Frenemy of the People Read online

  I let her go. Sometimes a mark needs to convince herself.

  And indeed, Heather came to find me at my locker at the end of the school day.

  “I’ve decided to endorse Desi Kirchendorfer for homecoming queen. I think it’s the right thing to do.”

  I realized that Heather’s eyes were full of tears. A wave of compassion swept over me. What kind of horrifying life did Heather have where she actually cared about this hollow ritual of being homecoming queen? Why was she so driven to be liked and have people’s approval? What kind of thing was eating at her soul? For the first time I saw her as a tragic figure, a ghost of a person floating through the school hallways, begging people to like her. She wasn’t a phony. She was a person in crisis, and no one even cared.

  “You’re a good person, Heather,” I said, reaching out to touch Heather’s shoulder. Heather didn’t even flinch with gay-shyness. Perhaps she sensed on some level that this was the first genuine thing I had said to her all day because the tears welling in her eyes spilled over.

  “Thank you,” she mouthed with no voice and turned and walked away.

  Right then and there I made a resolution. If I could connect with Heather Barrington, however tenuously, I could make a connection with anyone. Including Clarissa. If only she would hear me out, there was a chance at least that I could win her back.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Clarissa

  When I woke up in the middle of the night to a strange sound, I was convinced it was some kind of bank people, breaking into the house. I had thrown back my covers and was on my feet before I was even awake. Then I took in that it was Desi standing in my doorway, wearing her Tweety Bird pajamas, saying my name.

  “What’s going on?” I croaked.

  “There’s someone singing underneath my window,” Desi said.

  “Really?” Maybe Desi was having a dream.

  “Yes, really. But I think it’s Lexie.”

  I felt a slow smile spreading across my face. “I think she has the wrong window,” I said.

  “Oh, that makes sense,” said Desi. “Can I sleep in your bed? Her singing is waking me up.” She climbed into my bed without waiting for an answer, grunting with the effort.

  I went to Desi’s room and peeked out the window. There was Lexie, gazing up. Beside her on the ground was an iPod connected to small portable speakers. Lexie was wearing her signature Carhartt jacket that made her look like a janitor, a must-have for the rich revolutionary. Lexie’s hand was over her heart, like she was saying the Pledge of Allegiance, something I knew for a fact Lexie did not do.

  She’s a dirtbag, I tried to tell myself.

  I could barely hear Lexie’s voice over the music. Maybe she should have downloaded the karaoke version of whatever song it was. Finally I was able to make out some of the words, something about breaking apart and pictures of you.

  Lexie had a nice voice, low and melodious. The song wound down to a close. She was looking worried now. Even from here, I could see her many rings glinting in the moonlight. I was torn. I wanted to accept her sweepingly beautiful gesture, but it seemed disloyal, as if forgiving Lexie meant that losing Sassy didn’t matter.

  The next song sounded vaguely familiar. But this wasn’t Name That Tune, a game Desi’s speech therapist used to play with her, and she got obsessed with, when we were small.

  “Hi,” I called down, wanting to put Lexie out of her misery.

  “Hey,” Lexie called, breaking off her singing.

  “Give me just a minute, I’m coming down,” I said.

  I threw on a Parlington equestrian hoodie—it was a cool night for September—and my dad’s slippers, which I had taken over. As I was heading down the stairs, I heard my mom’s sleepy voice. “What’s going on? Are we being evicted?”

  “No, it’s Lexie. The one who’s not my girlfriend.”

  “What’s her problem? It’s the middle of the night,” Mom said, appearing at the door of the master bedroom she shared with Dad.

  “She’s serenading me,” I said. I didn’t think Mom would be too psyched about this. “Sorry she woke you.”

  To my surprise, Mom laughed. “At least someone has some romance in their life,” she said. “I haven’t been able to sleep, so she didn’t wake me. It’s cold. You can invite her in. But she’s not going into your bedroom. Living room only. I’m leaving my door open, so I’ll be able to hear everything. I don’t want you to do anything I would be ashamed of.”

  I wasn’t sure what exactly Mom would be ashamed of, but didn’t ask. Probably lesbian sex. “Thanks, Mom. I’ll be good.”

  I ran outside. It felt kind of magical to be outdoors in the middle of the night. “Hi,” I said.

  “Wait, wait,” Lexie said. She had a big canvas tote bag, the kind hippies carried to the grocery store, and she rummaged in it. I hoped it wasn’t going to be a freezer bag of butterfly wings. She pulled out a flowering cactus. It had spiky serrated leaves and tiny red buds blossoming all over it. She handed it to me, saying, “A symbol of my affection.”

  “A cactus?” I questioned. “Roses are generally thought to be more romantic.”

  “I know,” Lexie said. “But I just have to be me, and either you like me or…well, maybe you don’t. But a lot of people don’t know that cut flowers contribute tons of pesticides to the environment, including DDT, and the workers who grow them are mistreated, and it’s a big carbon load, shipping them to America. A potted plant is much more sustainable, and it will last for much longer.”

  “You’re sweeping me off my feet with your rhetoric, comrade,” I said.

  Lexie fell to her knees. “The cactus is like me. It’s prickly, but it’s blooming for you. I never meant to hurt you, and I’m really sorry.”

  “I know—”

  “Wait! I’m not done.” She rummaged around in her tote bag again, still down on one knee. “I burned you a mix CD.” She handed it to me. “And I got you some chocolates.” She piled this on as well. It was a box with a bow saying Alps Sweet Shop in brown letters. “And I got you my favorite romantic movie.” This was a DVD called Harold and Maude, featuring a wrinkly old lady and a boy with a seventies haircut.

  I thought I might cry. Everything had been so hard, and here was someone who really cared about me.

  “None of this came out of the garbage,” Lexie said, which mystified me. “All this is supposed to say that I realize I love you. Even if it turns out you don’t like me at all, I want you to know.”

  “Wow,” I said. “No one’s ever said anything like that to me before.”

  “I never said it before,” Lexie said, grinning crookedly.

  “Okay, get up, Miss Lovestruck,” I said, clutching my presents to my chest with one hand and reaching out the other to Lexie. I felt a tingle as Lexie’s be-ringed hand grabbed mine. Lexie stumbled to her feet, grass stains now visible on her light blue jeans.

  “Come inside. I’ll make you tea,” I said.

  “Are your parents gonna be mad?”

  “I talked to my mom already. She said you can come in as long as I don’t have sex with you. And you have to sit in the living room.”

  Lexie blinked. “Sure, that’s where I like to sit when I’m not having sex with people.”

  I set Lexie up on the couch with some blankets. Then I went into the kitchen and made us some tea.

  “Nice slippers,” Lexie told me when I brought the hot drink out to her. “Very butch.”

  “Thanks. They’re my dad’s.” They were soft and fluffy on the inside, but on the outside they resembled the kind of loafers my dad had worn as long as I could remember. I settled myself onto the couch next to Lexie. Was it okay if I had my leg touching hers? Jeez, the girl had just told me she loved me, so it must be okay. I inched a little closer until there was some leg touchage. Lexie’s leg was icy cold against mine. I threw the blanket over both our laps.

  “How long were you out there for?” I asked.

  “I dunno. I sang ‘Closer to Fine’
by the Indigo Girls because we heard it in the car the other day, ‘Pictures of You,’ and ‘I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend.’”

  “I only heard, like, one and a half of them. Did you know you were stationed under Desi’s window?” I asked.

  “Oops. At least it wasn’t your parents’ window.”

  “I’m glad you came,” I said. “I don’t know how much longer we’re going to be here. We got locked out, by mistake supposedly, and we broke back in.”

  It was so good to tell someone everything that was happening instead of pretending everything was normal.

  “Have you been to see a lawyer yet?” Lexie asked. I could tell from her voice that she really cared.

  “I finally talked my dad into it,” I said. “We’re going the day after tomorrow.”

  “What’s the deal about the ostrich farm?” she asked.

  “We might go live with my uncle in Arizona. I don’t want to go, and Desi doesn’t want to go. I don’t know if my mom wants to go or not. But my dad is kind of the boss of this family. He wears the pants, so I guess it’s up to him.”

  With every sentence I spoke to her, I felt the distance that had grown up between us disappearing.

  “You can’t move. Maybe you can stay here even if they go,” she said.

  “Maybe. Kind of doubt it though.” This was another example of Lexie’s hopeful naïveté. But I figured life would toughen her up someday, like it had toughened me.

  “Hey, won’t your parents be mad you’re out so late?” I asked.

  “They won’t know,” Lexie said.

  I tentatively laced my fingers through Lexie’s under the blanket.

  “So, do you forgive me?” Lexie whispered.

  “Yeah, I forgive you,” I said. “I kind of overreacted.”

  “And do you like me?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” I hoped Lexie wouldn’t ask me if I loved her because I didn’t know. I liked the romantic tone of the evening, though, and I thought it would be kind of a buzzkill to say I didn’t know how I felt about her.

  But Lexie didn’t ask that. Maybe she was no dummy. Instead she asked, “Am I allowed to kiss you?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. My insides did a little somersault when she said that.

  Lexie put her hand on my cheek, turned my face to her, and we kissed. As soon as our lips met, it felt so right. This was pure unadulterated lust, but a clean kind of lust where the whole lower half of me had liquefied into moonbeams. There was a tangy smell to Lexie that I couldn’t get enough of. It seemed like it would never end, but it had to end, or I would start doing something that would embarrass my mother. Since I was wearing pj’s, it would be all too easy for them to come off. I toned it down into cuddling and Lexie followed my lead.

  “I have to get going,” Lexie said.

  “Okay,” I said, stroking her hair. But she fell silent and didn’t go anywhere.

  Eventually I realized that Lexie had fallen asleep. I curled myself up around her, so we were like two spoons nestled together, and then soon I was asleep too.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Lexie

  I was driving with Clarissa down a long, bumpy dirt road. I was going to meet Sassy for the first time. Clarissa had told me to wear boots so I was wearing my non-leather Dr. Martens. I wasn’t used to driving in them, and I kept stomping too hard on either the accelerator or the brake. I didn’t want to tell Clarissa, but I was really nervous. Once when I was little I was led around on a tiny pony at a birthday party, but other than that, I’d had nothing to do with these animals.

  We walked past a big round pen with a familiar-looking girl leading a horse. “Hi, Harney,” Clarissa called, and we veered off to talk to her. The horse seemed big from a distance, and up close it only got bigger. It was an immense black animal with feet as big as dinner plates. It snorted, and I saw that its nostrils were easily each the size of my fist. Clarissa and this girl Harney were chatting, but I could not listen because I was so focused on how ginormous the horse was. It was almost furry, and its head was the longest I’d ever seen on any animal except maybe an elephant in the zoo. I was glad there was a sturdy fence between me and it. These girls were just chatting like nothing was going on, but if the horse batted that girl with its head, she would get knocked flat on the ground, and then it could trample her to death. I was glad when we left them and headed toward the barn. Butterflies were more the size I liked.

  “That was the first time I told anyone you bought Sassy,” Clarissa said, taking my hand. “I feel better now that I’ve done it. Did she look surprised to you or not? I wonder what she thinks about me now. Do you think she knows we’re going out?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. I hadn’t even been listening to them. “Is Sassy anything like that horse?”

  “Like Baxter?” Clarissa asked. “How do you mean?”

  “Is she as big as that?”

  “Oh no, he’s a Percheron. They’re exceptionally large. They’re bred to be workhorses and pull wagons and stuff, but they’re fun to ride too. Baxter is eighteen point two hands high, while Sassy is only fourteen point one.”

  That would probably have meant more to me if I knew what a hand was. We passed into the barn, which was lined with stalls. Most of them had a horse’s head peeping out curiously over the door. One stall had a small pony in it, hardly bigger than Clarissa’s dog Skippy, much too short to even reach the top of the stall door. It was ridiculously cute, with a sweeping mane and tail. It looked as though I could tuck it under my arm. It probably drank out of a teacup, not a trough.

  “Is Sassy like that pony?” I asked.

  She laughed. “You’re such a card, Lexie. By the way, that’s a miniature horse, not a pony.”

  I knew when we reached Sassy’s stall because there was a homemade sign beside it with her name on it.

  “This is Sassy,” Clarissa said. “Hi, girl.” She stroked the horse’s face, and the horse made snorty noises. Sassy was brown with a white blob in the middle of her forehead and one white-stockinged foot. Luckily she was nowhere near as big as Baxter. Tentatively I touched the animal’s head as she looked at me through huge eyes. Sassy’s mane and body were more or less the same color, not at all like My Little Pony, the equine I was most familiar with. Up close I could see she had kind of a hairy chin. She yawned, which made her teeth and tongue stick out. She seemed less majestic and more silly that way, which put me at ease. Above her dainty ankles she had a tiny bit of hair.

  “What does she eat?” I asked. “I know mares eat oats and does eat oats.”

  Clarissa smiled. “She eats a little bit of grain but mostly hay. She eats a ton of hay in the winter, to keep warm. But Sassy’s kind of fat, so she eats less grain than most of the horses here.”

  “That’s what my mom said,” I said. “That she was a good keeper.”

  “Look, you don’t need to worry about her food,” Clarissa said. “Mrs. Astin is going to take care of that. But you do need to groom her. Let me show you her different brushes. They’re hanging up in the tack area, and they’re all yellow so you don’t get them mixed up with anyone else’s.”

  We went to get the brushes, and when we returned to the stall and opened the door, Sassy was crowding the entrance. “Back up,” Clarissa told her, and pushed her back. She seemed fearless of this mighty creature, but I didn’t know if I could do that.

  Clarissa showed me what looked like a loop with a handle. “This is the shedding blade. It cuts off hair that has been shed, it doesn’t pull out her hair.” Then she showed me a bumpy comb that looked almost like a plastic soap dish. “This is the currycomb. You kind of exfoliate her with it. You try it.”

  Sassy kept walking away from me until I finally got it right. She seemed to really like it under her chin.

  “After you curry her, you use this stiff brush to wipe off all the hairs. Sassy has a really wonderful coat, so if you’re in a hurry you can just use this one, and she’ll end up looking clean even though she’s not,” Clarissa said.
“But I’ll know. So don’t do that.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  “And last is the face brush. It’s more gentle. Close your eyes,” Clarissa told Sassy and then brushed right over the horse’s big eyes. I didn’t know if I could do that either.

  “And you have to clean her hooves with this,” Clarissa said, tapping Sassy’s knee and lifting up her marbled foot. Clarissa picked out gunk with a pointy instrument. “Ideally once a day, but that probably won’t happen.”

  “What are those little rubber boots she’s wearing?” I asked.

  “Those are called bell boots. They keep her back feet from kicking her front feet. Oh, Lexie, you should know she really likes it when you scratch her withers,” Clarissa said, vigorously scratching the place where Sassy’s back met her mane. I figured that must be her withers.

  “So let’s get going teaching you to ride her,” Clarissa said.

  “So soon?” I squeaked. “I hardly know her. Let’s do that next time.”

  Clarissa laughed. “This is how you’ll get to know her. No, really, a horse needs to be ridden. You’re lucky. Some horses need to be ridden five times a week or they go psycho. Sassy’s so good you could just ride her once in a while, and she’ll act just the same.”

  She grabbed a jingly interlacing series of straps and guided Sassy’s head into it. She led Sassy out of her stall and into the hallway that cut down the center of the barn. We headed for the riding ring where we’d met the giant Percheron before. Sassy sashayed as she walked, and I kept well clear of her. We passed a little girl leading another horse, and when the two horses passed each other, the other horse shied away nervously for a few steps. To me it looked like a narrow brush with death as the other horse could have easily squashed the little girl, but both Clarissa and the little girl acted like it was nothing. I was starting to see that horse people were made of tough stuff.

  “First I’m going to lunge her,” Clarissa said. “You can just stand by the fence and watch this part.”