“So, how did it go?” Andrea asked cautiously, with a lilt of cheer in her voice that was mostly fake. Sophie had been so volatile, Andrea imagined her daughter had spent the day bored out of her gourd amongst heaps of garbage, feeding a festering hate. She peeked over at the girl and returned her eyes to the road. Washington Ave. glided by, a strip of grocery stores and barber shops, restaurants selling pupusas and plantains, or pizza and subs, or chow mein and chicken wings. Sophie’s belly rumbled.
“It was fine. I tumbled glass. What’s for dinner?”
Andrea sighed at the thought of cooking anything for anyone, even herself. The air conditioning at the clinic was broken, cooling the building in fits and starts all day, making work even harder and more annoying. If it were next week, closer to payday, she’d stop and pick them up a pizza, but it wasn’t next week, and the dollars folded into her wallet were a thin bundle. “I’m having cereal,” she said. “You are free to fix yourself whatever you like.”
“But I worked,” Sophie whined. She held her hands up to show her mother, but they were creaseless and clean. She’d forgotten about the gloves. “I worked so hard I had to wear gloves,” she said. She brought her hands to her hair and dug around her scalp. “Look,” she said, finding a pebble of glass caught in a web of snarl. “Glass in my hair, even.” She laid the red orb on the dashboard, where it caught the dimming sun and glowed like a coal.
“We both worked,” Andrea said, “so we’ll each make our own supper. If I could pluck an asthmatic child from my hair to illustrate, I would.”
Sophie laughed, and Andrea almost laughed, and the mood between them felt lighter than it had in days. Andrea was relieved that she wasn’t retrieving the same angry, stubborn girl she’d dropped at the dump. All day she’d mused upon that strange feeling she’d had pulling away in her car, a wonderful emptiness. She longed to feel that feeling again, but found it hard to explain even to herself. She’d have thought that feeling nothing would feel like death—something scary—but it had felt light and wonderful. And when her emotions poured back into her each feeling felt louder than before, more noticeable, as if she’d become numb to them without realizing. What were these feelings she felt toward her daughter? She felt ashamed at many of them. Fear? Awe? She brushed it away. Those were old feelings; she didn’t need to feel like that anymore.
Sophie understood in a new way how tired her mom must be after eight hours in the sweaty clinic. She didn’t think that Andrea had worked as hard as she had, lifting buckets and smashing glass, but still, work was tiring. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll have cereal. It’s too hot for real food, anyway.” The bolt of ugly feelings she’d felt from her mother seemed very far away, buried beneath the adventure of the dump. In the pleasant quiet of their drive home, Sophie almost pulled the sea glass from beneath her shirt to show her mother. Her hands touched the cord, but stayed there, fiddling. She dropped her hands to her lap. The glass lay cool and heavy on her sternum. It was from the ocean; there was no telling what part of the world it had come from, how many years it had taken it to wash up in Chelsea, currents and sand grinding its edges. It felt incredibly precious, too precious for anyone to see or touch. They arrived at their home without Sophie mentioning it. Andrea pulled two bowls from the cupboard, and Sophie heaved a gallon of milk from the fridge.
* * *
SOPHIE LOOKED AROUND for a place to talk with Ella on the phone. Their house was only so big, and the phone was a cheap piece of plastic, growing staticky when you walked it too far from its base. Sophie wished she had her own phone, a cell phone, and that she had a real room to take it into, a proper bedroom with privacy, not the glorified walk-in closet attached to her mother’s bedroom. She looked in on Andrea, already passed out on the couch, a milky cereal bowl before her on the coffee table. The television was blaring some news program, and the loud hum of the fan spun coolness onto her mother. This was the most privacy she was going to get. Sophie figured it was enough.
On the other end of the phone Sophie could hear the cacophony of Ella’s home. People hollered in dueling languages for the girl. Sophie could hear Ella’s younger siblings calling for her, excited and important to be delivering news of a phone call; older voices, her mother and her aunts, were a steady roar of talk. Sophie could imagine them circling the dinner table, eating cookies and drinking coffees. She felt a pang of loneliness at her own empty house, her tired mother already asleep with the sun still shining, creepy television newscaster voices intoning darkly through the apartment. Sophie wished Ella would invite her over, but knew it wouldn’t happen.
“Hello?” Ella was breathless at having run through the house.
“Hi!” Sophie said. “What’s up?”
“Nothing, just a million people over here as usual, a girl can’t get any space. I’m dying to get out of here.”
“Are you having a nic fit?” Sophie asked. Never having smoked, Sophie didn’t know what a nic fit felt like, just that her friend claimed to have them, and once she started having one it was all she thought about, all she talked about, until she smoked a cigarette. Sophie thought nic fits were strange and boring.
“No way, my house is so smoky with everyone over here, I just had a cigarette right in my bedroom and no one even knew!” Ella sounded proud, having found away to make the chaos of her home work for her. “I got burned at the beach today. It was hot, huh?”
Sophie had forgotten about the beach. She was surprised to feel not a single pluck of envy at having missed something. “How was it?”
“How do you think it was? Awesome. There were so many cute guys. One gave me the rest of his pizza—he was soooo wicked cute.”
“What’s his name?”
“Junior. Which is crazy, right, ’cause I’m a junior, like my mother’s name is Ella, and he’s a junior, ’cause he’s named after his dad, like his real name is Tony or something. But I was like, Junior! That’s got to mean something.”
Sophie paused, waiting for Ella to bust up into laughter. Was she joking? She sounded like an airhead.
Listening to herself talking to Sophie, Ella could hear how dumb she sounded, but she couldn’t help herself. There was something exhilarating about giving herself over to such talk and feelings. The boy’s attentions had electrified her, his steady dark eyes and his husky voice as he traded his pizza for a cigarette. She could feel another girl rising inside her, dumber in some ways and smarter in others, haughty and confident, a flirt. She supposed she’d flirted with the boy, and it had worked—he’d seemed both flirtier and shyer when he’d left, after smoking his cigarette down to the filter and tossing the butt into the frothy waves. Ella’s body buzzed from the interaction like a hive of yellow jackets swarmed through her, beating their tiny wings. The rash her last scrubbing spell had left upon her was minor, no one noticed it, she could pretend it was gone and that the girl who’d done it was gone, too, that she was through with all that, and she wouldn’t let such craziness overtake her again.
“Okay.” Sophie laughed. She sounded almost nervous. “Well, ah, I was at the dump all day.”
Ella had forgotten to stay mad at her friend for telling their secret and getting herself punished. She’d missed her at the beach, at first, but then, later, when the boys showed up, she’d been grateful Sophie wasn’t around. How could Ella have tried on this new personality in front of Sophie, who knew her so well? Sophie who knew she was a nerd, scared of most everything, had never exchanged a germy kiss with anyone. Sophie would have kicked her with her foot and crossed her eyes at her, and the boy would have decided they both were freaks, and he would have been right. Ella felt guilty to be glad about her friend’s punishment, but she was. “That sucks,” she said unconvincingly. “What, did you, like, hang around in trash all day? What even happens there?” Ella shuddered at the thought, feeling the incoming crave of another nic fit.
“There’s a glass recycling place, and this person Angel operates it, and she’s, like, a girl, but she looks like a boy, she’s really cool. And she gave me this amazing, like, jewel—not a jewel, it’s glass with a seashell in it, and there’s all this tumbled glass and it’s so beautiful.”
Ella found it hard to concentrate on her friend’s breathless report. Her sister and her cousin were chasing each other in and out of her bedroom, and she could hear a new thread of gossip being shared in the kitchen, the voices rising tantalizingly higher with outrage at someone’s scandalous behavior. And beneath the hum of her house, Ella thought Junior Junior Junior Junior, feeling the sear of the boy’s presence strong as her sunburn. She tried to focus. What had Sophie said, something about a girl that looks like a boy?
“What, are you working with a lesbian? Watch out she doesn’t make a grab for you, Sophie!”
“Don’t be a jerk.” Sophie felt protective of Angel. “I don’t know if she’s a lesbian.”
“Girls who look like boys are leeeesbians, trust me. My Auntie Bertie looks just like a boy, and she is a total les and she likes to make a grab at the girls, so you be careful!” Ella laughed. “A lesbian! The dump sounds more exciting than I thought it would be.”
“It is,” Sophie said. She couldn’t tell if Ella was being mean about Angel or not, but she decided to not talk any more about it. “Anyway, I’m so bored. My mother fell asleep in front of the television again.”
“Whooo,” Ella made a noise. “That woman likes to snooze. I wish these people over here would take a nap. Can you hear how loud it is?” Sophie could.
“I wish we could meet up,” Sophie said, suddenly longing for her friend.
“We could sneak out,” Ella said. “Later?”
Sophie bit her lip. She was already in so much trouble, banished to the dump all summer. She was conflicted over how she should behave as a result of this punishment. Should she be contrite and rule abiding to show her mother—what? That she was sorry? She wasn’t sorry, exactly. She didn’t think her punishment fit her crime. And if she was already punished for the duration of the summer, why should she behave? Sophie realized that if she didn’t sneak out to see Ella she could forget about having a best friend. Ella would never, ever, ever come to the city dump, and look how different she already was, after just a single day at the beach without her? If Sophie let go of her, Ella would wind up—what? Sophie pictured an even tanner Ella, her dark skin oily and coconut, her long hair teased out Chelsea-style, cigarettes stuck into the hairsprayed mess of it like barrettes. Ella would wind up vapid, uninteresting, and pregnant. Pregnant? Sophie felt like it was a betrayal of her best friend to even think such a thought, but the thought was there—Ella pregnant, by the end of the summer.
“Let’s meet at the creek,” Sophie said. “Where we met last time.”
Ella didn’t like the thought of that place, with its condoms and filthy water and the memory of her friend’s face-plant in the muck. But she could think of no where else to go. Street corners were patrolled by cops and cluttered with kids. Parks were locked, and too easy to get busted sneaking into them. The creek was pretty perfect. Ella wished they could just go back to the beach, and sit on the wall in the dark, straining their eyes to see where the black sky met the black ocean on the black, black horizon. Maybe Junior would be drawn back, too, looking for her. She tried to shake the boy out of her head, stay the Ella she was for Sophie, not the Ella she was that day at the beach. “Okay,” Ella said. “I’ll meet you there once the sun goes down.”