I pause.
“The girls’ bathroom. Today. The whole he-dumped-me drama. What girl?”
“Annelise. Can you believe it?”
“Parker broke up with her? After three years?” Jillian picks up her cupcake and, finally, takes a decent-sized bite. And another one.
“Apparently he wanted to be free for the summer.”
“You’re sure?” Chocolate crumbs cling to her bikini top.
“Annelise’s whine is unmistakable.”
We don’t say anything because we both know what the other one is thinking: we don’t need that kind of drama. We have goals. Priorities. While Jillian appears to sleep, I watch the action.
Bikini girls hook thumbs into guys’ waistbands—a three-legged race in slow motion. Flip-flop dust flies. They must not know how ridiculous it looks, how dangerous it is. Those girls daydream about some guy; their biggest goal is to change their Facebook status to include him. They think it’s going to make them happy, but I know for a fact it won’t. Goals keep girls like Jillian and me focused so that ten years from now we’ll be finishing med school.
The summer after the ninth grade we were here with Jillian’s mom in her long skirts and her brothers the Hat Trick (the triplet boys), the Double Minor (the twin boys), and her mom’s then-boyfriend. We made flower wreaths from daisies and dandelions and put them in our hair. It was the summer of friendship bracelets. Jillian and I already had twenty-five on each arm and we were tying our newest ones onto the boys. A group of tourists stopped to take pictures of us. Amid all this flowery love, Jillian’s mom left us, saying she and the boyfriend were going to get us some ice cream. They’d been gone more than an hour when one of the boys messed in his swim diaper. Jillian had to go to the car for a clean one. She came back empty-handed and furious, but she wouldn’t tell me why. When her mom showed up with her hand shoved in the back pocket of the boyfriend’s jeans (and without ice cream), Jillian grabbed my arm and pulled me toward an empty picnic table where no one could hear us.
“She was never even planning to get us ice cream,” she said, her body vibrating with fury. “Promise me we’re never going to end up like her.”
And that’s when we made the pact: friends first, grades second, boyfriends not on the list.
I don’t know how, or if, I should remind Jillian of the circumstances of our pact. Jillian’s mom is better than she was that summer, I think. She’s had the same boyfriend for over two years now and Jillian even likes him. But you have to be careful with your best friend, even when you have a good reason to tell the hard truth.
Jillian’s hard truth must be that I need a bikini because she says, “Don’t you think we could still be hot even if we weren’t looking for boyfriends? We could like, be hot, just for ourselves.”
Not again.
“Our own personal satisfaction?” I hadn’t really thought of it that way.
“Well, I’m saying it’s possible, don’t you think, to look hot and not have a boyfriend or be on the lookout for one?”
“It might be … counterproductive.”
“Huh?”
“Time. Money. Unwanted male attention.”
“Not unwanted. Unreciprocated.” It’s strange to be on the opposing side of one of Jillian’s debates. “It’s about choice.”
Jillian sits up, looks down at the watch I gave her last Christmas. It’s only 2:45. The hour we have left leaves us lots of time to plan our summer project. She takes off her sunglasses, scans the hill, and then turns to me. “Chantal, we’re number one and two in the class. We spend our summers on projects that are, let’s face it, pretty lame. I think we need to do what the other seniors are doing.”
“Joust with swim noodles in the hallways? Catch a goose and drop it into the cafeteria? Dress up like gorillas and chase people dressed up like bananas?” While I list all the things that the students in our class have done this year that we think are stupid and would never be part of, she alternately looks at her watch and then at the lake. My listing trails off when I see the catastrophe coming our way: two guys, Parker and Will.
Parker is shirtless and it’s clear he’s been doing more than studying. His shoulders have grown wider and he’s bleached his hair. He is far from the nerdy A student he was in junior high. Will hasn’t transformed much. Still average all around, still Parker’s sidekick. He, too, is shirtless. Parker waves to someone at the top of the hill. I notice movement from my periphery, of sunglasses being lifted, a raised arm, and a hand waving back.
“Jillian?”
“He wants to talk about physics. The study group. That’s all.”
“I … I … School’s over.” I squint at the bottom of the hill. Parker and Will are taking the long way up, along the beach and up the other side of the hill. So they can show off their biceps and abs. I need a cupcake, but I can’t eat in front of them.
“He specifically said physics.”
I give her the look that says, do I appear to have a brain malfunction? Didn’t I just say that he and Annelise broke up?
“Okay,” she concedes. “It’s probably not about physics. He was sort of checking me out. But, really, they just want to talk to us. It’s talking.”
“I knew something was up with the bikini.”
“Chantal. I still want to do a summer project. Look, we can plan it after they leave. We can raise money for Africa. That would be fun.” When she smiles, I feel like I’m at the doorway to her exciting life and she’s handing out charity.
“As a favor, you mean?”
“I mean I still want to do a summer project,” she repeats. “But … next year we’ll be graduating … and, we’re going to need a date for prom, right?”
“Prom?” I thought we’d decided to stand against the consumerism of prom. And no guy would see me as a potential date, not today. I didn’t shower, my hair is in a frizzy ponytail, I’m in my practical one-piece, and I have never waxed. Anything. I can’t be the best at fashion and looking hot and still be the best at grades. I don’t have the time. And neither does Jillian. I grab my backpack, search for my shorts.
“I wasn’t trying to surprise you. I wasn’t. I didn’t even know, for sure, that Parker and Annelise broke up. They’re just coming to talk to us.”
“Will picked his nose and wiped his snot on my arm.”
“In the third grade.”
“He tripped me in gym, almost every day …”
“In fifth.”
“He put the fetal pig heart from seventh grade dissection in a box and gave it to me. Pretended it was a Valentine’s gift. I hate him.”
“He does stuff like that to lots of girls.”
“No, Jillian.” I want to tell her that girls who want guys to like them are like moths flickering toward a light, that third-degree burns and scars are inevitable. I want to remind her that Parker was the one who sent Annelise to the bathroom. I want to tell her that earlier this year, Will grabbed my left one while I was standing at my locker. When he’s near me I fall apart inside and not in a good way. But I haven’t told anyone, because it’s weird. It doesn’t make sense.
The guys are now five rectangles of towels and two circles of umbrellas away from us. And I don’t have a plan.
Jillian
Beginning.
Our friendship was immediate, that’s how I remember it.
We moved to town when I was eight, moved away from the log cabin near a stream in the Slocan Valley, where my only friend had been our dog, Mangy. My parents were into sustainable living before it became fashionable. After a while my dad didn’t feel like an alternative lifestyle was for him. When he left to find work in Vancouver, my mother couldn’t sustain much of anything anymore.
She packed up our chipped dishes and we followed the trail of RVs on the winding mountain roads into town. We stayed in a motel at first and I used a remote control for the first time in my life. Over the noise of cartoons and National Geographic specials I listened to my mom talk to her parents on the pho
ne. She told them what had happened since she last saw them ten years earlier: she could find water with a divining stick, she’d learned to play the fiddle, and she had a daughter: me, Jillian.
“I’m ready to reenter the world,” she told them. I don’t think they expected that she meant the world of dating. She rushed her hellos and hugs when they reunited in our motel room, and left us behind to get to know each other while she met a guy for drinks. My granddad told me stories about his old war friends and my grandmother Nona combed and braided my hair. They said I was the most precious thing they’d seen, more beautiful than an emerald lake or a sunrise on the prairies. They let me drink hot chocolate with my dinner and eat ice cream for dessert. My mom and her new friend opened the motel room door as the sun was coming up the next morning, and Nona begged for me to stay with her and Granddad a little longer. The new boyfriend took me for a walk while my mom argued that she wouldn’t let them take me away from her. My grandparents left after breakfast.
The guy stayed with us in the motel long enough that my mom said I should call him Dad. “He can be Dad Two,” I told her, sure that she’d get mad and walk away. Instead she called the guy in and told him the story of me saying the cutest thing. Dad 2 looked at me sideways when he hugged my mother.
“She’s a real charmer,” he said. “She could tame a grizzly bear, couldn’t she?”
We moved into our house on Columbia when it was 85 degrees outside and Mom complained she was hot and sick. She walked in the front door, opened the freezer, and stuck her head inside. I carried my one box (containing colored pencils, sketchbooks, my collection of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, and an empty piggy bank) to the top of the creaky stairs and set it in the corner. I had my special things—I was moved in. I opened the window and leaned out to see what the world would look like. That’s when I saw Chantal in her backyard, crouched in the shade, staring at a glass bottle glinting in the sun. A sprinkler waved over the flowerbeds on the steep incline.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Hey!” She didn’t hear me. I got louder. “Hey you, in the backyard.” She still didn’t look up. I pounded down the stairs, stopped to watch my mother run past clutching her stomach, vomit in the toilet. “Jesus, I’m pregnant,” I heard her tell Dad 2. “I just know these things,” she said.
When she had her head back in the freezer, I approached her. “Mom. I’m going to meet my best friend next door.” I just knew Chantal and I had a shared destiny.
“Hey.” My shadow stretched over the glass bottle in Chantal’s dandelion-free grass. I could see the bottle had strips of duct tape markings all up the side. “What are you doing?”
“Watching evaporation.”
“Cool. Can I watch, too?”
“It takes a long time, evaporation. You have to be real patient.”
“Oh, I’m patient,” I said. “Dad Two says I’m charming, too. He says I could tame a grizzly bear.”
“Whoa,” she said. “I’d like to see that.”
We were made for each other: two geeky girls with shared time, loneliness, and dreams of being important one day. I’ve always believed that I moved next door to my soul sister, but maybe things have changed.
Now, I’m standing on the hill, looking fabulous in my bikini, beside the guy I want most to notice me, and I’m shouting for Chantal to come back. I have waited too long. Shocked that she bolted like she was being chased, but worried that Parker would lose interest, I did nothing. Now, though, I run after her. I don’t know how to convince her, what I can say to prove that some things can stay the same.
Chantal
Swoon.
The wind generated by my bike’s velocity down a mountain road is substantial enough to carry off the choked gasps of my panic attack. By the time I get home my stomachache has traveled from my gut to all my extremities. I struggle to shove my bike into the garage, lift my legs high enough to climb the concrete steps to our house. My fingers fumble the key in the lock.
I collapse on the couch and click on the remote. I rarely watch TV, influenced by a mother who says it rots my brain. We only have a TV because my dad loves the Golf Channel, aka the snore channel. I stare at the screen, looking for a reason to get up. If my mother discovers me here, she’ll start asking questions. Should she discover that I have no summer plans, my fate could be worse than a summer without a project. She likes the summer to have a structure—her structure.
The summer I was eight, my dad took my mother and me to visit his family out east. At the beginning of each driving day, my mother detailed the gifts she’d bought for my cousins, smocked sundresses from our town’s seamstress who was famous for sewing a smocked sundress once worn by Princess Beatrice of York. The seamstress even had a picture as proof.
“It’s an heirloom piece that can be handed down generation after generation,” my mother said.
After the third time she said it, my psychologist father responded so softly I almost didn’t hear, “The gifts are secondary. They want to see us.”
At Lettuce Loaf (as in let us loaf—get it?), the cottage floors were transformed into bedrooms for the cousins and my parents slept in the attic in two twin beds—the penthouse, Dad called it.
I trailed after the cousins to the lake, the mini-golf course, the water park, and a daily visit to the soft-serve ice cream stand where the cousins thought the coolest things were the hottest guys.
“I’m allergic to smoke,” my mother protested when my uncles invited her out to the campfire. She went to bed early and was gone when I woke in the morning, off to find a decent cup of coffee in the nearby village. She wore a sundress and espadrilles every day, with a wide hat to keep the sun off her face. It limited her, my father said, to certain activities. My mother had no interest in Frisbee, golf, or catching frogs—she thought a cottage was for lounging in solitude even if she wasn’t actually doing that.
Our ten-day stay concluded with a family photo session to document our visit. My cousins held rabbit-ear fingers behind my head as we stood in the front lawn, pine branches poking our backs. I didn’t ask why my mother stayed in the car. It was one of those things I knew not to do, like knowing that I shouldn’t ask for hot chocolate when she was slamming cupboard doors in our own kitchen.
We were on the highway before my mother spoke the only words she’d say for hours. “There is no such thing as a loaf of lettuce.”
“And those smocked sundresses, the ones like Princess Beatrice wore? I heard your sister say that the girls thought they were hideous. Old-fashioned.”
My dad should have said something like, I’m sorry or you’re right or they have very poor taste if they don’t like something that the queen of England’s granddaughter wore. I almost said something myself.
Their conversation ended, finally, when my mother announced that was our first and last trip to the cottage. I was carsick for the rest of the trip.
I knew then that family vacations were doomed to fail. Luckily, I found something else that day. I went outside with my canning jar and my duct tape, ready to try a different experiment. That’s when I met my best friend … until today.
I breathe deep and hold it for as long as I can. I think my lips might even be turning a bruised blue. Like all only children, I know how to throw a tantrum to get what I want. I feel one coming on.
Jillian
The Surprise Ending.
I didn’t get very far in chasing Chantal, once I realized how little support my bikini top offered. I climbed the hill to grab my stuff; my towel first, wrapped around me. Parker took a few steps back to give me some space, but Will stood close and watched me, wolflike.
“Well, that was weird.” Will slouched as he shoved his hands into the pockets of his board shorts. I stopped what I was doing and stared at him. He looked like every guy my mother brought home, dark stubble on his face, indifferent eyes; his fingernails were probably dirty. Why did I think Chantal would even sit next to him? Will took off his ball cap, smoothed his hair back, checked to see who was check
ing him out. Maybe a few tenth-graders.
“Jillian.” Parker’s voice was soft.
I looked up. His eyes. Eyes like those have never looked at me that way. Even if you saw him from across a playground, Parker could melt your resolve with his good looks and the way he stands with just enough tension in his shoulders, square on as if you were about to slow dance. Standing there, the rest of the world disappeared, including Will. Until he spoke.
“So … summer. You and Chantal got any plans?”
“Not really. Not yet.” Parker was never this cute when he was dating Annelise. “Maybe some physics.”
“Right. About that,” Will said. “Straight up. We don’t need any physics tutoring.”
“What?” I sort of knew it wasn’t about physics and, still, I felt a little betrayed. More proof, I guess, of what I didn’t know about the guy-girl world. They could have at least asked a few vector questions. If I walked into a debate that unprepared, my team would dump me.
“Hey.” Parker took a step toward me and lowered his head, then his eyes grew smoking hot. “There’s a party at Mia’s on Saturday night. You both need to come.”
“Um …” I shouldered my beach bag. “I don’t know.”
Will kicked at the grass, shook his head.
“Chantal doesn’t really go to parties.” I didn’t tell them that I didn’t, either.
I don’t think he meant for me to see, but I witnessed Will jab Parker in the ribs with his elbow.
“But Jillian, we’ll play Cranium,” Parker said. “Chantal kicked ass at it in career and life management class last year. Remember?”
“Cranium.” Will nodded his satisfaction. “It’ll be fun. I love that game.”
“Well, maybe if there’s Cranium. I’ll have to see.” I searched the ground to make sure I hadn’t left anything behind.
“You have to come,” Will said. “Both of you.”
“I gotta go.” I turned for a final potentially meaningful look with Parker, waved good-bye, and headed for my bike with a plan to go to Chantal’s house.
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