“I’ll call someone. I’ll call Kent.”
I sat down on the steps to the porch, hugging my knees to my chest while she stepped further into the yard, phone pressed to her ear.
“Kent,” Rudy yelled into the mouthpiece. “Will you come pick us up? Our ride left us.” Her eyebrows drew together angrily and her voice was warbled, shaking with the threat of tears. “Seriously, Kent, please just come get us? I don’t want to call a taxi, it’ll take forever and it’s cold. Please.”
She spent another minute arguing with him, and I tapped the heels of my shoes against the step to distract myself and to create body heat. My head felt detached from my body.
Finally she seemed to have convinced him and she gave him the directions to Skyler’s house.
“What an ass,” she said, and I didn’t know whether she meant Houston or Kent. She sat down next to me on the step, pressing her side to mine and we huddled together in the cold to wait.
When Mr. Golden’s car pulled onto the street we stood and ran (ran as much as you can run when you’re drunk and wearing high heels) into the street. Rudy yanked open the back door and climbed inside and I, in my state of drunken boldness, got into the passenger’s seat. It was warm inside the car, hot air billowing out of the vents.
“Where’s your boyfriend?” Kent tilted his head up toward the rearview mirror to look at Rudy without turning around.
She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know.”
“What a good guy,” Kent mumbled under his breath. I felt a throb of affection toward him for this display of big brotherly protection.
None of us spoke, and after a few minutes I twisted around in my seat to glance at Rudy. She was lying across the backseat, her legs propped up on the car door, asleep. I turned back around.
“She’s sleeping,” I announced to no one in particular.
“Yeah,” Kent answered.
I leaned my arm against the plastic console that divided the front seats, my fingers dangling off into the empty cup holders. A few moments later I felt Kent’s arm join mine, our forearms pressed together, the heat of his skin against my goosebumps. I didn’t dare look down at our arms for fear our touching was an accident and if I acknowledged it, he would move. I stared ahead, out the windshield into the darkness, my heart pounding.
A few more seconds passed and I felt his warm hand close around my cold fingers.
“Your hands are freezing,” he said casually, like holding hands was something normal for us.
“Yeah,” I said. I laughed, and it came out more like a croak.
The skin on his palm felt pleasantly rough against my smooth hand, and I suddenly felt thankful for my thin, girlish fingers. He rubbed the pad of his thumb against the palm of my hand, and I felt like I was melting into the back of the seat. Clearly it was not an accident. We remained this way – Kent holding my left hand, me turning into a roiling vat of liquid – until we pulled into the driveway of the Goldens’ house. Only then did I dare to glance across the seat and meet Kent’s gaze, mostly because it would have struck him as odd if I refused to look at him then. He smiled at me, gave my fingers one final squeeze and then he let go and got out of the car, and I abruptly felt his absence. I wanted his skin to be touching mine again; it felt unbearable to me at that moment to be alone, to have all of my body parts to myself.
Kent opened the back door of the car, reached inside and scooped Rudy, still asleep, into his broad arms. I climbed out of the seat and followed him to the door and into the house. He carried Rudy all the way up the stairs and into her bedroom, laying her on top of the covers in her bed. When her head hit the fluffy pillow her face scrunched up like she was going to speak, but she said nothing. I dropped my purse inside the door and as he stood to leave we made eye contact again through the shadowy light. On his way out of Rudy’s room he walked very close to where I was standing, and I felt his fingertips brush very lightly against my bare thigh.
The next morning Rudy was miraculously un-hung over and I, now in a fully sober state, went out of my way to avoid any contact with Kent. The mortifying thought came to me that maybe I had dreamt up the entire strange interaction between us, and the further the day progressed, the more likely this seemed. It was only when that night at dinner his foot bumped against mine underneath the dinner table and I looked up to catch his brief but significant smile that I became certain the event had truly happened.
I spent Thanksgiving Day at my own house. Both sets of my grandparents flew in for the holiday, and my uncle and his family came from Chicago to spend the day at our house. My cousins were young, five and eight, and they ran around the house in their socked feet, sliding across the slick floor and giggling when they lost their balance and fell down, bouncing onto their knees and elbows and butts. In the morning I joined in, chasing them down the hallway as they screamed with childish glee, until my mother retrieved me to help set the table for lunch. At one o’clock we sat down at the long mahogany table in the seldom-used formal dining room and while I filled my plate with mashed potatoes and stuffing, I thought of the Goldens. Marta was supposed to be flying in that morning from New York, and I imagined all of them reunited as a perfect family unit, laughing as they sat around the dining room table drinking hot cinnamon cider (one of Mrs. Golden’s special recipes). Even in my family’s best moments, I always imagined the Goldens surpassing our warmth.
By six o’clock, when the sun had begun to set behind the fence in our backyard and my youngest cousin had fallen asleep on the couch, everyone began to leave, to retreat back to their hotels (though our house was large enough, my entire family’s need for privacy meant that no one ever stayed the night with us when they visited). I wanted to go to Rudy’s, partly to feel myself an integral piece of their family dynamic, and partly just to be in Kent’s presence. Though he hadn’t been at the forefront of my thoughts, whatever had happened after that party had been lingering at the back of my mind the entire day. But my mother refused to let me leave the house, insisting that I not interrupt the Goldens’ family holiday. So I stayed, brooding in my room, well aware that I was being selfish and adolescent yet not caring a bit, while my parents sat together in the living room sipping what was left of the wine they had served with dinner.
For the rest of Thanksgiving break, I stayed glued to Rudy’s side like a permanent accessory, a bracelet or a skirt or one of her appendages that had somehow become unattached from her body. I went shopping with the Golden women on Black Friday and ate left-over turkey sandwiches with them for dinner, but it wasn’t until Saturday night that I got what I had been after, though I don’t think I really knew what it was I wanted, or at least I hadn’t believed I would truly go after it until after the moment itself had already passed.
Rudy and I had gone to another party, this one to mourn the end of our holiday break, and we were sloppy drunk again (to be completely accurate, Rudy was sloppy drunk. I was in a state of meticulously planned drunk – drunk enough to water down my good reason, but not enough to render me obnoxious), and Kent had agreed to be our ride again. It was the night before he would return to Florida.
As we walked to the car, I wrapped my arm around Rudy’s waist to help steady her while she bent down and climbed in the back. When the car pulled away from the curb, I was pulled into a strange alternate universe where Kent was my husband and Rudy our child; it wasn’t two in the morning, it was mid-afternoon and we were going home after a long day at the park. This is what it would feel like to be in a relationship, I thought. This is what it would feel like to be connected to people by love, not obligation. Emboldened by my own fantasy, I reached across the seat and, in the real, live universe, placed my hand on top of Kent’s hand, which was resting on his knee.
He glanced down at my hand, and he looked at me from across the car, and this time I was the one who smiled. Looking back, these details shock and amaze me. Was it the alcohol? Who was this girl, this freshman in high school, who made moves on her best friend’s much o
lder brother?
Before I knew it, we were at the Goldens’ again, and he was lifting Rudy from the backseat, and I had a striking and appropriate sense of déjà vu as I followed them up the stairs and watched him put Rudy to bed in her room. But this time, with just a hint of hesitation, he grabbed my hand and pulled me out into the hallway with him, pulling Rudy’s door closed behind us.
He led me down the dark hall and into his bedroom and without turning on the light (if he had turned on the light, if I had seen all of the features of his face and witnessed this moment for what it was under the brightness of a light bulb, my shaky confidence would have deflated and I think I would have turned around and left), led me to his bed.
He pushed me, gently, onto the mattress and he lay down beside me. His sheets were unmade, and a wadded up roll of comforter lay uncomfortably under my lower back, but I didn’t try to scoot away. He was kissing my face, and then my mouth, and he tasted vaguely of beer, even though he was the one who had driven us. He probably weighed nearly twice what I did, but he felt as light as a feather on top of my chest.
We stayed like this for ages, for eternities, until it felt like there was nothing to do but to go further, and that’s where we stopped, both of us, simultaneously (probably not simultaneously, but this is how I will always remember it happening). I don’t know if it was because he was nineteen and I was only fifteen, or if it was because I was his little sister’s friend, or if it was because he just didn’t like me that much (this crossed my mind, and I think I believed this reason the most, especially when I was feeling most insecure), but we never went any further than lying there, kissing. It was the best possible outcome, the only way I could see for us to escape the situation we had put ourselves in without any irreparable consequences. I could keep this, this relatively innocent drunken make out session, a secret from Rudy but if we had had sex, if her brother had taken my virginity, that secret would not have been manageable. At that point, Rudy and I both still held our virginity cards, clinging to them with all our might against the tornado that was male adolescent concupiscence. If I had handed mine over, she would have known. It would have been evident in my mannerisms and especially when I looked her in her eyes.
When I got up from the soft blue sheets of Kent’s bed at three-thirty in the morning, I straightened my dress and crept across the carpet holding my shoes in one hand, and neither of us spoke a word. I opened the bedroom door, then turned and looked at him across the darkness, our eyes locked for an instant in a wordless pact of silence before I stepped through the threshold.
I’m not sure what all Rudy hid from me, but that night remained my one big secret, my single act of treason upon our friendship.
3
Freshman Winter
Fall in the Midwest was subtler than fall in Massachusetts. Though the colors – the reds and oranges of the leaves that fell from tree branches and blanketed the ground and the golden yellows of the sunsets and the contrast between the light of summer evenings and the light of fall nights – were muted, I still thought autumn was beautiful to watch. When winter crept in though, its fingers digging into my sides beginning the second week of November, it was far different than it had been in the East. Midwestern winters were bitterly cold, with strong, biting winds that whipped at my hair and blew up into my jacket no matter how tightly I had it buttoned. The sky remained an unyielding wall of grayish-white and though it wasn’t always snowing like it had seemed to in Boston, the sidewalks and parking lots were marked with a perpetual layer of dirty, gray sludge. Yards turned into soggy brown puddles when they weren’t covered in a layer of white snow, and even the snow itself never seemed to hold the same virginal beauty in St. Louis that it had in Boston, against the backdrop of stone buildings and national history. That was the best way to describe winter in the Midwest, I thought, sitting in math class at the beginning of December, my head propped up on my arm, staring out the dirt smudged window as wind bent the branches on a bare tree in the courtyard. Long and dirty and freezing.
Math was the only class that year I didn’t have with Rudy – she was in freshman Geometry with most of the rest of our classmates, and I was taking Advanced Algebra because my score on the math section of Ogden Academy’s entrance exam had not been high enough to bump me up to Geometry. This had infuriated my mother, once she found out there were only two sections of Advanced Algebra offered at the school (compared to the six Geometry classes), placing me firmly, if not permanently, in the bottom quarter of my class. She had spoken first to my math teacher, and then to the principal, both of whom had referenced my math scores and then, taking in a deep, anticipatory breath, told my mother that there was nothing they could do – I would have to remain in Advanced Algebra. Maybe, they said, mostly to appease her at least a tiny bit, to give her some hope, and to get her off of their backs, we could “revisit the situation” after seeing the grades for my freshman math class. It appeared that money couldn’t get you anything you wanted. Or, in a school brimming with wealth, we just didn’t have the kind of money or clout that would get you that sort of influence.
By December I could already tell (I did not share this with either of my parents) that if there had been any truth to the idea of revisiting my math proficiency, I would definitely not be moving up. We had taken three exams over the course of the semester, and I had earned C’s on all of them. At my school back in Boston, and at the junior high school I had attended the year before I hadn’t been a stellar student, but I had mostly brought home A’s and B’s, and this had suited my parents just fine (grades weren’t the sort of thing that impressed my mother, unlike designer purses or naturally straight hair). But at Ogden it seemed that the workload was considerably more difficult. Or, I thought as I twirled my pencil around between two of my fingers, possibly it was because I spent the majority of my time in class thinking about what I would do after school or during the coming weekend, and outside of class I spent the majority of my time worrying about boys or how my clothes looked or what I would say if an upperclassman tried to start a conversation with me at a party or at the movies on a Saturday night. My immediate desires seemed most pertinent to me; homework and studying and facts all had a payoff that lurked so far in the future I was either unable or unwilling to see it.
Advanced Algebra was my last class of the day (I’m sure this didn’t help with my productivity), and after I had turned in my daily problem sheet (mostly a collection of doodles and scribbling that made evident my mathematical shortcomings) I would rush out of the room and down the hall to the second floor landing where Rudy and I and the rest of the freshman class had our locker assignments. Our lockers were right outside Rudy’s final period classroom, but today I had beat her. I poked my head into her class, but they had clearly been dismissed already – only a few stragglers were still standing around talking or shoving notebooks into their book bags, and none of them was Rudy.
I leaned back into the hall, dropped my book bag off of one of my shoulders and swung it in front of me so I could remove some of my heavy textbooks. It was a Wednesday, and I should have been planning to study for my History exam on Friday but instead, Rudy and I were planning on watching a Sex and the City marathon on TV all night. I unloaded nearly my entire book bag then replaced it on my back, then I stood and waited, other kids streaming past me, some even running (only boys) toward the large glass double doors that led out into the icy afternoon freedom. Though I had become more confident, more open and outgoing, since I had begun hanging out with Rudy, I found myself slipping into my old, shy shell at certain moments. Especially when I was stationary and when I was alone. People walked past me, some of them waving or calling out to say “hi” across the river of bodies, and I would wave back and smile timidly, but I could feel myself drawing inward. I looked up and down the hallway for Rudy. Finally, once most of the rest of the student body was gone, I found her, walking slowly toward me, her hands shoved into the oversized pockets of her sweatpants.
“Hey,
” I said cheerily. “Where were you?”
“I went in the bathroom to call my mom back.” Phones weren’t allowed anywhere in the school. She bent over her lower level locker and twisted the combination lock. “My grandma died this morning.”
I abruptly wiped the smile from my face. “Oh. I’m so sorry.”
Rudy looked up at me while she dropped a book into the bottom of her locker. “Thanks.” She smiled sadly. “I didn’t really get to know her very well. You know what I mean?”
I nodded, unsure of what to say. These situations always made me feel incompetent.
“I wish I could’ve spent more time with her. I only got to see her a few times my whole life.” Rudy shut the metal locker door and stood.
“Your mom’s mom?” I asked. We started walking toward the stairs. “Your Greek grandma?”
Mrs. Golden was part Greek, which helped explain Rudy’s beautiful, dark features. Her family had moved to the United States when Mrs. Golden was a child, so that she and her four siblings could go to school in America. In college at Dartmouth, Rudy’s parents had met and her mom had decided to stay here and get married. Two of Rudy’s uncles, as well as her maternal grandmother (her grandfather died sometime before Rudy was born), still lived in Greece. They were wealthy, owning some large company, I think. I was never quite sure how people acquired their fortunes.
“Yeah. The funeral is in Greece, on Friday. We’re leaving tonight.”
Selfishly, I felt a pang of disappointment and panic. Rudy would be gone for several days, and I’d be all by myself.
At the bottom of the stairs we pushed through the heavy glass doors and were hit with a gust of cold, blustery air. I pulled down on the sleeves of my sweater, covering my hands in the fabric.
“How’re you getting home?” I asked.
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