Holly and Her Naughty eReader

by Julianne Spencer

  And under no circumstances could you bring any materials into the bathroom!

  But samples on the Kindle changed all of that. Long, free, try-before-you-buy, you own it and can take it to the bathroom if you want, samples. What an utterly brilliant invention. Not only do you get to read all your heart desires, but you get the joy of pushing a button and giving yourself a treat from Amazon whenever you want!

  What a joyous, wonderful thing is the Kindle!

  And mine was broken.

  “You look sad.”

  The words came from a girl whose voice I recognized right away, but whose body was wildly different from the one I remembered.

  “Moongirl?” I said.

  She laughed. “I go by my real name now,” she said.

  I looked at her for a second, my alcohol-soaked brain slow to process all the many thoughts it had to deal with.

  “Of course you go by your real name,” I said. “How are you Vivian?”

  Vivian Halloway, a girl who was on the edge of my circle of friends, but not quite inside it.

  “I’m great, Holly,” Vivian said. “How about you?”

  “I’m….fine,” I said. “How come this is the first time I’ve seen you tonight?”

  “I just got here,” Vivian said. “I have no patience for the beginnings of parties. I only do the ends.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. Spoken just like Moongirl.

  Vivian “Moongirl” Halloway was the most gothy of the goths in high school. Declaring herself a Wiccan at the beginning of sophomore year, and always coming back to class stoned after lunch, she bore only a passing resemblance to the beautiful woman who was talking to me now. In high school, Moongirl wore dark makeup and big boots, had a messy brillo pad of a hairdo, and always had a cigarette in her lips.

  But this woman in front of me wore a short, tightly-fitted black dress that showed off a fit and toned body, her hair was short and tame, and her makeup was light and cheery.

  “I like the way you think,” I said. “Maybe next time I’ll only show up for the end as well.”

  “So why are you sad, Holly?”

  “I’m not sad. It’s nothing,” I said.

  “See, but right there you’ve said two different things. First you said you’re not sad. Then you said it’s nothing. Which is it?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said.

  “Which means it’s something,” said Vivian. “Something has made you sad and you’re pretending it’s nothing. What is it?”

  “I feel like I’ve wasted the past ten years of my life,” I said.

  Vivian nodded, slowly. “I understand,” she said. “I think reunions can do that. People put on a show when they get here. They all want us to believe their lives are just awesome. Nobody has the courage to tell the truth and say they wished some things had turned out differently. And because everyone is playing this game, it escalates. People start trying to one-up each other with their awesomeness and you get a feedback loop.”

  She was making a circle in the air with her finger now.

  “It starts with a douche like Felipe Valdez exaggerating about how good his job is,” Vivian said, nodding in the direction of Felipe, who was dancing with his wife. “Then Darian hears Felipe bragging and thinks he needs to show off how cool he is, so he brings over the hot girl he started dating last month specifically so he could take her to the reunion. He’s gonna dump her tomorrow.”

  Looking at Darian, I heard the truth of Vivian’s words. Of course that babe who came with Darian was a ringer. In high school, Darian dated the valedictorian and the Korean exchange student. He wasn’t the type to get caught up with a bimbo.

  “Then Janelle feels threatened by how good Darian’s date looks, and she starts yammering incessantly about her children,” Vivian said.

  Now I was giggling. Janelle had indeed been showing off pictures of her kids all night long.

  “The one-upsmanship gets passed around like a virus,” Vivian said. “And here you are, thinking you were coming back to catch up with old friends only to find yourself contaminated with a severe infection of my-life-is-better-than-yours.”

  “Wow Vivian,” I said. “That’s…exactly right.”

  “You wanna get out of here?” Vivian said.

  “And go where?” I said.

  “I can think of a hundred places more fun than this one.”

  Chapter 3

  And thus it came to be that I left my 10-year-reunion in the passenger seat of Vivian Halloway’s Passat. Didn’t see that one coming.

  In high school, Vivian and her crew sat under the big oak tree at lunch and talked about how God was a great lie and our parents were all suckers for believing in him. As a band geek, I had my own group of friends who were mostly removed from Vivian’s crowd. However, Vivian and I did have a history, albeit a minor one. In the middle of junior year, Vivian had an ugly breakup with her long-time boyfriend Miles Murphy, and she underwent a dramatic and temporary transformation. Whereas some girls might choose to go goth after the breakup, Vivian did just the opposite. Miles was as ingrained in the leather boot and trench coat crowd as Vivian, and after their breakup, one of them needed to step away. Vivian decided it would be her.

  For two weeks, she came to school wearing sneakers, jeans, T-shirts, and no makeup, and during this time, for reasons I still don’t understand, I became her best pal. She took me to lunch every day and spilled her guts about Miles and the tragedy of their breakup. She even slept over at my house one night. We watched Say Anything, we painted each other’s nails, and we stayed up until four in the morning.

  The next week Vivian and Miles got back together and my brief spate as Vivian’s bestie came to an end.For the rest of my high school career, Vivian and I said hey when we passed in the halls, but nothing more.

  So it was kind of weird that she and I bailed on the reunion together, but here I was, cruising down Montgomery Boulevard at midnight on a Saturday with the windows down. I was looking out the moon roof of Moongirl’s car.

  “Do you remember freshman year, when Krissann and Marvin put on a one-act play they wrote?” I asked.

  “You mean the one where Krissann played a confused lesbian?”

  “Yes, that’s the one,” I said. Vivian was remembering the silliest part of the play, when Krissann, the prissiest girl in school, stood center stage and screamed, “I’m a god-damned filthy dyke!”

  “What about it?” said Vivian.

  I was looking at her. All that remained of Vivian the goth were two silver pentagrams that sat flat against her earlobes. Otherwise, she looked like the sort of power broker who worked downtown and had important meetings over lunch.

  “You sat next to me in the audience,” I said.

  “And I offered you a hit of acid,” Vivian said with a laugh. “Now I remember. Oh shit. I was such a pusher. I’m sorry about that.”

  “It’s alright,” I said. “You know, I sort of regretted saying no to you. It was the only time anyone ever offered me something like that.”

  “Are you asking me to go get us a score tonight?” Vivian said with a giggle.

  “No, no, of course not,” I said.

  “Wow…it’s been years since--”

  “I really don’t want to drop acid tonight,” I said. “I was just thinking about that play.”

  We drove in silence for a moment, then Vivian said, “I’m sorry things didn’t work out with your fiancée.”

  I should pause here to make note of another distinguishing characteristic of my generation. We are the first to have an utterly meaningless high school reunion—a fact that occurred to me with Vivian’s condolence for my breakup. It was only a few years ago that you could go to your high school reunion and actually, you know, reunite. Now, thanks to Facebook, we all know everything about everyone.

  A week after I found Derek in bed with…her…I changed my relationship status to single. Facebook, being evil, posted that status change to my page for me, and that was that. I go
t fifty little frowny faces mixed in with some oh no’s and some sorry sweetie’s in the comments of that status change, and I’m certain that day there were a hundred private Facebook chats among my friends where word got out of how it all went down.

  “Well…” I said, “that’s just…”

  I couldn’t finish my sentence because my mind drew up a fun fantasy that, being drunk, I had to indulge at that very moment. In this fantasy, I saw a picture of Derek and his little slut, caught together in bed, posted on Facebook. If I had been thinking clearly that day, I wouldn’t have wasted any time throwing the engagement ring at him. Instead I would have pulled out my phone and taken a picture.

  “That’s just life?” Vivian said. “Is that what you were going to say? Because that’s not just life. That’s crap is what that is. How long were you together?”

  There she went again. Vivian, asker of direct questions. Had she hit me with this when I was sober I might have shut it down and said there was no reason to talk about it, but the booze I’d downed at the reunion made me friendly and open.

  “Six years,” I said. “Derek and I were together for six years.”

  “And he cheated on you,” Vivian said.

  “Yep.”

  Vivian turned left onto San Mateo Boulevard.

  “Some men are just fuckers, you know?” she said.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “I mean…you gave him six years of your life,” Vivian said. “When he cheated, he wasn’t just disrespecting you as a person, he was disrespecting your time. For years you wait around for someone, and he knows you’re waiting on him, he’s stringing you along, acting like everything’s cool and all this waiting is worth your time, and all the while he’s doing someone else. It’s such shit.”

  “It sounds like you’ve got your own story to tell,” I said.

  “I’ve had a few men string me along,” said Vivian. “Nothing like your story, but enough to know how it works.”

  We drove a few blocks and she turned right on Central Avenue.

  “You’re not taking me downtown are you?” I said.

  “No, I’m not taking you downtown,” Vivian said. “I’m taking us downtown. And it’s gonna be a great time.”

  Twenty minutes later we were on Albuquerque’s little downtown party strip, where two adventurous ladies could hop between a dozen bars all within walking distance of each other.

  At the Anodyne we played pool with some hipsters. At Burt’s Tiki Lounge we had Mai Tai’s while some kids barely older than my students flirted with us. At The Launchpad we drank Cosmos and listened to some band called Dirty Carburetor (they were awful).

  Our final bar of the night was the Downtown Distillery, where we stumbled into a booth at 1:30 in the morning and ordered two beers. The music here was low enough that we could talk, and our conversation drifted back to my failed relationship with Derek. This time I gave Vivian the complete story, starting at the educator conference where I met him and continuing through his rise up the ranks of the Dallas Public Schools, from history teacher to assistant principle to city councilman.

  “It was all kind of thrilling,” I said, “and I was so sure he was the one. He was handsome and well-spoken and a gentleman and he treated me like his trophy wife. Once he won the council seat we started hanging out with all the local power players. We had lunch with the mayor, we played tennis with a news anchor and her husband, we went to black tie charity galas, and everybody treated me like a queen when they found out I was a high school teacher. To these people, I was everything that was right with the world. It really was a great time, and I was having so much fun I was totally oblivious to what was happening between Derek and Marianne.”

  “Ah, so now she has a name,” Vivian said. “Tell me more about Marianne. I can already tell she’s a world class bitch.”

  “Marianne was a volunteer on Derek’s city council campaign,” I said. “A nineteen-year-old volunteer.”

  Vivian shook her head in disgust.

  “And before she was a volunteer on Derek’s campaign, she was a student in his class,” I said.

  “No!” Vivian gasped. “He cheated on you with a student?”

  “A former student. She had Derek for U.S. history when she was a junior in high school. When I caught them naked in bed together, she was a freshman at U.T. Dallas.”

  “So she was legal,” said Vivian, clearly upset that I wasn’t able to catch Derek in an act of statutory rape.

  “Yep. Legal and hot and a total slut. I should be thankful, really. Were it not for Marianne, I would have married that prick.”

  “Well then,” said Vivian, raising her glass. “To Marianne, the slut who saved you.”

  “To Marianne,” I said, then downed the last drink of the night.

  Neither of us was in a condition to drive home, so we got in a cab at two in the morning.

  “You have any more party in you tonight, or are you done?” Vivian asked me as the cab drove east on Central.

  “Neither,” I said. “I want pancakes.”

  “Pancakes?”

  “I can’t help it. My friend Natalie always takes me to IHOP after a night drinking.”

  Vivian laughed. “Okay. But I can’t do IHOP. That place grosses me out.”

  “Village Inn?” I said.

  “No greasy spoons,” said Vivian. “If you want pancakes, you’re coming to my house and I’m making you some.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes! My sister brought me a gallon of maple syrup from Connecticut last month and I need an excuse to use it. Besides, there’s someone I want you to meet.”

  “Meet someone at your house? Vivian, it’s awfully late to--”

  “No more questions,” Vivian said. “You’ll see when you get there.”

  She had the cab driver take us to a one-story brick house in Albuquerque’s Southeast Heights. Vivian fumbled with her keys and dropped them twice before she was able to get the front door unlocked, and, drunk as we were, we thought this was the funniest thing ever.

  The giggle-fest continued as we stepped inside and Vivian knocked over a lamp and left us tripping over each other in the dark. By the time Vivian got a light on, I was sprawled on the carpet, laughing like a hyena. And then laughing like a quiet hyena. And then a quiet baby hyena. And then a sleeping baby hyena.

  Awww….I’m a little baby hyena.

  I woke up from my little hyena doze to see a man with curly black hair and a familiar face standing above me.

  “Viv? What’s going on?” he said. He was wearing Superman pajamas. Oh Lord can I tell you how thrilling it was for me to see him in Superman pajamas. “Who is…”

  He didn’t finish his last question because, even though I was on my back and making a total ass of myself, even though he hadn’t seen me for ten years, the man recognized me.

  “Holly, is that you?” the man said.

  I looked at him, wondering if that last drink had taken me too far and I was hallucinating. Even though I knew right away who this man was, it took me a minute to say anything. I had to be absolutely certain.

  So I stared at his face for a moment. I allowed it to age backwards in my mind, to shrink and unwrinkle and go back to the eighteen-year-old version that I remembered.

  Yep, it was him.

  “Max Brody,” I said. “How the hell are you?”

  Then I broke into a fit of laughter.

  Chapter 4

  Vivian helped me up from the ground, with all the tripping, dizziness, and giggling you’d expect from two gals in our state.

  “How much have you all had to drink?” Max said.

  “How many pancakes does it take to fill the Empire State Building?” was my response. It was a question I’d heard on the last day of spring semester. Two of my students were playing an oddly entertaining game where they had to ask each other obscure, random questions, as fast as they could. Other questions I remember hearing from that game were: Why do kids love cheap Easter crap? and What is
your second favorite kind of tree?

  The kids spat out the questions in rapid fire fashion, not taking any time to think, just saying the first random, odd thing that came to mind. It was a funny game, and I was in the mood for fun, so I spat out my own random question, this one directed at Max.

  “Why did you stand me up ten years ago?”

  Silence. Max looked at me with curiosity, like I was an animal at the zoo.

  “I’m sorry, what?” he said.

  “Pancakes!” Vivian said. “That’s why we’re here!”

  She went up to Max and put her hand on his chest. “You go back to bed. Sorry we woke you.”

  And then she kissed him on the lips.

  What the hell was going on? Max and Vivian were….how come I didn’t know about….

  “Max, I thought I saw on…”

  That was all I got out. Even inebriated, I knew better than to try and figure out what was happening right now. I was about to say to Max, I thought I saw on Facebook, cause you know, I profile stalk you plenty, that you married a black woman and had two cute little mixed race babies.

  But clearly whatever I thought was wrong. Not unless the guy who stood me up ten years ago was a polygamist in Superman pajamas and the black woman I thought was his wife was about to join us for pancakes and invite me to be Wife #3.

  “Holly, it was good to see you again. I assume you’ll be sleeping here tonight. Have Vivian show you where the bathroom is. Good night.”

  As Max left, I turned to Vivian and said in an obnoxiously loud whisper, “What the fuck was that all about?” which, in that moment, was the funniest thing I’d ever heard.

  It wasn’t until we were in the kitchen, with pancakes in our bellies and a mess of batter all over the stove and counter, that we were sober enough to work through what just happened.

  “Max just wrapped up a nasty divorce,” Vivian said. “Left him totally broke. I told him he could crash here until he was back on his feet.”