by Trish Cook
“I love you, Livy. You’re my girl. I hate fighting.”
“I know.”
Dad let go of my hand and went into the house. I got my purse, feeling aggravated. I was one of those big “surprises” in life. Mom was a backup singer who had fallen in love—like the whole world—with Greg Essex, lead guitarist of the Babydolls with the biceps and forearms of a sex god. They were together first, then he broke her heart when he suggested a threesome with another woman. She ran into the arms of his best friend, my father and lead singer, and five months later—just starting to show—my mother married my dad. There was some question about my paternity . . . but I happen to have my father’s blue eyes. They are this weird icy blue. And I’m his. Much as I sometimes wish I wasn’t.
Our house—for a couple who never had any other children—is way too big. Eight bedrooms. Which is okay, I guess, since there always seems to be someone crashing—usually a musician. I once spent three months sharing a bathroom with David Drake, the bassist from the Kung-fu Cowboys. He had a nervous breakdown and spent the entire summer building model airplanes. Whatever.
Our house is on the Hudson River in Nyack, New York. Kind of trendy. A perky talk show host who never ceases gabbing about her children on the air lives next door. Guess what? The kids are raised entirely by nannies. I’m surprised Ms. Perky Talk Show Host even knows their names. But we can barely see their house for the big pines that surround our property. Our house is pretty, with a big back lawn that touches the water. My room is on the third floor, in what used to be the attic. My parents finished it off so it’s my own living room and bedroom. And no more sharing the bathroom with musician houseguests.
I shut the car door and started to head up to the front porch. Toby cleared his throat. “Liv?”
I turned around. Toby weighs a good 280—all muscle—and he shaves his head, but he has this enormous handlebar moustache that curls around his mouth and makes him look like some kind of weird kewpie doll.
“Yeah?”
“He’s trying.”
“I know.”
“Cut him some slack. He’s going to need a lot of support on this tour.”
I nodded. Toby was in AA, too, but unlike Dad, Toby had been sober for twenty years or something like that. My father pretty much fell off the wagon about every six months. Now he had nearly a year under his belt. I hoped he could stay out of trouble on the tour—no women, no drugs, no alcohol. The last tour ended with him in rehab. The tour before that with two nights in jail.
“I know, Toby. We’re all just worried.” I turned and climbed up the steps and into the house and then kept on going—all the way up to my room. When I was little, in my mind I used to pretend Toby was my father.
When I got upstairs, I turned on my stereo and popped a CD in—one I burned myself. I make a CD every week of all my favorites. That changes from week to week, song to song. Sometimes I can get into a “phase”—like only Nine Inch Nails for two or three weeks. Sometimes I hear an old song—like from my parents’ generation, like the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” or from the Seattle grunge era—and I can literally listen to the same song two hundred times. It’s in me, part of me, whatever. I put on my current set of favorites and started jumping up and down on my bed. Holy shit! I got it! I got it! Rock On!
I called Cammie, my best friend, who had talked her parents into letting her go on tour with us for two months. They thought it would be a great opportunity to see the world. I wasn’t sure what they thought of my father’s reputation, but I also knew they were so close to a divorce that maybe it didn’t matter—just having Cammie away while they tried to work things out would be good. They were letting her older brother live in Boston that summer. He’s going to college there. Anyway, her father could never say no to her. She had him twisted around her little pinkie.
“I got it, Cam!” I screamed into my cell phone. I had stopped jumping and flopped straight backward down on my bed. For some weird reason, I love doing that—except for the one time I hit my head on the wall and had to get stitches.
“Oh my God! That’s so great!”
“They’re even paying me.”
“Wow! Next thing you know, you’ll have your own reality show. Paul James’s daughter as rock star critic. You could call it Livy’s Real World.”
“No, I think my life has enough reality in it already.”
“I’m so happy for you.”
“I can’t believe it. My name in print . . . in a real magazine.”
“You’ll get into NYU’s journalism program for sure.”
For as long as I can remember, Cammie and I have been planning to go to New York University together. She wanted to study filmmaking. We had visions of sharing an apartment in Greenwich Village.
“You excited?” I asked her. We’d been planning this summer tour together as soon as the Babydolls announced their concert dates.
“Two days and counting!” She sounded like she was hyperventilating.
“One suitcase, Cammie. You can’t get nuts.” I was picturing clothes from one end of her room to the other.
“I know. One big suitcase.”
“Yes, one big suitcase. One carry-on. But it’s not like the suitcase can be the size of your closet, so I don’t know how you’re whittling down all your crap into one bag.”
“I’ll manage.”
Cammie was a major clothes horse. Juicy Couture and Abercrombie & Fitch—her two favorites. What she didn’t have, she borrowed—from me. She was also a makeup nut, and I think she had no less than fifty-two kinds of shampoo in her bathroom. I kind of liked sleeping over her house because I felt like I was at a spa—getting to pick shampoos, conditioners, soaps, cleansers. You can’t see her bathroom counter it’s so full of stuff.
“Anything new on Operation V?” she asked me.
“I refuse to help you anymore.”
“Oh, come on.”
Cammie was determined to lose her virginity—in a scheme that made our history teacher’s description of the landing at Normandy in World War II sound like a casual battle plan.
“All right. I just found out this morning that Steve Zane is not bringing anyone on the tour.”
“No one?”
“Nope. His latest girlfriend left him.”
“Operation V is going according to plan.”
Cammie intended to lose her virginity to the drummer of the Babydolls. He’s younger than my dad by maybe ten years, and he’s a total slut. But Cammie had a theory about losing her virginity.
“Are you sure you want to go through with this, Cam?”
“Absolutely. As I have said a thousand times before, I have yet to meet a single person who ranked their virginity-losing partner as anyone great. I mean, sure, you think you’re in love with some hot guy and you lose your virginity to him. Twenty years from now, he’s just some dumb guy you lost your virginity to. Most people are lucky if they remember the guy’s name. But if I lose my virginity to Steve Zane, even when you and I are ninety and have false teeth and side-by-side rocking chairs in the nursing home, I’ll remember exactly who it was—and to top it off, he’s probably quite good at it.”
“Whatever, Cam. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you. Every nanny I ever had in my life quit because he’d sleep with her and then dump her a week later in a different city. They’d all go home crushed.”
“But I know exactly what I’m doing. I’m losing my virginity for historical reasons. I can tell my grandchildren that I did it with Steve Zane.”
“Yeah. I often discuss sex with my grandmother.”
“Well, you get the idea. This isn’t about a relationship. It’s a quest. You can’t tell me you don’t think Steve Zane is totally fucking hot.”
I admit it. He was. Brown hair, blue eyes, really full lips, high cheek-bones. He was the Babydoll the magazines said was “the pretty one.”
“Cammie, you know my rule.”
“Yes,” she sighed. “Livy James’s first rule o
f the opposite sex: No musicians need apply.”
“Trust me, Cam. After a few weeks on the road, you’ll never look at a band the same way again.”
Sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
It’s not always all it’s cracked up to be.
But then again, it’s the only life I’ve ever known.
The Principles of Love
by Emily Franklin
Just to get this out of the way: yes, it’s my real name. And no, I wasn’t born on a commune (not unless you consider Boston, Massachusetts, circa 1989, to be a commune). In the movie version of my life, there’d be some great story to go with how I got my name—a rock star absentee father who named me in his hit song, or a promise my real father made to his grandmother in the old country. At least a weepy love story of two people so happy about their daughter they had to give her my name. But there’s not—there’s just me.
Love. My name is Love. Maybe this makes you think of your first kiss (mine = Jared Rosen, who managed to knock out my top left tooth at the beginning of the summer and provide my first kiss—a peck—by August’s end). Or maybe you cringe when I introduce myself, wondering if I come complete with a tacky poster of cuddly kittens tangled in wool. (I had one in third grade that showed a tabby clawing the wall, saying HANG IN THERE! Thank God for paper recycling.)
Trust me: Despite what my name conjures up, I am not the sort to have a bed piled with fluffy kitties or well-loved stuffed animals. I actually don’t even like cats all that much, not since I hugged little Snowball, my old neighbor’s cat, right before the freshman formal last year and wound up sucking down antihistamines and nursing facial hives in my gown. Not pretty.
Then again, pretty’s not all it’s cracked up to be—or so I hear. I’m not what you’d call pretty, not the even more tantalizing beautiful, though maybe I’ve got potential. Right now I suppose I could fall into the category of appealing. My Aunt Mable’s always saying the girls who peak in high school show up looking downright average at their tenth reunion, so I’m hoping (hoping = counting on) that my best years are still ahead of me. I don’t want to look back on my life and have sophomore year of high school stand out as a blue ribbon winner, though the chances of that happening are slim at best. Part of me wouldn’t mind trading places with the shiny, perfectly blond and still summer-tanned girls who probably emerged from the womb with a smile as wide as a Cadillac and legs from a music video. But since my life isn’t one of those Disney movies where the heroine gets to swap places for a day and learn the secret to life, I have to be content to know only what it’s like in my own life—and all I can say is it’s too soon to tell.
We’ve been here (here = the Hadley Hall campus) for four days. Four days and six hours. And still not one decent conversation, not one promising smile-nod combination over mushy tuna sandwiches and lemonade outside, courtesy of FLIK, the school food supplier. When my dad told me about orientation for Hadley, I guess I imagined days spent lounging on the quad, soaking up the last of the summer rays while meeting cute boys, bonding with my two amazingly cool new best friends, and somehow forgetting that I have a forehead label—New Girl. Love, the New Girl. And not only that (here I’m imagining some lowly freshman pointing me out as someone who’s even more lost than he is); I have the privilege of being the principal’s daughter.
When my dad and I arrived on campus, typical trunk loaded with boxes, laundry hamper filled with my still-dirty duds, some overly enthusiastic tour leader showed us to the faculty housing. I followed my dad up the slate pathway toward the front door of a yellow Victorian house. Huge and with a wraparound porch, the house overlooks the playing fields and the rest of main campus. I stared at it, thinking of the card my dad gave me for my seventh-grade birthday—one of those 3D cards that you unfold into a whole building—a large house with a turret and a carousel. I used to stare into that card as if I could get sucked into its landscape and experience some magical life for a while. This is what I thought of when I saw our new digs, minus the merry-go-round.
“This is Dean’s Way,” the tour guide boy explained, his hands flailing as he pointed out the features of our new abode—porch, view of central campus, door knocker in the shape of a heart. I stared at the metal heart and wondered for a minute if this could be an omen (heart = love = me) but then I rolled my eyes at myself. I hate when I give myself Lifetime programming moments.
“This is for you,” Tour Guide said and handed my dad a large manila envelope and reached out to shake my hand. It still feels weird to shake hands as an almost-sixteen-year-old (almost = just under eight weeks until I’m highway-legal). Plus, Tour Guide never even asked my name. Around here, I guess I’m just a faculty brat.
My dad took the keys from the envelope (an envelope labeled, by the way, PRINCIPAL BUKOWSKI AND DAUGHTER, as if I have no other identity), and began to fumble with the front door lock.
“Ready?” he asked, and smiled at me.
I nodded, excited. Dad and I have lived in some pretty grim places before—the apartment on Yucca Street that lived up to its name, the rent-reduced properties on the campus of Seashore Community College—so I never planned on living large. We’ve moved around a fair bit, actually, and one of the reasons Dad signed the contract with Hadley Hall was to make sure we could stay in one place. The thought of living here, of calling this home, or not peeling up anyone’s old apartment buzzer labels and slicking ours on top, feels both comforting (stability = good) and trapping (sameness = confining)—or maybe I just mean revealing.
Dad rushed in, ever eager to explore new places and see what problems (kitchen bulb out, bed in the wrong place for optimum light) he might fix. That’s what he does, problem-solve and rearrange. Me, I’m more cautious. I lurked for a minute in the doorway, holding onto the heart knocker and wondering what I’d find.
And I don’t just mean that I stood there wondering what my new bedroom would look like. It was like right then, at the front door, I knew everything had changed—or would change, or was changing. The morphing process of leaving freshman year and the already hazy memories that went with it. Soon, sophomore year at Hadley Hall—the Hadley Hall, with its ivy-coated brick and lush green lawns, its brood of young achievers, lacrosse-playing boys, and willowy girls—would begin. And I’d be in it.
In the made-for-television movie of this day, I’d wake up in my new house and while sipping my milky coffee, I’d meet my new best friend. We’d bond over loving the same sappy lyrics to 1970s songs (example = “Brandi (You’re a Fine Girl)”—lame but awesome song from sometime in the late seventies). Then, later, I’d be getting ready to go for a jog (and by jog I mean slow, but hey—it’s something), and the Kutcheresque hot guy I saw yesterday by the track would happen to be running by and take time out of his exercise regimen to give me a guided tour of campus . . . and of himself. Heh. Unlikely—but then, it’s a movie.
The reality of my life is this:
Outside, I can hear the buzz of bugs and the grunts from soccer and field hockey players from the fields near the house. I am decidedly unmotivated to get out of my bed—even though it’s eleven o’clock. Last night, I caught my second, third, and fourth winds and wound up flipping stations between a 90210 rerun on cable and some infomercial that nearly convinced me to order that bizarre brush/hair-dye combo thing that supposedly makes it easy to home-color. Not that it’d be useful for me, since my hair is different enough already: penny-hued, with some bright bits at the front (not so suitable for highlights or lowlights—more like dimlights). I think about adding some wild streak of blue or something, but mainly this is when I’m PMSy. As my Aunt Mable always says, Let No Woman Attempt Hair Change When Hormonally Challenged. This was, of course, after the Miss Clairol mishap that took her three trips to the salon to correct.
Actually, I kind of pride myself on never having ordered from TV before—not that there’s a fundamental flaw with it, but there’s a principle there. Maybe I feel like if I started, there’d be no turning back, and pretty soon I
’d wind up with that weird mop and the orange goop that strips paint and the hair-braiding contraption that I know would create such tangles I’d need to cut off great lops of hair. So I avoid potential psychological damage (and smelly fumes) by refraining from any and all made-for-TV offers.
Plus, Aunt Mable already signed me up for the Time-Life Singers & Songwriters discs. They arrive each month. She wants to edu-ma-cate me on the finer decades of rock and folk, long before OutKast and Britney. Most of the songs sound like an advertisement for deodorant, but I love the cheesiness of the lyrics, the mellow strumming of the guitars. Instead of John Mayer introspection, there’s just old-fashioned lust or odes to seventies fashion. Half the time the guy’s singing about making it with his lady or the woman’s crooning about how her disco man done her wrong—what’s not to appreciate there? Plus, sometimes Aunt Mable will listen with me and tell me how a particular song makes her think of being a cheerleader, eating grilled cheese, and making out with Bobby Stanhope in the back of his Camaro.
With so much late-summer sunshine streaming in my window, I can’t stay in bed any longer. It’s harder to be a lazy slob in warm weather—hiding under the covers is much more gratifying in winter or heavy rains. I slide out of bed and onto the floor, pressing PLAY so I can hear the latest disc—it arrived yesterday, my first piece of mail to this new address. The typed label proved that I don’t even need a street number anymore—just my name, Hadley Hall, Fairfield, Massachusetts, and the ZIP. Fairfield is “just outside Boston”—that’s how the school catalog describes it, although my dad and I clocked it in the car and it’s nearly twenty-four miles, so it’s not as if you can walk it. Probably because of my own moniker, I am name-focused and tend to overanalyze place-names, so when my dad announced (“Love, pack your bags—we’re going to prep school!” as if he’d have to endure the mandatory school blazer with me) we were moving to Fairfield, I couldn’t help but picture green expanses and fair maidens traipsing around in long dresses, books carried by the same guy who’d throw his blazer over a mud puddle for easy-stepping.