The Blonde of the Joke

by Bennett Madison

  I hadn’t really figured out what she was talking about with that business, which sounded kind of New Age-y to me. But I tried to act confident as we marched into the Limited, the two of us with loping, tigery strides, Francie in a pink tulle ballerina skirt and me in a checked micromini jumper.

  The confidence was just an act, obviously. I hadn’t gotten any more comfortable dressing this way since my haircut. I just kept it up to make Francie happy. To experience the look of unvarnished pride on her face when she saw me in a shorter skirt, a higher pair of heels. She said it gave me gravity, and I guess that part was good, because before I’d met Francie, I had been worried that I might just float away.

  As soon as we stepped into the store that day, Francie touched my hand, smiled, and made a casual beeline for the sale racks in the back corner, leaving me by myself. We had a plan. Or more like Francie had a plan and I was a part of it. I was just happy to be a player in her grand scheme—a scheme that I imagined to be part of an even grander one, and then another on top of that.

  But on that particular day, the agenda was as simple as it was practical. Francie would run distraction in the sale racks while I worked the bigger-ticket items near the entrance. I was going to hit big.

  Francie headed to the back, clearing her throat and rustling clothes as she walked, touching everything she passed, unfolding shirts and knocking them aside, drawing stares from every quarter. Her neckline plunged halfway down her chest, and she had her boobs pushed up around her shoulders, thanks to some mysterious undergarment. How could you not stare? No one was paying any attention to me at all, which really was the whole point.

  I wandered the front of the store aimlessly, my eyes swinging back and forth in search of the perfect thing to steal. They were blasting Shakira, but I could still hear Francie from the back of the store as if she was standing right next to me. “Excuse me? Excuse me, ma’am? This shirt has a hole in it. Right here. See? Right there next to the collar. How should I know how it got there? Do you think I could get a discount? I’ll give you four ninety-nine.”

  Francie was chattering away. She had a talent for spectacle. I didn’t look in her direction, but even without looking I could see her vamping and showboating, tossing her hair and batting her mascara-greased eyelashes until she had dark, scratchy lines etched above her cheekbones. When she wanted to, Francie had this absolute force of presence. I could have seen her with my eyes closed; I could have seen her with a blindfold on.

  Someone had put the jacket away wrong. I’d noticed a rack of black leather motorcycle jackets right by the entrance as soon as I’d stepped into the store, but I hadn’t paid much attention, since they were all wired to a central alarm system that would go off if you tried to unplug any of them, and I had nowhere near the nerve for that. But then, passing a lonely column of fleece hoodies, I spied the hint of a leather sleeve peeking out from behind the plush, bright microfiber.

  I looked again. It was unmistakable. Peeling back the layers of hoodies, I saw it, there by itself, free for the taking. No sensor, no alarm, no ink tag. A black leather zip-front motorcycle jacket, sleek and slim with a Nehru collar. Someone had put it away wrong. And I can’t really tell you if I believe in fate or not, but the fact of the matter is that at that moment it seemed like the jacket had been waiting for me. I wanted it.

  I looked at the price tag: $300.50. I looked around. No one was paying attention to me. But I couldn’t do it. Just standing that close to it made me feel like I was attracting suspicion.

  Be the sun, Francie had said.

  It had seemed like good advice at the time, but when it came time to implement it, the total uselessness of it struck me. Too hot to look at, I said to myself, and I pictured myself on fire. I pictured myself as a spinning disco ball, throwing flash in every direction; as a bolt of lightning; as a shattering star, a flaming arrow shooting for a bull’s-eye. But I wasn’t any of those things. I was not the sun. I wasn’t even a blonde.

  I was myself. Even if I had fooled Francie into thinking I was someone important, it didn’t change the fact that I was Valentina Martinez. People like me didn’t steal things, and they definitely didn’t wear jackets like this one.

  I stared at it. It was gorgeous—more gorgeous on further inspection than it had even first appeared. I toyed with a sleeve, rubbed the cuff between my fingers, feeling the leather. It was soft—too soft. Almost like it was still alive. And when I ran the back of my hand against the jacket’s breast pocket, I could feel something like a rhythm beneath the surface of the material, beating back against my knuckles.

  Something happened. Off in what sounded like the distance, I could hear Francie squabbling with a clerk. I paid no attention. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, and I didn’t care. There was something building inside of me, a black inky rage that I couldn’t quite understand. It was anger, but not the kind I was used to from my brother and stepfather. This was something quieter; something slithering and austere. It was powerful. Subtle. I liked it.

  Then I was putting on the jacket. I just put it on. I’m not saying I was possessed or anything; it wasn’t like that. I knew exactly what I was doing. I just took it off the rack, without a thought, and slipped it on and zipped it up, and as the zipper closed, I was surprised to find that it felt like I was shedding a skin instead of gaining a new one. Without hesitation, I turned and walked out of the store, not thinking, I just stole a three-hundred-dollar jacket, but thinking, This jacket looks amazing on me. Not wondering where Francie was or what she was doing, but knowing without a doubt that she was right on my heels.

  Francie and I had decided to meet in the handicap stall by Sears. The handicap bathroom at any mall is always deserted and is generally hidden somewhere in a dim alcove somewhere off the beaten path. There’s usually a handicap stall by the food court, too, but Francie and I tried to avoid those because they were always full of bulimics. The “handicap” part was important because the wheelchair stall was big enough for two people, with a door that went all the way to the tiles so no one could tell you were in there. That was where we caught our breath every day before heading home. It was where we took the loot from our bags, unballed it, and held it out at arm’s length, admiring it all under spastic white fluorescent light. Where we congratulated ourselves on the fruits of our misdemeanors.

  Waiting for Francie in there ten minutes after stealing the leather jacket, my heart was not pounding. For the first time, I had walked out of the store unafraid of being caught. People always talk about what a rush shoplifting is, but that day, I hadn’t been scared and I hadn’t been excited. I had just been angry about something that I couldn’t name. It wasn’t until I was sitting there on the white and gray tile in the wheelchair stall, my back against the partition, that a wave of euphoria rushed over me—a delayed reaction. I had done it. The jacket was mine. I stood up, then sat again, then stood up, then sat. I fiddled with the zipper, trying to find the perfect ratio of leather to cleavage.

  When Francie came busting into the stall, I stood one more time.

  “My God,” she said, out of breath. “You were amazing. Amazing. I couldn’t even keep track! I looked away for, like, one second, like, less than a second, and you were gone. The blink of an eye. Amazing!”

  I didn’t say anything. I stood on my tiptoes and leaned in, and her eyes widened and then closed as I kissed her on the mouth.

  Francie’s lips were waxy and kiwi-strawberry and I put my hand on hers, my fingertips smooth against her long and shiny nails. Francie, being Francie, made it French. That one time I kissed Francie, fluorescent lights lit us in the bathroom like jellyfish shining miles below everything. And I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. It wasn’t remotely romantic, or even very sexy. But that’s not to say it didn’t mean anything. Because it did.

  It was a pact that bound us. It was a kiss to say, We are deadly. We are sisters. Just to say, Genuine Italian Leather.

  Francie with her eyes closed and her to
ngue cautiously in my mouth. Francie was hot and then she was blinding. Francie was burning and then she was the sun. Francie was the sun and I was—I don’t know—something opposite.

  Chapter Seven

  “Vedela.” Ms. Tinker grabbed my arm as I was walking out of class. “I want to talk to you.”

  “It’s Vickie,” I corrected her. My name wasn’t Vickie, either, but it was what she usually called me, and I had gotten used to it.

  “Vendela, Vickie, Velma, Valentina—it’s all the same to me,” Ms. Tinker said. I think it’s possible that she winked when she got to my actual name, but it was hard to be sure, she was such a twitchy person to start with. “I must say that Vendela suits you better than Vickie these days,” she went on. “Forgive an old woman for getting mixed up.”

  Ms. Tinker really wasn’t even that old, but she was always acting like she had one foot in the grave. “I’m going to be late to my next class,” I told her. I was sick of her bullshit. I zipped my motorcycle jacket all the way to my chin and pulled away. She grabbed me again.

  “Hasn’t seemed to bother you much lately.”

  “Can I go?” I asked.

  “I’m worried about you,” Ms. Tinker said. “Doodles all over your work. Talking back. And you know I don’t tolerate tardiness. You used to be one of my best students.”

  “How could I have been one of your best students? You don’t even know my name,” I said. I jerked my elbow from her spindly, gnarled hand and pushed out through the door.

  At the mall, Francie was making big plans. I sat next to her on the edge of the fountain, half listening as she mused on and on about impossible topics. It was a drone that I liked. The infiniteness of her ambition was reassuring. “We should steal the Holy Grail,” she was saying that day, dragging her cupped palm through the water and drawing small whirlpools as she stared into space. “Now that would be a score.”

  “I doubt they have the Holy Grail at Montgomery Shoppingtowne,” I deadpanned. “I definitely haven’t spotted it at Wet Seal. Bebe maybe?”

  Sarcasm was always lost on Francie. “You never know,” she said. “You never know. We haven’t even scratched the surface of this place. And if I had the Holy Grail, I’d hide it in an unlikely location. Wouldn’t you? I mean, no one’s found it yet after, what, two thousand years? It has to be someplace no one’s thought to look. What hiding place could be more unlikely than this fake-o palace? Who would ever imagine you could find something real here?”

  “There’s the Armani store,” I said. “That’s real Armani.”

  “Armani Exchange,” Francie corrected me. Francie was the type of person who could tell you, in detail, the precise difference between Armani and Armani Exchange, right down to the pattern of the stitching. “A-fucking-X; black ribbed fifty-dollar T-shirt Eurotrash crap. It doesn’t count. Face it, Val. There’re two and a half real things in this whole entire place. You, me, and the Holy Grail—the Holy Grail only counts half because it’s just a suspicion that it’s here. And even myself I’m not so sure about all the time, when it comes to realness. Who’s to say I’m not a robot, or a hologram? That leaves you.”

  “Ha!” I said.

  “Don’t laugh, Val,” Francie said. “You are, like, so for real.”

  If she had told me the same exact thing a few weeks before, I wouldn’t have believed her, or even really known what she meant. But sitting there with her, I could feel my blood pumping, pumping against skintight leather. I knew that she was right. “Thanks,” I said.

  “Well, it’s true,” she said. “And we’re going to find the Holy Grail. I’m not sure why I think it’s here, but I do have a feeling.” Francie took out her eyeliner and carefully extended her curlicues in a silent show of determination. “My feelings are usually reliable.”

  “What does the Holy Grail even do, anyway?” I asked. “It has something to do with Indiana Jones, right?”

  “Indiana Jones and Jesus,” she said. “And it’s, like, totally valuable. But the main thing about it is that it lets you live forever. You take a drink from it and boom, instant immortality.”

  “So it’s a cup or a mug or something?”

  “Well, it’s actually technically a chalice, I guess, but supposedly it’s likely to be enchanted. So maybe it doesn’t look like a cup at all. I looked it up on Wikipedia yesterday. There are all kinds of theories. You’d be surprised how much thought people have put into it.”

  “I bet,” I said. I wasn’t surprised, though.

  “Do you think it’s, like, obvious that it’s something special?” I asked Francie on a different day. She and I were warming up at Claire’s Boutique, digging through wire bins of spray-painted gold junk. “The Holy Grail. Like, could it be disguised as a ball of lint or a piece of toilet paper? That seems like it would be unfair.” I palmed a five-dollar package of bangles as I spoke, slipped it in my pocket when I knew no one was looking. It’s better to put things in your pocket rather than your bag if you can, because they’re less likely to try to search your pockets. Everyone’s afraid of lawsuits these days.

  “I think whatever it is, it’s beautiful,” said Francie. “The most beautiful thing. But beautiful in, like, a way that you won’t be able to predict. Something you’d think would be nothing, and then you see it and you look carefully, and that’s when you’re, like, oh my God. I’m pretty sure that’s how we’ll know.”

  So we were looking for the Most Beautiful Thing. That was the Holy Grail. The thing you would almost overlook and then, all of a sudden, OMG. I didn’t tell Francie why it was so important to me, but I was determined to find it.

  Why we thought it was at the mall, I don’t know. Francie called it a suspicion, but I think it was just the kind of wishful thinking that comes out of shitty circumstance. The J-12 went to Montgomery Shoppingtowne. It didn’t go to the Louvre or Vatican City. You believe what you need to believe. So we searched.

  And we stole. The two of us, side by side. Me flanking her every move, stealing right while she stole left. We stole Egyptian cotton bedsheets and bottles of perfume and cheap handbags and more costume jewelry than one person could wear in a lifetime. We stole bras and silver-plated pens and Christmas ornaments. With my hair cropped down to messy roots and my motorcycle jacket on, I floated with Francie, for the first time, as an equal.

  The Holy Grail turned out to be elusive, though. Every day, after we were finished, we’d make our way to our handicap stall, where we’d take out all our stuff and examine it, just to see if we had found the Grail without realizing it. One time I stole a hundred-dollar pepper grinder that seemed like it had promise. There was something about the way it had called to me in Williams-Sonoma, something about the way it glittered under the soft-focus lighting that made me wonder if it was more than it seemed. But upon examination, in the fluorescence of the bathroom, it was just a regular pepper grinder, and not special at all. It was beyond ordinary—definitely not beautiful.

  If you had asked me what the Most Beautiful Thing was, I wouldn’t have said it aloud, but secretly I would have known my answer: Francie.

  You should understand that she was not exactly a supermodel. I mean, she was beautiful, but she wasn’t. Yeah, she was tall and blond and booby with amazing legs, but there was something a little funny about her jawline—something square and sharp and almost masculine. Her shoulders were too broad; one eye was just the tiniest bit wonky; her nose had a slight hook; and if you looked closely you could see small blossoms of acne under the crust of her caked-on makeup. It didn’t matter. There was just something about her. If you thought too hard about it, she was almost ugly. But then you looked again, and your jaw would drop.

  She was a more perfect body pieced together from spares and defectives. From day to day, her appearance was never quite the same. No picture resembled the last. And sometimes I wondered if she was replacing her own parts with things she had lifted, one by one. A rhinestone where her left eye should have been. A fist-size crystal paperweight for a heart
. It’s possible that she was a robot or a hologram. But aren’t those things real, too?

  I loved Francie. I mean, I was in love with Francie. But not in a lesbo way. It wasn’t like that. I loved Francie because she had seen something in me that I had never suspected. Because she had unlocked it. She had taught me how to steal. I loved Francie because she was beautiful. Because she was tall. And most of all, because I could not imagine a question that she could not answer. If she didn’t know it off the top of her head, she would make something up and be right without even really meaning to be.

  Christmas was coming fast. The mall was more jammed every day, and the carols on the sound system got more and more insistent. In the middle of December, it took twenty minutes to make it from Club Libby Lu to Build-a-Bear Workshop; there were just that many people crowding the way. Sitting on the fountain, staring up at the wannabe firmament of tiny white lights strung from skylight to skylight, we imagined ourselves as part of something larger than ourselves.

  We were at the Gap ten days before Christmas break, and I had just dropped a lamb’s-wool sweater into my bag when I heard my name in a voice I didn’t recognize. Shit. I turned around slowly and saw an older, dark-haired girl—in her midtwenties, I figured—standing there, a hand on her hip, kind of smiling at me like we were old friends. I had no idea who she was.

  “Val?” she asked. “Is that you?”

  “I just want to try it on,” I said. “I was just about to go to the dressing room.” But the girl gave me a blank look.

  “It’s me, Liz,” she said. “Don’t you remember me?”

  Then it came to me. It was Liz Jordan, my brother Jesse’s old girlfriend from years ago. I couldn’t believe that she had recognized me; I’d been just a little kid the last time I’d seen her.

  “Hey,” I said. I wasn’t quite sure how I was supposed to react. “What’s up?” I nodded in greeting.