The Pretty One(6)

She rolls her eyes and flips back her long, silky hair. “Who knows?” she says, pushing her plate away even though she has only eaten half of her chicken. “Maybe he doesn’t want to go with me.” I know Lucy doesn’t actually believe that. After all, the whole school knows she’s interested in him. And no boy in his right mind can resist Lucy. Lucy reaches across the table and pulls my thumb out of my mouth. “Yuck,” she says, examining my thumb. “Look at your nail. You’ve bitten it down to the quick. And your cuticles are all chewed up. Are you wearing that polish I got you?”

In an attempt to break me of my disgusting habit, Lucy bought me some polish that tasted like puke and was guaranteed to squash my nail-biting habit in two days. Apparently none of the test subjects had been quite as determined or addicted as I am, since I wore it for a week and all I got was a headache from consuming all those gross chemicals.

“It doesn’t work,” I say, pulling my hand away from her and snagging the untouched chicken leg off her plate. And out of the blue I get a visual: Drew with an inflatable Barbie doll, lip-locked and making out.

I put the chicken down as my thumb drifts back in my mouth.

“What’s wrong with you tonight?” Lucy asks, looking at me suspiciously. I rarely leave food behind.

“I got a stomachache from all the vegetables in the salad,” I say quickly, thus achieving the impossible. Blaming her for my misery and changing the subject.

“Oh,” Lucy says. “Sorry.”

Oh great. Now, in addition to being nauseous, I feel like I just washed her favorite white shirt with my indigo Levis. “You know I don’t like carrots.” There. That’s better.

I yank my thumb out of my mouth and stand up. As Lucy walks upstairs, I stack the dishes in the sink, determined not to think about vegetables, Drew Reynolds, his inflatable doll, or the fall festival for the rest of the night.

I wait until Lucy is in our room before stuffing my face with Oreos. They’ve never failed to settle my stomach in a jiff.



I’m hoping that by the time I get upstairs, Lucy will have forgotten all about the fall festival and moved on to more exciting things, like what’s on TV. But as soon as I get upstairs she starts yammering away again. And since our house is only fourteen feet wide (like all the other row houses) and only two floors, there’s really no place to escape.

We used to live in a big house in Roland Park, but when I announced I wanted to go to CSPA, too, my parents decided it would make more sense if we moved to Federal Hill so we could walk to school. And despite the fact that we’d have more room in a doublewide, it’s worked out pretty well. I like city living. The only problem is that even though our house is long and we have this really cool roof top deck, in the winter or when it’s raining, like tonight, and I can’t escape up to the deck, there’s no place to go for solitude. So even though I would prefer to be suffering in solitude, I’m sitting in the bedroom Lucy and I share and working on my latest project, an extra-credit project for my English class, a diorama of the living room of the great Gatsby himself.

“Look at this,” Lucy says. She’s in front of the computer in our newly renovated bedroom, sitting at the blond-wood desk I designed especially for our room. In fact, I had pretty much planned out and designed almost every aspect of our room, from the style of the bookcases and placement of the beds (Lucy said she would defer to me since I had a year of set design under my belt). For the carpet I chose a soft, plush green shag (that left footprints when you walked on it), and for the walls I concocted my own creation, a creamy yellow that I named Dijon-lite. Lucy (who loves mustard) said it made her feel happy just by looking at it.

The only thing that Lucy insisted on was that she be able to display her signed headshots of her favorite actors. They were all guys, all Broadway, Tony award–winning stars: Kevin Kline, Matthew Broderick, Michael Cerveris, and her favorite, the guy I knew she was totally head over heels in love with and had seen not once, not twice, but thirteen times: John Lloyd Young, the Tony award–winning star of Jersey Boys. So I made a huge bulletin board to hang over her bed.

I place Gatsby’s velvet couch in front of his fireplace and carefully set the diorama on my bed. I walk toward the computer and peer over Lucy’s shoulder so I can get a better look at the computer screen.



From: Andy Strout

Subject: fall festival



Hi, Lucy,

Do you want to go the fall festival with me? It would be fun.

Andy



“Ugh,” she says. “I hate this.”

Andy Strout is a senior. He’s tall, cute, and a drama major.

“Hate what?” I ask, rereading the note.

“Well, I can’t go with him. Have you seen his hands? They’re kind of long and slender, like the hands of a woman.”

“What?” I ask, annoyed. “Who cares about his hands? He’s totally sweet. And he kind of looks like John Lloyd Young.”

“John Lloyd Young?” she gasps, as though she can’t believe I would dare to make such a comparison. “Hardly!”

“Well, more than Tommy does, that’s for sure. Tommy has blond hair!” And an upturned schnoz. Not that I’m in any position to point fingers. Especially when it comes to noses.

“Andy’s fine. It’s just that there’s no…no spark,” she says, snapping her fingers for emphasis.