What’s twisted is, I always assumed that being grown up meant you didn’t get bogged down in petty high school bullshit. Don’t think that’s true, though. Our folks were buds, then they weren’t. They didn’t grow apart, they were just done all of a sudden, like, game over. My mom was pissed, but I never caught the whole story. End result is, we don’t do holidays with the Goodmans anymore, which is a bummer. Then again, Holden doesn’t come home so I’m probably not missing much. What’s weird is that for most of my life they were my extended family, until they weren’t.
Simone begins fiddling with her bracelets. “Was Mallory...” She grasps for the right word to end her sentence, but I get what she means.
“Was Mallory always like that?” I volunteer, watching her pound up the bleachers a few meters away from us, her face set in deep concentration, the muscles of her legs cut like the Kenyan guy who won the Chicago marathon last year. “Like, intense and hardcore and—”
“Hungry?” she offers.
“Ha. Negative. She used to be fun.”
Simone’s mouth puckers into a lemon-twist smile as she moves her woven leather cuff from one wrist to the other. I stop myself from touching the tender patch of bare skin exposed after she’s swapped the cuff. “Fun. That’s difficult to picture.”
I’m gonna say it; the jealousy is real cute on her. But I don’t want to perpetrate competition or a girl fight. I’m not one to play games. “I said used to be. She’s definitely changed, not for the better.”
“What happened?”
I examine the end of one of my dreds while I think about it. “Nothing real specific.” I rack my brain, because that’s a bogus answer. “Well. Maybe not. Okay, so, she was hanging out in my room one night when her family was over for a party—this is a few years ago. We were sophomores?”
“You’re asking me if you were a sophomore?”
I laugh. “No. We were definitely sophomores. Anyway, she’d never seen The Breakfast Club, which, criminal, so we started watching it.”
“God, I love that film.” Simone grabs her hands and clasps them to her chest, kind of like she’s hugging herself.
Her reaction to the mention of John Hughes’s work? That’s a sign. He used to live up here, too. Never knew him personally, but my folks met him a few times. They say he was everything I’d hoped he would have been. His untimely passing was tragic on so many levels.
I go, “Who doesn’t love them some J-Hu? That’s what I call him in my head ’cause I feel a kinship. Oh, know what else I love? Opening a movie with a crawl—you know, that text graphic where you read the backstory? Like in Star Wars IV, A New Hope, which was the first in the theaters about forty years ago, but obviously not the first part of the story. George Lucas’s staying power is amazing when you consider—”
“What about Mallory, now?” she prompts, trying to bring me back to this galaxy and not the one far, far away.
“Oh, yeah, I remember she got pissed off about halfway through and I was all, ‘What’s up?’ She goes, ‘This movie is fucking bullshit,’ which, shocker. She wasn’t usually one to swear. Also, even the most pretentious film critics agree it’s his best work. So I’m like, ‘Why is it bullshit?’ She goes, ‘Because it’s not accurate. Maybe back in John Hughes’s time, everyone was all about being one thing—the brain OR the jock OR the princess—but now? No. No way. Now, it’s like people expect us to be all of these things at the same time and it’s just so fucking hard.’”
Simone’s face softens and she stops fiddling with her jewelry. “That’s truly depressing.”
“Right? Like major insight into her world. Anyway, after that night, we were less tight. She got kinda bitchy with me, cold, ignoring me in the halls and stuff, especially once she started getting serious with Liam, and then our families stopped hanging out. I was like, whatever. Haven’t really talked since then.”
“Not at all?” she asks.
“Nope.”
Was she embarrassed for letting her guard down around me? We’d swiped a couple bottles of wine and I always say a drunk man tells no lies. Maybe I accidentally peeked behind the curtain all Wizard of Oz–style and that made her mad? Maybe she freaked out that she’d shown me too much of her soul or something, suddenly all naked and exposed like that part of Simone’s wrist where I can see the pale blue veins under the surface of her skin. Mallory’s not the kind of chick who gets off on allowing you to see her vulnerabilities, or anything less than Stepford-perfection.
Simone watches Mallory blow past us with nary a glance in our direction. “Certainly in her own world right now, isn’t she?”
I reply, “Yeah, I’ve seen her run the stairs a million times—I promise you we’re invisible. You know, if I were making a movie about her life, I’d open with a black screen and all you’d hear is her thumping and heavy breathing from running the bleachers. Maybe there’d be a grunt here and there. I’d let it go for a minute or two and people would be like, ‘Sex scene!’ but, no. I hate when directors start a movie or TV show like that, by the way. Too cliché. I’m all, stop it with that amateur shit. Anyway, the big twist would be to see that she’s not gettin’ down, that there’s no pleasure there. Instead, she’s torturing herself, and that would show the audience so much about who that character is.”
She bites her bottom lip before saying, “You see everything as it would play out on film, don’t you? My mum’s just like that.”
I pull back and look at her sideways. “Whoa, it’s super hot when you tell me I remind you of your mom.”
She gives me a shove and I tickle her in return. She shrieks with laughter and says, “Stop! No! I’ll wee myself. Too ticklish! Can’t do it! Swear to God, I’ll piss all over the place.”
I pause. “So what you’re telling me is I’m like your mom and you’re going to pee? Oh, you’re pushing every one of my erotic buttons. Dear Penthouse Forum, I never thought it would happen to me, but I was hanging out with this girl who—”
Before I can complete my thought, I spot a guy in a Lou Malnati’s shirt at the bottom of the bleachers so I excuse myself and head down to grab our pie. Can’t study hungry, right?
I tell Simone, “Hold that thought, my daughter, be right back.”
I amble down to the field and then give my favorite delivery driver a half-bro hug. Sometimes I feel like I see him more often than my pops. “S’up Rico?”
Rico slaps me on the back. “Owen! Good to see you. Double pineapple, pepperoni, and ricotta? Didn’t even have to look at the name on the order to know it was you.”
I shrug. “I’m a creature of habit.” Sure, there are lots of other tasty combos, but this one is the best. Trust me, I’ve tried ’em all. We bullshit for another minute or two before I head back up with the pie.
Simone clutches her stomach.
I ask, “You hungry or you guarding the fortress against marauding ticklers?”
“Starved. Absolutely famished. Christ on a bike, that smells amazing.”
I reply, “See? Who says I don’t know how to show my woman a good time?”
Simone peers up at me from behind her bangs. “I’m your woman, then?”
Emboldened, I say, “You tell me.”