Part 2: Victoria
Victoria spent that whole Friday in a state of nervous excitement. Her first concert. Her first fucking concert. A chance to finally be a real person, a real teenager, to walk around with Hannah and meet guys - cool guys, real guys, not these obnoxious little kids who sat next to her in Social Studies and made stupid, homophobic jokes when the teacher said “manifest destiny.”
Hannah had taught her what “homophobic” meant, because she had a gay cousin who was, like, twenty-three and lived in New York City. Victoria hadn’t met him yet, but she and Hannah had plans to go down there for a weekend as soon as Hannah got her license (she was six months older, would be fifteen in September), and Charlie had already said it was cool for them to crash with him, and he would show them around, bring them to all the cool places. And as soon as they graduated, they were going to move to the city and get an awesome apartment in Manhattan together (Hannah said Manhattan was the coolest part of New York) and Hannah was going to be an artist or a graphic designer or something and Victoria would go to college.
my parents will kill me if i don’t go to college lol, she had told Hannah.
who cares? was Hannah’s reply. fuck what they think.
But later she had softened, said it might be cool to have a roommate who was in college, as long as she went somewhere cool like NYU or Juliard.
These plans for the future had gotten Victoria through many boring days at school, or at home with her parents, but this Tuesday she didn’t need them. Our Beautiful Misery was enough. The greatest band in the world. With the greatest lead singer in the world. Xander Cross. Even his name was awesome. (Hannah had pointed out how the X in his name even looked like a cross.) And his perfectly messy black hair and dark eyeliner and the way he near-whispered words like “my love” and how much he appreciated and loved his fans. Apparently, after every show, he picked a couple of random fans to come backstage and just hang out with the band for the night. Eat Cheese-Itz (Xander’s favorite snack) and watch Spongebob Squarepants (his favorite TV show.) That would be her and Hannah. She knew it. Hannah would make it happen somehow.
Social Studies ended, then it was Math (spent imagining conversations they could have with Xander Cross, what she would say if he asked what her favorite Our Beautiful Misery song was), then Phys Ed (the second day of a voleyball unit - practicing the “bump pass” in partners), then her last class of the day and her only class with Hannah - English. Taught by Mr. Brown, a youngish guy with a beard who was pretty lax about rules and assignments, especially towards the end of the day. Today he talked for a couple minutes about something that wasn’t OBM, then told them to read independently. Victoria took her beat-up copy of whatever novel they were supposed to be reading, opened it to a random page in the middle, and held it in front of her as a prop while she talked to Hannah.
“What are we wearing?” was her first question.
“Well . . .” Hannah said slowly, deliberately. “I’m wearing the same pair of jeans that I wore last time, cause obviously they’re good luck, and then probably either your light gray shirt with three buttons on the top or something plaid - I don’t know yet, I’ll decide when we get to your house - oh, you don’t care, right? And, like, obviously my Converse, the black ones - I don’t know what you’re wearing yet, what are you thinking?”
“Well . . .” Victoria started, trying to mimick Hannah’s speech but hers sounded nervous rather than deliberate. “I was kinda thinking maybe I should wear my OBM shirt.”
Hannah made no effort to hide her laugh. A kid a few desks away shot a glare at her through his glasses; Mr. Jones barely glanced up from his own book.
“Ohmygod NO!” she exclaimed. “You don’t wear an OBM shirt to an OBM concert. You’d look like a total poser. And you are not a total poser. What the fuck are you looking at, Columbine?” she said to the kid with glasses, who returned to his book without comment.
“But then, like . . . what if I wanted to get Xander to sign the shirt?”
“Victoria. You can’t. I mean, you can get a shirt there - like, that’s obviously what I’m gonna do, and then we can wear them to school on Monday! But you don’t show up wearing one. Plus, like. Your OBM shirt is black. Ohmygod. I can’t believe you were almost gonna wear that. I’m so glad you said something to me now. Like, imagine if we were actually getting dressed - wait, your mom is dropping us off down the street, right? I am not getting out of a fucking minivan right outside of the show.”
“Yeah, I think so,” Victoria lied. Her mom had actually purchased three tickets to the concert, not just two, and she had not yet worked up the courage to tell Hannah this. Her hope was that Hannah would be so excited by the time they got there that she wouldn’t even care that they had to walk in with Mrs. Brixton. And they would obviously ditch her as soon as they got inside.
“Good. Because like I said, I cannot fucking be seen getting out of a gray minivan.”
“I know, right?”
“And she’ll pick us up in the same place, right? Like, five minutes away at least. And you’ve got to tell her to wait til you call her, ‘cause we might end up staying and hanging out with people after. Like, if we meet anyone cool, I mean. Or like, no, you know what, tell her we can just find rides back.”
“With who?”
“There’s always someone,” Hannah said casually. She flipped to the next page in her book; Victoria did the same. “Wait, you’re not actually reading right now, are you?”
“Yeah, right,” Victoria said. “I’m just doing that to trick Brownie.” Their half-affectionate, half-mocking nickname for Mr. Brown, which Hannah sometimes used to his face.
“Like he cares,” Hannah scoffed. “This book is, like, actually kinda good, though.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. You should read it sometime. But not right now because we’ve got way more important things to worry about - like Xander-Cross-and-how-fucking-sexy-he’s-going-to-look-tonight!” She made a shrieking sound, loud enough to make Mr. Brown place his book face-down on his desk, stand up, and scan the room. “Sorry, Mr. Brown.”
“Keep it down, please, Hannah.”
“This book is just really interesting.”
“Uh-huh.” Mr. Brown played along. He remained standing but didn’t move from behind his desk. No real threat. But Hannah had apparently decided their conversation was over for now, anyway, which meant it was. Even if she tried to start it up again, it wasn’t going to happen.
Victoria wondered when the hell Hannah had had time to read any of this book. She definitely never read during class, and after school and on the weekends she was always either at Victoria’s house, online, or dealing with her psycho alcoholic mom. Unless maybe she was reading right now, and her page-flip hadn’t been a calculated move after all. That was the thing about being friends with Hannah. She would always surprise you somehow.
Victoria tried to read a couple lines of the page in front of her. Some kid named Scout who sounded like he was from the south or something. Boring.
But Scout made her think of Girl Scouts, and remember with a sharp pang of embarrassment, of mortification, that she had still been a Girl Scout when she had met Hannah. The person she had been back then, only two years ago, seemed like a total stranger. A girl who rode horses and went to summer camp and did crafts; who listened to the radio; who had a backpack with her initials stitched on it, a backpack with wheels. Someone she and Hannah would make fun of now.
But then Hannah had arrived one day, a transplant from Connecticut (“which is pretty much New York City”), the representative of all things cool. Dyed hair, eyeliner, blue eyes, the body of a fourteen-year-old, t-shirts with the names of bands on them, jeans with song lyrics and the signatures of all her Connecticut friends. Rumors of a tattoo. And somehow, by some miracle, she saw through Victoria Brixton’s little-kid appearance, saw her true potential, and was willing to take her under her wing, into her gravitational field. She had introduced her to Beautiful Misery and all the other good music, taught her how to do makeup. Had saved her.
She only hoped that other Victoria Brixton - the one from Before - was dead to Hannah, as well. The fear that kept her up at night was that Hannah still looked at her and saw a twelve-year-old with pigtails, wheeling her backpack down the hall.