Shrimp (20 page)

174

months ago, but maybe it was his special day and Sid and Nancy being gone that had allowed him to finally voice it.

I flicked his head, our usual custom. "No, silly," I told him.

For a love child who spent the better part of her life dreaming about her other family, I've barely given them a second thought since returning to San Francisco, except for Danny, of course, who is going to be the cause of my future carpal tunnel syndrome from all the cell phone text messaging I do with him to keep in touch. I did get a Christmas present from bio-dad Frank: a blue Tiffany box containing a chain necklace with a diamond heart-shaped pendant attached, like I am a girl who wears horridly precious trinkets like that. The card inside read, for a sweet sixteen of a girl . Trust me, there is nothing about me that Frank finds sweet. I think the word he used to describe me was
spunky.
(Insert puking sound here.) Last year I might have been thrilled to get such a present from him, even such a sucky one, but this year--and by the way, Frank-dude, I'm seventeen, not sixteen--the necklace only confirmed how little he knew me. I set the Tiffany box aside to donate to charity.

Autumn and Shrimp approached our seats, carrying the birthday cake I'd made Josh, as everyone in the room sang "Happy Birthday." If anyone had told me last summer that my lifetime would witness an Autumn-Shrimp b-day duo celebrating my brother, at my request, I would have either collapsed in hysterics on the spot or possibly gone postal. To quote a great lady, Sugar Pie: "Life is funny, baby, and that's no joke."

After Josh had cut the cake, Autumn came over to sit with me while Helen snapped photos of the party and got

175

the digits for at least three senior gentlemen, her latest flirt pals. She's promised me she's past Aryan, over it,
done, finito,
but natural Helen flirting, no matter the age of her conquest, could never be off-limits. Autumn said, "This cake is delicious. You made this whole thing by yourself?"

"Guess so," I said. "Not a big deal."

"I think a banana cake with chocolate ganache filling and the best buttercream frosting I've ever had in my life is a big deal. Thank your brother in New York for passing on the recipe, from my taste buds. So in all those colleges Alexei told me he's been going through with you, did you find any with a cake-baking major?"

All the college brochures and discussions have only confirmed for me what I already knew.- College is not a place for me. I
hate
school, simple as that. I tolerate it because I have to, but when I'm there all I think about is when the school day will end, the weekend come, vacation start, my life begin again. I would rather study European history by going to Europe, or Far Eastern religions by traveling to China and India. I'd prefer to learn the great works of literature by watching Shakespeare in the park, and understand geometry and algebra by jumping off a triangular precipice and determining the distance to the bottom by whether the resulting injury requires an Ace bandage or a trip to the hospital for X rays. Making it through my senior year of high school--the actual school part, not the hanging with friends part--feels like I am a runner standing at my mark for the big race, waiting for the starting gun to signal graduation so I can sprint off to my future and some place that is not not not school.

176

"Nan," I said. "What about you? Did you finish your apps over the break?"

Autumn said, "Yeah. And I might even have snuck in a few dark-horse contenders."

"Where?"

Autumn's index finger and thumb did the zip lip gesture around her mouth. "I'm not jinxing it."

177

*** Chapter 25

The only wedding
I've ever been to was Sid and Nancy's, when I was five. They got married at City Hall, and the ceremony was brief, anticlimactic, and itchy--Nancy made me wear this horrible pink frilly dress that caused a rash to break out on my chest and back. I didn't know what to expect for Wallace and Delia's wedding, but I knew they were planning a double-dose party: a joint wedding and New Year's Eve celebration packed into one long, festive night. I assumed the night would suck--any event that requires that much planning, money, and drama is destined to be a letdown--but I was still eager to see how it turned out. Bonus.- Since Sid and Nancy were out of town, I could stay out as late as I wanted because Alexei had agreed to stay in the guest room next to Josh's room for the night, in exchange for my code of silence regarding certain sexual indiscretions he'd admitted occurred between himself and his former boss, Lord Empress Kari. Well, he also agreed because in addition to being a quasi-Horrible, he's basically a good guy. I've decided to look past the Kari thing anyway, because Alexei claims his older woman thing is not about age so much as that he's attracted to really smart women, who, according to Alexei, just tend to be older. Whatever, College Boy.

I did the unthinkable and raided Mrs. Vogue's closet for the occasion. Normally I wouldn't be caught dead

178

wearing any pieces from her fashion mag wardrobe, but the wedding was a black tie/evening gown occasion, and Mrs. Vogue did have a small selection of passable dresses to go along with her puke princess ball gowns. Nancy had told me not to wear black or white to a wedding, so as not to appear somber or to compete with the bride's dress, so I chose a slinky gold lamé, spaghetti strap number that dipped low at the breasts and was cut high on the legs-- especially high on me, because my legs and torso are longer than Nancy's, so the dress fell only a few inches below my butt. I tried adding a pair of Mrs. Vogue's Blahnik Choo or whatever-they-are shoes, but I kept wobbling on the spiked heels. How does Nancy walk in those fuckers and make it look so effortless? I traded the couture shoes for a pair of flat gold-sequined slippers with red patch flowers that I bought at the dollar store next to Helen's family's restaurant on Clement Street. I twisted my long black hair at the back of my head and placed two red chopsticks from the same dollar store in my hair to hold the twist, applied the dark Goth Chanel Vamp lipstick to my mouth, and I was ready to go.

"No," Alexei stated when I came downstairs, where he was waiting to give me a lift to the hotel on Nob Hill because I promised paranoid Nancy I would not drive on New Year's Eve, which she considers to be like Halloween for drunk drivers. "Go back upstairs and change. You're not wearing that." Alexei would not look like a Horrible in a tux, I suspected, admiring his buff bod decked out in sweats for his big New Year's Eve boys' night watching movies and playing video games with Josh. I so need to find for him an older woman who is not Lord Empress Kari.

179

I shoved Alexei's rock-hard chest. "Shut up," I said, walking out the front door toward the car. Alexei remained standing at the doorway, as if he expected that I would, in fact, return to my mother's room to choose another outfit.

Standing outside, goose pimples forming on my bare arms from the night fog and chilly Bay breeze, I said, "Seriously, Alexei, drive me or don't, but I am freaking freezing out here, and if you don't get out here now and put the heater on in that car, I am calling a cab."

Alexei, defeated, grabbed his keys from the hallway table, but then walked to the coat closet, rifled through it and pulled something out. When he came outside, he placed a long black pashmina wrap around my shoulders. "Modesty," he said as he opened the car door for me. "Learn about it."

In my eagerness to go to this wedding, I arrived way too early at the hotel, so I milled around alone for a while. I read a trashy celebrity tabloid in the gift shop, but that felt like bad karma so I left. Then I walked around the lobby fountain until I decided to kill the remaining time by taking a stroll around the little park across the street from the hotel. From the street at the top of Nob Hill, I could see the Bay Bridge and the Transamerica Pyramid, but what I particularly noticed was a familiar figure standing under a palm tree in the park, smoking a cigarette.

Wallace must have been nervous, because he is not a cigarette smoker. But how beautiful did he look in his tuxedo, his long brown hair falling in waves from his head, the front strands tucked behind his ears, and his big beautiful eyes staring off into space. If I were an artist I would have mummified him on the spot, to perfect him for eternity. Wallace whistled when he saw me. "Whoa! You sure

180

weren't named Cyd Charisse for nothing!" He smiled, but the hand he held out to me, offering me a smoke, was shaking a little, and not from the cold Bay wind.

"You doin' okay?" I asked him, feeling a blush hot on my cheeks. I shook my head to the cigarette offer.

Wallace said, "I'm good. It's all good. Last-minute jitters, you know. How
you
doin'? Just think: A couple years from now, this scene could be you and my brother taking the plunge."

I've never thought of myself as being the marrying kind, but Wallace's comment made me realize that (a) Wallace thinks of Shrimp and me as a couple, not "just friends," and (b) I am getting to be old enough where marriage wouldn't necessarily have to be this vague idea; it's something I could actually do if I wanted.

"Hardly," I said. "Marriage is stupid." Marriage to me is something that lonely people or pregnant people do. It's a nice enough institution, I suppose, for the right type of person, but not one with which I plan to bother. True loves don't need an official wedding license to validate their lives together.

"You're not helping," Wallace said with a laugh.

Damn me and my foot-in-mouth disease. "I didn't mean, like, stupid waste-of-time stupid. I meant I'm too young to think about it for myself." That was a lame recovery, but the best I could come up with in the moment. "Delia is a great girl, and I know you two will be very happy."

Wallace let out a little snort. "Happy, yeah. If we can ever get Iris and Billy out of our house. I tell ya, when the parents move back home... The slackers have no respect for the time and money it takes to maintain a household.

181

Parents today--what are ya gonna do?" Wallace stubbed out his cigarette on the ground. "Guess I'd better head back in; it's getting to be show time. See you in a while?"

Wallace leaned over toward my face, like he was going to kiss my cheek good-bye, but instead his lips grazed mine for an electric second. The kiss was romantic but at the same time innocent, as if he was saying
adios
to his single life and I to my crush on him. The fact that Wallace is a perfect ten-point-ohhhhh on the babe scale forgave the fact of his cigarette breath. After he'd pulled back I took a tissue from my purse to rub the slight Chanel Vamp lipstick stain off his mouth. Then I gave him a playful slap on the cheek. He winked at me before taking off back to the hotel across the street.

I found Shrimp lounging around the hotel lobby fountain when I went back inside, giving directions to the ballroom to an arriving guest. If I thought Shrimp looked best in a wet suit, that's because I'd never seen him wearing a tux. "That's some dress," he mumbled when he saw me. It's a good thing I didn't wear Nancy's shoes, otherwise I truly would have towered over him instead of just standing above him by several inches.

"I thought you were planning to wear a powder blue tux with a blue carnation," I said. I flecked a piece of dust from his black jacket, but really I just wanted to cop a feel of him in his tux. I straightened the daisy in his lapel.

Shrimp said, "Delia didn't go for that idea. Go figure. She thought a best man should wear the same style tux as the groom. Women! No imagination, I tell ya." He smiled. He looked and sounded just like his brother: nervous but happy.

182

I took his arm and we walked to the ballroom, where he left me to join the wedding party, and I took a seat. I've never been a girl who dreams about her wedding day from the time she's able to play Barbie Bride Dress-up Set, Ash's favorite activity, but I was awed at the beauty of the room: ivory and crimson roses everywhere, gold candles glowing, a string quartet playing in the corner, and from the top-floor ballroom a stunning nighttime view of the San Francisco skyline outside the windows, with bright stars made visible in the sky by the cold night wind.

Like Sid and Nancy's wedding, Wallace and Delia's ceremony was brief and anticlimactic, so at first the whole deal seemed like a lot of trouble for such a quick interlude. Delia, who had gone the puke-princess-dress route but did look stunning in her strapless ivory satin gown with beading around the bodice and a train extending a few feet, must have gone to hours of trouble to transform herself into a bride. Her red frizz of hair was straightened and pulled into an elegant updo, and I can't imagine how long she sat in the makeup chair to smooth out all her freckles and get that cover-girl look. I could never sit still that long to be beautified for a ceremony that lasted all of twenty minutes. You couldn't deny the genuine emotion of the ceremony, though. Delia's dad burst into tears when he lifted the wedding veil over her head to give her away, which started a chain reaction of parental tears: Delia's mom started weeping, then Iris and Billy, then Delia's stepmother and her stepfather, and when I looked over at the groomsmen, even Shrimp was wiping a tear from his cheek! In the middle of the ceremony Shrimp stepped to the podium to read a love poem. He looked at me in the audience while he was reading, which