The Blonde of the Joke

by Bennett Madison

  Francie gave me a head shake and otherwise ignored my defense.

  Meanwhile, Ms. Tinker was winding her way through the mall, moving with quick and deliberate steps but no clear destination. She was circling and spiraling. Not once did she look over her shoulder. When we passed Crate&Barrel for the third time, Ms. Tinker stopped again to peruse the window display, and Francie turned to me with wide eyes. “This is crazy,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. We could both see what Ms. Tinker was doing, but didn’t quite believe it. “She knows the angles.”

  Francie breathed a low and nearly silent whistle.

  And then, just as Francie had predicted, we were at Ann Taylor Loft. Ten paces ahead of us, Ms. Tinker paused at the entranceway, glanced up and down, and adjusted her beret to a suitably jaunty angle. Francie nudged me I told you so, but didn’t say anything. We just followed her and saw her standing at a rack of white blouses that tied in a ribbon at the collar. We watched her from ten feet away, pretending to be searching for a size at a table of slacks.

  “Watch,” hissed Francie. “Look! Now!” Just as she said it, Ms. Tinker went blurry for a second; she became somehow indistinct. For a second it was hard to tell what I was looking at, but when I focused—I mean, really focused—I saw our teacher take a can opener from the pocket of her skirt, and then she was stuffing one of the shirts she’d been looking at into her totebag.

  Francie and I were both staring, and as Ms. Tinker shuffled past us, she made brief but unmistakable eye contact. She still didn’t seem to have any idea that either of us was her student, but it was obvious we’d seen what she had done. And what happened next was truly astonishing. She paused at the doorway and turned around and looked straight at us. She tugged at one ear, then the other. She smiled, wiggled her nose, and paused with a friendly, expectant raise of her brow. She was waiting for a response.

  I didn’t think about what I was doing, I just did it. I returned the Sign, tug, tug, wiggle. Satisfied, Ms. Tinker nodded and trotted out of the store, back into the mall, leaving Francie and me standing there, too shocked to move.

  Francie’s jaw dropped. “She just…”

  “She did,” I said.

  Francie plopped her ass on the table of mom-slacks and dropped her bag to the floor. She spread her legs and placed her head between her knees, clutching her temples in her palms. Her hair scraped the floor.

  She breathed hard.

  “Listen,” she finally said when she had righted herself. “So I know I told you that the Sign was like this real thing….”

  “Yeah?” I said, with a feeling that I knew exactly where she was going.

  She turned away. “I made it up,” Francie said. “I mean, it’s just some dumb thing I made up.”

  “Oh,” I said. Of course, I had known it all along. I mean, I had, hadn’t I? I guess that even though I’d always sort of secretly known, I was still disappointed in her. Not because she had lied, but because by admitting it she was breaking her own rule. She was acknowledging the ordinariness of the world. She was acknowledging her own ordinariness.

  The way she was sitting there, so uncertain all of a sudden, shoulders slumped, mouth twitching, she looked like just a little girl. It was like she was a Russian doll and had stepped outside herself as someone nearly the same except smaller, and then again, and smaller, and finally one more time so small that she was hardly there at all. But then she was standing, and as she stood she gathered herself back together, and by the time she was to her feet she was whole again, had collected up every bit of the doubt she’d just betrayed, had hidden it away somewhere where she wouldn’t have to think about it. She ran her fingers through her hair, straight down to the ends, and was the same as ever. “Well,” she said. “I guess it was real after all. I mean, she obviously knew about it. So that proves it. I guess I’m smarter than I even realized. Just divine inspiration, I guess. I don’t believe in God, but I am spiritual, you know.”

  “Exactly,” I said. I sort of wasn’t a bit surprised. Francie may have thought she had invented the Sign herself, but leave it to Francie to stumble onto something that seemed fake but was in fact 100 percent for real. Leave it to Francie to will something into realness without realizing or even really wanting it. To be accidentally truthful even in the baldest of lies.

  Naturally Francie wasn’t considering anything like that. It had been completely uncharacteristic of her to doubt herself in the first place—a rare and momentary lapse, and it was already forgotten. Now she had moved on, as she always would, to the greater implications. She was applying a coat of eyeliner, deep in thought. “But Ms. Tinker!” she said to herself. “How can she of all people know? She’s our enemy! Our sworn enemy!”

  “Maybe not anymore,” I said. “She’s one of us.”

  “This ruins everything,” Francie moaned. “Ms. Tinker! Can you even imagine? We’re ruined!”

  “Don’t be so sure,” I told her. As much as I hated Ms. Tinker, the revelation about our teacher thrilled me as much as it had upset Francie. In a way, it reminded me of the dream I was always having—the one about the mall. A trapdoor you’d never noticed opens. It leads you to the hidden world you always knew was there.

  Francie was still reeling and needed to put herself back on an even keel. Nothing made her feel more sure of herself than a shoplifting spree. We headed to Sephora.

  And I don’t know how it happened. I was doing everything right. Maybe I had gotten cocky. Maybe we were just out of control. We had been stealing more and more, breaking records every day. Or. Maybe I was testing Francie without realizing it. Earlier that day, I’d caught a small glimpse of a different side of her. A Francie who was just a regular girl; a Francie who was powerless. Was that the real Francie? She had lied about the Sign. What else had she lied about? These were important questions.

  I was alone in the Stila aisle with a fistful of lip liner when Francie found me. She grabbed my hips from behind and whispered in my ear urgently. “We’re caught,” she breathed. I couldn’t see her, but a tendril of her yellow hair was curling around my shoulder. “Give me your purse,” she said, “and get the hell out of here.”

  I didn’t turn around, just shrugged my left shoulder, letting my bag slip into her open palm.

  “I can’t leave you,” I said, still without looking at her.

  “Move,” she said. “You know the drill. Twenty-five minutes.” I was gone.

  Francie and I’d had an escape plan worked out since we’d started at Montgomery Shoppingtowne months ago. Francie had drawn it up and presented it to me in her bedroom, wearing her black-framed glasses for that look of authority, a cigarette tucked behind her ear. She’d made a map and everything and had used a pilfered laser pointer to indicate a route. The plan was this: split up, run for our lives, and meet up at the bus stop by the Burger King, a quarter of a mile away.

  At Sephora, though, Francie wasn’t following the plan. She wasn’t running. As I booked it for the door, I looked over my shoulder and saw her standing there, by herself, my bag in her hand. Lips pursed into stubborn resignation. She was going to take the rap.

  I wasn’t brave like that. When the guard tried to stop me at the door, I just pushed past him. Everyone knows these mall security guards are just a step up from thieves themselves. Half a step. It’s not like they’re cops.

  “Miss,” the guard said, trying to block me with an arm. “You need to come with me.”

  “Sorry,” I spat. And I ran. No one tried to follow. I powered down the phony mall boulevard, up the escalator, and through Macy’s, pushing through a crowd of sluggish shoppers. The few times I glanced behind me, the place was deserted, a ghost town.

  When I made it to the bus stop, I checked the time every five minutes and watched the horizon, shivering in my parka and awaiting the sight of Francie’s blond, shattered halo flying down the sidewalk. It took twenty-five minutes, like she’d said. I’m not proud to say it, but if she hadn’t shown at that exact moment, I wo
uld have gone home by myself. I wasn’t really expecting her. We’d hit Best Buy earlier in the day as well, and between both stores and the two of us, we had easily more than five hundred dollars’ worth of stuff.

  But Francie surprised me. I should have had more faith in her. I had never doubted her before. She had said she would protect me, and she had.

  “Did I miss the bus?” Francie asked when she finally made it. She was hunching, out of breath, still unsteady on her heels.

  “Two,” I told her. “But you’re still right on time. Twenty-five minutes.”

  “Well, that’s something, at least,” she said, handing me my purse. I glanced inside and was surprised to see that everything I’d stolen was still in it.

  “How did you get out of there?” I wanted to know. “They didn’t even take the stuff back?”

  “I have my ways,” she told me. “I wasn’t going to give that shit up; that’s some serious makeup. We just need to avoid that particular store for a little while.”

  “I shouldn’t have left you,” I said.

  “I couldn’t let you get in trouble, babe,” she laughed, swinging her hair and hitting me on the butt with her purse. “You are too good for words.” Then the bus was there.

  I should have been grateful, I know. And I was. How could I not be? But I couldn’t help wondering: What had Francie done?

  You take a seashell. You take a tube of lip gloss and a prissy silk scarf like an English teacher would wear. You take a mountain, and a cloud, and a molten pebble from the core of the world. Francie said this was how we were going to do it. Because the entire planet Earth is pretty fucking big. Francie Knight was big enough to fit it all in her pocket. And climbing onto the J-12 I knew something else about her: she really meant everything she said. It was no exaggeration. Earlier that day, in Ann Taylor Loft, I had come closer than ever to doubting her. But now I knew for sure: she was capable of anything. If she hadn’t been before, she was now.

  It scared me. The lengths I imagined she might go to. Lengths without limits. But I had already traveled too far with her. And I was not just in it for myself anymore, either. Now there was Jesse to think about. He needed us.

  No. He didn’t need me. He needed Francie. I hated to admit it, but if I had learned anything that day, it was that I would not be strong enough without her.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sleepovers at Francie’s house were usually pretty fun, because Sandy tended to be occupied with her internet karaoke habit and really let us do whatever we wanted. As fun as it usually was—the two of us staying up all night with the run of the house—it sometimes made me worry that things could spin out of control. Like, the later it got, the more we risked turning into monsters: by three or four in the morning, Francie and I would both be red-eyed and awake as ever, all wired on Diet Coke and Cheetos, and anything at all could happen. Even something terrible.

  One time, in February, I slept over at Francie’s. She made me watch this horrible movie that she was really into called Blue Velvet. Basically it’s about two teenagers who find a severed ear behind the high school and decide to investigate. It really didn’t make a lot of sense, but it still freaked me out. Every time I tried to get Francie to turn it off, she would tell me that the best part was coming up, and then the so-called “best part” would be like ten times more fucked up than the last. When the whole thing was over, I told Francie I felt like I’d never be able to look another human being in the eye again.

  She just laughed and called me a pussy, and we went up to her room, where she sat me on a stool in front of her vanity and turned on Bronski Beat. She had shoplifted the CD just that day, and I watched her in the mirror as she bopped around to “Smalltown Boy” before finally settling at my back, where she framed my face with her hands and appraised me in the mirror.

  “I’m going to give you a makeover,” she said. Francie herself was wearing no makeup that night, which was unusual for her, almost without precedent. She considered liquid eyeliner—applied heavily and so frequently that she had to steal a new tube every week or so—to be an essential component of her character. She swore that without it she would lose her mojo. But it was the weekend, and when she came out of the shower, in her pajamas, her face had been scrubbed clean.

  “A makeover,” I said. I wasn’t so sure about it. My hair was growing out a little but was still on the short side, messy, and looked pretty awesome. I kind of liked myself the way I was these days. On the other hand, this was a sleepover, and makeovers were what you were supposed to do. I figured I could humor her. Why not?

  At the vanity, Francie stood behind me. “Close your eyes, but don’t scrunch,” she said. “Relax.” I felt her fingertips grazing my cheekbones.

  She slathered on the liquid eyeliner until my eyes were Egyptian. She lined my lips in deep red and frosted them whitish pink. A touch of blue powder at my cheekbones. “It’s very editorial,” she mused. I didn’t really know what she meant by that. But when I looked at myself in the mirror, I saw a different person looking back at me. The bloodred lips and death eyes. A corpse’s complexion. I saw a vampire: not Samson but Delilah. I couldn’t look away. I was so busy staring at myself that I didn’t even notice that Francie was leaning in close until I felt her breath in my ear.

  “Boo,” she whispered.

  I screamed. I fell off the stool and onto the floor. “Fuck you,” I said. “Are you trying to freak me out?” Francie was laughing too hard to reply—I mean, practically gasping for breath—but she was suddenly interrupted by another scream. It was a scream much louder than mine had been, from somewhere else in the house. A scream like someone was being killed. Then there was a crash.

  I looked up at Francie from where I was still lying on the floor. I was terrified for real now, as if I hadn’t been totally spooked already. Of course, Francie wasn’t even startled. She just stopped laughing, gathered herself together, and smoothed a tired hand through her hair.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she sighed. “It’s just Sandy. Stay here, I’ll be back in a second. She gets like this, you know. So crazy.”

  I was surprised that Francie could be so blasé about a scream like that, but I certainly wasn’t about to check it out with her. So I waited. Francie marched off and I pulled my leather notebook out of my bag. I sat at the vanity and began listing the spoils of that day, just to distract myself:

  Striped T-shirt, American Eagle, $14.99

  Vanilla Spice Shimmer Lip Balm, the Body Shop, $6.00

  When I was done listing the spoils of the day, Francie still hadn’t come back. I listened, but I didn’t hear anything. That big old house felt haunted.

  I wasn’t afraid of ghosts, but in some ways, at this late hour, Francie and Sandy were more ghostly than the real imaginary thing. And so was I. When I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I was afraid the girl on the other side was going to bust through and kill me and take my place. Where had Francie gone, anyway? I couldn’t wait anymore.

  So I got up and tiptoed down the dark hall. It was a dark and stormy night, and the floorboards creaked under my feet. I walked past Sandy’s bedroom to the wide, twisting staircase, and peered down over the edge from above. There they were. Francie and Sandy were climbing the stairs together, the two of them illuminated only by the bluish light of a streetlamp through a window, and Francie had an arm around Sandy’s waist and another on her shoulder. Sandy was hunched over, stumbling, and muttering something I couldn’t quite make out.

  “Come on, Mom,” Francie said. She hadn’t noticed me.

  Francie looked different. She looked tired and lonely. Her eyes were flush against the scrunched-up lines of her forehead as she tried to pull Sandy along with her. Sandy wasn’t cooperating. “Who do you think you are?” Sandy was saying. “I’m your mother. I’m your mother.”

  “I know, Mom,” Francie said. In that weird light, in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, and without any makeup, even eyeliner, she was almost transparent.

  Then
she saw me.

  She didn’t say anything, she just looked at me, and in that moment Francie changed. First a look of confusion, and then rage. And then she was the sun. Just blazing, I’m telling you. She was a ravenous, burning thing. She was on fire.

  “Francie,” Sandy groaned.

  Francie didn’t move. She just stared at me. I met her gaze, but only for a second. This Francie was not my friend. I’d never seen her look so angry. This Francie hated me. I turned and ran.

  I turned and ran down the long, wide hallway, the kind of hallway that houses don’t have anymore, back to her room, where I fell into her bed and just lay waiting.

  When Francie returned, she was normal again. It had never happened. “Sorry about that,” she said. “Mom had a little too much to drink.” But as soon as she said it out loud, I had the feeling it wasn’t quite the truth. I wondered why she would lie when she had never been embarrassed about anything before.

  “Let’s play MASH,” she said. She was acting like everything was totally normal. Generally I wasn’t into MASH, but it was occasionally fun with Francie, who made up ridiculous categories like Cause of Death and First STD. It was an improvement to the game even if neither of us could ever remember how to spell chlamydia. So I sat next to her on her bed and rested my head on her shoulder as she lit a cigarette and drew up the game board.

  “I’m sorry,” I told Francie as she was ticking off potential futures in her purple spiral-bound notebook.

  “Sorry for what?” she asked. The muscles in her neck tensed.

  “Never mind,” I said. I took a swig of Diet Coke straight from the two-liter bottle. It was going flat and tasted metallic.

  “Well, at least you won’t be driving a jalopy.” Francie crossed jalopy off the list of potential vehicles and continued on. Bronski Beat was still on the stereo, and I think we drifted off to the pulse of old-school synthesizers, Jimmy Somerville crooning in that pinched, womanly growl, and Francie’s arm around my shoulder.