Beth Bauman - Beautiful Girls

“Janet, man,” Nolan said in a sleepy, slow voice. “Do you know she invited me over for lunch last winter?”

“No,” Robin barely said.

“This is bizarre…” he whispered, lifting her hair from his face.

“Tell me.”

Nolan sat up on his elbows and shook his head as if to clear it. “I’m in the bakery one morning. Janet comes in for a sticky bun and asks me to stop by for lunch. So, I’m like, I guess. I go there expecting grilled cheese…

“When I get there she’s the only one home,” he said. “She’s got the table set in the dining room and she’s serving roast tenderloin and mashed potatoes and string beans with almonds. She’s got gravy in a gravy boat!

“She’s got on tight jeans and perfume and high heels. I’m sitting in her freaking dining room with a real napkin, and I’m sweaty and covered in flour. She’s running back and forth from the dining room into the kitchen, and her high heels are going click, click, click on the linoleum. The whole time she’s smiling like a goon. Man…”

A gravy boat! Robin thought. High heels!

“She was seriously hitting on me, man…I mean, the food was totally yum. Totally. But it doesn’t change the fact that I don’t exactly like her. I mean, she’s okay but I don’t ever think about her. Not to mention that she looks like something that crawled out from under a rock.”

Robin blinked. “You know, she’s going to get her jaw fixed one day.”

“It’ll help.”

Robin pictured the little scene Nolan Fry had painted for her. She could hear the click of Janet’s heels. She could see Janet’s dark creature eyes and goony smile. She felt ashamed as if it were she, not Janet, serving Nolan a roast tenderloin lunch. And she was ashamed for feeling ashamed. “That Janet, she’s a dog.”

“Sad but true,” Nolan said.

“You said it!”

“You like talking about your friend like this?”

“She’s not my friend…and it’s not because she looks like something that crawled out from under a rock, which she does, but because she’s…not nice.”

“ Nice! ” Nolan said. “Are you nice ?”

“I think so. I don’t know. I see what you mean.” Nice . It was sort of a dopey, incomprehensible word. A kiss-ass word. What was so good about being nice ?

“I’d rather be true than nice,” Nolan said.

“Exactly.”

“I’m true,” Nolan said.

“True is good.”

“Are you true?”

She closed her eyes and wondered. “I’ll let you know,” she whispered.

After a pause Nolan Fry said, “That seems like a true thing to say.”

She turned her eyes toward his chest, where her hair sprawled across him like tentacles.

“Would it be all right if we didn’t do it,” Nolan said. “Some skank in Sandy Hook gave me something nasty and my pecker’s still sore.” He reached lazily for his backpack and took out a prescription bottle, popped a pill, and swallowed it with cough syrup.

“I wasn’t thinking we should do it,” Robin said.

“You’re a virgin, aren’t you?”

“I’m not answering that.”

“It’s all right. I like virgins.” They lay down again, this time with her head on his chest, and he roamed his fingers through her hair, and they were quiet for a long time. “I know exactly who you are,” he whispered.

“Who?” she barely whispered back. She looked into his dozing face, so perfect even slack. She brought her cheek to his. “Who?” she whispered again.

A long while passed, or so it seemed, as she drifted in and out of sleep. “Wake me in two minutes,” he murmured. “I gotta go. My mom’s making Hungarian goulash for supper. Totally yum.”

When two minutes seemed to have passed she took his sleeping hand and held it with both her hands. “Tell me how to be pretty, Nolan.” He was in a lush, private sleep and didn’t answer. She felt safe, separated from him like this, but she wanted to know all the things he seemed to know and she wanted to know how he knew them. She brought his hand to her chest and gently held it there, not ready to relinquish it. When he stirred, he raised his sleepy head and gave her a quick kiss with chapped lips.

He dropped her off at the end of her block, and she lingered for a moment. “That was fun,” she said.

“Yup,” Nolan said. “Thanks for smoking with me.”

She stepped from the truck.

“Later,” he said. Then he sped away toward his mom’s Hungarian goulash.

Janet padded down the hall in Robin’s direction before homeroom, dragging her feet and chewing a gob of gum. “Janet,” Robin said, startled. “I’ve had enough of you.” She left Janet standing there, baffled and peeved. Robin spent the next few days in giddy expectation as if she were gathering energy. She ate by herself in the cafeteria and darted from class to class, not unhappily, her thoughts far from Janet, who’d become remote as a star, casting only a faint light over Robin.

Days later Robin developed Nolan’s cough. The cough was very dear to her and she delighted in every hack. He had given her something, like a souvenir. She decided to never speak of the Nolan episode, since once it touched the air it might disappear.

It wasn’t so much that she wanted to be with Nolan, though she thought she might; rather, she wanted to be like him. The first time she passed him in the hall since their encounter, he lowered his eyes to her and said, “Hey you.” Then most every time after he smiled, but near the end of the week it occurred to Robin that this might be the extent of her relationship with Nolan Fry.

On Friday, Janet had a note delivered to Robin while she ate a ham and cheese sandwich in the cafeteria. “At first I was furious with you, but maybe my behavior has been less than stellar lately. Please come over after school.”

At the beginning of the week Robin hadn’t cared if she ever spoke to Janet again, and she liked discovering what her days could feel like without Janet in them. But now she was lonely and curious and found herself walking toward her ex-friend’s cantaloupe-colored house after school. In the kitchen window, she saw the back of Janet’s hateful head.

“There you are,” Janet said, pulling her inside. Robin felt feverish and Janet pushed her into a chair. “Are you sick? Do you need an aspirin?”

“I have a cough,” Robin said, hacking several times, which made her feel better. She slid into a seat next to the watery hiss of the radiator while Janet opened a cabinet and rooted through a swarm of prescription bottles.

“I don’t know where an aspirin is,” Janet sighed. “There’s never anything I need in this house. What you need is homemade chicken soup, but do you think we have homemade chicken soup in this house? Never. Do you think my mom ever makes homemade chicken soup? Nope. She’s a bitch.” She opened a can of chicken soup and placed it on the stove. Then she sat down without looking at Robin. “Frankly, you dropped me like a hot potato.”

“Yes, I did.”

Janet twitched in her seat. “I can probably sneak a beer. Want to split one?”

“Okay.” While Janet poured the beer into glasses, Robin noticed that Janet had forgotten to light the flame under the soup. They sat together silently, drinking the beer.

“We’re friends again, right?” Janet asked.

“No.”

Janet folded her hands and looked solemn. “Why don’t you tell me everything you can’t stand about me.”

“Okay.”

“Wait!” Janet said, springing up from the table. “Let me get my cigarettes.” She lit one and fumbled with an ashtray. “I’m ready. I feel like Anne Boleyn or something.”

Robin took a sip of beer. “For starters, you’re mean, Janet.” Robin had lined up a few pieces of evidence and she pulled them out piece by piece, illuminating Janet’s various shortcomings.