by Kelly deVos
And yes, she’s beautiful. She walks the hall like it’s a runway in her model’s uniform of skinny jeans and a fitted T-shirt that’s probably made from cashmere. Her hair is dyed the same shade of blond as mine. This is me in a time-machine mirror.
“Cookie? What are you doing...here?” she asks.
Here. Because I’ve barely spoken to my mom in the last few years. Because me visiting her at home is freakier than the passing of the Hale-Bopp Comet.
“Gareth told me you approached him behind my back about doing his next show. I’m here to let you know he decided to go in a different direction.” I rip the unsigned contract in half, drop the pieces in one of her tote bags.
I turn around and walk back toward the elevator.
Mom leaves her bags next to the apartment door and trails after me. It occurs to me, for the first time, that we’re the exact same height. In our heels, we’re both close to six feet tall.
“He already agreed. My agent said—”
Without facing her, I shake my head. “I made it clear that he could choose to be in business with you or in a relationship with me. He chose me.” I’m pressing the down button over and over as the sound of her heels echoes down the hallway.
“You’re going to have to go back and tell him—”
“I won’t. Stay out of my life. Stay away from me.”
“This isn’t about you, Cookie.”
I whirl around to face her. “No. See, you’re wrong. The only reason Gareth was going to give you the job was as a favor to me. He doesn’t need you. He doesn’t want you. He was doing it for me. So for the first time in the history of our existence, it is finally about me.”
Mom runs back to the door, rummages around in one of the bags for something and hustles back. It’s a baby blanket. A $500 blanket from Saks probably knitted from yarn they took from Himalayan sheep and dyed with caviar. “I’m pregnant.”
“Congratulations.” I’m wondering where the fucking elevator is. I swear. Where the fuck does that thing go? To the moon and back? “Do me a favor. Don’t invite me to the baby shower. Not everyone thinks the second coming of Rosemary’s Baby is something to celebrate.”
The tears start falling from Mom’s blue eyes. “I’m begging you. This is my last chance to work before I’m showing. After that, I’ll be lucky if I can book another big campaign for a year. No one else will pay what Gareth is offering. I’m your mother and—”
The elevator doors finally swing open and I get inside. “Now you’re my mother? You weren’t my mother when I broke my arm. You weren’t my mother when you ran off with Chad Tate. You weren’t my mother every time I’ve ever needed food or clothes or shelter or money for college. I could be dead for all you care. But now that you want something from me, we’re one big happy fucking family?”
She sees the tears won’t work and they’re gone. Replaced by cold anger. She extends her arm to keep the elevator doors from closing. “Oh sure. I’m the worst mother in the world. Of course, you never mention your father. Where the hell is he?”
“Curing malaria in Ghana.”
“He’s hiding from his fucking responsibilities. I was twenty and pregnant and he wanted to run all over the world being Jack fucking Shephard. But you love him and you hate me. Fine. Cookie. Fine. But please, you have to help me—”
She’s wrong. I don’t think dear old Dad is any better, but he does have an excuse for his shithead behavior that’s easier for me to swallow. “You know, asking me to have sympathy for you is like the lion eating the zebra and asking for its pity.”
The door tries to close again and Mom stands in front of it. “You think I haven’t been where you are? Stood in your shoes? Been the nineteen-year-old that men like Gareth Miller would pay anything to fuck?”
I push the first-floor button hard, over and over. “He’s not paying to fuck me. We’re working together on a collection. Don’t assume for a second that you and I are alike in any way. I’m taking care of myself. I’ve been taking care of myself for years.”
“Cookie, please—”
I push the buttons in the elevator a few more times in futility. “Why did you name me Cookie?”
A blank expression settles across Mom’s face. “You’ve heard that story a million times. The nurse—”
“I’ve heard it,” I interrupt. “Be honest with me. For once. One time. Here in this hallway it’s only you and me. It was a punishment. Like a curse or something. The first time you saw me. You couldn’t stand me and you wanted everyone to know it.”
Mom puts one hand on her cashmere-covered hip and her baby blue eyes narrow. “You have no idea what it’s like to be me.”
There’s a creaking sound.
A little old man who looks strangely like Noam Chomsky comes out of the other apartment on Mom’s floor and hobbles into the elevator. She has no choice but to move her arm and let me go. I tap my foot the entire way down. I can’t breathe. The whole building feels like it’s infected with pepper-sprayed air.
On the first floor, I hold the elevator door open and wait for the old man to exit.
“Ah, you’re such a good girl. Have a nice day.”
This is what he says to me.
Another reminder of the superficial nature of the world.
I glance down at my Gareth Miller black dress with its white Peter Pan collar.
I look like a good girl. But I don’t feel like one.
FAT: Day 48 of NutriNation
“I need you to do something for me, okay?” Tommy says.
I’m trying to concentrate on what he’s saying, but he has a sandwich. A real one. With white bread and gooey peanut butter dripping out the sides. Not made with sandwich thins and some freaky peanut powder they sell at the health food store.
Grape jelly.
“Can you do it?” he asks.
“What?”
He rolls his eyes at me from his seat at the picnic table. The weather is nice, so we’ve taken seats outside the Mountain Vista cafeteria. Kennes is across the courtyard. She’s mastered the Scottsdale uniform of jeans with rhinestones on the ass and a nearly see-through T-shirt.
I glance down at my tie-dyed T-shirt covered with a swirl of ironic, yawning cats. Kennes and I aren’t even living in the same fashion universe.
Once word got out Kennes was a billionaire’s daughter, she had no shortage of attention-seeking sycophants jockeying for her friendship and shored herself up with a snobby mixture of cheerleaders and jocks. There’d been a couple of days when I felt sure she planned to transfer her affections for Tommy to some loser on the lacrosse team, but that didn’t pan out. She wanted him because she knew I did.
Kennes crosses the yard to toss her trash and gives Tommy a flirtatious wave. I lean into his field of view as he grins back at her.
“Do what?” I repeat.
He returns to the moment. “Oh. Meet me after school. I have to go over to Toys“R”Us and return some of my Lego sets. But I’ve been...well...I’ve taken a lot of stuff back recently and they keep giving me crap. So I need you to return the stuff.”
“We’ll have to do it fast,” I say. “My shift starts at five.”
“We’ll be in and out.”
“Is everything okay?” I ask. He’s watching Kennes as she walks off, and I can’t tell if it’s because he’s hot for her and wants to make out behind the portables or if he’s worried about something.
He nods, smiles and chews his sandwich.
After lunch, I have to dress for PE. I’m one of the few seniors taking it. You need one semester to graduate, and I should have gotten it out of the way freshman year like almost everybody else.
The only thing that sucks worse than PE is PE on Friday when you’re stuck watching the seconds to the weekend tick by as you try to square dance or play volleyball. I reach into my locker for my gym shorts and
drop them immediately. They smell. I mean really smell and I realize that I meant to take them home the day before and wash them. Luckily, I keep an old pair of sweats for an emergency.
It’s one of the few times of the year that the temperature isn’t a thousand degrees outside, so this is when they make us run. It’s only a mile, but in the past, I would have ditched. Or I would have been in the locker room trying to find a way to fake spraining my ankle.
Now I’m kind of okay with the running. I’ve been doing five miles on a regular basis with my NutriNation group. But today, Houston, we have a problem. My sweats are falling off.
I have to use one hand to hold on to the waistband as I walk-run around Mountain Vista’s orange track. I’m still one of the first to finish, even with my weird sideways shuffle.
“Well, Miss Vonn, I nominate you for most improved PE student of the decade,” Coach O’Grady says as I pass her. She’s the opposite of the butch female coach stereotype. She looks like she might have been Susan Lucci in a past life. She checks her stopwatch and makes a note on her clipboard. “You’re just under ten minutes. At the start of the semester, you were over twenty.”
“Uh...thanks,” I say. It’s sort of a backhanded compliment.
“You’ve dropped a lot of weight. You look great.”
I’m down fifty pounds and I should be thrilled, but it’s super awkward to have people call attention to me. It’s like people think they’re saying something that should make me feel really great. Instead, it’s a reminder that they didn’t like the way I looked before. That I’m fat and everybody has been judging me all along.
“Keep it up, Miss Vonn.”
“Uh, sure,” I say.
I pick up the pace of my walk both to get away from O’Grady and to have more time to change. I’m almost outside the track fence when I hear her call, “You’ll need to bring in some pants that fit, though, Miss Vonn.”
Behind me, a couple of girls snicker. I don’t look back.
After school, I follow Tommy’s truck to Superstition Springs Mall, where there’s a Toys“R”Us on the south side. He pulls Lego Mindstorm sets out of the cab of the truck for what seems to be forever. I know he’s king of the nerds and captain of the school’s FIRST Lego League team, but this is excessive even for him.
“Jeez, did you and your team of dorks hijack the Polar Express or something?”
“No,” he says. “Of course not. Why do you ask?”
I roll my eyes. “Why do I ask if you’ve become a train bandit and joined the Conrail Boyz? It’s a joke, Tommy.”
“Oh. Okay.”
He frowns and is way off his A-game as we load the Mindstorms into a shopping cart and I push it into the store.
Tommy grabs a second cart and says, “All you have to do is take the returns over to Customer Service. Tell them you need store credit. I’ll meet you right back here.”
“Okay.”
As I approach the customer service counter, I can see the bleached-blonde girl behind the counter is thinking the same thing as me. What the hell?
“I need to return these.” I hand her the receipt I got from Tommy. The total on the receipt is more than $6,000. These fucking Mindstorm sets are $100 each. Tommy’s parents do okay, but they’re not Jay-Z and Beyoncé. My stomach starts to churn out extra acid. It hits me that I should have asked a few follow-up questions.
But I’m committed now, and Blondie reaches into a drawer and pulls out a form. “What’s the reason for the return?”
“Uh...” I realize I don’t know the answer. Tommy didn’t tell me why he needed to exchange all this stuff.
The clerk reaches into the cart and pulls one of the sets out. “I guess they’re damaged?” she supplies.
I look down and see that she’s right. Each box is partially torn or smashed on one side. “Uh. Yeah,” I say.
“I need your driver’s license.”
I hand it to her and she starts scanning the Mindstorms. She makes it through the first couple and then the computer beeps. She scowls at the screen and presses a few keys. And then a few more. Then she’s typing like she’s decided to do a complete rewrite of Hamlet while I wait. She picks up the phone. “I need assistance at Customer Service. Code three.”
Code three doesn’t sound positive.
The speed of my pulse picks up but I tell myself that, with all this stuff, she probably needs a manager’s signature or something. I turn toward the store window and wave my hand to get Tommy’s attention. He’s standing next to his car watching me with a puzzled frown. A few feet from me, there’s a loud scene developing as a mom wrestles a SpongeBob doll from a wailing toddler.
“I need you to come with me.”
I jump as I find a large, balding man in a tan blazer standing right next to my left elbow. Blondie is passing him my driver’s license.
“What?” Out of the corner of my eye, I see Tommy closing the distance to the store.
“You need to come with me, uh, Miss Vonn.” He reads my name off my ID.
“Wait. Wait,” I say. “I’m not going anywhere with you. I don’t even know you.” I take a step back toward the exit door. It’s about five feet behind me and stuck in an open position. I consider making a break for it.
He reaches out and grabs my elbow. It doesn’t hurt, but I won’t be going anywhere either. “Darren Smith. Store security. You need to come with me.”
Before Tommy can make it inside, Darren Smith guides me to a gray door in the rear of the store, up a flight of stairs and into a small office, also gray. A large whiteboard with two columns, one labeled “Police Report Number” and the other “Status,” hangs behind a clean metal desk.
He closes the door, drops me into the chair in front of the desk, and takes the seat behind. With the two of us in the cramped, claustrophobic space, I’m flushing and breathing hard.
“I suppose you know you’re in a lot of trouble.” Darren Smith opens the top drawer of the desk and produces a notepad and a pen.
The pen clicks.
“If you’d like to give a statement, we might be able to avoid making this a police matter.”
“What? I don’t understand...what?” I stammer in shock.
Smith grunts. “Young lady, you wheeled a cart full of more than $5,000 in stolen Lego sets into the store. That’s not the kind of thing where the cops show up and give you a desk appearance ticket. You get arrested. For grand theft.”
“I had a receipt for that stuff. That blonde girl took it from me...and I...I don’t know...and um...” I’m trying to make some kind of sense of what’s happening. Tommy’s behavior. The bizarre amount of merchandise he had.
“Obviously, we’re interested in the identities of the shoplifters.”
“Shoplifters? I had a receipt...”
He drops his pen and pulls the black desk phone close to him. “So we’re doing this the hard way, I guess. Okay. Well, here’s the part where I tell you that we’ve been working in conjunction with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office on an operation designed to put a stop to this little return-fraud racket of yours.”
“Return fraud? Um...”
“We added individual serial numbers to the items in our Mindstorm inventory and sprayed them with code-laced liquid. We can prove the sets you tried to return were stolen from various stores in the valley, and we have your friends on CCTV, so cut the crap, young lady.”
He’s staring at me with an expression that combines anger with impatience with disbelief. He shakes his head. “Either you are a better actress than Meryl Streep, or you’re a complete moron.”
This comment fires up my engine. “Or I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Darren Smith smirks. “Sure. I suppose you just found all that stuff sitting in the parking lot.”
“I had a receipt.”
The smirk fades
. “Look, I might be able to buy that someone put you up to this. But I would need you to tell me who.”
Tommy.
I can’t rat him out. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about return fraud. Typically, someone goes into a store and steals an item for the purpose of taking it back and receiving a ‘refund.’” Smith makes air quotes when he says the word refund.
Tommy.
The guy who spent three weekends helping reroof Grandma’s house is involved in a shoplifting ring.
“In this case, your pals come into the store and steal Lego. Since they often have to damage the boxes in the process of removing the security sensors, they come back and buy a set like the one they have stolen.”
Tommy.
The guy who’d driven me to Donutville on five seconds notice when my car broke down.
“They bring the stolen, damaged Mindstorms back to the store—using the receipts for the ones they purchased—and trade them in for sets in good condition. Then they sell both sets on eBay, pocketing the profit from the theft. Return fraud, Miss Vonn.”
Tommy.
The guy who’d loaned me $600 without blinking when the airline said I was too fat to fly.
“So why don’t you tell me who put you up to this?”
I shake my head.
There’s nothing quite so disgraceful as being hauled out of a toy store in handcuffs while a bunch of five-year-olds gawk at you. You become the instant example of their parents’ cautionary tales. See, you better not stuff that Pokémon figure in your pocket, Billy, or you’ll end up like that girl.
Tommy’s at the front having an argument with the blonde lady at the return desk. I only catch the last part as he says, “I have to see my friend.”
I see the wide brown eyes of the boy who brought me dinner at Fairy Falls and told me stories of the stars, and I can’t let him get in trouble. I’m not even sure that whatever’s inside of him is tough enough to handle trouble. “Tommy. Go home.”