by Megan Abbott
It’s the worst kind of news to come with a hangover, the hangover already scraping the bottom of my bad thoughts, lifting them for inspection. At one point, I have to walk swiftly to the ladies’ room to try to throw up. In high school, among the cross-country runners, and in college, when I lived in that ramshackle co-op with sixteen other women, I used to see them do it all the time, but it’s harder than you think, even with all the water.
A memory flash comes of me hanging off the bed at two a.m., my head dizzy with drinks and desire, and Alex laughing in the dark.
All of it seemed like such a great idea twelve hours ago. Sometimes your genes rise up. My dad never thought ten minutes ahead. He once figured out he could set up phony orders at the electronics distributor he worked for, and he didn’t stop until he was caught starting an eBay store (LettheLightinHere) to handle the good business. Twenty-four months at Wasco for his trouble.
So not only do I open my legs at the first chance for my sweet-breathed, fine-limbed lab crush, I tell him all my secrets too.
Well, one. The only one that counts.
I know it’s coming—that moment, Diane and me alone together for the first time.
Why not, I think, make it now?
She’s alone in G-21. Four lab benches away, toiling quietly, setting up slides, acquainting herself with the work of the lab.
Things are stirring in my head. There’s a two-pound sack of flour on my neck and I haven’t eaten since the cone of free popcorn at Zipperz. Something makes me start talking. I want to be the one who starts.
“Diane,” I say. “I just wanted to congratulate you. On all your successes.”
I see her mouth open slightly even though her gaze remains on the slide tray before her.
“Thank you,” she says softly. “You’ve had quite a bit yourself. I’m not surprised.”
“So how’s your family?” I keep going. “Your mom?”
Diane’s eyes lift from the slide tray fleetingly before sweeping down again.
“She’s fine,” she says, her fingertip moving across the slides as if counting.
“Diane,” I start, but I have nowhere to go, a sudden flapping in my chest.
“Is there something,” she says, turning to face me now, “you want to talk about?”
Once she’s called me on it, I can’t think what to say. She parts her lips and I remember my dream. Diane, the green gust from her mouth.
“There is so much to talk about,” she continues, lowering her tinted goggles to her neck, looking at me. Her voice is stronger than I anticipated, and forthright. “Seeing you here, I keep thinking about fate.”
“What?” I say, thinking I’ve misheard. “What did you say—”
“There’s so much between us,” she says, softening her voice to a whisper. “The things we shared.” She places her hand on my forearm. “My best friend.”
At that moment, the door clicks open and Alex stands there, his key card in hand.
I step back from Diane quickly, nearly stumbling. Looking at me, face pale, Alex somehow decides on a smile.
“Hey, you two,” he says, his voice a little too calm. Then, turning to me: “Can I borrow you for something?”
I look at him and back at Diane, her goggles nudged up and flashing like an insect’s jeweled eyes.
THEN
“Kit, there you are, there you are!” Diane said, pointing, rocking in her cap-toe flats.
January 29, midterm grades in, I’d met the GPA requirement for the Severin scholarship. It was right there in black and white on the big bulletin board outside of Ms. Castro’s office.
Diane and me. Me and Diane. The only ones from Lanister High.
Ms. Castro emerged from her office and hugged me. When she saw Diane, she tried to hug her too, though Diane’s body stiffened like it always did if you stood too close, and Ms. Castro stepped back, uncomfortable.
“Now you’re my toughest competition,” Diane said to me.
We both smiled, but it was true.
“But you don’t have to go to State. You can go anywhere,” I said, unable to stop myself. This was the sneaky truth of it. Diane had her pick of schools, schools far better than State, and it seemed like she could afford them, with the money from her father’s will and from her grandfather, who was rich enough to own all that land in the Foothills.
She looked at me, something crackling between us.
“But I want to go where she works,” she said. “Dr. Severin.”
“The blood is the life,” I said, looking back up at the list, our names side by side. “You’re that into PMS?”
“No,” she said. “But you know what? My mom’s periods last a whole week, sometimes longer. She goes through twelve tampons a day. She keeps an index card taped to the inside of the vanity door filled with little hash marks.”
It was such an odd detail I was almost sure I’d misheard it. The bell rang, and all I could think of was Mrs. Fleming bleeding in her white, white car.
“It started after her miscarriages. She had three before she had me. And one stillbirth. She said she went a little crazy and thought for sure the baby was coming back. She kept buying presents for her for weeks after. They were all girls, all named Diane. She says they were all trying to become me. Until I became me.”
All the way home I kept thinking about those dead Diane babies.
“I used to dream about them,” Diane had said before the second bell rang. “All in bed with her, nestled like baby mice.”
Maybe everyone has strangenesses tucked deep inside. When I was little, I used to eat burned match heads and chalk. My dad kept a list of all the women he’d ever kissed. At least that’s what he told me it was when I found it in his wallet, soft as a puppy ear, so soft it might fall apart in my hands.
“When you were first born,” my mom confided once, “I used to have nightmares that I’d done something horrible to you. Like I’d dream I opened up a KFC tub and it was full of my babies all covered in honey. I plucked one loose and it smiled at me so I ate it like a chicken leg.”
And she laughed and laughed, and I did too. My mom never even liked chicken, and only my dad ate from the tub.
The next night, when Diane came over, I didn’t feel like studying for the first time in a long while. I told her we should celebrate instead. Celebrate getting this far toward the Severin without thinking too hard about how now we were each other’s primary competition.
“Come on,” I said. “Just one night. I gave up a senior-year boyfriend just for you.”
Which was true, in a way. I hadn’t had time to do any of the things that lead to having a boyfriend, like driving with the Ashleys to Cresper’s Peak with a cooler of Mickey’s, those green bottles like grenades, until we found the spot where all the college guys dragged along the viaducts, or taking up Marcus Bell on his offer of a midnight tour of the fun park where he worked. He said we could dive Coyote Canyon to loot out the day’s trash and that I could meet all the feral cats who took over the place from one a.m. till sunrise.
And I’d missed all the parties that fall. I never cared much, not when I saw the pictures everyone posted, the vomit shots, a nipple hanging out for all to see. Sometimes the girls’ drunken faces looked so old, like liquor-blossomed, beer-bloated visions of their future selves. Selves that would take up jobs at the hospital, Mather Electronics, or the water-treatment plant, marry in five years, and start pushing out whey-faced runts and sweet muffins and never, ever leave Lanister.
I didn’t need the parties. But I wanted to celebrate with Diane.
I called up my cousin Scott, and four hours later I had two driver’s licenses in my hot palm. A pair of blondes pushing twenty-five, hard-faced and aqua-smeared.
“I need these back,” he’d warned me. “They’re on loan. And the owners don’t know they’re on loan.”
I looked at them. Would I be sullen Amber or defiant Bailey? Both had at least three inches on me and neither had green eyes. I wasn’t sure how Sco
tt had gotten them, but he was on my dad’s side of the gene lagoon, so I knew better than to ask.
“Kit, I don’t know,” Diane kept saying as I hovered the mascara over her lashes. It seemed wrong, like layering kitchen sludge on angel wings, but it made her look four years older in an instant. Just hours before, we’d gone to the mall because she didn’t own any jeans. She’d stood in the mirrored dressing room looking like an Amish girl gone to Vegas.
“My mom doesn’t like jeans,” she’d said. “She says they’re unrefined.”
“Well, your mom’s not here now,” I’d replied, thinking of Mrs. Fleming posing with her daughter in matching bathing suits. “And you look great.”
We ended up at an old place called Barrelz and Bootz because it was as far out of town as we could get and still make it home before my mom’s late shift was over. Oh, to see it shimmering on the horizon, the two of us so hopped up on diet soda and our own febrile energies: a massive tin building made to look like a barn, with a neon barrel pouring neon hay over and over again onto the roof. The parking lot was jammed with parking-lot drinkers, and just over the door where a big bouncer loomed, a sign assured us: SORRY—WE’RE OPEN! In back was a deck lit with a campfire and chili-pepper lights where a quick-draw tequila contest was under way.
“This is perfect,” Diane said, and I’d never seen her face glow like that.
We drank three foamy beers apiece and danced with at least twice as many men, two of whom wore pinch-front Stetsons and one who had a flaming-pistol tattoo on his hairy forearm. He made me dizzy inside and my high heels tangled with each other, and he caught me just before I hit the ground, my forehead grazing the floor’s simulated sawdust, the crunching peanut shells.
And Diane—you should have seen her. Those long legs strutting, and breasts bobbing up the top of her tank as she two-stepped and hip-swung and boot-scooted; who could take his eyes off her?
And these were men, not boys, and because they had never seen Diane perform a fetal-pig dissection with the fluency of a star surgeon or seen her balance ionic equations, they did not shrink back in awe or intimidation.
There was no one to tell them that she was too brilliant for them, or anyone.
All they saw was her hair swinging like in a shampoo commercial, her skin rose-tinted under the dance-floor lights, and a smile—a smile I’d never seen on Diane before, a smile that was open and wide and pure, one that said, Untouched, please touch, never been touched, dying to be touched, come show me the big, wide world.
So they all wanted to dance with Diane and wind their arms around her wasp waist. They wanted to dance with both of us, and everyone was loving us, but most of all we were loving this. And I loved you, Diane. That night, I thought, I’m doing this for you, Diane. Because I never would have even tried for the Severin without you. Because I never dreamed far beyond Lanister until you. And because that night all I could think was Diane, you changed my life. You made my life.
Nearly one, and well past any curfew, I couldn’t find Diane. Not in Dart Alley or the pool room, not out on the raucous, sticky-planked deck. A girl with a beauty mark drinking beer from a big, kingly goblet said she’d seen her kissing the singer in the alleyway and I panicked.
But no, it turned out Diane was crouched behind the batwing doors of one of the Cowgirls’ stalls, like she was hiding.
“What’s wrong, Diane? What’s wrong?”
“I forgot where I was,” she said loudly over the music. “I forgot who I was.”
“What?” I said, laughing a little. “You’re drunk.”
So she made the motions of laughing too, though it didn’t seem like a laugh but something trickier.
I told her we had to leave, but when I reached out for her, she backed herself farther into the corner of the stall, one hand on either side.
“Kit,” she said, “you’re my friend, right? You’re my friend forever.”
I took one of her arms hard in mine, but I didn’t reply. I never replied to forevers. Life was long, and full of surprises.
Later that night, after my mom yelled at us halfheartedly for our coming-on-two-in-the-morning arrival, we settled in (Diane zipped tight in my old Ninja Turtles sleeping bag on the floor) and, our guts rumbling with bar nachos and corn-dog niblets and maybe even sawdust, recounted deliriously all our dances, especially those last slow dances, the way the men crushed so hard against us.
“That’s when you feel how different they are,” Diane whispered, her teeth glowing in the moonlight. “Men. They can’t hide it. They can’t hide anything.”
Because we both looked down and saw the imprints on our stomachs from the big belt buckles pressed there.
Sometime in the night, I felt Diane’s hand on my wrist. My mouth cottony, my head sleep-heavy, I shook her off twice, but she was insistent.
“Kit,” she said from the floor. “Are you really sorry you don’t have a boyfriend?”
“No,” I whispered. “It takes up a lot of time.” It seemed to, all the talking and making out and birth control and being scared of getting pregnant or worrying about doing something wrong in bed or having something wrong done to you.
“My mom’s always asking about it,” she said. “Every time she calls. But I’m not interested. I want so many things.”
I lay back and nodded because it was all I could do. Because it felt so real and true. I’d had full-on sex with two guys. The first was Patrick, my junior-year boyfriend whom I loved like my old teddy bear, and the second was just a few months ago, on the French club’s train trip to Montreal. After too many cans of sparkling Canadian wine with a college guy, I woke in the upper berth without my underpants. I was too nervous to get out of his bed and pee so I got an infection too. It’ll be different after high school, my mom had said after she took me to her gynecologist for antibiotics. (I told her I must’ve gotten the UTI when dirt flew up my shorts at cross-country and she just laughed, a little sadly.) It’ll be different once you’re out of Lanister.
I was pretty sure she was right, but no one in my family had ever left our town, and none had finished a four-year college.
Suddenly, I felt Diane’s hand on my wrist again, hotter now, night-sweated.
“Remember back at cross-country camp?” she said. “You told that story about you and that older man, the shoe salesman.”
My eyes shuddered open, suddenly. “Yeah.”
A whispered confidence, elbows pressed to nappy bedspreads at the Wheels Inn two summers ago, three girls I’d thought I’d likely never see again. I’d shared the whole sordid story of Stevie Shoes, the clutching encounter in his car. The way men touch you is so different from how boys do. Like they know all the handles and levers. Which felt so unfair, really.
Now, a year and a half later, it felt like a kid’s mistake, but one that made me feel naked all of a sudden. Or one that had left a big target in the center of my chest. But I never thought it would be Diane who would raise the bow, draw back the string.
“It just sounded so awful,” she said, eyes glowing in the dark below. “The two of you, and his car. It made me never want to do anything like that, ever.”
“What?” My face stung as if she’d slapped me. “What does that mean?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, that disembodied voice down there on my flattened-pile carpet. “Forget it. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not scary,” I lied. “Sex isn’t scary.”
“It’s just…how do you know how it’ll make you feel? You start something and you don’t know what it’ll do to you,” she said. “How far you’ll go with it.”
“I don’t—”
“Sometimes I get scared of myself.”
In the dark, all I could see were those big eyes of hers. And somehow I knew we weren’t talking about boys anymore, and maybe not even about sex.
“Sometimes, Kit,” she whispered, “I don’t know what I’ll do.”
NOW
Alex and I are the only ones in the lab lounge. No one wan
ts to take the chance of being seen lounging today. Not with those PMDD slots waiting to be filled on Monday and Diane Fleming emerging as an early favorite. The final day to show Severin what we are made of, but I’m shiny and twitchy-eyed, last night’s excesses seeping from me, scooting off to face last night’s shame. Trying not to think about Diane, her hand on my arm (My best friend)…
“Hey,” he says. “I guess this is a little weird.”
It’s the first time I’ve looked directly at him since whatever whispered dirtiness we passed between pillows at my apartment. His rumpled oxford seems no more or less rumpled than yesterday. His shrugging, gangling pose I’d long thought of as that of an aw-shucks cowboy from a TV Western feels different now. Lurching, grasping, looming.
He is the same, I realize, but I’ve ruined him for myself.
Not with the intimacies, not by encouraging his roving hand on the Zipperz patio, finding places for him to rest his hard fingers, my knees, my shins—I remember now—on the wall-to-wall.
No, I’ve ruined him with my secret. Which is Diane’s secret. Except it’s also mine. The minute she told me, it became mine too, this black-browed albatross.
“Could we…” He starts again. “What if we had dinner later? Or a drink?”
I feel my stomach pitch. “I can’t.”
“But,” he says, and I recognize the sickly look on his face. My infection is now his too. “But you told me something really big and I…”
“I’ll say anything when I’m drunk,” I say, then, narrowing my eyes, low and mean, I add, “I’ll do anything too.”
He pauses just a moment, the faintest of flinches.
“Got it,” he says, nodding, stepping back slightly. I begin walking away just as he adds, strong and clear, “But I don’t believe you.”