The Unlikelies

by Carrie Firestone

“Okay, but I’m feeling bummed about Mr. Upton and I want to do something in his memory. Will you humor me?”

  Alice agreed. “We’ll be little troll-fighting elves,” she said, sticking her spoon in my dessert and shoveling the rest of it into her mouth.

  We scraped up eleven dollars and left Val’s building through the side entrance.

  “Valeria!” A man’s voice shot through the parking lot.

  “Oh, God. It’s my dad.” A short, stocky guy in boots and a cowboy hat race-walked over to us looking very pissed off.

  “What’s he saying?” I whispered to Alice as we stood while Val’s dad yelled at her and pointed at us.

  “I don’t know. I take French.”

  Val came back, eyes averted, while her dad stormed off.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I was supposed to work at my grandparents’ store and I totally blew it off to do school-supply stuff. He’ll get over it.”

  “Why was he pointing at us?”

  “He said you white people are a bad influence on me.” Val laughed.

  “Hey. I’m half Iranian,” I said.

  “As far as my dad’s concerned, you’re white enough.”

  We drove to the pharmacy and wandered around, trying to figure out what we could buy with eleven dollars.

  “Manicure kit?” Val said.

  “No,” Alice said.

  “Journals?” I said.

  “No,” Alice said.

  “Cheez-Its?” Val said.

  “Come on, let’s get serious,” Alice said. “This.” Alice held up a package of candy necklaces. “Who doesn’t like candy necklaces?”

  “You are so right.” Val picked up another package. “Everybody loves candy necklaces.”

  We put the candy necklaces into tiny gift bags with cards that said We’re launching a troll-slamming revolution. We hope you’ll join us. Have a great day!

  “A revolution, Alice?” I said, watching her write in script with a purple pen. “Isn’t that a little dramatic?”

  “I like revolutions,” said Val.

  The revolution started a few blocks from the pharmacy.

  Alice’s Subaru crawled up the street, and I jumped out wearing a rain poncho over my funeral dress and a baseball cap I found under the front seat. I sprinted to the porch of the saddest little beige house, with chipped paint and no landscaping. Mom would go out of her mind if she had to live in a flowerless house.

  I dropped the tiny gift bag addressed to CARLY (trolled for “looking ugly with bangs”) and ran to the car. Alice peeled out.

  “Next,” I said, out of breath.

  We did the same thing for the girl referred to as Swiss cheese at a perky yellow house with impressive hydrangeas and a Volvo parked in the driveway. I almost chickened out when I saw the dim flicker of a TV through the porch window. But I dropped and ran.

  It was exhilarating.

  “What if they don’t get the bags? Like what if their little brothers take them or something?” Val said.

  “Then we’re out three ninety-nine for nothing,” Alice said. “Who cares?”

  We texted pictures of me sprinting in my poncho and baseball hat to Gordie and Jean. Five minutes later, we got a cryptic message from Gordie: Meet me at the farm stand as soon as you can get there. I have something to show you all.

  NINE

  CURIOSITY DROVE US to the farm stand. On the way, Alice assaulted me with questions about Gordie, beginning with “Is he one of those people who raise their hands in class every five seconds?” and ending with “So why haven’t you guys hooked up? It’s so obvious he’s into you.” To which I had no choice but to out Gordie Harris.

  “I was obsessed with him for two years until I found out the ruffians from my class saw him making out with some guy at the pizza place. They were the biggest homophobic assholes. They called him Gay Gordie for a long time on the slam pages. I have to say, he handled it all really well.”

  “Do you guys ever feel like the assholes are taking over the earth?” Val said.

  “Not anymore,” Alice said. “’Cause… revolution.”

  Jean parked next to the willow tree just as Gordie was pulling in. I had a feeling that it was going to be a long night.

  Maybe even an epic night.

  Gordie got out of his car looking really good in his dark jeans and gray fitted T-shirt. I, on the other hand, was in my dowdy funeral dress, with matted hair and a sweaty back from the poncho-and-hat disguise.

  “Did your concierge arrange an excursion for us?” Jean said in his butler accent.

  “Cut the shit, Jean. I don’t make fun of your short refugee ass,” Gordie shot back. Gordie Harris was very sensitive about his richness.

  We piled into the Range Rover and headed down Montauk Highway with the windows down and the music blaring as night swallowed up the last of the sunset.

  Alice tried to text Izzy, then threw her phone into her satchel and cranked vintage Red Hot Chili Peppers until Gordie turned down a narrow, unpaved road marked PRIVATE.

  “Where are you taking us, Gordie?” I said.

  “He’s having us killed to sell off our organs. I knew there was something sketchy about this guy,” Jean said.

  We continued past the shadows of craggy trees bending away from the sweeping dunes. Gordie turned down a smaller dirt road. A stately mansion popped up out of nowhere. Voices echoed and music floated through the haphazardly parked sea of cars.

  “Um. Where are we?” Val grabbed my sweaty hand.

  Gordie turned off the car. “This, my friends, is Speakeasy, mythical haven for the socially advanced.”

  “What?” we all said.

  “Come on. You’re going to love it.”

  I smoothed down my wrinkled funeral dress and wished I had taken a few minutes to get myself together. Alice, Val, and I were dressed to buy care package supplies at the pharmacy, not attend a “mythical haven for the socially advanced.”

  I felt the vibration of the music as the people milling around the front gardens came into focus.

  Gordie stopped before we got to the marble steps. “Just so you know, this place is invite-only. We don’t want the poseurs and the wannabes showing up,” he said, looking over his shoulder at me.

  “Why are you looking at me?” I said, flicking the back of his neck.

  He gave me his Oh, come on, Sadie. You and I both know how much Shawn Flynn partygoers suck expression and led us up the long stone staircase to the main house.

  Inside, we stopped to listen to two guys playing “Blackbird” by the Beatles on guitars on a landing overlooking a crowded foyer. It was awe-inspiring.

  Gordie motioned for us to follow him through a bar area to a kitchen, where a blond guy with jagged bangs and pink cheeks was pouring champagne into glasses and arranging them on a tray.

  “Gordie, I was looking for you. You playing tonight?”

  “Later. These are my friends.” Gordie draped his arms around Jean and Val.

  Blondie was apparently a twenty-seven-year-old trust fund kid named Jack who had turned his inherited estate into a haven for musicians and social justice world-changers.

  “Champagne?” He held out the tray.

  Gordie shook his head. “Nah. I’m driving.”

  “Where’s Keith?” Jack looked around.

  “Home. He’ll be here next week.”

  We sipped the champagne, which tasted cold and crisp and delicious. Jean burped loudly and grabbed another glass.

  We wove through the hallway and emerged in a massive ballroom, the size of my school gym, where a stage stretched all the way across the back wall. The ceilings were painted a coppery gold, and cavernous chandeliers hung above us.

  “People are going to be playing soon.” Gordie reached into his jeans pocket, pulled out a harmonica, and played a few bars.

  “I didn’t know you played the harmonica,” I said, surprised.

  “You don’t know a lot of things about me.” He raised his eyebrows and
smiled.

  “I play the viola,” Val said.

  “Yeah? I’ve never seen a viola jam, but I saw an incredible fiddle thing here once.”

  “Who’s Keith?” Alice said to me after another girl ran up asking for him.

  I shrugged. “No clue.”

  “Come on.” Gordie gestured to us. We walked up a back staircase and Gordie opened one of the doors on the second floor. I expected to find couples making out on piles of coats. But ten or twelve people were sprawled out on couches drinking from red Solo cups and laughing raucously.

  “These are the chat rooms,” Gordie said. “Let’s see if there’s a free one.”

  Gordie led us through a maze of corridors and up a flight of narrow steps to a rectangular alcove. “Score,” Gordie said, opening a closet and grabbing a bottle of champagne from a mini fridge. He popped the cork and filled our glasses as we settled onto two side-by-side leather sofas facing Long Island Sound.

  “You should see the stellar view during the day,” Gordie said, leaning back.

  I felt the buzz of the champagne and slung my legs over Val’s lap.

  “You guys,” Val said in her quiet voice, “I really like hanging out with you.”

  “Val’s shitfaced,” Jean said.

  “No, really, Jean. I just do.”

  “Sadie, can you believe Gordie from your class was hiding this whole double life?” Alice said.

  “No. I mean we all know Gordie Harris will be Most Likely to Succeed in the yearbook and probably invent something genius, but I didn’t know he was actually cool.” I looked over at Gordie.

  “I don’t want to be Most Likely to Succeed in the yearbook. It’s too much pressure,” Gordie said.

  “Val’s going to be Most Likely to Be Married with Kids by Twenty,” Jean said, laughing.

  “That is so messed up, Jean.” Val slapped him hard. “Like, seriously, do you not know how freaked out I am about college and getting in and paying for it? And then you say something like that. You’re Most Likely to Hide in the Art Room Forever.”

  “Okay, this is stupid,” Alice said. “Who cares anyway? I don’t want to be Most Likely anything. Gordie’s totally right. Even if I’m Most Likely to Save Scores of Dogs, which is probably what my unoriginal class would come up with for me, I’d feel like I never saved enough dogs. It is too much pressure.”

  We were quiet, thinking about the overrated tradition. “I wonder if any of those Most Likelies in the yearbook ever live up to their label,” I said.

  “If you forgive me, I’ll let you kiss my cheek?” Jean leaned over and smiled in Val’s face.

  She rolled her eyes. “Fine.” He leaned closer and she pecked him on his beard.

  “God, I just realized. I’m not Most Likely to do anything,” I said. “I don’t have a thing. You guys all have things.”

  “What does that mean?” Alice said, slurping the last of her champagne.

  “You people are lightweights,” Gordie said.

  “You have things, Sadie,” Val said, leaning down to hug my legs.

  “Like what?”

  “You’re good at making care packages,” she announced proudly.

  “I think it’s better to be a Most Unlikely,” Alice said. “Then when you do something awesome, everyone will be surprised, like when you saved that baby, Sadie. Right? If you went around saving babies every day, nobody would have given a damn. Except maybe the baby.”

  “Good point, Alice,” Jean said. “We should aspire to be unlikelies.”

  “Who put weed in the champagne?” Gordie said, getting up. He played a couple of chords on his harmonica. “Let’s go down. I’m about to get my groove on.”

  “No. No. No,” Val said, pulling Gordie by the arm. “Let’s stay here.”

  “Come on. I promise you’ll love it.”

  “He keeps saying that,” Jean said.

  We made our way down to the ballroom just in time for the two guitar guys to call a bunch of other people up to the stage. The lights dimmed and we moved to the middle of the floor. A pretty woman jumped onto the stage and took a mic from one of the guitar guys. She looked like she belonged on a boogie board. “Sylvie, Sylvie,” the crowd chanted. She smiled and tossed her wild blond curls. She reminded me of Shay.

  “I’m taking requests,” she said, so obviously comfortable performing in front of a packed room. I looked around at the people gathering. It was the most random crowd of revelers I had ever seen, a swarm of bobbing heads.

  Sylvie sang an old jazz song, “Summertime,” with a voice so smooth, so perfectly elegant, I got chills. She captivated the entire room.

  Gordie looked over at us and smiled.

  It stayed good. Every song, every singer, every instrumental made me want to cry, or hug someone, or jump up and down. The music filled me up. It serenaded my soul.

  We danced in the middle of the crowd until sweat poured from our bodies and our feet ached.

  “We need you, Gordie,” one of the guitar guys said into the mic.

  Gordie nodded and left us for the stage, where he belonged. He stood there in his dark jeans and fitted shirt and messy brown hair and smiled before he put the harmonica to his mouth and played the hell out of Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely?”

  The crowd sang together, “Isn’t she lovely? Isn’t she wonderful?”

  I knew all the songs from years of listening to Dad’s music. I didn’t even need to read the words projected across the wall above the stage.

  We sang “Don’t Stop Believin’.”

  And then we sang too many Beatles songs to count. The lyrics swam above the band and we followed karaoke-style.

  “I’ll never dance with another. Woo!”

  I wanted to stay at Speakeasy forever.

  It was well after two a.m. when the adrenaline retreated and the crowd, groggy and sweaty and eating the hot fries in waxed paper bags that had appeared from the kitchen, reluctantly disbanded.

  “Are you okay to drive?” Val asked Gordie as we waited for the long line of cars to exit the makeshift parking lot.

  “I’m good,” Gordie said. His voice was hoarse. “So… was I right? Did you like it?”

  “Hands down, best night of my life,” Jean said. “The energy was like nothing I’ve ever experienced.”

  “Good people, good energy,” Gordie said.

  “The Beatles are my new favorite band,” Val said. “I don’t want this night to be over.”

  “Not yet! Not yet!” Val, Alice, and I chanted from the backseat.

  “I’m starving. Is there any place to get food around here?” Alice said, stretching her long legs between Val and me.

  “We have no money,” I said.

  “We can go to my house,” Jean said.

  “I doubt your mom will appreciate us foraging in the middle of the night,” Gordie said. He drove over a stretch of lawn and inched into the long line of cars.

  “My mom’s a nurse. She’s on the overnight shift. We’re good.”

  We rode with all the windows down, singing at the tops of our lungs, until we got to Jean’s ranch-style house at the end of a tree-lined street.

  “Here we are, White Castle,” Jean said. He fished a key out of a planter and opened the door. Paintings of palm trees and tropical flowers and bright-faced Haitian girls hung on deep red walls above the turquoise sofas.

  Jean riffled through the refrigerator and brought out a glass container of rice and beans and another of fried plantains. He stuck the containers in the microwave while we studied an oversize portrait of Jean’s family.

  “Your dad looks exactly like you,” Alice said, pointing to a gap-toothed, smiling man holding a baby Jean.

  “That’s what everybody says. He’s gone. I mean, he passed away in the big earthquake we had in Haiti.”

  “Oh my God, Jean. I never knew that.” Val’s face turned red.

  “It’s not like I want to dredge it up all the time.”

  The microwave beeped. Jean took o
ut the food and we devoured the soggy plantains.

  “You all can stop being awkward. I’m fine.” Jean licked grease off his fingers.

  “We’re not being awkward,” Alice said. “If you want to talk about your dad, you can.”

  “There’s not much to say. He was an awesome guy with a huge personality, and he died and left my mom to take care of me, my three sisters, and half the neighborhood because she was the only nurse around. It pretty much blew.”

  We hovered over the counter, shoveling spoonfuls of rice and beans into our mouths while Jean told us about how his family had searched for nearly a week before they discovered his dad was dead, and how his mom bribed a government official to get their family out of Haiti, and how they were homeless and lived in a church in Brooklyn until his mom found work as a night nanny to pay her way through nursing school and certification here.

  “Does anyone at school know any of this?” Val said.

  “No. And let’s keep it that way,” Jean said.

  Jean went quiet. I couldn’t tell if he felt like he had overshared or if he had something else he wanted to tell us.

  “I’m going to show you guys something,” he finally said. “But don’t judge.”

  We followed Jean down a narrow hallway decorated with fancy wide-brimmed hats on hooks to a door marked JEAN-PIERRE. Jean stopped and turned to us.

  “So I kind of have this weird hobby. It started a long time ago. I have no idea why I do this, but it’s my thing.”

  “You’re making me nervous,” Val said. “It better not be that hobby where they stuff dead animals.”

  “You mean taxidermy?” Gordie said.

  “No. It’s not taxidermy.” Jean opened the door and flipped on the light, and a hundred faces smiled at us.

  We were speechless at first, taking in the full effect of the rows and rows of masks that hung on Jean’s walls. They looked like they came from all over the world. There were tribal masks, Japanese masks, wooden masks, masks bursting with color, some disturbing, some charming. The only thing that unified the masks was that they were all smiling.

  “Okay, I need a minute,” I said. I felt like I was in a global bazaar fun house.

  “I take it your thing is mask collecting,” Gordie said.