The Blonde of the Joke (16 page)

That afternoon Max and I pushed deep into unknown suburbs, stumbling along the curb and toying drunkenly with the fringes of front lawns. Even though the neighborhoods were unfamiliar, this was a universe that we both understood. We knew which way to go on instinct alone. This was where we had come from. The world of lawns and driveways and tall trees, Tudors and Colonials. And all those driveways were just sliding past us, every one of them
another asphalt pathway to someplace familiar and long ago. Every one of them was a story we both knew. We should have followed one of those paths—should have let ourselves pass out in some lady’s backyard, face in the dirt. Maybe a small difference like that would have changed something. But we kept on walking until the roads became home again.

When I got back to my house, the sun was gone, and there in the dark, on my lawn, Max kissed me good-bye. This kiss was different from our other kisses. It was tentative and sweet and not at all slobbery. At the time I thought the difference was that he was starting to actually mean it.

“I’ll see you around,” he said.

“I’ll see you,” I said.

“Who was that?” my mother asked when I stepped inside. She was sitting on the front staircase, busy polishing the stairs with a rag. She looked crazed, the way she was scrubbing furiously away at just one step.

“Who was who?”

“That guy you were kissing,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “That was just Max.”

“I see,” she said.

“So? What’s your point?”

“You smell like alcohol.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Are you drunk?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t see how you can smell anything with all the Pledge, anyway.”

My mom looked unconvinced, but she dropped the subject. I stumbled past her, up the stairs to the bathroom, where I knelt at the toilet, about to be sick. So I was drunk. It didn’t matter. Francie and Max had both revealed themselves to me, and now, armed with knowledge, I was stronger than ever. It had been a good day.

I
was back at the mall, flying solo. It felt good to be by myself. I felt more powerful alone than with Francie; I was finally free from the distraction of her all-consuming needs.

But even though I was stealing more and more, with speed and precision that I had never known, it was not enough. I’d stolen so much, but I’d yet to find the thing I was looking for. My brother was holding on by a thread, time was running out, and with nothing left to trust, I sat at the fountain, waiting for a clue.

The mall had always come through for me before, always at the perfect moment. Francie, Max, even Liz—the mall had given me each of them when I had needed them. That day, waiting for a map I could follow to the Most Beautiful
Thing, I came up with nothing. The mall was showing its stubborn streak. Instead of giving up its secrets, it gave me Max and Francie, both at once.

I saw Francie first. She didn’t see me, or maybe she was only pretending not to. She was just milling around, a hundred yards off, looking in windows, fiddling with her hair, listless and bored-looking, a shadow of her former self. She reminded me of me, almost—the way I’d been before I’d met her, in the days when I’d come to the mall alone in the hope of a transformation.

I’d transformed, all right. And so had Francie. I had exceeded my own expectations. Francie had become diminished. I was so wrapped up in watching her that I didn’t notice Max sneak up next to me until his hands were covering my eyes. “Guess who,” he whispered in my ear. He nibbled on it, sending a shiver up my spine, and I laughed.

“I give up,” I said.

When Max took his hands away, he looked so hot—in a worn, white T-shirt, a tiny patch of skin peeking out through a hole over his left breast—that I had to take him somewhere. I stood and looked behind me to see Francie, oblivious to us, examining a pair of sunglasses at Sunglass Hut. So I grabbed Max’s hand and led him through the mall, past Sears, to the girls’ room and into the handicap stall.

Max had already pulled off of me when she found us there, but it was all perfectly clear anyway. It might as well have
been written on the bathroom wall in thick black Sharpie, just to bring it all home.

My blouse was halfway undone; my bra strap was inching down my biceps. Max’s face was slick and shiny and newly kiwi-flavored. He was just standing up when the door to the handicap stall busted open.

Max jumped back. I was still on the floor, legs tucked under my knees and wedged between the toilet and the wall. I did not move.

Francie stood there, one fist on her hip, head cocked for action.

“I had a feeling I would find you here,” Francie said. She had a certain brightness in her eyes. “I don’t know why; I just had a feeling.” She tapped a pink press-on claw to her temple. “That old sixth sense. And look! Here you are.”

I kept my cool. “Hi,” I said. “I thought I locked the door.”

I tried to make myself look more respectable without being too obvious about it. But you could never get one past Francie. She rolled her eyes and tossed her hair with vengeful hauteur.

“Please. Go ahead. Put your clothes back on,” she said. “I mean, really. What did I expect?” She turned to Max and smiled. “Hi, Max.”

The thing is, Francie didn’t scare me anymore, even like this. Nothing scared me anymore. I didn’t shrink. I looked her straight in the eye and let a certain darkness make its
way across my face. “What, exactly, did you expect? Honestly, I’d like to know.”

She just raised her chin and folded her arms across her chest.

No one made a move. Max glanced from one of us to the other, unsure and nervous-eyed, and lamenting, almost certainly, the fact that he did not have a joint close at hand. He said nothing. He stood up, pushed past Francie, out of the bathroom stall, and walked away. He moved as if in slow motion, and I watched him go, not saying anything myself but knowing, this time for sure, that if I ever saw him again—which was doubtful—we would both be entirely different people. I wanted to be sad, but there wasn’t time.

Francie watched me watch him. For a second, she seemed to cool down. And then we both heard the bathroom door swing closed, a wheeze and a slam.

“You said you didn’t want him anyway,” I said.

“I don’t want him. He’s a fucking snake, trust me. That has nothing to do with it.”

She didn’t have to say it. I knew. “Let me tell you a joke,” Francie said.

I let her have her way.

“A blonde and a brunette go to the mall,” she said. “The blonde is a total moron and does something typically humiliating and retarded.”

“Francie,” I said. She barreled on.

“For instance: she eats a turd because she thinks it’s chocolate.”

“Francie,” I said.

“She walks into a glass door and breaks her nose. She actually dares to think that someone is her friend.” Francie shrugged and tossed her hair. “Something like that. All laugh.”

Francie began to laugh uproariously. I just looked at her.

“You’re not laughing,” she said. “What? Haven’t you ever heard a blonde joke before?”

“I guess you had to be there,” I said.

“I guess so,” said Francie. “Well. Maybe it’s not like funny ha-ha, anyway. But listen. What I want to know, Valentina Martinez, is: Who’s the blonde of this joke? Who in this picture is the bimbo and the slut? I am looking for an honest answer here, and I’m starting to wonder if the punch line is maybe precisely as obvious as it first appears.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” I said. “Personally I’ve never found blonde jokes funny anyway.”

Francie took her eyeliner from her purse and, right there in front of me, applied a new coat, her glare fixed on me the entire time.

“A person can have secrets,” I said. “I learned from the master.”

“A person can have secrets. But this is something different,” Francie said. “We’re supposed to be friends. And this is our stall.”

“We haven’t been in this stall in months,” I said.

She slid the tube back into its pocket. “Well?” she prompted me.

“Well what?”

“Aren’t you going to say sorry?” she asked. “It’s the least you could do.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not. Because I kissed Max? Why should I apologize to you for that?”

Francie had her hand on her hip. She was still waiting.

“I mean, I guess it must come as a surprise to you,” I continued. “I guess it must come as a surprise that someone would choose me over you. You thought you could just drag me along with you, just keep me to prop you up. I wonder if it ever occurred to you that I could be anything more than your partner in crime.”

Francie’s face fell. “I can’t believe you would say that,” she said.

“Oh really?”

“You actually think that?”

I didn’t answer her. Why bother? “I’m leaving,” I said. And I did.

Max was nothing if not a creature of unparticular urges. Given a path, he would follow it. And given any deterrent whatsoever, he would bail on a dime. That was just Max. I knew him well enough to know. The easy smirk; the constantly shifting gaze. Those long, awkward arms and legs; the
eager, skittish soul of a dog. It wasn’t too hard to figure him out, in the end.

Francie, though. Francie was more of a mystery.

Because that night, the same day she’d caught me in the bathroom with Max, she called me. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “I mean, why are you apologizing?”

“You’re allowed to have a life,” she said. “I told you I didn’t want Max. And if I’m not going to have him, why shouldn’t you? It would be a legitimate waste. I just wish you hadn’t kept it secret. You didn’t have to do that, and anyway, it’s not like I didn’t suspect. You could have told me. I wouldn’t have been mad. And I’m not mad. I understand.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter now,” I said.

“I shouldn’t have said the stuff I said the other day, either,” she said. “I don’t know why I said it. I was just frustrated. But we’ll find it, babe.”

“What stuff? Find what?” I asked.

“The Holy Grail,” she said. “All that stuff. I know it’s important to you. I will not let you down. Have I ever let you down?”

“Okay,” I said lamely. I didn’t even really know what I was agreeing with.

“Good. Then it’s all good,” Francie said.

There was nothing I could do. Ever since the day we’d kissed in the girls’ room, Francie had a hold over me. I had tried my hardest to let her go. It would not work.

“It’s all good,” I said.

“Great, babe. We’ll go to the mall tomorrow. Bring your rubber bands!”

At Montgomery Shoppingtowne the next day, I let Francie flutter at my side again. At first I barely noticed she was even there. She stole with lackluster gracelesseness, just dropping stuff in her bag without bothering to disguise herself with the usual plumage. She was wearing a gray, ill-fitting sweatshirt and a pair of jeans that made her butt look kind of big. Clunky New Balance sneakers that squeaked when she walked. When I pointed out that she had only put her eyeliner on one eye, she just dropped a package of bath beads in her purse and shrugged. “It’s avant-garde,” she said, but it sounded like an excuse.

And maybe it was the disbelieving way I rolled my eyes, or maybe she was drawing one last bit of energy from the bath beads she’d just taken. Whatever it was, she willed something to return to her.

She went off to the bathroom, and when she came back it was just like the other week at the Gap, except more. She had cloaked herself again in dazzle. Heels and hair and big, barely hidden tits. She was wearing the exact outfit she had worn on the first day of school. Hot pants and skimpy tube top with gold lace-up sandals. She was shining. This time, though, I knew it was just an illusion—one of the last tricks she had in her arsenal. I didn’t bother to be impressed.

“Well?” she grilled me. “Better?”

I didn’t feel like humoring her. “I guess,” I said.

Her face fell, and for a moment she began to wane, but then she collected herself. She took my arm in hers and dragged me out into the mall. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s find it. Today’s the day. I can feel it in my bones! I mean, isn’t there something about today? Can’t you tell that we’re on the trail of it? Can’t you feel that everything is about to get better?”

“It’s not exactly breezy in here,” I said. But I wanted to believe her. I wanted to believe
in
her. If nothing else, I guess, I wanted to believe in the mall. I was still looking for it myself, so why not give Francie one last chance? Maybe the mall had returned her for a reason.

“Sure,” I said. “Lead the way, you hot bitch.”

Francie beamed. That was all it took for her to sweep me right back up in her enthusiasm. She still had that power over me. We were bound together whether I liked it or not.

So Francie pointed straight ahead and used her finger as a divining rod. Her hand swayed back and forth, up and down in the air, before finally settling on a store. Spencer Gifts. And a kind of faith started to swell in my chest. Spencer’s—it was the last place in the entire universe that you would expect to find an ancient, holy artifact. Which meant that maybe we were on the right track.

We went to Spencer’s, and Francie made a big show of doing her eyeliner just so, of snapping the rubber bands
around her wrists, tossing her hair and shaking it out before stepping through the entranceway.

In the store no one paid attention to us. It wasn’t any kind of trickery or technique on our part, it was just that we weren’t really worth paying attention to.

So we walked in unnoticed, and Francie made her way around the tightly packed store, eyeing things carefully, picking them up and examining them, smelling them, while I trailed along. She was making a real show out of it.

“I can feel it. It’s here,” Francie said. “It’s calling to me, I’m legitimately sure of it. Valentina Martinez, this is going to change everything. The Holy Grail. The one thing that has eluded us.”

The store was full of the dumbest stuff imaginable. I mean, that’s the point of Spencer’s; it’s stuff only a little brother or a gym teacher would find funny. For instance, a naked lady pencil sharpener where the pencil was intended to be inserted just where you would imagine. Francie picked it up and pondered it, then rolled her eyes. “I don’t think so,” she said, and she dropped it in her purse anyway. “I’ll give it to Dan for his birthday,” she said. “He’ll think it’s hilarious.”

We examined a board game for sexually bored “married couples,” a pair of velvet-lined handcuffs, a remote-controlled fart machine, and several black lights of various size and price. Francie was unimpressed by all of it, like any sensible person would be, and as her search continued, she
got more and more manic, fidgeting with her hair and shimmying her hips and snapping her fingers distractedly.

And then, in the back corner of the store, she was shaking an eighty-dollar pole dancer kit at her ear when her head jerked up. Francie’s eyes sparkled with her earrings, and briefly I thought she was about to transform. But she didn’t; she had just spotted something else that caught her interest.

“Val,” she whispered stagily. “There it is.”

I caught my breath, full of unexpected anticipation. I turned and followed her gaze to a giant, heavy plastic beer cup that was shaped like a cowboy boot. “I told you,” she said. She took the boot off the shelf and caressed it, her boobs heaving excitedly under her tube top. “I told you it would be something that seemed just normal at first. Something that startled you with how beautiful it was. And don’t you see?”

It was just a big, hollow hunk of molded plastic. My mouth tightened. “Pretty beautiful, all right,” I said through gritted teeth.

If Francie sensed my rage, she couldn’t see it yet. “Not just beautiful,” she breathed. “The
most
beautiful. The Most Beautiful Thing.”

I searched her face. She was looking up at me with desperate, crazed hopefulness, the beer boot clutched tightly to her chest, the rings of gold around her pupils pulsating. I just shook my head.

Francie bit her lip and smiled wider. She looked almost
terrified. Like she knew that this was her last chance. And I knew it was bitchy of me. I owed her so much. But our friendship had been built on more than one promise, and one of the promises—in some ways the most important one—had been that she was better than this.