Lucia’s smiling face on the incoming call screen, right along her own, a selfie they’d taken. Mindy answered. “You know, before you, I never took a personal call on company time.”
“Company time?” Lucia scoffed. “They pay you minimum wage. They’re legally not allowed to pay you less.”
Not that Mindy wanted to hang up, but she didn’t want the call to be all her…blubbering over Lucia. “I’m driving.”
“So go slow,” Lucia said. “Are you almost off work?”
“Almost.” Mindy nodded, not that Lucia could see it. “I already did my deployment, I just had one last run—”
“Cool, cool. Listen, I am at a lake house on Lake Travis—”
“As opposed to a lake house on the set of Veronica Mars?”
“Oh, nice burn. Keep talking, bitch, see if I watch the next Hobbit movie with you.”
“But it’s gonna have the Battle of the Five Armies!” Mindy pouted, not that Lucia could see that either. Funny how just five minutes ago, that pout could’ve been real.
“We’re partying like it’s 2099. Get your ass over here, but before you leave work, use your employee discount, get us like ten pizzas, we’ll pay you back. Okay? Ten. Put whatever you want on them, but I’m trusting you not to get pineapple. Or olives. Hey, do people actually order olives on their pizza, or is that just like a way of secretly asking for drugs?”
“No olives, no pineapple. Got it. Wait, are you inviting me to your party?”
“Duh.”
“Well, do you have a dress for me to change into or—”
“Not that kind of party, Minz. There’s a guy here in jean shorts. It’s anarchy.”
Mindy hid her phone for a moment as a cop car passed her by. She kept it down until she hit a red light, then raised it quickly.
“—passed out already,” Lucia was saying.
“Listen, I’m not sure I wanna go to a party if it’s just you high school one-percenters and none of my friends are there.”
“You have friends? I’m jealous. I’ll be there, dum-dum. And so will a bunch of cute people. We’ll see if we can find you a boyfriend. Or whatever you’re into. There’ll be cheerleaders there. Don’t you wanna kiss a cheerleader? Know you do, slutty.”
Mindy was trying to parse this statement with Lucia being a cheerleader when her bestie followed up: “I’m gonna hang up now. I can’t text you the address and talk at the same time. If you’re not here in forty-five minutes, I’m gonna assume you pussied out.”
“You know, the vagina is actually, like, superstrong as an organ.”
“Goodbye, Mindy.”
“Love you,” Mindy said without thinking, at about the same time Lucia interjected, “No onions!”
What was wrong with her?
Twenty minutes later, she was at the store, and thanks to a quick game of phone tag, they were already taking her pizzas out of the oven when she got there. She got her money, loaded her pizzas up in the trunk, and was off, her hair blessedly free of the Dragon Pizza ball cap.
It was about a thirty minute drive to Lake Travis. The drive passed quickly. Breathlessly.
When she crossed the great gray bulk of Mansfield Dam, one of those eternal Texas sunsets had laid in. Like the sun was a quarter someone had flipped, and now it was spinning on the ground, not sure whether to come up heads or tails.
Lake Travis had changed since her girlhood visits with the folks. There was a parking garage now. And she was old enough to go to Hippie Hollow. Her actual destination, though, was a turn-off she’d never taken, circling the lake through a road lined with verdant trees to finally hit a sign that said Private Beach. There was a fence that looked like it could keep a rhino out, but it was swung open for the truck up ahead to jaunt along the semi-paved road. She followed it, grateful for the tour guide.
The pavement ended in a field of gritty rock. Several cars were already packed off to the side on the gray grass. The gravel led straight to the water, where it became a wind-worn boat ramp. Even with her windows mostly rolled up, Mindy could hear the party music blaring from a nearby pickup truck with roided-up speakers in its wide-bed. On the ramp, a two-engine racing boat was being filled with coolers, wake boards, and a few life vests as an afterthought. Next to it, jet skis were lowered from their trailers straight into the water.
That wasn’t Mindy’s destination, not according to Lucia. There was a car trail through the woods that looked like it had already been aggressively pummeled by trucks and jeeps, the tire treads well-worn in the dirt, and the tree branches and shrubs bent back and broken.
Slowing down, Mindy took the path, hoping her sedan could handle the twin ruts in the earth. What really worried her was the uncut section in the middle, with its much-abused grass. If the ruts dropped low enough for her undercarriage to hit— But the journey came off slick and smooth. Mindy went through the punched-out flora and found a nightclub had exploded in front of her. The party spilled out onto the big swath of pavement—the elite few cars there looked to be the football team’s, judging from their soaped-in messages from the rally girls: Go Dragons, Beat The Wolves. But they were parked off to the sides, letting the interior serve as an open-air dance floor where a storm of young, tanned flesh stretched all the way to the sandy white beach.
The trees were sparse near the water, dead and dying, but where the water had receded there were plants as green as jade. It was an open corridor between the dance and the parking lot Mindy had come from, the two mainly separated by a thin claw of rocky land leading out to the island. Mindy remembered it from childhood summers, the spit of rock in the middle of the lake accessible only by a hard swim. The hard drought exposed the ridge that connected it to the mainland—its bones poking through the watery skin like a sick farm animal.
A girl whose breasts could double as life preservers was jumping on a trampoline, with onlookers following the balls like they were at a tennis match. Another passel of wild bikini girls rollerbladed past Mindy. She dialed Lucia just as a couple pounced onto her hood, girl on top of the boy. They made out furiously. Mindy tried flashing her lights.
“Guys, you’re not making good choices!” she said, just before Lucia picked up. “Lucia?”
“Pizza!”
“Yeah. It’s pizza.” The couple had gotten to second base on her bumper. Mindy turned on her windshield wipers, with the fluid, but they were out of range. “Where are you?”
“I’m in the house! I’m waving at you!”
Mindy looked up. The mass of people tapered down the hill like an octopus tentacle extending from the lake house—its glass walls shining out light and pumping out music so all Mindy could see were darkly flaring shapes, the lightning inside a storm cloud. “I don’t see you.”
“I’m waving!”
Mindy plugged a finger into the ear that wasn’t against the phone so all she heard was Lucia’s voice. “No one’s waving.”
“Well, I’m waving. Come on, get up here.”
“The next season of 16 and Pregnant is gearing up on my car.”
“What?”
“If I were driving a Transformer, it could file a sexual harassment suit.”
Lucia started laughing—Mindy thought it was at something else—and the call got dropped a moment later. Bracing herself, Mindy locked all the doors and stepped out. It was like stepping out of the eye of the storm. Sound hit her in one great rush: music, dancing squeaking shoes, a thousand conversations like the hooves of a stampede, screaming boats out on the water, phones, lighters, kissing, fucking. A thousand people, all so desperate to prove they were alive that they’d cut their skin to watch themselves bleed.
Mindy wished she were one of them. But she slipped through the crowd feeling like a dog around a vacuum cleaner. This should be her idea of fun. Was fun. But something zigged in her head so she read cold as hot, this party as a dungeon.
With a combination of ducking, dodging, pushing, and unmeant apologies, she made her way up the impromptu obstacle course
of the casa’s stairway and onto the deck, where an entire wall opened into the house. It was slightly more sedate than the lower party. The music was a racing heartbeat in the background that broke against the house’s glass walls, no one dancing to it, just letting it animate them like thunder on the night of Dr. Frankenstein’s experiment. Everyone was smoking, drinking, kissing, chilling. Lucia was no exception.
She was sitting on a coffee table in True Religion denim shorts and a flower-print tanktop, it not covering her body so much as occasionally interrupting its flow. Top pulled up to her bra, bottoms unbuttoned and unzipped so Mindy could see the crease of her pelvis. She was a vision. Mindy almost couldn’t breathe, seeing her like that. There was usually a casualness to her sexuality; it wasn’t as direct as this. This was directed at her. Maybe at everyone else in the room, all her fawning worshippers, everyone who wanted to be or fuck her, but also at Mindy.
Her belly button was filled with tequila—lemon wedge in her mouth like the pin of a grenade. Quentin Morse…he of the square jaw, blond hair, blue eyes, all the necessary ingredients for an American Apparel model, or a Hitler Youth, poured salt on her breasts like it was money at a strip club, ran a trail of it down her stomach.
He knelt to her breasts, just missed them, licked the salt down to her belly button, drained the tequila like a tornado sucking up a pond, then went back up to get the lemon from her mouth. There wasn’t one part of her he’d leave untouched.
Injustice! The word shot through Mindy’s mind like the hook to a song she couldn’t remember the rest of. She was hungry, starving, and someone was eating a banquet in front of her.
Lucia kissed him, let herself be kissed, it didn’t matter, until she pushed him away to collect a shot glass from a nearby tray. Seeing Mindy, she grabbed another. Attention sloughed off her as she ran to Mindy; the new center of attention was someone doing a keg stand.
“Hey! Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey! Hey! Heeey!”
“Hey,” Mindy replied.
“I waved at you!” Lucia said enthusiastically, demonstrating by flopping her right arm from side to side and spilling most of the tequila from the shot glass.
“I’m sure you did.” Mindy tried not to sound judgmental. It was hard when she felt like such a bitch. “Are you high?”
“Noooo! No, no, Mindy, no. I’m drunk!” Lucia passed the empty shot glass to Mindy, carefully closing her fingers around it. “There’s a difference, ya know!”
“I think you’ve had—” Lucia knocked back the shot glass like it was a Flintstones vitamin. “I think you’ve had enough and then a shot.”
“I’m not drunk!”
“You literally just said you were drunk.”
“You want me to do a tuck check?”
Lucia turned, scouring the crowded room until she saw Pammy Dupree grinding on a guy. “Hey! Hey, Pammy! Tuck check!”
“Tuck check!” Pammy confirmed, elbowing clear of the guy, conversations breaking up as people cleared a circle around her. Then she did a standing backflip, making a neat roll in the air before coming down on her feet.
“Cheer, cheer, show no fear!” Lucia chanted, shoving Mindy back before doing her own 360. Even the sound of her feet hitting the floor was pitch-perfect. “Hey! Hey!”
Not this again. Mindy said, “How many drinks have you had?”
Lucia counted on her hands. Thumb, pointer finger, middle finger—which she then turned around, aimed at Mindy. Lucia broke out into gales of laughter, clapping her hands, with riotous applause coming from a few onlookers as well. Then she straightened so fast, she might’ve taken an electric shock. “How many shots are in a drink?”
Mindy tried very hard to hold in a sigh. “You told me you’d pay for the pizzas?”
“Huh? Yeah, yeah, currency.” Lucia clenched her hands together, which seemed to help her stay upright. “I put it—I put it—I didn’t want it to get lost, so I put it—microwave!”
Lucia shoved the other empty shot glass into Mindy’s hands, then pulled her by the wrist into the kitchen. Like the other room, it was a tile floor with thick walls and little else. That room had some furniture, this room had metal appliances, but just a few. At the exterior wall, a guy was mooning the dance party below. Only from the way he was resting on his shoulders and knees with his ass in the air, he’d passed out before the moon could wane.
Giggling her little heart out, Lucia opened the microwave to reveal an upside-down cowboy hat, stuffed to the brim with dollar bills. Some ancient and wrinkled, some so new Mindy was surprised they didn’t have Hillary Clinton’s portrait on them.
“Here! Here, here, here!” Lucia said excitedly, proudly presenting the hat to Mindy. With a huffed breath, Mindy took it, set it on the counter, and started counting it out.
No sooner had she turned her back on Lucia then she came up and tickled her ribs. Mindy stopped trying to hold in her sigh.
“Would you quit it?” Mindy demanded. “God…”
“It’s a party, Minz. Lighten up.” Sobering up, or doing a good impression of it, Lucia heaved herself onto the kitchen island to play with a dangling set of cooking knives. She chuckled to herself, then reached out to prod Mindy with her toe. “Sorry, my friends are poor. And you can kick in the last five yourself, right? You’re eating too!”
“It’s fine. I’m fine. We’re all…” Putting a pause on the count, Mindy turned over the hat. A small avalanche of coins poured out onto the counter. Some quarters. Mostly not. “Yup.” She gave up on the counting, turning to Lucia, who preened. “So where the hell are we, anyway? We’re not just breaking into someone’s house cuz they’re gone for the weekend, are we? Because this is Texas. You get shot for that.”
Lucia waved her hand like she was bitch-slapping that idea away. “It’s Coach’s vacation home. He lets the football team use it if they make a three-point shot with the puck or whatever. Oh!” She slapped her forehead. “That’s why I wanted you up here! Rules! Like, don’t break shit.”
Mindy had turned away from her to count out the money. “Really? I thought he was cool.”
“You can’t break shit!” Lucia insisted, missing her sarcasm. “And food stays in the house so you can put the dishes in the sink and the trash in the…the…the…”
“Trash cans?”
“That! Oh, and don’t go into the basement.”
“Why, what’s down there?”
“I assume porn.”
With a noise that made Mindy jump, Quentin careened into the room. The front of his shirt was stained and stunk of beer. After a kiss somewhere nonspecific on Lucia’s head, he went to the stainless steel sink to wash himself off. The process involved stripping his shirt off and watering it under the tap. “Hey, L, where’s the pizza? Beef’s getting hungry.”
“Mindy’s got it,” Lucia promised him. She clapped her hands. “Mindy! Keys! Pizza’s getting cold.”
A bit nonplussed, Mindy slid her keys down the counter to Lucia. Lucia collected them and bobbed into the other room. Through the glass wall that separated the kitchen from the dining room, Mindy saw Lucia be picked up by a quartet of beefy quarterbacks and borne outside like the priestess of some native religion.
Behind her, Quentin twisted the water out of his shirt. “So hey, I hear you’re bi-curious or whatever.”
It was amazing how you could be a person with thoughts and dreams and favorite Phish songs one moment, then the next, you were an animal caught in the headlights.
“Who told you that?” Mindy asked. Her voice sounded very steady to her.
“Hell, you know—saw it next to a dick on the bathroom wall. So, how about it?”
“How about what?”
“You have a…” Quentin lost his train of thought. He was soused, but able to hold his liquor. Out of the corner of her eye, Mindy could see him wincing in blitzed thought. He smiled as he got it, “A lick-her license?”
“No.” Mindy turned around, faced him, dared him to say differently. The setting sun glinted off the co
oking knives and into her eyes as she turned. No more than your girlfriend does.
She stared at him. He was so handsome, so smiley—muscles. Everything a girl could want in a guy. He twisted a little more water from his shirt into the sink. “That’s cool. If you were, you know… A lot of these girls, they get drunk, they want some attention, you could probably get to second base. They’re not, uh, lezbos—is that offensive?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Quentin’s train was already barreling forward. “They’re straight, but, you know. Wouldn’t surprise me if that rumor about you got started by a real Lebanese, lesbian,” he corrected himself. “Trying to turn you, maybe. You hear about that? Lesbians trying to convert straight girls. Like Mormons.”
“Just like Mormons,” Mindy said. She could feel a bead of sweat dragging between her shoulder blades.
“But I get it. You girls with the push-up bras and the dresses and the high heels—normal girls, I mean. Like Lucia. Of course, if you’re into chicks, you’d be into that. But some of these lezbos,” He hit the word harsh, knowingly. Offensive. “They dress up with the suits, the business suits…short haircuts…shave their heads. That I don’t get. If you’re into women, how come you go for women that look like men?”
“I guess,” Mindy’s mouth was dry, “they’re attracted to the lady and not to her hair.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He nodded, almost to himself.
“Hey, what’s the Wi-Fi password for this place?” Mindy asked him.
That’s when Lucia and her jocks returned like a Viking longboat laden with spoils of war, piled high with pizza boxes. Lucia wrestled around a small mountain of breadsticks.
As soon as they were inside, they were set upon by the party mob. They couldn’t defend a single slice. Boxes were ripped open—pulled apart like a black guy on The Walking Dead—a veggie pizza fell to the floor and was trampled underfoot. Mindy winced. What a senseless waste of mozzarella. Between the mob and the floor, Lucia lost her breadsticks, but she was able to beat everyone back with one last, steaming-hot box. She got to Mindy, shadowed by an orgy of finger-licking, lip-smacking Italian cooking. “Hey! Ask me how many drinks I’ve had!”
Ex-Wives of Dracula Page 7