“Nah, I’ll… I’ll still be in my work uniform.”
“But you live right next door. Just change and get over here.” Lucia gave Mindy a little shake. “It’ll be fun. You’ll be fun.”
“Maybe if I get off early,” Mindy said with all the flavor of a promise, but none of the actual calories.
“Cool. You’re so cool.” Lucia slapped Mindy on the back as she turned away, sending her off. “Go deliver good pizzas!”
As she got into her Taurus, Quentin nearly ran her over. Mindy was getting used to the near-miss sensation.
The rest of Mindy’s evening was too dull even for her blog, and she had posted more than one “What Star Trek captain are you?” quiz. She went out on another run, this one up north. Got stiffed, shoveled the receipt into her glove compartment for later, and when she got back, the manager finally cut her. She tallied her tips, brought in her car topper, and started home. And all the way there, she thought about Lucia’s party.
Assuming the offer was even genuine—assuming the party hadn’t dissolved because someone couldn’t bring ice cream sandwiches or something—assuming it wasn’t already over because she’d driven five miles up the road and back again with nothing to show for it but a corporate-mandated twofer for gas money. Assuming all that, go or no go?
If she went, Mindy could pretty much guarantee all she’d do is hang out in the corner and snarf all the snacks she could. Was that really any better than an evening of decompressing, updating her blog, maybe a movie on Netflix if she could stop herself from just endlessly scrolling through the new releases?
Then again, she was a fucking teenager and she’d never sent a drunk text. She hadn’t even used chatspeak. That was screwed up. She should be spontaneous and fun loving and easygoing. And in a week from now, she would be sitting in her room, bored out of her mind, wishing she had gone to the party. Because maybe at the party she’d meet a boy or whatever, and maybe they’d go to a movie. Then maybe in a week’s time she’d be thinking, Hey me-a-week-earlier, I’m kissing a cute boy because you went to the stupid party like a great big normal!
She was going to do that. She was going to get home, put on something cute, maybe grab a quick shower, and go over. She could bring some of her mom’s dinner rolls. They were still in the Ziploc bag by the fridge, right? Everyone loved dinner rolls.
Then Mindy got home and felt, right through her Goodyear tires, a thumping LMFAO song from the backyard of Lucia’s house. The words FUCK THIS were suddenly installed in big neon letters on the inside of Mindy’s forehead. She went in through the front door, leaving her hat in the car and ruffling her freed hair from back to front. Her parents were on the couch watching American Kid Swappers or whatever. They gave her, “How was work?” and she gave them, “Good,” and trudged upstairs to her bedroom, where with the windows closed, the party music became a subsonic transmission straight to her fillings.
Too tired to undo her shoelaces, she folded down onto her bed and kicked off her shoes before looking over at the window. Through it, she had a view of Lucia’s house and just about nothing else. Usually, Lucia’s blinds were down, leaving her with “nothing else.” Tonight, they were open. And Lucia herself sprawled across her bed. Not at the party. Not with some guy. Just lying in bed.
As if feeling herself being watched, Lucia’s gaze crossed the seven feet between them. She saw Mindy’s slumped posture, so close to her own, and smiled wearily. She even gave a modestly excited wave. Mindy returned it, not sure what to think. Before she could figure anything out, Lucia had turned away again. Mindy did the same, staring up at the ceiling and the baby platypus poster she had up there. Baby platypus always looked like it was having a good day being a baby platypus.
She was a little tired, but she felt like she’d waste the evening going to sleep now. She wondered how she could wake herself up enough to watch some TV, read a book, or photoshop some bees into that GIF she’d found of the Pope waving both his hands. That’d be funny. Probably get her a thousand likes on Facebook. She yawned. Did people still use Facebook? Did Lucia use Facebook?
Her phone trilled—a meow from Burt Reynolds the cat, who she’d house-sat for three weeks last summer. They were BFFs. She checked her phone. Not a garbled mishmash of Spanish or a butt-dial, for once. It was a text from Lucia.
My mom’s too much of a neat freak to let strangers in the house, Lucia had sent.
As if Mindy had been wondering about the carnival in her backyard. Mostly, she was just surprised Lucia still had her number.
Surprised, but oddly touched.
The next day, Mindy drove past Lucia’s bus stop on the way to school. Lucia wasn’t looking her way; she had her back turned while the wind played with her flaxen hair. She really was pretty, in unguarded moments.
CHAPTER 2
Mindy didn’t know why everyone hated on the school lunches. Everything on her tray tasted fine, in that it was tasteless, which was an improvement on her mom’s cooking. Mindy didn’t know what kale was supposed to taste like, but it probably wasn’t like the flesh of a dung beetle that had died screaming.
The cafeteria was basically just a very big classroom, without the TGI Fridays educational posters and such that the teachers put up. It was featureless except for the brick pillars that held it up, the bulletin board which shed extracurricular fliers like dead skin, and the glass doors that let the students see when a stray dog wandered onto campus.
Mindy ate alone, as usual, or she might as well have. The lunch room wasn’t crowded and she sat far from the vending machines, so she had her table to herself except for the couple who tried to kindle a fire with their jeans. Mindy toasted them with her carton of chocolate milk and went back to her homework. Last question and…done. She decided to give her brain a rest before moving onto her World History assignments. Digging out the library’s copy of A Great and Terrible Beauty from her backpack, she set about reading.
Her eyes rolled over the words like they did when it seemed like a book was beaming its story right into her brain. She wasn’t aware of her eyes running along the lines of text, didn’t know she was turning the pages, didn’t even look at her food as she worked it off her plate and into her mouth. The peas, the mashed potatoes, the pudding, they all disappeared bit by bit until—kritch! Her spoon scraped against the mesh of the tabletop. Her lunch tray was gone. Mindy looked up from her book to see Lucia sitting opposite her.
Lucia pushed the tray back into place. “Sorry. Could not resist.” She gave Mindy a slightly apologetic smile. “I don’t suppose you’re not really reading but simply desperately shy and secretly hoping I’ll hit on you?”
Mindy reared up. “That was a lot of adjectives.”
“I’m just fucking with you.” Lucia hovered her hand over Mindy’s little bowl of baby carrots, begging silently until Mindy made a permissive gesture. Lucia took one and crunched it. “That’s a good book,” she said, her mouth full but her voice still clear.
“Huh? Oh, oh yeah—I guess so.” Mindy rubbed the dust jacket self-consciously. “I haven’t finished, so, uh…”
Lucia wagged an eyebrow. “Surprised I know how to read?” She took another baby carrot.
“No, of course you can read…” Mindy said a little too apologetically for what she now realized was a joke. “You’re in high school,” she finished lamely.
Lucia let her off the hook. “Plus, I’m a cheerleader. We need to know how to read to spell out words. Otherwise how will the football players know what to do?”
Mindy giggled. She’d forgotten how bright Lucia was. High school seemed so monochrome, and Lucia was like a little splotch of color even when she wasn’t doing anything. From a distance, you couldn’t see it, but when she was up close, Lucia was just so alive.
Lucia kept going, picking up one more baby carrot and rolling it between her fingertips. “Not that I’ve seen you at the games.”
Mindy hid behind her book. “I’m not big into sports.”
Lucia preene
d up to look at her, so Mindy dropped the book to look back. Lucia gave her a brief smile. “Well, there’s a game this weekend, and I will be there wearing something I can’t blame men for jerking off to. Why don’t you come? Give contact sports a chance.”
That, more than anything, took Mindy aback. Lucia was surprisingly easy to talk to; it was even easier still to slip into their childhood friendship like it was a set of old clothes. Actually having Lucia proposition her set off a little pang in her. She remembered all the distance between them. And she didn’t know if Lucia was closer than she’d thought or if all that space just made her feel safe throwing stones, since Mindy was too far away to hit back.
“I don’t know…” Mindy said at last. She wavered in the face of Lucia’s expectant look. Her words got chopped up into some needed order. “If you’re there, okay.”
Lucia happily chomped the carrot she’d been playing with. “You know, you look so smart in those glasses, but when you don’t speak in complete sentences—totally ruins it.” She plucked just one more baby carrot as she rose. “See you Saturday.”
The next time Mindy saw Lucia, she was trying to kill someone.
* * *
Mindy was coming out of class the next day, going to her locker, the one with No weed here written on it. She was about to exchange one back-breaking load of textbooks for another when she heard all the sounds of a fight stampeding down the hallway.
Squeaking shoes, grunting, high-pitched profanities, and the arrhythmic slap of flesh on flesh.
Mindy wasn’t immune to interest. She waded through the crowd that always gathered at these things, expecting to see another gay kid standing up to a bully because Glee had done a song about it.
Instead, she saw Lucia had jumped on Quentin’s back, one hand buried in his curly locks and pulling hard, another punching him in the shoulder in a not-at-all-friendly way.
Their words overlapped as they spun around, Lucia’s high and shrill, his pained and slightly hysterical. “Get her off me fucking cheating asshole calm the fuck down I’m gonna kill you crazy bitch fucking shiv you!”
Mindy’s brain popped open the thought that it was only a matter of time until a teacher or school safety officer put in an appearance, separated them, and as the school system’s approach to violent behavior was more enlightened since Columbine, treat them both as if they were Nazi war criminals. And just like that, she’d thrown herself through the onlookers, grabbed Lucia by the waist, and pulled her off Quentin.
Lucia was slimmer than her, but she helped hold up three people at every cheerleading practice. The fact that they were probably bulimic didn’t take away from that. But Mindy had more body mass, and she’d taken Lucia by surprise. She dragged Lucia back six feet before she started resisting, digging her feet into the linoleum floor.
“Seb, little help!” Mindy called. Sebastian Brewster, Seb, a foreign exchange student from Romania or thereabouts, pulled out of the crowd. Mindy remembered being mock-UN partners with him last semester. He’d found it really funny whenever the Bulgarian delegates said something, and they got a B+ on the assignment. That was his entry in the Encyclopedia Mindy.
He wound his arms around Mindy’s waist and helped her pull, a Human Centipede that managed to overcome Lucia’s berserker rage. Pulling against Mindy’s grip, she slipped and slid on the floor, banging her knees on the tiles multiple times as Mindy tried to calm her down.
“Hey, hey, it’s me, I’ve got you.” She barraged Lucia’s ear with whispers, trying to talk her down like she was doing a show on Animal Planet. “He’s not worth it, okay? Let’s go—”
Lucia caught her breath. Mindy still felt her heart going a mile a minute. There was a feverish heat coming off Lucia, but she stopped struggling against Mindy, letting herself be held. Seb let go. Mindy didn’t. So they just stood there, Mindy now embracing Lucia from behind, as the cheerleader jabbed a finger at the recovering Quentin like she could fire a bullet from it.
“Just so everyone knows, he cheated on the hottest girl in school because he had an away game. Enjoy your sluts, genius motherfucker!”
“Let’s go,” Mindy repeated, pulling at Lucia, getting her to take a few steps back with her.
Quentin wiped at the blood from where she’d clawed at his cheek. “I gotta get some suck action before a game. You knew! You should’ve come to support the team, but thanks for putting your boyfriend-girlfriend shit before the Dragons!”
“Fuck you, Quentin!”
Mindy heard big, official footsteps coming down the halls. She tugged insistently at Lucia. “Bathroom, Lucia, let’s go.”
Lucia barely let herself be led away.
“Listen, Mindy—” Seb began.
“Daisy McDowell would’ve let Billy get a beej if he needed one!” Quentin shouted after them.
“Daisy McDowell’s a fucking A-cup and Billy’s into dudes!” Lucia shot back before Mindy could shove her into the nearest restroom.
Seb tried to press on. “Mindy, I was wondering…”
“Hold that wonder,” Mindy told him, following Lucia in.
The bathroom was empty, thank God. Mindy barely had time to look for Lucia before the blonde ran past her, kicking the wall hard enough to put a dent in the plaster. “Fuck!” she screamed.
“Hey, Lucia, hey…” Mindy tried to think of something to say, but someone came through the door then. “Use the boys’ room!” she ordered the intruder.
“This is the boys’ room,” he stammered.
Mindy took a closer look at him. He had very long hair for a boy. “I like your hair.”
Jabbing a finger at the row of urinals Mindy had failed to notice, he left. No sooner was he out the door and a few muffled words were exchanged on the other side than there was a knock from outside. Mindy gave Lucia an awkward pat on the head, mouthing promises to be right back, and went to answer it. It was only as she was actually pulling the door open that she realized how weird it was to knock on the door to a public restroom.
Coach Bakula was Mindy’s favorite teacher by a factor of a million and one, and he wasn’t even a teacher. He was the coach of Millarca High’s seven-time championship football team, but if that weren’t enough to make him small town royalty, he also volunteered to teach English class.
He was handsome in that ageless Hollywood way that seemed to be a constant from year thirty to year sixty, but without the Botox or plastic surgery, just a weirdly orange tan and some white in his hair and goatee. The business suit he wore everywhere was slightly undone, tie loosened and jacket hung up on the back of a chair somewhere.
“Everything okay in here?” he asked gently, sneaking a look at Lucia before averting his eyes respectfully.
“Yeah,” Mindy said. “We just need a minute.”
“Take all the time you need. I’ve got Quentin doing sprints until he learns some manners. Or vomits. Whichever comes first. Meantime, I’ve got a feeling this bathroom is going to be out of order for the next few minutes.” He flashed her one of those yellow folding floor signs before splaying it out at his feet. “Put it away when you’re done. You’ve got me next, so I’ll just forget to take roll until you get in.”
“Thank you, Mr. Bakula. Big time.”
“Go. Be a good friend.” He shut the door.
Lucia had slid to the floor, back against the wall thumping her head rhythmically against it. Mindy sat beside her. She offered a handkerchief before Lucia started crying.
The sight of the white cloth in her hand got Lucia started. Hot tears leaked out of her, under too much pressure to stay inside. “Fucking asshole,” she murmured.
Mindy put a hand on her shoulder. She didn’t know quite what to do. She’d never had a friend breakdown in front of her. She didn’t even cry that much herself. She’d seen a hundred movies and TV shows where someone cried, still looking sexy and perfect and beautiful, and someone comforted them, looking caring and masculine and confident. The women in those shows didn’t cry like Lucia, with her face a
ll blotchy and her eyes bloodshot.
Mindy took out another napkin from her purse and held it under Lucia’s nose. She’d grabbed a whole batch of them at work. Lucia instinctively blew. Mindy wadded up the napkin and tossed it into the trash bin. Three points.
At least she’d stopped crying.
Mindy used another napkin to wipe under Lucia’s eyes and rub off her runny makeup. Lucia sat there passively, letting Mindy mop her up. Then her head fell to one side, and Mindy almost got out of the way before she realized Lucia meant to rest it on her shoulder.
“I really tried with him,” Lucia said. Her voice wasn’t rattling with emotion any more, it was just quiet. Which was even worse. “I really thought I was a good girlfriend. I was gonna—wash his clothes and fix him pies and shit. I would’ve done anything to be a good girlfriend.”
“You were a great girlfriend,” Mindy assured her. “He’s just an idiot. He’s an idiot who never even got to know you well enough to know what he’s gonna be missing. He’s gonna be big and fat at the high school reunion, and you’re going to be super-hot and married to a senator. He won’t even know why he let you get away.”
“I did anal!” Lucia cried to the florescent lights. “What more is a girl supposed to do, huh?”
“Nothing. You’re pretty and smart and funny and own a cheerleader outfit. He’s just a goddamn idiot. He’s like the guy who dates Diana Prince and crushes on Wonder Woman, but he doesn’t even know that Diana Prince is Wonder Woman with glasses and a different hairdo. Screw that guy. He doesn’t know he’s dating Wonder Woman.”
Lucia gestured for another napkin. “It’s the week before Valentine’s Day,” she said listlessly and blew her nose.
“You don’t have to even do Valentine’s Day. I don’t.”
“Yeah, but you’re, like, a hobbit. I have to do something. That fucker’s not taking Valentine’s away from me. That’s the one holiday that is all about women. You never hear about a woman getting shit because she forgot to get her boyfriend something. Feminism, Mindy.”
Ex-Wives of Dracula Page 2