I'm Not Your Manic Pixie Dream Girl

by Gretchen McNeil

  I was leaning over the balcony searching for Gabe or Spencer to tell them about my encounter with Michael Torres when I spotted Toile and Jesse in the foyer.

  They were also plastering the school with flyers: green and gold with sparkling shamrocks, just like the enormous banner that was draped below me. It looked as if they’d hand-glitter-glued every single one. As I watched, Toile did a little pirouette, then mimicked a ballet dancer en pointe, flitting around the empty foyer. She wore a baby-doll dress that flared as she spun, exposing the bare skin above her thigh-high striped stockings. The tiny top hat that was secured under her chin by an elastic strap flopped back and forth.

  Try as I might, I could never totally be that. Toile was so effortlessly carefree, as if the only ideas in her head were of the here and now: no worries about the future, no calculations of percentages of probable outcomes based on her actions. She thought of something and did it. As simple as that. And no manic pixie cheat sheet or forced whimsy could compete.

  Jesse was delighted by the display. He took her hand and twirled her around while she giggled.

  Just kill me.

  “Aren’t you guys cute,” I said, traipsing down the stairs. The words could have sounded sarcastic, but I kept my tone light and perky.

  “Oh, hi!” Toile said, pausing midtwirl. Jesse’s arm knocked her tiny top hat askew, and she fumbled with the strap to straighten it. “We’re just putting up more flyers for the campaign.”

  I stepped onto the tile floor and help up my stack. “Me too!”

  Jesse’s eyes grew wide. “Are you running for office?”

  I took the opportunity to break into my boisterous Trixie laugh. “Oh, no. I don’t have time for that.” Then I dropped my voice to a whisper. “I’ve been recruited to help a secret candidate.”

  “Seriously?” Toile said.

  I started. For an instant, her voice was neither light nor perky. Her lips weren’t smiling, and her violet eyes weren’t sparkling with childlike wonder. She sounded sarcastic and looked skeptical. Totally, 100 percent un-Toile-like, and just for a second, a new idea crossed my mind.

  Could Toile’s manic pixieness be just as much of an act as mine?

  Then Toile clasped her hands together and cooed, “I mean, seriously how exciting. I love a good mystery.” She grabbed Jesse’s arm, bouncing up and down on her toes. “Don’t you?”

  Or I could be completely wrong about that.

  “Who’s it for?” Jesse asked. “Someone popular?”

  I handed him a flyer. “I have no idea.”

  He stared at it blankly. “What if it’s someone horrible and not cool at all?”

  “But that’s the amazing, sublime cosmic mystery of it all,” I cried, then I mimicked Toile’s pirouette from before. “Isn’t that awesome?”

  “You almost done down there?” Spencer called from the balcony.

  I glanced at him, and just caught sight of Michael Torres slinking into the shadows of the upstairs hallway. Had he been watching my interaction with Toile and Jesse? “No,” I said, shaking off Michael Torres’s stalkiness. “Got sidetracked. Come help?”

  Spencer hurried downstairs and, after casting some serious side-eye at Jesse, began plastering his leftover flyers around the room. Students were arriving, and in a matter of minutes the foyer had gone from empty to bustling. I had a big stack of flyers in my hand, and decided the most manic pixie move would be to hand them out. To strangers. Who I’d have to talk to.

  You can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs.

  “Secret candidate running for president,” I said, confronting the first group of students who passed within my orbit. “You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out who it is!”

  “Cool,” a couple of girls said, each snatching a flyer from my hand.

  That was easy. “Secret candidate,” I said, accosting another group. “Find out who it is on Thursday.”

  An upperclassman wearing a letterman jacket pursed his lips. “You sure you can’t tell me?” He almost sounded flirtatious.

  I batted my eyelashes playfully. “I would, but then I’d have to kill you.”

  Damn, I was good at this.

  As I approached more and more students, I got bolder in my spiel. Louder and more outgoing. It was fun, actually. Like I was playing a role I’d always wanted to play but was too afraid to try. Talking to people wasn’t so bad when you had nothing to lose.

  Spencer kept his eyes on me, his face a mix of surprise and annoyance, darkening whenever I flirted with a group of guys. He didn’t approve, of course, of Trixie or of this campaign or probably of me talking to anyone who wasn’t him or Gabe. But I was having fun. At high school. For the first time ever in a setting that didn’t involve an exam paper and a ticking clock. How could my best friend possibly disapprove?

  But Spencer wasn’t the only one watching me. Jesse kept glancing in my direction, his eyes lingering longer than was appropriate for mere curiosity and once, right as the warning bell rang, I could have sworn I saw him smile at me.

  Then Toile took his hand and pulled him down the hallway to show choir.

  The crowd in the foyer began to thin. I shoved the last few flyers in my tote bag and started toward first period when I saw Jesse trot back to me. “Hey,” he said, his voice low. “Do you want a ride home?” Three days, two offers. I was winning again.

  This time, I decided to accept. “Sure.”

  “Meet me in the lot right after the bell, okay?” He glanced over his shoulder, probably looking for Toile. I half wondered how he was going to ditch her after class.

  Whatever. Not my problem! “Will do.” Then I blew him a kiss and flounced off to class.

  Jesse was waiting for me at his car after school as promised. As soon as he saw me hurrying down the stairs, he slipped into the driver’s seat, leaned across, and pushed open the passenger door.

  “Thanks,” I said, climbing inside. I realized he was rushing because he wanted us out of there before Toile appeared, and I wasn’t going to argue the point. I needed some alone time with Jesse, not a scene with Toile where she might sway the momentum back in her favor.

  “So, the campaign,” I began as we sped down the hill away from campus. “How’s it going?”

  He shrugged. “Fine, I guess. Toile’s doing most of it.”

  As I suspected. “Yeah, but are you having fun? That’s the point, right?”

  “Toile is fun,” he said, not answering the question. “Sometimes.”

  That seemed like an opening. “Sometimes?”

  “Yeah, you know. She’s wild and does crazy things. That’s fun.” We stopped for a light and Jesse turned to me with a little smile on his face. “But not as much fun as you are.” Then he laid his hand on top of mine.

  “Oh.”

  Okay, so that should have been exactly what I wanted to hear: that I was out-pixie-ing Toile, that I was reminding Jesse of our relationship, that I was winning him back. But something about the gleam in his eyes—like we were about to do something naughty—made me want to smack him.

  He stopped the car in front of my dad’s house, and I let out a yelp of surprise. “You remembered!” I was relatively sure it was the first time he’d gotten it right.

  He cut the engine. “How could I not remember where my girl lives?”

  Your girl?

  “Um, thanks for the ride,” I said, suddenly irritated. Hadn’t he just been blissfully happy with his girlfriend that morning? One minute he was twirling her around, enthralled by her little-girl antics, and the next he was sneaking back to talk to me, practically begging for the chance to drive me home. It was almost as if he was trying to date both of us at the same time.

  He unlatched his seat belt. “I can think of a better way for you to thank me.” He half closed his eyes and leaned over as if he was going to kiss me.

  Maybe it was the weirdness, or maybe I was subconsciously playing by the manic pixie rule book, but instead of letting him kiss me (or even kiss
ing him back) I opened the door and practically catapulted onto the sidewalk.

  “See you later.” I grabbed my tote bag, then slammed the door and ran up the steps to the house.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I STARED DOWN the street long after Jesse’s boxy Scion had disappeared around the corner. What the hell had just happened?

  I could feel a tightness spreading through my stomach, accompanied by an unfamiliar nausea. Panic.

  Why was I panicking? I should have been elated that Jesse wanted to kiss me again. Wasn’t this what I wanted?

  I remember the first time I’d felt this way: the day my dad had sat me down and told me he was moving out, that he still loved me, but that he and my mom needed to try “living apart” for a little while to see if it could help their marriage. It had seemed so strange to me at the time. How could spending less time together improve their relationship? Sure, they fought all the time, but even seventh-grade Beatrice had realized that a separation was just a trial run for divorce.

  I’d felt the same knot in my belly, the same queasy feeling as if I were going to hurl rocks. I’d tried to steady myself, hang on to my dad’s words as if they were scientific facts instead of white lies told to ease a child into the idea of divorce. My mom had done a great job of toppling my tenuously built house of cards. The instant my dad’s Lexus, packed to the roof with books and clothes and a smattering of other cherished personal items, pulled out of the driveway, she launched into a rant.

  “Lying, cheating . . . Do you know what your father did? With that puta secretary?”

  The knot had tightened. Fear and panic had swamped me, wave upon wave, until I couldn’t do anything other than curl up in a ball on my bed and cry until there were no more tears. My mother had been able to channel her hurt into anger—anger that she’d never been able to get over, which was odd because, well, what the hell did she expect? She’d been my dad’s legal secretary, and he’d cheated on his first wife with her, so was it really such a shock that he’d cheated on her with Sheri? Of course, I didn’t know that at the time, and while my mom could hide behind her rage, I was merely left with the sharp pain of loss and a desperate, haunting sense of my own helplessness.

  Only I wasn’t helpless anymore. I was in charge of my destiny, or at least of my love life. Wasn’t I?

  I heard the crying the moment I walked through the front door, and it banished all thoughts of Jesse. It sounded like a cross between an overly tired child and a puppy with separation anxiety. “Sheri?”

  I waited a few seconds for a response, but all I heard was the continued whimpers coming from the back of the house. I left my bag by the door and slowly crept down the hallway. “Sheri, are you home?” The whimpering turned into a moan, which got louder as I knocked on the bedroom door. “Sheri? It’s Bea.”

  “In . . .” Sheri sniffled, her voice crackly. “Here.”

  I crossed the soft carpeting of the expansive master suite, decorated in light oak and ecru with pops of lavender and green, passed his-and-hers walk-in closets and a conjoined dressing area, and poked my head into the bathroom. Sheri sat in the middle of the tile floor—legs crossed, face buried in her hands as she wept quietly. Around her lay a dozen discarded pregnancy tests of every brand and variety on the market, and each one showed a single blue or pink line across its face.

  Poor Sheri. She and my dad had been trying for two years to supply me with a half sibling, but to no avail. And now her life was a mélange of fertility doctors, hormone injections, blood tests, ultrasounds, and vitamin cocktails.

  “Hey,” I said from the doorway. “You okay?”

  She heaved a jagged breath, her frosted ponytail jostling. “No.”

  I stepped onto the tile floor, picking my way past Clearblue Easies and First Responses, and crouched down beside her. “It’s going to happen, Sheri. Eventually.”

  Her head jerked up. Black mascara and liner streaked down her cheeks like she was a rabid fan at an Alice Cooper concert, and her eyes were puffy and bloodshot. “You don’t know that.”

  “You’re with the best fertility doctor in Orange County. He’s got like an eighty-nine percent success rate with women your age.” She knew this as well as I did, and had repeated Dr. Aaronstein’s statistics to my dad and me over the dinner table on more than one occasion, but every time she peed on a stick and got a negative result, she was crushed by disappointment.

  Sheri stared at the ceiling. “This is hopeless.” I fought to keep from rolling my eyes. She’d only just started fertility treatments and had a long way to go before actual hopelessness set in. She grasped my hand. “What if I never give your father a child? He’ll leave me for sure.”

  What was this, Downton Abbey? “Sheri, my dad isn’t going to leave you if you can’t have his kid.” I forced a laugh. “He left my mom, remember?”

  Sheri caught her breath. “That’s right!” Her face brightened, the cloud of fear and disappointment lifted, and she hugged me. “Oh, Bea. Thank you.”

  I couldn’t believe I was comforting my stepmom by reminding her that she broke up my parents’ marriage.

  A door slammed at the back of the house. “Sheri? Sheri, are you okay?” My dad’s footsteps pounded down the hallway. “You said it was an emergency.”

  Sheri bolted to her feet and stared wild-eyed into the mirror. “Stall him while I fix my face, will you, Bea? I don’t want him to see me like this.”

  “No problem.”

  I intercepted my dad in the bedroom, where he’d dumped his briefcase and jacket. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Just bad news on the . . .” I dropped my voice, hoping Sheri couldn’t hear me over the gushing faucet. “Pregnancy tests.”

  “Oh.” He tilted his head to the side. “Did you do something different to your hair?”

  So much for the lawyer’s attention to detail. “I cut off six inches and added streaks.”

  “Oh, good. I thought I was going crazy for a second.” His face relaxed. Not completely, though. Never completely. I wasn’t sure if it was his lawyer nature or the fact that he was carrying around a history of lying to his wives, but there was always a cloaked look in his eyes. “Is she okay?”

  “She’ll survive,” I said.

  He loosened his tie. “I’ll be happy when this is over.”

  “We’ll all—” Something caught my eye as my dad unbuttoned the top of his shirt. A smudge on his neck that had transferred to his collar, hot pink and shimmery, like an opaque lip gloss. And not the color Sheri wore. “Dad, seriously?”

  “What?”

  I turned him toward the mirror and pointed at the evidence. “Let me guess—Tonya’s shade?” His new secretary, only four months on the job, was a buxom redhead that strutted around the offices of Kelger & Giovannini as if she’d just left a Mad Men casting call.

  “Mrs. Akers,” he said sharply, naming the elderly part-time receptionist no one had the heart to force into retirement. He rubbed the spot off his neck with his thumb and quickly removed his button-down, stripping to his undershirt. He looked sadder this way, less important. “She was just thanking me for her birthday gift.”

  “I see.” I didn’t entirely buy it and was about to tell him so when my phone buzzed with a text from my mom.

  Have another hot date tonight with Benjamin Feldberger, Esquire!!!!

  Glad you’re at your dad’s so I’ll have the house to myself.

  Ew.

  You should maybe mention this to your dad? Just in case he knows Ben?

  “Anything important?” my dad asked, pulling a polo shirt over his head.

  “No.” I slipped the phone back into my pocket, leaving my mom’s texts unanswered. She’d probably send a dozen more, but suddenly I was too exhausted to deal with my parents’ ridiculousness. The sound of running water stopped, and I turned to leave. “Be nice to Sheri, okay? She’s kind of a mess.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I FLED TO my bedroom, quietly closing the door. I just need
ed to shut everything out: Jesse, my parents, my friends, the election. Everything.

  This bedroom was easily twice the size of my third-floor room in the town house. The sprawling ranch-style McMansion was brand-new when my dad bought it a couple of years ago, with four bedrooms including dual masters, two offices, formal living room, informal living room, formal dining room, informal dining room, and a massive backyard swimming pool that belonged in a music video. The four bedrooms had been Sheri’s request: room for me, guests, and her own theoretical children. She’d given me the largest bedroom other than the master, and taken great pains to “help” me decorate it, which basically meant presenting me with paint samples in such indistinguishable shades as “sand,” “sandstone,” “paradise sand,” and “tropical sandstorm,” and asking for my opinion.

  Don’t get me wrong, the room was lovely. My queen-size, pillow-top bed with a half dozen heavily stuffed pillows sheathed in cream shams could have been photographed for a design magazine, and the chrome and ecru lines of the dresser and armoire matched both the vanity mirror and the enormous flat-screen TV that was embedded directly into the wall. Sheri’s attention to detail when it came to decorating her house on my dad’s credit card was meticulous, and though her minimalist style didn’t necessarily fit my tastes, I could appreciate the continuity of the decor.

  Plus my room was quiet. Back of the house and on a corner lot meant no street or neighbor noise. It was my own little sanctuary.

  Except for my things. I wasn’t a particularly “stuff”-oriented seventeen-year-old, to be honest. The divorce had purged me of the permanency of physical belongings. When you’re being shuttled back and forth between residences every 3.5 days, it’s kind of hard to care about things that can’t fit in a single carry-on. I kept a stash of clothes and a full range of toiletries here, but I’d never fully embraced this place as a home. No personal trinkets other than what my dad or Sheri had supplied—a framed photo of the three of us, for example, that Sheri had given me last Christmas. I kept all my keepsakes at my mom’s, mostly pinned to my corkboard. Things that meant a lot to me. Memories I shared with Gabe and Spencer.