Who's That Girl

by Blair Thornburgh

  I caught up with her just as she stepped out onto the street, where I was struck instantly by competing odors of Lysol, pizza, and bus exhaust.

  “This is great,” Tess said.

  “If you say so,” I said.

  “New York!” Tess yelled.

  “Uh, Tess . . . ,” I said.

  “Shut up, lady!” some guy passing us said.

  Tess shrugged, as if strangers told her to shut up all the time, and jerked her head to the left.

  “This way. Come on.”

  I followed obediently, picking my way past soggy newspapers and what looked like an entire carton of french fries spilled on the sidewalk. Even though I’d grown up in the suburbs, I’d spent a decent amount of time in Center City Philadelphia, and I’d always thought I liked the slightly gritty character of cityscapes. But the shiny skyscrapers of Walnut Street and the colonial-age buildings around the Liberty Bell looked like a model train set compared to New York, where everything seemed to be squat, dirty, and crowded, with stores selling anything from sunglasses to sandwiches spilling their wares out into the path of pedestrians who all seemed to look angry at just having to exist. For the rest of the ten-minute walk, I tried to strike a balance between clutching my tote bag to my side and not looking like I was clutching whatsoever. And trying not to look so pale, if that was even possible.

  “Here,” Tess declared, yanking my wrist and pulling me across a crosswalk mere seconds before a taxi whizzed into our path.

  “Asshole,” she called after him, and then turned to me.

  “Ta-da! Vintage heaven. Weirdos galore. I guarantee you that none of those prepster prom queens in Wister will have duds like these.”

  The mannequin in the store nearest us was wearing a curly blue wig and a fishnet bodysuit.

  “To say the least,” I said.

  We picked through that store, which turned out to be mostly novelty costumes that were mostly really skimpy, and then the next one, which was all real vintage stuff with designer labels, where Tess insisted on trying on a fur stole, complete with dead mink head at one end, until she noticed it cost six hundred dollars.

  “We’ll have better luck here,” she said, picking another store at random and charging in.

  Surprisingly, we did. Despite a square footage rivaling that of the yurt, the place was jam-packed with all kinds of awesome stuff: sequins and shoulder pads and taffeta in tropical colors.

  “This is amazing,” Tess said. She’d found an old 1940s-style suit with a neat little blazer and skirt. “Check it out. It’s like a flight attendant became a dominatrix, or vice versa.”

  “Cool.” I was more into the place’s business cards, which had nifty scalloped edges and read “Va-Voom Vintage” in sparkly letters. I slipped two into my pocket as souvenirs.

  “Freaking fantastic.” She yanked something spangly off the hangers and shoved it into my hands. “Here. You try this.”

  I obeyed, and two minutes and a lot of struggling with zippers later, I had on a blue-green gown that pinned my legs together and rustled when I walked.

  “It’s great,” Tess said. “You look killer.”

  “I look like a landlocked mermaid,” I said, examining my butt in the mirror. “And I can’t walk.”

  “Beauty is pain,” Tess said. “You have to get it.”

  She brushed her palms over the front of her skirt. The girl behind the counter, who had cool rockabilly bangs and lipstick to rival Tess’s, paused in the middle of filing a boxful of receipts to give Tess a short nod of approval.

  “Looks pretty good,” she said.

  “Oh,” Tess said. “Yeah. Thanks.”

  The girl went back to her receipts, and Tess slumped.

  “Well, there goes this outfit.” She started shoving off the blazer.

  “What?” I said. “Why? I thought you liked it.”

  Tess stopped, one arm still in the jacket. “Yeah, because it screams girl-on-girl. Ten bucks says Bye Bye Birdie over there is writing down her phone number so she can ask me to a sock hop later.”

  I glanced over at the counter, where the shopgirl was indeed writing something down.

  “I thought the whole point of this dance was being ourselves,” I said.

  “Not anymore,” Tess said, yanking at the zipper. “The point of this dance is for everyone else to be themselves. The point of this dance for me is to not terrify my parents when I tell them where all my savings went. I need to look like Tess Kozlowski, all-American girl. Not Tess Kozlowski, radical and attention-seeking cliché.”

  “But . . .” I shuffled around in my mermaid dress. “Isn’t that—”

  “And now I have this whole stupid A Cappella party to compete with,” Tess went on. “We’re losing our chance to reach new people because they’re afraid we’re changing things too much. And I can’t let that happen. I have to show them. I have to . . .” She sighed. “It’s complicated, okay, Nattie? And it’s my life, and it’s my decision.” She looked at my outfit and jerked her head at the cash register. “Get changed and pay and we’ll go.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not buying this.”

  “What? But it’s so seductive.”

  “I don’t want to be seductive!” I put my hands on my hips, which was not easy given my current constricted state. “I want something . . . I don’t know.”

  I waddled back to the racks of clothes. What did I want? My usual fashion prerogative of don’t look weird didn’t really work in formalwear situations. I couldn’t just fall back on jeans and a T-shirt. For this dance, I’d actually have to commit to a look. And seductive was not it.

  I pushed dresses aside. Nothing sparkly. Nothing with a plunging neckline. Just something ordinary, but pretty. Something Nattie-y. Something like . . .

  “Oh.” I stopped pushing. “I like this.”

  Tess appeared over my shoulder. “What? But it’s yellow.”

  “So what?” Carefully, I dislodged a bunch of banana-colored taffeta from the rack and held it to my shoulders.

  “So you can’t wear yellow with red hair,” Tess said. “You’ll look like a stoplight.”

  But I wasn’t listening. The color was more gold than canary, with elbow-length sleeves and a high-cut bodice, and the skirt poofed more than flowed. It just looked nice, like a grown-up version of the party dresses you wore as a kid, or the sort of thing you’d see in the dance from Back to the Future. Classic high-school formal wear. Not seductive in the least.

  “I’m trying it on.”

  Inside the dressing stall, I pulled it on and tugged it into place on top of my hips, doing a few seconds of awkward back-and-forth for the zipper before I came outside for help.

  “Zip me?”

  Tess obliged, then steered me in front of the scarf-draped mirror, squinting like the color clash was going to burn her eyes, but I didn’t care. It was perfect.

  “Well, at least it’s only thirty bucks,” Tess said, ignoring the zipper and going straight for the tag in my armpit. “Which means you can totally go for something for tonight, too.”

  Right. For some reason, the dress had made me forget the actual reason we’d gone to New York. The one that involved confronting Sebastian and, apparently, a different wardrobe. I stepped back into the changing room and began to shimmy out of the dress.

  “How do you feel about backless tops?” Tess’s voice came from outside.

  “How does it stay on?”

  “Okay, mostly backless.”

  I folded the yellow dress with a sigh and gave it a fond little pat.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Somehow, “thinking about it” turned into “actually purchasing it,” and so I ended up with my first mostly backless top. It was only twenty bucks, which seemed an order of magnitude less than what I’d expected clothes to cost in New York, and something about being out in a big city, unsupervised, made me feel okay with making spontaneous sartorial decisions. Tess, on the other hand, rejected the rest of everything we foun
d: too old, too new, too expensive, too polyester, too eerily similar to something her mom had definitely worn in the nineties. After a brief pause for black coffee—“sorry, that’s all we have”—in a wood-paneled place that was about the size of the Moonpenny’s bathroom, Tess declared the shopping portion of the day over and led me to the subway once again.

  Forty minutes later, we emerged from the ground in what was presumably Brooklyn, and followed Tess’s phone to where Bethany West lived. I’d only met Zach’s sister a few times before—school potlucks, occasionally glimpsing her when she was home from college—so I really only knew things about her I’d absorbed by osmosis. She was twenty-five, a grad student in psychology, lived in New York Actual City, and yet was somehow still willing to put up two of her little brother’s friends for a night.

  “I’m sorry I have to just . . . leave you guys here.” Bethany yanked off her chunky orange scarf and dropped her backpack to the ground with a single, swift thud. After clomping up five flights of stairs, Tess and I had taken a seat at Bethany’s postage stamp of a table, which was in the middle of the kitchen-slash-dining-room-slash-living-room. The apartment itself was on the sixth floor of a brownstone, in a neighborhood that was less like the mess of Manhattan and more like the area around Zach’s house: residential and even a little calm.

  Bethany pulled off her jacket and boots in quick succession and then tramped off back down a narrow hallway.

  “It’s just that I’ve got the first shift at the restaurant, and I got out of class late, so I’m basically only coming home to ditch one set of clothes and put on another before I hop back on the train to SoHo.”

  She reappeared, clothed in head-to-toe black and winding an elastic around the tail of a hasty blond braid. She looked a lot like Zach, too, right down to the blue eyes. Which made sense, of course, but also made me feel another twinge of guilt.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Tess said quickly. “I mean, you’re doing us a huge favor by putting us up for the night, considering you, ah, barely know us.”

  Bethany paused, shrugged, and then went back to pulling her boots on. “You’re Zach’s best friends. He’s told me all about you.”

  “He has?” I said, my voice suddenly asserting itself.

  “Oh yeah. Tess is the one who runs the club with all the letters—sorry, I can’t remember them, I know that’s a big deal—”

  “Not at all,” Tess said, and sounded like she meant it even though I knew it was.

  “And Nattie’s the one he likes . . .” Bethany stopped, midzip in replacing her coat, and did a microcough.

  “To talk to,” she finished. “Likes to talk to.”

  Oh. Huh. I’d thought she’d go with Nattie’s the one who makes fun of his ex-girlfriend and whines every time she comes over to bake, but this was fine, too.

  “Well, it’s still awesome of you,” Tess cut in.

  “Like I said, no problem. My roommate’s back in Cleveland for Thanksgiving, and she said you guys are welcome to crash on her bed. Our couch is kind of Tuna’s home base, so . . .” She waved at hand at the “living” portion of the room, where an otherwise comfortable-looking brown love seat was jammed into a corner and covered with tiny feline hairs.

  “Anyway. Here’s Taylor’s keys.” She plunked down a key chain with a tag that read “No Sleep till Brooklyn.” “Bathroom’s back by my room, Taylor’s room is by the front”—she nodded forward—“and those cookies are going stale, so eat as many as you want.”

  Bethany swiveled her head to the clock on the stove, swore softly, and then turned back to us.

  “I really have to go. You guys are good? Know how to use the subway and all that?”

  “Totally,” Tess said, just as I said, “Not really.”

  “Great. I’ll be back around midnight. Zach said you were here to go shopping or something?”

  “And to see a concert,” Tess said. “The Young Lungs.”

  Bethany frowned. “Never heard of them. But that’s Brooklyn, I guess.”

  “Speaking of, are they super strict about IDs here?” Tess asked. “Because this show is technically twenty-one-plus.”

  My mouth fell open.

  “Tess!”

  “Oh, um, hm.” Bethany frowned. “I mean, you guys aren’t going to drink or anything, right?”

  “No, ma’am,” Tess said.

  “Here.” Bethany rummaged around in the mail-table drawer and handed us each a laminated card: a PA license for me, what looked like a college ID for Tess.

  “Wow,” Tess said, examining the Columbia ID. “Thanks.”

  “Are you sure?” I looked at the tiny Bethany photo in my hand. If you squinted, you could maybe convince yourself that she had auburn hair, which was close to red. Kind of.

  “I think they were supposed to punch through this when I got my New York license, but it wasn’t the most organized day at the DMV. Just go in separate doors and you’ll probably be fine.” Bethany stooped to pick up her bag. “Oh, and if you want to get food, the falafel place on the corner is great.” With that, she swung out of the room, her “Bye!” getting clipped by the door shutting.

  “Well,” I said. “She’s, um, busy.”

  “I think it’s a New York thing,” Tess said. “Everyone here is rushing to stuff. It’s the lifestyle.”

  “Yeah.” I took a cookie and a long look around the kitchiving room. It was a tiny space, maybe a fifth of the size of the Wests’ kitchen in Philadelphia, but it was still impressively tidy. There was even a tiny box of herbs growing on the very skinny windowsill. “Besides, we did just kind of appear here at the last minute.”

  “Whatever. I knew Zach would come through.”

  “Yeah,” I said, even though I hadn’t known that at all. I figured Zach had been telling Bethany I was either a Mia-hating bully or a pop-music poser. Or both.

  “I can’t believe she just gave us IDs like that. And this place is so legit, too,” Tess said, getting up to investigate the chunk of room around the corner, where the cat-condo couch faced a small TV flanked by two orderly bookcases. “They have a rug and everything.”

  “Yeah,” I said. It was legit, and that was kind of weird. Bethany West, who I’d always just sort of mentally rounded down to around our age, was already settling into an actual apartment. I finished my biscotti and looked down at my new driver’s license: Bethany West, age twenty-five. Not terrible.

  As Tess nosed through their DVD collection, I stuck to perusing pictures in their frames: another blond girl who was presumably Taylor of Having Gone to Cleveland fame, Bethany and a guy with a dark beard who was presumably her boyfriend, the Wests on vacation in the Poconos from back when Bethany was at Wister and Zach’s hair was still blue. I’d forgotten how goofy it made him look.

  “They have like a zillion old movies,” Tess said, shaking her head. “On VHS. It’s like they’re my parents or something.” She straightened and put her hands on her hips.

  “Anyway. Operation Confrontation time. What are you going to do?”

  “Do we have to call it that?”

  “Nonnegotiable.”

  I suppressed a sigh and nodded, a weird heavy feeling in my chest. Just getting to New York was exhausting, and outside Bethany’s window, everything seemed dark, loud, ominous, and unfriendly. So calling the whole thing “Operation Confrontation” wasn’t really reassuring.

  “Fine, fine. I’ll start.” Tess ticked off actions on her fingers. “We get dressed, get falafel, and then hop on the G train for Williamsburg.”

  “Okay.” I swallowed. “And then, um, we’ll go to the show.”

  She nodded briskly. “It’ll probably be hard for you to find him beforehand, since they won’t even open the doors until a half hour before the show starts. Unless you want to creep around the backstage entrance and wait for him to show up—”

  A sudden, terrible vision of me attempting to scale a chain-link fence in my fancy new top popped into my head. “No way. Let’s . . . wait until after
the show.”

  “Good plan.” Tess tapped the side of her nose. “I’ll obviously be at your side every step of the way, as your incognito associate. Then what?”

  “Uh . . .” I scrunched up my mouth, thinking hard. “I go up to the stage, and—”

  “Right, good,” Tess interrupted. “Act like you’re going to grab the set list off the mic stand, or something.”

  “Yeah. And then I’ll . . . talk my way backstage.” I winced. That sounded impossible, or, at least, impossible for someone like me. Tess must’ve had the same thought, because she shook her head furiously.

  “Yeah, no. You’re never going to be able to.” She snapped her fingers. “I’ll come with you. Create a distraction so that whoever’s guarding the door leaves his or her post.”

  “A distraction?” This was starting to sound less like a feasible plan and more like sitcom-level hijinks. “Like what?”

  “Oh, you know. Someone snatches my purse, or I fall and twist my ankle, or I rip my shirt off and indecently expose myself.” Tess waved a hand. “Leave it to me. The real question is: what are you going to say to Sebastian once you’re in?”

  “Well, I . . .”

  “Wait.” Tess grabbed my shoulders and squared me to her. “Pretend I’m him.” She slouched and lowered her eyelids, clearly doing what she thought was a good Sebastian impression.

  “Hey,” she growled. “Nattie. How are ya?”

  Actually, it wasn’t half bad. I stood up straight and tried not to laugh.

  “Sebastian, I need you to do me a favor.”

  “No, no, no.” Tess snapped back to herself. “You have to lead into it. Seductively. Like, hey, Sebastian, how are you? Funny seeing you here.”

  “If I’m backstage at his own show, it’s not going to be funny seeing him there at all,” I pointed out. Tess groaned.

  “Fine, fine. But you know what I mean. Start casual, then mention that you want a favor.”

  “Okay.” I chewed my lip. “But what if he says no?”