The Girls' Almanac

by Emily Franklin

  “I think you need stitches,” she said, careful not to touch the brother.

  “Yeah, well, I think you need a rope burn!” He took her forearm into his hands and twisted the skin one way and back until she kicked him in the shin with her sandal side. Gabrielle’s arm pulsed, a bruise already beginning to seep up from underneath. Carin tapped her son on the shoulder and scolded him with signs and words Gabrielle couldn’t make out.

  Andrea’s father appeared at the top of the stairs holding an iced drink, glanced at his son, and took his Want-Ads over to the side porch to sweat and circle things in the sun.

  From one of the kitchen drawers, Carin pulled out a tube of that glue from the advertisement on television where the man’s hard hat was glued to a steel beam and was strong enough to keep him suspended there for as long as he gripped his hat. There were only two chairs in the kitchen, so Andrea got up and offered hers to her brother as Carin snipped the end of the glue tube and went to her son’s forehead. In a careful line, she squeezed the clear sealant onto the boy’s skin and then pressed the edges of the cut together, blowing on it, until the sides adhered.

  Gabrielle thought about the words she would use later to tell her father and pictured him looking back at her in the rearview mirror with his eyebrows raised, then how he might ask her to spell the word adhesion, and she would, the letters fluttering into place like sparrows.

  Carin shooed the girls out of the kitchen so she could study. In her room, Andrea unfolded a bulky foam chair until it lay flat and long enough for both of them to sit.

  “Here,” she said and handed Gabrielle a Choose Your Own Adventure book and took one for herself. At the bottom of each page, the reader was left with a choice as to how to proceed—choose to go in the hot-air balloon over the Sahara and maybe you’d wind up lost over the blank expanse of ocean, or trek through the desert and maybe you’d find a cave filled with gold coins and ruby-pointed crowns. Andrea read hers the way the author intended, making her decision and going to the corresponding page until her journey had ended. Gabrielle tried to do the same but found herself marking pages with her fingers, reserving, revising possible outcomes in case the one she’d chosen ended in shark-infested waters or locked in an abandoned castle.

  Gabrielle’s way took longer, so Andrea stood behind her, braiding her hair, then undoing her work. She twisted it up and examined her from the front to see if she liked the style. Fish-bone braids took the longest and looked the most complicated, even though they were simple to do, and Gabrielle liked the feel of her hair being sectioned and then tightened, the trace of Andrea’s fingers on her neck. With guilt, Gabrielle wondered if Andrea knew this was one of the reasons for the repeat visits; Gabrielle had no one else to braid her hair, and it felt so gentle, like the moments right before sleep. She tried all the braids she learned from Andrea on the spider plants her father keeps in the kitchen, their green tufts forever sprouting new baby plants.

  “Can you try a side ponytail?” Gabrielle said and didn’t look up in case Andrea decided to stop brushing altogether.

  “You don’t know about hair the way I do,” Andrea said and increased her grip. As Gabrielle flipped the pages of the book, Andrea nudged her to read out loud, and they stayed like that until Andrea’s father called up.

  “Andrea, your friend’s ride is here,” Allan yelled from underneath the floorboards, where he stood at the wet bar dog-earing pages in a tool catalog. Maybe Allan still didn’t know to call her Gabrielle, even after months of the same routine. Andrea told Gabrielle to wait for her down there while she helped her mother chop red onion for the hamburger meat that sat cooling in a metal bowl in the fridge.

  Down the freestanding stairs that connected the den to the garage, Gabrielle saw Allan looking out past the end of his driveway. Her father’s car wasn’t there. “Guess it was someone else,” Allan said, pointing to the wafting dust on the road. “I’m sure he’ll be here in a minute or so.”

  Gabrielle watched her friend’s dad, wondered what he thought about then, if the melon light above the neighboring houses made him miss someone, if the ice in his drink had melted and seeped into the alcohol the way it did in root beer, if he minded the wood filings dispersed into tiny coils that nestled near his toes.

  Without turning to her, he said, “Carin and I dance in here.”

  He didn’t gesture, but Gabrielle figured he meant in the open garage space and not in his head. She went and stood next to him, closer than she ever had, and she could hear him breathe in between drink sips. He hummed then, a song she knew from a recording her grandfather had played when he’d dealt round after round of king’s corner in the one-room apartment he decorated with her spelling bee ribbons. Allan looked at Gabrielle and, tipping his glass, said, “I’d offer you some, but you probably wouldn’t like it.”

  He kept humming until she felt herself about to sway. Midges flitted into the garage, and Allan redirected the black specks away from them as he led the girl in a waltz. The generator buzzed, and Gabrielle noticed the fine dew-sweat that clung to the hairs on Allan’s arm. He wasn’t holding her tightly, but she felt he could lift her up at any minute and she would be put to flight like some wind-ripped blossom. Allan’s drink was gone, but he kept the glass pressed to her back. They turned once more and spun, and Gabrielle noticed he’d stopped humming and looked at her the way her father had when he’d collected the cat from under the Impala’s tire.

  “You’re a good dancer,” Allan said as he let her go.

  Andrea appeared in front of them, her face registering nothing of what she’d seen, and pulled Gabrielle to the edge of the driveway, where Gabrielle’s father sat, the car idling, waiting to take her home. They could see the curls of barbecue smoke from the backyard. Andrea put the back of one of her hands to Gabrielle’s nose so she could smell the sharp onions on her friend’s skin. “Smell,” Andrea commanded. “My mom taught me to cut them under cold running water. You know, so you don’t cry?” Gabrielle wondered what else Carin had taught, the moments missing from her own motherless life, if there were a checklist somewhere that might explain all the practicalities she lacked. Only when she is an adult will it register as significant to Gabrielle that she had so many feelings toward a woman who—literally—could not hear the need for her, one who communicated in near silence—not to mention the odd sadness of dancing with someone else’s father while her own father rushed through his ER patients to come collect her.

  Gabrielle liked when her dad arrived late and she joined the tumble that was Andrea’s family cookout. The girls would be offered rare burgers, sometimes so rare they were cold inside, sometimes cut in two, the half circles put into hot dog rolls and relished, whether she wanted it or not. She and Andrea would take their dinners away from the rest and go to the side of the house, where a doorless fridge sat turned on its length. They were still just small enough to fit in it, and they’d fold their legs to their chests, watching the sun sink behind the juts of pine and leaf-swollen oaks in the neighbor’s yard. From her pocket, Andrea would take a lollipop and they’d share it—each taking a lick or two until the center was revealed and they gnawed the last of the sugar crust from the white stick.

  The back end of the sea green Impala might be visible then, and Gabrielle’s father would give a short lean on the horn until Allan yelled from the backyard that it was time to go. Slinging Gabrielle’s book bag over her shoulder, Andrea would walk her to the car, where her father sat wearing his stained hospital scrubs. Pointing to a smear of yellow or the splotches of dried blood on his shirt, Andrea would make a face at her friend as they moved in to hug good-bye.

  Buckled into the backseat, where Randall, her father, felt she was safer, Gabrielle would wave to Andrea and then undo the straps of her bathing suit and let the ends dangle under her shirt. After she’d been wearing the thing all day, her skin would keep the string’s mark as if unaware it had been undone. Out the side window, Andrea would shrink to cutout size, and Randall would ask how C
arin’s accountancy studying was going. Gabrielle would shrug and feel her tongue roll in her mouth, forming words and then spelling them as if she had only half her hearing.

  In bed that night, after her father had smoothed her hair away from her face and kissed her forehead, Gabrielle took his hand and showed him how to trace letters in his palm. It was something she did at the spelling bees as she waited her turn, and it was something Andrea did with her mother late at night if they were both unable to sleep and wanted to sit together in the dark kitchen without waking anyone.

  June was almost over, so Gabrielle wrote summer in her father’s open hand, and he wrote sky, cloud, and sun, until she told him he was being too easy and he wrote honeysuckle, cocoon, and marigold. Summer would pass, and in the fall Andrea and Gabrielle would be placed in their own Language and Learning group. They would read about a fox so fantastic it slipped into another animal’s skin, and never came out.

  Voler

  Heather’s smoking the pot Celia’s boyfriend, Vaughn, gave her as a graduation present in June. She’d kept the stuff secreted away in an empty Sucrets box in her top desk drawer since June and took it out only an hour or so ago, when she and Jenna came back from Harvard Square. They—really Heather—want to change before going to a party at the dorm of someone they went to high school with and haven’t spoken to since graduation, when their class erupted and seeped out into the world.

  “Here,” Heather offers Jenna in the sucked-in smoker’s voice.

  “Not right now, thank you,” Jenna says and thinks how funny it would be if she could tell her parents how polite she is, even when it comes to drugs.

  Jenna doesn’t want to be high. Drunk, maybe, since what else is there to do during Head of the Charles weekend except row a boat or stand sidelined while someone else oars to victory or wander around feeling nostalgic for high school days, which are still too close to feel anything but relief that they are gone? Jenna thinks about her first semester at Dartmouth, about the brick and creeping vines that live even in winter. Just like in the handbook photographs, students sprawled on the quad and hiked themselves breathless with weighty packs up the White Mountains, then returned to the dorms to drink until they threw up. Or they’d write papers due the next morning, the football players keeping wads of Skoal in the pouch between lower lip and gum, spitting into empty soda cans, while Jenna watched through her room’s open door. The tin smell the radiator emitted in her dorm room came with nightly dull tapping sounds, as if some small creature lost in the looping pipes clinked along trying to get out. Those noises were different from the sighs and sheet shuffles her roommate made the first couple of weeks before she settled on some junior named Mark, who spent enough time in the room that he had his own drawer in the roommate’s school-issued dresser.

  Jenna suspected already that, while she would make it through the four years until graduation, she wouldn’t much use her degree. She worked ten hours a week at the Bagel Basement, even though she didn’t need the extra cash, just wanted the company of the bakers and the rank, yeasty scent from the bagel dough. The floating rings that would become sesame or poppy seeded gained their high-gloss exteriors from the hot-water bath Jenna ran. Like inner tubes, the bagels bobbed and danced down the length of the boiling stream until they were ready for the oven. Part of sophomore year you could spend a semester working, and Jenna had visions of going somewhere to learn how to bake. Something about the science of it appealed: the exact temperatures necessary to make dough behave the way you wanted—to ensure its rise or crust, to make it fly up and swell.

  “My parents would hate it if I didn’t do something really good with a degree from an Ivy League school,” Jenna says suddenly into the blank air. Each word comes out as a gray-white gasp. She hasn’t admitted the thought before, but since Heather is focusing on getting high and staying that way, Jenna figures she can say anything without having it resurface later.

  “Isn’t it funny how I thought we’d go to college together? But there you are, in the snow, while I’m—What was I going to say? Not in the snow?” Heather laughs at herself. When Heather—wide-mouthed, tall, perpetually tanned—laughs at herself, Jenna feels drawn to her, magnetized toward her friend’s disheveled beauty.

  Somehow, Heather claimed she’d missed the college application and interview process altogether and was taking the year off, supposedly to become a campus peer educator at Harvard—warning students about alcohol abuse or stress-related anxiety, keeping piles of pamphlets stocked in the office, each one detailing a sexually transmitted disease or gynecological issue. Heather had mailed one pamphlet to Jenna, highlighting how many times the word labia appeared, insisting that it could be a new expression. Jenna never commented that Heather seemed to spend as much time sleeping as she did peer-educating and so far hadn’t begun looking at schools for the next year, either. If she’d gone to a local college, Jenna thinks, she would have spent more time with Heather, and maybe pressed her for reasons, but from up north, away, it didn’t seem fair.

  Across from where the girls are standing, the Charles River seems solid, sheened by the streetlights. Groups of guys in college-name sweatshirts hustle by while Jenna and Heather remain unseen, tucked to one side of a Gothic-style apartment building. Jenna is on her third beer; only four would fit in her pockets, and she feels lighter since having had a couple, either due to the disposed of cans or the beer buzz, she’s not sure which.

  “Look up!” Heather instructs, tilting her head back so her face is nearly parallel with the ground, her nose its own mountain for the miniature; a whole breed of people Jenna imagines marching up and tent-pitching before eating tiny s’mores. Above, the apartment turrets seem to sway together, linking, then undoing themselves to reveal the shaving of moon slunk in the sky behind.

  Jenna follows Heather’s lead, but only for a second before saying, “I think it looks cooler to you.”

  “I think you’re right!” Heather laughs and then drags hard on her cigarette joint. She’d spent time hollowing the Camel Light of its tobacco and refilling it with pot while Jenna sat on the bathroom counter trying to catch a glimpse of herself from the back by angling the door mirror at the one over the sink. Heather had tucked the cigarette into a hard pack, and then they’d gone out together to watch the races.

  Oars flecked the water, the sculls slipped along, moving to the yells of “Stroke! Stroke!” until some team won and the people lining the bridges shifted to watch another race, happening along some other part of the river. Heather waved wildly from where she stood on the reed-banked swell of land just past the boathouse.

  “Who are you waving at?” Jenna asked.

  “No one!” Heather laughed, swinging her flannel shirt above her head the way she had once before, when the smoke alarm had gone off in the midst of baking hash brownies in her parents’ kitchen. “That’s the point—everyone thinks I’m rooting for them, but really, I don’t know who the hell they are!” Heather seemed so cool, Jenna thought, so relaxed and sure of herself in ways that continually elude Jenna. Not that Jenna wouldn’t think to wave, she would, only she would feel sad if no one—even people she didn’t know—waved back.

  They stayed like that awhile and then had burgers and salted pumpkin seeds some students were selling from a barrel. Dipping a measuring cup into the pile, they poured some seeds into a brown paper coffee filter. Jenna held the thing like an ice cream as they walked around Harvard Square, hoping to see people they knew, mainly boys they’d had crushes on who had graduated before them and gone away to places like Wesleyan and UVM and come back playing guitar, looking to let some girl borrow their school shirts for the weekend. When Heather took a couple seeds into her mouth, she swirled them around, only to suck the salt off, then spit the wet remains onto the pavement.

  Now Heather says, “I love pot. Really.” She pauses and puts her hand in front of her face as if she’s dodging paparazzi. “I’m blocking the moon out—all by myself!”

  “Good for you,”
Jenna says and does the same thing with her beer can.

  “But I do so love the weed. I wish that sounded as profound as I feel it, you know? I bet Vaughn knew that. Probably, he thought I’d sleep with him or something just because he gave me some. And I wouldn’t—no way would I lose my virginity to him.”

  Heather hadn’t slept with anyone, ever, and talked about it more often than Jenna thought necessary. When their friend Celia had been around, she’d rolled her eyes and said, “We know, we know, you’re incredibly virginal. We get it.”

  But Jenna just listened and chalked the drama up to Heather’s early days, when she was the child, then teenage lead in a couple movies. When her costars went on to be part of that notorious teen actor crowd in the eighties, Heather had reconnected with them long enough to make out with the hot, preppy guy but had stormed out of his hotel room in New York shouting, “I’m still a virgin for fuck’s sake!” when he’d tried to video her in the shower. There’d been a shot of Heather in some celebrity gossip rag, which caused brief but exciting school scandal. At school, Jenna had felt lucky when Heather chose her for a scene partner in Drama and invited her over that weekend, just to cement the friendship.

  Opening the last pocketed beer, Jenna says, “So, whatever happened with you and Vaughn, anyway?”