by Nick Rossi
“What IS wrong with you today, Darcy? You’re acting all kinds of weird,” Claire stated, looking angrily at her. Rena, too, joined in the glare.
“I’m just super tired, C,” she replied.
Of you, she wanted to blurt out loud, but bit her tongue. Her exhaustion made her prone to outbursts, but she caught herself before saying something she knew she’d instantly regret.
“Well drink some coffee or red bull or something. You’re beginning to get on my nerves,” Claire shot back, fire in her words. Rena smiled, seemingly enjoying the argument.
She took a deep breath, trying to maintain her own growing annoyance with Claire and her pedantic ways in check. She felt the glares of both girls upon her, trying to bear into her soul. Feeling a weighty pressure on her shoulders, she sincerely wished that all she could do was get into bed, pull down her black out blinds, and drown out the world around her. She had had no time to ponder her new life. She had been simply plunged into a whole new existence, and she wanted to take some time to properly analyze and make a decent attempt to understand her friends and family. She truthfully did not want to argue with Claire, or anyone at all for that matter, but she found herself reaching the end of her patience. If she couldn’t be dramatic as a 17 year old, when could she be?
She heard the photographer’s assistant call for students’ surnames starting M, and all three girls moved closer, even though they had a few more letters yet.
“Earth to Darcy,” Claire went on. “You’re holding up the line.”
It took every last ounce of will power she had to not lunge over her maybe-pregnant friend and pull her hair, or do whatever it was that girls did when in a physical fight and had to express their anger. Instead, she settled for a deep sigh and walked forward for the big photo op.
***
After much finagling with an amateur photographer who had a striking resemblance to Reba McIntire with an advanced eczema problem, she finally settled upon a pose that favored her ‘good’ side in photographs. Reba wasn’t too enthused about letting a teenage girl direct a photo shoot that held no real importance, but she let her move the camera, backlight and even the green screen to capture her best possible angle. She figured that Claire’s photograph take-over would probably have made her own appear downright homely.
“I’m ready,” she said through gritted teeth, aware of the prescient need to keep her eyes open so as to avoid having a droopy-eyed photo that would haunt her forever.
The photographer took three quick photos in succession and reviewed her work on the expensive-looking digital camera that was set up before her.
“Can I see them?” she immediately asked, walking closer to Reba who instantly pressed the power button to turn off the camera.
“We’re not supposed to show you the pictures,” Reba promptly replied, hunching awkwardly over the camera as though Darcy would have some sort of x-ray vision to see the photographs through the camera, which was now turned clearly off.
“Why not? It’s my photo!” Darcy countered, noting the unpleasant whine in her voice, which made her instantly embarrassed. She did, however, really want to see those pictures.
“Because it will ruin the excitement of wondering if you got a good picture for your yearbook,” Reba snidely replied, calling “Next” loudly.
She grabbed her purse and hastily left the makeshift studio set up in the gym. She heard other students trying to take over the photo session to no avail. She couldn’t help but think about Claire’s photograph session and the poor soul who had to deal with that ticking time bomb.
Chapter 19
Sitting alone in her car, blasting the Fugees and tapping her fingers on the steering wheel to match the rhythm of the catchy song, Darcy looked out ahead at the empty parking lot that stretched out and took up her entire field of vision, desolate and depressing in its lone presence. Even though it wasn’t even yet 1 pm, the parking lot looked like it had been evacuated due to some sort of life-altering, catastrophic event. The empty store shops were apparently open and ready for business, but there were no customers to be found. It gave her the creeps. And she wasn’t into the creeps.
Claire had made her drive to a remote, practically rural, strip mall where there was a drug store to buy a pregnancy test and mitigating the possibility of having anyone recognize her or question her with accusatory glances. Claire understandably didn’t want to have that prickly experience of running into any of their classmates, and Darcy couldn’t really blame her. Gossip was certainly something that they did not want to follow them as they gallivanted around school and the mall. At school, however, was a whole other matter.
As a result of the lengthy though picturesque drive, they had both missed Geography class, which was an absence that she knew she’d have to answer to the next day. Their teacher, Mr. Boone, was an avid attendance taker and question asker. A day didn’t seem to go by that he didn’t ask her for an answer to some sort of geographical related question. Fortunately, she did happen to know most of the answers to the teachers' questions, so in a way she thought perhaps she may have been goading him into asking her all of those times.
With her friend inside the drugstore, which, she noted, looked archaic and so aged that it would not have been out of place in a horror movie, she decided to turn off the music and let the silence envelop her. She had had the air conditioning blasting as it was extremely hot outside, sweat appearing on her brow from just the short walk from the school to the parking lot to where her car was comfortable parked in the shade. She was thankful to be safe in the confines of her car, cool, and alone, with serious emphasis on the alone part.
She looked out before her once more to better scrutinize her surroundings just a little bit more in depth. She momentarily glanced half-heartedly around the empty lot, and then found her focus venturing onto the long row of ash trees that swayed in the hot, humid wind that blew silently through them. Their leaves softly moved to and fro, almost like a lullaby in their gentle motions. She found herself almost beginning to nod off, the sleepless night before her catching up with her rather quickly.
Having been the ‘new’ Darcy for nearly a month, she quickly realized that she had not once thought about her real adult-Darcy life, though the term real did not really have a conclusive meaning for her these days. She instantly felt guilty for not having thought about it earlier, her heart feeling like it was sinking into the lower depths of her stomach.
She thought of her beautiful little dog, a little Dachshund that was (is?) the light of her life. She thought of the dogs little frantically waving tale whenever she got home late from work, a pizza box in her arms because she was often too lazy to make any sort of reasonably healthy dinner. The dog's long ears were her favorite thing to tickle, and the dog certainly loved all of the lavish attention that was bestowed upon her on a daily basis.
Her thoughts then ventured to that awful day that precipitated her decision to take Marina up on her impossible offer of switching lives. The firing from her job, the notice of her apartment building going co-op – all of those awful events that made up her mind to make this mammoth change which resulted in the predicament she now found herself in. She didn’t regret her decision, but she knew she hadn't had the chance to think it through completely.
Claire knocked abruptly on the driver’s side window, shaking her from her reverie. She felt like this was what her new life was: a series of interruptions full of dramatic angst that were no way remotely close to the fantastic teenage lives in the books she held so dear to her heart. She felt a pang in her temples – a surefire sign of a pending headache.
She reached over and unlocked the passenger side door and Claire bound in, placing a tiny brown paper bag into her lap. Both girls looked at the bag as though it was going to speak to them or engage them in some sort of conversation. Sensing the gravity of the situation, Claire didn’t chime in with one of her signature sarcastic comments, and she found herself thankful for the continued silence in the car as t
hey drove back to school. Both girls refused to speak about the elephant in the car as they made their way back to high school life.
***
With Picture Day now officially over, the girls' return to school after their lunchtime detour was like entering another world entirely. The student body as a whole seemed to exhale a collective breath of air once the last photo was taken, thus restoring some sort of normalcy and balance to their teen-verse. The heated worries about getting a good photo ended and the next, hot topic of discussion was a merger of the Senior Stay over and The Prom.
The week prior, the student council had placed posters throughout the entire school with semi-clever slogans and ads in hopes of recruiting kids to be part of the Prom Committee. The posters were literally everywhere: Darcy couldn’t even use the washroom without being 6 inches away from a brightly colored poster showing girls her age dressed in formal gowns, presumably at their prom. The slogan for this years prom was “Don’t let high school pass you by… help plan the most important day of your life!” She cringed when she saw it the first time, but with each subsequent bathroom visit (as the posters were literally omnipresent) she began to entertain the idea of joining the committee herself.
When she was in high school the first time, she had tried to join the prom committee since the 10th grade, which was when she would have first been considered eligible. Each and every time the student council thought of reasons why she couldn’t join, ranging from “We already have enough girls on the committee” the year that it was all boys who rather infamously planned a Playboy-themed Prom (which got shot down in the final hour), to “Not a chance”. All the reasons meant the same thing to Darcy: she wasn’t cool enough. Now seemed to be her chance to avenge that lack in her own past high school experience, but when she brought the idea to both Claire and Rena later that afternoon while they packed their purses after their last class, it was as like she said she’d said that she wanted to enlist in the army.
“You’d better be kidding, Darcy,” Claire immediately said, her face distorting into a look so disgusted that Darcy almost felt disgusted herself.
“Only the losers and geeks join the prom committee because they know they’d never get asked to go,” Rena chimed in, closing her locker not without glancing a look at herself in the mirror, pursing her lips absent-mindedly.
“And not go at all,” Claire continued. “Besides, I spoke to Jason today and told him to ask you”.
Rena dropped her purse, the contents spilling out all over the white linoleum floor. Darcy bent down instantly to help her re-fill it, though there was no disguising the palpable negative energy that Rena emanated, or the sudden blushing of her cheeks.
“I told you not to, Claire!” Rena screamed, her voice going from 1 to 10 within milliseconds.
“People tell me lots of things. But do I do them? Nope,” Claire replied, not even acknowledging Rena’s shocked expression. Looking at both girls on their knees, Claire began to scroll through her cell phone.
“Well, what did he say?” Rena finally muttered once her bag was re-filled and both girls were once again on standing upright. They then left the bathroom and began to make their way out of school for another day, long hair waving and with purses almost twice their size.
“He said that he was going to ask Darcy, duh,” Claire replied, flipping her hair over her shoulder. She wore it wavy today, the long locks bouncing as she walked.
“You can tell him to not waste his time,” Darcy said as they neared her car. She thought she saw a smirk sneak across Rena’s face.
“You’re not going alone to the prom,” Claire firmly replied, leaning against the black BMW. She pulled her sunglasses on, giving her the appearance of a bored celebrity just like the ones that Darcy loved to read about while lying in the tub on a Friday night. It was one of her many guilty pleasures.
There was a sense of finality in Claire’s voice, her tone implying she was not to be questioned and that the decision has been made and there was no repealing it.
She suddenly felt angry and did not know if she could keep her anger hidden this time. It suddenly dawned on her that since she had her dream come true and she became a character in a teen fiction novel, she had been unable to really enjoy herself and immerse her efforts in being that 17 year old girl that she envied as a 30-something year old woman. She knew there were several reasons adding to the lack of enjoyment: the lack of time to actually get to know herself because of the hectic social calendar she held, having an angry brother whom she was not giving up on, and also having her presumable best friends' boyfriend pursuing her like she was his unrequited love.
But there was one key reason that in all these weeks she didn’t realize until that moment that was causing her to always second guess herself and question her ideals, and at that moment it was crystal clear: Claire.
Claire was always proverbially raining on her parade. Every time she attempted to think of something fun to do aside from the usual jaunts to the mall and to the beach, Claire shot her down within seconds and managed to always turn the conversation’s focus back to her. Even just moments ago she tried to dismiss her suggestion of joining the prom committee without giving it a second chance. True, this time Claire had Rena’s partnership on preparing a united front of the prom committee idea, but most times, it was truly 'The Claire Show'.
She knew very well, not only from being an avid reader of Sweet Valley High but also from her own painful high school memories that she was trying to redeem, why Claire behaved the way she did. Claire was used to being the quintessential ‘mean girl’ and the object of every lusty teen boy’s attention. She was used to calling the shots and deciding what her friends were going to do and be seen with because essentially her friends were an extension of herself. While Rena had no problem with granting Claire the power to be the girl in charge, she herself found it become increasingly different to tolerate Claire’s antics, possible pregnancy or not.
Obviously, Claire was not used to being questioned or to have her friends express any kind of independent, rational thinking. And even though she was in this new life only a matter of weeks, her threshold for her friend's questionable behavior had been eradicated and erased completely. She recognized it could have been hormonal (she was having the weirdest mood swings lately), but she also realized that she wasn’t shaking her 30 year olds rational self fast enough. At that moment she had had enough, and wasn’t afraid of any social impact of what was to come once she honestly expressed herself.
“Oh, not only am I going to the prom alone,” she began, opening her own car door which was parked right beside Claire's. “But I’m going to join the prom committee and plan the most craptastic and tacky prom that they’ll let me plan.”
It was like a bomb had gone off, its pending disastrous impacts littering the world around them. The silence amongst the girls was sudden and severe. Claire and Rena both did not know what to do or say.
She opened the car door and sat inside, the scorching hot leather seat feeling like embers upon her bronzed legs. She turned on the radio and took her time lowering the window as both of her ‘friends’ were still speechless. Once the window was fully open, she felt some of the cool breeze enter the car, letting the still and stagnant air escape.
She saw both Claire and Rena’s eyes widen until she thought it must have been painful for them. Claire’s mouth opened slightly in shock, while Rena’s stayed closed, red cheeks in full-on flame mode.
“What did you just say?” Claire finally mouthed, her voice low, nearly a whisper by that point. Darcy let the silence linger and purposely did not answer right away, instead opting to turn the car on and letting the air conditioner blast.
“I think you heard me”, she replied. She turned the key in the ignition and blasted the air conditioning. “Text tonight?”, she said before backing up and driving quickly out of the school parking lot, leaving both girls dumbfounded at her outburst and clear assertion of independence, giving her an undeniable s
ense of elation as she drove away.
***
At the dinner table later that evening, she noticed that her usual talkative mother was rather silent as she passed around the asparagus. Her dark blonde hair, a few shades darker that her own, hung limply and the usual make up that adorned her youthful-looking face was absent. While her mother was certainly beautiful free of makeup, she found herself growing concerned as to why her mother was acting so unlike her usual hyper-self.
“What’s up, Mom?” she said once she got her plate back, full of vegetables and turkey roast. She heard her stomach growl.
Mason shot her a glance as though to warn her to not push the issue but it went right over her head. Even her father, handsome in his yellow polo shirt, looked briefly at her clearly wondering why she would ask such an inane question.
“You know what today is, honey,” her mother somberly replied, staring intently at the dinner plate before her. She pushed the food around on her plate, not taking one single bite.
She knew not to ask any more questions. The sullen expression that had soaked up her mother's usual cheery disposition was enough to quell the hunger she had just felt.
She decided to let the conversation move towards her father’s rather difficult work day at the law firm and his frustration with his new assistant's virtual incompetence. Remaining quiet throughout her father’s tirade, she thought that perhaps subconsciously she held solidarity with her new mom who reminded her so much of her own (old?) mother and let the men govern the conversation.
It was only after dinner did she find out why her mother was so obviously sad, and the news itself was acidly delivered, not unsurprisingly, by Mason who seemed to be brilliant at turning on the wickedness and sweetness within seconds of one another.
She had decided to sit by the pool and stretch out on one of the lawn chairs, rather content in not having to deal with Claire’s tirades when she had heard her brother leave the house and close the patio doors behind him, leaving the two of them alone in the yard. It was still warm despite being close to 8 pm, and she was happy she had stayed in her shorts and t-shirt ensemble instead of changing into sweat pants as she usually did when she got home from school.
