“Aw, you guys are the best,” said Slick. “I love you so fucking much.”
“SHUT UP!” the brothers Z-K said.
As Fletch and I entered the restaurant, she cried out, “Crap! It might be hotter in here than it is outside.”
“Think people will bail?” I asked. “That is, if they even show up?”
“They’re natives, they know what to expect,” said Fletch. “Of course they’ll show up. But where are those ice bricks? My caliente arms need some of that sexy action now.” She winked at me and I stopped walking. Wait. What did she know? She leaned closer to me, confidentially. She said, “So, have you sampled Jake yet?”
I was about to defensively announce No! I would never do that with Slick’s brother!
But then Fletch said, “Because I have, and just between us, you absolutely need to tap that at least once before you leave.”
Fletch and I stood in the long hallway between the restaurant and back parking lot, facing the bathrooms. The news was too urgent. I couldn’t even wait to drag her farther inside for a proper sit-down gabfest over a piece of Happies RASmatazz pie in our favorite booth.
“Does Slick know?” I asked, whispering, even though Slick couldn’t possibly hear us in the back parking lot over Zeke’s car stereo disco music, and Zeke loudly singing, “I’m your boogie man! That’s what I am!”
Fletch said, “Does she know what? That you like Jake, or that I’ve been with him?”
“Both.”
“Of course not! She’d freak.”
I didn’t know which was harder to comprehend: that Fletch had been with Jake, or that my thing for him was so transparent. “Is it that obvious?” I asked, mortified.
“No. You play it cool. I really didn’t have a clue until I just saw you two up on top of the Chug Bug.”
I grabbed her arm in concern. “Do we suck because we lust after our best friend’s brother?”
Fletch said, “We’re deceitful dumbsluts. I admit it! But we don’t suck. Look at him.” We glanced down the hallway outside to Jake, whose modest mountains of biceps were on display as he lugged bags of ice into the Chug Bug, whose core muscles were so strong that he could effortlessly lift heavy loads and still the fedora never dropped from his head. Whatta guy. Fletch and I both let out quiet but appreciative catcall whistles. She said, “Let’s sit down now, because I plan to dance the rest of the night away.” Fletch took my hand from her arm and led me inside the restaurant. We sat down at the corner table where we’d spent the greatest percentage of our collective Happies time together—talking, eating, laughing, snarfing. Our butt shapes were practically imprinted into the seat covers in this booth. Again, my heart ached. This would be the last time ever that Fletch and I shared this booth.
I said, “So what happened between you two? And how did you not tell me before now?”
“I don’t tell you everything,” said Fletch.
“You should.” Did I have to state the obvious?
“I tell you 99.9 percent of everything. This felt like a .1 percent to keep to myself.”
I started tallying in my head and said, “Maybe it’s more like 5 percent? Because you also didn’t tell me you’d deferred Yale until a week after you’d decided. You didn’t tell us you’d broken up with Olivier until just before prom. Why didn’t you say anything about Jake?” Fletch was about to go off and live a whole other life I wouldn’t be privy to except in Skype chats and occasional holiday visits. It concerned me that she was already withholding so much crucial information.
Fletch said, “I was worried you’d be mad at me on behalf of Slick.”
“Give me more credit. I can compartmentalize, at least where Jake is concerned! Do you still have a thing for him?” It was bad enough to wish to do scandalous things with my best friend’s brother. It would be worse to wish it with my other best friend’s secret tryst partner.
“Had. It was a passing curiosity.”
“Since when?”
“I guess it started when we were in middle school and Lindsay’s friends were always going on about him being the hottest guy in school and how every girl wanted to get with him because he had such specific talents. I always wanted to know which talents. Remember?”
“Of course I remember. Listening in on Lindsay’s friends had the same effect on me! How did we never discuss this together before?”
Fletch didn’t answer that question, because we both knew why: Slick. Fletch asked, “Lindsay never experimented with Jake? Not even just to be sure she wasn’t into guys?”
Instinctively, I took out my phone to text Lindsay, and then I set it down, knowing better. “No way. Jake is Lindsay’s twin’s best friend. Lindsay actually has a sense of family ethics, which apparently I didn’t get.” I leaned closer to Fletch and revealed, “But Lindsay did tell me she once gave Jake a private birthday gift of lesbian porn made by and for women. So he’d learn proper techniques.”
Fletch took my hands in hers from across the table and gave them a sincere squeeze. “Your sister is a great dumbslut. That was probably the best community service outreach effort she could ever make for the eligible female population of Rancho Soldado.”
I said, “I thought Olivier was the only guy you’d been with.” I felt weirdly disappointed. Every girl liked Jake, and Fletch was not every girl. She was Rancho Soldado’s number one everything. She was the one who always rose above. Fletch was better than the rest of us, and the rest of us were okay with that, even comforted by it.
Fletch said, “Your face right now is why I didn’t tell you. You don’t look betrayed; you look let down. Like once again I haven’t lived up to your image of me.”
“Once again?” I said, regretting that my face so clearly indicated my feelings. “When have I ever said you didn’t live up to my image of you?”
“It’s not something you say so much as what I feel is implied. ‘Fletch is the smart one.’ ‘Fletch is so responsible.’ ‘Fletch, don’t waste your time on a frivolous gap year in Europe when you could be doing volunteer service helping the world!’ That’s a lot of pressure. I hate that sometimes you guys make me feel like, ‘Fletch never fucks up like everyone else.’”
I thought: You’re right, you don’t fuck up. Except this one time. Fletch hadn’t fucked up because she fooled around with Jake, in my opinion. She fucked up because she kept it from me, and assumed I would judge her if she told me. And that’s exactly why she was the smart one. I was judging her. It stung she felt that way about me, but bruised deeper that she was right to feel that way about me. “I think you’re awesome and indomitable,” I said. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. It’s appreciated. Sometimes I just want to feel normal. Mortal.”
I laughed. Genesis Fletcher, a mere mortal? Ha! I didn’t know how to acknowledge that she could be anything other than invincible, so I steered the conversation back to anyone’s favorite topic after money and what’s for dinner: sex. I said, “So you and Jake: When? You only broke up with Olivier in April.”
“It was beginning of last summer, when you were away at soccer camp and Slick was visiting her aunt. When Olivier and I broke up the first time. It was just a weekend fling. There was a lot of tequila involved. Not a big deal.”
It was so a big deal, and she knew it, otherwise she would have told me right after it happened. I said, “What was it like with Jake? It couldn’t have been that great if you just got back together with Olivier a few months later.”
“One had nothing to do with the other. See, I can compartmentalize, too.” She paused and looked at me with concern. “You know to keep it casual with Jake, right? I don’t want you to get hurt. Jake’s a player, not a boyfriend.”
“I know that,” I said, probably too quickly. Then, I admitted, “I’m so relieved to be able to talk about him.”
“I know. It felt wrong not to tell you, but I didn’t want to risk Slick getting upset. She hates hearing about his conquests. But she needs to accept that lots of femal
es around here have their way with her hot brother.”
“Slick accepts it. She just couldn’t deal with it if you or I were concerned.”
Fletch said, “I don’t have siblings, so I don’t really get why she cares so much. Would you be pissed if Chester hooked up with me?”
I couldn’t answer the question because I was laughing too hard. “Chester wishes!” I finally said between convulsive fits of hysteria. The idea of Chester being able to score a girl who was both brilliant and beautiful implied that he had the verbal capacity to even start a conversation with one. He barely talked to me, and I’d lived in the same house with him for eighteen years. He shared a womb with Lindsay, and still couldn’t be bothered to return her phone calls or texts. I worried a lot about my brother and hoped he wasn’t destined to be a middle-aged bachelor still living in our dad’s house, collecting cereal boxes for entertainment. Should I drag Chester to San Francisco with me, kicking and screaming, just to be sure he finally took a chance and lived somewhere else in his life? Lived his life, rather than just sit around waiting for it to happen in between his shifts at Al’s Wine ’n’ Donuts?
Once I calmed down from the laughter, I said, “You know why it’s such a big deal to Slick. She hates feeling that people in this town—especially girls—like her to get to him.”
“But we liked her first,” Fletch pointed out.
I shrugged. “Somehow I don’t think that’s gonna matter.”
“So we’ll just keep the Jake indiscretions to ourselves,” said Fletch.
“Does that make us bad friends?”
“We’re great friends,” said Fletch. “Exactly because we keep the indiscretions to ourselves and don’t bother our dear Mercedes Sabrina Zavala-Kim with insufferable information about her brother that’s of a highly erotic nature.”
“It was erotic with Jake?” I honestly wanted to stop time and hear every detail Fletch was willing to share. As a preview for what I could hope for—and the standard I would strive to uphold.
“Yeah. But mostly I just wanted to use the word ‘erotic.’”
“How did it feel?”
“The hookup with Jake, or using the word ‘erotic’?”
“Both.”
Fletch stood up and performed a hips-thrusting dance. “Fucking awesome.”
The details were in her dance. I laughed even while my heart winced, as I understood just how much I was going to miss Genesis Fletcher. I knew I’d love living with my sister and I’d love San Francisco, but, for the first time, I understood that there would be actual physical pain in my heart involved once Slick and Fletch and I were living far apart.
There’s always time for pie.
The party was about to start and I surely had more important things to do, but I went to the pie case and cut a slice of RASmatazz for Fletch and me to share as she walked around the restaurant, admiring the party decorations.
She said, “The origami wrapper art is a stroke of genius. And while I don’t love that you wasted one of my precious yearbooks that I killed myself getting budgeted to produce, I do love the cut-up pages and pics on the walls. The place looks amazing. Great job, General Navarro.”
I said, “Sometimes when I reach beyond my grasp, I astound even myself.”
Fletch said, “Yeah, tell that to Arizona State and UNLV, where you should have also applied. Because you would have gotten in.” She came over to the cashier’s counter where I’d brought the pie and pointed to the windows facing the front parking lot. The windows were now covered in cardboard, like a hurricane preparation tactic. Fletch pointed to the cardboard and asked, “And this is festive how?”
I said, “The cardboard’s there so it’s not so obvious to cars whizzing by that a party’s happening inside.” I looked through the peephole in the cardboard that I’d cut out at eye level so I could monitor incoming traffic in the front parking lot. So far, no cars were arriving. I took a bite of pie, and Fletch did the same. “And I’m not worried about stupid colleges. But I am starting to worry about food. There’s not enough here.”
Fletch glanced toward the pie case. “Looks to me like you’ve got enough pie. The Make-Out Your Own Sundae Bar in the DDR room is fully stocked. The Chug Bug’s here. What’s your worry?”
“There’s no real food besides ice cream and pies to feed the masses. People will need something more substantial in their bellies to stave off extreme drunkenness later tonight. I’ve been so busy arranging the beer and party decorations, and how to thwart Thrope, that I didn’t plan well for food besides the leftovers already here at Happies. I should have arranged food for taco’clock, when the party’s ending and people will need it most.”
One in the morning was taco’clock in Rancho Soldado. On blazing-hot summer nights, the town’s insomniacs had a long-standing tradition of sharing taco meals on the front porches of their bungalow houses. Take a little bit of carne asada or fish or potatoes, some fresh guac, throw on some Cotija cheese, and add cold beer and some good folk to help pass the time, and all the problems of the world could be solved—or at least forgotten—under the starry skies.
“Is taco’clock really a thing?” Fletch asked. “Because I’ve lived in this town since I was five, and I’ve yet to experience it.”
“That’s because you live in the newer part of town where people’s big houses are fenced off and not that close together.”
“So it’s not just one of your Rancho myths?”
“I have Rancho myths?”
“Maybe ‘myths’ is the wrong word. You idealize Rancho to make it this place you want it to be rather than the kind of dump it often is. Sorry, honey. I know you don’t like to hear it. I mean, who else but you would bombard the Town Council with a twenty-five-page report about how to modernize the infrastructure and grow the local economy through sustainability platforms rather than pure profit incentives? It was a brilliant plan. Don’t get me wrong. I’m just saying no one else in this town could be bothered that much to care. It’s sad, actually. Taco’clock shouldn’t be a myth that only you and maybe twelve other people practice. It should be law.”
“It is sad,” I said, starting to feel morose before what could be the most exciting night of my life so far. It was like Fletch was implying I should be embarrassed to be so invested in my hometown. Even if it was a nothing place in the middle of nowhere, its most notable distinction being a now-defunct restaurant located just off the road to somewhere (else), and that some of its residents had an excellent but vague tradition of celebrating taco’clock in the middle of the night, that didn’t mean I couldn’t love it.
“Don’t get all offended, Vic,” said Fletch. “I’m just saying this town’s too good for you. I’m glad you’re leaving. If no one here cares about it other than you—except maybe Miss Ann Thrope—it’s hella time to go.”
Through the cardboard peephole, I saw lights of cars and trucks pulling into the front parking lot. People were starting to arrive. The name “Thrope” made me nauseous with anxiety. I put my fork down.
“Showtime!” I said weakly. Worse than Thrope finding out was the fear: What if my party bombed?
“One more thing to do.” Fletch reached into her purse for her makeup bag, and looked into the mirror on the wall at the cashier’s counter. She applied a coat of burgundy lipstick to her full lips, the only makeup on her dark, angular face. She said, “I’d put on mascara but what if we’re all crybaby by the end of tonight?”
“I wouldn’t bother with mascara unless it’s waterproof. With this heat, you’ll sweat it off before you can cry it off.” I licked my index finger and then dabbed it beneath my eyelids to remove the mascara that had already smudged there only minutes after applying it. My forehead was sweaty and my shoulder-length dark brown hair was sticking to the back of my neck from the heat. I asked Fletch, “Do you have a headband or something that I could borrow to hold my hair back?”
She rubbed her hands over her closely shaved head. “Sorry. I gave those up when I went bald
y. Not having hair is great. I highly recommend.”
“I miss your braids.”
“Grow your own,” said Fletch, patting my back comfortingly as I stood next to her, observing our reflections in the mirror. “Unless you want to chop yours off and go to Africa in my place so I can use all the money I saved working here to backpack across Europe instead. Your pale self will fry even faster in the sub-Sahara than it does here.”
I looked in the mirror. My face was a melting pot of ethnicities—my Irish-American grandmother’s blue eyes, my Native American grandfather’s dark brown hair, my Filipino grandfather’s nose—but my Polish grandmother’s fair skin was indeed not suited for the desert. Soon it would be in a more suitable habitat: foggy San Francisco.
I sniffed, thinking I smelled smoke. Automatically, my eyes shot toward the cook’s station behind the pie counter, but of course there was no one in there, and I knew the gas for the stove had been turned off when Bev closed the business. My head turned the other way, to the peephole. Through it, I saw the first set of party arrivals—a group of girls standing in the back of a pickup truck, while on the ground below them, a semicircle of guys appeared to be trying to light up a charcoal grill someone must have brought with them.
This was a graduation party, and not a tailgate party! Festivities hadn’t even begun and already these numbskulls were poised to flare smoke signals to alert the authorities. I ran outside.
“Finally! Tonight’s the night we throw a Barbie on the barbie!”
Standing in the bed of Jason Dunker’s pickup truck, Slick held up a naked Barbie in her hand as Jason lit up the coals in his charcoal grill with a whoosh of flames. It wasn’t just any Barbie, but the one we had most tortured in our childhoods. We called her Ugly Stepchild Barbie, and over the years, this Barbie’s luxurious blond mane had been shaved down to a purple Mohawk (colored by Sharpie), she had numerous scratch and lighter-burn marks, and she’d lost a foot to an “experiment” with a box cutter. Ugly Stepchild Barbie also had a torso with a black V shape drawn into her pelvic area, and outrageously large, red nipples on her boobs with fine black hairs drawn around the center (again, colored by that Matisse of Barbie abuse, le Sharpie). Tonight, Slick was at last ready to send Ugly Stepchild to her ignoble death.