Emma Straub - Modern Lovers

Her phone vibrated on the bed: MEET ME AT PLAYGRND AT 10? Dust was nineteen, with a chipped front tooth and a shaved head. He was one of the church kids, the tiny gang of skaters that spent all day kick-flipping off the church steps right across the street from Whitman. None of them went to school, as far as Ruby could tell, not even the ones who were under eighteen. The Whitman security guards sometimes chased them away, but they weren’t doing anything illegal, and so it never lasted long. Dust was their leader. He wore jeans that were the perfect size — not so tight they looked girly, but not too baggy so they looked like somebody’s dad’s. Dust had muscles that looked like they had occurred naturally, like he was a 1950s greaser who spent a lot of time working in a garage. Everything Ruby knew about the 1950s was from Grease and Rebel Without a Cause . Basically, being a teenager was the worst for everyone, unless you were John Travolta, who was obviously twenty-nine years old, and so it didn’t matter anyway. The only kids at Whitman who ever spontaneously burst into song were the musical-theater geeks, and Ruby hated them as much as she hated the athletes, who were even more pathetic given that Whitman barely had a gymnasium. Then there were the regular geeks, who did nothing but study for tests, and then there were the do-gooders, who were always trying to get you to sign their petition to kill the whales or save Ebola or whatever. The church kids were really her only hope, sexually.

CAN’T, she wrote back. MY MUM’S BOOK CLUB IS HERE. PARTY TIME/SHOOT ME.

IT’S COOL, he texted, and then nothing.

Calling her mother “Mum” wasn’t a British affectation — there were two of them, Mom and Mum, and so she had to call them different things. Anyway, it didn’t matter about the book club. That was only the most recent excuse. Ruby wouldn’t have gone to the playground regardless. She’d broken up with Dust three weeks ago, or at least she thought she had. Maybe she wasn’t clear. There was the time they went to Purity Diner on Seventh Avenue, right by school, and she wouldn’t let him pay for her french fries, and then two days later, she was leaving school and Dust was across the street on the church steps and she pretended not to see him and walked straight to the subway instead of letting him walk her into the park, where they would do as much fooling around as one could possibly do in public, which was a lot.

The thing about Dust was that he wasn’t smart or interesting except if you were counting skateboarding or oral sex. For a few months, his messed-up teeth and his bristly head and his crooked smile were enough, but after the effects of those wore off, they were left talking about American Idol (which they both hated) and the Fast and the Furious franchise (which Ruby hadn’t seen). The problem with Ruby’s moms was that their restaurant was three blocks from their house, and so you never knew when one of them was going to be home. What Ruby knew for sure was that she didn’t want them to meet Dust, because them talking to each other would be like trying to get a dog to speak Chinese. Dust was not made for parents. He was made for street corners and nuggets of hash, and Ruby was over it. She slumped off the bed and onto the floor and crawled over to her record player. While her mom was no one’s idea of cool, with her kitchen clogs and her barbershop haircut, Ruby’s mum had her moments. The record player had been her mum’s in college, in the days when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, but now it was Ruby’s, and it was her most prized possession. If Dust had been worth her time, he would have known all the bands she loved to play — the Raincoats, X-Ray Spex, Bad Brains — but he only listened to dubstep, which was obviously one of humanity’s greatest atrocities.

Ruby pushed through the pile of records on the floor, spreading them out like tarot cards, until she found what she was looking for. Aretha Franklin, Lady Soul . Aretha had never had a zine and probably hadn’t pierced her own nose, but she was a fucking badass anyway. Ruby put on side A, waited for the music to start, and then lay back on the rug and stared at the ceiling. From the floor, she could hear the book club starting to cackle more. Honestly, it was like no one over thirty had ever gotten drunk before, and they were always doing it for the first time. Pretty soon they’d start talking about their spouses and their kids and her mum would whisper when she said anything, but Ruby could always hear her, could always hear everything — didn’t parents get that? That even when you were on the other side of the house, your children could hear you, because they had hearing like a fucking bat and you only thought you were whispering? The summer already sucked, and it hadn’t even started yet.

It was almost eleven, and the only women still at the party were all in the kitchen helping Zoe clean up. Allison and Ronna were both new to the neighborhood and eager for details. Elizabeth had sold them both their places — a lovely old fixer-upper on Westminster between Cortelyou and Ditmas for Allison, and an apartment on Beverly and Ocean for Ronna. They were in their thirties, married, no kids. But trying! Young women loved to tack that on, especially to real-estate agents. Elizabeth had been a therapist, a marriage counselor, a psychic, a guru, all in the name of a quicker closing. There were things you weren’t legally permitted to discuss — the strength of the local public schools, the racial breakdown of the area, whether or not anyone had died there. But that never stopped people from trying. They were so excited to meet each other, too, giggling about looking for faucets and wallpaper hangers. Elizabeth kissed them both on the cheek and sent them off to inspect each other’s kitchens.

Zoe stood at the sink, her wet hands sending sprinkles of soapy water across the floor every few minutes. “You got me,” Elizabeth said, brushing some water off her arm.

“My deepest apologies,” Zoe said. “Well, that was nice. What was the next book, again?”

“ Wuthering Heights ! Chosen by Josephine, who has never finished a book in her life! I wonder if she thinks she’ll just rent the movie. In fact, I’m sure that’s exactly why. There’s probably some new version of it that she saw on her HBO Go, and so now she’s going to pretend to read the book. She’s going to spend the whole night talking about how it takes place on some beautiful Caribbean island.” Elizabeth picked up the stack of clean plates and put them back in the cupboard.

“You really don’t have to help, Lizzy,” Zoe said.

“Oh, come on. That’s what you say to people when you want them to leave.”

Zoe laughed. Elizabeth turned around and leaned against the counter. “There actually was something I wanted to talk to you about.”

Zoe turned off the sink. “Oh, yeah? Me, too. You first.”

“Someone is making a movie about Lydia, and they need the rights. Our rights. To the song, and to us. Someone famous is going to write it, someone good, I forget their name.” Elizabeth made an excited face, and then gritted her teeth. In ancient times, before Brooklyn and before kids, Elizabeth and Andrew and Zoe had been in a band, and in addition to playing many, many shows in dingy basements and recording their songs into a pink plastic cassette deck, they had sold exactly one of their songs, “Mistress of Myself,” to their friend and former bandmate Lydia Greenbaum, who then dropped out of college, dropped the Greenbaum, got signed by a record label, released the song, became famous, had her hair and clothes copied by all the kids on St. Marks Place, recorded the sound track to an experimental film about a woman who lost her right hand in a factory accident ( Zero Days Since ), shaved her head, became a Buddhist, and then dropped dead of an overdose at twenty-seven, just like Janis and Jimi and Kurt. Each year, on the anniversary of her death, “Mistress of Myself” played nonstop on every college radio station in the country. It was the twentieth anniversary, and Elizabeth had been expecting something. The call had come in that morning. They’d been asked before, but never by people with actual money.