Fletch advised Slick, “Maybe don’t do it in the hammock. Because of…you know.”
“I won’t flip over!” said Slick. “I can sit with my laptop on my knees and totally program music and…” She paused, reconsidering. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll do it on the chaise. Okay, Vic. I’m in.”
I feared Slick would fall asleep too early this afternoon and then assign her little brother, Zeke, to her task at the last minute, but one trick to being an effective manager is you have to assign duties, trust they’ll get done, and not micromanage every detail. I never worked at Happies long enough to advance from disinterested waitress to kick-ass manager who could put this principle into action, but I was fully aware of how to rally the troops. “Great,” I said to Slick. “You’re the best.” I turned to Fletch. “I need you to—”
Surprisingly, Fletch slipped out from under my arm before I could finish. “Sorry, Vic,” said Fletch. “Can’t do it. I’m booked tonight.”
“You just prematurely broke Cuddle Huddle!” Slick gasped, looking as betrayed as if Fletch had snatched the last slice of Doritos pizza directly from Slick’s hand.
“Who cares?” said Fletch.
“I care!” said Slick. “It could be another year before we see you again! You can’t just ignore our tradition at this vulnerable stage—”
“Fine,” Fletch said. “We can cuddle huddle all morning if you want.” She crouched back down to resume position, placing her arms around us. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I have plans.”
“To do what?” I demanded. Fletch had plans for her last night in Rancho that didn’t include me and Slick? What the hell?
“My parents wanted to do something special,” said Fletch. “So we’re going dune riding at sunset once the heat cools off, and then driving to Vegas to get dinner at that amazing Thai place.”
Fletch waited till now to spring this surprise on us? I needed her! Don’t freak out on Fletch, I told myself. Chill. Offer a compromise. “Obviously you should go dune riding,” I told Fletch, fully embracing the spirit of selflessness. “Great choice for your last day in the California desert.”
Fletch rubbed her belly and performed a little hip swivel. She sang, “I love my pad thai.”
I smiled approvingly and let the moment linger without response. Then Slick jumped in. “Vic’s too silent. She wants something.” They both looked at me expectantly.
“Well,” I said, looking at Fletch, “maybe you could go dune riding but please skip the Thai dinner part?”
“Toldja,” said Slick.
Before Fletch could tell me why she had to go out to dinner with her parents, I hastened to add, “You’ll end up driving an hour just to get caught in traffic on the Strip, and then you’ll have to wait hours for a table because that Thai place—which makes you get sick half the time, despite you always saying it’s worth it—doesn’t take reservations. Do you really want that whole ordeal when you should be hanging with us?”
Slick took up my cause, and I hadn’t even sent her a psychic request for support (because I felt it was implied). “Sad face,” said Slick, pouting at Fletch.
Fletch looked appropriately guilty. “I know,” said Fletch. “But my parents really want me to spend my last night here with them.”
Now was the time for the hard sell. I said, “You’re a teenager, Fletch. You break your parents’ heart. That’s what we do.”
“True,” said Slick. “It’s, like, our hormonal prerogative.”
Exactly! We were so due this hormonal prerogative. None of us had been the types of teenagers who broke our parents’ hearts by acting out and rebelling and all that. Slick’s and my older siblings had blazed such a trail of naughty during their own teenage years that anything we might have tried would have been mere trifles in comparison. And only-child Fletch was too studious and serious to be bothered with the rite of teenage rebellion.
Slick’s and my worst disappointment to our parents had been us deciding not to go to community college next year. Perfect-Fletch’s worse disappointment to her parents was probably when she broke up with her boyfriend, Olivier Farkas, because she didn’t want to be tied down to one guy any longer. They weren’t upset that she’d broken up with Olivier so much as they were disappointed that the breakup got in the way of the prom photos they’d been waiting for years to place at the end of their “Genesis: Senior Year” photo album. Her parents had religiously organized yearly albums of almost every day of Fletch’s life since coming to America, and the prom pictures were planned to be the culmination of that project before she left home for good.
I placed my hand beneath Fletch’s chin and directed her gaze to the newly hung portrait on my family’s basement wall, the remembrance that we had made to ensure Fletch’s parents’ prom photo dreams were still realized. With the words MÉNAGE À BFF painted at the top of the portrait, it was a large photo printed on canvas, showing Fletch and her prom date(s)—me and Slick—dressed in atrocious bridesmaid gowns we’d bought for ten bucks total at the Goodwill store. In the picture, we were sledding down our favorite Mojave Desert sand dune spot, lying on our stomachs, our arms lifted in a V for Victory pose, laughing so hard that we fell off the sleds a second after the photo was snapped.
“I can’t go to the party tonight,” Fletch said, but with enough hesitation that I knew she could—and would.
“You can’t not be there!” I said, aghast. “There is no party without you.”
I could tell Fletch was about to break, but then her gaze narrowed on me. “This isn’t about your war with Thrope, is it?”
“That’s just a bonus,” I said, repeating Bev’s line.
Fletch shrugged. “A good one, I suppose. But I don’t know…my parents will be so sad.”
“Your mom will be relieved,” I said. “You know how she loves to organize travel. Leave all the stuff you plan to bring to Africa on your bed this afternoon and tell her she can pack it for you tonight.” And then you can spend this afternoon helping me get ready for the party before I generously authorize you to go dune riding with the parents as a kind concession for them raising you so well and all.
“Mom would love that,” Fletch admitted, but still not officially getting on board. “And she’d probably be secretly relieved to have a few extra hours to double-check the passports and visas.”
“Your parents have a lot they need to take care of tonight without the distraction of a jaunt to Vegas just for dinner,” I told Fletch. Her parents were taking a month’s leave from their jobs to join their daughter in volunteer work for the first month of her year abroad, so it wasn’t like I was trying to take away their final hours with her. I was doing them a favor, actually, giving them this night back. I was probably saving the whole family from a post–Thai food, pre-transcontinental-flight diarrhea episode. Someone give me a fucking medal!
Still, Fletch did not budge.
I looked at Slick, sharing a moment of telepathy. We knew exactly how to close the deal. We started singing.
On the LA to Vegas
hop hop hop
Tummies ready for yummies
At everyone’s favorite dessert in the desert
stop stop stop!
Happies Happies Happies
Super burgers then ice cream with a toy
Where your happiness is our
joy joy joy
So come to Happies…hop hop hop!
The Happies song and its hop hop hop dance were Fletch’s number one favorites for life. The song had provided the gateway for her to learn English when she first came to Rancho Soldado. Learning the dance had helped ease her displacement anxiety. It was the first song Fletch ever sang, providing the introduction-to-America experience that she wrote about in her college essay that got her accepted to virtually every top-tier university in the country. Ivy League admissions coaches, take note: The secret to a great college essay is a weeper immigration story that ends with ice cream and a hopping song-and-dance routine at Happies.
r /> By the end of the song, we were all hopping around my basement, an even better wake-up than Happies’ super strong coffee sludge, and finally—finally!—Fletch said, “Okay! You broke me! I’m in!”
“Smart call, Ivy League,” I commended Fletch. “Girls, prepare yourselves for the most epic going-away party of our lives.”
I hopped back into the center of the room, where Fletch and Slick met me, and we resumed our Cuddle Huddle. Then we lifted our arms and high-fived each other.
“Good cuddle.”
“Good cuddle.”
“Good cuddle.”
I don’t trifle with small-scale ideas, which was why I wasn’t going to college next year, because I reached too high. (But whatever, USC Marshall School of Business. Me and my subpar GPA and SAT scores will have the last laugh when I make the cover of Lady Entrepreneur magazine without your degree and the ridiculous student debt that goes along with it.) If I wanted the Happies party to be big-scale fun, I needed something I was not old enough to legally acquire.
Beer. Beer makes a party big, and fun. It was also going to get Jake Zavala-Kim to show up, and if anyone knew where to find Jake, it would be Chester.
Having secured my best friends’ help in the coming night’s festivities, I bounded upstairs from the basement and found Chester sitting at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of Froot Loops. Not only has he not outgrown his childhood cereal, it’s a daily necessity for him. It’s like his Paleo Diet for Stoners.
“Are you and Jake working on the Chug Bug today?” I asked.
“Maybe,” said Chester. “Or we’ll work on the Mustang.” Typically, he volunteered no further information. Getting my brother to speak more than a sentence or two at a time is a major chore. I think he has so little to say because Lindsay, Chester’s twin, always did the talking for both of them. Can’t get that girl to shut up.
“Is he in the garage now?”
As if she knew I was trying to press Chester for information at that moment, Lindsay texted me. Ask Chester if I left my favorite shirt in his car yesterday. I can’t find it and he never answers my texts.
Chester shrugged in reply to my question and I didn’t bother asking him Lindsay’s; I’d just go check Chester’s car later myself.
Jake and Chester spent their weekends fixing up the vintage automobiles they planned on converting into business endeavors. Jake’s was the Chug Bug and Chester had a complementary venture in mind. With a vintage Mustang passed down to him from our dad, Chester planned to launch a late-night ride service called Drivers for Drunks. One of those ideas had a good chance to succeed; the other, maybe not so much. Guess which was which.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked Chester. Usually the mornings after BFF weekend sleepovers, my dad could be found cheerfully fixing us scrambled eggs when we emerged from the basement hideout. Dad’s scrambled eggs were often runny or overcooked so it’s probably no coincidence Chester turned to cereal as his primary breakfast food. Even though Dad’s eggs were less than stellar, my stomach grumbled for the comfort of them. They tasted like home. Ever since Mom had remarried Someone We Don’t Like Who’d Once Been Engaged to Someone We Hated and then moved to Somewhere We Don’t Like, North America, Dad was our sole provider, and cook. And with enough sriracha sauce thrown on, his breakfasts could taste pretty damn good.
Chester looked up from the cereal box he’d been intently reading while trying to ignore me. “Dad left for Vegas airport at the crack of dawn this morning. He got called back early to Phoenix.”
For sure I’d miss Dad’s weak chef skills this morning, but I wouldn’t miss Dad being home, at least not this weekend! If Dad was gone, I had no argument over a curfew and no old person sniffing for beer breath when I got home. Happy Graduation and Merry Christmas, Vic Navarro!
I don’t know why I paused, expecting Chester to fill in more details, but I did. When none were forthcoming, I said, “Why’d he get called back early?”
“Problem on-site that only he knows how to fix. Or so said the site manager. Stop interrogating me already.”
For the past six months, since I’d turned eighteen, Dad had been commuting to Phoenix for a much-needed engineering consulting job. He worked there during the week and returned home most weekends. He’d taken a day off to come home early for my graduation.
“Hey, guess what?” I said to Chester.
“You’re still here?” He sighed. I love my brother but man, I could not wait to live with my sister instead. At least she enjoyed my company instead of treating it like a chore.
I said, “I’m resurrecting the Happies senior class party. Tonight. Last time ever.”
“Says who?” said Chester.
“Says Bev Happie. She personally authorized me to do it. Want to come help me?”
“I’d rather impale myself on Miss Ann Thrope’s bayonet collection.”
“Your loss.”
“I’m working tonight, so don’t ask me to bail you out of jail if Thrope finds out about the party.”
“I’ll ask Jake,” I said, and turned around to leave the house in search of that very man.
As I was walking away, my phone buzzed. Lindsay again. Before I read the text, Chester called to me, “Tell your sister I put her stupid shirt on your dresser so you can take it to her in San Francisco next week. And to stop bothering me.”
I sprinted out the back kitchen door, across the backyard, through the fence of trees separating our house from our neighbor’s, and into the driveway of the Zavala-Kims’ house. Fuck, it was hot out. I looked to the thermostat attached to the outer wall of the garage: 101 degrees already. I grew up with this hot, dry weather so it didn’t faze me, but I did have a momentary panic, wondering how my party would survive in a restaurant with no AC. No big deal, I told myself. Enough ice cream and cold beers, and no one would care.
The garage door was lifted, and I saw that Jake’s Chug Bug was parked there, next to his parents’ food truck, Mexican Seoul, named in honor of the family’s Mexican-Korean heritage. Dad Jon (the Korean side) and Mom Selena (the Mexican side) drove their truck three plus hours each way to downtown LA to feed the lunchtime hordes on business days. Best kimchee chimichangas in the history of the world, according to online foodie reviews; personally, I was partial to their Korean BBQ–flavored tofu tacos.
The window blinds in Jake’s apartment over the garage were down, so I assumed he was still asleep. I felt confident that when I explained the beer emergency and how he’d profit from it, he’d quickly forgive me for barging into his bachelor pad and prematurely waking him.
Selena stepped out of the back of the Mexican Seoul bus, looking like a punk-rock foodie goddess, with short black hair and deep red lipstick, a short black skirt exposing long, lean legs, a tight Mexican Seoul T-shirt, and black Doc Martens laced up past her ankles. She and Jon had Jake when they were barely out of high school, and then quickly added Slick and Zeke to their brood, and they operated their own food business while raising a family. For someone who could reasonably be expected to look haggard and exhausted, Selena managed to look like she hardly aged. Selena saw me and asked, “Where’s my darling daughter, my darling Vic?”
“She’s getting up now,” I said. “She’ll be home any minute.” Since Selena was in her work uniform, I assumed the Z-Ks had a job this weekend. I asked her, “Whatcha got going on tonight?”
“We’re catering a wedding down in Newport Beach. It’ll be a late night, so we’ll park the truck at my sister’s in Orange County and stay there rather than drive back to the desert after. Tell Mercedes she’s on her own for dinner tonight.”
YES YES YES! It was like all the parental planets were aligning in my favor, like beer destiny. Just because I love and worship Selena Zavala-Kim and she’d been like a second mom to me didn’t mean I wouldn’t take major advantage of her absence this weekend. It also didn’t mean I wouldn’t possibly be a bad friend to Slick by being a very bad girl with Jake Zavala-Kim.
“Jake home?” I asked Se
lena.
“Yah. I think I heard his snores from the open window over the Chug Bug.”
Admiring the two business trucks parked side by side in the double garage below Jake’s apartment, I said, “Won’t it be great once the Chug Bug is operational? ’Cuz then maybe you and Jake could partner to cater local events.”
“Oh, sweetie,” said Selena. “I wish. I was there to support you at the Town Council meeting. I know you want local entrepreneurs to stay in Rancho, but there’s just not enough business for us here. Believe me, I’d love not to commute to LA at five every weekday morning.”
Jon emerged from the back door of their house and Selena tossed him a set of keys. “Ready to go, mi amor?”
“Sí, beautiful.” He came over to us and placed a kiss on his wife’s lips. It was weird how into each other they were for old people, and also weird how the fact of being so into each other made them not look so old. They were forty, but Selena looked like a rock star, and Jon funneled his manly good looks into occasional menswear modeling gigs. It was no wonder the Zavala-Kims’ children were so gorgeous—at least Jake and Slick were. Their youngest, Zeke, was in that awkward teenage squirt stage, but every family has its runt, I suppose. Sometimes the runts end up being the best in the bunch.
Jon patted me affectionately on the back and said, “What’s going on, General Navarro?”
I didn’t want to lie to Slick’s dad’s disturbingly handsome face, so I figured not mentioning the party was the better approach. I shrugged and rubbed my eyes like I was still waking up and was just a typical teenager who’d goof off all weekend. Not that the Z-Ks would have minded about the party—they’d probably applaud it. But I decided it was better to say nothing for the time being.
“Let’s hit the road before traffic picks up,” Selena told Jon. “Where’s the kid? I thought he wanted to get dropped off for band practice.”
“He’s coming,” said Jon. “Last-minute beauty preparations. You know.”
Selena rolled her eyes. “I only have so much patience for his makeup routine. Let’s back the truck onto the street now. If he’s not outside by the time we’re there, he can catch his own ride.”