The Blonde of the Joke Read online

  “It is you!” she exclaimed. “I can’t believe it! Last time I saw you you were, what, ten years old?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “Or younger?”

  Liz squealed and wrapped her arms around me. “It’s so awesome to see you! You’re all grown-up and everything. You look amazing. Your haircut’s awesome!” She pulled away and stood back, regarding me. “I just want to look at you,” she said. “Oh my God!” And she ran her fingers across my scalp, mussing what hair I still had.

  Francie appeared from wherever she had been. Her earrings were glinting in a way that told me she was saddled down with plenty of loot. She looked from me to Liz and back again. “Hey,” she said.

  “Francie, this is Liz,” I said. “Liz, this is Francie.”

  Francie looked confused. “Hey,” she said. “So, like, how do you guys know each other? Are you in high school?”

  Liz blushed. “I used to date Val’s big brother before he turned into a giant homo,” Liz informed Francie, who raised an eyebrow. Liz didn’t notice, just turned back to me. “Even though, now that I think about it, that was the least of the problem. We’re supposedly best friends, but I haven’t seen him in, like, at least a year and a half. I mean, we talk on the phone sometimes, but you know how he can be.” She cocked her head and put her thumb to her ear, switching into an impersonation of my brother. “‘Uh-huh. Yep. Sure. Next week. Yep.’” Liz rolled her eyes. “Like, give me something. Just a fucking word. It’s like he would prefer for no one to care about him. Well, sorry, but I’m your fucking best friend, Jesse.”

  “You sound like my mom,” I said. “Except that my mom doesn’t actually say any of that.”

  “Ha. Well, maybe that’s why he doesn’t like talking to me. Whatever. He’s doing better these days, right?”

  “It’s not like I would know. Last I heard, he was living in Harlem with some sixty-year-old dude.”

  “Oh, that was ages ago, thank God,” Liz said. “Ambrose. That guy was a real creep. Anyway, I do think he’s doing better. Him coming home is, like, a good sign, I’m pretty sure. But really, you can’t try to speculate; you’ll be wrong every time. We won’t know for sure until he’s back for Christmas, I guess.”

  I did a double take. “He’s coming home for Christmas?”

  “Uh, duh!” Liz said. “Where have you been?” Then she jerked her head and looked around the overrun store, distracted. Clothes were strewn on the floor and jumbled in huge messy piles on top of the tables. There didn’t seem to be a single folded garment in the entire place. “God, this place is a dump,” she said. “Back to work, I guess.”

  “You work here?” Francie asked.

  Liz rolled her eyes. “I’m the assistant manager. Maybe you should just kill me now.” Then she walked off to fold some clothes and called over her shoulder to me. “I’m sure I’ll see you when he’s back in town. I missed you!”

  “We need to get out of here, like, now,” Francie muttered. She shot a suspicious look at Liz Jordan’s back and took my hand, marching me out of the store, back into the mall, where we were swallowed up by the crowd. We stood alone in the center of the atrium while people streamed around us.

  “What the fuck!” Francie said. “You didn’t tell me you have a brother! Do you seriously have a brother?”

  “He’s not like a regular brother,” I said.

  “Clearly.” Francie snorted. “I mean, really, for fuck’s sake! How do you have a brother and not even mention it? Anything else you’re not telling me?”

  “He’s dying,” I said. “Like, any day now.”

  Francie stared at me. “Seriously?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s so shitty,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s really shitty.”

  “Well,” Francie decided, “if he’s coming home for Christmas, we need to get him presents.” Francie was always so practical like that.

  My older brother was dying. No one had ever told me that he was dying; I’d been forced to figure it out on my own. I didn’t know exactly what his problem was except that it didn’t seem like a normal disease or anything like that. It seemed like something almost mystical. A problem that only the Holy Grail might be able to solve. Not that I believed in things like that.

  I mean, I only believed in them a little. I wasn’t sure exactly what I believed in anymore. But I believed in Francie. I believed in my motorcycle jacket. And I believed that when it comes to things like the Holy Grail, people are usually willing to bend their beliefs.

  “What would he want?” Francie wondered aloud. She worried the middle of her forehead with an index finger. “Is he into video games?” she asked hopefully.

  “Not that I know of,” I said.

  “Hmm,” Francie said. She knitted her brows together, just slightly disgruntled. “I thought that video games were what brothers liked. Well, we’ll think of something.”

  Francie would think of something. Francie always had the answers. I had questions. The question I wanted to ask but didn’t was this one: How do you rebuild a boy? I figured that if anyone could tell me, it was Francie.

  We went to J.Crew and stole Jesse a pair of plaid footy pajamas—“So cute,” according to Francie—and then moved on to Hollister, for a long-sleeve T that said HOLLISTER on it, and finally back to Crate & Barrel, where I took a Marimekko platter with a kind of paisley print, still for him.

  Francie approved. “Everyone loves platters,” she pronounced. “They always come in handy. You have to let me sign the card.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “A present that is stolen means more. It shows you’re really willing to take a risk for someone else.”

  “I thought people liked it when you spent money on them,” I said.

  “Yeah, but that’s different. When you steal something for someone, you put yourself on the line. And it’s like, by risking your own safety, you’re tapping into this, like, infinite life force of the universe, taking just a little piece and giving it to someone else.”

  “That makes no sense at all,” I said.

  “It’s just what I believe,” Francie told me.

  At the dinner table that night, my mom sat to my left and my asshole stepfather, Jack, to my right, all of us crunching away at our salads and not saying anything. We never had a lot to say. It wasn’t that my mom and I didn’t like each other. It was just that she had other things on her mind. She was distracted by something, and had been for several years. But she was also really into totally pointless things like Family Dinner, no matter how excruciating it was for everyone.

  “You didn’t tell me Jesse was coming home for Christmas,” I said after a while.

  My mom looked up. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “Jesse. Christmas,” I said. “How come you didn’t tell me?”

  “Who said your brother’s coming home for Christmas?” she asked. Jack said nothing, but I registered a look of disturbance on his face. He had a piece of half-chewed lettuce dangling from the corner of his mouth. Gross.

  “I saw that girl Liz at the mall. She told me. Does anyone know anything around here?” I snapped my fingers around my face, like, Hellooo.

  “Don’t talk to your mother like that,” Jack said. I gave him the smarmiest smile I could muster.

  “Well, it’s all news to me,” my mom said. She seemed hesitant to take me seriously.

  I stood up and left the table without saying anything, and went outside to the front yard where I sat on the curb, even though it was December and getting really cold. I folded my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around my legs. I wanted a cigarette, but I didn’t have any. Instead, I puffed my chest and blew, and watched my breath expel in round puffs of steam. It was almost like smoking if you didn’t think too hard about it.

  My family was so fucked up. When Jesse had been around it was always some imagined disaster or another, but now it was just this overwhelming, impenetrable nothing. Sometimes it seemed like
you could go days in my house without hearing any noise except the buzz of the television from the den and, once in a while, a door easing shut.

  I don’t remember my real dad. He left when I was really little and I guess it was just as well, anyway, because from what I’ve gathered he was a total asshole. My mom married Jack next, and he was a disaster, too. He’s, like, the king of all dicks, but I guess I just learned to ignore it and go about my business. My brother had never picked up on that skill. He had hated Jack with a passion from the moment he’d laid eyes on him and had never let up. I guess it will mess a nine-year-old boy up when his real dad drops off the face of the planet, and then mess him up even more when that sucky dad is replaced by an even more sucky one. I guess it’s just, like, What is the point of any of this? Eventually Jesse decided, like my father, that there wasn’t a point at all, and left. First home, then town.

  Mom hadn’t been the same since he’d gone. She had just given up, I think. I couldn’t remember the last time she had raised her voice about anything. I couldn’t remember the last time she had been interested in anything anyone had to say. She could see that everything was totally fucked, but she couldn’t summon the strength it took to change it.

  I hated her, I realized. I hated her.

  I listened to the buzz of a flickering streetlight directly above my head and felt a recklessness of ambition tingling in my gut. I wanted, more than anything, to be different from my mother, who was the kind of person who saw that there was a thunderstorm and went out without an umbrella anyway, because it seemed futile trying to stay dry so why bother.

  I wanted something different for myself. Suddenly I could see possibility everywhere, and I knew that to ignore it was the height of spinelessness. Francie had taught me that.

  Just earlier that day, I’d thought I wanted to be like Francie, but that wasn’t it. Well, it was and it wasn’t. I did want to be like Francie, but sitting there on the curb outside my house, I knew that it went further than that. I wanted more. There was so much more to want. I wanted everything.

  Chapter Eight

  Jrancie disappeared without explanation the day before winter break. She wasn’t in school, and her cell phone went straight to voice mail when I tried to call her. When I hadn’t heard from her three days later, right before Christmas Eve, I thought about going by the house on Maple to see if there was anyone there, and then decided against it. I didn’t want to be a stalker. With nothing to do, I occupied myself by lying on my bed and listening to music on my headphones, staring at the ceiling and thinking, wondering what I might have done to piss her off. I worried that I hadn’t done anything, and that was the worst possibility of all. What if she had come to her senses, had just suddenly realized what I had suspected since the beginning: that I was not at all what she had expected me to be.

  Wasn’t I, though? I wasn’t who I had been. That much I knew for sure. The girl in the back of the classroom was gone forever—I remembered her like a cousin I’d known as a little kid and had fallen away from as we’d gotten older. But with that girl gone for good, I was uncertain who had replaced her. Because lying there on my bed, with my headphones on, Francie who knew where, I could feel myself scattering, the edges of myself blurring into limitless dark. I could feel myself grasping for my own name. Vendela? Vickie? Valerie?

  I thought I had changed. I had cut my hair, learned to steal, changed everything about myself. Now, with Francie gone, I had to wonder if I’d just been imagining things. Was I just a question mark without her?

  If she had been there with me, she would have taken me by the wrists and shaken me, laughing. Would have told me to stop feeling sorry for myself. Or said, “Please, Val, don’t you think you’re overthinking things?” Or maybe she wouldn’t have needed to say anything.

  Because sometimes, after trips to the mall, Francie and I would go back to her house and not even talk. She’d turn on Prince or Joy Division or the Aztec Camera or whatever band she was obsessed with at the moment, and we’d just lie on her bed. Her chain-smoking with her laptop balanced on her thighs, sending prank messages to strangers on MySpace and laughing to herself, and me looking through Vanity Fair or whatever, maybe reading the horoscopes out loud but otherwise quiet. Stealing a drag off her cigarette from time to time. We didn’t need to say anything. We had a kingdom, even if it was just the two of us, and in the throne room of Francie’s bedroom, we’d been untouchable and ultimate.

  The point wasn’t the talking, and it wasn’t quite the smoking, either, because I wasn’t actually into the smoking part of smoking. I thought it tasted gross, plus it made me lightheaded. Despite what my health teacher insisted, I wasn’t doing it to be cool. I just liked the feeling of being with Francie, sharing something intimate and quiet. Smoking with Francie, me on her swivel chair and her on top of her duvet in nothing but fancy lace underwear and green rubber Wellingtons—which she liked to wear for no reason when the mood struck her—I sometimes stared at the smoke drifting, the light catching it in its intricate, ghostly spiral, and felt bodiless, like maybe we had stepped outside of the normal flow of everything. Like, as long as the cigarette was burning the Earth might continue to rotate while Francie and I stayed casually fixed in one universal location.

  With Francie, in her room, I knew who I was. I knew what I was supposed to be. In Francie’s room I could see my world set out in front of me as a simple, perfect scheme.

  Now she was gone, and I felt myself going.

  But a funny thing happened. At almost the exact moment that Francie vanished, my brother rematerialized—showed up on Christmas Eve, just like Liz said he would. A click at the door, and then he was stepping inside, like no time had passed. Like it was nothing at all. That was just Jesse.

  On Christmas Eve, when Jesse walked through the door, he didn’t have to say a word. He dropped his old keys on the front table, and then my mom was running from the kitchen like a cat who’s heard the crunch of a can opener. Jesse just stood there, with that old who me? look on his face, the furrow of mock apology he’d perfected as a teenager, and my mom threw her arms around him, sniffling, and he looked over and winked at me as if to tell me I was the only person in the world who was in on his conspiracy. Everything felt pretty normal for a second. We hadn’t seen him for close to two years.

  Jesse was handsome. He had always been handsome, and he would always be handsome. Even when he was at his sickest, it had manifested itself—in terms of his appearance—as a fashionable wasting. Cheekbones, cheekbones, cheekbones. Now, in a ratty, pilled cashmere sweater and a pair of tattered jeans, he looked like a teen idol who had hit hard times. It was an improvement over the last time I’d seen him, but still. His face was drawn, his hair was patchy, and his eyes had sunk deep into his face. His beard was scraggly and uneven.

  It was always hard to tell how serious things really were with him. He had been sick for four years, but I sometimes wondered if it had been longer than that. If he had been sick for forever. There was something that was so mysterious about the whole thing—it was more like a curse than an illness. Like he’d been born under a dark and reckless star.

  When my mom finally let him go, Jesse turned to me and gave me an awkward kiss with icy lips. He had to really hunch to reach my cheek, and his bag swung around and hit me in the side.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Is this my same little sister?” he asked. I shrugged like I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I was happy that he had noticed the change.

  I didn’t talk to Jesse much that day. My mom wouldn’t let him out of her sight, and I couldn’t deal with listening to her grill him for information that we all knew he’d never give up. Jack knew that he wasn’t really welcome where Jesse was concerned, so he was keeping to himself, too, holed up in the basement in front of the television.

  I spent hours wrapping and rewrapping my Christmas presents, making sure the creases in the paper were all scored perfectly, that all patterns matched up exactly where the en
ds met. Everything tight and straight and absolutely flawless. Beautiful.

  When I was finally finished, I walked to 7-Eleven and bought a pack of Marlboro Lights, then headed down to the creek by myself, where I sat shivering and smoking until it was almost dark. I wondered where Francie was. I wondered where my brother had been for the last couple of years. New York, okay, but beyond that he had never really bothered to tell. It was no surprise. That’s how he had always been.

  Jesse had always been so much older than me. He was nine years old when I was born. I knew him first as a teenager, when he had seemed constantly engaged in some larger battle that I couldn’t know. He was always ready to attack: ears pricked, ropy muscles coiled and twitching.

  Practically the only thing I remembered about my brother living at home were his fights with my stepfather, over who-knows-what and probably nothing, both of them screaming and throwing things across the room at each other, my mother sitting on the kitchen floor looking hopeless, running her fingers anxiously through her hair, and then Jesse just walking out the door. He always showed back up on the threshold a few days later looking sheepish and none the worse for wear, backpack drooping from his shoulder and chin cocked at a dopey angle that suggested contrition. But he never actually said he was sorry, and he never told anyone where it was he had been. Probably he wasn’t sorry, and maybe there’s part of the story that no one told me. I was really just a kid back then.

  He’d been mean. He’d gone years barely acknowledging me at all, except to grab the remote control while I was trying to watch television. One time, when I was six or seven years old, he threw that same remote at my head and missed, grazing my scalp and shattering a window. He was a dick. His nickname for me was the Little Shit.

  But then sometimes, at the beach on rare family vacations, he would carry me on his back into the ocean, out past where I could stand, and I’d float while he shaped my hair into saltwater sculptures, singing under his breath, “Yellow is the color of my true love’s hair…” even though my hair wasn’t yellow. That was why I loved him.