The Blonde of the Joke Read online

  And I want to tell you something. You can feel free not to believe me, because it’s the kind of thing I’d call bullshit on, too, if I hadn’t experienced it myself. But the instant everything changes, you know. It’s just like—one second you are one thing, and then you’re something else. You feel it like a warm shiver that zings up the backs of your arms, and up and out through the top of your spine, all in one quick rush. A moment of clarity in which, briefly, the entire future of everything is laid out clearly before you and then is gone. A near-life experience. One moment…and then.

  “Valentina, right?” And zing. Francie Knight had said my name aloud. Everything was different now. There it was.

  I wasn’t expecting any of it. Yeah, we had one class together. And yeah, there had been that weirdness with the leaf. But just the same, I would never have guessed that Francie would know who I was, much less that she would care. First off, she didn’t come to class very often. And second, like I said, no one ever tended to notice me at all. But there she was, right behind me.

  “Hey,” I said. I didn’t move my hand from the rack of clothes I’d been looking at, just cocked my head to the side. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to react.

  Francie had already turned away, so my reaction didn’t matter. She had moved on to the sale rack, where she was shaking her hips to the beat of the piped-in ABBA on the Muzak, mouthing along to the missing words and flipping through long, sparkly dresses, making exaggerated faces of disapproval at each one. Had she really talked to me, or had I imagined it?

  Without looking up, she spoke again. “I don’t know about this store,” she said. “A little conservative, don’t you think? And what about these prices? It’s, like, a crime.”

  “I was just looking,” I said.

  “Hey, I’m not gonna stop you from shopping at Wet Seal if that’s your thing. Everyone has rights. You’re in Ms. Tinker’s third period, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Francie finally took her eyes off the clothes on the sale rack and looked up at me. She gave an exaggerated shudder. “What a bitch. One month into school and she’s already trying to dock me credit.” Francie tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “Apparently I have too many tardies. My mom writes me notes for the unexcused absences; it’s the tardies that are the problem. They don’t take notes for those. It’s re-tardied.”

  She raised her eyebrows at her own joke, and plucked something off the rack. It was a red satin halter dress. Kind of ugly and kind of beautiful at the same time. It was hard to decide. Probably more on the ugly side, but you could never be sure until you tried it on. Francie held it up to my chest, pondering.

  “Hey, that could actually work,” she said. “I really think it could work on you. It’s all about proportions.” Then, out of nowhere: “Wanna have a cig?”

  I’d never smoked a cigarette before and was actually sort of scared at the idea. But it seemed like a bad move to say no to this person who was obviously insane and liable to do just about anything. Plus, I was intrigued. I nodded. Without acknowledgment, Francie just turned and left.

  I stood there for a second, confused, and then followed.

  I followed Francie out of the store, through the mall, down the tacky, fake marble boulevard. Fountains, potted palms, the light perfectly uniform and yellow, originating from somewhere unknowable. Francie walked quickly. She didn’t wait for me. It seemed possible that she had forgotten about me, but I didn’t turn back. Every time I thought I’d lost her, I’d see a blur of blond out of the corner of my eye, and there she’d be again, heading in an unexpected direction.

  Francie was speeding along with eccentric purpose, as if her cigarette was the last important thing left in the world. She didn’t seem to have a clear idea of where she was headed. She just wound her way around corners, up and down escalators, doubling and tripling back on herself in a mystifying spiral. I finally caught up with her in a strange, narrow corridor I’d never noticed, next to Sears, where she spun around with an impish grin, and beckoned with an index finger.

  I nodded, barely even realizing I was doing it, and Francie turned around again and ran to the end of the hallway. Without slowing down, she reached out and pushed through a heavy metal door marked EMERGENCY EXIT. I was half a step behind her. I waited for the alarm to sound, but it didn’t.

  There was a coolness. We had emerged in the parking garage. I guess it was a part of the garage that no one knew about, because it was almost totally empty. An orange pylon in the corner was marked Q-2. I thought the sections only went up to F, but whatever.

  Francie stretched her fingers to the concrete ceiling and bounced on the toes of her absurd heels. The only car in sight was a lonely white Ford Thunderbird, parked at an angle between two spaces. “That was a close one,” Francie said.

  She hopped up onto the hood of the car, reached into her handbag, and pulled out two cigs. She handed one to me and lit her own with a hot-pink Bic.

  “Close one?” I slid next to her on the car’s hood.

  “Just kidding,” Francie said. “I never get caught. But still, it’s fun to pretend sometimes. It makes things more exciting. I love danger.”

  She dragged deeply and jerked her head in the direction of my bag. “Well? Check your purse,” she said.

  I tucked the still unlit Misty into my mouth and reached into the bag and groped around until I found something balled up at the bottom. I pulled it out: the Wet Seal halter dress. Red, shining, and brand-new, with the tags still dangling from a seam at the neck. A dress I hadn’t bought. A dress I had not put in my bag.

  “How…?”

  Francie shrugged and flipped her ponytail, narrowed her eyes, like to say, No big deal. “The dress isn’t my style,” she said. “But I think it’ll look good on you. You’ve got the right look.” She leaned over, touched a hand to my hip, and lit my cigarette. “It’s all about proportions.” A lock of her hair brushed my shoulder. “Pull,” she said. She could tell I didn’t know what I was doing.

  There was a spark and a flicker, and I felt a strange buzz in my chest. I didn’t cough. In fact, the smoke filling my lungs felt familiar. It felt like I had been living this way my whole life.

  “Let’s go to my place,” Francie said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  We rode the bus to Francie’s house, a big and gorgeous but dog-eared Victorian in a valley on Maple between Poplar and Elm. I don’t know where I had expected Francie to live, but it wasn’t in a place like the one we strolled up to. Francie’s house was pale pink with an elaborately latticed front porch and a white picket fence from which the front gate had come unhinged. It was damp and overcast outside, warm, and the pink of the house was exaggerated cartoon-ishly against the brownish sky. An old black Jaguar sat in the driveway.

  It turned out that Francie didn’t live too far away from me—it was walking distance, even—but stepping through her front door, I suddenly felt a million miles away from where I’d started the afternoon. I felt miles from myself.

  Inside, Francie’s mom was sitting on the couch in the living room, a glass of red wine in her left hand. She had waist-length silver hair, and she was wearing a pair of ratty jeans with a lavender spaghetti-strap tank top. I noticed a faded stain on the front, right between her boobs, which were, by the way, excellent for mom-boobs. Francie’s mom didn’t seem to be doing much of anything; she was just sitting there with some weird old-timey music on the stereo, swaying along but not quite on the beat. She was kind of beautiful.

  “Francie!” Francie’s mom said, brightening when she saw us. “How was the mall?”

  “Hey, Sandy. The mall was good,” Francie said. She turned to me and muttered, “Don’t humor her.”

  “Sit and chat,” said Sandy. Francie didn’t reply, just bounded up the stairs, beckoning. I gave Sandy an awkward half-wave, then followed Francie before her mother snared me in conversation.

  “She’s one of those moms who’s always talking about how we’re suppose
dly ‘best friends,’” Francie said after she had slammed the door to her room and collapsed on her bed. “Her and me, I mean. What the fuck she is talking about, I do not know. And what kind of a person is best friends with her own mother? A total loser, I’m pretty sure. Even if you like your mother, which, P.S., I don’t.”

  I didn’t point out that, from what I had seen at school, Francie was in no position to be rejecting applications for best friend. Still, I could see what she was saying.

  “Sit,” Francie commanded. She patted a spot next to her on the bed, and I sat. She lit another cigarette. “You like New Order?” Francie picked up a remote control and pointed it at the stereo, and there was the spare, blippy syncopation of a synth. Then strings. Then guitar. “No one respects this eighties stuff,” she said. “I love the eighties. I wish I had been alive.” It didn’t surprise me; in fact, I wondered if the reason she was such a freak was because she had transferred to Sandra Dee straight from 1988.

  I racked my brain, trying to think of something to say. That was what you were supposed to do when you had a friend, right? Talk? It had been such a long time that I was out of practice. I couldn’t think of a single topic of conversation.

  “I love your wallpaper,” I finally said, and smiled weakly. I immediately felt like an idiot. Francie’s wallpaper was fussy and floral like a grandma’s guest room. It was kind of hideous. She giggled. Instead of answering, she looked at me with narrowed eyes and a charitable grimace.

  “A blonde and a brunette jump off a building,” Francie said. I was starting to see that her favorite conversational tactic was to completely switch directions without warning. “Who lands first?”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “The brunette,” Francie said. “The blonde had to stop and ask for directions.”

  It was the oldest joke; I’d heard it a billion times before. But I laughed anyway, without knowing exactly why. It wasn’t just to be polite, but it definitely wasn’t because it was funny, either. Maybe it was because I could sense that the punch line was not exactly where it appeared.

  “It wasn’t a joke,” Francie said.

  I stopped laughing. So maybe I was wrong.

  “Just kidding,” Francie said. “Of course it was a joke. I was just trying to prove a point.”

  There was a certain sizzle in the room, a certain energy that Francie was throwing off. I got the feeling that if it hadn’t been for the thumping music, I would have been able to pull my finger through the air and hear a crackle. And I had a feeling that what I said next might change my life: say the right thing, and the road forks one way. Say the wrong thing, and…

  She tossed me a cigarette, and I lit up, this time without help.

  “A blonde and a brunette are driving down the highway,” I said. “The brunette is totally speeding, so she asks the blonde to look and see if there’s a cop car behind her. So the blonde looks, and says, ‘Yeah, there’s a cop car.’ So the brunette asks her if it has its lights on and the blonde goes, ‘Yes, no, yes, no, yes.’”

  Francie laughed. “Okay, see, that was a joke,” she said. “The best part is that it’s the brunette who’s too stupid to look in her own fucking rearview mirror.” She laughed again. “What a dumb slut.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was messing with me or not, but I decided I barely cared. At least someone was paying attention.

  “You must think I’m totally weird,” Francie said. She flopped onto a pillow and exhaled a giant cloud of smoke. The way she said it implied that she didn’t care; I could go ahead and think she was weird. It was fine with her.

  “No,” I said. “It’s just…I don’t know. I’m not used to making friends this way.” I was still sitting on the edge of the bed, back straight. I kept adjusting, trying to find the most natural way to hold the cigarette. It was hard to find something that worked for more than a few seconds.

  “You don’t have any friends,” Francie said. She didn’t say it in a mean way, just offhand, like a boring fact, like there are fifty states in the Union. She had been paying more attention in Ms. Tinker’s class than I realized. “Don’t worry. Neither do I. It’s because I’m choosy. I don’t just pick up stray girls at the mall all the time, right? Like just walk up and talk to people minding their own business? But there’s something about you. I can usually tell.”

  “Something like what?”

  “You’re different. You’ve got, like, that sneaky thing about you.”

  “A sneaky thing?” No one had ever described me that way before. I was actually kind of flattered.

  “Yeah, just sneaky,” she told me. “You look like you could get away with some serious shit. For one thing, you’re tiny. Like, how tall are you?”

  “Five feet,” I said. I didn’t see where she was going.

  “Exactly,” she said. “The type of person that people overlook. You’d be out the door before anyone noticed you. I bet you have a dark past, right?”

  I shrugged. Francie shifted positions; now she was lying on her belly, chin propped up on her closed fists.

  She pushed further: “Lots of secrets? Just admit it; I don’t care. Dark secrets—yes or no?”

  I couldn’t decide whether or not to lie. I couldn’t quite decide on the truth, for that matter. This whole afternoon had felt like a test. “Maybe,” I finally said.

  “Maybe means yes,” Francie said. “I knew it.”

  I stubbed out the cigarette, which was giving me a gaping feeling in the pit of my stomach. “I guess I’ll try on the dress,” I said.

  Outside the window it was dark. But Francie had scarves thrown over all the lampshades, and the room was warm and pinkish and filling quickly with the smoke that spiraled out from between her fingers. New Order was still pushing through the speakers, thump-thump-buzz and every now and then a giant thrum that shook me in the gut. Without thinking, I pulled my sweatshirt over my head, and then the dress over my jeans. I shucked off the pants and let them fall around my ankles before stepping back into my shoes and tying the halter around my neck, standing there, in a new, stolen dress, in front of a girl I’d never spoken to before today.

  The dress itched a little. I suddenly felt awkward. For one thing, it looked really stupid with sneakers. But more than that, I guess it was because of what I wanted: I wanted to be beautiful. I wanted to be like Francie, and I knew that I never, ever could. Standing there, in front of someone so different from me, in that ridiculous dress, I was revealing all of my stupidest ambitions.

  But Francie was looking up at me from the bed with a dazzled smile.

  “You should see yourself,” she said. “I mean, you should really see yourself. You look like a different person. You look amazing.”

  And then I did see myself, like from far away, like from an airplane at night, and she was right. Somewhere in the glittering grid of the suburbs, I was there, in Francie’s bedroom, and I was glowing through it all. The brightest light. I was beautiful. Anyone could have seen it.

  Chapter Three

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

  Francie was asking. We were sitting on the J-12 bus, in the back row, on our way to the mall. “I mean, have you given it any more thought?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I told her. I looked down at my lap. I flexed my fingers, examining my raggedy nails. Francie’s nails were an inch long, bright red, with little foil rainbows glued on. I needed her to do mine next.

  “We’ve been over this,” she said. I could hear her fighting to keep the exasperation out of her voice.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I’m still not sure.” I closed my eyes. “Can’t I just go along with you?”

  I concentrated hard on the green blobs floating on the backs of my eyelids. I was trying to memorize the bus route, just from the lurches and bounces, the stops and starts. Francie and I had taken the J-12 together exactly four times now, but somewhere between Monday and Thursday this route had become a familiar bass line in my rib cage. Taking
slow, steady breaths, I covered my face, visualizing the landmarks outside as we passed each one. Here was the high school, the Burger King, the 7-Eleven where two girls had killed themselves. We were on the edge of the suburbs, on the seedy stretch of outlying highway where the sky was always the exact same shade of gray and fast-food restaurants were clustered drive-thru to drive-thru. We were almost at the mall.

  “Listen, I’m not going to force you or anything,” Francie said. “All I’m saying is there’s nothing wrong with it, you know? It’s just shoplifting. It’s not like abortion.” She laughed wickedly.

  I opened my eyes, startled. I had practically forgotten she was there. “It’s not that I think there’s anything wrong with it,” I said. “And, like, I would care if there was?”

  Francie gave me a don’t bullshit me kind of look. She put a hand on my knee. “Val. It’s just taking back what belongs to us already. I mean, it’s getting what we deserve. You have to remember that. It’s our right. Because don’t we deserve more than this?” She fluttered her hand in the air to indicate not just the bus we were sitting on, but every crappy thing in the world.

  “Obviously,” I said.

  The thing is, Francie had gotten it all twisted. She thought I had some kind of moral problem with shoplifting. Well, anyone except a lunatic like her can see that it’s technically wrong. But stealing some dumb ten-dollar earrings from Cinderella Club didn’t bother me very much. It wasn’t that.

  “I’m just saying,” Francie said. She was working herself up as she talked, becoming more and more rapturous in her conviction. “It’s not just our right, okay? It’s, like, our duty. It’s, like, if we don’t do it, who else is going to? Someone has to change things. Take a stand and all that. Think Robin Hood.”