Virgin Territory (17 page)

Ora pulls out some of the packaged gowns; each one looks like the dusty chrysalis of an enormous and ancient butterfly that’s missed its once-in-a-century cycle. She lays them all out on the bed, and we gather around to watch them be revived. The first one is an apple-green number covered with fake leaves that glitter and sparkle up the shoulder. The skirt is all fluff and chiffon. I’m not an expert in the field, but I can tell the dress is not exactly a style that’s considered up to date. Still, there’s something undeniably fantastic about it.

“Try it on!” Marie commands. “Try it on!”

“And someone go down the hall to see about getting us
some refreshments,” Ora says, throwing the command over her shoulder. “This maybe gonna take a while.”

I grab Angela’s hand and pull her out into the hallway. But just as we’re leaving the room, I catch sight of Crispy rolling his eyes at us. He knows what’s going on. For several days, he’s been steering me away from any future involvement with Angela, either real or imagined. His warnings are always vague, but they’re lobbed at me with enough dark foreboding and oomph that I’m forced to pay attention. “Trust me,” he says when the two of us are alone. “You don’t want to go there.”

“You’re just jealous,” I tell him, since he’s been unwilling to say exactly what’s in store for me if I persist.

Once Angela and I are in the hallway, she pulls her hand away and refuses to take another step.

“What’s going on?” she asks me. “Why’d you drag me out of there? It was just getting good. I wanted to see the dresses.”

I spin her around and then ask her point-blank, “Okay, I need to know. Are you ignoring me?”

“What?”

“I mean, I need to know if you like me.”

“If I like you,” she echoes.

“Yes. Like seriously
like
me. I’m sorry, but I need to know. It’s driving me crazy. You haven’t said a word to me all day and … Just tell me. Do I have any hope?”

“Hope?” she repeats back to me.

It’s just the two of us. I’m here. She’s there. The long hallway
fills with silence, and a chasm opens up between us. She and I are instantly transformed into two parallel lines running into forever without the possibility of ever touching. The truth is, I like her more than she likes me. She doesn’t want me as a boyfriend. Not in the least. And she never will. Our lines will never meet. I can see that now.

“Oh. You mean …?”

She reaches out to touch my shoulder, but I jump back and do a fancy turn, which nearly knocks me over. I end up facing the wall like a punished student. I decide to stay that way—forever. My life is over. Done. I bang my forehead, slowly, very slowly—one, two, three, four times—against the concrete.

“Don’t,” Angela says, slipping her hand between my head and the wall. “Don’t. Listen. One day you’ll meet someone, and she’ll be crazy in love with you. And you’ll just know. It’ll be obvious.”

“Way obvi,” I grumble toward the concrete wall.

“Esssaaactly! And not just to you, but to everyone. You won’t even have to ask.”

We stay that way for several minutes, her cool hand between my forehead and the wall. Neither of us says a word. It’s as though we’re both making an adjustment that can’t be talked about or figured out—only lived.

“I’m no good for you, Dylan. Maybe if I was Marta and you were Alex, I mean, if we were our true selves, we’d be a good fit, but … as we are? I don’t know. We’ll still be friends, though,
right?” She makes this last statement sound more like a question.

“Sure,” I reply. “We’ll be friends.”

As we reenter Marie’s room, Crispy can tell that something just happened. But there isn’t an opportunity for him to grill me, so he lets it go.

Des comes waltzing out of the bathroom wearing a dark blue satin number with a giant flower stuck to her waist. Everyone takes a quick intake of breath and then lets out the appropriate
oohs
and
aahs
. She looks like someone who can win a contest, someone worth rooting for. Ora swoons and clasps her hands to her breasts. Crispy gives an all-out wolf whistle. Tears gather in Marie’s eyes, and then one by one they begin to drop onto the front of her housedress.

“I wore that dress the night I met Frank Sinatra,” she says as she swipes a tissue from the box beside her and dabs at her eyes. Ora goes to stand beside Marie, ready to catch her and pull her back up if she begins to fall down into a memory hole. “He grabbed me by the waist, Frank did, and pulled me to him. He smelled of smoke and strong cologne. I thought he was gonna carry me off and marry me that night. I guess my whole life woulda been different, huh?”

Des sits on the edge of the bed and takes Marie’s hand. She alights like an African fairy princess who has just come to enchant Marie and grant her one last moment of remembering. It’s a touching sight, and we all stand back and let it happen.

“Did you
want
to marry Frank Sinatra?” Des asks.

“Nah,” Marie replies as she smoothes the satin of the dress that now rightfully belongs to Des. “The guy could sing, but he was a bum.” Then she takes Des’s hand and pulls her toward her chair. “But you,” she says with a big smile, “you, I would marry this minute if I had half a chance.”

Then we all sit around while Marie tells Desirée stories of her past—the night Granddad swept her off her dancing feet, the time a girl taught her how to do a quick step ball change, the night she saved Tony Bennett from choking on a chicken bone. Somehow she has tapped into the stream, and the stories are pouring out of her. It’s as though she’s determined to pass the stories to Des, along with the dress.

A person can never be 100 percent certain about anything in this world—that’s the one thing about which I’m entirely certain. I once thought that gravity was going to be it. Every single one of us, whether we happen to be a hot-dog vendor or a semiprofessional videographer, whether we agree to it or not, is subject to the same law, is controlled by the same unseen force that keeps us tethered to this planet and prevents us from floating up and off into outer space: gravity. But it turns out that there’s a lot they don’t understand about gravity. For example, scientists can’t really explain gravity. They know
how
it works, but not what it is or where it comes from. Go figure.

“They know a lot,” Mr. Blyer, my sophomore-year natural studies instructor, explained to the class. “But some things remain beyond the horizon of our current knowing.”

Nice.

I’m convinced he told us this in order to prove that science is an exciting new frontier worthy of our attention, but it only
proves to me that I am right in assuming that nothing is for sure.

Consider Pluto.

At the moment, the only thing I’m absolutely certain of is how I feel about Angela. Even though my confidence has taken an impressive and unexpected nosedive, my affection is still there.

It’s not even eleven o’clock, and the thermometer is topping one hundred. The sun is blazing hot and all the green leafy things are seriously drooping. Crispy and Desirée are present and accounted for, but Angela is MIA. Calls have been made. Angela hasn’t been picking up. Something’s going on, and I’m sure I blew it by asking her if she liked me.

“She’ll show up,” Desirée assures us as she scans the crowd. “Angela’s not going to miss my videotaping. Not after all the prep we’ve done. I’ll kill her if she doesn’t show.”

“And what about your dad?” asks Crispy, also craning his neck to get a perspective on the crowd.

“Oh, he’ll be here,” I say, giving the crowd a once-over. “He promised me. And Doug’s pretty good about not breaking promises: that’s why he doesn’t promise me much. I’m going to text Angela one more time.”

As I scroll through my addresses, Crispy and Des exchange a look. By this time, I’ve learned to read their signals. I’m thinking that they have a secret.

“What?” I ask them point-blank.

“Come on,” Crispy says as he stands up. “You might as well know.”

He tells Des that we’ll be back in a bit and to call when Doug shows up. Then he motions to me, and the two of us head off in the direction of a nearby field that’s been turned into a parking lot. When we turn the corner and come into a clearing, we stop and stare at the long lineup of Acuras and Hondas and Toyotas and Saturns; they all sit there in the noonday sun looking like the dead and empty shells of some extinct species of giant beetle.

Crispy lifts his sunglasses and nods in the direction of a pickup truck, midnight blue, banged-up, with its back gate hanging open. A girl sits there, swigging from a water bottle and dangling her long bare legs. I guess you could say that I acknowledge the boy and girl before I see them, which is to say that my eyes take them in and register the fact of them without actually seeing what is going on. They have no story attached to them; they’re just two people hanging out together in a field, à la carte. The guy is leaning up against the gate, trying to grab the water bottle away from the girl. But the minute I hear her laugh, my brain allows the story to unfold; in this new story Angela has a boyfriend, and the boyfriend’s name is Chad.

“But that … that’s …,” I sputter.

“Yeah, Chad,” Crispy replies, even though my eyeballs have provided all the confirmation I need. “The dumb guy you caddy with. He and Angela. Need I say more?”

I’m thinking that it would be better if I just looked away. But
I can’t seem to move my head, so in a lame attempt to draw a veil and eliminate the whole tragic scenario, I opt to close my eyes. When I open them again, I discover that Angela and Chad are still there, but now they’re kissing. The kiss goes on and on until it’s official: nothing can undo it now. When they finally come up for air, she laughs; he throws his whole body against her, pulls her close, and nuzzles her neck.

“How long?” are the words I manage to eek out.

“Almost a week,” Crispy replies. “We didn’t know how to tell you.”

Just then Angela looks up, and she sees Crispy and me standing at the edge of the lot. We must look like old news, her personal Pluto. Chad is what’s happening; he is now, all get-up-and-go, the current center of her solar system. I turn and begin to walk away.

“Dude!” Crispy calls after me. “Wait up!”

I slow just enough so that he can catch up to me, and when we’ve cleared the side of the building, I stop to yell at him:
“You could’ve told me! You, of all people! You knew! You knew and didn’t bother to tell me. How could you have
not
told me?”

“Whoa,” is all he offers. But then after a beat, he adds, “I tried.”

The first punch doesn’t land, but I don’t let that stop me. I just keep swinging at him until eventually I feel my fist bang hard against his head. The hurt is sharp and immediate, and my knuckles sting. I instinctively grab my fist and pull it to my
lips to suck the wound. Crispy takes the opportunity to punch me hard in the gut; the air goes flying out of me and I stagger backward. I catch my balance just in time to swallow a terrible urge to wretch. Then I go charging back at him. He doesn’t look frightened enough, so I start screaming at the top of my lungs—a banshee’s cry, loud and clear and fierce. Crispy isn’t much bigger than me, and yet he is barely rocked when I slam into him. We tussle for a minute, our arms and legs grappling for advantage, and then he throws me to the ground with one deft move. He’s on top of me, has both my arms pinned to the ground, and he’s yelling—telling me over and over, to quit it, to chill out, to shut up before he’s forced to really haul off and hurt me.

When I manage to quiet down and stop struggling, Crispy rolls off me. He’s lying beside me in the grass, panting.

“Ma-an,” he finally says, and I can tell by the way he exaggerates the word that he’s having trouble wrapping his brain around what just happened. I’m right with him on that score.

“I’m an idiot,” I say to him, though I direct my comment up toward the sky.

“Yeah, well … me, too.”

“What am I gonna do?”

“What we all do,” he says. “Go on.”

“Right,” I reply. “But how?”

The question hangs in the air between us. Neither of us has the answer.

“Beauty pageants,” I say, because that’s what seems to be in
my immediate future. I notice that I sound pretty disgusted with it as a possibility. “I mean, we don’t even care about crap like that, do we?”

“No,” he replies. “But then again, it’s not about the pageant, is it? And it’s not about Des. For you and me, it’s all about Angela.”

He rolls over onto his stomach and stares at me. I don’t know what he’s hoping to see, but whatever it is, I’m determined not to show it. He’s already seen too much for one day.

“What?” I ask him.

“Don’t you get it?” he asks. “How do you think I knew to warn you? Me and Angela, dude. I saw her when we were both in Stone Mountain, Georgia. But she wouldn’t give me the time of day. She was too busy with this other guy. Then we got here, and for a couple of days I was her ‘it’ guy. But she dropped me when she met you. Now she’s dropped you for Chad. Just like she’s going to drop Chad for some other guy. Anyway, I tried to warn you.”

“You did,” I say as I turn over onto my stomach.

“And on top of everything else, she stole my wallet.” He gingerly touches the bruise on his face and winces. “Geez, that hurt. I never shoulda told you.”

“What do you mean, she stole your wallet? For real?”

“For real. Oh, she gave it back to me—eventually. But it was missing the fifty bucks that I had in it. At least I got my fake ID and my Social Security card back.”

“Are you saying she stole your money?”

“Yeah. Anyway, I’m leaving in a couple of days,” Crispy announces without any fanfare and no intro at all. “So that’s that.”

“No!”
I cry. “What about the pageant?”

He laughs out loud and says, “Gotta go, man. School’s starting next week. And let’s face it, we’re done here.”

“That’s just cold.”

“And my mom’s had it. She says this whole thing’s turned into a kind of circus, and she’s not interested anymore. Says the Virgin Mary experience has been diluted.”

Crispy gets himself up and onto his feet, brushes stuff off his pants, and checks his phone for a text. “Come on,” he says. “Angela just showed up at mission control. Let’s get this over with.”