“Actually, your mother would be on the mimosa train,” I point out.
“Okay, bye, guys.” Bugg gets up and places her hand on my shoulder as she leaves. “Danny, I’ll text you later. Also, now would be a great time to tell Sara that thing we talked about.”
My jaw nearly drops with the betrayal. She smiles and I say Fuck you, but only with my eyes.
“Ooh, tell me what?” Sara asks as Bugg disappears in a swirl of cinnamon, cigarettes, and one very unapologetic wave.
“I had this idea for a poem,” I lie.
Sara rolls her eyes. “Come on, Danny! It’s summer.”
“You’re right. I’ll tell you later.”
Luckily, she drops it. With Bugg gone, Sara and I fall back into the old dynamic of being Danny and Sara pretty quickly. I swear Sara has a magic power that sucks me into her world so fast I don’t even leave behind a shadow. She tells me about Ethan and I listen and nod and let her dominate the conversation. We don’t end up ordering any food because it’s all factory-killed grossness (Well, that was my reasoning; “I prefer to drink on an empty stomach” was Sara’s), but it feels normal and that’s something I haven’t felt in a while. Really that’s the best thing about Sara, and one of the reasons that I can’t tell her any of the unfortunate developments that happened while we were apart: It feels too good when she makes me feel okay.
“Okay, I need to go sleep this off,” Sara says, handing the waiter her mother’s credit card. Oh, right, it feels entirely normal except that she’s moderately tipsy at noontime. “You didn’t even look at my fake ID,” she pouts, holding her wallet out to me.
“Are you sure everything is okay life-wise?” I ask hesitantly. I figured the last few times Sara was drunk—like at my birthday and at her party—it was a fluke incident, typical college stuff. But day-drinking with a fake ID is some next-level shit.
“Totally. This is a classic hangover remedy.” She points to her empty glass. “I feel great.”
“If you say so. But you’d tell me if something were wrong, right?” I don’t want her to think I’m prying, but more importantly there can’t be anything wrong with Sara or I’ll have to blow up in solidarity.
She looks at me for a second. A foreign look flits across her face, but when she says, “Of course I would, Danny,” I believe her.
“You should come over for grilled cheese night when I come back from tennis camp. Did I tell you I’m going to tennis camp? I don’t think I did. It’s going to be awesome, lots of drills and so great for my game.” Sara signs the slip, and as we get up from the booth I decide that even though Bugg went about it in an asshole way, I should tell Sara about treatment and maybe about the kiss too. “Say you’ll come to grilled cheese night when I come back! We need more us time, Danny.” She drapes herself on my shoulder as we walk from the dark bar into the sun-soaked parking lot.
“Of course,” I say. Because I will go to grilled cheese night and because she’s right. We do need more us time.
CHAPTER TEN
Over the weekend I spend a lot of time writing in my journal and doing Cynthia’s prompts. It makes me want to read real poetry, so I gear up to unpack my treatment bags, but sifting through the contents of the last two months ends up being more taxing than I thought it’d be. Worst of all is finding the mostly full bottles of pills that I stopped taking because each medication the doctors pushed made me feel terrible. (Losing faith in medicine is yet another reason why I’m going to be a terrible doctor.)
I stuff the pills into a pocket of my suitcase and find the plastic bag with the used napkins inside it—which sounds weird but I swear I didn’t treasure the meals at You-Know-Where so much that I had to take home a souvenir. I unwrap the first one and smile at Bugg’s sloppy handwriting. I open the others and lay them out on my bed so that they form the full poem:
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Mary Oliver
I touch them softly, then wish I hadn’t because it kind of makes me feel like a serial killer. I take a picture and text it to Bugg: Thanks for passing me your dirty napkins. I appreciated it so much I took them home with me. Then I add self-consciously, I’m not obsessed with you, I swear. Just with Mary Oliver. But, that doesn’t seem good enough either. And you’re okay too. I enter into a staring contest with my cell phone and wait for the three dots to appear. When she finally starts typing, the excitement I feel rivals Christmas morning circa age five.
Pretty cool to have a bond like that without ever speaking to each other.
Speaking’s not the only way to talk, you know. I said things to you all the time. In my head.
Creepy. Then a few seconds later, JFK!
What’s JFK?
Just fucking kidding.
I want her to ask me to hang out or something, anything that acknowledges our sixteen-second kiss happened and I didn’t hallucinate it. When you haven’t kissed anyone since prom because it was so weird inside Billy Taylor’s mouth that you were afraid all mouths were like that, a kiss is a big deal. She’s probably had lots of kisses, though, because she doesn’t respond. I distract myself for the rest of the afternoon by doing the elliptical until I’m about to turn into someone’s pet hamster. I get off after one hundred and twenty-five minutes, then touch my face for whiskers.
Later, as I’m trying to fall asleep, I see the blinking light of a tiny pink helicopter outside my window. At first I think I’m having visions of the past, but when I get up I see actual Sara actually standing there. The moon gives her skin a bluish tint, and she’s holding the helicopter’s controller with two hands. I open the window and try to take it out of the air, but she makes it fly a little to the left. Out of instinct I reach for it and nearly topple out of the window. She giggles.
“Asshole,” I hiss. “Hey, is that my T-shirt?”
“Shit, is it?” she says with faux bewilderment.
I give her a look. The T-shirt is two years old from the kids section of some department store and says WHY BE PRINCESS WHEN YOU CAN BE PRESIDENT—not exactly a difficult T-shirt to keep track of.
“You gonna let me in or what?” she asks, finally directing the helicopter into my hands. I leave the window to unlock the front door, opening it quietly and putting my finger to my lips as we tiptoe back to my room.
“Wow, I haven’t been here in so long. What’re those?” She kicks her flip-flops off and points to Bugg’s napkins lying exposed on my bed.
“Nothing.” I gather them up quickly.
“Aren’t you going to throw them away?” She’s looking at me like I’m being weird, which I’m not.
“Yes, Trash Police.” I hover over the basket by my desk. If I throw them away, they might get ruined by peach pits and apple cores, but I don’t want to draw any more attention to myself. I place them as gingerly as I can on top of the basket and tuck my journal safely into a drawer.
“So what’s up? You haven’t sent the tiny pink helicopter of distress in a while.” I get into bed on the far right side, leaving space for her.
“I know I could’ve texted you,” she says, pullin
g the Harry Potter blanket back and getting in next to me. “But that would be sacrilegious.”
Sara started sending her helicopter when Janet’s drinking got so bad she tried to make the toothbrushes in the bathroom do karaoke. Sara knows how to handle Janet now, but sometimes nighttime is still scary, darker even than when you were a little kid.
“I tried to walkie-talkie you, but someone’s walkie-talkie wasn’t on,” she adds, then opens a drawer in my nightstand, rummages through some stuff, and finally finds what she’s looking for.
“You can’t just go through a girl’s nightstand,” I say, taking the walkie-talkie from her and trying to switch it on. “You never know what you’re going to find in there.” I flick the switch back and forth a few times, but the green light doesn’t come on. “I guess the batteries are dead.”
She takes it back and frowns at it, brushing the dust from the speaker aggressively, as if it’s the walkie-talkie’s fault for not being self-sustaining.
“We have to get new batteries, then. Remember that huge snowstorm in tenth grade when we lost power and this was our lifeline? And the hurricane senior year?”
“We’ll get batteries tomorrow,” I promise. As we lie there blinking into the dust I wonder how long it’ll take her to tell me why she’s here. “Janet getting to you?” I finally say. But I don’t think it’s Janet.
“Nah, she passed out at eight and was surprisingly nonintrusive.” Sara takes her shorts off and throws them on the floor. I look past her to the pink helicopter and see it for what it is: a toy. If we want to get to each other, we’re going to have to be more serious about our distress signals. “The thing is I had a burrito for dinner and I thought you might like to be in the company of my farts before I’m gone for a couple weeks.” She gets into typical Sara sleep position, curled on her left side with her right leg up like a frog.
“How considerate of you, but I better fall asleep before the orchestra starts.” I roll onto the side that doesn’t face her to protect my sense of smell. “Did you at least take a Beano?”
I can tell by the way her breathing is clogged that she’s already asleep. I close my eyes and try to sleep too, but every time I drift off I see Bugg’s face, feel her lips on my lips in the quiet darkness. I’m petrified I’m going to say her name in a dream and wake Sara up with my biggest secret.
I end up tiptoeing to the couch and lying facedown with my nose pressed into the suede cushion. It’s a terrible sleep, especially with the contributions from my dad’s cuckoo clock, but not more terrible than the alternative.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
While Sara is at tennis camp, Bugg and I spend a shit-ton of time together, melting the days of summer away like a Popsicle you can’t keep up with. She insists we do all her favorite things, which all have one thing in common: making out. Since I haven’t heard back from any pre-med endeavors (I did finally finish four applications), my lips and I are more than happy to oblige.
We go to the aquarium one day where we try (unsuccessfully) to find the octopus’s beak, then make out in the last row of the OMNI theater, crouched down during a remarkably uninteresting exposé on the green puffer fish. On the Fourth of July we go to the fair, where we ride something called the Spin Cycle. Afterward she pushes me into a Porta-Potty and kisses me amid the piss and fumes in a way that makes my stomach drop even more than it did when I was upside down two hundred feet in the air. I even come with her while she “doesn’t sell weed,” which brings us to a house party a few towns away where there’s alcohol in a trash bag and we each take big gulps of it.
“I’ve never seen you drink,” I observe as the red liquid sloshes against the sides of the bag and into our cups.
“I’m not supposed to be drinking after treatment,” she admits, “but this doesn’t count.” We drink so much we pass out on the trampoline in the backyard, only to wake up at five a.m. in nothing but our underwear. It’d be thoroughly appalling behavior if it weren’t so goddamn fun.
Besides kissing, the best part about hanging out is going to poetry class together. I do the exercises Cynthia assigns every week in preparation for our final project and my poems come out terrible, but God, it’s thrilling to be so bad at something and still like doing it. In one exercise Cynthia tells us to describe our inner world and I decide mine is a piece of land with everything bulldozed off it. It smells like rubber and dirt and no one can sleep because of the tractor noises, but in the far corner two weedlike flowers are growing closer, apparently thriving despite the mayhem. I’m not even jealous that Bugg’s poems are as wonderful as mine are terrible. It’s worth it to be around her. I don’t know what we’re doing, but I like not knowing and doing it anyway.
The only time it occurs to me that I might need to know what we’re doing is when Sara gets back from tennis camp in July and invites me over for grilled cheese night. She demands that I wear our matching leopard-print onesies, so I show up nervous, reluctant about eating a grilled cheese and, true to my word, wearing the footie pajamas Janet got us last Christmas. “If you girls can’t be together at school, you can at least wear the same adorable sleepwear while FaceTiming each other good night,” Janet had said, after like, six spiked eggnogs. She opens the door now and smothers me in a Chanel hug.
“Come right in, Danny. You look fabulous,” she says.
“Me-ow,” Sara confirms when I enter the kitchen. Janet got our onesies a little big, but now mine hugs every place on me that I never wanted to be huggable.
“You are one sexy cat, Dandelion. Come here and hug me.” Sara reaches out to me with her hands full of butter and cheese. “If you stopped wearing those tent dresses, you’d notice how hot you are.”
“I prefer to call them smocks.”
“Fine, have a grilled cheese.” She dangles the sandwich in front of my face but I wave it away. “Come on, you’re not going to have one of my famous grilled cheeses?” Sara looks so insulted I nearly question my decision, but it’s not worth breaking my veganism streak.
“I just ate.” My stomach growls. Pipe down, I hiss at it.
“Why the hell would you eat before grilled cheese night?” she asks, putting the grilled cheese in my face again and nearly inducing a sensory aneurism. It’s unfair for something to smell that good.
“I know, I haven’t had one since last June—” I start to say, but thinking back on high school graduation day—the day before I got the Harvard acceptance letter—makes me want to throw up. Everything was easy then, when Sara and I were still Sara and I and a grilled cheese was just a grilled cheese, not a number that translated to a number of grueling minutes on the elliptical.
“I can’t wait to tell you all about tennis camp,” Sara says as I follow her upstairs to her room. “It felt so good to lose myself in the game again—total topspin consumption.”
“You know, that’s how I’ve been feeling about poetry class. It sounds touchy-feely and terrible but—”
“Wait, before we get into all of this, do you know what I was thinking about today?” She pats the spot on her pink ruffled comforter where she wants me to sit. “The day we made our house. Look.” She reaches under her bed and pulls out the cardboard house we made together the summer before eighth grade.
“Would ya look at that.” I touch the cut-up Popsicle sticks we used for the roof and feel a wave of nostalgia flood my body. The summer we made the house was when we started hanging out with boys and Sara kissed one of them and I watched, but not in a creepy way. We had sleepovers every night, and her bed was always fluffy and cool from the AC. I secretly wished her parents would adopt me because they had all the normal cereals and didn’t make Sara read any books before bed like my parents did. Plus, if my parents signed me over to Janet and Cal, Sara and I would be more than Kool-Aid blood sisters. We’d be legal sisters and that seemed more legit.
“Do you remember the day we made it?” Sara asks, taking hold of the cardboard me.
“Duh. We got your dad to drive us to buy paint and glue and
cardboard.”
We got dollhouse furniture too—a bed, a sofa, a thumb-size toilet—then we sat on her deck and drew lines and cut things out and labored our future into existence, complete with stand-up mini-cardboard people that we’d taped pictures of our faces to.
Sara picks at the peeling sunburn on her arm, then looks up at me as if she wants to say something touchy-feely.
“I’ve missed you, Danny,” she finally says. “Not just while I was at camp, but this whole year.”
“Me too.” When I shift my weight on the bed the cardboard house rattles as if it’s experiencing a mini earthquake, but nothing falls.
Sara steadies the house, then moves the cardboard cutout of herself around the kitchen. “I wish shit was as easy now as it was then.”
I put my arm around her, noting that I do not feel anything when my skin touches Sara’s skin, which makes me think that my reaction to Bugg is just a Bugg thing. That or I’m immune to Sara the way you are with everyone else in your family.
“It was a shit thing to do, to know for a whole month that you weren’t going to college with me and not tell me,” Sara says quietly. “I felt like an idiot for ordering all that stuff from PBteen. You should have told me right when you got the letter. I could’ve handled it.” She rearranges the tiny furniture in our tiny pretend room.
“I know, I’m sorry.” I pick at my toenail polish and wish words meant more in times like this. “Sometimes I forget that I can’t actually make shit disappear by ignoring it hard enough.”
“That’d be the best superpower, though.”
“Why call Wonder Woman when you could call the Blind Eye?”
She hugs me and I feel that she forgives me—either that or she’s going to cry. I let my body relax into hers, but no tears come so we sit like that, holding each other up in more ways than one.
I’m of the school of thought that friendship is like a river in that it’s different in different seasons. Sometimes it’s an August river, all dry and shrinking from the banks, and sometimes it’s an April river, rushing and overflowing the dam. She and I, we’ve been in both places, but today the stuff between us is a good old July river, quiet and content, ambling through the summer.
Love & Other Carnivorous Plants Page 8