The Blonde of the Joke

by Bennett Madison

  “Val,” she whispered stagily. “There it is.”

  I caught my breath, full of unexpected anticipation. I turned and followed her gaze to a giant, heavy plastic beer cup that was shaped like a cowboy boot. “I told you,” she said. She took the boot off the shelf and caressed it, her boobs heaving excitedly under her tube top. “I told you it would be something that seemed just normal at first. Something that startled you with how beautiful it was. And don’t you see?”

  It was just a big, hollow hunk of molded plastic. My mouth tightened. “Pretty beautiful, all right,” I said through gritted teeth.

  If Francie sensed my rage, she couldn’t see it yet. “Not just beautiful,” she breathed. “The most beautiful. The Most Beautiful Thing.”

  I searched her face. She was looking up at me with desperate, crazed hopefulness, the beer boot clutched tightly to her chest, the rings of gold around her pupils pulsating. I just shook my head.

  Francie bit her lip and smiled wider. She looked almost terrified. Like she knew that this was her last chance. And I knew it was bitchy of me. I owed her so much. But our friendship had been built on more than one promise, and one of the promises—in some ways the most important one—had been that she was better than this.

  Seeing her like that, I knew that I had been lied to. The way she had toyed with the one thing that was still important to me, thinking she could sink her claws deeper.

  “It’s getting late,” I said, checking the time on my phone. “I gotta go.” I turned and left her standing there. “I’m sorry,” I said as I walked away. But I wasn’t actually sorry. I looked back over my shoulder and I could barely stomach the sight of her. She was teetering on her heels, knife-thin stilettos that could no longer support the overwhelming weight of her ambition. And then the heels crumbled. The eyeliner melted away. Francie’s lips were thin and dull, her hair tangled and limp and in desperate need of a new dye job. Her eyes were wide and pleading. Francie in baggy, big-butt jeans and a gray, ill-fitting sweatshirt. She had that boot clutched tight to her breasts, like if she hugged it close enough, she could swallow it inside her body and absorb its fake-o fucking magic.

  Francie had never been anything without me, and she had known it all along. She would not let me go. She was a vampire. In order to save myself, you can see, destroying her was my only choice.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  It was June, the twilight bit of not-quite-summer when everything is in between—either coming or going. My hair had grown out since the day Francie had cut it all off in her bathroom. I was someone different now. After the day in Spencer Gifts, I had stolen a bottle of Clairol Pure White from CVS. Now I was the type of girl who didn’t need a name.

  You know the type I’m talking about: Blond. Big boobs. Total slut. The kind of girl who, when you heard people in the halls talking about “her,” you didn’t question for a second who it was that they were actually talking about. They were talking about her. They were talking about me.

  When it comes to that kind of girl—the kind of girl who doesn’t need a name, the kind of girl who was me—the requirements are loose. Maybe certain criteria are not exactly set in stone. It’s a type, but there are variations. There are misinterpretations. For instance, it’s possible that people just think she’s a slut, even though she’s never actually gotten down with anyone at all. Maybe her boobs are really not all that giant, it’s just that she acts like they are. With the tube tops and everything.

  One point, however, is not up for negotiation: she’s always the blonde. Even if she doesn’t start as a blonde, she’ll end up that way soon enough—trust me. I was a blonde now. Certain things will turn your hair gold.

  I didn’t need a name anymore, but Francie didn’t have one. No one bothered to talk about her anymore. When you heard people talking about the slutty bitch who thought she was too good for everyone else, they were probably talking about me. It was as if Francie had never existed at all. Except she had existed. I remembered her.

  I still even saw her sometimes. I think I must have been the only one. When she walked down the hall that June, no one bothered to stare. She was shoulder-to-locker, her blond hair unwashed and unstyled, flat and dull and kind of growing into brown. She had a shell-shocked look in her eyes.

  And one day I was heading to my locker in a red stretch minidress with matching heels and a tangle of gold chains around my neck, with my hair piled in a shining tower, when I felt a firm grip on my arm.

  I twisted. It was Mrs. O’Keefe, the vice principal.

  “Excuse me!” I snapped and tried to pull away. But she had a grip of steel. She narrowed her eyes and pulled something green and vinyl from behind her back.

  “Skirt’s so short you need two haircuts,” she growled, and handed over the raincoat. “Put it on,” she said. I laughed in her face, not even trying to be rude, but just because I truly thought it was funny.

  Later that day I was coming out of the bathroom, still wearing the Whore’s Raincoat with pride, when I saw Francie slumped against a locker. She looked up at me like she’d been waiting, and I tried to bolt but couldn’t. It was too late; she had locked me in her gaze. A flicker of a smile played at the corners of her lips. She seemed almost amused at my outfit.

  I did not smile. I let my eyes bore into her skull, straight through to the locker behind her. I let black inky tendrils crawl from my body and wrap around her. I willed her to disappear as she faded, faded. I didn’t breathe until she was gone.

  I thought I had obliterated her.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  There is an afternoon that I don’t remember much about. I wonder if it will always be lost, or if someday I will recall the specifics of exactly what happened. I wonder, but then again, I suppose I would rather just let it all go.

  The things I do remember about that afternoon are, for various reasons, mostly inconsequential. I remember, of course, what I was wearing: a plain black shirtdress, black tights, red flats, and, in my hair, a red ribbon. I remember I was watching Judge Judy on television and she was yelling at the plaintiff because he could not produce receipts. Judge Judy was saying, “You claim to have the proof, sir, but where is the pudding? Where is the pudding?”

  I remember the weather. I hadn’t been outside that day, but I remember looking out the window and seeing the day and thinking it was beautiful.

  The one other thing I remember about that afternoon would be significant except for the fact that it can’t have actually happened. And something that didn’t happen can’t be important. Can it?

  Decide for yourself. Judge Judy was screeching and screeching and it was starting to make me feel kind of nauseated, so I turned off the television, and then there was a knock at my door. It was Jesse. I knew why he had come.

  I should have been shocked to see him, but I wasn’t. It seemed natural and ordinary that he should appear just then. It’s only polite to say good-bye. He was standing at the threshold, holding a big cardboard box.

  “Hey there, big brother,” I said. I didn’t make a move toward him, and he didn’t step any farther into my bedroom, just dropped the box at his feet. A groan and a thud. It was my brother, but this return was not like any of his previous ones. He wasn’t the same anymore; his smile was happy and full of the future, unmitigated by artifice or apology.

  “Hey, Blondie,” he said. “Looking good.”

  I touched my hair.

  “Thanks. What’s in the box?”

  “Just some stuff I wanted to return to you.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’re going to be on your own now,” he said. “But I think you’ll be okay.”

  I had to laugh, even though it was not the time or place. “I’ll be okay? I’ll be on my own? Like I’m not already on my own? Who has ever taken care of me? You? I see you, like, once every million days.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Whatever,” I said. I was annoyed with him, knowing exactly how inappropriate it was to feel that way at
that moment.

  “Don’t be like that,” Jesse said. “What’s the point of being like that now?” We looked at each other. Jesse ran his fingers through his hair. Left hand, right hand. And then I wasn’t annoyed anymore, because I just wanted him to stay. I thought maybe if I just kept talking and talking forever, I could trap him there, on the threshold of my bedroom.

  “You wouldn’t believe everything that’s been going on,” I said. “I got an F on my History test, and Mr. Fogelman told me that he thought I should visit the school psychologist, which is like the most insane thing I ever heard, so I told him that if he tried to flunk me, I was going to tell everyone—”

  “I can’t talk,” Jesse cut me off. “I wasn’t even supposed to come here at all. I just wanted to return this stuff. So…”

  “Stay,” I said.

  He shrugged, smiled, and gave me a half wave, which was really more like a flick of the wrist, then turned to go before thinking better of it and turning back. “You’ll be fine,” he said. “I’m proud of you. Look at you. Look at what you’ve become. I mean, really. A blonde? You’re blonder than blond. You are harder than diamond. You could survive anything.” He winked, and I knew that now that he was dead he could see everything, in all tenses, as an uncomplicated panorama. I knew that he knew exactly what I had become. He wasn’t trying to give me a compliment.

  “Jesse,” I said.

  He turned and went.

  “Come back,” I said. And all I wanted was for him to look at me one last time. He did not. All I wanted was for him to turn around and say something—anything—that would give me a clue to where I was going, or what I was supposed to do next. All I wanted was for him to forgive me.

  He did not.

  When he was gone, I knelt on the floor and opened up the box he’d left behind, and in it were all the things that Francie and I had stolen for him. Here were the books, the underwear, the T-shirts and baseball caps and action figures and scented candles—all of it, every useless talisman. I was surprised that it all fit in one box. It seemed like there should have been more. But it was definitely everything.

  I wondered why he’d felt the need to return the stuff to me. It had all been a gift; it was never meant to be returned. But maybe he believed in things that were stolen, believed they had a purpose in the larger plan of the world, and that somehow I was part of that plan, too.

  Maybe. Or maybe he just couldn’t travel to his next Elsewhere with all that shit weighing him down.

  It doesn’t matter. I know none of this is possible. I know it didn’t happen. I had believed in a lot of stupid things, and I’d finally learned my lesson. If there’s one thing I don’t believe in, it’s ghosts.

  What I do and do not choose to believe in, however, does not change the fact that the box of stuff was in my bedroom. I don’t believe in ghosts. But it got there somehow.

  When my cell rang, I didn’t need to look at the display to know who it was. It was Liz.

  “Hey,” she said. “I’ve got bad news and bad news.”

  I don’t remember what I said.

  I wished I was fearless. Harder than diamond.

  I wished I knew a person who could change things. Someone with special abilities, special sight. Someone with force of will so overpowering that all she had to do was want something and it would be hers. Just like that. Someone who didn’t make promises she couldn’t keep, whose bite was worse than her bark, whose bra was not stuffed with silicone falsies her mom had ordered for her off QVC.

  I didn’t know anyone like that. But I wished I did. I was not that kind of person. I wasn’t sure if I wished I was or not.

  My brother was dead and then it was dark out. I don’t know what time it was. Maybe early, maybe late, but either way dark. My mother was downstairs somewhere, planning things with Jack. I was in my bedroom, with all the lights off, sitting on the floor in a corner. I thought about calling Max, but I knew he wouldn’t remember me. I thought about calling Francie, but I knew it was too late for that.

  Certain things are open to interpretation. And other things are pretty incontrovertible, even if you would rather not admit it. Here are some facts: Jesse had gone. Max had gone. Liz was leaving. And as for Francie. Well. I was alone.

  I thought about going to the mall. But the mall was no place for me anymore.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The afternoon after Jesse died, I snuck out of my bedroom, still in my pajamas, and into the room that had once been his. Jesse’s room had floundered in disuse since he’d left for college, the door inching open only when my mom was on a cleaning kick or on the incredibly rare occasions when he himself had chosen to grace us with his presence. Now he was dead. The day after Jesse died, I eased the door open with no idea what it would be like to be in there now that it had no owner at all. I was prepared to cry, or puke, or have a fainting spell. But when I stepped inside and looked around, none of those things happened. I felt fine.

  Jesse’s room had not changed at all. In there he would be seventeen forever, except when he was twelve, or ten, or six. The more closely you looked, the younger he got. Sure, the wall was all plastered with posters of Nirvana and the Ramones and Scotch-taped pictures of Liz shoving her tongue between four spread fingers. And there was that ancient, dog-eared copy of Freshmen in the desk drawer under a red spiral notebook. But then you scanned down the bookshelf only to find row after row of Hardy Boys books, and, lower, two plastic milk crates brimming with at least one hundred He-Man action figures. A threadbare, nameless old teddy bear on the bed, flung carelessly across the pillow. The cheesy, framed needlepoint on the wall proclaiming the day of his birth. My brother had once been very young.

  I looked around the room, and Jesse visited me again, one final time. I mean, really, I know that it wasn’t him at all. I was just a memory, but it did almost feel as if he was speaking to me. “Fearless,” I heard him saying. “You are, like, so fearless.” I tried to be brave.

  I dialed her number. It wasn’t a conscious decision; it was just a muscle memory. A sequence of familiar twitches. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t want to do it. I just did it. I picked up the old plastic Sports Illustrated football phone on Jesse’s bedside table, the one he’d been given as a joke on some birthday or another, and dialed her number. I didn’t even know if she would still exist to answer. But she did.

  “Hey, bitch,” she answered. Like nothing had changed. Francie still held the ability to astonish with her willful obliviousness.

  “Hey, bitch,” I said.

  “You weren’t in school today,” she said.

  “I’m going to be out tomorrow, too,” I told her. That was all I had to say. Despite everything, it still worked that way between us.

  “Your brother died?” she asked.

  “Yep.”

  “That sucks. Does it suck?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not like a surprise or anything.”

  “I have an English test tomorrow,” she offered.

  “That sucks, too,” I said. I was feeling ghoulish, there on Jesse’s old bed. I twirled the cord around my finger and imagined him doing it, in that exact pose.

  Francie’s voice was tough and throaty in my ear as I sat on Jesse’s bed. I was barely listening.

  The room was starting to overwhelm me. I wondered if my mom was going to do that thing where she’d leave it untouched forever, like some weird museum. That’s what they always do on TV when a kid dies, but I didn’t figure my mother for the type. She was too into decorating and home improvement. It was pretty amazing that she’d left it alone for as long as she had. I figured as soon as the funeral was over, she’d probably spend a year stripping the paint on the windows and refinishing the floors, and then turn the room into a study for Jack or something.

  “We’ll go to the mall,” Francie’s voice was echoing through the cheap plastic of the phone. “You’ll feel better.”

  “Now?” I asked, still sort of disoriented.
<
br />   “No. Tomorrow. I’ll skip. That way you won’t have to sit around the house all day with your mom. She must be going totally crazy, huh?”

  “Skip? You sure?” I asked. “Didn’t you skip your last English test, too?”

  “That was, like, three tests ago. Anyway, for you, baby, I’ll skip another. I haven’t read stupid Midsummer Night’s Whatever, so it’s not like it matters. A girl spends her summer reading every tragedy Shakespeare ever wrote, and they go ahead and assign a comedy. So predictable.”

  “Well, you’re not missing much,” I said. “My class read it last quarter. In the end nothing happened.”

  “I had a feeling it might turn out that way,” she said.

  I hung up and went downstairs to see what my mother was up to. She was in the living room with a vacuum cleaner, vacuuming the couch, looking as happy as I ever remembered her being. She had pushed all the furniture to the corners of the living room, and was dressed in her cleaning outfit: an old checked blouse and a pair of baggy jeans, a hot-pink Minnie Mouse bandanna on her head.

  “Don’t you have better things to be doing?” I asked.

  “What’d you say?” my mom shouted over the roar of the vacuum before realizing that it would be clever to shut it off.

  “I said, don’t you have better things to be doing? For instance, crying or something?”

  “It’s funny,” she said. “I haven’t felt like it yet. I tried last night, and it just would not come. At first I felt guilty, but then I remembered that Oprah Winfrey says everyone mourns differently. I suppose I’ll cry sooner or later. Maybe I’ll be one of those people who throws myself in the grave at the funeral. You never know.”

  “They say vacuuming is the first stage of grief,” I said.

  “Come on. It’s not like we haven’t been expecting it. In a way, it’s a relief. I know that’s a horrible thing to say, but it’s true.”

  “It’s still horrible,” I said.