The Blonde of the Joke Read online

  The Blonde of the Joke

  Bennett Madison

  For Margaret Gopi Wright

  Contents

  Chapter One

  A blonde and a brunette walk into a bar. No,…

  Chapter Two

  Around here, no one has any parents. There’s a…

  Chapter Three

  “So you’re going to steal something today, right?”

  Chapter Four

  At school, no one noticed that I was different. It…

  Chapter Five

  “Do you believe in God?” Francie asked one day in…

  Chapter Six

  You take a seashell. You take a tube of lip…

  Chapter Seven

  “Vedela.” Ms. Tinker grabbed my arm as I was walking out…

  Chapter Eight

  Jrancie disappeared without explanation the day before winter break. She…

  Chapter Nine

  Francie ranc back. You knew she would.

  Chapter Ten

  There was always something different about the mall.

  Chapter Eleven

  The fountain was holding the whole thing together.

  Chapter Twelve

  Francie and I were standing on the escalator, heading down,…

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sleepovers at Francie’s house were usually pretty fun, because Sandy…

  Chapter Fourteen

  Around here, there is a creek that touches everyone. It…

  Chapter Fifteen

  Francie was eating a taco salad. They had put cheese…

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Did you hear you hear about the blonde who thought…

  Chapter Seventeen

  Francie wanted me to come over, but I wasn’t in…

  Chapter Eighteen

  One day, after Physics class, I stayed behind. Ms. Tinker didn’t…

  Chapter Nineteen

  At ten o’clock, Max was outside my bedroom window throwing…

  Chapter Twenty

  Liz came to take me out on a chilly Sunday…

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Sometime later, it was midnight, and Max was over again.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Things were getting out of control. I hadn’t seen Max…

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I was back at the mall, flying solo. It felt…

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  It was June, the twilight bit of not-quite-summer when everything…

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  There is an afternoon that I don’t remember much about.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The afternoon after Jesse died, I snuck out of my…

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Francie and I woke just before noon and got dressed…

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Well? Are you laughing?

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  A blonde and a brunette walk into a bar. No, wait.

  A blonde and a brunette show up at the Pearly Gates, and Saint Peter—no, not that one, either.

  Okay, so a blonde and a brunette go to the mall, and…oh, forget it.

  If there’s one thing I’ve learned lately, it’s that jokes are not funny. At least, they’re never funny in the way they’re meant to be. I once knew a girl who thought all jokes were funny, but it turned out she was laughing at the wrong parts. Sometimes, now, I wonder what it must be like to look at the world that way. To be able to ignore one punch line and see a different one where it never even existed. I mean, I guess it must be useful. I guess it must be beautiful.

  Okay, here we go. Knock-knock. Who’s there? Ima. Ima who?

  Ima gonna tell you a joke. Get ready to laugh; this one’s a good one. Kind of long, but funny. Of course, by funny I mean that it’s fucking tragic in the end. Bear with me. It’s the first day of school, and a blonde walks into a classroom….

  It had been at least ten minutes since the second bell had rung when a blonde walked into the classroom. It was like this: Ms. Tinker was up at the blackboard, halfway through Classroom Policy #3—No Foolishness—when the door slammed open and this girl just came sauntering in. This insane-looking girl—all breeze and smiles in a baggy, lime green raincoat that hung to her ankles, and like it was no thing at all. Like it was nothing.

  Ms. Tinker had already made it clear that she didn’t tolerate tardiness. It was right up there in white chalk. Classroom Policy #1: I Do Not Tolerate TARDINESS.

  Francie Knight couldn’t have been expected to know. She’d been tardy for the first two classroom policies, so how could she? Francie just stood in the doorway, digging through her purse while the class sat silent in anticipation. Ms. Tinker turned from the board, clearing her throat. It was that whole slow-burn business. I Do Not Tolerate TARDINESS.

  The girl still didn’t seem to notice she was in trouble. She had found a tube of lip gloss at the bottom of her purse and was thoughtlessly applying a new coat to her already shiny lips. And then, before Ms. Tinker could say anything, lip gloss still in hand, Francie looked up and cut her off with a confident sneer. A grand and haughty toss of her blond, blond ponytail. You could almost see a yellow shimmer lingering around her face when she spoke.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Francie said. “I had to make a pit stop at the assistant principal’s office on my way over. The first day of school and they’re already making me wear the whore’s raincoat! Can you believe it?” She reached up and pulled the band from her hair. She let her ponytail unfurl at her shoulders in spiraling, perfectly greasy tangles. “Where should I sit?” she asked.

  A murmur had started in the room from somewhere around the vicinity of Shana Miller in the third row. Who is this freak? Ms. Tinker pushed her little square eyeglasses up on her nose with her ring finger, regarding Francie suspiciously. She fidgeted with the gym whistle on the lanyard around her neck, as if considering whether to sound an alert. But we all knew it was too late, and it was obvious that Ms. Tinker knew it, too. Francie had the situation well in hand. She had won this round.

  She spotted an empty desk right next to me, and plopped her purse down.

  “Just see me after class,” Ms. Tinker grumbled. At least, that’s what I have to assume she said, because no one heard her, including me. No one was paying attention to anything except Francie anymore. Francie removed her raincoat and tossed it over the back of the chair. “Like hell if they think I’m really going to wear this thing,” she said, to no one in particular. “Last time I checked, there was such a thing as the First Amendment in this country.” And then I saw why she had called it “the whore’s raincoat.” Because when she stripped it off, Francie revealed that she was wearing an aqua tube top, a pair of gold lamé hot pants, and the highest heels I had ever seen.

  The room was quiet. I looked over at Shana Miller. She was staring, but her face was blank, like she had been hypnotized. Francie had no backpack or notebook; she sat and drummed her long, hot-pink fingernails on her desk, all, let’s get this show on the road.

  “Classroom Policy Number Four,” Ms. Tinker sighed. I guess she’d been teaching long enough to know when to give up the fight. She turned back to the board and began to write again. There Is No Such Thing as a Smart Question.

  Francie giggled. She turned to me and rolled her eyes. I looked away. I felt myself diminished just from sitting next to her. My shoulders crumpled into my rib cage. I couldn’t look at her. But I couldn’t not look at her, either.

  Francie was that kind of girl. You know the type I’m talking about. Blonde. Big boobs. Total slut. The kind of gir
l who doesn’t need a name. It’s always the blonde, isn’t it? I guess certain things will turn your hair gold. Francie’s hair was hell-of-gold.

  As for me: my hair was brown like something you looked for and looked for and couldn’t find until your mom told you to check under your bed, and then there it was, crumpled in a dusty corner where you couldn’t reach it.

  I didn’t see Francie again for the rest of that day, and honestly, I was glad. There was something about her that had freaked me out. The way she threw everything off balance. The way the rules didn’t seem to apply to her—and not just Ms. Tinker’s classroom policies, either. There were deeper rules being violated. When Francie had stripped off the whore’s raincoat to reveal herself dressed as a total hooker, the room had been completely silent. The way outer space is silent in the movies, with not even so much as a snicker from Shana Miller or Toby Snyder. That just didn’t happen. What I am saying is that Francie Knight was working some powerful shit. You have to be careful around a girl like that.

  I wouldn’t have minded having some of her mojo for myself, though. I had none. When the first day of school was over, I stood at my locker and couldn’t move. It’s not because the hall was so crowded, even though it was. That wasn’t it.

  Kids were pushing past me, rushing for the door in shifting clusters, grabbing at each other, yelling, laughing, whatever, and I just stood there. I didn’t see anyone I recognized, and I couldn’t bring myself to walk away. I couldn’t bring myself to be alone. I was standing there, fingers still on my combination lock, and all I could do was twirl the spinner around and around. Click, click, click. And then again. I stood there, a stranger, not even looking at the lock, but instead staring at the floor, watching my reflection in shiny tiles yet to be scuffed. Click, click, click. I didn’t know where to go. I was invisible.

  It didn’t matter. I’d stood there so long that the hallway was empty; there was no one around to see me one way or the other. I headed for the back door, the one by the girls’ locker room, and pushed my way outside, where I stood at an asphalt path at the top of a hill and looked out over the football field. Off in the distance, a group of girls I used to know had set up a blanket and were lying in their T-shirts and shorts, trying to sun themselves even though summer was really over.

  September went like that. I drifted along, talking to almost no one, sitting in the back of classrooms hoping to go unnoticed while other girls lazed at their desks with catlike lassitude, soaking up imaginary glory. Instead of taking notes, I wrote my own name over and over in my spiral-bound notebooks, filling up pages, and was always surprised when I looked down at the crammed blue lines. Valentina Martinez. Valentina Martinez. Valentina Martinez. Valentina Martinez. Then I would write it again, just to be sure that it was still my name.

  I hadn’t always been this way, I knew. It hadn’t been so long since I’d had friends. I had once been a regular person. But Emily had moved to California to live with her dad after her mom’s nervous breakdown, Kathryn had been sent to boarding school, and Sarah and Jaime had both gotten into a school for smart kids on the other side of the county, an hourlong bus ride away. Emily’d emailed me a few times over the summer to tell me about the crappy weather in San Diego, and that was it. Everyone else just kind of forgot about me. It seemed that I was a very forgettable person.

  I was barely there at all.

  It had happened to other people, too. People who had always existed—people with names, identities, nice shoes—who had just started to disappear once high school had started.

  One time, toward the end of September, I was coming out of the bathroom when I saw this guy, Nick Whitney. I’d known him forever; we’d had classes together since kindergarten. We used to call him Nicky. When I came out of the bathroom that day and found myself face-to-face with him, we locked eyes. There was something about his plaintive expression—his raised eyebrows, his heart-shaped mouth barely open—that made me want to talk to him. Help, he seemed to be saying. He was about to say something, and so was I, but before either of us could utter a word, he faded from sight right in front of me. “Nick,” I said. “Nicky?” But he was gone. I kept on walking. There was nothing else to do. This was just how it was now.

  Weeks went by, and I had almost forgotten about Francie. I mean, you could never totally forget about her: there she was every day in Ms. Tinker’s class, or at least three days out of five, and no one could possibly miss the sight of her cutting a wide swath down the halls of Sandra Dee Senior High School in skirts shorter than her high heels, with no books, no backpack, no nothing except her tiny purse and those long, long legs. There was no ignoring Francie, that’s the truth. But once I got used to her—once I stopped feeling my shoulders fall every time she walked by—she didn’t seem real anymore. She was like a deer you see darting across the road when you’re driving along late at night, half asleep in the back of your parents’ car. Something startling—unsettling, even—but mostly of another world entirely.

  I think everyone felt that way about her. Because although I heard people gossiping about Francie, I never saw a single person actually speak to her. She was supposedly such a slut—according to conversations I’d overheard in Modern Living class—but it was hard to see how she had the chance to hook up with anyone. She was always alone.

  Francie hanging outside the girls’ room. Francie slinking into Physics late, still with no books. Waiting on the corner before climbing into a strange car. Burning through one thousand Misty Ultra Lights.

  She was that kind of girl. She was the kind of girl it was probably better not to think about too much.

  September seemed like it went on forever, and then it was over, and I looked back on it and realized that I couldn’t remember any of it at all. It was October, and I wondered if the rest of my life was going to be like this. A lonely and indistinct accumulation of pointless days.

  I felt like I was losing parts of myself. Just small parts for now; things that you wouldn’t notice to look at me. But what if when the leaves on the trees started falling, more important things went missing? What if I woke up one morning to find myself without a big toe or a canine tooth?

  One day, it almost happened. I was slinking across the football field toward the park and noticed a breeze that smelled like something burning when I saw the first leaf of autumn. I had picked up the habit of training my eyes on nothing when I walked, just staring off at some unfixed point in the distance, which meant that I sometimes saw things that any other person would miss. Things like a yellowy leaf dislodging from a branch and floating in and out—one plane of focus to the next—until finally landing at the feet of a girl sitting alone in a canyon of concrete bleachers and puffing on a long, skinny cigarette.

  It was Francie Knight. A clear afternoon, early autumn, her crazy blond hair curling into white smoke and hovering in the air like messy tendrils of a scattering cloud. There she was, staring into space with a satisfied smirk, looking perfectly happy to be by herself, when the leaf delivered itself to her.

  Francie leaned over, picked up the leaf, and looked at it; she twirled it by its stem between her index finger and thumb and let it go. And instead of falling to the ground, the leaf was airborne again, and I swear to God that Francie was looking straight at me—I mean, looking me right in the eye—as it gained altitude, climbing, climbing, and then was gone.

  If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought that Francie Knight had reversed gravity. She was the kind of girl who might actually be able to do something like that.

  Chapter Two

  Around here, no one has any parents. There’s a long, winding creek that seems to be in everyone’s backyard. There’s a mall a few miles off, sitting big and solid at the top of a hill, ringed by parking garages. These are the things you know. This is the suburbs.

  Around here, there are no sidewalks. In spring azaleas spill out into the street. The parents that people do have definitely don’t count. In afternoons, after school, you wander up and down t
he block, pondering an intention. The mall hangs in the distance, above the trees, blue and indistinct like a mountain range. Most days, you head there. Where else is there to go?

  I went to the mall a lot.

  It wasn’t that I liked shopping all that much. And I never had any money, anyway, so it basically wouldn’t have mattered even if I had wanted to buy something. But there wasn’t much else to do, and hanging around the house with my mom was just way too depressing to handle. I had to go somewhere. At the mall, I could pretend that I was someone other than myself.

  At the mall, there was something about the bubbling fountains in the atrium that implied a promise. Even if you weren’t going to get your wish, at least you could dig through the coins at the bottom and collect a couple of dollars for an Orange Julius.

  At the mall, in the beginning of October, there was this whiff of something: like newness, or the future. Or maybe I was just mistaking the smell of Cinnabons and makeup. Either way, walking into any store, I could see myself in a different sweater, a different pair of underwear, and feel like it would really change everything. Like the mall could transform me.

  The first time Francie Knight ever said my name, I was at Wet Seal, next to the Guess? store, near Bloomingdale’s, pretending I was the kind of person who shopped at Wet Seal. Francie had snuck up behind me.

  “Valentina, right?”

  And when I turned, she was standing there. In a plain white T-shirt ripped at the collarbone, a white cotton miniskirt over white, cropped leggings, and bright red heels, her hair swept back into a tangled ponytail revealing giant gold hoop earrings that glinted with a hint of something I couldn’t put my finger on. She had her small baguette-shaped purse clutched at her hip like a pistol.