Page 2 of Melt With You

Chapter One

‘I’m not going, and you can’t make me.’

‘You sound as if you’re six years old,’ Janie said, knowingly. She was a first-grade teacher at PS 137, and so had plenty of experience with truculent six-year-olds.

‘I don’t care. I’m not interested.’

‘Come on, Dori,’ Violet insisted. ‘We’ll have a blast. It will be like old times.’

Dori shook her head, long silver-streaked ebony hair swishing past her shoulders. She wasn’t going to be bullied. She wasn’t going to be swayed. The 80s were over for a reason. There was no need to go back.

Unfortunately, her trio of girlfriends didn’t agree.

‘You have to,’ Violet continued, half-commanding, half-begging. ‘Really. You’ll see everyone from school. All your old friends.’

‘My old friends are all right here,’ Dori said stubbornly, spreading her arms to indicate the three ladies seated around the table. ‘If I wanted to know what those other people were doing, I would have Googled them by now.’

‘You’ll see, Rowan,’ Violet told her, watching carefully over the rim of her neon-green Apple-tini for Dori’s reaction. Violet was Dori’s closest friend out of the three, the one who knew which buttons to push in order to get the right response. But Dori held her face in check. She’d already had this discussion with herself for the past few weeks.

‘Why would I want to see Rowan? We broke up –’ she checked the oversized silver man’s watch dangling on her wrist, her exaggerated manner filled with sarcasm ‘–exactly twenty years ago.’

‘I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to go to your reunion if we’re all going. Did you hate high school that much?’ This was Chelsea. Chelsea who had adored high school. Chelsea who was Violet’s twin sister, and the first to tell everyone that ‘No, thank fucking God, we’re not identical.’ She had been both a cheerleader and the Homecoming Queen of their class, had peaked as a senior and never been truly happy since.

But they weren’t discussing Chelsea’s personality flaws right now. They were focused on Dori. The women all looked at her, three sets of expectant eyes waiting for Dori’s answer. And, although she’d thought she was tough enough to ride out their repeated requests, she’d had precisely enough alcohol to drink that she spoke the truth.

‘No,’ she said softly. ‘I loved it that much.’

And then there was silence until the slim-hipped waiter brought around the next round of fanciful, pastel-hued cocktails, and the foursome had a reason to talk about something else. Anything else. Because Dori’s words had brought a melancholy fog to their gathering. Had high school really been the high point of their lives, like that idiotic movie they’d all been forced to watch in the gymnasium: The Time of Your Life So Far? Had any one of them actually become the person she’d aspired to back as a starry-eyed graduate?

‘Do any of you actually remember the 80s?’ Violet said suddenly. ‘You’re worried about how people will think of you now. But can you even remember what it was like then?’

‘What was what like?’ Janie asked, playing along.

‘God, the hair. Do you remember your hair?’

Dori grinned ruefully. To her father’s horror, right before graduation, she had chopped off her long dark hair and, with Violet’s help, had dyed what was left of the short fringe a color usually found only on a peacock’s tail – a neon version of the cobalt hue on her favorite pair of Doc Marten boots.

‘My dad almost died,’ Dori reminded them.

‘I think he wanted to kill me,’ Violet recalled. ‘Our parents sat far away from yours at graduation.’

‘You should do it again,’ Janie urged.

They laughed at the thought. Dori, at thirty-eight, with a punk rock hairstyle. But why not? Of the four of them, she was the one who could most easily pull off something crazy. She was a make-up artist. Nobody expected her to look like a capable human being who could handle thirty screaming children at a time, like Janie. And Chelsea, a stay-home mom, would have horrified the ladies on her architectural preservation committee if she showed up dressed in anything other than Talbot’s with a refined highlighted pageboy in birch blonde. Violet could take some risks – she was an art dealer. But many of her clients were on the conservative side. Blue hair wouldn’t work for her.

‘And remember your glasses?’ Janie teased Dori next. Dori had worn glasses since she was eight and, even though she had chosen decent frames in high school, she still felt the stigma of being called ‘four-eyes.’ The first thing she’d done when she’d gotten a bit of money saved up was have corrective surgery. Now, when she wore glasses, they were Oliver People’s, high-end, dark-tinted sunglasses with rhinestones on the corners.

‘It’s better now,’ Dori insisted, as if desperate to prove the point to herself. ‘We didn’t have these in the 80s, did we?’ She waved the new scarlet X-phone from Cherry Computers that the women had given her for her birthday. ‘Remember? We were tethered to landlines.’

‘God, yes I remember,’ Violet said. ‘My dad threatened to rip the phone out of the wall once when you and I had one of our marathon conversations. “What could you girls possibly have to talk about?” he demanded. “You just spent all day together.”’ Dori and Violet could still spend all day on the phone together. That’s why Violet had suggested the new high-tech gadget as a gift for her birthday.

Dori managed a smile at the thought and then the conversation turned to the range of devices that now ruled their worlds, from Blackberrys to the turbo Rabbit vibrator Janie had given Dori as a gag gift.

‘We didn’t have these back then,’ Janie said, red-cheeked from the drink as she waved the seven-speed vibrator in the air.

‘Dori didn’t need one. She had Rowan,’ Chelsea responded snidely.

‘Please, Dori,’ Violet whispered to her while the other two were talking. ‘Say you’ll go. I swear, we’ll have so much fun …’

---