Golden

by Andrea Dickherber

  “It should be fun.” Rudy pulled the dress off its hanger and held it flat against the front of her body so I could give her my opinion. “I hear Kendell has a gigantic house.”

  Rudy had heard correctly. When we arrived at the gates in front of Kendell’s house a few hours later, I found myself literally speechless at the sight of its hulking mass. The exterior resembled a castle, with grey stones and pointed roofs over little rounded towers, and inside everything was cloaked in rich red and black furnishings. People spilled out from one room into the next, and we pushed our way through, collecting our bearings, waving to people who waved at us first and searching for our friends. This was largely how I survived crowded upperclassmen parties – seeking out a group of people I knew, attaching myself to them like a magnet on a refrigerator, and hoping what I was doing would help me remain inconspicuous.

  We found Houston with his friends in the den, four of them circled around a plush leather ottoman, passing something around the circle in their fingertips. They had their shoulders pressed together, blocking the view of whatever they were passing, but as we got closer one of them shifted and I could see it, whatever it was. It looked like a fat, brown cigarette and it smelled like the wind outside the car window when you’re on the highway and you run over a skunk. Of course I didn’t recognize it was a joint – I had never actually seen one in person before.

  Rudy snuck up behind Houston and wrapped her arms around his waist. He was holding the weed in his hand and when she squeezed him, a thin trail of smoke seeped from his mouth.

  “Hey, you,” he said. His eyes were red around the edges, I was fascinated to observe. He looked down at his hand, then held the joint up toward us and raised his eyebrows.

  “No, thanks,” I shook my head. I was curious what it would feel like to taste the smoke on my tongue, and I might have taken him up on his offer if the circumstances had been different (if the room was darker, if it was only Houston, Rudy and I, if I had felt more confident that I wouldn’t erupt into a coughing fit). But here, in this moment, with four junior and senior boys at a crowded party, I declined.

  Rudy shook her head too.

  “Suit yourselves,” Houston shrugged and passed it on.

  I followed Rudy and Houston out of the den and toward the heart of the party in the living room. There was a bottleneck forming, people trying to shove their way into the room, and I stayed close behind Rudy so I could squeeze through the path they cleared. I always felt a hint of shame tagging along as their third wheel, but the feeling was never strong enough to make me detach from them. Inside, the living room was huge, with tall ceilings that arched over the hardwood floor beneath us. Paintings taller than me adorned the walls. All of the furniture had been pushed aside, lining the walls of the room, to clear enough space for a dance floor in the center. There was a deejay (an actual deejay, with flashing lights and microphones and a swanky advertisement for his services taped to the front of his table) mixing music, and a knot of people danced in the middle of the room.

  “I don’t want to dance yet,” I could hear Rudy yell into Houston’s ear. Her eyes were on the dance floor, where Kendell was snaking around in the middle of the crowd of people. She was wearing a silvery shirt that just skimmed the waistband of her jean skirt, and her short legs were elongated by the added inches of high heels. “Let’s go get a drink.”

  Houston obliged, and I followed them into the kitchen. There was a full bar set up and Rudy mixed us both drinks. I took a sip from my cup and the taste of liquor was so strong I nearly spit it back. I looked up to make a comment, but Rudy’s eyes were closed, her own cup tipped back so that the contents spilled into her open mouth. When she lowered it, half the drink was gone.

  I was hardly surprised when, an hour and two similarly strong drinks later, Rudy announced loudly that she was ready to hit the dance floor. But by now, Houston was wrapped up in his third game of beer pong. He was on a winning streak, and he wouldn’t leave the table.

  “Let’s go dance anyway,” Rudy tugged at my arm. “I just want to move.” Her eyes were sparkling, wet green jewels beneath the arches of her eyebrows.

  “Yeah, okay.”

  The dance floor had grown, expanding toward the edges of the room as more and more people had flocked to the thump of the music. The paintings on the walls shook slightly, knocking against the drywall with each drumbeat. Rudy pulled me into the center of the crowd and she wove her fingers through mine, thrusting our arms high above our heads as she moved with the music. Someone bumped into me from behind, and I was pushed up against Rudy, our faces smashed together at the cheeks.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of silver and suddenly Kendell was at my side, reaching across my body to grab Rudy around her wrist.

  “What’re you doing here?” Kendell’s eyes were squinted and they locked on Rudy’s face. Two of her friends, girls named Amber and Dominique, stood close behind her, their arms crossed on their chests. Their posture reinforced Kendell’s anger.

  Rudy yanked her arm out of Kendell’s grasp.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “What the fuck are you doing in my house?” Kendell was screaming now, her eyes glowering. A guy beside me turned to look. I could feel the situation rapidly spinning out of control, and the feeling was disorienting.

  “No one invited you here!” A dot of spit clung to Kendell’s bottom lip.

  Rudy gave her a cold glare but said nothing.

  What happened next, I could not have anticipated. In fact, the possibility of a physical fight was so far from my mind that when Kendell threw the first punch, I was actually confused as I watched her arm straighten out until it was horizontal in front of her, her fingers balled up into her palm, all of this occurring in slow motion in front of my eyes. It wasn’t until her fist connected with the side of Rudy’s face, just below her ear, that I recognized the movement as a punch.

  Rudy, however, must have expected it, at least on some level, because the instant Kendell hit her she lunged forward, knocking Kendell over. Her back hit the ground, her head banging against the floor, and the people behind them scattered wildly, scrambling out of the way like a bomb had been detonated.

  I had never seen a fight in person, but I had imagined that it would resemble boxing, which I had watched before on television with my father. I thought the two would face one another, bobbing up and down slightly, trading punches and jabs until one of them clearly had the upper hand. I had envisioned something orderly and civilized, but I saw now that I had been wildly, stupidly wrong.

  Rudy was on top of Kendell, straddling her torso, and she drew back her arm and hit Kendell in the face with the knuckles of her fist. Kendell was thrashing below her, kicking her heels wildly and yanking at the long tendrils of Rudy’s hair that hung down in her face. Finally, (it seemed like finally, though in reality it was probably only a few seconds) she pushed Rudy off of her chest and with one of her arms, swung aimlessly and connected with Rudy’s shoulder. Both of them flailed on the ground, their fists drawn to one another like magnets, and everyone in the room watched raptly, giving them an increasingly wide circle of space, until three senior guys burst from the crowd and into the circle. One of them grabbed Rudy by the shoulders and yanked her back; the other hauled Kendell away, one big arm around her waist, while the third stood in the middle, his arms spread wide to separate the two girls until several feet of open space existed between their still swinging arms. Kendell’s curls stood up from her head like a crazy blonde fire, and one of her eyes was beginning to swell, the skin around it puffy and pink. Rudy’s dress hung askew. One strap had slipped down her shoulder, and there was a thin red line on the side of her face where one of Kendell’s rings had cut her skin. Both of them appeared visibly dazed.

  Once they were separated, both of their chests heaving as they drew breath and calmed down, the crowd around them exploded. Everyone was talking at once, their eyes wide with incredulity. A camera flashed white light.


  “Here.” The boy holding Rudy motioned to me, and I stepped forward from where I had been standing, frozen. “She’s your friend, right? Take her outside.”

  He passed custody of Rudy off to me and I held tight to her arms for a second before I realized her muscles were flaccid beneath my hands – she wasn’t a wild animal trying to escape. I loosened my grip, and she followed me out of the room.

  Outside, in the chilly night air, my heart was still thumping furiously against my breastbone.

  “Holy shit,” I breathed, finally. “Holy fucking shit. You just got in a fist fight with Kendell.”

  Rudy brought her hand up to her face, touched the cut and examined the trace of blood on her fingertips.

  “You punched her in the face! Did you see her eye? Holy crap.”

  Rudy looked up and met my eyes, but her mouth was still an unreadable straight line.

  “Oh my god, I can’t believe that just happened.” I couldn’t stop talking, adrenaline flowing from my mouth in the form of words.

  “What happened to her eye?” Rudy asked finally, her voice strange.

  “It’s all swollen! You gave her a black eye!”

  “I did?” Her face was so shocked, so innocently surprised, that I began to laugh. She stared at me, bent over at the waist as I laughed, until she began to giggle too.

  She held onto my shoulders, both of us howling with nervous, incredulous laughter alone in Kendell’s backyard, oblivious to the cold air stinging our bare skin, until we could catch our breath again.

  The fight was the most popular topic of discussion at Ogden in the weeks following spring break. You could hear people whispering about it (or even speaking loudly about it – it was no secret) in the halls between classes, and at lunch, speculating about what had started it and who had thrown the first punch. Someone had videotaped the entire thing on their cell phone, but the video quality was poor and the camera operator had moved the phone around frantically, so you could only catch glimpses of the fight, of Rudy knocking Kendell over, of Kendell grabbing for Rudy’s hair. Occasionally, when I was walking with Rudy to class that first week back, I would feel someone glaring at us, but they would turn their head when I looked. Other times, someone we hardly knew would come up to Rudy, their arm held high, palm out to offer Rudy a congratulatory high five. This surprised me most; not necessarily that other people disliked Kendell, that they wanted to see her get her ass kicked (the outcome of the fight was decided later that night, and the vast majority of people who had seen it go down came to the conclusion that Rudy was the victor), but that because it had already happened, it was now acceptable to blatantly acknowledge this happiness.

  By the end of our second week back in school, as March was coming to a close and the branches on the trees in the school courtyard were beginning to sprout little white buds in anticipation of spring’s arrival, no one was talking about the fight anymore. The freshness of the event, the excitement it had spawned, had died off. And also, the fight seemed to mark the end of the feud between Kendell and Rudy. They didn’t become friends, of course, but they were no longer hostile to one another, at least not publicly. They were on the same 400-meter relay team during track, and they could run side by side at practice without an argument igniting. I was utterly shocked by this reversal at first. But this, apparently, was the way that Ogden functioned. There were so few of us at the school; by the end of the year we all knew one another, by face if not by name. We saw each other trip in the hallways, spill milk on our pants during lunch or stand around half-naked in the locker rooms before sports practice. We were intimately familiar with one another and because of this, we often clashed like siblings. But similarly, because there were so few of us, we couldn’t permanently hate one another. Relationships, friendships, courtships and enemy-ships were so tenuous at Ogden – they could change before your eyes in just a matter of days. It was amazing to me, the sense of possibility. But I was also struck with the fragility of it all. At Ogden, nothing was permanent.

  That year, our very first prom was held at a ritzy hotel downtown. They served snacks and punch from real glass plates and engraved martini glasses on the roof of the building, and you could see the St. Louis Arch in the distance, with the river a dark, swirling mass behind it. We arrived by limousine almost two full hours after the dance had begun and we only stayed for an hour, enough time to have professional pictures taken with our dates, them in their black on black tuxedos, Rudy and me in sparkling floor length gowns that must have cost our parents hundreds of dollars (prices are the types of things for which I have no memory). I remember thinking how stupid it was that we were late and we didn’t stay. I wanted to see the King and Queen crowned, but Houston and my own date were impatient. They wanted to get back to the limo, loosen their ties and drink some more before their buzz wore off. I didn’t yet understand the whole point of prom wasn’t the dance (the dance was just to be seen, briefly, before you went on your way). And the boys, like seventeen and eighteen-year-old boys in all decades, wanted us. They wanted to take off our sparkly dresses and they thought that, because it was the prom, we would let them. But we didn’t; at least not those boys, and not that night.

  Rudy was always in the company of boys, all kinds of boys, and I think that’s what made it so hard for her to get along with other girls, particularly girls like Kendell. To be a freshman girl and receive so much attention from the older boys – it made sense that the junior and senior girls were jealous. But Rudy let everything pass over her, the whole mixture of good and bad feelings, of new friends and new enemies, without leaving so much as a scratch on the surface of her exterior. Later, in college, when my friends and I would get distracted from studying and find ourselves reminiscing about the high schools from which we had come, I was thoroughly shocked to find that everyone’s high school experience had not been as easy as mine. They had agonized over themselves as freshmen, groaning about their timid naiveté, the ridiculous clothes they wore, how they tried so hard – too hard – to fit in. I learned freshmen in high school were supposed to be socially awkward, to say and do the wrong things. But I had no horrifyingly embarrassing mistakes to share with my college girlfriends, because Rudy and I had transformed into high schoolers seamlessly, effortlessly even. They shook their heads and rolled their eyes and told me how lucky I was, how nice it would have been to have escaped all of that tedious adolescent agony, but sitting with them in a study room, over our open chemistry books, what I felt wasn’t exactly a feeling of luck, or a feeling that I had dodged a bullet. Until then, I had assumed my high school experience to be almost ideal, but this gave me pause. Maybe, I thought, this was what had gone wrong. Maybe Rudy and I had needed that friction, the difficulty of the transition. Maybe if we had been gawky and awkward freshman girls, holed up in Rudy’s bedroom gushing over yearbook photos of senior boys we were too scared to speak to and stuffing our faces with ice cream and potato chips while we watched reruns of old sitcoms and did our homework, things would have turned out differently.

  SCREWED

  5

  Sophomore Fall

  My sixteenth birthday fell on the last Friday in August, the week before Rudy and I returned to Ogden for our sophomore year. I woke up early that morning, excitement and nervous energy filling my body, and my mother drove me to the DMV office because I feared driving there myself, with her beside me in the passenger’s seat, would jinx things. I would rear-end a police officer or side-swipe an old lady or something equally horrible. The instructor who administered my test was a big man, his stomach bulging over his belt, and he was bald with the exception of a wisp of thin grey hair combed over the top of his head. To compensate for his missing head hair, he sported a massive, bushy grey mustache and he did not smile, not even when we pulled back into the DMV parking lot and he congratulated me on passing the test.

  When my mother and I arrived home, this time with me sitting behind the wheel, I could see my father’s car still parked at the end of the driveway, ju
st in front of one of the garage doors. We were still easing down the length of the driveway, me with a puzzled expression on my face – my father was never home past nine in the morning on a week day – when the second garage door lifted, slowly revealing first the tires, then the front grill, then the entirety of the new, shiny black car inside. My father was leaning against the hood of the car – my car! – a bouquet of pink roses in one of his hands, and when I saw him, I accidentally pumped my foot on the gas pedal and we jerked forward suddenly.

  “Jillian!” My mother cried beside me, but I had already hit the brakes, shifted into park and I was unbuckling my seatbelt. I was out of the car before she could say anything else, running down the remainder of the driveway and leaping into my father’s arms. He grabbed me around the waist, the flowers tickling the back of my neck, and he laughed a bit, nervously. I did not hug my father often.

  “Congratulations, Jill,” he said. “Happy birthday, from your mother and me.”

  “Thank you so much, Dad,” I breathed into his shoulder. He still smelled like mint and tobacco smoke, like he always did when I was a child. The way he still smells today, somehow, though he gave up smoking long ago.

  The first place I drove was, of course, across the street to the Goldens’, and I sat in the driveway honking the horn until Rudy pulled back the curtains and peeked out her window. From the look on her face and the way her mouth opened, I could tell she was screaming.

  Cross country was the second fall sport Rudy and I tried, having come to an unanimous decision (there had been no need to even discuss it) we would never again go out for cheerleading. Even then, from the perspective of only one more year of age, my glee at having made the squad and my visions of myself in a blue and white striped skirt, raptly watching football games from the sidelines, cheering in earnest and celebrating with the team when they won, other girls envying me my cute uniform and my popularity, seemed stupid and childish.