Cherry Money Baby (4 page)

“Hello, you gorgeous thing.” She leaned her arms against the sill.

He raised the screen and leaned out for a kiss. He tasted like coffee. He always tasted like coffee. It was enough to make a girl a Starbucks freak.

It was widely acknowledged that Lucas DuBois was the only dude chill enough to date Cherry Kerrigan. He was the mellow ying to her manic yang, the silent partner to Cherry’s chatter, responding in monosyllables with the occasional New Orleans drawl he’d inherited from his Creole father. (Cherry referred to these honeysuckle-dipped phrases as “panty remover.”) Kids who liked Cherry referred to their relationship as adorable; kids who didn’t joked that no matter what Lucas had in his shorts, Cherry Kerrigan had the bigger balls in
that
relationship.

But really she was wrapped around his finger.

“Mmm. . . .”
She laid her head on her arms and batted her eyelashes at him. “I’ve been waiting for that sugar
all
day.”

“You and me both.” He handed her a piece of paper. “Latest design. What do you think?”

She considered the sketch. Like all of Lucas’s artwork, it was hysterical and vibrant. He spoke softly, but the boy painted
loud.

“I love it.” She traced the contours with her fingertip. “Where you going to paint it?”

“I got the spot picked out.”

“Let’s go!”

Lucas checked his watch. “Now?”

“I got to get out of here,” Cherry said. “I had a crazy day I’d rather not think about.”

“What happened?”

“I take it you haven’t been online lately.”

Lucas didn’t do Facebook or Twitter, and he’d only gotten e-mail at Cherry’s insistence. The TV was usually turned to sports in the DuBois household.

“Not recently.”

“I’ll tell you on the way,” she said. “You’ll laugh your ass off.”

They trekked down the darkened path along Sweet Creek. Lucas’s duffel of paint cans went
poing!
and
clang!
as it bounced against his leg, echoing across the ravine. The wet weather had turned the gentle slope to slick mud, and they clung to each other, sneakers pressing into the slime as they clutched each other’s sleeves.

Lucas shook his head. “So you’re a web celebrity now. A
webrity.
”

“It’s awful.”

“Why?”

She blew a wisp of hair. “All these comments on how I look or talk or act . . . Like I
asked
for it. Like I deserve getting hated on because I wanted attention in the first place. Which I didn’t.”

“It’ll blow over,” said Lucas. “What’s that line about fifteen minutes of fame?”

“I fucking hope so. Jesus, I hadn’t even thought about school.”

“Nobody will care.”

Cherry let out a humorless laugh. “Oh, yeah, they will. This is, like, the biggest thing to happen in our town since that girl found a potato that looked like Mother Teresa.”

“It was an apple. And who cares? You don’t care what people think.”

She smirked, threading her fingers through his.

“Is Badass Cherry Kerrigan actually feeling a little
vulnerable
?”

“How’s this for vulnerable?” She twisted his arm until he cried out in pain.

“All right, all right! Jesus.”

“Come on, you like it.”

Lucas rubbed his sore knuckles. “So what did your father say?”

“He hasn’t seen it yet, I don’t think.” She sighed.

“Oh?”

She explained the latest chapter in the college saga. The message was clear:
Go somewhere, because here isn’t good enough.
But what was so bad about Aubrey? She looked up through the branches. Bats were wheeling in the sky, disappearing in front of the water tower, and reappearing again like black sparks. She loved her hometown. It was part of her. Aubrey was a silent family member. She couldn’t just abandon it.

“He’s just worried about you,” said Lucas. He knew there was no changing Cherry Kerrigan’s mind once she’d set it.

“What about you? You worry about me?”

“Never.”

They came to a quiet stretch of Route 9 that ran over the creek. The water disappeared into a drainage pipe. Together they climbed up the embankment and crossed the pavement. A dirt road led into the woods, and there was a sign that read:

UTILITY ACCESS ONLY
NO ADMITTANCE

They sidled over the chain and made their way down the potholed path, Cherry using her toe to dig out rocks embedded in the soft earth, kicking them down the lane. At last they came to a train bridge, towering over the riverbed like a dinosaur in the moonlight. It was just bright enough for working. A cement canvas twenty feet wide and sixty feet high.

While Lucas set up his gear, Cherry stretched out on a flat rock overlooking the creek bed. She could see the stars through the railroad struts above. She listened to the rattle and hiss as her boyfriend began the first outlines of his piece, which would be sixteen feet across and incorporate seven different colors. Lucas hated the word
graffiti.
His artwork wasn’t bubble lettering or crazy script (he’d call that
too nineties, too Fresh Prince
). Instead it resembled his favorite subversive street artist, Bonzo. He liked to paint people, often children, clinging to the real cracks in the pavement, hiding behind a real drainage pipe, interacting with the surface he painted on. Cherry felt that Lucas’s people seemed to want to jump off the wall.

“Why’d you choose this spot?” Cherry asked, sitting up. “I mean, it’s real romantic and all, but no one’s gonna see it.”

“Less likely someone will paint over it, then,” Lucas said, shaking the chromium yellow. “Besides, we’ll know it’s here. We’ll be old and ugly, and this will still be here and still look fine.”

Like Cherry, Lucas had no plans for college. He’d work as a janitor at the high school like his dad. Her man was an
artist,
and he didn’t need a college degree or a generous grant from the White People Foundation to make art. This was one reason Cherry loved him. He didn’t need to
go somewhere
to be amazing.

He stepped back and admired his work. He’d embellished a crack in the cement, widened it, lengthened its offshoots into tree branches, and added leaves and blossoms. Below he’d painted a small girl in a dress, her hand pressed to the tree, as if feeling its bark.

Cherry snuck up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist. He twirled her around and pressed her against the strut. Cherry giggled. She wasn’t a giggler, a blusher, a
girl
— Lucas brought it out of her.

“So . . . what
do
you want to do?” he asked.

“Right now?”

“After school.”

Cherry shrugged, fiddling with the buttons on his shirt. “I dunno. Get a job? Maybe an apartment downtown?”

“All by yourself?”

“Why, you got a better plan?”

Lucas licked his lips.

“What? What is it?”

She could hear the roar of the creek where it got deeper up ahead. She could hear the roar of the highway. There was a roar in her ears, too.

“Let’s get married.”

“I beg your
what
?”

The moonlight glinted off Lucas’s teeth. Pressed against him, she could feel his heart racing under his spattered painting shirt. “Why not. You love me, right?”

“Yeah . . .”

“And I’m pretty into you —”

She shoved his shoulder. “Jerk.”

“So, let’s get married. I don’t want anyone else.”

Cherry opened her mouth, hoping the right words would just fall out. She felt dizzy. She’d only had one other boyfriend (Big Mistake). She’d known Lucas since preschool, when his family moved into the trailer behind hers. One morning she found him carving his name into
her
tree and said if he didn’t stop, she’d beat him senseless. He offered to carve her name, too, which she’d accepted as a compromise. They were bound together thereafter, first as friends and for the last two years as a couple.

The bridge began to hum.

“Jesus, Cherry. Say something!”

Cherry’s breath quickened. Tiny freight trains coursed in her veins, rushed through the hub of her heart. Her bones vibrated with the approach, the engine, the wheels, the noise, the track humming all the way from now into the endless future, and she had to hop on or let it blast by because life would not slow down for her. And really there was no question because there was only one place she wanted to go, an inner place, a place with Lucas.

She breathed
yes
into his mouth just as the 8:21 to Boston blasted,
exploded
overhead, quaking the bridge and rattling the paint cans in their duffel bag, vibrating the happy couple pressed against the strut. Once it had passed and Cherry and Lucas pulled back from their kiss, the train was gone, but she was still rocketing on, moving forward, breathless with velocity.

Once, on a dare, Cherry had chugged an entire twenty-ounce Red Bull. The effect of all that caffeine, aside from making her jaw clench, was a kind of relaxed hysteria, like a tiny, insane Cherry was doing jumping jacks inside her skull. She felt something similar now, saying good night to Lucas at his door. Like life was set, certain, and simultaneously so fucking exciting, she might piss her pants (another side effect of the Red Bull).

But the dreamy-giddy thing lasted only as far as the chain-link fence, and then something began to grate at the edges. She’d have to tell the fam. She didn’t want to tell them. The news was perfect so long as it was just hers. Stew would laugh it off, make a joke like he always did. Pop . . . Pop would be trouble. He’d see it as the nail in Cherry’s college coffin, an idea that was already sealed and buried.

She crossed the backyard, auditioning her tone out loud.

“Lucas asked me to marry him. . . . Pop, I’m marrying Lucas.” No, that was taking the offensive, which made her feel like a sneaker-stomping little girl. Climbing the rear steps, she tried again, imagining her father in his armchair, staring up at her in glum disbelief. “Poppa, there’s something I need to tell you. . . .” Too dramatic. Keep it light. “Okay, you wanna hear something
nuts
. . . ?”

No.

Fuck it. If Pop didn’t like it, tough. She wasn’t going to make a production.

She opened the door.

“Hi. I’m engaged.”

The trailer was empty. She checked the bedrooms; the garage was dark and vacant. No note. It was 9:30. At this hour Pop was usually watching TV, halfway through a six-pack of Silver Bullets. She checked her phone, also lifeless. She was on her way to charge it when she heard a car pull in, an engine die, a door slam. Now she pictured Pop lumbering up the walk, fist stuffed in his jean pocket, searching for his keys.

Cherry opened the front door.

“Hi. I’m
ennnn
. . .” The last word teetered over the edge like Wile E. Coyote. Cherry steadied herself against the door frame to keep from tumbling off the stoop. The mental image of her father snapped back like a rubber band, leaving Cherry brain-numb, completely stalled.

There was a movie star on her doorstep.

Ardelia Deen looked much recovered. She was dressed in a swimming green cocktail dress, her flawless features touched with makeup.

“Cherry, right?” She offered a manicured hand. Cherry shook it.

“Yeah.”

“Sorry, you must think I’m absolutely
bonkers
just dropping in like this. My manager got the address from
your
manager, ha-ha.” She swallowed.

Cherry’s brain was still stumbling. Pop, the engagement, Lucas . . .

“I’m sorry, what’s happening?”

“I wanted to say thank you. I’m sorry I didn’t this afternoon. I was so distracted, and Spanner — that’s my manager, the friend I was with — she insisted we rush off before the press showed up. And then there was a checkup at hospital, and with one thing and another . . .” She took a breath. “Anyway, I am sorry it’s so late, but I had to see you in person.
Thank you,
Cherry.”

“Oh! Yeah, sure.” Cherry tried to clear her head, shaking it. “You’re welcome. I just did . . . It was nothing.”

“Not to me!”

The intensity of her tone startled them both; Ardelia’s voice was for amiable after-party interviews and gracious
your welcome
s while signing photographs, not life-and-death talk. She smiled and flipped her hand to lighten the tension. Cherry squinted. She didn’t seem like that afternoon’s Burrito Barn customer or the towering goddess Cherry knew from the big screen. Ardelia Deen in person was something new, something huge and vague, reduced in size. And sharpened.

She had no clue what to say.

“So . . .”

“I love your”— Ardelia waved absently —“caravan.”

“What? Oh, the trailer. Yeah it’s . . . I like your dress. It’s really”— she groped for something intelligent —“green.”

“Chartreuse, actually.”

She nodded vigorously. “Oh, yeah. Chartreuse. I love their stuff.”

“Actually chartreuse is the
color,
” Ardelia said, blushing. “The designer is . . . It’s Faviana, but . . . Wow.” The starlet took a breath. “I just sound incredibly pretentious, don’t I?”

“No! No, no. It’s me. I’m retarded.”