I figured Johnny was pissed at me for blowing him off for Christmas dinner, and I wasn’t even sure we were still going out—we hadn’t had a private moment since the Bitter End gig—so I was surprised he called me the next day.
I was in my room, enjoying my one and only Christmas present, a Rubik’s Cube from my youngest sister, Katherine. With so many Belle girls to deal with, instead of everyone doling out presents to everyone else, our family held a Christmas grab bag. Each December first, while we were putting up our fake Christmas tree with the garland and decorations already on it (and, of course, our nativity scene, because God knows you can’t have Christmas without a really tacky nativity scene), we would each pull the name of one family member out of a hat. For a while it was just the seven sisters, but since last year, even my parents threw their names in. They still bought presents for the three kids under twelve, but for the rest of us it was the luck of the draw.
I got Agnes. She’s easy to shop for; just find something sensible. I got her a set of very nice colored pens. They were what the bookstore called sidelines, and I got them at a big discount. She seemed to really like them. As for my Rubik’s Cube, for a present from a seven-year-old, it was pretty good. And, hey, it’s the thought that counts.
Anyway, I was getting pretty wrapped up in trying to make the damn thing work but could never get more than one side at a time to match colors. I wanted to give it to Harry to see how he would do with it. I also wanted to smash it with a hammer. Anyway, that’s what I was doing when the phone rang. A minute later, my mother was calling up to me.
“Cheyenne, there’s a boy on the phone!” She underlined the word boy. I hated that she did that. She had to announce to the whole universe that a boy was calling me, like she was trying to shine a light on my future life of sin. If she’d only known.
Plus, it’s not like she didn’t know Johnny, Harry, and Richie, the only boys who would ever actually call me. I mean, it’d been forever since any other boy had called me. I think the last one must’ve been Greasy Jack.
That was the name my family gave him. And he didn’t call on the phone; he was dumb enough to show up at the door.
Jack went to St. Augustine, an all-boys Catholic school that was somehow connected to Our Lady of the Perpetual Adoration. I met him at a birthday party—I didn’t really have friends, so I was there as a pity invite—and he just kept hanging around me. I tried to stand quietly in the corner until it was time for my mom to pick me up, but he wouldn’t leave me alone.
“Do you like sports?” and “What kind of music do you listen to?” and “What’s your favorite TV show?” and “Are you going to the freshman mixer?”
That last one caught my attention.
“What freshman mixer?”
He told me that twice a year our two schools held a joint mixer. It’s one of those rituals that cheesy movies seem to get right. Boys stand on one side of a badly lit and badly decorated gym, while girls stand on the other. The popular kids spend the night trying to sneak shots of alcohol.
“At your school, in November,” he said. “Are you going?”
“I didn’t even know about it.”
“Well, now you do.”
The guy was pushy as hell, but he was cute in a goofy kind of way, too. He had a mop of light brown hair that matched his eyes. I liked that he wore a Clash pin on his denim jacket.
“What’s your name?”
“Jack.”
“I don’t think I’m really allowed to go on dates, Jack,” I told him. I didn’t know if this was true, because I’d never been asked on a date before. I wasn’t even really sure I was being asked.
“Well, if we meet at the dance, it’s not really a date, is it?”
“I guess.”
So I went to the mixer—my mother approved of any school-sanctioned event—and met up with Jack. We danced and then snuck outside and kissed. He was the first boy I’d ever kissed, which was a big deal for about one minute, but then the novelty wore off. He had braces, and his breath smelled like pepperoni.
I thought that was that until two days later when he showed up on my front step. I was in the living room, sitting next to my dad, trying to hear a M*A*S*H rerun over his snoring, when the doorbell rang. “I’ll get it,” I called. My mother got there first.
“Hi, is Cheyenne at home?” Jack was wearing the same denim jacket, this time with more buttons, including one that said Sex Pistols and one that said I’d Kill Flipper for a Tuna Sandwich. His hair was slicked back with some kind of goop, though in God’s name I couldn’t tell you why. I guess he thought it made him look more presentable. I thought it made him look more like a serial killer. By this time, three of my sisters and I were standing behind my mom.
“Oh, hey, Chey,” he said, craning his neck around my mom to see me. “Do you want to go for a walk?”