Angie Rubio shrank at the snickering of classmates, cringed at the embarrassed looks on her behalf. She tucked the newspaper clipping inside her notebook and pressed it closed on the article that told about Sam Cooke and his band being arrested.
She hoped she would see Max Delgado at recess. If he happened to speak to her again, even if it was only about dodge ball, she would tell him about Sam Cooke. Maybe her eyes would well with indignation. Maybe Max would offer a sleeve.
But at recess, Judy Wiekamp shouted for all the girls in Mrs. O’Farrell’s fifth-grade class to gather around her. Though Angie fit the category of girls, she was still uncertain whether Judy meant to include her.
Judy handed round little white envelopes. But not to everyone. A few of the invitations had two names on them. Judy explained to the throng of girls around her that the person whose name came first was the primary invitee and the person whose name came second was invited because she was friends with the primary invitee. “It would’ve been rude to exclude you,” Judy told the second-named, who in keeping with their status formed a second ring of girls around Judy. Angie stepped closer to Sylvia, who turned and smiled at her from the inner circle. “Here,” she said, handing Angie the envelope, “you can hold it until recess is over.”
Angie’s mother was skeptical when Angie announced she was invited to a slumber party, and when Angie could not produce an invitation as proof, Mrs. Rubio dismissed the matter altogether.
“But I am invited,” Angie wailed. “Aren’t I, Eva?” Angie had already explained the circumstances of the shared invitation to her older sister.
Eva looked up from her homework. “It’s true. Angie’s invited,” she said, making quotation marks with her fingers. Then she elaborated, “Only the popular girls got an invitation to take home. Like Sylvia Rico.”
“Popularity isn’t everything,” their mother said. She looked at Angie and then in the direction of the Rico house next door. “Well, if Sylvia’s going –” She left the room, her resignation trailing behind her.
Angie knew her mother wanted her to be more like Sylvia. In fact, Angie was sure her mother wanted her to be Sylvia, who was never awkward but shy in the way that charmed rather than aggravated people. She turned to Eva and repeated their mother’s words, maybe for assurance, more likely for consolation, “Popularity isn’t everything.”
Eva scoffed. “That’s what unpopular people say. And we,” she said, “are not a popular family. FACT OF LIFE.”
Eva said fact of life a lot, ever since she got her period. It was an irksome phrase and Angie often hid the box of Kotex to get back at her.
Junior high had hardened Eva. It was in P.E. class that the mortifications of adolescence were first laid bare to her. She had disclosed to Angie the horrors of changing her clothes side by side with other girls, of the gym monitors imposing demerits for showering without soaping, and the cruelly democratic policy of one girl, one towel. But what sent Eva to the precipice of despair and reckless sarcasm was one word in eighth-grade science – genetics. It wasn’t as if she’d never heard the word before. It was just that only now had she really understood its implications. “It determines our lives,” she said. “Hair color, eye color, skin color, bra size. Popularity.”
Eva paused for breath and effect. “Fact of life: We’re doomed.”
That was Eva. But Eva had never been to a slumber party. Angie decided that this was where Eva’s path and her own would differ.
In Judy Wiekamp’s rumpus room, they ate frozen pizza, potato chips with onion dip from a plastic tub, and snickerdoodles. They burped indecently from root beer. They did each other’s hair with Dippity-Doo and sprayed Aqua Net until they were faint from fumes. They danced to the Dave Clark Five and lip-synched to Gerry and the Pacemakers. They spoke to each other in English accents as they passed around the latest issue of Tiger Beat. Angie was always one step behind, miming the last note to “Ferry Cross the Mersey” when everyone else had begun to squeal over the pin-up of Bobby Sherman. Then someone put Sam Cooke’s “Another Saturday Night” on the record player and Angie’s ears burned at the recollection of her current events failure. Earlier that week, she had announced that her current event to share was about Sam Cooke. But Mrs. Williams had cut her off, scolding that news about celebrities and singers did not qualify as news, so Angie never got to tell the class about how he had a reservation at a hotel in Shreveport, Louisiana, how when he showed up the white-only hotel refused to let him stay there, how he refused to leave, how he got thrown in jail.
While the other girls sang “Another Saturday Night” at the top of their lungs, Angie only joined in at the end of the chorus, the part about “ain’t got nobody” and being “in an awful way.”
“Pillow talk!” Judy shouted.
The girls lay in a circle on their sleeping bags, propped on their elbows, and told scary stories and then gossiped about their classmates. One girl, who apparently had forgotten that Angie was present at the party, exclaimed, “Did you see what Angie Rubio was wearing to school the other day?” For a minute Angie wondered if there could possibly be another Angie Rubio. But no, there was only her. As she tried to recall what unforgivable thing she might have been wearing, Judy addressed her directly.
“Angie,” she said, as if she’d just discovered her presence, “too bad about your current event.”
“Yeah, too bad,” Sylvia said more gently.
“At least now you know the rules,” Judy said in her PTA-president’s-daughter voice.
While Angie, the part-time-cafeteria-worker’s daughter, was trying to decide just how grateful she should be for Judy’s assurance, the conversation turned to fashion and Jackie Kennedy’s elegance, and Angie, eager to contribute to the discussion, announced, “My mother framed the LIFE magazine photos of Jackie and JFK.”
But the topic had changed yet again. To boys. Judy first had everyone swear that anything said that night in that room (her rumpus room) would remain a secret. Then she revealed that she had a semi-crush on Max Delgado. Everyone gasped and gushed an opinion ─ that he looked like a sixth-grader, that his voice was already starting to change, that he hardly ever spoke to girls. That even though he had greasy hair, it made him dangerous-looking in a good way.
This time Angie knew better than to volunteer that Max had spoken to her out of the blue at recess the other day.
“Of course, I would never kiss him,” Judy said.
No one questioned this policy as there seemed to be a universal understanding of its logic, though it completely escaped Angie.
“I just need to walk on the wild side for a bit,” Judy said, and the other girls nodded their agreement.
The conversation seemed to inspire the next slumber party activity. Strip poker.
But after the cards were dealt they discovered that none of them knew how to play poker. So Judy ordered everyone to write down her name on a piece of paper. When pen and paper were passed to Angie, she hesitated, wondering what kind of disease she could claim that would exempt her from the game.
“What’s the matter? Judy asked. “Something wrong with you?”
“No,” Angie replied quickly, wondering why she seemed to regularly invite such a question.
The pen was slippery in Angie’s hand and her penmanship, normally sure and neat, wiggled out of the lines and it worried her to see her name so slouchy and untidy. She folded the paper tightly, her fingers, still greasy from chips and cookies, leaving stains along the crease. Judy collected the folded slips of paper in her cupped hands and then dropped them into the empty potato chip bowl.
The game was simple. Judy would draw a name and that girl would have to lose an item of clothing. There was nervous giggling all around except from Angie who feared any sound of protest that might escape from her constricted windpipe. Angie was grateful for one thing. Earlier, when they had all changed into their nightclothes, modestly taking turns behind a screen, Angie was made acutely aware that she was the only one not wearing a frilly night gown. For once, she was happy for her departure from the norm. At least her pajama top and bottom gave her a two-to-one edge in pieces of clothing.
Judy swirled the names with her hand, making a show of it, raking the contents with her fingers, scooping a handful of names, letting them drift back down into the bowl, and increasing the drama of it all by humming the death march. At one point Judy stopped swirling the names and raised her hand to tuck a strand of her Aqua Net stiffened hair behind her ear and Angie caught a glimpse of a slip of paper stuck to the corner of her palm, saw it slide down the folds of Judy’s rayon nightgown into the curly clumps of the shag carpet. From where she sat, even nearsighted Angie could see the telltale smudge that marked her name.
Surely someone saw it. Angie looked around her. Some of the girls had their eyes closed and their fingers crossed. But even those whose eyes were open seemed not to have noticed the stray slip of paper. Surely, she should say something. But then Judy leaned forward and buried the paper under her knee as she drew the first name and Angie felt a giddy relief at the knowledge that it wasn’t hers.
She soon felt justified in her deceit. As names were drawn and clothing was gradually discarded, Angie was horrified to learn that under their night gowns, everyone was wearing a bra. Even Sylvia – her sometimes best friend. Before long, a pile of nightgowns and a tangle of pink appliquéd training bras filled the middle of their circle, and the girls had wrapped themselves in blankets or burrowed like naked moles into their sleeping bags, all while something was happening ─ or not happening. Angie alone, though braless, remained fully clothed, sitting atop her sleeping bag, a creeping conspicuousness overtaking her.
“Why isn’t Angie’s name coming up?” someone asked from the depths of a quilt pulled to her chin.
Judy, suddenly suspicious, reached for the potato chip bowl and emptied the names onto the floor. Clutching a sheet around herself with one hand, she picked through each name with the other, taking roll call, each girl huffing a righteous “here.” When Judy had called all the names from the bowl, only Angie had not responded. There was silence and accusing stares, and Judy’s eyes narrowed as she searched for an explanation. Angie’s eyes went to the floor, searching for her name, but it had become lost amid all the strewn clothes, which Judy was now flinging about with her one free arm. “Aha,” she shouted, holding up the plastic dish of onion dip as if it were evidence in a crime. A little slip of paper, Angie’s slip of paper, clung to the side of the onion dip.
“You were never even in the game,” Judy said. The other girls in their covered-up nakedness glared at Angie, who without having shed a single piece of clothing, felt completely exposed.
Later when the lights were out and the last whispering and giggling around her had died and been replaced by soft breathing and snores, Angie remembered Eva’s voice of doom, Judy humming the death march, Sam Cooke singing “I ain’t got nobody.”
The clock struck one. She was the only one wide awake.