Nothing

By Taylor Grieshober

Cheyenne and I are in her bathroom applying our makeup under the drop lights her dad got for cheap. It’s her very own half bath with double sinks so we don’t have to take turns to spit out Listerine. Her room is reflected in the gold accent mirror: waterbed, Japanese divider screen, black lace bras, size 36C, hung from their short straps like sneakers on telephone wire, their placement no accident. I can also see a sliver of the T.V. room, the towering stacks of VHS, and home movies in the corner. Last night we found one of her brother’s pornos and popped it in when her Dad was at the VFW for poker night. The girl in the video was a cheerleader and the guy was supposed to be a punk and they were having sex in the boy’s locker room. It made me sick and I begged Cheyenne to shut it off. She thought I was being squeamish, but it wasn’t the girl’s enormous flopping boobs or even how the guy called her a “preppy little slut.” It was that I couldn’t help but picture Cheyenne in her Bobcats uniform having sex with Tommy. The guy even looked a little like Tommy, with his chin-length blond hair, sharp cheekbones, and sinewy arms. 

Cheyenne and I have only known each other for a year, but I know everything about her.  I know that she wants to be a nurse, that she doesn’t wear pink because she thinks it makes her look like Barbie. I know she hates her mom and reveres her brother, and that her dad is “doing the best he can with what he’s got.”I know that she lost her virginity to Tommy over Memorial Day weekend and that she’s had not one, but two pregnancy scares since. I know she’s prone to theatrics, that she rarely thinks of the most obvious answer to any problem. I know her average gym class mile is seven minutes and twenty seconds—fast, four minutes faster than mine, but she’s not fast enough to make the track team. 

She smiles unnaturally in the mirror and dusts silver glitter on her cheekbones. She’s wearing frayed black short shorts and my old Forty Licks shirt, which looked so much better on her that when she tried it on, I told her to keep it. She cut the neck out of it so it hangs off her shoulders, exposing her collar bones, which are sharp and bronzy like the rest of her. It kills me when she wears it, but the thought of wearing it now, and looking like a fat imitation of Cheyenne, is way worse. She doesn’t even like the Stones. 

She hands me her bubble-gum Lip Smackers gloss and I apply it carefully, lining my lips with the end of the brush just like she showed me.

“Blot,” she says and hands me a tissue. The lip gloss is so sticky I can’t stand it. I rub it off. 

“It’s better if it’s not all thick anyway. Boys don’t like it.” She smiles. “You think tonight’s the night?”

What she’s asking is will I make out with someone, will I have my first kiss, but what she doesn’t know is I’ve already been kissed, and the kiss was perfect, so perfect I don’t want to kiss anyone else so long as I live.

Cheyenne’s dad drops us in front of the Pit Stop, a concert venue that used to be a porno theater. Our principal, Mr. Dix, runs the place. It amazes me that he kept a name like that. Mr. Dix isn’t around much anymore since he flipped the old Ames store into a Mega-church. It’s technically called Oasis of Love, but everyone just calls it the Ames Church. Everything used to be something else here. The Pit Stop is supposed to keep us off drugs and maybe it has, but “sexual activity” has skyrocketed. There’s a dumpster we call the “cumster” because it’s where the girls go to give hand jobs. They duck behind it and stroke away. 

A row of pine trees flank the parking lot and below them, there’s a lake and small beach. But it’s not the kind of place you walk around without shoes on. There are beer bottle caps and cat shit from the neighborhood strays.

Tommy’s black Trans Am is parked in front of the pines and Tommy, aviators down, shirt off, is lounging on the hood. Tommy Pinto, who lit up a joint in the middle of biology class because Ms. Nugent has an olfactory disorder, who played electric guitar in the jazz section of the marching band before dropping out last year when he was a sophomore. Tommy Pinto, whose band is prohibited from playing the Pit Stop unless he comes back to school or gets his GED. Tommy Pinto, who works full time at the Reel Deal, who got me to watch Faces of Death last spring even though I can’t stand the sight of my own blood, let alone anyone else’s. Tommy Pinto, the boy I secretly love, who I kissed last month—french kissed—right over there, between the pine trees and the beach, while Cheyenne was away at cheerleading camp. We haven’t talked about it, but more than once since it happened I’ve caught him staring, looking at me differently than he looks at Cheyenne. It’s how he looks when he’s watching a band he likes.

Cheyenne wags her butt as she walks over to the car and for the first time I don’t think it looks cool but desperate. Tommy is rolling a fresh cigarette between his fingers, blue Drum pouch in his lap. His idiot friends, Max and Chuck are poking a dead squirrel with a twig. I can see the notch of Big Chief balled up in their cheeks and they look just as stupid as squirrels with nuts in their mouths.

“Hey,” Cheyenne says to Tommy.

“Hey,” he says, licking the glue strip. 

Cheyenne climbs on the hood and Tommy sticks his arm out and she folds into it as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. It hurts to watch, but in a different way than before. Then she grabs the cigarette from his hand, and no kidding, he sparks up the Bic and lights it for her like they’re in a movie, but really it’s because Cheyenne has never gotten the hang of using a lighter and he has to do it for her. She’s smart in other ways; she landed a boyfriend, after all. I wish I could judge her for it, but it’s just one of those things, like how I never figured out how to swallow pills and have to take chewables if I’m sick and I’m fourteen-god-damn-years-old.

Max and Chuck have grown bored of the squirrel and are hocking brown loogies at the trees. I stomp a Pepsi can with my foot and Chuck turns.

“Hi Gabby,” Chuck says. 

“Sup,” says Max.

Max and Chuck are not so secretly in love with me, but Chuck is ugly, covered in pimples and pimple scars, with frizzy dishwater blond hair and a fat neck, and Max has repeated the tenth grade so many times, I have no idea how old he is. I thank God I didn’t cave and kiss either of them, though I could have many times. 

The strum of a guitar reverbs in waves out to us. 

“Sounds like they’re starting soon,” I say.

“So?” says Cheyenne. 

“You can sit, if you want,” Tommy says, pulling his arm out from behind Cheyenne. He pats the hood. I smile at him before I can stop myself, and his mouth curls up too. Cheyenne is too busy inspecting her nail beds to notice.

I try to be lighter, as light as I can be, as I climb on Tommy’s car. Once I leaned on my Dad’s Pontiac Firebird and he told me I’d dent it with my fat ass. On one hand, it was mean and gave me a bit of a complex, but on the other hand it motivated me, and Cheyenne showed me how to make myself throw up with a toothbrush so my fingers wouldn’t get all pukey and  I could get it over with in one go because the toothbrush was much longer than my finger. I feel like it’s paid off because Tommy isn’t worried about me denting his hood. I sit directly in front of him so he’ll have to look at the back of my head. Maybe he’ll smell my Pantene if a breeze comes. 

Skinny boys from the next town over are skating outside the Pit Stop, ollieing onto the wheelchair ramp. A tall girl I’ve never seen before walks with Len Simkowski—a boy from my English class—towards the cumster. Len’s always quiet in class and when he’s called on he second guesses himself, like he’s not sure what he really thinks, but now, holding hands with this girl, leading her to the cumster, there’s a sort of glow to him. He isn’t so bad looking when he stands up straight. The girl’s hair is brown and oily and hangs limp under a Pirates cap. But what really stands out are her legs—long and pale and mottled with little purple bruises. Around her ankle is a neon orange and yellow braided friendship bracelet. She looks a little like a girl I used to know from Sunday school. 

Cheyenne pokes me and when I turn, she’s holding a full bottle of Peach Schnapps. 

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Don’t be chicken shit,” says Cheyenne. 

Being chicken shit is one of the worst things in Cheyenne’s book. It’s worse than being a thief or a narc, but not worse than being a liar. She hates liars most of all, which is why I know that if she finds out about Tommy and me, she’ll definitely quit being my friend and possibly turn the whole school against me. I saw her do it to Sara Brisbane and all Sara did was rat out Cheyenne for selling eighths of oregano to some seventh graders.

For as long as I can help it, I want to stay on her good side, so I take a long pull from the bottle. I don’t like the taste of Schnapps, but it’s what Cheyenne drinks. Tommy is sipping on a Yuengling. I consider asking him for one but worry about what Cheyenne would think. 

Max digs in the cooler for a beer, tries to pop off the cap with his teeth, and cuts his lip. 

“Fuck,” he yells. 

“Dude,” Tommy says, unhooking the carabiner from his belt loop, keys jangling, black rabbit’s foot hanging down. He separates the bottle opener and hands it to Max. The handle is wooden with a tiny picture of a naked blonde with big dumb eyes. It looks like an older, fatter Cheyenne, and suddenly I can see their whole future together: the shotgun wedding at the courthouse; the ugly split level they’d inherit from Cheyenne’s grandma; the ruddy-cheeked blond babies, sticky with jam, crawling on every surface; Tommy in the recliner after a long day at the plastics plant, Cheyenne rubbing his feet as he strums a guitar. 

Max pops off the top and takes a sip, his lip still bleeding. “Fuck,” he says again, and places his beer bottle on the ground, hand on his mouth. 

I spring from the car, untie the bandana from my neck, and dig into the cooler. I can feel Tommy looking at me, watching how I think on my feet, how capable I am, and for the first time, I think maybe the future will be different. Maybe I’ll be the one rubbing his feet at the end of a long day. I drop a few ice cubes in the center of the bandana and wrap it up into a makeshift ice pack, and hand it to Max.

“Here, this’ll help.”

His fingers graze mine as he takes the pack. “Thanks,” he says. He walks away toward the Pit Stop, slump-shouldered, forgetting his beer on the ground. I pick it up and take a big gulp, crawl back onto the hood and sit with my back to Cheyenne and Tommy again. Cheyenne shakes me by the shoulders.

“You should make out with Max!” she squeals. 

I swivel around and tell her to shut up. She grins with all her teeth. I can’t fathom how so many teeth fit in that small, mousy mouth. 

“Seriously! He’s kinda cute in his own way, don’t you think?”

“She’s not interested,” Tommy says, lighting another cigarette. “Why can’t you ever mind your business?”

“Sheesh! I just want Gabby to be happy. I just want my best friend to find a good guy like I did. Didn’t realize that was a criminal offense!”

“There you go again with the dramatics,” he says.

It’s not the first time that they’ve fought in front of me, but it is the first time they’ve fought about me. It’s flattering that Tommy’s come to my defense. I want to tell Cheyenne I’m not some charity case, that I can do better than Max. That, in fact, I’ve done better, her boyfriend-better. And I’m about to just spill it, lay it out for her, see who’s smiling then, when a white van screeches up, tailpipe dragging on the ground, black smoke sputtering out. A wanna-be Alice Cooper roadie hops out and starts unloading equipment.

“Is that a touring band?” I say.

“Who cares?” says Cheyenne. 

I don’t know when we stopped caring about the bands. Last summer Cheyenne and I 

were here every weekend. We never missed an opener. We even got Dix to let us run the lights sometimes and we’d stay up in the projection booth all night, casting shadows of the musicians on the movie screen, lime green and fuchsia lines crisscrossing on the stage like that scene in Mission Impossible with the lasers. We didn’t even drink back then.  

Tommy’s Yuengling can make a tinny sound when it drops to the ground.

“Bat Shit,” he says.

I turn around. “Huh?” 

“The band, Bat Shit. They’re from Akron.”

I laugh. “I’m surprised Dix booked them with the swear in their name.”

He grins. “On the flyer, there’s an asterisk in the “shit” where the ‘i’ is supposed to be.”

Moments like this, I am sure Tommy and I are meant to be. You think he’d be resentful of the people who still get to play, but he isn’t. He roots for them. 

In the morning, Cheyenne and I wake up groggy.

“Big Maaaaaac,” Cheyenne whines. 

“I’m not going alone,” I say. “You have to come with.”

Sometimes, because I’m a chump, I walk alone to the McDonald’s across town and bring back our fries and burgers. Granted, Cheyenne always pays for my meal, but I still end up feeling used. It’s a habit I’m trying to break out of because like my grandma says, you give an inch and they’ll take a mile. The “they” she’s referring to is my parents, but I think it applies to Cheyenne too. 

I pull on my clothes from yesterday: cut-offs and a thrifted blue soccer jersey. I feel naked without my bandana and wish I’d brought a spare. Cheyenne surprises me by staying in her big sleeping shirt and sliding into her Vans. Usually, she takes forever to get ready. 

She pushes her heart-shaped sunglasses down over her eyes with a flick and says, “Let’s motor.”

We pass the neighboring split levels on Cheyenne’s block, all white or beige or brown, skin-colored, like the tubes of concealer in the makeup aisle at CVS. Are you a pearly, a toffee, or a bronze? We pass the Dairy Queen, Motel 6, the library, the methadone clinic, the Dominos, and finally, the Dominos sign-guy.

“I could climb him like a horse,” Cheyenne says, but I don’t get what she sees in him. He has a weak chin. He’s wearing khaki shorts. Cheyenne could have anyone and besides she already has Tommy. 

We watch as the sign guy spins the cardboard arrow in front of him, tosses it spiraling into the air, then catches it on his fingertips and keeps twirling it around like a basketball. 

“See how he handles that sign? Imagine what he could do.” 

When she talks like this, I don’t feel bad about kissing Tommy. She deserves it, taking him for granted like that. The sign guy winks at Cheyenne, and she smiles back, and I wonder if she would dump Tommy for him and if Tommy would come crying to me and realize he loves me too, and we could go on double dates to the skating rink: me, Tommy, Cheyenne, the Dominos sign guy, all of us couples skating to “Thriller.” 

“You should go for it,” I say.

“Nah, I could never do that to Tommy. What kind of person would I be, doing something like that?” 

She strides ahead of me, and I’m glad because I can feel my face getting hot, cheeks burning red. What kind of person am I to do something like that? The question is so pointed, like she planned it. It’s not that I don’t feel bad about going behind her back; I know it was wrong. But I can’t feel too bad because I’ve replayed it over and over, like clicking through a Disney Viewmaster, each moment shuttering by on glorious, full-color slides, and I can see, with perfect clarity, that Tommy kissed me first. 

With the McDonald’s still twenty minutes away, we stop at the Sunoco. I buy a pint of Turner’s iced tea and a yellow Bic for me, and because of my guilt, a nail file, rolling papers, and watermelon Nerd’s Rope for Cheyenne. We sit under an oak tree in the parking lot and Cheyenne rolls a joint with the weed her brother left behind. She’s careful to pick around all of the seeds. The weed is old and dry, but Cheyenne doesn’t know where to get better stuff. Tommy flat-out refuses to hook her up with his contact because he thinks she’s too young. I light the joint for Cheyenne and we take long drags so I won’t have to keep lighting it for her. I’ve never actually gotten high, which probably means I’m doing it wrong. 

That’s when the girl from the show, the one who made it with Len, walks up and staples a flier to a telephone pole.

“Hey,” I yell, but she doesn’t hear me. We walk over to her. “Weren’t you at the show last night?” 

“Show?” she says, cigarette hanging out of her mouth.

We step down into the street to look at the flier. “Imogen Dent – Professional Medium/Psychic/Grief Counselor”

“Is that you?” I ask.

“My aunt. I’m stuck with her this summer because of my attitude.”

She has a southern accent. She sounds like Daisy Duke. 

“Is she for real?” asks Cheyenne. She offers up the joint and the girl trades her the cigarette. 

The girl takes a long drag from the joint. “Fuck if I know.”

“Does she have some kind of certification?” I point to where it says ‘professional’.

The girl laughs. “I told her to put that. Before it said REAL Medium, in all caps. I think you only write REAL when you’re lying, you know? Like ‘Real Gold’ or ‘Real Arrowheads’. Or like ‘Fresh Seafood’.” She walks to the next pole. We follow. 

“Could be fun,” Cheyenne says.

“Even if she’s a phony, there’s Camels in the freezer.” The girl turns and walks backwards up the hill, in the middle of the street. “And they say I won’t make anything of myself. Look at me, I’m a fuckin’ entrepreneur!”

“I’m gonna ask the medium about Tommy,” Cheyenne says when the girl is out of earshot. She pulls her hair to the side and starts braiding it dazedly. “He’s been acting weird the last few weeks.”

I stop in the street. “Weird how?”

She snaps a hair tie around her braid and looks at me. “Like he’s hiding something.”

I’ve watched enough Jerry Springer to know that nine times out of ten you can spot a liar by their body language: eyes shift downwards, hands fidget with clothes, feet tap. So I make sure to stand perfectly still and keep my eyes on hers when I tell her she’s crazy, Tommy loves her. 

The medium’s house is a Victorian with purple siding and green trim. There’s a gnarly mess of brush on one side and the town water tower on the other. The house is noticeably lopsided, the left side of the porch dipping into the lawn. A neon hand is lit up in the bay window, the words “palm reader” in neon loopy script below it. A dog yips from inside. 

I follow Cheyenne up the sunken steps.

“Are we sure about this? What if she’s crazy?” I say. 

“If she’s a quack, we’ll leave,” Cheyenne says. 

What I’m really worried about is the off-chance she’s not a quack, that she’ll know what I’ve done on sight. My mom called a medium once when she couldn’t find her keys and the medium told her to look in the front door, and there they were. It seemed an obvious enough answer to me, but it was the medium’s first guess. She could have told mom to look in her coat pocket or purse, but maybe it was just a matter of body language again. Maybe the medium could tell how frantic and strung-out my mom was just by her voice. 

Cheyenne rings the bell. The door swings open and there is the girl, sucking on an orange Otter Pop, a shaggy brown dachshund yipping at her feet. 

We follow her down a dark and cluttered hallway, milk crates overflowing with newsprint on the floor. The walls are this ugly periwinkle color, covered in picture frames. We pass by what must be the living room, painted blood red with a zebra print rug on the floor.

The girl leads us to the kitchen, where a fat woman in grey sweatpants is spreading peanut butter on Ritz crackers. 

“Auntie,” the girl sings, “You’ve got some customers.”

“I’ll be right with you girls, just have a seat in the living room.” She licks peanut butter off one thumb and gestures with her other hand to go back the way we came. 

The living room is less depressing than the rest of the house. There are prisms hanging in the bay windows and rainbow spots dance on the floor and the walls, on us. We sit on a blue velvet loveseat. The dachshund sits quietly at our feet. He’s a weird little dog. He stares up at me. My biology teacher, Ms. Nugent, told us dogs couldn’t look up, something about their necks not being pliable enough. She also showed us a PBS documentary on incest in the Amish community, about how genetic disorders abound because of their shallow gene pool. Cheyenne grabs a Tarot card off the coffee table, and another and another, and fans herself like a southern debutante. 

“What could a woman like that possibly know about us?” I say.

Cheyenne giggles. “Relax. It’ll be fun.”

I wonder how we became friends. Cheyenne doesn’t have a skeptical bone in her body, I swear, but I don’t trust anyone. It’s like going to a hair salon, and the person who’s going to cut your hair has a mullet. How could someone with hair like that know what’s good for you? What could this fat, sad woman possibly know about my future, about the things I’m capable of?

The woman introduces herself as Marianne. Her t-shirt says, I walked the hot coals at Salamanca in hot pink lettering.

“I thought your name was Imogen,” I say.

“I drew the Fool today. Imogen is my old life. I’m fazing her out starting now. Please put those down, dear,” she nods at the cards in Cheyenne’s hands. Cheyenne fans them out on the coffee table like playing cards. Marianne neatens them into a stack and puts them in a drawer.

“Now tell me a little about yourselves.”

“Isn’t that your job?” I say. Cheyenne’s knee knocks against mine.

“It helps to have a little bit of information about you to start. How old are you?”

“Fourteen,” we say. 

“Young. Young and pretty,” she says cryptically. “And have you always lived here?”

“I moved here last year,” Cheyenne says, “from Grove City. Gabby’s been here forever.”

“Ah, I can see it in your auras. Yours is so red, like the color of these walls. You adapt easily to change. A free-spirit. 

“You, on the other hand,” she says, pointing to me, “like routine, known quantities.”

“You can say that again. Gabby won’t even ride roller coasters.”

“People die on them all the time,” I snap.

“Once a year, tops!”

“Both of you have your strong points. No need to squabble.” The dog jumps onto Marianne’s lap and she pets it with fat silver-ringed fingers. 

“What color is my aura?” I ask.

“Green. A deep sort of green, like being lost in a forest.”

I think of Tommy, pine needles snapping under our feet. 

“Now,” Marianne shuts her eyes and raises her hands like kids do at Christian rock concerts, “without saying it out loud, think of your macro want.”

“Huh?” I say. 

Her eyes blink open. “What you want most in the world.”

Tommy is my first thought, but then I feel silly. He’s probably not what I want most in the world. I want to be done with high school and move away. I want to eat whatever I want and not gain weight. I want to have a house someday, and a husband, one who has a really good job so I won’t have to work. Most of the things I want are in the future. Just last week the guidance counselor asked me where I see myself in five years and I know she wanted me to say majoring in business at college and living in a sorority house, so that’s what I said. But really what I wanted to say was sunning myself in the backyard, a fat stack of magazines and ice cold margarita at my side, not a single care in the world. I’ve always wanted to try a margarita. My mom used to drink them. 

Marianne breaks in then and says, “I’m sensing that one of you has found love in the wrong place. You’re wasting your time.”

“Oh no!” says Cheyenne.

“The name of the fellow starts with a B.”

“B B B,” Cheyenne repeats pensively.

“No, wait, D. It begins with D.”

“Could it be ‘T’?” Cheyenne says.

“Yes. T. That’s it.”

Cheyenne gasps and grabs my hand. “Tommy!”

 I can’t believe how gullible she is, how incapable of seeing what’s right in front of her. She’s like one of those girls who doesn’t realize she’s pregnant until she has her baby on the toilet. 

Cheyenne leans forward, still gripping my hand. “I’m wasting my time with Tommy?”

“No,” says Marianne. Then she points at me. “She is.” 

Cheyenne drops my hand. 

“What’s she talking about?” 

How could she possibly know? I rub my palms on my shorts, catch myself fidgeting and stop. Maybe she saw it in my body language. Maybe I have “boyfriend stealer” written all over me. If I can just sit still, keep my chin up, if I can say that I have no idea what she’s talking about without my voice cracking, I can walk out of here with Cheyenne. I can forget about Tommy and she’ll never know. 

“Gabby?”

But I can’t look at her. I stare instead at the dark stain on the carpet like I put it there. The words are thick in my mouth, hard to push out; I have to stop every few words. “Tommy and I kissed. A couple of weeks ago. When you were at cheerleading.”

I can feel Cheyenne’s eyes on me, but I can’t look up. I wait for her to cry or yell or smack me. To get up and walk out. But she doesn’t do any of these things.

“I know,” she says calmly. “Tommy told me right after it happened. I’ve been waiting for you to admit it.”

I glance up and she looks the way you do when you know you’ve won, but don’t want to gloat. A glimmer in her eye, a slight curl to her lips.  

“Aren’t you mad at me?”

“I was. But then Tommy explained how bad he felt for you. It’s so obvious you like him. I know it didn’t mean anything.”

Heat blooms on my face, boiling under my skin. It feels like the time I was called on in math class and when I went to the board, everyone laughed because I’d gotten my period and was bleeding through my shorts. But it feels worse than that. It feels worse than when my Dad said that thing about my weight, worse than when my grandma pointed out that I had a mustache. Worse because I thought I had a secret.

“Really, Gabs, it’s water over the bridge,” she says.

But I barely hear her because I am off and running, out of Marianne’s house, down the hill, past the telephone poles with Marianne’s face on them, past the Sunoco, the Dominos and clinic, and as I run faster than my typical 12-minute-gym-class-mile, I think about the kiss, how Tommy took my hand and led me back into the pines, how his hands felt on my neck on my hips, on every curve. How warm the summer rain felt because it actually started raining, no joke, and we didn’t stop, we kept on kissing, his body pressed against every soft part of me, the crowd inside cheering us on, screaming for an encore. I think about how my favorite band was playing my favorite song and it felt like a made-for-T.V. movie of my life, like someone was directing it, saving the best song for last. I think about how Cheyenne is wrong. She has to be because a kiss that good couldn’t mean nothing, and if it does, I want more of it. 

About the author

Taylor Grieshober's debut short story collection Off Days was published in 2019 (Low Ghost Press). Her recent work has appeared in Joyland and the Masters Review, where she was a third-place finalist for the Winter Short Story Award. She lives in Pittsburgh where she is at work on a novel and her second story collection. You can find more about Taylor and her work here.