Good Girls Read online

  Joelle sits in the seat next to me. Her eyes are red from crying. For me. “Dirtbags,” she whispers.

  “Who?” I say.

  “The dirtbags who took that picture,” she says. “Of my friend. At my party. If I ever find out who did it, I. Will. Kill. Them. I will personally shove my purple boot down their throats.” She extends one of her long legs and displays the purple suede boot, which has a four-inch spike heel a drag queen would envy. If it were anyone else talking, anyone else crying, I would think it’s an act. But this is Joelle. She means everything she says. At least at the moment she says it.

  A geeky little freshman with carroty hair glances back at us. “What are you looking at?” Joelle snaps. She pokes me in the arm. “I wonder which of these skinny children are here to try out for the play? I’m sure we’re doing Antigone. Ms. Godwin does Antigone every four years. I don’t have to tell you that the part belongs to me. No one here can do a better Antigone, I don’t care what color their hair is!”

  “You’re right about that,” I say. I’m not here for the tryouts, I just want to know what play we’re doing so that I can think about the set. I’ve worked on every set since I was thirteen years old and too shy to audition for a part. Sometimes I have a big job, and sometimes it’s a small one. Today I’m hoping for an opera set in medieval Venice so that I’m forced to figure out how to build a bunch of working canals, so that I don’t have a single brain cell free to think about anything else. Not one synapse firing off a teeny tiny replica of a blow job over and over again. Not one stray neuron pulsing about Luke DeSalvio and how he’s a hero and I’m a whore.

  Joelle reaches into her bag and pulls out a list. “Here are some more names I came up with.” Joelle’s last name is Lipshitz, which, she says, is unacceptable for a human being, let alone an actress. She’s been trying to come up with something glam and different, something she will adopt when she gets out of high school and runs off to New York City to become famous (or when her dad drives her to and from the city to become famous).

  I look at the paper. She’s written:

  Joelle Paris

  Joelle Roma

  Joelle Asia

  Joelle Nepal

  Joelle Geneva

  Joelle St. Petersburg

  Joelle Quebec

  “What do you think?” she says.

  “I’m sensing a theme,” I tell her.

  “Any favorites?”

  “You forgot Joelle Boise. Or Joelle Long Island.”

  She whips the paper from my hand. “You are totally too traumatized to take me seriously right now. I swear I’m going to kill whoever did this to you. I’m going to shove this boot down their throats.”

  “You already said that.”

  “Then I’m going to run them over with my car.”

  “You mean your dad’s car.”

  The carroty redhead in front of us risks another glance, and Joelle shrieks, “You, too, if you don’t stop staring at my friend! She is not a zoo exhibit!”

  Of course, everyone turns around and stares at me as if I were a zoo exhibit. Joelle tells them all to STOP STARING!! JUST STOP!! Just then the side door swings open and Ms. Godwin marches into the auditorium. Ms. Godwin is aptly named, tall as a goddess, with a low oboe voice that sounds as if she’s talking through a tube of wrapping paper. She is wearing what she always wears, a long, flowing top and skirt and sharp-heeled character shoes that snap when she walks.

  “What I would like,” she says as she moves to stand in front of the stage, “is for you to stop shrieking, Ms. Lipshitz. They can hear you in Sri Lanka.”

  Everyone settles down—including Joelle—and waits for Ms. Godwin to tell us which play we’ll be doing, and thus what our lives will be like for the next two months. But first we have to get through her customary “welcome” speech. I mouth the words with her:

  “Hello. I am Victoria Godwin, Ms. Godwin to you. Ms., not Miss, not Mrs., Godwin. For those of you who are new to the school or perhaps new to this program, I am the drama teacher. Which means that I am the queen of this auditorium. What I say goes. You don’t have a vote and you don’t have influence. When I select someone for a part, it is that person’s part. If I select you for the set design team, then the set design team is where you belong. Begging me will not change any of my decisions, nor will flattery, tantrums, gifts, or flowers. You will attend every rehearsal you need to attend. You will perform every task you need to perform. I will not police you, I will not scream at you, I will not call your parents, I will not ask for hall passes, I will not demand proof of your citizenship. Why? Because I don’t care. However, if you show up for a rehearsal and you don’t know your lines, you’re out. If you’re on the crew and you don’t pull your weight, you’re out. If it is your job to place props during rehearsals and we find you behind the curtains making out with your boyfriend instead, then you’re out.”

  Someone giggles, and Ms. Godwin stares stonily. “Have I said something funny?”

  The giggles stop.

  “Now, I realize that some of you may be expecting your typical high school drama, but I want to do something different this season.”

  Next to me, Joelle inhales sharply.

  “I have a friend, a playwright, who has graciously allowed me to license a wonderful, humorous piece of work based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet.”

  “Great,” murmurs Joelle. “Ophelia. She’s such a wimp. I hate playing wimps.”

  “The play is called I Am Hamlet, and it turns Shakespeare on his angst-y little head. In this play, Hamlet is a woman. Of course, the weight of the play will fall on Hamlet’s shoulders. I’m going to need a very strong actress to carry this.” Ms. Godwin’s eyes briefly flick toward Joelle. I don’t have to turn my head to feel Joelle’s grin. “But do not despair. There are a number of juicy roles for both men and women in this production, and I will need all of you.” Ms. Godwin whirls around and taps the pile of stapled packets stacked neatly on the edge of the stage. “This packet contains a summary of the play and a description of each role and key scenes. Auditions will take place next Tuesday, promptly at three thirty p.m. No excuses. No sob stories. No whining.” She smiles tightly, gathers her fluttery, feathery, flowy clothes around her, and proceeds right up the aisle past us, shoes clicking clicking clicking till she reaches the very back of the house. After the door slams behind her, everyone crowds the stage, grabbing for a packet.

  Joelle comes back with two: one for her and one for me. “Hamlet!” she says. “This is so cool!”

  “Yeah,” I say. “As long as she’s doesn’t want me to do some minimalist thing. Like the stage is set with one coffee table and a telephone or whatever.”

  “Who cares?” she says, flipping through the pages of the packet and scanning the lines. “You never minded before.”

  “I need something to build. Venetian canals. Castles. Throne rooms. The Vatican. I need to be distracted, Joelle.”

  “Bastards,” Joelle murmurs, and squeezes my arm, but her heart’s not in it. Her heart’s with Hamlet, brooding somewhere in Denmark. She turns a page in Ms. Godwin’s packet. “To be or not to be,” she says, her voice soft. “That is the question.”

  I sigh. “One of them, anyway.”

  After Drama Club I start to walk home, but I’m stricken with the thought that my mom might be waiting to talk to me about sex and how beautiful it is with the right people. She’s bound to have a speech ready by now. Maybe even some websites she wants me to visit, the name of a gynecologist she’s made an appointment with, or a few “intriguing” books—Sex in the City: Maintaining Your Selfhood in a Corrupt Culture; Things My Mother Never Told Me; Sugar and Spice: Teenage Girls Talk about Life, Love, and Sex.

  My mom. My dad. Books by PhD’s. Doctors with gloved fingers and neutral expressions and why-don’t you-tell-me-about-it’s.

  I turn around and walk instead to the strip mall down the road from the school. There’s not much there: a card store, an ice cream store, an electro
nics store, a beauty supply store, and one of those places that sells Christmas trees and ornaments in the winter and lawn furniture and Frisbees in the summer. We used to come here a lot in sixth grade to hang out at the Carvel ice cream store and make fun of the names on the cakes, which sounded vaguely porn-ish to us easily amused preteens. The Hug Me the Bear cake. The Fudgie the Whale cake. And our favorite, Cookie Puss, which was some unidentifiable mystery alien creature with an ice cream cone for a nose. Cookie Puss! Cookie Puss! we’d growl over and over again, until the ice cream guy chased us out of the store.

  I’m not in the mood for ice cream. Instead, I decide to wander up and down the aisles of the Christmas place, poking at the fake trees and the lighted candy canes. They have an entire section devoted to Nativity scenes of all sizes and shapes, and I go there to check them out. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in plastic; Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in wire; Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in wood. I say “hey” to all the Jesuses. Hey, baby. It’s what I used to say to my mom’s stomach when she was pregnant with Henry. I don’t remember it; I read about it in a notebook I found hidden at the back of my mother’s closet. She was only pregnant for five months before she lost him. The last entry in the book, the entry my mother wrote a few months after Henry died, said that I kept patting her belly, saying Hey, baby, Hey baby, Hey baby. She wrote that the last time I said it, my father put his face in his hands and cried. She wrote that I never said it again.

  I get tired of walking around, so I slump down on a bale of hay in one of the life-sized Nativity scenes. I glance around. Mary seems smug, Joseph seems stunned, and baby Jesus looks like a glowworm in a blanket, but the bale of hay is the perfect place for a girl to hide from her mother, her father, the world. I gather my hair up in a loose bun at the back of my head, yank one of the elastics I always wear around on my wrist and wind it around the knot. Then I dig in my backpack for Much Ado About Nothing and start reading.

  “You can’t sit here,” a voice says.

  I look up, confused. I must have been sitting for a while, because my butt’s asleep. The guy standing over me is maybe fifteen, but I don’t recognize him. He’s wearing a uniform vest the red of his numerous zits. His name tag says “Walt.”

  “What’s up, Walt?”

  Walt is short and skinny, with a very prominent Adam’s apple. He also has a serious hair-gel fetish. He’s probably the one who set up the Nativity scene that I am ruining with my presence. I’m pretty sure I’m not holy enough to guest-star in any Nativity scenes.

  “You can’t just sit there,” he warbles. “This isn’t a library.”

  “I know that,” I say. I wonder if his hair is stiff enough to pop a balloon. “I was just resting my legs.”

  “Yeah, well. You can’t do that, either.” He scratches at a pimple on his nose. “You’ve been back here for forty-five minutes.”

  “I have not,” I say.

  “Have too.”

  I don’t feel like getting up. I don’t feel like talking to Walt. I don’t feel like talking to anyone. “There’s no one in the store. What do you care if I sit here or not?”

  “I don’t care,” Walt says. “My boss cares. He told me to tell you to leave. He thinks you’re going to steal something.”

  “Like what?”

  “How should I know?” he says.

  “Think I’m going to smuggle out the baby Jesus over there?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And why does he look like a glowworm, anyway?”

  “Like a what?”

  “Never mind,” I say. I don’t know why I’m torturing Zit Boy. It’s not his fault that I’m in a pissy mood and that his boss thinks I’m going to make off with the Virgin Mary. I shove my book back into my bag and stand up, my butt tingling painfully. “I’m going.”

  “Good,” he says.

  I feel a weird little snap at the back of my neck, and suddenly my hair falls down. I shake my head and pluck the broken elastic off my shoulder. I’m about to fling it to the floor when I see Walt’s face. He’s smiling.

  “What?” I say.

  “Nothing,” he says. But he’s still smiling.

  “What?” I say again, louder.

  “You’re that girl, aren’t you?”

  “I’m a girl, if that’s what you mean,” I say, though I know. Of course I know.

  “That senior girl. I saw the picture,” he says. The smile is now a smirk. There should be some sort of law against smirking. You should have to be at least eighteen to do it. It should require a license. “Everyone at school has seen that picture,” he’s saying.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say. But he’s watching me tug at my hair, and he doesn’t believe me.

  “Sure,” he says.

  This kid doesn’t even shave yet. He probably has a penis the size of a pencil eraser. “What are you talking about?” I say, practically shouting.

  “Nothing,” he says. He’s starting to enjoy himself. He’s bouncing up on his toes to make himself taller.

  “That’s right, nothing,” I say, practically spitting. “You know nothing.”

  Bounce, bounce, bounce. God should strike him dead. Or at least explode all his zits at once. “You need to look into something for those pimples,” I tell him, turning to leave. “I saw a commercial on TV for some stuff that might help.”

  “Maybe you should be on TV. Or in one of those movies. You’d get paid, anyway,” he calls after me. I walk faster, but not fast enough. Just as I make it to the front counter, where some gray-haired man is frowning sternly, I hear Zit Boy call: “Or maybe you like to do it for free?”

  Okay. Fine. Christmas store, bad idea. Nativity scene, bad idea. I push open the glass door with my foot and storm outside. I know I should just go home, but I think that maybe Cookie Puss and Fudgie the Whale could use some company. But what’s the first thing I see? A green minivan parked right next to the ice cream store. A minivan that looks a lot like Luke’s mom’s minivan, a van that Luke sometimes used when he had lots of stuff to cart around, or when he wanted a little portable privacy. I’m assaulted by flashbacks. Hands slipping up the back of my shirt, looking for the bra clasp. Fingers scrabbling at the front of my jeans. The smell of carpeting and warm skin. And then newer memories: slamming the door on Luke at the party, my picture on the cell phone, his stone face as he passed me in the hallway.

  I’m standing frozen on the walk when I see the door of the ice cream shop swing open. I don’t have time to think, to consider if it really is Luke’s mom’s green van and if that really is Luke coming out of the ice cream store with another one of the half-vanilla, half-chocolate milkshakes he lives on. I do the only thing I can: I duck into Sally Beauty Supply. The choppy-haired punk girl at the counter looks up from her magazine, looks me up and down, and then looks down at the magazine again. Well, here’s someone who obviously hasn’t seen the infamous photograph. Hallelujah. Sighing in relief, I begin fake-browsing the shelves. I have my choice of cheap lipsticks in every shade known to woman and hair clips with beads, sparkles, or feathers, as well as curlers, crimpers, dryers, tweezers, and other instruments of torture. I pick through nail files and polishes, shampoos and conditioners, gels and mousses. I make faces at the wig heads and then wonder if there are hidden cameras documenting everything I’m not buying. Moving on to the dyes, I marvel at the colors. Vampire Red. Purple Passion. Too Blue. Flamingo. Fade to Black. For some reason, I like the last color the best, like how it looks, all inky and thick in the bottles. I grab a couple, one in each hand, just to look as if I’m actually shopping, doing something other than hiding from other people’s mom’s vans.

  “You’re going to need developer with that.”

  I whip around and see the girl from the counter standing there. With her plaid pants and a “Luv A Nerd” T-shirt, she’s paired black socks with green rubber flip-flops. I’m momentarily stunned by her fashion choices, and by the Oreo-sized plugs piercing her ears. “What?”

  “Developer,”
she says. She pulls a big bottle of white stuff from the shelf. “You can’t use the dye unless you mix it with this.”

  “Oh,” I say. “But…”

  “Have you ever dyed your hair before?” she asks me. Her hair is Flamingo, with Purple Passion bangs. She’s clearly an expert.

  “Uh, no, but…”

  She plucks a bottle of dye from my hand. “I know it says ‘Fade to Black,’ but it’s really a very dark brown. I don’t know why they don’t call it something else. I always thought that Dirt would be a good name.”

  “Dirt?” I say. I would never want my hair to be something called Dirt.

  “You should probably get some gloves.” She thrusts a box of rubber gloves at me. “The whole box is only five bucks, so it’s worth it. Especially if you dye your hair again. And you will, believe me. It’s addictive.” She hands me a little plastic bowl and something that looks a lot like a paintbrush. “Use this to mix the dye in. Equal parts dye and developer. Use the brush to paint the dye on. Start at the roots and work down to the ends. Wait twenty-five minutes and wash it all out until the water comes clear.” She eyes me critically, and I see that she’s even dyed her eyebrows Flamingo to match her hair. “You have a ton of hair. And it’s so blond. Is that natural?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “But I’m not sure…”

  She pulls another bottle of Fade to Black from the shelf. “You’re going to need more.” She looks at the pile I have in my arms and laughs. “I guess I should help you carry the stuff up to the front.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “But I really haven’t decided whether…”

  She turns abruptly and walks to the front of the store. I follow, because I don’t know what else to do. She moves behind the register and faces me. “I say go for it,” she tells me. “If you don’t like it, you can just chop it all off, right?”

  I dump the stuff on the counter, wondering how I’m going to get out of the store without buying a thousand dollars’ worth of products. “It took me years to grow my hair. I can’t just chop it off.”