Bulletproof Mascara: A Novel (5 page)

“Left it at our house with some T-shirts. Housekeeper found ’em,” he said, holding out the bag for her to take.

“You didn’t have to bring them yourself!” she said, touched by his thoughtfulness. “You could have sent them with Mrs. M.”

“Yes, but I wanted to see how you were getting on. Are you having a good time? Are you making friends? Did you get to ride the ponies?” Nikki laughed as he dropped his voice into an overly cute grandfatherly tone.

“I met some nice girls,” Nikki said, pitching her voice a bit higher to go with the joke. “I really like Jenny and Ellen.” She really did feel like she was talking about summer camp.
And after arts and crafts we rode the ponies, but the mean girl put bugs in our shoes
.

“And some not so nice people?” he asked perceptively, dropping the cute voice.

“Yes, our team leader, Dina,” Nikki confided, flopping down on one of the chairs. Mr. M followed suit. “We’re afraid she’ll make us flunk.” Discouragement colored her tone. “She’s really terrible. Everyone thinks so. I think she’s actually pretty smart, book smart anyway. She doesn’t seem very good with the everyday stuff like broccoli.” Mr. M made a puzzled expression, but
Nikki continued. “She won’t listen to suggestions because she thinks she has everything all figured out, and if she weren’t so freaking cocky I’d think she had low self-esteem or something.”

“Fire her,” he suggested.

“I don’t think you can fire the team leader,” Nikki said.

“Sure, you can. Just calmly tell her that you are unhappy with her leadership and that you have decided to take the team in another direction.”

“I couldn’t do that!” exclaimed Nikki, almost as shocked as if he’d suggested breaking Dina’s ankle. “I can’t be boss.”

“Being boss is just being the first person willing to do something. And being a good boss is being open to suggestions. You can do that.” Nikki looked doubtful, but he grinned broadly and nodded encouragingly.

“I’ll think about it,” she said, wondering if she could tell Ellen to be the boss.

“Hello, Nikki,” Mrs. Merrivel said, coming out of a back office.

“Hello, Mrs. Merrivel.” Nikki stood up with a slight guilty twitch.

“Hey, sweet pea,” Mr. M said, leaning down to kiss his wife on the cheek. Mrs. M gracefully inclined her cheek upward and slipped her arm around his waist.

“Did you give Nikki her letter?”

“Letter?” asked Nikki, looking at the pair of them.

“Letter!” he exclaimed, smacking his forehead with his palm. “Clean forgot about it. It’s in the bag. Your mother forwarded it to us.”

“Oh,” Nikki said, reaching into the brown paper grocery bag with her clothes in it. The letter had been placed on top of her neatly folded and laundered shirts, along with her brush. The letter now smelled faintly of fabric softener.

The envelope had been forwarded from their Canadian P.O. box to the house in Tacoma, where her mother, always the penny pincher and still irritated about Nikki’s abrupt departure, had crossed out the Washington address and written, “No longer at this address,” in a tight, cramped script. Beneath that she had written in the Merrivels’ address. Nikki squinted at the smudged return address and felt her heart skip a beat as she saw the name
Z’EV CORALLES
written in bold, block letters, along with a Canadian postmark.

“I didn’t have time to tell my friends where I was going or where to write me,” Nikki lied, trying not to breathe hard, and hoping that the Merrivels wouldn’t question her any further.

“They can write to a P.O. box here at the ranch,” Mrs. Merrivel said helpfully. “They usually distribute the mail once a week. Ask the girl at the desk on the way out; she can give you the address.”

“I’ll do that,” promised Nikki. “And thanks for bringing me my stuff, Mr. M. I really appreciate it.”

“Of course!” he said cheerfully.

There was an awkward moment as she hugged Mr. M goodbye and wasn’t sure whether to hug Mrs. M or not, but Mrs. Merrivel solved the problem by stepping in and enfolding her briefly in a light lavender-scented embrace before letting Nikki escape. As she hurried down the path to the dorms at a pace approaching a trot, Nikki’s only thought was to get to the privacy of her room as soon as possible and open that letter.

CALIFORNIA IV

Shooting Script

Nikki rushed inside and up the stairs to her room. Sitting on the bed, she took out the envelope again. It was too big for a regular letter, and thicker besides; it had to be some sort of card. Slitting the envelope with her nail file, she pulled out a pale blue greeting card. There was a drawing of two pairs of shoes on the cover: a girl’s pair of dancing slippers and men’s lace-up business dress shoes. Between them was a pair of interlocking gold rings. Nikki laughed; it was an anniversary card.

Inside, the message read, “We make a pretty great pair! Happy Anniversary!” Under the preprinted words, Z’ev had written in the same strong block letters from the envelope:
TO MY FAVORITE WIFE: THANKS! LOVE ALWAYS, Z’EV.

“Jackass,” murmured Nikki softly, falling back onto her bed and staring up at the ceiling. What was the matter with him? He could find her address but not her phone number?

“Nikki?” Ellen asked, appearing in the doorway. She was car
rying Nikki’s dinner plate. “Is everything all right? Did you want your dinner?”

“Oh,” said Nikki, sitting up. “Uh, yes, thanks.”

“I brought you a Co-Cola,” said Jenny, shortening the name Southern style and holding up a can of Coke.

“Thanks,” Nikki said, shoving the card under her mattress and reaching for the dinner plate. She knew Jenny and Ellen had noticed the maneuver, but she didn’t want to explain the complicated set of circumstances that had led to an anniversary card being delivered to an unmarried woman.

“So, are we still up for shooting?” she asked, hoping to divert their attention.

“Yeah, absolutely,” Jenny agreed, nodding.

“Cool,” Nikki said, shoving her remaining piece of chicken into her roll and reaching for the soda pop. “Let’s go.”

With the sun sinking lower behind them, Jenny, Nikki, and Ellen trooped out to the gun range. Jenny and Ellen carried several handguns apiece. Nikki munched on her makeshift sandwich.

“So, is there a reason you guys brought ten guns?” Nikki asked as they walked.

“We didn’t bring ten. We brought . . .” Jenny paused to count. “Six.”

“OK, so why did we bring six?” Nikki said absentmindedly, still pondering Z’ev’s note.

“Because it’s important to know the basics of how guns function. And once you know that, you can apply that knowledge and fire accurately with any gun. Are you ever going to tell us who came to visit you?” demanded Jenny, abruptly switching topics.

“Hush!” Ellen said. “Maybe it’s bad news and she doesn’t want to talk about it.”

“If she doesn’t talk about it, we can’t help her fix it!”

They both turned to Nikki, their eyes filled with speculative curiosity.

“It’s not a big secret,” Nikki said, feeling awkward. “I just . . . I stayed with the Merrivels before I came here, and Mr. M brought me stuff I forgot.”

“You stayed with Mrs. Merrivel? What’s her house like?” Ellen asked.

“Plush,” Nikki said. “Really tasteful, and the kitchen is fantastic.”

“Never mind that,” said Jenny. “What about the card?”

Nikki blushed, and Jenny grinned.

“It’s from a boy, isn’t it? I knew it! Boy letters always go under the mattress. Who is he? Is he your boyfriend? How’d you meet?”

“I’m not really sure who he is,” Nikki said cautiously. “It’s kind of complicated. I think . . . no, I don’t know what I think.” She shook her head trying to clear up the confusion that always came up when she thought about Z’ev.

“You’re no good at gossip at all,” said Jenny disgustedly. “You’re not supposed to know what to think! You’re supposed to tell us, and then we talk about it and decide what you’re supposed to think.”

“You don’t have to tell us if you don’t want to,” Ellen said, looking amused. “But sometimes it is good to sort of hear another opinion on things.”

“Well,” said Nikki uncomfortably. “It’s complicated. I didn’t mean to meet him at all. I just wanted to go to Canada.”

“What’s in Canada?” asked Jenny.

“Canadians mostly,” Nikki answered without pausing. She was trying to pinpoint precisely where the story started. “But I wanted to go to Vancouver. I had a job interview. Only, I couldn’t afford to go.”

Sitting at the kitchen table, sunlight blazing in a sharp arc across the white paper of the “request for interview” letter, Nikki had seen that Fate was clearly taking a hand. She was supposed to go back to Canada.

“Have you ever thought that something was destiny?” she asked, coming back to the present. “I mean, believed in something so much that you had absolutely no doubt it would happen?”

“Yes,” Jenny said. “I absolutely knew that Marky Mark was going to marry me.”

“I don’t mean like a junior-high crush,” Nikki said with a laugh. “I mean, like, believed it so hard it seemed more like a memory of what happened, rather than what might happen.”

“Yeah, I know. Mark Wahlberg was going to come to Peachtree, Georgia, and marry me.”

“I’m incredibly disturbed by that,” said Ellen. “Let’s pretend she didn’t say it.”

“I’m fine with that,” agreed Nikki.

“So, back to this job interview in Vancouver,” said Ellen, restarting the conversation.

“Well, it was for a company that did glorified market research, but I would have been using my degree. I was very excited, and I don’t know . . . it just all seemed so right that I believed it. I knew what I was going to wear, what I was going to say, and how much they were going to love me. The only thing I didn’t know was how I was going to get there. I had like forty-two dollars in my bank account.”

“What’d you do?” Jenny asked.

“I broke down and asked my mom to lend me the money. And she said she could get me a free hotel room. All I had to do was go to an informative seminar on a ‘lucrative and fun new business opportunity.’”

“Carrie Mae,” said Ellen, recognizing the tag line.

“Right,” Nikki said, “so I said yes, because I was going to get the job and Carrie Mae wouldn’t matter.”

“But you didn’t get the job?” Jenny asked sympathetically.

“I think you could safely say that,” said Nikki disgustedly.

“What happened?” Ellen said, laughing.

“Well.” Nikki hesitated. “It just didn’t go well,” she finished lamely. Some things were just too embarrassing. Particularly when she’d known Jenny and Ellen only a week. Z’ev’s knowing was one thing. He was different. “It was just really obvious that I didn’t get the job.”

“So where does the boy come into it?” asked Ellen.

“At the bar in the hotel after the interview.”

“Ah,” Jenny said. “It was beer obvious you didn’t get the job.”

“Martini obvious,” Nikki agreed. “And I was on my second martini, and he was sitting next to me at the bar, and then he turned around and asked me to marry him.”

“What?” Ellen asked, startled.

“I know! That’s what
I
said!” exclaimed Nikki. “He had some story about some business associate thinking he was married, but he really wasn’t, but now he was meeting the guy and the guy expected to meet a wife.”

“That’s retarded,” Jenny said, bluntly. “That doesn’t even make sense.”

“It made sense at the time,” Nikki said, blushing.

“That’s because y’all were drunk. What happened?”

“I went to lunch with them,” Nikki said, suddenly feeling self-conscious. It hadn’t sounded so ridiculous until she’d said it out loud. “And he sent me a thank-you card, that’s all.” They had reached the shooting range and Nikki quickly took the gun cases from Jenny and spread them out on the counter.

“So tell me about guns,” she said, grateful for the opportunity to switch topics.

“Actually,” Jenny said, “you’re going to tell me. Yesterday Connie explained single-action, double-action, semiauto, and full automatic to you, right?”

“Right,” said Nikki, knowing that the statement was true even if her absorption of the information wasn’t.

“Good. Now explain it to me.”

“Uh,” Nikki said, floundering, trying to focus on the moment at hand. “Well, anything that isn’t a revolver is an automatic.”

“A revolver is defined as . . . ?”

“A handgun with a revolving cylinder into which bullets are placed. Cowboy guns,” babbled Nikki, beginning to sweat.

“Not just for cowboys, but moving on. Tell me about automatics.”

“Most handguns are semiautomatics because you have to squeeze the trigger each time you want a bullet to come out.”

“Which makes it different from a fully automatic weapon how?” Her blue eyes fixed intently on Nikki. Jenny pushed a piece of flyaway blond hair behind her ear.

“Uh.” Nikki stared back at Jenny and wished the information would stop loitering and exit her mouth promptly. “When you squeeze and hold the trigger, lots of bullets come out. Automatically.”

“Good,” Jenny said. “Now, back to the revolvers. Tell me about single versus double action.”

Nikki licked her lips; she was a little less clear on this bit. “Double action means that you can either cock the hammer or simply pull the trigger. Soooo . . .” She paused, trying to find the words. “Single action means that you have to cock the hammer each time?”

“Exactly,” Jenny said, smiling. “Now, find the safety catch on each of these guns.”

Nikki quickly found the little lever on two guns that would prevent a trigger from being pulled completely and discharging the weapon, but she was stumped by the third. She turned the gun over in her hand and finally looked at Jenny in capitulation.

“I give up,” she said. “Where is it?”

“Uh-huh,” Jenny said, shaking her head. Ellen laughed.

“Stop being mean, Jenny. The poor girl has been doing so well.”

Nikki looked at each woman with a questioning expression.

“It’s a trick question, sweetie,” explained Ellen. “Not all handguns have safeties. Rifles almost always do, and revolvers almost always don’t. Just the way it is.”

“Why not?” asked Nikki.