“No. I don’t want to know what they say.” Amy rolled her head back, and my mom tapped the tip of Amy’s nose. Amy laughed. “Don’t tell meeee.”
“They say whatever you put your mom through comes back to you twice as bad when you have a daughter. So keep pushin’ it and I’ll get my revenge when you have an Amy Junior.”
Mom tickle-attacked Amy’s sides, and my sister’s laughter bounced off the walls. It was a good sound, helping to diffuse all the tension of what had just happened.
Once Amy got away from my mom, she sat next to me on the couch. Meredith turned on a movie, the original Halloween.
Right before it began, Amy asked Mom if she was really going to tell Meg that Amy sold her out to Shia.
Mom turned to look at Amy with a funny look, said, “I sure as hell am,” and went back to the movie.
26
jo
Laurie’s room was a mindfuck. It was layered with contradictions. Like a record player from Urban Outfitters with a Halsey record spinning, to an autographed box set of old WWE wrestling tapes. He was so fascinating but so ironically normal it made him a character to me.
I could have written forty thousand books about Laurie. Maybe someday I would.
I kept my trip around Laurie’s world going and walked over to the desk. He kept encouraging me to snoop through his things, like it was a game.
“Tell me if you find anything that surprises you,” he said with a pen in his mouth.
“Oh, I will.”
I opened a drawer, and he changed the song on the record player through his phone.
My fingers felt something soft like fur and then something cold and metal. “What the hell?” I jerked my hand back and wiped it across my jeans.
Laurie was on his feet, moving toward me. I wondered if his grandpa was home.
“What?” Laurie shoved his hand in the mystery fur drawer and I closed my eyes.
It could have been a dead hamster or a wild rat. Gross.
When he pulled his hand back out, a black-and-red fuzzy key chain was dangling from the tip of his index finger. “It’s just a rabbit’s foot.” He swayed it closer to me and I jumped back.
I hadn’t seen a rabbit’s-foot key chain in forever, but I remembered when Meg used to have a bunch of them from her job at the skating rink near my middle school in Texas. She had a purple one hanging from the rearview mirror of her first car, an old Buick Riviera with a tan paint job and brown wood interior. The dangling foot creeped me out.
“Ew.”
“It’s not ew. It’s good luck.”
I shook my head. Meg used to say the same thing. “An animal’s foot is not good luck. Nature wouldn’t allow such a cruel thing.”
Laurie stood next to me, rubbing the thing. “That is such a human thing, isn’t it? To claim that the severed foot of an animal is ours for good luck. How fucked-up?”
“Yep.”
“Is that why you don’t eat meat?”
“No. Well, in a way, yes. I guess so. Not rabbit’s feet directly. Can you put that thing away?” I pointed, with my face bunched up in disgust. He tossed it back inside the drawer and snapped it shut. I was done sleuthing for now.
“I think it’s cool. I mean, I don’t plan on changing my diet.” He tapped on his stomach to drill in the words. “But it’s cool that you do what you want and believe in something.”
“I believe in a lot of somethings.”
“Oh, I know you do.”
We sat down on opposite ends of the couch. I was closest to a circular side table that was painted gold and had our Yoo-Hoo cartons on them. I couldn’t remember which one was mine, and it would have been super-awkward to just assume and grab one and start chugging.
“So, do your sisters have boyfriends? I know Meg has John whatever-his-name-is, but what about Beth and Amy?”
I leaned up and pushed against his leg. “Amy is twelve.”
He shrugged, and his face was the definition of And . . . ? “I had my first girlfriend well before twelve. Her name was Lucia, and she had the prettiest curly hair.”
“And why did you and Lucia break up?”
Laurie ran his hand over his hair. It was so wavy now that it had air-dried. “Well, I thought we were exclusive, and she was dating all the boys in my class. It broke my ten-year-old heart. I’ve really never recovered.”
I rolled my eyes. “Sure. But seriously, no, Amy doesn’t have a boyfriend. Beth doesn’t either.”
I didn’t want to tell him that I thought Beth would never have a boyfriend. It wasn’t my truth to tell.
“Do you?”
His question didn’t feel as crass as those words would typically sound coming from a guy like Laurie. I don’t know why my brain kept thinking that—a guy like Laurie—because I couldn’t decipher what that meant.
“No. Do you?”
“Have a boyfriend? No.” He smiled at me, showing his teeth. He had what Meredith called rich-kid teeth.
“A girlfriend,” I clarified. Shelly Hunchberg sashaying out of his house was sitting on the tip of my mind and tongue.
“Not really.”
I looked up at the ceiling, wondering if Laurie had ever broken a girl’s heart before. I suspected that, yes he had. Of course he had. Boys like him were made just for that. I hoped some of the girls who would fall in love with him would make it out to the other side stronger, not less whole than before him.
“None here,” he told me.
Hm. “None here as in Fort Cyprus or the United States of America?”
Laurie laughed and jerked his leg, making it bump into mine. I moved away and his smile grew even more.
“Fort Cyprus.”
“What about Shelly? Is she one of your girlfriends?”
More laughter from him. “No. What do you know about her, by the way?”
“Nothing you want to hear, I’m sure. How do you guys even know each other?”
“Her mom sent her over to bring us a packet for that fund-raiser thing they’re doing.”
“What fund-raiser thing?”
“I don’t really know, but I guess my grandpa told her I would go.”
I wondered what the fund-raiser was. I bet it was some cookout-type thing. The sun had been coming out to play for the last few days and Shelly’s mom, Denise, used any reason she could find to throw a “fund-raiser” where she’d be the center of attention.
If Meredith didn’t know about it, I didn’t want her to.
“She seems okay,” he said. “Cute. A little bossy.”
I didn’t think I liked the way his words pressed into the sides of my body. I suddenly didn’t want to know anything else about his opinion of Shelly. Or anyone who Laurie would find cute but a little bossy. I didn’t want to draw the faces of the girls in Laurie’s past. It struck me as odd that I had never thought of these girls or wanted to know who they were before.