“Well, uh . . .” I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I just . . .” I met Kyle’s eyes. He had really nice eyes. And even if the shy smile thing was an act, for a split second I thought about just going with him. Hanging out with the PR people. Going into Seattle. It would be easier. I would know what to expect. I wouldn’t be lying. Or at least I’d be lying to myself, which is inherently easier than lying to other people. But I really wanted to be there when Myra’s ex showed up. I wanted to hear what Heather and Robbie had been doing since high school, because they were sweet and funny. And Fish. I had guys like Kyle figured out, but I didn’t get Fish at all, and I wanted to. “Yeah, you know, I’m good here tonight. But maybe tomorrow?”
“Well, then,” Kyle said, smiling, “I’ll ask you again tomorrow.”
“Good,” I said, smiling back, and watched him walk into the restaurant before I climbed the stairs to the bar, just to be sure the coast was clear.
When I got back, Robbie was up at the bar with the girls, waiting on beers. Fish was talking to some guy across the room. He looked at me when I walked in. He stopped talking, but when I made eye contact, he looked away. I could see him stumbling on his words, wrinkling up his forehead like he’d forgotten what he was saying.
“I mean, thirteen years since high school, but a bag full of Pixy Stix and a stack of John Hughes movies is still my favorite way to spend a Friday night,” Myra said, poking at the mint in her glass. She used her red straws like chopsticks to pick up a sprig so she could nibble at it. “Tonight excluded.” She grabbed my arm. “If you lived here again and this was what Friday night could be . . . Nope,” she said, shaking her head. “I’d still choose Pixy Stix and John Bender.” She took a sip of her drink. “But you’d be invited, of course.”
“You’ll have to fight me for Judd Nelson,” I said. “He’s totally mine.”
“Ew!” Robbie said. “You guys are perverts!”
The bartender looked like he wanted to shush us.
Myra punched Robbie’s arm. “Shut up!”
“No,” Robbie said, “think about it! So you had a crush on Judd Nelson playing a high school kid when you were in high school.”
“So?” Myra said. “I’m failing to see your point.”
“I haven’t made my point yet,” Robbie said, laughing. “Now, you still have a crush on Judd Nelson in his role as a high school kid, but you’re thirty-one. That’s totally creepy. You’re getting all hot and bothered over a high school kid.”
“Judd Nelson is in his fifties now!” Myra said.
“But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about your crush on Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club, where he’s only, like, seventeen.”
“One,” Myra said, “I won’t be thirty-one for three more months.”
“How is that better?” Robbie asked, shaking his head but smiling wide.
“It just is! And two, when I watch it, it’s like my high school self still has a crush on Judd Nelson playing a high school kid. It’s nostalgic. I’m remembering how I felt about him when I was sixteen.”
“I don’t know,” Robbie said, laughing. “I still think it’s a little pervy.” The bartender handed Robbie his beers. Robbie left some wrinkled bills on the bar.
“Three,” I said, picking up where Myra left off, “Judd Nelson was twenty-six when he was in The Breakfast Club. It wouldn’t be weird at all if Myra dated a twenty-six-year-old.”
“Okay, so you’re not a perv, My,” Robbie said, smiling. “You’re just a cougar.”
“Robbie!” Heather said, and tried to cover his mouth with her hand. He pushed it away.
“Really, Robert,” Myra said, raising an eyebrow at him. “Really? If I dated a guy four years younger than me, you’d call me a cougar?”
“If the tail fits,” Robbie said, smirking. “Plus it’s almost five years, because you’re going to be thirty-one in three months.”
“Well,” Myra said, dragging the word out like she was searching for a comeback, “well, maybe my imaginary younger man is going to be twenty-seven in two months.”
“Oh! Oh! You’re reaching,” Robbie said, stretching his arm out like he was trying to grab something just past his fingertips.
“Go drink your beer, Robert. Fish is thirsty. Go away,” Myra said, shooing him with her hands, laughing.
Robbie kissed the top of her head before he walked away. “Love you, My!” he said, in a patronizing voice.
“Piss off, Robbers,” Myra said, but she was smiling. She reached for the pitcher and poured herself another drink.
“Oh,” Heather said, “I wish Karen was here. Then we’d all be together!”
Myra caught my eye and smiled nervously, and I got the idea that there was something about Karen. Did Karen hate Jessie too?
“She’s stuck in Florida until Dylan’s okay to fly again,” Heather said, tucking her hair behind her ear.
“I heard! She left me a message. That’s awful,” Myra said.
“I know,” Heather said. “He’s going to have to get tubes when she can get him back here. That’s like the third ear infection in two months.”
“So,” I said, working with the context clues, “does Karen just have Dylan?”
“No,” Heather said, pulling out her phone. “She has Paige too.” She scrolled through pictures on her phone, found the one she was looking for, and passed it over to me. The picture was of a little girl with long brown hair and gorgeous big brown eyes. She was sitting on a tractor with Robbie, and he was letting her steer. They were both laughing. The next picture was of Heather holding a little boy, a toddler, on her lap and they were both clapping their hands.
“That’s Dylan,” Heather said. “We babysit a lot. Karen’s husband left right before Christmas last year. He was a total douchewad.” She rolled her eyes. “She’s better off without him. And he’s lucky he left. I was ready to castrate him in his sleep.”
Myra whispered loudly, “Couldn’t keep it in his pants.” She’d taken care of most of the second pitcher of mojitos by herself.
“So Dylan is sick?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Heather said. “Karen took the kids to Disney. The divorce has been really hard on Paige and Karen wanted to cheer them up, but then Dylan’s ears got so bad that the doctor she took him to said she can’t fly back until he’s better.”
“That’s awful!” I said.
“Yeah, I feel so bad for them. Karen is all stressed out, because she’s stuck there and missing this and missing work and spending more money on a hotel than she had in the budget. Paige is bored out of her mind. Poor Dylan keeps asking for his dad. It all sucks.”
“Do you and Robbie have kids?” I asked, and then realized it was probably a rude question. I already knew the answer. If Heather and Robbie had kids, I’d have seen a full slide show.
Heather sighed. “No, we’ve been trying. For a really long time. No luck yet. But Dylan calls me Aunt H. now. It makes my heart feel like it’s a trillion times bigger, you know? If we can’t be parents, I am determined to be the greatest fake aunt there ever was.”
“You guys?” Myra said, looking at us gravely, like she was about to say something madly important. “Too many mojitos. Too little food.”
So we grabbed menus. I ordered Myra a Coke, and Heather discreetly handed the pitcher back to the bartender, even though there were probably two drinks left in it.
“Wait,” Robbie called from across the room. “You guys are getting food?” He and Fish came back over.
“You can’t order food without us!” Fish yelled to Heather. “They have the best burgers here.”
Fish made every effort to stay as far away from me as he could, waiting to sit down until the last possible moment, trying to tell Robbi
e he should sit next to his wife. But since I was sitting between Robbie and Myra, and Heather was at the end of the bar on the other side of Myra, the farthest Fish could get from me was the other side of Robbie.
And before we knew it, we were all sitting in a row at the bar, drinking Cokes and eating burgers like overgrown teenagers in some upscale version of a village soda shop. I loved it.
Fish pretended to be so into his burger that he couldn’t be bothered to look my way, but every so often I caught him staring. One time he even smiled. Just a little bit.
“Hey,” Robbie said, holding his burger in front of his mouth and pointing across the bar with his index finger, “is that Justin Finkel?” There was a guy wearing a gray wool suit and a flashy silver watch signaling the bartender smoothly, with two fingers, like he was hailing a cab.
“Yeah,” Fish said, “I think it is.”
“I mean, that’s who he would turn into, right?” Robbie said, aggressively taking another bite of his burger.
“Fuck him,” Fish said. He looked over at me, but I turned my head and pretended to be paying attention to whatever Heather and Myra were talking about. I didn’t want to push my luck and have to pretend I knew who Justin Finkel was, but I kept listening.
“Yeah, I know,” Robbie said. “It’s just . . . You know how you have some things that are, like, on replay in your brain?”
“Yeah,” Fish said.
“Sometimes when I screw something up or I feel like I’m in over my head, I can still hear him calling me a fucking retard when I had that panic attack in the middle of the SATs. Like, I still remember the way my pencil smelled and the stupid loud clock and then Justin’s voice over and over.”
“He’s such an asshole,” Fish said. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him lean over to gently bump his shoulder into Robbie’s.
“He looks like he’s a rich, successful asshole,” Robbie said.
“You’re successful. You guys are in the black at the shop. That’s no small thing.”
“Yeah, but I’ve got dirty fingernails and a house with a leaky roof, you know. And I know Heather doesn’t care, but—”
“Heather’s proud of you, man. You gotta do what you love. What else is there? You want to be that guy? In that shirt? You want to sell meaningless shit for a living? You fix things. You’ve got dirt under your fingernails to prove that you do something. You don’t just push widgets around.”
Robbie punched Fish in the shoulder lightly. “Thanks.”
“Joke’s on him, man, because he still looks like a douchebag. And you,” Fish said, gesturing to Robbie, “are just a whole lotta fabulous, my friend.”
I couldn’t help myself, I looked over. Robbie had a mouth full of milkshake, and he was in danger of spitting it across the bar. He managed to swallow it before he started laughing, but his eyes teared.
“He is fabulous, right, Jess?” Fish said, catching my eye and smiling, like he’d forgotten he was avoiding me. Or maybe, in the face of making Robbie feel better, the way he felt about me didn’t even matter.
“Robbie,” I said, “you are exquisite.”
“Aw,” Robbie said, putting his arm around me. “I love you, Jess.”
While we were eating, Kyle walked back in. He went to the other end of the bar and ordered another shot. He held it up and nodded his head toward me before he downed it. He flipped a twenty on the bar, said something to the bartender, and walked away.
This is it, I thought. My cover is blown. I started thinking about my escape plan. It would go better if I took my shoes off before I ran out.
“One for the road, you know?” Kyle said, patting my shoulder as he walked past. “See you tomorrow, Not Monica.”
“Who’s that?” Heather asked, smiling at me like maybe there was a secret to be found out.
Fish slurped at the ice at the bottom of his glass with his straw. Loudly.
“Oh,” Myra said, “Jessie’s here for a conference too.”
“So you didn’t really come to see us,” Fish said, staring me down.
“Well, I did.” I hedged. “I mean, it just—it all worked out nicely, you know?”
“Whatever,” he said, and wiped his hands on his napkin. “I gotta go see a man about a horse.”
“Charming,” I said, before I could stop myself.
Fish gave me that look again, the warning one that made my pulse charge through my veins. It wasn’t a bad feeling.
“You guys,” Myra said, wadding up her napkin and tossing it on her empty plate. “One, I don’t think John’s coming tonight.” She took a sip of her soda. “And b I have to go finish setting up for the reunion tomorrow.”
I thought she was really drunk, but then Robbie pointed at me and said, “Oh my God! Ha! Remember, you always used to do that? ‘One’ and b, or a and ‘two,’ whenever you had a list of things. Like you couldn’t remember which you were using.”
“One, totally. And b I’m sure it was intentional,” I said, defending myself or Jessie or I don’t even know who.
“Yeah,” Robbie said, getting up and putting his arms around me and Heather. “Keep telling yourself that, Jesseroo.” He grabbed my face with his hand and smushed my cheeks. “Look at this face,” he said to Heather. “Just precious!”
“Look at this face,” Heather said, smushing Robbie’s cheeks while he was still holding mine. “You guys are goons.”
We all piled into the reunion banquet room to help Myra finish getting ready.
Fish grabbed a wound-up wad of twinkle lights from Myra’s decorations box and sat on a table in the corner by himself to untangle them.
Myra put Heather and Robbie to work blowing up red and white balloons with a helium tank. Robbie blew them up, and Heather tied ribbons on the ends. They were a well-oiled machine. Robbie sang, “Ninety-nine red balloons, ninety-nine red balloons, ninety-nine red balloons, ninety-nine red balloons.”
Myra and I laughed.
“Oh my God!” Heather said. “That song does have other words.”
“Yeah,” Robbie said, holding up a finished balloon and hitting it across the room like he was serving a volleyball, “but I don’t know what they are.”
I kicked my heels off and stood on a table while Myra handed me a cascade of streamers to hang over the DJ booth. “A little bit this way,” she said, and I moved them toward her. “No, to the left now.”
“Ninety-nine . . .” Robbie stopped. We heard him suck helium from one of the balloons. “Red balloons.” His voice had gone munchkin. “Ninety-nine red balloons.”
Myra turned her back to Robbie. “Oh my God!” she mouthed to me, laughing so hard her face turned red.
Her laugh made me laugh harder. I tried to keep my head down so Robbie wouldn’t see.
“We can’t encourage him,” she whispered, shaking her head. “He’ll never stop.”
“Robert!” Heather yelled. “You’re killing brain cells.”
“I didn’t have that many to begin with,” Robbie said, his voice slipping from cartoon character back to normal.
“That’s why we have to be extra careful, sweetheart,” Heather said, kissing him. “You’re such a dork.”
“Oh my God,” Myra said, taking a deep breath. “Okay, a little to the left.” Her voice wobbled on the edge of giggles. I stepped to the far corner of the table, but I couldn’t quite reach the right spot.
“Fish!” Myra yelled. “Get over here!”
“What?” Fish said, making no effort to get up.
“Help Jessie.”
Fish gave her a pained look.
“Oh, grow a pair,” Myra said, and walked away.
Fish sighed and jumped up on the table next to me.
“Hi,” I said. “Just a little bit farther over . . .” I stretched my arm out as far a
s I could. He grabbed the bunch of streamers from me and smacked them up without really looking at where they were supposed to go.
He jumped down from the table. “I’m going to head home,” he yelled to Myra. He kissed her on the cheek, whispered something to her, and then walked to the door without even saying good-bye to me.
“Hey,” Robbie said. “Don’t leave me here, man! They’ll make me glue glitter on doilies or something. Drop me off on your way.”
“Fine,” Fish said, without looking back.
Robbie ran over and handed his keys to Heather. “Drive Myra home.”
“I’m sobered up,” Myra said.
“Drive Myra home,” Robbie said again, loudly.
“Love you, Dad,” Myra yelled after Robbie, as he jogged out of the room to catch up with Fish.
“Love you, ladies! Behave yourselves!” he yelled over his shoulder as he left.
“Thanks for staying with me, girls,” Myra said. She sat down and started making loops out of red, white, and gray streamers. “You’re saving my ass.” Her hands moved so fast, and then all of a sudden there was a perfect bow in front of her. She started in on another one.
“No problem,” I said. I tried to copy Myra’s loops, but I kept stretching the crepe paper out too much, and the resulting bow looked floppy and pathetic.
“Of course! I wouldn’t miss this,” Heather said.
“Actually.” Myra raised an eyebrow. “I think technically we’re saving your big fraud of an ass.”
Why Can't I Be You (9781101602843) Page 9
