by Schow, Ryan
“You look phenomenal,” Jacob says. “I only barely know you, but you coming home is what I’ve looked forward to most these last months.”
“That’s sweet of you,” I tell him. And it is.
“What are you doing right now?”
Playing with my hair, smiling, I almost forget how much I hated him. I almost forget all the terrible things he said and did when I was that portly bridge troll, Savannah version 1.0.
“We’re going to Oren’s on University.”
“How’d you feel about company?” Chad asks.
“Sorry,” I say, faking a disappointment I just don’t feel (and not doing a very good job of it by the look on his face), “this is a girls only lunch.”
Then, right out of the blue, Maggie says, “Plus it’s easier to pick up Stanford men if you don’t have high school boys hanging around you.”
None of us know what to say. Me personally, I’m baffled. The first two boys she meets and Maggie’s totally cock-blocking us. Bridget once said, “It’s one thing to play hard to get, but playing impossible to get never got you anything but too much time with your vibrator.”
“Well, on that uncomfortable note,” I say, acting overly chipper, “Maggie and I are off.”
“Can I stop by later?” Jacob says. He’s pretending Maggie didn’t just blow them off. Chad, on the other hand, is not. He just stares at us. His manners gone. We could be naked the way he refuses to even blink. Freaking rude-ass creeper.
“I guess. But we might not be here. How about I stop by your house, if it’s not too late?”
“Okay,” he says.
He leans in to give me a hug and instead, like a total slut, I kiss him on the mouth. He’s the third boy I’ve kissed this week, and I know I should feel bad, but whatever, this is the new me.
When we get in the car, Maggie says, “They were cute.”
“You treated them like lepers,” I say.
“Makes them try harder. Plus, you can tell they’re so full of themselves. If you don’t break their ego down in the beginning, they’ll try to have their way with you later, and then move on to the next girl that catches their eye while you sit at home waiting for them to call.”
“I don’t think they’re all like that.”
“If they’ve got a dick and two balls they’re like that,” Maggie says.
“So what do you think about Chad?”
“Too short.”
I laugh. “He’s definitely too short.”
Maggie says, “I just can’t go out with a guy if I’m taller, you know? I don’t know how Nichole Kidman did it with Tom Cruise all those years.”
It’s like she’s reading my mind. Pulling the S5 out of the driveway, I say, “Maybe he’ll hit a late growth spurt.”
“What, when he’s twenty-five?”
3
The thing about Oren Dobronsky and his wife Nancy is they know Mediterranean food, and—in the land of tech geeks and dreams of funding the next billionaire start-up—who knew an Israeli restaurant with the name “hummus” in it would be such a hit?
Oren and Nancy, that’s who.
Maggie orders the Fatush salad, and I have the Mozy’s Rice Bowl, which is Basmati rice with simmered tomatoes, garlic, mint, and parsley, all topped with grilled chicken. Maggie orders lemonade and I get a coconut water and we both head toward an open table facing the decorative brick wall.
Oh, and by the way, the place smells euphoric.
I expect us to fall into an easy conversation about whatever, but once again there’s this palpable silence falling over us that is very dark-cloudish, and a teensy bit irritating. I mean seriously.
All around us, people are conversing, food is cooking, orders are being taken and great music is playing. The bright environment is energizing, at least, it could be. There’s this vacuum of solitude that seems to envelop us, the same way you’d feel squeezed to death if you were ejected into space. To say I feel bad for my friend would be the understatement of the year. I want to cheer her up, I do, but dammit, raising the dead just isn’t my specialty. I’m much better at putting people down. Or fighting.
Being a friend, a one-on-one friend, it’s harder than you think. For a second I’m wondering what the hell I did, forcing her to come home with me.
“Why are you just staring at me?” Maggie says. She says it like she’s prepared to be offended. I want to say something reassuring, I do, but I also want to shake her back to life! I have seen the side of Maggie that’s fun and airy and easy. This isn’t it. Now, what…she’s wanting me to do all the talking? I’m trying, I swear.
“Hello?” Maggie says.
I realize I’m staring not at her but through her. My eyes clear and I stumble all over my words. “Sorry. I guess I’m just thinking about school, I mean, not being there anymore. The summer is what I’m thinking about. I guess.”
Maggie gives a sarcastic laugh and says, “You sound stupid. Just say it. I already know, Abby or Savannah, or whatever.”
The way she says my names so flippantly, so rudely, I’m hurt. And maybe a bit offended. I’ve only been there for her as a friend. I’m not one of the Bitch Brigade. Not one of Julie’s hit squad. We are who we are, GMK’s, and it mostly isn’t our fault. At least it isn’t mine. “Abby. It’s Abby, and you don’t need to be so snarky.”
She takes a bite of her salad, chews it, and swallows. The way she looks at me without saying anything rubs me the wrong way. It’s like she’s channeling demons.
“Well, do you have anything you want to say for yourself?” I ask. On a scale of one to ten, the way I can get into arguments scores a solid eleven.
Unfortunately she just shrugs her shoulders. Before I can complain, she stabs her fork into her lettuce and tomatoes then shoves it all into her mouth. She’s chomping like a racehorse and eyeballing me. She isn’t blinking. Isn’t talking.
“That’s it? I bring you home to stay with me for the summer so you don’t have to think about, you know, and you’re rude to the first boys we see and rude to me and now you won’t even talk? Jesus H. motherfreaking Christ, it’s like you’re bipolar or something.”
She finishes chewing, not having blinked once the entire time, then swallows hard. She sits there for a moment, her eyes clearing, perhaps bringing in a more hospitable host, then she says, “It’s not that I’m trying to be rude. There’s just so many things wrong I’m having a hard time sorting them out. Plus, with you not being yourself—”
“Me? How about you?!”
In a softer, almost apologetic tone, Maggie says, “I know. I’m being terrible right now.” After another monumental stretch of silence, one so long it almost becomes unnerving if not for all the noise and activity around us, she says, “I just don’t know how to be happy anymore. I feel like being here, with you, and away from everything that’s been so bad in my life. I should be happy, but I’m not. I’m in this fog, and I just feel…really empty. Like all the time. Plus he’s texting me again. He won’t stop.”
“He? He who?”
She shoots me a sour look, like I should know the answer. And I should. The record label’s executive producer. The rapist.
“Really,” I stammer.
Her eyes shine with pain; she lowers her face, hides those same eyes from me.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I realize I brought her home to fix her, but now, in my naiveté, I’m realizing this is the kind of broken you can’t fix.
“Let’s go do something. Anything you want. What will cheer you up?” It’s a stupid question I already feel like chastising myself for asking. How do you cheer up someone who survived the things she’s survived? The only acceptable right-of-passage into the music industry should be talent and hard work, but apparently, in Maggie’s case, it involves letting a sleazy music executive take your virginity while everyone else seems so unaware.
“Where was your father when…you know…when it happened?”
Head still down, running her fork through her sala
d, she pulls her hair across her face and—in a voice so vanquished I have to strain to hear her—she says, “I don’t want to talk about that. Don’t talk to me about that.”
Dropping my voice to match hers, leaning forward, I say, “You have to talk to someone about it, Mags. You can’t just shut down. That’s why you have friends. Why you have me.”
I can barely see her face through her hair. People are glancing at us, their darting eyes saying they see problems occurring.
“I know,” she says.
She doesn’t say anything for a long time, so long I wonder if I’m being brushed off. I hate this feeling. Then finally she says, “When we’re done, can we just go back to your place? I’m really tired.”
Now it’s my turn to shrug my shoulders.
4
We’re settling in to our meal when three sumptuous looking guys breeze into the restaurant with great energy, five o’clock shadows and confident laughter in their voices. Their presence is a sexual force felt by every unclaimed vagina in the place. Except maybe Maggie’s. It takes an act of will power to look away from them. My eyes return to Maggie. She hasn’t seen the boys yet. Then her head turns toward their voices, and almost in slow motion, she sees them. Her entire demeanor shifts so fast it’s practically unbelievable. She has the look of someone struck with an overwhelming need they can’t control. Like the scent of orgasmic promise set the air on fire and all she can do is just sit there burning, shivering.
The three of them see us seeing them and all the sudden I’m sucked into their gravitational pull. It’s a crackling in the air, a profound, swallowing silence. It’s the look of Stanford men aching to make girls like us into women. Looking at these guys makes high school boys seem so silly, so immature. So very, very bush league.
They look at me and I smile, choosing sexy and mysterious over the Hollywood smile. Then, oh my God, it feels like the air just spiked ten degrees. All three smile back. I fight the blush. They grin. In that moment, I look away, then give a half glance back. They’re still looking and I’m like, holy cow, is this really happening?
OMG, it is.
They’re coming over.
For some completely unfathomable reason, Maggie looks away from them and goes back to eating her salad. The gods are descending upon us and she’s tits deep in her f*cking salad! I tap the foot of her chair. She looks up, like she wants and doesn’t want this, then she looks up at them again. Her breath catches. Yes, that’s right, they’re coming to us, these…
….freaking gods.
What they say next, I can’t remember for certain. I just smile a whole lot and they smile a whole lot and next thing I know, we’re accepting invitations to a party.
You know when you lose time for a minute or ten? It was like that. I can’t say much of what happened from the moment we said yes to their party to the moment we left.
Time just happened.
I’m a silly school girl with a crush. Some part of me remembers waving good-bye. In the car, I frantically check my back pocket to make sure I still have the number they gave me. One of the boys, he said make sure we show up.
“We’ll be there,” I promised.
In the car, I open the slip of paper given to me. The sigh I heave when I see those seven digits scratched in blue ink is enormous. I don’t even remember their names, they’re that hot. But I’ve got the number, so who really gives a crap? Names are so inconsequential when you’re in love.
“Will someone pinch me please?” Maggie says as we’re pulling into traffic. For a second, we’ve got the old Maggie back. Well freaking Hallelujah!
“That happened,” I say, breathless.
Next thing I know we’re giggling and it seems—for the barest of moments—that maybe Maggie will drag herself out of this momentous funk after all.
5
All the way home we talk about the boys. Maggie likes the tallest of the trio and I like the one with blonde hair and green eyes. We’ve already decided the one with too many muscles likes himself better than either of us do so he can fend for himself.
It’s when we get home that the sexually charged adrenaline burns off, like some spell cast on us completing its cycle. Sitting in my bedroom, Maggie’s lying on the bed next to me with her shoes off staring at the ceiling. I say, “Do you ever think about our clones? The ones we come from, I mean?”
For some reason, my dumb brain won’t stop revisiting this. I think of them as our gods. The DNA we come from. Also—and this is more of a semi-conscious secondary agenda—I’m looking for ways to avoid sinking back into the mire of Maggie’s past.
“Not really,” Maggie says, her voice faraway, like she’s not even taking the subject serious. “I mean, sometimes I think of my clone, you know, but not in an obsessive compulsive type of way. Not like you do.”
“I’m freaking A.D.D. about them, Magpie. Seriously, I swear it’s a problem. A fixation.”
“Damien said you had a hard-on about them. Like preserving their rights is going to be your cause or something.”
“It almost is. But it isn’t, you know? I mean, to have a cause, you have to be fully committed.”
“You should be committed alright,” she jokes with a grin and a sly look from those gorgeous, ocean deep eyes. I almost don’t want to object because she’s not sucking the sunshine out of the sky with her misery right now.
“The way things are going, I’ll probably end up institutionalized or dead. It’s my new DNA, I think. I don’t know.” I blow out an exhausted sigh, then say, “Half the time I feel crazed with these thoughts of mine. And half the time I’m not sure they’re my thoughts at all. They feel like someone else’s emotions crammed into my head, laying down their roots, growing their leaves of dissent in the darkness.”
“Why do you even care about them?” Maggie asks.
“Why do people worship God? Because He’s everyone’s father. At least, that’s the belief if you’re not into Darwinism or Scientology, or whatever. But with these people, our clones, you and I know for sure parts of us came from them. We’re hybrids, Magpie. It’s verifiable.”
“Yeah,” she says, “I guess.”
You guess?! Man, I get frustrated with this conversation! I unhook my bra, yank it through my shirt sleeve and lob it into my closet. How can anyone not care where they came from if who they came from was a clone?
With an edge and a depth to my voice that only surfaces when my blood pressure gets cranked up, I say, “Don’t you ever feel—I don’t know—ungrateful when you just dismiss them so easily? It’s the reason you’re healthy and beautiful, Magpie. Me, too. And the non-triplets.”
She pins me down with those eyes. “Jesus, Abby, you don’t think I know that?”
“So why don’t you act like you care? They gave you everything, and you barely even give them your consideration.” Exasperated, I say, “You’re like my father.”
Slowly, Maggie sits up straight, but not like she wants to fight. When she answers, it’s in a soft, solemn tone. The kind of velvety tone you just know carries with it a tremendous amount of pain.
“If I weren’t so beautiful, maybe I wouldn’t have gotten raped. How I look, how I feel, this was once a gift. Being pretty has its downsides, too. I feel like a target now.”
Her body goes boneless. She lays back down, as if the weight of that single admission drains her of whatever strength she has left.
Simmering, feeling selfish, I let my breath out gradually and even, and I say, “It didn’t seem like that with those Stanford boys, did it? Did you feel like a target?”
“For a minute, no, but then I considered what they’ll want from us and it sort of all crashed down on me at once.”
“They’re just boys.”
“Boys rape girls, Abby,” she says. “It happens.”
The heat in my voice simmers, the edge all but gone. What’s left is sadness and concern for my friend. The male DNA part of me makes me think I can solve her problems. Or perhaps offer her some kind
of perspective that won’t leave her feeling so wounded all the time, or so vulnerable.
“Not all boys rape girls,” I say. “Some boys, they believe in love. And those same boys, they’re scared too, and insecure. Just like us, you know? They just want to be seen, to feel valuable, to at least feel…I don’t know, wanted. It’s not always about taking. A lot of guys are desperate to earn that.”
“You’ve read too many Nicholas Sparks’ books,” she says, teasing. Okay, so I have. I still think The Notebook was amazing. And Best of Me made me cry for hours. But still, isn’t there always a little truth in fiction?
“The point is, something horrible happened to you and you’re letting it define you. It changed the way you see things, the way you think. Your entire perspective on life and love, it’s been poisoned. But that doesn’t mean it’s right. Or accurate.”
“God you sound like such a guy right now.”
“I know.”
“I love you for trying to help me though,” she says.
“I love you, too,” I say, “which is why I’m anxious to help you.”
Tears boil in her eyes and I can see everything rushing forward at once, taking her body, pulling her into a fetal position. She can’t help the sobbing that starts inside her. I lay down beside her, pull her into my arms. For the first time since I learned of her defining trauma, she lets go of everything inside her. It’s the saddest most tragic thing I’ve ever seen and before I know it, I’m crying, too. Not that me doing this is any great surprise. I cry like all the time.
The way I feel, so immersed in sympathy right now, I can almost be her. I can almost feel the depths of her anguish, and I can feel her depression like it’s my own. I also feel her hate. This man—this music mogul—he can’t be allowed to do this to anyone else. In my heart, where love, devotion and justice beat their drums, I know he must pay for the pain he’s caused. I want that pound of flesh.