Why Girls Are Weird (14 page)

Replying to e-mail was one thing, but meeting someone that read my journal? I didn't feel ready for that. What if she saw right through me? What if I was disappointing in person? What if I found out that my biggest fan was someone I couldn't stand?

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How bad could she be, anyway? The girl loved me. An hour of coffee and praise couldn't hurt a Friday afternoon. She was probably harmless.

And, okay, I was really curious to test out a fan. If all went well with her, maybe I'd be bold enough to meet LDobler someday. If he wanted to. If we wanted to.

So there I was, just under a week later, sitting out in front of the large, open garage door of the Ruta Maya Coffee House, listening to a jazz trio from inside on the tiny wooden stage. A wintry wind whipped past my face. I sipped my mocha and tried to guess which girl was Tess.

She was wearing a green beret. Green like she was about to sell me some Thin Mints. Green like I was supposed to think of her as a child. She walked toward me, zoning in on my face, smiling like we were lovers meeting at an airport after a long separation. How did she know it was me?

“Look! Famous shirt!” She pointed at my chest. I was wearing a shirt I had written about a couple of days ago, saying that the coffee stain on it makes it look obscene.

“It does look like the cat's flipping me off!” she said, her eyes wide, her finger inches from my chest. I instinctively leaned back in my chair.

“Go get some coffee,” I said to her, smiling my friendliest smile.

“Do you think it's going to rain?” she asked as she looked up. When her eyes met mine again I saw that she was pouting. The girl was so young and aggressive. She never even said hello—just launched into conversation like we'd known each other for years. I wondered if her heart was racing as fast as mine. I worried briefly that she'd brought a gun and she was going to kill me right here next to the couple playing chess.

When she came back with a cup of coffee steaming in her hand, I tried to start over in a more recognizable getting-to-know-you pattern.

“Hi, Tess,” I said. I was still nervous, afraid of saying the wrong thing around her. Then I said with a start, “You're name's really Tess, right?”

“Yep.” She laughed. Her eyes got wider. “You don't mean your name's not Anna, do you?”

“No, it is.” I liked her smile. She had very large green eyes. It was like her entire face was exaggerated. Her cheekbones were rounded. Her hair was blond and short, and flipped at the ends. She looked exactly like what she was: a young girl finishing college who hadn't had anything really horrible happen to her yet, who thought the best about everyone and wanted to “do good” in life.

I smoked cigarette after cigarette, letting her do most of the talking. I started to calm down. Since she was chatty, I felt less like I was on display. To the common observer this would look like a couple of girlfriends getting coffee after work and not the winner of the Win a Date With Anna K contest that I was terrified it had become.

Tess was funny. She'd talk faster than she was thinking and she'd sometimes lose her sentence halfway through. She took big gasps of air before she talked, as if she was about to go underwater to tell me a secret. Her hands moved constantly, and she had a habit of tucking her hair behind her ears over and over again, like it wasn't staying where she put it. Sometimes she'd talk so fast that she spit.

“Did it cost a lot to get your bed fixed?” she asked. “You never said.”

“What?”

“The bed. The bed where you and Ian…y'all broke it with the…”

“Oh! The bed! Yeah!”

Three months ago I had written an entry about us accidentally breaking our bed during a particularly heated night of sex. I guess there weren't enough Post-Its to prepare me for this meeting. She was going to catch my lies eventually. I just hoped I was ready with more lies to patch up the holes when she found them.

“I can't believe you'd forget that.”

“I didn't forget it,” I said. “I forgot I told all of you about it. No, it's fixed. Sorry.”

Tess giggled into her café au lait. “I know all sorts of stuff about you. I guess you would forget some things that you tell us.”

Us. Like she was the leader of my fans. A representative. Like I was leading a nation. A tribe. A cult. It was so unreal.

“I thought you'd be taller, Anna.” She had her head tilted as she sized me up.

“I thought you'd be younger.”

“And you're quieter than I thought you'd be.”

“You're wearing a beret.”

“You're making fun of my hat?”

I started laughing. It probably wasn't appropriate, as it was too early to be mocking her clothes, but I couldn't help it. There was tension and anticipation and that anxiety that comes with not wanting to disappoint someone. I couldn't get over how I was someone with fans, and I was meeting one of those fans and the entire thing sounded like something that happened to someone else.

Tess pulled the hat off her head and looked at it. “I wasn't going to wear it, but I didn't know how else you'd pick me out of a crowd. I mean, everyone here in Austin is pretty young. Except for you, I mean.”

My mouth dropped open. “No, you didn't say that!” I shouted.

“I did! I said it! I'll say it again. You're old.”

“You wear ugly hats.”

“Oldie.” She tossed her hat on the table.

“Hattie.” I lit another cigarette.

“Okay, I take it back,” she said, as she leaned in to bum another cigarette, this time without asking first. “You're what I thought you'd be.”

“And what's that?” I asked her.

She smiled with her head down. Her eyes looked up at me as if she was scheming as her mouth formed the word.

“Fun.”

“I need you to wait out here,” I said to Tess as we stood at the door of my apartment. “Just give me a second.”

“How messy could it be, Anna? I'm sure it's fine.” She looked excited, ready to see proof of my private life. My afternoon with Tess had flown by. We kept talking and suddenly we were out of cigarettes, out of cash, and ready to flop on a couch in comfy clothing. I had invited her back to my place for pizza and movies.

“It's not fine,” I said, jamming my shoulder into the door as I unlocked it. I slid myself inside before Tess could see anything. “It's beyond messy.”

“You're being silly!” she shouted as I closed the door in her face.

The place wasn't just a mess; it was a single girl's mess. The apartment was completely void of anything Ian. I rushed straight away to the recycling bin and found a few empty beer bottles. I left them in random places in the apartment—the bookcase by the futon, the television stand, and my bedroom windowsill. From my bedroom closet I pulled a box of Ian's old things from the top shelf. I dropped his things in their old familiar homes. A pair of his boxer shorts on the floor in the bathroom, right behind the toilet. Another one in the living room, near the bookshelf. A can of shaving cream on the sink. An Oxford shirt on a chair. I didn't have enough guy things. As I walked to the door to let Tess in, I hoped she wouldn't notice.

“Okay, I'm coming,” I shouted.

“Finally.” Her voice was muffled through the door.

As I put my hand on the doorknob, I looked back over my apartment. It looked like a busy, hip couple lived here, a couple with too much going on to worry about cleaning up. They might have even had sex on that futon recently. The room had a tousled coolness to it.

That's when I spotted the Post-Its of Lies that had grown to mural proportions on my wall. A multicolored explosion of fibs stared me in the face. I frantically found the Weezer poster that used to be taped there, tripping over Taylor in the process. Nursing my stubbed toe, I once again stuck the poster to the wall, shoving random Post-Its underneath the paper. My lies were now safely covered—lies like my parents lived in Houston and that I took ballet for a number of years.

Tess knocked on my door. “Anna, I'm starting to feel rejected!”

I took a breath and opened the door. She looked around and squished her face into a doubtful squint. “I thought you were cleaning,” she said.

“Trust me, it was worse,” I said, noticing I was a little breathless.

Tess walked around my apartment like she was touring a place she'd been studying in school. She carefully looked over framed photographs, and each time it filled me with anxiety. What did I tell her about that person? Had I mentioned that friend?

“God, is this Ian? He's a total hottie. I knew he would be.” Tess was holding a picture of Dale.

I laughed. “No, that's really
not
Ian.”

I took a photo album down from a bookshelf. I opened to a picture of Ian and me with our arms around each other. We were at a wedding of a friend of his we both lost touch with. Kevin-something was his name. I think.

“Oh, he's even cuter. You're so lucky. Where is he?”

“On a business trip.”

“What does he do?”

“Sales.” Sure, why not? Sales. That was nice and vague.

Her eye caught the discarded boxer shorts. I could hear my pulse in my ears as I waited for her response. She looked back at me, her mouth open, her eyes squinted, her tongue touching her bottom teeth. She had to have known. She must have figured it all out. I was about to be exposed.

“Boys are dirty,” she said quietly.

Tess and I talked through the night, giggling over stories like we'd gone through five years of school together. She told me about her crazy boyfriend that dumped her by saying she turned him gay. I told her about a boyfriend I had that decided to become Ringo in a Beatles tribute band. We didn't know which one was a more embarrassing story to tell. After a detailed comparison list where we analyzed how those relationships affected all future love affairs, Ringo won. When we finally looked at the time and saw it was after two in the morning, I insisted Tess crash on the futon.

I woke up from a bad dream around four. I dreamt that LDobler was at my high school graduation, and he was telling everyone I had cheated on my Biology final. LDobler was, of course, John Cusack in my dream, and I was trying to explain everything to him. Then he was crying, telling everyone that I ran over his dog with my car. My mother was there, and the bloodied, dead dog was in her lap. She was holding it close to her chest, looking up at me with tears in her eyes. “How could you?” she shrieked.

I couldn't fall back asleep. When I was little, Mom always told me to turn my pillow over if I had a bad dream, because the other side would be cooler. It was the hot side of the pillow that held the bad dream, and by smooshing it back into the bed you could get a fresh dream. But flipping the pillow wasn't working, so I quietly walked through the house to the kitchen for something to drink, as Mom also suggested a very cold glass of water to clean away lingering nightmares. Why all of her nightmare cures involved cooler temperatures I'm not sure.

When I opened the refrigerator door, I jumped. I saw a shape on the living room floor. It was Tess.

She was asleep with a blanket pulled around her. The laptop was open in front of her, but I didn't remember leaving the computer on. I gently placed my hand on Tess's knee.

“Tess?”

She stirred and for a second didn't know where she was. “Oh, Anna. Sorry.”

“Why are you on the floor?”

“I couldn't sleep, so I was surfing the net for a little while. I guess I fell asleep here.”

“I'm sorry my futon's not so comfortable.”

“No, it's great, Anna. It's great. I love that you call it a ‘futon.'” She stumbled over to the couch, clutching her blanket between her legs. “You're so technical. It's hilarious.”

I noted how tiny she was, seeing her in my high school choir T-shirt and another pair of Ian's plaid boxer shorts I had exhumed from the box. As she curled into a fetal position, Taylor jumped up to sleep on her feet. Tess smiled and closed her eyes.

I heard her rhythmic breathing a minute later as I left with a glass of water. It was only then that I noticed my photo album was off the shelf on the floor by the computer.

The album was opened to a picture of Ian and me on the swing set at the playground near Ian's parents' house. I'm on the swing, and Ian's holding me back against his chest. I'm pleading for him to let me go, and he's holding me back by the swing chains. He's laughing and my face is frozen in a half-terrified grin.

It was then I saw that a yellow Post-It note had fallen off the wall and was on the floor by the album, my own handwriting scribbled across it. “Possible wedding next year?”

Even if she had seen it, she probably didn't know what it was. Of all the Post-It notes to find, at least this one sounded like I was working on a story. Or even if I was talking about myself, it wasn't like it was completely impossible. Maybe Anna K needed to remind herself that she might want a wedding next year. If I were Tess and I found this Post-It, would I think anything about it?

I had to stop worrying and get some sleep. If Tess was really curious, she'd ask me. If she had figured it all out, I'd know in the morning. There was nothing I could do. I picked up the Post-It and crumbled it into a ball. I carried it with me as I closed the album and put it back on the shelf. I picked up the computer, placed it back on my desk, and momentarily debated checking my e-mail. LDobler would have written another letter. I decided to save something for my Sunday afternoon once Tess had gone home. I turned off my laptop, grabbed my glass of water, and quietly made my way through the dark back to my bed.

Again I couldn't sleep. I flipped the pillow a few more times, but by then the entire thing was cool. I changed to a different pillow. I kicked the covers off. I pulled them back on. I took off my pajama bottoms. It wasn't that the nightmare was lingering, I was just completely awake.

In my head, in my dreams, in my fantasies (and even my nightmares) LDobler is John Cusack, dressed as Lloyd Dobler, wearing the outfit he's wearing when Lloyd asks Diane out for the first time. He's wearing a Clash T-shirt and his hair is tousled and he's warm and strong. He's watching me—watching me write him letters. I'm at my computer and I'm reading his words and I'm laughing. I start writing back to him and John Cusack's reading over my shoulder and he begins to laugh, and just as I sit up shocked that someone is there, he's suddenly around me, pressing against my back and shoulders. My bottom feels warm and tingles run down the backs of my legs to my feet. He's kissing my neck from behind. His teeth graze my skin. His tongue slides up to my earlobes. He's sucking and biting gently, but with just enough pressure. My arms are out straight, clutching the sides of my desk as he cups my left breast with one hand and his other hand lowers to my crotch. He pushes against my clothes. His hand is strong and insistent. I push my body into his hands. My back arches to push into him deeper. I can hear his breath in my ear, against the side of my face. I'm hot and I can feel my face turn red as I feel him wanting me. I can't see him but I can feel him. I can hear him. I can feel how he's craving me. I tilt my head back because I'm sure I can't breathe. He's sucking my neck and squeezing between my legs and I'm warm and wet and his tongue is in my ear and his hand is on me and I'm grinding into him and his skin feels good and he smells so good and I feel so sexy and I'm rocking and I'm coming and I fall asleep with my hand still inside my underwear.