ONE

4

“Hey, hey-hey!  Hey, hey-hey-hey!  Hey everybody, it’s Fat Albert!  Who you goin’ to Formal with, Fat Albert?”

She thinks the voice is Duffy Deckert, one of Todd’s friends.  Though she cannot be sure.

“Oh that’s right.  No-body.  Well, you were goin’ with somebody.  But.  Ha.  He’s already here.”

Oh God.

“Say hi, Todd!  C’mon, man.  It’s your date.”

Oh God oh God oh God.  She can’t talk to him right now.  Please don’t put him on the phone.

She can hear the caller shift the phone, cover the receiver with his hand.  He is talking but she cannot make out the words.  She cannot hear anyone else talking.  The phone shifts again.

“He’s uh, having way too good a time to come to the phone.”

She is sure it is Duffy now.  It has to be.  That exaggerated surfer drawl.  Is Todd even there?

“I got to ask you.  Who the fuck do you think you are?”

A pause.  Does he want her to answer?

“No one wants to take your fat ass to Formal.  Nooo-body.  You’re straight wretched.  My boy Todd, he’s too good for you.  He doesn’t want to go with you.  You hear that?”

She says nothing.  There are no words.

“You’re still there.  I know you are.”

Again, a pause.  He’s daring her to hang up, but she’s frozen.

“Now Kelsey Taper, she likes Todd.  Kelsey Tapeworm is going to blow him.  You’re not going to blow him, are you?  No, you’re not.  So why don’t you have a good cry, eat some Ben & Jerry’s or whatever, and eat a fat dick you fucking.Whale.”

Click.

The dial tone pounds in her ear until the robot woman comes on.

“If you would like to make a call…”

Beddy hangs up.

She slumps down into her chair and wants to cry, but can’t.  It feels foreign, like she has to first remember how to do it.  She is on a different axis than the room’s.

“This,” she says.

The music wafts back to her.  Connie’s mixtape she made special for Beddy.  “Tight Like Prom Night Mix.”

“I clean my mouth ‘cause froth comes out,” Ms. Phair commiserates.  “Send it up on fire.  Death before dawn.  Send it up on fire.  Death before dawn.”

She squeezes the arms of her chair.  How could Todd do this?  After she’d done practically the whole report for him.  After she gave him years of love in her mind, never doing him wrong.  After she’d pitied him.

She imagines him in his street clothes on tilting polar ice, clubbing baby seals and humping their pulped heads.  Sex and carnage and rancid death.  Humping and pumping.  Pumping and pumping.

Beddy retches into her wastebasket, and then the tears come.  She becomes a confusion of bodily actions, coughing and crying and retching until she exhausts all of them.  She sits up and takes stock of the trauma in her mirror.

No matter.  She heard you only wear a prom dress once anyway, and she needs this one less than once.

She grabs the fabric scissors from her dresser top and poises them over her breastplate.  Inhales deeply.

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