by Trish Cook
“It’s only five o’clock, Grandma,” I called back. “We don’t have to go yet, do we? I mean, the party probably won’t get cooking until after ten, right?”
She popped her head inside our rapper room. “Didn’t I tell you?” she said, flitting about in her surprisingly cool Lucky jeans, Candies, and off-the-shoulder top. “The party is from five thirty until nine thirty. Some of the older and younger folks need to get to bed way before midnight.”
So much for our conspiracy. We all reluctantly got dressed and piled back into the Country Squire.
“I am totally whipped,” I complained to no one in particular.
“See? That’s why we have the early-bird hours,” Grandpa explained. “So people like you can still enjoy the party.”
Inside the sterile confines of the senior center, a DJ who looked like he was about a hundred years old was spinning tunes. Though we tried to sit it out, being cynical and making snide remarks about everyone out there shaking it on the dance floor, we finally caved in to Grandma’s pleading and Macarena-ed like maniacs. After that, we moved on unashamedly to the Chicken Dance, the Electric Slide, and the Hustle. It was actually hot, sweaty, crowded fun. Surprise, surprise.
“I take it back, Zander,” I said. “I don’t hate New Year’s anymore.”
He smiled and leaned against the wall, pulling me back with him. “Told you so.”
Brina took one look at us pawing each other and moved on to greener pastures. “I’m on the prowl. See you lovers later!” She vamped over to the other side of the room. When I looked up a minute later, she had a crowd of admirers trying to impress her. Granted, they were all still in diapers, due to either extreme youth or old age, but it was still better than watching us make out, I’m sure.
At 9:20, the DJ announced that it was almost time for the normally dreaded countdown to the New Year. “I better head to the bathroom now if I want to get back in time for my smooch,” I told Zander.
“No problem,” he said.
I threaded my way through the crowd, only to find that practically every little girl and old lady in the place had the same idea as me. I sighed and did the only thing I could—crossed my legs and waited my turn. Frustrated, I checked the clock, my watch, and the position of the moon every few seconds. For the first time in my life, I actually wanted to be in the mix when it hit midnight—well, fake midnight at this party—and this lousy line was probably going to keep me from getting there.
Finally, an open stall. I hovered over the seat, thigh muscles burning, and finished as fast as I could. On my way out, I paused just long enough to run my hands under the water and check my hair. But maybe I should have washed with soap. Or put on some lipstick. Or read some of the graffiti. Because the minute I got outside the ladies’room door, my right foot slid out from under me and I landed—SPLAT!—in a puddle of Chunky Puke soup. A little girl was still heaving next to it and crying into her grandmother’s skirt. “But I only had one bag of gummy worms, Grandma. Usually it takes me at least two packs before I throw up.”
I wanted to cry, too. The moment I had been waiting for just wouldn’t be quite as romantic with me smelling like Eau de Vomited Neon Night Crawlers. Sighing, I pushed my way back into the bathroom and began wiping globs of colorful gel balls off my clothes. I even put a quarter in the vending machine and bought a cheesy spray deodorizer. I spritzed the offending parts of me and sniffed. I smelled like a new car that had been barfed in.
I’ll just have to make the best of it, I thought, and plastered a smile on my face. I started winding my way back through the crowd as the countdown started. “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two . . .”
Just as everyone yelled “one,” I made it back to where Zander was standing. It just so happened he was whispering something in Brina’s ear at the time. Nope, I said to myself, I will not get jealous. I repeated it over and over in my head, like a mantra. I will not get jealous, I will not get jealous, ooooommmmm, oooooommmmm, ooooooommmmmm.
And I was doing a great job at keeping my cool until I heard Brina ask him, “Do you think Trace found out about our little thing?”
“I hope not,” he said, and hugged her.
“Found out about what?” I asked, not sure I wanted to hear the answer.
“The three blow jobs I gave him when you were out running,” Brina said, laughing.
“Yeah,” Zander added. “We filmed it all for that new video series, Friends Gone Wild.”
“Fuck you,” I said to him, so entirely sick of the whole flirty-flirty thing those two had going. Admittedly, knowing my dad walked away without a backward glance didn’t help much, either. Even if he was a rock god, that didn’t give him the right to abandon me and my mom.
“Give me a break, Trace,” Brina said. “We were just kidding.”
“And fuck you, too,” I told her, heading toward the door.
“You’re going all bunny boiler on me again,” she said, grabbing on to my sleeve. “Don’t embarrass yourself.”
I shook her off and kept going. “What part of ‘fuck you’ didn’t you understand?”
“I’m not making up any excuses for you, Trace,” she said. “This time, Zander’s gonna find out the truth about your awful jealous streak.”
“Have fun flirting with my boyfriend,” I said over my shoulder. “Be sure to tell me how he is in bed. We haven’t quite gotten to that point in our relationship yet, but I’m sure you will before the night’s over.”
“That’s not fair,” she said, looking hurt.
“Says you,” I said, slamming through the exit. I knew I was going to have to just sit there until my grandparents and friends came out, but I was stubborn enough and pissed off enough to do just that.
“You are going to feel like such a jerk when you find out what you’re blowing a fit about,” Brina said.
“I doubt it,” I called after her as she headed back inside. I actually would, later, but for now I was content to stew in my overreaction.
I didn’t speak a word to my friends the entire car ride back to the house. When the g-rents tried to find out what was wrong, I pretended I’d been the one who’d gotten sick, not the little girl. And they believed me, mostly because I totally reeked by that point.
Back at the ranch, I stormed into the bedroom and slammed the door just to spite Brina. I couldn’t even think straight. Sleep eluded me, though I pretended to be completely passed out when I heard Zander and Brina tiptoe in the room about a half an hour later.
“Don’t worry—she’ll come around in the morning,” I heard Brina say. She was so wrong it wasn’t funny.
I stared at the clock until it was six a.m. Then I packed up my things, woke Grandma, and told her I had to catch an earlier flight than my friends because I just remembered I had a big paper due at school on Monday, and called a cab. I ignored all offers of a ride and attempts to dissuade my foolishness.
At Newark Airport, I took out my journal and spent the whole flight composing an embarrassingly bad poem. The sum total of my efforts was contained on one measly page where I had scrawled lines, crossed them out, and rewritten them until I was semisatisfied with the finished product. It read:Trying to be cool
Thinking that you’re friends
All you’re really doing
Is hurting me again
Trying not to care
Never even thinking
Go and do it all again
Never even blinking
Trying to get away with it
Being so abrupt
Having no compassion
Needing to grow up
Why hurt the person closest to you
By playing little games
Putting on your phony act
When inside, you’re all the the same
All I can say
Is leave me alone
Both your hearts
Are made of stone
I reread my piss-poor work once more before we landed. I realized I was no Emily D
ickinson. In fact, I realized I wasn’t even on slp’s level. He could always find just the right words to fit the occasion, even if they were someone else’s.
When I dragged my body through the door three hours later, everything was still quiet in my house. Thank God, I thought. There was no way I wanted to talk to Bebe yet. I dropped my pack in the laundry room, and was tiptoeing my way upstairs when I thunked to a halt.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Mr. Perry said with a grin.
“Have you been here all week?” I asked him, yawning.
“No,” he said. “Actually, Belinda stayed at my place a couple of days. I needed to feed the fish and get my messages.”
“Mr. Per—” I started to say, and then caught myself. “I mean, Mr. . . . Steve . . . Perry?” My tongue was getting all tangled up.
“I thought we were going for plain old Mr. Steve, since you can’t seem to go whole hog and just call me by my first name.”
“Right, Mr. Steve,” I said, wanting so badly to ask him the question that had been rattling around in my head for days now—the one about whether he was slp, and if so, why he was spending every second of free time with my mother.
“What’s up, Trace?”
“Nothing, nothing,” I said, my balls shriveling up and running home to their mamas. “I just wanted to know how your week was.”
“Honestly?” he said, his eyes practically twinkling. “It was my best Christmas vacation ever.”
“That’s great,” I said, moving past him. “At least one of us had fun.”
Before he could try to delve into what had happened on my trip, I ran up to my room. Closing the door behind me, I plunked myself down at my computer and typed in www.borntorun.com. I was rewarded with a guy selling Springsteen memorabilia and mobile homes in Alabama. I tried the .net extension. Nothing—the domain name was for sale.
I changed my tactics and typed in Born to Run tribute band. That led me to a bunch of pasty boys from Liverpool, England, who liked to pretend they were born in the U.S.A. None of them resembled Bebe’s friend Mac Whoever-He-Was in the least bit.
Next, I tried Bruce Springsteen tribute and came up with pages upon pages of bands with names like Candy’s Room, Tramps Like Us, Greasy Lake, and Spirits in the Night. And to think, just last week I didn’t even know people like the Boss-alike existed, and today I was learning they were a dime a dozen.
Switching gears again, I Googled the name Mac Donnelly. No one who was even remotely involved in a Springsteen tribute band or appeared to be Bebe’s age came up. I struck out again with Mac Donohue. Desperate, I tried Mac Donald. You can only imagine how many times our redheaded, striped-jumpsuit-wearing friend Ronald appeared.
Just before I was about to click off the computer, I took one last look at the Spirits in the Night band Web site. Clicking a recommended link brought me directly to backstreets.com, the Boss’s unofficial Web site.
Surfing around, I quickly discovered that the “Loose Ends” section was where rabid fans went to find anything and everything related to Bruce. I figured I kind of counted as being possibly related to him, so I dashed off a posting requesting that Mac Donnelly (or possibly Donohue or Donald)—or anyone who knew him—contact me to help return something important that Bruce had misplaced the summer of 1986. I neglected to say that something was me.
Satisfied with my amateur sleuthing, I pulled down the shades, unplugged the phone, turned off the computer, and threw the covers over my head. I was seriously considering hibernating until it was time for college to start when I fell asleep.
I woke up later wondering where the hell I was. Everything was pitch-black. I squinted at the alarm clock, finally making out that it was ten-something p.m. through glued-to-my-eyes contacts. January first was almost over. Next year, I vowed to trust my judgment and stay home.
“Mrowwooww.” My stomach was complaining about the lack of food, so I tiptoed back down the stairs again, hoping Bebe had already gone to bed for the night. No such luck. She was sitting at the kitchen table, staring at what I thought was my BeDazzled pillowcase with You the Shizzy on it.
“This isn’t funny, you know,” she said, glowering at me in the dark. It almost looked like she had cat eyes. “And you had no right snooping into my business.”
Uh-oh, this sounds bad, I thought. I went for the “Who, me? I’m innocent” routine. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I told her.
“This,” Bebe said, holding up the pillowcase. “I found it in your backpack.”
“What do you care if Grandma’s gone BeDazzler crazy and talks like a retarded rapper?” I said, almost yelling now. “And why the hell were you snooping in my things?”
“For your information, I was being nice, doing your laundry,” Bebe said. “Wait a minute. . . . Are you saying your grandmother made this? I’m gonna kill her!”
“For making a gaudy hip-hop pillowcase? You’re nuts,” I said, snatching it away from her.
“Look again, honey,” Bebe said.
I stared down. Bebe, Bruce, and the Boss-alike stared back at me. “ ‘Who’s Yo’ Daddy,’ ” I whispered as I read the rhinestone lettering.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Bebe said.
If I didn’t think I was in such big, fat trouble, I would have laughed. “I am SUCH an asshole,” I said, smacking myself on the forehead as I realized this is what Brina and Zander were talking about at the party last night, not sexual favors.
“Yeah, and so are your two best friends,” Bebe said. “They’ve been ringing the phone off the hook all day. Wanted to make sure you got home all right.”
“I’m just fine and dandy for a girl who’s been lied to her whole life,” I said bitterly.
“Just who do you think you are?” Bebe asked, her voice shaking.
“A near adult whose mom doesn’t have the guts to tell her the truth,” I said, disgusted with the whole mess.
“And you’re nothing but a spoiled, disrespectful child who doesn’t deserve such a long leash,” Bebe said. Then she delivered the kicker. “You’re grounded.”
“Ha!” I snorted. I’d never been grounded in my whole life, and I didn’t intend to start now. “That is such a joke, Bebe.” A horrible thought popped into my head and I smirked, going for it. “In fact, you’re such a joke. You were the lamest groupie ever created, and you’re an even lamer mom.”
The second I said it, I wished my comeback lobe had stayed in its coma. Bebe looked like I had physically hit her, and I couldn’t have felt worse if I had. Eventually, she asked me, “Whoever said I was a groupie?”
“You? Your book jackets?”
“Oh, that,” she said. “That’s just a marketing thing, so people like you with very little imagination can have a nice, neat little label to hang on me.”
Mr. Steve popped his head in the kitchen. Bebe and I continued to glare at each other. “What’s going on, girls?” he said, looking from me to Bebe and then back again. “Want me to make some hot chocolate?”
“I was just on my way out,” I said, not even taking the time to get my backpack or keys as I headed toward the front door.
Bebe followed me. “Trace, where are you going?”
“To sleep at my boyfriend’s house.” I don’t know what gave me that idea, but now that I had said it, it sounded as good as any.
“Don’t be stupid,” Bebe said, grabbing the sleeve of my pajamas.
“Condoms take care of that kind of stupidity,” I told her, walking outside to the front porch. “But I guess you didn’t know that when you were my age.” I couldn’t believe how mean I was being to her—but I just couldn’t seem to stop myself, either.
“I deserve more credit than that, Trace.”
“Why?” I said, practically spitting the words out now. “You were stupid enough to keep my father from me my whole life. Why shouldn’t I think you’d be stupid about birth control, too?”
I took one last look at Bebe’s shocked face and ran away as
fast as I could in the pink bunny slippers Brina had gotten me as a joke for Christmas. A cop car drove by, and I ducked behind a big oak tree. I figured I could probably get thrown in the loony bin for being in the streets wearing fleece pajamas and kiddie slippers at eleven o’clock at night.
Ten minutes later, I was staring at Zander’s house trying to remember which window was his. I counted three in and threw a few pebbles at it. Nothing. I picked up a bigger rock and chucked it harder. Psych! His window was opening. Only . . . wasn’t the guy in there a bit too small to be Zander? Oh, crap, I’d woken up his little brother. I jumped in the bushes and ducked.
“See, I told you. The Penguin is not here,” I heard Zander saying. His brother was hysterical at this point, apparently convinced Batman’s archenemy was trying to get into his room.
“Hey!” Zander yelled, sticking his head out the window and peering around. “Who’s there? I’m calling the cops right now!”
I stood up and put my arms in the air. “It’s just me, Zander,” I said, feeling very, very embarrassed.
“Trace, why didn’t you just ring the bell? It’s a lot easier than getting your ass shot out of the bushes, which is what I intended to do next.”
“I didn’t think your parents would go for it,” I said, hanging my head. “Not to mention I wasn’t thinking very clearly after the huge brawl I just had with Bebe.”
Zander laughed. “My mom and dad are out of town until tomorrow. Meet me at the back door.”
I walked around the house and Zander led me up inside.
“You haven’t seen the third-floor den yet, have you?” he asked me.
“Nope,” I said.
It turned out to be more like an adult playroom with a pool table, Pop-A-Shot, Ms. Pac-man, Centipede, pinball machines, a humongous flat-screen TV, love seats with cup holders just like at the real movie theater, and a whole karaoke setup complete with a stage to perform on.
“And you bother leaving the house because . . . ?” I asked him, staring out the huge picture window at Lake Michigan.
“To meet cool people like you,” he said, taking hold of my hand. “So tell me what happened. Why did you leave us hanging at the g-rents’ house?”