Those Girls

by Lauren Saft

  AFTER THE SERVICE, WE went back to the Carsons’ and sat around the deli spread making uninspiring small talk. The house smelled like wet wood and boiling spaghetti sauce, like it always did. The family pictures that crawled down the moss-colored walls above the wooden stairs that had once seemed cliché and embarrassing were now tragic. An old aunt I’d never met sat in Drew’s dad’s chair. I’m sure she didn’t know that was where he’d sat, where he’d drunk, read the paper, and was waited on by his doting wife, where his daughters sat on his lap before they were thrust off to make room for a new paper or a new glass of Johnnie Walker. I wondered if Marcia was upset to see the aunt in the chair, if I should maybe ask her to get up.

  Per Mollie’s orders, I hadn’t spoken to Veronica all week, which was fine by me, because I couldn’t look her in the eye, anyway. It was clear she hadn’t told Drew about the Sam thing, as much as it was clear that Drew hadn’t told her about us. As much as I didn’t know how she lived with herself, sitting there, comforting him under a blanket of deceit and lies, I understood why she didn’t tell him. Because I hadn’t, either. How do you tell a guy whose dad just died that his girlfriend cheated on him? How could I tell the guy whose dad just died and who I’d just lost my virginity to that his girlfriend, my best friend, had fucked our other best friend’s boyfriend? When is an appropriate time to bring that up? What is a tasteful phrasing?

  I also hadn’t told Mollie about me and Drew yet, which was actually the worst burden of all. I hadn’t told her partially because nothing felt real until I told Mollie about it. If I told her, I’d have to acknowledge that it had happened and deal with it, rather than just pretend it didn’t, which seemed much easier. And partially, because a small part of me was worried that she’d be mad at me. Technically, I had done the same thing to Veronica that Veronica had done to Mollie. I was the other woman in this scenario, and with everything going on, and so much up in the air, everything changing at such a frenetic pace, I couldn’t risk losing Mollie.

  I was somewhat proud of V’s attempt at funeral-appropriate modesty. Yes, her skirt was too short for an event with a priest in attendance, and yes, I would have buttoned one more button, but there was no body glitter or underbutt or sideboob, which was a small but important gesture on her part. Mollie kicked my calf and rolled her eyes every time V touched Drew or talked to him or kissed him or offered to help his mother. Every twenty minutes or so, I’d tear up or wonder if this was a nightmare and then remember that I was at my best friend’s father’s funeral, and feel even worse for having the gall to feel sorry for myself.

  Mollie left after about an hour, and I walked her to her car.

  “It took every bone in my body not to punch her shiny little bird face and cause a scene right in the middle of the cemetery,” she said as she pulled a Marlboro Light from the pack I’d extended to her.

  I made a short exhale that resembled a chuckle.

  I lit my cigarette and looked out at all the dew-covered cars lined along the leafy street.

  “Drew, six o’clock,” she said, and gestured behind me.

  I nodded and tapped the hood of her Audi as she pulled away. I choked back another wave of tears as Drew’s gravity closed in. I stomped out my cigarette, turned around, and saw him standing about a foot behind me in the driveway. He looked morbidly handsome in his dark suit—taller, older, like he was beginning to look like what he’d look like when he became a man.

  “Can I have one?” he asked.

  I handed him my pack, still choking on words and tears.

  “Let’s walk down the block,” he said. “I don’t want any relatives to see me smoking.”

  “They’ll all smell it when they kiss you,” I said.

  There were no sidewalks, so we walked down the middle of the road. I stayed about a foot away, because even so much as an accidental brush of his jacket on my elbow would have destroyed me.

  He said something about not knowing anyone there. I said something about what a good job he was doing being strong for his mom and sisters. He shrugged and thanked me for helping so much. We got to the end of the cul-de-sac and sat down on the curb.

  “You don’t have any weed, do you?” he asked.

  I laughed and told him I was sorry I didn’t.

  He took a deep breath and put his hand on my back. My cotton cardigan was thin; I felt his heat through the material.

  He took a long inhale of the cigarette. “So we should talk about the other day,” he said.

  Tears gathered in my throat, in the emptiness that swelled there since it happened.

  “We don’t have to,” I said.

  “Yes, we do. This can’t ruin us.” His eyes stayed fixed on his dusty black wing tips and mine on my bare knees. He regretted it, I could tell. We were going to go back to being best friends and pretend like it never happened—it’d be something we’d laugh about in our twenties over beers, a quip for an embarrassing speech at his wedding… to someone else.

  “It doesn’t have to,” I said. “It was an extenuating circumstance. I understand.”

  The late-afternoon sun tried desperately to hide behind some clouds, but it peeped through the holes and stung our eyes anyway. Birds, bugs, fresh-cut grass, lawnmower exhaust, fertilizer, pale legs under floral dresses: there was no hiding from the awkwardness of early spring. I ran my hands through my hair for lack of a better idea of what to do with them.

  “I just…” He paused and leaned back into the grass on his elbows. “I’m going to tell Veronica. I don’t want you to think…”

  “I don’t.”

  I wiped a tear away with my knuckle.

  I looked over my shoulder at him lying in the grass, perched on his elbows. He sat up and hugged me from the side, laying his head on my shoulder. His hair smelled of the sun, and his jacket was wool, itchy and stiff, too thick for the warmness of the day.

  “I’m not going to tell Veronica. I haven’t even told Mollie. I understand. I understand everything. Please don’t worry.”

  “Then why are you crying?”

  His head was still on my shoulder, and his long arms were still wrapped around me.

  “Because this is sad!” I began to sob. “It’s a sad day. I’m sad for you and your family. I hate to think that you’re sad, about your dad, about me, about anything.”

  He kissed my slimy cheek.

  “I just didn’t want you to think I haven’t been thinking about it, because I have. A lot.”

  “I know,” I said, and slipped out of his grasp.

  “Did you tell Fernando?”

  I had barely even thought about Fernando or the band or music or the fact that we were playing at the prom since it all happened. I’d barely thought about the songs I’d written that I’d have to perform or the fact that I now had a million more songs in my head but couldn’t write them, because then it’d be written and I’d have to actually look at the truth of it.

  “I was sort of waiting to see if you’d tell Veronica,” I said.

  He rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  A sharp breeze shook the leaves on the trees. I hoped he’d offer me his jacket. But instead, he reached into it and pulled something out of his inside pocket.

  “I want to give you something,” he said. And he handed me a stack of white paper folded over itself. I opened it and read the top: “Women and Boys,” by Andrew Carson.

  I skimmed the first paragraph. It started: “Without the man, she became the best version of herself…”

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “It’s what I’ve been working on. It’s about you. Sort of.”

  I flipped through the pages to see how many of them there were: forty-seven.

  “You wrote a forty-seven-page story about me?” I started to choke up again. And panic. Wondering what Drew knew, or thought he knew, about me that could be worth forty-seven pages.

  “It’s not just one
long story; it’s a collection of a few of them. I started it with one I wrote when your dad left, which led to another, and then another. It’s a little embarrassing, which is why I never told you that this is what I was doing. I just started thinking a lot about you and your dad, what him leaving meant about him as a man, how you handled it, and what that meant about you as a girl, as a woman.”

  A woman? I wasn’t a woman; I was just a kid. A girl, a chick. I had never thought of myself as a woman, and was certainly shocked by the notion that anyone else, let alone Drew, had. I started to cry. Again.

  “You don’t have to read it,” he said. “But in light of, I don’t know, everything, I wanted you to have it. I wanted you to know what you mean to me, because, for the first time, it occurred to me that you might not.”

  I felt exposed. “I can’t believe all this time, you’ve been sitting up in your room, writing… about me.”

  “I love you, Alex,” he said. Just like that. In such a breezy way that I was sure that he didn’t mean it the way I would have meant it if I’d said it. But in a way that I understood what he meant.

  And for the first time in a long time, I looked at him, really at him, not at his neck or at his nose or over his shoulder, but into his welling blue eyes, at his crumbling face, and locked my eyes on his, even though it made me nervous and self-conscious and every muscle in my face was programmed to look away. And he looked right back at me, seemingly not nervous at all, like he was totally at home there, warm, safe, and cozy, just melting in my gaze.

  I fell into him, and we wrapped our arms around each other and wept on each other’s shoulders and stayed there, on each other’s shoulders, until the sun fell behind the clouds and the sky once and for all succumbed to gray.

  I folded his story back up, put it in my pocket, and handed him another cigarette. He stood up, took my hand, and pulled me off the curb. He didn’t let go of it until we walked back inside.

  MOLLIE FINN

  That Veronica could just go on breathing, eating, and dating fucking Drew and holding his fucking hand at his father’s fucking funeral was totally ludicrous. She had done the unthinkable. She wasn’t a human; she was a goddamn monster. I wanted her caged and poked and electrocuted and studied by scientists.

  A month after D-day, and the Wednesday before prom, Alex and I sat at my kitchen counter after school and ate grapes from a glass bowl, which soothed me because knowing that one grape equals exactly one carb makes tracking intake and the subsequent necessary burn off extremely simple. If only all equations could be so simple. If only every action could be undone with an equal and opposite reaction.

  Lately, though, my rage had been satiating my typically insatiable hunger. I didn’t crave food anymore—just revenge. I was going to be in fighting form by prom. I wasn’t going to let Sam think that I’d been at home wallowing and sobbing into Ben and Jerry’s; fuck that and fuck him and Veronica and whatever skintight boobtastic trash can she’d be wearing that night. I hadn’t eaten a real meal in two weeks. I was going to make Sam hate himself.

  Alex, however, looked like shit. She sat across the black granite counter, her hair even more unbrushed and disheveled than usual, wearing her smudged, crooked glasses and a gray hooded sweatshirt with coffee stains on the sleeves. She stared blankly into the bowl of grapes, picked them off the vine one by one, and chewed with the vigor of a sedated cow.

  “Alex!” I screamed at her. “What is with you lately? Snap out of it!”

  “Sorry,” she said. “Just thinking about stuff.”

  It seemed strange that she’d be so distraught about the Veronica/Sam thing, but my guess was she was more upset about what Veronica had done to Drew. I couldn’t believe she hadn’t told him—it took every bone in my body not to blurt it out at the funeral, but even I knew that it wasn’t my call, and even if I decided I didn’t give a shit, his dad’s funeral was clearly not an appropriate forum. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t gotten wind of it, though. Everyone knew. Even the teachers had been talking about why Mollie and Alex weren’t sitting with Veronica anymore.

  “We need to come up with a plan. Figure out how to publicly humiliate and disgrace Veronica the way she did to me.”

  Alex took off her glasses and rubbed them with the bottom of her sweatshirt.

  “What could we possibly do that would rectify what she’s done?” she said. “We’d need to physically harm her—do something illegal.”

  “We could beat her up?”

  Alex giggled a little. “You’re going to risk a black eye before prom?”

  “Good point.”

  “We could frame her for something?”

  “Like what, like a crime? Like a murder?” My wheels started to spin.

  “That would mean we’d actually have to murder someone and make it look like she did it. Are you willing to murder someone? Who would we murder?” Alex posed as she popped some more grapes in her mouth. “What if we drugged her? Slipped her some acid so she’d be tweaking out and tripping balls at prom and not know why?”

  “Not mean enough,” I said. “She’d take it as an excuse to get naked and dance in public.”

  We laughed, picturing that.

  “We could roofie her,” Alex said between giggles.

  “We could roofie her!”

  I stopped laughing.

  “Yes!” she said. “We’ll roofie her at the prom, and when she passes out, we’ll strip her naked and plant booze and drugs and shit on her and leave her for everyone to see what a dumb, drunk whore she is.”

  The wheels ground to a halt.

  “Alex, that’s a brilliant idea.…”

  She crossed and uncrossed her legs and went back to picking grapes. “Veronica probably eats fucking roofies for breakfast.…”

  “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  I ran upstairs and rustled through my sock drawer. In the back left corner was an antique embroidered change purse that some dumb aunt gave me for some dumb graduation from something dumb. I kept drugs in it mostly. I grabbed it and ran back downstairs, adrenaline pumping like during the slow climb of a roller coaster before the first big drop.

  When I got back to the kitchen, I opened the change purse and dumped two round white pills out into my palm and showed them to Alex.

  “Painkillers?” she asked. A grape skin was stuck to her front tooth.

  “Roofies,” I said.

  And the lights behind her eyes switched back on.

  “Are you kidding? Why do you have roofies?”

  I popped a grape in my mouth, brushed off my kilt, readjusted my ponytail, and stood up straight. I debated lying to her but realized there was no point in continuing to defend Sam anymore. The jig was up. I had to be honest about what a truly vile douche he was now, which still somehow felt embarrassing. Even though his douchiness was no longer technically my problem. I thought if I covered for him, made it look like we were the couple I knew we could look like, that everyone would see us as that perfect couple—the couple that I knew we could actually be if he would have just tried a little harder to be the guy I needed him to be instead of the guy he actually was. I’d spent so long trying to hide what a truly mean and selfish and foul person he was that I’d become a part of it; I was no better. He’d sucked me in and down with him, and I’d legitimately forgotten that I could get out and remove myself from it at any time, that I had a choice, and I didn’t have to be with him if I didn’t want to be.… It was strange, like a Stockholm syndrome thing. I had to snap out of it; I had to stop thinking of him as a reflection upon me. But I still wasn’t quite there yet.

  “Apparently, a bunch of guys on the lacrosse team got them. Sam said it was a joke, but I mean, I’m sure some of them probably used them. I took Sam’s, just in case he ever thought to try them on me.”

  Alex dropped her jaw.

  “That’s terrifying, Mollie,” she said.

  “Yeah…” I trailed off and brought the conversation back around to a productive place.

/>   “So, I’m serious. We should do this.” My eyes thumped with my heart, like the National Geographic soundtrack, that throbbing bass they play before an animal pounces, played in the back of my head.

  “Mollie! I’m kidding! We’re not going to date-rape Veronica.”

  “We’re not going to rape her; we’re going to roofie her, at prom, just so she passes out. We’ll make sure she does it in the lobby, and we’ll take her dress off and spill shit on her, just so she looks like a drunken mess and everyone will walk by and see her all passed out like she’s hammered and puked on herself. It’ll be hilarious.”

  “She could get in seriously big trouble!” Alex gnawed on her cuticles.

  “Fuck her. She’ll have been drinking anyway. It’s not like we’re even framing her for something she didn’t do. She’ll get in trouble for being drunk, which she will actually be! We’re just going to add a layer of public humiliation to it.”

  I had to admit: it was genius. Alex’s pink little mouth twisted into a smirk.

  “What about Drew? Drew will see that she’s out of it and take her home.”

  “That’s where you come in. You’re on Drew duty. Distract him while I get her out of the room and into the lobby. He won’t know where she went.”

  She tapped her long fingers on the counter and adjusted her glasses. She squirmed on her stool a little, crossed and uncrossed her legs.

  “Alex, come on. This is brilliant. We said we needed a plan, and this is a plan. Plan on? Are you in?”

  She looked at me, then out the window, twiddling her thumbs and appearing to be counting something behind her glasses. She took them off and rubbed her eyes.

  “Plan on,” she said, and put her hand out, her black nail polish half bitten off and chipped. I laid my hand on hers.