JESSE KNOWS ME way too well. I do want to see that gator. I read all about it in this guidebook called Fantastical Florida. Back when my brother Penn and I had to share a room, we used to read to each other out loud, whispering because we were supposed to be asleep. That book is full of weird stuff. A building shaped like an orange. A bat tower built by a guy named Perky that no bats ever lived in. World’s smallest police station. A twenty-two-foot statue of Jesus Christ built entirely underwater. Xanadu, home of the future, which looks like it’s made of marshmallows.
Penn and I used to try to get my dad to take us to some of these places on vacation, but he always made us go visit Grandma Shelly in Aventura. No stops, except for gas—a straight drive down.
According to Fantastical Florida, Old Joe Alligator is three hundred years old. He used to sunbathe in the town square and even swam with kids in the fountain. Never hurt a flea. Then some stupid poacher shot him, so now he’s stuffed and displayed in a glass case in a Florida history museum only a couple hours from Niceville.
Maybe we can hit Coral Castle, too, on this trip. Years ago, Ed Leedskalnin, this hundred-pound weakling from Latvia, got dumped on his wedding night by his sixteen-year-old fiancée Agnes Scuffs. Then he spent twenty years carving a memorial to her out of coral, working only in the middle of the night. He moved blocks of coral that weighed thousands of pounds, and no one knows how he did it.
Now it’s a palace to unrequited love.
Ed Leedskalnin. What a wimp.
If Brady never calls me, if he never ever calls me again and just goes around humping cheerleaders at the U like we never were each other’s first time and it never meant all the things we said it meant—to be actually doing it like we might be together forever—and he acts like we never built that matchstick house for our six-month anniversary, or made our own potato chips in his mom’s deep fryer, or stayed up all night talking, or like we never used to see each other every day and tell each other everything and text each other nearly every minute we were apart…If Brady just disappears on me the way that sixteen-year-old Latvian girl did to the hundred-pound weakling, no way am I building him a coral castle.
I’m not the kind of girl to take shit from a guy. You don’t grow up with five older brothers and not know how to fend for yourself when it comes to the opposite sex.
Anyone building coral castles has got to be an only child.
Me, I’d just—I’d do something else, for sure.
Make him come back.
Force him to remember. How he noticed me sprinkling vinegar on my school pizza, to give it some kick. How he noticed me again when I dyed my hair black. How he hadn’t known I’d noticed him, too, until I slammed his locker shut that day with barely enough time for him to get his hand out safely, then went running down the hall. How all of a sudden I wasn’t Penn Simonoff’s little sister, I was something else. How he asked me to come watch a football game of his. He played outside linebacker for the Travers Manatees.
“No thanks, dude,” I had told him.
“You don’t like football?” Brady asked, wrinkling his forehead.
“I love it,” I answered, glad to surprise him. “But I like touch games on Sunday afternoons, or watching it on the national level. Super Bowl Sunday? I’m your girl.”
“Really?” he said, raising his eyebrows. He was flirtatious.
I went on. “The problem is, I spent way too many years watching my brother Tully’s high school games, and let’s just say it was a losing streak for the Manatees. Before Coach Martinez took over. Can we catch a movie instead?”
Brady laughed. It was the first time I’d seen that huge smile break across his face just for me, and the first time that bouncing laugh had shaken up the room because of something I did.
I made up my mind just then that I wanted to make him smile, over and over, every day.
“Yeah, we can catch a movie,” Brady said, but then even before we set a time or figured out what to see, he leaned in and kissed me on the neck, like he was aiming for my cheek but kind of went astray, and he giggled while he was doing it, but it felt good, and I could tell he liked me the way I liked him.
This was something real. Not just a date, not just a crush, not just a fling.
So, yes, I will be taking Jesse up on her offer. I want to go down to Miami, and when I get there, I want to make Brady remember what it seems like he’s forgotten in ten days of summer practice and half a week of classes.
Because I know he hasn’t forgotten at all.
What I don’t want to do is ask why he hasn’t called. That’s certain death. Steve, Joe Jr., Tully, Jay, and Penn taught me that. They had so many girls my head spun as they banged the screen doors going in and out, but if there was one thing that made my brothers cool off fast, it was the way some flowery girl would whine, “Why didn’t you call me?”
Because there’s no answer to a question like that. “He didn’t call you because he didn’t want to call you,” I’d say, if they asked me when I answered the phone. “I think you should take that as a message.”
“Well, tell him I called,” the little Rose would say, “and ask him why he didn’t call when he said he would.”
“You got it,” I’d say, and write it down in large letters and stick it on the Frigidaire. “Your girlfriend’s nagging at you again. Call the droopy little flower and get her off my back.”
And Steve, Joe Jr., Tully, Jay, or Penn—whoever it was—would never bring that girl through our screen door again. Not because of what I wrote. They didn’t care if I hated their girlfriends or wanted to be just like them. Why they didn’t call was, guys don’t like to be pegged on bad behavior. They like you to overlook it, or coax them round to something better from the side, not with the head-on relationship jabber.
And the girlfriend, poor flowery girlfriend, would probably go and build a little coral castle of her own, writing in her diary or sobbing on the phone with some other Roses, or sending cutesy photographs or heart-shaped notes to our mailbox that my brothers would open and then forget about, leaving them lying on the kitchen counter for anyone to see.
Guys respond to action. They respond to a body sitting next to them on the old couch while they flip through the channels. They respond to a girl who understands football, a girl who keeps her mouth shut and doesn’t yammer on like it’s important what she bought at Target that afternoon. A girl who eats when they take her out to dinner.
Jesse’s waiting for me to answer, to say yes or no to her crazy plan. She’s starting to look worried, and I feel like a wench.
I know she’s sad I didn’t tell her right off about what’s been going on with Brady since he left for the U. Instead I kept quiet about it for days and days—and then told little Mel.
I don’t know why, really.
My friends from Travers—to them, Brady and I are the perfect couple. Me and Brady, walking down the halls with our hands in each other’s pockets. Going to the Halloween dance as Superman and Lois Lane. Kissing during assembly. Me sitting at the seniors table surrounded by a crew of Brady’s friends, me wearing Brady’s old Mr. Bubble T-shirt. Me and Brady, all the time.
I don’t want to deal with their reactions. Their sympathy. It’s a lot easier to tell a girl your boyfriend hasn’t called you back when the whole way she thinks of you doesn’t hang on your being the girlfriend of a senior starter on the district champion football team.
Jesse—I could have told her. Should have told her. We’ve been close ever since we started at the Waffle last year. She goes to public, but not to Travers, which makes it a lot easier to be real friends. Because Jesse doesn’t think about “VicksandBrady” like the girls from Travers do. To Jesse, I’m the person willing to wait while she goes through giant bins of discount makeup at Eckerd. I’ll sit through her boring Christian network TV shows and let her pick all the cashews out of the nut mix. I’m the one who’ll help her think up questions for the funny surveys she posts on the wall of the staff room, asking people to write in their favorite word, their least favorite sound, their most beloved song. I buy her a toasted almond ice cream bar when I bike down to the 7-Eleven on my break, because I know that’s her favorite, and I’ll even go out to Applebee’s with her slightly bat-shit mom and say stuff like “Oh, Ms. Fix, what happened to the unhappy pit bull you were telling us about last time?”—and then listen to the answer, because her mom will seriously talk about dogs for an hour and a half at a go.
To Jesse, I’m not one half of “VicksandBrady.” I’m just me. Her best friend.
Mel and I aren’t really friends, but somehow everything about the Brady situation came pouring out of me when she stepped outside to—I don’t know what she was doing, really. Watching me have a cigarette break.
I feel sorry I didn’t tell Jesse first. There isn’t a truer friend than Jesse when my parents are driving me crazy or I’m freaking about a test or if I just need a little retail therapy—but I haven’t been honest with her about me and Brady.
She’s really Christian, Jesse is. The one time like five months ago when I hinted that Brady and I were maybe going to do it—sex it—and asked her to come to Planned Parenthood with me, she got all uptight about how sex before marriage is a sin, and how Planned Parenthood just supports that kind of sinning. Then it was as if she decided she’d said too much, because all of a sudden she clammed up.
Like she couldn’t even talk about it, it was so bad.
I wonder if her spaz had to do with her mom not being married. And obviously, doing it, since Ms. Fix ended up with Jesse. Or maybe it’s got more to do with Jesse’s dad, whose name I don’t even know, and how he split before Jesse was even out of diapers.
Brady would never pull a trick like that, but also—I’m never giving him any reason to. Hello? We have Planned Parenthood now. Anyone can go, and you barely have to pay.
Jesse must figure that by now I’m not a virgin, but since she made it clear she didn’t want to hear about it, I’m not telling her.
Lately—since right before Brady left, actually—she’s made remarks. Like God is taking up more room in her brain than usual, so Christian stuff pops out. Like she wants to help me be saved.
It is really, really not fun to be around.
Still, here she is, standing in the lot behind the Waffle, waiting for me to say something. And she’s got to be hurt I told Mel instead of her about Brady not calling, but she’s not showing it except maybe in her eyes. There’s a crazy-strong yearning coming off her, how she’s jingling her keys and stalking this grease pit on her day off. Just to get me to let her give me a ride.
I gotta love her. Plus, I want to see Brady so bad it’s making my eye twitch. And then she pulls this thing of pretending she wants to go with Mel, which I know she doesn’t at all; she’s just trying to make me say yes—and I can’t tease her anymore.
“What the hell,” I say. “Let’s do it.”
Jesse wants to leave from the Waffle the minute our shifts are over, but I don’t want to show up at Brady’s dorm covered with grease and smelling like sausage patties and eggs. So we decide that Jesse’ll swing by my house at three thirty, and then we’ll go get Mel, who writes down her Fort Walton address on a napkin and takes my cell number. I think she wants a way to get in touch with me—in case Jesse tries to stand her up.
I fry up about a zillion more eggs, and then bike home to find a note from my parents. They’ve gone to Babies “?” Us to buy stuff for Steve’s kid that’s not born yet. I know they won’t mind if I go to Miami so long as I tell them where I am and take my cell. Even if they do think it’s a bad idea to go out with Brady long distance, which they do, they don’t have the time or the energy to make a fuss about it. By the time you get to kid number six, your rules are pretty lax.
Mom and Dad are electricians. They run their own business, Simonoff Electrics, though Mom took a lot of time off to have us. My eldest brother, Steve, is a chip off the block, now an apprentice electrician down in Broward. Joe Jr.’s in the navy, Tully’s a senior at Florida State in Tallahassee. Jay’s on summer break from community college, living with his girlfriend and hauling boxes at Wal-Mart for a couple months. And Penn, my favorite of all my brothers, graduated with Brady and moved in with a couple friends for the summer, living in a junky apartment across from the mall. He’s been working a prep station at P.F. Chang’s, which is like a giant step up from the Waffle in terms of restaurants, and come September, he’s going to culinary school three towns over.
Anyway, he moved out in June. Which means, it’s just me and the folks.
It sucks to be the one left behind. Next June I’ll be the one graduating, but still.
I call Penn while I pack. “Hey, it’s me.”
“Vicks.”
“This house is silent like a morgue. I’m going to Miami to see my long-lost boyfriend.”
“Didn’t Brady just leave?”
“No, it’s been two weeks.”
“Like I said, he just left. Can’t you live without him?”
“Shut up,” I say, and mean it.
Penn can tell, so he changes the topic. “How you getting down there?”
“Jesse’s driving me.”
“Jesse, the one you brought to Fourth of July?” he asks, all innocence.
“Uh-huh. The one who always gives you free Coke when you come in the Waffle.”
He chuckles. “Oh, yeah. Jesse.”
“So, what are you doing?” I ask him.
“I’m in Publix,” Penn answers. “I just got off the lunch shift.”
“So did I. I’m totally sweaty and greasy.”
“Me too!” he cries. “You wanna hear about the state of my T-shirt?”
“I’ll pass.”
“Disgusting is the state of my T-shirt. I’m in the detergent aisle right now, looking for a box of—oh, there it is. You think Tide is better, or All?”
“Which has a prettier box?” I ask.
“I don’t want a pretty box. I want a dude box.”
“Uh-huh,” I deadpan. “You want a dude box of laundry detergent.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Good luck with that.”
“Okay,” he announces. “I made my decision.”
“Whadja get?”
“I’m not telling you. Mocking my dude detergent.”
“When are you coming over to the house?”
“Not till next weekend.”
“Come sooner. Come for dinner Monday.”
“Won’t you still be in Miami, following Brady around?”
“Shut up! And no, I have to work Monday morning. So you gonna come over?
“Nah, I got stuff to do.”
“Come on, Penn. It’s so boring here. There’s no one around if you don’t come.”
“Vicks, I gotta go. I’m at the checkout.”
“Fine,” I say. “But don’t leave me alone in this house for too long or I’m gonna die of boredom. You won’t have a little sister to boss around when I’m dead, now will you?”
“Guilt me later,” he says. “I gotta run.” And he clicks off.
Does Penn really think that two weeks is “just left”? Does Brady? Because two weeks is a very long time in the Vicks department.
I head to the pantry, which is overflowing. There are, like, eight sacks of potatoes in here. My parents think every meal should include a potato and they’re still buying food at Wal-Mart like they’ve got five boys to feed, instead of one girl who’s working all summer at a restaurant. I snag a pack of Fig Newtons and some chocolate snack cakes.
Next, I open the fridge. Rummage past potato salad, leftover baked potatoes, and a Tupperware filled with a disgusting invention of my mother’s called Potatoes à la King. Hey, mangos. My favorite. I grab them.
Jesse honks the Opel outside, I write a note to the proprietors of Simonoff Electrics—and I’m out.