“Me and Jenny?” I asked.
The door opened. Sam jumped away with his hands behind his back. It was Daniel, the assistant manager. Daniel ran his fingers through his hair nervously. His eyes moved between Sam and me and stopped at the air between us.
“Customers,” he said.
I looked at the floor. In my periphery, I saw Sam do this thing with his head, a nod. Daniel closed the door and we were alone again.
Sam put his hands in his pockets, shoulders up to his ears, and walked away. When he got to the door, he looked back at me.
“Yeah,” he said. “Friday.”
The rest of the day, Sam was more quiet than usual. He also didn’t mention Friday again, even when Jenny and I were in the same room or working the same shift. On Thursday, though, Jenny was at the register and I was stocking shelves when Sam walked out of the back room. He stopped, like he forgot we were both working that day. There were no customers in the store. Jenny and I both looked at him, and this wide, stupid smirk spread across his clean-shaven face. None of us said anything.
I considered the mechanics of a threesome with Sam and Jenny. Who would kiss whom first? What would I do if Sam was penetrating Jenny, and would Jenny be doing anything with me? Matt and Frankie’s attention that first night had triangulated on me, and while it felt like there was considerable pressure to perform for them, it was easy because I was the object being acted upon and the object against which their desires were playing out. If Jenny and I were actually to sleep with Sam, I wondered if she or I would be more dominant, who would get penetrated first, and whether this weird sexual politicking would feel good or if it would become very awkward afterward. I wondered if the feeling that I was both competing with Jenny for Sam’s attention and also with Sam for Jenny’s attention would leave me unable to act at all. Or perhaps the solution was simply to drink a lot, take a few pills, and let it all play out as chill as humanly possible.
I’m not really sure why we thought proposing a threesome would be some kind of revenge. After all of the time I spent waiting for Sam to validate me, I think I wanted to finally say to him, Look what we can do to you. And look how easy it is to get you to do this.
THERE IS A COST TO BEING SPECIAL
ON FRIDAY, FRANKIE SAID she wanted to play a game, which was unusual. She asked if she could come over to my place.
“I want to play dress-up,” she said.
Frankie had asked to see my place before. I was hesitant, in part because my mother had become reclusive since we moved to Lamplighter. If she was home, she was either completely overwhelming in her desire to host, bringing my friends slices of American cheese and Ritz stacked on paper plates with cups of soda, or she would be entirely motionless, slumped on the couch watching whatever was on the TV, Dr. Phil or Judge Judy or the evening news.
Playing dress-up seemed innocuous. When we arrived, my mother’s car was gone. Frankie unbuckled the baby from the backseat of the car and carried him on her hip as she followed me up the wooden porch. Jett hardly looked like Matt’s child, except for his lips. He had the same pouty lips, only smaller. Mostly he looked like his mother. He smiled and flapped his arms at me, gurgled in a strange language. He seemed to like my attention, and I was happy to oblige. As we walked into the house, Frankie spoke again.
“The caveat,” she said, “is that we’re going to go to Wal-Mart in whatever outfit I pick for you.”
My hairs rose on my arms. I felt tricked, but I didn’t want to tell Frankie no. I wondered what sort of outfit she had in mind for me.
The trailer was dark. I turned on the light in the hallway that led to my room, which felt foreign since I had been spending so much time away from it. My closet was a mess. I sat on the unmade bed, holding Jett in my lap. Frankie began throwing clothes out of the closet and rummaging through a laundry basket of clean clothes on the floor.
“Are you always this disorganized?” she asked.
“I haven’t been home in a while,” I said, although the state of my room was pretty typical. I had two perpetual piles of clothes on my floor, clean and dirty, and hardly ever wore anything hung up in my closet. I surreptitiously kicked the trash back under my bed, empty soda bottles and candy wrappers.
Frankie had me try on a few pairs of short shorts and a dress before she settled on a pinstripe miniskirt that I’d bought from a cheap, fast-fashion retailer and never wore. She managed to find the one water bra I’d owned in high school, buried at the back of my closet. She dug out a cropped striped polo and a pair of industrial goth platform boots. When she was happy with the outfit, I looked in the mirror. It didn’t seem so bad,
