Likes

by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

  Imogen usually didn’t contribute to these conversations. There wasn’t any disapproval in her silence, or squirminess, and she didn’t act bored. It just felt as if she had politely stepped away for a moment. In fact, she seemed to have excused herself altogether from the fray—the consuming, frantic efforts of creating a self. She still looked like the girl who had befriended Mari in second grade, and Bree in sixth—same heavy curtain of hair, same orderly teeth and narrow body and marvelous skin—except that she was taller now, of course. She liked particular things but was not given to obsessions. She was known for being good at sports, singing in a clear contralto, and leading the student council with Cabinet-level skill. She was curious about other people. She could do complex math problems in her head. She had a delighted-sounding, unrestrained, bell-like laugh. When Mari stopped to think about it, her feeling of wonder was undimmed—what stroke of fortune had befallen her at age seven—for how did she ever get so lucky as to have Imogen as her friend?

  But by the eighth grade there was something about Imogen that Mari couldn’t quite put her finger on—that refused to be asked about, that was at once much bigger and subtler than the accident involving Bree’s eyebrows—something that had to do with her sense of Imogen staging an imperceptible retreat. Imperceptible because she was still firmly at the center of everything: a school day felt desultory without her there, the weekend shapeless if not spent at her house. Yet Imogen occupied this position while also making herself absent. Sometimes literally—one Friday afternoon she startled Mari and Bree by appearing in her kitchen clad in the gym clothes she had brought home over the weekend to be washed. She passed right by them—they were standing in the pantry, opening a new box of Petit Écolier—and headed for the back door. “Where are you going?” they called after her. “Running,” she called back. “On your own?” Mari asked incredulously. “For fun?” But Imogen didn’t hear her; the door had already swung shut.

  Still, she was Imogen; she commiserated and argued and teased; she planned birthday parties; she initiated cookie-eating contests; she filled the car or the locker room or the kitchen with her laugh; at the same time she was elsewhere, and Mari couldn’t tell if her gaze was turned inward or directed at a spot so far in the distance that it was beyond Mari’s ability to see.

  * * *

  For several months, Mari endured the uncertainty of whether she and her friends would be going to high school together. Life as she knew it felt suddenly provisional. Bree said that her family was waiting to see if the school would give them more financial aid, and then there was the question of where Bevin would be going, the possibility of added tuition. “Can’t they just put her in public school until sixth grade,” Mari asked, “like they did with you?” Imogen’s having a sibling was also proving to be a problem, with her parents making her apply to the boarding school from which Nicholas was about to graduate, on the tiresome principle of exploring one’s options. “But why be in someone else’s shadow?” Mari said. As for Mari, she was threatening to enroll at her enormous local high school and take her chances on getting into the alternative program where students voted on things and called teachers by their first names—a threat that her mother failed to treat at all seriously.

  In the end, Mari and Imogen and Bree decided to stay at their school. A relief that also felt slightly like a prison sentence. Four more years of all girls—and despite the promise of coed leadership conferences and community service outings, or the annual spring musical production with their so-called brother school, this felt like a long time.

  The question of how and where to meet boys began to circulate among their classmates, gaining urgency, and resourcefully Bree started the summer by finding one in her backyard. Mari and Imogen were sitting cross-legged on the floor of Imogen’s room, eating frozen fruit bars, when Bree told them. His name was Alex, he was fifteen, and he lived in the other half of her house.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “My parents aren’t like yours. When I say they’ll kill me, I’m not talking metaphorically. They will kill me.”

  “But all he said was hi,” Mari clarified.

  “And smiled,” Bree said. “And then took his shirt off.”

  “That’s something I always want to do,” Imogen said, “when it’s hot out and I’m playing basketball.”

  “The thing is,” Bree said, “he hadn’t even started playing yet.”

  Mari had been in Bree’s backyard only a couple of times because it wasn’t really a backyard, more like a paved-over area where extra cars could be parked. At one end a basketball net had been erected. Two wide wooden porches hung off the back of the house and overlooked the parked cars, or when there weren’t any cars, a makeshift half-court. The porch on the first floor belonged to Bree’s family, and it was where they kept the hibachi and Bevin’s Big Wheel, along with her old stroller and play castle and other abandoned baby equipment.

  “How did you not notice him before?” Mari asked.

  “I did. He was just shorter then and a little chunky. There’s four of them. My mom calls them the brood. You should hear them coming down the stairs in the morning.” Bree wiped a drop of melted strawberry from the hairless expanse of her leg. “He’s not the oldest but he’s the tallest. Over the winter he got tall. And now he’s practicing all the time out in the back. Not with the other kids—by himself.”

  Mari waited to see if Imogen wanted to say something. She herself was finding it hard to speak in the breathless tone that Bree seemed to expect of them. Finally she said, “I don’t think there’s anything for your parents to be worried about. That’s normal, isn’t it, for a neighbor to say hello. I say hello to our neighbors practically every day.”

  Bree smiled, almost sadly, as if at Mari’s vast innocence. “This is different,” she said. “Completely different.”

  “Because he took his shirt off?”

  “No,” Bree said, “because of the way he looked at me.”

  And how was that? (Mari didn’t add exactly but wanted to.) Bree couldn’t put it into words, she said. It was just a feeling. A back-and-forth. A spark. She frowned at the feebleness of her phrases. “This sounds arbitrary,” she said, “but it’s sort of like when you’re about to take a test and you turn it over and read the first question and immediately you know the answer, and you know it’s right? It’s that feeling in your chest when you know you know it.”

  Mari felt her own chest growing tight as Bree spoke. She tossed her popsicle stick in the vicinity of the wastebasket and unexpectedly it went in. She tried summoning up the reason that Bree’s family no longer spoke to their neighbors—was it the noise? Or something about a dog? A pitbull? Nor could she quite remember where they came from, though she was pretty sure it was somewhere that started with a C. They were either Cape Verdean, or Colombian. Or maybe Cambodian.

  Bree was saying, “I could tell from the way he acted that he could feel me looking at him.”

  “He started missing the basket?” Imogen asked.

  “Nothing that obvious. Though he did miss a few. It was more like he started walking and moving around in a different way, more slowly than before but also with more energy—”

  Mari laughed abruptly. “You put a new spring in his step?”

  “It was like he was slowly vibrating when he moved.” Bree’s voice was faraway, her face dignified. “And after he smiled at me, he never looked over at me. Not once. Not even when it would have been natural to glance in my direction. He made himself not look. And that’s how I could tell.”

  “Well, just try not to get pregnant,” Mari said flatly.

  But Bree was too happy, exalted, to even roll her eyes at this remark.

  * * *

  Bree didn’t get pregnant that summer, but she did end up having sex, and more than once. When Mari found out, her numb first thought was, But I was only kidding. The acceleration induced a sort of whiplash: How was it possible that Mari and Imogen, who between them had never kissed a single boy, or h
eld hands with a boy, who didn’t really know any boys, had a friend who was now experienced at having sex?

  Bree told them nothing at the time. Throughout the summer, she offered up a handful of distracting details: notes written and exchanged, with the play castle as mailbox; late-night meetings by the trash cans, parents not registering a new readiness to take out the garbage. Brief conversations on the back-porch steps; spasms at the sound of a screen door swinging open. Mari imagined a forbidden love unfolding chastely in a Revere that was gritty and poorly lit but in a picturesque way, as if Bree had been cast in a community theater production of West Side Story.

  The whole time, however, actual real-life sex was being had. And not with Alex, the vaguely brown boy next door, but with Nicholas. Nicholas Pickett. Imogen’s brother was home for the summer before he went off to college, and Bree had sex with him. Or he had sex with Bree. Even years later Mari wasn’t sure, when forming the sentence in her head, who to make the subject and who the object of the preposition.

  * * *

  Since you’re not on FB I don’t know if you saw but no small feat getting bus up and running. Jon very handy to be fair but I gravely underestimated. Bought it for a song then fell down down down down rabbit hole of repairs. Talk about a money pit!!! Remember when we saw that movie? At Circle Cinemas. Starring Shelley Long and I can’t remember who played her husband. I think it scarred me. Seriously I have flashbacks whenever Jon starts looking at fixer uppers online believing himself secret real estate genius. Of course superior me I landed on biggest fixer upper of all. The moral is never buy school bus off Craigslist.

  * * *

  Imogen’s house didn’t have an ordinary backyard: what stretched behind her house was more like a woodland garden. Everything shady and dense, with only a small, irregular-shaped patch of lawn. A little creek ran through the greenery, and though you couldn’t always see it, you could always hear the trickling sound it made. The creek was so narrow you could step over it easily, but nevertheless a low stone bridge had been built. Moss grew in abundance, also ferns and hostas. A mass of rhododendron turned different shades of pink in the spring. Knee-high statues rose up at random from the undergrowth: an upright frog with arms akimbo, two cherubs grappling, a rabbit absorbed in reading a book. In the sun-speckled depths of the garden stood an obelisk and several urns.

  When they were much younger, Imogen and Mari played there after school. Back then there was less statuary and a little more wilderness, also a primitive tree house and a rope swing and a short zip line. Mari was afraid of heights, afraid of insects, wary of dirt, alert to poison oak, always dodging spiderwebs whether they were there or not. The only pants she owned had an elastic waist and were made of velour. Yet Imogen didn’t despair of her. She remained cheerfully deaf to worries and complaints. Unflappably, she coached Mari over boulders and under fallen branches and through soggy patches. She didn’t sigh when Mari lost her balance or needed to stop and catch her breath. Despite Mari’s hopelessness, Imogen kept inviting her over to play, week after week—months passing, and then years.

  Mari would not forget it: the feel of Imogen’s bony grip on her wrist as she pulled her up through the rough opening in the tree-house floor.

  The summer before high school began, the girls barely ventured out to the backyard. Maybe once or twice to hose off their feet, or to find mint to put into a pitcher of lemonade. Mari’s second attempt at smoking occurred early one morning, alone, beneath the crabapple tree. Sometimes they would drape their bathing suits on the Adirondack chairs to make them dry faster, but usually they just hung them up in the bathroom. Bree always seemed to forget where she’d left her clothes and so had to run through the house in her damp bikini searching for them, squealing with cold.

  Since it was summer and they were going into high school, they could sleep over not only on Fridays but on other days of the week as well. On one such night Mari stumbled upon Bree pushing open the French doors from the outside, stepping into the living room from the garden. She scared Mari nearly half to death. What on earth had she been doing out there? It was late—the middle of the night—Mari didn’t know what time it was. She had awoken with a terrible thirst that only not-from-concentrate orange juice could quench and was making her silent way to the kitchen.

  For a moment Bree didn’t seem to see her. Her face was blank, and she was barefoot, wearing the oversized T-shirt she had put on before bed.

  “You gave me a heart attack!” Mari whispered, and Bree jumped, sucked in her breath. “What are you doing up?” Mari asked, but before Bree could answer, a large shape appeared behind her in the doorway. It was Nicholas, dressed in his regular clothes, the same khaki shorts and wrinkled white Oxford he’d worn during the day. He wasn’t wearing any shoes.

  “Hi Nicholas,” Mari said automatically. And then, stupidly: “I was just getting some orange juice. I think I might be coming down with something.”

  The words issued forth without her thinking. As if she were apologizing, as if she were the one who had interrupted or disturbed.

  And this would be the moment when she knew. Without needing it spelled out for her, without questions and answers. She would take it all in—the late hour, the naked feet, the two bodies standing in the darkness, one right behind the other—and she would understand. She would see them, and she would know, and Bree would know that she knew. The two of them knowing it together.

  Which wasn’t how it happened, to be clear. This was solely the strange fantasy that Mari had concocted—her unwitting discovery, her reservoir of intuition. A look shared between her and Bree in the shadowy living room, followed by an understanding beyond her years.

  * * *

  So first it was engine that needed to be replaced. No big surprise there. Otherwise bus would still be in use right? But who knew diesel engines cost A LOT. Like down payment on a small house a lot. Then brakes failed inspection. FYI bus has air brakes not hydraulic brakes and air brakes are of course way more! Imogen literally saved our lives by paying for complete overhaul new compressor new lines new valves the WORKS. Plus labor. She wanted everything all new. Our third day a deer jumps out right in front of us and was I ever glad for brand new brake system! Whole process one miracle after another. Stunning moments of kindness from unforeseen sources. Largely reaffirmed my faith in humanity which was at low ebb for multiple reasons as I’m sure you can relate. It was Jon who after much arguing and defensiveness overcame my reluctance re fundraising page. He said people want to help and website just makes it easier to do so and though I hate to admit when he’s right he was right.

  * * *

  Mari didn’t stumble upon Nicholas and Bree in the middle of the night. And at no point that summer did Bree confide in her. She had to be told—by Melanie, of all people—while flipping through the new-imports bin at a record store near one of the unavoidable universities. They were music shopping before the start of school. Melanie didn’t break down but seemed instead to expand under the weight of her conscience. Her eyes welled up as she told Mari, but Mari remained stony. It was only when her mother picked her up at the end of the afternoon that she slammed the passenger door shut and wept.

  Her mother, who was a tentative driver to begin with, drove home extra slowly, as if steering a small craft through a squall. Mari had resolved not to say anything, but that resolve was hard to maintain once she was inside the warm hull of her mother’s Toyota. She couldn’t identify what hurt more: the fact that Bree had had sex; or that she had had sex with their best friend’s brother; or that somehow with all her dumb vamping she’d actually won the attention of golden, unattainable Nicholas; or that she, Mari, had to hear about it secondhand from a random person like Melanie. It was like probing for the fracture in a limb that was entirely alight with pain. As she sobbed, her mother kept asking mundane questions: “Is Bree fifteen now?” (No, fourteen, her birthday isn’t until the end of October), and “Does she still live in Revere?” (Yes, obviously), and “Remind me: How old
is Nicholas?” (Eighteen! They had that big party with the tent, you were there). Questions with easy answers, the sort Coach Bell would ask when you banged heads with another girl while playing field hockey in PE class.

  At home Mari’s mother guided her in through the front door, made a pot of tea, and then parted and brushed her hair. Once she finished both braids, she said quietly, “You have to tell Imogen, and I have to tell her parents.” She was standing behind Mari, who was seated in a kitchen chair. Mari didn’t see why Imogen’s parents needed to know anything, and said so, but her mother then began to undo and rebraid her hair as she explained the meanings of several legal terms: “age of consent”; “statutory rape”; “liability.” When she stepped from behind Mari’s chair to turn on the faucet, Mari saw the look on her face. She feared for an awful moment that her mother was about to cry. But she didn’t; she rinsed out the teacups and scrubbed the pans left soaking in the sink and paused only to look up briefly and say in midthought, to either Mari or her own reflection in the window, “They opened their home to her.”

  * * *

  Imogen looked so plainly delighted when asked to return to the tree house that Mari felt like a monster. “We haven’t been up here in ages,” Imogen said, and stretched her arms up, oblivious to the accumulation of cobwebs. “Look! I’m hitting the ceiling now.”

  But as Mari talked, Imogen’s arms sank back down to her sides. She bent over so she could rest her elbows on the filthy edge of the window, and she allowed her sheet of hair to fall forward and hide her face. Mari knew that she was crying, but she also knew not to put her arm around her smotheringly. When Imogen finally spoke, she didn’t turn to look at her. “This whole time I thought Alex was the one she liked.”