The Blonde of the Joke (9 page)

T
he fountain was holding the whole thing together.

From a perch on the edge of it, in the middle of the mall’s central hub, you could skim your fingers along the surface of the water and look around and see every aspect. The vantage allowed for an unsettling feeling of omniscience, the way a simple swivel in any direction presented another tableau. The Trench Coat Mafia loitering outside Hot Topic, pretending to be dangerous; the Caribbean nannies wandering out of the Gap and yapping at each other over giant strollers. From the fountain, you could just shift your gaze to another cluster and understand not only who they were but know instinctively exactly what they were saying to each other.

Even the few parts of Montgomery Shoppingtowne that
you couldn’t actually see: sitting at the fountain, it was like you had this awareness. Like you were somehow plugged into the nervous system. The water bubbling, the lights shining up from the bottom. Country club blue. Scrape the tiles with your fingers, sift through pennies. Francie and I could both feel Max heading toward us, I think. We looked at each other. Francie smiled an
I told you so
and quickly wiped a small trace of Cinnabon icing from the corner of her mouth. She patted down her hair.

And then he was sitting next to us. Just slid right in, all cool like that. “Hey, ladies,” he said.

“Hey,” I said. He was looking at Francie.

“Max!” she said. As if she was surprised. She ran a finger around the edge of her ear, along her cheekbone to her jaw, and then, tilting her chin, down her long neck and across her bare collarbone.

“You remembered my name,” Max said.

“Duh,” Francie said. “How could we forget?”

Max had a nose you could write a poem about. I would write a poem about it myself if I was the kind of person who knew how to do things like write poems. Well, it was a nose like a cat’s. Broad and flat but strong, too; noble. It was a nose that meant something, if only you could figure out what.

His eyes were small and narrow, and heavy lidded, giving the impression that he’d just woken up or been born. His hair hung barely to his chin, gold-blond on the surface
and velvety dark—nearly black—underneath, when you ran your fingers through it. Obviously I had never run my fingers through Max’s hair. But I’m not going to lie and say I hadn’t considered it, more than once, more than twice, since the day we’d first met him in the parking garage.

“We got you a present,” Francie said to Max. It was news to me. But somehow, there on the edge of the fountain, Francie reached into a gap of air in front of her and plucked out a Swiss Army knife. She held it out to him with a sphinxy gleam in her eyes, a certain mischievousness in her smile. It was a gift; it was a challenge.

Max took the knife from her with dubious curiosity and rolled it over a couple of times in his fingers. He flipped out the blade with his thumb and brandished it in front of his face, let it catch the light. “What did I do to deserve this?” he asked.

“I stole it from Brookstone,” Francie said. “I had a feeling we’d see you again, and it seemed like something you would like.”

I wanted to know where Francie had gotten that knife. I wanted to know if she had really stolen it with Max in mind. I wanted to know why she had not told me about it.

“Thanks,” Max said. “This is awesome. Let’s kill someone!” He laughed at his own joke and waved the knife around some more before adding, “Just kidding,” although obviously we knew he was kidding.

“Wanna go to the food court?” she asked, even though
she had finished a Cinnabon about five seconds before he had showed up.

“Sure,” Max said. I realized suddenly that I had only said one word to him, and that that word had been
hey.
But I didn’t know what else to say. I felt like my presence was pretty much beside the point anyway. We took off for the food court, Francie and Max walking together a few paces ahead of me.

“Want to hear a joke?” I heard Francie say.

“Sure,” said Max.

“So there are these two blondes in the parking lot,” Francie said.

“Okay…” Max said. There was a note of uncertainty in his voice, like he was trying to see where she was headed. Like he suspected it was nowhere good.

Francie soldiered on. “So these two bimbos are standing there, trying to unlock the car door with a coat hanger.” She paused for effect, to no effect. “And they’re, like, fiddling with the door, and it’s taking forever, and it’s starting to get, like, totally cloudy, and the one blonde says to the other, ‘Hurry up, it’s about to rain and the top is down!’”

Crickets. Max tilted his head like he was waiting for her to finish, but if Francie noticed that no one was laughing, she didn’t betray any discomfort. Francie was really the worst at telling jokes, which was ironic, because she was the only person I knew who enjoyed them. She chuckled to herself and tossed her blond, blond hair. I noticed then that she had just
redone it. The roots were mostly gone and it was a slightly different shade than before. Still white-blond, but with a new note of gold somewhere underneath it all. Max turned, looked over his shoulder at me, and raised his eyebrows, smiling. A couple of his teeth were slightly discolored from where I could tell he’d once had braces; his left canine tooth was a tiny bit undersized, leaving a gap. A dimple in one cheek. Max’s smile was nearly a snarl, just the right side of vulnerable. All over the mall, you could hear cash registers turning over,
ka-ching.

“Your friend is crazy,” he said to me. “A blonde who tells blonde jokes.”

“Crazy!” Francie exclaimed. “Me, crazy! That’s a laugh!” She slapped him on the butt, all playful, and skipped ahead a couple of steps. Max looked at me again, shrugged, and this time just mouthed the word.
Crazy,
he said without making a noise.

“Smoothie time!” Francie announced. She took Max’s hand and pulled him with her into the food court. It was like the first line of one of Francie’s jokes. “A blonde and a brunette meet the world’s hottest boy in a parking garage.” You could already see how it would all go down.

F
rancie and I were standing on the escalator, heading down, when she grabbed me by the shoulder. “Look!” she hissed, and gestured across the atrium to a gray-haired woman in a long denim skirt, a purple T-shirt, and a purple felt beret. The woman was wandering through the crowd, pausing here and there to browse shop windows.

“No way,” I said. There was no mistaking who it was: our Physics teacher, Ms. Tinker. Francie squealed and applauded silently to herself, then clapped an open hand to her mouth.

“Let’s follow her!” she whispered.

“I can’t believe she wears that beret even in public,” I said. “Does she ever take it off?”

“I bet it smells like cheese. And I bet you a dollar she’s gonna go to Ann Taylor Loft and not even buy anything.”

“Sucker’s bet,” I said. “No deal.”

Francie swung onto the black rubber escalator railing and vaulted herself across the metal plate onto marble tiles, landing with a triumphant thwack. “Come on,” she said. “We can’t lose her.”

We were in no danger of losing her. If you want to make sure you never get lost in a crowd, a purple beret is really the way to go. Ms. Tinker had just moved from one store to the next; she was outside Crate&Barrel, contemplating a display of flatware.

“Look inconspicuous,” Francie said. So we both became our most inconspicuous selves and made our way across the mall to near where our teacher was standing. We lingered behind a ficus, peering through the leaves. Ms. Tinker didn’t notice us. She stepped away from the window and started wandering again. Francie took my hand and we moved with her.

It was a little sad seeing our teacher outside of school. She was dressed as if for class, in her
PHYSICS IS PHUN!
T-shirt, her gym whistle dangling familiarly from the lanyard around her neck, the
SAVE THE WHALES
totebag at her side. But here at the mall, shuffling along, Ms. Tinker was different. She had no power over anything at all. She was pathetic, really.

“God, I hate her,” Francie said. “She made me and Sandy
come in for a so-called conference last semester—those tardies I told you about. It was a complete joke. She kept calling me
Fanny.”

I giggled. “It suits you,” I said.

“Whatever,” Francie snorted. “Like it matters if I miss the first ten minutes of Physics? All she’s doing is telling us how to label our dividers!”

“She used to teach Special Ed,” I told her. “She told us that on the first day, before you showed up. That’s why she’s so into dividers.”

Francie gave me a head shake and otherwise ignored my defense.

Meanwhile, Ms. Tinker was winding her way through the mall, moving with quick and deliberate steps but no clear destination. She was circling and spiraling. Not once did she look over her shoulder. When we passed Crate&Barrel for the third time, Ms. Tinker stopped again to peruse the window display, and Francie turned to me with wide eyes. “This is crazy,” she said.

“I know,” I said. We could both see what Ms. Tinker was doing, but didn’t quite believe it. “She knows the angles.”

Francie breathed a low and nearly silent whistle.

And then, just as Francie had predicted, we were at Ann Taylor Loft. Ten paces ahead of us, Ms. Tinker paused at the entranceway, glanced up and down, and adjusted her beret to a suitably jaunty angle. Francie nudged me
I told you so,
but didn’t say anything. We just followed her and saw her
standing at a rack of white blouses that tied in a ribbon at the collar. We watched her from ten feet away, pretending to be searching for a size at a table of slacks.

“Watch,” hissed Francie. “Look! Now!” Just as she said it, Ms. Tinker went blurry for a second; she became somehow indistinct. For a second it was hard to tell what I was looking at, but when I focused—I mean, really focused—I saw our teacher take a can opener from the pocket of her skirt, and then she was stuffing one of the shirts she’d been looking at into her totebag.

Francie and I were both staring, and as Ms. Tinker shuffled past us, she made brief but unmistakable eye contact. She still didn’t seem to have any idea that either of us was her student, but it was obvious we’d seen what she had done. And what happened next was truly astonishing. She paused at the doorway and turned around and looked straight at us. She tugged at one ear, then the other. She smiled, wiggled her nose, and paused with a friendly, expectant raise of her brow. She was waiting for a response.

I didn’t think about what I was doing, I just did it. I returned the Sign, tug, tug, wiggle. Satisfied, Ms. Tinker nodded and trotted out of the store, back into the mall, leaving Francie and me standing there, too shocked to move.

Francie’s jaw dropped. “She just…”

“She did,” I said.

Francie plopped her ass on the table of mom-slacks and
dropped her bag to the floor. She spread her legs and placed her head between her knees, clutching her temples in her palms. Her hair scraped the floor.

She breathed hard.

“Listen,” she finally said when she had righted herself. “So I know I told you that the Sign was like this real thing….”

“Yeah?” I said, with a feeling that I knew exactly where she was going.

She turned away. “I made it up,” Francie said. “I mean, it’s just some dumb thing I made up.”

“Oh,” I said. Of course, I had known it all along. I mean, I had, hadn’t I? I guess that even though I’d always sort of secretly known, I was still disappointed in her. Not because she had lied, but because by admitting it she was breaking her own rule. She was acknowledging the ordinariness of the world. She was acknowledging her own ordinariness.

The way she was sitting there, so uncertain all of a sudden, shoulders slumped, mouth twitching, she looked like just a little girl. It was like she was a Russian doll and had stepped outside herself as someone nearly the same except smaller, and then again, and smaller, and finally one more time so small that she was hardly there at all. But then she was standing, and as she stood she gathered herself back together, and by the time she was to her feet she was whole again, had collected up every bit of the doubt she’d just betrayed, had hidden it away somewhere where she wouldn’t have to think about it. She ran her fingers through her hair,
straight down to the ends, and was the same as ever. “Well,” she said. “I guess it was real after all. I mean, she obviously knew about it. So that proves it. I guess I’m smarter than I even realized. Just divine inspiration, I guess. I don’t believe in God, but I
am
spiritual, you know.”

“Exactly,” I said. I sort of wasn’t a bit surprised. Francie may have thought she had invented the Sign herself, but leave it to Francie to stumble onto something that seemed fake but was in fact 100 percent for real. Leave it to Francie to will something into realness without realizing or even really wanting it. To be accidentally truthful even in the baldest of lies.

Naturally Francie wasn’t considering anything like that. It had been completely uncharacteristic of her to doubt herself in the first place—a rare and momentary lapse, and it was already forgotten. Now she had moved on, as she always would, to the greater implications. She was applying a coat of eyeliner, deep in thought. “But Ms. Tinker!” she said to herself. “How can she of all people know? She’s our enemy! Our sworn enemy!”

“Maybe not anymore,” I said. “She’s one of us.”

“This ruins everything,” Francie moaned. “Ms. Tinker! Can you even imagine? We’re ruined!”

“Don’t be so sure,” I told her. As much as I hated Ms. Tinker, the revelation about our teacher thrilled me as much as it had upset Francie. In a way, it reminded me of the dream I was always having—the one about the mall. A trapdoor
you’d never noticed opens. It leads you to the hidden world you always knew was there.

Francie was still reeling and needed to put herself back on an even keel. Nothing made her feel more sure of herself than a shoplifting spree. We headed to Sephora.

And I don’t know how it happened. I was doing everything right. Maybe I had gotten cocky. Maybe we were just out of control. We had been stealing more and more, breaking records every day. Or. Maybe I was testing Francie without realizing it. Earlier that day, I’d caught a small glimpse of a different side of her. A Francie who was just a regular girl; a Francie who was powerless. Was that the real Francie? She had lied about the Sign. What else had she lied about? These were important questions.

I was alone in the Stila aisle with a fistful of lip liner when Francie found me. She grabbed my hips from behind and whispered in my ear urgently. “We’re caught,” she breathed. I couldn’t see her, but a tendril of her yellow hair was curling around my shoulder. “Give me your purse,” she said, “and get the hell out of here.”

I didn’t turn around, just shrugged my left shoulder, letting my bag slip into her open palm.

“I can’t leave you,” I said, still without looking at her.

“Move,” she said. “You know the drill. Twenty-five minutes.” I was gone.

Francie and I’d had an escape plan worked out since
we’d started at Montgomery Shoppingtowne months ago. Francie had drawn it up and presented it to me in her bedroom, wearing her black-framed glasses for that look of authority, a cigarette tucked behind her ear. She’d made a map and everything and had used a pilfered laser pointer to indicate a route. The plan was this: split up, run for our lives, and meet up at the bus stop by the Burger King, a quarter of a mile away.

At Sephora, though, Francie wasn’t following the plan. She wasn’t running. As I booked it for the door, I looked over my shoulder and saw her standing there, by herself, my bag in her hand. Lips pursed into stubborn resignation. She was going to take the rap.

I wasn’t brave like that. When the guard tried to stop me at the door, I just pushed past him. Everyone knows these mall security guards are just a step up from thieves themselves. Half a step. It’s not like they’re cops.

“Miss,” the guard said, trying to block me with an arm. “You need to come with me.”

“Sorry,” I spat. And I ran. No one tried to follow. I powered down the phony mall boulevard, up the escalator, and through Macy’s, pushing through a crowd of sluggish shoppers. The few times I glanced behind me, the place was deserted, a ghost town.

When I made it to the bus stop, I checked the time every five minutes and watched the horizon, shivering in my parka and
awaiting the sight of Francie’s blond, shattered halo flying down the sidewalk. It took twenty-five minutes, like she’d said. I’m not proud to say it, but if she hadn’t shown at that exact moment, I would have gone home by myself. I wasn’t really expecting her. We’d hit Best Buy earlier in the day as well, and between both stores and the two of us, we had easily more than five hundred dollars’ worth of stuff.

But Francie surprised me. I should have had more faith in her. I had never doubted her before. She had said she would protect me, and she had.

“Did I miss the bus?” Francie asked when she finally made it. She was hunching, out of breath, still unsteady on her heels.

“Two,” I told her. “But you’re still right on time. Twenty-five minutes.”

“Well, that’s something, at least,” she said, handing me my purse. I glanced inside and was surprised to see that everything I’d stolen was still in it.

“How did you get out of there?” I wanted to know. “They didn’t even take the stuff back?”

“I have my ways,” she told me. “I wasn’t going to give that shit up; that’s some serious makeup. We just need to avoid that particular store for a little while.”

“I shouldn’t have left you,” I said.

“I couldn’t let you get in trouble, babe,” she laughed, swinging her hair and hitting me on the butt with her purse. “You are too good for words.” Then the bus was there.

I should have been grateful, I know. And I was. How could I not be? But I couldn’t help wondering: What had Francie done?

You take a seashell. You take a tube of lip gloss and a prissy silk scarf like an English teacher would wear. You take a mountain, and a cloud, and a molten pebble from the core of the world. Francie said this was how we were going to do it. Because the entire planet Earth is pretty fucking big. Francie Knight was big enough to fit it all in her pocket. And climbing onto the J-12 I knew something else about her: she really meant everything she said. It was no exaggeration. Earlier that day, in Ann Taylor Loft, I had come closer than ever to doubting her. But now I knew for sure: she was capable of anything. If she hadn’t been before, she was now.

It scared me. The lengths I imagined she might go to. Lengths without limits. But I had already traveled too far with her. And I was not just in it for myself anymore, either. Now there was Jesse to think about. He needed us.

No. He didn’t need me. He needed Francie. I hated to admit it, but if I had learned anything that day, it was that I would not be strong enough without her.