How to Be Bad Read online

  “An awesome idea,” I say, thinking about Vicks and Brady and how she’ll jump at the chance to go see him for sure. Brady left early for the University of Miami because of football workouts, though by now he’s probably started classes and everything. He’s a freshman, and he’s playing for the Miami Hurricanes. Pretty cool. Heck, Miami in general sounds pretty cool.

  Niceville, on the other hand, hosts the “world famous” Boggy Bayou Mullet Festival. Now there’s a whomping good time. You can eat fried fish while cheering on your top picks for Baby Miss Mullet, Junior Miss Mullet, and Miss Teen Mullet, which I was in the running for once, but I couldn’t figure out a talent, so too bad for me.

  Vicks flicks me. “So are we going to hear this awesome idea?”

  “Oh. Right. Well…how’s Brady?”

  She looks at me funny, like I’m changing the subject. But I’m not. I’m just warming up to it. “He’s busy,” she says. “Practice starts every morning at six, then they run them again in the afternoon.”

  “It’s not good,” Mel says, all sympathetic, like she’s got the inside scoop. “I can’t believe he’s only sent her one pathetic text message since he left.”

  What? This is news to me, and I don’t like it. I especially don’t like that Mel’s the one reporting it.

  “That true?” I ask Vicks.

  “‘The U rules, wish you were here. Heart ya!’” Vicks says. She looks uncomfortable, like she knows she done wrong by me. When you’re best friends with someone—even when things aren’t quite right—you give her the inside scoop. Not some new hostess girl.

  “He sent it at two A.M.,” Mel goes on. “When he knew Vicks would be asleep.”

  “Whatever,” says Vicks. “I’m not going to be some whiner-baby girlfriend, all freaked out because he doesn’t check in every morning and every night.” Her tone is ballsy—classic Vicks—but her brow furrows as she draws on her cigarette. And her foot, which is pressed against the concrete wall, is tap-tap-tapping away.

  “But…how can he not call you?” I say. “You’ve been going out for almost a year.”

  She sighs. “Tell that to him.”

  I’m floored. Whenever me and Vicks and Brady went out for wings this summer, or when the three of us went to the movies, Brady would hold Vicks’s hand and give her little kisses and not care a whit that I was looking on. “You are just gone over this girl, aren’t you?” I said once. Brady just smiled.

  “No, listen, you tell him,” I say to Vicks. ’Cause this is my great idea: to drive to Miami so Vicks can see Brady. “Let’s go down and see that bum in person. The U is only six hours away.”

  Vicks snorts. “Six? Try nine.”

  “You know he loves you, Vicks. We’ll kick his behind for not treating you like he should!”

  “How would we get there?” Vicks says. “Take the bus? That’s classy. I’d hop off the Greyhound, all grubby and smelly, and be like, ‘Dude, it’s me, your stylin’ girlfriend. Wanna take me with you to Freshman Composition?’”

  “I’ve got my mom’s car,” I tell her. “I’ve got it for the whole weekend.”

  She snorts again. She’s no stranger to the Opel.

  “Don’t be rude,” I say. I’m trying too hard, and it’s making me sweat. “Think about it: you and me and the open road. We can do whatever we want, whenever we want to do it. And I got the radio working again, so we’ll have music.”

  “I need to find a good radio station around here,” Mel puts in, as if we’re all three having a conversation. “All I can find is country, so I pretty much just listen to my iPod. Hey, does your mom’s car have a built-in iPod?”

  I glare at her.

  “No iPod in the Opel,” Vicks says. “I regret to inform.”

  “Is there a CD player?” Mel asks, and I glare harder. Plus my cheeks heat up.

  “No, o innocent one, the Opel is a minimalist outfit,” Vicks informs her. “No power windows, no AC, no cup holders, no CD player, and definitely no built-in iPod.”

  Now I glare at Vicks.

  “And the windshield wipers are kaput,” she adds.

  “They are not kaput!” I protest. “They get a little sticky sometimes, that’s all. Anyhow, who needs wipers? We’re in Florida! The sunshine state!”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “‘The sunshine state,’” Mel says. “I like that.” She blinks and smiles, and it’s like she’s trying to smooth things over or something. Which is so not her place, it’s not even funny.

  She gazes at me with her too-blue eyes and says, “That’s so cool that your mum’s giving you the car for the entire weekend.”

  “Mum?” I say. Who says “mum”? I turn to Vicks. “So…you up for it?”

  Vicks stares into space.

  Mel fidgets. Out of nowhere, she goes, “Um…I am.”

  I’m speechless. Did anyone ask her to go with us to Miami? Did anyone ask her to go sticking her nose where it isn’t needed and sure as heck isn’t wanted? I mean, really. Where does she get off?

  With my body I shut her out for real.

  “C’mon, Vicks. A little bit of fun before school starts? We can swing by—” I almost say Disney World, but I don’t, ’cause I don’t want Mel knowing I’ve never been, or even just guessing. Mel’s traveled to Africa, and I’ve never crossed the state to Disney World? That’s sadder than a hound dog who’s lost her pups.

  “We can swing by that museum place you told me about,” I improvise. “See the giant lizard.”

  Vicks crushes her cigarette and flicks the butt on the ground. “It’s not a lizard. It’s a gator. Old Joe.”

  “Fine, see Old Joe,” I say. “We’ll make a road trip out of it, go to any of those tourist sites we want!” Vicks adores that crap. She’s got a whole book of roadside attractions involving mermaids and albino squirrels and monkeys wearing Beatles wigs.

  Vicks checks her watch. “I’ve got to go back in.”

  “But…what about my idea?”

  She sighs. “Who would I get to take my shifts?”

  “T-Bone. You know he needs the extra cash.”

  “Yeah, and speaking of—how would we fund this adventure? I bet you’ve got, what, all of fifteen dollars?”

  “Thirty!” I reply indignantly.

  “And I’ve got maybe ten dollars, tops, since I blew my entire last paycheck on booze and Lucky Strikes.”

  “You did not.”

  “But I did buy Brady a laundry hamper for his dorm room, the kind that stands up on its own. The rest I socked away in my college fund.” She shrugs. “Sorry, Jesse. We can’t go anywhere on forty dollars.”

  “We can if we want,” I say. There’s a wobbling in my chest. I drive my fingernails into my palms.

  Mel clears her throat. “Um…I’ve got money. I can pay.”

  I turn and gape.

  “Fuel, snacks…whatever.” She gives an awkward hitch of her shoulders. “I could get us a room at a hotel.”

  I throw up my hands, because she is insane. “Why?!”

  “I want to see Old Joe?” When Vicks and I stare, she juts out her chin. “What? I do.”

  This isn’t the way it’s supposed to play out. Mel’s ruining everything. Except the truth is, Vicks isn’t helping much, either. And when I think on that, my insides twist tighter. After all, she’s the one who’s been on me for being a wet blanket—so why’s she being like this? Can’t she see how much fun we’d have, dang it?

  Then I realize how to make it happen. It’s a gift from God, which proves it’s true, I guess, that He works in mysterious ways. Mysterious, annoying, Chloé-clad ways, but who am I to go against His will?

  “Fine,” I say to Mel, knowing there is nothing Vicks hates worse than not being Tough Girl Numero Uno. “We’ll go to Miami. It’ll be awesome.”

  Mel looks slightly alarmed that I’ve accepted her offer.

  I turn to Vicks, trying to stay cocky. “So what do you say? You in?”

  2

  VICKS

&
nbsp; JESSE KNOWS ME way too well. I do want to see that gator. I read all about it in this guidebook called Fantastical Florida. Back when my brother Penn and I had to share a room, we used to read to each other out loud, whispering because we were supposed to be asleep. That book is full of weird stuff. A building shaped like an orange. A bat tower built by a guy named Perky that no bats ever lived in. World’s smallest police station. A twenty-two-foot statue of Jesus Christ built entirely underwater. Xanadu, home of the future, which looks like it’s made of marshmallows.

  Penn and I used to try to get my dad to take us to some of these places on vacation, but he always made us go visit Grandma Shelly in Aventura. No stops, except for gas—a straight drive down.

  According to Fantastical Florida, Old Joe Alligator is three hundred years old. He used to sunbathe in the town square and even swam with kids in the fountain. Never hurt a flea. Then some stupid poacher shot him, so now he’s stuffed and displayed in a glass case in a Florida history museum only a couple hours from Niceville.

  Maybe we can hit Coral Castle, too, on this trip. Years ago, Ed Leedskalnin, this hundred-pound weakling from Latvia, got dumped on his wedding night by his sixteen-year-old fiancée Agnes Scuffs. Then he spent twenty years carving a memorial to her out of coral, working only in the middle of the night. He moved blocks of coral that weighed thousands of pounds, and no one knows how he did it.

  Now it’s a palace to unrequited love.

  Ed Leedskalnin. What a wimp.

  If Brady never calls me, if he never ever calls me again and just goes around humping cheerleaders at the U like we never were each other’s first time and it never meant all the things we said it meant—to be actually doing it like we might be together forever—and he acts like we never built that matchstick house for our six-month anniversary, or made our own potato chips in his mom’s deep fryer, or stayed up all night talking, or like we never used to see each other every day and tell each other everything and text each other nearly every minute we were apart…If Brady just disappears on me the way that sixteen-year-old Latvian girl did to the hundred-pound weakling, no way am I building him a coral castle.

  I’m not the kind of girl to take shit from a guy. You don’t grow up with five older brothers and not know how to fend for yourself when it comes to the opposite sex.

  Anyone building coral castles has got to be an only child.

  Me, I’d just—I’d do something else, for sure.

  Make him come back.

  Force him to remember. How he noticed me sprinkling vinegar on my school pizza, to give it some kick. How he noticed me again when I dyed my hair black. How he hadn’t known I’d noticed him, too, until I slammed his locker shut that day with barely enough time for him to get his hand out safely, then went running down the hall. How all of a sudden I wasn’t Penn Simonoff’s little sister, I was something else. How he asked me to come watch a football game of his. He played outside linebacker for the Travers Manatees.

  “No thanks, dude,” I had told him.

  “You don’t like football?” Brady asked, wrinkling his forehead.

  “I love it,” I answered, glad to surprise him. “But I like touch games on Sunday afternoons, or watching it on the national level. Super Bowl Sunday? I’m your girl.”

  “Really?” he said, raising his eyebrows. He was flirtatious.

  I went on. “The problem is, I spent way too many years watching my brother Tully’s high school games, and let’s just say it was a losing streak for the Manatees. Before Coach Martinez took over. Can we catch a movie instead?”

  Brady laughed. It was the first time I’d seen that huge smile break across his face just for me, and the first time that bouncing laugh had shaken up the room because of something I did.

  I made up my mind just then that I wanted to make him smile, over and over, every day.

  “Yeah, we can catch a movie,” Brady said, but then even before we set a time or figured out what to see, he leaned in and kissed me on the neck, like he was aiming for my cheek but kind of went astray, and he giggled while he was doing it, but it felt good, and I could tell he liked me the way I liked him.

  This was something real. Not just a date, not just a crush, not just a fling.

  So, yes, I will be taking Jesse up on her offer. I want to go down to Miami, and when I get there, I want to make Brady remember what it seems like he’s forgotten in ten days of summer practice and half a week of classes.

  Because I know he hasn’t forgotten at all.

  What I don’t want to do is ask why he hasn’t called. That’s certain death. Steve, Joe Jr., Tully, Jay, and Penn taught me that. They had so many girls my head spun as they banged the screen doors going in and out, but if there was one thing that made my brothers cool off fast, it was the way some flowery girl would whine, “Why didn’t you call me?”

  Because there’s no answer to a question like that. “He didn’t call you because he didn’t want to call you,” I’d say, if they asked me when I answered the phone. “I think you should take that as a message.”

  “Well, tell him I called,” the little Rose would say, “and ask him why he didn’t call when he said he would.”

  “You got it,” I’d say, and write it down in large letters and stick it on the Frigidaire. “Your girlfriend’s nagging at you again. Call the droopy little flower and get her off my back.”

  And Steve, Joe Jr., Tully, Jay, or Penn—whoever it was—would never bring that girl through our screen door again. Not because of what I wrote. They didn’t care if I hated their girlfriends or wanted to be just like them. Why they didn’t call was, guys don’t like to be pegged on bad behavior. They like you to overlook it, or coax them round to something better from the side, not with the head-on relationship jabber.

  And the girlfriend, poor flowery girlfriend, would probably go and build a little coral castle of her own, writing in her diary or sobbing on the phone with some other Roses, or sending cutesy photographs or heart-shaped notes to our mailbox that my brothers would open and then forget about, leaving them lying on the kitchen counter for anyone to see.

  Guys respond to action. They respond to a body sitting next to them on the old couch while they flip through the channels. They respond to a girl who understands football, a girl who keeps her mouth shut and doesn’t yammer on like it’s important what she bought at Target that afternoon. A girl who eats when they take her out to dinner.

  Jesse’s waiting for me to answer, to say yes or no to her crazy plan. She’s starting to look worried, and I feel like a wench.

  I know she’s sad I didn’t tell her right off about what’s been going on with Brady since he left for the U. Instead I kept quiet about it for days and days—and then told little Mel.

  I don’t know why, really.

  My friends from Travers—to them, Brady and I are the perfect couple. Me and Brady, walking down the halls with our hands in each other’s pockets. Going to the Halloween dance as Superman and Lois Lane. Kissing during assembly. Me sitting at the seniors table surrounded by a crew of Brady’s friends, me wearing Brady’s old Mr. Bubble T-shirt. Me and Brady, all the time.

  I don’t want to deal with their reactions. Their sympathy. It’s a lot easier to tell a girl your boyfriend hasn’t called you back when the whole way she thinks of you doesn’t hang on your being the girlfriend of a senior starter on the district champion football team.

  Jesse—I could have told her. Should have told her. We’ve been close ever since we started at the Waffle last year. She goes to public, but not to Travers, which makes it a lot easier to be real friends. Because Jesse doesn’t think about “VicksandBrady” like the girls from Travers do. To Jesse, I’m the person willing to wait while she goes through giant bins of discount makeup at Eckerd. I’ll sit through her boring Christian network TV shows and let her pick all the cashews out of the nut mix. I’m the one who’ll help her think up questions for the funny surveys she posts on the wall of the staff room, asking people to write in th
eir favorite word, their least favorite sound, their most beloved song. I buy her a toasted almond ice cream bar when I bike down to the 7-Eleven on my break, because I know that’s her favorite, and I’ll even go out to Applebee’s with her slightly bat-shit mom and say stuff like “Oh, Ms. Fix, what happened to the unhappy pit bull you were telling us about last time?”—and then listen to the answer, because her mom will seriously talk about dogs for an hour and a half at a go.

  To Jesse, I’m not one half of “VicksandBrady.” I’m just me. Her best friend.

  Mel and I aren’t really friends, but somehow everything about the Brady situation came pouring out of me when she stepped outside to—I don’t know what she was doing, really. Watching me have a cigarette break.

  I feel sorry I didn’t tell Jesse first. There isn’t a truer friend than Jesse when my parents are driving me crazy or I’m freaking about a test or if I just need a little retail therapy—but I haven’t been honest with her about me and Brady.

  She’s really Christian, Jesse is. The one time like five months ago when I hinted that Brady and I were maybe going to do it—sex it—and asked her to come to Planned Parenthood with me, she got all uptight about how sex before marriage is a sin, and how Planned Parenthood just supports that kind of sinning. Then it was as if she decided she’d said too much, because all of a sudden she clammed up.

  Like she couldn’t even talk about it, it was so bad.

  I wonder if her spaz had to do with her mom not being married. And obviously, doing it, since Ms. Fix ended up with Jesse. Or maybe it’s got more to do with Jesse’s dad, whose name I don’t even know, and how he split before Jesse was even out of diapers.

  Brady would never pull a trick like that, but also—I’m never giving him any reason to. Hello? We have Planned Parenthood now. Anyone can go, and you barely have to pay.

  Jesse must figure that by now I’m not a virgin, but since she made it clear she didn’t want to hear about it, I’m not telling her.

  Lately—since right before Brady left, actually—she’s made remarks. Like God is taking up more room in her brain than usual, so Christian stuff pops out. Like she wants to help me be saved.