Lucia laughed. It felt good for Mindy to join in. Like they were singing a duet.
Mindy trailed off into another drag on her smoothie, slurping on the icy dregs at the bottom. “You were right about seaweed. For something that is one part weed and one part sea, it is not bad.”
“Here.” Lucia took Mindy’s straw and put it besides hers in her smoothie. “Case you get thirsty.”
The lights dimmed, and the stereo system got louder to signal “We’re starting for real now.” Even with no one else in the theater, Mindy spoke softly. Or maybe it was just what she had to say.
“We’d still be friends if I were gay, right?”
Lucia faced her in the sudden darkness. “Of course. I’d just start calling you my lesbro.”
“Okay.” Mindy sat back in her chair as the green of an MPAA-approved trailer finally came up. “Strong reason to be straight.”
During the obligatory scary part of the movie where the heroine went into a dark and spooky apartment despite knowing there were monsters running around and it turned out there were monsters inside, Lucia grabbed hold of Mindy’s hand. She didn’t let go, even after Frankenstein saved the Maxim cover girl.
Toward the end, after a battle that broke most of the laws of physics that Mindy could name, the main bad guy lay defeated on the ground, his katana knocked far away. “You can’t kill me!” he said, with all the gravitas a British character actor who hadn’t managed to be cast in Harry Potter could muster. “You’re Frankenstein… You’re a hero! And I’m an unarmed man!”
“I’m not Frankenstein,” said the guy with the conspicuous but not unattractive scars. “I’m his monster!” Then he dropped a refrigerator on the poor bastard.
Frankenstein: Rise of the Prometheans was the worst movie Mindy had ever seen. She had never had a better time at a theater.
They walked out of the mall, pausing briefly, regretfully, at the window of the jewelry store. Inside was a heart-shaped necklace that could be broke in half so two people could wear it. One half read Best friends, the other half read Forever. Lucia groaned lustfully as Mindy led her away.
Mindy drove them back home, where Lucia kissed her on the cheek and took back her necklace before she scurried out of the car to her own house. Mindy watched Lucia disappear through the front door before ambling to her own house. She noticed her parents’ car in the driveway.
A sewer main had burst at the hotel, so the romantic evening had been cut short. Her dad was saying maybe they were getting too old to make a big to-do about Valentine’s Day anyway, and it’d become one of those mild arguments that Mindy supposed cropped up when people had been married since the dawn of time. They suspended it, like halftime in a football game, to gently waterboard Mindy as to who she’d been with for Valentine’s Day: Had she been with a boy? What was his name? No need to be embarrassed.
And Mindy pretended to look through the fridge for something to eat, replying no, it was just her friend Lucia, yes, just a friend, not a lesbian, a cheerleader. Her parents were ex-hippies and considered themselves pretty liberal, and maybe that was so for Texas, but Mindy thought they were more ex than hippie. They’d prefer Mindy be friends with gay kids, not be one of them.
They were great, really. She’d known one boy at school who’d kissed another boy and had been sent to a gay cure program that might as well be called Camp Lobotomy. Compared to that, her parents could lead a gay pride parade. But it was so obvious that their vision of their little girl hadn’t been so butch, and they were still holding onto that picture in their heads. Like it was a losing lotto ticket, with them hoping the gambling syndicate was gonna call and say that there’d been a mistake, it really had won. That grated on Mindy, despite all the love and tolerance. All it took was one kernel between your teeth to ruin a tub of popcorn.
But wouldn’t it be great if just a few more people could be like Lucia? Make bad jokes and ask questions and look at this whole thing that even she hadn’t figured out as just another part of her, not some terrible secret like she was the Green Goblin or a Martian from Invasion of the Body Snatchers?
* * *
She saw Lucia again at school the next day. The cheerleader looked perfect as ever. Perfect face between heart drop earrings, perfect breasts under a zip-front hoodie covered in little pink hearts, perfect ass in J. Brand skinny jeans, perfect toenails exposed by her wedge sandals. Perfect boyfriend holding her, kissing her, playing with her hair like it was his.
Mindy didn’t cry. She didn’t feel sad. She wasn’t angry. But all of a sudden, she was driving home, and she didn’t know why it was so hard to fill her lungs with air and just breathe.
Lucia was next door when she went into her room. Mindy didn’t look at her. She needed to study. She didn’t even notice her, not even a little bit. Not until she heard the voice outside her window.
“Knock knock.”
Lucia was straddling the little bumped-out addition on Mindy’s house that almost touched the little bumped-out addition on Lucia’s house. Shit, she’s gonna fall. Mindy ran over and threw open the window.
“You’re gonna break your neck.”
Lucia rolled her eyes. “You’re supposed to say ‘Who’s there.’”
Mindy stepped out of the way and gestured for Lucia to come inside.
“Knock knock?” Lucia repeated meaningful.
Deep breaths, Murphy. “Who’s there?”
Lucia grinned as she answered: “Easily offended bear.”
“Easily offended bear who?”
“Fuck you!” Lucia laughed at her own joke, perching herself on Mindy’s windowsill. “Next-door neighbors,” she said wonderingly, looking into Mindy’s room. “You ever watch me get dressed in the morning?”
“You don’t get dressed in there.”
“Ha! You checked. You’re such a perv.”
Mindy smiled, but she didn’t really mean it. Didn’t smile with her eyes, as Tyra Banks would say. “Speaking of pervs… Heard you’re not on the market anymore, West.”
Suddenly Lucia wasn’t smiling with her eyes either. “Lots of couples have fights, Mindy. It’s not like me and Quentin broke up. Not officially. Officially-officially.”
“He cheated on you.”
“It was a blowjob.”
“You can get herpes from a blowjob. It counts.”
Lucia tried not to laugh, but her cheeks ballooned up until she just couldn’t take it anymore. She giggled, and Mindy giggled with her because she didn’t have any words to tell Lucia how special she was, how beautiful, how funny and clever and amazing she could be. How could she not know?
Mindy stopped laughing before Lucia. “Just tell me one thing. Why him? You could have anyone you want. Why someone who—why Quentin?”
Lucia spoke lightly, but it took an effort. Or maybe that was just Mindy’s imagination. And she just wanted it to be hard for her friend. “Girls like me are supposed to date guys like that, you know?”
Mindy shook her head.
“C’mere.” Lucia pulled her into a hug without waiting for an answer. “You’re going to find someone. And it won’t be like me and Quentin. It’ll be easy. It’ll be really, really easy for you two. How hard could someone have it? Being in love with you?”
The phone rang back in Lucia’s room, a million miles away, and the ringtone was as harsh as a dentist’s drill.
“I gotta take that,” Lucia said as she slipped out of Mindy’s hands. “It’ll be Quentin. He said he’d call. He says we need to work on our relationship.”
“You shouldn’t be the one doing the work,” Mindy said, but Lucia had already turned around and stepped over to the little balcony of her house and acted like she hadn’t heard a single word of it.
CHAPTER 4
“Hey, Minz, got a live one for ya,” Dario called up from the front.
Mindy hustled out of the backroom, barely grabbing a paper towel to dry her hands off. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Dario routed her on the computer, futzi
ng with it as it tried to do everything but what he wanted. “214 Whitby Lane. Order asked for you by name and said there’s a ten dollar tip there if you bring…” The receipt finally printed. “ten hot wings and a twelve-ounce Sierra Mist.”
Mindy ripped the receipt out of the printer. She was smiling to herself. “Driver out the door, ten minutes.”
“You don’t have a stalker, do ya?”
“Ten bucks is worth someone watching me pee.”
* * *
Mindy didn’t think she lived in Carfax. She was just kinda there, the way Carfax just was. You lived in NEW YORK, you lived in SAN FRANCISCO, but in Carfax, she just drove along, in and out of the forestry that pressed in on the city limits like a cancer—or maybe white blood cells. It wasn’t a bad place to live, she knew. Way better than places like Peniel or other East Texas towns that seemed like little more than storage units for people who couldn’t be anywhere else.
Mindy turned on the radio, shuffling between the two stations she got with real regularity. Imagine Dragons and Blurred Lines. She shut the radio back off. She was almost to Lucia’s place anyway, dipping into the dirt roads that wound through Carfax like holes in a cork, trees throttling the road, before she hit pavement again and saw the house. Lucia was sitting on the curb, wearing jean cutoffs and a gray top from the Gap with the sleeves rolled up.
Mindy pulled to a stop a few feet from her. Lucia got up, parked her hands on the roof of Mindy’s car, and leaned in on the driver’s side as Mindy rolled down the window. ”I checked out that singer you told me about. You’re right, she’s not a tranny, she’s just British.”
Mindy offered her the receipt. “Quentin not picking up the bill?”
“No, I got it.” She took the receipt and the pen and signed atop Mindy’s car. “Pop the passenger side, I’m hitching a ride.”
“You’re what?”
Lucia practically sashayed as she wound around the hood. “You heard me. A blood vessel in my brain is going to pop if I spend any more time staring at a Calculus textbook. It’s true. I checked WebMD. So I’m going to ride with you a while. Road trip!”
Mindy pushed open the passenger door, but her mind gave the order under protest. “That’s not how road trips work.”
Lucia moved the heat bag from the passenger seat onto the dash. “Sure it is. C’mon. Bring Your Bestie To Work Day. You can’t tell me it doesn’t get lonely.”
“I have books on tape. And the radio. You like NPR?”
“Does NPR have fresh hot wings they’re willing to share?” Sitting down, Lucia opened up the box and presented it to Mindy like twenty-four karat gold.
“Not with present technology,” Mindy sighed.
Lucia cheered as she buckled her seatbelt. “This is gonna be just like Thelma & Louise!”
“They died. And I think almost got raped. And one of them was Susan Sarandon.”
“Okay, then it’s like The Heat. I’m Sandra Bullock,” Lucia added quickly.
“You don’t want to be Melissa McCarthy just a little?”
“I did until I watched Identity Thief. Then I wanted to die for a while, then I wanted to not be Melissa McCarthy. Or human.” Lucia picked up a leg and offered it to Mindy. “You drive, I’ll feed.”
Lucia was right about one thing, and it wasn’t Melissa McCarthy. Driving with her was a lot more fun than working alone. Usually, Mindy just let the road hypnotize her, getting to her destination in a haze of pizza smell and Top Forty hits, but with Lucia, she actually felt her neurons firing.
“No, what sucks about this town—besides the fact that we let a website pay us a couple million dollars to change the name of our shit to Carfax and then spent all the money on a new football stadium—is that it’s fucking hot. All the time. Other places have weather. Remember weather? Being a meteorologist here must be like getting sent to the gulag.”
Mindy laughed along with Lucia. “I think this place can’t decide if it’s a city or a town. I think we might have more deer per capita than people. Like a…like a tattoo on the forest, or something. Did they really have to build one shopping center, go two miles down the highway through nothing but grass and trees, then build a Blockbuster and go another mile for a Wal-Mart? I visited my grandparents in Cleveland. They can actually walk places. If you have two legs over there, you can get groceries, you can see a movie, you can get a dog. It’s like a superpower!”
She looked over to see if Lucia thought she was funny, but she was resting her head on the window, staring out at the dark pavement made darker by the setting sun. The cat’s eye highway markers were just starting to wink at her.
“I could take the heat,” she said, “if only there were something here. There’s nothing here once you scratch the surface. If you’re just passing through, it’s idyllic, but that’s just because people project—they see what they want to see. They make every generic small town into Gilmore Girls. But when you live here, it never stops being just…anonymous.”
Mindy saw the NOW BAKING sign in the pizzeria’s window coming up. It shot out light that dappled onto the scrubs and trees surrounding the place. “Hey, you’d better hide. There’s probably some BS corporate rule that says you can’t ride with me.”
Lucia ducked down into the footspace. “Okay. I’ll just stay here and eat your hot wings.”
“You paid for them. Hey, let me know next time you want something. I’ll give you a discount.”
“You spoil me.”
Mindy parked. As she left, she heard a canine whine as Lucia pouted and pawed at the window. She looked back briefly, but only to insist Lucia hide again.
“Sup.” Mindy clocked back into the computer, saw a new order was available across the bridge, and logged it out. Freddy, working oven, shoved the stack of pizzas into the bag she opened up for them.
“Go make some money.”
“Buckle up, drive safe,” the manager said as she breezed out the door.
She got to her car. Lucia pushed open the door from inside and made a little “ahhh…” expression when they came face to face. Mindy dumped the heat bag on her lap. “Here. Keep those warm. You’re the firecrotch here.”
“Anything else you need?” Lucia asked, batting her eyelashes.
“I suppose it’d save a little time if you typed the addresses into the GPS.” Mindy handed Lucia the receipt. “Top right corner. I already know that it’s up north, so that could get us into traffic earlier and whatever. Oh, and keep an eye on the GPS. It likes to slip out of the holder.”
“GPS…” Lucia muttered, looking at it as Mindy demonstrated how to punch in the address. It was a little Garmin the size of a notepad, stuck to the console’s AC vent by a set of claws that gripped the ventilation slits. Only it wasn’t very tight, so the GPS slid down with every button press. “Hey, would these help?”
Lucia turned two pegs on the bottom of the holder so that instead of being parallel with the holder, they stuck out and kept the GPS steady.
Mindy stared at it. “Either you’re a genius or I’m an idiot. I’m an idiot.”
“Does this have to be an either/or situation?” Lucia leaned over and kissed Mindy on the cheek. “C’mon, let’s go. My vag can feel the pizza getting cold.”
At the end of the night, Mindy counted out her tip money. She’d driven them home, it was raining, and they were taking their time before making the dash from the Taurus to their front doors. Most nights she made about fifty dollars. Tonight it was sixty-six. Mindy could only attribute it to Lucia being good luck. She peeled off a ten and a five and gave them to Lucia once she’d driven her home.
“I can’t take this,” Lucia said.
“You earned it. You helped fix the GPS and everything.”
“Oh, that’s how we’re going to remember it?” Lucia took the money. “You could at least put it in my G-string.”
“Like you’re wearing a G-string.”
“You’re right.” Lucia’s grin was feral. “I’m not.”
They ran t
o their houses, screaming and laughing as the rain drenched them well and good. Then they were inside, upstairs, and in their rooms to shower, dry off and put on warm clothes. The rain was coming down too hard to open the windows that bridged between them. Almost too hard to even see. But Mindy saw the message Lucia wrote in big bold letters on a piece of paper held up to the glass.
Sometimes I feel like you’re my only friend.
Mindy almost reached for her phone, but she quickly felt why Lucia hadn’t sent her a text. The words were too big to fit on a tiny electronic screen. So she dug through her closet, found a marker and the notebook-sized dry-erase board that her mom had used to assign the kids chores for six weeks one summer. Shortening Lucia’s name to something from childhood, she wrote out:
You have a lot of friends, El.
She held it up, but Lucia already had another piece of paper written out against the glass.
It would be okay if you were.
* * *
The next week, Mindy forwarded her new schedule to Lucia. Lucia wasn’t always waiting at her car when Mindy came out in her smart uniform, ready for a day’s deliveries, but she was there often enough for Mindy to get used to it.
Fun became novelty, routine, ritual, comfort. They talked about everything in that car, with the sole exception of Quentin.
Eventually, Dario brought up that a customer had mentioned Lucia to him. Mindy told him it was a friend of hers who wanted to know what it was like to work for Dario’s. She might apply someday. Dario nodded. Then he asked what Lucia liked on her pizza. He sent one home with them that night, free of charge. Lucia was grateful as hell. She was babysitting her brothers and hadn’t had a clue what to do for dinner.
* * *
The Taurus surged along the empty highway, up toward the bridge, a five-mile drive to the northern boundary of Dario’s delivery range. It was an unlucky order for Mindy to take—the northies tipped for shit and still expected their pizzas on time, as if they lived in civilization. But she didn’t mind, not with Lucia for company.
Ex-Wives of Dracula Page 4