Golden

by Andrea Dickherber

  “Holy shit!” Jack yelled, and all three guys bent to the ground and began frantically scooping up snow to pack into ammo.

  Wet slush dripped down my cheek.

  “Are you okay?” Rudy grabbed my arm, but when she saw I was laughing, she started to giggle too.

  Packing snowballs, I quickly learned, was not one of my strong skills. No matter how much I smashed the snow between my gloved palms, it failed to form a nice, smooth ball. But the boys were fast and efficient at it, so they would crank out snowball after snowball and stash them in a hole at the base of a big tree where Rudy and I would retrieve them, folding up the bottoms of our coats and holding them to our stomachs so we could store dozens of pieces of ammunition at once. Then we would take off running, sprinting the distance from one tree to the next, crouching behind the trunks if anything came flying in our direction, then standing to retaliate, throwing one of our own balls when we glimpsed a flash of color – the tails of someone’s puffy winter coat or a logo on their stocking cap. I sucked at making the snowballs, but I had surprisingly accurate aim.

  “Crap,” I muttered as another of my balls crumbled to powder in my hands. My fingers were cold and soaking wet (my gloves got ripped off when one of the boys tackled me to the ground and pummeled me with snow) and too stiff to treat the snowball delicately. My shoulders were sore, and I could hear the rasp in my voice as I panted. We had been in the park for almost two hours, I guessed, and looking around at the way everyone else was moving, slower and with less purpose, huddling in on themselves against the cold, I could tell that the others felt similarly exhausted.

  “Truce?” I yelled to one of my teammates, Jack, fifty or sixty feet away from me. He didn’t hear me, so I cupped my hands around my mouth. “Truce?” I yelled louder, and he turned to me and nodded, I think, though it was hard to tell beneath his scarf and ski mask.

  “Truce!” He repeated, his voice bellowing out over the snowy park. “Truce! Come out, you assholes, we’re done!”

  From all around us people popped up from behind trees and bushes and we walked back toward the cars, dragging our tired feet, making long tracks through the snow. When we’d first arrived at the park the ground had been untouched, a perfect white barrier across the grass, but now when I looked back over my shoulder it was blemished all over with footprints, patches of dull green and brown visible through the trampled snow. This part – the rapid defilement of that immaculate winter canvas – was the part of winter that made me the saddest, and I felt a pang of disappointment strike me at that moment, even around all of those people. Even when I’d been exhilarated and happy just minutes before.

  Someone behind us launched another snowball and it hit Houston in the back.

  “Hey!” He whipped around but couldn’t tell who had thrown it. “Fuck off, we called a truce.” He sounded angry but he was smiling. His white teeth were almost translucent between his red lips and pink, wind burned face.

  When we reached the parking lot all twenty of us collapsed against the hoods of the cars, or on the ground below us, sprawled out to rest. My calves burned under my long underwear and sweatpants and I felt cold dampness leaking in from somewhere, though I couldn’t pinpoint the location.

  Rudy and I sat on a snowdrift, where the city truck had pushed all the extra snow when they’d cleared the parking lot early that morning, and we drank from our thermoses, which were miraculously still a little bit warm. I could feel the lukewarm liquid – and the alcohol mixed into it – warm my insides as it traveled down my throat. Beside me, I heard Rudy’s stomach growl.

  “What time is it?” She said, laying one arm across her stomach. “I’m about to die.”

  “It has to be almost noon. I’m starving, too.”

  We left the park to drive back to Rudy’s house, all of us fairly quiet in the car. The roads were mostly cleared, and it had stopped snowing, and I wondered absent-mindedly if my dad had been able to get a different flight. At the Golden’s, all five of us sat thawing at the kitchen table, our cheeks red and our hair flattened against our foreheads at odd angles from our hats, while Mrs. Golden made us fat grilled cheese sandwiches and steaming bowls of tomato soup, and I ate two of each before I felt my stomach start to expand. After lunch we went back out into the snow and unloaded plastic sleds from the trunk of Houston’s car and we dragged them up the street to the big hill that ran down from one of our neighbor’s backyards to the community pool (which was largely pointless because most of the houses in the neighborhood had their own pools). There were only three sleds and five of us, so we took turns pairing up, two or three of us smashed together, our arms and legs entangled on top of the tiny plastic discs, while someone else shoved the sled down the hill. A few times we tried stacking all five of us onto one sled, lying on our stomachs, our arms spread out to the sides. As the smallest I was always on the very top, lying with my face pressed against someone else’s back.

  “Ready?” I would cry, and all I could hear below me was moaning and laughter. “Let’s go!”

  I would push off the ground with the tips of my boots – the only part of me that could touch – and the person on the bottom would drag us along, pushing as best as they could with their hands.

  Most of the time we toppled over immediately and all went rolling down the hill on our own, stopping at various points when our momentum ended, laughing hysterically until we couldn’t breathe. But once, the last time we tried it, we managed to make it three quarters of the way down the steep hill with all of us together, my mouth aching as I grinned and screamed against the wind, my heart bursting with the biggest happiness, and I thought how lucky I was, how unbelievably lucky I was, that this was all mine.

  4

  Freshman Spring

  The last week of February marked the beginning of spring sports season at Ogden, even though it only hit forty degrees outside on a lucky day, and it would still be weeks before any of the coaches would consider having us practice outside. Rudy and I joined the track team, and when we showed up at 3:30 the afternoon of our first practice I scanned the gym for familiar faces in the relatively large crowd. Track was a popular sport at Ogden because it was so diverse, with sprinting and distance races and field events. It appealed to people who weren’t really all that athletic because you could blend in easily, not like with basketball or volleyball, and because the track team did not make cuts. Also, Coach Kline, the head coach, was one of Ogden’s most popular teachers because he was genuinely funny and he was really good looking (he was probably only in his late twenties, which seemed ridiculously old to me at the time; but he was a runner and he was trim and muscular and had a strong, masculine jaw and I could understand, though I couldn’t quite agree with, why many of the girls at Ogden had crushes on him).

  Rudy and I weaved through the crowd and stood beside Natalie, one of the girls from the JV cheerleading squad.

  “What do we usually do for the first practice?” I asked, snapping the hair band on my wrist.

  Natalie was a junior and she was pretty, with long brown hair and soft features, but pretty in an unobtrusive way. She was quiet and didn’t draw much attention to herself, though she was nice and actually very funny when you got to know her.

  “Today they’ll probably just give us all the information. Forms and the meet schedule and everything, you know?” Natalie wasn’t an especially good cheerleader but I had heard that she was a fast sprinter, that she had advanced past the district meet the year before.

  “Do we even run? I need to shed some of this winter flab, man,” Rudy joked, grabbing a handful of t-shirt around her waist.

  “You think that’s bad? Check out my sagging butt.” Natalie rolled her eyes and turned to give us a better view of her not at all saggy backside. “Too much of my mom’s pecan pie at Christmas.”

  Throughout high school and college, I was fascinated by the tendency of all girls to follow another woman’s self-deprecatory comment with one of their own. It was like an invitation you coul
d not decline – you had to RSVP by revealing your own self-consciousness, the things you hated about your own body. Though I certainly didn’t love everything about myself (I thought my blonde hair washed out my complexion, my knees turned in and made me look bow-legged, my hips were too narrow and the freckles on my nose and cheeks looked like pimples), I didn’t really feel compelled to air all of my grievances. I thought about my faults constantly, particularly in the company of boys, but deep down I hoped that maybe I was just imagining these flaws. I feared if I spoke them out loud, they would somehow become more prominent. But when someone else started it, you had to follow suit – to not, to seem self-assured and confident, would be a gross betrayal of the female population, not to mention cocky.

  “Hey.” Coach Kline was yelling over the rumble of the crowd in the gym, trying to get our attention and quiet us down. “Hey, everybody!” He flapped his arms, as if he were physically patting the noise down, like smoke in the air. “How about we get quiet so we can get this season started?”

  Someone, a boy, in the back of the crowd hooted and pumped his fist in the air.

  Coach Kline smiled. “That’s right, it should be a kickass season, huh? Whoops, I probably shouldn’t have said that, right?” This was part of the essence of his popularity – that he could curse in front of us, that he would joke with us and because he was still close enough to our own age, it didn’t seem creepy or over-exaggerated.

  “So,” he continued. “I’d like to start by thanking everybody for coming out today. We’ve got a lot of returning seniors, juniors and sophomores, and I know I see some new faces out there as well.”

  There was more cheering, from the seniors, and I began to tune out, gazing around at the faces in the room as I often found myself doing in classes or assemblies or even at a party or a movie theater. It wasn’t necessarily that I was uninterested in what Coach Kline was saying, just that I found the people around me to be so much more interesting. They were so alive, and their lives so much more compelling than flat, unfeeling words or pictures in my textbooks or actors and actresses on a movie screen.

  Ogden was a small school - there were only about 800 of us in all four grades combined, and that year’s senior class would graduate only 178 students in the spring, according to what would be printed in the graduation program. That was their entire class though; it was virtually un-heard of for someone at Ogden to drop out of high school.

  The school was small, but there were still many faces in the crowd I didn’t recognize. It’s a cliché for high school to be cliquey, but at Ogden it seemed that the groups were so well defined, they became solid boundaries you physically could not cross. I had 200 classmates, and I only ever really spoke to one third of them. But sports were huge, and they drew everyone together. There were kids of all races (though Ogden was still 85% white, something they did not highlight on the fancy school website), clumped together under the fluorescent bulbs in the gym. There were scholarship kids, in slightly more worn tennis shoes, and to my right, a pair of girls with black painted fingernails and neon streaks in their hair listening attentively to Coach Kline. I didn’t actively dislike anyone who was different from me. Actually, I often found myself either fascinated with them, with imagining the circumstances that made their lives unique from mine, or intimidated by them and thus I averted my eyes when I passed them in the hallway. No one at Ogden was ostracized; there weren’t any “bullies” (at least not any general, black-leather-jacket-wearing, knuckle-cracking bullies; bullies existed, but they existed within each clique, and they were often your former friends), we just associated with those most similar to us. We refused to exit our comfort zones, and in that way, we were the blandest portrait of teenagers possible.

  But that’s not how I saw my classmates and myself while I was still attending Ogden. Standing in the gym, which was less than five years old, with fancy features that made it look more like a college gymnasium than one meant for a high school, or walking through the school, I often felt a swell of pride rise up in my chest. We were more than ordinary, I thought, walking through the columns that flanked the front of the school, or past the marble lobby where the school secretaries sat behind glass paneled windows. The school was special, and we were special by virtue of our attendance here. In high school I rarely felt pride in myself as an individual, but it wasn’t hard for me to feel proud of a group I was a part of.

  I was looking at the ceiling, at the large blue velvet championship banners that hung from the rafters, when Coach Kline stopped speaking and everyone around me began to stir.

  “Well, that was a bust,” Rudy said beside me.

  “Huh?”

  “Weren’t you listening? No practice today. Soccer reserved the gym for four and it’s too cold outside.”

  “Oh. Sorry, I sort of zoned out. That sucks.” I was following her into the lobby that faced out toward the sports parking lot.

  “Natalie said she’d drive us home,” Rudy said, sitting down on one of the gold plaqued benches, donated by an alumni class. “She had to get her stuff out of the locker room first though.”

  It was a Friday and because we had no tests coming up the next week, Rudy and I had sworn off of studying for the entire weekend. We left our backpacks in our lockers, to further commit ourselves – not that it was a tough commitment, not for me at least.

  “Let’s wait outside. Something smells in here.” Rudy stood and walked toward the doors.

  “It’s freezing outside.”

  Rudy shrugged. “It doesn’t look that bad. Come on, I want some fresh air.”

  She pushed the door open and reluctantly I followed her outside.

  We were only wearing shorts and t-shirts and the wind whipped through my ponytail, slapping it against my back. The hairs on my forearms rose instantly, and I wrapped my arms around my body.

  “Do you think I can walk on my hands?” Rudy had her back to me, but there was no one else outside (probably because it was barely 40 degrees out) so I knew she was speaking to me.

  “I don’t know. Can you?”

  “I bet I can walk all the way to you.” She turned around and wiggled her eyebrows at me.

  I scoffed. “Bottle of Patron that you can’t.”

  This expression had been widely used amongst the Ogden seniors that winter and it had just begun to trickle down the totem pole to our freshman class. It felt a little false coming out of my own mouth, but I felt a bit proud for coming up with a reason to say it aloud, even just to Rudy.

  “You’re on.”

  She kicked into a handstand, her long legs up straight above her head, and when she began to stagger forward on her hands her t-shirt slipped down over her face, exposing the red fabric of her sports bra. She moved about three tiny steps, then fell over onto her back with a scream. She was still several feet away from me, and she was laughing hard, her eyes pinched closed.

  “You’re insane,” I said leaning over and offering my hand to help her up. “Plus, you owe me a bottle of Patron now.”

  Rudy grasped my palm, but she stayed limp and let me yank at her, trying to lift her dead weight off the ground.

  “Totally insane,” I added.

  “Yeah.” Rudy opened her eyes, but she kept giggling. “But you love me, don’t you?”

  And I did. I really, honestly did.

  The second week of March, before spring sports schedules got seriously underway, Ogden had a weeklong break from classes, sports and any other school activities. It was the only time all year, aside from the summer (and even then, there were unofficial practices and camps), that everything at the school shut down completely to give us a rest. Officially, it was our spring break; unofficially, I learned, it was called “Dead Week,” and for every day of that week, someone from the senior class held a party at their house and everyone spent the entire week getting drunk for a last time before the really serious athletes gave up alcohol for the next three months. It was an Ogden tradition, Rudy told me. When Kent was a senior, her
parents had let him stay home for the break while the rest of the family left for vacation; when they’d returned the house had been trashed, with broken bottles all over the place, and an enormous red stain across one of the living room rugs. Mr. Golden had been livid. But Rudy said her parents wouldn’t stop us from going to the Dead Week parties, though it seemed that all of the parents were vaguely aware of what happened at them. They mostly turned a blind eye, probably just thrilled the party would be out of their hands and away from their valuables.

  The fourth party, on Thursday night, was being held at Kendell’s house. Though the intensity of their feud seemed to have died down, there had been no reconciliation between Rudy and our pompous senior cheerleading captain, and I had assumed, though I didn’t confirm my assumptions with Rudy, that we wouldn’t be attending. But Thursday night, after we sat through pasta dinner with Rudy’s parents, still slightly hung-over from Wednesday, Rudy started rifling through her expansive closet again, while I lay sprawled out on the bed, my hands folded over my full stomach.

  “We’re not going to Kendell’s tonight, are we,” I asked, unable to keep the surprise out of my voice.

  “Sure, why not?” Rudy called from the closet. “Did you not want to?”

  “No. I mean, yes, I would go. I just thought, since she basically hates us…” The situation had seemed so cut and dry to me that I couldn’t even explain my train of thought.

  Rudy appeared in the closet doorway holding a dress in one hand, her other hand on her hip. “It’s Dead Week though. You don’t think she’d be that petty, right?”

  I shrugged my shoulders against the mattress. “I don’t know.”

  “But we don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

  “No, I’ll go.” I said these exact words in similar conversations with Rudy probably a thousand times. “I just didn’t know we were planning on it, that’s all.”