This comment put me at ease – not so much because I felt better about my facial expressions post-making out but because it implied that I had a friend, a real, true friend who knew me.
I was just settling into our relaxed summer routine, getting accustomed to another person’s constant and welcomed presence in my everyday life, when Rudy threw out the first of many obstacles for me.
It was a Friday morning and we were laying poolside, sprawled out on our stomachs, determined to bronze equally on both sides, though we agreed that laying face down gave us kinks in our necks and made the blood rush to our faces. Our stomachs were full with cream cheese and cinnamon bagels, our bathing suit tops untied and hanging loosely off our shoulders. It was hot that morning, so stifling hot and windless that whole summer. The surface of the pool was completely placid, and I could already feel the skin of my thighs sticking to the navy cloth chair.
“A guy from Ogden is having a party tonight.” Rudy turned her face toward me when she spoke, and I opened my eyes a crack to look at her. The woven pattern of the chair had pressed indentations into her cheek.
“Who is it?” I asked, though surely I wouldn’t recognize the name.
“Skyler Warren. He’s a sophomore.”
Panic began to rise in my chest, and my heart rate picked up. There had been so much agonizing change in my life the past year that I feared any deviation from the norm, anything that threatened to rock my fragile boat of sanity.
“Do you want to go?” Rudy asked, politely.
“Okay. Sure,” I said slowly.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to,” she said. She was always so accommodating of my feelings, and that fact almost always guaranteed that I would do whatever it was she wanted to do. “It might not be that great anyway.”
“No, let’s go,” I replied quickly. “We haven’t really done much yet this summer. I mean, with other people. You know.”
“Right. You can invite Ian, too, if you want.” Rudy said, then lay her head back down on the chair and closed her eyes again.
I blinked and continued to stare at her face, thoughts swirling in my head. She breathed softly, her nostrils flaring the tiniest amount with each exhale. My heart pounded against my ribcage with increasing speed and my throat felt so constricted I was sure that soon I wouldn’t be able to breathe at all.
Later that night, after we had been fed (Mrs. Golden, though exasperated by our insistence, allowed us to have a pepperoni pizza delivered and eat it in Rudy’s bedroom), Rudy had dressed me and, per my request, styled my stick straight hair into soft waves resembling her own. We paraded down the stairs in front of Mrs. Golden, who planted her hands on her hips and clucked pleasant admirations at our outfits.
“Oh, Jillian, your hair looks so pretty with that shade of red! And those eyes!” It was the compliments that first made me fall in love with Mrs. Golden.
“Don’t they look beautiful, Charlie?” She prodded Mr. Golden, who had come up from the TV den, his man cave, to see us off.
“You both look very nice,” he said. He wrapped one arm around Mrs. Golden’s shoulders and looked at both his daughter and his wife proudly.
We posed together in front of the huge marble staircase in their (largely unused, I came to discover) formal foyer, our arms placed around the smalls of each other’s backs, while Mrs. Golden snapped our photo and grinned at us, her face partially obscured by the camera. I’ve still got my copy of that first picture we took together, enclosed in a frame that Rudy bought me as a part of my fifteenth birthday present.
“What time is our curfew?” Rudy asked through her smiling teeth as Mrs. Golden took another photo.
“I don’t know, Rudy. Who’s driving you?” Mrs. Golden lowered the camera from her face and pressed a button to review the photo she’d just taken.
“Can we just take a taxi?” Rudy slipped her feet through the straps of the flat, silver sandals she had set by the foot of the stairs.
At this, Mrs. Golden looked up at Mr. Golden. She returned her gaze to Rudy and her facial features sharpened into a sterner, motherly look. “You know I don’t like you out by yourself like that late at night.”
“But mom, it’s the summer before high school. And it’s only a ten minute ride away.” Rudy wrapped her thin arms around her mother’s neck and lay her head on Mrs. Golden’s shoulder. Rudy, even in flats, was already several inches taller than her mother. “Trust me. Trust us. Please.”
“They’ll be fine,” Mr. Golden added, giving his wife’s shoulder a gentle squeeze.
Mrs. Golden stood contemplating for a few more seconds, but it was obvious that Rudy would have her way. “Fine. Fine, call your taxi. But be careful.”
“Thanks, mama.” Rudy planted a kiss on her mother’s cheek and pulled her cell phone from the purse hanging against her left hip.
“And be home by midnight. No later,” Mrs. Golden added, and Rudy nodded, the phone already pressed up against her ear.
When we pulled up to the front of Skyler Warren’s house it was clear, even to someone as inexperienced as myself, that the party was already in full effect. Light spilled out from cracks in the thick window draperies, casting yellow lines out across the dark grass. Cars lined the curb – BMWs and other shiny, new cars – parked bumper to bumper, most with navy Ogden Academy parking tags hanging from the rearview mirrors. Ian had agreed to meet us there – we had been on a handful of “dates,” from Rudy and I visiting him on his lunch break at the country club to more movie nights at my parents’ empty house, but tonight was the first time we would be out together in public. I could make out his shadowed, lanky figure leaning up against the door of his old mustang, punctual as always.
Rudy pushed the taxi door open, and we stepped out onto the sidewalk leading up to the house. Outside in the cooler night air, I could feel the soaking wet armpits of my silky shirt cold against my skin. I pressed my arms into my sides and crossed my forearms over my body. I felt even more out of place than I had inside the stale, smoky, yellow cab.
Ian met us at the open gate and as we approached the front door I could feel the throb of the music against the soles of my feet through my shoes. He let out a low whistle, gazing up at the face of the house. “This place is freaking huge.”
I felt my cheeks go warm.
“You can stay with me, if you want to,” Rudy said, combing a dark wave of hair away from her eyes with two fingers. “I don’t know everyone, either.”
I nodded; the lump in my throat had grown so large that I felt it would
be difficult to speak.
She pushed open the right side of the huge double doors, and we followed her into the crowded foyer. It was my first glimpse inside another Ogden student’s house and while I would never whistle, I wasn’t unimpressed. The walls were papered with an elegant scrollwork pattern stretching all the way up to the vaulted ceiling twenty feet above my head. Creamy marble covered the floor and a burgundy and teal embroidered rug was spread in the center of the entryway. It looked old – antique – and expensive. I watched as a boy stepped back onto the rug, his shoe grinding chunks of mud into one of the embroidered roses. He didn’t seem to notice.
The room was packed – dozens of kids pressed up against one another as they stood talking loudly over the pounding music, clutching red plastic cups in their hands. The girls wore jeans like mine, with the same meticulous stitching on the back pockets, the same distressed holes gaping over their knees. Hanging from their tanned shoulders they wore neon halter tops or pastel polos with a little animal embroidered beside the buttons –usually a horse. I took a mental note.
Rudy pushed her way through the crowd that was semi-circled around the door, leading with one arm and pulling me along with the other until we had reached the threshold of another room. In the kitchen were a handful of guys crowded around a center island, where a boy in a button down shirt and backwards baseball cap was manning a beer keg. Puddles of spilled beer speckled the granite countertop at random,
like landmines on a battlefield.
On the opposite side of the enormous kitchen was another circle of kids packed around a long wood table watching two pairs of boys lobbing a ping-pong ball into more red plastic cups across from them.
“Rudy Golden?” I barely heard someone shout her name. I turned my head away from the game. It was the boy with the keg who had called out to Rudy.
“Hey!” Rudy yelled, stepping closer to him. I followed so closely behind her I could smell the hint of shampoo in her hair. He wrapped her in a one armed hug, their sides smashed together for the briefest of seconds before they both pulled away. “This is my friend Jillian. She just moved here last year. And her boyfriend, Ian.”
This close – standing just inches from his face – I could see this boy was very good looking, with dark eyes and dark hair and a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of his nose. My heart pounded; it didn’t help that without prior discussion, Rudy had called Ian my boyfriend.
“Hey, Jillian. Ian. I’m Skyler.” He nodded.
“Nice to meet you,” I yelled, my voice ringing strange in my own ears.
“You guys want a beer?”
Rudy glanced at me and I arranged my face in a way that I hoped conveyed ambivalence.
“Do you have anything else?” Rudy asked.
“Nope, not tonight.” Skyler shook his head and smiled. “It’s beer or bring your own. Sorry, ladies.”
“Beer’s okay then,” Rudy said, and he filled three cups with foamy liquid and handed them to us.
“Thanks,” I said, gazing down into my cup.
“Oh, none for me, actually.” Ian held up his palms to ward off the proffered cup of beer. “I have to drive later.”
“A responsible one, huh?” Skyler clapped him on the shoulder. “Most of these drunk idiots are just planning to crash in my basement. Where do you go to school, man?”
“St. Louis High. I’m working at the country club golf course this summer, though. That’s where we all met.”
“You go to High, huh?” Skyler paused then held out his cup exaggeratedly, as if to cheers then took a big gulp. “Go Rams.”
Ian thrust his hands into his jeans pockets and looked down.
“We’ll see you later on.” Rudy squeezed Skyler’s forearm and took a small sip from her cup before leading us down carpeted stairs and into a large basement, far less crowded than the floor above us. A different song was playing on this level, at a slightly lower volume, and a group of girls was dancing together in the corner. A few guys sat on cushy leather couches. The television was turned off and they weren’t speaking to one another, just staring very obviously at the dancers as they slithered around to the music.
Sometimes, at fourteen especially, I thought that the easiest thing in the world would be to be a man. Being a girl required so much showmanship – you had to buy the right clothes, you had to wear the right makeup, you had to impress the other girls but you couldn’t be too impressive, lest they decide you were someone to envy. You had to give the right compliments in public and the right insults in private. You had to always long for something you didn’t have. And you had to play the game, or you risked becoming something worse than being enviable or disliked – being unknown completely.
But boys could be crude, they could be lazy or stupid or ugly or fat, and they could still be loved and respected. They said what they thought, and they asked for what they wanted. They fought with their fists and then they slapped one another on the back and forgot what they had been fighting about in the first place. They stared at the girls they wanted, and then they got them.
“Do you like beer?” Rudy leaned in close to my face to ask me.
“I don’t know,” I admitted, lifting the cup close to my nose.
“Don’t smell it,” Ian said. “You definitely won’t want to drink it after you smell it.”
I tipped the cup up to my mouth and took in a mouthful. It was bitter and the color reminded me of urine. I struggled not to grimace.
“This is disgusting,” I said, and Rudy and Ian laughed.
“I know. I’m still getting used to it. My brother used to dare me to finish his beers when he had friends over, so I got a head start.”
Rudy had two older siblings, both old enough that they had moved out of their parents’ house. I hadn’t met either of them yet, (her sister, Marta, was spending the summer at an internship in New York City and her brother, Kent, was a freshman in college, living on campus for the summer and retaking a prerequisite calculus class because, Rudy had told me, his grade was bringing down his GPA, which he needed to improve if he wanted to get into a decent law program three years from now), but I heard about them constantly from Mr. and Mrs. Golden. When Rudy had given me a grand tour of their home the first week I was there, I had seen pictures of them hanging in the large hallway between the formal foyer and the dining room. Rudy had called it her parents’ trophy room, and she had rolled her eyes in fake exasperation as we passed through. But a few times in the past weeks I had found myself drawn to that hallway, fascinated. There were pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Golden’s wedding, when Mrs. Golden’s waist was nearly as tiny as Rudy’s, and a family portrait of the five of them when Rudy was only three or four, dressed in a poofy black dress and patent leather buckled shoes. There were photos of her siblings’ high school accomplishments and thick shadow boxes full of medals they had won. Kent had been a wrestler in high school and I was shocked to discover that he was also quite handsome; I thought the two were mutually exclusive. And Marta, who was beautiful but very serious looking, was president of the student council and debate teams. Finally, there were photos of them in cap and gown, grinning at their high school graduations. I couldn’t explain what drew me to that hall, but something about the memories encapsulated there filled me with a warm feeling.
“I’m going to need a lot of practice,” I said, taking another large gulp of beer, this time while holding my breath, hoping I wouldn’t taste it.
Rudy clinked my cup with her own and drank as well.
The three of us mingled amongst the kids in the basement, and most of them seemed to know who Rudy was even though a lot of them were a year or two older than us. I wasn’t surprised that Rudy attracted more attention from the boys than the girls. The boys always touched her, wrapping her in big hugs to greet her or resting their hands on the small of her back, or on her waist, and leaning in even closer than necessary when she spoke to them. In contrast, the girls didn’t approach Rudy; some of them looked at her through sideways glances and whispered to their friends when Rudy wasn’t watching. But she handled all of it with grace, easing away from the boys when they clung to her too tightly, and smiling kindly when another girl looked her way.
When we had both finished our beers I felt slightly light-headed, my face flushed with heat while I stood awkwardly beside Rudy, fiddling with the lip of my cup while she talked to another polo-clad guy beside us. Ian was across the room, playing a game of darts with two other boys, and I watched them with bored eyes. I felt an odd swelling of pride when he said something that made the other guys laugh, and I wondered if this was what it felt like to be half of a pair – your partner’s social wins were your wins, and their social missteps your own as well.
“Hey,” I heard someone say, and I ignored it because it obviously wasn’t meant for me.
“Hey.” This time I felt fingers grasp my arm, though not harshly, and I turned toward the voice. “Have I met you before?”
The voice belonged to a guy with shaggy brown hair that hung down to his eyebrows. He was very tall, and he stooped over a little to speak to me. His breath was sour.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“What’s your name?”
“Jillian.”
“Jillian,” he repeated, without giving me his own name. “I’ll remember that.” He grinned a toothy grin and his eyes slipped quickly from my face down to my chest and back up again. Gross.
Someone walking past k
nocked into his arm and beer sloshed over the rim of his cup and splashed onto my jeans. I jumped back, and Rudy turned.
“Oh, no.” She glanced at the wet stain spreading across my thigh.
“Shit. I didn’t mean to.” The guy lunged toward me, stooping over to wipe at the wet spot with bottom of his shirt. I could see the coarse brown hair around his belly button and my cheeks flushed bright red.
“It’s okay.” I pulled my leg away out of his predatory grasp.
“Don’t worry about it,” Rudy swatted him away. She met my gaze. “Let’s go get refills.”
“Sorry.” The guy stood as we turned to leave. I couldn’t meet his eyes. I waved, limply.
We pulled Ian away from his darts game and fled up the staircase into the kitchen. This time Skyler was gone, and Rudy began to refill our cups herself. The foyer had cleared and from the kitchen I had a clear view of the front door as it swung open and three guys in baggy jeans and long t-shirts walked in, their eyes scanning the crowd as they stepped into the room. The first boy was tall and slender, his jeans hanging low on his hipbones, exposing green plaid boxers. He wore his hat backwards over thick black hair and cold black eyes. The second boy was shorter and squattier, with a stern brown buzz cut and a matching fuzzy mustache. The third guy was black, and he carried an open beer can in one hand, pausing in the doorway to swig from the top. There were two girls in the foyer and they turned as the door slammed shut. Both girls gave them a once-over and immediately turned to walk into the kitchen. The guy with the hat smirked as he watched them go.
“Who are they?” I nudged Rudy.
She handed me my cup, now full and cool against my fingers, and she peered into the foyer. “I don’t know. Not from Ogden.”
“I’ve seen those guys around school,” Ian added. “Or at least I used to – I think they dropped out or got expelled.”
They walked past us toward the kitchen and the plaid boxers guy stopped and tipped his chin up in Ian’s direction. “I seen you before, man.”
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