The Brittanys Read online

  Brittany Ackerman

  The Brittanys

  Brittany Ackerman’s debut memoir in essays, The Perpetual Motion Machine, was the winner of Red Hen Press’s Nonfiction Award. She has a creative writing MFA from Florida Atlantic University and has attended the Writing By Writers Methow Valley Workshop and Mont Blanc Workshop in Chamonix, France, as well as a residency at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods. The Brittanys is her first novel.

  Also by Brittany Ackerman

  The Perpetual Motion Machine

  A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, JUNE 2021

  Copyright © 2021 by Brittany Ackerman

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: Ackerman, Brittany, author.

  Title: The Brittanys / by Brittany Ackerman.

  Description: New York : Vintage Books, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020044125

  Classification: LCC PS3601.C545525 B75 2021 (print) | LCC PS3601.C545525 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020044125

  Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780593311738

  Ebook ISBN 9780593311745

  Cover design by Madeline Partner

  Cover photograph © Lysandra Whitchurch-Bennett/Arcangel

  www.vintagebooks.com

  ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Brittany Ackerman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  For Carl

  • ONE •

  Brittany Rosenberg’s lost her purse. She’s laughing, though, not crying, even though her pink Coach bag could be floating around the fairgrounds, where teenagers are paid to dress up like zombies and pop out from behind maze walls. This is the ticket. We want to be scared. We begged our parents to let us go. We’ve paid for this, folded-up twenty-dollar bills in our little plush wallets. This is the kind of occasion we wear jeans to, tight Brazilian jeans decorated with holes and embroidery that lace all the way up the thigh, with a nice top, our hair straightened by our regulation flat irons. We can never get the back straight, and there’s always one lumpy wave from the crown of our heads to the base of our necks. In pictures, it appears as though we are wearing hats made of our own hair.

  There are five Brittanys in the group: Brittany Rosenberg, Brittany Jensen, Brittany Gottlieb, Brittany Tomassi, and me. There is also a Mackenzie Bedner, aka Kenzie, and a Leigh Cotner, but we just call her Leigh. The seven of us: linked together, traversing the darkness of fairgrounds filled with haunted houses for the month of October. It’s eighty degrees in Florida, even though it’s fall. Winds are strong, the telltale sign of a storm approaching, but we persist. Brittany Jensen’s parents lead us around, chaperones, and tell us to hold on to our things. Our hair blows into our lip gloss, and our bare arms dampen in the ever-present humidity. I’m the only one who brought a zip-up hoodie, and I’ve loaned it to Jensen, who wears it unzipped and loose around her shoulders, pointless.

  When Brittany Rosenberg screams, “My Coach purse! Where is it?” Jensen’s parents immediately identify the nearest attendant, a ponytailed teen in bloody face paint sporting a straw hat and wielding a flashlight. He looks for the purse on his hands and knees while we all laugh, because he’s kind of cute.

  “What color is it?” he asks.

  “What’s your name?” Kenzie, the slutty one, asks back. She was the first of us to get felt up: in the seventh grade, at Adam Leibowitz’s bar mitzvah. She’s also the only one who doesn’t stuff or wear a padded bra, because she actually has boobs somehow.

  The ponytailed attendant shoots Kenzie a smile, and Brittany Gottlieb, the know-it-all, wants to know, “What was in the bag, anyway?” To which Rosenberg replies, “My permit! I just got it two weeks ago! And some tampons and my Hard Candy lip gloss. Oh, and fifty dollars for tonight.”

  Brittany Tomassi gets on all fours, too, says, “We’ll find it, don’t worry!” Leigh twirls Rosenberg’s long black hair into one big knot, then lets it loose on her baby-blue tank top, an attempt to comfort her, I guess.

  Brittany Jensen, my best friend out of all the best friends, butt-bumps me and turns me around to the Ferris wheel. When we were twelve, we rode one together at her church’s annual fair. Without speaking, we grabbed each other’s arms and thought to ourselves, I hope we stop at the top, I hope we stop at the top. We closed our eyes and hoped so hard, and when we felt the car shudder to a halt we opened our eyes and saw we were right smack-dab at the apex. It was then we knew we were magic, witches, fairies—whatever you want to call it—but we could do it, make things happen just by thinking.

  For the last two years, we’ve used this power at school to get the fire alarm to go off or to get hundreds on our social studies tests. Now we are fourteen, it’s two weeks before the real Halloween, and we know we can find Brittany Rosenberg’s purse if we use the magic. We turn away from the group, and I grab Jensen’s arm as she grabs mine. We think, we hope, we drown out the loud music and flashing lights. We concentrate on that pink purse. We focus on Brittany Rosenberg’s face, her blue eyes, her black hair frizzing up in the humidity, her pale, flat tummy showing from underneath her top, her wedged sandals, her shiny, glossy lips.

  “I found it!” the ponytailed guy calls to our group. We run and see he’s actually found her bag, the pink Coach purse with interlocking Cs all over it.

  Kenzie writes her phone number on a used gum wrapper, using Leigh’s bony back as a flat surface to compose the note. She hands it to him, and he asks, “How old are you, anyway?” and she says, “Sixteen,” and he walks away, laughing at the obvious lie. He ended up calling her the next weekend, and she gave him a blow job in his truck. I remember how she didn’t want any of us to know except Leigh, but then Leigh ended up telling everyone during an eating-disorder-themed assembly. It’s ironic, because Jensen always thought Kenzie might really have an eating disorder since she always went to the bathroom right after lunch and her teeth were kind of yellow. But I remember Leigh, how she kept giggling while some blonde teenage girl who must have weighed all of eighty pounds told us about how she’d overcome her friend ED, which stoo
d for “eating disorder,” and how ED would always be in her life, like a true friend, but how he could never hurt her again like he had in middle school. Leigh kept laughing until Rosenberg made her say what was so funny. Finally, Kenzie told us. She said his “thing” tasted like nothing but his “stuff” tasted like crushed-up SweeTarts. SweeTarts—that’s why Leigh couldn’t keep it together. For the rest of the year, whenever someone brought them up, we all lost it.

  Rosenberg reunites with her purse and checks inside for all her belongings. She reapplies her lip gloss, and it makes her mouth bright pink.

  “You smell like a cinnamon bun,” Jensen tells her.

  “It’s Creamsicle,” Rosenberg says, and I remember debating between that shade and one called Confection, which I ended up getting.

  Our group migrates to the snack stand, and Brittany Jensen and I split a blooming onion, dipping the fried strips into the ranch in the middle. Brittany Gottlieb wants to share, but we’re adamant that no one gets involved except us. Jensen’s parents also buy us two Cokes, and we feel like we own the place because we’re the ones with the big cups of Coke, the snack and refreshments, the matching Guess watches. She has a lime-green Kate Spade, and I have a small, classic Burberry bag. My mom gave me the twenty-dollar bill that I folded and ended up not needing because Jensen’s parents paid for me.

  We look forward to Fright Nights every year. Usually, the fairgrounds are home to the Expo Center, which hosts concerts and conventions, but it is mainly known for the South Florida Fair. You can eat a burrito made out of cotton candy, you can pet an emu and have it nip at your fingers, you can win a stuffed bear the size of an armchair. But we much prefer the place at night, when the moonlight makes us appear older than we actually are and we become unafraid of the things that are supposed to scare us.

  We do a few haunted houses, scream and laugh so hard our voices will be gone tomorrow. Tomassi and Gottlieb sit these out: they don’t like the fake chain saws and the way a guy dressed as a psychotic clown gets too close to their legs. The rest of us move through the houses, pushing Rosenberg up front, watching her buckle in fear, take every corner with a squeal, and eventually fall down onto the hay that covers the ground. Tomassi gets a Diet Coke and drinks it out of the bottle like a model. Rosenberg takes a sip and snorts so hard it comes out her nose. We take a group picture on Jensen’s digital camera. Kenzie keeps asking me for gum, but it’s my last piece. I break it in half, and Jensen slips her half into the pocket of her jeans.

  * * *

  —

  At the end of the night, everyone is having a sleepover at Kenzie’s house, but I have to be somewhere in the morning, so it’s been arranged that Brittany Jensen’s parents will take me back to their place, where my parents will pick me up. No matter how late it is, I’ll call and they’ll come. I say bye to my friends when Kenzie’s mom arrives in her Range Rover and all the girls pile in. Brittany Jensen is laughing at something that Brittany Tomassi said, and I worry I’m missing out. I feel good in the car, though. Jensen’s parents drive a white Mercedes-Benz, “Old Mercy.” Ironic, because the car is brand-new, but I think Jensen gets embarrassed by the money her parents have.

  The back is spacious, and I put my purse on the open seat where Jensen sat before, earlier today, when her dad picked us up from school. He brought us Subway sandwiches with extra pickles and two half Sprite–half Cokes. Up front, her mom calls my mom, and I hear them talking. Jensen’s mom says it’ll be forty-five minutes or so, that it got a little crazy with all the girls around and then the whole mess about the bag, and something about how they’ll never do it again, they’ll never volunteer to be the chaperones.

  I drift off while they drive, and I’m out by the time we get to the highway. I don’t think about the girls in Kenzie’s room teaching one another how to use eyeliner on the inside of their eyelids. I don’t think about how Brittany Gottlieb has her period and a boyfriend and I don’t even know what a “thing” looks like yet. All I’ve ever done is kiss a boy, and it’s only been for truth or dare, nothing real, nothing out of love.

  The first time happened when I was at my friend Anika’s house for a birthday party in fifth grade. Her older cousin, whose name I don’t even remember, something boyish and proud like Nate or Jonah, was dared to kiss me on the trampoline. It was about to rain, and I heard the beginning of a drizzle drumming on the tight canvas below us. His lips were so big, like gummy worms, and he smelled like the inside of a tree. If my name comes up tonight, I hope Jensen will recall this story for everyone, because she was there that night and saw it all go down. I miss her. I smell her cucumber-melon perfume on my arm. Maybe I could grab my own arm and hope, but she isn’t here with me to make the magic happen.

  When we pull into the driveway, I wake up and see my parents’ car already waiting. I take the stick of gum out of my purse, the one I broke in half for Jensen because we only had one. This way, we each got a piece. This way, we could share what we had.

  • TWO •

  One week after the fair, we decide to dye our hair. Mine will be red, since I want to be the Little Mermaid for Halloween, and Jensen will do a streak of blue in solidarity. I’ve asked my mom many times if she’d take me to a salon to get a red tint, and every time she said no it only made me want it more.

  Tonight, my dad is coming home from his weekly commute between New York and Florida, so we’re going out to dinner at this hibachi place where they cook on the table and make flaming onion towers. Jensen was supposed to come with us, but she’s grounded because she didn’t walk her dogs and they made a mess on her mom’s new sofa.

  Jensen almost never gets into trouble. Her mom is an interior designer and her dad is a lawyer. They’re rarely home, and her older brother, Matty, who’s a senior like my brother, Brad, is usually out with friends. Jensen and I like having her house to ourselves, to watch movies and go in her pool and paint our nails and walk to the park. One time, we stumbled across a bounce house in the park that had been left up after a kid’s birthday party. No one was around, and we bounced in it for hours until we got tired and sat inside talking until dark. It was one of the best days of my life. When we’re at the Jensens’, it never matters what time we come home or how late we stay up, since her parents and Matty are usually back way after us anyhow.

  But the one thing her mom is strict about is keeping the place clean and orderly. Jensen’s mom never makes the bed for me when I stay over. Instead, Jensen has to take out the bedding, and I help her stretch the sheets over the pullout. In the morning, I have to fold everything back up, and Jensen assists me, our arms wide to open the sheet and then meeting back in the middle to clasp the edges together, corner by corner. Jensen knows how to do things that I don’t, because she has to take care of the house when her parents are working. My mom still does most of that stuff for me, but I really am eager to learn certain chores, like how to clean dishes and bake cookies and mop a floor and take out the trash. I think Jensen enjoys coming to my house more because those things are taken care of. My house is a luxury, an escape, a more comfortable home away from her home. But I envy how grown-up she is.

  Still, despite the couch blunder, she’s sure that she’ll be able to fix it so she can come over tomorrow for our hair-dyeing adventure. But now I have to endure a family dinner alone.

  “Why do they have to put mushrooms in the soup?” Brad complains, and passes it off to me. I had to forgo my appetizer since I’m sharing the teriyaki chicken with my mom and she loves the salad with ginger dressing. So I am happy to obtain this small prize.

  “It wouldn’t kill you to eat a vegetable,” Dad says, and winks at me, proud of his daughter for being a vegetable eater, a noncomplainer in the land of food, but really I’m just starving and I’ll take what I can get. If Jensen was here, she’d have ordered her own meal and gotten soup and salad and refused to share with me, even though we always end up taking most of the
food home because it’s so much. She’d take chopsticks and carve Jensen into the Styrofoam package so no one would eat it from our fridge.

  “Actually,” says Brad, “the pesticides they’ve been using on produce have proven to cause a lot of serious diseases and long-term illnesses, so they actually could kill me.”

  I get nervous and move the mushrooms to the side of the soup bowl and eat around them.

  “But not organic ones, right?” I ask.

  “Those are even worse!” Brad says. “Those are the produce you always see crawling with all kinds of insects and mites and covered in dirt.”

  “Well, I’m thinking of becoming a vegetarian,” I say. “It’s so inhumane, what they do to animals.”

  “So you don’t want to share the chicken teriyaki?” Mom asks.

  “No,” Dad says. “You need the protein. Eat the chicken.”

  “Why are you so worried about animals all of a sudden?” Brad asks.

  “I saw this video in school, and all these chickens were in cages and could barely move and then their heads just get chopped off one by one, and it’s horrible!”

  “Oy.” Mom puts down her salad fork.

  “This is what they’re showing you at school?” Dad asks.

  “It was for biology. It was really sad. I want the chickens to live full, happy lives and be free…”

  “Chickens?” Brad laughs. “You should be more worried about the magnetic fields collapsing and our Earth’s core rotting and solar storms that could send us back to the Dark Ages…”