Instant Love by Jami Attenberg
Holly is getting her makeup done by the burnout girl she befriended at work. They’re in the bathroom at the back of the pharmacy, and Shelly’s dusting one perfect pastel-colored triangle on each eyelid. Same as hers. She’s been staring at Shelly for two nights a week, 5:00–9:00 PM, most of senior year, and has fallen deeply in love with her makeup.
Holly has tried to make the same perfect triangles herself at home, usually with Seventeen magazine spread out next to her on the bathroom counter. She looks at the photos and diagrams and memorizes the quick tips, muttering directions under her breath as she stares into the mirror, but it’s no use. Her eyes end up looking more like Picasso’s than Madonna’s. It turns out she’s no good at blending in the makeup. She’s going to suck at blending in for the rest of her life.
Tonight she’s going on a date, that’s why all the makeupping. She’s going out with a boy named Christian who is nineteen and who likes the Smiths and the Cure and New Order. Holly is seventeen and likes New Order and Echo and the Bunny-men and Joy Division. She knows she should like the Smiths, but Morrissey seems like such a whiny turd. Holly has lied to Christian about this, because he worships Morrissey. Morrissey changed his life forever, that’s what Christian says. He’s a vegetarian now and everything. Meat is murder, he says.
Shelly likes Aerosmith and Judas Priest.
That’s how Holly and Christian met, because of music. They were both wearing the same New Order T-shirt, the one with the Brotherhood album cover (which is a classic, even though it is only a few years old), when Christian came in the pharmacy to pick up his father’s heart medicine. No one else wears those shirts in her hometown. Holly lives in a town so small she can barely breathe. That’s the joke, she’s heard it said before: If you want to breathe, go to the next town over.
Coincidentally, that’s where they sell New Order T-shirts, too, in the next town over. At that little shitty record store in the minimall, between the 7-Eleven and the dry cleaner’s. That’s where they both got their shirts. They talked about that record store for five minutes, how it was such a rip-off but it was the only place around. A line built up behind him, and she thought he was going to leave, but then he stepped to the side and waited, and her heart fucking flung at her chest, hard and fast and repeatedly, because oh my god, this guy is going to like me.
No one ever likes her like that.
Because of their age difference, Holly and Christian are keeping their romance a secret. No one wants anyone getting arrested for statutory anything.
Plus the engine on his car is so loud she can hear him coming from a block away, and she jokes about it with him, but she’s not kidding, that car is a piece of shit.
And he has shaved the sides of his head and left the hair on top long so that it spills over his narrow face in an awkward way and makes him look vaguely like a celery stick.
Also, there is the matter of Christian living in his father’s basement because he doesn’t feel like getting a job while halfheartedly taking community-college classes in accounting because he doesn’t feel like going away to college. He doesn’t feel like doing much of anything except riding around in his car and running errands for his dad, talking about Morrissey, and drinking beer from cans in paper sacks. Holly is two years younger than him, and already she knows she is going to blow him away in life, though she’s not sure if she’s allowed to feel that way yet, so she beats herself up for being a big snob. She is no better than her girlfriends, who say things like, “Like I would date a guy who wasn’t in National Honor Society” because all of her friends are smart-girl snobs.
That’s why she likes this burnout girl so much. Shelly thinks it’s normal to date a guy who goes to community college. Shelly thinks it’s OK to spend an hour putting on eye makeup. It doesn’t matter to Shelly if he smokes or drives a crappy car. He has a car, chica! (Shelly likes to translate words into Spanish whenever possible. It’s the only class she isn’t failing.) At least he has a car. At least you have a boyfriend.