The Brittanys Read online

  • FOUR •

  A few days later, when the Internet comes back, I see that Brody sent me an instant message, You’re pretty. I die over it and call Jensen to tell her. I can hear Lucky barking on the other end of the line. Jensen can’t talk much, because the new puppy requires a lot of attention. I lose the nerve to tell her, and instead of talking about Brody, I say we still need to figure out what we’re doing for Halloween. We agree to let each other know if anyone gets invited to anything. We only miss one day of school because of the storm, and I spend most of it taking pictures of my red hair in the mirror on Jensen’s camera that she left at my house.

  When my hair hasn’t faded by the end of the week, my mom takes me to her salon to get it washed out. It doesn’t come out fully, and for months afterward I have a red tint, the kind I always sort of wanted. My mom hates it. She also finds out about the carpet when she’s in my bathroom to look at the towels and calls me an asshole. Sometimes she’ll call me a bitch or an idiot, but she’s never called me an asshole before, and it feels comical, but she doesn’t laugh. She’s really upset with me for a while. I don’t get in trouble, though; she just says I’m not allowed to get nice stuff for my room anymore.

  Since my hair isn’t Ariel-red anymore and Jensen just looks like she always did, we decide to go as sexy babies for Halloween. The only plans we manage are to hang out with the dreaded twins, Daniella and Danny. Their names are so stupid it makes us sick. But they have a huge house a few subdivisions over. All the neighborhoods in Boca look the same: a string of homes and pools and well-placed palm trees. Our neighborhood, Woodfield Country Club, has twelve subdivisions, smaller areas of our community with similar-style houses. I live in Bay Creek, where all the houses are beige with Spanish-style architecture, rounded doorways and windows, and coral-colored roofs. The Albertsons live in Cascada, which is much larger, with much bigger houses that are modern and simple. There’s one subdivision, Briarcliff, that has houses so expensive, they have their own guard gate. Woodfield Country Club is always really busy on Halloween, so we figure at least we can hang out with other people this year instead of just ourselves. Also, my mom won’t let me go out unless it’s in a group, and Jensen doesn’t count, so this gives us a way in.

  For our sexy-baby idea, we’re both wearing baggy men’s sleep pants from Target (mine are SpongeBob and hers are Batman) and tight black spaghetti-strap tank tops with major push-up bras. Our hair is in pigtails, hers low and mine high, and we have pacifiers that we got from Babies R Us. I think we look sexy. Jensen wears Crocs that I hate, and I’m wearing Nikes.

  We get to the Albertsons’ house around 6:00 p.m. We’re sleeping over, so my mom says she’ll pick us up tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. She tells us not to do anything stupid. Daniella and Danny are both wearing all white and going as Miami Heat fans, which we think is dumb. They’re always doing dumb stuff we don’t understand. Daniella is wearing white eyeliner and it looks scary. Danny has a secret spot in his room called “the cave” where he watches porn and masturbates, and when we’re over he lets us sit inside and watch some of his movies. Before we go out trick-or-treating, he shows us one of a German girl losing her virginity to her boyfriend that he’s shown us before, but we watch it again. Their mom made us red velvet cake, but it’s cooling and we can’t eat it until later.

  I really just want candy. I love Halloween. It’s always been my favorite holiday since I was a little kid and dressed up as a different Disney princess each year. I loved collecting candy in my orange pumpkin basket and dumping it out on the floor at the end of the night, sorting it into chocolates and fruit-flavored candies. I always gave my mom all my Whoppers and Bit-O-Honey. My favorites are Twix, Twizzlers, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Jensen loves chewy candy, like Starburst and anything caramel, so we make a good team.

  Daniella and Danny give us pillowcases to carry our candy in. Before we head out, Nick Morano comes by to say hey. He’s our age but doesn’t go to our school. He knew Danny and Daniella when they were in sixth grade together at another school. Even though Nick is way cooler than them, he has some kind of camaraderie with them that won’t ever go away. Nick rides over on his moped and gives each of us a turn. I can’t balance on it, but Jensen impresses Nick with her athleticism.

  Nick says he’ll ride next to us as we walk but he doesn’t want to ask for candy. Nick’s definitely not my type: brown hair and green eyes with a muscular build. He’s wearing basketball shorts and Nike slides with a tank top. For some reason, Jensen is really into this kind of look. She likes athletic guys, and I can tell she’s into Nick. She doesn’t say anything to me, though, doesn’t even eye me when he’s not looking. I wish she’d be honest with me. I don’t understand why she never tells me when she likes someone. I always know anyway, but it’s frustrating that she can’t just be normal and talk about that stuff.

  We make our way around the houses in their subdivision and get a good amount of candy. Girls in the neighborhood are dressed in variations of slutty: Little Red Riding Hood in short shorts; witches who’ve simply donned black leotards, witch hats, heavy makeup, and kitten heels; angels and devils but mostly devils; and other even sexier babies. All the boys are wearing basketball shorts and bandannas and calling themselves gangsters, but really they just look like they’re ready to play basketball or go to sleep. My pillowcase gets heavy, and I have to sling it over my shoulder between houses. Nick wants to go to the house of this one kid he knows, Devin Kempler. We all agree and follow him to the next subdivision. It feels weird to leave the safety of Daniella and Danny’s area and move into the night with God knows what else out there. There’s a thick fog in the air, and the shrubbery is cut differently. For the first time tonight, I feel cold. I can see Jensen shivering, too. Nick gives her his flannel, and she throws it on. It’s oversize, but I can tell she loves the feeling.

  We get to Devin’s house, and he has some people over, all guys. They’re watching a scary movie about a clown who kills people. Devin is sitting on a big leather couch, rolling a blunt. Nick asks Jensen if she wants to smoke, and she asks if I can smoke, too. He says yes, and Jensen and I reconvene in the bathroom. We decide that we’ll do it and that she’ll go first, since she was offered and pretty much got us to this point. Good job. I think about Brody and how happy he’ll be that we can smoke together now. I think about Joey and how I’m finally going to prove him wrong.

  Daniella is knocking on the bathroom door and crying, so we pull her in.

  “I…don’t want…to be…around drugs!” she whimpers.

  “You can leave if you want to,” I offer as consolation.

  “Yeah, you’re not, like, a prisoner here,” Jensen adds.

  “You guys are sleeping at my house. You need to stay with me,” Daniella says. “Don’t you want to get more candy? We’ve barely filled one pillowcase. Last year, Danny and I got, like, three whole full ones.”

  “I mean, we’re just a little old to be worried about candy, don’t you think?” Jensen says.

  I’m torn, because, although I agree with her, I also still love candy. I kind of wish we could just keep trick-or-treating and dump our bags out and share our treasures, but we have to grow up at some point, and maybe this is that point. We’re fourteen, and even though we’re dressed like babies, we aren’t little anymore. We’re young women, and we want to smoke weed with Nick Morano and Devin Kempler.

  “We’ll meet back up with you later,” Jensen offers.

  “Yeah, we want to sleep over and have red velvet cake,” I add.

  “If you guys don’t come with me now, then you can’t sleep over, and you can’t have any cake,” Daniella says firmly.

  “What the hell, Dani? You’re such a cockblock,” Jensen says.

  Daniella leaves the bathroom, and we know we have to stay with her: we can’t go back to my house high at midnight. It’s not an option. We follow her out. Nick comes running outsi
de after us.

  “Where are you going?” Nick shouts, but we’re too embarrassed to turn around and answer. Jensen runs to Nick to hand him his flannel and then returns to us. We walk the whole way back to their subdivision in silence.

  Once we’re back, though, we hit up some more houses, houses that Daniella and Danny were saving for last because they’re the best. These houses give out king-size candy bars or have bowls outside that say Take One, so you take a fistful.

  I’m looking inside my second pillowcase for a sucker to eat while we walk when Jensen pulls me aside. We let the twins walk ahead a bit, and she tells me she needs to take out her tampon.

  “We were just in a bathroom! Why didn’t you do it there?”

  “I don’t have another one with me. These pants don’t have any pockets. I was going to just wear it the whole night, but I’m scared of toxic shock syndrome because Amy Hershel in math got it from wearing hers for, like, six hours.”

  “I’m sure we’ll be back to their house soon, and you can just wad up some paper towels in your underwear or ask Daniella for a pad.”

  “I doubt she’s had her period yet,” Jensen says, and realizes I don’t have mine, either, and that she’s hit a nerve with me. “Well, even if she has, it doesn’t matter. I need to take this one out, pronto. I’m not bleeding that heavy. I’ll just stick leaves in my thong or something. Or go au naturel for an hour.”

  Jensen gets the idea to run behind a house and throw her tampon as far as possible. I hold her pillowcase while she rushes behind a fence, squats down, and then chucks her feminine product across a yard. We hear the tiniest splash, and Jensen runs back to me, grabs her pillowcase, and says, “Run!”

  “What! What?”

  “I think it landed in their pool!”

  We die laughing and run over to Daniella and Danny, who are clueless to the situation.

  “Don’t you dare say anything!” Jensen yells, and I can tell she’s kind of embarrassed.

  “I swear,” I say, and reach out my pinkie finger to meet hers. We kiss the ends of our hands and solidify the promise.

  “That guy’s gonna have fun cleaning his pool tomorrow,” Jensen says.

  “So gross!”

  “What?” Daniella asks.

  “Nothing, oh nothing,” Jensen says.

  We get back to the twins’ house, and their parents are still up, drinking wine and watching a movie. We each cut ourselves a hearty piece of red velvet cake and sit at the kitchen table eating in silence. The cake is so good and rich, and the cream cheese icing is my favorite. This cake is one of the only reasons we hang out here. It’s that good.

  Their dad comes over and explains that if we have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, we shouldn’t flush for number one, pee, but we can flush for number two, poop. I don’t like it when their dad says “poop,” especially because we’re eating, and also because it’s just weird. Now I know if someone flushes the toilet in the middle of the night it’s because they’re going number two. It just makes me feel like a little kid, being told what to do with my bodily functions.

  We get ready for bed, and Danny asks if we want to go to the cave to watch another movie. I kind of do want to watch one. I like the pornos because everyone gets what they want. If a girl says, “I want you so bad,” the guy lets her have it. If a guy says he wants to do something dirty to a girl, they do it. It seems so simple. I wish I could ask someone to kiss me and then they’d just do it. In real life, I freeze up and get quiet. In real life, no one ever kisses me like I want them to. But Jensen thinks the pornos are weird. She always laughs at the actual sex parts, so I have to, too. She says she only agrees to watch them for the story lines, the stuff leading up to the sex. I like the plots, too, but I’m much more interested in the sex scenes. It’s the closest I can get to real sex.

  We say no, though, and go to Daniella’s room, where Jensen and I have to share a cot. We’re not sure why we wanted to sleep here so bad. We probably could have just stayed at Nick’s or even at Devin’s, but then my mom would come here at 9:00 a.m. and get mad.

  Daniella falls asleep fast, and Jensen and I talk to each other in whispers.

  “Do you like Nick?” I ask her.

  “Nick’s hot, but he’s kind of a pothead, you know?”

  “Yeah, but do you like him?” I prod.

  “How can I like someone I barely know?”

  “I don’t know. But I wish we could have smoked with him tonight. I feel like that was a good chance.”

  “Same. And I doubt he’ll ask us to do it again, because we just ran off like idiots.”

  “Brody messaged me that I’m pretty,” I finally confess.

  “Brody is a weirdo.”

  “Why?”

  “He just showed up at your house, and he was only there to buy weed, I’m sorry to say it. Maybe he does, like, like you, but I think he’s definitely a pothead.”

  “So what if he is?”

  “You don’t want to be with a pothead. You want to be with someone who has, like, other interests and stuff and doesn’t just smoke and get high and buy drugs and sell them. He’s not good for you. You need to be with someone good. And I think he’s dating Hannah Abrahams.”

  “He’s not anymore, I think.”

  “Shhhhhh!” Daniella whisper-yells from her bed.

  “Sorry!” we whisper back in unison.

  “It’s impossible to find someone who’s all good at our age,” I say.

  “Yeah, that’s why I like Mr. Zuppurdo.”

  We laugh. Daniella shushes us again. We apologize.

  Jensen turns on her back to face the ceiling, and I do the same. We realize that this position gives us much less room. We laugh again through our noses and try to be quiet about it. She rolls to her side and lets out one last whisper: “This sucks.”

  When I wake up the next morning, I call my mom from the house phone. I try to be quiet in the kitchen and wrap the cord around the corner to speak. The twins’ parents are up at 8:00 a.m. Their mom is doing a load of laundry, and their dad is doing some work on the computer in the office. My mom answers and asks why I’m up so early. I tell her to come get us sooner: we want to go home. She asks if we want McDonald’s for breakfast, and I say yes. I wake up Jensen and she’s reluctant because she loves to sleep in, but I tell her about the McDonald’s and she gets up. We throw our stuff into our backpacks, grab our pillowcases full of candy, and head downstairs without waking Daniella to say goodbye or thank you for having us. We don’t bother knocking on Danny’s door, either. I realize at some point we’ll have to return the pillowcases. Jensen became exempt from this nightmare, because the pillowcases stayed at my house, not hers. Most people would have forgotten about something so small, but Daniella brought it up a couple of times in our history class. When I gave them back to her a month later, she actually inspected them in front of me. It only made sense that someone so anal would, years later, end up landing a job at the United Nations. Meanwhile, Danny never made it out of Boca Raton. He still sells cars locally, and once, when we were both in our mid-twenties and single, he asked me out on a date. We caught up over chicken fingers and beer, but nothing happened beyond that. He said he was trying to be more positive about his life, trying to find happiness in simple things. I’ve always kind of felt sorry for him. His sister is such a smart and successful person, and it reminds me of Brad, how I’ve always felt pressure to live up to his genius.

  We slip out of the house unnoticed and wait by the mailbox. Candy wrappers and streamers cover the streets, like a Halloween hurricane came through the neighborhood last night. More foreign objects, like the butts of Swisher Sweets and broken bottles, lie in the driveways and on the sidewalks, too. I imagine Jensen’s tampon floating in some stranger’s pool, the blood-red cloud surrounding it, the limp string sinking toward the bottom. I feel
like Jensen’s forgotten it already; it’s become another bad thing she did that didn’t really matter.

  My mom pulls up and takes us to McDonald’s, where we order egg and cheese on biscuits with orange juice. Jensen gets an iced coffee, and I think it tastes like the smell of smoke. She loves it, though. We keep looking at each other, because we know we have a big day ahead of us.

  My cousin Liza works as a receptionist at our pediatrician’s office and gave me a bunch of earring starter kits a while back. They’re these little punch machines that shove an earring into the desired spot. It doesn’t really hurt, and it’s mainly used on babies. I told her I needed more studs, and she just let me have a whole bunch of these kits. Jensen and I both have our first and second holes pierced, one on top of the other, both somehow approved by our parents, but we want more, of course. Jensen wants to do one more hole above her second, and I want to do the very front part of my ear, the little piece of cartilage called the tragus. After much research from Katherine Bennington on the varsity volleyball team, who is a grade above us and has piercings all up and down her ears, this seems like the best plan. And today feels like the perfect day to put the plan into motion.

  When we get back to my house, we start sorting candy, making a small pile for my mom. My dad gets back from New York early this afternoon, so I make a stack for him as well, but my brother doesn’t eat candy so I don’t worry about him. After we eat a sufficient amount of after-breakfast candies, we sterilize our hands with Dial soap and water. We pull our hair into tight buns and clip back any pieces that might slip out during piercing. I go first, to show Jensen how to use the piercing mechanisms. I draw a tiny dot in permanent marker on the spot where the earring will go, then line up the sharp end of the earring with that dot, and squeeze the plastic until the earring and stopper click together. I aim for the center of my ear and end up going a little too close to the edge, but it still goes in. It hurts like a bitch. The tragus is thick toward the center, and I have to keep pushing, because it’s cartilage. There’s a sense of control, but I’m definitely going to need to ice it after.