How to Be Bad Read online

  “Shoot.”

  I motion him toward me, and I feel a thrill at my own brazenness. He scoots over until his knee is touching mine. I lower my voice. “The only sport I ever do is Pilates.”

  He whispers back. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a bunch of stretchy exercises,” I murmur. “I’m the most unathletic person in the history of the world.”

  He laughs. “Why are we whispering?”

  “It’s classified information. All these people”—I gesture at the crowd on the lawn—“they look very sporty.”

  “Okay,” he whispers. “I’ll tell you a secret back.” He leans right in and I can feel his lips on my ear. “So am I.”

  I reply in his ear, inhaling his peppermint smell. “So are you what?”

  “Unathletic.” His breath on my neck sends a shiver down my back.

  I bat him on the arm and speak aloud: “You just told me you water-ski.”

  “Yeah,” he says, grinning, “but I didn’t say I was any good at it.” He picks up his beer and takes a swig. I’m sad the whispering game is over. “Hey, will you tell me something?” Marco asks.

  “What?”

  “Why are you the one in charge of paying for your posse’s hotel? Why aren’t they chipping in?”

  My face gets hot. “Oh, it’s no big deal. They were short on cash so I offered to pay for hotels and gaz—”

  He raises an eyebrow. “Gaz?”

  “Yeah. You know. Fuel. Gaz.”

  “Oh! Gas. I’ve never heard it pronounced like that.”

  I look down at my nails. “Whoops. It’s a Montreal thing, I think. A French-English hybrid. I’ll have to remember to say gas now.”

  “No, don’t,” he says, leaning back on his elbows in the grass. “It sounds exotic.”

  “Gaz?”

  “Yes,” says Marco. “It makes you sound like a French movie star.”

  “Gaaaaaz.”

  “Stop saying that or you’ll blow your cover.”

  “Gaaaaaz.”

  “The paparazzi will descend on us! We’ll be mobbed! Fans are going to swarm you!”

  “Gaaaaaz!”

  “Will you be quiet? You’re causing a serious security breach!” He leans over, laughing, and puts his hand over my mouth. I am giggling and trying to push him away. Okay, not really.

  “Just talk to me like I’m an ordinary girl,” I tell him. “Don’t be intimidated.”

  “It must be tough trying to find true friends when you’re so famous.”

  “Oh, it is, it is. Ever since the James Bond movie last year, I can barely go out in public. I had to move to Florida just to get a break.” I toss back my hair.

  “I knew the ordinary-girl thing was a ruse.” He reaches over and takes my hand. “You made up that stuff about the snow forts, too, didn’t you? Your hands are too soft. That’s what gave you away. That and the gaaaaaz.”

  His hand feels cool from the beer and now my body is cold and hot and cold and hot and he’s holding my hand, he’s holding my hand, Marco is holding my hand.

  “I soak them in buttermilk three times a week and sleep in gloves,” I say with a straight face. “That’s the secret.”

  “You’re just full of secrets.” He touches the back of my flip-flop with the toe of his shoe. “What else should I know about you, Melanie?”

  That I have a huge crush on you? “My last name is Fine.”

  He shakes his head. “That’s not a last name. It’s an adjective.”

  “Ha-ha. What’s yours?”

  “Exceptional.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “What’s wrong with Exceptional? I mean, I don’t like to brag, so I prefer just Marco, but my dad is Mr. Exceptional. My mother used to be Mrs. Exceptional but since they got divorced she went back to her maiden name, Ms. Prettygood.”

  I laugh again. His hand isn’t cold anymore. It’s warm.

  I love that he makes me laugh. I love that he thinks I’m exotic. I love that he listens to me. I love that he makes me want to talk. I love that he’s so hot. Sexy hot, not Florida-weather hot.

  Maybe I should kiss Marco.

  My lips burn. No, no, no. Can’t kiss Marco. Too scary. Too hot.

  “Mr. Exceptional and Ms. Prettygood,” I say instead. “I’ll have to remember all that when I meet your parents.” It’s only after the words leave my mouth that I realize what I’ve just said. When I meet your parents! As if I’m meeting his parents!

  Way to get ahead of myself there. I’ve known him for, like, three hours, I’m probably never going to talk to him again, yet I’m practically sending out the wedding invitations. I drop his hand, fall on my back, and groan. “I’d like to take back that last line, please.”

  “What, now you don’t want to meet my family?” he asks, his voice teasing.

  “No,” I squeak. I cover my face with my hands.

  “Why not?” he says, grinning. “What do you have against my parents? They’re nice folks. They’re even Exceptional.”

  He moves closer to me, next to me on the grass, still smiling. “So if you don’t want to meet my parents, what do you want?”

  I want you to kiss me. I should just say it. Why not? I haven’t held anything else back. I want you to kiss me. I want you to kiss me!

  I want to say it. I think he wants to kiss me too.

  But what if he doesn’t?

  “I want…a wine cooler” is what I finally say instead.

  He nods. Pulls back. Pulls me to my feet. “Then let’s go find you one.”

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 21

  10

  JESSE

  I’M SICK OF cleaning up other people’s messes. Why am I cleaning up other people’s messes, especially for “my boy Robbie,” who isn’t my boy and who looks like an albino to boot?

  It’s past midnight. No one should be cleaning up someone else’s kitchen after midnight, especially when it’s so sticky with beer that your flip-flops make squelching sounds.

  I leave two white plastic bags on the floor by the kitchen counter, one for recycling and one for plain old garbage, and hope Marco-man and his boys have the brains to figure it out. I’m restless, but I can’t hunt down Vicks and Mel because Vicks is on her second round of drinks and already using me as comic relief. As in, “Don’t tell Jesse, I’ll get scolded.” Does she honestly believe I didn’t see her when she oh-so-slyly went to the fridge? She knocked a bottle of ketchup onto the linoleum, for Pete’s sake. Which I put away, thank you very much.

  I find a back room where the music is slightly less loud and the smoke slightly less thick, and I drop down on the carpet and try to be invisible. Three girls and a guy are clumped by a laptop on a desk made out of a door, and best as I can figure, they’re using the laptop to take pictures. Beep, beep, beep—click! And then they whoop and says things like, “Dude, look at your nose!” or “You are such an f-word alien!” (except they don’t say f-word) or “Omigod, you geezer! That’s how you’ll look when you’re, like, a hundred!” Then they do it all over again: beep, beep, beep—click!

  The carpet smells like dog. I check my shorts, and sure enough, dog hair. Great.

  “What’s wrong with you, girl?” R.D. has said more than once, referring to the fact that I don’t love up every dog on the planet. He can’t understand why I’m not a “dog person,” what with Mama making her living brushing and washing dogs and clipping their dang toenails. We don’t own a dog of our own, at least not anymore, but there’s always two or three hanging around the trailer. Mama boards them when their owners go out of town, so they don’t have to stay in the kennel with five thousand other yapping dogs.

  Some of the dogs are sweeties, I admit it. Like how they nose your hand for treats and flop their heads on your lap when you’re watching TV. But what R.D. doesn’t get, when he sees me shoving them away and wiping the slobber off, is that you can’t get attached to every mutt that comes along. What’s the point? They’re just gonna leave.

  Vicks is a dog
person. Dotty brought her geriatric labradoodle to the Awful Waffle one day, and Vicks was all, “Hey, girl. What a good dog. Oh, yes you are!” Dotty’s old dog gazed up at her solemnly, prompting Vicks to call her “one dignified doodle,” which made us all laugh.

  Vicks was the same way with Old Joe the alligator, even though he was dead. She cracked me up cooing over his fine sharp teeth—she cracked us all up—and it made my heart lift. I thought, Yes, this is what this trip should be. And when Mel started singing…

  Her voice was like a piece of sea glass, rounded and clear and pale seaweed green, and I had the crazy thought, gazing at that gator and hearing Mel sing, that that’s what an angel would sound like. Then the even crazier thought: Maybe Mel was an angel. Maybe that’s why she came on this trip. To save me, or—don’t, it hurts—to somehow save Mama.

  Stupid. Miracles don’t happen to folks like me. And if one did, it would happen in a manger or something. Not in the basement of a podunk museum, with a stuffed reptile grinning in the dark.

  Anyway, Mel’s Jewish. Can angels even be Jewish?

  A guy with a fro sticks his head into my-boy-Robbie’s room, which reminds me that I am at a party, and people at parties aren’t supposed to be thinking about angels and being saved.

  “Todd!” the guy cries. “The Toddster!” He jabs his finger at the guy parked in front of the laptop, who looks up.

  “Wayne,” he says, jerking his head. “Get over here, you gotta see this.”

  “No time, my man,” Wayne says. He’s holding the door frame. “You are needed in the den. SpongeBob. Drinking game. Now.”

  “I love SpongeBob,” one of the laptop girls says wistfully, as if she really is heartsick in love with SpongeBob’s yellow spongy self. “He’s so nice, you know? Even to Mr. Krabs. Even to Plankton.”

  The Toddster stands, and he and the three girls file into the hall.

  Wayne spots me with his bleary eyes. “You in?”

  “No, thanks,” I say.

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “All right, then,” he says. “Keep it real.” He shoots me a point-and-wink, and I point and wink right back. I even make the cheesy tchh sound. It makes me think of Vicks’s brother Penn, who’s also a fan of the point-and-wink. Penn does it with such delight that it’s funny, though. Like he knows he’s being a goofball.

  If Penn were at this party…

  Well, that’s a crazy thought, since he’s not. But me and him hung out once at a Fourth of July bash Brady threw. Penn felt bad for me, that’s what I figure, ’cause Vicks and Brady were pretty much the only people I knew and they ended up in Brady’s bedroom doing something that I preferred not to think about. Don’t ask, don’t tell, that’s pretty much what me and Vicks have worked out when it comes to her and Brady in the bedroom.

  Anyway, Penn came and found me out on the patio.

  “Hey,” he said. He jerked his chin at the hammock where I was sitting and said, “You mind?”

  “Huh?” I said. “Oh, no. I mean, that’s fine.” I scooched over, and he joined me. Our bodies touched. That’s just the way hammocks are.

  We lay there for a while, and I worried I might be sweating, and that my heart might be beating really loud. But I also liked it, just being there with him.

  “I went to the train tracks this morning,” he said at last.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Had coffee and a doughnut and watched the train come through.”

  “I love trains,” I said. It was true; I’ve always loved trains. I love the sound and strength and power of them.

  “Me too,” Penn said.

  There was a whole bunch more silence, and then he shifted his body and pulled something out of his pocket. It was a penny he must have laid on the track, ’cause it was all smushed and flattened.

  He handed it to me, and I said, “Cool.” I turned it over in my hand, thinking, A penny from Penn. I liked how those words connected, how the penny was, like, a symbol of the Penn sitting beside me. Penn’s penny. A mini bit of Penn.

  And then I did something I’m still embarrassed about. I put it in my pocket.

  He chuckled, and the sound of it told me I’d misunderstood. Blood rushed to my face and I dug it out quick and tried to give it back.

  “Here,” I said. “Omigosh, sorry. Sorry!”

  “Nah, keep it,” he said, standing up from the hammock. He grinned, and I know what he was thinking. He was thinking, Vicks’s little friend Jesse. What a card.

  He stretched, and I saw the muscles of his tummy. And then he left. Later I saw him making out with a girl wearing a tube top.

  I still have that penny, though.

  Eventually I start feeling pathetic, so I get to my feet and brush the dog hair off my cutoffs. I approach the laptop just for the sake of something to do, and staring at me from the screen is the Toddster. Only he looks like a Martian, or Jack Nicholson, or a bulging-forehead combination of both. His eyes are too close together, his nose too pinched.

  I sit down in the swivel chair and skim my finger over the touchpad. I click a button that says “Photo Booth,” and all of a sudden there I am on the screen. Only I’m a bulgy-headed Jack Nicholson clone too. I move my head to the right, and my computerized image slides with me, making my forehead grow pointy and my left cheek stretch like taffy. I move to the left: Now the right half of my face whooshes out.

  As Vicks would say, this is seriously wacked. I move closer to the screen, and my eyes swell into saucers. I pull back, and my head turns into a tiny pinhead floating on a creepily long neck.

  I scan the toolbar and see that there are other options for my entertainment. I’ve been using “Bulge”; now I click on “Twirl.” Whoa—now that is just wrong. My face dips and twists like a Picasso painting, or whoever that guy was who lopped his own ear off. Vicks is good at that artsy stuff. She would know.

  I click another icon, and I’m hit with the telltale beep, beep, beep—click!

  Ah, crud. There I am, frozen in time looking like a mess of scrambled-egg eyeballs and loosey-goosey lips. At first I panic, and then I giggle. What is Robbie going to think when he sees this picture of a girl he doesn’t even know? He’ll think, Thank goodness that freak show cleared out of here, that’s what. Though he probably won’t use the word “goodness.”

  I move the cursor from the snapshot button, which I now know to stay away from, and click on “Squeeze.” Ew—this must have been the one the Toddster was using when one of the girls called him a geezer. My cheeks cave in and my eyes turn to wrinkled slits and my teeth, when I grimace, grow long and skinny. I do look old. Or sick, like I’ve got some terrible wasting disease.

  I hold still. I stare.

  People always say how much me and Mama resemble each other, which I hate, because I’m like, “Do I wear stretchy aquamarine bra tops? No, I do not. Stop saying we’re two durn peas in a pod!”

  I glance at the door, and then I swallow and hitch up out of the chair. I position my upper body in front of the tiny red dot at the top of the computer, which I’ve figured out is the camera. My boobs wither before my eyes. I pull farther back, and my boobs collapse in on themselves, like smushed-down cupcake liners.

  This is what she’ll look like, I think. No more aquamarine tops.

  And then, What is she going to do?

  Voices sound in the hall, one guy’s raucous laugh and a second guy’s response, and I stand and jerk away from the laptop.

  “I’m telling you, she wants it,” the first guy says. “I heard her with my own two ears. She was like, ‘Ooo, he’s so hot. Ooo, he’s so sexy.’” He pitches his voice high the way guys do to make fun of the female sex.

  “Shut up, Robbie, you drunk fool,” guy number two says.

  They’re coming closer. I edge up against the wall.

  “Ah, you want the other one,” Robbie says. “The one with the big titties. I get you, bro!”

  What a slime.

  They’re outside th
e room, they’re passing right by, and I can’t help glancing their way. I take in Robbie’s underbelly whiteness, and why, look, it’s Marco at his side. I knew he was bad news. Then Robbie makes a comment about “big titties’ skunk stripes,” and suddenly I put it together.

  They’re trash-talking Vicks and Mel.

  I burst out of the room without thinking.

  “Don’t you dare,” I say. “Don’t you dare talk about my friends that way!”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Robbie says, holding his hands up.

  Marco stops short. “Jess,” he says. “We weren’t…I wasn’t…”

  “It’s Jesse,” I spit. “And Mel doesn’t…what you said. She’s not that kind of girl. And Vicks has a boyfriend, you turdball!”

  “‘Turdball’?” Robbie says. He’s amused, and my anger flames higher. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

  “Jesse…chill,” Marco says. “Nobody’s slamming your buds.”

  “He is,” I say, jutting my chin at Robbie.

  “Baby, you’re reading me all wrong,” Robbie says. “I’m not slamming them. I’m complimenting them!”

  I storm past, purposely ramming his shoulder. He laughs.

  “Get a fucking life!” he calls to my back. “Fucking buzz-kill!”

  My heart races. We shouldn’t have picked up Marco, and we shouldn’t have come to this…this…cesspool of sin. I’m going to find Vicks and Mel, and we’re getting out of here. Even if it is one in the morning.

  I find them in the crowded TV room. Vicks downs a shot as Plankton orders a Krabby Patty; then she lets out a burp like a foghorn. The guy with the fro slaps her a high five.

  Mel is draped in a C shape on the sofa. Her feet are on the coffee table, a wine cooler is in her hand, and she’s crooning softly to herself. As I push through to her, I make out her slurry words.

  Which are about Marco.

  And which are not pure.

  And there are two other empty wine cooler bottles on the coffee table, plus a couple of empty beer bottles, and maybe she didn’t drink all of them, but it’s obvious she’s had her share.