Touch

by Francine Prose

  Marian noticed the moment I walked in her front door. That was why she looked me up and down and laughed and said I wasn’t a kid anymore.

  She said, “Maisie, you look lovely. You really do.” I don’t know why she sounded so sad. Maybe it made her sad to think about us all growing up so fast. Or maybe she saw herself in me. Grown-ups were always doing that.

  “I wish your mom were here,” she said.

  “I was just at my mom’s, remember? I left.”

  “I miss her,” said Marian.

  I said, “Believe me, you’d miss her less if you got to know Geoff.”

  I was having the weirdest reaction: my own stab of sadness for all the time I’d been away, all the weeks and months I’d missed and that I would never get back. Nearly a whole year without my best friends, a year away from the only kids who cared about me.

  Just at that moment, Shakes came up behind his mom.

  “Shakes!” I said.

  “Edward,” Marian said.

  “Edward,” I said. It always felt strange to call him that, but I suddenly liked how strange it felt. It wasn’t weirdly strange. It was familiar strange.

  Just as I’d thought when we’d talked on the phone, his twitches, or spasms, or whatever they were, had gotten slightly worse. But maybe I was only paying closer attention because I hadn’t seen him in so long. I’d gotten used to the funny movements Shakes couldn’t help making, but now I was struck by them all over again. Maybe that was because he looked like a different person—taller, thicker around the middle—a slightly butterball, junior-sized grown-up.

  “Shakes?” I said, as if I really had to make sure.

  “Edward,” Marian said.

  “Yo, Maisie.” Shakes’s voice cracked, and he grinned. “It’s…it’s great to see you.” He hadn’t gotten much taller, but his face was longer, and he had the faintest dark shadow on his upper lip. It made him seem sort of mysterious, dangerous, and exotic, like a messed-up old-school gangster. His left leg had always dragged slightly, and he did a kind of quick little hitch to propel himself forward. That jerky skip also seemed more pronounced than it had when I’d left.

  Back in the day, I would have hugged him. My mom and Marian both have snapshots of me and Shakes throwing our arms around each other like two babies in a bubble bath commercial. But I didn’t hug him now. I raised my arms, and then stopped.

  Kevin and Chris were in the basement, watching TV. Kevin had the remote. As I walked downstairs, Chris and Kevin turned and saw me. Their faces lit up, they burst into these gigantic grins—and then Kevin changed the channel.

  Just before he did, I saw a flash of two blue dots dancing on the chest of a half-naked blond girl. The guys were watching one of those programs about college kids getting drunk in Mexico or Florida or some other frat-boy vacation hot spot. We used to imitate the dumb beefy guys slurring their speech and yelling the same stupid things over and over.

  Chris and Kevin looked at me as if I’d caught them doing something really wicked. As if I were their mom. And then something strange happened in their faces. It was almost as if they were looking at me from the opposite end of a telescope, and I was growing smaller. I felt as if I was being accused of some crime I didn’t commit. For some reason, tears popped into my eyes, and I blinked them away.

  Chris and Kevin had changed, too. They weren’t kids anymore, but they weren’t men, either. They weren’t even teenage boys. They seemed to have stalled at some bizarre in-between stage. They’d both gotten sort of plump—girlish, in a way. They reminded me of turtles separated from their shells. They looked as if they would squeal if I poked them.

  I’d noticed something similar happening with the boys I’d gone to school with in Wisconsin. A lot of them went through a homely phase and got sort of soft and round, with those funny, cracking voices. They got these huge Adam’s apples that always made me think of babies whose teeth are too big for their mouths. Then suddenly—it often seemed like overnight—they’d shoot up and get taller, more muscular. Their voices were strange and deep. But somehow I never imagined it happening to the friends I’d left at home. I thought they’d always be little boys and, no matter how much I changed, they’d look exactly the same as they had on the day I’d left.

  “Maisie,” said Chris. “You look really good.” Chris was always the nice one. Kevin looked at me and squinted, and said, “Holy shit, you grew up.” Chris nodded like a maniac.

  I knew they were talking about my breasts, though they would never have admitted that. It was almost as if they didn’t recognize me, as if they’d never met me. Oh, I should never have gone away! I wouldn’t have, if I’d known that I could never come back and have things be the same as they were when I left.

  I wanted to wave my arms and say, Hey, look, it’s me, Maisie. We rubbed paste in each other’s hair in preschool. Remember me? I’m the same person.

  But I wasn’t the same person. For one thing, I had breasts. And if I’d waved my arms, it would only have made my chest stick out more.

  For the first time in my life, I almost wished that my best friends had been girls. Then the same things would be happening to us all. Breasts, hips, getting our period—it would bring us closer together instead of forcing us apart.

  “How are you?” said Kevin. His voice was different, too. Not only because three words were enough to make it break up like a weak phone signal, but because of his tone. He sounded stiff and sort of phony, as if he were talking to a girl.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “You look good,” said Chris.

  “You already said that, doofus,” said Kevin.

  Why were they talking about how I looked? They’d never done that before. No one thought about how anyone looked. We had just looked like ourselves. I wished they would relax so that we could just be ourselves.

  “Leave her alone,” said Shakes, reading my mind. At least he could still do that. “She’s fine. She’s…Maisie.”

  “How was living with your mom?” asked Chris. “Not that great, I guess, if you’re back here. So how come you came home?”

  It made me happy that they called it home. But I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t know why I’d left Wisconsin. They knew everything about me. It took me a few minutes to remember that I’d stopped emailing and calling them months ago, probably because they’d stopped emailing and calling me.

  “Mom was cool,” I said. “But the guy she married makes Joan look like a cross between Mother Theresa and Albert Einstein.”

  “Wow,” said Shakes. “How could your mom and dad both have made such messed-up choices?”

  “Good question,” I said. “I asked myself that a hundred times a day. Geoff is a total freak.”

  They were giving me strange looks, and I wondered if they were thinking that maybe I’d been molested or something. That was the story you heard every time you turned on the TV. I read a novel for kids about that: My pervert stepdad groped me. He threatened to kill me if I told.

  “Not that kind of freak,” I said. “He didn’t hit on me or beat me or sneak into my room at night or anything like that. He was just like this…spoiled brat.” I couldn’t explain it. They would have had to have been there every time Geoff acted like a two-year-old.

  “It’s good you came back,” said Shakes, and then they all fell silent.

  “A lot happened since you went away,” Chris said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like nothing,” Kevin said. “I guess you must have forgotten that nothing ever happens in this town. Somebody’s cat got run over. When was that?”

  “I don’t remember,” Chris said. “But it was totally sad.”

  “Come on,” I said. “What did I miss?”

  All three of them started giggling. I looked from one to the other. We never used to have private jokes that left one person out.

  “Chris has a girlfriend,” said Kevin.

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” said Chris.

  “She is, actually,�
�� said Kevin. “Your girlfriend.”

  “Who is she?” I said.

  “It’s Daria,” Shakes said. And he made a face, though maybe I just thought that, because with Shakes you sometimes can’t tell a face from a twitch.

  “Daria Wells?” I said. “You’re kidding.” Daria was the world’s nerdiest math genius. Kids teased her, they called her Pocket Protector Girl. But they didn’t tease her that much, because she was so smart. Everyone used to say she was going to grow up to become the world’s richest investment banker.

  “No, you should see her,” Chris said. “She’s, like, really pretty now.”

  “Are you guys trying to tell me that Daria Wells is a hottie?”

  Chris turned literally purple. “What’s on TV?” he said.

  “See that?” said Kevin. “She is his girlfriend. Better be careful what you say.”

  I felt suddenly tired from the effort of trying to figure out how exactly Daria would fit into our gang, the three of them and me. Meanwhile, they kept trying to look at my face, but their own faces were frozen from the strain of not checking out my breasts. I told myself, They’ll get used to the new me. That’ll just be who I am now. Maisie, their best friend from preschool. Only now their old pal has breasts.

  “Chris and Daria are having sex,” said Kevin.

  “No way,” said Chris. “It depends what you mean by sex.”

  “You ask Daria that?” said Kevin.

  Once more, Chris and Kevin giggled and snorted through their noses. Who were these dorky guys? The funny thing was, Shakes kept looking back and forth between me and the two guys, as if he was trying to figure out how he should be acting. Or maybe he’d just developed some new twitch when I was gone.

  Kevin said, “Everyone saw them kissing in the hall outside the girls’ bathroom.”

  Chris said, “Kissing isn’t sex.” And they laughed again. I wasn’t getting the joke.

  After a silence, I said, “So what is on TV?”

  “Let’s find out,” said Shakes.

  They took the sofa. I grabbed a chair, and Kevin hit the remote.

  “Pimp My Ride. Cool,” I said.

  They all seemed a little surprised, but pleased, as if they’d been thinking that a person with breasts would insist on watching some girl show like My Super Sweet Sixteen. Slowly, the pressure leaked out of the room, like air from a punctured bike tire, as we watched the transformation of a wannabe Hollywood actor’s ten-year-old, beat-up Lincoln Town Car into a movie star limo with a screening room built in behind the backseat.

  “Pathetic!” said Kevin.

  “Loser!” I said. I could feel them relax a little more. Breasts or no breasts, I was still Maisie, who could still insult the people who got makeovers on TV. Next we watched a segment about a girl who worked for a veterinarian, picking up ill pets and returning them cured, getting her mom’s station wagon all cheesed up and made over into a vehicle with a comfy dog bed that folded down into a dog run. I wished the girl hadn’t squealed in such a high-pitched soprano. I felt as if my friends were blaming me for how girly and ridiculous she sounded.

  I said, “So what have you guys been doing besides kissing girls and watching TV?”

  Shakes said, “Making movies. I got a camera for my birthday.”

  “What kind of movies?”

  “Short films. Stupid stuff,” Shakes said. “But we put one up on YouTube and got more than a thousand hits.”

  “What was it about?” I asked.

  “I play Shakes the Detective,” he said. “These guys take turns being the murderer and the murder victim.”

  I said, “If there were four of us, you could have a crime-solving partner.”

  “Or the victim could be a girl,” Kevin said.

  “I guess it could,” I agreed. No one spoke for a while.

  I said, “I could pretend to fall off a roof. You could film me going out a window, and then cut to a shot of me lying facedown on the ground.”

  “That would be cool,” Shakes said. “But you wouldn’t always have to be the one who gets killed.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That would be good.”

  All of a sudden, it was like I was back in the club, though no one could have said what I’d done, or what it had taken, to be readmitted. They were glad to have me back, and I was glad to be there.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  We got through the rest of the summer. We had fun. It was just like before. Though actually, it wasn’t, not exactly. It was sort of just like before.

  Now, when the guys went swimming, I pretended I had something else to do. If they saw me in my bathing suit, it might undo all the hard work I was doing to make them see me as the same person I was before I’d left. Or anyway, the same person in an older person’s body.

  We made two episodes in the Shakes the Detective series. They were smart and funny and amazingly good considering we made them for no money with Shakes’s handheld camera. The best part was thinking them up. All of us had ideas, and we’d shout them out; it didn’t seem to matter which person had the idea.

  Even though Shakes had said I didn’t always have to be the murder victim, that’s how it worked out. I told myself I didn’t care. I was the only girl. Since we seemed to have started thinking that way—who was a girl and who was a boy—I figured I might as well take advantage of everything that made me a girl. That is, besides having big boobs. It always seemed more criminal and tragic if the victim was a girl and more satisfying when Shakes found out whether Kevin or Chris was the perp. The films were sort of a cross between mystery and science fiction. As soon as Shakes figured out who’d done the deed, I—the victim—would immediately come back from the dead. And later, at home, Shakes would score the film to a woozy, outer-space sound track.

  Once, we were shooting in the town park, and Daria Wells walked by. She didn’t seem at all surprised to see us, so I figured that she and Chris had talked, and he’d told her we would be there. I couldn’t see how the boys thought she’d gotten so hot. She still looked chunky and snooty. Her breasts weren’t nearly as big as mine. It struck me how weird it was even to be thinking like that. But as I looked at her, I sort of got why Chris liked her. Either she’d gotten taller, or she held herself tall. She no longer rounded her shoulders. She looked really comfortable with the whole thing of being a girl. It seemed strange that she could get away with it, being as smart as she was. Obviously, math wasn’t the only thing she was smart at.

  In a high, unnatural voice, Chris said, “Hey, Daria! Want to be in our movie? We could write you in.”

  We could? I thought.

  “Oh, no, thank you, Chris,” Daria said. “Acting isn’t my thing. I’d prefer to produce someday.”

  Produce? I thought. Pathetic!

  “Gosh,” said Chris. “That’s amazing. I’ll bet you’d really be good at it.”

  Shakes and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes. It was hard not to laugh. Only then did I realize that I’d been a little worried ever since Chris asked her to be in our movie.

  Actually, acting was Daria’s thing. She made a big show of being superior and bored.

  Finally, she said, “Bye, I guess.”

  I said, “Bye, she guesses?” Shakes started to laugh, or maybe he was just shaking. Then I saw him look at Chris, and turn away and do his funny, hop-walk a few steps away, and then back.

  In fact, our film wasn’t boring at all, though maybe that episode might have been better if Daria hadn’t made everybody self-conscious.

  That was the episode in which Kevin shot and then strangled me because I’d cheated on him with Chris. In the installment after that, my body washed up on the shore of the lake and the three of them had to figure out who had killed me, and why. I can’t remember the details. I could look it up on YouTube. I could watch how happy we were that summer before school started. Or how happy we were trying to be. But it was happy, really, compared to what came after.

  That’s why I don’t want to watch it, though I
think about it when I’m on YouTube. I know better than to go there. It would break my heart to see us still being best friends before we reached the point of no return, the point where we are now—the point at which I’m the accuser, and my best friends are the defendants. This time, Shakes the Detective can’t solve the crime and make everything all right.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Doctor Atwood says, “There’s one part of the story I don’t understand.”

  “One part?” I say. “You don’t understand one part? There’s a zillion and one parts of the story I don’t get. So maybe if you tell me what that one part is, I can ask you about the other zillion.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Doctor Atwood. “Obviously, there are mysteries here that need to be cleared up. That’s why you’re coming to see me, Maisie. So we can figure it out together. Maybe I should have said there’s one detail that I don’t get.”

  “Try me,” I say. I make my eyes go out of focus, and I concentrate on one of Doctor Atwood’s masks, until its eyes swim together and it turns into Cyclops. I can tell she thinks she’s onto something big. Maybe she imagines that she’s going to catch me in one of those tiny slipups that give the whole case away when the cops are interviewing a suspect on TV. Something that will prove I’m lying, that the incident didn’t happen the way I say it did.

  Isn’t that what this is all about? Someone has to be lying. Either it’s me, or it’s Chris and Kevin and Shakes. Are these sessions with Doctor Atwood all about finding out whether the liar is me? I tell myself I’m just being a paranoid teen. Joan believes me, and she was the one who suggested I go see Doctor Atwood. The reason she set this up isn’t because she thinks I’m lying when I say the guys touched my breasts even though I told them not to. Or maybe it’s a legal thing, maybe they’ll call Doctor Atwood as their expert witness.

  The problem is, it’s all gotten pretty jumbled. There’s the story I first told Joan, the story that got repeated, the story I told after that, the story I’m telling now. So if Doctor Atwood can help me figure it out, it’s worth all the money Dad and Joan are paying.