The Pursuit of Miss Heartbreak Hotel Read online

  Bowing dramatically, I say, “Your Lordship, Ms. Ancient History,” and place a dried seaweed crown on her golden curls. The other Pennies ignore me as they would a green beach fly, the backstabbing, heart-Jack-snatching brunette giving me the death-stare once-over before turning back to the glossy pages of her magazine. But Eve is smiling as she pulls me down by my wrist, hands me chilled cantaloupe and grapes on toothpicks from a cooler.

  “Beatstreet,” I say, grinning, taking the cold fruit in my mouth.

  She laughs. “We simply must stop meeting like this.”

  I grin and shrug, O-R-S-H-O-U-L-D-W-E, spelling out crisp and neat inside my mind. I tug at the neck of my Bettie Page one-piece, smooth down my bangs. “So, what’s on the switch, Eve Brooks? I mean, I’ve wanted to ask you since forever ago. Ahh…” I lower my voice. “How’s your eggs?”

  “Eggs?” she whispers. “What’s eggs?”

  I scowl, draw two circles in the sand and under them an arc.

  “How’s my happyface?”

  “Eggs,” I hiss. “Like, ovaries.”

  “Oh!” she says, cracking her sunset smile. “The pregnancy test. Yeah. That was hell.” She brushes sand from her leg. “It was legit, though. Got my period that night.”

  “Oh, word?”

  “Yeah. But my happyface is good, too.”

  I smile. I tell her a story. I say, “D’you remember when we were in sixth grade and we went to Roller-Planet and that schemey, pube-’stached Jack camped out at the water fountain and was lunging in to spit-swap the little innocent antelope betties sipping from the watering hole? And you saw it all and heeled it up to the bubbler and, when he pounced on you, you hit him with this massive mouth of chewed-up red hots, leaving the whole mucous-coated fireball in his skeezy oral hole? ’Member?” She nods and I take a breath.

  “And then that time we got on the city bus after school to see where it went and it held us hostage for like, three flippin’ hours? And the bus driver got off and was all smokin’ tars and scratchin’ his balls and said, ‘I don’t give a rat’s tail where you live, no way I’m turnin’ this goddamn bus around.’ And your mom had to cut a wheel practically across the state just to get us?”

  She’s laughing. “’Of course I do.”

  I pull a tar from behind my ear and stick it between my lips, but I have no light. I pat my bathing suit like I’m shaking myself down, and shrug, smiling from behind the tar. She rifles through her large straw bag and finds a loose set of matches.

  “Smoking’s clash,” she says, giving me a light.

  “Word,” I agree, one eye closed as the smoke wafts up into my mug.

  “You should stop.”

  “Think so?” She nods. I flick the ashes away and then flip the tar around into my mouth. I open my eyes wide and look down with big Ophelia eyes as smoke billows out my nose. My best and most classic party trick.

  She’s laughing again but says, “Crank, Lu. For real,” and I’m blasted with jumbles of words I shift and edit and sort. A poem:

  As gulls cry, aloft

  Taken by a whispered wind

  My name on her lips.

  Haiku, courtesy of Lu I-Love-You Butler. I chill easy and dam the words fighting to spill from my mouth as I spin the tar back around and pull it from my lips, studying it. “I’m beatstreet,” I say. “I quit,” and flick it into the sand.

  Eve sighs and picks it up, stubbing it out on a small stone and dropping it into an empty water bottle. “A-plus for dramatic effect, but that doesn’t mean you can be some littery little litterbug.”

  “You always were a better person than me.” I take another grape from the plastic plate in her lap.

  “Litterbug, litterbug, shame on you,” she sings, her outstretched palms moving back and forth in front of her. “Shame on the terrible things you do. You spoil the soil and the wonderful view. Shame shame shame shame shame on you.” She looks up over her sunglasses, beaming, her shoulders skipping with giggles.

  I shake my head. “You live in a fantasy land, Ms. Ancient History,” and I pour sand grains through my fist. “So I’m a bug, huh? A litterbug?”

  “Bugs are massive pesky,” she says, pulling off her shades. “So yeah, that’s what you are.”

  I laugh and she’s squinting in the sun, her oiled skin glaring and shimmering like the sea’s whitest caps. She says something but I’m counting the freckles on her nose.

  “Ground control to Major Lu. What ever happened with that sweater?”

  I shrug, transfixed.

  She says, “What’re you doing?”

  “Research.” I say, “Nothing,” and pop another cantaloupe into my mouth, fixing her with my best stony-eyed gaze.

  “What?” She laughs loud, her voice rippling, shimmering in waves over the hot sand, and the Pennies cock their ultra-tweezed brows and glare at us over superfreeze shades. Eve looks at them, laughing, and turns her back to them, her singing giggles like a thrush’s liquid call. I’m beside myself. Beyond.

  I look into her gray-ocean eyes and she smiles. I quickly look away, but again, my mouth is opening, my brain on total revolt. “‘Once she hears to her heart’s content, sails on, a wiser Jack.’”

  My chest burns. I’m pouring it on like syrup over Sunday-morning pancakes. Eve furrows her brow, her cheeks flushed and rosy, and I shake my head, laughing it off. I look away, mutter, “The Odyssey. Reading humor.”

  “O-kay?” she says and reaches out her hand, lays four impossibly long fingers across my wrist. And it’s like the whole world is okay. Like everything is all right. And I know I should tell her about Nate. Now would be the perfect time. I take a breath, look up again, and then catch two of the Prickly Pennies eyeing me sidelong. Though it literally slays me, I slide slowly out from under Eve’s warm hand.

  “Um, I gotta jet,” I say, standing, hold up two peace sign digits. “Things to see, people to do. You know.”

  “Too bad.” She frowns and I feel my cheeks go beet-borscht red.

  “Rinse and repeat,” I smile.

  “Later, Beatstreet. Keep it on the real,” and I wave, heel it down the beach, back to my Jacks, where Zoë, Maya, and I powwow and decide to go out for pizza. As we’re heeling it to Zoë’s whip, we pass Amelia Long, sitting on a towel at the end of a row of other misfit betties. She waves and smiles and I smile and, for some unconscionable reason, invite them all to come with. My apple-Jacks give me the massive stink eye, but I’m actually glad I invited her and her crew ’cause by the looks of her big mop grin and blissful seesaw eyebrows, I’ve just about made her life.

  Light, Like Air

  Last day of school, forever. In the hall, everyone exchanges long, rambling notes written in the backs of yearbooks, and betties hug and cry and hold on for dear life. En Français we have une grande fête. We invite the senior Spanish class to crashpad and Zoë and Maya are there and we scarf on crêpes and fajitas and rock out to Basque and Breton folk music. Zoë pulls a neck muscle headbanging.

  I’m slightly sweaty-palmed all day, the goodbye poem I’ve written for Ms. Hayes burning in my back pocket, and I pull it out over and over to scrutinize. I will give it to her. I won’t. I will. I won’t.

  I sit in my last class ever with her and we listen to her freshmen give in-n-out group presentations of their theatrical interpretations of A Separate Peace and there’s an abundance of flip Finnys falling from trees, and many a mop Ophelia Gene, wringing their mitts and cackling Wa ha ha! like Count Dracula.

  Ms. Hayes and I laugh and huddle close, making notes on their projects, smiling sweet as peach pie at each student as they speak. Before the bell rings, I say goodbye to the wee-Jacks and get a gaggle of quick, stiff hugs and the betty who’s been so crush on me gives me a drawing she did and it breaks my heart in two. As everyone files out, Ms. Hayes gives me a massive Ms. Hayes–scented hug. So close, she feels infinities away.

  “You’re gonna miss me,” I say and she laughs. I know I’ll miss her more.

  “No ki
dding,” she says. “You better come back to visit once in a while.”

  “Word,” I say. “I will.” I look up and she’s smiling. “Ugh. I hate goodbyes. I don’t know what’s wrong with everybody. All this sentimental bullscat. It’s like the world is coming to end.”

  “Never mind about them,” she says. “How are you?”

  I laugh. “That’s a loaded gun.”

  “Lu,” she says. “You’re gonna be amazing. I have no doubt whatsoever, Dr. Butler. Just promise me you’ll squeeze in some lit classes, maybe creative writing, or modern verse. Visual art!”

  I nod, knowing I probably won’t, what with premed requirements up the wazoo, and she pulls me into another, longer hug. With one final flashing of my pearly whites, I turn to leave, but feel again the poem I scrawled out this morning, just for her, burning bright inside my back pocket. I slide it out and hold it between my digits. It’s warm, and feels light, like air. I turn back and she’s waiting. I put it in her hand, saying nothing, and heel it on out.

  Outside her door, I hyperventilate for a sec and then heel it sort of spaced down the hall, one, two, three, counting the forty-one steps from Ms. Hayes’s door to my very-soon-to-be locker-no-more. I imagine her reading each word of the poem, reciting it silently in my head:

  At black hole’s edge I turn

  Wave at last from the event horizon of her.

  Does she see how beautiful she is? Does she know?

  I hope.

  Baby Owl

  Graduation day. A flock of white-cloaked cogs, we follow each other’s backs into the gymnasium and march in line one last time.

  I shuffle-step by my family. Dad is dressed massive swank, his stubble shaved, hair gelled. Miles squirms and fidgets in his shirt and tie, pushing the stem of his glasses up his sweaty nose. My sweetbeat little Oma’s freshly permed silver curls glow around her head like a halo. And as always, the absence of Mom and my sister-Jack, Marta, looms the ever-present pink elephants. Mom’s been on permanent Butler Family Haitus for eons now, so that’s no big shocker. And Marta’s latest love-’em-and-leave-’em adventure has her seated on a plane to Rome, probably reclining in a plush, cushioned seat, sipping ginger ale as I sweat in my polyester gown. But I can’t help but smile and wave as Oma snaps picture after picture on her relic disposable camera as we walk by single file before the seated audience.

  Ms. Hayes sits in the second row with other teachers and I wonder how many ceremonies like this she’s had to attend. She smiles big as I go by and I swallow deep the uneasy memory of my poem as I commit to my mind the lines around her eyes, the slow curve of her mouth, the contours of her neck. She kills me, she always will.

  It’s a massive long, sweltering hot ceremony and in response the sky spews its first major late-spring thunderstorm outside the gym’s floor-to-ceiling windows. Students, teachers, moms, sisters, dads, uncles, and grannies fan at their dripping mugs and we all trickle and squirm and drip drop dribble in our gowns and skirts and trousers. Eve Brooks is three seats down from mine and I try to catch her eye but she’s got this plastered-on, slapped-on, surgically implanted smile on her face. I fold my program into an origami lily, thinking I’ll pass it down to her, but next to me, Abby Cortland gushes at it, and I sigh, hand it to her.

  “So beat!” she says.

  “Rinse and repeat,” I whisper, wishing she were Eve.

  All in all, it’s an utter anticlimax. After the last overachieving monkey stands down from the podium, nobody throws their caps in the air. In the hall, everyone with their flushed faces and greasy shags are chalky wisps as they mingle in their flash-photographed stupors.

  The Butler clan (minus a few) go out for family dinner to a swank restaurant in the city and I wanna invite Zoë to join, liberate her from her degenerate blood relations. But she says she’s gotta stick it out, leading a Stone family mission to find some BBQ wings and keno. I wish her Godspeed.

  At the table, Oma sits beside me and pats my mitt with her soft, blue-veined, gold-and-diamond-adorned digits. My dad waxes high school sentimental over a plate of crispy calamari tapas and Oma winks and slips me a small wrapped box. I open it and inside’s a brandy-new Mickey Mouse wristwatch, white-gloved mitts orbiting in arm-wrenching ellipses around the retro icon’s smug little rodent grin. Oma’s hazy smile is pleased as cake, as it always is when she sits like the Godfather in her hand-carved rocking chair, doling out mail-order complimentary wristwatches like hundred-dollar bills. I got two last month.

  As I strap Mickey onto my sticky wrist, Miles looks at me with this mischievous grin and we both start cracking up because in an hour it’ll be dangling from Spider-Man’s boot or the light-up Rudolph and Santa-head pin we all forbade Dad from sporting at Christmastime a thousand years ago. Miles has this mega-ton of useless junk (armless action figures, broken techno-gadgets, gaudy jewelry, and, of course, many a mail-order wristwatch) that our family’s been gifted over the years all hanging on fishing line along the walls of his bedroom. He’s massive Ophelia for junk and it’s riot as hell. His collection already boasts seven or eight Mickeys, but Miles, the little Trashrat, loves a repeating punch line.

  At the table, Oma starts to crack up a bit, spilling her food and forgetting what she’s saying mid-sentence. We eat quickly to get back to her house before she conks out comatose in her tortellini. I say I’ll take her so Dad can get back to the hospital for work, and I even invite Miles to come with to make him feel like a big kid. Dad looks proud, and a little tired, as Miles and I scoop up our sweetbeat hunched little Oma, who totters between us, her bony arms wrapped in each of ours.

  When we drop her off, she makes a big show of walking in circles around her kitchen, trying to pawn off her earthly possessions. Bitsy, her tiny, ankle-terrorizing Chihuahua, yips at us and runs in fits around Oma’s mauve orthopedic shoes.

  “Oma, stop. I don’t need anything!” Miles says, his small round mug reddening as she wraps a yellow silk scarf around his thin, sweaty neck. I’m giggling massive as I scheme a tube of her coral lipstick and paint perky geisha lips on my protesting and rather ace little bro. Even Oma’s cracking up as she places a dainty, feathered fur hat on his head that slides down and sits on the rim of his glasses.

  “You,” Oma says, “are the spitting image of me fifty-five years ago, Miles Gregory Butler. I was twenty-six years old when I bought that hat and it cost me a week’s wages, worth every dime. Your Opa fell in love with me in the hat.” Her words warble in a crackly, nostalgic voice, and we are all splitting our sides.

  “Yowza,” I say, looking through tears at Miles’s scowling mug. “You musta been a real looker, Oma,” and she hoots, swatting her creaky mitt at me.

  As we’re shuffling out the door, she slips a stiff, folded twenty into my pocket, money I know she can’t spare, and kisses me and Miles one hundred baby-powder-puffing times.

  “Remember to thank God every night before bed for all you’ve been given,” she preaches. “I talk to Him all the time. I pray for you. I always pray for you, now. Don’t you forget to thank Him. He loves you.” From her frail arms, Bitsy yips in punctuation.

  “Okay, Oma,” Miles says, rolling his eyes at me, wiping pink paint from his lips with the back of his hand.

  On the trek home, the rain finally lets up, so we stop for ice cream with Oma’s twenty before beating it home. Still superfreeze in our wrinkly formal gear, we lean against the hood of my banger, shooting the breeze. I slide Mickey from my wrist.

  “Here ya go, Trashrat,” I say, and he grins, shoving it in his pocket.

  He leans back, takes a pensive lick of ice cream. “D’you remember Opa, Lu?”

  I nod. “Word. He was pretty loopy, though. ’Cause of the war. But cool, too. Massive cool.”

  Miles looks up at the clearing sky. “I wish I could have known him better. But I was so young when he died.”

  I laugh. “Miles, he died two years ago.”

  “I know,” he says solemnly. “I didn’t understand things like
I do now.”

  I almost laugh again, at how massive serious he’s being, but I don’t and appreciate for a half second that even for a genius he’s kind of adorable. I slurp up my black raspberry with chocolate sprinkles until I get to the cone, and then give him the rest (his favorite part). Then my speak rings and Zoë and Maya are wondering where the flip I’ve been their whole lives.

  I herd Miles back into my banger and he stares out the window as I call Castle and Rabbit and we round up a gaggle of Jacks for a post-graduation toaster. We decide a pool is a must-have, so everybody’s looking to crashpad my house and I call Dad and he says the more the merrier, just don’t invite Al Coholic. Yuk yuk. I say of course, and not fifteen minutes after Miles and I pull in, the lantern-lit pool is spilling over its edges with kids crammed into every cranny and nook. It’s a strange brew of my track-Jacks, the city crew, and Maya’s ever-revolving male entourage. But an odd harmony’s found and I relax into the mismatched randomness of the night.

  Dad, back from saving lives, shuffles around awkwardly for a bit, achieving new heights of mortification with every gesture, making small talk with Zoë and Maya, grilling about college and the summer to come. Miles gets massive zoomies and tears around in his swim shorts, near hysterical with excitement, cannonballing shrieking betties in the deep end and chugging down heaping mittfuls of chips and cookies. He’s teetering on sugar-induced seizure status after mainlining two cans of orange pop, when Dad mercifully launches into the “Time for pj’s, brush teeth, and tinks” bedtime routine.

  “Da-ad!” Miles balks, but, thank-ye-jesus, traipses heavily up to bed.

  With Dad MIA, Jacks crack secretly stashed brews and the stereo is turned up loud. A few hours in, I catch sight of Miles curled like a baby owl in a dark window, peering down at all the glossy full-grown shavers and betties. We play music and dance and laugh. There’s a drunk diving contest (not safe) and then a massive water-noodle war (epic) that morphs into semi-nude noodle tag in the yard. And all the while my wee brother-Jack sits with his small fingertips perched on the windowsill and I know he wishes he were big, too. I know, too, someday he’ll learn not every night is as switch and easy as this one seems to be.