. . .
That night, I listened to the game on the radio while I transferred all the articles from between the pages of The Color Purple to my new scrapbook.
I used a glue stick and pasted in the articles, two to a page. Though if the article had a picture of James, it got its own page.
I saved the first page for last and stapled the Polaroid to that one. Then I used a faded green marker from my junior high days to draw a heart around the whole thing.
I stared at the picture.
I wondered if the house that James lived in was as nice as the one in Sixteen Candles. I knew that they had moved into the old Glass Plantation house. I had never seen it, since like most plantation houses, it was located in such a way that you didn’t just pass by it during your daily routine.
The house was about four or five miles from where I lived, down a long dirt road that led to the Glass House and nothing else but the Glass House. Corey had been invited by James a few times to hang out, and he described their house to me in a series of monologues. He told me that the family didn’t swim in a pool but a whole lake that sat a little ways behind the house. He said that they had their own live-in maid to keep the place clean, because the house had six bedrooms and a kitchen that was bigger than Corey and his mom’s entire apartment. James and Corey had eaten in the kitchen the times that Corey had gone over, and the maid had served them after-school snacks, which had just about blown Corey’s mind. From what I could tell, he had never been invited to stay for dinner, because he had never described the dining room. But I assumed that it was just as grand as the rest of the house.
And the dining room was where I imagined James and me kissing for the first time, just like Molly Ringwald and Jake Ryan in Sixteen Candles. We’d be sitting on top of a large glass table in that dining room, a birthday cake between us. He’d thank me for coming, and I’d thank him for inviting me, and then we’d both lean forward for The Kiss. The Kiss that would mark my final transformation from Monkey Night into the girl who got a Molly Ringwald Ending. I couldn’t wait.
. . .
At around midnight, I woke up to the sound of Cora screaming. “Oh, fuck me, baby. Fuck me real good. Oh God, baby. I cannot believe this.”
New friend.
I turned on my back and stared at the ceiling. I would have to wait for them to finish, so that I could get back to sleep.
I hadn’t heard them come in, but I could smell someone’s cologne on the air. A strange but nice scent in our musky house.
Then there was a break in Cora’s screaming and I heard something else in the night. A car idling outside the house.
Uh-oh. This had happened a few times. An angry wife or girlfriend finally got sick of her man not coming home at night and would show up on Cora’s doorstep.
But it almost never happened with her new friends.
Someone must have followed him here.
And that someone was now sitting out there in her car, maybe thinking about loading a gun.
Cora had almost gotten stabbed by a girlfriend once, and I had often thought that it was just a matter of time before somebody showed up here with a gun.
I sat up on the couch and peeked out the window. If I could see that the woman had a knife, I would run and hide in the basement. If I could see she had a gun, though, I would have to call 911 before she came in here and started shooting people.
But when I looked out the window, what I ended up seeing was Veronica and Tammy Farrell’s convertible. It was idling out on the street in front of our house, but no one was in the driver’s seat.
I looked around and eventually my eyes found Veronica Farrell, standing on the cracked path that led to our house. She was standing perfectly still, like a tree. And she was staring at our door with such a look of hatred in her eyes.
A Saab was parked behind my mother’s car, a larger, newer, nicer version of the one that James drove.