“Okay, hang on,” Victoria interrupted. “First of all, if these people were cool, they wouldn’t be home reading gossip sites on a Friday night.”
“Oh. Well, um…” I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. “SometimesIdothattoo.”
“Yes, but do you call people sluts on them?”
“Okay, point taken.”
“See? They are not PLU.”
“PLU?”
“People Like Us. I mean, I’m all for sharing our differences and all that, but we’re cool girls. They”—she pointed at the computer screen—“are crazy. And they’re hiding behind their fucking laptops or whatever. They’re just jealous because they didn’t get to make out with Simon.”
“But…but…but they think I’m something I’m not!”
“Who cares? Have we not established that they’re crazy?” She took a long drink from her coffee. “The way I see it, if crazy people hate you, you’re ahead of the game.”
“Audrey, are you actually awake?” I could hear my mom coming upstairs. The last thing I needed was for her to see photos of me making out in Hollywood. There wasn’t enough coffee in the world for that conversation, so I slammed the laptop shut and, for reinforcement, threw Bendomolena on top of it. “I’m gonna buy you the best kitty condo ever,” I promised her when she gave me a halfhearted swipe with her paw. “Just stay there.”
“Stay there or you’re gonna be a throw rug on my bedroom floor,” Victoria added under her breath. She takes a very no-nonsense approach with Bendy. They have an odd respect for one another, like two warriors engaged in battle.
“Wow,” my mom said when she poked her head in the door. “You’re both awake! Did the fire alarm go off?”
“Hi, Mrs. Cuttler,” Victoria said. “Hope you don’t mind that I came over. Audrey and I were just—”
If she said ‘doing homework’ or anything lame like that, we were dead.
“—getting an early start on this mosaic project we’re doing.”
I knew my cue. “Yeah, it’s just some idea Victoria had. We have to smash up CDs.”
“Well, be sure to do it outside.”
“Is our daughter alive?” My dad came up behind my mom and grabbed at his heart. “My Lord, it’s a miracle. I thought you were doomed to never see morning hours again.”
I turned to Victoria. “Don’t adjust your television. My dad’s really that funny.”
“I can see where you get it from,” she shot back.
But I missed the jab because I was too busy looking at my parents’ clothes, which were suspiciously…athletic. “Did you guys…do you go to yoga?!”
“For three weeks now.” My mom flexed a bicep. “Check it out: I’m built.”
“I did my first downward dog today,” my dad added proudly, and Victoria made a weird strangled sound and then choked on her breakfast burrito.
“That…that’s great, Dad. Really.” I bit my cheek so hard that it hurt. “Way to go. Good personal growth and all that.”
By the time they went back downstairs, Victoria and I both had tears in our eyes from trying not to laugh, and she ran across the room and buried her face in my pillow, muffling her howls of laughter. “Your dad! Yoga! Downward dog! Ahahahahah!”
I was laughing too hard to talk, but I joined her on the bed. “Are my parents PLU?” I asked after gasping for air and wiping my eyes.
“Oh God, I hope not.” She sat up a little and raised up the hammer like a punk rock Thor. “So. Let’s go wreak a little Saturday morning havoc.”
15 “Lying wide awake in the garden, trying to get over your stardom.…”
—Pete Yorn, “Just Another”
TO SAY I THOUGHT ABOUT THE VIDEO for the rest of the day would be an understatement. It consumed me and made my stomach do contortion acts that belonged in Cirque du Soleil. Victoria and I smashed up the Lolitas’ CDs (“C’mon!” she yelled from the side as I bludgeoned them into smithereens. “Put some muscle into it! Channel your inner Trent Reznor!”); then we found pictures of worthier rock stars to paste over the Lolitas on my wall collage, but nothing worked. By nighttime, all my fingernails were nubs, and I had gone to work on my cuticles. I was a masochist from the wrists down.
The weird thing was, music wasn’t fixing the problem. Normally, I could put on a well-chosen song or two and I’d feel better. But every time I tried to make a playlist, I thought of making the playlist at the backstage party. When I went through my CDs, my first instinct was to put on the Lolitas, but that CD was now at the bottom of a trash bag in a million pieces. And forget the radio. I couldn’t risk hearing “Audrey, Wait!” come on again, lest my ears start to bleed in agony. It was playing all the time now, and not just on KROQ or KUXV or whatever radio station my parents pretended not to listen to. It was still moving up the Billboard charts—number fifteen, last time I checked—and it didn’t seem to be stopping any time soon. I’d even heard my geometry teacher humming it in the hallway, but at least he’d had the good sense to look apologetic after he saw me.
So that night, I lay in bed in total silence, looking at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling. (I had spent a whole afternoon last year putting them up in the form of constellations, which Evan had called anal. “Just stick ‘em wherever,” he said. “You’re gonna be sleeping anyway.” Jerkface.) Bendomolena was asleep at the foot of my bed in her normal space—right between my ankles, so it was impossible to roll over without kicking her—and I could hear my dad watching TV downstairs. I couldn’t understand how things stayed so normal with everyone else while inside, I felt like a tornado with no place to touch down.