Gingerbread

by Rachel Cohn

  Delia says how can I have a name like Cyd Charisse and not want to be a dancer. Have you ever actually

  38 Rachel Colin

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  watched a movie where Cyd Charisse danced? she asked. Not really, I said. Delia is trying to get me to come to the modern dance class she teaches at a nearby dance studio, but when I picture myself there, I see myself wearing a tiara and a tulle tutu, standing on tippy toes in combat boots and frowning. No thank you.

  Nancy has figured out a way to get back at me for having a summer job. She sends Fernando, the driver, over to Ocean Beach in the Mercedes with the dark tinted windows to pick me up after my shift. I have offered Fernando my whole salary as hush money to not come pick me up, but he won't take it. "Orders is orders," he said, which I understand. I know the difference between a latte and a cappuccino.

  Fernando drinks straight black coffee every day while he waits for me to finish washing dishes and sweeping the kitchen. That's how I figured out something about Fernando. He is Sugar's soulmate. Every day after I give Fernando his black coffee, I clock his sugar-pouring time and it's about ten whole seconds. That's a lot of sugar for a guy with a long red scar on his face, the kind of leather face you would never think to ask, "Can I make you an espresso drink this evening?" I mean, he is black coffee and then some. Some sugar.

  Fernando is not that old, even though he is a grandpa. He is a widower. I would say he is in his early sixties, which is young for Sugar, but so what. A good man is a good man, no matter what age. He got the long red scar going down the side of his face during the civil war in Nicaragua. That's all he'll tell me about it. Fernando is not exactly a talkative kind of guy, so I don't know much about him. I do know for a fact

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  that he was not named for the ABBA song "Fernando."

  I like Fernando and I am totally going to hook him up with Sugar but I'm sorry to say I am going to have to ditch him, orders or no orders. Twilight after work is Shrimp and Wallace's sacred surf time, and Delia and I would like to start sunset barbecuing so we can all eat dinner together when the moonlight strikes. See, I am so ready for a commune situation. Have grill, will commune.

  In exchange for being allowed to have a job, I have promised to be a model citizen daughter, and for these first few weeks working at Java the Hut, I have been. I have let Fernando pick me up at work and I have eaten dinner with the fam every night. My shoplifting days are over, I actually got decent grades last term, and I have not made a razor design on any part of my body in eons. I have confined my Shrimp time to making out with him in the Java the Hut supply closet and quick feels on the cold hard sand at the beach during our breaks, but enough is enough. A girl can only be dutiful for so long. The summer solstice is only days away, and Delia and I are planning a party at Wallace and Shrimp's house and I am spending the night whether Sid and Nancy notice or not. I will be as wild as I wanna be.

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  Twelve

  Shrimp is totally my main ingredient, but can I just confess that I would not mind a little side order of Java sometime? Shrimp's brother is hot hot hot. Wallace is a little taller than Shrimp, but way more filled out in his wet suit. Wallace has some serious drool-worthy upper body happening and beautiful long dirty blond hair which he wears pulled back in a ponytail, but not in a gay way like Fabio. And he has smoldering gray eyes that burn when Java the Hut receipts don't add up, or when delivery people are late, or when he's been working since five in the morning and goes out surfing at the end of the day and the waves are lame and the sun is bright instead of obscured by broody fog which means that tourists are everywhere.

  I suppose I will burn in hell like in some Greek tragedy for lusting after my boyfriend's brother, he who also happens to be the boyfriend of my new friend Delia from Alaska. But I also suppose there is a long list of deeds for which I might burn in hell, so why not add secret crush on my boyfriend's brother.

  Anyway, it is not the dangerous type of crush where I will play all Lolita and entice Wallace into some skanky love triangle. Spare me. Wallace is just like this aesthetic dream that if I were an artist I would paint and be tortured by and long for always, but never have.

  It's hard not to sigh at those brothers while staring at them through binoculars from the roof deck of Wallace and Shrimp's house. Those boys are sumpin' sumpin'. The sun

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  was just falling over the ocean horizon as Shrimp and Wallace, wet-suited and carrying their boards under their arms, crossed over Great Highway back toward the house. Their heads were hunched over at the same exact angle and the wind was whipping their wet hair so they looked almost like identical surf punks.

  Nine o'clock in the evening on the longest day of the year, and Delia and I were summer-solstice barbecuing on a deck built on the roof of Shrimp and Wallace's house as we watched the sun set over the Pacific. We were making scrumptious veggieburgers din-dins for our menfolk to eat once they jumped out of the surf.

  Curiosity was burning through my skin and I wanted to ask Delia, What is it like to touch Wallace? To feel the weight of him on you? Luckily before I spoke, my mind went ding-ding-ding-danger, and instead I said to Delia, "How come you came to San Francisco from Alaska?" I suppose I don't really care how or why Delia came to be here, I just think it is cool to be from some remote wilderness with a cool name like A-la-ska, and anyway it is fun listening to Delia talk because she has this husky deep voice which totally does not match the way she looks, little miss slip dresses and ballet plies and jettes as she walks.

  "I ran out of dance teachers in Alaska," Delia said. 'And who doesn't want to live in San Francisco?"

  I don't want to live in San Francisco. I don't mind living here because it is insanely beautiful, but I will bail for my commune or to move to New York and wear all black at the first opportunity.

  "Did you live in an igloo in Alaska?" I asked.

  Delia laughed like I am uproarious. "Hardly, Cyd

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  Charisse," she said. "I grew up in a nice suburban house in Anchorage with running water and cable TV. Winters were cold and summers gorgeous and dancing, always."

  "Oh," I said. I must admit that I was disappointed.

  I was not disappointed that I managed to ditch Fernando. I told him to pick me up at Sugar's nursing home after work, knowing that by the time Fernando figured out that I was not at Sugar's, Java the Hut would be closed and we would be barbecuing veggieburgers and Fernando would be in love with Sugar. Done deal.

  By the ringing of the phone as I stared at Shrimp and Wallace through the binoculars, I knew it was safe to say that Fernando had caught on.

  " Hola ," I said into the cordless.

  "Very funny," Fernando said back.

  "Do you totally love Sugar?" I asked.

  Fernando pretended he didn't hear my question. "You want to tell your mother about this, or should I?"

  I wasn't sure. I had assumed Fernando would tell her, if she was even paying attention. No biggity.

  Sugar got on the line and said, "Cyd Charisse, you bad girl. Are you trying to get Fernando in trouble?"

  "Fernando won't be in trouble, Sugs. I will."

  Sugar's sigh was a mile long. "No, baby. It is Fernando's responsibility to see that you come home from work every evening. That was the agreement with your parents. He doesn't come home with you, he's in trouble."

  "But that's so unfair!" I said.

  "Exactly," Sugar said, and handed the phone back to Fernando.

  "Chiquita bonita?" he asked.

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  "I'll call Nancy now," I said. "I'll tell her I bailed on you."

  "Adios," Fernando said. Click-ito.

  Here's how I know I have entered a total freak zone. When I called Nancy, she said fine that I had dinner at Shrimp's, just to not come home too late. She was hostessing a grand soiree for her society friends, so I'm guessing she was relieved not to have me traipsing through the door and her having to explain to all those biddies about why her daughter
has... gasp... a J-O-B... gasp... in Ocean Beach! Ocean Where? they would have asked, like the Ocean Beach neighborhood isn't four miles from their Pacific Heights mansions.

  "I'm free!" I sang out as Shrimp walked through the deck and hugged me from behind. I did not care that his wet suit was still damp or that his head nuzzled inside my neck was dripping chill water down my chest. He felt just right.

  La vie en Cyd Charisse is getting awfully cozy, I thought. I have not been in trouble in ages, I have a totally boss boyfriend, a responsible summer job, and Nancy is even doling out permission slips for hanging out with that boy . I might be getting bored, I realized, as I turned around to plant one on Shrimp, but over my shoulder I checked out Wallace and noticed that he was totally checking me out too.

  Danger.

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  Thirteen

  "You're cool," Wallace mumbled to me in the moonlight. Delia and Shrimp were passed out in their sleeping bags on either side of us. Only the sound of the crashing waves drowned out their snores.

  How could I sleep when Java the Hut with the peppermint-tea breath was telling me stories all night, with his dreamy long hair hanging down over his shoulders and his smoldering eyes burning through my moonlit gaze. Oh lordy, pray for me now, Sugar Pie would have said if she were here now.

  "Yup," I said back to Wallace, and then thought, Yup? Cyd Charisse, thy vocab is doth lacking.

  I must be some kind of a gravedigger because Wallace is almost a quarter of a century old and I totally want to unzip that sleeping bag of his and squeeze on in.

  On my commune, it will be okay to love two brothers, just not at the same time.

  After Shrimp and Delia fell asleep, Wallace and I started talking about past loves. I told him about my first boyfriend, Luke, when I was fourteen but almost fifteen. Luke was seventeen and rode a motorcycle. Actually, it was a moped and he sucked at riding it. He was always wiping out in the parking lot. No wonder he had to be a Latin tutor, there had to be something for him to be good at.

  One other thing Luke was good at was kissing. When we were supposed to be studying declensions, he was actually teaching me how to kiss using all the parts in my mouth--

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  my lips, my tongue, my teeth--and how to kiss with Hershey's chocolate syrup on my tongue and marshmallow fluff on his. Disgusting--maybe, but yummy--definitely. Sometimes we kissed shotgun style using a Coke can cradling Jamaican weed. I got bored with the weed thing a long time ago, but the soul kissing thing is a keeper.

  No matter how many varieties of substances Luke abused, or how many leather jackets he wore or how long his hair got or how much he tried to look like Kurt Cobain, he could not pull off the whole Angry Young Man thing. The boy was a bottom-line brainiac who was destined to go to Harvard and be a neuro-chem-atomic-physics genius, regardless of the fact that he had perfected the art of Frenching, and it is my hope that one day when he wins the Nobel Prize, he will remember it was me who told him that he was so totally just a geek who could make out like a champion but really, ditch the rebel routine and get back to the books.

  Luke dumped me for a mathlete girl who put out. But by that time Justin's bulky biceps and lacrosse calves had entered into my line of hormonally challenged vision, and I was, like, Luke who? and I gave it up to Justin in a heartbeat. Quid pro quo . I mean Justin just had the body of a god. Forgive me, but it's true. I just wanted to run my hands all over him, all the time. That's how trouble starts, see.

  How come on TV shows where teens are having sex it's always such a naughty thing, or something that has to be talked about over and over until the characters can finally get it on. In real life, it is not so hard. Look, want, touch, trouble.

  Sex doesn't always end in trouble. On TV if you are a teen and you are having sex, you are either (a) not a major character or (b) going to have to learn an Important Lesson,

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  whether it's pregnancy, AIDS, or any other form of sexually transmitted disease, or you are going to suffer through mucho parental freak-out scenes.

  Most people I know my age who are doing it just do it, they don't talk about it forever and ever, and they certainly don't tolerate talking about it with their parents. Not everyone has to have a little morality lesson like I did. Because the truth is, you never see those teens who talk and talk and talk about sex on TV ever really going after each other all hot and heavy. Because what is supposed to be a secret is that--shh, say it quiet--sex can be quite nice, thankyouverymuch. But it's better when it's with a person you care about as much as you want to grope.

  Wallace's first love was an Australian-Indonesian girl named Lucinda. Lucinda had azure eyes the color of the tropical sea and long blue-black hair falling to her waist. He met her the year he spent backpacking across Asia before going to college. Lucinda's skin was a bright orange-brown sunset and she was always saying "gerr-ate!" for "great!" in this Australian accent like her Australian father. Lucinda wore silk sarong skirts and Wallace dressed in grass tiki-things and together they liked to sneak off and make love under waterfalls and wrap tight around each other in the warm Indian Ocean, I'm fairly sure.

  Lucinda's family lived in a hut on the beach. Her dad was a coffee exporter. That's how Java the Hut was born, learning the trade from Lucinda's pops. Dig?

  I asked Wallace how come you didn't stay in Indonesia and marry Lucinda and have Californian-American Australian-Indonesian babies? Because you could tell by the way he talked about Lucinda that she was the love of his life. Wallace answered, I wanted to backpack in Nepal and India

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  and Vietnam, and Lucinda didn't want to go so far away from her parents. I still wanted to go to college. So I left. I was young and I was stupid. Oh, I said. Right.

  I wonder if Lucinda pines for Wallace under the Balinese moon now the way I do under the Ocean Beach, San Francisco, moon. I wonder if we met if she wouldn't mind teaching me how to do that funky Indonesian dance with the curly hands and sexy-swish hips. I wonder if a dingo would eat her baby if she had one. Maybe she had Wallace's secret love child and a dingo ate it one time when she was visiting her grandparents in Australia and now she is, like, totally traumatized and never leaves her hut even though her mom is always trying to make her dance and be happy again.

  I wonder if Lucinda has forgotten Wallace after almost six years.

  Doubt it.

  I told Wallace, "That is so cool how your parents let Shrimp live with you while they are digging ditches and whatnot."

  Wallace laughed but his eyes were not smiling. "It's not so cool," he mumbled.

  "Que?" I asked. No way having no parents around could be anything less than splendido .

  Wallace adopted an adult tone which sounded totally queer. He said, "The kid needs his parents, that's all. He's still a kid, and a kid's parents should be with him, not making selfish attempts to recapture their youths by thinking they're helping people who don't need them nearly as much as their son does. I love having him around, don't get me wrong, it's just that... I'm not his parents, y'know?"

  It was funny to hear Shrimp called "kid." Call me inno

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  cent, but I tend not to think of the guy I am fooling around with as "kid." "Kid" to me is a shorty squirt like my little Hyper Boy brother Josh, who likes to make burping noises and open his mouth wide when he's eating so you can see he is eating rocky road ice cream with yellow and red Gummy Bears. "Kid" to me is not the King of Hearts who likes to slow dance against me in his wet suit even when there is no music playing.

  "No, I don't know," I told Wallace. Parents who leave their teenager alone to grow up in peace would have to be the coolest.

  I guess.

  If I could ditch my 'rents, I would stay on this rooftop in a sleeping bag sandwiched between the two cutest brothers in the world forever and ever. Who knew life could be this good?

  Of course, Nancy's tentacles must have radared my pleasure back to her nightmares, because all
of a sudden we heard a very loud HONK coming from the street. The kind of HONK that can only come at one in the morning from my stepfather's armored Mercedes, with a large, scarred, black-coffee-drinking Fernando at the wheel.

  "Bugger!" I said. I was up and out of the sleeping bag before Wallace could explain about why their parents should not be halfway around the world.

  Shrimp had woken up from the sound of the HONK. He knew the score.

  "Bye, babe," he murmured as I raced toward the stairway leading downstairs. His outstretched hand brushed the ankle bracelet he'd made me as I stormed past him.

  He is a BABE BABE BABE and so is his brother and I am not going to tolerate this interference from my parental units any longer.

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  Fourteen

  When I got home I found that a little slumber party had been going on in Pacific Heights as well. The kind of slumber party that happens when Nancy wakes up in the middle of the night and comes into my room to see if I am sleeping or if I am awake and picking the cuticles on my fingers or some other kind of mental behavior, but instead Nancy finds me gone, and proceeds to wake the whole house up with her screeching and shrieking.

  My little sister Ashley was waiting for me at the door when Fernando and I drove up.

  "Cyd Charisse's Pieces is home and she's in fucking trou-trou-trouble!" she singsonged. She is six going on sixteen and may be more of a terror than Hyper Boy Josh. She is an angel-faced, gutter-mouthed little pudge. I think she is adorable. You will never catch me telling her that.

  I didn't used to think Ash was adorable because she was always going through my stuff, but then Nancy had my room redecorated and now I no longer have any desire to keep my stuff in that puke princess room. Besides, I am not the type of girl to keep a diary with a lock and key. I keep all my secrets in my head, where no one besides myself and Gingerbread, who is a telepath, can mess around. All my other important stuff--old letters from Justin, drawings by Shrimp, my birth control prescription, the "Home Sweet Home" pillow I embroidered for Gingerbread in home ec class--I keep in a box in Sugar Pie's room at the home. She