The Blonde of the Joke Page 8

  Francie had just unfolded the instructions for the iPod when there was a clackety-clack in the distance. We both looked up, startled. There was never, ever anyone else in the Q section of the parking lot. But that day, suddenly, there was a blur flying around the corner, and a crash, and then, truly out of nowhere, this guy was lying on the ground fifteen yards away in a tangled heap. His skateboard kept rolling without him and settled curiously at my feet like a puppy.

  “Things are always getting more interesting,” Francie said. The boy was lying there, eyes clenched, muscles cramped up in pain.

  I looked at Francie. She raised her eyebrows. I reached down to pick up the skateboard, but it was too late. Francie had already tucked it under her arm and was standing up.

  “Shall we check it out?” she asked. It was rhetorical; here was a boy, all wounded and sexy and everything, lying on the ground and waiting for us to come along and nurse him back to health. Obviously the answer was yes. And then she was marching over to him.

  I half didn’t want to follow her. The skateboard had landed at my feet, not hers. She should have been the one following me. But everything was always meant for Francie; I knew that, too. The idea that something could have been mine by rights would never have occurred to her.

  So I followed her anyway.

  We stood over the guy and looked at him curiously. He was our age, probably, and kinda hot, I think. I mean, it looked like he was maybe hot. It was actually hard to tell because his face was all screwed up in pain. He was hugging his knee to his chest and writhing.

  “Are you okay?” asked Francie. “I brought your skateboard.” She dropped it at his side, and it hung there, tentative. Without meaning to, I rolled my eyes.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Give me a second. Ouch.” It looked like maybe he was crying, or about to start.

  It occurred to me that we should leave and come back—give him some privacy—but Francie waited, patient and expectant, while he wheezed, and I stood with her, feeling dumb. Finally he sat up and propped himself on his hands. “Hey,” he said. “Sorry. I thought my leg was broken for a second there. But I’m fine.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  “I’m Francie. This is Valentina,” Francie said. Sometimes she really had no sense of shame.

  “I’m Max,” Max said. He stood up, and I realized that I had been right: he was totally hot, with scruffy sandy hair and blue eyes, his tight, vintagey T-shirt straining at his biceps. It was unseasonably warm out, but not really warm enough for a T-shirt, and I noticed the blond hairs on the backs of his arms standing on end.

  “Nice moves you got there,” Francie said. Max looked her up and down, took in the whole picture. Francie had her hair piled into an enormous, teased beehive that day, and the effect was quite something.

  “Uh,” Max said, “nice to meet you.” Then he picked up his board and skated the hell out of there before Francie could open her mouth again.

  “That was a success,” I said. I could still hear the rattling of Max’s skateboard in the distance, getting fainter.

  “Just wait,” Francie said. “If you love something, set it free. He’ll be back.”

  We went to visit Liz at the Gap. “Welcome to the Gap,” Liz said when we walked in. “My name’s Liz. What can I help you find today?” She smiled with exaggerated condescension. Without taking her eyes off of us, she knocked a pile of sweaters onto the floor and walked away.

  “She’ll be getting that promotion to general manager any day now,” Francie muttered. She pulled a tube of lip gloss out of her bag and glopped an oily blob onto her mouth.

  It was pretty obvious that Liz was bored out of her mind. She was perched on a stepladder now, fiddling with her two-way headset. “Breaker, breaker to Dixie Cup!” she was saying. “Dixie Cup, you got a smokey in a brown wrapper knocking at your back door, you copy?”

  You could see the clerks rolling their eyes at one another from opposite ends of the store.

  “You’re going to get fired if you don’t shape up,” Francie informed her. “I mean, this isn’t exactly professional behavior.”

  “These clowns get what they pay for,” Liz said. “I barely make more than an associate!”

  “Don’t they get mad at you, though?” I asked.

  “I’m a totally different person when the general manager’s around,” she said. “So professional. How’s your brother?”

  “I don’t know. Good, I guess,” I told her. “I haven’t seen too much of him since Christmas. He, like, disappeared again. I’m glad he’s better, though.”

  “Are you sure he’s better?”

  “What’s even wrong with him?” Francie demanded. “People keep talking about how sick he is, but he seemed fine to me! Will someone please fill me in?”

  “He’s dying,” I said. “Things were bad, but now I guess he’s better.”

  “He’s not better,” said Liz. “I mean, I’ve been burned by thinking that way in the past. You think he’s all fine again and then wham. I keep calling him, but does he call me back?”

  Liz left the answer unsaid, but Francie’s mind was elsewhere anyway. “Have you ever seen him naked?” she asked me.

  “Ugh!” I gagged.

  “What?” Francie said. “He’s hot as hell! What’s so wrong about that?”

  “He’s my brother!” I said.

  “Exactly,” said Francie. “So you must have seen him coming out of the shower. Or something. Right?”

  “Wrong!” Francie could be truly disgusting sometimes.

  “Well, I’ve seen him naked,” Liz said. “Even if it was a long time ago. And he is hot.”

  “Ugh!” I said. “Please!”

  “Here,” Liz said. She took a pair of dark, stiff jeans off the denim wall, and without even bothering to check if anyone was looking, opened my bag to drop them in. “Those will fit him,” she said. “Use them as an excuse to visit him, and tell him I say hi.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  We left the store, and the mall whirled around us—like it was thinking hard, considering all possible outcomes. The Gap became Waldenbooks became Pottery Barn became Candy Express became Tuesday Morning. I snapped the rubber bands around my wrist to keep from getting disoriented.

  “See?” Francie said. “Liz knows it, too. She doesn’t know about the Sign, but even she knows that a stolen gift is something special.”

  “Do you think we’ll ever see him again?” I asked Francie.

  “Of course. It’s not like he’s in Timbuktu. I mean, it’s not like he’s even in New York! He’s a couple of stops away on the subway. You guys are so weird about him. Come on—you could go there right now, if that was what you wanted.”

  “I wasn’t talking about my brother,” I said. For less than a split second, I had the impression that Francie and I were standing in a ruin: that the mall had crumbled around us, and it was just Francie and me with dirt and ancient, weathered marble tiles under our spike heels. A brittle potted palm stood alone a few feet off, pathetic and withered and yellowed by time. I caught my breath and the mall sprung up again, reconstructed itself in the blink of an eye, brick by brick, into a bright and glittering temple that was even better than it had been to start with.

  “Oh,” Francie said. “I should have known. You were talking about him.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Francie said. “I told you, he’ll be back.”

  Her dangly silver fishtail earrings were throwing flash everywhere, and it was obvious what she was thinking. She was thinking she could have anything she wanted. All she had to do was want it and it was hers.

  Before heading home, Francie and I stepped onto the elevator together—the same elevator that was in my dream. In the glass chamber, our reflections were gilded in gold, and they stared back at us, transfixed, as the food court receded and the uppermost tier of the mall approached. That day, instead of turning to me, Francie spoke to my reflection, and said, “You’re my
best friend. You know that, right?”

  “Of course,” my reflection said.

  “I have your back,” she said. “Do you have mine?”

  “I will always have your back,” I told Francie. And I meant it. Of course I meant it.

  Francie could do this. She could be bossy, selfish, thoughtless, bug the crap out of me. And then, just like that, she would remind me of not just everything that she had given me, but everything she would always give. Her irrational, unquenchable generosity. A lock of hair had worked its way out of her beehive and was curling around her jaw.

  Francie grabbed my hand. It was the real Francie now, no reflection, and my real actual hand. She squeezed it, hard. It was then, feeling her inch-long, foil-plated nails digging into my knuckles, that I knew that Francie was not exaggerating at all. Maybe Francie never exaggerated. She did have my back. She would not let anything hurt me. She had said it over and over again; it was important to her in a way that I could never totally understand. The way it meant something to her, I knew I could never, ever match.

  Chapter Eleven

  The fountain was holding the whole thing together.

  From a perch on the edge of it, in the middle of the mall’s central hub, you could skim your fingers along the surface of the water and look around and see every aspect. The vantage allowed for an unsettling feeling of omniscience, the way a simple swivel in any direction presented another tableau. The Trench Coat Mafia loitering outside Hot Topic, pretending to be dangerous; the Caribbean nannies wandering out of the Gap and yapping at each other over giant strollers. From the fountain, you could just shift your gaze to another cluster and understand not only who they were but know instinctively exactly what they were saying to each other.

  Even the few parts of Montgomery Shoppingtowne that you couldn’t actually see: sitting at the fountain, it was like you had this awareness. Like you were somehow plugged into the nervous system. The water bubbling, the lights shining up from the bottom. Country club blue. Scrape the tiles with your fingers, sift through pennies. Francie and I could both feel Max heading toward us, I think. We looked at each other. Francie smiled an I told you so and quickly wiped a small trace of Cinnabon icing from the corner of her mouth. She patted down her hair.

  And then he was sitting next to us. Just slid right in, all cool like that. “Hey, ladies,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said. He was looking at Francie.

  “Max!” she said. As if she was surprised. She ran a finger around the edge of her ear, along her cheekbone to her jaw, and then, tilting her chin, down her long neck and across her bare collarbone.

  “You remembered my name,” Max said.

  “Duh,” Francie said. “How could we forget?”

  Max had a nose you could write a poem about. I would write a poem about it myself if I was the kind of person who knew how to do things like write poems. Well, it was a nose like a cat’s. Broad and flat but strong, too; noble. It was a nose that meant something, if only you could figure out what.

  His eyes were small and narrow, and heavy lidded, giving the impression that he’d just woken up or been born. His hair hung barely to his chin, gold-blond on the surface and velvety dark—nearly black—underneath, when you ran your fingers through it. Obviously I had never run my fingers through Max’s hair. But I’m not going to lie and say I hadn’t considered it, more than once, more than twice, since the day we’d first met him in the parking garage.

  “We got you a present,” Francie said to Max. It was news to me. But somehow, there on the edge of the fountain, Francie reached into a gap of air in front of her and plucked out a Swiss Army knife. She held it out to him with a sphinxy gleam in her eyes, a certain mischievousness in her smile. It was a gift; it was a challenge.

  Max took the knife from her with dubious curiosity and rolled it over a couple of times in his fingers. He flipped out the blade with his thumb and brandished it in front of his face, let it catch the light. “What did I do to deserve this?” he asked.

  “I stole it from Brookstone,” Francie said. “I had a feeling we’d see you again, and it seemed like something you would like.”

  I wanted to know where Francie had gotten that knife. I wanted to know if she had really stolen it with Max in mind. I wanted to know why she had not told me about it.

  “Thanks,” Max said. “This is awesome. Let’s kill someone!” He laughed at his own joke and waved the knife around some more before adding, “Just kidding,” although obviously we knew he was kidding.

  “Wanna go to the food court?” she asked, even though she had finished a Cinnabon about five seconds before he had showed up.

  “Sure,” Max said. I realized suddenly that I had only said one word to him, and that that word had been hey. But I didn’t know what else to say. I felt like my presence was pretty much beside the point anyway. We took off for the food court, Francie and Max walking together a few paces ahead of me.

  “Want to hear a joke?” I heard Francie say.

  “Sure,” said Max.

  “So there are these two blondes in the parking lot,” Francie said.

  “Okay…” Max said. There was a note of uncertainty in his voice, like he was trying to see where she was headed. Like he suspected it was nowhere good.

  Francie soldiered on. “So these two bimbos are standing there, trying to unlock the car door with a coat hanger.” She paused for effect, to no effect. “And they’re, like, fiddling with the door, and it’s taking forever, and it’s starting to get, like, totally cloudy, and the one blonde says to the other, ‘Hurry up, it’s about to rain and the top is down!’”

  Crickets. Max tilted his head like he was waiting for her to finish, but if Francie noticed that no one was laughing, she didn’t betray any discomfort. Francie was really the worst at telling jokes, which was ironic, because she was the only person I knew who enjoyed them. She chuckled to herself and tossed her blond, blond hair. I noticed then that she had just redone it. The roots were mostly gone and it was a slightly different shade than before. Still white-blond, but with a new note of gold somewhere underneath it all. Max turned, looked over his shoulder at me, and raised his eyebrows, smiling. A couple of his teeth were slightly discolored from where I could tell he’d once had braces; his left canine tooth was a tiny bit undersized, leaving a gap. A dimple in one cheek. Max’s smile was nearly a snarl, just the right side of vulnerable. All over the mall, you could hear cash registers turning over, ka-ching.

  “Your friend is crazy,” he said to me. “A blonde who tells blonde jokes.”

  “Crazy!” Francie exclaimed. “Me, crazy! That’s a laugh!” She slapped him on the butt, all playful, and skipped ahead a couple of steps. Max looked at me again, shrugged, and this time just mouthed the word. Crazy, he said without making a noise.

  “Smoothie time!” Francie announced. She took Max’s hand and pulled him with her into the food court. It was like the first line of one of Francie’s jokes. “A blonde and a brunette meet the world’s hottest boy in a parking garage.” You could already see how it would all go down.

  Chapter Twelve

  Francie and I were standing on the escalator, heading down, when she grabbed me by the shoulder. “Look!” she hissed, and gestured across the atrium to a gray-haired woman in a long denim skirt, a purple T-shirt, and a purple felt beret. The woman was wandering through the crowd, pausing here and there to browse shop windows.

  “No way,” I said. There was no mistaking who it was: our Physics teacher, Ms. Tinker. Francie squealed and applauded silently to herself, then clapped an open hand to her mouth.

  “Let’s follow her!” she whispered.

  “I can’t believe she wears that beret even in public,” I said. “Does she ever take it off?”

  “I bet it smells like cheese. And I bet you a dollar she’s gonna go to Ann Taylor Loft and not even buy anything.”

  “Sucker’s bet,” I said. “No deal.”

  Francie swung onto the black rubber escalator
railing and vaulted herself across the metal plate onto marble tiles, landing with a triumphant thwack. “Come on,” she said. “We can’t lose her.”

  We were in no danger of losing her. If you want to make sure you never get lost in a crowd, a purple beret is really the way to go. Ms. Tinker had just moved from one store to the next; she was outside Crate&Barrel, contemplating a display of flatware.

  “Look inconspicuous,” Francie said. So we both became our most inconspicuous selves and made our way across the mall to near where our teacher was standing. We lingered behind a ficus, peering through the leaves. Ms. Tinker didn’t notice us. She stepped away from the window and started wandering again. Francie took my hand and we moved with her.

  It was a little sad seeing our teacher outside of school. She was dressed as if for class, in her PHYSICS IS PHUN! T-shirt, her gym whistle dangling familiarly from the lanyard around her neck, the SAVE THE WHALES totebag at her side. But here at the mall, shuffling along, Ms. Tinker was different. She had no power over anything at all. She was pathetic, really.

  “God, I hate her,” Francie said. “She made me and Sandy come in for a so-called conference last semester—those tardies I told you about. It was a complete joke. She kept calling me Fanny.”

  I giggled. “It suits you,” I said.

  “Whatever,” Francie snorted. “Like it matters if I miss the first ten minutes of Physics? All she’s doing is telling us how to label our dividers!”

  “She used to teach Special Ed,” I told her. “She told us that on the first day, before you showed up. That’s why she’s so into dividers.”