The Blonde of the Joke (5 page)

“D
o you believe in God?” Francie asked one day in her bedroom.

“Yes,” I said. “Do you?”

“No,” said Francie. “Well, not really. Maybe a little. So do you, like, read the Bible and stuff?”

“No,” I said. “But I went to Sunday school when I was little.”

“So you know about Samson and Delilah, then.”

“Maybe?” I said. “It sounds familiar, but I’m not sure.”

“I read the Bible over the summer and it was totally boring,” Francie said. “But Samson and Delilah was one good part of it. It’s, like, about this superhero named Samson and his bitchy girlfriend, Delilah.”

“Oh, wait. Is he the one with the ponytail?” I asked.

“Yes,” Francie said. “A long beautiful ponytail, like three feet long, and very shiny. And he had these superpowers, superstrength and whatnot. But then one night when he’s asleep, the bitch Delilah sneaks up to him with a pair of, like, shears and chops off all his hair.” Francie punctuated herself by scissoring her fingers through the air maniacally,
snip-snip-snip.

“Why’d she do that?” I asked.

“I forget.” Francie shrugged. “The devil probably. Anyway, then the next day he goes on this mission where he has to, like, hold up a temple while it’s collapsing. Or something like that; I’m just going on memory. Whatever. Normally it would have been no problem for him because he was just that strong. But it turned out that all his powers were in his hair. Without the ponytail he was just some regular dude. So the temple collapses on him and he dies.”

“What a bitch. I hope Delilah was sorry.”

“Probably not,” Francie said. “They never are. It’s a crazy story, though, right? And it teaches such an important lesson.”

“What’s the lesson?”

“Appearances count,” said Francie. “Even in Bible times, it was so important to have good hair.”

“He probably looked better without the ponytail,” I pointed out.

“Maybe they were more in style in those days,” Francie said. “Like in the nineties.”

I looked down at myself, at my jeans, not too baggy and
not too tight, and my blue zip-up hoodie. I twirled a limp strand of hair around my finger. I looked over at Francie.

“Cut my hair,” I said.

“I really don’t think that was the point of the story!” Francie laughed. “Unless you want to be crushed in a tragic collapsing-temple accident.”

“I’m sick of it,” I said. I thrust forward a lock of my limp brown hair. “It just, like, hangs there.”

“Okay,” Francie said. “Let’s do it, Samson. You could hardly be less superstrong than you already are.” She picked a pair of scissors up off her desk and led me to the bathroom, where I sat on the edge of the bathtub. Francie draped a towel over my shoulders. “I’ve never really cut hair before, but it can’t be too hard, right?”

“I’m sure it’s easy,” I said.

“How do you want it to look?” Francie asked.

“Different,” I said.

And Francie took the scissors and just went to town, her tongue poking from her mouth as hair started flying everywhere. I’d been growing it out since elementary school, but I wasn’t very sorry to see it go. It was the old me.

“No, don’t look!” she yelped when she was done and I made a move to the mirror. “I have to put some
product
in it.”

She dumped some sticky crap in her palms, rubbed them together, and then gunked it around on my head. “Okay, now you can look,” she said. Around us, the bathroom was completely covered in scraps of dark hair.

Appearances count. The Bible teaches us this. Although I believe in God, I don’t put much stock in the Bible; it’s just way too long. But appearances do count. Look at poor Samson and that bitch Delilah. A different hairdo and everything would have swung the other way.

The next day, I showed up at school in a tight white shift dress that stopped six inches above my knees and a pair of white go-go boots borrowed from Francie. My hair was gone; now it was just a spiky, dark crown at my skull. It looked great.

Everyone stared at me when I walked into Physics. All heads turned at once. “Slut,” I heard Shana Miller cough under her breath. That was Shana Miller for you. Ms. Tinker pushed her glasses up on her nose and regarded me for a brief moment. “Valerie,” she said. “You’re late. See me after class.”

Francie was sitting at her desk already, grinning from ear to ear.

I’d thought it would feel different. To look like this, to dress like this. To be this person. I had thought I would feel powerful. Unstoppable, like Francie. Instead, I was embarrassed. Who did I think I was?

Appearances definitely count, but I also had to wonder if Francie had missed the point of Samson and Delilah. Because, to me, the real question was exactly the question that she had glossed over. The question I asked Francie—the one she blew off—cuts right to the point of everything: Why’d Delilah do it?

Y
ou take a seashell. You take a tube of lip gloss and a prissy silk scarf like an English teacher would wear. You take a mountain, and a cloud, and a molten pebble from the core of the world. Francie said this was how we were going to do it. Because the entire planet Earth is pretty fucking big. You have to start small and take a chunk at a time.

That was Francie’s theory, at least.

Francie claimed that she had been shoplifting for at least as long as she could remember, and even though I didn’t quite believe her, the thing is that it almost would have made more sense for it to be true. Maybe she had been born with a popped antitheft sensor in one hand and a rubber band in the other. Because when it came to stealing, Francie
was amazing, I am telling you. Amazing. Like that first day at the mall, at Wet Seal, when she’d stolen the red dress: one minute it was in her hand and then it was in my purse, in my size and everything. An offering of friendship. All she had to do was want something and it was hers. She had wanted not just the dress but, for whatever reason, me.

Well, Francie wanted everything. By
everything
I mean every single thing. Sometimes it seemed like there was a clandestine line of ascendancy, like Francie knew she was waiting in the wings to rule an oblivious world. Francie had a sparkle in her eye that suggested she had a secret, and the secret was that you couldn’t even begin to imagine her destiny. A girl-queen in exile.

“I have a plan,” she told me one day in November, a few weeks after she had showed me the Sign. We were standing by the glass elevator on the mezzanine level, looking down over early Christmas shoppers milling around the wide pavilion below us. The glowing signs and kiosks were laid out like a set of instructions to be followed, and Francie leaned out on tiptoe, palms facedown against the guardrail. She turned to me with a mischievous slant of the eyebrow and said, “All this is going to be ours.” The tiny silver lima bean around her neck quivered at the hollow of her clavicle. Breath in, breath out. I thought I saw a spark.

Start with a shitty plastic charm bracelet. Have a plan. “Why stop at stupid, tacky Montgomery Shoppingtowne?”
Francie wanted to know. “Between the two of us, we can do it. We clean this place out first, then expand the operation. It already belongs to us, anyway. We just need to claim it.” With Francie’s voice hoarse from cigarettes, it was always hard to tell how serious she was. Of course, by then I had learned that questions like that were basically immaterial.

“We’ll clean this place out,” I said, going along with her. “Then move on to the Smithsonian.”

So Francie and I went to the mall every day after school. We held our little black bags close to our hips and closer to our fingers, always looking out for that one thing that caught our eye. “It’s easy,” she explained to me when I asked her for her secrets. “Just pretend you’re the sun. Too hot to look at. Anyone looks at you too long—burn ’em. Remember that and you’ll never get caught.”

It wasn’t exactly that easy. There were tools and techniques. There were strategies she taught me—strategies in which I will never lose my expertise. Rubber bands, bottle openers, booster bags, decoys. Angles to be worked out. You had to know the blind spots. But, according to Francie, not one of those specifics was nearly as important as what she called “the becoming.”

“The becoming” was what you told yourself before the hit. It was reminding yourself that it all belonged to you, and that you were doing nothing wrong. It was leaving your own body and letting something fearless and hungry inhabit it instead. In Francie’s case, it was donning a spooky, blinding
camouflage. It was channeling the sun. Too hot to look at. That was just Francie. For me, it turned out, it was something entirely different.

Francie knew that the closer it got to Christmas, the less anyone at the mall had time to worry about a couple of teenage girls. Around the holiday, according to her, you could really go crazy. So we ditched seventh period on Friday afternoon the week before Thanksgiving and caught the bus down Georgia Avenue to the mall.

I still hadn’t stolen anything big. Up till then it had been all trinkets for me; junky crap that no one would care about if they caught me. And even when it came to that stuff, I was so unsmooth that I couldn’t figure out why Francie thought I would make a suitable accomplice. Just the intention of stealing anything made me edgy: eyes darting, mouth twitching, movements all jerky, totally suspicious-looking. It was a miracle I hadn’t been busted.

For some reason, Francie believed in me despite my complete amateurishness. She believed that I had something special and had decided that it was time for me to take it to the next level. To steal big, earn my stripes. Thanksgiving being the perfect time for it. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the idea. Okay, I did know how I felt about it. Not good.

“It’s all about the
becoming,”
she explained for the trillionth time on the bus ride over. “You get that down and
you’ll be able to steal anything at all. You’ll be fine, I promise. I can always tell.”

I hadn’t really figured out what she was talking about with that business, which sounded kind of New Age-y to me. But I tried to act confident as we marched into the Limited, the two of us with loping, tigery strides, Francie in a pink tulle ballerina skirt and me in a checked micromini jumper.

The confidence was just an act, obviously. I hadn’t gotten any more comfortable dressing this way since my haircut. I just kept it up to make Francie happy. To experience the look of unvarnished pride on her face when she saw me in a shorter skirt, a higher pair of heels. She said it gave me
gravity,
and I guess that part was good, because before I’d met Francie, I had been worried that I might just float away.

As soon as we stepped into the store that day, Francie touched my hand, smiled, and made a casual beeline for the sale racks in the back corner, leaving me by myself. We had a plan. Or more like Francie had a plan and I was a part of it. I was just happy to be a player in her grand scheme—a scheme that I imagined to be part of an even grander one, and then another on top of that.

But on that particular day, the agenda was as simple as it was practical. Francie would run distraction in the sale racks while I worked the bigger-ticket items near the entrance. I was going to hit big.

Francie headed to the back, clearing her throat and
rustling clothes as she walked, touching everything she passed, unfolding shirts and knocking them aside, drawing stares from every quarter. Her neckline plunged halfway down her chest, and she had her boobs pushed up around her shoulders, thanks to some mysterious undergarment. How could you not stare? No one was paying any attention to me at all, which really was the whole point.

I wandered the front of the store aimlessly, my eyes swinging back and forth in search of the perfect thing to steal. They were blasting Shakira, but I could still hear Francie from the back of the store as if she was standing right next to me. “Excuse me? Excuse me, ma’am? This shirt has a hole in it. Right here. See? Right there next to the collar. How should I know how it got there? Do you think I could get a discount? I’ll give you four ninety-nine.”

Francie was chattering away. She had a talent for spectacle. I didn’t look in her direction, but even without looking I could see her vamping and showboating, tossing her hair and batting her mascara-greased eyelashes until she had dark, scratchy lines etched above her cheekbones. When she wanted to, Francie had this absolute force of presence. I could have seen her with my eyes closed; I could have seen her with a blindfold on.

Someone had put the jacket away wrong. I’d noticed a rack of black leather motorcycle jackets right by the entrance as soon as I’d stepped into the store, but I hadn’t paid much
attention, since they were all wired to a central alarm system that would go off if you tried to unplug any of them, and I had nowhere near the nerve for that. But then, passing a lonely column of fleece hoodies, I spied the hint of a leather sleeve peeking out from behind the plush, bright microfiber.

I looked again. It was unmistakable. Peeling back the layers of hoodies, I saw it, there by itself, free for the taking. No sensor, no alarm, no ink tag. A black leather zip-front motorcycle jacket, sleek and slim with a Nehru collar. Someone had put it away wrong. And I can’t really tell you if I believe in fate or not, but the fact of the matter is that at that moment it seemed like the jacket had been waiting for me. I wanted it.

I looked at the price tag: $300.50. I looked around. No one was paying attention to me. But I couldn’t do it. Just standing that close to it made me feel like I was attracting suspicion.

Be the sun,
Francie had said.

It had seemed like good advice at the time, but when it came time to implement it, the total uselessness of it struck me.
Too hot to look at,
I said to myself, and I pictured myself on fire. I pictured myself as a spinning disco ball, throwing flash in every direction; as a bolt of lightning; as a shattering star, a flaming arrow shooting for a bull’s-eye. But I wasn’t any of those things. I was not the sun. I wasn’t even a blonde.

I was myself. Even if I had fooled Francie into thinking I was someone important, it didn’t change the fact that I was
Valentina Martinez. People like me didn’t steal things, and they definitely didn’t wear jackets like this one.

I stared at it. It was gorgeous—more gorgeous on further inspection than it had even first appeared. I toyed with a sleeve, rubbed the cuff between my fingers, feeling the leather. It was soft—too soft. Almost like it was still alive. And when I ran the back of my hand against the jacket’s breast pocket, I could feel something like a rhythm beneath the surface of the material, beating back against my knuckles.

Something happened. Off in what sounded like the distance, I could hear Francie squabbling with a clerk. I paid no attention. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, and I didn’t care. There was something building inside of me, a black inky rage that I couldn’t quite understand. It was anger, but not the kind I was used to from my brother and stepfather. This was something quieter; something slithering and austere. It was powerful. Subtle. I liked it.

Then I was putting on the jacket. I just put it on. I’m not saying I was possessed or anything; it wasn’t like that. I knew exactly what I was doing. I just took it off the rack, without a thought, and slipped it on and zipped it up, and as the zipper closed, I was surprised to find that it felt like I was shedding a skin instead of gaining a new one. Without hesitation, I turned and walked out of the store, not thinking,
I just stole a three-hundred-dollar jacket,
but thinking,
This jacket looks amazing on me.
Not wondering where Francie was
or what she was doing, but knowing without a doubt that she was right on my heels.

Francie and I had decided to meet in the handicap stall by Sears. The handicap bathroom at any mall is always deserted and is generally hidden somewhere in a dim alcove somewhere off the beaten path. There’s usually a handicap stall by the food court, too, but Francie and I tried to avoid those because they were always full of bulimics. The “handicap” part was important because the wheelchair stall was big enough for two people, with a door that went all the way to the tiles so no one could tell you were in there. That was where we caught our breath every day before heading home. It was where we took the loot from our bags, unballed it, and held it out at arm’s length, admiring it all under spastic white fluorescent light. Where we congratulated ourselves on the fruits of our misdemeanors.

Waiting for Francie in there ten minutes after stealing the leather jacket, my heart was not pounding. For the first time, I had walked out of the store unafraid of being caught. People always talk about what a rush shoplifting is, but that day, I hadn’t been scared and I hadn’t been excited. I had just been angry about something that I couldn’t name. It wasn’t until I was sitting there on the white and gray tile in the wheelchair stall, my back against the partition, that a wave of euphoria rushed over me—a delayed reaction. I had done it. The jacket was mine. I stood up, then sat again, then
stood up, then sat. I fiddled with the zipper, trying to find the perfect ratio of leather to cleavage.

When Francie came busting into the stall, I stood one more time.

“My God,” she said, out of breath. “You were amazing. Amazing. I couldn’t even keep track! I looked away for, like, one second, like, less than a second, and you were gone. The blink of an eye. Amazing!”

I didn’t say anything. I stood on my tiptoes and leaned in, and her eyes widened and then closed as I kissed her on the mouth.

Francie’s lips were waxy and kiwi-strawberry and I put my hand on hers, my fingertips smooth against her long and shiny nails. Francie, being Francie, made it French. That one time I kissed Francie, fluorescent lights lit us in the bathroom like jellyfish shining miles below everything. And I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. It wasn’t remotely romantic, or even very sexy. But that’s not to say it didn’t mean anything. Because it did.

It was a pact that bound us. It was a kiss to say, We are deadly. We are sisters. Just to say, Genuine Italian Leather.

Francie with her eyes closed and her tongue cautiously in my mouth. Francie was hot and then she was blinding. Francie was burning and then she was the sun. Francie was the sun and I was—I don’t know—something opposite.