The Mean Girl Apologies

by Stephanie Monahan

  Now, Jack smirked at Amber. “Just that you rule the school. Don’t you?”

  After a second, she smiled back at him. “That’s true,” she said, flipping her hair over her shoulder.

  “Okay.” Lori sighed. “Listen, I need to ask you something.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m taken,” Jack said.

  She looked horrified. “God. No. I wanted to know if your band could play at prom.”

  “What?” Adam spit out. “We’re going to have a gay band at prom?”

  “I don’t have a choice, okay?” Lori had been particularly high-strung since prom season started. She and Amber were both on the committee, but Lori had been put in charge of the venue and the band, and she took both of these things very seriously. “I’m running a tight budget. Do you know how much it costs to rent the Lighthouse BeachClub ballroom?” She took a deep breath. “Listen, I saw that you guys had won that battle of the bands thing, and Miss Helmen mentioned that maybe you guys could play. So, what do you say?”

  Jack turned the tambourine over in his hand. It was so weird to have him sitting there next to me without looking at me. Especially considering how badly I wanted to kiss him.

  “Hmm, I’m not sure prom is our scene.”

  I knew that wasn’t true. Travis still hadn’t stopped talking about it, and Reid had asked Madeline. She’d said yes.

  As for Jack, I wasn’t sure. He hadn’t mentioned it at all.

  “You’ll be paid,” Lori said quickly. “I’m not sure how much yet, but there will be a check involved.”

  “Then we’ll be there,” he said.

  Lori looked relieved. “Great!”

  Just when I thought he would be leaving, he looked at me. “And who will have the pleasure of taking you to prom?”

  I was going to kill him. Again. My throat started to close as all my friends looked on. I hadn’t told him about Eddie yet, even though I’d agreed to go a couple days ago. How is that something you say to the person who is kissing your neck in his bed?

  “Ew,” Amber said, saving me. “Why do you care?”

  He opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, the bell rang. I pushed past him without daring to look into his eyes, and a minute later, I was sitting in Economics, free. Still, there was a troubling feeling I couldn’t shake, the growing sense that I was somehow falling into something too deep. Something I wouldn’t be able to get myself out of and still be the same as I was before.

  …

  On the Thursday before prom, I went to Jack’s house after school. His room was nothing like mine. Everything on my desk was neat and orderly, and I normally ironed my clothes before I hung them up. His desk was piled with CDs and guitar pics and notebooks and pencils worn down to nothing. There were clothes on his bed, on his desk chair, on the floor. On the wall behind his bed was a calendar with every day up until now crossed out with a red X.

  “What do you think is going to happen after graduation?”

  He stood up against the closed door of his bedroom, writing in his notebook after a burst of inspiration. A second later, he pushed his hair behind his ears and looked over at me. Slowly, he smiled. “You’re going to go to Brown, and I’m going to get a record deal with a major label and become rich and famous.”

  He already knew the probability of the last part happening—pretty much zero—but ignored me when I tried to convince him to at least consider a day job. In fact, as the end of the school year neared, his focus only got more and more intense. There was less than a month left of school. His dad had already hooked him up with an apartment in New York where a couple of guys he used to play with lived, and last weekend, the Kerouacs recorded an EP in a small studio in Boston, another one of his dad’s connections from his old guitar-playing days. But Reid and Travis had both gotten into college. The EP was the Kerouacs’ last hurrah.

  But that wasn’t what I was talking about, and I was pretty sure he knew it. What was going to happen to us? Was there even an “us”? Somehow, over the course of these few months, all of our fun had turned into something more, but what did that even mean? It seemed impossible that whatever we had between us would span the distance between Providence and New York City (183 miles, to be exact), and I wasn’t sure if he even wanted it to. All he talked about was getting out of here, going to New York, and music. But could I expect anything more from him when I wouldn’t even acknowledge that we knew each other?

  So I just rolled my eyes at him and let my gaze drift elsewhere, to two photos with curled edges that were taped to the wall behind the bed. I didn’t remember seeing them before. “That’s us after the Foo Fighters show a couple years ago,” he said, coming up behind me.

  “You guys look exactly alike.”

  They even wore matching flannel shirts. Jack’s dad had short hair, though, and no piercings.

  He ran his hands down my sides. “Thanks.”

  “Who’s everyone else in the picture?”

  He laughed into my neck. “The band.”

  “Oh. Really?” The bearded guy in the middle did look sort of familiar.

  “Yes. My dad used to play with the drummer back in the day.” As he spoke, he swept the hair from my neck and held it in place with one hand to expose the skin there. He put his mouth on my neck, and I bit my lip.

  “Oh. Um. What—what kind of music did they play?”

  He laughed again. “Rock. Grunge, before it went mainstream.”

  He sat on the bed and grabbed my hand, pulling me down onto his lap. “Don’t you think we should go to prom together?”

  I tried to sound fun, sexy. “I think that would blow our cover.”

  Jack’s eyes were serious. “I’d be okay with that.”

  “I didn’t think you would even want to go,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I wasn’t going to, but now that we’re the entertainment…why not go with the hottest girl there?”

  I tried to laugh, to think of something self-deprecating to say, but I couldn’t form any words that would give him the answer he wanted. So instead, I leaned across him and grabbed a bottle of black nail polish that was sitting beside a stack of cassettes and CDs. I situated him so that he was sitting up with his back against the headboard and his feet stretched out in front of him, and I settled myself into his lap. I rubbed the bottle between my palms, then took his hand and splayed his fingers over my knee. “Hold still. You have really nice nails. Mine are all chewed up.”

  The backs of his fingers were another story, all hard and callused from the guitar. I painted each nail slowly, one brush stroke down the middle, then one on each side. A little bit of paint spotted the skin around the nail, and I wiped it off carefully with the tip of my own finger.

  When I was done, he surveyed my work. “If Brown falls through, you could totally get a job at Nail Trix.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’d try to take your shirt off right now but my nails are wet.”

  I ruffled his hair, sending it up in every direction. “You’re so rock and roll.”

  “Don’t worry, they’ll be dry in a couple of minutes.”

  My breath caught and I looked away, over at his desk, scanning the titles on the sides of his mixed tapes: pixies mix, early nirvana, fave b-sides.

  “I love that you make mix tapes,” I said. “Who makes mix tapes anymore? I mean, of the under-forty crowd?”

  I tried to poke him in the side but he wormed away. “So you’re really going to the prom with the kid who skateboards to school?”

  So much for avoiding the subject. “Who’s Talia going with?” I asked innocently, and right away my stomach started to hurt at the thought of the two of them going together.

  “She doesn’t want to go. She’s more anti-establishment than I am.”

  Talia was a seventeen-year-old girl. Of course she wanted to go to prom.

  “Is he going to pick you up on his skateboard?” Jack asked. He kissed my collarbone.

  “Ha ha.”

  “Ser
iously, is he? Maybe he’ll get you your own. His and hers.”

  “Did you find out how much they’re paying you?”

  “Actually, it’s not bad. Three hundred to split between the three of us.”

  “That’s good. People are going to be blown away by your vocal stylings.”

  “And you’re going to have to act like you’ve never heard it before.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. He sounded kind of pissed, like he was accusing me of something. But after a little bit, once his nails were dry, he cupped my chin in his hands and kissed me, very softly.

  When we broke apart, I took one of his hands in mine and touched the tip of his fingernails, shiny and black. I loved how, even when Adam and the other guys bullied him for it, he never took off his nail polish. The simple truth was that Jack was stronger than me. Why would he even want to go to prom with me? “I wasn’t always like this,” I said. “It used to be just me and Sarah. We weren’t exactly popular.”

  “Oh, the horror,” Jack said.

  I made a face. “Seriously. It was bad for a while. I was kind of…bigger than I am now. Kids were brutal. Especially on the bus. I hated the bus. They would say things. Sometimes they threw things. The bus driver never did anything about it. I saw him smiling once, like he thought it was funny.”

  “Sounds like a nice guy,” Jack said. He was serious now. I could barely look at him. I’d never told this to anyone. The kids at school had forgotten about it, but I never had.

  “I thought, so this is the way life is going to be. But then I lost weight and Sarah met Amber… I couldn’t believe it when she wanted to be friends with me.”

  He ran his hand down my arm. “What about you? Deciding to be friends with her?”

  “It doesn’t work that way. If she decides to be friends with you, you don’t argue. It was like we had all this power all of a sudden. But it’s something you have to keep up. You have to…exert it. When you’re the one picking on other people, they’re not doing it to you. A fairly simple equation. You don’t have to be in Science Club to figure it out.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Jack said. “But so much energy goes into being mean, don’t you think?”

  He didn’t know the half of it.

  “Sometimes you have to do what you have to do. Sometimes it’s easier to be mean.”

  Jack shifted so that he could run his fingers through my hair. It surprised me, kind of, that I hadn’t scared him off yet. I still wasn’t sure exactly what it was he saw in me. “What’s so scary about being nice to people?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I don’t want anyone to know I have feelings.”

  “Why?”

  I shifted my eyes away from him, toward the ceiling. I was very aware of his fingers in my hair. They sent little sparks of pleasure to my feet. “Because. Sometimes it’s easier when other people think nothing can touch you.”

  “Because…”

  “Because…if people know your weakness, they’ll take advantage of it.”

  “Wow.” He sounded sad. He ran his fingers through my hair again, then ran his knuckle up and down the side of my face. “I don’t think that’s people. I think it’s just the people you hang out with.”

  He smiled and I had to smile back. “Yeah, maybe.”

  “So maybe that’s the problem.”

  I didn’t say anything. Obviously, that was the problem.

  He shifted again, this time moving me so that I was lying flat on my back, looking up at him.

  “I don’t expect you to be mean or not have feelings,” he said. “You’re not some mean girl, Natalie, I promise you. I’ve seen you with Trav and Reid and Darcy and even Madeline. You like people. People like you when you’re being yourself. All I want is for you to be you.”

  “Madeline doesn’t like me,” I started to say, but he bent down and kissed me. I held my breath, waiting for more, but he stopped and propped himself up again.

  I stared at him, his eyes and eyelashes and lips. I touched the metal that pierced his eyebrow. “Maybe I only want to show those things to people who really matter.”

  He lowered himself on top of me so that every part of me was touching a part of him. When he kissed my neck, I swallowed and closed my eyes. In the background, Bush sang “Comedown.” Something about today felt different than all of the days we’d spent up in his room that had led to this. It was like being in a car that I wasn’t driving. I had no control left. Maybe I never had it in the first place, I only thought I did.

  His fingers played at the waist of my jeans, and I let him undo the zipper. He ran his hands up my thigh—they’d been there before—and then kept going. I kept on swallowing. There was no stopping any of this now, not even when he paused for a second, maybe sensing my hesitation, when he lifted my shirt. I hesitated not because I wanted to stop—this may have been the one thing in my life I knew I wanted—but because we hadn’t gotten this far before. I was scared of him seeing me for who I was.

  “Are you okay? We don’t have to—”

  “I’m fine. It’s just…” My throat started to hurt and it was hard to talk. I’d never put myself in a situation like this before, opening all the secret spots inside me and inviting someone to see. Not my family, not my friends, nobody, ever. But with him it was like there was no other way. I swallowed again. “I…I’m scared you’ll think I’m fat.”

  “No.” He shook his head, kissing my neck. “You’re not. You’re perfect.”

  He was seeing me. Fully and for the first time.

  The first time. I was the last of my friends to have a first time. I’d heard so much about theirs—too much, in Sarah’s case with Mike—that I’d somehow convinced myself I knew what it would be like, how it would feel. Painful, Lori had grimaced. Boring, Amber had said, throwing her hair back over her shoulder. Words can’t even begin to describe, Sarah told me, her eyes filling up, and then proceeded to find many, many words. I listened to all their stories, partly envious, partly repulsed, and not at all in a hurry to have a tale of my own to tell.

  But the thing I hadn’t been prepared for, here in Jack’s bed, was how right it all felt. How unembarrassed I was when, eventually, he took off my shirt completely and then everything else. I was unprepared for how easily I relaxed into his touch, which seemed to be everywhere all at once. There was a loosening, the sensation of letting go of everything I’d been holding on to for my whole life. It reminded me of being by his side, watching the ocean from the top of the abandoned lighthouse. The waves rolling in and out endlessly, the notion of being so small in an unimaginably vast sea and not being the slightest bit afraid to fall in.

  …

  Later, I went into the bathroom to clean up. His dad was due home soon, and I needed to get home, too. I was dizzy and exhausted and felt a little crampy. There wasn’t much blood, but it still hurt a little.

  When I came out, he was sitting up in bed, flipping through a guitar magazine. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” I laughed off how shaky I felt.

  “You sure? You look pale.”

  I grinned. “I’m always pale.”

  He stood and wrapped his arms around me. I wedged my face between his neck and shoulder, breathing him in. He smelled like sweat, like me. I was surprised by how not weird this all felt. How perfectly comfortable I was in a situation that could be, according to all my friends who had gone before me, the opposite of comfortable. Like Sarah, who had done it in Mike’s den while his family was out at a sporting event for his sister and who had indents in her back for days from the futon. Even Amber, for whom I’d expected things would go perfectly, had scrunched up her nose in the retelling, complaining about bad breath and awkward angles. There was none of that here. Only a sense of calm, a peace I never knew when I was anyplace else.

  “I can pick you up,” he said. “I can’t afford a limo, but my car is a pretty nice ride, don’t you think?”

  It took me a second to understand what he was
talking about. I did want to go to prom with him. At that moment, I wanted it more than anything. Screw my friends. Who cared what they thought? School would be over soon anyway. There in his room, in his arms, with his hand burning the skin on my back, I nodded my head yes. He pulled back for a second, confirming my answer, and the smile that took over his face spread to my lips, too, and for a second, I really believed that I would.

  …

  Back at school, under the harsh florescent lights of the cafeteria and the laser-focus of Amber’s eyes, I felt like one of those amoebas we studied under the microscope in tenth grade. All I could remember about them now is that they had no definite shape. That was me, sitting there, pretending to be normal when I had no idea what normal was. Spineless. Shapeless. Formed by the others around me. I was what they wanted me to be.

  “What’s your deal?” Amber asked, loud enough that everyone at the table stopped talking about prom and turned to us.

  “What? Nothing.”

  “You haven’t eaten your lunch. That’s so not like you.” Amber laughed.

  I bit a chip, as if that meant something.

  I could feel Jack’s presence on the other side of the cafeteria, even if I hadn’t managed to get up the guts to look over at him. He was still acquiescing to my wishes to keep our relationship secret—for now. “I just want a chance to talk to them,” I’d said once I was out of the spell of his bedroom and back in my own. I’d taken a shower and was ironing my outfit for school the next day. Being in my room, surrounded by my school books and clothes and photos of my friends tacked up on the bulletin board over my desk, dampened some of the resolve I’d had when I’d been alone with him.

  The next day, the resolve had almost been completely diluted.

  My friends couldn’t stop talking about the prom, and going out with a bang, and making sure we spent as much time together as we could from now until August, because this was it. This was the end. Everyone was wistfully nostalgic, reminiscing about basketball games and parties, and even though I didn’t think these times were as great as they did, the fact that they were our times counted for something. I was there, cheering in the gym, eating all the leftovers from the Howell’s fridge at two in the morning after the four of us had stayed up all night watching rom-coms and doing one another’s nails. When I was with my friends, I was secure. Nearly untouchable, looked up to, and respected. I’d been wrong before when I thought that the real Natalie was the one breaking into lighthouses and wearing eyeliner in dingy clubs. The real Natalie cared what her friends thought of her. Even when she understood it was stupid. Even when she didn’t particularly like her friends. I realized that when we were standing around before class that next day and Jack walked up to us with a dollar in his hands. A part of me thought—Why? Why now, why again? Adam stood in his way, as usual. “Dude, I thought you’d have stopped trying by now,” he said. He snatched the money from Jack’s hand and stuffed it in the pocket of his own jeans.