by Jo Knowles
It’s the first time I’ve ever heard her cry.
I don’t dare move. I’m sure she wouldn’t want me to know.
When she finally gets what she’s looking for, she closes the drawer. She starts to walk toward the bed and stops near my feet. I keep my eyes closed and breathe steadily so she’ll think I’m asleep.
She sniffs and makes a sound like she’s wiping her eyes or nose with her hand. Then, instead of getting undressed, she crawls into bed. I hear her moving around in the bed above me. After a while, she throws something down on the floor next to me. I slowly reach my hand out and touch her soft pink sweater.
It’s quiet now, except for her steady sniffling. I should say something, but I don’t know what.
Promise you won’t leave me alone with Sam, she’d said.
But I didn’t. She was with her family, having a good time. She was with Sam, but she wasn’t alone.
So why do I feel guilty?
In the morning, Sam offers to take me home in his Jaguar. Leah and Brooke insist on coming along. Leah and I sit in the tiny backseat. She pretends to be a movie star, waving out the window to invisible fans. Only Leah could do that without being embarrassed.
“You really could be a star, honey,” Sam says. He smiles at her in the rearview mirror.
Leah doesn’t answer him.
When we turn onto my road, Leah looks over at the wooden doll in my hands. “Let me borrow it for a while,” she says. She reaches over and takes the doll from me. I think I see Sam give her a fake disapproving look, but I can’t be sure.
As soon as they drop me off, I go to my room and shut the door. My old Curious George smiles disapprovingly at me from the shelf. “What did I do?” I ask.
But I know. Leah took the doll because I let her down. I broke my promise and Sam did something to her. I don’t know what specifically, but I know it wasn’t good.
The following weekend, Leah comes to my house. She pulls me straight into the doll closet. She doesn’t ask or even tell me what we’re going to do. She’s rough and angry. It doesn’t feel like practice. It feels like punishment.
I hold myself as stiff as I can, my eyes squeezed shut, feeling like I deserve it.
“Sam says we could be supermodel sisters,” Leah says, sticking out her chest.
It’s the fall of eighth grade. Leah and Brooke are strutting down the catwalk that is the path between the twin beds in Christi’s room. They have light blue bath towels wrapped around their heads like turbans. They swing their hips as they walk, pretending to pose for photographers.
Christi and I watch from Christi’s bed with our mouths open.
“Sam says they make tons of money,” Leah adds.
Christi and I had watched Sam from Christi’s window when he dropped Leah and Brooke off here earlier. He kissed them both good-bye on the lips. I swear his hand brushed against Leah’s butt as she walked away from him. If it did, she didn’t seem to respond. The way she talks about him now, you’d never know he was the same guy she didn’t want to be left alone with.
“And if it doesn’t work out, we could always be strippers,” Brooke says, lifting up her shirt to just below her breasts. She and Christi are sophomores, but Brooke looks more like a college girl. Brooke is beautiful, like Leah. But that’s their only similarity. Brooke doesn’t have the same “I’m in charge” look in her eyes. She just seems to like being watched.
“How pathetic,” Christi says, nudging me with her elbow.
Brooke stands above us and sticks out her chest. She turns, a graceful little half-step, her hands on her hips. “If you’ve got it, flaunt it. That’s what my mother says.”
Christi jabs me in the ribs again, and we exchange knowing looks. Mrs. Greene is always wearing low-cut blouses that show the tops of her large breasts.
“Flaunt it? That’s so — slutty,” Christi says, wrinkling her nose.
“What’s slutty about it?” Leah asks. “Just because you show off your goods doesn’t mean you’re giving them away.” She’s gathered the waist of her T-shirt and pulled it through the neck, making a halter top out of it. She walks up to us and sticks her bare stomach close to our faces. Her eye-like belly button watches me.
“Don’t be gross,” Christi says.
But Leah keeps her stomach inches from my face.
I feel my own stomach tighten the way it does when Leah and I are in the doll closet. My cheeks go prickly hot.
“What do you think, E-laine? Am I gross?” she asks.
I don’t answer.
“Don’t call her that. You know she hates it.” Christi moves closer to me on the bed, going into protector mode.
Leah ignores her. “E-laine, you don’t think I’m gross, do you?”
“Leave her alone,” Christi says. She sounds nervous, as if she knows what Leah is getting at.
I force myself to look up into Leah’s face and plead with my eyes for her not to say anything. Leah smirks and turns around.
Later that afternoon, Christi and Brooke are outside practicing new cheers for tryouts. Leah and I are alone in my room.
“Let’s play house,” Leah says quietly. “We haven’t practiced in a while.”
“I don’t think so,” I say, remembering what it was like the last time.
She moves closer. “Please, Lainey. It will be fun,” she says softly. She looks almost sad, like I hurt her feelings by not wanting to go. She reaches for my hand and tries to pull me. Her hand feels delicate and strong at the same time.
“I don’t want to,” I say. As she laces her fingers with mine, though, I feel that strange, familiar tingling in my stomach. I shake my head, but even as I do, I’m already walking with her up the stairs.
Once we’re inside the closet, Leah shuts the door. I turn on the tiny light. Leah comes closer, raising her eyebrows.
I close my eyes and pretend I’m someone else. I pretend I’m one of the dolls, sitting in the corner, watching Leah kiss me and put her hands up my shirt and down my pants, feeling every part of me, then taking my hands and making me feel every part of her. I try not to let it feel good, but it does. It feels good and horrible at the same time. Every part of my body feels alive.
“Right here,” she says.
“Right there,” she whispers.
Her voice is deep and not like her own. It scares me. Why is it that the only times I feel really alive are when I’m terrified?
When it’s over and Leah opens the door, Christi is standing there, looking at us.
“What were you guys doing in there?” she asks. Her face is pale.
I feel like I’m going to throw up.
I pray Christi won’t look in my eyes, because if she does, I’m sure she’ll know. I hear her words from earlier. Don’t be gross.
But I know what she really meant, because it’s how I feel now. Dirty.
Leah clears her throat. “Playing house,” she says coolly. She walks past Christi as if that’s all she needs to say.
I stay put, looking at the floor. Eighth-graders don’t play house.
I wait for Christi to say so, but she just turns and leaves, careful to avoid making eye contact with me.
Later, when Leah and I are alone outside, I tell her I’m finished with practicing.
Leah shrugs her shoulders. “I don’t care,” she says casually.
I feel my mouth drop open. Then why do you make me do it?! I want to scream. She makes her own mouth drop open to imitate me. Then she turns and walks away. I swear I see her smile, as if she’s had a new idea.
“I was just talking to Zack Wallace,” she tells me the next week at school. “I was telling him about this neat closet you have in your house. How you call it the doll closet, and how we used to play in it together.” She smiles, showing me her white teeth. One of her top front teeth crosses over the other just slightly. It’s one of Leah’s only flaws, and I always catch myself looking at it when she talks to me.
“Leah, please,” I say. “You can’t tell any
one.”
She grins at me. “Why not?”
“Because —” But I don’t know how to answer. And, anyway, she knows.
“You said it was a secret,” I tell her.
“A secret is like a promise,” she says. “And you broke a promise to me. Maybe if I tell the secret, we’ll be even.”
“But I didn’t —” I want to tell her I didn’t mean to break the promise about Sam. But the more I think about it, the more I’m not sure.
We look at each other, both waiting for the other to say something. The words I want to ask are in the back of my throat. What happened with Sam? What did he do? But when I open my mouth to force them out, Leah rolls her eyes at me and walks away.
“Let’s see if your dad has any dirty magazines,” Leah says. She’s found my old Barbie suitcase in my closet and is making Ken and Malibu Barbie do obscene things to each other.
“Why do you keep these things, anyway? My mom gave away all my old toys.” She digs through the suitcase and finds Skipper. “Looks like you, Lainey!” She laughs, pointing at my chest.
I roll my eyes.
“You still play with them, don’t you?”
I’m used to this. Ever since I broke my promise, Leah has gotten increasingly nasty.
“I don’t play with them,” I say. “My dad says they’ll be worth a lot some day.”
I grab the dolls and shove them back in their case. “And my dad does not have dirty magazines,” I add. “He’s not like that.”
“Like what? There’s nothing wrong with looking. That’s what my dad tells my mom.”
“Well, my dad doesn’t,” I tell her.
“Whatever.” Leah smiles. “But I bet he does.”
“How would you know?” There is no way my father looks at that stuff. “The only time my dad ever had a Playboy is the one he got at the surprise party my mom had for him when he turned forty.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Leah says. I want to hit her. She reaches over and puts her hand on my thigh. “Prove it.”
My cheeks get hot with her touch, and a familiar, horrible warm feeling fills my stomach — and lower down. I feel my body wake up with excitement and the fear that always comes with it.
“I told you my dad doesn’t have any. He’s not like that.”
“We’ll see.” Leah stands and walks out of my room.
As the stairs creak under her weight, I know I’m going to follow. I don’t want her looking through my parents’ stuff without me. I look out the window to make sure my mom is still outside in the garden, then I follow.
I hear Leah in my parents’ bedroom. When I go in, I find her searching through my father’s closet.
“Hey! What are you doing?”
“Looking,” she says, all serious. She pushes her way farther into the back of the closet. Sure enough, behind a small pile of shoes he never wears, Leah hits the jackpot. A cardboard wine box, ripped on one side, is hidden behind a white plastic bag that has summer clothes written on it in Magic Marker.
Leah pulls open the flaps and snickers.
“I told you,” she said, holding up a Playboy magazine. There’s a blond woman with huge breasts and a toothy smile on the cover. “My mom says all men keep their Playboys in the closet. So predictable.” She says the last bit in her know-it-all voice. I still can’t believe it, but there it is. In her hands.
Leah shoves the magazine under her shirt. “Come on!” She pushes past me and makes her way back up to my bedroom.
I stay behind and push the plastic bag back against the cardboard box deep in the closet. The closet smells like my father, only it’s a stale him, mixed with must and old wool. I quickly step back out into the room.
It feels different in here — the sweet blue flowers on the wallpaper, the silver frame with my parents’ wedding picture, Christi’s and my tiny plaster handprints hanging from pink ribbons — it all feels fake. I shut my father’s closet door. How could something so nasty exist in this room?
“E-laine!” Leah calls in a singsong voice from upstairs.
It’s wrong. I know it. But I go to her anyway. She’s lying on her stomach on my bed. She looks up and smiles when she sees me, then pats the space beside her.
I join her. She has the magazine opened to a picture of a woman with red hair sitting in a chair with her legs spread open. She’s smiling.
Leah turns the pages while we both stare, speechless. My body tingles all over. I feel the same fear and excitement I felt in the doll closet. I hate it. But I keep looking.
Suddenly we hear the back door open downstairs and my mother’s footsteps wandering through the house.
“Girls?” she calls out.
“Hide it!” I whisper loudly.
Leah laughs. “You should see your face,” she says.
“Leah, please,” I plead. “Put it under the mattress.”
She stands up with the magazine in her hands.
“What’s wrong, Laine? Afraid your mother will catch us?”
“Yes!”
Leah rolls her eyes. “It’s only a stupid magazine. What’s the big deal?”
“Girls?” my mother calls from downstairs. “Are you ready for some lunch?” I hear her feet starting up the stairs. I know at that moment something awful is going to happen.
“Hide it. Please,” I whisper.
Leah dances around the bedroom, swirling the magazine above her head. The blond woman on the cover smiles at me, her large white breasts laughing.
I lunge for the magazine, pull it out of Leah’s hands, and manage to shove it under the mattress right as my mother reaches the top of the stairs.
Leah seems surprised, but only for a second. She giggles.
“What are you girls doing?” my mother asks from the doorway.
“Nothing,” I say.
“Well, not nothing, Laine,” Leah says.
God, I want to kill her. My heart beats so hard and fast it hurts. Sweat prickles out all over my body, hot and cold at the same time.
“We were playing, right, Lainey?” Leah giggles again and sits on the bed.
“What are you up to?” my mother asks suspiciously.
“Nothing,” I say again. But she’s already caught on.
“Why is the dust ruffle on your bed tucked into the mattress?”
I look. The edge of the magazine is sticking slightly out from under the mattress. I’d shoved it under so quickly, I pushed the dust ruffle in, too.
“What is that?”
“Nothing,” I answer quickly.
Leah giggles again.
My mother pulls the magazine out from under the mattress and looks at the cover. Her mouth drops open. She rolls the magazine to hide the cover. Leah keeps giggling. But she sounds nervous now.
“Where did you get this?”
I don’t answer. Leah can’t stop making those awful giggle sounds.
“Where?!”
Leah laughs out loud. I glare at her. “Shut up!” I scream.
My mother grabs my arm so hard, her fingers dig into my muscle.
I pull away and run out of the room, down the stairs, and outside. Out to the pathway in the woods that leads to the big rock Leah and I used to hang out on when we first became friends. We pretended it was an island and we were stranded on it and had to come up with ways we could survive.
I climb the rock and sit on top of it, hugging my knees to my chest. Through the woods and my tears, I see our white farmhouse. It looks quiet, but I know it isn’t. I watch, waiting for some sign of my mother. Or Leah.
I’ve never felt this ugly or embarrassed — this dirty — in my life. I hate the way I feel. I hate it. I’m a pervert. Why else would my body feel that way when I looked at those pictures?
I will never be able to face my mother again.
After a while, I hear leaves crunching in the distance. It’s Leah. She climbs the rock and sits next to me.
I move a little bit away. “What do you want?” I say without looking at her.
; “She found the rest,” Leah says. She doesn’t tell me she’s the one who told my mother where to look, but I’m sure she did. She doesn’t say she’s sorry.
Leah and I sit on the rock and watch the house in silence. Waiting.
Soon the back door opens, and my mother marches to the outdoor grill pit with the cardboard box in her arms. She throws it in the pit and runs back into the house. A few minutes later, she returns with a bottle of something in her hand. It must be lighter fluid. She squirts liquid all over the box, then lights the match. The whole thing goes up in flames.
I watch my mother through the smoke. She steps back and turns away from the heavy grayness, walks back to the house, and disappears inside.
The smell of the burnt magazines reaches our rock.
“Men,” Leah says, shaking her head and wrinkling her nose at the smell.
I turn and watch her look at the scene she’s created. Her eyes are slightly squinted so she has tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. It’s like looking at an adult almost, the way those wrinkles map out across her temples.
She catches me watching her, but she doesn’t say anything. She just keeps shaking her head and looking at the burning magazines. I swear she’s trying not to smile. But then she says without looking at me, “I didn’t think that would happen, you know.”
I’m not sure what part she means — finding the magazines, getting caught, telling my mother where they were, or the way they made me feel.
“You shouldn’t have done it,” I say.
“I know. I’m sorry.” She shifts a little next to me. “Your mom shouldn’t make you feel bad about looking. There’s nothing wrong with it. Besides, I’m sure it’s not you she’s really upset with. It’s your dad.”
I smell the smoke again and hope she’s right. I want to ask her if she felt the way I did when she looked at the pictures, but I don’t dare. I couldn’t bear to be the only one.
We stay there for a long time, not saying anything. Just watching the smoke rise into the sky and disappear.