Pop Princess (2 page)

On Labor Day before sophomore year Dad sat me down for The Talk, the “You're such a smart girl, if you'd only
apply
yourself” speech. I responded that while I didn't aspire to be some airhead twit, I really didn't care if anybody thought I was smart and a good student so would it be okay if I just dropped out of school and got a job? The big fat answer was NO.

My GPA improved to a staggering C-plus average that year, which didn't impress my parents at all, but what really sent them over the top was the new gang of girls who let me hang with them, more because I had been a B-Kid than because they actually liked me. With these girls, I was caught smoking in the bathroom; with them, I got busted for skipping school and hanging out in Harvard Square cafes, flirting with college guys and pretending we were college girls highly in need of invites to their keg parties.

Mom said, We're moving; I won't tolerate this behavior. To Mom, it didn't matter if I explained it was one cigarette—my first—and I didn't even like it, didn't matter when I said I was just skipping school because it was all one big bore, I never actually went to one of those keg parties. Mom said, My therapist is worried that you're a follower, you just go where the wind blows. You need direction. Lucky had motivation and drive—don't you want that for yourself?

Dad said, We're broke. We can't afford to live in Cambridge anymore. We're moving to a quiet, safe place where my children will have nothing better to do than study.

Bye-bye big city, hello small town with the sea breeze and fresh-cut grass and white lace curtains at every house. Yawn. Whatever.

No one said what we all knew: No move could bring Lucky back, and no change of scenery was going to make us forget our loss.

We'd been living in Devonport, Cape Cod, for three months now and the most exciting thing that had happened was Gerald Tiggs coming into the Dairy Queen.

I had been planning to remind Mom that a music career was not an ambition of mine, when the morning after our encounter with Tig, I walked into the kitchen and found her telling Dad and Charles about it.

“Wonder could have a record deal within a month, with Tig!”

Dad's face had not adopted the newfound glow on Mom's. He sat at the kitchen table, not looking up from his newspaper, his fork absently moving around pieces of scrambled eggs he likely would not finish. In the two years since Lucky died, he'd lost a lot of weight, and now stood tall and skinny as a rail, his hair completely gray. I think Mom ate for him: Her wardrobe had graduated from black career suits to poly-stretch pants from Target.

Dad said, “Unless those grades go up, Wonder can forget about it. The agreement with Lucky was a 3.5 or higher GPA if she wanted to pursue the music career. Wonder clocked in at, what, 2.5 last year? As it is, unless there's a marked grade improvement at this new school, she can kiss the Dairy Queen job good-bye.”

That comment really pissed me off. I could feel my disinterest in Tig's offer turning into
Just try and tell me I can't make a demo, Dad.

Our dog, Cash, was wagging his tail at Dad's feet, waiting for the leftovers Cash knew Dad would be discreetly discarding. The condition of us getting a dog had been that Dad got to name it. He named the dog after his favorite “pop” star. Cash was my man in black, the most gorgeous black Lab/poodle mutt mix you ever saw.

Charles said, “Stupid fucking record people. Don't do it, Wonder.” To Charles, “record deal” equaled “death.” On that terrible day, Lucky and I had been walking down our street in Cambridge and Lucky was giddy: She and her two best friends, Kayla and Trina, were close to signing a major label record deal for their girl group, Trinity. Mom and Charles were across the street waiting on the porch for us to return with the groceries she'd sent us out to buy for a celebration dinner. Mom waved, Lucky waved back. Lucky was all
Trinity this, record deal that,
and in her excitement, she stepped out into the street without looking. A car ran a red light and hit her. Drunk driver.

Two years later, our family was just starting to get on with our lives, but we were all going through the motions, as if we expected that at any moment our lives could again change in a random instant: irrevocably, horribly. The two years of litigation with the family of the driver of the car that killed Lucky had ended with the driver in jail, but that brought us no satisfaction. Lucky was still gone, and my parents' love for each other seemed to have gone along with her. The expense of the court costs had drained their finances until they finally gave up the lawsuit, sold our house in Cambridge, and moved us to Cape Cod for a fresh start. The custody battle over their marriage ended in a dead heat, with the two backing off into separate corners: Dad took permanent custody of the living room, with his computer; Mom took the bedroom, with her TV; and the kitchen was the open arena reserved for occasional sparring.

“No cursing at breakfast,” Dad mumbled after Charles's use of the F-word. Charles kicked at his skateboard under the table. Cash growled at Charles.

“But it's okay at dinner?” I asked.

Dad looked up at me. He almost smiled. “Only on alternating Tuesdays in leap years,” he said.

Just then we heard a crash in the living room. Cash barked and ran to the door, tail wagging. We ventured into the living room to find that a small piece of the ceiling had cracked and fallen, knocking over an antique lamp and spreading debris over the shabby, worn-out wooden floors. Our home was on prime oceanfront property, but the house, built by Dad's grandfather, was falling apart everywhere, and we had no money to fix it.

Since Dad, a college dean, had been placed on “sabbatical” by the university in Boston, and the only job Mom had been able to get in town was as a cashier at the grocery store, my parents had barely enough money to pay for our move from Cambridge to this ancient rickety house my father had inherited. Dad was supposedly going to use the profit from the sale of the Cambridge house to support our family while he used the peace and quiet of the Cape house to write a great novel that would make us rich beyond our wildest dreams. I think Cash was the only family member who believed Dad could do it. Cash sat at Dad's feet every day while Dad stared at the blank computer screen, usually playing solitaire or surfing the Net when he thought we weren't looking.

“Please let me call Tig, Wonder,” Mom said in my ear. “Please.”

“Sure,” I muttered. I was glad I hadn't blown my summer savings from the Dairy Queen on a new stereo for my room. Looking at the plaster falling from the ceiling, I knew I would have to use that money for school clothes.

I went upstairs to my
room for Sunday sanctuary. It was still weird to go inside my bedroom and not see two beds. Lucky and I had shared a room in the house where we'd grown up in Cambridge, and we'd shared a room in this house on the Cape when we spent summers here. Now that we lived permanently at the Cape, I had moved into the guest bedroom. Lucky's and my old room was locked and nobody ever asked Mom for the key. My new room had a great view, though. I could wake up in the morning and lie in bed, watching the blue ocean rolling right outside the window, the ocean's rocking motions making me feel as if my bed were moving to its rhythm. The roar of the ocean and the waves breaking below the window helped drown out the silence that had existed in our family home since Lucky had gone. Sometimes it felt like we had become a family of ghosts.

There was a knock on my door and I snapped, “I said I'd do it!” thinking Mom was at the door wanting to talk about Tig again, but instead Katie and her twin brother, Henry, aka Science Project, walked in. Henry and Katie lived next door. I'd been hanging out with them every summer since we were babies.

Katie flopped on my bed. “Guess what! Mom told us at church this morning. Only the second week of school and school's going to be canceled this week! They found asbestos somewhere so the whole school has to shut down to get it cleaned up so we don't all like die during homeroom.”

I did a gospel
Messiah
jig around my room, singing, “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”

My initial week at Devonport High had been beyond painful. A summer becoming a permanent townie? Who does she think she is?

The kids my age in town were forever separated by whether they were townies or summers. Townies lived in Devonport year-round, and had families that could not afford vacation homes. Townies had jobs working at the fish stands that the summers frequented, and the townies' parents often had side jobs looking out for the summers' houses during the winter. Summers, the group I had been part of before, were only in attendance on the Cape in July and August, refugees from the heat and humidity in New York, Washington, and Boston. They drove expensive cars, went to fancy private schools, and did not spend their school vacations slaving for minimum wage. Our family had been a summer one, but we were never rich, just lucky to have inherited a house on awesome oceanfront property. I no longer belonged to either group. I was glad to have spent the past summer buried inside the Dairy Queen with a uniform visor half-covering my face.

“I'm so excited you live here year-round now!” Katie chirped. She threw what I referred to as her Popularity Kit—beauty and celeb mags, makeup samples, and hair accessories—onto my bed: her idea of Sunday entertainment. If there could be an award for Girl Most Determined to Be Popular Despite Her Acne and Braces and Kmart Clothes Collection, Katie had it nailed. She should have been popular just based on how nice she was. I'd spent a whole summer at the DQ watching her give free vanilla dips to college students so broke they paid for their Value Meals with rolls of dimes, helping old people to the bathroom, giving little kids a reassuring rub on the back before she had to clean up the peanut butter sauce they'd just spewed all over the condiment table. I could barely manage minimum-wage-level pleasant.

Katie tossed me a soap opera magazine. “Check out the cover—I brought this one special for you.” The my-reason-for-living gorgeous face of Will Nieves, the hottest actor on daytime television, stared back at me, all black eyes and chiseled cheekbones, cinnamon skin and tousled black hair. Will Nieves, star of
South Coast,
the one soap I never missed, the reason I took the five-to-ten rather than the three-to-eight shift two nights a week at the DQ, since our family VCR was on the blitz and no way could I miss my daily dose of Will. I smacked my lips onto Will's picture.

Henry said, “You seriously think that guy's hot?”

“Shah!” I said back.

Henry made a
blech
face. In the last year, he had grown very tall, but way gawky. His thin, dark blond hair had turned golden from the summer's rays, and his usually pale skin was pink and healthy. He almost looked cute, except for his pants always looking like they would fall right down off of his skinny white ass. Henry/Science Project looked like both his name and his nickname: he had that
aw shucks
thing going with a pleasant puppy dog face, but he also had perpetually wrinkled brows and intense stares because his head was always computing computing computing. He had this habit of coming into my room with Katie for no reason; like today, he'd seen Katie carry the Popularity Kit to my house and there was no way he planned to do girly stuff with us, yet here he was in my room.

“You two are not honestly going to spend the day slobbering over pictures of that guy and putting on makeup, are you?” Henry asked.

“You bet we are,” Katie said.

“Katie, I thought you said you would help me build the new computer for Dad's birthday today.”

“No, Science Project, that's
your
project, not mine!” Katie said. “Wonder and I want to do something fun!” She wrinkled her eyebrows, then asked me, “Hey, did you ever call that Tig guy?”

I shrugged, and Katie let the subject drop. She said, “I know! Let's prank-call Doug Chase!”

That
idea interested me. I told Henry, “Charles is gonna go hang out with his pseudocool skater dudes if you wanna go hang with him.” I did not need Science Project's geek karma infiltrating my room if I was going to prank-call my crush. Will Nieves may have been the man I intended to marry, but Doug Chase was the fer-real guy I was seriously lusting over.

Henry squinted up at the sun beaming into my bedroom through the window. “Gimme pseudocool skater dudes over Doug Chase any day,” he mumbled, then got up from the window seat and left my room.

I had been drooling over Doug Chase all summer, though really I had been crushing on him since the summer after fourth grade when he caught me in a game of Marco Polo at the community pool. He had crystal blue eyes, tattoos covering both his upper arms, and he was practically a rock star in Devonport—everyone had heard his band play at the Fourth of July Devonport town festival. Even though he was like one of the most popular seniors at Devonport High, even though I had about as much of a shot with Doug as I did with the prime minister of Canada, I couldn't help fantasizing about him. I had gone from a size eight to a size ten over the past summer from eating pizza where he worked every day, just so I could scam on him while cheese was probably oozing down my blouse, for all that he noticed me. I loved to watch the slither of the serpent tattoo on Doug's left bicep while he flipped the pizza dough in circles. I had lost a summer of lunchtimes watching that dough twirl and fantasizing that Doug and I were on a blanket on the beach at midnight, with moonlight streaming down onto us as I ran my fingers along the serpent—an extreme sensual touch that would have Doug's lips finding mine in no time.

Now that we lived in dullsville Devonport, dreaming about kissing Doug was my only entertainment besides dreaming about kissing Will Nieves from
South Coast.