Cherry Money Baby

by John M. Cusick

  And then, as sometimes happened, something clicked in Cherry’s head, and she suddenly got these people, from their understated shoes to their overstated hair. They were just popular kids. Perhaps slightly more popular popular kids, but popular kids, nonetheless. Popular kids liked to shine, but not at the center of anything. A crowd of popular kids wanted to be a halo, which was why they always stood in circles (dorks and losers lined up against the wall like a mass execution). Once she understood this, she instantly relaxed. By midnight a crowd of models, actors, and older film people encircled her. The beer was making her loose, and the added height of the heels gave her authority. She was a tipsy Titan. A wobbly Amazon.

  “So it was me, Vi, and Sharon Hanniford,” she explained, revving up another story.

  “The one with the lazy eye?” a girl in a teal cocktail dress asked.

  “You’re thinking of Sharon Gregory,” said her date. “Sharon Hanniford’s the one from the beer-bottle story. Right?”

  “Exactly,” said Cherry. “So, Sharon’s all heartbroken because of the whole Danny cheating thing. I mean, the girl is tore up. So, I got this box of M-80s —”

  “Pardon,” said a French fashion model. “M-80s?”

  “Fireworks,” said the model’s husband, also a model.

  “Yeah, but serious fireworks,” Cherry corrected. “Vi’s cousin brought them down from Canada. Anyway, we got this box of M-80s, and we pull through the parking garage where Danny is in the backseat with this skank from Aubrey Private.”

  “That asshole,” said the girl in the cocktail dress.

  “I hate Danny,” said her date.

  “Totally,” said Cherry. “So we pull up real slow and quiet like we’re just another car looking for a spot . . .” She paused for dramatic effect. This story had slayed the Aubrey football team at last year’s homecoming. “And then I just let loose from the passenger seat. I’m throwing them under his car, on the roof. M-80s are going off — bang! Bang!” Cherry made explosion shapes with her hand. “It sounded like a drive-by. They were shitting themselves.”

  The crowd applauded. A woman in a frosted bob held her hand against her chest. “Oh, that is too much.”

  “Serves him right,” said the director of photography.

  “It was sick,” said Cherry, flush with attention and booze. Everything she said was fucking fascinating. And once you got past the goofy accents and conversations about cheese, these people weren’t so bad. Cherry said so and got a big laugh.

  Ardelia appeared at Cherry’s side, putting an arm around her waist.

  “Ardy, where did you find her?” asked the frosted bob.

  “In a burrito place,” Ardelia said. “And she’s all mine, so none of you go and steal her. Anise, don’t give me that look. I know you’re searching for a new PA.”

  The teal cocktail dress fluttered her eyelashes. She leaned toward Cherry with a confidential air. “Well, I am.”

  “Tough!” Ardelia said, snapping her fingers. She did that a lot, Cherry noticed. She imagined Ardelia snapped things away, or snapped them into existence, all day long. Quickly, more wine! Snap-snap. Bring the serving boy to my boudoir! Snap-snap. Take this girl away — she is vulgar and boring. Snap.

  Just then the music cut out. Maxwell was standing by a grand piano in the corner, waving.

  “Ardelia! Come do the thing.”

  “Oh, yes!” someone shouted. “Come on, do it!”

  Ardelia waved them away, but the crowd wouldn’t let her go, urging her toward the piano. She resisted for all of ten seconds.

  “Fine! Fine.”

  The room applauded.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Maxwell announced, “as some of you may know, our little Olive”— Cherry guessed this was the name of Ardelia’s character —“recently had a scare.”

  The crowd went, “Awww.”

  “We’re just so happy she’s all right,” Maxwell said. By now Ardelia had reached the piano. “So let us celebrate the fragility and sanctity of life,” Maxwell added with mock reverence, “with a private performance.”

  “Stop! Stop!” Ardelia waved at the cheering crowd, laughing. “What do you want to hear?”

  “Do ‘Night and Day’!” someone shouted.

  “Do ‘Love for Sale’!”

  General laughter. Ardelia’s eyes found Cherry.

  “Cherry! Any requests?”

  The room’s eyes were on her. What were they asking her, exactly?

  “Uh . . .” She cleared her throat. “How about ‘Superb Ass?’”

  She’d meant this as a joke, but the room went nuts. Ardelia shrugged.

  “Well, if it’s all right with Cynthia . . .” She gestured to somewhere in the room. The yellow feather, its owner obscured by the crowd, bobbled.

  Maxwell sat at the piano and began pounding out the bass line. Ardelia climbed onto the grand’s glossy top, Cherry’s sneakers squealing. When the vocals came in, Ardelia began to sing, and Cherry was surprised by the sweetness and emotion she was able to wring from a song about a nice ass. Ardelia hammed it up, turning the hip-hop anthem into a torch song, about love and loss, and when she sang, “‘I’ll die if I don’t get it, I’ll cry if I don’t get it, I need you . . . !’” Cherry believed her.

  She was the brightest spot in the room. Even among the rich and famous, Ardelia Deen was important.

  She finished to wall-shaking applause. Ardelia curtsied and let Maxwell help her down. Cherry clapped — difficult while holding a beer bottle — and let out a wolf whistle.

  “So, what is it you’re doing here, exactly?” said a pert voice in her ear. Spanner was at her side, smoking a slender brown cigar. It smelled awful.

  “Sorry, what?”

  She exhaled a jet of blue smoke. “I mean, it can’t be fun for you. Being a party favor.”

  Cherry waved the smoke from her eyes, her stomach turning queasy, her fingertips going tingly with the realization that she was being insulted. At school, digs were hurled down the hall, unmistakable. Spanner’s words seeped, like poison. The toxins detected, Cherry shifted into Fightin’ Mode. She didn’t take shit from jokers like Olyvya Dunrey, and she sure as hell wouldn’t from a copper-bottom bitch in a too-tight dress.

  “All right. You got a problem with me?”

  “Problem? I have no problems. I fix other people’s.”

  “Ooh, good one,” said Cherry. “How long you been sitting on that little gem?”

  “Right now I see one problem,” Spanner continued. Her coolness flustered Cherry a little. “And I plan to solve it, pro bono. Do you know what pro bono means?”

  Cherry didn’t, though she’d heard it on CSI: Miami. “N-no . . .”

  “Not surprising. Pro bono, from pro bono publico or ‘for the public good.’ Colloquially, ‘for free.’ I’d explain what colloquial means, but we’d be here all night.” Spanner sighed. “I’m guessing they don’t teach Latin at your school.”

  Cherry’s face was on fire. Was it uncool at Hollywood parties to savagely beat another guest, or would it be considered part of the general mayhem?

  “Ardelia asked me to come, okay?”

  “Oh, you’re not her problem,” said Spanner. “You are utterly inconsequential. She is your problem.”

  “How is she my problem?”

  Spanner tapped her cigarillo. The ashes drifted toward the floor and seemed to disappear.

  “You see, this is what Ardelia does. A new production, a new city, a new friend. She likes new things. Year after year, I have seen new friends, like you, come and go. But none of them lasted.” She pronounced the word like something sharp and unbreakable. “So, when this production is over, Ardelia will go home, and you will stay in your awful town, in this awful country. You will go back to the trailer where she found you, and your life will snap back into shape like a rubber band. And it will hurt.” Spanner’s eyes met Cherry’s, and they were smoky and blue. “So, this is my professional advice. Cut out now, and save yourself the heartbreak.
There’s a good girl.” She glanced at Cherry’s beer. “Are you old enough to have that?”

  Spanner removed the bottle from Cherry’s fingers and dropped it in a wastebasket, then disappeared in a puff of smoke.

  After her performance, Ardelia was absorbed by the crowd. Cherry searched for her, feeling like Invisigirl. Bodies didn’t part for her the way they did for Maxwell and Ardelia. Nobody seemed to hear her say “Excuse me” or “Coming through.” Women threw back their hair in fits of laughter and struck her in the face. Men swept their arms like batteries in a gauntlet. She wished Vi were here. No, she wished she were wherever Vi was.

  Something large and yellow bumped her elbow.

  “Excuse you!” snapped a woman with a feather jutting from the top of her hairdo. She was covered in feathers. A sexy Big Bird. Disturbing on many levels.

  “Have you seen Ardelia?” Cherry asked.

  “Ardy? In there.”

  Big Bird nodded toward a far door, her feather dipping into Cherry’s face before returning to the full upright position.

  Cherry wedged herself through the crowd and at last reached the bedroom door. It stood ajar, the room beyond dark. Cherry knocked once, praying her friend was alone.

  Ardelia stood in a rectangle of yellow window light, holding a cigarette. She’d removed Cherry’s sneakers, which lolled half under the bed. It was quieter here. The view from both windows was stunning, but it was the painting on the wall that Ardelia was looking at. She jumped when Cherry cleared her throat.

  “I’m gonna bounce.”

  “Oh, no! Are you bored?” Ardelia’s pout fell. “Sweetie, have you been crying?”

  Cherry wiped her eyes. Fuck, fuck, fuck. “Smoke makes my eyes watery.”

  “Oh, sorry.” She held her cigarette away. “I was just thinking about what Maxwell said. About life being fragile. Max was just being Max, but . . . he’s right. Life is fragile. You know what I thought that day, when I was choking? I had a full thought, apart from, you know, I can’t breathe.”

  Ardelia’s eyes searched the middle distance. She licked her lips. “I was sitting there, choking, convinced, you know, this is it. And I thought, I’m all alone. Isn’t that silly? What a thing to think when you’re dying.” She looked at Cherry. “Do you ever feel that way?”

  She thought about Lucas, about Pop and Stew, about Vi. Her life was full of people. But why did it sometimes feel like she was constantly gathering sand into her arms? Sand that was always rushing away from her, through her fingers, between her arms, no matter how much she scooped, no matter how hard she squeezed?

  “I worry a lot. About people.” She’d never realized this before. But she did. She worried. All the time.

  “Intelligent people always do,” said Ardelia. Before Cherry could ask what this meant, she’d turned back to the painting. It was just a boring watercolor, like the kind hanging in the Aubrey Public Library.

  “I love this painting. It’s an Edward Hopper. His paintings always make me cry. So many lonely women.”

  The painting was lonely. A woman in blue leaned against an orange wall at the back of a theater. The back of an audience member’s head was visible, the stage obscured.

  “Who is she?”

  Ardelia shrugged. “I always thought an actress. Waiting for her cue.”

  Cherry looked closer. “She’s an usher.”

  “Hmm?”

  Cherry pointed to the girl’s trouser leg. “She’s got an orange stripe down the side of her pants. That’s a uniform.” Cherry thought about this. “She can’t see the show from where she’s standing.”

  Ardelia looked again. She traced the band of tangerine down the girl’s side. She turned to Cherry and seemed to consider her with the same surprise, the same interest, as if there were a colored band on Cherry she hadn’t noticed before.

  “Listen, stay, won’t you? You and I will have fun. Fuck everybody else.”

  Cherry laughed. “It’s weird hearing you swear.”

  “I don’t usually. You bring it out of me.”

  Cherry considered the blonde in the painting. She looked bored. She looked sad.

  “All right,” said Cherry. “Back in a sec. I gotta do something.”

  She found Spanner amid a circle of girls, speaking in a low voice through cigarillo smoke. The girls hung on her every blue word.

  “Hi,” said Cherry with a grin. The others smiled politely.

  Spanner turned with exaggerated slowness. “Yes?”

  Cherry leaned in so only she could hear. “Fuck with me again, and I’ll break your face. Got it?”

  The other girl swallowed. She looked even paler, if that were possible. Cherry was all grin. She nodded to the others. “Ladies.”

  She crossed to the bar and drummed on the counter. “Another one of those German beers, please, and keep ’em coming! It’s a party!”

  Cherry woke hours later in the bedroom with the Hopper painting on the wall. Light from the partially drawn curtain crisscrossed the bed like rays from a heat lamp; she felt like she’d been sleeping in a boiled, damp, loosely rolled burrito.

  She kicked off the soggy sheets, revealing Ardelia, still in her party gown and curled in a fetal position, clutching one of Cherry’s sneakers like a teddy bear.

  “What time is it?” Cherry asked in an unrecognizable voice. An investigation of her phone revealed six missed calls from home. She didn’t bother to check the voice mails. Pop was going to flay her for being out all night.

  Ardelia opened her eyes with visible effort. She glanced up at Cherry, raised herself on one elbow, and looked around. “Well,” she mumbled, “I’m all sunshine and rainbows.”

  They found Maxwell in the wreckage of the living room, asleep on a foldout with a blonde who turned out, much to Cherry’s surprise, to be Spanner. Ardelia stood over them. Cherry couldn’t detect any hurt in Ardelia’s swollen eyes. She stooped to pick at a wad of gum tangled in Spanner’s hair. Spanner batted her away sleepily.

  They rode the elevator in silence. She didn’t want to see her reflection in the mirrored doors. While Ardelia took care of some business with the concierge, Cherry waited on the curb. She’d helped herself to a pair of sunglasses a guest had abandoned on Maxwell’s carpet. Even with the shades, the early afternoon light was punishing. No, not just the light, the wind too. Being alive was painful. So, this was it. Her first-ever hangover. She was used to the pain of overexertion, from running too far or overdoing it in a push-up contest. This was different. This was damage. She felt like she’d swallowed a cheese grater. She resolved to never make fun of Vi’s hangovers again; no one should have to suffer through this.

  Two younger girls teetered past in matching Hello Kitty T-shirts. They were giggling and screaming about something, and Cherry imagined a million tortures for them. They glanced her way, and she wondered what she must look like to a pair of middle-school girls. She’d never been that girl before, the one heading home in last night’s clothes, mascara turned to ash, all disheveled and hungover and looking roughed up in a way that was maybe slightly sexy. She’d always thought those walk-of-shame zombies were pathetic. But now, despite the throbbing in her head, Cherry felt like kind of a badass. She felt older and, yes, a little damaged, like she’d left a part of herself behind in Maxwell Silver’s hotel room. Like she’d spent a little of her life’s currency, diminished a precious supply, just a tiny bit.

  It wasn’t a bad feeling at all.

  The hotel door opened, all flashes and squeals, and Ardelia emerged, wearing her own face-masking shades. She took a look at the world and sneered.

  “Isn’t it hateful?”

  “Yes,” said Cherry, wondering if her voice would ever sound normal again.

  “Breakfast?”

  “I gotta get home. My father’s going to kill me.”

  “I’ll drop you.” Ardelia touched the doorman’s elbow. “Greg, could you have them send my car around?”

  Buses thundered past. Cherry stuffed her hands in
her pockets and shivered, thinking of bed and maybe pancakes. She heard the snap of a lighter. Ardelia lit a cigarette. Cherry plucked it from her lips and crushed it on the pavement.

  “Wha . . . ?”

  They were being watched. She nodded toward the middle-schoolers waiting for the light. The girls giggled, pretending not to stare.

  “You’re a role model.”

  Ardelia gave her a once-over. She looked formidable in her shiny shades and rumpled party dress. Snap-snap. “You know, usually the only people who tell me what to do are my agent and my manager.”

  “If they’re not telling you to quit, they’re idiots.”

  The SUV pulled up, and the girls climbed in back. Cherry worried she’d crossed a line. Ardelia was quiet, looking out the window until her cell hummed “God Save the Queen.” She checked the ID and silenced it.

  “Who was that?” Cherry asked.

  She leaned her head on Cherry’s shoulder and removed her shades. “Oh, you know,” she said with a sigh. “Just some idiot.”

  Ardelia dropped Cherry by Mel’s, where she’d left the Spider last night. Cherry drove with the window down, worried she might puke. The pavement near Sweet Creek Bridge was a swirl of skid marks; someone had nearly gone into the guardrail, it looked like. The black squiggles and stink of recently burned rubber made everything worse, and Cherry experienced a kind of nauseated déjà vu.

  She made it back to Sugar Village, killing the engine and sitting in the driveway, mustering the energy to face Pop. The stomachache, she realized, wasn’t only physical. Guilt circled her insides like a spiny blowfish. Somehow being with Ardelia, her fellow debaucheress, had shielded her from it, but alone now, Cherry felt disloyal. Disloyal to her father for breaking curfew, disloyal to Vi for abandoning her at Mel’s, and weirdly, she felt disloyal to Lucas, though she hadn’t done anything wrong at the party. Having a great time, feeling so awesome, having something that was just her own — this felt like a betrayal. As if in the communal world of Sugar Village, memories were supposed to be made together and shared, and here was Cherry with her own little gleaming evening tucked in her pocket like a found coin. It was all hers. It made her feel selfish and sleazy.