For Keeps Page 5

  “What’s this thing?” I run my fingers over the shiny silver contraption sitting on the counter.

  Bob swats my hand away. “Don’t touch!”

  “OK!” I jump back. “Sheesh.”

  “This,” he says in a low voice, “is our new cappuccino maker. . . . Observe.” He presses a button and a little door pops open. “This is the grinder compartment. Where the espresso beans go.” He presses another button and machinery whirs. “See how fast it is? Once the beans are ground”—he whips out a metal cup attached to a black rubber handle—“they go in here. Now . . .” He slides the handled thingy into a slot, clicks it into place, and presses yet a third button, which causes brown liquid to squirt out the bottom. “Voilà!”

  “Looks complicated,” I say.

  “Now we steam the milk.”

  “There’s more?”

  “Cappuccino-making is an art, my dear. Art takes time.”

  “Ah,” I say.

  I watch as Van Gogh continues his tutorial. When he’s finished, he hands me a cheery yellow mug overflowing with froth. “Taste.”

  “Since when do we have mugs? . . . Wait—is this from one of the mystery boxes in the basement?”

  “Taste.”

  “I’m not really much of a coffee drinker.”

  Bob huffs a sigh. “Just try it.”

  “Fine.” I take a sip, get a nose full of foam.

  “Well?”

  “Not bad.”

  “See?” Bob is smiling, triumphant. Whenever he shows his teeth, I marvel at how tiny they are. Tiny and perfectly square, like a two-year-old’s. “Customers are going to love this!”

  I am not so sure. “Who drinks cappuccinos with their ice cream?”

  Bob shakes his head, exasperated. “There won’t be any ice cream. We’re phasing it out.”

  “What?”

  “Hello? How many European-style cafés do you know that serve ice cream?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I’ve never been to Europe.”

  Bob purses his lips. “Well. Europe is about to come to you.” He tells me to close my eyes.

  “Why?”

  “Just close them.”

  What is it with the eye closing around here? First Liv, now Bob. I don’t know why people insist on—

  “Ta-daaaa!”

  He’s holding up a wooden sign—yellow with brown lettering and a couple of biscotti painted on—simple, yet elegant. Fiorello’s Café.

  I have to ask, since Bob’s last name, I happen to know for a fact, is Schottenstein.

  “Please.” Bob grimaces. “Schottenstein Café? ” He tells me about the year he spent in Italy when he was in his twenties, about the café downstairs from his apartment. “Every morning I would wake to the smell of espresso and pastries. . . . Fiorello’s. . . . It was heaven.” His eyes get misty for a moment. “Best year of my life.”

  This makes me wonder if there was a girl involved, some Italian beauty he shared his biscotti with. But I don’t ask. Because then Bob might feel compelled to tell me the story about how he got his twentysomething heart broken, and I don’t want to feel any worse for him than I already do. So instead, I nod.

  “Anyway,” he says, “I’ve always wanted to open my own café. . . . Nobody ever thinks I’ll do things, but this time I’m actually doing it.” He reaches under the counter, whips out a flyer: FIORELLO’S CAFÉ! GRAND OPENING! “See?”

  “Wow,” I say. Because he looks so proud of himself right now. And because, even though Bob is a nutcase, he’s a nutcase with passion. And that kind of makes me want to root for the guy.

  I wake in the middle of the night, sweating.

  I had this dream that Matt Rigby came into Fiorello’s for a cappuccino, and when he took a sip, his whole head got covered in foam. I kept trying to wipe the foam off him with a towel, but it kept growing back. His mouth would open, trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying because the only thing that came out of his mouth was more foam.

  “Spit it out, babe,” I kept saying. (God knows why I was calling him “babe.” I’ve never called anyone “babe” in my life.) And anyway, Dream Matt didn’t listen to my sage advice. He just kept frothing at the mouth like a rabid squirrel.

  Ha! What a stupid dream.

  I can’t believe I’m still sweating.

  Five

  THREE WEEKS INTO school, one of the soccer guys announces he’s having a party. The whole girls’ team is invited. We’re all bonded now, apparently. Ever since the scrimmage, it’s been fist bumps and high fives in the hallway. Also a lot of jokes about coed naked mud wrestling. From the amount of innuendo in the air, it’s obvious there will be hookups on Saturday night, even if no one is coming out and saying it.

  In French, Jamie wants to know if I’m going to the party. It’s the hundredth time she’s asked, and I have yet to provide a straight answer.

  “I might be washing my hair,” I tell her.

  Jamie rolls her eyes and nudges Peter Hersh, as if to say, Do you believe this loser?

  Peter looks up from his French-English dictionary. “You should go.”

  I say nothing, leaving Jamie to poke me in the ribs with her pen. “Hello. Peter wants you to go.”

  Peter shakes his head. “I don’t care if she goes.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I say.

  “Someone else might, though.”

  Jamie squeals beside me. She’s a squealer. “Oh my God, Peter, who wants Josie to—”

  I reach out my hand to shut her up, but Madame Plouchette beats me to it. “S’il vous plaît,”she says, rapping Jamie’s desk with her ruler. “Conjugez le verbe ‘offusquer’ en passé composé.”

  Jamie looks confused. “Pardonnez-moi? ”

  “Pare doan ay muhwa?” Madame gives a pitch-perfect imitation of Jamie’s horrendous accent.

  Everyone laughs, but Jamie isn’t even fazed. She just stands up, tosses her hair, and proceeds to butcher the verb “to annoy.”

  Someone wants me to go to the party.

  Someone. Wants me. To go to the party.

  The mind boggles.

  How is a person supposed to focus on trigonometry?

  At the end of soccer practice on Friday, we get the Big Warning from Coach: Just because you have a bye this weekend doesn’t mean you can stay out all night raising Cain, blah, blah, blah.

  I guarantee the boys’ team is getting the same lecture. Unlike Wendy Geruntino’s purity pledge, the signing of the EHS Athletic Association’s Drug and Alcohol Policy is not optional. Thou Shalt Not Do Jell-O Shots During the Soccer Season is the point. Zero tolerance.

  Coach looks at us through squinty eyes, preparing to lecture some more, but then his mouth twitches at the corner, like he’s remembering that he, too, was a teenager once. “All right, ladies,” he says. “Bring it in. ‘Team,’ on three.”

  Friday nights my mom doesn’t have to work. This means two things: movies and junk food. We slide Grandpa Gardner’s old leather wing chairs together, kick up our feet on the mosaic coffee table, and pretend we’re at the Multiplex. Sometimes Liv joins us, but tonight she’s staying home to work on her MyPage. Liv is obsessed with MyPage. She has about five hundred cyber friends, and she’s constantly posting new pictures of herself doing weird things: shaving her legs in the rain, juggling kiwis.

  So tonight it’s just me and my mom, and the movie is St. Elmo’s Fire—one of the many cheesy ’80s movies she has in her collection. We love St. Elmo’s. It’s full of bad hair and heartache, of faithless lovers and secret crushes, of sweaty saxophone players rockin’ it out on top of the bar, of cocaine-snorting best friends locking themselves in freezing-cold rooms and having breakdowns, of bitter-sweet endings and fresh beginnings.

  There are certain scenes we can quote verbatim. Like the one where Jules and Billy are in the Jeep and she’s trying to talk seriously to him, but all he’s doing is trying to unzip her pants. “You break my heart,” she says. “Then again, you bre
ak everyone’s heart.” And the camera pans from the Jeep to the house, where Billy’s wife is standing on the stoop, holding their baby.

  I know a lot of my friends wouldn’t be caught dead hanging with their mothers on a Friday night. Some of them, like Schuyler, barely even acknowledge their mom’s existence, except to ask for money. Or else they’re constantly fighting, like Melanie Jaffin and her mother. I was in the car with them once, and they were having this argument about curfew, and Mel called her mom a bitch. Right to her face. “You. Are such. A bitch.”

  I can’t imagine doing that. Ever. I can honestly say that my mom is my best friend, and even though she gets on my nerves sometimes, she is still one of the kindest, most decent people I know. I just can’t imagine a situation where I would slam her like that.

  When the movie is over, we polish off a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips, and we talk. We talk about Jonathan, who came back into the store last week and, as I’d predicted, asked my mom out for tomorrow night. We talk about school and soccer and Matt Rigby and mud and cappuccinos and books and celebrity gossip and the genocide in Darfur and everything under the sun.

  That’s how it is with us.

  After work the next day, I go to Liv’s house. I always go to Liv’s on Saturdays because it’s my mom’s busiest day at the store. In the morning she has story hour with the little kids; afternoon is book-of-the-week club; Saturday night is the poetry slam. Whenever I have a soccer game, my mom will get one of her assistant managers to cover for her, but today I don’t.

  “You smell weird,” Liv says. We’re sitting on the parquet floor of her orange bedroom, painting our toenails.

  “Thanks a lot,” I say, leaning back against one of Liv’s many vintage beanbag chairs. She finds them at tag sales. The more hideous the color, the better.

  “Well, you do,” she says. “You smell burnt.”

  “I know. It’s the cappuccinos. Bob’s obsessed with this café opening. He made me practice making espresso drinks all morning. They get into my pores.”

  “It’ll wash off in the shower,” she says. “You are planning to take a shower . . .”

  I give her arm a little shove.

  “Good. Because this is going to be a big night, I can feel it. We’re going to dress you up. Dodd will do your hair. You’ll be like Cinderella! Riggs will take one look at you and—”

  “What are you talking about?” I shove her again, harder.

  “What? I saw you two at the scrimmage. Everyone did. It’s so obvious, Josie.”

  “Well . . . OK, but that doesn’t mean . . . I mean, Peter Hersh could have been talking about someone else wanting me to come tonight. I don’t know, that little sophomore winger who’s always saying hi to me in the hall. What’s his name—Garth? Garrett?”

  “Please.” Liv laughs. She hands me a bottle of top coat.

  “Thanks.”

  We sit in silence for a minute, finishing our toes. Then I say it. “What if he’s an asshole?”

  Liv shrugs. “What if he’s the love of your life?”

  “He cheated. On Missy.”

  “They had an agreement.”

  “Well,” I say. “Maybe.”

  Liv unweaves the strip of toilet paper from between her toes, holds it to her upper lip. “Hey, who am I? . . . ‘Pee and flee, ladies. Pee and flee.’ ”

  I sigh. “Mr. Charney.” Mr. Charney, the hall monitor with the bushy mustache, who likes to stand outside the girls’ bathroom between class periods, holding a stopwatch. “Could we focus on me? Please?”

  “Yes.” Liv uses the toilet paper to wipe a smudge of polish off my big toe. “Now you’re perfect.”

  Suddenly, I have a stroke of genius. “Why don’t we go to the movies tonight? There’s that new Drew Barrymore playing at—”

  “No.”

  “But you love Drew Barrymore.” Fact. There’s a poster of Drew Barrymore next to Liv’s mirror. Liv blots her lipstick on it. She thinks Drew has great lips.

  “Absolutely not,” Liv says.

  “But—”

  “Josie,” she says firmly. “We are going to the party, and you are going to face your fears.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re scared of getting hurt, and that’s holding you back from doing what you really want to do.”

  “No, it’s not!” (Yes, it is.)

  “You can’t change what you won’t admit.”

  “OK, Dr. Steve.”

  “Mock if you must,” Liv says, “but Dr. Steve happens to be a very wise person. He’s changed a lot of lives for the better.”

  “I’m sure he has.”

  “Josie.” Liv sighs. “You may not want to hear this, but I’m your best friend, and that means brutal truth, right?”

  I nod.

  “OK. . . . Matt Rigby is not your dad.”

  “I know that!”

  “Do you?”

  “Well . . . obviously.”

  “So stop assuming that every guy in your life is going to do what he did! It’s not fair to anyone, least of all you!”

  “Wow.”

  “Sorry. I just had to get that off my chest.”

  Well.

  “OK?” Liv’s hand is on my arm, soft and sorrowful. “I just don’t want you to sabotage this Riggs thing, you know? . . . Jose?”

  “Fine,” I say. “Point made.”

  We stare down at our toes, which are blood red. Sexy or grisly? It’s hard to tell.

  Pops and Dodd drive us to the party. Pops is the disciplinarian in the family—the layer-down of laws—and Dodd is the worrier. Between the two of them, all the parental bases are covered.

  “Where exactly are this boy’s parents?” Pops asks, almost reprimandingly.

  “Who knows?” Liv says. “Aruba? Detroit?” We are side by side in the backseat—Liv in a lime-green flapper dress and cowboy boots, me in jeans and a silver tank top. This is as far as I would go in the outfit department, despite Liv’s best efforts.

  “Will there be alcohol?” Pops asks.

  “Well, it’s a party, so . . . yeah.”

  “I’m not sure I like the sound of this,” Dodd murmurs.

  “I do,” Wyatt pipes in from the other side of Liv. “Why don’t you send me along as a bodyguard? Keep these fair maidens safe.”

  “One beer each,” Pops continues, ignoring Wyatt. “No liquor. And absolutely no drugs. Is that understood? Not even pot, because pot is where it all begins.”

  “Smoke grass,” Wyatt quips, “and Pops will kick your ass.”

  Pops isn’t amused. “Wy,” he says, “you are not helping. . . . Liv?”

  “Aye-aye, Captain,” Liv says.

  “Josie?”

  “Got it,” I say.

  I know Pops is trying to be a responsible parent, but when he was younger and living in New York City, he was a huge partier. It wasn’t until he met Dodd that he stopped going to raves every weekend. Liv and I got the whole story one night when I was sleeping over. Pops and Dodd aren’t like other parents. They’ll discuss anything—drugs, sex, relationship stuff. No topic is off-limits. Liv and Wyatt can ask whatever they want, and they know they’ll get a straight answer.

  “You both have your cell phones?” Dodd asks now.

  “Yes,” we say.

  “If anything happens, call. Call any time.”

  Pops pulls up to the house at the same time about fifteen guys are piling out of the SUV in front of us.

  Dodd makes a strangled noise in the back of his throat. “Please, please don’t get in a car with anyone who’s been drinking. . . .”

  We assure him that we won’t and slide out the door before the condom lecture can begin.

  “Hey, kids!” Wyatt calls out the window as we’re running up the driveway. “We’ll be back at eleven thirty! Sharp!”

  At the door, Liv reaches out and squeezes my hand, which is already sweating. When I look at her, she smiles. “Your hair looks great.”

  “You think
?” Dodd did some loose-curl thing with hot rollers. It feels weird—like I’m wearing someone else’s head.

  “Yeah,” she says. Then, “Ready?”

  “No.”

  Liv laughs and rings the doorbell.

  The Makeup Mafia is already on the dance floor. They wave us over, and Liv starts right in with her signature move: the Flight Attendant. To the beat of the music she stows luggage, points out emergency exits, distributes imaginary drinks.

  Some guy in a Viking helmet walks around with a stack of cups and a pitcher of green liquid.

  “The punch is wicked strong,” Schuyler informs us.

  From somewhere in the back of the house I can hear the chants. “Chug, chug, chug, chug!” Then, cheers.

  Jamie offers me a sip from her cup.

  “No, thanks,” I say.

  “You’re so good, Josie.” She says “good” like it’s a bad thing.

  Whatever.

  I start dancing. I don’t love to dance in public, but the lights are dim and the floor is packed, and it’s Madonna’s Immaculate Collection playing—which, come on, how can you not dance to Madonna? At one point we’re all voguing away and I spot a clump of varsity jackets across the room. It’s like they called one another beforehand: “OK, guys, we’re wearing our letterman jackets, right? With jeans? And—”

  Oh, God.

  Matt Rigby is looking at me.

  I see that he’s indulged in the hair products tonight. Sweet.

  His eyes are locked on mine, and I am still voguing. I know I must look like a moron, since my hands are busy forming geometric shapes in the air around my head, but I would look even more moronic if I stopped. So I keep right on going. On principle.

  I can see a little smile tugging at the corner of Matt Rigby’s mouth, and I can feel myself start to smile back, and this time I don’t even try to stop it from happening. Because maybe Liv is right. Maybe what I need to do is loosen up and let fate take its course. Maybe this seven-month “thing” between us really is meant to—

  Well. Just shoot me now.