The Brittanys Read online

  “Yeah, I just really wanted to do it,” I say. “I don’t get why it’s such a big deal. It’s my hair. It’s temporary. It won’t last forever.”

  “If it doesn’t wash out in a week, we’re going to the salon.”

  “Fine!”

  I go upstairs and tell Jensen the news that I’m not in trouble. She asks when the pizza will arrive.

  * * *

  —

  We decide to look for a movie on HBO to watch after dinner. Our neighborhood started getting free HBO a few months ago, and it’s been a godsend. One night, we stumbled upon a movie about a couple who goes to a hotel and there’s all these murders in the middle of the night and you think the butler did it but it ends up being the maid who seduced the husband, and also the movie is a porno but you only see tits and ass, no frontal lower regions. We watch it because it’s good, and laugh during the sex parts, because they’re overly dramatic and too passionate, very unreal, or what we assume is unrealistic in bed.

  The storm gets a lot worse, and the TV goes out a few times. Eventually all our power goes out and we can’t sleep. Jensen suggests we talk about what we’d buy if we won the lottery. She says she’d buy her own boat and go sailing all over the world, but I remind her she gets seasick, so then she says she’d just buy a plane ticket to London and meet a British man and fall in love. I say I’d want a mansion on Star Island in Miami, with a huge pool and a waterfall and a private chef, and then I realize Jensen is fast asleep. I close my eyes and think about Joey’s eyes and what it’d be like to smoke with him. I wonder if he’ll like my hair.

  • THREE •

  We wake up later than usual because of the storm. Usually on Saturday mornings we get up early and eat breakfast and beg our parents to take us to the mall, but this morning it’s dark outside, even though my watch reads 12:00 p.m. The sky is still swirling, but there’s no more rain. The clouds are the color of bone.

  “It’s a hurricane now,” my mom says, as we realize we can’t make Eggo waffles in the toaster because the power is still out. “No one flush the toilets unless it’s an emergency.”

  Jensen uses her cell phone to call her parents and says she’s going to stay with us until the power comes back. Jensen and Tomassi are the only Brittanys with cell phones. Tomassi has a BlackBerry because her mom has a BlackBerry, and Jensen has a Nokia flip phone with a camera. Not even Kenzie has a cell, but she steals her mom’s sometimes. My dad said I can’t have one until I turn sixteen and start driving on my own. He thinks that’s the only reason a “kid” should have a cell phone. My mom’s on my side and thinks I should have one in case of emergencies. We’re both working on slowly wearing him down.

  My dad lays out old towels in the dining room next to each of the large windows. He’s prepping for water damage. His flight back to New York for next week already got canceled because of the weather. None of us are really sure what to do if things get bad here, but my dad has confidence that we’ll be okay. We don’t have hurricane shutters, but our neighborhood association assured us the windows were hurricane-proof. The first year we lived in Florida, my dad was out of town when a hurricane warning was announced. My mom drove my brother and me up to Orlando and we went to Disney World for a week. But this time we haven’t had enough warning to escape and will just have to ride it out. Jensen keeps bringing up Hurricane Andrew and how this is nothing compared with that.

  “You were, like, two,” I argue. “You didn’t know your ass from a hole in the ground!”

  “Excuse me,” Jensen replies. “I can assure you I was a very intelligent toddler.”

  “What the hell happened to you then?” my mom chimes in, before giving Jensen a kiss on her forehead.

  Our neighborhood is usually quick to get power back after a storm. It’ll probably be another day until it all gets fixed. It just sucks that the storm is being wasted on the weekend and we can’t miss school for it instead.

  “Let’s play N64 with Brad,” Jensen suggests. I know she has a weird crush on him, even though he’s kind of nerdy and not really interested in girls yet. Or maybe he is but doesn’t make it obvious. Jensen gets crushes on the most random guys: teachers, our pediatrician, Jude Law. She never likes guys in our grade, or even in our school, unless they’re teachers.

  “Brad has to study for his math competition,” I say. “And the electricity doesn’t work. We can’t do shit.”

  “Crapulence.”

  “I guess we can see if he wants to take a break and play a board game,” I suggest.

  We gather the courage to go upstairs and knock on my brother’s door. He keeps it closed most of the time. Since he’s a high school senior, I try to respect his space. I’ve been closing my door, too, lately, slamming it when I’m mad, locking it when I want to be alone. But my dad threatened to take the door off the hinges if I keep locking it, something I’d let happen just to watch him do it. A lot of my parents’ threats are empty, but I do worry about my hair dye not washing out.

  I motion for Jensen to knock on the door, and she puts her hands behind her back and shakes her head no. I go ahead and knock, and Brad calls for us to enter. He’s at his desk, which is covered with a bunch of textbooks and notepads. He holds a graphing calculator, something I am still afraid of, even though I know I’ll have to learn how to use one eventually. His blue quilted comforter is haphazard on his bed, and there are a few empty cans of Red Bull on the floor. There’s a leather jacket in a frame on his wall.

  I remember the story my mom always tells about when we lived in New York. Our family went to see the musical Grease on Broadway with a few family friends. Before the show started, Rosie O’Donnell, who was playing Rizzo, got onstage and asked if any kids wanted to come up and participate in a dance competition. To my parents’ surprise, my brother, age eight, jumped up and threw himself onstage. He was always shy, like me, but something in him just made him get up and want to dance that day, right there in front of everyone. There was a group of about fifteen to twenty other kids who got up onstage, and “Greased Lightnin’ ” started to play in the big theater. My brother started doing karate kicks and splits and spins and wowed everyone in the audience. In the end, he won, and a stagehand ran from the wings and handed Rosie a kid-size leather jacket. Rosie placed it over Brad’s shoulders. I was there when this happened, but I was so young I don’t remember it—only the story.

  Brad’s become introverted since those days. Sometimes I think the move from New York to Florida was harder on him. He’s still made friends and excels in school, but he seems so far away from the kid who let loose on that Broadway stage.

  “What?” he says, not looking up at the two of us hovering in his bedroom doorway.

  “Do you want to play Monopoly or something?” I ask.

  “I’m studying, and Monopoly’s the worst game in the history of the world.”

  “What about Life?” I ask.

  Brad lets out a cackle. Jensen starts to laugh, too.

  “What?” I ask. “I love that game! I love the little car and picking up all the people.”

  “I always end up with, like, fifty kids,” Jensen says.

  “Last time we played, I had to be a cosmetologist,” Brad says.

  “We’re bored,” I say. “We’re desperate.”

  “Why don’t you go outside?” Brad suggests. “The neighborhood probably looks cool as shit now, with all the trees and garbage everywhere.”

  As usual, Brad is right. We go to the garage to grab bikes, but Jensen wants to use my old Rollerblades. They’re bright purple and babyish-looking, but she argues that probably no one will be out anyway. She’s much better on them than I’ve ever been. I once rode over a patch of gravel and scraped up both my knees so bad that I couldn’t fully bend or extend my legs for a month. I’m okay on a bike, though.

  We ride around my neighborhood surveying the damage. The si
dewalks are a mess: trees blown down, leaves everywhere. We step over dirt and debris, random mail, letters and newspapers strewn about the streets. There are no cars out. It feels like the end of the world.

  It’s easier for Jensen to maneuver the Rollerblades through the wreckage. I notice that she flexes her left foot and pivots when she wants to slow down or stop. I never knew that technique existed. I just rolled forward until I could grab on to a mailbox or a tree trunk to stop myself.

  “Do you think school will get canceled?” I ask Jensen. She slows down and turns back around toward me on the bike, a move I didn’t know was possible, either.

  “I hope,” she says. “Maybe the school blew away.”

  We see Florida Power & Light attempting to fix a power line up ahead.

  “Thank you! We love you!” I yell.

  “We love you, FPL!” Jensen screams.

  “We’ll suck your dicks if you get our power back!” I scream at the top of my lungs. One of the workers looks down from his post. We wheel away quick.

  When we return to my house, we discover two bicycles slumped in a bush out front. I haven’t been friends with anyone in my neighborhood since Mike Lipski moved out last summer. I had my first sip of alcohol with him. He poured all the alcohol he found in his mom’s liquor cabinet together into a “Magic Juice.” He hid it under his bed, and we drank it in his room, pretending to get drunk off one or two sips. It tasted terrible. Then his mom remarried and they moved to Miami. Otherwise, Jensen and I know the twins, Daniella and Danny Albertson, from school, but we don’t like them very much. We hope to God it’s not them, because we have literally no excuse not to hang out now. There’s no power, nothing to do, but we’d still rather do nothing alone than with them.

  We walk inside and hear the voices of my mom and a couple boys.

  “I told them all we had was cold pizza,” my mom says. “They rode all the way from Coconut Creek.”

  It turns out the boys are Brody MacIntyre and Fred Weitz. They’re both sophomores. I know Brody because I went into the library once during seventh hour and he was in there for study hall. I had to get copies for a teacher, and Brody told me I was cute. Brody has curly black hair and is pale, very pale, with piercing blue eyes. He’s got a boyish frame but is tall and has full lips. I heard he was dating a sophomore, Hannah Abrahams, but I guess she’s out of the picture if he’s here in my house. I’m in love with him, and it’s a bit unnerving to see him sitting at my kitchen table.

  Brody hops up and gives me a hug. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand while his arms are around me. Jensen is in shock. Fred I don’t know too well, aside from that he’s neighbors with Brody and doesn’t go to our school; I’ve only heard about him from Brody. He just sits there and continues eating his slice.

  “Did you dye your hair?” Brody asks.

  “Yeah, it’s for Halloween. It’s temporary.”

  “It looks hot. I mean, good. It looks really good. Crimson.”

  “What are you guys doing here?” Jensen asks, and I wonder if she’s annoyed or feigning interest.

  “We were bored, so I figured we’d ride our bikes as far as we could, and we got all the way here.” He leans over to whisper to me, “And we had to pick up weed from a kid who lives a few subdivisions over.”

  “Anyway,” says my mom, “as I was telling Bodie—”

  “It’s Brody,” Brody interrupts.

  “Oh, sorry, Bro-dy, Jensen’s mom called my cell and said that she has to go pick up her new dog today at four o’clock. She’s coming to get her at three thirty.”

  Jensen lights up.

  “What dog?” I ask.

  “My mom’s coworker’s shih tzu had puppies and we were promised one. They’re giving them up for adoption.”

  “We gotta head back anyway,” Brody says. “I just wanted to stop and say hi.”

  “How did you know which house is mine?”

  “The school directory. My mom still orders one of those each year for some reason. It finally came in handy.” Brody smiles.

  It’s only now that I can tell Brody is high. Maybe I can get high for the first time with him. He must like me, or want to do stuff with me, if he came all the way over here. But, then again, he was already coming to my neighborhood in order to get drugs. Brody and Fred leave, and Jensen and I run upstairs to discuss plans for the rest of our lives.

  “If I choose the girl pup, I’m going to name her Lucky, or something girly, like Baby, but if it’s a boy, I want to give it a real boy name, like Jack or Franklin. I think that’s so cute, to have a boy dog named a real name like that.”

  “Yeah, but what about Yacko, Wacko, and Dot?” I ask. “How are your parents even letting you get another dog at this point? And won’t they be jealous of Lucky or whatever?” I ask these questions as if I care about the dynamics between her dogs, but really I’m hoping she’ll bring up Brody soon, so I can talk about him forever.

  My mom yells for me, and I tell Jensen I better go down alone. I hurry downstairs and brace myself.

  “Did you buy drugs from Brady?” she asks.

  “It’s Brody. And no, Mom! Why would you think that?”

  “Those boys smelled like marijuana.”

  “Oh my God, Mom, no, they didn’t.”

  “You’re crazy if you didn’t smell it on them. They were stoned.”

  “Okay, well, I didn’t. Can I go now? Jensen is leaving soon.”

  “I need to ask you something.”

  “You just did.”

  “When you girls dyed your hair, like idiots, what did you use to clean up?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What towels did you use? I assume you put towels around your necks and on the floor. They must be covered in red dye. Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “I used old towels.”

  “When Jensen leaves, I want you to show me.”

  I run back upstairs, and I tell Jensen that my mom wants to see our towels, and she laughs and tells me I’m screwed.

  Jensen is getting her school bag together. She never actually packs but simply shoves all her things into her navy-blue JanSport and calls it a day. I have a red JanSport—we bought them together before sixth grade. It was a whole ordeal, picking them out at Target. I obviously wanted a feminine color, but Jensen wouldn’t let me get purple or pink, and she wanted brown, the worst color ever. We decided on red and navy because they both would go with our uniforms for high school. We were proud of ourselves for thinking about our future. And we like that we match but aren’t exactly the same.

  When I first moved to Florida in fourth grade, Jensen hated me. My arrival meant there was another Brittany in town, and Jensen was afraid that her boyfriend, Jonathan D., would fall in love with me because I was new and had lots of colorful butterfly clips that I wore in my hair—though I never knew how to style them properly, so they sat on the top of my head, having landed there unfashionably. Jensen was a tomboy with beautiful platinum-blond hair. I had buckteeth and a unibrow, but a boy named Billy Millman said he loved me, wanted to marry me. These things happen when you’re nine. He was the only one who talked to me, who showed me any attention. Then one day at recess, Jensen pulled me aside.

  Her icy-blue eyes were serious. “Do you want me to ‘take care’ of the Billy situation?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t worry about it. I just need to know if he’s bothering you.”

  She told me that she didn’t like Billy, either, but never really explained why. I assumed it was more of the same. Maybe he’d harassed other girls before; maybe he used to bother her and she didn’t want to admit it, didn’t want to show what was underneath her toughness. Anyway, Billy wasn’t really bothering me, it was just annoying, the way he followed me around and tried to touch me with his fat hands. But I sai
d yes because I wanted her to do me a favor. I wanted to be her friend.

  So she punched Billy in the stomach and got sent to Principal Sherry’s office. Billy left me alone after that. And I got to play basketball as a “package deal” with Jonathan D. and his best friend, Jonathan Z., and Jensen, of course. We stood side by side on the playground until the boys asked us to play with them, and they always did as long as they got both of us. When I told her I didn’t know how to play, she said all we had to do was have the ball tossed to us and then gently bounce it back to whoever passed it. Easy enough.

  I never wanted to be “cool” until I met Jensen. The way she wore boys’ basketball shorts and never blow-dried her hair, it was clear she didn’t care what anyone thought of her. She knew how to bake cookies and how to run fast. She understood her dogs’ feelings better than her own. She was the only person I knew who could beat Donkey Kong on Nintendo 64. Jensen was the one who realized we could use the Brittany name to our advantage, to confuse teachers in class. We became inseparable and unstoppable, answering at the same time when “Brittany” was called, fitting into one PE T-shirt because we were the same person, talking in a backward language that no one else could understand.

  A part of me feared Jensen, too, but it was more like respect. From the moment we met, I knew it was her schoolyard, her turf. Principal Sherry didn’t even care about the punch on the playground. She agreed with Jensen that Billy Millman was a pain in the ass. Instead of getting suspended, Jensen spent the rest of the day in Principal Sherry’s office doing homework and eating candy. From that day on, I knew I had to listen to Jensen, learn from her, try to become like her. She would always be the leader, and I would always follow.