by Compai
Evan stared into the ocean and mumbled something.
“What?” Janie asked.
“Free country,” he repeated. Janie mounted the stairs and crouched down on the painted wood floor beside him, folding her bony legs beneath her and facing Evan while his chlorine green eyes remained trained on the water. Janie had never seen Evan at the beach before. It looked so natural. His eyes were sea glass, his skin was driftwood, his soft steady breathing was the tide itself.
“You are not going to believe this,” Janie began, “but there has been a horrible mix-up.” Evan remained stoic, unmoving. A salty breeze rushed past them and chilled Janie’s bare shoulders. The sun was beginning to set, streaking the foggy sky with the murky golds and battered purples of a fading bruise.
“Evan, I know you probably hate me right now for being so flaky lately, but there is a reason for everything that happened. The other day at Ted Pelligan’s, I overheard Charlotte talking to Jake about Nikki Pellegrini and how she kissed like a dogfish. When Charlotte got off the phone she lied and pretended she was talking to you, and so I thought that you had told her kissing me was like—well, you know—and then I was so hurt and insulted that I did not show up at the projection room or text you back.” Janie felt like she could finally exhale. “How tragic is that?”
Evan turned to face her, his expression still empty. “So it was all Charlotte’s fault,” he said.
“Yes!” Janie exclaimed, relieved.
“It was Charlotte’s fault you thought I said something bad about you, and it was Charlotte’s fault you did not meet me in the projection room, and it was Charlotte’s fault you never texted me back….”
“Exactly!”
“… and it was Charlotte’s fault you made out with some guy who was old enough to be your father at the Creatures of Habit show last night.”
Janie froze. “No—wait, what? Who told—”
“Nobody told me anything, Janie. I saw you.”
The sky was the sickly smeared purple of a mashed prune.
“I can explain that too,” Janie began, but Evan cut her off by laughing aloud.
“Yeah, I bet you can. It seems like you have an explanation for just about everything right now.”
“I swear—”
“Listen, you don’t have to get into it, okay? It’s not like I’m your boyfriend or something. You don’t owe me anything.”
“I know I don’t, or, you’re not,” Janie stammered, “but… just… what you saw? That guy…? That wasn’t me last night. I wasn’t me last night. I smoked pot for the first time ever and drank some beer and… I don’t know. It’s like I was possessed or something. And to be totally, humiliatingly honest here…” Janie slowed. Was she really going to say this? Wasn’t this conversation already mortifying enough? But hey, she’d gone this far; might as well go for broke.
“All I could think about all night was you. And as crazy as this is going to sound, I thought that maybe if I kissed somebody else it would help me get over my feelings for you. But instead, I woke up today feeling lower than I ever have, and not just because it felt like somebody was mashing an ice pick into my ear, but because kissing that guy did not make me miss you any less. It just made me miss you more.” Okay, that was enough. Janie officially needed to stop talking now. She had said more than enough and now it was up to Evan to reply.
Evan stared into Janie’s slate gray eyes like he was searching for something. His gaze was piercing, probing; she resisted the urge to avert her gaze. Finally, Evan turned away, shaking his head so his sandy blond locks shook in the icy air. The waves crashed loud and hard like a bookcase collapsing.
“Don’t you believe me?” Janie pleaded. Talk about groveling, she thought. This was unbearable. What more did he want her to say?
“Do I believe you?” Evan pondered, staring out at the murky horizon. He shrugged. “I don’t really know anymore.” Janie was broken. How could she make Evan understand that it was all just a horrid misunderstanding? That she had never meant to hurt him? That she had never even thought she could hurt him?
“Please,” Janie begged, hearing the telltale quiver in her voice that meant she was probably going to cry soon. Oh God. She really, really did not want to cry right now. “Tell me what I can do to make things normal again,” she whispered.
“You know,” Evan replied, “I think you’ve done enough already.” A lump rose in Janie’s throat. So that was it? It was all just over? Because of something he never said and something she never meant to do?
“But I like you!” Janie wailed.
“I like you too.” Evan nodded. “I liked you.”
It was the first time Evan had ever told Janie he liked her. And it was already over.
“Liked?” Janie repeated. Evan let out something like a growl. Like he was holding in a fury that could consume him completely if he wasn’t careful. He cracked his knuckles and then his neck and took a deep breath. He balled his hands into fists and then stretched them out again.
“I just”—Evan looked down at his lap and shook his head—“I need to think. I can’t handle this right now.”
He didn’t even say good-bye. Evan rose and walked back down the ladder, keeping his beautiful face trained on the steps all the way. Then, he left. He just started walking across the sand toward the parking lot, alternately shaking his hands out at his sides and running them through his tangled hair. At one point, he kicked the sand hard, and it spewed up in front of him like a desert geyser. Then he quickened his pace. Soon, Janie could not see him at all. He was gone. Evan was gone. Janie had lost him forever.
If the traffic light on the corner of Ocean Avenue and Pico Boulevard changed from red to green, and Janie had not given in and cried yet, Evan would call her. Janie trained her gaze on the light, feeling the growing burn behind her eyeballs but refusing to let the dam break. The light changed. She checked her cell phone. Nothing. Okay. That was okay. She could do it again at the next light. And the next light. And the next light. And one of those times it was bound to work. She just wasn’t trying hard enough. She just wasn’t believing enough. If Janie could truly believe that Evan would call, then she could make him call. Janie had read The Secret. She knew all about the Law of Attraction, capital L, capital A. Believe it and it is so. Imagine it and it will be. And so Janie kept on believing happy things. As hard as she could. While she inched down Ocean Avenue, catching every single red light.
Evan is my boyfriend, she envisioned. He takes me surfing sometimes after school and I am really bad at it but he thinks it is just adorable. I get my first tan. And sometimes we just sit on our boards out there in the surf until the sun sets while the waves lap past us, talking about everything that has ever happened to us and laughing so hard and kissing each other even harder and feeling like there was never a time before the two of us were an “us.” And we look back on that day at the lifeguard station when he told me he needed “to think” and walked away as the saddest day of either of our lives, and we are both so traumatized by that memory that we never spend a minute apart again. Okay, maybe a minute, but not much more. And Evan decides to get one of my drawings tattooed on his bicep—no, on his back? Yeah, on his back, and on my seventeenth birthday he tells me he loves me; that he has always loved me. And I don’t say it back yet but I feel it too. And all of this joy and love and general awesomeness begins today—just moments from now—when I arrive at my house and Evan is sitting on my porch just waiting for me. (I’m not sure how he finds out where I live… maybe Charlotte tells him?) And when I walk up to him, Evan looks at me all hard at first and says, “Janie, don’t you ever let another guy touch you again.” And I am scared by the gruffness in his voice and the fire behind those pool green eyes, and I gulp and say, “Never.” And he says, “Ever,” or something sort of like that but better—in his own words, you know?—and then he reaches for the back of my head and just tears me toward him, wrapping me in that sandy salty strong embrace and I just relax into his body like
I did that first time on the lawn and that second time in the projection room and then he kisses me hard, like a promise. And I surrender into him now and forever.
Janie sighed. That was fun!
She idled at the crosswalk on Ocean Avenue and San Vicente Boulevard, waiting for a pair of joggers to pass. Her cell phone beeped. It was him… it had to be him! Janie took a deep breath and exhaled, relishing the sweet moment before her love story began in earnest. She rolled down her window and smiled, prolonging the agony that preceded the soon-to-be-glorious moment when she read what was sure to be Evan’s text. Okay, so he hadn’t shown up on her doorstep. Wasn’t texting really the doorstep of 2010 anyway? Janie turned on the radio. Natasha Bedingfield. Cheesy, yet oddly apropos. Feel the rain on your skin no one else can feel it for you only you can let it in no one else no one else…
When Janie could not take the suspense any longer, she reached for her scuffed navy Samsung and popped it open.
It was Jake.
Charlotte and I got back together!
The dam broke.
And once it did there was no turning back. It felt so good to cry. Hot salty tears came streaming out of Janie’s eyes, leaving trails down her dry blotchy cheeks and splattering on her bare arms and stained bustier. Snot or something like it came flooding from her nose; it was as if somebody had turned on a faucet in Janie’s face and everything just came gushing out. It felt so fitting. After all, Janie was filthy. Had not even brushed her teeth that morning and still in those horrid clothes from the night before. Why not be covered in snot and tears to complete the look? Janie wanted to rip her own hair out too, rip her clothing to shreds, rip the steering wheel clear out of the car.
She kept driving, taking side streets home instead of the far more expedient freeway. Janie wanted to prolong her misery; to wallow in it; to drown in it. She did not want to go home yet. What was waiting for her at home? Just her brother maybe, all glowing and giddy after reuniting with the midget bitch who had ruined Janie’s life; and Janie’s mess of a room, still chaotic from her excruciatingly involved primping session the night before; and her mom. Oh God. Janie really could not handle seeing her mom right now. The sorry state of her room would be enough to invoke the Wrath of Mom; look what she was wearing!
How had Janie’s life gone from so good to so irrevocably wrecked in just a few short days? Janie cried and gulped and cried and gulped, her weeping wails only interrupted by her occasional need to gasp for air so she could wail anew. It felt good to wail. Amazing. Janie wailed louder. And then she rolled up the windows and screamed. She gripped the steering wheel and screamed again, as loud as she could, loud enough to tear her eardrums tear her lungs tear her heart. And as she inched down San Vicente behind a shiny black Hummer, Janie watched a stream of spandex-clad bikers pass her in the bicycle lane, and a mother pushing a Bugaboo stroller down the sidewalk. It blew her mind. How could all these people just bike around, stroll around, and otherwise continue living their lives as though everything was normal, when as far as Janie was concerned, this day was good as Armageddon?
The sky opened up then, no joke. They’d been predicting rain for days, and now here it was. Pelting her windshield and giving the Volvo its first wash in months. Janie turned on the windshield wiper and it made a horrible scraping sound as it swung back and forth across the glass. The rubber squeegee part had slid back in its track like it always did, leaving the metal wiper tip to scrape the windshield repeatedly, like nails on a chalkboard. Janie turned the wiper to a slower speed, and the sound improved slightly, but rain was pelting the windshield so hard then that she couldn’t see a thing with the wiper on low. Plus, the tears streaming from her slate gray eyes—still, and with no signs of abating—did nothing to aid her already obstructed view. Janie pulled into a gas station to slide the rubber blade back up the wiper. And to gather her sorts somewhat, before she mowed down a baby carriage or a pair of bikers. She leaped from her car and slid the rubber blade back up the wiper like she had so many times before, and quickly got soaked in the process. Janie could not help but laugh. It was so bad it was funny. What else you got? Lay it on me! she felt like screaming to the man upstairs.
Janie got back into the car, slammed the door, and checked her phone. One text message. She inhaled, exhaled, pressed the read now button.
Jake again.
!!!
Janie started the Volvo and headed home.
The problem with driving is, no matter how many red lights you hit, no matter how many miles below the speed limit you drive, no matter how many ill-advised side streets you take, eventually, inevitably, you reach your destination. And so it was that Janie pulled into the driveway of her boxy one-story house in the pouring rain that Saturday at 7 p.m. She’d stretched the drive home from its usual forty-five minutes to an hour and a half. Now there was no place else to go. It was time to go in and face the music. Tear the Band-Aid off. Confront the Wrath of Mom.
Janie opened the door and found her mother waiting for her at the kitchen table, turquoise cat’s-eye glasses down over her nose.
“We need to talk,” Wendy Farrish announced.
Janie settled into the cracked vinyl chair across from her mother with peaceful resignation. “I know,” she surrendered, “my room is a mess and I look like a waterlogged tranny.”
“Your room is a mess?” Wendy inquired. “I haven’t been in there. Please clean it up before the Patchetts arrive for dinner.”
Shoot. She didn’t even know about the room.
“So, if you haven’t been into my room, then what did you want to talk to me about?”
Wendy paused. “I feel like Dad should be here for this conversation, but I don’t think it can wait till Monday. Do you have anything you’d like to tell me?”
Hmmm, mused Janie. That I have ruined the only wonderful thing that has ever happened to me? That I puked all over the bathroom last night? That I have not brushed my teeth in twenty-four hours and am starting to think there is nothing more foul in the entire universe than the taste in my mouth right now?
“No,” Janie replied. “Why?”
Wendy sighed, clearly disappointed to have to pull the information out of Janie instead of having her offer it up voluntarily. But Janie wasn’t sure which information Wendy was even digging for. And she was not going to make the messy room mistake again. Janie peeled a bubble of Mod Podge off of the kitchen table she had decoupaged with her mom years before. It was covered in pictures from Teen Vogue and CosmoGirl, along with words they’d cut out: Rockstar, Flirt, Fearless, Daisy….
“Your credit card statement arrived today,” Wendy announced, handing a folded sheet of paper to Janie. Janie did not bother unfolding the page. She knew what it said.
“Three thousand, four hundred eighty dollars,” Wendy intoned. “Please tell me this was an accounting error.”
“Nope, no error,” Janie replied. “That’s what clothes cost these days, Mom. Unless you want to shop at Walmart or something.”
Wendy cocked her head, disbelieving. “I may not be the most fashionable mother in Los Angeles, but even I know there is no reason to spend that kind of money on clothing. What did you buy?”
“This,” Janie answered. Wendy scanned her daughter’s hot mess of an outfit.
“What else?”
“Nothing. Just this.”
“Janie, what were you thinking?” Wendy fumed. “You know we don’t have that kind of money!”
“I have that kind of money, Mom. From the Ted Pelligan deal. And so now, finally, I do not have to walk through the halls of Winston dressed like some kind of street urchin.”
“Street urchin?” Wendy gasped. “Janie, what happened to all those clothes we bought you at Old Navy right before school started?”
“Mom! You should never have even sent me to Winston Prep if you expected me to show up at school wearing Old Navy! That’s like sending your kid to Iraq with a squirt gun!”
Wendy looked down at a well-shellacked Kate M
oss cutout and shook her head. “Those clothes are going back,” she announced. “Today.”
Janie couldn’t help but laugh at that one. “Um, Mom, it’s sort of a you-break-it-you-buy-it situation. I’m pretty sure they don’t want these clothes back.”
“Fine,” nodded Wendy, “but I hope you really enjoyed your shopping spree, because that is the first and last time you will get to pull a stunt like that. From here on out, I will be placing all of your Poseur income in a trust until you are eighteen.”
“You can’t do that!” cried Janie. “That’s completely unfair!”
“Yes I can, and no it’s not.”
“One day ago, you were telling me what a creep Petra’s dad was for wanting to manage her money, and now you’re doing the exact same thing! You’re just as bad as he is! No, you’re worse than he is, because you’re being a phony about it, when all along you just wanted to control my share!”
“Are you done, Janie?”
No, she was not done! Janie was seething. What was this, some kind of cruel joke played on her by some bitter god with a vendetta? What had she ever done to him? Or was he just bored up there in heaven and toying with her increasingly fragile emotions for sport? If so, she hoped he was getting a kick out of this. Janie’s life had always sort of sucked and she was fine with that. She was used to that. But what she seriously could not handle was having the illusion of the perfect life—kissing Evan, the Teddy P. deal—and then having it all taken away from her as quickly as it had been given.
“Do whatever you want, Lady Farrish,” Janie mocked. “Any other parts of my life you’d like to ruin while you’re at it?”
“I would check your tone, young lady,” Wendy snapped. “And this probably goes without saying, but just to be clear here, you are grounded.”
The first thing Janie did when she entered her catastrophically messy, red-white-and-black-themed room was strip. She unhooked the suffocating bustier, shimmied out of the skintight mini, and then crouched down on her itchy red carpet in her day-old undies to survey the wreckage. There was no way in hell Ted Pelligan would take these clothes back. The bustier was stained with beer, the telltale red soles of the Louboutins were beyond scuffed, and the miniskirt was unraveling at the seams. Not to mention singed with a cigarette burn. Eew, shuddered Janie. Was the cigarette burn from that slimy horndog she’d let grope her at the bar? And why had she let him do that anyway? Part of it was Amelia’s fault, Janie decided, for encouraging the whole get-over-Evan-by-getting-under-someone-else approach, but Janie was pretty sure she could not blame the entire thing on Amelia. As much as she would have loved to.