“Like what?”
“Tell me a story about us.” She rolled over to face me, waking herself up. “And make it good. Give us knives, or something. Make us strong.”
*
The same day our penis made the front page, the paper also reported on a break-in at Ludlow, a family-owned local pharmacy, located about five miles from the Big Boy, near a cluster of summer homes that were mostly empty that time of year. Our prank, with its vulgar showiness, had gotten most of the cover, though the pharmacy piece filled a slim column on the left-hand side that ran into the third page. It was luck that I noticed it at all—I was only looking at the paper because of the article about us. The police suspected that whoever was responsible for the crime had a connection to a Ludlow employee; there were no signs of forced entry anywhere on the premises. But hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth—that’s what the paper said, a number I couldn’t fathom—of drugs had been lifted from the shelves. Most of what was missing fell under Schedule II and III classifications—drugs whose active ingredients included Oxycodone and methylphenidate, benzodiazepines and dextroamphetamine. I didn’t have any proof that Bolt was responsible for the break-in, and as long as I lived in Silver Lake, no one was ever caught and prosecuted for the crime. But from around then and well into the summer, Marlena seemed to have an even easier time getting pills.
*
Six thirty in the evening on a Friday night in April, and Mom was getting ready for a date. She zipped between her room and the bathroom clouded in perfume and anxiety and hairspray, her outfit different every time she tottered out in her spiky boots to check her reflection in the foyer mirror, the only full-sized one in the house.
“I knew this day would come,” I told Marlena, who had already plowed through two bowls of Cap’n Crunch. Sometimes, Marlena could seriously eat.
“Of course it would. Your mom’s hot, she’s pragmatic, and she’ll try anything once. Shit, I’d do her,” said Marlena, quoting from my mom’s online dating profile. One night, at around three in the morning, we’d practically memorized the whole thing when Marlena hopped on my computer to see if Greg was online and had found, to her mortified delight, my mom’s Plenty of Fish account logged in and up on the screen.
“You’re hilarious.”
“Jimmy’s working, right?”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
“Maybe your mom won’t come home at all tonight. A home run.”
“Please, please, please can you not be gross about my mom?”
“Please, please, please can you not be a bitch about your mom?”
“How I am being a bitch?”
“You’re so fucking mean to her. You’re like, so haughty. She could come out here and tell you that she has cancer and you’d roll your eyes. It’s like you forget that some of us don’t have the luxury of being bitches to our moms.”
She threw her bowl into the sink where it clattered against mine, and then flounced off in the direction of my mom’s bedroom. What was I supposed to say to that? I resented how Marlena occasionally used the shitty details of her own life to establish a kind of moral superiority over me. I resented how she could always play the fucked-up friend trump card, how my problems seemed so childish compared to hers. She was cranky because she was almost out of pills and whoever she kept texting wasn’t going to come through. Why should I get punished for that? But she was right. I was a bitch to my mom, for that inescapable reason alone: she was mine.
“Doesn’t she look amazing?” Marlena called from the bathroom, all the fight absent from her tone. “Come see.”
Mom’s hair was so straight-ironed it beamed the bathroom light back onto itself, all the brighter for reflecting off that waterfall of shimmery blond. Next to the two of them, I was the one who didn’t belong. They were all bright and yellow, bikinis and popsicles, cut grass and stinging-hot vinyl chairs in the midday sun.
Mom wore an Eagles T-shirt I’d never seen before, worn so soft and thin fine holes edged around the neckline like lace. Her jeans were tight. She didn’t look old, but there was something in her face—you’d never take her for a girl as young as us. I was always aware, in some buried place, that girls my age had just entered their peak prettiness, and that once my pretty years were spent my value would begin leaking away. I saw it on TV and in magazines, in the faces of my teachers and women in the grocery store, women who were no longer looked at, and I saw it when my mother sized up me and Marlena, some memory flickering in her eyes.
“Where’d you get that shirt? I want to borrow it.” I leaned against the doorframe. There wasn’t enough space in the bathroom for me.
“I’ve had this since I was your age, just about.” She strung a silver triangle through her earlobe, flinching. “Some things are sacred. Everything in this house belongs to you kids. I have to have a few things that are just mine. One hundred percent mine. You get that, don’t you? You don’t like it when I borrow your stuff.”
“Mom! I’ve never even seen you wear it.”
“Are you really going to make this into some big thing?” Marlena slid a tube of sparkly gloss from her pocket and handed it to my mom. “I think you should go gloss over lipstick. Lipstick is too ‘Take me serious.’ Gloss is like, ‘Don’t you want to kiss me?’”
The doorbell rang. “One second,” I shouted.
We’d checked out a few of the guys my mom was messaging before I made Marlena X out the window. Mostly they were old or oldish sad-sack types who seemed like they were probably still married and just using Plenty of Fish for a kick, to anesthetize themselves against the mundanity of their middle-of-nowhere lives, their berber carpet, the flats of Capri Sun stacked in their garages. Some of them were rich summer people looking to line up dates in advance of arriving for the warmer months. They wrote things to Mom like, “hey hottie, what u up to 2night?” or “send me a pic!” or “you + me + boat = July 4!” Mom never answered those, I noticed, with some relief.
When I opened the door, it was Bolt who stood there waiting, the hair on his head shaved close to the skin, a tattoo curling out from the sleeve of his denim jacket and blooming across the back of a hand that held a single blush-colored rose.
“Jesus Christ,” Marlena whispered, from somewhere right behind me.
“I’ll be right there,” Mom called from the bathroom. “Tell him he can come on in!”
He looked at Marlena without surprise, a smile creeping across his face. “Hold on,” I said, and slammed the door on him.
“What the fuck is Bolt doing here?” I hissed at her.
“I don’t know. How am I supposed to know?” I heard her ask me not to press this. I heard her ask me to be cool, to let it go. Bolt knocked, two polite raps.