Confessions of an Angry Girl

by Louise Rozett

  “Robert McCormack. Do you know him?”

  “I don’t think so. Is he in your class?”

  “Yes. Are you here with Frankie?”

  She affectionately rolls her eyes. “Who else?” she says. Frankie and Michelle have been together since she was thirteen. Frankie was homecoming king all four years of high school, even as a freshman. It must have been a bit of a comedown from king of Union High to general manager of Cavallo’s. I wonder when it will dawn on Michelle that that is all Frankie will ever do. Maybe Michelle knows already and doesn’t care because Frankie is so incredibly hot that most people would never wonder what she was doing with him. But somehow I doubt that. She seems like she might not want her life to be tied to a pizza parlor that’s open seven days a week, fourteen hours a day.

  When I met Michelle at Peter’s graduation party last year, she told me a story about being in shop class with Peter in junior high. Mr. Dray had been called out of class, and Peter decided to entertain everyone, standing up on a table and improvising a song called “Shop Class Blues” to the tune of Elvis’s “Blue Suede Shoes.” Michelle claimed she laughed so hard she wet her pants and was excused for the rest of the day. I think she had a crush on Peter back then. Sometimes I like to imagine what my life would be like if Michelle had gone out with Peter instead of Frankie. I’d practically be Union High royalty.

  “Here, ’Chelle,” says Regina, reaching across me again to return the gloss. She takes a few steps back and turns to get a good look at her ass in the mirror, as if it could have changed significantly from the last time she checked it a few seconds ago.

  “Did you go to dinner?” asks Michelle.

  “We went to Shaun’s. Me and Robert, and Tracy and Matt, and Stephanie and Mike—you know, that whole group.” Of course she doesn’t know, but she nods and smiles anyway. “How was your—”

  “Come on, Michelle,” squawks Regina, fluttering and jostling at the door with the other girls, who look like a flock of impatient parakeets. “They’re waiting.”

  “All right. Have a good time, Rose,” she says. “I’ll see you out there.”

  “Good luck. I’m sure you’ll win.”

  “Of course she’ll win,” hisses Regina, glaring at me. “Michelle always wins.” She flings open the door and I see the guys waiting for the homecoming court, red roses pinned to their lapels. Frankie takes Michelle’s hand, and his best friend, Sal, who I recognize from Peter’s hockey days, puts his arm around Susan. Regina looks around, shoots a nasty glance at me over her shoulder and says, “Where’s Forta? I told him to wait.” The door shuts, saving me from being reduced to a pile of ash.

  My face is hot. The zit crop throbs. I picture Jamie kissing her at that stupid party, and I have to swallow.

  I leave the safety of the bathroom for the snake pit of the gym. It is pitch-black in the corners with bright red-and-blue lights flashing on the hardwood floor. The music is so loud that the chaperones can’t stand to be in the room, so they’re all standing just outside, talking to each other and peering into the darkness every once in a while to make sure there are no orgies going on. I suspect they all went out to dinner earlier and got drunk. How else could they stand a night like this? I find Robert talking to Mike about the fight he and Stephanie just had about which after-party to go to.

  “Robert, can I have the keys?” I say, trying not to see anyone around me. “I left my bag in the car.”

  “I’ll go get it.”

  “No, that’s okay, I could use the air.”

  “I could use a cigarette.”

  “You said you wouldn’t smoke tonight.”

  “I know, Rosie, I was just kidding. Come on, let me be chivalrous. I’ll go get your bag.”

  “Robert, please just give me the keys.”

  “Um…okay.” He digs deep into all his pockets, finding his keys in the last one he searches, inside his jacket. “Here. Don’t go anywhere. It’s my first time out with my stepfather’s Lexus, and he’ll kill me if I lose it.”

  “I can’t drive yet, remember?”

  “Joke, Rosie. That was a joke. Are you okay?”

  I ignore him and head toward the back door. Someone clamps a hand on my shoulder. I jump, imagining Regina with her fist cocked back, ready to punch me in the face when I turn around. “You’re not supposed to go outside until the dance is over.” It seems to be Mr. Cella’s lot in life to keep kids from going where they want to go. Reasonless tears spring to my eyes.

  “I know, I just…I have to get out.” I look up at him, the tears now rolling down my cheeks. In that instant, I learn the unfortunate lesson that some men will give a woman anything in order to stop her from crying, or at the very least, to get her to go cry somewhere else. He looks uncomfortable and awkwardly pats me on the shoulder, waving me in the direction of the door. I wonder what he’d do if I cried in study hall when I want to go talk to Tracy.

  As if I have any control over this stupid crying thing.

  I push open the heavy metal door to the back parking lot between the school and the track, and the cold December air rushes into my lungs. I run to the car, and as I slide behind the steering wheel, I step on my bag, which has somehow found its way to the floor. Something crunches. I can’t figure out what it could be, until I remember my mom lending me her compact so I could check for food in my teeth after dinner. I kick off my shoes and slouch down, my head against the headrest. I see two people leaning on a car nearby, kissing, backlit by the lights of the school. They look perfect.

  There’s a knock at the passenger-side window. Jamie raises his hand. I blink at him, wondering if I’m seeing things. He knocks again. I realize he wants me to let him in. He gets one boot in the car before I figure out that I should let go of the door. I turn and look out the rear window to see if anyone followed him, but there’s no one there.

  “What are you doing here?” I whisper, as if Regina could hear me over the blasting music from all the way inside the gym.

  “Want me to go?”

  “No, I just—no.”

  We sit. We stare out the windshield. I’m about to start talking, and then I decide that I’m not going to be the first one. He came out here, he can do the talking.

  “So you think I’m a liar, huh?” he asks.

  “I don’t really think that.”

  “Still mad about the Peter thing?”

  I think for a minute. “I’m more mad at Peter than at you.” He doesn’t say anything. So much for me making him do the talking. “Having a good time?” I finally muster.

  “Not really.”

  “Did you go to dinner before?”

  “Fitzpatrick’s.”

  “Was it good?”

  He shrugs, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a piece of paper folded in quarters. I watch as he opens it. It’s a grocery list. He refolds it and puts it back in his pocket.

  “Why aren’t you having a good time?” I ask.

  “Same reason you aren’t.”

  “I never said I wasn’t having a good time,” I counter, proud of myself.

  “So why are you out here?”

  “I needed a break.”

  “Me, too,” he says.

  I can see his breath. He doesn’t breathe very often. I inhale and exhale three times for every breath he takes.

  “Why did you need a break?”

  “Regina.”

  I make an unattractive snorting sound and instantly regret it on so many levels. He says not
hing. “She’s mean,” comes out of my mouth.

  “To you?”

  “To everyone,” I say. “Are you guys really going out?”

  He shrugs, and his starched shirt moves in one stiff piece up to his ears and back down. He has on a black tie, a black jacket, black pants, construction boots.

  “I’ve never seen you dressed up. You look really nice.”

  He stares out the passenger-side window. “So do you.”

  “No, I don’t. My dress looks like something I would have worn to my sixth-grade graduation. And my hair is a disaster. It doesn’t do anything.”

  He looks at my hair for what feels like a long time. “What do you want your hair to do?”

  “Curl. Poof up. Anything but hang straight in my face.”

  “Why, so you can look like everyone else?” he says.

  Maybe he has a point.

  He reaches forward to fiddle with the latch on the glove compartment. I wonder what Robert would say if he knew I was sitting in his stepfather’s car with Jamie Forta when I’m supposed to be dancing with him in the gym. Well, I know what he’d say, actually. He’d say, “I told you so.” As I’m thinking about this, the glove compartment door falls open and a plastic bag slides to the floor. Jamie reaches for it and grabs the wrong end, dumping out the contents. He leans down to pick them up and hesitates. Then he puts them in the bag in the darkness of the floor well and sits up, shoving the bag back into the glove compartment and latching it shut. He puts his hands in his pockets and exhales. His breath hangs in the air between us.

  “What was that?” I ask.

  “Don’t know.”

  “You didn’t see?”

  “Not really.”

  “How could you put it back in the bag without seeing it?”

  Something about the expression on his face makes me reach past him to open the glove compartment. He carefully studies the car parked next to us as I take the crinkly bag out and find two boxes of condoms. Two.

  “Those for you?” he asks.

  “No!” I wrap the bag over itself a few times and jam it back into the glove compartment as if it were burning my hands.

  “Whose car is this?”

  “Robert’s.”

  “Aren’t you here with him?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But they’re not for you?”

  “Robert and I aren’t even going out!”

  “Guess he’s thinking tonight’s gonna be his lucky night.”

  “Well, he’s not getting lucky with me. He’s just a friend.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Not like you and Regina Deladdo.” I spit her name out with such a vengeance it surprises us both.

  “What do you got against her?”

  “She hates me. She stares me down in the halls.”

  “So, what did you do to her? You musta done something.”

  The answer to that question is, I was followed by her boyfriend. But I don’t feel like saying that. Jamie opens the glove compartment again and takes the bag out. He looks inside and smiles. “You know how many times you gotta have sex to go through two boxes of condoms?” I realize that I don’t actually know anything technical or practical about condoms. Ms. Maso would be very disappointed in me. “If a guy is takin’ you to a dance and you find two unopened, new boxes of Trojans in his glove compartment, you can bet they’re for you.”

  “Well, I don’t want them, so you can put them back.”

  “What I’m sayin’ is, he likes you.”

  “I don’t like him.”

  “So why are you with him?”

  “Why are you with her?”

  “Favor for a friend.”

  “Same with me.” Did he just say that Regina is his friend? Is that what he meant? I’m suddenly exhausted. I want my sweatpants. “Why does he think that…that something like that could happen between us?”

  “He’s a guy.”

  “I don’t even want to know what that means.”

  “Guys are always prepared. In case they get lucky.”

  “Why do guys get so obsessed with sex? It’s dumb.”

  “You haven’t done it yet.” How does he know that? I’m so irritated with Jamie’s ability to make me blush that it almost overrides my embarrassment. I memorize the grooves on the steering wheel. “I embarrassed you,” he says.

  I shake my head. When he reaches for the door, I panic and ask the first question that comes into my mind. “Are you going to get ‘lucky’ tonight, Jamie?”

  And then something miraculous happens. He laughs. It’s the first time I’ve heard his laugh—it’s warm and rich, and I want to wrap myself up in it—but I’m too busy being jealous to fully appreciate it.

  “That depends,” he says.

  “On what?”

  “What you consider lucky.”

  “Sex. With her. Regina,” I say, annoyed by his dumb question.

  “No.”

  “Then you’re not going to get lucky.”

  “Not with her.”

  “You’re going to have sex with someone else?” I say, furious and clueless.

  “No.”

  “So how are you going to get lucky?”

  The next minute happens in slow motion. Jamie Forta turns to me, puts his warm hand on my neck, and pulls me toward him. It dawns on me that he is about to kiss me, and I panic because I’ve never kissed an older man—I’ve never kissed anyone for real, only while playing stupid games at junior high school parties—and he surely must know everything there is to know because he’s wiser and he’s a bad boy and he gets around and I’m just a silly girl and none of that matters because his lips are on mine and it’s so easy I can hardly believe I worried I wouldn’t know what to do. His thumb strokes my cheekbone while his fingers clasp the back of my neck. His other hand is in my flat and boring hair, pulling down lightly, causing my head to tilt back. His tongue traces the outline of my lips and finds its way inside my mouth. He’s gentle and moves slowly, but he has a firm hold on my hair, and he’s increasing the force of the pull, exposing my throat. His lips disappear from mine, and I feel them a second later in the hollow between my collarbones. He finds his way up the side of my neck, biting me just a little, moving lightly back and forth, like he’s searching for a special spot. When he finds it, I make a small sound I’ve never heard myself make before, like a gasp. He traces his tongue in slow circles around that spot. I realize my hands are just lying in my lap, doing nothing. I concentrate on lifting my arm and reaching for his face, but he catches my hand and holds it tightly at the wrist. His lips leave the spot and find their way back to my mouth, which is waiting, hoping for his return. He plants a gentle kiss on my lower lip and then whispers in my ear, “I just got lucky, Rose.”

  He’s gone before I’ve opened my eyes. If it weren’t for the rearview mirror, I’d think I imagined the entire thing. As I try to remember how to breathe, I watch to see if he looks back, but he heads straight for the door as if he hadn’t just given me what I’m sure is the best first kiss in the history of humankind.

  As he goes back inside, Robert comes out, his hand raised in greeting. Jamie nods slightly as they pass each other. Robert watches Jamie go and then looks out toward the car. I can barely move. The last thing I want to do is talk to Robert right now. I want to sit here and relive what just happened, over and over again, and try to relearn how to inhale.

  But then I remember the glove compartment and I decide to head Robert off at th
e pass. I get one foot out the door and realize I forgot to put my shoes back on.

  “Find your bag?”

  “Yes.”

  “What took you so long?”

  “I was sitting in the car,” I say, struggling to get my shoes on, not looking at him.

  “You’re not having a good time.”

  “Robert, why are there two boxes of condoms in your glove compartment?”

  He blanches, shocked. Then the shock turns to anger, and the blood rushes back into his face. “Why are you snooping around in my car?”

  “I wasn’t snooping. I was looking for a tissue. And the bag fell on the floor. And they fell out. Why do you have them?”

  “Just in case.”

  “Just in case what?”

  “You know, just in case…we…” He trails off. I leave him twisting in the wind for a few seconds before I let him have it.

  “Are you crazy, Robert?” I slam the car door shut.

  “Well, I didn’t know what you wanted to do! How should I know? What if you wanted to and I didn’t have anything?”

  “You’re not even my boyfriend!”

  “Fine! Just forget it.”

  “Is that why you asked me to come to this stupid dance with you?”

  “I just wanted you to be my date.”

  “You could have told me you were expecting me to have sex with you!”

  “Rose, I wasn’t expecting anything! Just forget they’re there. They don’t matter, okay?” We stand there in the cold, me staring at him, him staring at his shoes. “I’m sorry, Rose.”

  “Let’s go in,” I say. We start back to the gym, both of us shivering.

  “Want my jacket?”

  “It’s zero degrees out here, Robert. Keep it for yourself.”

  “I don’t want you to be cold.”

  “We’re almost there.”

  “Will you dance with me?”

  “I don’t really feel like it.”

  He reaches to open the door and stops with his hand on the handle. “Rose?”