The Pursuit of Miss Heartbreak Hotel Read online

  Then the shaver-Jack, caught in the act of pulling his shirt over his head, turns, and I see it’s none other than the enigmatic Nate Gray in the flesh—literally. And me, I’m beyond gone and I don’t look back. I heel it down the slanting path, slipping on last fall’s wet, rotten leaves, hating the flip out of everyone, and all that’s wrong in this world, and myself and my crank awkward alwaysness.

  “Lucy Butler?” I hear him yell. “What the—?”

  And I’m running, chugging along, the back of my throat burning and aching. I fall, get up, fall again.

  I am the Loser Express. Choo choo.

  * * *

  I get home, rattled to my core, and see there’s a note from the remaining two residents of the Butler abode saying they’re out for the night and the place is all mine. There’s even money for a pizza. I order delivery, do about ten thousand crunches, three hundred jump ropes, fifty or so (not in a row) legit, flat-backed push-ups. I pump up the tunes in the living room and rattle our McMansion with switch, swashbuckling beats until the grub arrives and I stuff my face and play video games till my eyes go blurry.

  I decide I never saw what I saw, and then I decide I did, and I’m gonna tell Eve. She deserves to know, and I’m gonna spill. I sneak sips from a fifth of gin in the cupboard and dance till I’m slick with sweat, honing my skills in the reflection of the porch’s darkening double doors. I recover. I bounce back.

  I’m gonna call Eve and I’m gonna tell her what’s what. And she’s gonna cry and ask me to come over, and cry some more in my arms. It’s totally maybe gonna happen. It totally maybe could.

  I collapse into my bed, an entire small veggie pizza pie shifting around happily inside my gut, thinking about Eve, Ms. Ancient History, with my phone—my six-shooter—lying ready at my side. I recite her digits in my head, and the moments tick by and my heart beats faster, faster still. Until, until, until, I’m running out of steam, the night blanketing down around and over a moment that’s fading away. Gone.

  I lie in my now-dark room, listening to the quiet, gurgling murmurs of my digestion, and think about Eve, and how totally Ophelia it would be for me to call her, dish it all. I won’t do it. It wouldn’t be right.

  I pocket my pistol and curl up into a ball, falling asleep with the soft, oval pucker of Eve’s strawberry lips lingering on my wayward mind.

  Thank You for Holding

  I’m cutting a wheel home from my last track meet of the season when Dad buzzes in. I’m feeling pretty good, tunes blaring, dragging a tar. For cheap thrills, I smoke as we talk.

  “Hi, stranger. It’s Dad.” Like I don’t know who it is. “How did it go?”

  “Eh, we flipped.”

  “Oh, congrats, kid!”

  “No, Dad, we lost.” I pull up to a stop sign and exhale a perfect ring out my open window. “We’re losers.”

  “Oh.”

  “Whatevs. At least the season’s over.”

  “I’m so sorry. Miles’s Project Brain meeting ran late.” Project Brain, so subtle. “I’m really gonna miss watching you throw,” and I can hear him smile, can picture his stubbled mouth creasing at the edges, his head tilting at that angle like I’m still five years old and he forgot it was my birthday—again. “Guess I’ll just have to make the trek up north next year and catch a couple of your D1 college meets!” I’m a silent stone. “Anyway, you joining us for dinner tonight? Fried chicken and corn on the cob!”

  Miles’s favorite. I was planning on heading home, but am not really feeling it now. I chuck my tar out the window and hear Miles, in his pre-pube, nine-year-old vocal stylings, singing in high falsetto to the theme song of their favorite cartoon and then Dad’s laughing, talking too loud to him in an unfunny voice.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What, Louie? You’re not coming?”

  “Yeah, no—” But I’m cut off as he’s hollering to Miles. The line goes silent and I yell into the receiver, “Dad? I’m not coming! I’m hanging up!”

  He’s laughing as he gets back on, as if he’s trying to piss me off. “Louie, this is a special night. Your brother’s team won the Regional Electric Mini Sub Race! And you missed dinner last night, too. Not that anyone’s keeping tabs.”

  “Yeah, and you missed it the night before. And the night before that. Not that anyone’s keeping tabs,” and he goes quiet, knowing I’m right. “Dad, I just can’t. Okay? Be easy. I gotta jet.”

  “Fine,” he says, and I can tell he’s hurt.

  “Look. I was thinking maybe this weekend we could all go scope that flick at the drive-in. I can’t remember the name. The remake of the corny one you mega dug when you were a wee-Jack.”

  “Oh, Louie,” he says, and the regret in his voice makes me fume. “That sounds so nice. But we’re in the city both days for Miles’s—”

  “Switch,” I say, cutting him off.

  “Louie—”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Well, you obviously do.”

  “I obviously don’t.”

  He sighs.

  “We’ll talk when you get home.”

  “No, we won’t because I’m not…” But I can hear he’s already beeped off. “Thank you for holding,” I say to no one, hanging up.

  I wheel past my street and call in a turkey-bacon sub at the sandwich shop, but as I pull into the parking lot, I realize I don’t have my wallet. Good thing I’m not post-hibernation hungry and just competed my backside off in a three-hour-long track meet.

  I tool around, feeling massive jammed and self-sad, wishing I had something stronger to smoke or perhaps a loaded gun, when I remember the gas card my little Oma slipped me last time I cruised by her house. I pull into Citgo and stock up on dried fruit, orange fishies, and enough beef jerky to feed a small, meat-loving nation. I’m scheming a shiny quarter from the leave-a-penny, take-a-penny when I sense a presence hovering behind me and I turn around and her gaze is a tractor beam searing red-hot into the tender flesh between my eyes.

  Oh woe is me.

  Amelia Long, class pariah. She focuses her enormous, watery eyes on my own and plasters on a greasy smile. Three months ago I swore I’d never hang with her again. Yet here she is. And me, I got nothing. I got orange fishies.

  “Hidey-ho, Amelio,” I mumble, not meeting her eyes. I shuffle toward the door, pocketing my quarter and tearing my teeth into the oily wrapper of a Slim Jim. I’m so hungry, my hands are beginning to shake.

  “Oh, word, Lu!” she says, squeezing my name from the depths of her self-loathing. I flinch, eyeballing the kid behind the counter, finally place him as one of the quiet freshie-Jacks who sits shyly in the back of Ms. Hayes’s freshman English. I feel my face burning apple red as Amelia steps closer, the sweaty heat of her desperation and need vibrating between us.

  “Good news,” she says, too loud. “I’m clean! No crotch crabs!”

  “Yay.” I grimace, averting my eyes as another customer jangles through the door.

  And I remember all too well the last time Amelia conned me out, maybe four months ago, scheming a free concert and all-you-can-eat alters. Naturally, there was no show, no drugs, just a few empty kegs, a crowd of flap-Jacks I didn’t know, and an ingrate of a non-heart-Jack flap-Jack who announced to Amelia she most likely had the creepy-crawlies infesting her nethers. It was freezing cold that night and when I got home I spent a painfully sober hour hosing down and scraping off Amelia’s ice-encrusted vodka vomit from the outside of my passenger’s side door. Quoth the Raven Nevermore.

  And I’ve got one foot out the door when she asks what I’m getting into that night. My too-heavy heart sinks, my mind fast-forwarding to my wide-open itinerary; angry parental simmering at home, a cold bowl of cereal schemed after dark, bestest apple-Jacks gone prom-crazed Ophelia with mani-pedis and spray-on tans. I hesitate too long and Amelia’s train is chug-a-lugging off its tracks. She gushes, telling me she’s way into some toaster in the city and that they’re all scoring a sinkload of E and it’s gonna be hecka m
assive kill and I’m super flip if I miss out on this crazy amazing time. I remind her Zo and I have been on the outs with alters of the fourth power for a year now and then she says Clarissa’s gonna be there and was begging her to bring me by.

  Clash.

  Zoë and I, we call Clarissa Molly Master Jack ’cause she’s always holding the bestest, purest, whitest slip. She carries only primo candies and is the funniest damn cat you could ever imagine. She’s got this curly red Afro, and she’s always standing in the middle of a hundred hit-Jacks telling these stories, like how she thinks about her kitten getting bit by a rabid raccoon and dying whenever she needs to cry at funerals and sad flicks, or how her bestest betty, so-and-so, crapped in bed while doing it with some flap-Jack after snorting snow. Clarissa and her E are massive bad news bears, but she makes me laugh until I cry and I could use a little pick-me-up right about now. Not to mention she’s got that pure white slip. I won’t tell Zoë, she doesn’t have to know. She’d go mental if she found out.

  “I…” I sigh. “Sure. I’m free. I think. Buzz me the address and I’ll meet you there. Maybe.”

  “Switch, Jack!” Amelia grins. “Um, I just gotta swing by my place first. I forgot the address there. I, like, wrote it down.”

  “You wrote it down.”

  “Word. Actually, can you give me a ride? I was just gonna walk back, but it’s, like, really far.” She slippery smiles, and it dawns on me that it’s happening again. That it’s entirely possible there is no party and no drugs and no Molly Master Jack. It was the drugs! I blame the drugs!

  Miserable but resigned, I agree to give her a ride, holding out hope in a hopeless world. It’s nice, at least, to have a little company.

  We pull in and her house is a massive pit. It’s this crank mole hole of an apartment she and her dad, who’s never home, have been shacked up in for years, with a billion cats and dogs who are always pissing and yakking brains all over the floor. I flop on her bed as she pretends to look for the address and then I help her clean the kitchen, which is filthier than any kitchen I’ve ever seen. And then because it’s getting late and the “party” falls through and her new litter of kittens are so flipping cute, we cue up a flick and sit under blankets and smile and laugh as three furry-whiskered, munchkin-faced monsters climb and push their tiny, fluffy heads through tunnels of fabric, mewing and generally raising G-rated ruckus.

  We’re sipping off Amelia’s dad’s D-Day-sized Miller Lite mega-stash and scoping the trailer for a new action flick, when Amelia laser-locks her watery, probing eyes onto mine. I’m feeling a little loose and am scatting on how some actress—what’s-her-name—is, like, totally drop-dead ace to the max, and how if I were a shaver-Jack, I’d wanna snag her. Amelia smiles, her shiny eyelids slack at half-mast. She rubs a clammy-palmed hand on my back and nods her bobblehead up and down.

  “Y’know, Lu, that’s coolio.” Her eyes probing my soul with their stare. “I’m hit, Jack. I got your back.”

  “Huh?” I say. “Come again?”

  She smiles again. “You know.”

  I think I do, but really don’t want to. “No,” I say, looking away. “I don’t.”

  And Amelia just shrugs, turns back to the TV. “Like … whatever,” she mumbles. “To each her own. Girls, guys, whatevs.”

  She trails off, and as the hotter-than-Sahara starlet scampers across the screen in full, superhero getup, I feel my scalp tingle with heat and the crooks of my palms flash with sweat. I pick up the little black kitten with white socks and stick my nose deep into the softest-soft fur behind her ears and suddenly, I think, maybe I’m gonna cry. I hold her there, her warm animal belly like a hot water balloon in the palm of my hand, and two or three hot tears roll from my eyes into the soft, sweet down of her fuzzy, dark fur. I breathe back a swell of fire in my chest, and, thankgeezuschrist, Amelia can’t pester me again because her grubby dad shuffles through just then, hollering at us for snagging his sauce, and dumping all over Amelia for not cleaning up after her filthy pride of tiny beasts. He finally leaves, in a huff, and Amelia, unfazed, gets to flapping her mouth, gabbing through most of the credits about this new shaver-Jack she’s maybe seeing, like, sort of.

  The movie starts and Amelia doesn’t shut her trap and, about twenty minutes in, I check my pulse, find it’s still on the marathon-racing side of normal, and say I gotta jet. I tell her my allergies are flaring up and Amelia nods miserably and I heel it outta there, nearly sideswiping the three and a half junk bangers crashed out like enormous, metallic corpses on the apartment complex’s dirt-and-weed front lawn.

  I look back as I shift from reverse into first, and see Amelia’s watery, moon eyes peering out from the front door screen. She smiles, holding up a kitten, waving its tiny, fuzzy paw goodbye. I wave quickly back, drive on, and think about how good it’s gonna feel to get home. Clean, quiet home.

  And it does, it really, truly does. I walk in and there’s Miles and Dad, curled up on the couch watching a cartoon flick and all the dishes are clean and the lights are low and the carpet isn’t jumping with fleas. I slump down next to Dad and he smiles, yanks on one of my braids. I scheme a cookie from Miles’s plate and he whines, so I get up, grab a handful more, and we all munch and watch and laugh in easy peace.

  Jazzed

  At long last, it’s prom. All the betties in town are jazzed on sentimental overdrive, torpedoing around like women possessed, in jeans, button-up blouses, and hundred-dollar aerosol-sprayed updos.

  “The prom is ruining our environment,” I say to Zoë and watch as her gorgeous blond coif is teased and plastered and cajoled around her head like a curlicue helmet. “I think prom was born when Beelzebub, Miss America, and the Tooth Fairy had a three-way and pumped out masses of squealing, teeming, acrylic-nailed bride-princess-zombie spawn.” She rolls her eyes and scopes the magazine in her lap. “Prom and I are, like, so not talking.”

  “Go Children Slow, Jack,” she says. “It’s truth prom is massive gay,” and I cringe, look up, see she didn’t notice. “But let’s be honest. You’re just tweaked ’cause you wish you were going.”

  “I think maybe I’m just depressed.” And Zoë sighs, sadness and feelings and hugs being massive outside of her jurisdiction. “No. I just really wish I hadn’t let you con me into coming here.”

  “Nobody begged you.”

  “Well, yeah, you kind of did.”

  “Nope. Didn’t.”

  “Yup. Did.”

  Zoë shakes her head and I stare out the window. This whole pre-prom hysteria week, I’ve been so checked out, peering through a foggy glass pane at the frenzy and mania. Nothing touches me and sounds are muted and the world zigzags by. I don’t have a dress. I don’t have a date, an updo, a downdo, bronze skin, or glitter glued to my cheeks. I don’t have an orchid to string around my wrist with a scrunchy band that smells like eucalyptus. I don’t find I particularly want these things. But my apple-Jacks, along with every other betty on the planet, certainly seem to.

  Zoë and Maya work to erode my will all afternoon—over flower pickups, a last-minute, emergency strappy-shoe search, and a pre-prom booze cruise—pestering me to come stag or call up my ex-heart-Jack, Eli. But I manage to resist. They drop me off at home, and I soon find myself back in bed, cozily curled up to a Dick Van Dyke marathon and a bowl of O’s, the sun setting gently outside my open window.

  Just as Dick is tripping over his third peskily situated ottoman, Maya buzzes me a picture of her face frozen in a sulky-eyed pout. Then another, a blurry white confection of lace and taffeta and the words My ass. Too big!?!? And I’m laughing so hard I surprise myself when I call up my track buddy co-captain crony, Luke Castle, and tell him he should come with to the dance, say we can make fun of everybody and feel good about how much more awesome we are. I know he’ll say yes, too, because he and his short-term betty just called it quits and he’s massive on the rebound. As friends, I say, but of course.

  “’Cause after all,” I wax philosophically to Zoë five
minutes later on my cell, “it’s prom, once-in-a-lifetime goddamn hell-on-earth prom, and I know if I miss it, I’ll kick myself when I’m a hundred and six, fluffy white shag, a half-dozen teeth and as many fond memories left to my name. Y’know?”

  “I hate you,” she says, but then both she and Maya agree to help me get dressed last minute via video chat and Maya tells me to try on the dress Marta wore a few years back, a jet-black flapper-style number, that shockingly fits like a mitt. I insist on wearing bomber boots and my shag straight down and leave it at that.

  I tell my apple-Jacks I love them and we hang up and I sit in my room for an hour, chewing my nails, waiting in my fancy-pants threads to avoid any unnecessary parental or sibling oglings of any kind until the last possible second when I jet the sixty-three steps from bedroom to banger. In my mad dash, I find nobody’s home, so it doesn’t actually make any difference either way.

  Castle and I meet there, no I’ll-pick-you-up-at-eight funny stuff—just two hit-Jacks hanging out. He’s got a cane and top hat his grandfather used to wear, and one of those black tees with an iron-on cartoon tuxedo, and we look like some kill postmodern Bonnie and Clyde remake. We eat at a table with Zoë, Maya, and their two man-glam dates as they all pull sauce from Five-Fingered like thirsty fools crawling through a desert. I take a few half-hearted swigs while a geriatric DJ starts to spin the hits of yesteryear and the century before, the walls lousy with pruney streamers and starry ornaments sagging in the corners. After grease-coated chicken à la factory farms and sparkling corn syrup cider, slugged back from complimentary Glam-R-Us champagne flutes, we disperse.