Jensen picks a blue-green pair that I actually think are the ugliest ones, but they’re the tightest on her ass. Even though no boys are coming to the brunch, we still want to look good. I pick a pair of destroyed ones with an embroidered butterfly on the left hip. It’s a bit childish, but they fit great and go well with the tight black tank top I’m going to wear. I pull up the jeans, and one of the strings of fringe catches on the burn on my knee. It stings like crazy.
“Crap!” I yell. Tomassi and Jensen turn around, both of them at the mirror scrunching their hair. Scrunching involves taking a shower, letting your hair dry a little bit, then taking hair gel and scrunching it up into curls until the hair becomes curly and doesn’t move. You can’t get a brush through it. This doesn’t look good on me because I have too much hair—I’ve tried it. Tomassi has a lot of hair, too, but somehow she makes it work. My hair is already straightened, and I decide to keep it that way for the birthday brunch. I might opt for a headband, depending on if I can borrow one from Tomassi’s collection.
“What’s wrong?” Tomassi asks, curling her eyelashes with a purple curler.
“I got a court burn yesterday during the game. The jeans scraped right over it.”
“You barely even played.” Jensen laughs, her head tilted to the side over the sink, covering every strand of her hair in gel that smells like berries.
“Do you really think Max Green would just use me to get popular?” I ask, to change the subject.
“Are we popular now?” Jensen asks.
“Well, we’re not losers,” I say.
“Your group definitely needs some shifting,” Tomassi adds, moving on to painting her lips a deep mauve color. The tube smells like vanilla bean. “You two are the best, obviously, and Kenzie is cool, Gottlieb is okay, but Rosenberg and Leigh are just lost causes.”
“I don’t even know how this whole group got started,” Jensen says.
“Well, it was always the two of us,” I say. “The Brittanys, since fourth grade. But then it just kept growing, and I think it really solidified at fifth-grade graduation, when we all cried on the dock…”
“And in sixth grade, when we all had lunch together…” Jensen continues. “But I think Leigh is turning into a pothead and Kenzie is turning into a slut. Rosenberg is pretty boy crazy, too.”
It stings almost as much as the stupid court burn to hear her say this again, although at least this time she’s not talking about me.
“Tomassi, is there anyone you like in our grade?” I ask, fishing.
“Hmm, I don’t really think so. There was a boy in New York I liked a lot, but we only kissed a few times.”
“As a dare?” I ask.
“Ha! No, like, a real kiss.”
“Have you ever done more?” I press, and Jensen looks back at me like I’m asking too much. I shrug, and we both wait for her response.
“The most I’ve done is kiss, and guys like to grab my butt.” Tomassi turns around and shakes her butt at us, smiles, goes back to doing her makeup. We laugh.
“Have you ever smoked weed?” I press on.
“No, that stuff is dangerous. I agree, Leigh is becoming a pothead. So gross. You know, guys don’t like it when girls do that stuff, either. It’s not…clean. And as for Max, I think he’s okay. A boyfriend should be someone who treats you right, no matter their status.”
I sit in the front when Tomassi’s mom drives us to brunch. Tomassi and Jensen sit in the back, whispering, laughing, complimenting each other’s asses in their jeans. I kept my borrowed pair for a long time, and when I finally tried to return them to her a few months later, Tomassi said I could just keep them. They were too “babyish” for her, is what she said. I wore them to at least three dress-down days.
All the girls come to brunch except Leigh, along with a bunch of Tomassi’s cousins and some neighborhood friends. Her older sister arrives late with one of her own friends. They are both wearing high-low dresses with heels. They look beautiful, their makeup light and perfect, and their hair in those beachy waves. I want to be them. I want to wear the right thing all the time and get guys and have a best friend who doesn’t think I’m too boy crazy.
I keep going to the bathroom to pull down my jeans and look at the burn on my knee. It hurts to sit for too long with the denim pressing against it. I should have worn a dress or a skirt. Everyone orders salads for some reason, and I do, too, even though I want pasta. Everyone drinks iced tea, but I have a Coke. I don’t understand why everyone is trying to be such a lady. Tomassi’s mom keeps asking if I am okay. At one point I almost cry in front of her and excuse myself to the bathroom again. I don’t want to be there; I’m not in the mood to have a good time.
When my mom comes and gets me, Jensen decides to stay, instead of our original plan to leave together. She and Tomassi end up having another sleepover, and Jensen is convinced to join the soccer team. They happen to have practice on the off days of the varsity volleyball team, which she is also asked to join.
I quit volleyball because I hate it. I know I could try harder to improve and play more, but I don’t want to. The truth is, I want to go home from school every day and call Max from my room. I like to bring the receiver over to my desk by the window, sit on the roof, and talk to him while I look out at the lake. Sometimes I miss calls from Jensen because Max and I talk for so long. Sometimes we talk all night.
• EIGHT •
At Jensen’s birthday party, Kenzie goes missing, vanishing in her low-cut orange top and bedazzled jeans. I’m in a green bustier top and my favorite Brazilian jeans, black with lace-up ankles. I just got my hair dyed professionally for the first time, and I’m not sure if it’s the right color. My mom finally let me do it, because I told her I wanted to look more like her. I’ve always admired her blond locks—that, and Sophie Pollack in science lab said my brown hair looked mousy, like I needed highlights. It’s kind of brassy blond now, but I like that it’s different because it stands out.
No boys I like are here, so I tune in to the drama between Brittany Jensen and Kenzie. Apparently, the last anyone saw Kenzie, she was with Jensen’s brother, Matty. Jensen is furious and wants to send out a search party to find her. My parents are here, eating crab cakes while everyone else shimmies and twists on the dance floor. They’ll wonder where I am, but it’s my job to accompany Jensen on her mission. She’s in a tight cream-colored dress that makes her butt look big, but that’s in now, it’s a look, and we told each other we look great when we arrived at the venue in separate cars. She also just got her nose pierced and is wearing a diamond stud in her nostril. Matty took her to the piercing parlor where his friend works and let her get it done as an early birthday present without telling their parents. Jensen says her mom likes it, though, that it makes her nose look cuter and less big, so she’s allowed to keep it as long as she wears a clear stud for school. I imagine how grateful she must have been to Matty for the gift, and how all that grace is now absolutely out the window.
Jensen storms from the party room and down to the outside deck of the Hillsboro Beach Club. The club is a collection of white bungalows where people can rent rooms for the weekend, for a month, for a summer. Inside is all beach-themed: wicker chairs and paintings of birds, glass vases filled with shells. It’s an eyesore. But the pièce de résistance is the lighthouse at the end of the inlet. It has a white base and a black top, and its light flashes a bright beam that can be seen by boats from very, very far away, according to Jensen’s dad.
Jensen’s parents are members here, and we sometimes come together on the weekends during warmer months. Tomassi came with us last weekend, and we took pictures on a disposable camera of us in the ocean. We all wore tankinis and screamed our heads off each time a wave crashed over us. After that, Jensen told me she thought Tomassi was getting annoying, that she was sick of her and needed a break. “It’s okay if she comes to my birthday, ’cause it
’s a group, but I can’t deal anymore. At soccer she always wants to do drills together, and I can’t always be with her.” I nod and agree.
It’s December, but it’s warm, still humid enough to make Jensen’s tight curls unravel into loose waves. The light of the lighthouse spins, illuminating her face every twenty seconds.
“Let’s look on the beach,” she suggests. “They’re probably having sex.”
We find Kenzie and Matty on the beach, passing a bottle of Captain Morgan between them. I’ve seen smaller versions of that bottle underneath Matty’s bed when we’ve played video games in his room late at night. Jensen once showed me what a condom looked like: Matty had one under his stained black pillow.
Kenzie looks a little drunk, and Matty is smoking a cigarette.
“Ew!” Jensen screams in a whisper.
“Don’t be a bitch, Britt,” Matty replies. Kenzie grabs his biceps, and he pretends not to care. The whole thing is unfolding. It’s obvious that they hooked up, or were about to, and we’re spoiling it. I am happy it isn’t happening. I want it to be me standing on the beach with an older guy. Not Matty, but someone who knows what they’re doing, because I don’t.
Kenzie and Jensen have been walking to English together every day, sharing a Diet Coke and a pack of Oreos. I’m always jealous of this, but, then again, I like walking alone and not sharing my snack. Sometimes I see my brother walking to his senior seminar and drinking a Sprite. He doesn’t look at me, but I know he sees me and watches me as I walk to my language arts class. Brad couldn’t be more different from Matty. One time when Matty dropped off Jensen at our house, they sort of sized each other up. They’re both shorter than most of the other upperclassmen, but Matty is wild and Brad is calm. Matty acts out and Brad holds it all in. I wouldn’t know which was worse until later. It kind of reminds me of the way Jensen is able to say what she feels and I’m not. I’m always holding in my feelings. It’s especially hard at school, when everyone walks with such purpose and I’m left to wonder why I’m even there.
It was on one of their walks that Kenzie taught Jensen how to give a hand job. Jensen reported back to me that you’re supposed to rest your hand on a guy’s thigh for a while to see if anything’s happening and then spit on your own hand before you go inside the pants. I wondered why Jensen even cared to know how to give a hand job, but I was grateful she told me the details anyway. I’ll take what I can get.
“Want some?” Matty extends the bottle toward Jensen, and she scoffs, then grabs it and takes a big gulp.
“Are you finally gonna get a car this year so I don’t have to drive your ass around?” Matty says.
“I’m fifteen, you idiot!” Jensen screams back. “And you never take me anywhere anyway.”
“But Kenzie’s sixteen,” Matty says as he looks at Kenzie, who is almost falling over.
“No she’s not! We’re all fifteen now, except her.” Jensen points to me.
“Whatever,” Matty says. “Whatever you say, birthday bitch.”
But I’ve stopped paying attention. I’m imagining being out here alone with someone else, getting undressed, feeling the salty breeze on my whole body, letting a person do things to me, and enjoying them. I can hear Jensen’s dad running toward us, sand squishing under his boat shoes. I’m happy that he’s coming to break up the drama. Sometimes it feels like no one is watching us, the way we find ourselves in spots to make our own decisions. But it also feels like we’re too young to do so, even though it’s all we want, to be able to cut our own bangs, kiss boys in public, pierce our own ears. Her dad looks more concerned than angry as he approaches us. I think about how he always got Jensen’s Subway order wrong, how I’d end up sharing my half and eating some of hers, which had too much mustard or too many onions. I can tell he just wants to see that we’re all okay. He wants us to come back to the party he probably paid so much for, but we run anyway, because that’s what kids do.
We split up and race back to the party room. Matty takes Kenzie through the parking lot and into the main entrance. Jensen sticks with me, and we run through the halls of the hotel. We jump over empty room-service trays and discarded beach towels. We stop at room 113 and press our ears against the door. When we were younger, a kid told us this room was called “Bloody Cheerios” because a baby was murdered inside while eating cereal. We believed him when he said the carpet still had blood on it, stained forever and ever. We once chased boys down these same hallways and went into the kids’ club to watch music videos on MTV. We walked out farther than we were allowed, climbing on the rocks and watching the lighthouse light spin and making up stories about buying a house here and sharing it, living here together, having kids who would be friends, best friends, like us.
We make it back to the party room, and my parents are up and dancing, and so we join them. Jensen’s dad walks in, and her mom points at us. They join us, and we all dance to “Celebration” by Kool & the Gang, a song everyone knows, even the kids. They must figure that their girls are still girls, and we figure, since it’s Jensen’s birthday, they’ll let us off the hook. When the chorus comes on, we all sing and hold hands, twirling each other, dads and daughters, mothers and best friends. Our hair is a mess. My spaghetti straps won’t stay up, and I let them fall down my shoulders as I move.
Jensen invited Tarek Mendel, who goes to her sleepaway camp. Lately she can’t stop talking about how they’ll both be CITs, counselors in training, together this summer. She’s shown me pictures of him: curly red hair, messy, dirty, and kind of chubby, but cute. I don’t understand her type. She seems to be attracted to older men, British guys, or lovers of the great outdoors. Tarek never shows up, though, and I wonder if Jensen is upset. It’s the first time in a while she’s brought up any guy, and even though she swears they’re just friends, I know she has a crush on him. I know she wanted him to come but would never admit that someone could hurt her. She doesn’t seem hurt, the way she dances and holds hands with her dad, and I wonder if maybe it’s just the shot of rum she had that’s making her forget she’s a girl who has feelings, a girl who wanted a boy to come to her fifteenth-birthday party. Matty was kicked out of the house a year later, after he was caught with stuff worse than rum. He moved in with one of his friends. Our junior year, he picked us up late from a party, and there was a girl with him, in the passenger seat, crying. “Don’t cry, dry your eye,” he said to her, and it became an instant inside joke. I always wanted to go into his old room and look at all the stuff he left behind: go through his drawers and look at his movies and see if maybe he left any weed. Jensen never wanted to, though. She didn’t talk about him much after he left, but she developed a sacred respect for him. It was like she understood that what he’d done was wrong, but he was still her brother and she wished he was still around.
Matty eventually got his boating license, and now he takes tourists out snorkeling in Key West. He married a Vietnamese woman, and they have a daughter whose name means “star.” Jensen is holding the baby in photos. She’s an aunt, and I’m happy that she and Matty have reconnected.
It’s funny to see Matty as a dad after all these years. I remember him at Jensen’s house when we were in middle school, jumping off the roof into her pool, singing some rap song with bad words at the top of his lungs. When it got dark, he held glow sticks in between his fingers and showed us how to rave. He would dance all night, even after we fell asleep.
• NINE •
New Year’s Eve is a week before my birthday. I’m the last one to turn fifteen, and I can’t wait. I still don’t have my period. Waiting by the bathroom door while all the girls change their tampons is just part of my daily routine at school. I start to wonder if I’ll ever get the damn thing. Jensen taught me how to use a tampon during PE one time. She said it’d be good to practice, so I’d know how to do it when the time came. She told me how to angle the cotton tube back and up inside of me, farther than any boy has
gone besides Brody. I said I felt nothing once it was in and secure, and she said that was good. She said sometimes it feels wrong, like a sharp pinch, and then you have to take it out and start over or deal with the pain for a few hours.
Jensen and I always spend New Year’s together, usually with a trip to Orlando or a sleepover at one of our houses, hopefully hers. But I manage to get sick over Christmas break. We spend Christmas Eve at her house; her parents cooked seafood pasta with three different kinds of fish and wrapped presents all day and the night before. Jensen’s mastered the art of wrapping, and I help her rip and stick tape on her packages as she works. In the morning I help her unwrap her gifts: a set of nail polishes in an assortment of Christmas colors, a new straightening iron, a gift card to Sephora, and a Coach purse just like Rosenberg’s but white. Kenzie has it, too, in black. While Jensen is opening her gifts, her dad pulls out another wrapped present from under the tree and hands it to me. To my surprise, it’s another Coach purse. Red, my favorite. The best part is that it matches Jensen’s. I’m nervous she’ll be mad at her parents for getting me such a nice gift, but she’s excited, and we both scream, hold the bags on our shoulders against our bodies, and pose like fashion ads.
The Brittanys Page 8