The Blonde of the Joke (4 page)

Watching her, seeing the casual, easy way she had, I wanted more than anything to be like that. Francie was not afraid of anything. She truly did not give a shit. I wanted to be like her. I wanted to be the type of person who believed in something, even if it was something crazy and sort of ridiculous. I wanted to be beautiful, but not beautiful like one of those girls in perfume ads. I wanted to be beautiful like Francie. She was burning, brilliant with courage and
self-assurance. There was something about her that was not
good
but really kind of perfect.

As she had promised, it was all there, right in front of me, just asking to be taken. Wouldn’t it be careless of me—irresponsible, even—not to take advantage?

So I did it. It was easier than I’d thought it would be. It was just like doing anything else, like buttoning your shirt or opening a book. I reached across the counter and grabbed a tube of liquid eyeliner from its display by the register. It was that simple. It belonged to the mall, and then it belonged to me. Just like that. It was that simple, but I kept it cupped in the palm of my hand, ready to drop it if I needed to.

Francie and the salesguy, whose name turned out to be Clint, were deep in debate about the importance of lip liner, with Francie taking the affirmative position. Clint was more circumspect. “Sometimes it can look a little cheap, if you’re not careful or if the contrast is too intense,” he was saying, to Francie’s emphatic head-shaking. Neither of them had noticed what I had just done.

I waited for her, heart pounding, breathing shallow, imagining beads of sweat forming on my upper lip. Francie was taking her time. She and Clint had gone from being adversaries to BFFs, and they were joking around about Paris Hilton’s wonky eye. I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Hey, Francie?” I said. She looked up like she’d forgotten all about me.

“Yeah, babe?”

“I really have to pee,” I said.

“Oh,” said Francie. “Okay, let’s go.” She turned back to Clint, who was pissed off again. “I don’t think any of this works,” she said. “I’ll come back another time, okay?”

“Fine,” he muttered, gathering everything up. Francie and I left the store.

I was still nervous. But there was something about having Francie next to me—her boundless confidence a halo that enveloped both of us. It was her hair. Her eyeliner. The sunny warmth of her undivided, overpowering attention. She was my friend. As long as I was with her, I didn’t have anything to worry about. We walked through the exit together, in lockstep, leaving the cameras, the security guards, the smarmy clerks, all of it, just leaving it all behind. There was a shrill beep from above us as we stepped through the antitheft sensors, and Francie whispered, “Just keep on walking.” And I did. No one tried to stop us.

“I got something for you,” she said when we were safe in the atrium, the smell of Francie’s Thierry Mugler Angel mixing with the chlorine from the fountain. “I know you thought I was ignoring you, but it was all part of the plan.” She reached into her bag and pulled it out: a new tube of Dior eyeliner, liquid. She presented it with a grin. “The best presents are always stolen,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said. I waved her off, trying to look casual.
“But I already have my own.” Francie looked surprised. I tossed my hair, trying to copy the way she always did it, and with a careless flick of my wrist revealed my own tube, still in the palm of my hand.

She squealed. “Oh my God,” she exclaimed breathlessly, and she threw herself on me, wrapped her arms around my neck and a leg around my waist. “You did it! You totally did it.”

I stood stick straight, kind of embarrassed because we were making a real spectacle, right there in the middle of the mall. But I had to smile. Francie was squealing and hugging me and jumping up and down.

“Francie!” I finally said. She was making me tense. “Please!” She laughed and pulled away.

“I’m just so proud of you,” she said. “Go ahead, put it on. Oh my God! You’re going to look great. Dior’s the best, best, best—I mean, real top-of-the-line shit, the finest there is.” She handed me her compact to use as a mirror. “They never give you enough in the bottle, though. Cheap fucking assholes.” Francie sighed as an afterthought.

I unscrewed the tube, looked at the foam-tipped brush, and then thought better of it.

“You do it,” I said. “You’re the expert.”

Francie was gratified. “Sit,” she said. And I perched on the edge of the fountain and closed my eyes. I concentrated on the green blobs again, and imagined Francie’s lips, bright red, lined with eggplant, and twisted into deep, satisfied
concentration. I imagined each tiny movement of her hands as I felt the cold brush across my face. Francie’s bangles were barely jangling in my ear, and I pictured sparks flying. I could have sat like that forever, or at least a really long time. But Francie was well practiced. It only took her a minute.

“Okay, open up,” she said. I opened my eyes to the sight of Francie, radiant with openness and generosity. “You look so badass,” she said. “Babe, you are legitimately the baddest.” She held up the mirror, but I didn’t need to look. I already knew what I had become.

Around here, very small things can transform you. There’s a winding creek that seems to touch every backyard. You put a toe in the freezing water and shudder, but a good kind of shudder because you’re happy just to feel anything at all.

On days when you have nothing better to do, you go to the mall. You are hoping to be a better person. Or a worse one. You ask the mall for what you want. And if you want it enough, you’ll get it. Because it’s all laid out right there in front of you. It would be stupid—irresponsible, even—not to take what’s being offered.

A
t school, no one noticed that I was different. It was easy for them not to notice because they still didn’t notice me at all. I was the same as ever. I was no one.

I still sat in the back row, hair hanging in my face, drawing listless curlicues in my notebook while some teacher droned on. I still showed up for class on time, handed in enough homework to pull B-pluses, and walked through the halls with my shoulder grazing the lockers, books flat at my chest. I didn’t look any different. Well, except for the eyeliner. And I didn’t really act any different, either.

But I was different. No one had any idea how much I had changed. I liked it that way. I was fooling them all.

A few days before Halloween, I was headed to Physics when Francie beckoned to me from a door by the cafeteria that I’d never noticed before. She was standing in the doorway, hip cocked, forearm resting against the jamb. “C’mere,” she hissed, waving frantically. “I need to show you something.”

“I have Physics,” I said. “And so do you, come to think of it.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Francie said. “I’m not going to argue with you! Come
on.”

I wavered for a split second, but let’s be real: of course I went with her. Everyone else skipped class all the time; I figured I could do it once without Ms. Tinker even noticing. And Francie had, like, this power over me. So I stepped through the door and followed her into a musty, dark stairwell.

“I can’t believe I found this,” Francie said. She lit a cigarette and handed me one.

“No thanks,” I said.

“I thought it was just going to be a broom closet or something, but false! It turns out to be, like, some kind of secret passage! Truly insane.”

“I swear to God I never saw that door before,” I said.

“Really? That’s weird. Sometimes you have to be looking, I guess.” She was standing only inches away from me, and I could feel the heat from her cherry on my face. It lit her up, all orange and spooky in the dark of the barely illuminated stairwell.

“Come on,” Francie said.

We walked down mildewy concrete stairs, deep into the bowels of the school, me trailing my fingers along the cinder block walls the whole way. I read somewhere that you can find your way out of any maze by keeping a hand pressed against the wall as you walk. Even though our path was a straight line, I thought it was better to be on the safe side. Then, finally, the stairs ended, and we continued on, down a narrow, subterranean corridor, our way lit only by weak, caged-in sconces on the walls. Francie bounced ahead of me, totally unworried about the possibility that we were most likely heading straight into the lair of a serial killer or, at best, the pervy janitor.

I tried to figure out exactly where we were relative to the rest of the school—tried to imagine what was going on above our heads—but it was too confusing. I couldn’t orient myself. We were just getting more and more removed from everything real. And then Francie stopped, waiting for me, and when I caught up, I saw that we’d come to a dead end—the passageway ended in a steel ladder bolted to the wall, which led to a trapdoor in the ceiling.

Francie gave a deep curtsy. “My most awesome discovery ever,” she crowed.

“Where does it go?” I asked.

“Just see!” she said.

“You go first,” I told her.

“Ha,” she said. “Trust me—it’s not scary. But fine.” And
she scrambled up the ladder, undid the latch in the trapdoor, and disappeared above me. I took a deep breath and followed.

I poked my head out on the other side, into what seemed to be a tiny supply closet. Francie was perched on a plastic milk crate. She had her high heels dangling from her toes.

“Um, it’s a closet,” I said, pulling myself out of the trapdoor. “Awesome.” I didn’t see what was so great about a closet.

Francie just winked and opened the door, and light flooded our closet, leaving me momentarily blinded. When my eyes finally adjusted, all I saw was green grass and blue sky. I laughed in surprise. The passage had led us straight out of the school. We were in the supply shed at the far end of the football field.

“No more sneaking past security guards or any of that crap,” Francie said. She was making fun of me, sort of, knowing that I had never snuck past a school security guard in my life. “Three steps and we’re off school property. Free! Seriously, could anything be better?”

I laughed again. “It’s pretty awesome,” I said. Francie took my hand, and we left the shed, careful not to let the door latch behind us. We made our way through the trees into the park behind the school, and down past the bike path, to the hidden creek, where we settled in on the pebbly bank. This time I accepted Francie’s offer of a cigarette. She sat next to me,
puffing thoughtfully, and she gave me a serious look. “So I want to show you something really important,” she said. “I’ve been waiting till I thought you were ready. And I think you’re ready now. You did such an awesome job at Nordstrom the other day. It’s time.”

“Um, okay,” I said.

“Okay,” said Francie. “First off, you have to promise that you’ll never reveal what I’m about to tell you. Promise?”

“Duh,” I said. With Francie I’d learned it was often just better to go with the flow and figure things out later. Trying to get a straight explanation out of her before she was ready was usually more trouble than it was worth.

“I promise,” I said. Francie reached over and took my hand and squeezed it, looking me straight in the eye.

“Even if they torture you,” Francie said. “Like, especially in the face of torture. Promise?”

I couldn’t not roll my eyes. “Okay already!” I said.

“Good,” she said.

Francie tugged on her left earlobe. She tugged on her right earlobe. She wiggled her nose twice like the lady from
Bewitched,
except it was more of an up-and-down bunny twitch than a witchy back-and-forth.

I stared at her, waiting for her to tell me what she was going to tell me. She didn’t say anything.

“Well?” I finally asked. “Don’t get me all excited and then kill me with suspense or anything.”

Francie tugged on her left earlobe. She tugged on her
right earlobe. She wiggled her nose again. “Got it?” she asked.

“Um, no,” I said.

“It’s the Sign,” she said. “I’m showing you the Sign.”

“You mean that stuff you were doing?”

“Yes,” Francie said. “Try it.”

I tugged on my earlobes, copying her as she did it along with me: left, then right, then wiggled my nose. I felt like a fool.

“You got it,” Francie said.

“I got it, but I don’t get it,” I said.

“What’s not to get?”

“What’s the point of it?” I asked. “I mean, why are you showing me this?”

“It’s, like, if you’re ever in trouble,” Francie said. “Like, if things get desperate. Like, if you’re about to be caught. You make the signal, and hopefully someone will recognize it and help you out.”

“Who’s going to recognize?” I asked.

“Another member of our sisterhood,” she said. “There are more of us than you know, Val. More of us than I know, either. It’s, like, all ancient and everything. It goes so far beyond you and me. A sisterhood. It’s been around for thousands of years—as long as anyone’s been stealing. They used this sign in the open-air markets of ancient Mesopotamia. So now I’m passing it on to you. You’re a member of the club.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“No, seriously,” Francie said.

It was hard not to look skeptical. “So who, like, told you about it?” I asked.

“I can’t reveal,” Francie replied, with a mysterious shrug.

Of course, it was all totally idiotic. The Sign itself seemed like something that a five-year-old made up on the playground, and the idea that there was some centuries-old network of shoplifters stretching back to ancient Mesopotamia was even more dumb. If anyone else had told me any of this stuff, I would have laughed out loud.

But this was Francie. A girl who could find doorways where they’d never been before. A girl who had been known to reverse gravity. A girl who could make anything—anything—disappear.

She had proven herself to be a master of the unlikely. Why start doubting her now?

“Got it now?” she asked.

Instead of answering, I tugged at my earlobes and twitched my nose.

“Perfecto,” Francie said.

We stood, and as we dusted our butts off, there was a giant gust of wind, and leaves began to fall. We stood there, on the edge of the creek, looking up as red autumn leaves flew around us in an unexpected cyclone.

“Let’s go to the mall,” Francie said.

“Now?”

“Yeah, we’re already out. Why not?”

I thought it over. There were still four periods left in the day; I had a quiz in Geometry.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”