All the pretty girls in the upper school are in the dance club performance. It is an opportunity to wear a leotard with a sheer fairy skirt and to extend your nylon legs underneath a spotlight while everyone sits in foldout chairs and stares.
I’m in the second row holding two roses. One for Bianca and one for Sarah. This is one of several activities they perform as a twosome. They were best friends first. I get that. They have a secret language of tallness and romantic maturity I will never understand. I get this, too, but it makes me nervous. I’ve lost my rhythm with them, and I have to put in the work to regain it.
Tonight they are doing a dance to a Sting song. The dance is a slow meditation on friendship and becoming your own person. They crawl through each other’s legs, circle around each other, make a side-by-side bridge with their two raised hands and then pull away. Now Bianca is extending one leg on the floor and Sarah is creating a halo over her with her arms.
The last dance I choreographed was for a middle school talent show, a series of swimming gestures set to the Beach Boys’ “I Get Around.” I wore goggles and orange flotation cuffs on each arm. We’re so much older now.
It took so long and then happened quickly. Eighth grade was the beginning. Our first year in upper school, our first year in kilts. Our first year smoking cigarettes in diners and using my sister’s old ID to buy booze. Our bat mitzvahs. When we started to wear real bras with lace. When our parents started leaving us alone for the night in our apartments, and when we started boiling our own pasta, buying our own coffees. When we switched from hot coffee to iced coffee.
Eighth grade. Last year. The same year Bianca first kissed a popular boy. The same year he died. There was an accident at a beach house; bones were broken irreparably. Bianca found out a few days before the memorial service, which took place at our temple, where we had gone with him to Hebrew school. The whole city of eighth graders was going, though no one had specifically invited us.
We debated if we had any right to go. Bianca could go, of course, but she wouldn’t go without us. Are these things even by invitation? Who do we know who’s going? And soon I began to wonder what I should wear.
So we took the day off from school and dressed in black miniskirts. When we got to the temple, we were already late. No one could agree who should walk in first and we stood at the entrance asking each other pertinent questions. What if everyone turns around and stares at us? What if people are mad that we don’t have an invitation? Are we awful people for coming at all?
We figured we should talk this over some more at the diner around the corner. We ordered cheese fries and Diet Cokes, and by the time they were put in front of us, we were laughing at ourselves, how we’d gotten all dressed up and never even went inside the temple. The absurdity of our insecurity. The fear of what was behind those doors. The lie we told ourselves about returning. The melted cheese over hot fries. The thought of math class happening while we sat in a diner. The giggles, uncontrollable, springing from my stomach, worsened by how wrong it was to have them.
Then Sarah’s face dropped. She knocked Bianca’s arm. Bianca kicked my shin. Outside a stream of mourners were passing by the diner. Some resembled kids we knew, only their hair was flatter. Their faces slack and uninhabited. One boy looked right at us through the glass. He saw us dressed in black with our plate of french fries. He saw me laughing.
He was one of the boys from the roof that night. Dressed in an oversize gray suit he might have borrowed from an older brother. I want to say he looked at us behind the glass, but that wasn’t it. His head turned to us, but his eyes registered nothing. His eyelids, pink and swollen, blinked involuntarily, as if their operator had slipped away, leaving the motor on. If anything, he was showing us his face, and what a face looks like when the person who wears it disappears. It looks like a mask.
This was why we didn’t go inside the temple. It wasn’t that we feared embarrassment; it was that we feared the moment it no longer mattered. Behind those doors was a truth we weren’t ready to witness—the gruesomeness of grief, its dripping desperation, the collapse of posture and order, the obliteration of the bubble that’s been blown up around us, leaving us raw and unprotected.
A boy had died. I hadn’t understood what that meant. I still didn’t understand. But I’d seen his friend’s face in the window, and now I wished more than anything else that I had gone inside the temple. I wanted to be brave enough to open those doors and mature enough to handle what was behind them. I wished I could share his grief, so that he didn’t have to carry so much of it. I wished I could be the kind of person who didn’t care about outfits and guest lists. I wished I hadn’t laughed like an asshole. I wished I wasn’t so self-absorbed, but instead was more compassionate, more comforting to others, and less shallow. I wished I was on the outside of the diner’s window walking alongside the mourners, and not on the inside watching them pass. But it was too late. The service was over. I walked home in my platform heels and miniskirt, pressing through the brightest part of the day, wishing I wore a mask, too.
At the end of their dance, Bianca and Sarah stand side by side linking arms and leaning in opposite directions. When the music fades, they extend one shimmering leg in front of the other, pointing a toe and setting it down, pointing and setting. You are supposed to clap and woot so they hear you in the audience. You are supposed to believe as they’re followed by a spotlight offstage, their necks elongated, gazes fixed on the path ahead of them, that they are headed toward some gauzy endless horizon and not the flat, sealed doors of the auditorium.