by Laura Ruby
I felt a sharp elbow in the ribs. “Stop staring,” Ash hissed. “You look like some kind of maniac stalker.”
“She is a maniac stalker,” Joelle said. “You missed a spot on my shoulder blade. I can feel it.”
“Then you can just do it yourself,” Ash said, throwing the bottle of sunscreen on the ground next to the deck chair. “This scene is straight out of a porn flick.”
“Did somebody say ‘porn flick’?” one of the eighteen guys said.
“Yeah,” said Ash. “It’s playing at the shallow end. Why don’t you dive for it?”
“And what do you know about porn flicks, young lady?” said Joelle. She lifted her hand and waved at Luke, who waved back.
“Don’t wave,” I said, under my breath.
“Why not?” Joelle whispered. “Don’t you want him to come here?”
“Don’t talk so loud,” I said.
Joelle wasn’t listening; she was waggling her fingers at Luke, motioning him over. “Audrey, hurry up and take off your shirt so he can see your bikini.”
“Joelle!”
Another of the eighteen: “Yeah, take off your shirt, Audrey.”
“My God,” said Ash, who was wearing a beater and cutoff jeans that she would swim in.
“What?” said Joelle. “He shouldn’t see her bikini? What’s wrong with her bikini? I helped her pick it out.”
“I’m not sure I want anyone to see my bikini,” I said.
The eighteen: “We want to see it!”
“Will you losers get the hell away from us?” Ash snapped. When Ash snapped, people usually obeyed. There were a few grumbles, but the eighteen drifted away.
I didn’t have time to take off my shirt even if I’d wanted to; by the time the eighteen cleared off, Luke was standing at the end of my lounge chair.
Joelle put a palm over her eyes and squinted up at him. “Hi, Luke, what’s up?” she said brightly, as if they’d been dear friends since birth.
“Hey, Joelle, not much,” he said. He nodded at Ash. “Any new piercings?”
Ash smiled. “Not today.”
“I think Nardo’s around here somewhere, in case you’re interested.”
Ash shrugged; Nardo had been calling and texting her since Joelle’s party, but she was ignoring him. She said that it was because he was too straight-edge, she said she preferred her boys in a bit of guyliner, she said she didn’t need a boyfriend, but I thought it was because she was afraid to be hurt. She got pissed when I’d said so, so I wasn’t planning on going there again.
Luke smiled at me, but didn’t say anything. He sat down on the end of my chair so that I had to bend my knees a little to make room. “So, Joelle,” he said, “how’s business? Any new TV shows?”
Joelle wrinkled her pert little nose. “No. Not that I haven’t been auditioning every thirteen seconds. My agent has a lead on a commercial spot, some perfume or whatever, so maybe something will happen with that. I’d rather not do commercials, you know, but work is work. Everything counts.”
“I guess you have to sacrifice for your art,” said Luke.
Joelle clutched at her chest. “That’s so true!”
Without looking at me, Luke reached out and put his hand around my ankle. His thumb gently rubbed the knob of bone that stuck out. My breath caught in my throat.
Joelle’s eyes flicked to my ankle, and a perfectly evil grin spread across her face. She reached down and picked up the bottle of sunscreen that Ash had thrown to the ground. “I keep telling Audrey that she has to be more careful with her skin,” she said. “Why don’t you put some of this on her?” She handed Luke the bottle.
Luke looked at me. “Do you want some?”
It seemed like a loaded question.
“Okay,” I said.
“Start with her back,” said Joelle. “Audrey, take off your shirt so that he can do your shoulders.”
“Jesus, Joelle,” Ash said, “why do you keep asking Audrey to take off her clothes?”
“What?” said Joelle, her eyes wide and innocent.
To Luke, I said: “Joelle secretly wants to be a director.”
“Yeah,” said Ash, snorting. “Of adult films.”
“I hear there’s money in that,” Luke said. He held up the bottle of sunscreen and waited for me to take my shirt off. I guessed there was nothing else for me to do except take it off, so I did. Luke touched the strap of my turquoise halter top right where it hit my collarbone. “I like this.”
If I looked into his eyes I thought I might spontaneously combust. “Thanks,” I said to the space between his eyebrows.
“I helped her pick it out,” said Joelle.
“You have good taste,” Luke said.
I swung around to a sitting position and lifted my hair. I noticed that a few of the girls around the pool were watching this operation intently and tried to keep my expression neutral, like, Oh, ho hum, another hot guy lathering me up with sunscreen, yawn. But then Luke’s warm hands were on my shoulders and on my neck and skating down my spine, and I was positive that I looked like I had somehow ingested a ball of fire that was slowly expanding in my gut and roaring outward to every limb. Despite the August heat and the weird burning in my stomach, my skin exploded into goose bumps.
Joelle chattered on about a disastrous grape-juice commercial she did when she was six as Luke smoothed lotion over my back, shoulders, and arms. “We had no idea that I was allergic to grapes,” Joelle said, “until I got sick all over the director.”
“That’s pretty funny,” Luke said to her. “Did they fire you?”
At the word “fire,” I shuddered a little. Luke pressed his thumbs into the muscles along my neck until I relaxed.
“Amazingly enough,” said Joelle, “they didn’t. I did three commercials for them. Go figure. I would have fired me. I mean, puking on the director’s shoes? Not the way to get ahead.”
Luke’s hands slid around my waist and gave my stomach two quick (too-quick) swipes. “They must have liked you a lot,” he said to her. To me he said, “Sit back.” I dropped my hair and leaned back in the chair so that he could do my legs. He started at my feet and moved upward, bending my leg so that he could get the underside as well as the front. I could barely keep myself from howling out loud. As his palms circled upward toward the hem of the white denim skirt I wore over my bikini bottoms, I wondered where he would stop, or if he would just keep going until he was publicly molesting me and I would be faced with the choice of kicking him or letting him. His fingers slid briefly yet chastely under my skirt to get the tops of my thighs, and then he was done. The finishing touch was the brush of his thumb down the bridge of my nose and across each cheekbone.
He snapped the top of the bottle closed and held it out to me. “There you go,” he said.
I took the bottle. “Thanks,” I squeaked.
“So do you guys want to swim?” he asked.
“Maybe later,” said Joelle. “But you go ahead.” We watched as he ran for the diving board, gracefully loping back to the rest of his kind—the young, the proud, the penised.
After Luke was safely back in the pool, I exhaled heavily. “You are an evil, evil, evil chick, Joelle. Evil. E. Vil.”
“That’s what they tell me.”
“I’ve just been mauled.”
Joelle shrieked with laughter loud enough to make the other girls around the pool glare at us. “And you enjoyed every minute.”
Ash merely shook her head. “Girl, you have it bad.”
“Do you blame her?” Joelle demanded.
“I don’t have it so bad,” I said. I was literally burning up. I stood, unbuttoned my skirt, and dropped it around my feet, happy that the bikini bottoms were boy-cut shorts and not one of Joelle’s dental-floss numbers.
“Look what you’ve done, Joelle. You’ve turned our sweet little honors student into a stripper. Audrey, you should see your face right now.”
I sat down again. “What do you mean?”
“You look
like a puddle of melted wax,” Ash said. “Oh, never mind. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Leave her alone,” Joelle said. “When was the last time she had a bit of a rubdown?”
“Why didn’t you get your own rubdown, if that’s what you’re into, Ms. Movie Star?” Ash said.
Joelle adjusted one of the miniscule triangles covering her sizable boobs. “We’re not talking about me. And why aren’t you off looking for that guy you hooked up with last week? What’s-his-name? Nardo?”
“Who?” said Ash.
I lay back down and closed my eyes. I stopped listening to them and tried to listen to myself. I told myself that Ash was right, one hookup didn’t necessarily mean another one. It was stupid to get messed up with someone like him, someone who could have anyone he wanted (and probably did). I heard the happy squeals of this girl and that girl as the guys tossed them around the pool—“Luke! Stop it! Lu-uuke!” See? I said to myself. You had your fun, now move on, leave it alone. But just a half hour later, when I felt a brief squeeze on my big toe and heard Luke’s low voice saying “See you,” I felt like I might drown in disappointment. I sat up to see Luke walking through the gate at the side of the house. As if my chair had suddenly grown thorns, as if my feet had developed brains and wills of their own, I jumped out of the chair and followed.
“Audrey,” Ash said, but I ignored her and ran after him in my bare feet. I caught up with him at his car, an enormous green van.
“Hey,” I said.
He turned around and smiled. “Hey.”
“Are you leaving?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I have to work tonight.”
Work? He works, I thought. Some place where other people tell him what to do. It was oddly fascinating. “Where do you work?”
“Rock Garden Restaurant. Here’s a tip for you: never eat there. The cooks don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Cook.” He looked at his watch. “I’d love to hang out longer, but my shift starts at five. I have to go home and change first.”
“Oh,” I said stupidly. I stood there, suddenly aware that while he’d put on a dry T-shirt, I was standing in the street wearing very few, very small items of clothing. I wrapped my arms around myself—to hide myself, to hug myself, I wasn’t sure. My nipples felt like bullets against my forearms.
“I really like that bathing suit,” he said.
“You already said that,” I told him.
He blinked slowly, as if his lashes were made of lead. “It’s worth repeating.”
“Oh,” I said again. The ball of fire was back, threatening to take over my body, the block, the planet. I’d never been so attracted to a guy in my life. It was like there were tiny magnets in my mitochondria, tugging me toward him. Without thinking, I took two giant steps forward.
“Well, hi,” he said when I was standing under his nose.
I lifted my face and breathed him in. “Hi and goodbye,” I said. “Do I get a kiss?”
Yes, I do.
The Other Audrey
After an hour and a half of labor plus three bottles of dye, one oversized bottle of developer, one paintbrush thingy, and a hand mirror so that I can see the back of my head, I’m no longer a blonde. It takes another forty-five minutes to scrub the bathroom sink and tub free of splotches and smears of dye I’d gotten absolutely everywhere. Only then do I allow myself to take a serious look.
My hair is less the color of dirt and more the black-brown of coffee grounds. Next to all that dark hair, my skin looks paler yet somehow brighter, my eyes gold and lionlike. It’s me. And isn’t me at all. For some reason, it’s different than dyeing your hair a fake color, green or blue or hot pink, the kind of color that people use to piss off their parents or scare old ladies or prove to all the other teenagers that you are so much more wild and crazy and unique than they are. This is a normal color that could be found in nature. So it could be real. I could be this fierce coffee-haired person walking around, this other Audrey, a mirror image of myself. Someone who’s never fallen in lust with Luke DeSalvio and so was never “sexually active” with him and never had her photograph zipping around cyberspace. Someone who’s never been humiliated in front of her entire school and her own parents. I go to bed at three a.m., Stevie the Purr Monster draped across my chest. For the first time in days, I fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow.
Four hours later, I drag myself downstairs, Stevie at my heels. My parents are both sitting at the breakfast table, talking in low voices. They both stop and stare when I come into the room. My parents both have brown hair. They always thought my blond hair was this special thing, like a present they got when I was born. They aren’t happy.
“Audrey!” says my mom.
“Your hair!” says my dad.
I grab the nearest box of cereal and flop into my seat. Stevie jumps on the table and my dad shoos him off. “It will grow out, okay? Don’t give me a hard time about it.”
They look at each other, then back at me. “But,” my dad says, “your hair was so beautiful.”
“It still is,” I say.
He doesn’t know how to respond to that.
A few minutes later, my mom says, “It does set off your eyes.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“If you do it again, maybe you could think about putting in some red highlights.”
“Red what? What are you talking about?” says my dad. “Why…” He starts again. “What made you change your hair?”
“No reason. This crazy store clerk talked me into it. When I get sick of it, I can always dye it back. Or shave it off.”
“Shave it off?” My dad is really becoming alarmed now.
“She’s not going to shave it off, John,” my mom says.
“How do you know?” I say.
My mom sighs and rolls her eyes toward the ceiling. I haven’t seen that in a while, and it makes me feel better. Then she ruins the mood by saying, “Remember, you have your doctor’s appointment at the end of next week.”
In the car, Ash can’t get over me. “Holy Scheisse!” she says. “What the hell did you do to yourself?”
“I figure that if I have to be all dark and brooding, I should look the part.”
“You even did your eyebrows! I’ve never done my eyebrows.”
“Yeah. The package said that you weren’t supposed to, that you could, I don’t know, go blind or something if you got the stuff in your eyes, but I thought I’d look really dumb with blond eyebrows and brown hair.”
Ash leans back in her seat and considers me. “You know what? I like it. It’s pretty cool. Hot, actually.”
“Thanks.”
As she turns into the school parking lot, she says, “But it’s not like people won’t recognize you. I mean, they still might be talking about that stupid picture. So…”
“I know,” I tell her. “I get it. It’s not a disguise. I just wanted a change, that’s all.”
But it does work as a disguise, at least a little bit. Some people float by me without seeming to see me, and a lot of others do double takes. I still get comments about the picture, I still hear whispers behind my back, but I keep telling myself that in a few weeks they’ll forget. Someday soon, someone will write something outrageous and personal and maybe disgusting about someone else on a blog or a text message or chat, people will get pissed and the rumors will spread, and I’ll be old news, no matter what color my hair is. I’ll rack up the A’s, I’ll work on the set for Hamlet—even if there’s only a coffee table and a telephone, it will be the best coffee table and telephone that the audience has ever seen. By April, I’ll know where I’m going to college; then I can pack up and be off. See ya, kids. Bye-bye, high school. I’ll leave this photograph behind while the gargoyle who took it will slink off to whatever circle of hell waits for him.
So I read, I study, I study some more. I admire my toothpick village and wish I were young enough to want to add to it, to disappear into a tiny little house or a train
or a windmill. I slog from class to class to class. I’m more chilly than Chilly, I freeze him out. Except for Ash and Joelle, I freeze everyone out. By Friday afternoon, I’ve aced two tests and gotten an A plus on my Much Ado About Nothing paper from Mr. Lambright. Not bad. It seems that being a dirt-haired ho is pretty good for my grades. I seem to have mastered transitions.
On Saturday, I work in my parents’ store, Angel, ringing up evening gowns and bridesmaids’ dresses and wedding gowns. Normally, I do everything I can to help people find dresses that flatter them. This time, I tell everyone that they look beautiful even when it’s not true, because this is what everyone wants to hear, because it’s easier. I let three girls walk out of the store with feather boas. Yes, boas. Nobody wears boas—we’ve had the same four in stock since the Big Bang—but they didn’t know that and I didn’t tell them. I feel like a person with a rotten tooth or broken toe: it doesn’t hurt enough to ignore the world, and it hurts too much to be patient with it.
Sunday morning. Church. Pastor Narcolepsy is even more hypnotic than usual, or maybe they put drugs in the communion wafers. The sermon is about how one can’t really be a true Christian if one doesn’t come to church. Which is fine and everything, except we are at church. Wouldn’t it be better for the pastor to go find some people who aren’t and give them the guilt trip? Like, say, go preach at the mall? I make the mistake of saying this to my parents on the way home.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into you,” my dad says.
“What do you mean?” I say.
“Church is important.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t important. I’m just saying that it’s weird to tell us to come to church when we’re already there.”
“The pastor was simply reminding us that regular worship is something that God wants,” says my dad.