Sydney slouched up to the front of the line, her wad of purple piled on the counter. The clerk was a student, a tall girl snapping bright green gum, with hair dyed a brittle blond and broad stripes of an unflattering blush swiped across both cheeks. Theater major for sure, someone expecting to be the center of attention, and she spoke in a brassy voice: “Hey, Sydney.”
Sydney pivoted her attention to the girl, straightened her spine and shoulders, and managed to look regal in her ponytail and sweats. “Oh, um, hi... um?”
“Kathleen.”
There was a pause. Sydney didn’t blink, and her famously pouty lips were pinched tightly together.
“From—”
Sydney sighed sharply. “Look, I’m in a rush and I just need to pay for this.” With one finger, she nudged forward the purple thing. Her voice wasn’t what I had expected, very flat, like a straight line, not fluttery at all.
“From Philosophy of Language and Communication,” Kathleen said. “We were in the same discussion group.” She clicked her fingernails on the keys of the cash register but only to make noise, not ringing up anything.
Finally Sydney focused on Kathleen and gave a curt nod. “I remember.” Anyone could tell that was a lie. A cluster of giggling girls swooped from the aisle of beer mugs and shot glasses, and Sydney pawed the purple thing, covering it with one hand until the girls disappeared back into the merchandise.
“Yeah, remember?” Kathleen prodded. “That TA was a real dick.”
Sydney crossed her arms over her chest and drilled Kathleen with a hard, narrow-eyed stare, like a magnifying glass lasering sun onto hapless ants roaming a sidewalk. “Do you mind?” she said, as she delicately hitched one edge of her sweatshirt to retrieve a folded bill from her waistband. “I just need to pay for this.” She let the bill drop onto the counter in a colossal bitch move.
Kathleen popped her gum, then lifted the item with both hands and gave it a little shake. It was a toddler-sized hooded sweatshirt with a cartoonish Willie the Wildcat on front, exactly what the old people scooped up at homecoming for their grandchildren.
“Sure that’s not too small for you?” Kathleen said, flashing a theatrical smile like she was still convinced they were great friends.
“It’s not for me, you imbecile,” Sydney snapped.
“Jesus, it’s a joke,” Kathleen said, smile collapsing into an audible huff. “You really need a sense of humor.”
“You really need to do your job and ring this up,” Sydney said, “and shut up already. Just shut up, please, just shut up. Shut the fuck up, you fat fucking bitch.” The words were fast, nearing hysteria, and Kathleen stared at her, glassy-eyed and confused, until Sydney added, “Okay, Katharine, please. Just please ring it up and put it in a bag and just please let me get out of here.” She forced a smile.
Kathleen looked about to say something, mouth open as if to speak, but then she cocked her head sideways and gave it a quick shake as she got the register dinging and the cash door swinging open. She counted out the change silently, and Sydney didn’t recount or examine the bills, simply folded them in half and half again, crunching them in her fist as Kathleen shoved the tiny sweatshirt into a plastic bag. I mean, oh my god. What had I just seen?
“Thank you,” Kathleen called sarcastically, “come again!” and she spun around, abruptly spotting me. Her face reddened, and I felt so sorry for her, but I wasn’t sure if a smile would help or not so my face froze into a grimace, and Kathleen grabbed at her hair, dredging it up off her back in an affectedly casual way. “Jeez, and I let her copy my notes for that class, and plenty of times. She never would’ve passed without me.” Her voice was shaky.
“I guess,” I said.
“Pure bitch,” Kathleen pronounced. She crossed her arms over her chest and sighed deeply. “You saw what she did, the kind of person she is. Why is someone like that? Why are you friends with her? What’s wrong with you?” For a frozen moment, Kathleen waited for my answer, so I shrugged and grabbed my bag and hurried away, thinking I should get to class where I was already late; thinking, I’m not her friend, obviously I’m not, anyone can see how different we are.
And there was Sydney, in line at the grill, tiptoeing and leaning to shout her order at the half-deaf man in the white paper hat. Probably he should be fired for his perpetual crankiness and the way he pretended not to hear orders, but the greasy ooziness of his patty melt was sublime. Just one bite and a new zit or two leaped up, but so worth it—though I couldn’t imagine Sydney craving patty melts. I mean, supposedly they deep-cleaned the grill only once a year, the day after graduation, and I’d heard stories about a rat nest in the exhaust fan, and once I was sitting one table over from a guy who found a bolt in his cheeseburger. But, really, I couldn’t imagine anything about Sydney anymore. Why she would freak out at the student bookstore over a sweatshirt for a baby, why she’d call a chatty theater major a fat fucking bitch, why she was running around campus looking like she’d been scraped off the bottom of a trash barrel. I was suddenly conscious that she might be furious if she caught me following her, so I ducked over to the wilted salad bar, pretending to check the soups that never changed: chicken noodle or tomato. Both as salty as an ocean, but no one fussed if you swiped crackers, which I did, jamming them in my coat pocket for later.
The fry guy grabbed a plastic plate off the stack and dumped an entire basket of French fries onto it, which he handed over to Sydney, who walked to the cashier and paid with one of the bills in her hand. Double or triple order of fries, easy, with that just-out-of-the-fryer glisten. Crinkle cut. I hadn’t eaten that leftover pizza in the fridge, and my stomach whined, but I had my crackers, I guess, so I trailed Sydney to a section of empty tables far, far away from the windows overlooking the lake where everyone normally sat. In case she looked up, I ducked over to a bank of pay phones, pretending to make a call. Sydney wolfed those fries, not pausing for ketchup, not once wiping her fingers on a napkin. The bag with the tiny sweatshirt was a lump on the table across from her. She kept staring at it, or maybe she was just staring as she pumped fries into her mouth, an assembly line of eating.
Then the plate was empty. Five minutes, tops. She circled the pad of one fingertip around the dish and licked that finger—for the salt?—then stared at her finger for a moment. She jumped up, leaving the plate on the table, ignoring the laminated signs posted every five feet telling us to bus dirty dishes to the bins. She scrunched the bag and strode across the room—eyes focused on the floor, but she was interrupted by scattered “heys” from various groups sitting at tables, so she stopped twice to chat, foot tapping, arms crossed, the plastic bag crushed under her elbow. She didn’t smile. She seemed to stand too still, except for that single tapping foot.
Then she was at the Cone Zone, and the acne-scarred boy behind the counter gawked and twitched and blushed pink as she ordered and pointed; he scooped a double-dip of chocolate chip (my personal favorite) into a sugar cone and she set a couple of bills directly onto his outstretched hand, which made his face go pinker. He turned for change from the cash register, but she was already walking away. “Hey,” he called after her. “You forgot your change,” and then, “Sydney!” as if it were the magical word he’d never dared utter, but she was off, and so was I, trailing up the stairs, past the posters and notices taped to the walls, the concerts and bikes for sale and roommates wanted and typing services at super-low prices; she took the stairs fast and hard, thump by thump, up to the third floor, to the big chairs overlooking the grassy lakefill and the flat blue of the lake rolling along and over the edge of the horizon.
Sydney strode to the far glass wall and stared straight ahead, biting through the ice cream, her perfectly straight front teeth hacking off chunks. It was a cold, painful way to eat ice cream, chewing through it fast enough for a brain-freeze headache. There was no pleasure in these treats. Pleasure wasn’t the point. Clearly.
Sunlight streamed in through the glass, and the blue beyond of the lake and the sky
were dizzying. Her vivid red shoes, that lace still untied, still dragging. I was aware that I had skipped class for this. But what was this? I wasn’t her friend and never would be. I couldn’t possibly know Sydney Moore after trailing her around like a psycho for forty-five minutes. I wanted to say something to her, something like “I get it,” even though I didn’t get anything. I wanted to disappear. I wanted to have chosen earlier to go to class. That plastic bag, the mystery of that bag wedged between Sydney’s ribs and her elbow.
She was down at the cone already, crunching slabs off it. Ravenous. The cone disappeared, and she licked her lips, then wiped them with her palm.
Right then Sydney whirled around, accusing and so fast that I couldn’t react, because her legendary blue eyes, exactly the same sharp and dizzying blue of the sky outside, pierced mine, locked up mine. My mouth dried to dust and dropped open. My knees went to Jell-O. It might be the first time in my life I would faint for real. I didn’t, I couldn’t—not in front of her. I gulped in air, more, and steadied.
She was gazing right at me, but also through me, like the window, like I was glass, like I wasn’t there, I was without substance. I thought, We’ve sucked the same man’s cock, but luckily I didn’t say it. I thought, Someone thinks I could be a writer, but I didn’t say that either. I thought, Two girls stare at each other, and one is pretty and the other isn’t. And finally I thought, I know you. And I said it: “I know you. Who you are. I know who you are.” But so what? I thought. So did everyone else on campus, as I had witnessed.
She blinked quickly, reached both hands to wipe her eyes with her index fingers, and the bag fell with a plasticky whisper, landing just next to her foot.
I imagined Tommy whispering her name, remembered everyone we passed saying it.
I imagined how unhappy she might be. More unhappy than me maybe. More unhappy than anyone. I felt right to imagine this.
I bent down to pick up the bag, I don’t know why. Because it was just there on the carpet, practically on top of her ankle, and she wasn’t doing anything about it, so I knelt down and grabbed the bag—surprised it didn’t feel like anything except what it was, a plastic bag, barely any weight to it—and I stood slowly, the bag in my outstretched hand so she could take it, so she would see I wasn’t swiping it. There was a moment where we just stood there, me with the bag in my hand and her not taking it, and I thought I should say something, so I said, “You dropped this,” which was a very obvious thing to say, but the words made her blink again, and it was like I was following her for exactly right now, to be the one waiting here to retrieve the bag.
Suddenly she whisked toward the hallway that led to the ladies’ room. “You dropped this!” I called after her. A loop of words I couldn’t escape, the cue she missed. My apparent purpose thwarted.
I waited for a minute. Was I supposed to follow her? Would she come right back? It occurred to me that if the receipt was in the bag, I could return the tiny sweatshirt for cash when Kathleen was on break. I waited another minute. It wasn’t like she didn’t know she’d dropped the bag. You dropped this, I had said. I know you, I had told her, when we didn’t know her at all.
I tiptoed down the narrow hallway, halting at the bathroom door, the sound vivid and clear and horrible from where I stood, hacking and coughing, choking and heaving. My own gut clenched as I imagined her finger jamming down her tongue, pushing, prodding, digging deeper; I imagined the tile stony against her knees; I imagined the dark, bitter burn spreading up and into her throat, that familiar taste, the pleasure of that pain; I imagined warm bile spilling over her finger and hand, tumbling into the white maw of the toilet. I imagined her kneeling ass-up over the toilet, Greek letters in clear view, the red Converse high-tops a bright anomaly. Begging her body for more.
The plastic bag abandoned in my hand, the tiny purple sweatshirt not the simple gift, as I had assumed, for a sister, niece, godchild, neighbor. Or it was, but it wasn’t. The wallop in my gut, the sickening thump of knowing: there had been a baby. There had been a baby and now there wasn’t. Like me and that baby I didn’t have. I ached for her, and for just one tiny second I ached for myself.
Some choices you can’t think about ever again once they’ve been made. You have to tell yourself that. Isn’t that what being tough was? That steady course forward, bulling through. Damn it.
I listened for another minute as Sydney Moore purged, a long minute that brought me no vindictive pleasure.
I didn’t know what to say, how to save her. Not Sydney, not myself. Not Grace. Damn it. Damn it again. I stared up at the ceiling, down at the gray carpet, up again, down. Finally, I dropped the plastic bag on the floor and did what I’d learned to do: I left. I chose to leave. And I didn’t look back.
Back when we were freshmen, Jess had been asked to a fall formal by a freshman guy she barely knew. He was in her soc class. They had whisper-chatted in the library, both of them cramming for midterms in the special room kept open all night for the desperate. Another time she gave him a pen in class because his ran out of ink. That was all.
“And then Thursday he was like, ‘I need someone to go to this dance with me,’” she reported, “‘on Saturday.’ I mean, really. He’s telling me this on Thursday.”
She’d be doing him a huge favor, he explained, that as a pledge the guys would totally give him shit if he didn’t show up with a decent date.
“That’s exactly what he said, a decent date,” Jess said. “That I looked like the kind of girl who’d already have a dress.”
Which was true. Jess had tons of formal-ready dresses to choose from, and right now they were spread out across her dorm bed an hour before he was picking her up. (“I told him hell no was I taking the el and he better find a car somehow,” she said.)
“You could have said you were busy,” I said, knowing exactly why she didn’t, wondering if she would cop to it.
She fingered the black sequined dress with the dropped waist that was the current favorite. “I felt sorry for him,” she said.
“And?” I prodded. I don’t know why I cared, why I needed her to confess the truth. I would have done the same—said yes—though anyone could glance at me for half a sec to see no way would I have a dress already, that I’d need time to scour thrift stores for something unique enough to pull the shift into “vintage” from “used.” I pushed again: “Why’d you really say yes?”
She laughed. A lot of times when I dug into her like that, she laughed, as if she knew exactly what I was doing and found it amusing. She liked me catching her bullshit. “You win,” Jess said. “I said yes because somehow that dork got into ATO. He must have a father, an uncle, and a hundred cousins who are ATOs. Legacy.” She flung aside that black dress and pressed a different black dress against the curves of her body, staring at herself in the mirror. “Maybe I’ll meet someone else there,” she said. “Someone better. You’d do the same, right?”
Her eyes met mine in the mirror, locked them still, because we both knew about her boyfriend back home, Mitch. Also that Mitch had been her high school friend’s boyfriend first and that the friend stopped speaking to her. We both knew these things, and I knew I should have been appalled and yet she knew I wasn’t. Already we liked this about the other.
The five dresses were pretty, arrayed on the bed like a black-and-silver rainbow. The scent of lavender rose from the silvery-gray one when I reached for it. It was simple, like a slip, but glittery. Very short. I inhaled, imagining the occasion that had come before, Jess spritzing perfume behind her ears, in the crooks of her elbows, behind her knees, on one thigh. Until I met her, I sprayed perfume only on my neck.
She still watched me in the mirror. “Try it on,” she commanded. Maybe it was the lavender or the slick fabric, but I yanked off my T-shirt with one hand as my other tugged the buttons of my Levi’s. I wriggled the jeans down my unshaven legs, stepped out of them, and bent to roll off my knee socks. I twisted my arm to unhook my bra. Then I let the dress drape over the top of my he
ad—the cool cloth like a tickle of water flowing down my body—and the shimmers flashed before settling against my skin. I sucked in my stomach and stood next to Jess, assessing myself in the mirror. I looked good wearing this dress, better than Jess had, and this style suited my stick-straight body, not her curves; this pale color was mine, not hers. I imagined sparkly earrings, high heels, perfume dabbed behind my knees.
Jess tossed the black dress on the bed behind us, where it landed on top of the others. She said, “You go.”
“What?”
“He won’t care. Anyway, I think I’m feeling sick.” She coughed delicately. Our eyes locked in the mirror again. “Just...” and she pulled a sparkly bracelet off her wrist and slid it onto mine. “Just maybe meet someone with a friend for me.”
I stared at myself in the mirror, inhaling lavender, watching the bracelet catch and fling tiny glints of light. I looked into my eyes in the mirror. This was what she wanted.
It was easy to believe Jess had never cared about Mitch. I think maybe she called him up that night and dumped him over the phone. Or it was the next day. Not long after anyway. “He was just baggage from home,” she said. “Time to jettison that deadweight.” Same with that former high school friend whose name I forgot, if I ever knew it. The ATO dork was happy enough to have a girl, any live girl—the brothers had nicknamed him Pugsley after the Addams family kid because he was a dead ringer—and he spent the night rubbing his hard-on against me during slow dances and scoping my neckline, trying to trick me into bending too far forward. This was the first time I saw Tommy, who was in ATO (always on the verge of being kicked out for bad grades, always skimming by). He was at the formal with Sydney Moore, who came out of the stall of the ladies’ room at the Drake Hotel while I was at the sink slicking on lipstick. She didn’t wash her hands. Maybe there were times when I didn’t either, but I always, always washed my hands if anyone else was in the bathroom. She didn’t bother looking into the mirror because she didn’t need to, I guess, because she already thought she was perfect. As the door swished shut, one of the girls pressed a lipstick O into a tissue and said to the other, “I heard she had an abortion when she was sixteen,” and the other said, “No, it was her married sister who took the baby, when she was fourteen,” and then they suddenly looked at me, and though I pretended I hadn’t heard, they glared and one sighed sharply and the other tossed her balled-up tissue right past me at the garbage, so I left to let them talk as mean as they wanted.
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