Ordinary Girls

by Blair Thornburgh

  But Tate also had my rings, or at least (perhaps) knew what happened to them. And, worse than that, he had noticed me.

  “Hey,” Tate said. He was grinning. “Come here a sec.”

  I froze, heart still pounding. What was I thinking? Talking to Tate would involve, well, a conversation, and that conversation would probably touch on either the dog-poop incident or the no-plumbing situation. Or, worst of all, the porta potty.

  “Yeah, come here,” said Stevie. “Sit your fine self down.” His face contorted with laughter, as if calling me fine was the world’s funniest joke. Which, I realized, it was.

  This was a mistake. I started to walk away.

  “Aw, come on,” called Tommy at my back. “Don’t be such a prude!”

  But I turned. Tate was laughing just like the rest of them, and my chest was tight as an iron lung. As the LSBs started speculating on what Tate could have possibly convinced me to do, I unfroze fully, and then I ran—so fast that I couldn’t hear whatever else Tate was yelling, so fast that I made it to Algebra II with three point five minutes of passing time to spare.

  That night, Ginny went to Charlotte’s house to study and, quote, use an actual toilet, so Mom and I watched Home and Garden Television, eating our dinner popcorn as endless iterations of upwardly mobile couples squinted and nitpicked over real estate: too big, too small, not enough yard, too much yard, no soaking tub, and so on.

  “Jesus,” Mom muttered into her wineglass after our sixth episode. “It’s just a house.”

  “Houses are important,” I reminded her.

  “Mm.” She stared ahead, almost like she wasn’t looking at the TV. I busied myself petting Kit Marlowe, who had curled up in the dent he’d made in the back of the sofa cushions.

  “It’s only a few more days,” Mom said.

  “I know.”

  “Thanks for putting the tub in the tub.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  I had enacted my suggestion, despite Ginny’s thinking it was dumb, with a plastic tub we had once used for Halloween apple-bobbing. It was not ideal, but desperate times called for a non-Tate shower solution. Even Ginny had used it, although she’d left the water for someone else to dump out.

  Kit hissed, and I rolled my eyes. “Oh, come on. You still have a litter box.”

  “I got a job,” Mom said. “By the way.”

  “What?”

  “Pamela Wills,” she explained. “She wanted someone with an artistic eye, or so she says. For fund-raising help at ArtSong. It’s a chorus or something that she runs. I don’t know.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “I think I throw fund-raisers now.” Mom gulped some wine. “There’s one after Thanksgiving. I said we could have it here, so . . . it’ll be here.”

  “Oh,” I said. At least having a fund-raiser in the house meant that 5142 Haven Lane was probably not about to go on the market anytime soon. “Do you know how to do that?”

  She threw up her hands. “Well, I think I can figure it out. I mean, I learned the basics of mouse anatomy in, like, three weeks. When I was twenty-two.”

  The Five Little Field Mice had unusually, presumably anatomically incorrect, giant ears, but I didn’t mention that. “That’s great, Mom.”

  “Thank you.” Mom squinted at the TV, where an ungodly McMansion squatted over an emerald lawn. “I guess this place comes in handy sometimes. You know everyone said we had no business buying this house, though. Your father and I.”

  “They did?”

  Mom nodded, swiping a piece of hair out of her eyes. Without makeup on, she looked older than she was. “At the TGS kindergarten open house. Charlotte’s parents, even. Don’t tell Ginny.”

  “Oh.” I crunched a piece of popcorn. “That’s not very nice.”

  “They were right, though.” Mom shook her head. “They were absolutely right. I mean, we have a porta potty, for Christ’s sake. We have at least three rooms we don’t use for anything. This is not how this house is supposed to be lived in.”

  “We use the Hiltiddly Room,” I said. “We keep the NordicTrack in there. And the office—”

  I cut myself off. We weren’t using the office, but it had its use. We needed that space to contain everything it contained so that it wouldn’t get everywhere else.

  “I’m sorry. Thanks for helping us, Plum.” Mom turned and patted my knee. “I really appreciate it. And I’m doing my best. We have some old things we can get rid of. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “It’ll be fine,” Mom said again. She sipped from her glass, and twisted her hands. Something was missing.

  “You’re not wearing your engagement ring,” I said.

  “Oh, hm.” Mom looked at her ring finger, as if she’d just now noticed. “That’s right. I dropped it off to get cleaned.”

  Iris Blatchley is not the sort of woman who cared about having clean jewelry.

  “I hope it wasn’t expensive,” I said. “We don’t exactly have money to spare.”

  “Oh, no, it wasn’t,” Mom said quickly.

  I gave her a look that said, You are absolutely lying, Mother, and in two seconds, she crumbled.

  “All right, fine, you win. I’ll get it back in two days. It’s just a cash-flow issue, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “They’re just things, Plum,” she said. “Having them or not having them doesn’t change anything.”

  She set her glass on the table with its upside-down leg and settled back into the couch.

  Things were not just things. And at that moment, I knew that no matter how humiliating it would be, I had to get those rings back.

  And so, the following night, I enacted a plan. Fortunately, I had a ready-made excuse to leave the house every night, in the form of the dogs. Unfortunately, I also had Ginny, who had taken to staking out the kitchen after dinner and hyperventilating at her schoolwork.

  “You’re going out?” she said. “You’re going to freeze.”

  “I am, and I am not,” I informed her.

  “You know what you need,” Ginny said, a maniacal gleam in her eye. “The Amazing Wonder Jacket™.”

  “No,” I said. “Not at all.”

  The Amazing Wonder Jacket™—which you pronounce by saying “The Amazing Wonder Jacket tee-em” to make sure your listener hears the little trademark sign—is an old jacket we have that is black on the outside and fuzzy purple on the inside. When we were kids, we used to film these fake infomercials using random stuff we found around the house, like our mom’s old Janis Joplin records or, say, an old piece of outerwear. That is how the Amazing Wonder Jacket™ got its name. Ginny had long maintained her claim that it magically adjusts to whatever temperature you need, like it’s a kind of coat-thermos or something. I thought it was warm and relatively lightweight. In any case, the important part was that on anybody but Ginny, it looked hideously bulky.

  “Yes!” Ginny cried. “It has advanced therm-adjust technology!”

  “What does?” Mom wandered in, a sheaf of papers under her arm, and glanced at the leashes in my hand. “Oh, good. Thanks for walking them.”

  Ginny pivoted. “Mother,” she said, jacket situation forgotten. “Why is there no furniture in the living room?”

  She put her hands on her hips. Mom adjusted her papers.

  “When were you in the living room?”

  “I don’t know, recently?” Ginny said. “It is for living, after all. Except that we no longer seem to own any couches.”

  I looked at Mom with a look of concern, because I actually was concerned, but I was also slipping toward the door. Perhaps this was my chance to flee without the jacket on.

  Mom sighed.

  “Can we not do this now? I have a wine-and-cheese . . . thing to plan. I’m stressed out.”

  “Oh, like I’m not?” Ginny said.

  “I’m just saying,” Mom said. “Cut me some slack, okay?”

  “I just want to know where the
furniture is!” Ginny said.

  Mom sighed again, more theatrically this time. It was easy to see where Ginny got it from.

  “Fine. I had it taken to the resale store.”

  “What?!” Ginny cried.

  “We never go in that room anyway. And it was all . . . I don’t know.”

  “Moldering,” I suggested.

  “Exactly,” Mom said. “Plum, if you’re going outside, put a coat on.”

  Cripes. Trapped. I had made it almost all the way to the door, too.

  “But I can’t,” I said. “It looks stupid.”

  “So?” Ginny said. “Is anyone important going to see you?”

  I could not answer that in honesty. This is how I ended up swaddled in the Amazing Wonder Jacket™.

  No sooner had I gotten them outside than the dogs immediately yanked me down the block. This was not in and of itself particularly unusual, but this time they seemed to have a destination in mind, like they knew. Dogs are dumb like that, or perhaps smart like that. Gizmo wasn’t even interested in biting the leash.

  As the dogs sniffed assiduously around the gateposts to the Kurokawa/Feingold driveway, I reaffirmed my executive decision: no matter how embarrassing it was to go up to Tate’s house and speak to his face about the matter of retrieving my missing rings, I had to do it. Those rings were important, and I would only have to speak to Tate face-to-face for approximately five minutes, max. And also, the dogs really seemed to like the way he smelled, or something.

  So I went up to the back door, knocked, and waited. I stood there in the door-shaped square of golden kitchen light and tried to keep the dogs from eating the semi-mushy jack-o’-lantern next to the welcome mat. Which was strange, as we were still on the earliest cusp of acceptable Halloween decoration season, and stranger still because even in its deflated state, I could tell there was something weird about the face: it didn’t have any eyes, for one thing, and the mouth had no teeth on top and a bunch of weirdly shaped ones on the bottom right.

  It had been almost five minutes of dog wrangling, and I was about to knock again when something in the kitchen beeped. A series of thumps pounded overhead, and Tate appeared, barefoot and in sweatpants that read NANTUCKET, with his bister hair sticking up on one side. I waved, and he kind of jumped.

  “Peach?” He smiled, but also yawned. “Hey.”

  “Were you asleep?” I asked. I don’t know what prompted me to open with this. I think it was something about seeing Tate’s bare feet—which were normal feet, just bare, and which makes sense when you think it through, of course. But you just don’t think about people like Tate shuffling around in bare feet.

  Tate yawn-smiled. “Maybe.”

  “It’s five thirty at night,” I pointed out.

  Tate shrugged. “Yeah. I’m lazy.” He looked right at me—or rather, right at the Amazing Wonder Jacket™, into which I had stuffed my leashless hand. “Are you cold?”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “I’m fine.” This was the truth—the AWJ™ was doing its thing.

  “Mm.” Tate looked over his shoulder, then down at the dogs. “Do they wanna come in?”

  It was hard to deny that I was gripping the straining leashes so tightly I was practically getting a brush burn on my right palm. Tate swung open the door, and I let go of the leashes, and Gizmo and Doug vaulted over the threshold and knocked right into the UCK of Tate’s sweatpants-knee.

  “They probably smell the food,” Tate said. “I’m making pizza bagels.”

  “While you were asleep?”

  As if on cue, there was another beep.

  “Yo, Tate, shut that shit off!” yelled a voice from upstairs.

  “I’m a multitasker,” Tate said to me. To the upstairs voice, he yelled, “I got it, Benj.”

  He grabbed a pot holder—the kind of pot holder you actually buy somewhere, not a half-melted loop-weaving pot holder you make in kindergarten—and yanked open the big silver oven door. It smelled very, very good, in that way that melted cheese always does.

  Tate dropped the baking sheet on the stovetop with a clatter. There were six bagel halves on it.

  “You’re going to eat six pizza bagels?” I asked. (A stupid question.)

  “Probably not,” Tate said. “You hungry?”

  I was. We had had pasta for dinner, but pasta with just sauce and some cheese, because no one had remembered to buy meat, or, frankly, knew how to prepare a meat sauce. I was probably so hungry that Tate could tell, which is probably why he didn’t even wait for my answer before ripping off a paper towel from over the sink and picking two pizza bagels off the sheet.

  “Thanks.” I took the paper towel and sat on one of the island stools, since it seemed supremely stupid to eat standing up. Tate helped himself to a bagel, too, and as we sat there eating pizza bagels it occurred to me what a weird sentence that was: Tate Kurokawa and I are eating pizza bagels together. It was, by the way, an excellent pizza bagel. Not too much sauce.

  “How’s the shower situation?” Tate asked.

  “Good,” I said. “Fine. I mean, we are able to shower again, if that’s what you were asking.”

  I did not feel the need to share with Tate my tub-in-tub solution.

  “Damn.” Tate chewed. “Yeah, I was thinking about it, and that has to be crazy annoying. Like, every time I got in the shower after that I thought about you.”

  The shock of this statement was immediate. I stopped chewing. Tate’s face went very, very red, like he was the one wearing the Amazing Wonder Jacket™, and he started clearing his throat about fifty times a second.

  “Um,” he said. “I just meant like . . . so anyway . . .”

  “Sorry if I scared you,” I interrupted, partially because I was worried about it and partially to give Tate a break from all that throat clearing.

  Tate laughed, a little uneasily. His face was still kind of flushing. “Don’t flatter yourself, Peach. You are not that threatening-looking. Even in that ginormous jacket.”

  “It’s supposed to make me look tough.”

  “Really?”

  “No.” I gave him a look that said, It’s a jacket; it is supposed to keep me warm, and picked up my bagel. “I just meant that you looked surprised to see me.”

  “Yeah.” Tate nodded. “I dunno. Maybe ring the doorbell next time.”

  I barely had a chance to register the fact that Tate said next time before he moved on.

  “Oh, shit, of course. Your rings.” Chewing, he jerked his head toward the stairs. “I have them. They’re upstairs.”

  He leaped up for the stairs, but paused on the bottom step. Like he wanted me to follow him.

  “Um . . .” I looked at the dogs, who were sniffing interestedly around the bottom of the oven. Tate shrugged.

  “Eh, they’ll be fine.”

  And so, with my remaining pizza bagel balanced on its paper towel so as not to leave it for dead with the dogs, I followed Tate and his bagel up the back stairs and onto the second floor. I recognized it, of course, from showering there, but this time we went farther down the hallway and to the right, into a room that had clothes all over the floor and papers all over the desk and absolutely zero books. It was surely a breeding ground for bacteria and illiteracy.

  “They’re somewhere.” Tate put his pizza bagel on top of a stereo speaker. “I put them away so I wouldn’t lose them.”

  Judging by the state of the room, which I now realized was his bedroom, I was not optimistic. Also, I was a little embarrassed to be standing at the threshold of Tate Kurokawa’s bedroom, especially considering that some of the clothes on the floor were boxers, with little pinstripes and blue and green plaids. But Tate just waded into the mess and started picking things up.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you or anything,” he said. “At school, I mean.”

  “Oh,” I said. There didn’t seem to be any good way to tell Tate that Loud Sophomore Boys were, by their very nature, despicable. “You didn’t. I just . . . had to get to math.”

&n
bsp; Tate was silent, and I thought perhaps I should elaborate until he cried out.

  “Aha!”

  He grabbed something off the desk and hopped back over all his piles of stuff.

  “Here.”

  He held out a little velvet bag, presumably containing my rings.

  “My mom put them in there,” he said. “So they wouldn’t get tarnished.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Um, tell your mom thanks.”

  “Okay.”

  He was standing very close to me, so close that I could smell the familiar scent of his soap, soap that he must have used in the shower, and I was in the middle of realizing how amazingly easy it is to think about someone showering, even by accident, when a terrific crash came from downstairs.

  “The dogs!” I yelled.

  I stuck the little bag into my jacket pocket and dashed back to the stairs, Tate pounding after me. When I got there, it was exactly as I had feared—Gizmo and Doug had pulled the baking sheet to the floor and were merrily snarfing up the remaining pizza bagels.

  “No!” I leaped forward and yanked them up by the collars. “Bad dogs! Drop it!” I knew these were the kind of things you yell at dogs that were trained, but I figured it was worth pretending.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, using all my strength to keep the dogs in check while Tate stooped to pick up the baking sheet.

  “It’s no big deal,” he said. “I wasn’t going to eat all of them.”

  Gizmo burped.

  “I should really go,” I said. “But thanks for the rings. And, um, the pizza bagel. Bagels. For all of us.”

  “Of course,” Tate said. “Anytime.”

  With the leashes reclipped, I navigated the dogs out the back door, but I was so focused on not letting them bolt back for the saucy remains of the food that I accidentally stepped into something pulpy and wet. The pumpkin.

  “Oh, shit.” Tate came out the back door. “Gross.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, shaking the pumpkin goop off my shoe. “I think the pumpkin got it worse than I did. Sorry.”