CHAPTER 2
Donny had friends over. Butch, a tall guy with red frizzy hair and a ZZ-Top beard. Stacy, with hair bleached and teased high on her head, who wore jean cutoffs and a tight white tank top with the word SEXY in sparkly green across her chest. A half-dozen girls by the sink whose names I didn’t catch. And a group of guys near the refrigerator who were older—maybe twenty-five—and barely looked when Donny introduced us. Last was Smitty, Donny’s roommate, who hugged each of us and said we were the most beautiful women he’d ever met.
“Ya’all are college girls, huh?” He wore jean shorts just visible under a tank top that said This Bud’s for You. His blond hair was shaved above both ears and hung long across the back and top. He had a silver tooth in front, top row, which sparkled when he smiled and caught the light. It matched the chain around his neck.
“Not only are they college girls, but Sarah’s gonna be a doctor,” Donny said.
She punched him in the arm. “Don’t jinx it. I gotta get into med school first.”
“You will. You girls can do anything you want!” Donny looked at each of us, but stopped at Lee. He grinned, the skin wrinkling in the corners of his mouth. Lee turned away as she took a long pull from her beer.
Guys liked Lee, partly because she acted so indifferent but also because of how she looked. She was tall and thin with olive-colored skin, long, shiny black hair, a small nose and mouth. She wasn’t beautiful, Ben said once, but “interesting-looking.” Somewhere on her dad’s side she had Wampanoag blood and we used to joke about this. My relatives had been in New England for centuries, and maybe our ancestors had had Thanksgiving together. Now I wondered if they fought each other.
“They’re sorority girls,” Donny said.
Smitty raised his eyebrows. “Really? I don’t know any sorority girls. But you don’t seem the type. And I was meaning that to be a compliment.”
Ducky grinned. “See, Lee? Thanks. Because we aren’t typical sorority girls.”
Lee shrugged. I wasn’t sure why this had become the topic of the day. Maybe we weren’t as preppy. Maybe we were bigger partiers and carried around, except for Lee, an extra fifteen pounds more than the average sorority girl. But Lee had been right. There wasn’t much variety between the houses and within our own.
And this had ultimately been a disappointment. The first couple of years, I loved coming back to the house each day. It was a huge and intimidating structure, four stories, redbrick with a sloping lawn, able to house eighty girls easily. There was always so much energy and stimulation. After dinner we sat around, sometimes twenty of us, and laughed and talked. It had been a wonderful surprise—so different from the long-drawn-out conversations about books, politics, and war at my parents’ house—to find happiness in nonsense conversation and joking around.
Maybe I had patience for this because Lee and I, alone, discussed meatier topics. Our classes. Lee’s obsession with Patricia Graceson, the visiting film professor. Our interest in Freud. But by the time school started this year, I’d grown tired of communal living and vapid conversations and Lee wasn’t around much; she spent most of her time on her senior film project. And then after winter break, when she was around, all she talked about were these worries and how awful she felt.
“Donny, what can we do for these not-typical sorority girls?” Smitty asked.
“Only one thing.” Donny grinned. “Get ’em stoned.”
He pulled a joint from his pocket and lit it. He passed it to Lee, who took a long drag and gave it to me. I held it between my finger and thumb and let the pungent smoke drift up to my face. Most everyone smoked, even Ben when it wasn’t baseball season. I rarely did it because I could never be sure how it would affect me.
Ducky, who was on her third beer, was laughing with Smitty. Sarah and Donny were talking about something that had happened in eighth grade. Lee was getting more beers. Across the room, Stacy was drinking shots of tequila with Butch. And the guys by the refrigerator were passing their own joint.
These people couldn’t be more different from the Sigma Chis. And this house was unlike any place I’d ever been. Small, just one room, with scummy tiles on the floor—black sludge in the corners—cabinets so grimy that they no longer were white. Low ceilings, dim lights. A giant water heater that jutted out from the wall next to the bathroom. A pale pink phone on the other wall, its dirty cord long and bunched on the floor. A single black La-Z-Boy chair with a floor lamp next to it. We were in a questionable neighborhood. On the wrong side of the tracks.
Not one of our friends was having a spring break experience like this. Julie and Lisa were skiing in Vail. Amy and a group were in Fort Lauderdale. Susie was in Chicago. Which was where my mother was. Or maybe she was in Denver?
What would she think of this place?
I put the joint to my lips, inhaled, and immediately burst out laughing.
Someone turned up the music, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” and when Ducky yelled, “This song is perfect! Because that’s where we are!” we laughed so hard that Sarah had to cross her legs so she wouldn’t pee in her gym shorts.
“We’re not in Alabama, sweetie, we’re in Florida!” Donny yelled.
After that we kept yelling, “Sweet Home Alabama” and laughing. More people arrived, a girl in a halter top with bleached, feathered hair and a guy with a mullet wearing too-tight jeans. The room was spinning because the pot was so strong and I’d had too many beers and not enough food or sleep.
Outside, it had begun to rain again—we could see it through the huge floor-to-ceiling window—and flashes of lightning lit up the puddles in the muddy lawn. And then suddenly there was another flash and we turned to the window just as a huge naked man leaped into the room from outside, slid on the rain water that had pooled on the floor, and knocked over the halter top girl and the guy with the mullet.
Everyone started screaming at him. When he got to his feet, I saw that he wasn’t naked but wearing a tight white Speedo. He had hair everywhere, down his back and legs and arms, and he was at least six feet eight. People seemed to know who he was and eventually went back to what they were doing. Not us. We watched him, even Ducky, who was so drunk that she kept scrunching her nose and forehead, as if trying to focus. He stumbled around the room, bouncing off people, the walls, the water heater. Where were his clothes?
The music was so loud that it was impossible to hear anyone talk. But during a break between songs, I heard Sarah ask Donny what was wrong with him.
“Probably acid,” Donny said. “That’s his thing.”
We glanced at each other. Lee was the only one among us who’d ever done acid. A quick burn started across my chest. It was a nervous, cautionary feeling—one that I recognized from earlier in the car but couldn’t name—that told me that maybe this wasn’t a good idea. These people were too old, too hard-core. I walked over and dumped my beer into the sink. Someone had to get sober, which would be me, as always. I was the responsible one, the person to count on if you needed a lifeline in the middle of the night, my mother used to say to me.
Ducky, Sarah, and Donny started dancing. Lee bobbed her head as she watched. And when others began to leave and the Speedo giant ran back out the window, as if being chased, I felt a bit silly. I’d overreacted. After all, we had Donny. He and Sarah knew each other not from eighth grade but from fourth. That was a lot longer than I’d known anyone and it made me feel that we had a right, a claim, on Donny, and that we belonged here as much—maybe even more—than anyone else.
We stayed in the corner, listening to music and dancing for another hour. Although we’d found a boost of energy, I felt myself starting to fade again and looked around, wondering how we would sleep. The grimy floor was swimming with spilled beer and cigarette butts. The patch of dry floor near the La-Z-Boy was big enough for only one sleeping bag. And then the music stopped and I heard Lee tell Smitty about her documentary, the one she’d submitted for the film internship.
“Patricia Graceson is this amazing person,” she said. “She grew up with nothing, one parent with schizophrenia and the other a drug addict. But she made something of her life. She got her PhD and eventually made a film about malnutrition among children in Africa. My film is about her and her life.”
“Whoa! That’d be real interesting, I bet.” Smitty was so stoned that his eyes were slits and he swayed from side to side, a persistent grin on his lips.
“But it’s not just about what she does,” she said. “It’s about how she lives. What comes out of the film is this Socratic idea that the unexamined life is not worth living. That’s what gives the film its heft and what people can relate to.”
Socratic idea? Heft? I cringed.
Smitty scrunched his forehead, as if trying to make sense of what she was saying. Not only had he not gone to college, he probably hadn’t graduated high school, either. These were the types of people Lee had grown up with. How could she not notice how uncomfortable this made him? I hated when people, when anyone, did this kind of thing. I flinched as sweat broke out on my sunburned neck.
“Wow,” Smitty said. “You’re gonna be a famous movie director!”
I frowned. It was one thing to produce a twenty-minute short film and another to be a famous movie director. While her film was good, it wasn’t perfect. Watching it, I always had the sense that it needed something although I had no idea what that was.
“Not everybody has the luxury to live an examined life,” I said. “Some people have to work three jobs to put food on the table. Or they have to take care of sick relatives. They don’t have time for anything else.”
Lee’s smile faded. “I know that.”
“Well, don’t be so judgmental.”
“You don’t have to tell me what it’s like to worry about putting food on the table.” Lee frowned and lowered her eyes.
“Seriously?” Smitty laughed. “I got no fucking idea what you’re talking about.”
Of course Lee knew what it was like to struggle. It was one of the things we talked about. And she typically wasn’t pretentious or oblivious to people’s feelings, either. What was wrong with me? Why was I so frustrated? I walked to the window, my cheeks stinging, and looked out. The lightning had stopped but I heard the rain smacking the puddles. I thought about how sunny it had been when we walked into the bar today. Ducky had started us off after the Sigma Chis moved to our table with their plates of food and pitchers of beer. “I’m Ducky. This is Sarah, Lee and—”
“This is the famous Eleanor Michaels’s daughter, Clare,” Lee had said.
The boys looked at Lee and then at me. I was so shocked that I felt my mouth fall open. It had been a long time (junior high?) since a friend talked about my mother like this in public in front of me.
“Who’s Eleanor Michaels?” the tallest one asked.
“She wrote Listen, Before You Go,” the blondest one said. “The Vietnam book.”
“Never heard of it,” the tallest one said.
“I read it,” the blondest one said. “In high school, I wrote a paper on it. I talked about the death foreshadowing. At first, you don’t realize how much of it there is.”
“I didn’t get it,” the shortest one said. “It was supposed to be about the war but there aren’t any battle scenes. I mean, it takes place in, like, Vermont.”
“You’re joking, right?” the blondest one asked. “That’s not really her mom?”
“It’s true,” Ducky said.
The inevitable onslaught of questions followed. Are the characters based on your family? Are you Phoebe, the heroine of the story? Is her book going to be a movie and will you be in it? Are you a writer? Which was always the worst question because I had no creative abilities. Eventually we stopped talking about my mother and her book but something lingered. A carefulness. A deference that didn’t belong to me. A laugh and look from one or two boys that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. This was more than enough reason to be angry with Lee. Wasn’t it?
“Clare.” Lee came up behind me and I turned from the window. “Can we talk? About today? About what I said? I know you’re mad.”
“Did you notice how they acted after you said that? It changed everything. It always changes everything. I’ve told you that.”
“I know. I’m so sorry,” Lee said, her voice just above the music. “I’m sick about it. I don’t know why I said it.”
Across the room, Sarah was trying to get Ducky to sit in a chair, but she kept standing on it and dancing. Donny lit another joint. Someone turned off the music. I wanted to stay angry with Lee but felt it slipping away. Because really? What she said wasn’t the reason we left. That was because the boys were boring, after all, and we were ready for the next exciting, unpredictable thing. But I couldn’t let it go.
“I’m just surprised, after everything I’ve told you about my mother.” Well, I hadn’t quite told her everything. But almost. Certainly Lee knew how difficult and demanding my mother could be. And how in junior high and high school people had tried to friend me to get to her. “I guess it makes me mad.”
Lee’s voice was hushed. “But you’ve been mad at me for months now.”
“That’s not true,” I said. But it was, wasn’t it? This problem between us felt complicated and I didn’t understand it. Before winter break, we were fine. Normal. Things started to change when we returned to school in January. That first night, we stayed up for hours, talking about her aunt’s embezzlement charge and how she’d cut Lee out of her life. Lee was devastated. Why did she steal from her company? Why won’t she answer my letters? Why is she acting like I don’t exist? Every night after that we went over this. It took hours to get Lee to a place where she wasn’t so upset, but the next night we had to start again. It was like I had to pull her out of a dark hole.
I felt a jolt of anger that was familiar and utterly exhausting. “Look, I don’t exactly know what’s going on—”
“Something’s changed between us,” she said.
She was right. She’d changed. She used to be so strong, intimidating, and mysterious. She’d command attention and respect just by walking into a room. Now she was clingy and needy, always sulking and sad. She kept cornering me, wanting to talk, wanting to dump it on me, and I’d begun finding excuses to avoid her.
I licked my sunburned lips. We were always each other’s cheerleader but she was so sensitive now. Would she freak out if I told her how much she’d changed? If I said I didn’t want to talk so much about how sad she was? God, it felt daunting. It felt impossible. She felt impossible.
But I was the house therapist. Everyone brought problems to me. Why wasn’t I more patient with her?
“I know I’ve been upset about what happened to my aunt.” Her voice shook. “I don’t get why she can’t call. What if I never talk to her again? What if this is it?”
How many times had she said this to me over the last few weeks, twenty? Fifty? I shook my head and said, “That doesn’t make sense. She loves you.”
“I don’t even know if that’s true,” she mumbled.
“So, now you don’t think that she loves you? Come on, Lee.” I glanced into the kitchen where Ducky was doing a shot of something.
“I know. I just feel awful.” She slumped against the window.
“I feel bad about what happened to your aunt, too,” I said. And I did, even if I couldn’t relate to her family. Visiting her farm last year had been a shock. It was so rundown and shabby, unlike anything I’d imagined. That she’d gotten out of there and gone to college, even with help from her benefactor, was incredible. “But like I’ve said before, you’ve got to find a way not to let this get you down so much.”
“You’re right. I don’t know why I can’t get over this. And I had another one of those dreams last night.”
Oh, crap.
“This time you and I were standing in line for a bus and everyone got on and you shut the door on me,” she said. “Then the bus took off. You left me behind.”
She’d been having these dreams long before I began pulling away. Once, she dreamed that I dumped her and became best friends with Susie. In another, I’d invited her to our cottage on Martha’s Vineyard but then ignored her while she was there. I didn’t understand these dreams and it didn’t seem fair that I was always the bad guy. “That’s crazy, Lee. Why would I ever shut a bus door on you?”
She shrugged. “I just feel stressed. I miss our talks. And I worry about us—”
I couldn’t stand this. “We’re both stressed. It’s the end of senior year and neither of us knows what we’re doing next. It’s a weird time for everyone.”
“I know, but something has changed—”
“Stop! We’re going through a rough patch. You’re still my best friend, okay?”
She nodded. Then the crease in her forehead disappeared and the tightness loosened in her cheeks. Just like that the mood lightened, the thickness between us softened. I held my eyes steady, even though I was confused. Yes, I’d pulled back. But she made it worse by telling me about these dreams and worrying so much.
“Okay. I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right. As always.”
“I’m not always right. Don’t keep saying that. Let’s just have fun—”
“What are you guys doing over here?” Sarah came up behind us. “You gotta help me with Ducky. I don’t know what to do. She’s completely trashed again.”
The music started, the Rolling Stones, as we watched Ducky, staggering toward the bathroom and then grabbing the water heater to steady herself.
“I’ll go.” I hurried over, reached for Ducky’s elbow and steered her into the bathroom. When I flipped on the light, a huge cockroach scurried behind the sink. The room was tight with no windows, a tub with no shower curtain, a toilet and a small pedestal sink that was coated in toothpaste and brown crud.
“I think I’m gonna get sick.” Ducky’s knees buckled.
“Wait!” I flipped up the toilet seat, pulled a towel off a hook on the wall, and draped it around the dirty rim. I spread a second towel on the floor at the base of the toilet. When Ducky dropped to her knees and leaned forward, her blond hair went with her. I quickly and expertly—like I’d done for my mother that time in New York—pulled her hair behind her and held it while she threw up.
Projective vomit filled the toilet and fumes leaped into the air. I buried my face in my sweatshirt sleeve and stifled my gags. She finished and tried to stand.
“Hang on.” I let go of her hair and flushed the toilet. “Just wait here a second. You don’t want to stand too quickly and faint. Try to relax.”
She rested her head on the toilet, her white-blond eyebrows quivering. She smelled like vomit, beer, and the Lubriderm lotion she always wore. I reached for a magazine on the floor (Thrasher?), rolled it up, and watched for the cockroach. I felt mild disgust for how wasted she’d gotten. Something bad could have happened to her if we weren’t here to help.
She peeked at me, and as if hearing my thoughts said, “You can go.”
I knew she meant it. She’d never asked me for anything. Never demanded anything. I felt myself relax. “It’s okay. I won’t leave you alone.”
“Thanks,” she slurred, then grimaced and closed her eyes.
I wasn’t as close to Ducky as I was with Lee and Sarah. We didn’t have much in common. I was an English major from Boston. She was a business major from the North Shore of Chicago. After we graduated I imagined she’d marry a nice boy from the Midwest, raise four nice kids, and sit by a nice country club pool every summer.
After word was out in the house about my mother (somebody from our sorority’s national office told our president), Ducky said, “Gosh! I’ve never met a real writer before!” Her earnestness was refreshing. She never took herself too seriously. God, I was so tired of people taking themselves so damn seriously.
“I’m going to get sick!” As she sat up and dry heaved into the toilet, I held her hair again. Then she slumped against the wall and started to whimper. In a few minutes, if she no longer had the dry heaves, I’d make her splash water on her face and wash out her mouth. That might help. That might make her feel better.
That was what I’d done for my mother when I found her in a heap on the floor in the hotel bathroom before the North American Book Award ceremony. She’d left me at the table with her editor and others I didn’t know. I was only eleven and no one was paying attention to me. So, no one noticed when I followed her.
“It’s not worth it, this agony,” she moaned when she saw me in the toilet stall doorway. She was on her knees, her legs splayed behind her, new black patent leather shoes—mine were just like hers but smaller—toe down on the marble floor. I’d never seen her in such a vulnerable position and I was too stunned to move.
I also didn’t understand how she could say that it wasn’t worth it. Listen, Before You Go, narrated by eleven-year-old Phoebe whose older brother, Whit, had just returned from the Vietnam War with a broken leg and damaged soul, was loved by so many people. She loved it, too. Once, I heard her talk for twenty minutes about the importance of the comma in the title. And she’d just won a huge, prestigious literary prize. This was all she’d ever wanted. How many times had I heard her complain when others had won?
“Help me,” she’d moaned.
It was a guttural, primal call, and I’d never heard this before, either. All I thought about as I stood in the stall of the swankiest hotel I’d ever been in was that it made no sense. My mother was a college professor, an expert on John Milton. Her novel was a best seller. She had “saved my life,” a woman cried to her one day in Emack & Bolio’s ice-cream store. What in the world could I do?
Then I thought about Phoebe (I was sure this was what she’d do) and with my fingers, pulled my mother’s long brown hair out of her face—every strand—while she threw up. She flinched when my fingers grazed her neck. I remembered that. But I saved her hair and the beautiful black dress on which we’d spent so much money.
I leaned toward Ducky and said, “Do you think you can stand up?”
She kept her eyes closed and shook her head. “No, and don’t leave!”
“Okay.” I was in no hurry to face Lee with her crazy dreams and Socratic references. The unexamined life is not worth living. Would Ducky ever examine her life? And if not, who were we—or who was Socrates—to judge whether that life was worthwhile or not? And what did it mean to examine your life, anyway? Keep a diary? Go to the health center and talk to a counselor? Write a book and tell-all?
I stood and washed my hands in the sink as I looked at myself in the mirror. I was totally average; chestnut-colored hair resting on my shoulders, hazel eyes, white teeth and a small nose with freckles. I’d put on weight, but not much. Would Phoebe, if my mother ever wrote about her again, look like me now? Or would I look like her? Phoebe has the same freckles as you, people used to tell me. Phoebe has the same eyes! You and Phoebe are so good at talking to adults. Why, you’re Phoebe!
I squatted and stared at Ducky, her nose burned from the sun, a roll of pink flesh spilling out over the top of her shorts. She opened her eyes and smiled. After we graduated and she went home to the North Shore and I went back East, I imagined we wouldn’t see each other much. This, along with the fact that we were bonding and she was wasted and probably wouldn’t remember, made me feel daring. And so I brought up something I’d never discussed with anyone in the house.
“How do you think Lee has been acting?” I asked.
“Like what do you mean?” Ducky squinted at me.
“I don’t know, on the trip, I guess. Like with the Sigma Chis.”
“Same old Lee.” She burped and groaned, but nothing came out. “Sometimes I don’t know why she joined the house. She’s so different from everyone else.”
I nodded. I used to wonder this, too, until one day when Lee, gazing up at the glass chandelier in the foyer, said, “Isn’t this house the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen? Aren’t we so lucky to live here? We’re like one big family.”
If Ducky wondered why I’d joined the house, too, she didn’t ask. Which was good because at the moment I wasn’t sure I could answer.
She burped again, a sweet, polite one that sounded like the chirp of a baby bird. “I’ve never told anyone this—Oh! I’m so wasted but that burp kinda made me feel better—and I know you’re best friends and all but Lee scares me. She’s got all this intense stuff inside of her. Like that thing with the periods. Who thinks of stuff like that? I don’t know. She doesn’t really talk to me. You know, like talk-talk.”
“Do you think she can be, I don’t know, insensitive sometimes?” I asked.
“Maybe she doesn’t talk to me because she thinks I’m stupid about movies and the world. Which I kinda am. Remember that movie she made sophomore year? How good it was and funny and how she got Mom Tolliver to agree to be in it? Or did you do that? I can’t remember. Mom Tolliver likes you two more than she likes me.”
“That’s not necessarily true.”
Ducky grimaced and closed her eyes. Lee’s movie, her first, came out of an assignment in a film class. She got so many people in the house involved. Sarah and Amy were gangsters, the dinner cooks hid the gun in the angel food cake batter, and Mom Tolliver, our seventy-year-old house mom, drove the getaway car. Lee showed it one night in the chapter room. It was a huge hit.
Ducky’s eyes shot open. “Do you think she’ll make a movie about us?”
I frowned. Why would anyone want her life on a screen for the world to see? Besides, we’d have to actually do something to warrant a movie. Drinking beer, smoking pot, and laughing around a dining room table night after night, year after year, wasn’t very productive or interesting. I cringed, thinking about my four years of college. I. Had. Done. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada.
“Wow! I think I am feeling better.” She sat up and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Wanna hear something funny? I used to think, back when we were pledges, that, you know, you two were, you know. Well. Together.”
“You mean, like, lesbians?” I asked.
Ducky put her hand over her mouth. “Yes!”
I frowned. Did anyone else think that? “Why did you think that?”
“Because you were both, like, so intense with each other, you know, huddled in the corner being all intellectual and stuff. But then I got to know you both and now you’re with Ben, and I think it’s more like you and Lee are, well, I don’t know, friendship soul mates or something. Am I talking too much?”
Lee and I were intense with each other and it was like being in love. I thought back to our nights talking in the stairwell and the trips we took to each other’s houses, but I couldn’t remember any awkward sexual moments. I’d never felt that way toward her. Had she with me? I doubted it. Lee, who’d lost her virginity when she was fifteen, had slept with many guys. Still, I tried to put into words this feeling between us. Intense. Important. One of a kind. Maybe soul mates.
“I’m so wasted!” Ducky said. “But isn’t this fun? What about that bathing suit guy? I can’t believe these people. And their haircuts. My parents would freak if they knew we were here. Is Donny still a drug dealer? But just pot, right? I can’t wait to tell everyone about this. And oh, I just love you. I know you think I’m not respectful because I don’t talk to you about your mom’s book. But I read it.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“Don’t tell anyone about this, okay?” She started hiccupping. “I mean, that I hurled and everything? Cause I’m so wasted? I think it was the pot.”
“And the tequila shots,” I said.
“Oh, I’m feeling better! I know you won’t tell anyone. Because you don’t talk about people. I know what you did for Julie. She told me that you went to the clinic with her and waited until it was over and then drove her home and brought her soup. And you never told anyone, did you? Not even Lee.”
Julie’s abortion at Planned Parenthood last year. Of course I never told anyone. But I felt my cheeks burn because I’d just gossiped about Lee. But maybe that didn’t count since I didn’t say anything. I just asked about her. I tightened my grip on the magazine.
“I have a lot of respect for you,” she said. “I know you’re an English major but you should do something where you help people. You’d be a great nurse. I’ll cry if I talk about it but I can’t believe we’re graduating in two months. It went so fast!”
Then she started whimpering and I worried that she might have the dry heaves again. “Hey, hey. It’s okay. Let’s enjoy these last couple of months. Okay?”
She nodded and rested her forehead on the toilet rim.
I’d always planned to teach, but changed my mind after visiting the clinic. The women who helped Julie were so passionate and warm. My plan was to take science courses next fall and then apply to graduate school in nursing or counseling. I didn’t know where. Lee and I talked about moving to New York. And one night not long ago, Ben asked if I’d go with him to Philadelphia, where he’d been accepted to law school. I could barely even think about that.
You should help people. I smiled. I’d always been good at that (Phoebe and me. Me and Phoebe). Maybe after working for a while, I’d feel passionate about it, too.
Someone banged on the door. “What the fuck is going on in there?”
“Just a minute.” I lowered my voice. “Can you get up?”
Ducky stood and leaned on me as I pulled down the bottom of her sweatshirt and told her to wipe her face. I moved the clasp on her pearls to behind her head and opened the door. The lights were on. Most everyone was gone. Donny and the halter top girl stood next to Sarah and a guy I didn’t recognize. It was two a.m.
When the halter top girl slipped her arm through Donny’s, I realized why she was still here. Sarah yawned. And Ducky, whose face had turned pale again, stumbled over to the La-Z-Boy chair next to the floor lamp and slumped into it.
“She’s a mess,” Sarah said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Just let her sleep in the chair.”
That left only a small, dry spot next to the chair. I glanced at the puddles of beer on the floor and thought about the cockroach in the bathroom.
“This is Charlie,” Sarah said. “He said two of us could crash at his place.”
“He lives a couple blocks away,” Donny said. “It’s cool.”
Charlie was old, maybe twenty-five, with short dirty blond hair that was thinning across his forehead. He had small black eyes that never seemed to blink and crisscrossing acne scars along his jaw. He was tall with broad shoulders and arms ripped with muscles. I bet he lifted weights like Ben and his friends.
He wedged his fingers into the pockets of his skintight, acid-washed jeans. Now I recognized him. He’d been here all along, one of the guys standing by the refrigerator. Still, we didn’t know him. I glanced at Lee, who was studying him, too.
“I’ll stay here with Ducky,” Sarah said. “You two okay going with Charlie?”
Lee tilted her head. I knew her well enough to see the hesitation. Then she shrugged and licked her lips. “Okay, I guess. We need to get our stuff out of the car.”
Charlie nodded.
It was still raining. Lee and I ran across the yard and grabbed our backpacks, sleeping bags, and pillows from The Travelodge. Then we followed Charlie. Most of the streetlights were burned out—it was so dark—and we had to hurry to keep up. How many blocks was it? We were soaked by the time we got to his house. Outside it looked like Donny’s and the others on the street, small, one-story, with a big window next to the front door. The inside was like Donny’s, too, one tight room with a giant water heater, but nicer. And cleaner. A couch, chair, and floor lamp, the shade with miniature red and blue racecars along the edges, framed an oversized rug in front of the window. A Pioneer stereo and turntable sat on red milk crates in the corner.
“So, you can crash there.” Charlie pointed to the rug.
“Thanks,” I said. “This is really nice of you.”
“Don’t matter none to me.” And then he walked into a back room and shut the door. But he’d left the lights on in the kitchen area and the back door was open. Had he gone to bed for the night? Should we turn off the lights?
We took turns changing and brushing our teeth in the bathroom. We draped our wet shorts and sweatshirts on the chair next to us. Then I spread my sleeping bag onto the rug and crawled inside. Lee rolled out her bag next to mine and glanced at the back door, then at the window in front of us. “I don’t know about this.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
At least the floor was clean and it was quiet and dry. I was so tired that it hurt to keep my eyes open. I yawned. “It’s better than Donny’s place.”
Lee sat cross-legged on her sleeping bag. Then she got on her knees, reached for her wet clothes, and began stuffing them into her backpack.
“You should pack everything up and sleep with your backpack.” She put her flip-flops next to her pillow and shoved her backpack into her sleeping bag. “I know guys like this from home. I’m not sure I trust him.”
If she didn’t trust Charlie, why did she agree to come here? But she rarely referred to guys from home, only to tell me once—when she was wasted—that she’d slept with some “questionable characters.” This was one of several things that we didn’t have in common. I’d only slept with Ben.
“What’s he going to do, steal our backpacks in the middle of the night?”
“The karma is off,” she said. “I just have a weird vibe.”
Ben thought Lee was “flaky” when I told him that she believed places gave off vibrations. But part of me felt it here, too. I packed my backpack and pushed it into my sleeping bag. I wiggled in, not sure how I’d sleep with this wet mound.
Lee stood and put her hands on her hips. She wore baggy green Army fatigues, cut off mid-thigh, that she’d bought freshman year at the Army-Navy Surplus store and a tight white tank top, faded to gray. I’d seen this outfit so many times that I could close my eyes and see the uneven hem, the rip on the back pocket, the slight hole below her left shoulder where she’d caught the shirt on the window frame in her room. I thought about how my mother had looked her up and down that first morning on the Vineyard when Lee had walked outside in this outfit.
Later, of course, it didn’t matter what Lee wore. My mother was so charmed by her, so impressed by her ambition, her intelligence, her joie de vivre, that Lee could have worn a tent and it would have been so interesting.
Lee stepped forward and drummed her fingers on the window frame as she looked out. Then she unclasped the lock and opened the window a few inches. Cool, humid, wet air rushed into the room. Like Donny’s window, this one didn’t have a screen and now I knew how the cockroaches got in.
“If you’re so worried about being robbed, why are you opening the window?”
Lee whipped around, angry, and dropped to her knees in front of me. Her long, dark hair fell over her shoulders and the muscles in her cheeks flexed. But then her dark eyes filled with tears and her thick lips trembled and she brought her hands to her face and cried, “Nothing I say or do is right. Why are you so mean to me?”
“I’m not trying to be mean,” I said.
“Then what would you call it?”
“I don’t know!” I felt my cheeks redden. No, we absolutely weren’t going to have another talk about our friendship. Not again.
She slumped forward. “It’s my fault. I’m so stressed out and sad and I don’t know why. I feel sick all the time. I can’t sleep and when I do I have those terrible dreams. That you won’t talk to me. That you’re ditching me.”
“I’m not ditching you,” I said.
“It feels so horrible to be so out of sync. You’re the only person who really knows me. You’re the only person I’ve ever really talked to.”
“And that’s too much goddam responsibility!” I yelled. “I don’t want it!”
My words seemed to hang in the air between us. Outside, car doors slammed. A dog barked. A siren wailed, close and closer, then faded away. And still the rain came down. I couldn’t see it but heard it slapping the ground outside the window.
Lee straightened and pulled her hair behind her. She walked over to the counter, turned off the overhead light, turned on a light above the stove, and shut the door. Then she switched off the floor lamp, crawled into her sleeping bag, and faced away from me. The humid yet cool breeze through the window made me shiver. The dim stove light cast long shadows across the room. Across us.
I knew that I was the only person to whom she’d ever confided. She hadn’t told anyone about the benefactor from her hometown that paid for her tuition and board, or the boys she’d slept with or her high school track coach’s unwanted advances or how insecure she felt about being poor. I’d wanted to hear these things. I liked being her confidant. I’d felt so honored. But then she became so demanding, so difficult, and wasn’t I right that it was too much responsibility? To be the only one? God, I was so frustrated and tired. Maybe I wasn’t thinking clearly.
“Lee,” I said. Her head was tucked in the crook of her arm and her shoulders seemed to tremble, as if she were quietly crying. I began to worry. Maybe Lee had been seriously depressed this year and I didn’t realize it.
Charlie walked out of the bedroom, still dressed in the jeans and wet T-shirt he’d worn earlier. He opened the back door and two guys came in. They stood against the sink, talking. One of them opened the refrigerator, pulled out beers, and handed them around. The cans popped and hissed when opened.
I turned my head and watched Lee slowly roll over. We were face-to-face, but she was looking over my shoulder at the guys. I opened my mouth to say something but she whispered, just loud enough for me to hear, “I think we’re in trouble.”