KissnTell

Chapter 2

THERE GOES MY BDAY

Anais

I don't know why I always listened to her. She was my best friend, but at a certain point, after a certain number of failures, disappointments, and humiliations, all of which ended with me consoling her—even though it had been her choice to begin with and I essentially wound up as collateral damage—you'd think I'd get my shit together and figure out a way to politely decline. But I never did. Because I'm a doormat. And because Vaughn was my only real friend.

I have a theory that there can only be one selfish asshole in every relationship. The other person inevitably has to be accommodating. ("Accommodating," by the way, is my mom's pageant queen euphemism for "pushover," a classic selfish asshole characterization.)

I never faulted my mom, exactly. In a way, she had earned her right to be selfish. After all, my dad left her when she was pregnant with me, but not before he spent all their savings on a ridiculous platinum and diamond Rolex. When he announced he was leaving over the phone from some skeevy motel room (where he was probably with another woman), my mom, furious, retrieved his Rolex from his bedside table and put it in a safe-deposit box. He turned the house upside down looking for it, but eventually gave up, announcing that his new woman would buy him a better one.

For as long as I could remember, she'd kept that Rolex next to the bathroom sink. She said it reminded her of what an idiot my dad was, and looking at it every morning after she'd splash cold water on her face made her feel better. I tried countless times to get her to sell it, put it toward my college fund or her retirement fund or something, but she didn't want to live her life knowing that he had bailed her out. That watch reassured her before she headed off to work, killing herself to make ends meet for me, this little girl who didn't even resemble her. Who probably resembled him.

See, my mom was beautiful. Not just in a pageant queen way, in a movie star way. People used to stop her in the grocery store to tell her how much she looked like Kim Novak in Picnic. You know, the one where the small-town girl's exquisite good looks cause a kerfuffle and turn the whole neighborhood upside down? I, on the other hand, was pretty plain looking, and always a little bit aware of her disappointment in my appearance. It wasn't anything she ever said; she was very supportive verbally. It was these little flickers every now and then, like a really poorly-executed cut in an old movie, flaws in the masquerade of her motherhood that exposed the truth: she was sad for me because I wasn't pretty like her.

That's why I made a point not to dwell on it or anything else that wasn't perfect in my life; if it didn't bother me, maybe it would stop bothering her that I wasn't the popular ingénue she'd hoped for.

But Vaughn was different. Vaughn should've been my compadre, my equal. She should have been sensitive to my lowly status at Cranbrook. Instead, she seemed hell-bent on turning her whole existence into a circus freak show for the Shrew Crew, and making me her opening act.

It was my birthday. My sweet sixteen, to be exact. Now, I don't normally make a big deal out of these things, but my birthday is—I can't deny it even in my proudest moments—a day I relish. Every year since I was ten, my mom, Vaughn, and I have played hooky on my birthday, watching a movie marathon expertly curated by yours truly and feasting on Cool Ranch Doritos and a log of raw cookie dough.

When I got the text message from Vaughn—I have the best birthday present ever!!!!!!!!!!—I was putting the finishing touches on my movie list, tuning out Ms. Goldenblatt's lecture on Dostoevsky. I'd decided months earlier on an existential theme. Movies about angsty kids just trying to get by. Some people call them coming-of-age films, but that expression makes me want to barf. I was really looking forward to sitting back for hours, absorbing classic tales of miserable young people just waiting for their time to shine. We would start with Working Girl, a shout out to my mom, who pretty much starts bawling her eyes out at the first few bars of "Let the River Run," followed by Pretty Woman, which features Vaughn's favorite shopping montage of all time, followed by Carrie, for obvious reasons, and rounding out with a classic I couldn't resist: Sixteen Candles. Because it was my sixteenth birthday and I figured I should commemorate it somehow, for posterity's sake.