Instant Love (2 page)

It’s funny, though, because Holly can see how easily Shelly could be something else besides a burnout girl. All the rest of them have a raw look, narrow and paranoid in the eyes, and they’re too skinny (except for the one who is too fat), and have bad skin and wear too much makeup that they’ve probably shoplifted. Whenever Holly walks by them when they are smoking in the school parking lot, they are always laughing dark, bitter laughs, raw and scratchy and pained. They sound as if they’ve stayed up late the night before, when she was in bed by eleven, just as her mother asked her to be.

But with Shelly, Holly sees puffy soft cheeks, and pink sad lips, and otherworldly gray eyes that are always drifting off toward the sky, toward somewhere else besides the fluorescent peak of the pharmacy. Shelly is soft feathered hair, a real natural blond, dirty blond maybe, but blond nonetheless, and perfect pink-and-purple eyelids, and tight black jeans and a form-fitting black button-down flannel shirt that just hits the waist, and high-heeled black boots with a strap and silver buckle around each ankle. Shelly is quiet until you get to know her, and then she has something to say. Shelly has a secret, that’s what Holly thinks. When you look at her, you know she has a little secret just bursting to get out of her.

In other words, she’s a real knockout.

HOLLY SITS
on the toilet seat while Shelly finishes her eyes, and stares at the reflection of the bathroom in the mirror. There are so many signs in this bathroom, reminders of how to be a normal person when you’re away from home: Wash your hands. Don’t flush sanitary napkins. Please put the seat down when you’re done—yes, that means you, Alan, Greg, Schneider, and Mario. (“Please” is underlined, and someone has drawn a star next to it.) There is also a framed print of a sketch of a rose over the toilet. A bottle of air-freshener spray rests on the toilet tank. Lilies of the Valley. What valley?

Shelly tells her to look up, and doses her lashes with mascara. Then she asks if she’s in love with Christian.

So are you totally in love with him, Holly?

Christian? Christian who doesn’t like to read anything but
NME
? Christian who has things like “Buy Jelly” written on his hand?

Holly laughs as if to say,
As if,
and Shelly looks at her all soft and puffy and sad, like, How can you not be in love? Don’t you know how lucky you are? And a little bit of: Then why have I spent the last hour doing your makeup if you’re not even in love?

So Holly says, No? Maybe?

Finally she lands on: Well, it’s only been five weeks. Which should have been her answer in the first place.

Shelly tells her to stop squirming or you’ll fuck it all up. While she leans over she sticks the round edge of her tongue out between her lips and holds it there. Some of the pink eye shadow drifts down from Holly’s lid and her applicator onto Holly’s chest.

Sit still, she says. Do you want to look hot or not?

HOLLY HATES MAKEUP
on principle. Makeup is what other girls wear, girls who need to wear it in order to get attention, or to make themselves feel better, or to feel like they fit in with everyone else. These are girls who cannot carry their weight in the world otherwise. But I am an exceptional person, this is what Holly tells herself in between beating herself up for being such a snobby smart-girl bitch. (She cannot help it if she is the smartest girl, possibly the smartest person, in her AP biology class, and maybe even AP chemistry, too.) She has other things to worry about besides makeup.

Her mother doesn’t wear makeup. When Holly asked her once to show her how to put some on, she said, “Really?” and Holly knew her mother thought that that was the dumbest thing she had ever heard. Like, why would you want to? Like, what is wrong with you?

And the truth is, Holly looks better without it. Makeup makes her look darker and older, like she has something to cover up when in reality she has fine, rosy skin, bright eyes with dark lashes, and plump red lips. She is bursting with youth. She doesn’t realize it now, but she will in ten years when she looks back at her high-school graduation pictures. She is a ripe plum waiting to be plucked.

But if she’s going to have a friend who is a burnout girl, and she’s going to date a guy with no future who sometimes wears eyeliner on their dates, if she’s going to lead this secret, opposite-world life, she might as well try wearing a little makeup.

EVERY TIME
she goes out with Christian, she lets him do something new to her body. She is conducting an experiment. She is her own science project. Mix a hand with the space between the thighs, it feels this way. Apply a tongue to a nipple, it feels that way. Oxygen and water and heat equal steam.

This seems to be the main purpose of their dates, this getting to the half-naked-on-the-black-leather-couch-in-his-father’s-basement part of it. The couch impresses her. It has a few cigarette burns on it, but otherwise it’s luxurious. All the furniture in Holly’s house is wicker or velour or some sort of flower-patterned fabric. The couch totally works on her. All she wants to do is lie on that couch and make out with Christian.

They both have become better kissers in the last five weeks, although he still likes to do this tongue-swordplay action that she thinks requires too much effort for the end result. When she kisses his neck instead, he says: Are you trying to seduce me?

Which is preposterous. She has no idea what she is doing. But she says yes.

And then he says: Are you turned on?

He asks her questions like this, and she has to answer yes even if she feels stupid saying it, because if she doesn’t he will stop with the experimenting.

BECAUSE HOLLY
is the smart girl who works after school (Shelly is the cute girl who works after school), her bosses have trained her well and given her important responsibilities. She is asked to count pills, balance the register at the end of the night, and look up prescription histories on the computer. She can search by name or address or type of medication, so one day she did a search for the pill and now she knows everyone who is on the pill in her high school. There were surprises. She told her girlfriends some of their names, and now they all giggle and feel superior when they see them at lunch. But also she thinks: Why are they having sex and not me? None of her girlfriends are on the pill. Neither is Holly. Shelly is on the pill, but she says she takes it just to help her cramps and Holly believes her, because Shelly is always sad because she doesn’t have a boyfriend.

Shelly runs the lottery machine and video rentals. If someone returns a video late, she pockets the fee and buys scratch-off lottery tickets with it. She splits them with Holly, and the two of them play them at the end of the night when the store is mostly empty. Once Holly won fifty dollars and they both went to Taco Bell after work and got nine million steak tacos and ate them till they wanted to puke.

Holly loves her pharmacy life. She even thought about going to pharmacy school. She’s awesome at math and science and it seems like such a relaxed job. But when she told her father about it he said, “Really?” in such a dry, bored tone that she dropped it. Her father is a famous writer and doesn’t understand anymore what it’s like to be not famous. And even though in her mother’s house he is Enemy Number One, Holly would hate for him to find her boring, so she drops the pharmacy dream and thinks pre-med instead.

Sometimes she sees her father on the news or on a talk show, discussing a new book or being an expert on something, and he looks so handsome and confident that she can almost forget he is probably
covered
in makeup at that moment.

CHRISTIAN HAS NEVER
even heard of her father.

SHELLY IS DONE.
“Perfecto!” she says. She backs out of the bathroom to give Holly more mirror space. Holly leans in, knocks a box of Kleenex into the sink. They’re on special this week. She leaves it there. Instead she focuses deeply on the glowing lavender triangles that lie nestled in a base of delicate pink eyelids. I look like I should be going to a party where a band is playing, she thinks. I look dreamy, yet glamorous. I look so fucking hot.

And then Shelly leans in next to her, and Holly sees how they match in the mirror. And how the pink and purple complement Shelly’s naturally honeycomb-tan skin, and how the gray in her eyes makes it all look a little risky even, but it totally works. Those eyes take her into the future.

Holly will see girls like her years later when she has finally moved to New York, when she and her friends from college will dress themselves up in revealing shirts and travel downtown on Friday nights to edgy bars in edgy neighborhoods in search of edgy men to take them home. The girl will be behind the bar. Her eye makeup will be perfect, and she will be wearing a halter top that Holly could only
imagine
owning, and when she asks the bartender where she got it, she will say, “My friend’s a designer. He made it for me. Isn’t it great?”

And Holly will want to be her, just as she wants to be Shelly now, because as soon as she has seen Shelly in the mirror, she realizes that she does not look hot. The colors are all wrong for Holly; on her eyes they’re garish, and they make her skin look sallow. On Holly’s eyes, the triangles don’t look mystical or Middle Eastern; they look like children’s blocks. She’s not spiritual or ethereal; she’s a girl who is wearing too much makeup.

Some girls are made for makeup, some aren’t.

She can’t take it off, of course. She can’t insult sweet, scarred Shelly. Plus Holly was thinking of having her come over to her house sometime and make her up some more. Shelly would lean over her, breath close, in her upstairs bathroom or maybe her bedroom. They could have a sleepover or something when her mom is out of town.

Holly is stuck with this clown makeup for the rest of the night.

CHRISTIAN IS LATE
picking up Holly. Christian is always late picking up Holly. Usually she meets him at the Taco Bell after school, on nights she doesn’t have to work. She sits on the picnic bench and does some homework and tries to look casual, like she doesn’t have a secret. (If she could somehow work it out that people knew she had a secret, without actually knowing what that secret
was,
that would be perfect, but she doesn’t think it works that way.) Eventually Christian picks her up in the parking lot and apologizes for being late and blames it on his dad, because it is always his dad’s fault.

Everything is his dad’s fault, except when it is his mother’s fault, Holly has learned. His dad is too old, his dad is too sick, his dad won’t ante up with the cash. His mother isn’t even worth talking about, except when he is really drunk. A few months ago she kicked him out of her house, three towns over. She doesn’t love him anymore. That’s all he’ll say.

She met his father once. He was in a wheelchair, and he seemed so excited to meet her. He shook her hand and grabbed her wrist and held it. It only freaked her out a little bit.

When Christian is done blaming his dad, they drive through the drive-through and get Nachos BellGrande and a bunch of tacos and two Pepsis, and then they go to his house and eat it and then make out with their awful taco breath. Sometimes they drink beer and then they have beer breath. Tonight he has promised vodka, but that doesn’t really taste like anything at all.

She stands and waits with Shelly, both of them behind the counter with their matching eyelids and skimpy T-shirts and armpits deodorized within an inch of their lives. Shelly has never met him. Shelly wants to see him. Shelly wants to know who her secret boyfriend is. How exciting! A secret boyfriend. Everyone in the store is almost ready to leave: the pharmacist, Christine, who has a one-year-old and an unemployed load of a husband waiting for her at home; the stockboy, Mario, who always wears red shirts and black pants and has a unibrow; and the delivery guy, Schneider, who is probably too old to be a delivery guy—he’s well into his thirties—but Holly couldn’t imagine him doing anything else, the way he shuffles and sneers and seems completely devoid of any math skills. More than any of the other employees, he’s the one who consistently stares at Shelly’s ass.

They all want to go home, and she is standing there, waiting, like a jackass.

Christian walks into the pharmacy, straight to the back counter where Holly and Shelly are standing. He is wearing a black sweater with holes in both elbows and camouflage pants with ties at the bottom and huge pockets at the thighs. His hair is slicked back—He’s fresh out of the shower, she thinks. He showered! For our date!—so she sees the shaved sides of his head. He is one perfect smooth person now. A tiny cross earring dangles from his right ear. Forgotten is the tardiness, forgotten is the trashiness, forgotten are the constant complaints. She is suddenly swooning with pride that this is her boyfriend.