I Am the Wallpaper (2 page)

When Gary saw it, his whole head turned red. Everybody noticed. Lillian laughed and then so did Frida, Digger and Azra, and that made him turn even redder.

Wen saw it too. I nearly died.

“It’s so small!” Lillian giggled. She held it up so everyone could see how ridiculous it was, and probably also to see how red Gary’s face would get. Even Azra was too big for this—and Azra had no boobs at all.

“It’s a training bra, hon,” my mother said.

“That’s stupid,” I said, sure my cheeks were warm enough to fry eggs on. Imagine sending a bra to your niece! If I’d wanted another one, I’d have bought it myself. “What does she think I’m in training for?”

“Well, it’s not the gift that matters.” My mother snatched it out of Lillian’s hands and packed it back into its box before the entire upper half of Gary’s body could turn into a cherry. “It was sweet of her to remember your birthday, that’s all. I want you to write her a nice thank-you note. Are you all right, Wen?”

“Yes, Mrs. Packer,” Wen said, smiling his big goofy grin. “I’m just fine.”

He had been looking at Azra, obviously pretending to be interested in something else rather than embarrass me by staring at the bra. That was my Wen, always so considerate!

Azra slept over that evening, so Lillian spent the night at her friend Rebecca’s apartment. (At least, that’s what she told my mother. I bet she really went to see Helmut, the latest and longest-running in her long line of adoring boyfriends.) In the bedroom, Azra, who was always coming up with stupid ideas, convinced me to try the bra on. I figured there wasn’t any harm in it since there were only the two of us. I could barely strap the little thing around myself over my nightgown. We both thought it was hilarious. Frank Sinatra watched us from under my bed as if we were nuts. Then Azra took her Polaroid camera and told me to pose. Maybe if it hadn’t been my birthday, if I hadn’t been enjoying the rare attention, I wouldn’t have agreed, but I did.

The picture was ridiculous. I was standing as if I were in a beauty pageant, my arms behind my head, staring coyly at a point somewhere above me. The tiny bra pushed my boobs up so all you could see in the V-neck of my nightgown was cleavage.

Azra and I nearly wet ourselves laughing.

Later, just before we went to sleep, Azra stared at my sister’s graduation picture hanging over my stack of books. “You’re so lucky,” she said from Lillian’s bed. She ran her fingers through her short black hair, which accentuated her long face. “Lillian is so great. I wish I had a sister like her.”

“That’s because you’re an only child,” I said. “Trust me, you don’t.”

“Why not? She’s fabulous. She’s one of the coolest people I know.”

“Yeah, well, I wish she had an Off button.”

“What do you mean? She’s just wild and spontaneous. Didn’t you think Frida and Digger were nice?”

“Sure,” I said. “But you try living with Miss Wild and Spontaneous every day of your life.”

“Oh, come on, Floey,” Azra said, sitting up. “You’re jealous.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You should try to be more like her.”

I rolled my eyes.

Azra studied me, or at least she studied the top of my head from the nose up, the only part of me above the covers. “You know? I think I’m on to something. You’re jealous because Lillian’s glamorous and fun and popular and you’re …”

I narrowed my eyes and waited.

“… Well, you’re you. You’re just …”

“Ordinary?” I offered.

She shrugged. “I don’t know … maybe.”

I glowered at her. “Gee, thanks.”

“That’s not fair. You said it, not me. Anyway, I think you’re great. And since we’re best friends, I must be ordinary too, right?”

“Azra, you should go to sleep before I get really insulted.”

I waited for her to get under her covers, but she just sat there for a while longer. “You know what our problem is?” she asked finally. “Low self-esteem.”

“What?” Sometimes Azra is crazy.

“We
definitely
need to get boyfriends, and fast.”

I didn’t say anything. I was thinking about my plan to work at the studio with Wen. The thing was, it had been months since Azra and I had admitted to each other that we both had serious crushes on him. For both of us, it had started back in September on his first day at our school, the day they put him on our science lab team. We’d been a threesome from that day on. Since Azra and I had been best friends since second grade, we had agreed it would be best to share him and do nothing that might hurt our friendship. But it was obvious to me that I was the one Wen especially liked. We had the same weird sense of humor. Like, whenever he’d ask me what time it was, I’d answer, “You mean
now
?” Then, always with a straight face, he’d say something like, “Yes, but in Tokyo.” We
got
each other. I figured he was practically my boyfriend already, he was just too shy to come out and say it. I was sure that my first-ever real kiss was only days away, at most. A part of me felt guilty about keeping these thoughts from Azra. It was the first secret I’d
ever
kept from her. If only we hadn’t made that pact.

Of course, our deal didn’t mean I couldn’t spend a little extra time with him.

“You know what we should do?” Azra said, her voice suddenly more serious. “Something wild and adventurous, like Lillian would do. Something the ordinary you and me would never do in a million years. It’d be good for us.”

“Like what?”

She frowned. “I don’t know. Maybe get belly-button rings?”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

“Stand naked in front of the school and make speeches?”

I laughed. “Too cold. And public speaking makes me break out.”

“I know what
you
could do,” she said. “Why don’t you send that picture of you in that bra to your aunt? That’d get her attention.”

I gave her a not-in-a-trillion-years look and turned out the light.

“Good night.”

I heard her rustling around under her covers. Eventually, after everything was quiet, she said, “You should do it. You really should.”

I laughed.

I didn’t laugh the next night, though, when Azra called to tell me she’d put the picture in a thank-you note and dropped it in the mail. She’d copied the address off the birthday package and had written and signed a card as if it were from me.

“You did
what
?”

“Dear Aunt Sarah,” she said, giggling. “Thank you for the lovely training bra. It was sweet of you to remember my birthday. P.S. It’s just what I need, now that I’m in training.”

“You didn’t!”

“I knew you wouldn’t do it yourself—you think too much about everything. So I had to do it for you. It’s the first step toward breaking us out of our shells. Floey
Packer, you have now broken free from your ordinary, drab little world.”

For an otherwise sensible girl, Azra had some stupid ideas. I wondered if somebody dropped her on her head as a baby.

She giggled again.

Ha ha.

I didn’t speak to her for two weeks. Even after that, it took us a while to get beyond this. But after she slipped a tin of homemade peanut butter brownies, my favorite, into my backpack, I was able to remind myself that, misguided as she was, she was my best friend and she meant well.

I should have called Aunt Sarah right away to tell her that the thank-you note wasn’t from me, but I didn’t want to think about it—it was just too horrible. And then time went by. By the time Lillian announced her engagement to Helmut and I realized I was actually going to have to see Aunt Sarah at the wedding—and found out that her two kids would be staying with us for the three weeks after the wedding—it was too late.

After that, in the months leading up to the big event, I blushed every time I thought of my aunt.

Thank God Rebecca Greenblatt was such a fatty.

Rebecca, the other bridesmaid, shifted her position, so I shifted mine, too. She was chunky enough that if I kept behind her, I could stay pretty well hidden from about a third of the guests, including Aunt Sarah.

From the front row of folding chairs, my mother was giving me the evil eye.
Floey
, she mouthed silently,
stop … moving
.

I fixed my gaze on the main event and pretended not to see her.

With her veil, tiara and bouquet of white lilies, Lillian looked like a princess. I, on the other hand, clutching my Alice-in-Wonderland bouquet (What flower has big, red, floppy elephant-ear petals? And who, other than my sister, would choose them for her wedding?), felt ridiculous in my bridesmaid gown. It was a horrible pink thing with ruffles and a silly neck, and it looked even worse on than it did hanging in my closet. Anyone who wore this dress should have been blond and waiflike, and I was neither. I felt like a troll in a doily.

Seeing how happy Lillian and Helmut looked only made me consider how pointless relationships were. I’ve read that half of all marriages end in divorce. Doesn’t that tell you something? In Ma’s case it wasn’t divorce, but I bet when she got married, she never thought her husband would just drop dead and leave her with two daughters, aged ten and two, to raise by herself. Sure, Helmut and Lillian seemed happy now, but how long could it last?

Then, of course, there was Wen and me.

For almost three months we’d been working together part-time as Gary’s assistants, going every few days to the photography studio, helping at the front desk and getting the cameras and backgrounds ready. Wen was funny and sweet with me, and eventually I started thinking of us as kind of a unit. At home I talked about him so much that my mother and Lillian asked if he was my boyfriend, and stupidly, I told them he was. At the time, I didn’t think it was a big leap. I thought of him as
practically
my boyfriend already.