How to Be Bad Read online

  Click, click, click. “Only suites. There is the Golden Coin Suite on the twenty-eighth floor for three hundred and fifty dollars, and the Black Pearl Suite on the thirtieth for five hundred dollars.” She emphasizes the word dollars in case I’m confusing her currency for pesos or Monopoly money or something. Her lips are sealed in a disbelieving, I-feel-sorry-for-you-because-you-obviously-can’t-afford-a-suite smile.

  “They both have one king-size bed, as well as a separate living room and sofa bed,” she says, overly polite. “Would you be interested in one of those?”

  I no longer care about Vicks or Jesse thinking I’m a princess. In fact, I want to show them both. Show them what I have and they don’t. Show this pirate how wrong she is. Look here, ladies, at what I can do. Charge five hundred dollars to my credit card because I feel like it. I don’t need anyone.

  I give her a big fake smile and press my mother’s AmEx on the desk. “I’ll take the Black Pearl Suite, please.”

  19

  JESSE

  I BOUNCE ON the huge bed—it’s king-size! I wish I had a king-size bed! I wish our trailer could fit a king-size bed!—and watch the rain pummel the window. From up here on the thirtieth floor, with nothing but swirling gray as far as the eye can see, it’s like we’re smack in the deepest part of the ocean. Only we are safe and dry in the Black Pearl. I love the Black Pearl. I would like to live in the Black Pearl for the rest of my life.

  I use my arms to score more air as I jump. The mattress is incredible. It feels so good to move.

  “‘Who did, who did, who did, who did, who did swallow Jo Jo Jo Jo,’” I belt out.

  Mel watches. I can see her in the living room, slumped in a red velvet chair. Oh, yeah, this place even has its own living room, velvet chairs, a velvet couch, another TV, and a glass coffee table. The coffee table is etched with a fleet of ships.

  “Shut up,” Vicks calls from the bathroom. But I don’t have to listen to her, ’cause she’s being punished. When Mel marched out of the lobby and over to the Opel, she told me we had a room and to pop the trunk, grab our stuff, and come on. Me, as in no acknowledgment whatsoever of La Cheater.

  Vicks tossed the keys to the valet (who looked at the dripping Opel as if it were, well, the dripping, soggy, malfunctioning heap it is) and followed us with her army green duffel bag. She acted the teeniest bit cowed, but jutted her chin out like, What are you going to do about it?

  “I didn’t say—,” Mel began. Then bit her lip.

  “You want me to stay in the car? Sleep in the car like a homeless person?” Vicks said. “Because I will, no problem.”

  The valet looked hopeful, like maybe Vicks would drive that heap away and he wouldn’t have to deal with it.

  “But then you won’t hear my explanation,” Vicks said.

  “So?” I said.

  “Fine, you can come,” Mel said. “But don’t talk to me.”

  I personally thought Vicks was being overdramatic. It was barely noon. She was going to sleep in the car like a homeless person at noon?

  “Mel…,” Vicks had said, following her toward the hotel doors.

  “No,” Mel replied, surprisingly fierce. “Not. One. Word.”

  So the three of us filed silently through the lobby, up the elevator, and into this suite, which let me tell you is friggin’ sweet. Even the bathroom is amazing, with a Jacuzzi bath, a separate glass shower stall, two sinks, a closet bigger than my trailer, plus heated towel racks decorated with doubloons. Yes, doubloons.

  Vicks is camped out in there now, probably hogging all the heated towels.

  “‘Who did, who did—’” I sing.

  “Could you stop singing that stupid song?” she calls.

  “Not one word, remember?” I say. I’m going to sing all I want, as loud as I want. “‘Who did, who did, who did swallow Jo Jo Jo Jo!’”

  Vicks stomps out of the bathroom. Or skulks, more like. Something between a stomp and a skulk. She doesn’t make eye contact with either of us.

  “I’m going for a smoke,” she mutters as she strides past me and then through the living room.

  “They’re your lungs!” I say.

  The door leading to the hallway shushes shut, ending with a solid click. I am so glad to have that girl out of my hair. She was giving me a headache—I just now realized it, ’cause now it’s gone. It’s gone ’cause she’s gone. And here I am, me and Mel and no mean Vicks, in our Black Pearl suite with a big honking treasure map hung on the wall. It’s even signed by Lord Matteo Crowley, whoever he is.

  This place is so not the Sunny View Motel, where I stayed with Mama once when we drove to Gulfport, and where the doors were made of particle board. There were roaches in the bathroom, and the whole place smelled of pee. The mustard-colored comforter was stained. I pushed it off the bed with my feet and used only the scratchy blanket.

  This place has four-hundred-thread-count cotton linens—a creamy card up near the pillows says so—and mahogany furniture that gleams. In the sitting room there’s a wide-screen TV on a pull-out shelf inside an armoire thingie, so that you can be classy and have no TV (when the armoire is closed), or be life-of-the-party and On-Demand-here-I-come when the doors of the armoire are thrown open. I myself would love some On Demand action, but I figure I’ll let Mel make that call, since she’s the one footing the bill.

  For real, I could live here forever. Even the air smells good, like ocean spray. I drop onto my fanny and flop backward on the bed. Ahhhh.

  “So…,” Mel says, coming into the bedroom.

  “Yeah?”

  “Who did swallow Jo Jo?”

  I laugh. “Not Jo Jo. Jonah.” I roll onto my side and prop my head on my hand. “It’s from Veggie Tales.”

  “Veggie Tales?” Mel repeats.

  “Larry the cucumber?” I prompt. “Archibald the asparagus?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, come on. Bob the tomato? You gotta know Bob the tomato.”

  Mel blinks, and I take pity on her.

  “It’s a cartoon, only the characters are all veggies,” I explain. “That particular song is from their very first full-length feature film, which is about Jonah and the whale.”

  I hesitate, because maybe they don’t have Jonah and the whale in Canada. Then again…she’s Jewish, and Jewish people would have Jonah, wouldn’t they? I realize how little I know about this whole other religion that Jesus Himself came from.

  “You do know Jonah and the whale, right?” I ask.

  “Um, yeah.” She says it like she’s not sure why I’m asking, like I’m quizzing her on what color the sky is or something. “Jonah’s the guy who got swallowed.”

  “Yes!” I say with too much enthusiasm. “Good!”

  She regards me curiously. I blush.

  “In the film they call him Jo Jo, but that’s who he is,” I say. “Jonah. He’s played by Archibald.”

  “The asparagus.”

  “Bingo!”

  Mel isn’t appropriately appreciative. If anything, she seems a little freaked out, in that way of being stuck with a batty bag lady spouting off about UFOs. Or in this case, produce.

  “No, it’s a really funny movie,” I say. “Veggie Tales in general is really funny—and I’m not just saying that ’cause I’m a Christian.”

  Mel’s still giving me the bag-lady stare, and I’m kind of wishing I hadn’t started this.

  “What I mean is, even normal people like the Veggies. Not just me.” I laugh. “Not that I’m not normal.”

  “Oh,” Mel says. She sighs. Then she sighs again.

  Okay, enough sighing: It’s time to snap into action. I’m up and off the bed with this crazy energy I’ve been possessed by, and I rummage through my purse, which is on the floor. I pull out eyeliner, powder, mascara, blush. Body glitter. Lip gloss. A three-pack of eye shadow: green, pale green, and neutral beige.

  “I know what you need: makeover,” I announce. I straighten up and pat the edge of the b
ed.

  She looks dubious, but comes over and sits beside me.

  “Close your eyes.”

  She does what she is told, and it strikes me that either she always does what she’s told, or she’s so depressed about the whole Vicks-Marco thing that she doesn’t have the energy to protest.

  “I’m sorry Vicks did that,” I say, stroking translucent powder over her skin. “With Marco, I mean. Especially after y’all…you know.”

  “No, what?”

  I fidget. I don’t want to go there again, to the topic of sinning with boys. “In Robbie’s bedroom? At the party?”

  Her eyebrows come together, and I see there’s a little plucking to be done there. Only I don’t think I brought my tweezers.

  “Jesse, nothing happened between me and Marco,” she says. “He wouldn’t even kiss me.”

  “What? Y’all didn’t even kiss? But…I mean…”

  “He thought I was revolting.”

  “Oh, nuh-uh,” I say. “I saw the way he looked at you—there’s no way he thought you were revolting.”

  “Then why’d he pick Vicks instead of me?” she asks with such a miserable expression that I have to put down my powder brush altogether. “What’s wrong with me?”

  I hug her and say, “Nothing! It makes no sense. But just…don’t even waste your time thinking on it, ’kay? Vicks shouldn’t have let him. Vicks messed up big-time.”

  “She was drunk,” Mel says.

  “Doesn’t matter.” I squeeze her skinny shoulders, then release her and uncap the blue eyeliner. I use feathery strokes to draw a line above her lashes.

  “People aren’t themselves when they’re drunk,” Mel says. “Maybe…I don’t know. She was probably missing Brady.”

  “So she hooked up with Marco to ease her pain?”

  “It’s not like I owned him,” Mel says. “It’s not like we were going out. I can’t be mad at Vicks for doing the exact same thing I wanted to do.”

  “Yes, you can,” I say.

  “I just feel so dumb. When he called? I got so excited. I was like, ‘Omigod!’ Because I thought he’d called for me. I thought he wanted to talk to me.”

  “But he did want to talk to you,” I say. I realize this twist has escaped me, what with all that’s been going on. “He thought I was Vicks…but he asked to speak to you.”

  “He did?”

  “‘Can I talk to Mel?’ Those were his exact words. And I would have let him, too, if the whole whoring-around business hadn’t come out.”

  Mel lifts her eyes to mine. They’re bluer than ever, thanks to the eyeliner. Then she looks down. “That’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not,” I say. I really want to stay bouncy and flying, but dang it, it’s starting to slip away. “Not everything’s ‘okay,’ Mel. People cheat, people lie, people die. And sometimes people treat their friends like crap. But that doesn’t mean you sit back and take it.”

  She shifts her posture in a way that makes my gut throb ’cause I haven’t exactly been treating my friends so well myself. But I’m not the one on trial here. I’m not on trial, and I’m not calling Mama, and I’m not going back to the old buzz-kill Jesse now that I’m dry and warm and safe in the belly of the whale. Heck no. Nothing can touch me in the belly of the whale.

  “Time to turn that frown upside down,” I say to Mel. “Look up, please.”

  She does, and I line her lower lids. I apply pale green shadow at the inner corners and the bright green farther out and in the creases. Not everybody can pull off green eye shadow. Mel can. I stroke on mascara with a big, fat brush, and her eyes look amazing.

  “Jesse—” she says.

  “Tch,” I say. “Hold your mouth still.” I use my pinky to smooth on a dab of strawberry “Lip Burst” and it’s unsettling, touching her in such an intimate way. It’s not like, Oh, Mel, I want to kiss you. It’s just…oh, I don’t know. She’s so different from me.

  “There,” I say, after brushing just a smidge of baby pink blush onto the apples of her cheeks. “Go look.”

  Any normal girl would dash to the bathroom mirror, which is what I want her to do. I want her to see my handiwork and be delighted. Instead, Mel draws her legs to her chest and wraps her arms around her shins. She rests her cheek against one knee and gazes out the window.

  “Is it ever going to stop?” she asks.

  “The rain? Yeah, of course.”

  She doesn’t look convinced, so I hop off the bed, grab the remote, and flick on the TV to the Weather Channel. We watch as the man points at maps and talks about miles per hour, and then I click it off.

  “See? We’re going to get dumped on, but we’ll be okay.”

  She sighs.

  “Did it never rain like this in Canada?” I ask. What a concept—no rain. I could so totally get behind that. Except then I’d probably miss it.

  “It rains,” Mel says. She rests her cheek on her other knee, so that now she’s facing me. I mimic her position without thinking about it. We’re two monkeys on the bed, legs pulled up, faces inches apart. The rain drums against the glass. Lightning flashes, followed by the crack of thunder.

  “Have you ever been in a real hurricane?” she asks.

  “Sure,” I say. “Live in Florida long enough, and you will too.”

  She grimaces, like great. “What was it like?”

  Okay, I don’t really want to go there…but I also don’t want to shut her down.

  “In the worst one, our trailer flooded,” I tell her. “Not the trailer we have now, but before.” I blow out air in a pffff. “Yet another piece of crap, so no big loss.”

  “Were you inside? When it flooded?”

  I shake my head. “There’d been warnings all day, so Mama had MeeMaw pick me up from school and take me to her place.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Nine,” I say. Fifth grade. The year Sissy Roberts said I had ugly toenails. The year Mama broke up with Earl, who stank, and started going out with Darren, who had five zillion guns. R.D. with his truck stop wasn’t even a fleck in her eye.

  “Were you scared?” Mel wants to know.

  “Nah,” I say. “I mean, yeah, but mainly for Mama, because she got stuck in PetSmart. They did that lockdown horn. Have you heard it? Which means nobody’s allowed to leave till they sound the all-clear. Anyway, Mama couldn’t call ’cause the electricity was out, so MeeMaw and me couldn’t help being worried, even though we knew she was most likely fine.”

  “And was she?” Mel says.

  “Yeah. She called when the phone lines got patched up, wanting to know…” Oh Lord, here it comes.

  Mel waits.

  My throat tightens, which is dumb. This is old news—so why do I still have to get choked up?

  “We had a dog,” I tell her. “A cocker spaniel with ‘abandonment issues,’ that’s what Mama said. The owners moved to another state, so she was ours, clean and clear.”

  “Oh, no,” Mel says.

  “She was in her crate, ’cause she chewed up stuff something fierce when we weren’t there.”

  “Oh, Jesse.”

  “So…yeah.” I remember the water marks on our wallpaper, when me and Mama went to clean everything up. The marks were above the oven, above the fold-out couch where I slept. All that junk. Wet magazines and cereal boxes. Thick, sodden clumps of toilet paper.

  Mel puts her hand on mine. “Did she…?”

  I’ve seen it in my mind too often: her claws scrabbling, her nose seeking the uppermost corner of the crate. Scared and alone. The water rising.

  I drag my hand over my face, ’cause there’s nothing to be done about it now. “It’s fine,” I say. “It’s okay.”

  “No,” she says, shaking her head. “Not everything’s ‘okay,’ Jesse.”

  She’s throwing my own words back at me. This itsy-bitsy girl in designer flip-flops, who’s scared to death of a stuffed alligator and who doesn’t know a hurricane from a doughnut—she’s throwing my own words back at me. She’s got
to feel as awkward as heck, but she lets that awkwardness exist and doesn’t try to act like, Oh, let’s just pretend that awful thing never happened.

  “What was her name?” she asks.

  “Sunny,” I say.

  She winces.

  “I know,” I say.

  “That is so sad!” she cries. “Everything about it is so sad!”

  I nod.

  “Does Vicks know?”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. I was just wondering.”

  I think about it, and I realize that, no, I’ve never told Vicks about Sunny. I guess it’s always been easier to tell her the easy, fun stuff than the hard stuff. Is that my fault, or Vicks’s?

  There’s a zzzzt and a click, and the hotel door handle twists open. Speak of the devil.

  Vicks walks in, takes one look at Mel’s made-up face, and says, “Dude, what happened to you?”

  I get up quick from the bed, ’cause I am not letting Vicks see this almost-teary me.

  “I’m hungry,” I say. “You hungry, Mel? I think I’ll go get us some snacks.”

  “Oh,” Mel says. She looks anxious at the prospect of being alone with Vicks. “Okay. Or we could just order room service.”

  “Get some salt and vinegar chips,” Vicks instructs. “And some cherry Coke.”

  I say neither yes nor no. I slip past her and out the door.

  “Well, um…be sure to charge it to the room!” Mel calls.

  In the hall, which is spacious and pale gold and has pirate flags all over, I take a moment to get a grip. My face is hot. I try to blame it on Vicks, but I can’t make it stick. Not as well as before.

  Vicks’s phone is still in my pocket from when Marco called. It’s a hard, unnatural bulge, and I wonder if I’d get used to it if I ever get a cell phone of my own. I also wonder what Marco actually wanted to say. To Mel.

  The Veggie Tales movie about Jonah drifts back to me. I saw it one Sunday when I was volunteering in the church nursery, and I wasn’t lying when I said how good it is. And clever, like when Jonah tells the sinners from Nineva, who are played by French peas, to stop slapping one another with fish.