Ordinary Girls

by Blair Thornburgh

  “Oh,” Tate said. “Yeah.”

  “I usually always have bags,” I explained, as briskly as I could. “I don’t do this. I’m very responsible. I think it’s really gross when people just let their dogs—”

  “Relax.” He put up a hand. “I gotcha.”

  He jogged back up to the porch and returned with an oblong blue bag I recognized as a New York Times wrapper, which he held over the fence. I took it without looking him in the eye and didn’t move. It wasn’t that I was actually going to just leave the poop on Tate’s next-to-sidewalk lawn strip; I didn’t hate him that much. It’s just that there was no good way to do the deed: either I turned my back and gave Tate a full view of my butt, or I stayed facing him and let him see me put Gizmo’s poop in my bag-covered hand.

  Finally, once I realized Tate was not going anywhere, I settled for a three-quarters view, blocking the actual scooping action with my foot as much as I could.

  I stood back up.

  “Most people say thank you,” Tate said, “when someone helps them not get dog poop on their hand.”

  I was glad it was kind of dark, because hearing Tate say dog poop made me very embarrassed for some reason.

  “I was going to,” I said—well, snapped.

  Tate waited.

  “Thank you,” I said—well, mumbled.

  “You’re welcome,” he said, and did not go away. The dogs, before so eager to drag me down the street, now trotted up to smell Tate’s knees through the fence. For a moment we all stood there.

  “So are you always this pissed off when you walk these guys, or is tonight a special occasion?”

  “I’m—always?” I tightened my grip on the leashes. “Are you watching me?”

  Tate stopped scratching Gizmo’s ear and did a palms up. “No way.” He pointed at a second-floor window. “I can just see you sometimes down Evergreen from my room. You have headphones on, usually.”

  “Oh,” I said feebly. And then, embarrassed of my feebleness, I straightened up. “If you must know, my sister broke our plumbing system by taking a stupid long bath and I haven’t taken a shower in two days so I’m on a walk to escape my house because if I stayed home I was going to commit sororicide.”

  “What?” Tate said. “You were going to kill yourself?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Not suicide. Sororicide. It means killing your sister.”

  “Oh,” Tate said. “I know the feeling. My brother drives me batshit.”

  Neither of us said anything. Then:

  “Can you really not take a shower at your house?” Tate asked.

  “The outflow valve is broken.”

  “What?”

  “It’s . . .” I shrugged in what I hoped was a noncommittal way, because I had suddenly realized how strange it was to be talking to Tate about showers outside at night while holding a bag of dog poop. “Complicated. I don’t know. I have to go.”

  I attempted to rustle the dogs up from where they’d plunked in front of Tate’s legs for ear scratching, but they were not having it.

  “Do you need to take a shower?” Tate asked. “You can shower here, if you want.”

  I blinked.

  “It’s cool,” Tate said. “My parents aren’t home. I mean—”

  “What?”

  “—what I meant was, they won’t, uh . . .” Tate scratched the back of his head.

  “Never mind,” he said, just as I said, “Okay.”

  Immediately, I realized how stupid of a decision this was. But having seen Tate Kurokawa, of all people, act flustered, and clear his throat a lot, and look down at the dogs instead of at my eyes, it didn’t feel like a bad decision. And a shower sounded really, really good.

  “Cool.” He grinned. “Come on in, Peach.”

  Obviously, being flustered did not prevent Tate from being annoying. He opened the gate, and I followed him up to the porch, subtly dumping the bag of poop into a big plastic trash can by the steps. I realized, as I followed, that I didn’t have clean clothes, and that I kind of needed a comb for my hair, but it felt too weird to turn around. And then we were in the kitchen.

  The house was, of course, really nice. The kitchen was clean and gleaming and had pots and pans that matched hanging from a little rack above the island. There were two sinks and a six-burner stove and no stuffed polar bears or phrenological heads anywhere, and the curtains all matched.

  “There’s a bathroom up the back steps,” Tate said, and indicated a very steep, very white set of stairs. I did not move, because I was still holding the dogs’ leashes.

  “Oh. Here.” Tate took the leashes from my hand, without even asking. “You can just go on up. Second door on the right. There are clean towels in the closet. Help yourself to whatever.”

  And so I went on up, and opened the second door on the right, and found the clean towels in the closet. Then I took off all five of Patience Mortimer’s costume jewelry rings and put them in a little copper dish next to the sink. Then, after only a moment’s hesitation, I took off the rest of my clothes.

  I couldn’t pretend that taking a shower at Tate’s house wasn’t weird. But I also couldn’t pretend that it wasn’t nice, either. The shower had a glass door that glided open like a dream, the water was hot right away, there was a delightful assortment of bath products, and the towels were fluffy, sage green, and floral-smelling.

  I pulled my (admittedly still dirty) clothes back on in thirty seconds, but took a long time mopping my hair dry because, well, I have a lot of hair. After piling it in a wet knot on top of my head, I even helped myself to a tiny blob of creamy moisturizer in a genie bottle with a gold knob top. Then I took a very long time studying myself in the mirror, partially because I was nervous to go back downstairs and interact with Tate again, and partially because I was wondering what, exactly, Tate would see when he looked at me. And maybe it was just the flattering shell-shaped recessed lighting on either side of the medicine cabinet, or maybe it was the blob of moisturizer, but I looked decidedly okay. A little glowy, and very clean. Presentable. I folded and hung my towels politely over the towel bar, not leaving them strewn on the tiles like Ginny always does, and slowly made my way downstairs.

  It was cool and quiet in the kitchen, with nothing but the hum of appliances and some squeaky cricket chirps out in the yard. A stack of dishes smeared with something red and saucy lay in sink number one, and a big wooden bowl offered oranges in the middle of the island. Tate was nowhere to be found, and more worryingly, neither were the dogs. I stood stuck, not wanting to infiltrate further into the house, since I had only technically been invited into the bathroom. I could yell something, but what? My voice seemed to have died. I could make some kind of noise in the kitchen to alert the absent Tate to my presence, but I’d already come down the stairs without so much as a creak, and there was nothing else I could do to elicit sound—well, nothing else normal. I wasn’t going to start randomly turning on the taps or clanging together pot lids.

  Instead, I decided to hover by the refrigerator (which was next to the stairs) and casually study the photographs with my ears pricked so that if anyone came in, I’d act like I’d just gotten down the stairs and hadn’t been hovering at all. After surveying the same three photos over and over again (Tate in sunglasses and a life jacket, hanging over the edge of a boat with a rope in his hand; a pretty woman in a sweater set I recognized from the co-op as Tate’s mom; and Tate and an older, curly-haired kid in matching white polos and uncomfortable expressions), I had just started worrying that maybe I should’ve just put my towels in a hamper or something instead of folding them up when someone came thumping down the stairs.

  “Eep,” I said, not too intelligently.

  “Who are you?”

  The person was not Tate, or a parent. It was Benji Feingold, the guy Ginny’s age from the Senior Tea. From the little I knew of him at school, Benji was not so much a twelfth-grade model of a Loud Sophomore Boy as he was a Burnout Sports Boy—i.e., he ran track but also did large amounts
of drugs—which would explain his outfit of a TGS T-shirt, mesh shorts, white socks, and vague smoky smell.

  “Um,” I explained, but Benji was already craning his neck down the hallway.

  “Tate!” he roared. “Is this chick a friend of yours?”

  In the distance, there was the click-zap of a TV being turned off, and, to my relief, the familiar clicking sound of poodle toenails on floorboards. Gizmo and Doug came bounding out of somewhere, followed by Tate, who nodded a little at Benji.

  “Hey. Sorry, she—”

  “Whatever.” Benji threw open the fridge, grabbed an entire carton of organic no-pulp orange juice, and slammed the door shut with his heel. Tate and I waited as he went back upstairs, as seemed only polite.

  “Uh, yeah,” Tate said. “How was your shower?”

  “Fine,” I said, and looked intently back at the fridge, where I realized that the curly-haired kid in the photo was Benji.

  “Your brother,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Who drives you, um, crazy.” The um was because I didn’t swear.

  “Yeah. I know,” Tate said. “We look just like each other.”

  I didn’t move, not sure what to say or do, and Tate laughed. “I’m just messing with you, Peach. Yeah, he’s technically my stepbrother. My mom married my dad, they got divorced, he lives in Connecticut, my mom remarried Benji’s dad, boom. And she changed her name but I didn’t because, you know, I still have a dad I see in the summers or whatever. And my first name is her maiden name, so, like, it’s still around.”

  I got the sense that he’d told that story a lot.

  “My middle name is my mom’s maiden name,” I blurted out, for no real reason. “I didn’t get my own.”

  Tate nodded. “Nice.”

  It wasn’t nice, but I wasn’t going to protest, and anyway, at that exact moment, Doug let out a barrel-chested woof and knocked right past my knees to the screen door, where I could just see a jogger in neon shorts whipping past on Evergreen.

  “Sorry.” I lunged for his collar. “They’re really badly trained. I mean, they’re not really trained at all.”

  “It’s okay,” Tate said—or yelled, over the booming barks. I gave Doug a yank, but he wouldn’t shut up.

  “I . . . I guess I should probably be going,” I yelled back. “Um, thanks for the . . .”

  “Don’t mention it.” Tate held out the leashes. “See you around, Peach.”

  Outside, it was the electric blue of an autumn evening, and the night air felt clean and cool on my newly washed skin. There was a single light on in the carriage house, and faint sounds of piano music drifting down. Inside, the kitchen was empty, and when I went upstairs, I had the TV room to myself. I didn’t have to explain to anyone why my hair was wet. I had, I realized, a secret, for the first time in a very long time.

  On Monday, we went to school. I always hate when books skip the parts where characters go to school and do homework, but, from my low-level understanding of narrative action, I’ve also realized that school is just boring. It is not the sort of place where you contend with the profundity of the human condition, unless you are Jane Eyre. It is the sort of place where you contend with vocabulary lists and witness unconvincing assemblies on the importance of self-esteem. And if you describe it in detail, you end up writing the same thing over and over and over again until you graduate or die.

  At any rate, we did go to school that Monday, and I was furious, but clean, and trying to avoid thinking about what had happened the night prior. There is a way of avoiding thinking about something, though, that makes you think about it even more.

  “How does my hair look?” Ginny poked her lips out at her reflection in the Volvo’s rearview mirror and snapped a hair tie around the floppy knot on her head. We were sitting in the parking lot of the Jesus Is the Way Christian Church, which is across the street from the Gregory School and allows seniors to park in its lot as long as they’ve cleared out in time for 3:00 p.m. Bible study.

  “Like you washed it in a plastic tub,” I said. Ginny had not apologized for breaking the entire house, and I had not yet forgiven her.

  “Plum!”

  She dropped her arms and flopped onto the steering wheel, which gave a forlorn beep. That, I have to admit, made me laugh.

  “It’s not funny,” Ginny said, but underneath her pitiful expression she was laughing a little, too. “Ugh. This is the. Worst. We’re like Dickensian orphans.”

  “Except for the part where we still have Mom,” I said.

  “So we’re half orphans. Whatever.” Ginny stuck the hair tie between her teeth and begun to separate her hair into three very uneven chunks. She was missing a whole chunk at the back.

  “You’re missing a chunk,” I said. “At the back—”

  “Ugh!” Ginny slammed her hands down and dug into the car seat so hard that her knuckles went white. “Ughughughugh—”

  I withdrew. Sometimes, with Ginny, you just have to wait it out.

  “Sorry.” She shook her tub-washed head. “Sorry. I’m just, like . . . ugh. Our house is falling apart, and I’m never going to get into college, and my hair is a mess.”

  “You are going to get into college,” I said, rote.

  “I hope Dad left some tools in the basement. I’ll be hewing wood soon. Whatever hewing is.” Ginny’s knuckles went slack.

  “Here.” I took the hair tie. “I’ll fix it.”

  Ginny turned obediently back around, and I divvied her hair up into four sections (even size, no missing chunks). I braided in silence for a few seconds before she interrupted again.

  “Plum!!” She grabbed me by the wrist, which made me completely lose control of the braid. “Your rings are gone!”

  My rings. I drew my hand back—it was naked. I didn’t remember taking them off this morning. Usually I only took them off to . . .

  . . . shower.

  “Oh my God.” Ginny gasped. “You pawned them!”

  “What? No.” I clenched my hand into a fist. “I just—I’m not wearing them today.”

  “You pawned them,” Ginny said, “because you knew it was the only thing you could do to save your impoverished family—”

  “I didn’t pawn them,” I said. “First of all, I don’t even know where to go to pawn them.”

  “Okay, okay, you sold them on eBay,” Ginny said. “Same difference.”

  “Ginny,” I said. “You’re being ridiculous.”

  “Then where are your rings?”

  “I told you,” I said. “I’m just not wearing them today. I know exactly where they are.”

  This, of course, was not the technical truth. I had left them in their neat little stack in Tate Kurokawa’s soap dish, but for all I knew, Tate had thrown them away by now, or swept them out in a litter of used tissues, or sealed them up in one of those Cash4Gold envelopes and traded them in, except that they weren’t gold, and he probably didn’t need the cash.

  “But—”

  “Ginny!” I snapped the elastic onto the end of her braid. “Shut up.”

  She didn’t, but I decided it was time to get out of the car.

  “Plu-uuuuum!” Ginny yelled at me when I’d reached the parking lot. I stopped.

  “What?”

  She jogged up to me, her giant backpack bouncing. (The braid looked very good, I was pleased to note.)

  “Just don’t tell anyone about the whole plastic-house-of-shame situation,” Ginny said. “If people find out we don’t have a place to shower, I will literally die.”

  I gave her a look that said if that were true, you’d already be literally dead, Ginny.

  But all I said was, “Who would I tell?”

  “Gin!” Charlotte was walking in from the senior lot, a pair of giant sunglasses over her eyes and a travel mug of coffee in her hand. She never had a backpack, just a peach-colored tote bag, a small gold charm dangling from one of the straps, that was in no way suited to carrying all her textbooks. I was surprised she didn’t nee
d some kind of cantilever to keep it on her shoulder.

  “God, I’m exhausted,” Charlotte said. “I was up almost all night working on this problem set. You have no idea how lucky you are not to be in advanced calc.”

  “Tell me about it,” Ginny said, before snapping back to me and bugging her eyes out. “Just keep a low profile, okay?” she hissed.

  “Sure,” I said. This would not be hard, because at the Gregory School, I barely had a profile to begin with. I wasn’t invisible; teachers knew who I was, because they had had my sister, and upperclassmen knew that Ginny Blatchley had a little sister. Absent my sister, though, I had no identity to speak of. I was physically proximate to Jeremy Beard and the Weird Sweatshirt Kids and their notebooks and dice and Chex Mix in little Baggies, but that was it. It would be a sad situation if I didn’t, in fact, prefer it.

  And school was reassuring in its boringness, because at school all the plumbing worked and there were things to eat that were not sandwiches and I did not have to think about Ginny crying in the bathtub or yelling at me or having conniptions over the University of Pennsylvania. Also, it was a Monday, which meant that my first class was English, which was the only acceptable way to start a school day. Unfortunately, my second class was Algebra II, which meant that in five measly minutes of passing time, I would have to scuttle down the back stairs of the Gregory School main building, speed-walk half a city block including a street crossing, and scramble to the second floor of the Greaves Math Center.

  So, after forty-five anodyne minutes of vocabulary worksheets, I packed up my backpack and headed into the breach. Ordinarily, the mad dash from class to class was, by necessity, an anonymous time. Standing still to talk slows the tides of the hallway flow and everyone naturally hates people who do that. But that day, fate intervened.

  I saw Tate at the outside picnic tables. Not alone, of course; he was flanked by Stevie and Tommy and some other Loud Sophomore Boys whose names were irrelevant.

  My heart palpitated in my chest. This was exactly what it had been like, moments before my greatest humiliation. Moments before they’d snatched the notebook out of my fourth-grade hands and read aloud my idiotic verses composed for the class poetry unit, which, in retrospect, was fruitless and lost on most of our fourth-grade brains. The fight-or-flight was suffocating.