Sometimes being in my mind, you have to be really fucking careful.
Plus, I wouldn’t wish it on Felicia.
Newman taps my shoulder. He has taken his first hit of the evening.
I do the same, a little uncomfortable about walking the NYC streets with a lit blunt. Newman brushes me off. He is going to be living there soon; better get some practice.
We end up getting to the mall late. Pete is already there, which we knew from the text messages he was sending, and his first report was not good. We also knew already that the girls were nasty. He was providing the details:
Nadine = fugly, just fugly
Jodi = fat + bad skin
Claudia = butterface; big Ts tho
Which is OK with me, as I already put in for Claudia, based on those Facebook pics.
We spot them sitting at a table in the food court. Pete did not do them justice. Two of them were not just fugly, they, as in Nadine and Jodi, were heinous, nothing like their Facebook pics. But I thought Claudia was way cuter than Pete gave her credit for.
They get up to greet me like I’m Brad Fucking Pitt, and I instantly remember again how great it is to be a hero. Sometimes a random person will nod at me like they know me, not realizing that they just recognized me from TV. I have, on occasion, signed autographs. Tonight I am planning to get even more familiar.
Newman tells them that we are carrying, plus he produces two “bottled waters,” and we pour some Kennyjuice into their Diet Cokes, which, for girls who have probably been warned not to take anything from strangers, does not seem to be a problem. They drink and laugh and Nadine is all over me, but I am focused on Claudia, who, I’m thinking, Pete is totally wrong about. Not only is she kind of pretty, she also has a sexiness to her. Pete, the most discriminating of us, would call her porky, but she wears her roundness well, as far as I’m concerned. She’s got this Latina vibe that makes her way hotter than the average girl. What does Pete know anyways? I have definitely questioned his taste in the past.
So we go out into the parking lot and light up, and the girls all want pictures with me, so I accommodate, posing with my hand held out in a sideways V, pursed lips, the same pose like I am in all my pictures. Then Pete gets into a discussion with Nadine, and I have my chance with Claudia, and next thing I know we are hooking up outside and so we move it to the BMW . . .
And I get her to go down on me.
She was unbelievably good at it. This girl had absolute technique. Plus she moved her entire body the whole time, like she was into it even more than I was, even though, tell you the truth, I wasn’t doing anything for her at all.
I could not stop laughing when she was done. I was laughing so hard that she started laughing too, even though she had no idea what we were laughing about, which kept me laughing even harder. I realized that I hadn’t actually laughed uncontrollably with a girl, not like that, since Burn’s sister made me laugh back in high school. Immediately I knew that I was going to have to see this girl again, no matter what. If for nothing else, to see if she was really this much fun, or whether it was just the weed and the night.
We stop laughing when my cell phone rings.
Christina. Fuck. It’s almost like she knows. I think this for an instant before I realize that she can’t possibly know. Plus she stopped calling me, so there is no reason for me to feel guilty, which I do not feel anyways.
Plus I am not in the mood for a serious conversation. I let it ring.
“Aren’t you going to answer?” Something about Claudia has changed for me, and she has become even more attractive.
Still, I better answer.
“Hi, Steven.” She sounds so serious. I look over at Claudia, who looks like she is ready to laugh again. No seriousness in this one. “Are you there, Steven?”
“Me? Yeah.”
“So. Hi.”
“Yeah, hi.” Again, I am never completely on my game with Christina.
“So I was thinking. I haven’t seen The Dark Knight yet and pretty much everyone else has.”
“Yeah, I saw it.” Then, realizing what she was actually saying, I stopped myself, not wanting to miss out on the opportunity. “Yeah, I would definitely see it again. Look, can I call you back?”
“Tonight?”
“Yeah, in like an hour.”
“No, I mean the movie. Tonight? It’s at the IMAX.”
“Can’t. I’m not home now,” I tell her. “What about tomorrow?” I look over; Claudia is losing interest. I don’t want her to leave.
“Can’t tomorrow.”
“Friday?”
“Yeah, OK.”
Then she hangs up, leaving me to figure out what exactly was going on in her mind. My last image of her was her walking away in disgust and me almost getting vomited on.
Oh well. I chalk it up to the residue of the magic, which I always seem to get an extra dose of from Felicia (or which, she claims, I have in me in the first place).
“Is that your girlfriend?”
“It’s . . . complicated.”
“Whatever she can do for you, I can do it better.”
“Yep” is all I say. As in, yep, I will definitely be seeing this girl again.
We exchange cell numbers. I double-check that it’s correct by calling her, so she answers while still in my car. She likes this, and she starts laughing again. This girl certainly laughs a lot. As for me, I want to be absolutely certain that I get to see her again.
I drop her off by her friends. Newman gets back into the car, takes a look at me, and laughs, knowing I got a hero’s welcome, which is what he calls it. It got me to thinking that Burn had his own code word for it, as in the “Ultimate Kiss.”
Chapter Nine
How Burn Got His First Kiss
In the months after Jacob moved out, my mom went from being this stressed-out housewife to this supercharged business woman/working mom, constantly in a rush, constantly in control, as she adjusted to her new life. She filed for divorce almost immediately, not that any of us thought for a second that there would be any kind of reconciliation, not after what happened. The other thing that Caroline Crashinsky did immediately was revert to her maiden name and go back to being Caroline Prescott. She also started working out like a fiend at the gym in the same strip mall as the real estate office where she worked. So in a few months, my mom, already considered a milf in her own right, was getting even more milfy (this according to my friends, as I would not have recognized this on my own). Maybe because she felt she needed to show my father that she could survive without him, or maybe she was just as happy as I was that he was gone. Who could tell?
Point was, she didn’t seem to mind the whole divorce thing one bit.
They had their separate lawyers and almost never talked, except through Lindsey, which only made Lindsey feel more important, especially since she was essentially in charge of all of our visitation plans, having the most frequent direct access to Jacob. As for Lindsey, apparently her war with Roxanne had escalated as word got out about all of the explicit details of the Thanksgiving Day fiasco. Lindsey figured Roxanne was the source, as who else could it be? The only other potential source, David, had gone back to his school for emotional misfits and was out of touch. I wondered whether Roxanne would have done that—not that I would have blamed her—and I hoped that I would get a chance to talk to her again, just so I could tell her it was just fine with me. But, being as we went to different schools, I never actually got the chance. Besides, although I couldn’t admit it to Lindsey, it might have even come from me, for all I know, since I didn’t exactly keep it a secret from my friends.
I heard very little about Burn for the rest of seventh grade. After a few random emails between Thanksgiving and Christmas, there was radio silence from him. And while my mom still talked to Mrs. Burnett, the conversations were apparently kept to a minimum, as my mom was fully preoccupied with her new life. The one thing I remember overhearing was that Burn was still having a problem with medications, and they
were constantly experimenting with new treatments for him, but nothing mattered because no matter what they did, he continued going through his lifelong pattern of being either Too Up or Too Down, which was the way me and my friends often described him throughout high school.
For me, there was baseball and going to kids’ bar mitzvahs almost every weekend and school, which was going OK, except for math and Spanish, which I totally sucked at, and of course, just living life without Jacob, which was, not gonna lie, fucking fantastic.
Then, sometime in June, as if no time had elapsed, I get an IM from Burn with a one-line message: “How big are your father’s balls?” which I stupidly took literally and wondered what he knew about Jacob’s manhood, until he explained that he meant that any man who brings the girl he’s fucking home to his wife had to be out of touch and totally self-absorbed, especially if he thought he could get away with it.
He asked me how’s it going, and I told him that I saw Jacob every second or third weekend and that it wasn’t so bad, even though there were still fights (like every time). Then Burn asked me when was I going to officially thank him for saving my life, being as I didn’t have to go to boarding school and he had heard that my father moved out for good.
I found it funny that the kid who actually tried to kill me when I was younger, in fact, turned out to be the only person to come to my rescue when it really mattered. I guess at that moment I had decided to finally forgive him for what happened when we were kids.
I asked him how’s it going, and he told me that school was still hell—no, worse than hell—and they kept trying to fix him and make him fit in, which wasn’t going to happen because they didn’t understand that genius was not a disease, or at least a disease for which there was a cure.
I asked if he was coming home for the summer, and he said that coming home was not an option that was open to him, as his mother made arrangements to keep him there. What were my plans? he asked.
And of course before I could answer, he was gone, leaving me with one line, which was actually the title of an Evanescence song.
“Bring me to life.”
And I realized that, forgiveness or not, it was still a supreme relief to know that he wasn’t going to be back in town.
So seventh grade ended, and summer was about to begin, which meant that I would be going away to camp, which in the past was a great thing when I could escape for a few weeks from the fury of Jacob. Only this summer, with Jacob gone, I wanted to be home for the summer baseball league. Most of my friends were going to be playing in it, and they needed a shortstop, which was pretty much me or Feinblum, and Feinblum was going away all summer. So I worked out a compromise with my mom to go to camp in August, not July.
And so it was in July, on a Sunday night, after a rainy weekend of movies, one after another—Pirates of the Caribbean (the first one), Terminator 3, and then Finding Nemo (again)—with Jamie, that I heard from Burn again:
How HOT is Felicia, dude? Heard your dad moved in with her.
Which was how I got the news that Felicia was still in the picture.
I asked how he knew and, get this, he said that he knew because there was a photo of the two of them at some New York party that he found on the internet. He directed me to the site, and sure enough there were a bunch of images of the two of them at some sort of benefit thing, the kind of reception that Jacob would ordinarily have required my mom to attend with him.
And there she was again, looking model hot, even hotter than I remembered, which of course made my father look like a celebrity, but that didn’t mean that they were necessarily together as a couple—after all, she worked with him, and I said so to Burn and his answer was, “Trust me, dude” followed by “Bring me to life” and he was gone again.
It wasn’t until just before school started up again that I found out that Burn was telling the truth about my father and his girlfriend. I got this phone call. Actually Jamie handed me the phone while I was in the middle of playing the new Tomb Raider, telling me it’s for me and yeah, yeah, had to be Jacob doing his call before the weekend. Only not this time.
“Steefen, this is Felicia. We met before. Your father and I vood like your company dis veekent.”
And so my first time out with her, with them, was surprisingly normal: more movies, and me having to sit through Legally Blonde 2 with Lindsey, Jamie, and Felicia, and then shopping, where I noticed that most people were staring at her like she was some kind of royalty.
Like in the restaurant where we went for lunch, with waiters stopping by almost constantly to refill our water glasses, or the boutique she took us to, where everyone knew her by name and treated her more like a friend than a customer. She had this informal way about her, casually touching people all the time, like she had known them forever, and bursting into laughter with a comfortable confidence that you had to notice. I instantly liked her, almost as much as I disliked my father. She quickly won over Jamie as well, but Lindsey remained cautiously suspicious.
A few days later, my final year in middle school began, and I was feeling optimistic that I was going to do OK for a change. I just felt it, like this was the year it was all going to click in for me.
It wasn’t just me. Jamie, for some reason, was also in this great mood all the time. It got even better for us that fall because one particular afternoon just after school started, my mom, feeling guilty about not being around all the time as work got increasingly busy, decided that she wasn’t paying enough attention to Jamie’s needs. So after many years of us begging even though the answer was always no, my mom finally relented and decided to get the family (mostly Jamie) a dog, a chocolate lab named Medea, which Lindsey thought was a great name, so me and Jamie decided we had to change it immediately and I came up with “Medusa,” which was close enough for her to respond like it was always her name.
The deal was that Jamie had the first line of responsibility for the dog, which my mom thought would get her away from the TV for a while, but which also meant that Jamie had to be the one to feed her and take her for walks before and after school, although it was up to Lindsey and me to do it at night.
So Jamie couldn’t be happier. She was all about Beyoncé, singing “Crazy in Love,” going around the house, gyrating, “Got me in love, so crazy right now,” like, constantly. She was all about the “Naughty Girl” song. And “Baby Boy,” so yeah, Beyoncé was big in our house that year.
And I aced my first math test. Not so good in English.
Halloween came and went. School got harder. Nothing clicked at all. Not in math, not in English, not in science. In fact, things were clicking less and less. I got a tutor. Jacob paid, and reminded me of that every time he called the house.
Thanksgiving that year was, get this, at Jacob’s apartment in the city, with Felicia doing the hostess thing. Apparently my father got us in the custody contract thing for this particular holiday, which made me wonder why he would even ask for it, given the negative association and all.
I was on my best behavior. My aunt Randi was there, with a loser-guy who seemed like a science teacher or something. He had, like, not a full beard, but this scraggly growth in clumps on his chin and cheeks. He smelled like burned wood, like right out of the fireplace. What was that about?
Felicia looked totally knockout hot (no surprise there) in a black dress with pearls, which seemed to be her more or less constant look.
After dinner (no altercations this time), she played the piano, this classical piece where her hands moved practically faster than you could watch them. And she asked me for a request, any song. Thinking of Burn, I said “Bring Me to Life,” thinking no way could she do it.
Only she played it perfectly. With her head down, like a rock and roller, she turned the piano into this loud rock orchestra. Even Lindsey was speechless at the performance.
Later that night, we were hanging with her in the TV room and she handed us all presents: clothes for my sisters and a new digital camera for me. We took pictures to
gether, including one with her squeezing me playfully, which I thought I would send to Burnett if he ever IMed me again.
She suggested that I use the camera to take pictures of my girlfriends. I said I didn’t have any girlfriends, and Jamie laughed and blurted that she heard that a bunch of girls in school thought I was hot. Felicia actually got Lindsey to acknowledge that a few girls in her grade kind of thought I was cute. And then she absolutely insisted that Lindsey spill the names of the girls who were interested in me, so Lindsey reluctantly mentioned two of her friends, girls who were at our house all the time and constantly made fun of me. In fact, these girls were relentlessly teasing me about being stupid, so I didn’t think they liked me at all. But according to Lindsey, they said I was not only cute but “really, really cute.” And Felicia asked for more names and got another one from Jamie and then, according to Lindsey, “that horrible Roxanne Burnett.”
And I wanted to ask how she knew, being as I knew that she and Roxanne were sworn enemies, but of course I couldn’t exactly act interested. And besides, Felicia noticeably flinched at the name Burnett, so no point in belaboring that particular subject.
Then Felicia said something that stayed with me all through high school and in a way saved me when I sucked at other things. She sat beside me and leaned on me against my hair, even though my hair was all spiky and gelled with BedHead, and she touched the spikes gently and said to my sisters:
“You know, gils, never underestimate your brother. He has talents are not easily definable. Besides, he is absolutely atorable. He will never haf a problem vit vimen.” This, with a kiss on my forehead as Jamie took the picture.
I still have this picture on my bedpost to this day. I have to admit that I did look kind of hot in that shot. I will be taking it to college with me. And, OK, I kind of knew all the time that girls liked me before, but ever since that point I was totally armed with a different kind of mojo, given that, like, the hottest woman in the known universe thought I was cool.
Crash and Burn Page 13
