by Jen Brady
“Yes, but not a boy who matters,” I said. “What are we watching today?”
She looked at me like I’d sprouted a second head. “I need my sandwiches first.”
“Right.” How could I forget the sandwiches? “I’ll be back in a sec.”
I headed for the kitchen. Maybe if I took an extra-long time making the sandwiches, she’d fall asleep, and I could turn on Stranger Things. I hadn’t had time to check out the third season yet. If I listened to it on mute (because unlike some people, I find the captions to be a useful tool in stealthy TV watching), she might not wake up for a while. I could get a whole episode in.
“Don’t forget to cut the crusts off!” she yelled after me.
I plastered a smile on my face, even though she couldn’t see me, before yelling back, “I know, Aunt Deb!” Mom taught me that trick; your tone is bound to come out more pleasant if you’re smiling, even if you’re simmering inside.
I putzed around in the kitchen, taking my time mixing her favorite lemonade and preparing the cucumber sandwiches. Two full sandwiches, cut into four diagonal pieces each, with the crusts hacked off because she has the same taste in food as a three-year-old. She would only eat a total of one sandwich, but if I only brought her one, she’d complain that the plate looked too empty. It was all about the presentation. She’d nag me until I ate at least one piece of the tiny sandwiches. I used to refuse out of principle, but that made her crankier, so now I take my no-thank-you portion, and WeeWee gets the remaining pieces, which makes his farts extra smelly.
I must have putzed too much because after a while, she yelled, “Joanna, where are my sandwiches?”
Darn. No sleeping yet.
I hurried to finish up, pouring a glass of lemonade and tossing the last two tiny sandwich pieces onto the plate. I put the smile on my face again and walked through the swinging door to the living room.
“Here you go, Aunt Deb,” I said, all perky, as I set her food on the end table next to her.
She peered down at the plate, then looked up at me with a squinting, critical eye. “Your plating hasn’t improved.”
I flopped down on the couch next to her. She “hmphed” at the jolt, and WeeWee stirred like he’d been horribly inconvenienced by the couch cushions resettling.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, even though I knew I’d never win this battle. “Nobody’s here. It’s just for us.”
“You should always prepare food as if you’re serving it to someone important,” she said, indignantly.
“I know, Aunt Deb.” I’d heard it a million times.
“After all, what if the President were to stop by?”
“Why would the President stop by?” Sometimes I think she’s losing it.
“The world is getting smaller and smaller, you know.”
“The world is staying the exact same size it’s always been,” I said. “Unless you count the melting of the polar ice caps, which will lead to the eventual sinking of coastal cities.”
“Oh, that’s nonsense, Joanna. We had record lows in November.” I didn’t bother trying to correct her about how climate change works. I’d wasted enough breath on that one before. “Now let’s eat and watch my story.”
I almost groaned. Her “story” is a cheesy daytime soap opera. She watches it every day at one o’clock, but sometimes she gets behind and I have the pleasure of watching the recordings with her and relaying every fourth awful, sappy, unimaginative line.
“Then,” she went on, “I need your help with The Facebook.”
I couldn’t hold back my groan this time. After being anti-technology for years, Aunt Deb recently discovered the magic of Facebook. She basically reads her newsfeed and Facebook stalks random family members to stay up on all the gossip. She rarely comments or even “Likes” anything, but you always know she’s there creeping on you, even if she doesn’t make her internet presence known very often.
Because all she does is silently stalk people, whenever she wants to try something more advanced like uploading a picture or posting a status, she doesn’t have a clue, so she makes me do it for her, all the while asking questions about how it works. The same questions. Every single time. I don’t know how many times I’ve answered the question, “Now does everyone on the world wide web see this or do just my friends?”
Forty-three minutes later, we’d watched her story, and we were on to “The Facebook.” I uploaded to her Timeline a picture of WeeWee wearing an ugly green Christmas sweater with little dog bones all over it. He looked like an idiot. And it took me longer than it should have because Aunt Deb refuses to get a cell phone, so she takes all her pictures on a digital camera (thank goodness she gave in on the camera because before she got it, I had to endure the additional steps of picking up her pics from the grocery store photo lab and scanning them) so I have to upload them all to her computer before posting.
She leaned across the laptop, invading my personal space and mouth-breathing like Mya. Now I knew which side of the family Mya got that disgusting habit from.
“Now . . . will Thelma see this?” Here we went with the questions. “I want her to see this.”
“Is Thelma your friend?”
Aunt Deb looked at me like I was an even bigger fool than WeeWee in his dog bone Christmas sweater. “Well, of course she is.”
“Then she’ll see it.”
“Really?”
“Yes, Aunt Deb. If Thelma’s your friend, she can see your picture.” I decided not to go into the technicalities of how Facebook algorithms work. Maybe Thelma would see it and maybe she wouldn’t. I knew what Aunt Deb wanted to hear, so I simplified it down to that.
She squinted at the screen. “Even without the world wide web?”
“Well, no. She would need internet access to check her Facebook.”
Aunt Deb let out a sharp, “Ha!” She shook her head. “Thelma wouldn’t get The Facebook. She’d never figure it out. Not the sharpest tack, that Thelma.”
“But you just said she was your friend.”
“She is! Went to nursing school together.”
I massaged my temples. “No, Aunt Deb, I meant is she your Facebook friend?”
She looked at me blankly. “Well, what difference does that make?”
Scraping gum off the undersides of tables at a fast food restaurant was looking better and better.
I grabbed the remote off the coffee table and turned on the TV again. “What do you want to watch?”
Aunt Deb chose a movie I’d already suffered through three times. I found it in the TV menu and started it. After five minutes, I was bored. After ten, I heard the sweet, sweet sound of light snoring. I took out my phone and scrolled through some YouTube comments on our latest video. I’d have to give Aunt Deb a few more minutes to really get snoring heavily before I changed the channel, or she’d wake up right away and I’d have to wait out the process all over.
I scrolled in peace for a few minutes, replying to a few comments here and there. Then, out of curiosity, I clicked over to Rick’s channel. I snuck a peek at Aunt Deb. Her eyes were closed, head tipped back, mouth open. I reached into my pocket slowly and soundlessly tugged out my earbuds.
Rick looked the same in his videos as he had today during the interview: clean-shaven, not a hair out of place, wearing dress clothes. Not to be rude, but he was much better-looking all scruffy and casual with his ripped jeans, T-shirts, and flannels. He should dress like himself, not like a stuffy newscaster. He should act like himself more, too. Just because you were interviewing some boring person didn’t mean you had to be boring, too. In real life he was funny and sort of sweet—when he wasn’t picking a fight with me, that is.
I’d just gotten into the video about Shanna, the nurse Bethany worked with, when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. Aunt Deb sat straight up and snorted.
“What did he say?” she asked as she jerked awake.
I pulled my earbuds out and tried to hide them under my leg. “Uh, I don’t know.”
“Joanna!” She looked at me over the top of her thick bifocals. “Are you paying attention?”
“Not really,” I admitted. The look of disapproval in her eyes irked me. “You fell asleep, and I had work to do.”
“And what work is so important that you have to be on your phone to do it?”
I sighed. “Nothing, Aunt Deb.”
“It’s not nothing. If it were nothing, you wouldn’t be shirking your duties.”
“You fell asleep,” I tried again.
“I did no such thing.”
One of these days I’m going to take a video of her sleeping on that couch, mouth open, drool flowing and everything to prove her wrong. I’ll also promptly get fired when I do that, so I’ve held off for now.
“Show me what’s so important you can’t be bothered to watch a movie with your old aunt.”
There would be no getting out of it now that she was riled up, so I toggled to the menu that would let me cast the video from my phone to the TV. Maybe I could pass the time at Aunt Deb’s and get my work done at the same time. She’d probably like boring documentaries.
A paused image of Rick in front of the hospital filled the sixty-inch screen.
“I’m telling you, it’s pure magic,” Aunt Deb said, shaking her head slowly, the way she did every time I cast something from my phone to the TV. “It’s like the TV can read your phone’s mind. Like electronic televpathology.” Apparently, Mya also got her fondness for inventing big words from Aunt Deb. Maybe Mya should work for her. Mya would probably enjoy crustless sandwiches and ugly dog sweaters.
I ignored Aunt Deb’s old-person-technology remarks. “Let me get back to my channel, and I’ll show you the comments I was replying to.”
“Who’s that boy?” She pointed a crooked finger toward the screen where Rick was sitting across from Shanna, asking her questions about working in the NICU. “Can we watch his show instead? Does he do all the silly things like you and James’s grandson?”
I snickered at the thought of Rick doing something the least bit undignified on camera. “Nah. This guy’s videos are actually pretty boring. They’re like documentaries.”
“If they’re so dull, then why were you watching one?”
“We’re sort of collaborating on a project.”
“What’s it about?”
“The mall.”
Her nose wrinkled in disdain. “You’re forcing that poor boy to make a movie about the mall?”
“No, Aunt Deb. He’s the one who had the idea. I’m just helping him.”
“Let’s see it.”
“It’s not done.”
“Then let’s watch one of his other movies. Did you help with those, too?”
“No, just the one.”
I tried to change the subject back to my channel, but she insisted, so I restarted the clip about Nurse Shanna. Aunt Deb sat riveted to the screen, only taking her eyes off it when it was over.
“He’s quite a hunk.” She nodded as if she approved. “How do you know this boy again? Do you think he’ll ask you out?”
Christopher Columbus! I was not having a conversation with Aunt Deb about Rick’s “hunkiness.” I’d rather talk about why internet-less Thelma couldn’t see her picture on The Facebook, even though they’d been friends since nursing school.
“He doesn’t usually look like that,” I said. It was the best way to shut the conversation down. Aunt Deb had very specific criteria for acceptable boyfriends for us, and scruffy Rick with his holey jeans and slobby room most definitely wouldn’t meet her expectations.
“Now before you go, I have another question about The Facebook.”
It was going to be a long afternoon to match my long morning.
14
RICK
JOANNA’S REFERENCE to “the video where we were bald” had intrigued me so much that I went right to my computer when I got home from our filming session.
I opened YouTube and typed into the search bar “JoJo+Teddy bald.” The first result was a sponsored ad for hair regeneration cream for men. The second result was a thumbnail of Joanna and Laurence looking at each other, hands on their cheeks, mouths gaping open, as if their appearances shocked each other.
And, sure enough, they were bald as cue balls.
I had to see this. I pushed play.
“Hey, guys, welcome to another video,” no-haired Laurence said.
“I’m Joanna March . . .”
“And I’m Ted Laurence. And you’re watching . . .”
They flung their arms out. “JoJo plus Teddy Equals BFF Forevah!”
“What do you guys think about our cool new hairstyles?” Laurence asked, grinning so hard I wanted to punch him through the screen.
What was it about that guy that was so obnoxious? He also hadn’t added his snarky quip about Joanna making him say the BFF line with her, which meant that at one time, he saw nothing wrong with being that cheesy.
“Let us know in the comments below,” Joanna said. Laurence pointed down with both index fingers as she turned to face him. “Are you ready to show everyone what we did today?”
“Yep,” he responded, “and I think we should start with the best reaction of the day.”
The scene cut to a kitchen. It must have been Joanna’s because it wasn’t the kitchen with the stainless-steel appliances and smart refrigerator where they’d filmed the We Make Five Gallons of Slime video. That one I knew was Laurence’s because they’d captured his grandpa’s surprised-and-disgusted face when he walked in and saw all his counters covered in icky green ooze.
Joanna sat on a stool at the counter, swinging her feet. She looked a couple of years younger, but it was hard to judge because I kept focusing on her lack of hair.
Laurence must have been filming because his voice came from behind the camera. “Here she comes! Act natural.”
He snickered. So did Joanna. Then she pulled a fairly straight face, folded her hands, set them on the counter, and stared ahead at the door, looking anything but natural.
The door opened, Laurence let out a rather girly giggle in anticipation, and Joanna’s mom walked into the kitchen carrying a grocery bag in each arm. I recognized her from previous videos. She set both bags down on the counter and started pulling items out of them.
“Hi, Mom,” Joanna said.
Mrs. March looked up and dropped a bundle of apples. They hit the counter and then thudded onto the floor. Her eyes widened and her mouth dropped open. Laurence was sure to zoom in on her flabbergasted expression.
“What did you do?”
“What do you mean?” Joanna asked innocently.
Laurence snickered some more. Mrs. March turned to stare into the camera, still looking shocked. Then she looked back at Joanna and at the camera again.
“You, too, Ted? Is this real?” She took a step toward Joanna and reached her hand out like she was going to touch her daughter’s bare scalp, but Joanna leaned back, out of her reach. “This better not be real. School pictures are next week!”
They both cracked up and the scene changed to Joanna and Laurence (pre-head-shaving) walking up a driveway and stopping on a doorstep. Joanna’s voiceover set the scene. “So this is how we started the day.”
She flipped her long hair over her shoulder as she rang the doorbell, and Laurence addressed the camera. “Okay, so today we’re going to shave our heads and then show you the crazy reactions we get. We’re guessing Joanna’ll get better reactions than I will, but you never know. I can’t wait. It’s going to be so funny.”
The door opened and a girl who looked somehow familiar to me stepped out and waved. Joanna turned to the camera. “This is my sister’s best friend Sallie. She’s a hair genius and a new member of the high school drama club. She’ll get a chance to show what she can do when she works on hair and makeup for the spring production of West Side Story.”
The date on the video was three years ago, so they’d been in eighth grade when they recorded this. How had her hair g
rown back to nearly waist-length in three years?
“Sallie’s going to help us look the part so we can pull off this prank,” Laurence explained.
The scene cut to what must have been Sallie’s bedroom. The walls were painted purple and decorated with posters of popular male actors and boy bands. Laurence sat on a stool facing the mirror of one of those makeup desks with drawers and lights. The surface was covered with hair products.
Sallie held up an electric razor and moved menacingly toward him.
“Go for it,” Joanna encouraged.
Sallie looked at Laurence and raised her eyebrows in what looked like an offer for him to back out at the last minute.
“Bring it on,” he said confidently. “I’m not afraid.”
The razor hummed to life, and Sallie took one long swipe across his head, front to back, giving him a reverse mohawk. All three of them, along with a fourth person (whoever was holding the camera, I guessed), busted up laughing.
“Ted, you look awesome!” Joanna shrieked between giggle fits.
“I’m gonna stop now because nothing can make this funnier,” he said, leaning forward to study his new look in the mirror.
Sallie, however, had other ideas. “Sit down and let me finish.” She poked him in the shoulder and started going at his head with the razor. More and more clumps of hair fell, and Sallie brushed them to the floor, which was covered with what looked like a little kid’s plastic party tablecloth.
The scene cut to a closeup of the fully-shorn Laurence. He didn’t look so cool without his hair. In fact, the best thing about this video was that he couldn’t flip his hair out of his eyes with his annoying head-flick gesture.
Joanna was now sitting on the stool. She turned and waved at the camera.
“Joanna’s turn,” Sallie said as she brought the razor closer to her. At the last second, she pulled back, stuck her face so close to the camera that I backed away out of instinct, and said, “Just kidding!”
“I’m not actually going to shave my head,” Joanna said. “School pictures are next week, and my mom would kill me if I shaved my head. What we’re going to do is have Sallie work her magic to make it look like I’m bald.”