“This is spicy,” Rudy warned, but it was too late. I’d already crammed the entire pepper into my mouth. It couldn’t be that bad, could it? I bit down and it oozed over my tongue, hot and gooey. “Really spicy.”
Rudy wiped her face and gulped from her glass of lemonade.
It was like an oven in my mouth, the temperature rising by the second. My tongue itched like crazy. I chewed twice and swallowed the pepper whole, feeling it blaze a spicy trail down my esophagus.
“Oh my God.” The sides of my nose were collecting tiny beads of sweat and my eyes were watering. I reached for the nearest drink, bringing it to my lips just as Rudy opened her mouth to speak.
“Wait, no!”
I gulped an enormous mouthful of the bitter amber liquid and cringed helplessly as it flooded my assaulted taste buds. I gagged, spewing flecks of beer out onto the front of Rudy’s dress.
“That’s beer,” Rudy finished her warning.
My face was so hot with embarrassment I wasn’t sure I could speak. “I’m so sorry,” I squeaked.
Over the years, I’ve thought of this moment often – my adolescent anxiety, the intense desire to impress this stunning girl, the tenderness of my own humiliation, softened by age and humor – and it never fails to make me smile.
“I’m so glad you moved,” she said. “Finally, someone I can hang out with in the neighborhood.”
I had expected it to be easy from there – to glide into best friendship – for my life to instantly bounce back to how it had been in Boston. But it didn’t. School had already begun, and Rudy and I went to different junior high schools (hers was a private middle school my mother had been unable to secure me a position in this late in the game), and we saw each other only a handful of times over the course of the year. She was always friendly, and I was always awkward in a way I agonized over for days afterward. She was like a crush, but not in that manner. I idolized her from the beginning in this way I can’t quite explain, not that I would have tried explaining it to anyone if I could. At my junior high school the cliques were firmly established, and I was not charming enough to force myself into any of them; I remained on the edge of friendlessness, participating in only a marginal way, despite my mother’s attempts to host slumber parties at our new house or push me into activities like ballet, cheerleading or girls tennis (the right sort of activities, mind you).
It wasn’t until my mother convinced my father, probably under threat of divorce or tantrum or withholding of sex, to take her on a summer vacation to Europe following my semi-miserable eighth grade year that I finally got the friendship I had wanted all along. My mother informed me over our breakfast of exotic fruit the weekend before they left for Spain, the first leg of their journey, that Mrs. Golden had offered to let me stay with them for the summer. For the entire summer. At first I had balked, unsure that I wanted to be pushed onto another family – tagging along behind Rudy when I still wasn’t so sure she wanted me around. But the prospect of spending another year alone, on the periphery, threatened to break me. I had already lost so much of my old self, sunken into this shell of self-conscious self-reflection that was exhausting and all-consuming. Finally, I consented. And I resolved I would spend the summer making myself as likable to Rudy as possible. I would win her over, completely and totally, and I would ride through the next four years of high school with a gorgeous, enviable best friend by my side.
If only I had known I didn’t have to work so hard at it, I could have saved my young self a lot of worries. For a reason I still can’t place, Rudy loved my self-conscious teenage self at first sight.
The first two weeks of summer consisted of several hours spent lounging beside the pool in Rudy’s fenced in backyard, soaking up rays of sunshine and watching it darken and swell up in our skin. We would wait as long as possible, testing our endurance in a game of chicken until one of us would give in, begging for a relief from the heat. Then we would dive into the cold, silky water of the pool, feeling it glide over our necks and backs, between our toes and through strands of our unwashed hair. We would stay in the pool, swimming back and forth across the length of it underwater until our lungs felt like bursting (Rudy could always hold hers the longest), and doing dives and handstands and flips in the water of the shallow end. At lunchtime we climbed out and sat on the edge of the pool, dangling our feet through the crystal water, droplets streaming out of our hair and down our backs onto the sweltering brick beneath us, and Mrs. Golden would bring us lunch – salami and crackers, blueberry muffins, sliced fruit and homemade potato chips – on individual wooden platters. High school may have been the last time I was comfortable eating in my bikini, or maybe it was only in Rudy’s company that I felt a swelling of her abundant self-assuredness seep into me, enough to show off the skin across my stomach, pulled taut over ribs and young muscles. My stomach never swelled over my waistband, never became anything other than a strict, flat line despite how many calories I dumped down into its depths, but sometimes I looked down at my lunch – the soft brown of the muffin’s rounded top, speckled with oozing blue lumps – and I imagined it, as my mother would, sitting on top of my own jeans.
Mrs. Golden never ate with us – almost every afternoon she was off to brunch or coffee, at the Country Club or the Ladies Gardening Group, with one of her many housewife friends who kept a schedule almost identical to her own, but a few times Imelda, the Goldens’ housekeeper, would have her lunch with us beside the pool. Imelda was fat – much fatter than Mrs. Golden – with an even deeper skin tone and tight, black ringlets of hair she kept pulled back with a bandana while she was cleaning.
“You better be careful, girls, or you’ll turn as black as me,” Imelda would say, rolling up her linen pant legs and dipping her swollen, red painted toes into the water. I loved the sound of her voice – it always seemed like she was on the verge of bursting into laughter, giggles tucked into the creases between her words.
She teased us about our tans and our floppy, disheveled hair – bunheads, she called us – and she probed us with questions about how we kept the boys away. Rudy always laughed the loudest when Imelda was around, and I envied Imelda’s easy-going nature. I wanted to make Rudy laugh like that, to be someone she could be effortlessly comfortable around (although, truthfully, Rudy was effortlessly comfortable with everyone she met – at least it seemed that way to me).
In the afternoons we walked to the country club a few blocks away to play tennis (Rudy always won this too), or we went for long, sweaty jogs around the neighborhood on the afternoons Rudy became antsy and itched to be away from the house. We would fly down the sidewalks, our tennis-shoed feet slapping against the scorched pavement, heat radiating off of our sun-soaked skin. We ran in only our neon sports bras and slick shorts that covered just half of our thighs, and if there had been anyone around to look, Rudy’s lithe body and my long, whirling white-blonde ponytail surely would’ve elicited stares. We always finished our runs with a sprint back up the hill to Rudy’s house, and we fell over in the prickly, freshly cut grass, panting up at the blue sky above us. Running was the only thing I discovered that summer I was better at than Rudy. I could run faster and for longer intervals, and I always found I had more breath left in my lungs when we were finished, so running became one of my favorite afternoon activities, despite the deep, sore burn it left in my calf muscles the day afterward. When we caught our breath again, we would jog around to the back of the house, covered in salty sweat and speckled with pieces of grass and dirt from the yard, peel off our bras and socks and shoes and dive into the pool in just our running shorts. I had never, never been topless in public before that summer, and the sensation of the cool liquid on my bare chest, the possibility (though very slim, considering the tall white fence that enclosed the Golden property) of a stranger seeing us both thrilled and terrified me. Rudy’s father was always irritated when he came home from work and found clumps of soggy grass collecting in the pool, but he never told us in person, just left Rudy notes on the
kitchen table before he departed in the morning (over the years I knew him, the years that I practically lived in his home, I came to know Mr. Golden as a reasonable and stoic man – I spoke to him only a handful of times and when he did speak, the words stayed with me for years). Mrs. Golden always brushed off her husband’s scolding.
“Don’t worry about him, girls,” she would write in bubbly cursive underneath her husband’s pin straight words. “You’re strong, active women! Grass can be cleaned, but don’t you ever let go of those beautiful spirits.”
We were at the country club tennis courts, standing fifty feet apart on opposite sides of the net and dripping with sweat as we finished the final game in our set of five, when we met Ian for the first time. Rudy smacked the ball out of bounds and I ran to chase it toward the fence; when I returned, wiping stinging sweat out of my eyebrows and carrying the fuzzy ball in my clinched fist, she was angling her racket casually toward the concession stand on our far right, nodding her head in his direction. I turned to see him leaning on the counter, watching us. He quickly dropped his gaze the moment we made eye contact, and I did too. I dropped the tennis ball into the pocket of my shorts and met Rudy in the middle of our court.
“Who is that?” I asked her over the net.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. But he’s been staring at you this whole last game.”
My interest piqued, I stole another glance in his direction, but he was still looking down at the supply of snacks beneath the counter of the bar.
“But you don’t know who he is?”
“Nope.” Rudy twirled her racket in the palm of her hand. Beside us I heard the thwack of someone’s racket connecting with a tennis ball. “Maybe he’s new. I’ve never seen him before.”
I considered this. We had spent at least one afternoon each of the past five weeks here and the only concession stand worker we had encountered was a pale, pudgy woman whose clothes were far too tight for her bulging stomach and who often left the snack stand unattended while she snuck off behind it for a smoke break.
“Let’s go talk to him,” she said, pulling the pink visor off of her head, leaving a thin line an inch above her eyebrows.
We crossed the length of the line of courts but the boy didn’t look up until we were standing directly in front of him, underneath the shade of the black and white striped canopy. When he turned toward us I could see that he was jarringly handsome, with short brown curls and deep-set brown eyes.
“Hi,” Rudy said, leaning against the counter. “Could I get a Gatorade, please?”
He nodded, then looked toward me.
“I’ll just have a bottle of water. Please.”
He turned to the refrigerator behind him, and Rudy and I exchanged a glance. She wiggled her eyebrows up and down.
“Thanks,” I said as he slid the bottles to us across the white countertop.
“No problem.”
“Just put it under Golden, please,” Rudy said, twisting the cap off of her bottle and taking a long drink.
“Are you new here?” I asked, swinging my water bottle in my hand. I was suddenly unsure of how to control my arms. “We haven’t seen you before.”
“No, not really,” he said, typing Rudy’s name into the computer beside him. “I usually work on the golf range though, but someone called in sick today.”
“Oh,” I answered dully. I sipped from my water bottle, unable to follow up my question with anything remotely intelligent.
“What’s your name?” Rudy filled in.
“I’m Ian.”
“I’m Rudy.”
They both looked at me.
“Jillian,” I said. “So, do you go to school here?” I felt like a police interrogator. Why couldn’t I just hold a simple conversation?
“Yeah, at St. Louis High.” There were only two things I knew about St. Louis High school. The first was that it was a public school and the second was that, according to the kids in my eighth grade class, it was the easiest place to score weed.
“Cool,” I said. “We start at Ogden this fall. We’ll be freshmen.”
“So, Ian, are you doing anything later tonight? Some friends bailed on us and we were looking forward to doing something fun,” Rudy asked, and I shot her a very blatant look. We had just come over to talk to him, to flirt perhaps, and to leave. I had never intended to follow through on anything, but she was already taking another long drink from her Gatorade and it was apparently up to me to complete the social transaction.
“I get off at six, then I don’t really have any plans.” His cheeks had turned slightly pink through his tan and he was looking back and forth from me to Rudy.
“Do you want to hang out? We could go see a movie or something?”
“Um, sure.” He blushed even deeper. “What’s your number? I could call you when I get off work. Maybe at seven or eight or something.”
I wrote down my phone number on a little square cocktail napkin and he folded it into fourths and stuck it into the pocket of his khaki shorts.
“We’ll see you later tonight, then,” Rudy called over her shoulder as we turned to walk away.
“See you tonight,” I repeated awkwardly. “Bye.”
My arm reached up to wave before I could control it.
He smiled, and his teeth were small and white. His left front tooth was just barely crooked and I wanted to squeeze him for having that one small physical imperfection that made it possible for me to believe that a boy could be interested in me.
“See you later.”
When my phone rang at seven thirty that night we told him to meet us at my parents’ house, because it would be empty. And we asked him to
bring a friend, to which he happily, even eagerly, obliged. When they arrived, Ian’s old Honda slowly rolling down the length of my driveway, Rudy and I were waiting for them outside on the front porch, swinging in the woven hammock beside the front door, our thighs pressed together through our jeans.
“Hi,” Rudy called, waving as the boys got out of the car and walked up the sidewalk, both of them with their hands shoved in the pockets of their shorts.
“Hey.” Ian looked up at my home behind us. “Nice house.”
“Thanks,” I said, and I shifted so he could sit next to me in the hammock. It had been unclear to me earlier how we would split into pairs, but now it appeared that because it was my number Ian had been given, it was me who he would sit beside. It was me who he would pursue, though bashfully, judging by the way his face flushed when he sat down and our sides smashed together. Inside, I was drowning in a hot puddle of happiness.
“I’m Jake.” His friend, who had a blonde buzzed hair cut and was not nearly as good looking as Ian, remained standing, leaning against the iron railing of the porch.
“My name’s Rudy.” She didn’t get up to shake his hand or hug him, or even to allow him room on the hammock. For a brief second I feared she would revoke her apparent decision to allow me Ian and because his friend was sort of ugly, she would choose Ian for herself instead (because surely, if given the choice, he would pick Rudy over me). But, of course, nothing like that happened at all.
That night we watched a movie in my family’s basement, on a television that was so new it had not yet been set up properly (the boys did this while Rudy and I popped popcorn in the basement’s small, similarly unused kitchen). The couches were cushy and deep seated and smelled of new leather. Ian and I shared one couch while Rudy lay sprawled across the other and Jake sat by himself in the matching armchair, looking at Rudy nearly as often as he looked at the movie. It appeared Rudy had not intended for this to be a double date at all; she and Jake were only vehicles to aid in the union of Ian and me.
In the middle of the movie – a horror film we selected from my parents’ mass library of DVDs – I got cold and Ian offered to get me a blanket, but because it was my house and I was fearful that if left alone to wander in the dark Ian would stumble into my room and find something horribly damning, like a stray pair of
dirty underwear or a tube of pimple cream, I was the one who scurried off to find one in the hall closet. When I brought it back and he spread it over both of our laps, his hand accidentally brushed against my knee for a moment – it was warm and clammy with sweat. We both blushed.
The rest of the movie went by in a blur – the important things I would remember were that during a creepy scene, Ian shifted so that his fingers brushed up against my own. A minute later, he wove his fingers through my own with such caution I could actually feel the question within the gesture. I tried to smile at him in response. And at the very end of the movie, when Rudy and Jake were both consumed completely in the unfolding action on the TV, he cleared his throat softly and I turned my head to look up at him and he pecked his lips against mine, my very first real kiss, and the fluttering sensation in my chest lasted the whole rest of the evening.
After the boys left, Rudy and I locked up my house and crossed the street to hers. I was so exhausted and spent by the way I had felt too alert and over-sensitized by all of the physical contact– it was as though each nerve ending that had touched Ian had been charged with enough feeling to fill my entire body – that I knew I would fall asleep the moment I crawled into Rudy’s bed.
“So, did he kiss you?” Rudy asked finally, her voice foreign in the stillness of the summer night.
“Yes,” I said, and a little smile crept over my face.
“I thought so!” She was squealing now, and she grabbed my wrist in her hand. “At the end of the movie, when that girl was running away? I didn’t see it, but you looked so…I don’t know, your face looked different when I looked over at you guys.”
My heart plummeted and I felt a diluted wave of panic wash over me.
“Great,” I said. “So I make weird faces when I’m around guys? Especially when they kiss me?”
Rudy laughed. “No, stupid. You’re being ridiculous. You just looked happy. And I could only tell because I know you.”
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