Once I’ve ordered and received my slice, I take a bite of the deep dish and end up liking the gooey cheese more than I thought I would. As I stand there eating, hoping he’ll show up, I have a chance to check out the crowd. And boy am I sorry I looked. Two men in line for pizza appear to be snorting cocaine. A guy eating a slice of pizza is wearing a Speedo—and only a Speedo.
A young couple is making out. They kiss the entire time we’re eating our pizza. What’s the world record for kissing? When they finally pull away from each other for a break, Sierra starts cheering and we join in. The drunk couple appears confused by our applause, but then they start laughing and take a bow.
I’m cracking up, but I’m envious at how comfortable they seem with each other. I did miss out on kissing T.J. I can’t believe I lost him before I had a chance to start a hot summer fling like in a rom-com. Sigh.
“I really thought T.J. might show up here,” I say.
“I have an idea!” Sierra begins tapping on her phone. She pulls up a photo of T.J. and me from earlier. I didn’t even know she had taken a picture. Sierra must’ve snapped it while we were waiting in line to get into the concert.
In the photo, the sky behind us is a soft pink and purple, a cotton candy swirl. I’m pushing my hair behind an ear and smiling down at the ground. My glasses are embarrassingly perched on the tip of my nose. Still, T.J. is gazing at me like I’m made of gold.
My stomach leaps into my throat.
Megan peeks around Sierra’s other shoulder. “Oh, Mari, he’s hot. You guys are so cute together. You’re my life goals.”
“Life goals? Like, making enough money to go on tropical vacations?”
“You know, life goals,” Megan says, looking from me to Sierra. “Finding true love.”
True love? I’d only met T.J. about twenty minutes before that picture was taken. Besides, while my life goals do include kissing and hopefully not dying a virgin, they don’t include finding true love. That sounds like something out of a fairy tale, not real life. When I think about couples from school—even the ones I swore would be together forever, nearly all of them break up at some point or another.
The idea of love only goes so far.
Sierra smiles sideways at me. “Okay, you guys. Get ready to retweet me.”
She opens Twitter, uploads the picture, and types: At #Lollapalooza tonight with my sister Mari who met T.J. earlier but lost him in the crowd. Anybody know him? Help us find him! #WhenMariMetTJ #FindTJforMariPleeeeeease
All the girls take out their phones and retweet the post.
On my own screen, I stare at the picture again. It’s kind of hard not to. I can’t get over how deeply T.J. is gazing at me, how happy I look. The photo feels like hope on Christmas morning, when you wake up and rush to unwrap presents under the tree, searching for the gift you wanted most. My skin flushes with desire. I can’t believe I missed out on the chance to make out with him.
I’m here all weekend. If only I can find him…
I doubt any of my Twitter followers will be linked to T.J.’s life, but it’s worth a shot. I push the retweet button in hopes someone will see it and connect us.
Our group decides to go back to the Shawn Mendes concert while waiting to see if the tweet works. One of Sierra’s friends who has a fake ID passes a couple of beers around and we take sips, laughing.
As we’re dancing, Sierra flicks her phone screen on. “I’ve already got three hundred retweets! Of course my most popular tweet ever wouldn’t even be about my own love life,” she pouts.
I nudge her. “Hey, you could’ve gone for it. You’re the one who forced me to sit beside him in the car.”
She blows me an air kiss. “You love me.”
“I do.”
Sierra leans against me sideways. “I wish you’d come visit more often… I missed you.”
Her words bring tears to my eyes. Even though we text all the time, this is only the third time I’ve ever hung out with Sierra. I came for Dad’s wedding to his new wife two years ago and then once last summer to visit. Meanwhile, he’s never come back to visit me.
“It’s hard,” I tell my stepsister. “It makes my mom sad when I come here—she gets jealous if I’m with y’all.”
“That really sucks.” Sierra stops dancing and slips her arm into mine, walking me farther away from the music so we can talk.
“I feel caught between my parents,” I tell her. “Mom didn’t want me to come this weekend. She, like, screamed and cried at me, and begged me not to come.”
Sierra’s eyebrows furrow. “Have you told David any of this? He thinks you just don’t want to visit.”
“I want to visit you,” I say. But my dad? My feelings are complicated. I love him—I like him even, but I hate what he did. It’s hard to get past that. I don’t know if I ever will.
“He hasn’t even made an effort to come see me,” I start, “and I’m the one who has to live with my mom. She’s always so angry.” Purple and green lights from the stage illuminate Sierra’s face. She’s watching me closely as I talk over the loud music. “Mom is going to freak out when I get home, and Dad won’t have to deal with any of it because he’s gone.”
I wish I were gone from Tennessee, too, but I have an entire year before college. I’ve been giving thought to the University of Chicago, because it has a great physics program, it’s close to Sierra, and like I said, I love this city.
I go back and forth on whether I should ask Dad if I could live with him while I’m in school, to save money on a dorm. But it would make things worse with Mom. Dad already left her. If I left, too, and came here to college and lived with Dad, would she lose it?
I bet she would.
A big part of me wants to ask Dad if I can move to Chicago now, to get away from Mom and her temper. Nobody knows how bad things get sometimes.
I stare down at my phone, flicking through my notifications to make sure I haven’t missed any texts. “Mom hasn’t even checked to make sure I arrived safely. She must be super pissed at me.”
Sierra looks taken aback. “My mom’s already texted me four times since we’ve arrived at this concert.”
“Well, your mom is normal,” I snap, then immediately regret my tone. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize to me. We’re family.”
Family. It’s so nice to have someone in my corner.
When I was little I thought family meant a group of people with an unbreakable bond. People who would be there, no matter what. Family came together, so it would stay together. So fucking naïve.
I worried my coming here would send Mom into an emotional tailspin, like the time she flipped out when Leah and Sierra sent me a new jacket for Christmas. A jacket Mom can’t afford. When I opened the package and squealed with happiness, she ripped the jacket out of my hand and threw it on the floor, with no regard for my happiness or consideration for Leah and Sierra’s kindness. I understood why she felt so hurt and upset, but that didn’t make her actions okay.
That was the worst Christmas Eve ever.
The entire night, I kept picturing Dad with his new family, sitting around the Christmas tree, eating cookies and listening to music, while I was listening to Mom scream and cry about how she didn’t want to be alive anymore.
It scared me so much, I called my aunt Gina to come over and help, but that pissed Mom off even more. She saw what I did as a betrayal. She didn’t want anyone—not even her sister—to see her at such a low point.
Aunt Gina convinced Mom to try therapy. She went once, but never again. Mom said she didn’t need therapy, and she couldn’t risk her women’s church group finding out about it. She forbade me from ever calling her sister again either.
The fallout from this trip to Chicago has the potential to be equally as terrible as that Christmas Eve—what if Mom says she wants to die again?
&n
bsp; But I need to see Millie Jade sing in person. Seeing her will help me sort my life out. Put things into perspective. Maybe even help me figure out my destiny.
“Thanks again for inviting me,” I tell Sierra. “I never would’ve thought to try to see Millie Jade in person.”
She pats my hand. “You should do things for yourself like this more often.”
“That’s hard when I feel like the only adult… Dad wants stuff from me. Mom wants stuff from me. And then they get pissed when I agree with the other. It’s still hard to believe they got divorced. I never saw it coming.”
It’s not something I like thinking about. Back when I was eleven, Mom got pregnant with a baby boy, but she ended up losing him at six months. It devastated her. After that, Mom couldn’t get close to Dad again. It was like something snapped in her. She didn’t want him touching her. Not even a hug. She could barely look at him.
Since she wouldn’t let Dad touch her, they drifted apart. Even though they were still together, living together physically, Dad had moved on mentally. But he should’ve tried to help more—offered to get counseling. Asked for help at our church. Anything. Instead he retreated inside himself, just like Mom did.
He ended up meeting Leah online a couple years later. I remember screaming at him, I was so pissed that he met someone on the internet. In a Marvel fansite, of all places. And worse, he cheated on Mom with her. He said he’d done it because he was lonely and needed someone to talk to.
Next thing I knew, he’d decided to leave Tennessee and move to Chicago.
It’s hard not to resent both of my parents, but like I said, I’m the adult here.
* * *
“Mari, there’s a bunch of responses to Sierra’s tweet!”
Megan rushes over to us, her thumb scrolling on her phone.
I pull up Twitter on my screen, praying someone’s tagged T.J. so we can find each other. My smile melts as I sort through the responses. Some of them are totally mean.
One random lady wrote: Forget Mari, come find me TJ! She’s a 6, you a 10.
Another person tweeted: Think I saw him in Times Square. Better hurry there quick!
How stupid. We’re in Chicago, not New York. A bunch of people have already written back to that commenter, telling them what’s what.
But there are fun responses too:
Hope you find each other!
So cute. Fingers crossed you find him! I can tell TJ’s in lovvveee! #WhenMariMetTJ
Love? I examine the look on T.J.’s face in the picture. He does seem into me—maybe more into me than I am to him. There’s lust, maybe. But love? This weekend is supposed to be fun and simple. Love is messy and complicated and unnecessary.
Why do you need another person to be happy?
T.J.
With no sign of Mari, I’m not sure what else to do besides try to enjoy the concert.
We head back to Tito’s, where the crowd has started the biggest mosh pit I’ve ever seen. After getting caught in that mosh pit earlier, the idea of being smashed between all those people freaks me out, so we stay toward the back where we can still hear the music and dance.
My brother sneaks me a beer. “I’m glad you came out with us. We’ll have to hang out when you move here for college.”
I nod with a smile and sip from my plastic cup. The beer tastes bitter, but also cool and crisp in this billion-degree weather. I could get used to this.
Tyler leans near my ear and says over the music, “Try to have fun tonight, okay?”
My brother’s four years older than me, so we’ve never been particularly close. He was always ahead of me. I was playing T-ball when he was a Little League star. When I was in middle school, he was preparing to graduate from high school and leave home.
Sure, we played video games a lot growing up and fought over the last piece of bread at the supper table, but not much beyond that. We didn’t go to the movies or hang out with our friends together. We were too far apart.
It means a lot he’s willing to see me as an equal now, as someone worthy of hanging out with. He invited me to this concert because he wanted to spend time with me. Yeah, I want to find Mari, but I also don’t want to be the shitty one who whines throughout the whole concert about a girl.
As Tyler and Chris approach a group of girls, I want to stand with Mike, who’s more focused on the music, probably because he has a girlfriend. But one of the girls is looking over at me expectantly. My brother beckons me to stand next to him. Tyler’s never going to ask me to go out again if I mope around.
With a deep breath, I scrub a hand through my hair and move to his side.
A small blond with a pixie cut gives me a coy smile as she sips from her beer.
Chris leans around the back of Tyler to talk to me. “Man, you gotta go for it with this one. She’s into you.”
Is Chris right? Should I pick somebody random and just do it already? I’m sick of getting myself off.
Before I can even say hi to the girl who’s supposedly into me, things around me begin to escalate. It’s like I suddenly entered a raunchy nightclub.
This one lady starts doing these dirty grinding moves against Tyler. He seems really into it. Jesus. No one wants to see their brother practically making a fully clothed porno.
At the same time, another woman pours alcohol on her chest and Chris does a body shot off her skin. Then Tyler rips off his shirt, screams “Wooo!”, pours beer on his own chest, and two girls do body shots off him.
Mike is recording the whole thing on his phone while laughing his ass off. Being totally nosy, I watch as he posts the video to IG, tagging two handles I don’t recognize. One of the handles is @ChrisdaLadiesMan, and the other is @T-Bonezzz.
T-Bonezzz?
Does Tyler have a secret IG account?
His Instagram, the one I follow, is a bunch of pictures of him looking important wearing a suit, going to Cubs games, lifting weights, and petting our dog. There certainly aren’t any videos of him doing body shots. I mean, I can understand why. Can you get a job at a hedge fund if you call yourself T-Bonezzz, chug beer, and do the Running Man dance while people cheer you on?
I don’t even want to know what T-Bonezzz means.
I’m not going to do body shots or dirty dance, but I guess I can talk to this girl. It’s the polite thing to do, even though I’d rather be talking to Mari.
I stick out my hand to the blond with the pixie cut. “Hi, I’m T.J.”
“I’m Dawn.”
* * *
I’m trying to pay attention to Dawn, the girl I just met, but that’s impossible when your brother has started a drunken conga line.
A. Drunken. Conga. Line.
The last time I saw a conga line was at my cousin Joel’s wedding when I was in eighth grade. Grandma Pat started a conga line and everybody above the age of thirty joined in. Meanwhile, Tyler led a group of older kids out onto the deck to drink the bottles of wine he had nicked. I spied on them and listened as they made fun of the adults for doing the conga.
And now he’s doing it himself? He claps his hands above his head and turns in a wide circle, and his entire conga line of like twenty people copies him.
Only Tyler could make the conga seem cool.
“Where are you from?” I shout to Dawn over the music.
“Here!” She starts to dance with me, and I try—I really do, but I feel like my arms are moving like an octopus’s tentacles. I hope nobody’s watching me. Why can’t I just act normal? Why can’t I dance with her like I did with Mari earlier? I try to replicate the moves I did with my hips before. This time, I probably look like one of those flailing tube man balloons at a used car dealership.
Dawn gives me a weird look. Without a word, she moves on to another guy in the crowd, dancing uninhibitedly like no one is watching.
My face burns in embarrassment
. Yeah, I wasn’t all that interested in her, but I didn’t expect her to ditch me a few lines into a song. Why do I always screw up with girls?
Tyler breaks from his line and congas over to me. “What happened? Where’d she go?”
“I guess I suck at dancing.”
My brother lifts an eyebrow. “You’re a Clark. You were born to dance!” He pats my chest. “Have confidence, Teej.”
Tyler has been saying that a lot lately. But saying it doesn’t seem to do shit. I still feel like the same person. The same weak guy who let go tonight when Mari was ripped out of my arms.
With my beer in hand, I walk back over to where Mike is standing listening to the music. We sing along to the song together. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Dawn approach my brother to dance. I gasp.
He shakes his head hard at her, then turns around and ignores her.
I’m glad he said no, but I hate always being an afterthought. With him as a big brother, how could I be anything but?
* * *
Tyler is double fisting two beers. He hands one to me.
“I had the best idea while I was waiting in line,” he says, taking a long sip from his cup.
I drink too. The crisp taste is really growing on me. “What’s your idea?”
He throws his free arm around my shoulders. “Let’s get tattoos.”
For once, that’s something Tyler and I agree on. “Yes, we should get tattoos.”
“That’s what I was thinking! Tattoos.”
I crack up. “You’re the one who brought it up, man.” Drunk Tyler is also a hilarious Tyler. “What kind of tattoo do you want?”
“A hula girl.” He points at his forearm with his beer cup. “Right here. That would look so legit at the gym. You can get one too.”
“Not a hula girl.” I’m opening my mouth to tell Tyler about my tattoo design I came up with, wondering if he’ll approve, when my smartwatch buzzes on my wrist. A text from my best friend, Ethan, lights up the screen:
Who is she?!
I pull my phone from my pocket to reply one-handed.
The Pick-Up Page 5