Chapter 1 #2
Katie is clearly not thinking deeply about the naked girl in the photo, so Susan shrugs back, eager to conceal how thrown she was by the image, the bare breasts and pale stomach and … She blinks. She needs to stop thinking about it. Now. She grits her teeth.
Katie hums to herself as she pulls up a new music-pirating program and begins downloading the?? album. Pop-up ads for Girls Gone Wild and local injury law firms and contests to win a TV or a Caribbean cruise flood the screen and Katie deftly x-es out of them while the songs load.
“My parents would kill me if I did this on their computer,” Susan says, and Katie rolls her eyes.
“Yeah right,” Katie says. “People with old parents get away with murder. You’re just paranoid.”
The computer makes a cash register noise, the sound of a completed download. Katie cranks the speaker to the highest volume while she hits play.
Over a twangy acoustic guitar, a man’s voice begins to sing in the kind of whispery croon they can’t get enough of. I was born in the shadows under your eyes, he sings.
“Fuck,” Katie says. “I think this is a perfect song.”
Susan smiles, closing her eyes. Thirty seconds in and she already loves it; she loves how something sad can sound so pretty.
Like the inside of her heart has been transposed onto liner notes.
To better absorb the music, she lies down on the rug.
It smells like feet and carpet cleaner, but she doesn’t mind.
She spends a lot of time on this floor listening to music they rip from the internet.
Susan is not a musician, though at one point during freshman year she half-heartedly tried to learn the drums, giving up once she realized how little talent she had.
She’s not a performer of any kind; she’s never wanted to be on a stage.
But she loves music more than anything in the world.
It makes her bones vibrate, like her body itself is a tuning fork, capable of resonating at the precise frequency of the emotions in the songs she plays on repeat.
“Now that we’ve seen his face, you know who he kind of reminds me of?” Katie says. She’s hugging her knees on the desk chair and spinning it around.
Susan raises her eyebrows.
“Fishman,” Katie says.
“No,” Susan groans. “Can’t I just have this one thing?”
Katie begins to giggle. “Oh my god,” she says, “he’s a total Kyle Fishman.”
“I don’t even like Kyle anymore,” Susan says. “It was too humiliating.”
“For him, or for you?”
It’s a fair question, though Susan doesn’t answer.
Instead, she watches Katie spin around and around in dizzying circles.
“Whatever, Susan. You have a type. Kyle was just the original.”
“I’m hungry,” Susan says, sitting up, wanting to change the subject. “Do you want to go to the mall?”
“Hell yeah,” Katie says, flinging herself out of the chair mid-spin. “I would die for pizza.”
Later, the taste of pizza grease is still on Susan’s tongue as she wanders aimlessly down the alt rock aisle of Tower Records, one parking lot over from the Walt Whitman Mall, next to the TGI Fridays.
She runs her fingers along the top edges of the CDs while a Fall Out Boy song plays through the store’s speakers, nails on a chalkboard with its high-pitched harmonies.
She’s wearing her large headphones like a necklace, plugged into a Walkman in her black pleather messenger bag.
She considers putting her own music on, but there’s no way she could play it loud enough to drown out the store’s surround sound.
Katie sometimes likes to schlep Susan all the way down Sunrise Highway to the nearest independent record store, which is always an annoying journey because Katie is also too afraid to actually drive on Sunrise Highway, with its short merge lanes and frequent drag racers.
This means Susan is the default driver while Katie gets to be the DJ and the passenger princess.
The truth is Susan likes Tower Records better, even if it is a chain.
First, the size: this huge open space with endless possibility.
Also, they always have everything she wants.
And the best part is no one judges her. The people who work at Katie’s place don’t even say hi, they just sit at the front and read magazines until you decide you want to blow all your money on some out-of-print vinyl and then they judge you for the one you pick.
Her cell phone, clipped to her belt loop, buzzes.
It’s a text from Katie, who is on the other side of the store.
“Cute cashier today,” it says. Susan glances at the front.
She can’t really see who is working, but that’s beside the point.
The point is that she has only 150 text messages per month and Katie has just wasted one of them.
Katie’s parents have her on an unlimited plan, and she seems to have no empathy for the limits of Susan’s cell phone usage.
Susan looks at the flyers on the corkboard in the back.
There’s one asking people to come to an Iraq war protest; people looking for roommates; guitar lessons with a guy named Dan Smith.
Then she sees it: The paper looks like a homemade collage that’s been photocopied and reads SUPER SICK ALL AGES ROCK SHOW.
And there, in the middle, two question marks.
“Katie!” she yells across the store. A few people glance up, and she blushes for calling so much attention to herself.
Katie walks over. “What are you screaming about?”
“What-What is playing the Masonic temple this weekend. Look.” She points at the flyer.
The Masonic temple is twenty minutes away if they speed on the LIE, in a neighboring town Susan doesn’t know the name of.
Actually, she doesn’t really know what a Masonic temple is, either, but this one has a large basement and they let local kids put on shows there, so she and Katie have been a few times.
“I wish it didn’t say super sick,” Katie says. “That’s so annoying.”
“It’s not amazing,” Susan agrees. “But, still!”
“Why in the world would they play Long Island?” Katie asks.
“No idea,” Susan says. “We should go.” She takes the flyer and shoves it in her bag.
After buying nothing (“Why would we spend money when I can just download it?” Katie had said), they sit in Susan’s old red Volvo station wagon while it idles, a pair of fuzzy dice dangling from the rearview mirror, making plans for the weekend.
Susan smooths the flyer out in her lap and together they study the details.
“If we do end up going, just promise me you’re not going to wear that,” Katie says, gesturing to the pink floral dress that Susan has on over her skinny jeans. The laces of her black combat boots are untied, permanently muddy at the ends, dragged through too many parking lot puddles.
“What’s wrong with this?”
“A dress over jeans is, like, a thing,” Katie says, rolling her eyes as though this is something everyone knows. “I promise you people will make fun of you. Like, older, cooler people.”
Susan groans and throws her head back.
Katie is wearing flared brown corduroys and a knit yellow cardigan with black Converse sneakers. No bra, not that she needs one, and lots of necklaces.
Susan thinks Katie looks perfect. She always does.
“Fine. What time do you want me to pick you up?” Susan puts her seat belt on and starts to pull out of the parking lot.
Katie pops in one of the burned CDs that are spilled on the floor in front of the passenger seat and turns the volume up. “I don’t know, seven? Do you mind if Jake comes?”
“I assumed he would,” Susan says.
Katie almost never wants to go anywhere without Jake these days, especially now that he’s in college and only home for the summer. This afternoon they are spending together without him is a rare treat.
Jake is Korean American, with long black hair and acne-scarred skin.
He’s also artsy in the kind of way that means for most of his life, the popular kids liked to slam him into lockers and call him a fag.
Which is ironic, to Susan, because Jake is one of the most heterosexual boys she’s ever met.
His long hair and tight black clothes don’t mean he likes girls any less.
And he likes Katie a lot; he’d liked her forever, and once she finally noticed him toward the end of freshman year, it was like they were glued at the pelvis, making out and dry humping everywhere in a way that strikes Susan as gross and also kind of rude, but she’s happy for Katie, if a little jealous and way too involved in the details of their sex life to express disgust outwardly.
When Jake gave Katie her first orgasm, Katie and Susan went out for milkshakes to celebrate; when they lost their virginities to each other after Jake’s prom, Katie texted Susan about it from the bed.
Susan is still a little surprised they’ve been able to make it work while he’s at NYU, but he and Katie travel back and forth on the LIRR to see each other as often as they can, and every time he comes back for the holidays and summer it’s like he’s never been gone.
Katie has learned a few phrases in Korean in order to be polite to Jake’s parents, an effort that stands out given that Katie nearly fails French every year.
Susan figures they’ll probably get married, and she will be the third wheel for the rest of her life.
She doesn’t imagine that Katie and Jake getting married will mean they have their own world that doesn’t include her. It would be far too painful a thought.
“I have to go home to help my parents with their new TV,” Susan says to Katie. “But I’ll drop you off first.”
“Wow, I can’t believe they got a new TV. Haven’t they had the same one since you were, like, born?”
“Literally,” Susan says, turning left onto Jericho Turnpike. “It’s a fucking miracle. But now they can’t figure out how to turn it on.”
When Susan gets home, she sits in the driveway for a moment to rub what she can of her eyeliner off on her fingers, wiping her black-stained hands on her pants.