YOU...ONLY BETTER

One week before Thanksgiving, two weeks after Barry gave Quinn Catherine his pin, it was early in the morning, black as night, and we were circling the East Side’s sterling streets, pulling up slow to the gutter curb and checking people’s recycling bins for empties.

“Nothing,” Astrid sighed, pulling her blond curls back through the window. “How about that one? Up there?”

Flashy mansions, Grecian columns, Georgian slate roofs lined the streets. All dark windows and frowning expressions. The lawns were manicured and neat, squared by clipped box-wood hedges. There was a smell to this part of town, the air laced with the smell of the rich, of expensive cut flowers, clean sheets, pricey leather interiors from imported German cars. And another smell on top of that smell, of something so clean and antiseptic it’s never used. Juli was oblivious to it since she lived there, but to Astrid and me the difference between Wauwatosa and the East Side was like crossing country lines. The majority of these houses were dark eight months out of the year—their owners off vacationing in St. Moritz or the Bahamas. Who knows? This was old money, as old as money could be in Milwaukee, attractive and decrepit at once.

“Hand me that Maglite, would you?” Astrid asked me, fishing her hand around in the backseat. “I want to check this out.”

We pulled up in front of a blond-brick mansion, its face naked with the summer striped awnings taken down for winter. Now it was blinking bare eyed under spotlights, an old lady without her false lashes.

“Nice,” Astrid said, training the flashlight on the rows of recycling bins in front of the house. “The mother lode.”

It was obvious someone lived here. Finally. We sighed with relief, eyeing the green bins filled with Coke cans, plastic milk gallons, smart, squat Heineken bottles. We slammed all four doors of the Audi.

“Load ’em up,” Astrid said. Juli cracked open the trunk. “Just the bottles now, no cans,” Astrid said, picking out the Heinie bottles.

“We know.” Juli sighed, irritated. “I think we get it already.”

The sky was black and cold. There were no stars. We picked our way through the recycling bins, sifting past the plastic soda bottles and tin cans, looking for glass, darkly lit, white glass, blue glass, and the black bottle green.

We took them all. Juli’s trunk was already half-full with bottles. Champagne bottles from Moët & Chandon, green Perrier bottles, Coca-Cola bottles, Miller High Life bottles with the gold label, glass milk bottles, the really expensive kind you can buy at Organic Express for seven dollars a gallon, imported Orangina bottles like girls with little balloon skirts, but mostly beer bottles, wine bottles, Rolling Rock, Sam Adams, Chardonnay, and Pinot Noir. We had an arsenal of bottles.

“That should do it. Let’s motor.” Juli yawned, closing the trunk on all those bottles. We got back in the car and hit the road, listening to the glass rolling around in the trunk as we hung a left first, then a right, heading for Lakeshore Drive.

Astrid flicked on the dome light and pawed through a frayed Seventeen magazine, irritated, going, “Great, look at this ‘How to Be a Better You.’ ” She turned the page and pointed to pictures of carrots, eyebrow tweezers, and plaid pants. “Carrots,” she sighed. “Wow, genius.”

We found Barry’s house easy, even though we never did get invited to the legendary monster kegger he threw every spring. Astrid knew the address by heart, even if she’d never been formally invited.

Juli’s headlights flashed over Barry’s baby blue BMW parked on the street.

“There it is.” Astrid kicked the glove box with the heel of her shined Doc Marten. “He parks it in front because he wants everybody to see.”

We pulled up in front of the BMW we all knew so well and cut the lights. Lakeshore Drive was deserted. Not one car inched its way down the salted, freezing streets. We got out and popped the trunk. We stood there before Barry’s Beemer, in silence, watching our breath cloud before us. A dog barked in the distance at the north end of the block. Then another dog returned its call from the south end, just a low, piercing howl. Astrid dug through her blue suede satchel for a cigarette.

“We better watch out for those dogs,” Astrid said, her face a flicker of light from her Zippo.

“You sure you wanna do this?” Juli asked.

Astrid stood there, holding her cigarette out in her right hand. She stared down the black street, curving around the lip of the lake, giving the illusion, with its nips and tucks, that there was something wonderful just around the corner. She smoked her cigarette like a waitress on the graveyard shift, worn thin. “Yeah,” Astrid said with a brief, sharp nod. “Yeah, let’s kick this, kids.”

Astrid took the first bottle by the nose, a fat, blue, graceful lady meant for holding artesian drinking water, and chucked it, end over end, at Barry’s windshield. We all stood there, bracing ourselves, scared to shit, waiting for the windshield to shatter. But it didn’t. Instead, the blue water bottle hit the tip of the roof and broke, tinkling blue glass over the front hood of the car.

The dogs kicked up their barks in the distance, a cacophony of loud clattering yelps. Astrid glanced over her shoulder, first right, then left.

“Shit. Okay, let’s do this quick,” Astrid said. “Nothing serious. Just litter the shit out of it. Aim for the roof and let the glass trickle down.”

The dogs were barking now, full-throttle yapping, like machine-gun fire. “Hurry,” Astrid urged.

We rained that car with bottles, with breaking glass. We went to work. We hit it with bottles from Heineken, Miller High Life, Perrier, bottles from France, from the Netherlands, from old Milwaukee. Astrid scampered up on the back of the car and just whaled on the car, raising beer bottle after beer bottle over her head, like she was serving up tennis balls one after the other.

It made a horrible noise, but we got caught up in it, and then there was nothing but the noise and us, the barking of the dogs just swallowed up by us, that shattering-glass sound and pop and crash, the sound of our breaths, hammering in our ears, the white clouds before us when we exhaled.

A light clicked on, casting a hazy yellow glow off the side of Barry’s brick house. The dogs’ barking kicked up. Astrid shouted, “Down!” We dove for the gravel bed behind Barry’s BMW just as the side house door slammed. We heard footsteps on the steps. Then a man’s voice: “Shut up you goddamn animals. Assholes.” We laughed, hunched over in the gravel bed, Juli’s bare brown hands clasped over her mouth. A car zoomed past us, the headlights catching the blond wispy bits of Astrid’s curls and turning them white. But then the clattering dogs went silent, the side door slammed closed, and we were safe, alone, in the black arms of night again.

And Barry’s baby blue Beemer was covered in pointy, multicolored, gem-faceted shards of glass.

“Okay,” Astrid exhaled, pausing for rest on Juli’s rear fender. “That was close.”

We got in the car, sweaty and tired, our arms raw from lifting and throwing. Juli turned on the radio and Genesis whined on some FM station.

“I’m starving,” Astrid said, quietly. Juli drove down Lakeshore Drive, hanging a right on Clifford, and a left on Downer. Without a word, she pulled into the parking lot for George Webb, the twenty-four-hour diner, and we swung our way, breezy, through the rotating glass doors.

Astrid made a beeline for our usual table on the right by the windows, a large melon-colored booth. She threw her blue suede satchel in the corner and slid in after it.

“Do you feel any better?” Juli asked and took a cigarette from Astrid’s soft menthol pack.

“I want to be like the girls in Seventeen,” Astrid said, and for a minute her mask slipped and she didn’t look like my Astrid anymore. She looked exactly like what she was: a fifteen-year-old girl, scared and unsure of everything, of the world. “You . . . Only Better,” Astrid said. “Isn’t that right?”

When the anorexic-looking waitress asked us what we wanted to order, we yawned, “Coffee. All around.” The clock over the counter hummed at 5:13 a.m. We ate our eggs, doused with ketchup and Tabasco.

Astrid stared out the window at the white frozen streets, at the car exhaust puffing smoky white clouds. Everything, our whole young world, swabbed with shades of grey.

We got back in the car and drove the twenty-six miles to Sacred Heart Holy Angels. The sun clawed its way past the night’s dark clouds. In the backseat, I picked pieces of glass, like gemstones, greenish blue and cerise, out of my jacket. By the time we got to school, the whole sky was a perfect, endless blue.