37 Things I Love (In No Particular Order) (4 page)

Hope you won big today!

xo, Ellis

Tonight, Mrs. Scottie gets to sleep in her own bed, and I get to sleep in Abby’s.

*   *   *

ABBY ANSWERS THE DOOR
swaddled from neck to ankles in her fluffy yellow bathrobe, her face a Cheshire grin. Right away I know I’ve misjudged what this evening will entail.
Shit.
I didn’t think this through.

Abby’s mom is lying on the sofa with her feet in Abby’s dad’s lap, and they’re watching television.

“Hi, girls,” Mrs. Duncan calls as we snake past them through the living room.

“Hi, Mrs. Duncan.” I smile. She blows me a kiss over the back of the sofa. It lands exactly on my cheek. Nice.

“Don’t bother us,” Abby grunts, unnecessarily. Her parents are sharing a bottle of red wine and a platter of Sun Chips and carrot sticks. Before the clock hits double digits, they will both be zonked out and snoring in those exact spots. Comfortable.

“My mom wants you to call her.”

Abby disappears down the hall, but I linger in the living room. The quiet warmth calls to me. A sitcom laugh track echoes over us. Mr. Duncan laughs along with it.

“I’ll do that,” Mrs. Duncan says. “At home or at the station?”

I shrug.

She reaches over the back of the sofa toward me. I drift closer and let her smooth her fingers along my hand. “How are you doing, sweetie?” she says.

Abby pokes out of the hall. “Ellis, come on.”

“I’m fine.” I duck my head and trail Abby to her room, where she slams the door like it means something.

“Sorry. They’re such losers,” she mutters.

“Hmmm.” Actually, her parents are kind of cool. I would tell her so, but she won’t see it because she’ll never know what she has until it’s gone, and I know the Duncans well enough to know that for Abby it will probably never be gone, so it’s a point I don’t bother to make anymore.

Abby locks the bedroom door behind us. My backpack bounces off the edge of her mattress as I toss it toward the bed and turn in time to face the big reveal.

Abby peels off her bathrobe the way models shed fur coats at the end of the runway. She doesn’t throw it over her shoulder, though—she loses a few style points as she simply tosses it aside.

“What’d you do to your boobs?” are the first words out of my mouth.

Abby beams. “Good, right?”

She’s wearing a miniskirt that is all mini and almost no skirt, and a deep V-necked halter featuring seriously impressive cleavage that is not at all representative of Abby’s budding B cups.

“Yeah, it looks good. What’s in there?”

Abby smirks, spinning with her arms out. “Trade secret.”

“Oh, come on. You know you’re gonna tell me.” I flop down on her bed, propped by a mound of sparkly turquoise throw pillows.

“First touch them and tell me if they feel real.”

“Oh, please. I’m sure they’re fine.” Checking Abby’s stuffed boobs for realness is not my idea of fun on a Friday night, but I know I must take steps to stall what is inevitably coming next. Dreading the answer, I ask “Who else is going to be touching your boobs tonight, anyway?”

Abby grins in a way that I know all too well, the way that means I should really just have stayed home and wallowed in my various miseries instead of trying to cheer myself up by joining the land of the living.

“I don’t know yet,” she says. “I’m hoping maybe Dennis?”

Oh, great.
“Dennis?” I echo, helpless. No way to elude the drama that’s to come, might as well run headlong into it. “Since when?”

Abby looks in the mirror, adjusting. “We walked between two classes together yesterday. I dropped a book in the hall, and he picked it up and then I was just…” She shakes her hands wildly. “He’s so cute!”

“Uh-huh.”

“If he doesn’t take me to the dance, you’re going to have to kill me,” she wails.

I resist the urge to roll my eyes. “Don’t say that.”

“Just do it. C’mon. Feel.” She thrusts her chest toward me.

“Fine.” First I grab my own boobs—which I’m not ashamed to say are fairly generous—for a control group. Reaching forward, I cup hers.

“Well, they feel…” I’m really tempted to lie. Send her back to the drawing board and delay whatever foray into the world of Dennis she’s planning. But I’m tired. I don’t want to have to sit here trying to come up with better boob ideas. I was doomed the moment I walked in the door, so whatever it is, let it come and let it be over. “They feel pretty darn real. What is it?”

“Jell-O Jigglers in Saran wrap.”

The image that pops into my mind is Dennis, horny and trying to get past second base, lowering his lips to Abby’s chest and coming up with a mouthful of lime gelatin.

I cover my laugh with what I hope sounds like an impressed chuckle. “Wow, that’s … creative.”

Abby pulls her makeup crate from under the bed as she launches into explaining the genesis of her Jell-O boobs.

I dig back into the pillows, trying to listen. Her chatter swirls around me, but I only grow heavier and heavier in this spot, like I will never be moved. Abby’s craziness usually has the ability to take me out of myself and make me forget stuff, but this is not helping. I randomly point to purple when she asks what color eye shadow, and she nods like this is an inspired choice.

I wish she would just look at me, look at my face and stop talking long enough to see me. To see that things are not right. That none of this is real and I am in some other place.

“Now, what are we going to do about you?” she says, raising her eyebrows at me.

“I’m fine,” I say, pretending she has bothered to ask what’s wrong.

“No,” she says quietly, and for a second I think it’ll be okay to tell her.

“The jeans are okay, but you at least have to change your shirt,” she says.

I am so erased from this place. Abby’s talking to a great big blur, and I’m desperate to know why she can’t see that.

“I didn’t bring a change of clothes.” Everything Abby owns will be too small for me, so she has to let me off the hook.

I’m wrong. She throws me a tube of fabric. Could be a skirt, could be a top, but in its unworn state, it resembles one of my pant legs. “I can’t wear this.”

“Sure you can. It’s stretchy.”

I strip off my T-shirt and tug the silvery tube over my boobs and my belly. It squeezes, but at least it reaches the top of my jeans, hiding all of me inside. A major relief, because I refuse to do bare midriff. I step over to the mirror. My boobs are pushed together in rather a nice way, I think, but then I rethink, and actually the cleavage is kind of overdramatic.

“I look ridiculous.”

“You look really good,” Abby says. I look at her looking at me in the mirror, and I’m tempted not to believe her because she has ulterior motives, but one thing she does not do is lie about when people look good. She can’t lie, because the jealousy gleams in her eyes, and I can see it—and it lifts me up a little, even though she’s prettier than I’ll ever be.

“Thanks,” I say.

Luckily, my bra is the kind with straps that unhook. I stuff them into my backpack. Then it’s like a blade of scissors runs over a ribbon and the whole of everything curls up inside me, and I can’t stand up anymore, so I kind of fall onto the bed.

“I don’t want to go out.”

Abby grabs my arm and pulls. “No! We have to go. Please, pleeeeeeeaaaaase.”

“I can’t.” Everything but my eyes is crying,
Don’t make me.
But Abby is dressed and ready, and she has put Jell-O in her bra because that’s how badly she wants Dennis to touch her boobs, and who am I to stand in the way of that? If Abby believes it to be just another Friday night, maybe at some point the feeling will rub off on me.

I climb off the bed and put my best best-friend face on. “Okay. Sorry. I’m really tired.”

“Oh, we won’t stay out long,” she promises, still gripping my arm. This is a transparent lie, but I shrug and pop
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
into her DVD player and pump the volume just high enough so that when her parents wander off to their bedroom later they’ll hear it and think we’re in here having fun.

“Thank you.” Abby hugs me, unexpected and strange, her hands on the bare skin of my back and her Jell-O boobs pressing against me.

“Yeah, yeah.” I let her hug me, closing my eyes. Maybe underneath it all, she senses I’m having a bad day.

“Really,” she says, grabbing my hands and starting up our old, secret BFF handshake. The one we made up together, long before boobs and boys and parties. If we could get back there, I think, everything would be okay.

Abby grins as our fingertips bounce off one another. “I love ya.”

“I know.”

I do know. Abby will bribe me with love, because somewhere deep she knows it’s what I crave, and I’ll go with her, because, damn it, that’s what craving makes you do.

8

The Dark

There’s something perfect about not being able to see too far ahead.

THE WEATHER IS IDEAL,
a thick, unsticky heat that makes you feel like you can get away with anything. I poke my head out Abby’s bedroom window and breathe it in.

The lights on the street and in the house windows make it undark, but the swell of shadows is enough to hide some things, which is how I like it.

Abby returns from the living room. She relocks the door, once again shedding her thick robe. I pull my head back in.

“They’re soooo asleep.” She rolls her eyes. “Never even saw me.”

With a triumphant smile, she extends the mug in her hand toward me. “
Cabernet Sauvignon
,” she declares in an elaborate faux French accent:
ca-bur-nay so-veen-yon!

I sniff it and nod approvingly, although it smells like car tires. “An excellent year.”

“Go ahead. You can drink first,” Abby says.

I stare into the mug. The wine has sloshed up on the edges of the white ceramic, leaving little purplish trails. “That’s okay. You can have it.”

“Really?” Abby takes a long sip, makes a face, then holds it out to me again. “Are you sure?”

“Hey, it’s only fair. You did the recon.” Abby has become expert at sneaking the right amount of wine from her parents’ bottle after they fall asleep. There is always leftover, and they never notice any missing.

“But you’ll have something later, right?”

“Sure,” I say. “Later.”

“Cool.” Abby steadily chugs the wine, draining the mug to the dregs. She wipes it out with a tissue and shoves it under her bed, to be snuck into the dishwasher later. She reapplies her lip gloss, then extends the tube to me.

I slide a layer of Watermelon Slick over my mouth, because it doesn’t hurt to dream, most of the time.

Abby tucks the gloss into her waistband and hands me the Purse, for which I am now responsible. It contains all the necessary items: our cell phones, our learner’s permits, our money, Tic Tacs, my house keys, hair ties, a spare gloss, a compact, and tissues.

We open the window wider, and Abby is feeling the wine already, so I try to hush her giggles as we climb into the undark. I would like to feel relieved that we’re out of the house, out of the light, where I don’t have to feel like anyone should notice anything out of the ordinary. But instead I feel a sense of rushing, rushing toward the rest of this night, and I don’t like the sensation at all.

Abby grabs my hand. “Come on.” And just like that, we are hurrying, racing, skipping across the yard away from the house.

*   *   *

“COME ON,”
Abby says, trying to hurry me up. She sings, “I wanna go to Grover’s!”

“It’ll still be there when we get there.”

“Ellissss,” she pleads, running ahead. There must have been more wine in her cup than I thought, because she’s giddy as all get-out.

Grover’s Field is a popular weekend hangout spot for kids from our school. The proper name of the complex is President Grover Cleveland Memorial Athletic and Recreational Acres, but who has time to say all that?

Abby lives near the north edge of Grover’s, but the Field is way to the south, so we have to cross through the rest of the park. The sports fields are fenced off after dark, but the playground and picnic area is wide open at all hours.

Grover’s is dimly lit, but not seedy, not the sort of place where you have to be nervous to go at night. We go tripping between the fences, me because I’m dragging my feet, and Abby because she’s tipsy. Maybe she snuck a beer from the garage and drank it before I got there.

“Is Colin meeting us there?” I say.

“Not coming tonight. Family thing.”

“Ah.” Suddenly my role in the evening crystallizes. Abby is going to get wasted, and it’ll be my job alone to drag her home. I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me before.

It will cost us five dollars each to party on the Field. Some of the seniors use fake IDs to buy kegs of beer, or else they get their older brothers or uncles or someone to buy it. I’ve gone to the party a couple of times before, but Abby usually goes alone with Colin. It’s easier that way, for all of us. Colin gets to be with Abby. Abby gets to be wild, knowing Colin will always be right there to keep her out of trouble. I get to avoid all superfluous human contact.

We hear the others before we see them. Abby loops her arm through mine as the shape of the gathering looms up out of the night. The cars are driven up right onto the grass, in a loose circle. Abby makes a beeline for the keg, which is propped in the bed of a black pickup that belongs to one of the football players.

I pay ten dollars to the guy in the letter jacket who’s guarding the stack of Solo cups. He draws a star on my hand with a Sharpie and stares appreciatively at my chest. Suddenly I’m very aware of my outfit.

Abby sticks her fist out for her star, and moments later, we’re both clutching big blue cups of beer.

“There he is. I see him,” Abby says, casually nodding toward where Dennis is standing, chatting up two girls from the volleyball team.

“Well, you better get in there,” I say, nudging her toward them.

I lean against the hood of someone’s car and try to look casual. A cute senior guy smiles at me on his way over to the keg, tossing me a saucy wink and finger guns. I blush a little; my own personal here’s-looking-at-you-kid moment. I wave to a couple of girls that we’re friends with, but they’re busy hanging with their boyfriends, so I’m not going to go over and make myself the fifth wheel. Tonight I’m thinking unicycle.