***
Stefani snacks on a frozen Snickers bar and a bag of Cheesy Curls, chasing them down with a can of Mountain Dew as she sits on the curb outside of Love Saves the Day on First Avenue and Seventh Street. People pass. The festival stumbles to life. Morris is waiting for her down the street, out front of McSorley’s. She saw him there, is making him wait. “Absence makes it hard to throw farmers,” she tells herself. She heard the adage somewhere, in a movie, maybe, and liked how it sounded, though she has no idea what it means. All she knows is she’s going to make Morris wait.
Bright orange crumbles of Cheesy Curls drift down onto her white Baby Phat jeans as she fills her mouth with two or three at a time. The music from the festival pitches and rises, sending an off-tune wave of noise. Some girls from her class stroll past, girls who look at her but don’t acknowledge her. Stefani stares straight through them, knowing it’s better to be aloof and remain unhurt then venture a “Hey” or “What’s up?” and be snubbed.
Finishing her soda, her candy bar, and her Cheesy Curls, Stefani stands. Prom is on the agenda, though she no longer plans to go with Morris. She dampened on that idea since Robby Robinovitz, the boy with the sticky touch whose father owns a Subway sandwich shop, asked her to prom between English and Biology class today. Only Robby’s touch was no longer sticky. And he’d grown, filled out and become less chunky and more strapping. He’d been out of school for over a month, been in the hospital for an operation on something deep inside him, something that wasn’t working the way it was supposed to work. “I’m not even sure myself,” Robby told Stefani when she’d asked. “They explained it to me, but I didn’t understand. All I know is that it was painful, and that I have a scar across my stomach. I have to go in for another operation at the end of summer.”
“Are you going to live?” Stefani asked, intrigued. The idea of dating someone terminally ill held a perverse appeal. She envisioned herself wearing black and crying over his casket, envisioned all the attention she’d get.
“Probably not,” he said, and shrugged. “But I’m good for now.” He then asked if she wanted to go to prom with him.
She said yes, on one condition.
“Name it,” he tells her.
“I want a kiss,” she says, testing him.
He dove in passionately, grabbed her head in his cool, dry hands and stroked her tongue to hers.
A passing student hooted, yelled, “Go, go, go.”
They ignored him.
Pulling back for air, Stefani said, “Yeah. Yeah, okay. Prom.” They made out until the bell rang.
Morris is nice, Stefani thinks, but he’s nice the way librarians are nice: quiet, helpful, reserved. And who wants to date a librarian? She’ll let him down easy, tell him she changed her mind, isn’t going at all.
She brushes the faux-cheese dust off her pants, applies some grape-flavored lip-gloss, brushes her hair, then strides down the street toward McSorley’s and the dancing Ukrainians.
It’s through the sparse crowd, past the stands selling undercooked meat products and warm cans of Coke, beyond the clattering old women in knitted shawls, that Stefani sees Morris.
She stops some distance away.
Her father’s with him, his arm around Morris’s shoulder. Seeing this, she grows angry. Morris is mine, she thinks, seething. Her father can’t have him back; they can’t be friends like they use to be. Morris is hers.
“He’ll pay,” she says to herself, watching her father laugh.
Then she sees the skinny woman with red lion’s mane, sees Morris dance with her. Sees them kiss.
“That son of a bitch,” she says. “He’s cheating on me.” She’s jilted. Hurt. Enraged. “He’ll pay, too,” she says. “Goddamn it, they’ll both pay.”
Chapter 31
The Trouble with Bliss Page 33