Not Okay, Cupid

by Heidi R. Kling

  So weary and trying to stave off the inevitable food-borne illness in the James house from raw eggs, I’d saved up my money, bought a real pan, and only used farm fresh eggs that I bought from the Farmers Market. They were cheaper than grocery store eggs and far superior in both color and taste.

  Long egg-story short: I was now the breakfast chef of the house.

  But I’d slept in, waking up in a cold sweat after an especially heated dream about Hazel.

  “You look pale, sweetie,” Mom said, her cup of coffee dangling off her hand.

  “I don’t feel so well. No thanks on the eggs, Ma. Seriously.” I waved her off, and she set the pan back on the counter.

  “I didn’t add milk or that fake cheese you love so much,” she said. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. But good job on the recipe,” I managed to utter.

  “I hope you aren’t upset about our family argument last night. Because Kimmy and I are fine. Aren’t we, Kimmy?”

  “Huh?” Kimmy was sitting on the bar stool, typing frantically into her bejeweled pink iPhone. I noticed she was wearing a new white cardigan sweater.

  “We are fine, right?” Mom asked Kimmy. “Though I still don’t agree that it’s okay for you to go out with Hazel’s boyfriend.”

  Kimmy growled. Actually growled. A Wolf in a White Cardigan. “He’s my boyfriend now, Mother. Not Hazel’s.”

  “You know exactly what she means,” I said, trying my best to ignore the smell of Mom’s nasty eggs.

  “I know. And I know you disagree, but Jay and I have a connection. A profound connection! And we need to explore it.”

  I swallowed back the sudden urge to spew. “I’m already feeling ill, Kimmy. Please don’t exacerbate it.”

  “What does exacerbate mean?” she asked, annoyed.

  “Look it up.”

  She sighed so dramatically that her large silver hoop earrings jangled. “You are so weird. I’ll never understand why someone who hates school insists on using SAT words in everyday conversation.”

  “I don’t understand why someone would steal their best friend’s boyfriend away over something so lame as a ‘connection.’”

  I used Hazel-style air quotes.

  Kimmy cocked an eyebrow.

  “That’s because you’ve never had a connection with a girl, like, ever. You just use them and abuse them.”

  I stood up. “Hey! I’ve never abused a girl. Ever. And I resent you insinuating I have.”

  “You use them. Same thing.”

  “I am a feminist, Kimmy. I fully respect the female position, and if a woman chooses to sleep with me, she has every right to.”

  “Ha! You don’t even like the girls you ‘date’ or whatever it is you call it. You use them for…yuck. Forget. You know what. Don’t forget it. I’ve seen them sneak out of your window and run naked down the street.”

  I groaned and shook my head. “You know Mom is standing right there.”

  “Oh. Don’t mind me. Carry on,” Mom said, nonplussed. We both ignored her.

  “If anything, we use each other,” I said, not letting Kimmy shove me in some awful male corner.

  She twirled her necklace—the one Jay was fingering at the cafeteria table—in her hand. “Except they are all probably in love with you—for some reason I can’t even begin to imagine—and you don’t even take them on dates! You just bring them here and sneak them up into your room.”

  “Kimmy. Please. Mom.” I stuck my thumb in Mom’s general direction.

  Mom didn’t really care what we did in our personal life. In fact, when I was fifteen, she sat me down, gave me a brown bag full of Trojans, and told me she wasn’t going to micromanage my life as long as I treated girls with respect—which I did. And I promised to have safe sex, which I always did.

  Thankfully, Mom remembered all of that. She even seemed to be enjoying watching me and Kimmy sort this out ourselves, but I guess we’d taken it too far, because she said, “I got enough on my plate without dealing with a Neanderthal son and/or a screaming infant living under my roof.”

  Mom was a “fallen away Catholic” that was pro-choice out of necessity. Better not to have unwanted children, but if it came down to it, she would want me or Kimmy to have our baby because it wouldn’t be an “unwanted” child. Children are always a blessing in this house.

  So basically I went along with what was expected of me based on home protocol. I sometimes wondered, though, if my mom was more like Hazel’s mom: no boyfriends in your room, curfew at ten, and please don’t have sex until you’re in college (but if you must, make sure you are emotionally and physically prepared). She respected our choices, but that didn’t mean she didn’t necessarily wish we’d made different choices.

  But enough about our household and our progressive sex habits.

  “Those girls are not in love with me,” I yelled. “And if they are, that’s fine. I never promise anyone love. And besides…”

  Now I was getting mad. As my sister, she knew as well as I did that girls didn’t fall in love with me. They liked me because I was casual. Fun. There for the hookup and nothing else.

  Kimmy cocked her head. “And besides what? You going to make your big point, or are you just going to stand there?”

  “Who are you to preach morality to me? At least I’m honest with everyone. I tell them the truth and then I keep my word. But you? What you’re doing with Jay has to be some sort of moral breech. You’re both cheaters and liars, and that’s the only reason you fit together. What about all your tattooed rockabilly dudes? What do they think about this new Kimmy with her cardigans and her straight hair? Frankly, I miss those guys. At least they were true to themselves. At least they weren’t total phonies.”

  “I didn’t care about any of those guys. Sure they were fun, but they weren’t forever types. I want a forever type. I want what Hazel had.”

  She covered her face with her hand. She’d revealed too much.

  I couldn’t resist pouncing. “Oh. I get it. So this is about your friendship with Hazel. It’s not about Jay at all.”

  She stepped closer to me. “Wrong. It’s all about Jay! And you know what makes zero sense? You suddenly hanging out with Hazel. You are the ones who have nothing in common. She hates you. You hate her. It’s ridiculous.”

  I stepped closer to her. “No more ridiculous than you and Tennis Shorts McGee!”

  “Stop making fun of his shorts!”

  “I’ll never stop making fun of his Fifty Shades of Douche shorts. Sorry.”

  Now we were practically nose-to-nose. Straight-up dogfight in the kitchen, yo. We used to get into it as kids—with my skinny, twiggy sister usually kicking my butt. When Mom finally rescued me, I’d be a bloody, teary mess.

  Hilarious when I thought about it.

  “Kids.” Mom clapped like we were a couple of stray dogs in an alley. “Stop. This kind of behavior is getting us nowhere.”

  My sister scrunched her perky nose. “Tell your precious son that. He’s the one that started all of this.”

  “No,” I countered, knowing how incredibly immature I was being, but doing it anyway. Siblings brought out the most childhood elements in a person. “You’re the one that started all of this. If you hadn’t got with Jay like that in front of everyone in the caf—tacky as hell, by the way—you raised us better than that, Ma…” Nothing Kimmy loved more than me manipulating Mom onto my side. Especially because it was a known, spoken entity that I was Ma’s favorite. “Then Hazel and I would never have decided to…” My voice trailed off.

  Control your anger, Luke.

  Suddenly I heard Darth Vader’s voice in my head, warning me I was about to spill our secrets onto the messy kitchen linoleum.

  I was seriously losing it!

  “I’m—never mind,” I mumbled. “I’m going to be late for school.”

  “We go to the same school,” she said. “What were you going to say, bro? Go ahead and finish your sentence.” She glared at me, hip jutting out, prod
ding me.

  Fire rose in my belly. I wanted to tell her everything. I wanted to dish it all out and let her mop it up. But that wouldn’t be fair to Hazel. She needed this revenge to succeed so she could feel whole again. And I needed her to feel whole.

  “Nothing. I said nothing.”

  “Uh-huh. Sure.”

  Avoiding her eyes, I glanced up at the wall clock. Unlike everyone else I knew, we still had a cheesy kitchen wall clock. Ours was…you guessed it…Felix the Cat, a clock Ma had found at a flea market.

  “Well, then we’re both going to be late,” I said.

  “Jay’s picking me up in ten minutes…”

  “Goody for you.”

  I grabbed my backpack off the kitchen table and stuck my cell in my back pocket. I couldn’t wait to get in the car and check it for potential Hazel texts.

  That’s when my sister spun around and faced me. “You don’t…need a ride, do you?” She said it like I was a puddle of vomit she was forced to clean up.

  Scowling, I imagined me sitting in the backseat of Jay’s DoucheMobile.

  Ha! Like that would ever happen.

  Tempting as it was to rile him up the whole way to school, I doubted I’d last ten minutes before throwing up. The guy was seriously scum.

  “I’d rather ride a donkey than show up with you two asses.”

  “Felix! Language!” Mom, said, laughing.

  “Uck, can you stop taking his side for once in your life?” Kimmy shouted at Mom, then stormed out the door, ignoring Mom’s weak protests.

  Five minutes later, I was out in the driveway and my frickin’ truck wouldn’t start.

  Nice day to pull this, A-Rod. I popped the hood and climbed around to look under the lid.

  While I was fiddling around with the starter, who pulled up blasting some cheesy hip hop music at top volume but Jay the goddam dingleberry problem starter himself.

  In a horror film, he’d for sure be first to be killed, because by the first entrance you knew he was the villain. Tennis rackets stuck up out of the backseat, cheesy confident smile, pressed clothes showing off how rich he was. From this vantage point of leaning under the popped hood of my old Chevy, I couldn’t see the bottom half of his torso—thank God—but I’d bet money he was wearing tennis shorts.

  Please start, please start.

  It started.

  “Oh good,” he shouted from his convertible’s driver’s seat. “I thought you might need a ride. That would be awkward.”

  “I’d rather rollerblade to school in your purple skates,” I replied.

  “I don’t have purple blades,” he said, looking confused.

  “What color are they then?”

  “White with neon stripes.”

  “Of course they are.” I grinned and hopped in my truck.

  Was Jay parked ever so close to the back of my truck? Why yes, yes he was.

  “You have about three seconds to move or you’re joining me for a Monster Truck Rally,” I said.

  The snob didn’t get it at first, but when he saw my reverse lights flash and heard my truck’s engine roar, he understood. He barely backed up in time. But of course he did. I’d never actually ruin his car. But put the fear of God in him? Couldn’t resist!

  He shouted after me as I burned rubber down the street. Good enough for me to fist pump. After he was out of eyeshot, I slowed way down. I never sped in our neighborhood. There were little kids all around, and Jay wasn’t worth scaring them. Still, I didn’t like him hanging around.

  I didn’t trust him.

  And the fact that he had his claws in both Hazel (indirectly) and Kimmy (directly) now made me squirm.

  We had to get him.

  The guy had to pay.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Hazel

  At once the secret was revealed. There lay the gentlest and sweetest of all wild creatures, Cupid himself, the beautiful Love-god, and at sight of him the flame of the lamp spurted joyfully up and the knife turned its edge for shame.

  Even though I felt a little sick still, I craved something familiar. Something that was like it used to be. You know, before Jay and Kimmy turned my world upside down.

  So on the way to school, I stopped at my favorite coffee shop, the one where I used to always meet Kimmy.

  The familiar jingle bell rang as I walked through the front door.

  The familiar barista—Jan—waved as I entered.

  Pleasant, right?

  But this morning, the familiar smell of freshly brewing espresso for lattes and cappuccinos and Americanos smelled sour. Even the freshly baked baguettes and croissants and cinnamon scones made me think of a chewed-up lump of white dough clunking into my gut.

  This was a mistake coming in here. I thought about Leo DiCaprio’s line from the new Great Gatsby (Mom particularly enjoyed rewatching the scene where his usual confidence is shaken up by Daisy’s impending arrival, and you see this all over his face as he orders his staff to decorate Nick’s little summer cottage full of fresh flowers), “You can’t change the past.” And then Gatsby’s naive reply, “You can’t change the past? Why, of course you can.” Good ole Fitzgerald. I needed to reread that book.

  Anyway, I could relate to both Gatsby and Nick in this scenario.

  Here I was trying to relive a past that was as good as dead and buried: me and Kimmy, best friends, hanging out in a coffee shop, talking life and love and future.

  I was Gatsby. I thought I could change the past.

  I walked by a table of kids I knew and waved to them. The smell of their coffees, though, made me so sick that I almost retched.

  I remember Mom telling me what it was like to be pregnant. How things she’d once loved had made her feel terrible. How, in her first trimester, my dad had taken her to the movies to see one of the Fast and Furious movies (they both loved fast cars in theory, if not always in real life), she’d munched down an extra-large popcorn with butter and a ton of salt—and later puked her guts out in the movie theater bathroom. She couldn’t even go to that movie theater, still, and that was seventeen years ago. So now we went to the one on the other side of town.

  “Classic example of classic conditioning,” said she. “Pavlov’s dog and all that.”

  “So you’re a dog in this scenario?”

  “Exactly. A dog averse to movie theater popcorn.”

  It took her about five years to get back to popcorn as a favorite movie-watching snack (after all, what are Classic Sads without popcorn?), and since she was a movie critic, she watched lots of movies.

  I guessed maybe since the Jay Dump/Kimmy betrayal, this café was like my mother’s pregnancy popcorn.

  “What would you like, Hazel?” asked Jan, the barista. She had a nose ring and a tattoo where her wedding band would be. “What’s more permanent than a tattoo?” she’d explained to me. She’d been with her partner Sage forever, and they had a baby girl, Jenna, who I sometimes babysat. (Usually in exchange for Latte Bucks!)

  Anyway, I knew them well, and they knew me well.

  “I’m…not sure. I’m not feeling that great.”

  “I heard.”

  “You too?”

  She shrugged. “It’s all over town.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “But Felix James. He’s a cutie.”

  “Yeah. Um. So maybe just some herbal tea. Lemon?”

  “You’re not…”

  “What?” I asked, clueless.

  “Suddenly sick, smells making you nauseous, a sudden breakup. I don’t mean to pry, but…”

  Oh my goodness. She thinks I’m…

  “Pregnant?” I shook my head vehemently. “No. No. Me and Jay never. Well, we were thinking about it, but we never got down to actually…”

  Eyes wide, she shook my explanation away. “Don’t mean to pry, Hazel. Glad that’s not it is all. After what Sage went through, egad. Babies are great, but wait till you find the perfect partner and until you’re at least thirty.”

  “You sound li
ke my mom,” I said, laughing with her relief.

  “Side effect of parenthood. Anyway, I’ll get your tea, and Hazel?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I know these sort of things hurt like hell, believe me, I’ve been through my fair of breakups, but it’s worth crawling through the pain to get to the other side.”

  “And what’s on the other side?”

  A slow smile crept up her mouth, and I could see she was thinking about Sage and little Jenna. “The good stuff.”

  I nodded. “Thanks,” I said, and I handed her a Latte Buck (we actually had these printed out like coupons).

  But she waved off the faux money. “On the house, kid. Just remember not to let him get to you. I know it’s tempting to want to hurt him back, but you know what’s the best revenge?”

  I took the drink from her. “What?”

  “A good life.” She smiled at me, then went to help the next customer.

  Back in my Jeep, it began to drizzle.

  I turned on my windshield wipers and just watched them swipe back and forth, back and forth for a while.

  I thought about what she’d said. About how the best revenge was living a good life.

  I would have a good life after Jay. I knew it. But I also knew how small he and Kimmy had made me feel. How tiny and powerless. I couldn’t have a good life if I didn’t show him—if I didn’t show myself—that he couldn’t hurt me anymore.

  Suddenly I was so relived I’d never had sex with Jay.

  Sure, he’d wanted to.

  Maybe I had even wanted to a bit. For a while, anyway.

  We’d tried some stuff, but I just wasn’t that into it.

  Then I flashed on Felix James and imagined him standing in my room, sitting on my bed. I imagined his head on my pillow, looking at me as he lay on his side. Maybe we’d be holding hands. I fantasized about the conversations we’d have about sex.

  And then I saw him leaning in, kissing me. His body on mine.

  My lips on his. My hands in his hair…and I realized it wouldn’t be a long conversation at all.