The Blonde of the Joke

by Bennett Madison

“I love your outfit,” Jesse said. His voice was froggy.

  “Valentina thinks I look like a slut.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” Jesse said.

  “That’s what I said.”

  No one had said a word to me. It was as if I wasn’t even in the room. I examined the chips in my nail polish while Francie cuddled up to an amused Jesse and threw her arm around his neck.

  I spoke up. “We brought you some stuff.”

  “More booze, huh?”

  “Not exactly.” I opened up the duffel bag and dumped the contents out onto the floor. The hats, the tank tops, the books, the toys; all of it was there. We had been collecting it.

  “Awesome. Thanks. So remind me why you guys are always giving me this stuff?”

  “Don’t ask so many questions,” Francie snapped with good nature. “Look!” She pulled the Brookstone flashlight from the pile. “A hand-crank flashlight. So you will never be without light. It charges your cell phone, too; you just need to get the attachment separate. What kind of cell phone do you have?”

  “It’s a Nokia,” he said.

  “I’ll see if I can get you the right thingy,” she said. “I bet they have them at Radio Shack. I don’t know about you, but my phone is always running out of batteries.”

  “You’re awful,” Jesse said. “Stealing all this stuff. Luring my innocent little sister into your shadowy underworld.”

  Francie flipped her hair and used her arms to push her boobs up and forward, practically to her shoulders. “It’s not my fault I have a gift,” she said.

  “You have many gifts,” he replied. “Look at all this stuff. How much would it have cost?”

  “Close to six hundred dollars,” Francie said. “I did a spreadsheet in Excel.”

  Jesse still hadn’t gotten up off the couch. Francie mussed his hair and was examining his face without shame. He had not changed. Even with the gifts, he still looked like shit. Something had gone wrong. And I saw a quiver in Francie’s lower lip, a failure of confidence, as she realized it for herself.

  “Don’t you like it?” she asked.

  “I love it,” he said. It didn’t really sound like he was there.

  I wanted to be surprised, but for some reason I wasn’t. I’d heard somewhere that up to three-quarters of physics is belief.

  Francie stood without taking her eyes off him, and you could tell the wheels were turning in her head, trying to figure out what was happening. I’m not sure she’d ever believed me before when I’d told her he was dying. But now it was obvious. His eyes were fluttering open and shut like he was about to fall asleep. You could see his rib cage vibrating through his T-shirt.

  Francie looked up at me, flailing.

  If up to three-quarters of physics is belief, then what’s the other quarter? I guess it’s just physics.

  “Maybe we should go,” I said.

  “Sorry,” Jesse said. “I just got really sleepy all of a sudden.”

  “It’s cool,” I said.

  Francie didn’t talk much on the street outside. She took slow, narrow steps down the sidewalk, her heels clomping awkwardly. “Things are changing,” she said after a while. We were cutting through the circle on the way to the subway, looping around the fountain. “I can feel things changing. Not just the weather, either, even if that’s part of it. I get this feeling now and then.”

  I snorted. “Ha!” I said. “Now you’re psychic? Like what exactly is changing?”

  “I can’t explain it,” Francie said. “But I guess it’s something like a new chapter starting. Don’t you have, like, this sense of the unknown lately? Usually I have, like, a general feeling about where things are heading, but for the past few weeks I just have no idea at all.”

  “I hope it’s heading somewhere good.”

  “It usually isn’t,” she sighed.

  We walked along together. Francie’s hair was blowing wild. We made our way through the park and across the street, where a new building was going up. “I wonder what used to be there?” Francie asked.

  I wasn’t going to give her an answer, because I had none, but I wouldn’t have had time anyway, because a bunch of construction workers suddenly started yelling at her from the building site.

  “Look out, Blondie,” a dude called. “You got all your snacks hanging out the back!”

  “You’re beautiful!”

  “Wanna have my baby?”

  You’d think she would have been used to it. That kind of thing would only have amused her before. But that day Francie froze at the catcalls. She stopped and turned, facing the guys who were shouting at her, but said nothing. Her shoulders dropped. She just stood there.

  “Francie, come on,” I said. “Don’t listen to them. They’re just assholes.”

  She looked over her shoulder at me, still frozen in one spot. The guys, emboldened, were coming closer.

  “Lemme smell your panties!”

  “You like it rough, don’t you, baby?”

  “You’ve got a pretty face. Wanna sit on mine?”

  I touched Francie’s shoulder. She was breathing hard. “Francie,” I said. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  “I can’t,” Francie said. There was panic in her voice.

  “What?”

  “I can’t move,” Francie said. “There’s something wrong with my legs.”

  The guys were circling now, only a few feet away. They looked kind of nervous, too, like they’d never taken it this far before but knew that they couldn’t turn back. “What about your friend?” one of them asked. “Is she a slut like you?”

  I had to do something. Francie wouldn’t move. So I stepped out in front of her, my feet wide, my shoulders square. I felt a certain blackness behind my eyes. I was not afraid. “Fuck you all,” I said quietly. There was really no need to shout. “Really, fuck you all. She’s fourteen fucking years old.”

  “Fifteen next month,” Francie managed to wheeze, but I don’t think they heard her.

  That was all it took. I’d barely said anything, hadn’t even raised my voice, but I looked each of them right in the eye, and as I looked each of them in the eye, an absence crossed their faces, like they had forgotten why they were even there at all. “Sorry,” the fattest one said. “Only playing around.” And just like that, they all wandered off listlessly, back to work, leaving us.

  Francie sat down in the middle of the sidewalk and covered her mouth and nose with her hands. The street was completely empty; it was just us. “Francie,” I said. “Are you okay?” She didn’t answer. She sat there like that for a few minutes, then gathered herself up, and we headed on our way.

  When we finally sat down on the subway, Francie couldn’t look me in the eye. “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know what happened. You saved my ass.”

  And I knew I should have tried to comfort her. But I didn’t want to. She had disappointed me. “I told you you looked like a hooker,” I said. “Maybe you should have listened to me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Francie said. She was crying now. “I should have listened.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  At ten o’clock, Max was outside my bedroom window throwing rocks.

  “You know, they invented cell phones for a reason,” I whispered when I met him at the back door. “You should have just called. This is some Leave It to Beaver bullshit.”

  “I don’t have your cell number,” said Max. “Or I would have called. I’m just glad that was your window and not your parents’. I had to guess.”

  I led him upstairs to my room and turned on some music to cover our voices, then pulled the computer chair away from my desk for him and sat on the edge of my bed.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I smoked a J and decided to go for a bike ride. And now I’m here.”

  “Don’t you have parents?” I asked.

  “No one has parents around here.”

  “True,” I said.

  We sat t
here looking at each other for what felt like a really long time.

  “So what’s up?” I asked.

  “Not much,” Max said. “You look different or something. Every time I see you you look different from before.”

  “Thanks.” I took it as a compliment.

  “You seem different,” he said.

  “Well, maybe I am.”

  And he rolled his chair across the wood floor and kissed me. He just did. I kissed him back. What else could I do?

  Kissing Max was pleasant, but not, like, out of control or anything. I had never kissed anyone before—besides Francie, who didn’t count—and I have to admit I was expecting it to be more exciting. When I had kissed Francie, it had been a solemn agreement between the two of us. Like pricking our thumbs and rubbing the blood together. But with Max, it was all spit and wiggling tongues. I thought of a quiz I’d once taken in Seventeen magazine. “Are You a Good Kisser?” With Max’s open mouth against mine, his hand inching up my thigh, I wanted to know: What is the difference? What would a good kisser be doing that I wasn’t? I tried to think back to the quiz, but all I could remember was something about sweaty palms. My palms weren’t sweaty. Was that good or bad? I couldn’t remember.

  “So what’s your phone number, anyway?” Max asked when I broke away. “It’s kind of weird that I don’t actually have it.” I gave him the number, he tapped it into his phone, and then he disappeared.

  Weird, I thought. And I stood up and looked at myself in the mirror and smoothed my hair. So that’s what it’s like.

  After school the next day, Francie was in the bleachers, alone, clutching her cigarette like it was heavier than her entire body. It was spring, and 70, and from where I stood on the sidewalk, the blossoms that had fallen from the trees were whirling everywhere in little eddies of wind. I watched her for a few minutes from across the football field before walking in the other direction. She didn’t see me.

  Chapter Twenty

  Liz came to take me out on a chilly Sunday afternoon, gray and overcast, at the end of April. I wasn’t expecting her. The thing about Liz is that while I definitely admired her, and appreciated all the clothes she let us steal, I didn’t exactly like her. She had a way of making me feel uncomfortable. Given a choice, I probably would not have chosen to spend an afternoon with her.

  You don’t always get a choice. When Liz came to pick me up, she was dressed like an old-fashioned movie star, with a silk polka-dotted scarf tied over her head and red cat’s-eye sunglasses. But her lips were chapped, and puffy bags peered out from the lower rims of her glasses.

  I tried to think of an excuse not to go with her, but I couldn’t come up with one. So I got into her little blue Volkswagen, which had probably been paid for with hocked Gap merchandise, and we drove off.

  She took me ice-skating at the mall. “Just you and me,” she’d said. It turned out that Liz had been halfway decent at skating once, when she was my age, but she’d given it up because her parents weren’t about to pay for coaches and tutus and everything. It was just as well, Liz said. Who wants to be fat, insane, and broke, all for the sake of one double axel at age sixteen?

  “I’m moving to Australia soon,” she informed me when we were on the rink, just skating around and around, me grabbing her hip every now and then for balance. She had taken off the scarf and sunglasses as soon as we’d gotten out of the car. I guess she had realized for herself how absurd she looked.

  “What are you going to do in Australia, of all places?” I asked her.

  “I’m gonna break into the soaps. They’re big there, you know. Neighbors and all. They call it Naybas. Maybe I’ll meet a man with an Australian accent. It’s all I ask.”

  “That’s dumb,” I told her.

  “I know,” she said. “Ridiculous, right? But something ridiculous is the only thing left to do. And I love kangaroos. So cute.”

  “When are you going?” I wanted to know.

  “After…you know.”

  “After Jesse dies.”

  “Right.” She gave me an apologetic shrug, did a little pivot on her skates, and suddenly she was skating backward, facing me. “I mean, he’s the reason I even came back from LA in the first place, obviously. It hasn’t done much good. I don’t see him any more than you do. I think he’s avoiding me for some reason. But at least he knows I’m here. If he needs me, I’m here.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked her.

  “I guess I just wanted to say good-bye. Because when it happens, there’s not going to be time. We’re all going to be preoccupied with other stuff.”

  “I guess.”

  “It’s going to be soon,” Liz said. She looked at me hard. “I want you to be prepared. You remind me of myself, I think.” She took my hand and twirled me under the strong arch of her bicep. “I thought I could save him, but I couldn’t. You can’t, either. You know that, right?”

  We’d done twenty or thirty laps of the rink at this point. We had passed this spot so many times that it seemed like we hadn’t ever left it.

  “I’d stay, but I can’t,” Liz said. “And anyway, what good am I? I couldn’t help Jesse. I spent years trying to help him, if you want the truth. Even before he got sick. Look where it got him.”

  “What is he even sick with?” I finally asked. It was the question that everyone always avoided.

  “I think he’s just bored,” Liz said. “I mean, that’s as good a guess as any, right?”

  “Last I checked, you couldn’t die of boredom.”

  “What, I look like a doctor?”

  I shrugged. “It just seems like a dumb reason to die.”

  “Well, obviously it’s more complicated, but you know what I’m saying. And really, the important part—the true, actual thing of all of it—is that it does not fucking matter. Jesse has made his own choices, cowardly and pathetic though they may have been. It’s all on him, okay? None of us could have done anything. I told you, I tried. I even went to a witch doctor in New Orleans and bought a crystal and tied a piece of his hair around it and threw it in the ocean.”

  “Sucker,” I snorted.

  “Tell me about it. That crystal was really fucking expensive.”

  Then she left me, wobbling on the ice, to skate out to the eye of the rink, where there was a circle drawn for fanciness. There, Liz twirled and leaped while some schlocky old song played, narrowly dodging little kids and red-jacketed guards, while I retreated to the bleachers and bummed a Marlboro Light from an old lady.

  I watched Liz skate. She had gone off like a bomb—detonated by a sequence of familiar twitches. She’d thought she wouldn’t remember how to do it; she hadn’t skated in years. But her body still knew, I guess, because she flew through the air with an instinct so killer that I was almost afraid to watch.

  Liz stabbed the ice with the picks on her toes, threw her arms like helicopter blades before liftoff. Flakes of ice sparking from her feet. It reminded me somehow of Francie. No—of myself. I wondered if I’d always remember how to steal. I pictured myself years in the future, reclaiming that sneaky art with a screaming baby in one hand and a bag of cat food in the other, in the crowded aisle of a supermarket. It would always be with me, I realized. When I was ready, I could let it go.

  But I wasn’t ready. Not quite yet.

  I watched Liz spin and spin in the center of the rink, that girl a cold blur of fury and resentment and determination. She was spinning faster and faster, and then, just like that, she transformed. She was all ice. She was like me. And I realized suddenly that I’d been mistaken all along. I had been relying on Francie. But Francie would never be enough. It wasn’t her fault—no one else could ever be enough. If Liz had taught me anything that day, it was that I had only myself to rely on.

  Anyway, Francie was less extraordinary every day. Something had caused her illusion to fray at the edges, and it seemed that it might begin to unravel completely at any time. As for me: there in the bleachers, burning through that Marlboro Light,
I knew that I was only growing stronger. I was more beautiful with every breath. Francie was not going to rescue me, or my brother, or anyone. I had to do it myself. It was so obvious. I don’t know how I’d ever seen it any other way. I was not ready to give up yet. I was more beautiful than ever.

  The next day, Monday, I passed Francie a note in the class that was no longer Ms. Tinker’s, telling her I couldn’t go to the mall. Too much shit to do, the note said. She just turned around and shrugged.

  I went to Jesse’s by myself, just because, bearing a pair of cheap drugstore sunglasses as a tiny offering. By then it was tradition. The route to my brother’s place was becoming as familiar as the one to the mall, and when I got there I didn’t even say hello, just climbed onto the couch next to him and curled up, perched the sunglasses on his brow.

  “I’m not sure if we’re both going to fit like this,” he croaked. He was right. My ass was hanging off the edge.

  “I’ll scrunch.”

  “Robin Hood,” he murmured, “you are, like, so full of fearlessness that I can hardly stand it.”

  “And all this time I thought you knew what you were talking about,” I said.

  On Jesse’s couch I felt like a fetus, all pink translucence and no fingernails. He was so much older than me. Old enough to be dying.

  We just lay there, my arms wrapped around his chest, his body suddenly as fragile as the little piece of vibrating tissue paper in a kazoo.

  Francie could not save him. All she had done was cast one of her many illusions. But I didn’t need Francie anymore. I was going to accomplish what she had failed.

  Have you ever done that thing where you take a hand mirror and hold it up to, say, the mirror on the medicine cabinet, and turn it an inch in this direction, an inch in that direction, until you’ve got the angle just right so that you see an endless string of yourself reflected back in front of you, into infinity? That was how I felt looking at Jesse that night. He was my brother. If I had been nine years older, we could have been twins. We could have been the same person. We were mirrors, pushed together face-to-face on his threadbare couch, eyes open, my hand on his shoulder. And looking at my older brother that night, saying nothing, there was a spark of understanding, and instantly I could see both myself and him, reflected back in a mysterious, repeating line that stretched through all the years. All the versions of ourselves that we had ever known, an infinite loop.