Randall #01 - The Best Revenge (7 page)

Camilla tried not to care as she searched in the medicine cabinet until she found the bottle of tiny yellow pills. Her head pounded. Her mother took Valium all the time, so she figured it couldn’t be terribly dangerous. She popped off the cap and took two.

Chapter 7—Making Guacamole

When Camilla woke up, the clock by her bed said 10:49. The noise around her was surreal. Electronic Devo grunts chugged in her ear, and hordes of humanity yammered outside her door. She forced herself out of bed and hoped nobody would walk in as she dressed. There was no lock on the door.

She knew she shouldn’t look like a “major wimp” for Jennifer’s TV star, so she put on a slinky little Bob Mackie gold slip dress with a plunging neckline. Her hair didn’t look as bad as it might have, even though it was limp from the hot tub. It had turned very blonde in the California sun. With some eye make-up, she managed to make herself look fairly human. Finally, she felt prepared to open her bedroom door.

She had to try about four times, but when she got it open enough to squeeze outside, the man who had been leaning against it gave her a nasty look—as if she had no right to be there.

She couldn’t believe how many bodies were crushed into the tiny living room. Was this really better than going back to Connecticut?

Yes. She thought of her mother’s call today and realized anything, even this, was better than going to that wedding.

Searching the crowd for a familiar face, she caught sight of Wave, perched on the back of the couch. She still wore her micro-shorts and beach top, to which she’d added a leather motorcycle jacket. She’d gelled her hair to look dark and spiky, and wore one huge, dangling black earring—a sort of a “Gidget Goes Punk” look. She was talking to a darkly handsome man wearing what appeared to be an authentic 1940’s pinstriped suit over a T-shirt printed with an advertisement for shock absorbers. Wave stared into his tanned face with unconcealed rapture.

As she made her way toward them, Camilla tried to picture the actors on “Darrell and Darryl” and wondered if Mr. Pinstripes was the famous star. But by the time she had squeezed her way to the couch, he’d gone.

“Camel!” Wave said. “Welcome to the land of the living. Awesome party, huh?”

“I’m not really awake yet.” Camilla was feeling not so much awed as squished.

“No problem. I’ve got your wake-up call right here.” Wave reached into her shorts pocket. “I saved enough for a few lines.” She put the glass vial in Camilla’s hand.

“Thanks,” Camilla said, trying to give it back. “But I think I’ll eat something first. Besides…” She smoothed the sides of her skimpy dress. “I don’t have any pockets.”

“Put it in your bra.” Wave’s attention moved from the vial to Pinstripes, who pushed his way toward them with a beer in each hand. He was amazingly good-looking.

“Is that him, the TV star?”

“Don’t be a doofus. That’s our garbage man. Jimmy.” Wave blew the man a kiss. “You probably don’t recognize him without his uniform. I invited him on Tuesday morning. He was throwing our cans in the neighbor’s yard again, so I told him he could do something useful for a change and bring beer to our party. Cute, huh?”

“Is he here—that actor Don-Jon?”

“Jon-Don. Yeah. Somewhere. But he brought his girlfriend. Jennifer’s totally suicidal. Especially since Mike hasn’t even shown up.” Wave smiled happily and turned to greet Jimmy the garbage man.

Acutely aware of the vial in her hand, Camilla decided to head for the kitchen. But the kitchen was, if possible, even more crowded than the living room. She pretended to fiddle with her dress strap and hid the vial where Wave suggested.

Being in the kitchen reminded her that she hadn’t eaten since morning. Fighting through the crowd to the refrigerator, she managed to open it a crack, but found nothing but a huge quantity of beer and a few bottles of wine. She took a can of light beer and inched her way to the cupboard in search of something edible. After gobbling some stale Wheat Thins, she turned to survey the crowd. She didn’t recognize one person.

But with dawning horror, she realized she was terribly overdressed. In fact, hers was the only actual dress to be seen, and—except for Wave’s gym shorts and the vintage pinstripes worn by Jimmy the garbage man—the only outfit not made of denim.

She wondered if she should attempt the journey back to her room to change, but by now the crowd was impenetrable. She tried to look busy rearranging empty beer cans on the counter. Behind them she found the avocados from the hot tub as well as several others that had been sitting on the counter for days. No one had made the guacamole. She looked in the cupboard for a bowl. She had never made guacamole, but she had watched Wave whip up bowls of it many times, and it didn’t look very hard.

~

Camilla’s fingers were coated with green slime, and she was trying to mash the lumps with a bent fork, the only utensil she could find, when a deep voice spoke close to her ear.

“Guacamole?” the man said.

“Guacamole,” Camilla replied

“You must be Camel.”

“How do you know that?” She turned around to look. He was a thirtyish man of medium height with sandy-colored hair and bloodshot blue eyes. He needed a shave.

“Jennifer told me your name,” he said, leaning on the counter dangerously close to the green slime. “I asked her for the name of the lady with the nice cleavage.” He spoke with a lazy boredom, as if he were commenting on the weather. His eyes focused on the neckline of the Bob Mackie.

“I’m aware that I’m over-dressed,” Camilla said. “We dress differently for parties in New York.” She turned to resume lump-squashing.

“Yeah. Jennifer said you were from back east. Me too.” He stuck a finger into the green mush and tasted it. “Needs hot sauce,” he said.

“Of course it does. I haven’t seasoned it yet.” Why did men think that making critical remarks was attractive?

“Did you know that if you leave in a pit or two it won’t turn brown?”

“No, I didn’t.” She unearthed a bottle of Tabasco sauce from the cupboard.

“Here.” The man fished one of the pits out of the mess in the sink. He dropped it into the bowl. With a plop, it sent out a spray of green blobs. One hit Camilla in the mouth. He wiped it off with his finger.

“You have nice mouth,” he said, licking his finger. “Luscious.”

“The guacamole?”

“Your mouth. Haven’t you ever been told you have a luscious mouth?”

“As a matter of fact, I have.” She shook the bottle of hot sauce with vehemence at the thought of the
Guardian
article and the odious Jonathan Kahn. Unfortunately, the top shook right off and the entire contents poured into the bowl.

Just then, a skinny woman with deathly white skin and purplish-black hair emerged from the crowd and draped an arm around the man.

“Jon-Don, babe, we’re all out,” she said.

Jon-Don. The star himself. Camilla hid her burning face by busying herself with extricating the bottle top from the red and green goo in the bowl. She’d just made a stupid mess in front of the famous Jon-Don Parker. She stirred the bowl’s contents with the bent fork. It turned a repulsive shade of gray.

“Really into the hot sauce, huh?” Jon-Don said. The black and white woman seemed to have evaporated.

“I think I ruined it,” she said. “But maybe I can save the pit. I could stick three toothpicks in it and let it rot in a glass of water while I pretend it’s going to turn into a plant. I had a counselor at summer camp who used to do that.”

Jon-Don laughed. Now she could picture him in his pink linen jacket.

“You’re all right, Camel,” he said, patting her shoulder. “Hey, is there somewhere we can go and talk? It’s awfully noisy in here.”

“OK.” She was happy to move away from the disaster in the bowl on the counter. After that mess, it was probably OK for him to see her bedroom, which wasn’t too chaotic for once. And they’d be able to sit down. She grabbed a fresh beer.

The crowd parted magically as she led Jon-Don down the hall. Jennifer threw Camilla a lacerating look from her seat on the lap of a man with a chest full of muscles and gold chains.

“You said you’re from the East?” Camilla said to Jon-Don as she smoothed the bedspread on her unmade bed.

“Yup. Tulsa, Oklahoma.”

“Do you miss it?” she said after a pause. It was hard for her to grasp the California concept of “east”.

“Hell, no.” He plunked himself down on the bed. “Well, I guess at first I was kinda homesick, and I thought Californians were weird. But when I went home for a visit, everybody there thought I was the weird one. I’d turned into a Californian without knowing it.”

“I don’t think that could happen to me.”

“Sure it could. It’s like…” He leaned back on the bed. “Have you ever read Ray Bradbury?”

Camilla shook her head as she tried to decide whether to clear the clothes off her desk chair so she could sit in it or whether it was OK to sit next to him on the bed.

“In
The Martian Chronicles
, he tells this story about how Earth sends this expedition to Mars, and at first the colonists try to make Mars just like Earth, and they send lots of messages back home to tell the folks how they’re doing, but slowly, they get more into being on Mars, and they finally stop sending messages. Then a whole lot later, Earth sends out a new expedition to figure out what happened, but they don’t find anybody but Martians. The colonists had all turned into Martians, see?”

Camilla decided to sit on the bed.

“So you’re saying if I stay here too long, I’ll turn into a Martian?” She was trying to follow, but she didn’t much care for science fiction.

“Right,” Jon-Don said. He laughed loudly as if she had told a funny joke.

Camilla laughed, too, even though she didn’t get it.

He reached over and put a hand on her thigh.

“So. Are we gonna screw or what?”

She tried to remove his hand politely.

“I don’t think so. I mean—your girlfriend’s here and everything. Right?” She gulped beer. If she was dorky with Jon-Don, Jennifer would heap scorn on her forever and life here could get unbearable.

“True? She left with that guy Tooter to score. We’ve been partying for three days. You’d never believe the amount of toot we’ve gone through. It’s a good thing I’m rich.” His hand was back, inching under her skirt.

“You want a toot?” She jumped up, finally seeing her chance to ease out of the situation with a minimum of wimpiness. “No problem!” She reached into her bra for Wave’s vial. “Let’s go out by the hot tub. We’ve got works out there.” Outside, she could be magnanimous and let him take all the cocaine, and then she could disappear back into the crowd.

“Not to worry,” he said, taking the vial. He pulled from his jeans pocket a wallet-sized leather case, which he opened to reveal a small mirror, and gold-colored razor blade, tiny spoon and short metal straw.

She took a deep breath as she realized her plan had backfired. She watched him arrange a spoonful of cocaine into two neat rows. She let her breath out slowly and carefully, and prayed that whatever the drug’s effects are, it wouldn’t make her do anything embarrassing.

Jon-Don handed her the little straw and held the mirror. She put the straw to her nose and, since she could think of nothing else to do—inhaled, moving the straw along the line of powder the way Wave and Jennifer did. When she had inhaled the whole line, she felt as if she had no nose. She touched it to make sure it was still there. But nothing else happened. Maybe the cocaine was no good. She hoped Jon-Don wouldn’t be mad. She handed him the straw.

He inhaled the second line of powder. He seemed to think it was OK. She relaxed a bit as he closed the kit and put it back in his pocket.

“So. When are you going to get out of that dress?” he said. “We haven’t got all night.” He reached for her breast.

No. She’d been willing to take a stupid drug to be polite, but this was ridiculous.

“Listen, Jon-Don,” she said, inching away. “I think you’re really cute, but you’re here with another girl and my door doesn’t lock and there’s the party out there…”

“Are you turning me down?” Jon-Don’s face distorted with anger. “Don’t you know who I am? It’s not like I’m asking you to do anything kinky.”

“Of course I know who you are, Lieutenant Darrell.” She added a little Marilyn Monroe breathiness to her voice. “Do you think I’d be here with anyone else? It’s just that I don’t feel comfortable about the situation tonight.” She smiled the sweet-little-girl smile that once charmed horses, cars and trips to Europe out of her dad. “Listen, Jon-Don, I’ll give you my phone number, and you can call me any time. I’m not turning you down. You make me just melt. Really.” She managed to make herself kiss his stubbly cheek, and started to stand up.