Nothing Real Volume 2 Read online

  Contents

  Nothing Personal

  Frank and Me

  The Switch

  Mom and Ginger Pete, a Love Story

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Nothing Personal

  It was Mrs. Cole who called Fiona’s mother to tell her about James. It was December, the end of first trimester, and Fiona had been making cookies—procrastinating, as usual. She had two finals left, Spanish and American History, and she’d convinced herself that an hour off from studying was just what she needed. She’d be up half the night anyway, looking up every irregular verb, rereading chapters from the unwieldy textbook that Mr. Rosenthal called “a woefully inadequate look at the last four centuries on American soil.” There were the notes she’d taken in class too, but she found that these often trailed off into elaborate doodles, spirals, and curlicues that filled her page and then branched into squares and steps, leading into yet more spirals. She tried to avoid drawing squares after Jennifer Gottlieb remarked on them, saying that doodles revealed your true personality, and that square doodlers were sexually repressed. She knew she wasn’t repressed, just bored, and not the type to doodle some boy’s name in the margins of her notebook. Anyway, Fiona’s fling with James was secret, or at least she’d thought it was, until the call came from Mrs. Cole.

  As soon as Fiona’s mother picked up the receiver, Fiona could tell something was wrong, and that her mother was surprised by the identity of the caller. “Oh, hi!” she’d said, too emphatically, and then she’d turned quiet, her thick brows knit together. She glanced over at Fiona, her look prematurely sympathetic.

  How Mrs. Cole knew that Fiona was involved with James was a mystery. James had an actual girlfriend, Andrea Beaumont, who was away at Miss Porter’s School, her straitlaced parents’ last-ditch effort to reform their death-metal-inclined daughter.

  Andrea was the sort of girl who would go out with a guy like James, while Fiona was not. Mrs. Cole had three sons, and one of them, Will, a long-haired, pothead type who hung out with James’s crowd, was in Fiona’s grade, but she couldn’t imagine Will bothering to mention Fiona to his mother in any capacity. That he would instruct his mother to call Fiona’s mother was almost as startling as the news itself.

  Mrs. Cole had been two cars behind James and saw the whole thing. James was driving his beat-up old Camaro very fast around the bend at Broadway when he must have hit a patch of ice and slid across Southgate into the trunk of the Sampsons’ oak tree. It was unclear, even at this very moment, whether James was alive. James’s head had hit the windshield. Mrs. Cole saw this with her own eyes. She had seen the blood trickle down the middle of his forehead.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Fiona’s mother began, but Fiona waved her off.

  “I barely even know James Kennedy,” Fiona lied. “I’ve hung out with him once or twice, but it’s not like I’m close to him or anything.” Fiona kept her eyes downcast as she arranged the cookie batter on the sheet in front of her. She could feel her throat constrict and her eyes well up, but she avoided her mother’s gaze. What was she going to do anyway, rush down to the hospital? She could just picture herself in the waiting area, surrounded by James’s dirtbag friends, and his distraught mother. Probably Andrea would come racing home from boarding school, red-eyed, her ample chest heaving, to sit vigil by his bed. There was no place for Fiona by James’s deathbed, if that’s where he was.

  Fiona knew James Kennedy from school, of course, but only as a character—James was a sort of prince of potheads, a long-haired burnout with green eyes and a wide, stupid grin that made all the burnout girls he hung out with hot for him. Fiona wasn’t his type, nor he hers. Fiona ran track, did all her homework, and got mostly As. Unlike James’s girlfriend, Andrea, she favored black ballet flats over sky-high platforms. Andrea had dyed black hair, loved the bands Sludge and Quench, and wore elaborate concert T-shirts, whereas Fiona had a black asymmetrical bob, and listened to mostly pop. Her world and James’s world didn’t overlap.

  But then there was the pool.

  Over the summer, while most of Fiona’s friends were away—working as counselors in training, or traveling with family—Fiona was working at the pool club. It had been her own idea. It wasn’t like they were exactly hurting for money. Fiona’s father, who had died when Fiona was only four, had left them enough to live on. He had life insurance, not to mention a small inheritance from his own parents. When he died of stomach cancer, Fiona’s mother was able to pursue her own career as a fashion writer and personal shopper without worrying too much about the bills.

  Fiona could remember her mother’s sadness at her father’s death, a sort of atmosphere that had descended upon the house, but had no distinct remembrance of her father that did not rely on photographs. She could recall her mother crying in odd places, like the car on the way to preschool, or when she took Fiona to the doctor’s office for a checkup. Her mother cried when she had to fill out forms and circle the word deceased.

  Fiona’s desire to work at the pool that summer had more to do with her need for independence than her need for cash; it was just the two of them in the little red carriage house on Flower Avenue. She wanted to not need her mother. She wanted her mother to see that she could get along without her.

  Fiona worked from seven until eleven in the morning as a swim instructor’s assistant, helping to get the little kids changed and into the pool, which was, during those hours, frigid. From twelve until five, she helped out at the snack bar. She worked the cash register and sold candy bars and ice cream, while James helped out Fat Andy on the grill.

  It took two days before Fiona realized she knew James from school. With his hair pulled back into a ponytail, standing beside Fat Andy, James looked like just another townie-type kid. He’d immediately taken charge of the radio, and set it to some lame classic rock station. James played guitar and worshipped what he called “the Gods of the Rock and Roll Pantheon,” which Fiona found simultaneously embarrassing and touchingly pretentious. He had the annoying habit of calling her Fifi, instead of Fiona. He sang every time a Stones song came on.

  “Hey Fifi,” he asked, “Mick or Keith?”

  “Mick or Keith what?” she responded cluelessly, handing an ice cream sandwich to a chubby, red-haired boy, who began to unwrap it before Fiona even had time to count his change.

  “Who do you think is cuter? Or whatever girls say, sexier?”

  “What? Neither. Aren’t they, like, someone’s grandparents?”

  “C’mon. I showed you the video Tuesday. You can tell a lot about a girl by which is her favorite Stone.”

  “Keith looked like a corpse. Young Mick, I’d have to say. He was okay in the one where he was young.”

  “I would have thought you were a Keith,” he said. “Most smart girls like Keith.”

  James was cutting a pathetic, yellow-pinkish tomato into slices. He had on a white baseball cap backward, and his stringy brown hair was pulled into a ponytail long enough to be a girl’s. His face was also girlishly attractive, with wide cheekbones and large greenish-blue eyes. He had a slight gap between his two front teeth. He turned up the radio, and danced a little Mick Jagger strut around the counter toward where Fiona stood by the fan, waiting on her next nine-year-old customer. He sang as he strutted past her.

  “‘I’ve walked for miles, uh uh, my feet are hurting!’”

  “You’re such an idiot,” Fiona said. “People’s dads like the Stones.”

  “Your dad?” he asked.

  “That’d be difficult,” Fiona said, “since he’s dead. But he probably did at some point.”

  James stopped dancing and looked at her.
/>   “Me too,” he said. “My dad’s dead too. But he lived in California, so I didn’t really know him. I was in sixth grade.”

  “I never really knew my dad.” Fiona shrugged. “He got sick when I was four.”

  “My dad was a fuckhead,” James said, “a real fuckhead.” Then Fat Andy told James to shut up with his crying and get back to prepping the burgers for the lunch rush.

  Later that afternoon, once the moms and the kids and the few other teenagers stopped lining up for their burgers and ice cream and sodas, James made Fiona a “Kennedy Special.” It was a double cheeseburger with pickles, tomato, and, Fiona thought, every condiment they had, though James refused to divulge his special ingredient.

  “For Fifi, even though she’s a Mick-chick,” James said, placing the burger on the counter.

  “Oh my God,” said Fiona. “A burger, with everything I didn’t want.”

  “My specialty,” said James, and he leaned on his elbows to watch her take a bite.

  He called her Fifi all summer. He moved on from the Rolling Stones to bands she had even less interest in: AC/DC, Judas Priest, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and his current favorite, Terminal IV, an obscure band featuring four guitarists. He made her a “Kennedy Special” every afternoon, and every afternoon she ate the whole disgusting mess. She hated his hair, and his skinny legs that retained, all summer long, an incredible, fish-belly pallor, but then there started to be the things that did not disgust her about James Kennedy. Oh no, far from it.

  His long, slender fingers, his eyes that were sometimes blue, sometimes green, his convincing falsetto, the way he sometimes crept up behind her with her burger, almost but not quite leaning into her.

  She especially liked that he was afraid of her, afraid of making a move.

  It was the Fourth of July, when the pool club stayed opened late. After the fireworks out over the Hudson and after all the families piled back into their station wagons, and the two of them told Fat Andy and the other girl from Dobbs, who came on to help out with the crowd, to go home, that they’d clean up, and Fat Andy threw James the key. They cleaned the Snack Shack and hauled the trash bags out to the back Dumpster. Then James called to her, “What’s that? Over there by the fence?” She’d thought he was just messing with her, but there was something moving on the ground. He crept over, one foot in front of the other and she followed him. At first she thought it was a chipmunk or a mouse. But then James sprang out to catch it and scooped it up in his hands—a toad. They often found dead ones in the pool filters in the morning.

  When he caught it, he held it in his palms, and it sat there, perfectly still. Fiona could see its heart beating through its gray, warty-looking skin. “Let it go out here,” she said, opening the gate into the wooded area behind the pool. “Let it go before it gets away and jumps into the pool like its suicidal brothers.”

  He put it down gently beneath a pine tree, in a little pile of pine needles. He watched it hop away. “Bye, little toad,” he said, and then he spun around quickly and grabbed her by the shoulders.

  He pulled her down under the tree. She felt a hunger in herself that she hadn’t known existed. She could feel his breathing against her chest, his hands trembling at first, then calm and sure.

  It was like that the rest of the summer. There was the morning swim lesson, the heat of the Snack Shack, and then the woods, his car, his basement room, her own slant-ceilinged bedroom in the rear of the little red house, when her mother was down in White Plains, or in the city at Bergdorf’s, or Bloomingdale’s, with a client. They didn’t talk much about what they were doing. Then, in late August, Fiona stopped working at the pool club and started double sessions for preseason track. James, who didn’t play a sport, worked until Labor Day. She never went back to the pool club, even for an afternoon swim.

  At some point, shortly before she quit, James had mentioned the girlfriend, Andrea, who’d been away at fat camp, even though she wasn’t fat. She had been fat, James explained, and felt that she had to keep going to fat camp to be sure she didn’t get fat again. She’d be going back to boarding school in Connecticut, but she came home most weekends to see him. There was an express bus. “I didn’t exactly see this as a school year thing,” Fiona had told him.

  “I know,” James said. “I’m not good enough for you anyway.”

  “You’re the one who’s cheating,” Fiona countered, and James had left it at that. He looked hurt, but Fiona knew he wouldn’t have it any other way. She remembered Andrea from before she went away, remembered her tight concert T-shirts and big tits.

  Now Fiona’s mother was giving Fiona her “look of concern,” which included putting her straight blond hair behind her ears and peering at Fiona with her head cocked at an angle her mother had to know was cute. Her mother wasn’t a phony exactly but she had a disheartening way of always looking perkily attractive, or almost always. Sometimes on a Saturday morning, if she had had a “girls’ night out” in the city, and someone else was driving, she had a blotchy look no amount of concealer could wholly eliminate. “If you want, I’ll call the hospital for you, see if they have any news,” she asked.

  “No, thanks,” Fiona said, though she wasn’t sure why. Then she added, with unnecessary brusqueness, “I’m not sure why we were on Mrs. Cole’s call list. I worked with James. He’s a good guy. I hope he’s okay, but I’m not exactly inner circle.” She could feel her throat constricting, her breath coming too fast, but whatever was going on with James, she didn’t want to find out about it, at least not yet, not with her mother standing next to her.

  “Oh,” Fiona’s mother said, and Fiona could hear the dismay in her voice. “I thought you were sort of an item last summer.” She took a cookie and bit into it. Fiona’s mother didn’t normally call Fiona on her stuff. Nor did she eat cookies. Fiona just shook her head, and busied herself, moving cookies off the cookie sheet. How could she explain that what had happened between her and James didn’t exactly mean that they were close in the hospital-waiting-room sense? In the real world sense? There were people she could call who would know something. She could call the hospital herself. But she didn’t want to hear the sound of her own voice asking about James. She didn’t want to hear something that would bring her back to the summer evenings she’d spent with him. She knew about shock. She knew about grief. She knew the animal sounds the body made on receipt of certain types of news.

  That night, Fiona dreamed about James. He was flipping burgers in the Snack Shack. Then he handed her a “Kennedy Special” and she took a bite, but it tasted funny. When she turned around to tell him she didn’t like the way he’d made the burger, he was standing very still. “James,” she’d said, shaking him gently, “James!” But he just stood there, frozen in place, in a kind of cartoon version of death.

  It wasn’t until Spanish class that she heard.

  He had a severe concussion, and a resultant impairment of his short-term memory. No one knew how long it might take for him to get better. Jill Sarkozy, a close friend of Fiona’s, lived down the block from James. Their mothers were, if not friends, exactly, old bus stop comrades. “My mother said his mother needed massive sedatives just to get her to stop making these weird groaning sounds. They even admitted her to the hospital. They were afraid she was going into some kind of shock. Anyway, they say he has no memory. It might get better and it might not. It’s a wait-and-see situation.”

  “What does that even mean?” Fiona asked. “No short-term memory?”

  “I don’t know. I heard he keeps calling his girlfriend, what’s her name, Andrea? He calls her all crying and upset because she hasn’t come to visit him, but she’s only just left. So she’s like, ‘James I just got back from seeing you.’ Then he says ‘Oh’ and hangs up and calls her right back again, since he can’t remember talking to her.”

  Fiona wanted to laugh, or cry, she wasn’t sure which. She didn’t want James to be calling her every five minutes, but it was odd now that she thought about it, that he had nev
er called her once. Over the summer, in the heat of their fling, he hadn’t needed to, of course, and then it had all been over. When they saw each other at school, he sometimes flirted with her, occasionally walked her to the soda machine, and stood a little too close to her as she made her selection, but she’d pretty much frozen him out. She’d once heard Sam Greenfield, her ex-boyfriend from sophomore year, a popular senior, say he’d never go near “that Andrea Beaumont bitch” no matter how hot she was now that she was thin. He’d never go anywhere near any bitch who’d been with that dirtbag, James Kennedy. Fiona didn’t particularly want Sam Greenfield to want to go out with her again, but she wasn’t exactly ready to move out of the Sam Greenfield realm of things. She didn’t want to be automatically off the list of any soccer-playing senior.

  When Fiona got home from track practice that evening, her mother was already home, cooking dinner, her hair pulled up into an untidy, but still somehow stylish, bun. Usually, on weeknights, Fiona stopped off after practice with some of the girls for a slice of pizza at Rocky’s or chicken and fries at the Red Rooster, but Fiona hadn’t been in the mood to hang out. She was relieved when she saw her mother cooking what appeared to be pasta sauce. She was in need of carbs, of serious comfort food, not her mother’s usual fish and salad.

  At dinner, her mother surprised her by bringing up James again. “I really think you should go visit him,” her mother said. “It’s times like these, people need their friends around them.”

  “Mom,” she said, “don’t you get it? James has an actual girlfriend. We don’t hang out with the same people. We hung out over the summer out of necessity.” Fiona surprised even herself with her caustic tone on the word necessity. It wasn’t how she felt, but her mother had driven her to this exaggeration. There was no way to explain the truth, which was that what had happened between her and James existed only in that one particular context. They could be lovers again, she was quite certain, if there was enough chlorine and burger grease, and if no one else they knew was around.