europeans were the ones with nude beaches and porn and cursing on TV—they were the lewd ones. Her mom ought to be happy that Natalie was a boring, wholesome American college girl. She’d been with the same guy since tenth grade, and she opted to stay in Cooliage County for college in order to save money on rent. She was prepping to be an elementary teacher: there was no room for risqué in her life.
And yet, blush made her look like a hooker.
Sighing, she quickly went through the rest of her outfit: skinny jeans and a black t-shirt. Maybe she’d wear a pair of heels with it to class it up, but seeing as it was only her nineteenth birthday, it wasn’t like she was painting the town red on Cooliage Row. No, the one street littered with bars frequented by students was still off-limits, no matter how hard her friends pushed for her to use the fake ID they had. Natalie didn’t think the girl in the picture looked anything like her, and she had no desire to be turned away before the night began.
Her parents let her drink at home anyway; she didn’t see why alcohol was such a big deal. Many of her friends were high school era pals, though there were a few wild-child additions who came in from neighbouring farming communities—they were the ones who could let loose at the drop of a hat.
Raised voices seeped into the bathroom through the vent in the floor, and she tried to concentrate on her hair to drown out the noise. Couldn’t they at least wait until she was out of the house to start tonight’s brawl? It wasn’t anything new to hear her parents shriek at each other from across the living room: they’d been doing it since she was six. The last year, however, had some of the most verbally vicious fights she had ever heard, and there were a number of vases and antique figurines that had met a grisly end in the process.
Natalie wished they’d just get divorced already. At least she’d be able to come home from class without walking around on eggshells, watching what she’d say to keep the peace, to avoid the verbal sparring that would lead to a full-blown fight in front of the TV later that night. It broke her heart to hear them scream, to hear her mom cry, to hear her dad slam doors. Sometimes she’d find him sitting in the front seat of his car when she came home from school, and he’d be smoking and blaring the radio, but not going anywhere.
After trying a number of different styles, Natalie decided on a basic ponytail. She didn’t have the skill to do any fancy braids, and her normally wavy hair had decided to toe the line between frizzy and stick straight—basically unworkable. They were only going to a diner, anyway. Maybe she wouldn’t wear heels. No, she would. Tonight’s dinner was for her, after all. Her birthday was right in the middle of spring exams, and the group collectively decided to celebrate a week later when they had some free time. Most of the girls, Natalie included, still had a few exams to get through next week, but there was a light at the end of the tunnel.
“Oh, what? Because I don’t have pictures that means it isn’t happening?”
“That’s not what I said!”
They were near the staircase now. Natalie glanced back at the closed door, willing it to be a better sound barrier. She wasn’t sure what had sparked tonight’s match, but it had been going on since her parents had dinner at six, and it was nearly eight. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to get sucked into the drama, and after spritzing herself with perfume, she hurried back to her room to grab her purse and car keys.
“I knew the only reason you hired her was so that she could put your dick in her mouth!”
“Sasha!”
She froze at the top of the stairs, a hand on the railing and one foot teetering over the edge.
“Monica told me she’s seen you two together—”
“Monica is the office gossip and full of shit!”
Tears sprung to her eyes, and Natalie wiped them away quickly. She didn’t want them to see her cry, because then they’d take her tears and throw them back at each other, blaming one another for her pain. They were both at fault. Neither was better than the other.
“So if I were to confront her, would she lie for you? Does she love you?”
“This is fucking ridiculous…”
“You’re just saying that because it’s true! How long? How long has it been going on?”
Natalie flinched when something shattered in the kitchen. Lips trembling, she grabbed her heels and ducked out of the house, unlocking her brother’s old car and sliding in the front seat. She wished he was here—he had a knack for making light of all this. Unfortunately, Drew was in California for field hockey and physics, and she didn’t have it in her to pull him away from his life to deal with home drama.
Heels and purse tossed in the back seat, Natalie sat there for a moment with her forehead on the steering wheel and the AC blasting against her face. Adrenaline coursed through her, making her palms sweat and her feet numb. She took a few deep breaths before checking her make-up in the mirror. Some of her mascara had smudged, but there were no horrifying streaks down her face. Sniffling, she ran a finger under each eye to get rid of the black marks, and then turned the car on completely. As she pulled out of the driveway, she noticed her dad peering through the curtains in the living room, face twisted with rage.
Once she was on the road, she didn’t look back. From here on out, she had three, maybe four hours free from the fighting and the chaos, and she was going to try to enjoy every millisecond of it.
*
“So why didn’t Mark come out tonight?”
Natalie glanced up guilty after shoving a massive nacho chip in her mouth. The chip itself wasn’t unmanageable, but all the toppings made it a messy endeavour. Grace waited with raised eyebrows, elbows resting on the table. She was like every waitress ever, waiting until you have a bite of food in your mouth to ask you a question. Natalie chewed quickly, wiping her hands and mouth with her napkin as every single conversation around her stopped to wait for an answer.
“He had to study,” she told them. “I mean, he took me out on my actual birthday.”
“Dinner at the sub shop on campus isn’t taking you out, but okay.”
Her cheeks flushed at the muffled giggles from the rest of her friends, and she shrugged. “I was fine with it.”
The blonde rolled her eyes. They’d been friends since the first day of primary school, and not once in the four years that she had dated Mark Jones did Grace ever approve of him. Still, she had learned to be civil toward him when he was around, and at this point, that was all Natalie could ask for. She had enough fighting going on at home, and she didn’t want it to bleed over into her social circles.
> “So, can we all talk about Jim and Heather’s totally ridiculous amount of PDA lately?” The question was posed from the far end of the table, and the girls on either side of her chimed in readily. Last year, Natalie would have dove headfirst into gossip—there was no shortage of it in their group. However, with her parents on the verge of calling it quits—or throwing blows, whatever came first—and the leftover stress form exams gnawing at her nerves, she just didn’t have it in her to care.
Who cares if two of their friends, who had just started dating, wanted to be affectionate when they were out? Who cares what she was wearing? Who cares who he was talking to? Did it really matter?
Natalie had hoped tonight would take her mind off things, and for a fleeting moment earlier, it had. The drive to the little restaurant on the outskirts of Cooliage College campus had been peaceful and quick: Wednesday night wasn’t exactly known for its rush hour traffic. The sun had just ducked below the hilly landscape surrounding their valley-inset town, and she had leaned against her car for a little while after to watch the beautiful reds and oranges dance across the spring evening. It was finally that time of the year when the nighttime breeze didn’t litter her skin with goosebumps: for all intents and purposes, it was a gorgeous evening.
After that, she was met by a chorus of birthday wishes and a round of hugs, and she and her friends settled in to the reserved table in an almost empty restaurant. Mocktails trickled in. Every appetizer on the menu arrived. It was all delicious and wonderful and the company was, theoretically, good.
But Natalie was still miserable. No one asked her why her eyes were a little red. Grace didn’t acknowledge her text from last night, the one she sent while her parents screamed at each other just outside her bedroom door. Her bubbly aura just wasn’t there tonight, but no one seemed to mind. They all wanted to talk about Jim and Heather, not why Natalie was quieter than usual.
Even if she did bring up her parents, she wasn’t sure how anyone would take the change in topic. A few of them knew how bad it was at home, but it was way too serious a topic to chat about over greasy pizza and cheese sticks and loaded nachos. Especially at Natalie’s birthday dinner.
She shoved an especially cheesy chip into her mouth, getting some satisfaction from the way it still crunched despite the melted goop on top. Just as she reached for another, the conversation about Heather and Jim moving on to Jim’s last girlfriend (Erin, who was now excluded from the group after a messy break-up), her phone rumbled against her leg. After wiping her hands on her pants out of habit, she retrieved the phone and swiped her thumb across the screen.
At first, she thought it might be Mark checking in on her. The expectation of seeing his name with that heart beside it made her stomach knot with anticipation, finally feeling giddy again. However, all the excitement disappeared when she saw that it was her mom who had texted her. No one seemed to notice. No one asked who she was texting, or why her shoulders slumped, her lips curled downward.
There was some hesitation before opening the text, but she eventually did it with a heavy sigh. A couple at a nearby booth laughed noisily, and a waiter bumped into her chair while he cleared a few empty dishes away. She turned the brightness of her screen up to read the message in the dark restaurant, its circular lamps from the eighties only good for mood lighting.
Still, she didn’t need much light to know what would be on that text.
Ur father is a pig.
She pursed her lips, eyes watering as she read each word over and over again. What was she supposed to say to that? Did her mom expect her to reply?
“Natalie?” Grace’s voice had an edge to it, like she had been trying to get her attention for ages and only now did she hear her.
“What? Sorry.”
“If I get more nachos, will you split them with me?”
“I… Yeah, I guess.”
“Good. I’m so going on a diet after this dinner… My beach body is suffering tonight.”
“Yeah.” They stared at one another for a moment, as if each was waiting for the other to say something profound, until Grace turned back to the gossip session to her right. With no one bothering to make conversation with her (and Natalie not feeling much like trying), she set her phone on the table and went to her alert page. There were a few Facebook notifications (belated birthday wishes and a message from a co-worker asking if Natalie could swap shifts with her), two new emails from an online class’s discussion board, and six twitter updates.
Perusing twitter was more of a guilty pleasure than anything, and her profile had, on a good day, twenty followers at the most. Still, she and Mark had signed up for twitter together in high school back when none of their friends had it, and it was a great secondary means of communication. Plus flirting articulately in one hundred and a forty characters was a fun challenge.
Much to her surprise, Mark had been tweeting up a storm over the last two hours—and every single one of them had to do with a football game. Scores. Plays. Crooked referees. Cheerleaders. Heat rushed to her cheeks: he bailed on the dinner with her friends to watch a fucking football game?! She could already picture him sitting around at home in his boxers, a bowl of chips on his lap, his dad snoring on the recliner beside him.
Why did he bother to lie? Didn’t he think she’d see this? Did he want her to see the tweets? Was this some sort of message?
Natalie blinked away more frustrated tears, and then shoved her phone in her purse. She tried—tried desperately—to pluck up some good-time feelings and enjoy the rest of the night, but in the end, she drove home more miserable than ever. The fight between her parents raged on when she returned, this time over the phone, and she couldn’t stand to do the same thing with Mark tonight. Instead, she turned in early, hoping to wake up in a better place than this.
*
Campus was beautiful in the springtime. Even with the air full of exam stress and graduate goodbyes, she loved spending lazy afternoons out on the various fields, contentedly seated beneath a tree with her books scattered around her. Unfortunately, there would be none of that today. Natalie woke up that morning angry. Her misery had transformed to rage, and it took everything she had in her not to call Mark and lay into him over the phone. Instead, she asked him to meet her at their spot by the Mathematics Building. It had been their spot since their first day of classes in September: a small alcove to the side of the building, there were a number of stone benches interspersed between willow trees.
It was beautiful. He’d kissed her there more times than she could count, and she’d thought about their future beneath the wispy branches, his head on her lap and a book in each of their hands. Now, here she was, thinking about their future again, but the image in her head was cloudier today than it had been before. Blurred by anger and frustration, she found it difficult to think of anything but those stupid football tweets from last night.
She glanced at her watch. Her child psychology study session started in forty minutes, and she knew he had a two hour break between study meet-ups of his own: there was plenty of time to get this sorted out. People poured out of the nearby building, chatting and laughing and trudging along toward the paths back to the main campus grounds. Mark slowly emerged from the herd, weaving through a couple of girls and waving to her.
“Hi!”
Natalie frowned: he was totally oblivious to her mood, and if he wasn’t, he had gotten better at faking pleasantries. Mark had been her ideal guy for a long time. Physically, he was just her type with sandy blonde hair and blue eyes, a cluster of freckles showing up on his nose and cheeks when the sun was out. At roughly her height, he had long, slender fingers and a lean physique—she’d never been one for super muscular guys. In high school, they had met in band, where they were both assigned to the flute section. He’d been dorky and funny, and while he wasn’t awful to look at, he had definitely aged well.
And now he wanted to do business and law, and the dorky side of his personality disappeared by the end of twelfth grade. He’d be
come snippy with her for no reason, and this wasn’t the first time he had stood her and her friends up for something that didn’t matter—football did not matter, regardless of how much he loved it. He could have recorded it and watched it after the dinner—anything!
“That was totally useless,” he said as he threw his bag next to hers and plopped down beside her on the bench. “I was the only one who did any of the readings, of course.”
“Did you do them last night?” Fiddling with her fingers, Natalie fixed her gaze on one of the dancing willow branches. “While you were studying?”
When there was no immediate response, she glanced over at him, and then sighed pointedly when she saw him texting.
“What?”
“What did you do last night?”
“I had to study—”
“Did you do that while you were watching football?”
He opened and closed his mouth a few times, and she shook her head.
“I really wanted you to come to the dinner,” she muttered. “You know I like it when I can do stuff with you and Grace. You totally bailed.”
“I had to study, Nat.”
“According to twitter,” she started, “you had other things to do too—”
He let out a groan, kicking his feet out at a few long weeds that had sprouted around the bench. “Are you seriously not taking my side on this? You’re going to go with what you read on twitter?”
“Well, what do you want me to think?”
“I can’t handle this right now.” She watched him stand and reach for his bag. “I have too much to think about—”
“You have too much to think about?” She rose too, easily meeting his eyes in her little ballet flats. “My parents are pretty much for sure getting a divorce after last night. Dad’s been cheating on her, and the house is a fucking mess. Do you think I want to think about this? No, I want my boyfriend to be honest with me! You’re supposed to be my rock!”
“Yeah, well, I can’t hold you up all the time, can I?” He flung his backpack over his shoulder, wrenching the strap into place. “I have to think about me sometimes too!”
London Calling Page 1