“Um, hi,” said a voice. “Judy?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s Sarah, Sarah Taylor.” Goth Sarah.
“Oh, hi.”
“I got your number from the directory.”
“Oh. Okay. So, hey.”
“So, um. I’m not doing anything today, and I was just calling to see if you maybe wanted to come over and hang out.” She didn’t even wait long enough for me to respond before she was like, “If you’re too busy that’s cool—we can do it another time.”
“No, no, I’m free. I’d like to. What time?”
Her voice had lifted. “Whenever? I mean, I’m just hanging out, reading Gatsby.”
“Me, too,” I lied.
I hung up and went to ask my mom to drive me over to Sarah’s. I was overjoyed. Even though Sarah was no Ginger, I was almost as grateful as my mom that I didn’t end up spending the entire weekend alone in a pathetic homework bubble or playing Guitar Hero with Sam. My mom drove me over to a two-story on Rock Creek Drive, right off of Geddes, and on the way, I saw a dead dog with its eyes popping out of its head like a cartoon. I don’t even know how I saw the thing so clearly, but I guess my mom had slowed way down for the stop sign at the bottom of Londonderry and Devonshire, and the dog was right there on the corner, which makes sense because it probably was running across the intersection when it got hit. It was a white dog, with so much blood on its fur it had a kind of neon look to it. It must have been dead only a few minutes when we saw it, otherwise all that red would have been black already, the way it looked in the pool on the pavement. My mom, who hadn’t seen it, accelerated out of the stop, turning right onto Devonshire, and I asked, “Why would getting hit by a car make you bleed that much? I mean, doesn’t getting run over just crush your bones or break your neck or something?”
“What are you talking about?” my mom asked.
“Did you not see that gory thing?”
“What gory thing, Judy?” She looked at me, worried.
“Watch the road, Mom!”
“What gory thing are you talking about?”
“Road-kill, Mom. A dog. With a collar and everything. Someone’s dog! I can’t believe you didn’t see it.”
“I’m busy watching the road,” she said. She seemed relieved that it hadn’t been anything actually scary. She signaled to turn right from Hill Street onto Geddes.
“I’m surprised how much blood there was. I mean, don’t small dogs like that only weigh like a few pounds? There were, like, gallons and gallons of blood. An ocean!”
“Maybe it had a head injury. Heads are very vascular.”
When we pulled up at Goth Sarah’s house, her mother was out on the lawn, raking leaves. She looked like a catalogue model, with a red parka on and medium-length sandy blond hair yanked back into a messy ponytail. I wondered if Sarah didn’t dye her hair, whether she’d be blond too. Her mother walked over to the car, her duck boots crunching gravel. She had no makeup on, and a pretty face. Her teeth were all white and straight, lined up in her mouth in an obedient way. I thought of what Sarah had said about her wanting to be an artist. I wondered what kind of art she had wanted to make. I climbed out of the car, feeling inexplicably shy. The rocks in the driveway shifted under my feet, making me think they might become quicksand and swallow me up. I checked my orthopedic shoes; still there. My mom left the car idling, rolled her window down.
“You must be Judy,” Sarah’s mom said, reaching down toward me, her hand in a gardening glove. I thought she was going to shake my hand, and felt a tremor of social awkwardness, but she put her hand on my shoulder instead. She managed to do it impressively naturally. I liked her right away.
“I’m Ann. Sarah’s in the living room—go ahead on in. We’re glad you could come over.” She made her way over to my mom’s window.
“Hi, I’m Ann,” she said again, this time to my mom, peeling off a glove and sticking her bare hand into the window to shake my mom’s. Sarah’s last name was Taylor, so I immediately thought how ridiculous it was that her mom’s name was Ann Taylor. Of course now I know that her mom’s a big feminist and kept her own name, so her last name is Carlton. It’s funny that even though my parents lived in New Mexico once and had their whole hippie era, my mom totally changed her name the day she married my dad. Of course her last name was Haverfinder, so who wouldn’t want to change that? I’m going to keep my name, even if I ever get married. It’s weird to change your own name after having it for a million years. I mean, my parents didn’t even get married until they were like almost thirty. That means my mom was just suddenly someone else, after a whole really long life as Peggy Haverfinder. I think that’s weird.
“I’m Peggy,” my mom said, “Thanks for inviting Judy today.”
“She’s welcome to stay for dinner,” Ann said.
I wandered up a stone path to the front of the house. The living room faced out into the yard, and was walled in glass, so I could see Sarah in there, lying on the couch reading a book. Next to the living room was a screened-in porch, and the rest of the house fanned out in a mess of wood paneling and two-story predictability. I rang the doorbell, watched Sarah swing her long legs off the couch, wondered, as I often do, what it must feel like to live in an ostrich body like that. To stand up and tower over couches and chairs. To be someone else.
She waved through the window before arriving at the door and opening it.
“Come on in,” she said, turning not toward the living room but straight back from the door into the kitchen. “You hungry at all?”
“I’m okay,” I said.
“I’m hungry,” she said, and I liked her very much for this. I didn’t know if she was or not, but it’s always better to pretend you’re hungry at your own house so that if your guest is hungry she doesn’t have to admit it. She can just eat some of whatever snack you put out “for yourself.” Sarah put some chips in a basket and poured salsa out of a Whole Foods container into an orange pottery bowl. The chips were the healthy kind, Garden of Eatin’, so I figured her parents were like mine and shopped at the co-op and bought that nasty peanut butter with the oil floating on top. But the reason I liked her mom was also that she had brought up dinner right away. It’s funny how if you’re comfortable in someone else’s house, you’re a million times more likely to like the person. Whereas even if you love someone desperately, if you starve or freeze or suffocate when you’re over at their house, you never want to go back. We’re all basically animals, is the thing.
“Come on,” Sarah said, handing me the chips and carrying the salsa. “I’ll show you my room.”
We went down a flight of stairs off the kitchen, into a basement that was quite bright as underground spaces go. There was a couch against the back wall, and a TV facing it, two bookshelves crowded with toys, a sock monkey puppet, and some baby dolls. There was a laundry room to the right, with a door that led out to the backyard, and two bedrooms straight to the back of the basement. The playroom or whatever it was at the bottom of the stairs had a yellow linoleum floor and smelled faintly of mildew but also like lemons and bleach, like something old and damp but that’s just been washed, the way most Midwestern basements do, especially ones with no carpet. Sarah gestured with her shoulder to the one on the left. “That’s my brother Josh’s room,” she said. She turned right and headed into the other bedroom, which was, to my surprise, painted pale yellow. There was a row of narrow horizontal windows along the ceiling of the room, letting a little line of light in. The floor was baby blue and plush. I considered the walls and rug. Maybe she was a big Michigan fan, but I doubted it. Then I saw that there were stenciled animals along the ceiling that broke only for that row of windows: alligator, bear, camel, dolphin, elephant, flamingo, giraffe.
I realized with glee that it was the alphabet. This was just her baby room, like mine, all those suddenly embarrassing little flowers crawling up my curtains and bedspread like squeamish reminders that I’d been an infant mere moments ago. The revolting purple carpet
. The white, lacy Chinese lantern. I realized, looking at her baby animal parade and yellow walls, that I had expected Goth Sarah’s room to be pierced and wearing fishnet wallpaper. But being a teenager isn’t gradual, that’s the funny thing. It happens all of a sudden, and your bedroom can’t quite catch up with you immediately.
Underneath the stencils were two punk rock posters and a framed collage of pictures of Sarah and a bunch of other goth girls I’d never seen. Next to it was a poster of Martha Graham dancing, and next to her, Isadora Duncan. Sarah had an open violin case with a shiny violin inside, and two huge bookshelves stuffed with books, many of them horizontal. There were books stacked on her nightstand, and some books open on the desk and others lying on the floor. Except for the scatter of books, her room was mostly neat. There was a bright red Stratocaster next to the bed.
“Wow,” I said. “Can I pick it up?”
“Sure,” she said. “That was my sixteenth-birthday present from my parents.”
“It’s unbelievable.”
“You want to plug it in?”
“That’s okay,” I said, meaning no, not really.
I held on to it, played a few chords. She sat on the bed. I pointed the guitar at Martha and Isadora, thinking it was funny and totally predictable that she’d have them up, rather than posters of someone currently cool.
“You a fan of modern dance?” I asked Sarah.
“I’m a dance major so everyone buys me dance posters when they can’t think what else to get me. I like the Isadora Duncan story,” she said. “Do you know it?”
Everyone liked to talk about our “majors” at Darcy, as if. But Sarah said it sarcastically enough that I thought she had perspective on all that bullshit too.
“What story?”
“She died, you know, when her scarf got caught in the wheel of a convertible she was driving in.”
“No kidding.” I played another chord.
“She was in the car with a hot Italian mechanic. In Italy. The last thing she said was ‘I’m off to love.’ ”
“Who’d she say that to?”
“Her friend on the street.”
“I’m off to love, huh?” I could see why Goth Sarah liked this.
“Right. And then she was gagged to death by her outfit.”
I wondered for a moment what I wanted my last words to be. “I’m off to love” was a pretty good choice.
“What did the mechanic do?”
“I don’t know,” Goth Sarah said. “He probably screamed. Or called an ambulance. Tried to unwrap her? He must have freaked out, right?”
We spent the rest of the afternoon in Sarah’s room, gossiping about D’Arts. She hated Chessie and Carrie and Amanda, said they were all total bitches who belonged in a B movie. I said Carrie had been nice to me and Sarah shrugged. “Whatever, watch your back.”
Then I ate the first of what would turn into countless dinners at Sarah’s house with her family. Her parents were mellower than mine, not low involvement exactly, but laid back. When they asked questions, they weren’t the kind my parents asked, probing, social, embarrassing. They were like, what we thought of health care reform. Literally.
They called us when the pasta was almost ready, asked us to make a salad, but didn’t boss us about how. I spun lettuce in a plastic white spinner while Sarah sliced red peppers into slivers. She made sure to cut all the white stuff out of the insides, and washed off every seed, then cored a tomato and chopped it into pieces as tiny and even as jewels. Sarah’s a meticulous person, that’s the funny thing about her. You wouldn’t have thought so to look at her, because of her whole ripped fishnets thing, but even those were artfully constructed. She tore them up herself, deciding first exactly where the holes would go and then cultivating them. Whenever the tears were the wrong size, or in the wrong places, or just too numerous, she threw the tights out.
Goth Sarah’s dad was a pale blond giant, lumbering around the kitchen in a friendly way, joking and small-talking while he handed stemless mushrooms to Ann. He threw the stems out, washed the cutting board, wiped the counter, and opened a bottle of red wine, saying he would “let it breathe” on the counter. He surprised me by putting five wineglasses on the table. Apparently, Sarah and her pimply, totally silent, chess-playing brother were adult enough to have wine. As soon as I met Josh, I thought he would benefit by meeting Sam, even though Sam was younger by at least a year. Sam wasn’t cool either, but he was so much cooler than Josh that it was sad.
We all sat sipping wine and eating pasta and salad while her parents talked about politics and a trip they were planning to South Africa for Christmas. They both taught at U of M, her dad history and her mom environmental science. It turned out her little brother was an actual chess nerd genius of some sort, so they spent part of the evening planning out a tournament they were taking him to in October, while he scarfed his food like a wolf and then bolted from the table without saying a word. Sarah asked if we could be excused, and we went back to her room and watched old Michael Jackson videos on YouTube until it was time for me to go, when she drove me home in her mom’s car. I was interested that they let her, considering we’d sipped some wine, but it had only been thimblefuls. I didn’t say anything, of course. Sarah said on the way to my house that she thought her parents were about to surprise her at Christmas by giving her the car for her own, but she wasn’t sure yet. She had to prove she could drive it around for a few more weeks without crashing or anything. I told her I thought my parents were going to get the pedals in our car raised soon, so I could drive too.
At home, I went straight to my bedroom, happy, the promise of my new friend and a week of D’Arts and Kyle Malanack floating above me like a pink candy cloud. It was nice to have had a distraction from thoughts of Kyle, but now that I was alone in my room, I was thrilled to be able to go back to thinking about him again, safely and quietly. I hummed Rickie Lee Jones’s “Lucky Guy” while I packed homework and books in my leather backpack. Then I set out a yoga mat so I could stretch in the morning, and hung my Monday outfit up—jean skirt, red tights, and a soft, striped sweater.
The week flew. I was at least an assignment ahead in every class except AP bio, and I had so much to think about that I spent the days in a happy fantasy. Goth Sarah and I sat together every day at lunch, and on Thursday, Molly joined after volunteer-tutoring someone in precalc. D’Arts was big into “students as teachers,” which meant smart people helping stupid people during lunch. When Molly arrived at lunch, she was like, “Why can’t people just work harder?”
Molly thought everyone had equal talent, and whether you were good at stuff was a question of whether you were a lazy sack of shit or not. I sometimes wondered what she thought of me. Mostly, I was glad for her company, because it was good not to spend lunches or weekends in solitary confinement or even just with Sarah anymore. I mean, even though it makes me a bad person, I was a little bummed about the whole being BFF with Sarah so fast, if I’m being totally honest about it. I still wanted to be friends with Ginger, and my friendship with Goth Sarah disqualified me for ones with girls like Ginger. Everyone the least bit glittery had lost interest in me entirely. As usual, I should have appreciated what I had when I had it. And even though it’s counterintuitive, Molly made that problem better, since when she was around, there were three of us, so it was more like we were a group, and less like the two friendless freaks had found each other and latched on. Whenever Molly wasn’t tutoring during lunch she sat with us and sang weird songs about food and people in our class, and talked about who had said what in American lit and her mysterious crushes on Chris Arpent and Tim Malone, the class fat guy.
The second time we ever hung out at lunch, she was eating tidy rows of sushi from a plastic box her mom had clearly packed and she was suddenly like, “Do you guys want to hear a poem I wrote?” So we were like, “Okay, sure,” and she took a folded piece of paper out of her pocket and cleared her throat and read this crazy thing about giant spiders that live underground
and come out at night to hunt and eat chickens. The poem was called “Housekeeping,” because the spiders keep this pet frog who eats ants and mites and other bugs they don’t like. I think her point was that even though the frog is trapped, the spiders love him, and maybe he loves them, because she ended it like, “Beloved frog, you are the definition of a pet. Eat your grief quick, keep kept.”
Sarah was like, “Wow. What’s that about?”
“Brazilian spiders and their pet frog,” Molly said, smiling, and I couldn’t tell if she was being secretive or if that was just the whole thing of it.
It was a pretty good poem. Molly was like, good at being good at everything, but also bizarre and unpopular enough not to be annoying. She had gone to a private school in Atlanta called Atlanta Girls School, and apparently her dad didn’t think D’Arts was “academic enough,” so he was teaching Molly history on the weekends, kind of like homeschooling. It sounded horrible to me, but Molly said her dad was a genius, that he had written four books on American history and was a practicing lawyer and taught “the law,” too. Whenever Molly talked about what her dad did, she always said, “the law.” She was very proud of him.
When Molly invited me and Sarah over for a sleepover, we consulted and then said yes. Molly’s house was kind of like mine, except bigger and fancier. There were papers and pieces of mail on all the surfaces in the study and kitchen, but they were stacked neatly. And the living room was completely, fanatically clean, with a white couch and some expensive-looking lamps and glass sculptures on the shelves and tables. But the den was full of stuffed bookshelves and soft chairs. Molly’s mom was in the kitchen, cooking complicated Thai food and wearing high heels. When we were upstairs, Molly said her mom was a “housewife,” and Goth Sarah, unable to refrain, was like, “Um, I think, it’s ‘homemaker’ or ‘stay-at-home mom,’ ” and Molly shrugged. “My mom says ‘housewife,’ ” she said, and Sarah managed to keep quiet, although later, when Molly went to the bathroom and we were alone, she told me she thought Molly’s frog poem was actually about her mom. I wasn’t sure.
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