The People We Keep

by Allison Larkin

It’s also weird, the way you can go from just working someplace to feeling like you really belong.

  * * *

  A few days later, Adam says he knows a guy who has a vacant studio up by the college, and he coaches Carly on how to get out of paying the security deposit. Over pancakes again, because that’s like our thing now. This time, Carly brought home a bag of chocolate chips.

  “Buddy’s tenant failed out of school and left him in the lurch,” Adam tells her. “He’s already got a security deposit from that guy that he doesn’t have to give back; he shouldn’t need one from you. If you move in, he won’t even miss a month of rent. There aren’t enough new students second semester. He’s not going to rent it otherwise and he knows it.” He scribbles Buddy’s number on an old receipt and hands it to Carly. “If he gives you a problem, let me know. I’ll call.”

  As much as part of me wants Adam all to myself again, I feel like grabbing the number away from Carly. Having her stay with us has been like how I always thought having a sister would feel.

  * * *

  I go with Carly when she packs up her stuff. It’s this place up by the college. Half a ranch house. Jock boys next door and very un-Carly. I figured she’d live in one of the cool old houses on East State Street or College Avenue, someplace with character.

  Rosemary is perched on a chair at the kitchen table. Long flowy skirt, bare feet; she hugs her knees, smoking as she watches us. She’s thin with dark hair cut in an angled bob. I’ve seen her before at the cafe. I thought she was just Carly’s roommate. And even then I didn’t understand how Carly could stand to live with her. She’s exactly the kind of rich bitch Carly is always complaining about. Or maybe she is the rich bitch Carly was complaining about. She has this look on her face like she’s just too cool to care for any of it.

  Rosemary doesn’t try to hide that she’s watching us. She stares, but she doesn’t say anything until we’ve taken eight trips out to Carly’s rusty, orange Pacer, and we’re grabbing the last few boxes. Finally she says, “You’re not going to introduce me to your girlfriend?”

  My face gets hot and I know it’s red and I feel so awful, because the last thing Carly needs is me acting like being her girlfriend is some kind of terrible thing. So I rest the box of cassette tapes on a chair and offer my hand to Rosemary to shake. “April,” I say. “Nice to meet you.”

  Rosemary ignores my hand and gives Carly a death stare. “She’s perfect for you,” she says, and I know it’s an insult, even though I’m not sure why.

  “Let’s go, hon,” I say to Carly, picking up the box again. It’s funny how two seconds ago I was embarrassed she thought I was Carly’s girlfriend and now I’m pissed that she thinks I’m not good enough to be.

  When we get in the car, Carly bursts out laughing. “ ‘Hon’? Really?”

  “Too much?” I say.

  “You rock,” Carly says, and really smiles, not just the smug tight-lipped deal she pretends is a smile.

  — Chapter 25 —

  Carly said that even though she has her own place, she’d still come by every week for 90210 and pizza, but she calls ten minutes before the show starts to say she can’t make it because of a psych paper and we’ll have to catch her up next week.

  “We ordered a large and everything,” I say to Adam when I hang up the phone. I’d even run to the convenience store to pick up a six-pack of Dr Pepper, because Carly likes that more than Coke.

  “It’s fine,” Adam says, handing me a plate with two slices. “I’ll bring leftovers for lunch tomorrow.”

  “She’s not going to know what’s happening next week,” I say. “Even if we explain.”

  Adam laughs like I told a joke.

  When we get settled on the couch he says, “It sucks to be an undergrad. There’s so much busywork.” And it makes me feel far away from both of them. I barely even did my homework in high school.

  * * *

  The next day, when we’re almost through the morning rush, Carly takes a break and has coffee with two guys and a girl at a table in the corner. The girl has a lip ring. One of the guys has bleached white hair with dark roots and skin so pale you can almost see through it. The other one looks like James Dean with black lipstick. They talk in hushed tones that grow into bursts of laughter, then drop to whispers. I can’t tell what they’re talking about. By the time I finish with one customer, they’re being quiet again. When they’re loud, I’m taking another order.

  After they finish their coffee, they go out for a smoke. Right by the front door, where Carly always tells Bodie he’s not allowed to smoke. At first she’s just taking drags off James Dean’s cigarette, but then the girl with the lip ring offers Carly her own and when James Dean finishes his, he steals Carly’s for a few puffs. I wonder if he gets black lipstick all over his cigarettes. I’m not close enough to see.

  The pale guy is telling a story and suddenly slaps his palms to his chest and his whole body shakes. He looks like he’s exploding and they all laugh so hard they have to lean on each other to catch their breath.

  The four of them seem like they belong together. Like they’re an advertisement for combat boots or hair gel. I wonder if they found each other because they look like that, or if after they met, James Dean borrowed black lipstick from Carly, Lip Ring convinced Pale Guy he needed peroxide, and who they are now isn’t who they would be if they’d never crossed paths.

  * * *

  When her friends finally leave, Carly comes back in and we rotate the stock of flavored coffee on the shelves. I kneel on the counter and she hands me new bags from the cabinet below.

  She isn’t chatty like she was with her friends. She looks weary, as if she’d rather be wherever they were headed next.

  “How much vanilla is left?” she asks.

  “Two bags,” I say, and I want to crack a joke, but I can’t think of anything particularly funny about vanilla. She hands me two bags to tuck behind the old ones.

  “How much cherry?”

  “Why would anyone want cherry coffee?”

  “It’s not bad,” she says.

  “Oh. Three bags,” I say. “Did that crazy girl come back today?”

  “Which one?”

  “Nipple ring?”

  “I don’t think so.” She hands me an extra bag and her bracelets slide toward her elbow. I see a tattoo on her wrist I hadn’t noticed before. A thin black line looped into a knot. “Hazelnut?”

  “Four,” I say.

  “Caramel?”

  “Three.”

  She hands me one. “Ugh. The caramel smells so bad.”

  “I know,” I say. “It doesn’t smell like caramel.”

  “It smells like vomit,” she says.

  It’s stupid, but I love that we’re agreeing. We might be headed toward a real conversation.

  “Mocha?” she asks.

  “One.”

  She hands me the rest. I put them away and jump down from the counter. She yawns and stretches, watching people walk by outside like she hopes someone interesting will show up.

  “I think I want to get a tattoo,” I say. And really it isn’t a thing I thought about, but as soon as I say it, I do want one. A mark to prove I’ve changed, that I’m not the same sad old April in the motorhome.

  Carly perks up. “Nice. What are you going to get?”

  “Not sure,” I say, feeling the wobble of nerves in my belly.

  “There’s a place right on The Commons,” she says. “They’re pretty good.” And before I know it, she’s arranged for Bodie to cover for us, and for the Lettuce Murderer to come in early to cover for Bodie, so we can take our lunch break together and go to the tattoo shop. It’s this spiraling thing where my random thought becomes what I’m actually going to do and it’s so exhilarating I forget to be nervous.

  Bodie spends the rest of the morning sitting in the kitchen with his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth, sketching on a napkin. We don’t know what he’s drawing. He won’t let us see, and it’s hell to ge
t him to fill orders, but when he’s done, he gives the napkin to me. “Just an idea,” he says. “For your tattoo.” It’s a white flower with a yellow center and five pointy petals like a star, streams of every color shooting out behind like it’s zooming through space. It’s beautiful and I can’t believe Bodie drew it just for me.

  Carly says it won’t hurt. Like at all. “It’s seriously like not even a big deal, April. You’ll be fine. You’ll love it.” She holds my hand and swings it back and forth as we walk across The Commons to the tattoo store. But when I’m in the chair and I’ve flashed my chalked ID and signed all the papers, I ask her again, and she says that it does hurt, but it’s good hurt, like when you have a sore tooth and you can’t stop poking at it, which sounds a hell of a lot less appealing than she seems to think it does. At the very last minute, while Carly is squeezing my hand and the needle is buzzing right next to my hip, about to sear Bodie’s drawing into my belly forever, I wimp out.

  The big, hairy tattoo guy gets crabby. He got the ink and the needles ready and now I’m not even going to pay. It makes me nervous to make him mad, so I blurt out, “Nose ring. I want a nose ring instead,” because it’s one quick jab instead of a billion little ones.

  I choose a tiny fake emerald stud.

  “Wicked color,” Carly says, nodding her approval. She’s not acting like I wimped out, and it makes me feel better.

  “Birthstone.”

  “Diamond is the birthstone for April,” she says.

  “My birthday is in May,” I tell her.

  She laughs, squeezing my hand as the needle goes in. “I love it.”

  * * *

  Bodie asks to see my tattoo when we get back to Decadence and Carly says, “You wish, Bodie. You wish April would show you where it is.”

  Bodie touches his finger lightly to my new emerald stud and says, “Maybe I do,” before he goes back into the kitchen. And even though I don’t want him, even though I’m with Adam and I’m happy that way, the whole thing leaves me blushed and buzzing.

  * * *

  At six, right before Adam gets home, I get so nervous. Maybe he’ll be mad that I got a nose ring. What if it’s a totally amateur move—this stupid immature thing that’s going to make it obvious that I can’t possibly be nineteen? Or maybe he’ll think I’m a totally different person than he wanted me to be. I stare at my nose in the mirror, like maybe if I look hard enough it will be undone. My nose is red around the stud, so even if I take it out, he’ll still see what I did.

  When I hear the downstairs door open, I slam the bathroom door shut. I hear Adam’s footsteps on the stairs. The door to the apartment opens and closes. I have no choice but to confess.

  “I did something stupid,” I call from the bathroom.

  “April?” he says, like there might be someone else in here yelling to him.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine. Just stupid.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I don’t want to show you.”

  “I’m sure it’s fine.”

  “It’s stupid.”

  “Did you cut your hair?” He sounds amused.

  “No.”

  “Dye it purple?” He’s laughing.

  “Uh uh.”

  “Volunteer for a medical trial?”

  “No.”

  “Get a tattoo of a screaming eagle across your butt?” I hear him snort.

  “Adam!”

  “Did you eat at that truck stop by the interstate? Because that would be stupid. Those hot dogs look like they’ve been there since—”

  I open the bathroom door.

  He stares at me for a second, like he hasn’t quite picked out what’s different.

  “Oh,” he says, touching the side of my face. “It’s not stupid. It’s really hot.”

  Making love on the bathroom floor is actually a lot sexier than it sounds.

  — Chapter 26 —

  Adam has finals to grade before winter break, so I’m home by myself a lot after work. It’s funny, I spent so much time alone in the motorhome and I was used to it, but now, when I’m alone in Adam’s apartment, I can’t stand how empty it feels. I tell Carly how I get antsy while we’re refilling the milk thermoses during a lull at the cafe. She says, “Let’s go out tonight. Cat Skin is playing at The Haunt. You’ll love them.”

  And even though the shit Carly listens to makes me want to puncture my eardrums, I say yes, because the prospect of going out is too hard to pass up. She makes me sign a napkin:

  I, April, promise to rock hard.

  She pins it up next to Bodie’s anti-manwhore proclamation and the stack of other vows we’ve taken, promising everything from the courteous replacement of register receipt paper to the finding of existential enlightenment on one’s own time.

  * * *

  There are no nightclubs in Little River. And it’s not like any of us could have gotten away with chalking a license and going to Gary’s bar. He knows which kid belongs to which parent and nine times out of ten the parent is already sitting at the bar. Going out in Little River meant the deer blind with flashlights and a nicked six-pack, or hanging out in the gas station parking lot, watching the boys flip their skateboards. I was always just a hanger-on. I came as a package deal with Matty. No one ever invited me out. Margo took me to the movies in Springville sometimes, but that’s different.

  I tell Carly about how there are no nightclubs in Little River and she gets it. Where she grew up isn’t much different. So she tells me to come to her place before and she’ll let me borrow some of her clothes. That’s even more exciting than going to a club.

  This girl in my class, Ashley, had a big sister who would let her borrow clothes all the time and even do her hair and makeup in the schoolyard before the first bell. Heather would hold Ashley’s face with one hand to steady it and tell her to suck in her cheeks so she could brush blush in the hollows. I wanted to be Ashley more than I ever wanted anything else.

  I walk to Carly’s new place, because she said she’d drive me home after. The Haunt is closer to us than to her. She answers the door wearing boots that lace up to her knees, cut-off red plaid pants with ripped tights underneath, and a black t-shirt that says Nipplehead across the chest. Her eyes are rimmed with sparkly black and purple eye shadow. When she turns around, the back of her shirt looks like a werewolf clawed her, and the blue creature on her back stares out through the rips in the fabric. I still don’t know what it is, but it has a big round eye. Her hair is extra spiky like maybe she cut some chunks out of it, but it looks good. It’s very Carly.

  “Okay!” she says, bouncing to the closet before I’m even in the door. “Outfit! April! Outfit!”

  She might be on something. I’m not good at telling. Maybe she just had too much coffee. She’s happy. Like capital H Happy. Like capital-everything happy. She’s HAPPY, and even if it might be artificially induced, after all the hurt she went through, it’s nice to see. She’s playing some CD that sounds like nails on a blackboard and a toddler torturing a violin. I’m guessing it’s Cat Skin.

  Carly sings along, “I ain’t, I ain’t, I ain’t me! You. Ain’t. You!” as she pulls clothes from her closet and throws them on the bed. Layers upon layers of black and silver and ripped flannel. There’s incense burning and a drippy candle and scarves over the lights so her little apartment looks like a cave. Cozy and artsy and it makes sense. Not like the place we moved her out of.

  “Anything you want to wear,” Carly shouts.

  “Okay,” I say, but I’ve never had free rein of a closet like this before. I don’t even know where to start.

  I grab a striped knit shirt and pull it on. It has a low scoop neck and my black bra straps show on my shoulders.

  “Try this over it,” she says, handing me a grey velvet corset.

  I fasten the corset over the shirt and all the fabric bunches up in the wrong places. I hold my arms out to show her, but she’s digging in the bottom of her closet.r />
  When she backs out with a pair of black pinstriped pants, she looks at me and laughs. “You have to pull it down.” She drapes the pants around her neck like a scarf so she can tug at the bottom of the shirt. She tugs and looks and tugs again and then pulls both sleeves past my wrists.

  “Oh, you know what? Hold on!” She runs over to the kitchen area and grabs a pair of scissors from the drawer by the sink. “Thumb holes,” she says, and I don’t know what she means, but with two quick snips she cuts holes in the sleeves and slips them over my thumbs. “But now I’m not feeling these pants.”

  “They’re okay,” I tell her, because I worry if I’m too much of a bother all the good will go away. And this is enough. But Carly has already found a black pleated skirt that’s held together with giant safety pins. I slip it on. She scrounges up two pairs of ripped black tights and tells me to wear both of them. When I put my boots on, she pulls the laces out, stuffs them in my purse, and hands me a ball of rough brown twine to re-lace them.

  “There,” she says when I finish tying my boots. She closes her closet door so I can see myself in the mirror. Somehow the whole outfit works in the way Carly’s outfits always work. I don’t understand how she can grab random pieces that don’t seem to go together and find a way to make them fit. I would have just worn the shirt and maybe those pants and thought I had a whole thing going.

  She hands me a lipstick and starts twisting the front pieces of my hair in tiny buns. The lipstick is dark and matte and when I smear it across my lips it makes the rest of my face look very pale.

  “It needs something,” she says, and grabs a tiny jar of loose black powder and a paintbrush. “Close.” She blinks her eyes shut to show me what she means. “Hold still.” She steadies my chin and sweeps a thick black line across each eyelid with the brush. It makes me look dangerous. Powerful. I could be a villain or a superhero. The emerald green stud in my nose catches the light and sparkles. I smile at myself in the mirror. I can’t even play it cool. It is like having a big sister, and it’s even better than I thought it would be.