Been There, Done That (17 page)

twenty

These girls did not look like hookers. The leader, Vanessa, looked like my high school French teacher, a skinny, lank-haired, twittery woman named Mademoiselle Shlott. One day, in the middle of conjugating the verb
rire,
Mademoiselle grabbed her shrunken cheeks and yelled, “Why can’t you pay attention to me for five goddamn minutes!” In shock, we halted our note passing and whispering. Her shoulders began to shake and her face grew wet with tears. “How do you think it feels to be standing up here, day after day? Don’t you think I know what you say about me? DON’T YOU THINK I KNOW?” She ran out of the room, and we never saw here again. (For the rest of the year, the softball coach, who confessed that
escargot
was the only French word he knew, supervised the class.) In retrospect, perhaps the saddest thing was that Mademoiselle Shlott had it all wrong: we never said anything about her. In fact, until her breakdown, we never thought about her at all.

But Vanessa possessed something that Mademoiselle Shlott did not: a voice like Ella Fitzgerald. It was astonishing to hear a voice that big coming out of a body that skinny. Vanessa sounded like she weighed two hundred pounds. Also, she didn’t dress like Mademoiselle Shlott, who favored knee-length skirts and cardigans. Vanessa wore frayed jeans and a pale pink baby doll top that offered a peak at the hoop in her navel.

Penny was Costello to Vanessa’s Abbott. All bulges and curves, she probably did weigh two hundred pounds. She had big blue eyes, a tiny bow mouth, and a sweet baby-girl voice. She was quite striking, in a sixteenth-century kind of way, but I was surprised that the local johns were so enlightened. Unlike a lot of heavy girls, she dressed to accentuate her curves and possessed the self-confidence to wear thigh high boots over her generous legs.

There were six more girls in the group, none of them especially beautiful. I wondered if the less attractive girls were drawn to prostitution because they longed to feel desirable. Briefly I worried that I was on the wrong track, that these girls were just here to, well, sing. But I’d mentioned the audition to Amber—“That girls’ singing group we talked about? I’m auditioning. I know you said they’re a little, well, wild, but I really love to sing.”

She gawked as if I’d just confessed to eating a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts. “Those girls are bad news, Katie. Seriously.”

The auditions were being held in a dorm common room that appeared to have been decorated in the seventies: orange vinyl cushions, brown industrial carpet, the very same molded plastic chairs that Richard had in his office. Then again, given the popularity of anything “retro,” the room could have been decorated in the last year, eradicating all traces of late-millennium mauve. The chairs were arranged in a horseshoe. Following a couple of songs intended to give us an idea of “what we, ya know, do,” the existing Wallflowers had taken up residence on the couches. There were openings for four new members—a soprano, two altos and a tenor. That was good news for me, an alto.

They had us fill out index cards with our name, graduating year, phone number and experience. (Mine: “Lead alto in my high school’s a capella group; member, choir; first runner-up, All State Choir.” I wondered briefly whether there was any such thing as All State Choir. I figured I was pretty safe as long as I left out which state it was in.)

We handed in the cards. There was a lot of throat clearing and paper shuffling. Some of the girls had brought along class work. I figured they’d be automatically excluded for their poor prostitute potential. The Wallflowers sifted through the index cards and sorted them. I wondered if the sorting served any real purpose or if they were just enjoying the power gained from making twenty-five girls test the staying power of their Teen Spirit antiperspirant, a sample of which we had all received on our first day of school.

One by one, the Wallflowers called up the hopeful girls. In sync with the demonstration, they sang the forties: “Someone to Watch over Me,” “My Funny Valentine.” Some of these girls could actually sing. My chances were looking dim.

Tiffany sang before me. She had come on a whim. During our dinner the other night I had stupidly mentioned the audition. She’d said, “Oh, fun! I’ll do it, too!” I didn’t know how to discourage her without sounding like I didn’t want to spend time together, which I knew from experience would send her into a depression, complete with a wailing-women soundtrack. I just hoped she couldn’t sing. Leading her to a life of prostitution was even worse than making her feel unpopular.

She stood in the middle of the horseshoe. She wore black leggings and a long red cable sweater. When she’d gotten dressed, she’d asked, “Does this make me look even fatter than I really am?”

To this, I had no reasonable answer save the obligatory, “You’re not fat!”

Doing her makeup (which was far too heavy), she’d remarked, “I wish my eyes were green. Or blue, even. Anything but brown.”

I’d come back with, “But your eyes are such a pretty shade—almost gold.”

Then, predictably, came the hair. “I wish my hair were curly.”

It took every ounce of strength to say, “Isn’t it funny how everyone with straight hair wishes it were curly, and everyone with curly hair wishes it were straight?” when I really wanted to advise her to get tinted contacts, a perm and a membership to Weight Watchers.

Vanessa glanced up and said, “Okay . . . Tiffany? Go ahead.” Tiffany began to sing. A few notes in, I gasped. It wasn’t that Tiffany’s voice was especially good or bad—it was breathy but tuneful. It was that she was singing my song, “You’re Mean to Me,” a song she had never even heard of until I sang it for her two nights ago. She’d told me she was going to sing a show tune, something from “My Fair Lady” or “The Music Man.” Imitation may be the purest form of flattery, but I hadn’t sung yet. It was going to look like I was imitating her.

As Tiffany sang, the girls on the couches smiled. They could all be called Mona, so complete was their collective mastery of the don’t-you-wonder-what-I’m-thinking? smirk. I’d been checking them continually, hoping to catch even one of them in the act of eyeball rolling or eyebrow raising. As yet, they had given not the slightest clue of whom they did or didn’t like.

When Tiffany finished, she flushed with pleasure and, eyes to the ground, scurried back to the seat next to mine. “Do you think they liked me?” she whispered.

“That was my song,” I hissed.

“I didn’t think you’d mind.” Not only didn’t she sound sorry, she was actually smiling a little. Another Mona: she’d fit right in.

“Katie? O’Connor? Is Katie here?” It took me a minute to remember that that was supposed to be my name.

“Here!” I popped up.

“You ready?” skinny Vanessa asked.

“To sing, you mean?” I asked stupidly.

“Yes. To sing.” At last—a raised eyebrow. Goody.

I walked to the middle of the horseshoe. During Tiffany’s solo, I’d been so busy thinking venomous thoughts that I hadn’t had time to think of another song to sing. I’d have to pull an instant replay, I thought miserably. There simply wasn’t another song I knew well enough to perform, unless you counted “I Will Survive,” that silly song from the seventies. After Tim dumped me, Marcy bought me a tape of the song and forced me to drink vodka and cranberry juice until I stood on my bed and belted it out. From then on, every time I got depressed about Tim, she made me perform. I sang the song a lot. Marcy was really supportive during that time. She gave me endless pep talks about how men are scum and how I didn’t need a man. Of course, she was already married to Dan, which didn’t do a hell of a lot for her credibility.

Still, no matter how many times I had sung that song, I never quite pulled it off. I needed something easier, catchy and simple and not too challenging. Only one song came to mind. I tried desperately to think of something else, but time had run out. What the hell. At least I could say I tried. I put my hands on my hips and flapped my elbows back and forth. “Cock-a-doodle,” I began. “Cock-a-doodly-doo . . .”

As I sang, some of the Mona’s mouths began to twitch, then they revealed, miraculously—teeth! They were smiling! There was even a little finger snapping. When I finished, I grinned at them. They grinned back. As I walked back to my seat, I looked at the girls on the folding chairs and knew that, for that one glorious moment, every one of them hated me.

 
 
After that, I couldn’t face another dinner with Tiffany—I couldn’t face another minute with Tiffany—but I feared the repercussions of slipping out with any fellow hall mates. So, rather than heading back to the dorm after the auditions, I walked in the opposite direction, to where my forlorn Civic sat in a vast lot, and drove to the A&P on the edge of town. In Mercer, the service and retail hot spots—the A&P, the Jiffy Lube, the Denny’s—had all been banished to the border. As such, there was surprisingly heavy traffic for such a small town.

The A&P was old, scruffy and underheated. The fruit was underripe; the lettuce was wilted. There was no organic milk or fat-free cream cheese. It was the only grocery store in town, though, so it was packed.

I filled my handheld basket with a bag of Hawaiian sweet rolls, an apple and a rotisserie chicken so hot that steam coated the inside of its hard plastic container. I was well within acceptable express line limits: “12 Items or Less.” (It should be “12 Items or Fewer,” a detail that never fails to annoy me, although I know I should get over it.) In front of me, a little girl with carefully styled corkscrew curls and perfectly straight blond bangs turned around and smiled. She had pale blue eyes fringed with eyelashes so light they were almost invisible. Her lavender T-shirt read PRINCESS. I smiled back.

Her blond mother gently stroked the girl’s silky head. The girl leaned against her instinctively. The mother turned just enough for me to see her face. I stepped back in shock, knocking into the man behind me. “Sorry,” I murmured as I scurried off to join another line before Chantal could see me.

twenty-one

Prostitution simply wasn’t in Tiffany’s future. The Monday after the auditions, the Wallflowers posted a list of new members, and her name wasn’t there. It was through no fault of mine, but she subjected me to acoustic guitar and wailing women, anyway. Since I was still pissed at her for stealing my song, I was a little short on sympathy. Besides, she could have been gracious enough to congratulate me for getting into the group rather than remarking, “Your song didn’t seem like what they mostly sing.”

I was sitting on the floor outside my door, highlighting a textbook, when Jeremy came down the hall. “You locked out? Or did Clay Aiken stop by to perform unspeakable acts with Tiffany?”

“Neither. She’s just listening to really bad, really loud music. By the way, Clay is on the outs ever since Katherine told Tiffany he was so last Thursday or last year or, God, could have been last millenium.”

“Harsh.”

“How do you think Clay feels?”

He sat down next to me. He wore gray gym shorts and a gray T-shirt and glistened with sweat. He looked like an ad for men’s cologne although, quite frankly, he didn’t smell like one. “What’s she got up her butt today?” he asked. By now it was common knowledge that Tiffany was passive aggressive. I remembered Jeremy warning me about the singing group. I wasn’t in a mood for another one of his lectures but figured he’d find out about it sooner or later. “We both auditioned for the Wallflowers. I got in. She didn’t.”

I waited for him to react with shock or disappointment. Instead, he smiled. “Awesome. I didn’t know you could sing.”

“I can’t, but don’t tell anyone.” I checked his face. Where was the condemnation? Perhaps he figured this was a done deal: no point acting all self-righteous. Or maybe these girls weren’t evil en masse; rather, there were one or two high-profile floozies. On consideration, that made sense. Granted, I hadn’t spent much time with them yet, but I couldn’t believe they were all on the game.

“Listen,” Jeremy said. “About yesterday? The things I said? Can we just, you know—”

“Forget it ever happened?” I finished. I was learning to talk in questionese.

“Exactly.” He grinned. I beamed back, so pleased to hear a declarative statement for a change.

It was almost ten o’clock. Had I been back in my old adult life, I would have been in my pajamas. But it felt early, even though it was a weeknight. I was restless. Also, I didn’t want to spend too much time sitting in the hall with Jeremy lest it spark any rumors.

I made up something about having a paper due tomorrow and headed outside without saying good-bye to Tiffany. I had my key: I figured I could do without my coat. It was colder out than I’d expected. If I were still thirty-two, I would have gone back up for my coat. But tonight I was eighteen, so I clutched my arms and dared the night to chill me.

There were two barely-used pay phones at the library. Tiffany and Amber were the only other students I knew of without cell phones, but Tiffany was getting one for Christmas, while Amber was a Resident Assistant on financial aid. It was bad enough that it had taken me this long to get my own computer. The other kids probably assumed I was really, really poor.