by Dalya Moon
Now that I think back to that evening in my kitchen, when I was mentally giving Cooper a makeover, I understand how it's wrong to change someone to suit you. At the time, however, I was not as enlightened as I am these days. Don't judge me, okay? We all make mistakes. I was about to make several.
Conversation in the kitchen waned as my father and brother sat on the stools at the kitchen island, gorging on the Greek food.
“I dabble in a bit of art,” I said to Cooper.
“Show me.”
With Dad and Garnet happily gobbling away at the food, I gave Cooper an express tour of the downstairs floor of the house, then ran up the stairs to my bedroom with him right at my heels.
Unlike Marc, Cooper had no qualms about coming into my bedroom, or closing the door behind him.
With the two of us in there together, my room seemed smaller than ever. It had never felt so cozy when I was in there with friends, or with our housekeeper, but as I showed Cooper my Forgotten Creatures on the wall and the branches over my headboard, he brushed up against me several times to get past, and I could feel body heat radiating from him.
He seemed way more interested in my Creatures than Marc had been. Marc had actually called them demons. And nightmare teddy-bears.
“How many of these beasties have you made?” Cooper asked.
“Like, four. There's one in my brother's room.”
He got on my bed and crawled across to examine one of the stuffed creatures up close. “I know someone who does little dolls like this,” he said. “Collectors pay big money for them.” He tapped on the eyes, which were made from one rusty metal nut and one penny with a hole in the middle. “Don't sell these at a craft show. These are aren't craft, they're one-of-a-kind. They have little souls.”
My face flushed red with embarrassment. My friend Courtney was the artist, not me. I just sewed some silly things together, and I wasn't exactly prolific, with all four of my creations.
With him right there, on my bed, I almost didn't know what to do with myself. I feared he'd look down at my unmade bed and see curly pubes on my sheets and I would die of embarrassment.
I quickly kicked a pair of dirty underwear under the bed. Oh, the horror!
My brain popped in and out of something, and I got that feeling that people call surreal. People always say they “feel surreal” on reality TV shows when they win, or in interviews when they've become famous. I guess all your senses are completely alive, all your nerve endings lit up with something similar to panic, but not panic.
A boy—no, a grown man of twenty-one—was in my room, sitting on my bed. This is how it happens, I thought.
Casually, I sat on the bed next to him, taking care to smooth the blankets down, covering any potential pubes or sweat stains from my favorite sleeping zone. He turned around from where he was kneeling and sat, leaning his back against the wall.
“Have you thought about art school?” he asked.
I picked at my pale blue nail polish where it was chipped. “We already have one crazy artist in the family. I thought I might take some business classes. Something practical. I think art leads to a lot of unhappiness.”
“Because of your mother,” he said, nodding. “Women are not as laid-back as guys. Imagine if our female ancestors had been more like dudes, trying to ride pterodactyls to show off.”
I giggled, imagining a Flintstones-style scenario.
“Every kid would have been an orphan,” he said. “It's not fair, but a woman's role is to worry. You can't look at your mom and think she's neurotic because of the art, because she would have been that way even if she was a nurse or a teacher.”
“Or the Prime Minister,” I said, pulling at the baggy knees of my granny-crochet leggings. I'd taken my wrestler boots off when we came in the house, and I hoped my feet weren't giving off any cheese smells. Despite a good bleaching, the vintage boots had retained a certain something from their past in the wrestling ring.
“Prime Minister, sure,” Cooper said. “But never mind all this weird talk, maybe I'm full of garbage and dumb ideas from my own family. I've read some stuff about evolutionary psychology and while it makes some sense, I don't like how reductive it is.”
“How so?”
“Well, evolutionary psychology would say I feel an attraction toward you because of your hip to waist ratio.” He reached down and tickled me on my sides briefly.
I sucked my stomach in, which is hard to do when you're giggling and nearly peeing your pants from excitement.
He continued, “Your little waist shows me, the caveman, that you are not currently with child, and the shape of your hips shows that you could get pregnant, if I play my cards right. And by play my cards right, I mean demonstrate that I would be able to protect and support our shared offspring until they are about six years old, at which time you'll want to find a different mate so you can have a variety of offspring, all the better to ensure the survival of your genes.”
“I what?”
“That is, if we were caveman and cave … girl.”
“Living without modern bathroom facilities would suck,” I said. “But you're saying we'd last about seven years in our home-sweet-cave? Probably longer if we could brush our teeth.”
He laughed. “Even at the seven-year mark, I would have already been sneaking around behind your back, scamming on every other cavegirl with a nice hip-to-waist ratio.”
“Jerk,” I said playfully, smacking him on the shoulder. “But that is interesting. Anything that illuminates strange human behavior is pretty cool.”
“I also took some philosophy. Wanna hear about Immanuel Kant?”
Did I want to hear about philosophy? No, I didn't. I was in my room with a cute, older guy, and the door to the outside world was closed. I wanted him to show me philosophy, not tell me about it.
So, being the brazen hussy that I am, I leaned in and kissed him. In retrospect, my timing could have been better.
My lips landed somewhat near Cooper's mouth, but I took careful aim and got him with the second one. He kissed me back. I shifted around on my bed so I wasn't so twisted-around.
How would I describe the kissing? I'd say it was very physical, like I was aware of the texture of his lips and his tongue on my lips. While I'd not had a boyfriend before, I'd done some kissing at parties, so I wasn't a total newbie. Things got deeper, and I imagined that he was painting my mouth, and his tongue was the paintbrush. His hands found my waist again, but he seemed to be holding me still, rather than pulling me toward him.
Something made a bumping sound, and I jerked back, thinking it was my father at the door.
Cooper winced and rubbed the back of his head, which had just hit my wall, making the bumping sound.
“Did I hurt you?” I asked.
He pointed to my eyebrow. “Is your piercing bleeding?”
“No,” I said defensively. I could see the round ball up there, at the edge of my vision, but there was no way I would have been able to tell if it was bleeding.
Sensing a sudden shift into extreme awkwardness, I jumped up from the bed and ran into my en suite bathroom, where I found my eyebrow looking a bit purple and forlorn, but not bleeding.
By the time I came out again, Cooper was already at my bedroom door, opening it to make his escape. “We should do this again sometime,” he said, though by the tone of his voice, it sounded like an empty promise.
“Sure,” I said, and I followed him down the stairs. In waves, I was getting the dreadful feeling that I should not have kissed him. I'd feel like everything was going to be okay, for maybe a second, then the wave of regret would hit me again. People who say they have no regrets are full of crap. We all have regrets, but denial is also a powerful force.
I'll just act like nothing happened, I thought. We'll both forget about this, and we'll be friends.
We got to the front door and my father came over to shake his hand and thank him for the great food.
My father said, “Perry's getting to be a
better cook, with practice, but I sure appreciated a great meal tonight.”
“Dad!” As horrified as I was that he was delaying Cooper's escape, did he have to insult my cooking too?
As the three of us stood there, Cooper turned from my father, to me, and shook my hand. He left without saying anything more.
After the door closed, I said to my father, “How could you?”
He frowned. “I said you were getting better.”
“You suck at life,” I said, which was a little on the mean side, but he shrugged it off and went back to his computer room.
My brother was watching something with loud explosions in the TV den, so I went to the kitchen to check out the mess left by the male members of the Martin family. They'd done a decent job of putting most of the takeout containers in the garbage, but they'd left a few utensils out and hadn't wiped down the surfaces. My father and brother both do this thing, where they'll try to clean up the kitchen, but miss the final five percent that'll make it totally clean.
As I wiped the counter, more waves of horror and embarrassment returned over having kissed Cooper. It was much worse than simply having your friend tell a guy you like him. I do not recommend it. Girls, try to be sure he likes you before you stick your lips on his face.
Upstairs in my room, I sat on the clothing-covered chair next to my bed and thought of someone I usually thought of whenever I suffered emotional crush-related trauma around a boy: Scott Weaver.
In my head, I heard him taunting me, saying, “Ne ne, ne ne.”
Thinking about idiotic Scott Weaver made me feel like punching something. I turned and glared at my crafts on the wall.
“You're fat and ugly,” I said to the first Forgotten Creature.
“You say stupid things,” I said to the second.
“And you,” I said to the third, the one who looked most like me. “I can't even look at you.” I tore her out of her shadow box frame and tossed her under my bed.
Next, I calmly went to my bathroom and cleaned my piercing with the solution the piercing studio had sold me. The ritual was soothing. When that was done, I lay on my bed and cried like a little girl.
Chapter 14
On Saturday morning, I woke up with crusty eyes and an equally crusty eyebrow piercing. I checked my aftercare sheet and confirmed my piercing was the expected level of disgusting, right on time.
Staring at my puffy face in the mirror, the Perry from the night before seemed like a different person.
Crying over kissing some guy who didn't seem that into me? Weak. What good would crying do? Does crying drain excess moisture from the body in some way that is beneficial?
Put on your big girl panties and get over it, I told myself. Today is a new day with no mistakes. Fuck other people and their expectations. It's my life, and I'll do what I want.
As I was giving myself the pep talk, my poor teeth, which I was brushing rather furiously, cried out in pain. I spat out suds and a bit of pink blood from my gums. “You're a nightmare,” I said to myself in the mirror.
The girl grinned back, with foamy lips, then began making rabid-dog faces. I highly recommend making crazy faces in the mirror, if you're feeling blue. How can you not love someone who's unafraid to look hideous?
Next, I cleaned my bruised-looking eyebrow piercing with the saline solution and sprayed on the stuff from the blue bottle, the H2Ocean Piercing Aftercare spray. Maybe it was the sexy merman on the cover, but the misted stuff did smell like the ocean, and that made me happy.
I whistled a few silly tunes as I tidied up my room, made my bed, put away my dirty laundry, and retrieved the sad little Creature from where I'd tossed it the night before. “I'm going to make you some more friends,” I told her.
After a quick cheese sandwich for breakfast, I walked over to the nearest laundromat to search for some left-behind clothes to make more Creature bodies.
At the laundromat, I found my friend Haylee, arguing with the owner about whether or not her comforter could be washed in the regular-sized washing machines. The owner wanted her to use the bigger machine, saying the quilt would wreck the smaller machines, and Haylee objected because the big machine cost more. This was not the first time I'd heard this exact same argument, and I didn't even do laundry there, just rifled through their basket of left-behind clothing a couple of times. In addition to the materials for the Creatures, I'd also found a few cute shirts there, but don't tell anyone or all the good stuff will get scooped on me.
I approached the two of them and said to Haylee, “Dude, just use the big machine. I'll give you the extra two dollars.”
She hugged me and took the toonie coin I offered.
“You win,” she said to the owner, an Asian woman with glasses on a chain.
I felt embarrassed for my friend for being so aggressive, but she had just moved into an apartment with horror-movie-fan Andrew, and her budget must have been tight. Even though they were both students with only part-time income, I could understand her wanting to move out of her parents' house, because they were dysfunctional in the sad-not-comical way.
“You look good,” I said, instantly regretting what any sane person would recognize as a white lie. Haylee's normally-pale skin was sallow and her lightened hair looked orange under the unforgiving fluorescent lights of the laundromat. She wore no makeup and had a huge pimple on one cheek.
“You too,” she said, which made me question my cuteness. “I'm glad you combed your hair out, it's nice to see you looking so soft and vulnerable.”
“Vulnerable?”
“Yeah, you look feminine. More feminine.”
I asked why she was doing laundry there and she launched into a saga about some war they were having with their landlord about the hot water usage, visitors after eleven, and suspicious smoke-like smells. Haylee is one of those victim-types, who's always on the bad end of a deal. She's constantly getting ripped off by people on Craigslist, whether she's buying or selling, and as far as I know, she's never quit a job of her own accord.
While she talked, I snagged a striped shirt and a single bright pink sock from the box. After completing my mission, I wanted to get out of the laundromat, and I didn't have that much planned for the day, so I invited Haylee to my house for a visit while her loads washed.
She agreed, so I pulled out my phone and set the timer to synchronize with her washing machine.
“Nice phone,” she said wistfully. “Andrew broke his and then he took mine, so now I have to use payphones to call people and it's costing me two hundred dollars in quarters every month, I swear.”
Foolishly, I said, “Why don't you just get a cheap phone?”
“All those plans and contracts are rip-offs,” she said as we stepped out of the laundromat to the cool outside air.
“But they'd be less than two hundred dollars in quarters,” I said.
“Yeah, but you have to sign a contract.”
“Right,” I said. Never offer logical solutions to someone like Haylee, unless you enjoy being frustrated. I began to regret inviting her over.
Back at my house, she ate three cheese sandwiches and talked about all her problems while I laid out the paper body templates on a pink-and-grey-striped stretch-knit shirt I'd liberated from the laundromat.
My phone timer beep-beeped, but Haylee remained on her chair at the kitchen island, saying the laundry lady could “suck it.”
“It is Saturday,” I said. “The place will be busy.”
“They'll just pull my clothes and put them in a basket,” she said.
“People will touch your panties,” I said.
She grinned. “I hope they steal some so I can buy new ones.”
I threaded my needle and began putting the body together so I could stuff it. We do have a sewing machine, but it's not worth hauling out of the linen closet for such a small job, and besides, stitching by hand gave my Creatures charmingly bumpy seams.
“I guess Courtney's gone full-time-gay,” Haylee said.
“How do you get along with her new girlfriend, The Queen of England?”
“She seems okay. I don't see them much. Andrew likes to have me all to himself.” She smiled and wrapped her arms around herself, apparently still madly in love with him, which was great for Andrew. As I thought about him, I pictured his big head and strangely short arms, which always reminded me of those short-armed dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus Rex. When I first met Andrew, his jerky laugh turned me off. He sounded like the cartoon mean kid who points and laughs when someone gets hurt. I wasn't a big Andrew fan.
As I was adding long bunny ears to my Creature, I wondered how it was someone like Andrew could get a girlfriend, and I was eighteen and had never had a boyfriend. I'd made out with some guys, even gotten into the occasional grope session, but I hadn't been able to snag and reel in a sweetheart, and yet Tyrannosaurus-head Andrew had.
I attempted to talk to Haylee about the two guys I liked, Marc and Cooper, but when I brought them up, whatever I said would remind her of a funny anecdote about Andrew and some new low-budget horror movie he was shooting or scouting locations for, and of course she had to tell me all about it.
“Haylee, can we talk about something besides Andrew?”
She blinked at me. After the stunned look wore off, she said, “I'm sorry. He's my whole life, besides school, but I forget other people have their own feelings.”
I smiled. “Other people do have feelings.”
She shook her head playfully. “Mind boggling! Okay, hit me with all your feelings.”
Put on the spot like that, I drew a blank. We sat quietly for a minute, then Haylee got up, grabbed the step stool, and raided our top shelf of junk, bringing down the Oreo cookies. “These Oreos give me feelings,” she said.
I said, “Do you think guys would like me better if I acted more … I don't know … normal?”
