Rachel Cohn - Gingerbread

Gingerbread

Rachel Cohn

One

My so-called parents hate my boyfriend, Shrimp. I'm not sure they even believe he is my boyfriend. They take one look at his five-foot-five, surfer-shirt-wearin', baggy-jeans-slouchin', Pop Tart-eatin', spiked-hair-head self and you can just see confusion firebombs exploding in their heads, like they are thinking, Oh no, Cyd Charisse, that young man is not your homes.

Dig this: He is.

At least Shrimp always remembers to call my mother "Mrs." instead of just grunting in her direction, like most guys my age do. And no parent could deny that hanging out with Shrimp is an improvement over Justin, my ex, from my old prep school. Justin got me into trouble, big time. I'm so over the Justin stage.

Not like Sid and Nancy care much. I have done my parents the favor of becoming more or less invisible.

Sid, my father, calls me a "recovering hellion." Sid's actually my stepfather. You could say I hardly know my real father. I met him at an airport once when I was five. He was tall and skinny and had ink black hair, like me. We ate lunch in a smoky pub at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. I did not like my hamburger so my real dad opened his briefcase and offered me a piece of homemade gingerbread he had wrapped in tinfoil.

He bought me a brown rag doll at the airport gift shop.

The cashier had made the doll herself. She said she had kept the doll hidden under her cash register waiting for just the right little girl. My real dad gave the cashier a one-hundred-dollar bill and told her to keep the change. I named my dolly Gingerbread.

Nancy and I were on our way to San Francisco to become Sid's family. My real dad was on his way back to New York, to his real wife and family. They don't know about me.

I'm fairly sure that my real dad's wife would not mind that I make scissors cuts on my arms and then pick the scabs. His real wife probably makes fresh gingerbread every day and writes Things To Do lists and does her own grocery shopping instead of having a housekeeper and a driver do everything for her, like Nancy does.

Nancy only met Justin once, at the expulsion hearing. The headmaster told her Justin and I were caught fooling around in a room loaded with Jack Daniels and prescription bottles. In flagrante delicto were the words the headmaster used. I failed Latin.

Nancy said Justin was from a "wonderful Connecticut family" and how could I shame her and Sid like that. It was Justin who was selling the ecstasy out of his dorm room, not me. It was Justin who said he pulled out in time. Sid and Nancy never knew about that part.

Nancy came into my room one night after I returned home to San Francisco. Sid and my younger half-sibs were at Father's Night at their French immersion school. "I hope your friends use condoms," Nancy said, which was funny because she knows Shrimp is my only friend. She threw a box of Trojans onto the lace-trimmed four-poster bed that

I hate. Shrimp is a safety boy, he takes care of those things. If it had been Shrimp back in boarding school, he would have come with me to the clinic.

"Can I have a futon on the floor instead of this stupid princess bed?" I said. The thought of my mother even knowing about contraception, much less doling it out, was beyond comprehension, much less discussion.

Nancy sighed. Sighing is what she does instead of eating. "I paid ten thousand dollars to redecorate this room while you were at boarding school. No, you may not, Cyd Charisse."

Everybody in my family calls me by my first and middle name since my dad's name is pronounced the same as my first name. When she was twenty years old and pregnant with me, Nancy thought she would eventually marry my real dad. She named me after this dancer-actress from like a million years ago who starred in this movie that Nancy and real-dad saw on their first date, before she found out he had a whole other life. The real Cyd Charisse is like this incredibly beautiful sex goddess. I am okay looking. I could never be superhuman sexy like the real Cyd Charisse. I mean there is only room for so much grace and beauty in one person named Cyd Charisse, not two.

Nancy fished a pack of Butter Rum LifeSavers out of her designer jacket and held them out to me. "Want a piece of my dinner?"

Two

I might not have fallen for Shrimp if it hadn't been for Sugar Pie.

He was walking by Sugar Pie's room at the nursing home, singing this song, something about take the A train somewhere. From the pictures by Sugar Pie's bed, you could tell Shrimp might be about the same height as her long-dead twin sister, who also had short brown hair and a way of slouching. But Sugar Pie can't see so well, so I guess it was the song that made her perk up.

"Honey, is that you?" Sugar Pie called out. Sugar Pie cannot see for squat, but she's got ears stretching all the way from San Francisco back to her home state of Mississippi. She was so distracted by Shrimp's song that she laid her cards on the food tray so I could see that in the next hand she would have gin if I gave up my king of hearts, as I was about to do.

"Honey Pie?" Sugar Pie called out. Little tears snaked through the crevices of her wrinkled face.

Honey Pie was supposed to be the maid of honor at Sugar Pie's wedding to a serviceman Sugar Pie had met in Biloxi, back during World War II. But Honey Pie and the groom ran off together and eloped, and two days later, they were dead. Drove right over a cliff in Nevada when the parking brake disengaged while they were in the backseat getting wild under the shooting stars.

Sugar Pie doesn't hold grudges. She never found

another husband, but she did have a dog, a chocolate Lab she called "Honey," who was her best friend. Honey the dog died right before Sugar Pie came to live in the nursing home. That's when I became her family. At first, I only came because community service was part of the judge's orders after my little shoplifting problem, but now I come because I love Sugar.

Shrimp stood at the door to Sugar Pie's room. "Pie? Did someone say pie?" He pulled a Hostess lemon pie out of his backpack and offered it to Sugar. Sugar Pie shook her head, spraying faint tears onto my arm. I have never known Sugar Pie to turn down a sweet. I gave her my king of hearts even though as a rule I never let anyone at the home win at cards just because they are old.

Shrimp checked me out and said, "Hey, you go to my school." He had this wicked deep, gravelly voice, which you would not expect from someone so short and scrawny, and he had short brown hair with a patch of spiked platinum blond at the front towering over his forehead. If I had been a cartoon character, you would have seen the letters L-U-S-T pop into my eyes like the ding-ding-ding display on a Las Vegas slot machine.

Since being kicked out of the fancy boarding school in New England, I'd been attending an "alternative" high school for the arts in San Francisco. The school is really just a dumping ground for rich parents' kids who aren't total social misfits but who also have no interest in being trend victim poster children, but it's also a haven for scholarship students with actual talent, like Shrimp.

Sugar eyed Shrimp's spiked hair and deep blue eyes. "Cyd Charisse, there's your star," Sugar Pie said. She was a

psychic and tarot-card reader with her own offices before she retired.

The Honey Pie blues had made Sugar Pie sleepy. She reached for a roll of quarters tucked under her mattress. "You two go have coffee on me," she said. We didn't take her money, but we took her suggestion.

Three half-caff mochiatos later, Shrimp was my main man. He was the first and only friend my age I made since returning home from New England.

He told me his nursing home community service was probation for making a midnight excursion to an expensive yuppie fitness club in the Marina and graffiti-painting a mural on the club's outside brick wall that pictured a sweaty pig with dollar bill signs for eyes. When he asked how I landed before a judge, I told him about my former habit of shoplifting from surgical supply stores.