There were a number of problems with the Snow Ball situation: One, we were going as a group. Two, I had nothing to wear, no opportunity to go get something, and no money to buy a dress. Lakshmi had offered to lend me one of hers, but seeing as how she was built like a professional athlete and I was the shape of a sushi roll, I politely declined. And three, my mother became interested.
“A dance, huh?” said Mom, nosing into my room that afternoon as I was going through my entire wardrobe for the third time, hoping to find some magic rats that could weave a new dress for me.
“It’s not really a dance,” I said. “It’s more like a gathering.”
“The Snow Ball. I like it.” She said Snow Ball in a vaguely dirty way. “Well, I want to meet your friends when they come over.”
It’s not that I was hiding my mom. But if the apartment complex wasn’t embarrassing enough, my mom was already dressed for work in her cheddar-yellow SpongeBob SquarePants Roller Coaster outfit.
I suppose I should probably explain my mom’s job. We have something called the Mall of America in the Minneapolis area, which was the first of the ginormous shopping destinations built in the United States at the end of the twentieth century in the vain hope of bringing about the apocalypse. Sadly, none of the giant supermalls actually ended life on Earth, so they still existed, pulsing with malevolence and shopping opportunities.
Once you start working for a place at the Mall of America, it’s kind of like being trapped in a specific circle of Hell—you may bounce around a bit, but you are not leaving. In the past year, my mom had worked at the Rainforest Café, Ulta, the Buckle, and now at the Nickelodeon Fun Place Amusement Center and Roller Coaster of Doom.
Not its actual name. It had changed hands from one corporate master to another over the years, beginning life as SnoopyTime, and at some point it had morphed into the Nickelodeon center and was currently a writhing mass of screaming ten-year-olds eating cotton candy and getting themselves doused with green goop.
Every night Mom donned her pride-swallowing SpongeBob outfit and ran the rides for the overprivileged children of the Twin Cities. It was a job, it put food on the table, it supported us, and I worried that my new friends wouldn’t understand it at all.
“Are you sure you want to meet my friends? They seem weird.”
“Definitely.” She absently poked through my tiny closet, sighing in displeasure. “I don’t understand all this black. These are the clothes of a sad person, Sydney. You’re not a sad person.”
My lips tightened. I’m not?
“You need to celebrate yourself. You should enjoy yourself. You know, once I started working out, I felt so much better about—”
“Ugh. Mom.”
She held up her hands. “I’m just saying! I decided I didn’t need to be sad; I decided I didn’t need to hide anymore. I could be out there, jogging, I could wear any color I want. Here I am. This is me. Deal with it.” I leaned back on my bed, looking at the ceiling. “You know I’m right.”
“I’m not really a colorful person.”
“Lies,” she said cheerily. “You used to be a colorful person, and then you decided that you were going to wallow.”
“Oh, I decided I was going to wallow? Was that before or after Dad went to prison?”
She took a deep breath. “So you’re just going to let that dictate how people see you? Walk around in black and look sad and have a sad story about your father? Is that what you want people to see when they look at you?”
“Can you just let me pick out an outfit and not psychoanalyze me right now?”
“I’m trying to help you.”
“I’m fine. I don’t need any help. At least I’m not throwing myself at the nearest guy with triceps.”
She was about to say something and then stopped. “You don’t need to be mean,” she said quietly, and left my room.
I felt bad about my conversation with Mom, but her knack of looking on the bright side of things had the effect of always making me feel like shit. Somehow it always turned out that it was my fault that I wasn’t being optimistic enough. Not only that, but it seemed like she was always regurgitating whatever self-help book she had been reading this week—all dictated by the gurus at the CrossFit cult. There was a book for everything. Exercise your way into your best life! Eat the right food! Wear bright colors! Tell your daughter what to do every day! Break your ex-husband out of prison with the power of positive thinking!
I finally chose something I didn’t actively hate, a black-and-white dress that had survived the cataclysm—I think it was my eighth-grade graduation dress. It was a little tight, but if I decided not to breathe for the rest of the night, I’d be fine.
My friends managed to arrive exactly on time. Somehow Elijah had acquired a limo at the last minute, but he had skimped on the research for this one, and the result was that it was less of a limousine and more of a black Weinermobile.
Elijah had taken the whole thing seriously and was wearing a black tux. I’m not gonna lie—he looked great. His red hair was actually styled; it still looked unruly, but purposefully so now, and the cut of the tux accentuated his wide shoulders while hiding the fact that he probably weighed nineteen pounds. Lakshmi was killing it in a blue dress with just the right amount of sparkle—she had her hair done up and had found some earrings for the occasion. There were heels. She looked like a movie star slash basketball player.
The two of them together made me feel like I was a third wheel made out of cheese.
“Come in, come in,” said my mom as Charlie bounded into view like a madman, slipped on the floor, and smashed into the wall. “You look wonderful. You are so pretty.”
“Thanks,” said Elijah, smoothing down his red hair.
Mom gurgled with laughter as Charlie slobbered all over Elijah’s legs. Elijah patted him on the head, causing him to rise up and start humping his leg unfruitfully.
“Charlie, no!” I said, grabbing him by his collar and yanking his muscular little body backward, his tongue falling out of his mouth like a snake.
Thomas stepped in gingerly. He hadn’t gone full tux like Elijah, which was a relief. He did wear a fanciful purple-striped sport coat and vest, though, which made him look like he’d just escaped from a poorly thought-out wedding designed by Tim Burton.
“You must be Sydney’s date!” Mom cried, smothering him in a hug.
“Actually, we’re more of a cluster,” said Thomas. “Group date. It’s not really a romantic event.”
Elijah looked like he swallowed a frog.
“Well, maybe someone will get lucky,” my mom added inappropriately.
“I’m gay, so I don’t know that that’s going to happen with this crew, but we’ll see.” Thomas smiled.
“I love gay people,” said my mom.
“All right, Mom,” I said, trying to force our way out the door.
“What?! Can I not say that? I love gay people, I really do.”
“Great,” said Thomas, giving her a thumbs-up.
“We gotta go,” I said.
We started out at the Macaroni Grill in Burnsville.
Oddly enough, we had the only limo in the parking lot, but the place was packed.
The hostess sized us up and narrowed her eyes like she was expecting an invasion of high school students at any time. “I’ll put you on the list,” she said. “You’re looking at probably thirty minutes.”
“Sweet,” said Elijah, making his way through the throng to our spot. I was sitting next to a six-year-old playing on a phone, smashing his thumbs over the screen and vehemently protesting every time he died. No one else in the Macaroni Grill was dressed up. We looked like refugees from a cocktail party gone horribly wrong. Thomas lingered nearby, proudly displaying his purple sport coat like he was a supervillain.
“You didn’t make a reservation?” said Lakshmi once Elijah got back.
“Um… I had a lot going on.”
“We’re going to the Macaroni Grill on a Saturday night and you didn’t make a reservation?”
Thomas sighed. “Why did you imagine you could plan anything?”
“No worries. I got this,” Elijah said. He sidled back up to the hostess and I watched as he folded a five-dollar bill into his hand. He tried to slide it across the podium to her, and she looked at it like he was passing her a dead fish. Elijah nodded, then slyly opened his wallet to look for more cash. He took out two more one-dollar bills and tried to add them to the bribe.
He was back moments later.
“This place is bullshit,” he said.
Thirty-nine minutes later we had a table. Our waiter, Tabb, wrote his name in purple crayon on the paper tablecloth and looked like he might break into song at any moment.
“I’ll have a Chardonnay,” said Thomas.
“Nope,” said Tabb.
“Coke then.”
“Cool.” Tabb was so slick he didn’t even need to write shit down. Tabb had this.
Lakshmi regarded him coolly. “I’ll have a Chardonnay.”
Tabb sized her up. With her hair up, in the dress, Lakshmi basically looked like a professional model slumming it with a few high school kids.
“I’m gonna need to see some ID,” he said.
Lakshmi reached into her purse and pulled out an ID and handed it to Tabb. Tabb looked at it. Then he looked at Lakshmi. Then he looked at it again.
“Najima, huh?”
Lakshmi took one of the crayons and wrote Najima on the tablecloth. “I’m the babysitter.”
“All right, then.” Tabb bowed and retreated.
“Well-played.” Elijah nodded approvingly.
“My sister let me borrow her ID. White people have a hard time telling the difference.”
“Boom,” I said, dropping my crayon on the table.
For the next few minutes we wordlessly drew pictures on the tablecloth in crayon, like anyone would do when presented with an expanse of white paper and a whole bunch of crayons. Lakshmi drew a pretty intricate flower pattern. Elijah drew a robot. Thomas concentrated on monsters. I had always been mediocre at drawing, so I drew a set of eyes looking back at me and wrote I know what you did. Just to lighten the mood.
Two glasses of Chardonnay (which our babysitter was sharing with us as covertly as possible) and a steaming plate of microwaved mushroom ravioli later, we were having a tremendous time. Elijah had made up a story about a previous girlfriend in Canada that we were all certain did not exist.
“I don’t have pictures of her,” he lied, trying to keep his phone facedown on the table.
Lakshmi had told us about her first childhood crush, who had turned out to be an asshole, and I was in the middle of telling my story.
“I’ve had two boyfriends, and they were both named Chris,” I said. “And they were marginally attractive at best.”
“Why did you go out with them then?” asked Elijah.
“Because I was dumb and I didn’t know how to shoot people down. I figured if some loser liked you, you just had to say yes. But Chris number one dumped me because a friend of his thought I was ugly, and Chris number two bolted as soon as my dad’s… criminal activity became known.”
Lakshmi shook her head. “Boyfriends are supposed to stick by you when your family goes to prison. It’s in the rules.”
“I know! But I am now officially done with love. Done with it. I am planning on being a nun or a priest or a priestly nun—one of those. My mom has a new boyfriend—he’s a piece of shit. So I have made a vow to myself to ban all lusty activity from my life.”
Lakshmi raised her glass of wine. “I support you, sister.”
“Well, I’ve never had a boyfriend,” said Thomas.
Elijah guffawed. “Such a lie.”
“It’s not. Not a real boyfriend.”
Thomas rocked in his seat. “I don’t remember what happened there, only that a series of terrible mistakes were made. I was also young. And stupid. And naive. And stupid. And had terrible taste in men.”
“He sounds dreamy,” I teased.
Thomas blinked. “Arjun was a senior when I was a sophomore, and I only liked him because he could sing. That was the entire attraction. He had a great voice and the rest of him was only focused on the fact that he had a great voice. He literally sang to himself in the car with me. Not to me, mind you, around me.”
“What about Andrew Chen?” asked Elijah, driving in another nail.
“Oh my God. Andrew Chen.” Thomas seemed to quiver with rage. “Is it too much to ask of God to have him die in an octopus attack? If I could summon fish creatures, I would do it.”
“What did he do?” I asked.
Thomas’s head swiveled to look at me, then tilted to the side as if he had just lost a bolt keeping his neck upright. “What did he do?!”
“Here we go,” said Elijah. “Andrew is Thomas’s ex.”
Thomas’s eyes went wide. “Um… no. No, he is not. He’s not gay. He’s not bi. He’s one hundred and thirty percent straight.”
“I’m not even sure that’s mathematically possible,” I said.
“He manages. All right, so…” He stopped and gestured to Lakshmi, who handed him her Chardonnay. Thomas took a big gulp, then handed it back. “You’re the best babysitter I’ve ever had, by the way,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“All right so—he was basically my best friend last year, right? We were in Singin’ in the Rain together. I taught that motherfucker how to tap-dance. And he was good. He had a lot of natural rhythm, which blinded me to the fact that he was a serpent creature from hell. The boy can move. And I had a huge crush on him, even though he totally confounded my gaydar.”
“So you thought he was gay?” I asked.
“I didn’t know, actually. I thought maybe. And I was too scared to ask him, so… after the musical we had student-written one-acts, right? And I wrote a very lovely, very trashy romantic play about a boy, who was possibly a little bit like me, coming out to his parents, and then falling in love with a guy who could dance. Right? And it was both beautiful and tragic and really, really poorly written.”
“I liked it,” said Elijah.
“Stop,” said Thomas, waving him away.
“No, it was good! I mean not like good in the traditional sense, but more like frothy fun.”
“Frothy? It was frothy? I have to remind you I’ve seen your improv comedy and half of your stuff is about proctologists, so your taste is suspect,” said Thomas. “So—okay—I poured my heart out, misguided as it was, into this show. And I cast Andrew, because I was sure this was the way into his heart. He would realize the play was about him, and his icy heart would melt, and then we would live happily ever after, and all that jazz, which of course, was also in the play because I’m into jazz.
“And all through rehearsals he’d drop these little hints, like, ‘Oh, I’m so happy to be in this show, you’re so talented, everyone else is a pile of shit, et cetera…’ Little things to win my approval because everyone else in the show was a piece of shit, and the whole time he’s screwing around with the stage manager, Megan, behind my back.”
“No!” I said.
“Yes! Total betrayal. But that’s like, chapter one, you know what I mean? In the book of what an amazing ass he is.”
Lakshmi put a finger up and ordered another Chardonnay from Tabb. “What about his amazing ass?”
Thomas grimaced. “He does have an amazing ass. So get this—he joins the speech team this year, and I hear he is doing a piece entirely about me. Not only that, he is doing a piece about coming out to his disapproving parents. He’s pretending to be gay in order to win tournaments. He’s stealing my trauma, making it all about him, and slandering me in the process.”
“Ugh. Don’t get me started on the speech team,” growled Elijah. “I want them all to contract diseases.”
“They’re the worst,” said Lakshmi. “I want to fight all of them. I’d win, too. I would fight all of them and win.”
“I’m thinking of joining,” I said.