I was down on my knees, checking the expiration dates on some containers of liquid chai. “Some of these went bad months ago.”
“Ah, I knew you were a good hire. Don’t stay too late, okay?”
She grinned, and I wondered if she had any suspicion of why I was really hanging around. A little while later, that reason came shuffling into the break room, looking surprised to see me.
“Do you get extra credit for this or something?”
My face flushed. “This closet was a mess. I guess I…lost track of time.”
Jack sat at the card table and fanned himself with his notebook. He was sweaty from performing, but for some reason, it didn’t gross me out. Why didn’t it gross me out? “So what are you doing, working here?”
I stood up, halfway between the closet and the table. “What do you mean?”
“This isn’t the kind of place where your friends hang out.”
I smiled. “Yeah. That’s one of the perks.”
He tilted his head as he looked at me in a slightly adorable way. I swallowed. “Plus, isn’t this type of thing a little…I don’t know, not like you? I mean, I’m assuming barista isn’t a future career goal.”
I got tired of standing, so I took a seat across from him, the spot Travis normally occupied. “Yeah, I don’t think they offer that at Brown.”
He smiled. How had I never noticed what a cute smile he had? The smile juxtaposed with the eyebrow ring…I never saw it like this before, but it was kind of hot. “What do you think about Dirt Soup?” he asked.
“You’re good. But you already know that.”
“That’s not what I meant. I mean, what do you think about the name Dirt Soup?”
Hmm. How could I put this tactfully? “Do you want me to be honest?”
He looked intrigued. “Always.”
“Okay. I think it’s one of the worst band names I’ve ever heard in my life.”
I thought maybe he’d be mad. No one really meant it when they asked someone else for their honest opinion. But he nodded. “Yeah, me too. We came up with it one night after we’d cleaned out Travis’s mom’s liquor cabinet.”
“I’m kind of not surprised you were drunk when you thought of it.”
“Yeah. It’s pretty bad.”
“I just don’t get it. I mean, why would anyone want to eat soup made out of dirt?”
Jack stared at me. He rubbed his eyes as if he had a headache. “That’s not what it’s supposed to mean. It’s not literal. It’s like, the beginning of the world. Like the big bang. Before we were all here, what was it? What was the earth like? A bunch of trees and grass and dirt. All mixed together.”
“Oh. Okay. Yeah, I definitely didn’t get that.”
Jack sighed. “That’s what I figured. If we’re going to be taken seriously—I mean, more than we already are—we need something new. Something better. Something catchy but not, you know, too easy for the masses to digest.” He bit the inside of his cheek, and inside my chest, there was this strange, fluttery feeling, like there was a bird caught up in there, fighting for its life. “I don’t know. I’ve got nothing.”
I hesitated for a second. “I have an idea,” I said. “The Kerouacs.”
“As in the writer?”
I shrugged. “I saw your book. Plus your name is Jack, so it’s kind of funny. Not completely obscure, but not as, um, theoretical, as Dirt Soup.”
He smiled slowly. “Are you going through my stuff?”
I was full-body flushing again. “Yeah, right. You left it out on the floor. I nearly tripped over it—”
“Listen, you’re stalking me. It’s okay to admit it.”
I was suddenly too weak to do anything but half laugh. Was this flirting? Was I flirting with Jack Moreland?
“Come on, Natalie. The first step is admitting you have a problem.”
A weird, little sensation shot through my toes when he said my name. “I have an idea. Why don’t you name your band the Jackasses? It’s really much more fitting.”
Jack fished the book out of his backpack and flipped through it. “No, I actually like the Kerouacs. A lot. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Is it good?” I nodded toward the paperback.
“Of course it’s good. It’s a classic.”
“So’s The Scarlet Letter, and that sucked.”
He put the book down and looked at me. “Are you in a book club?”
“A book club? No. I’m not thirty years old.”
“You look like someone who would be in all sorts of clubs. Let me guess—debate?”
I shifted in my seat. “Possibly. You look like someone who wouldn’t be in debate club.”
I meant it as a witty insult, but he didn’t even acknowledge it. “I knew it. Let’s see, what else? You’re a cheerleader, right? I will also guess yearbook, newspaper, and library aide.”
“Library aide?” Only the dorks were library aides. Fiona Locke and her friends.
“Two for three, that’s pretty good. Oh, wait, I forgot about Science Club.” His expression became serious. “All the well-rounded students are in Science Club. You can’t study for forty-eight hours to only get an eighty-seven and not be in Science Club.”
It wasn’t my fault my parents forced me to sign up. Apparently, I needed something to balance out all my artsy hobbies.
When I didn’t say anything, Jack laughed. “Wow, you really are, aren’t you?”
“Maybe,” I said.
A second later, I was laughing, too. Who knows how long we would’ve been sitting there, laughing together, if Darcy hadn’t poked her head inside and told us she was locking up.
…
I wasn’t sure why I made the signs.
It was a rainy Saturday, Sarah was grounded for failing an Econ test, and Adam Dixon was away for the weekend, so there were no parties. I didn’t have to work until four o’clock, so I got my sketchbook out and started to sketch. Maybe I’d never be the best at it, but it made me happy.
A few hours later, I looked down at my picture. A guy carrying a guitar on his back, like the Dirt Soup posters, but I’d managed to draw it so that he actually had a human-like figure. His legs were situated so that it looked like he was walking. I drew a border around him and underneath, I wrote: the kerouacs, live! every saturday until june!
I put on my hoodie and walked a couple of blocks to the library, where I made ten copies. When I got home, I put the flyers in a folder and stuffed them into my bag.
…
I planned on giving Jack the flyers as soon as I saw him in the break room, but I hesitated two seconds too long and Travis and Reid burst through the doors, talking heatedly about a video game. I didn’t want the two of them around in case Jack took one look at the flyers and burst out laughing.
I waited it out through their set, and when my shift technically ended, I suggested to Darcy that I sweep the breakroom floor.
“Didn’t you sweep it earlier?” she said, loading the dishwasher.
“Yeah, but it’s still dirty. It, uh, gets dirty easily.”
“Be my guest.”
As the band cleared out their equipment, I swept. Sweat from my palms made it hard to hold on to the broom, and I wiped my hands on my apron when no one was looking. What the hell was my problem? It was a flyer. If he didn’t like it, what was the big deal? I tried to convince myself that if he laughed at me, I wouldn’t care.
Eventually the band collected the last of their things and headed toward the door. I flashed a smile, trying to hide my disappointment.
“I’m good here for a while,” Jack said. He plopped down in a rickety chair and picked up the deck of cards. “Solitaire helps me unwind.” He was speaking to them but looking at me.
I clutched the broom handle. Travis and Reid exchanged a glance, shrugged, and left.
Jack shuffled and flipped his cards with precision. “Are you going to study sweeping at Brown?” he asked, not looking up.
“Ha ha.”
“Yo
ur technique is a bit off. You need to stand up straighter so the broom hits the floor at a better angle.”
I imagined him standing behind me, showing me, and then I really started to sweat. I tried to laugh it off. “Sounds complicated.”
“Don’t worry, you’ll get it. Took me three years of sweeping out the coolers at Shop Saver to perfect it.”
“I didn’t know you worked at Shop Saver.”
Jack moved some cards around on the table and shrugged. “I’m a mysterious kind of guy.”
I laughed again, and the broom fell out of my hands from all the sweat and made a clattering noise. I picked it up and set it against the wall. Casually, I grabbed my bag out of the closet and set it on an empty chair.
“Before you say anything, if you don’t like them, it’s fine. I just figured since you were changing your name, it’d be a good time to change those god-awful posters I was forced to tape on the windows.”
Jack looked like he had no idea what I was talking about. I handed him the flyers.
He studied them as I stammered on. “I-I’m serious, if you don’t like them, I won’t be offended. I was bored today, so…”
My voice trailed off. He didn’t say anything as he leafed through the pages.
“They’re all the same,” I mumbled. Looking at them now, I wasn’t sure why I’d thought they were so good earlier. It was clearly the work of someone without much talent. Even the border wasn’t completely straight. “Actually, I should fix—”
I tried to take them from him, but he moved them out of my reach. “You drew these?”
I nodded.
“Huh. I mean, I didn’t know you could draw.”
I can’t, I thought. “I’m a mysterious kind of girl.”
That made him smile. “These are really good.”
“They are?”
“Hell, yeah. Much better than what Reid managed to do on his mom’s computer.”
Knowing that Reid had done them made me feel bad for calling them god-awful. But then Jack smiled at me again, and all of my bad feelings went away.
“Thanks,” he said.
“You’re welcome.”
“I mean it,” he said. “You’re really good.”
“Thanks.”
We both looked at each other for a second. I realized then how wrong I’d been to think that he would laugh at me. That was something Adam Dixon or Amber would do. Not Jack.
He stood up and collected his cards, and I got my bag and we walked out of the break room. Travis and Reid had already left, and Darcy was locking up the register. If she thought the two of us leaving together was strange, she didn’t act like it. She just smiled and thanked us and told us to be careful in the rain.
This morning’s showers had intensified, but this time, I had my umbrella. The parking lot had cleared except for one car, which I assumed was Jack’s, but I couldn’t see very well from this distance. It was pitch-black outside, and the bus stop was three blocks away. This area wasn’t like the touristy streets of my neighborhood. There definitely weren’t boxed flowers at the end of the streets or seashell-shaped flags that welcomed you to town. There weren’t even streetlights to guide me out of the plaza to the bus stop.
Jack shifted his guitar from one shoulder to the other. “Where’s your car?”
“Don’t have one.”
“Seriously? How do you live without a car?”
“My parents say there isn’t anywhere I need to go that I can’t walk to.” I zipped my fleece up as far as it would go when a gust of wind sent some rain into my face. “Except work, apparently. But it’s fine. I’ll take the bus. I’m used to it. George—that’s the bus driver—only stared at me creepily once this month.”
Jack stopped and looked at me. “Really?”
“Yeah, but he looks at everyone like that.” It was true. He had freaked me out the first couple of rides, but I was used to it now. I considered it a badge of honor, like I was tough or something. Amber never would’ve lasted on the bus.
“I can give you a ride,” Jack said. He scratched the side of his nose. “If you want.”
“Really?”
He shrugged. “Sure. It’s not safe for little girls to walk home alone around here.”
We crossed the parking lot to his car, a black Grand Am. As we got closer, I could see that it was in disrepair. One of those cars on perpetual death watch. A couple of the letters had fallen off, so it just said GR N AM.
“It’s unlocked,” he said.
I got in and turned to watch as he situated some blankets in the back seat, then carefully placed the guitar on top. By the time he got in, he was dripping with rain. I reached behind me for my seat belt but could find nothing but cloth.
“So, there’s some things you should know about this fine machine.” He patted the steering wheel. “First, there are no seat belts.”
“Oh. Okay.”
The temperature seemed to have dropped ten degrees in the past ten seconds, and I reached out to adjust the heat on my side. “And that doesn’t work, so don’t bother.” He smiled. “But hey, it’s better than the bus, right?”
Cold air blew straight into my face. I fiddled with the vents. “Um…sure?”
“They don’t close,” Jack said. I managed to turn them straight up instead.
I sighed. “Well, at least you have a car.” A car that smelled like French fries, but a car, nonetheless. I looked around and noticed bungee cords hooked from the top of the window glass on my side to the doorframe. Jack said, “You can’t roll it up or down otherwise.”
“Oh.”
I turned on the radio to fill up the silence. “It doesn’t work,” he said.
Some static came through the speakers, but that was it. Between the lack of heat and lack of radio and the complete disaster that was Jack’s car, I wasn’t sure this really was an upgrade from the crummy city bus. But then I glanced over and took in his profile, and he turned and caught me staring and smiled. Yeah, better than the bus.
The rain was starting to get worse, and now we were on the twisty back roads that connected Riverdale to Stonebury. I couldn’t see anything as rain pounded the windshield. If I were driving, I totally would have pulled over. Sarah always said I drove like an old lady. Jack didn’t seem bothered by the weather, until a couple seconds later, when the car in front of us slammed on its brakes as a light I could barely see turned red. Jack swerved into the breakdown lane to avoid hitting it. I swore I saw my life flash before my eyes as we narrowly missed skidding into a tree.
I jerked forward, nearly slamming my head against the airbag-less dashboard. I cried out, more from anticipation of being dead than any actual harm to my body. “Oh, shit,” Jack said. “Are you okay?” He put his hand on my wrist. It was the slightest of touches, barely skin to skin, but it still made me shiver.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” A pain shot through the back of my neck. “Just a minor case of whiplash.”
“I’m really sorry…”
“It’s okay. It wasn’t your fault.”
The light turned green. We didn’t move. It didn’t matter; the car ahead of us was gone, and there was no one else on the road. The rain fell against the Grand Am’s hood so hard the worn wipers could barely keep up. The wind shook its already wobbly frame, and it seemed as if we’d be picked up and blown into the ocean at any second.
“Does it really hurt?” Jack studied the side of my neck where my hand automatically rubbed. His face was nothing more than shapes and shadows in the dark, but I could see his gaze moving, fixing on my neck, then moving slowly to my lips before settling on my eyes.
I looked away and swallowed. “No,” I lied. My voice broke as if I’d just woken up from a long night’s sleep. “It’s fine.”
“Good.” He smiled. “I can’t afford to be sued, you know.”
I laughed softly. “Obviously. Look at this car.”
That made him laugh, too. He started driving again. My stomach felt funny, hot and unsettled, all mixe
d up with unfamiliar sensations that I couldn’t name. “There’s a tape in the glove compartment, if you want to listen to music,” he said after a little bit.
So the tape deck worked, but the radio didn’t. That made a lot of sense. But when I found the tape, it was attached to some rope and some other makeshift plug. “You have to plug it into the Discman under the seat,” Jack explained, “and then plug that into the cigarette lighter. Then it should work.”
I reached under the seat and came up with an empty McDonald’s French fry carton. Well, that explained the smell.
“Try again.”
I got the Discman and hooked it up like he said. Miraculously, it started playing, a bunch of songs from all types of genres. Some songs I recognized and some I didn’t.
I rubbed the right side of the back of my neck, which had started to cramp. “How do you write songs?”
“Well, I take a pen and notebook…”
“No, really. I seriously want to know.”
As he thought about it, he turned the windshield wipers—something in the car that worked—to low now that the rain had begun to taper off. “I guess I don’t really know. I mean, I don’t try to. It’s not like doing homework or writing a paper or something. It just comes out.”
“How do you know what you want to write about?”
“I don’t. Not all the time, anyway. Or sometimes what I think I want to write about isn’t what the song ends up being about.”
That intrigued me. “Give me an example.”
He looked at me sideways. “You’re kind of demanding, aren’t you?”
I smiled. “Kind of. Some people say it’s my best quality.”
“Well, I’d like to politely disagree. ‘The Sun in Summer’ is all about these family vacations we used to take when I was a kid. We would go up to Maine for long weekends and stay in a trailer at one of the state parks up there and have the best time. We’d swim and cook out and eat lobsters and my dad would play his guitar for me and it was wicked fun. So I wanted to write this song about how pissed I was that we didn’t do that stuff anymore. But all that would come out was how much I used to love it. Even when all I wanted to do was write something angry. I couldn’t.”
The Mean Girl Apologies Page 7
