The Leftover Club

by Voight, Ginger

  The Leftover Club

  By

  Ginger Voight

  ©2014, Ginger Voight

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher.

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  Special acknowledgement to John Hughes, Steve Perry, Sesame Street, Fisher Price, Mattel, Sid and Marty Krofft, John Ritter, Davy Jones, Steven Spielberg, Bruce Willis, Glenn Gordon Caron, Berkley Breathed, Opus, Prince, Bono, Jon Bon Jovi, MTV, vinyl records, Roseanne, Cher, Oprah, Robin Williams, Weird Al, VH1, Hal Sparks, Michael Ian Black, Mann Junior High, including both those kids who loved me and those who didn’t, stacks and stacks of paperback novels, Mrs. Borger, Mrs. Adams, Mr. Newton and Mr. Whitaker, Bill Cosby, The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson, SNL, Steve Martin, Must See TV, Harry, Dan, Bull, and Roz, Britt, Mike and Ronnie, Jeff, Carolyn and Barbi, Danielle Steel and Stephen King, Sam and Diane, Maddie and David, Luke and Laura, John Stamos, the Eagles, Will Smith, Marie D. Jones, Steven Moffat, Doctor Who, Mofy, QAF, BBT, Shirley, Sarah, Victoria and all the unofficial Leftovers, those who thought I would make it, those who thought I wouldn’t, Brandee, MJ, Jo Ann, Kelsey, my mom, my kids, Dan and Steven.

  Thanks for making the ride worthwhile.

  #longlivethe80s

  Prologue

  June 20, 2008

  I guess you could say the Leftover Club was officially founded in 1985, though some of us were informal members much earlier than that. I, myself, earned the rightful place as President of our club in May of 1979, many years before I met other key members of our exclusive little group. It started with a shy kiss on a dusty, neglected playground with rusty, broken equipment. The only thing that worked was a chipped and faded merry-go-round.

  A fitting metaphor, looking back.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  My name is Veronica Lawless, but everyone has called me Roni since I was two. I’m proud to say that I belonged to one of the greatest generations of the 20th Century. I was there at the birth of MTV, and bore witness how households changed with the advent of home video games, VCRs and microwaves. I’ve gone from vinyl records to CDs and MP3s, right back to vinyl records again. I even remember what it was like to get up and walk over to a TV to change the channel, of which there were usually three. Those were the days when you knew to go to bed whenever you heard the national anthem play.

  I gained valuable mechanical skills by fiddling with old school rabbit ears for an ancient black and white television set, as well as salvaged many a tangled cassette tape with the cunning use of a butter knife. I knew how to properly center a 45 on a turntable even without the plastic doohickeys I always managed to lose.

  We weren’t afraid of no ghosts because we knew exactly who to call at the first hint of slime. We knew where to find the beef, and delighted in dancing raisins. We were oft-thanked connoisseurs of watered down wine coolers way before we were legally old enough to consume them, even though we were the generation courted to “Just Say No.” We were the footloose, sweater-sporting Cosby kids and almost every single one of us, at one point or another, wore a Mullet without the good sense to be embarrassed about it. We also wore parachute pants without a hint of irony, and proclaimed “RELAX” boldly across stark white T-shirts accented with Day-Glo accessories.

  If it was bold and obnoxious, you could find it in the 80s.

  We lived in an era where space exploration became routine, even mundane. Computers had shrunk from entire rooms to a desktop, putting cutting edge technology right at our fingertips courtesy of three-to-five-inch floppy disks. We watched the Berlin wall come down, and were witness to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the wake of the Cold War, finally lifting the threat of nuclear war for generations taught to “Duck and Cover.” We read Stephen King and VC Andrews by the stack and inhaled anything the great John Hughes created. We’d walk out of those theaters with a triumphant fist thrust into the air, like he was crafting each and every story just for us.

  (And I like to believe that he did.)

  We were too young to be adults, but smart enough to be self-aware, which made us older than our years. Our era was one of great change, and we were witness to it in every area of our lives, notably in our music and in our entertainment.

  As we raced after the ever-changing technology and social paradigm shifts that proclaimed greed was good even for working girls, we kids of the 1980s were taught that we could have anything and everything we wanted.

  Too bad it was a big fat lie.

  When I was sixteen I had only one real dream… and it was shared with hundreds of other girls (and a notable subsection of guys) at Hermosa Vista High. I wanted Dylan Fenn, the most popular boy in school. He was as cool as he was hot, the very definition of fine no matter which idol happened to grace the cover of your notebook that week. And if he liked you, you became the most important person on campus.

  Well, next to him anyway.

  In fact, if we’re going to get technical, it wasn’t so much that I wanted Dylan. I just wanted Dylan to want me. Maybe then I wouldn’t be the overweight, awkward, pimply-faced teenager who didn’t fit in with any of the major cliques. I related most to The Breakfast Club’s Allison, who showed up at detention just because she didn’t have anything else better to do.

  Dylan was my Andrew.

  Twenty years later and I’m still too intimidated to sport his varsity jacket.

  Tonight is my high school’s twenty year reunion, a fitting celebration for the Class of ’88, the Fighting Jaguars of Hermosa Vista. This California school had produced celebrities of varying degrees. Among our prestigious alumni were actors, musicians, business titans, tech wizzes, aspiring politicians and even a few porn stars. Some multi-taskers could check off several of these boxes on their collective resumes. It seemed Generation X gave rise to the multi-hypenates. We rejected ill-fitting cubby holes polite society wished that we would cram ourselves into, if only to store us neatly out of sight. No longer did we chase thirty-year tenures at our jobs, pursuing the gold watch and pension like our hardworking parents. Choice and personal happiness dictated our careers and our life paths, which were no longer “one-size-fits-all.”

  We could have/do/be anything we wanted. And most of us took that challenge to heart.

  But despite this illustrious roster of most interesting alumni, Dylan Fenn is still a notable figure in our school’s history, at least for my graduating class. He never feared being noticed, which would explain why he currently teetered on the precipice of his own personal fame and fortune as an emerging actor. It was something he was voted “most likely to” way back in 1987, after he starred in our junior production of Grease.

  And then there is me, plain ol’ Roni Lawless, a divorced, single mom, still struggling to fit in, in my chosen profession, with my testy, teenaged daughter… and even in the club I had unwittingly founded all those years ago with a kiss on a dare.

  There, dear friends, is the root of my problem.

  The reason I don’t fit in is because I’m a fraud. I have a secret, a really, really big one. This secret involves the object of our many desires, which means I’ve
been lying to the people I had always called my friends… including Dylan himself.

  And tonight… for the first time in a long time, I know it is time to set the record straight, win or lose.

  Tonight my life is going to change, which usually never works in my favor. But after nearly thirty years, I am hoping that this 80s girl can finally become the woman who has it all, rather than fall right on her face for the whole damn world to see.

  This is my story.

  Buckle up and hang on.

  1: Things Can Only Get Better

  September 3, 1985

  “Veronica!”

  My mother’s voice filtered through the epic dream I had been having about Rob Lowe, her shrill voice popping the dream just like a bubble. I woke up, drooling on my pillow. I groaned as I caught a glimpse of my bedside radio/alarm clock. It was 6:29 in the morning, approximately five hours from when I had finally drifted to sleep. Maybe more. Maybe less.

  It felt like less.

  “I’m up!” I shouted back before I rolled over and pulled the covers over my head. A minute later my radio alarm clicked on, blasting Phil Collins in my darkened room, singing jovially about his “Sussudio.” With another miserable groan, my hand landed on the radio to silence the sound before I had the song stuck in my head all damn day. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and assessed the situation.

  It was a Tuesday. Early September. Summer vacation was officially over. First day of high school was afoot.

  Yay.

  I trudged over to my closet to survey my choices. Jeans, that was a given. Not designer, though. There was never enough money for designer jeans. Thankfully by 1985 my mother had given up this idea that she could make all my clothes from scratch, otherwise I might have finally made good on my threat to run off and join the circus. That had to be safer than exposing myself to the most dangerous environment known to a 15-year-old girl.

  High school. The horror, the horror…

  Lions? Tigers? Walking a high wire? These were all walks in the park compared to the first day at a new school, which promised to be full of unpredictable teenagers and narrow, ill-fitting cliques.

  My plan of attack was simple. Draw as little attention to myself as I could by blending into my surroundings as much as possible. This wasn’t an easy feat by any means, considering I carried about twenty-five extra pounds. But a muted, pastel button-down shirt and some non-descript jeans might do the trick.

  I grabbed a handful of my armor of choice and headed down the hall to the bathroom. The door was locked. I heaved a sigh. “Mom!”

  She rounded the corner as she slipped into her blazer. “What’s the matter?”

  “I need to get into the bathroom. If I don’t wash my hair now, I won’t have time to dry it and curl it before school.”

  As any girl of the 1980s knew, we needed at least thirty minutes hair time before class. That flip took some time to tame, not to mention about a half a can of hairspray to lacquer into place. Hair in the 80s was no accident. It was a religion.

  My mom gave me a benign smile that indicated she had no plans to fix my conundrum. “I’m sure he’ll be out in a minute. He’s a boy. He doesn’t require the same kind of upkeep.”

  What my mom failed to realize was this wasn’t just any boy. This was Dylan Fenn. And he was more concerned about getting his appearance just so than I could ever be. Granted, he had been born with amazing genes, so his time was better spent as he styled his hair and got his dazzling white smile even whiter. He’d preen for ten minutes, searching every pore for any sign of a blemish… most of which somehow always skipped gaily over his handsome face and land right onto mine.

  He wasn’t overweight. He didn’t wear braces. He didn’t struggle with acne. His time in the bathroom wasn’t polishing the same kind of turd that my meager thirty minutes threatened to be.

  I tried to be annoyed with him, but it was impossible.

  The minute that door opened, he walked through the sauna-like fog that had accumulated in our shared bathroom like some scene straight from a music video. He smelled of a heady mix of Halston and mouthwash as he bestowed me a smile. “Sorry, Roni,” he quipped. “Bathroom is all yours.”

  I watched him walk away despite my better judgment. Man, that boy could wear a pair of jeans like nobody’s business. As an athlete, his ass was firm and rounded, enough to invite two eager palms to cop a feel. And for the 1,437th time, I had managed to resist.

  But barely.

  I walked into the bathroom to try and minimize my inherent dork damage. I had a medicine cabinet full of products to fight back the blemishes that plagued me since my thirteenth birthday. By 1985, I had a system down. There was a natural soap to clean my face, an astringent to shock any dirt right off my skin and a cream to deal with and minimize any pimples that were too noticeable. It didn’t get rid of them all, but I knew without a rigid upkeep that I’d have to wear a ski mask to go to school. I was playing defense only, with endless optimism that one day I’d wake up to the peaches and cream complexion I had always dreamed of.

  It never happened, of course. Why should it be any different than any of my young desires? (Rob Lowe included.)

  That was why I knew despite the twenty-nine-and-a-half minutes I had to work with, I would not transform from a geek to a princess with nothing more than a new pair of clothes or discarded glasses. Despite plastering my dull, black hair into the lacquered helmet of my generation, or the makeup that I needed to make my skin look less blotchy and more even-toned, with the pink and blue eye colors I had finally convinced my mother to allow for my sophomore year, I would not, in fact, fit in with my peers at Hermosa Vista High School in Fullerton, California.

  Worse, by the time I collected my brand new Trapper Keeper full of a neat stack of blank, wide-ruled notebook paper, I knew that I had dallied too long to get a ride. My mom and her best friend, Bonnie Fenn, had already left for the office in Irvine where they both worked.

  That was, in fact, where they both met. Bonnie got a job there in the wake of her divorce in the early 1970s. My dad had died, sending Mom back into the workforce around the very same time. Their meeting proved quite fortuitous. As two single moms in the tumultuous 70s, Bonnie Fenn and Elaine Lawless were thrust into the women’s liberation movement much against their will. These kindred spirits began to lean on each other to survive this era of change, taking on non-traditional roles out of necessity. When Bonnie opened up her home to us, we moved in almost immediately. It was either that or public assistance, and my mom would have rather died than ask for help.

  Rooming instead with her best friend, who needed help to pay her steep mortgage, was a no-brainer.

  So we moved in and Bonnie was able to keep her upper-middle class home, and we got a family of choice.

  Bonnie’s son Dylan was my age, so they did everything they could to cultivate a friendship between us. It had worked when we were much younger, where we acted more like brother and sister than a couple of unrelated kids whose mothers just happened to share a house. That all ended in 1979, and it had been an uphill struggle trying to find our footing ever since.

  Don’t get me wrong. Dylan was a great guy. He was smart. He was funny. And he was incredibly kind, even when boys that age got made fun of for such traits. He never treated me like I was different, or weird, or ugly… like so many of my male classmates did. But he never treated me like I was special, either. After a few years, I began to suspect he was right.

  I regressed into books where he went out for sports, and we ended up polar opposites on the middle school social spectrum.

  I didn’t expect high school would change anything. He’d be on top and I’d still slink along the bottom with all the other teenaged mutants who couldn’t seem to scrape one iota of coolness between us.

  Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. I had already learned in junior high that having Dylan as a built-in buddy elevated my meager ranking in the adolescent social pecking order, at least temporarily. Pretty,
popular girls would inevitably buddy up to me, in search of that invitation to hang out or sleep over in the very same house Dylan called home. I was incidental, you see; a means to an end for all the girls whose real goal in life was snagging the class ring of cutest guys in class. Those big, bulky monstrosities taped to fit slender girl fingers were the precursor to the wedding ring. It meant you were somebody because you were chosen.

  Dylan didn’t even have a class ring yet, but there had been girls gunning for position since the sixth grade. And I had been burned enough to know that everyone who smiled at me and called me “Sis” was not, in fact, my friend. Not for real, and certainly not ‘4-ever.’

  The closer they got to Dylan, the less interested they were in me. Little by little I was slowly edged out of the social circle they were once so eager for me to join. They allowed me to keep my tippy toe dipped in the pool of their coolness until Dylan moved onto the next girl in line, in which case I would get unceremoniously dumped on my well-padded keister.

  Game over.

  What they didn’t know, and what I had been unable to convince them, was that Dylan wasn’t a ‘going steady’ kind of guy. No moss grew under that rolling stone. I chalked it up to his parents’ divorce, as well as the rocky relationship he had maintained with his father who had likewise married and divorced a couple more times by the time Dylan turned fifteen. But whatever the reason, Dylan shunned the idea of being committed to just one person. He wanted to play the field and have some fun. How long a girl lasted in his life depended entirely on how well she rolled with that. The clingier she got, the quicker she got her walking papers.

  I had seen the pattern repeat over and over again. Dylan had no time for drama.

  Ironically I had been the longest lasting female relationship he had had, for someone who wasn’t blood kin at least. There were two reasons for this. I accepted him as he was and I never pushed him for more than he was willing to give. I didn’t even ask for it, because I knew it was futile. We were friends, sorta, and I had a healthy respect for the boundaries that protected that fragile relationship.