Caroline had been naïve. Everything she knew about high school had come from movies like The Breakfast Club and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. She expected a campus rather than a school, with large swaths of unsupervised space and enormous blocks of unscheduled time. She expected well-lit hallways lined with lockers and trophy cases, a gleaming cafeteria, a football field, and a collection of odd and easy-to-fool teachers.
And she expected the students to be divided into clearly delineated categories. Caroline didn’t really think she’d fit into any of the cliques. She wasn’t a jock or a cool kid, a stoner or an outcast. But she hoped to achieve a sort of Molly Ringwald–type status. She would be the girl who was a little shy and a little poor, who would eventually find her tribe and earn the grudging respect of the masses.
That was the problem with being naïve. You went into things entirely unprepared.
Caroline didn’t get her Brat Pack utopia. At Blackstone-Millville Regional High School she found low-hanging ceilings, dim, fluorescent lighting, and a dingy cafeteria that smelled of spoiled milk. Worse, she was faced with a highly structured, well-supervised environment with four minutes between classes, a complete absence of free time, and a draconian emphasis on homework. There was no football team. No quirky teachers. There were cliques, all right, but most kids didn’t fit into those convenient boxes. Some dumb jocks were smart. Some cool kids were mean. There were popular stoners, articulate stoners, sad stoners, and everything in between. Whole categories Caroline hadn’t even though about. Punks. Princesses. Good-looking geeks. The aggressively college bound. The clinically depressed. The invisible kids. So many invisible kids.
Standing on that sidewalk on the first day of school, Caroline was filled with misconceptions. She was frightened, but she was hopeful. Foolishly hopeful.
Emily Kaplan’s idea of high school had been entirely different. Pretty, intelligent, and charming, bolstered by the wealth of her yuppie parents and her only-child status, Emily was a confident kid well armed for high school. Confident people, Caroline thought, didn’t worry. They did not plan. They possessed an expectation that they could overcome any challenge placed before them. It’s not that the world bent entirely to Emily’s needs—even she had her disappointments—it’s that she carried herself with the confidence of a person who believed it eventually would. Emily was nervous on the first day of high school, but ultimately, she knew that she would find her way and come out on top. Because she always had.
“The John F. Kennedy of children.” That’s how Caroline’s mother had referred to Emily. Caroline hadn’t understood the reference at the time, but even if she had, it wouldn’t have mattered. Emily’s social skills were of little consequence to Caroline. For Caroline, it was much simpler. Emily was her best friend. The person who knew her best. The person who made her the happiest. Their friendship was a miracle of sorts. Caroline’s luckiest break.
“Did you actually like Emily?” Polly asked.
“I loved Emily. You couldn’t not love her. And as little kids, we were together all the time. I spent more time with Emily than anyone else. That history meant something.”
The two girls had grown up across the street from each other. Up until eighth grade, Caroline and Emily had spent at least of portion of every day together, and when they weren’t in school, they were often together for the entire day.
In childhood, proximity matters. It matters a lot.
“And I knew that being friends with Emily was good for me,” Caroline explained. “I knew it made me … not exactly popular, but less invisible.”
“So you were a name dropper?” Polly asked, a smirk spreading across her face.
“Maybe,” Caroline admitted. “When stuff like that started to matter. But when we were little, we were more like sisters.”
“What about Aunt Lucy?” Polly asked. “Where was she?”
“Lucy was four years younger than me, which is like a million years younger when you’re a kid. I was in second grade before Lucy could even walk. Emily and I would let her hang out with us sometimes, but mostly we left her at home. There was a little girl who lived two houses over. Patty something, I think. Lucy spent a lot of time with her.”
“So you bagged on your sister?” Polly said.
“No,” Caroline said, not entirely sure what bagging on her sister meant. “Lucy and I were close. We would sit on the couch under the same blanket at night and watch TV and eat popcorn. And Lucy would climb into my bed whenever she had a nightmare, which was like every night. But I couldn’t talk to her like I could to Emily. She was just too young.”
Caroline’s father had built a tree house for her when she was in kindergarten. It had been a safe haven for Caroline and Emily throughout most of their school years. Built within the bifurcated trunk of a towering oak at the edge of the tree line, it represented a demarcation of sorts for them. On one side stood Caroline’s backyard. Civilization, where a glass of water or a Band-Aid could be had in a moment’s notice. On the other side stood the untamed copse that filled the swath of land between Farm and Lincoln Streets, an area that Caroline and Emily had called the Deep Dark Wood.
Until they were old enough to care about skinned knees, muddy socks, and mosquito bites (and that came later for them than most girls), this was where Caroline and Emily had spent most of their childhood. They caught frogs in the trickle of water that they called Bloody River because it was where Emily had once gashed her elbow on a rock. They swung on the teenagers’ rope swing over Getchell’s Pond, perfecting their Tarzan calls and clinging on for dear life. They read novels by Judy Blume and Lois Lowry beneath a low-hanging pine tree and argued over which one of them most resembled Margaret and Claire. They hiked and climbed and crawled and swam like only free-range children of a generation ago could.
But no matter how long they spent exploring the forest, they would eventually find their way back to the tree house and to their favorite positions on either side of the small, rectangular room. There they would talk for hours, feasting on Flaky Puffs and Junior Mints and drinking cans of warm Mello Yello.
Caroline had never been more true to herself than in those early days with Emily. Competition and envy didn’t exist between the girls. Their friendship had no room for ego or deceit. That was simply the way it was. And it was perfect.
Caroline’s father left on Saint Patrick’s Day when she was seven years old. He went out to the Firehouse Pub and never came home. At the time, Caroline didn’t entirely understand what had happened. Her father drove a truck and was often gone for two or three weeks at a time. She assumed that he was on another road trip. The two had been close when she was little, but the cross-country trips, combined with what Caroline later understood to be her father’s descent into alcoholism and depression, had driven them apart. She loved her father, but she stopped needing him because he wasn’t around to be needed.
Proximity, it turns out, works both ways.
Caroline came home one day to find her mother crying at the dining room table. One of her father’s bottles was on the table beside her, empty. “Your father left,” she had said. “He doesn’t want to come back. He’s in Florida, and he wants to stay there.”
“Do we have to move to Florida?” Caroline asked.
“No, hon. We don’t.”
“Okay. Good.”
“You understand what I’m saying,” her mother said, looking at her closely. “Right? Dad isn’t coming home like he usually does.”
“I know,” Caroline said. But she didn’t. Not really. “He’ll be back for Easter, probably. And my birthday. And those aren’t far away. It’s just like a long trip in his truck. But he’ll be back soon.”
“Did he come back for your birthday?” Polly asked.
“No.”
“Bastard,” Polly said quietly.
Caroline was accustomed to her daughter’s indignation, but it was usually directed at her. This was different. It was nice.
“My mother let things sink in slowly for me. Let me figure it out myself over time. I know it sounds rotten of me. I had just lost my dad, but I wasn’t all that upset at first.”
Polly screwed up her face. “Really?”
“Here’s the thing … I was used to home being just Mom and Lucy and me. ‘Just us girls,’ as my mother would say when Dad was away, which was all the time. And I was in middle school. Getting ready for high school. I had so much to think about already. So much of my life to deal with. And back then, parents just weren’t as enmeshed in their kids’ lives like they are today. There were days when I would leave the house in the morning and not come home until the streetlights came on. And I still had Emily. Even more than my mother or Lucy, I had Emily. There’s a time in your life, you know, when your parents and your family just aren’t as important as your friends. At least that’s the way it was for me.”
“I get it,” Polly said. Caroline knew that she did.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Caroline said. “My father broke my heart. It just took time. It broke a little bit at a time.”
“He broke Grandma’s heart, too,” Polly said, more a statement than a question.
“Yes, but he broke hers all at once. Maybe that’s why she was a disaster for so long. Then Mom was forced to sell the house, and we moved into the apartment on Main Street. That’s when I really got angry at my father. I hate to say it, but it wasn’t until we lost the house that I was really upset about him leaving.”
“When your dad leaves you like that, you get to feel however the hell you want.”
“Maybe so,” Caroline said.
“There’s no maybe about it, Mom,” Polly said.
Caroline and Emily spent their last day in the tree house eating Junior Mints, listening to The Karate Kid soundtrack, and crying. Emily helped Caroline pack her bedroom into cardboard boxes, taking time to examine mementos that had accumulated over the years. Friendship bracelets. A mini-golf scorecard from a night at Weirs Beach. Notes about bitchy girls and annoying teachers passed across middle school classrooms. A ticket stub from their first concert. Memories piled neatly atop each other like an endless wall of Lincoln Logs. Caroline felt closer to Emily in that final day than she had ever felt before.
Then that perfect wall began to crumble. All her walls started coming down. With the loss of her father also went all of the family’s discretionary income. Her mother began harping on lights left on and showers taking too long. They ate a lot of macaroni. Sometimes they had cereal for dinner. Then Caroline and Lucy were added to the free lunch roll at school.
The losses began piling up, one after another. Summer camp was canceled. Their membership to the Tupperware Pool Club was not renewed. Places that had been an integral part of Caroline’s childhood were suddenly inaccessible and off-limits. It was like vast swaths of Caroline’s childhood landscape had been annexed by some foreign power. The loss of her father and even the house had been quick, but it was these small losses that did the most damage. Death by a thousand humiliating cuts. The donations of food from the local church. The hand-me-downs that found their way into her dresser drawers. The end of family vacations. The kind words and generous offers from family and friends made unkind by their acknowledgment of the family’s descent into poverty. Caroline quickly learned that the last thing a poor kid wants is for people to know is that she is poor. Hunger is often preferable to charity.
Caroline’s access to Emily seemed to have expired, too. The girls still spoke in school and saw each other after the final bell, but Caroline sensed the friendship slipping once the gravitational pull had been eliminated.
“I know it sounds crazy,” Caroline said. “But just the fact that we started taking different buses made it hard,” she said. “We went from a forty-five-minute bus ride every day to a quick good-bye at our lockers. This was before cell phones, so it wasn’t like we could stay in constant contact like you and your friends do. I would go over to her house sometimes, but it was hard. I’d stare across the street at a house that used to be mine.”
“First your dad and then Emily,” Polly said.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Caroline said. “I never thought about it like that, but yes. And you know, just like I didn’t care about losing my father at first, I felt like Emily didn’t care about losing me. I kept trying, but I never felt like she was trying back. She didn’t always return my phone calls. Even though she could’ve taken me to the swim club as a guest as much as she wanted, she didn’t invite me. She’d tell me she wasn’t going, but when I’d call her house, her mother would tell me that she left for the club hours ago. She started dating this boy named Brian but didn’t tell me for three days, which is like three centuries to a teenager. At least back then it was. And when she dumped him two weeks later, she never bothered to tell me that, either. That summer before high school was awful. I felt like everything was falling apart.”
But then came the first day of high school. Thrown into an unknown and confusing world, Emily and Caroline stuck together, partly because they arrived in their new environment aboard the same bus once again, and partly because there is safety in numbers. Mostly it was because Emily and Caroline shared five classes together. They couldn’t escape each other if they had tried.
Proximity was working its magic once again.
For a while, the girls were as close as they had ever been. They navigated the embarrassment of the girls’ locker room together and learned to avoid the make-out corner of the library. And during that nerve-wracking first-week jostle for tables and seats in the cafeteria, Emily and Caroline had found an empty table where they were joined by four other similarly nervous girls.
Caroline was doing okay. She and Emily were doing okay together.
But by the time the Freshman-Senior Get Acquainted Dance rolled around in October, Emily had joined the cheerleading team and was dating Danny Pollock, a boy who’d been chasing her since seventh grade. The time that she and Emily had spent on the phone each night, talking about homework and boys, was now all but gone.
Meanwhile, Caroline’s mother fell behind in rent. The family car was repossessed.
Then Ellie Randoph arrived.
It was early November when Ellie came to Blackstone High with a confidence usually reserved for star athletes and prom queens, despite the fact that she looked like no one else at school. With her fishnet stockings, black leather boots, and a seemingly endless supply of concert T-shirts, safety pins, and lace accessories, Ellie looked like she had stepped right out of music video, which, for a small town of five thousand people who had yet to see MTV, was unusual to say the least. The older girls didn’t like the way Ellie acted like she owned the school. But Ellie didn’t care. She flirted with the boys and ignored the dirty looks, which turned out to be an effective strategy. By her third day at school she was working as a member of the theater club’s design crew. By the end of her first week, she was walking with Emily to at least half her classes, muscling Caroline out of her usual spot on Emily’s left side.
It was during one of these elbowing sessions that Caroline discovered Ellie’s parents had bought Caroline’s old home and that Ellie was now sleeping in her old bedroom.
“It killed me,” Caroline said. “The thought that some other girl, exactly my age, was living in my house, in my room, was awful. The fact that it was Ellie Randolph made it a thousand times worse. I felt like I had been replaced. Perfectly replaced. No. Not even replaced. I felt like Ellie was an upgrade. An upgraded version of me.”
“I would’ve been mad, too. Bitch stole your house, then she stole your friend,” Polly said.
“Exactly,” Caroline said, feeling relief in her daughter’s validation even decades later. “The two of them started going to the Lincoln Mall all the time. I wanted to go, but Mom was working two jobs. She was never home, and you can only bum rides for so long. So we’d be walking down the hall, the three of us, and Emily and I would be talking about something that happened in class, then Ellie would mention something that happened in the arcade on Saturday and bam! End of conversation for me. She did that all the time. Even if I tried to join in Ellie would say things like, ‘Sorry, but you really had to be there.’ Even their names were practically the same. It was awful.”
“So Emily turned out to be a dumb ass?” Polly asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Sounds like she let this new girl control her.”
“I never thought of it like that,” Caroline said. “I don’t know … I think it was just nice for her to have someone who didn’t have to be carried along all the time. Someone on her level. It was a terrible way to treat me, but I understood it. Even back then I understood it.”
“There comes a point when a person is too understanding, Mom,” Polly said. You don’t need to try to understand why someone is treating you like dirt. You can just hate them for it.”
Caroline shook her head slightly and smiled. “I don’t get it. You still don’t know how to do a load of laundry, and you answer most of my questions by rolling your eyes, and I can’t remember the last time I heard you say please, but then you say something like that, and it makes me think you’re all grown up. That you understand things maybe even better than me.”
“I know how to do laundry,” Polly said. “I just hate doing it.”
Caroline smiled again. Twice now in less than a minute. It broke her heart to think how rarely she smiled in the presence of her little girl these days. Somewhere between the sunny days of kindergarten, filled with crayon drawings of their home and trees and hand-flapping stories about her classmates and her teacher and these sullen, silent days of high school, she and Polly had diverged. A wedge had been positioned between the two, and it had been applying outward pressure ever since. Where had that happened? And why had she allowed it to continue for so long? Why had it taken something like this to bring them together again?
“So what happened?” Polly said. “That can’t be the end of it.”
“No. It was little things at first. I’d be walking toward them in the hall, and they’d start looking at me and whispering. The kind of whispering that you know is about you, but you’d seem like a crazy person if you accused them of it. You know what I mean?”
Polly nodded.
“Then they started passing notes. We all passed notes back then, but they weren’t private like a letter or e-mail would be today. They were more like group texts on paper. Sometimes we’d have three or four girls adding to the note in a long chain. But Emily and Ellie started writing their notes on paper from this pink notebook. They told me that the pink notes were top secret. For their eyes only. Then they started adding girls to the top-secret list. Girls who we ate lunch with. Sat with in class. They called it the Top Secret Sisters. I kept waiting for them to add my name to the list, but they didn’t. That hurt. And even worse, it became awkward. I’d be sitting in French class with Emily and a couple other girls, and they’d be passing these notes right in front of me. Right over me. Laughing about what was written. And I’d just be sitting there like an idiot. Trying not to make eye contact. Trying to act like I didn’t care.”
“Makes me want to punch every single one of them in the face right now,” Polly said, and Caroline loved her for it.
“I know it sounds bad, but I knew that I wasn’t the easiest friend to have, either. Mom’s car was repossessed. I was living in a run-down apartment. I didn’t have any money to do anything. I was stuck at home, babysitting Lucy all the time. I wasn’t exactly the happiest person in the world.”
“She was your friend,” Polly snapped. Maybe the same way she snapped just before she punched Grace Dinali in the nose. “She should’ve treated you better. Especially then. When you needed her the most.”
“It wasn’t like she just dropped me the second Ellie arrived. Ellie wasn’t in many of our classes, so a lot of the time it was still just Emily and me. And Emily came over the apartment a couple times just to check on my mom. Make sure she was okay. It was sweet. But still, I knew that she was slipping away. And I knew that Ellie was a big reason for it.”
“Gimme a break, Mom. It wasn’t Ellie’s fault. The girl sounds like a total bitch, but Emily was supposed to be your friend.”
“I know. It’s hard, because at first I thought that we were just drifting apart. It happens.”
“This was not drifting apart. Those girls were bullies.”
“It’s not like they—”
“Mom, she was the definition of a bully. Exclusion. Isolation. Behind-the-back bullshit. I should know. My generation is the expert on bullying. It’s all we ever hear about.”
“It’s all you ever hear about?”
“Are you kidding me?” Polly said. “Police officers started visiting our class in first grade to talk about it. And every grade after that. Stop, walk, and talk. Tattling versus reporting. What you’re supposed to do as a bystanders. We role play. We practice strategies. We have assemblies where weirdos in costumes sing and dance about bullying. I’ve been taught more about bullying than I have about the Civil War. I’m probably the only kid in my grade who knows what Pickett’s charge or the Appomattox Court House were. And I know you don’t know what they were, either, but just trust me. Emily was a bully. Ellie, too.”
“Things were different when I was your age. Bullying wasn’t the thing it is today.”
“Jesus Christ, Mom. A rose by any other name and all that bullshit. Chilean sea bass is really Patagonian toothfish, but the name doesn’t change the way it tastes. You didn’t call them bullies back then, but that’s what they were. Fucking cowards who ganged up on you and made your life miserable.”
Caroline didn’t know why she continued to defend Emily, but she did. Old habits, maybe. “I always thought that Emily and Ellie had more in common than me and Emily, so it made sense that they would gravitate toward each other.”
“Sure,” Polly said, sounding exasperated now. “But they didn’t have to be dicks about it. You can have more than one friend. You can make new friends without cutting out your oldest friend completely.”
“A lot of the stuff that Emily and Ellie got into was stuff that I didn’t even understand,” Caroline said. “They were listening to bands like Black Flag and Suicidal Tendencies. Echo & the Bunnymen. The Meatmen. Music was so important. Liking the right music, but just knowing the music was even more important. It changed the way they dressed. The way they talked. God, I can’t believe I remember all this. It must sound so pathetic…”
“It’s not pathetic,” Polly said, softening her voice a bit. “Of course you remember that stuff. It was high school. You remember stuff when you are younger because there are so many firsts. Lots of memorable moments. When you get old, it’s same old, same old. Less new stuff to remember. It’s why time seems to fly the older you get. Life isn’t as interesting anymore.”
“Is that really a thing?” Caroline asked.
“Seriously? Do you even read anymore?”
“It makes sense. I remember so much from that time. Emily and Ellie would watch Saturday Night Live every week and spent all day Monday talking about the skits and the monologue. It’s all I would ever hear on Mondays.”
“You had Saturday Night Live back then?”
Turned out Polly didn’t know everything. “Yes, but I never got to watch it. Grandma wouldn’t let me stay up that late. And there was no Internet back then, so it wasn’t like I could catch up on YouTube the next day. Even if I wanted to listen to their music, it meant I’d have to find the tapes and buy them. I couldn’t just use Google and know everything I needed to know to sound cool. It may be hard to believe—today’s world is so different—but information cost money back then, and I had no money.”
“You guys were living in the stone age,” Polly said.
“It wasn’t that long ago,” Caroline said. “But the world really was different back then. I remember spending hours sitting in front of my mother’s radio with a clunky plastic cassette recorder in my hand, just waiting to record a Meatmen or Black Flag song. And of course they never did. Emily and Ellie loved the most obscure bands. The ones that only college radio stations were playing. It sounds crazy, but I thought that if I could just find a way to listen to the same music, then I could talk to them about it. I could be cool.”
Then came the day that changed everything.
It had started off well. An A on her French test. A smile from Randy Marcotte in English class. A substitute in gym who let the class hang out on the bleachers and do homework. Caroline was feeling good when she passed through the double doors into the already crowded cafeteria. She arrived late on Fridays—she had to walk across campus from typing class—so many of the students were already seated and eating by the time she got there.
As Caroline approached the lunch table, she saw that all six seats were occupied. She stopped, thinking for a moment that one of the orange discs had somehow broken off, leaving the table one seat short. Then she spotted Ellie. She and Emily were sitting side by side and laughing about something in one of Emily’s notebooks. Ellie was wearing a Dead Kennedys T-shirt. Different than the one Emily was wearing, but the same band. As she drew closer, she heard Emily say something about someone named Simon Le Bon. “He’s got such a stupid name, but he’s wicked cute.”
Caroline burned.
She approached the table. Heads turned. No one made eye contact. Not Kimberly, who Caroline knew from homeroom. Not Janet, who sat next to her in history. Not even Molly, who Caroline helped with algebra almost every day. They weren’t exactly looking away from her, but they weren’t looking at her, either. It was as if they were looking right through her. As if she was nothing. Invisible.
“Hi, Ellie,” Caroline said. “I think you’re in my seat.”
Ellie smiled. It was the smile of someone who knew she had already won. A king-of-the-mountain smile. A fuck-you smile. “I am?” she said. “I didn’t know. Emily invited me to sit with her today.”
Caroline looked to Emily.
“I wish we could just pull up a chair,” Emily said. “But we’re stuck with these stupid stools.”
“Yeah, but that’s my seat,” Caroline said. “You can’t just give away my seat.”
“It’s not like they’re assigned,” Emily said. “This isn’t middle school.”
Someone giggled.
“Yeah, but I’ve been sitting there since the first day of school. No offense, Ellie, but that’s my seat.”
Caroline knew she was fighting a losing battle. She had been ousted, at least for the day, though deep down, she knew that she had been permanently banished.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Emily said. “Ellie can sit wherever she wants. And I want to sit with her today.”
Ellie smiled again. “Emily went to the mall yesterday, and she’s been dying to tell me about all the stuff she bought, so I thought we could talk during lunch. We only have chemistry and homeroom together.”
“And it’s not stuff you’d be interested in,” Emily added.
Caroline stuttered. She wanted to say something clever. Something that might diffuse the situation. Make her sound cool. Casual. No big deal. Preserve some dignity for another day. But with six pairs of eyes affixed to her, not to mention the gaze of people at nearby tables now drawn to the possibility of conflict, all Caroline managed to say was “Why—”
“Why?” Emily said, filling the gap between words. “You need a reason why I want to sit with Ellie? How about she’s my friend? Isn’t that good enough?”
“But you’re my friend,” Caroline said. And instantly regretted it.
Emily rolled her eyes. “I’m not saying I don’t want to be your friend. I just need some room for new friends. Ellie and I have stuff in common that you and I don’t. We’re not little girls anymore.”
“Emily!” Ellie said. “Don’t be mean. I’m sure you still have a few things in common. Right, Caroline?”
More giggles.
“I was just thinking maybe I could pull up a chair so we could all fit,” Caroline managed.
“Jesus Christ, Caroline, we don’t need to be attached twenty-four-seven. Could I just get a break? Just once?”
And just like that, Caroline was on her own.
“Emily?” Caroline said. Pleaded.
“What?”
“Is this for real?”
“I just need a break,” Emily said, her voice softening. “Okay? We’ve been stuck at the hip for such a long time. I just want a break.”
“Fine,” Caroline said, her anger rising again. In that moment, an image of her father entered her mind. He had wanted a break, too. “Fine,” she repeated, feeling the first tears form in her eyes. “But I want my seat back. I’m serious. You can’t just kick me out like this.”
Caroline braced for the counterattack that never came. Emily rose from her stool first, followed Ellie. Then Kimberly and Molly, and a few seconds later, Janet and Briana. “Fine,” Emily said, and without another word, all six girls walked past Caroline toward the other side of the cafeteria.
“Wait,” Caroline said. “You don’t have to go.”
The suddenly empty table might as well have been an erupting volcano. It drew the attention of almost every eye in the cafeteria.
Caroline was alone. Her seat was empty. The whole table was empty.
“Shit, Mom,” Polly said. “That was harsh. Talk about mean girls.”
“I know it was a long time ago. I know it sounds adolescent and silly, but I sometimes think that if it weren’t for those stools, then things would’ve turned out different,” Caroline said. “One more stool and everything that happened afterward would’ve been different.”
“I don’t know, Mom. It sounds like Emily was done with you, seat or no seat.”