Firsts

by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

  I don’t even know why I’m shopping for lingerie, considering I’m done with the virgins for good now. I feel weird about ending with the number thirteen—how unlucky is that?—but if the experience with Jeremy taught me anything, it’s that I have completely fallen apart. I used to love helping the guys plan a special night, and now the thought is utterly exhausting. My patience used to be my trademark, but it’s conspicuously missing in action. I guess I’m shopping for lingerie because it’s what I know how to shop for. Besides, I’ll need a fresh collection, now that I’m done with my good deeds. A fresh start. New lingerie to take with me to MIT, where I might eventually have a normal relationship. Nothing that reminds me of anybody else.

  After shopping here monthly for the past four months, I have never once run into someone I know. So today, when I hear a familiar voice as I’m holding up a pair of white lace panties, trying to determine if they’re too cutesy, I almost jump out of my skin.

  “Mercy,” she says. It’s Faye, wearing a name tag, the letters in loopy cursive so that it looks more like Fate. She’s squinting, and I’m not even aware that I’m clutching the underwear to my chest until she pries them out of my hands.

  “No offense, but these aren’t really you,” she says. “Unless you’re shopping for Angela.” She leans in and lowers her voice conspiratorially. “I call these first communion panties,” she says. “They’re like those lace dresses all the girls had to wear.”

  I let her put the underwear back.

  “What’re you doing here?” she says. “Shopping for a hot date?”

  I shake my head. “No, just looking for some new pajamas.” Except pajamas are the one thing this store does not sell.

  Faye raises her eyebrow. “Good God, you’re a terrible liar,” she says. “So you have a hot date. You don’t have to tell me who it’s with. Just let me help you find something more you. I’m thinking green, emerald green. Something to match those big beautiful eyes of yours.”

  I look at the floor. Nobody has ever told me I had big beautiful eyes before. I feel a rush of affection for Faye, affection mixed with frustration. Does she use that tone of voice with everyone? Because the way she said it didn’t sound like a mere compliment.

  “How was your date?” I hear myself say the words before I can take them back.

  She smiles at me, but it’s almost a smirk. “I don’t know. It’s just hard to find someone you’re interested in these days. Everyone’s a version of somebody else.”

  She bends over to open a drawer full of bras. Her shirt rides up, exposing the arch of her lower back and the tattoo there, the one I noticed after the soccer game. It looks like a winged insect, maybe a butterfly.

  “Dragonfly,” she says without looking away from the drawer. “So typical, right? A dragonfly tramp stamp. But I really wanted to rebel against my mom, and I was dating a tattoo artist at the time.”

  I nod. I know exactly what she means. This sounds like the kind of thing I would have done years ago, if I thought getting a tattoo would have any impact whatsoever on Kim. But I know it wouldn’t. Kim has a giant rose on her left shoulder and a heart with some guy’s name on her hip. I wish I didn’t know this.

  Faye sorts through negligees, pushing the hangers at a rapid-fire pace. “Nope, not this one, definitely not this,” she keeps saying, without giving me enough time to even see them. She pauses at a black nightgown, then pushes past it. “Too cliché,” she says.

  My rush of affection runs cold. I remember the missing negligee from my closet, the black lacy one, and wonder if Faye could be the thief after all. But she works in a boutique and probably gets a 50 percent discount, and I’m not exactly jumping to admit that I noticed a sole negligee missing from so many in my closet.

  “This,” she says loudly, stopping at a spaghetti-strap concoction that looks black at first, until she holds it in front of the light and I realize it’s very dark green. “This is you.”

  I want to say, You don’t know me well enough to know if that’s me. You don’t know me well enough to recommend something for me to wear in my bedroom. You don’t know me enough to form an opinion.

  But I don’t say this. I say nothing and follow her to the dressing room in silence.

  She got the size right—I give her that. It cups my breasts, skims my hips without being too clingy. I hate lingerie that’s too tight. It’s right up there with jeans that create a muffin top.

  I’m just getting ready to step out of it when Faye steps in. To the dressing room. She just pushes the curtain aside and stands there, staring at me.

  “You could knock first,” I say, folding my arms across my chest.

  “It’s kind of hard to knock on a curtain,” she says. “I was right, though. That’s a great look for you. Whoever you’re buying it for will be a lucky guy.”

  “I’m not buying it for anyone,” I say.

  “Of course you are. Nobody buys lingerie that they don’t expect somebody to see. Who is it? Is it Chemistry Boy? I knew he was looking at you a lot.”

  Damn Zach and his stupid puppy-dog eyes. But she has a point, so I come up with a lie.

  “It’s a college guy,” I say. “We’ve been out a few times. I thought I should be prepared, in case, you know.” I look down at my feet.

  “I’ve been through my share of those,” Faye says, twirling a strand of hair absentmindedly around her finger. “Most times they don’t live up to the illusion of a supercool college guy that you had in your head. Just to warn you. And you think they know what they’re doing, but they’re even worse than high school guys. Mostly the girls they slept with in high school didn’t know any better, so they just kept doing the wrong thing. Except by the time they’re in college, they think it’s the right thing and it’s harder to get them to change.”

  I nod, hopefully not too emphatically. She’s right, and she has just reaffirmed why I do what I do. What I did. They have to learn it right the first time, because guys are impossible to change.

  “Somebody ought to just tell them what they need to do from square one, huh?” Faye says. “There needs to be some kind of manual. Preferably, an interactive one.” She laughs.

  I give her a tight-lipped smile and start to close the curtain, but she puts her hand on the curtain to stop it. For a minute I’m not sure what she is going to do, if she is going to get in here with me and shut us both in. But she just smiles at me, a different smile than the one she uses in public. And just like that, she’s gone.

  I leave without buying the lingerie, even though I really like it. I don’t buy it because of Faye. For whatever reason, I don’t want her to think I’m buying lingerie with someone special in mind. I don’t want to take it home with me, because I will think of Faye when I look at it.

  “Want to come over later?” Faye says when I wave good-bye. “We could watch a movie or something. Or just bitch about guys. I’m done with work at five.” She says it casually, but the invitation doesn’t sound like a whim.

  I nod mechanically, wondering why I feel so strange. I guess Angela is the only person I have really hung out with on a regular basis. Faye is vastly different than Angela, and I feel different around her.

  “Great. I’ll text you my address. See you at seven?” She winks and disappears into the dressing rooms.

  Back at home, I spend an hour flat ironing my hair and choosing an outfit that is both casual and cute. I don’t know why I’m nervous for an evening that involves my clothes staying on, but I’m definitely on edge. I’m so used to planning for guys, dressing and undressing for them and trying to morph myself into their dream girl. I’m so used to it that I don’t really know where that girl ends and the real me begins. I suppose what it comes down to is confidence. I’m confident in that girl, the one who emerges from my walk-in wearing lingerie when I’m done getting ready. But at Faye’s house, I’m not going to be that girl. I’m going to be me.

  Whoever that is anymore.

  16

  I end up getting to
Faye’s ten minutes late, because her house is totally hidden from view of the street and dwarfed by bigger houses on both sides. Maybe the most surprising thing is that it’s small, unlike the majority of the homes in Rancho Palos Verdes. It’s plain and unassuming and doesn’t suit Faye at all.

  When I pull into the driveway, I take a deep breath. My heart is pounding and I shake off the feeling that I’m nervous—nervous to go into Faye’s house, because that means something. This isn’t about school or chemistry tutoring or some sense of obligation. Faye wants me here.

  When I walk up the front steps and ring the doorbell, I hear laughter coming from inside. Faye’s laugh, that seal-bark one. And another laugh that sounds familiar, too.

  I don’t put it together until Zach opens the door.

  “Mercy,” he says, stepping forward like he wants to hug me but stopping at the last moment. “You made it.”

  “Welcome to my humble abode,” Faye says, appearing in the hallway wearing a frilly pink apron over her jeans. “Sorry if it was hard to find. Now you see why I had to get a part-time job.”

  Zach laughs. “I hear you. That’s why I’m the guy making your sandwiches at the Submarine King.”

  I look at him, but he stares at the ground.

  “You make sandwiches at Submarine King?” I say.

  A flush creeps into his cheeks. “Yeah—you should see how much of an artist I am with lunch meat,” he says, jamming his hands in his pockets.

  Faye laughs again. “It’s so weird,” she says. “Zach and I work at the same mall and had no idea until today. I went to the food court after you left and there he was, wearing the cutest little outfit. This bright yellow hat—”

  Zach’s face turns full-on red. “Come on—it’s not that bad,” he mumbles.

  “I didn’t know,” I say dumbly. Zach won’t meet my eye, and I don’t know what else to say. I know what he’s probably thinking: You didn’t ask.

  “Well, let me give you the grand tour,” Faye interjects. “There’s not much to it.” She shuffles back down the hall and beckons for me to follow. “The bathroom is upstairs, and that’s the door to the garage. Which we don’t use to actually park because Lydia hoards all kinds of crap in there. She never gets rid of anything. She thinks it’ll all have value someday, even though it’s junk.”

  “Who’s Lydia?” I say, slipping off my shoes and following her.

  “Oh. My mom,” Faye says. “I just call her Lydia. She has always seemed more like a sister to me. She had me when she was fourteen.”

  My heart starts thumping, and the distance to the kitchen feels like walking through water, where breath is impossible to find and every inhalation feels too heavy to take in. Luckily, Faye is turned away and doesn’t notice my silence or the fact that I feel like all the color has been sucked out of me.

  “I’m a great cook,” Faye says. “But I’m a huge slob. I think I got some of Lydia’s tendencies after all.”

  She’s not lying. The kitchen counter is cluttered with cereal boxes and stray papers and dirty pots and pans that don’t fit in the overfull sink. Kim would have a conniption if she stood in this kitchen for even five minutes—a kitchen that looks actually lived in. Even though Faye and her mom didn’t move here until just over a week ago and I can tell a lot of the house has yet to be unpacked, they still managed to put photos on the fridge. Kim loves her stainless steel too much to ever allow me to mar the fridge with photos and magnets.

  “Is this Lydia?” I say, touching a photo of Faye with her arm slung around a blond woman’s shoulders, a woman who is a carbon copy of Faye.

  “Yeah. She’s pretty, right? I always wanted to look just like her.” Faye fills a pot with water and sets it on the stove.

  “You do,” I say.

  There’s an awkward silence, wherein I realize Faye knows I think she’s pretty. I don’t know why I feel weird about that.

  “I want to look like her, but I don’t want my life to be like hers,” Faye says. “I never knew my dad. He was a loser who walked out on her when she was knocked up with me. And the only work experience she has is bartending. That’s where she is now. If it weren’t for the money my grandma left us, we definitely wouldn’t be living here. This was our fresh start.”

  Faye speaks quietly, which I realize I haven’t heard her do. She always has what Angela would call an “outdoor voice.” But I can tell by the way she is speaking now that her voice drops when she talks about someone she loves. It’s obvious that she loves and respects Lydia.

  Faye clears a stack of newspapers off a chair and gestures for me to sit, then plunks a glass of water in front of me. I can’t help but notice that there’s already a spot cleared for Zach—how long has he been here, anyway? How much of Faye’s house has he seen? Has he been in her bedroom? Her grand tour didn’t extend upstairs, and I don’t know if I should be relieved or offended.

  And I don’t know why I should feel either.

  I take a long gulp of my water and watch Faye move fluidly around the mess in her kitchen, like she knows where every stack of boxes is by memory.

  “I do most of the cooking,” she says, using a can opener on a jar of tomato sauce. “I like to think I’m a genius at cooking on a budget by now.”

  “I should have offered to bring something,” I say. “Like a salad. Or dessert.”

  Zach muffles a laugh. “You don’t cook,” he says.

  I shoot him a withering stare. “How do you know?” I snap.

  Faye looks at us and raises an eyebrow—and wisely changes the subject.

  “How about you? What’s your mom like? Is your dad in the picture?”

  I look into my glass, hoping the right thing to say is located somewhere at the bottom. I didn’t expect Faye to turn the tables on me. I’m usually good at avoiding questions like these, even with Angela, who lets me get away with a vague “Kim’s being Kim” answer. But I have a feeling this won’t work on Faye.

  “My dad’s not in the picture,” I say steadily. I can say this without anger, tears, or any emotion. My dad ceased to be a person and became more of a memory the last time I heard from him, when he sent me a “Happy Sweet Sixteen” card on my fourteenth birthday. But Kim is a different story. She’s physically present but mentally absent, which is so much worse.

  “Looks like the three of us have something in common,” Zach says slowly. “Single moms. Deadbeat dads.”

  I don’t look at him, but I can tell he’s staring at me. I wonder what he’s thinking—that as much time as we have spent in my bedroom, we’re little more than strangers outside of it. I wonder if he’s pissed off that I can talk to Faye but not him.

  “And your mom,” Faye continues, stirring pasta into the now-boiling pot of water and leaning against the oven, cocking her hip toward us. “What’s she like?”

  Faye definitely isn’t letting me off easy. I press my hands together and think of the easiest way to sum up my mother.

  “I don’t know,” I start slowly, looking at my hands. “She’s not around enough to let me figure her out.”

  I don’t let myself look up. I don’t want to see pity on Faye’s face or curiosity on Zach’s. They can’t think I’m weak. For a long minute nobody talks, and I’m afraid I said too much.

  “Parents really fucking suck sometimes,” Faye finally says. I let my eyes flicker up to her when I hear the tone in her voice. There’s no pity in her eyes, no curiosity, no malice. Just a very astute observation.

  “There’s the truth,” Zach says.

  “Seriously. I mean, Lydia and I are all tight and shit, but she makes the worst life choices. She has been through so many douche bag boyfriends that I lost count, and she keeps telling me she’ll never degrade herself like that again. But she still does it.” Faye shakes her head.

  “I know what you mean. If Kim gets one more ‘cosmetic procedure,’ I think she might try to attend our high school. She already dates guys young enough.”

  I wasn’t planning on saying that, b
ut the words spill out, clothed in sarcasm, my favorite defense mechanism. Zach chuckles, but Faye throws her head back and laughs, that seal-bark sound that I thought would get annoying the first day I met her. I was wrong.

  “Watch the pasta,” I yell, jumping out of my chair. “Your hair’s dangerously close to the burner.”

  Faye grabs a fistful of her hair and bursts into another fit of laughter. “God, wouldn’t that have sucked? The only thing worse than hair in your food is burnt hair in your food.”

  When we sit down to eat, there’s an awkward silence, punctuated by the sound of forks hitting plates. I feel the need to fill the silence, like it’s my fault it’s even awkward in the first place.

  I work up the courage to ask the question that has wiggled to the forefront of my mind. “So, it must have been hard moving high schools in last semester,” I say, pushing pasta around on my plate.

  Faye swallows and wipes the corner of her mouth with a napkin. “Not really,” she says. “Schools are schools. They’re not much different, wherever you go. Milton High is just a bigger playground.”

  “But why now?” My voice comes out more bluntly than I intended. Faye’s shoulders stiffen, and I notice the way her grip on her fork tightens.

  “We were done with Nevada. Lydia got a better job here, at a real restaurant. Not a crappy dive bar where she has to get groped by old perverts every night.” She winds pasta tightly around her fork and looks at her plate, a gesture I take as the end of discussion.

  Faye is done with her meal and Zach has had seconds in half the time it takes for me to eat a quarter of mine. She filled our plates with heaping portions of pasta and tomato sauce, portions that would make Kim stick her finger down her throat before she even started. I was taught from an early age that carbohydrates were evil. “Spaghetti will make your ass expand like a balloon,” Kim had told me the last time we went out to eat together. I can never eat anything around her without feeling like her eyes are on me.

  Faye notices my lack of appetite. “Don’t you like it?” she says. A crease has appeared between her eyebrows. I fight the urge to touch it with my finger and tell her that I love the pasta but hate eating in front of other people. Yet another way my mom has messed me up.