“There’s actually a couple of things I want to talk to you about,” I say, and even though I’m not psyched about it, I know telling her about treatment is the only way to keep our friendship from turning into a memorabilia piece, a useless relic of the past. I take a deep breath, but Sara interrupts me.
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you too.” The foreign look flits across her face like it did at the bar when I asked her if she was okay.
It’s only fair to let her tell me first. “What is it?”
Slowly she turns her butt toward me and lets out a loud fart, approximately five inches from my face. “IT’S TIME TO WAGE A FART WAR.” Then she jumps on top of me and puts her hand over my mouth, which forces me to inhale her fart directly through my nostrils.
“SWEET JESUS MARY MOTHER OF GOD,” I yell, meanwhile my eyes water at the stench. You cannot judge a book by its cover when it comes to pretty girls; they have the most lethal farts. When she hops off of me she’s laughing so hard I think she might pee herself, which has happened on exactly four occasions during a fart war. I try to summon something of my own, but I haven’t eaten enough to come up with anything so I wave an imaginary white flag: “You win,” I gasp. “I surrender. I have no ammunition and I’m weak in the head after that one.”
She wipes tears of laughter from her eyes, and when we lie back on her bed I almost forget that Sara and I aren’t thirteen anymore. It makes me hesitant to bring the moment back to where we are now.
Sara props herself up on her elbow and asks, “So what was it you wanted to tell me? I should’ve let you talk, but I felt the fart gathering steam and then I couldn’t resist waging a tiny—” She’s interrupted by her own phone ringing. “Sorry, it’s Liz. Do you mind if I get it real quick?”
“Not at all. Take your time.” Frankly, I’m grateful for the excuse to postpone telling her about treatment.
“Hey, girl.” I can’t hear Liz, but I know she’s telling Sara something good by the way Sara’s eyebrows are moving. “Oh my God. Get out. I can’t believe it.”
“What?” I mouth, sitting up.
“Wait until I tell Danny.” Sara plays with our cardboard figures and accidentally knocks me over. “Okay, yeah, I’m gonna tell her right now. Bye.”
“What?” I ask again, leaning over Sara to try to stand cardboard me back up, but I’m out of reach.
“You’re never going to guess who came out on Facebook.” Sara’s voice is juicy with gossip, and I instinctively put a hand on my stomach to keep it from somersaulting. “Bridget Carr,” she says before I even try to guess.
“From the high school tennis team?” My voice cracks a little.
“Yeah, isn’t that so weird?” Sara picks up her cardboard cutout and fixes its taped-on clothes. “We all used to change together in the same room. Do you think she was into me? Because I thought one time I saw her giving me the look—remember I told you about it—but then I forgot about it, but now that I’m remembering it, she was totally giving me the look.” She’s being all cavalier, as if this is another piece of gossip to exchange instead of something real and hard and life-changing. I hate the smug look on her face, as if there’s a prize for knowing something about Bridget Carr’s sexuality before Bridget Carr did.
“You’re kidding, right.” My voice is so harsh that Sara fumbles and drops her cardboard self. The closeness I felt toward her before the phone call now feels like a distance that nothing but anger can cross. “She finally gets up the courage to come out to, like, seven hundred of her closest friends, and all you can think about was whether or not she thought you were hot?” Even though the AC is on blast I’m starting to feel like I’m overheating, and it’s all I can do to keep the steam from coming out of my ears.
“Danny, I obviously think it’s great that she came out.” Sara crosses her room and selects a lipstick from her makeup desk. She swipes it on and smacks her lips in front of the mirror. “I’m just saying I felt like I knew that. Don’t be so dramatic—”
“I’m not being dramatic!” I tell her reflection. She’s looking at herself and not at me. “You’re so… so… in your own bubble. Do you get that there’s a world outside of yourself?” Something bad is happening. All the anger I didn’t know I was hiding for the last year suddenly wants out. I grab the cardboard cutout of myself and take it from the room that Sara’s cardboard cutout is in. I try to control my voice but it’s a fairly useless exercise at this point. “Bridget Carr being a lesbian has nothing to do with you, but you’re too self-absorbed to know that because you’re so self-absorbed that you could make a line of fine sponges that would put Bounty, Scotch-Brite, and Swiffer all out of business.” Tears stream down my face and I grip the cardboard cutout of myself harder.
Sara smacks her lips together again and swipes the dash of red off her tooth. “I see what you mean,” she says slowly, finally looking at me through the reflection in the mirror. “About how you’ve gotten a little fat.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Unbe-fucking-lievable,” I say to my cardboard cutout as I run down Sara’s stairs with it safely in my grasp. “She can have the house.” My cutout nods in agreement, but I still vow to eat, like, three carrots for the rest of my life.
When I get in my dad’s car I text Bugg to meet me at the Coffee Place. I’m driving too fast, but if I run over a squirrel it’s the squirrel’s fault for not having learned a single lesson from its roadkill ancestors.
“I’m glad you suggested this. My blood-gelato levels are low,” Bugg says when I pull into the parking lot next to her. She’s wearing a short blue sequined dress and fingerless gloves. “Wait, have you been crying? And why are you wearing footie pajamas?”
My hands are shaking slightly with adrenaline. “Sara and I had a fight. Blood was shed. Not real blood—friendship blood. I guess you could say Kool-Aid was spilled.”
Bugg puts her hand on the small of my back and guides me toward the small brick building. “Come on. Gelato will fix you up.”
Inside, people stare at my ridiculous outfit, but I ignore them and give Bugg most of the details of the fight. I leave out the part where I related Sara’s potent self-absorption to that of a drugstore sponge because it’s not the light I’d like to paint myself in. Besides, Sara will probably tell her the next time they’re having some lame bonding experience at yoga.
“Yikes, sorry, dude.” Bugg looks between me and the chalkboard of gelato flavors on the Coffee Place’s wall. “I think you needed to have a blowout fight, though. That’s the best way to relieve tension.”
She approaches the gelato scooper and says, “Pistachio, please,” like it isn’t the worst flavor invented.
“And for you?” the bored-looking guy asks me. I look into the tub of offerings and realize the frozen crystals on the sides of the containers are probably cow tears.
“All set, thanks.”
“Oh, come on, Danny! Live a little.” Bugg takes her cone of animal cruelty and licks it.
“What about the cows?” I ask, and she gives me a look. “Besides, Kate Moss or someone in her BMI range said no food tastes as good as skinny feels.”
“Oh, please.” Bugg points the cone in my face like a microphone. “What about gelato, Kate?”
I end up with a cone of something that tastes like Nutella and Bugg kisses me on the cheek in public. I get as frozen as the freezer while she goes on about how “There’s nothing more boring than complaining about your body. Bodies are beautiful. It’s an inherent thing, not a weight-contingent thing.”
When I turn around to get some napkins, I notice Liz and Kate are standing in the doorway staring at us and whispering to each other. When the hell did they get there?
“Um, hey,” I say to them, waving my hand a little rudely in their direction. I grab a fistful of napkins too aggressively and a few hang out of the canister.
“Oh, hey, Danny!” They have this look on their faces that sends my paranoia into high gear. They absolutely saw Bugg k
iss my cheek. They’re going to tell everyone they’ve ever spoken to in real life and on the Internet about it, and I’m going to have to live out the rest of my youth debunking rumors or finally squaring away what it is Bugg and I are doing.
“Well, bye,” I say and pay for Bugg’s gelato to get the whole thing moving faster.
“What’s the rush?” Bugg whispers as I bump a chair in my haste to get out. “Don’t you want to stay and talk to your friends?”
“No, I don’t want to stay and talk to my friends.” I pull her safely outside, and the bells of the door jangle as I slam it shut. “I’ve only been back here a month, and I’m already so tired of everyone and their gossip and their pea-size lives.”
Bugg takes hold of the back of my footie pajamas. “Come here.”
“No!” But I turn around and let her pull me back toward her. Her smile spreads like the flu and I haven’t been immunized yet. “Don’t you get that I can’t cuddle with you in the middle of the parking lot, where people are probably spying on us from the bushes?” I look past the hot tar to where two severely dehydrated, perhaps clinically depressed bushes dream of water.
“No one is spying on us because no one gives a shit about us. You’re lucky you’re cute or this avoid-each-other-in-public thing would be way too annoying.” The wind blows her blue sequined dress up a little too far. “Wait. I’m getting a really good idea.” She holds her eyes closed with her thumb and pointer finger. Meanwhile her dress gets more carried away with the wind.
“What is it?” I’m trying not to look, but I end up entirely looking anyway.
She’s silent for a minute then snaps her fingers. “Run away with me.”
I blink at her, and some of my gelato dribbles into my thumb crease. “Come again?”
“Run away with me!” Her voice rises with excitement. “We’ll live like villains. Do everything we think we’re not supposed to do. It’ll be fun, Danny. Do you remember fun?”
I resume my licking and try to think. “Vaguely? It might’ve made an appearance last summer before high school graduation?”
“Exactly. Before I fired my therapist she told me,” she says, and she takes on this mocking voice, “‘Not everything is supposed to be fun, Sally. Some things in life are boring and hard work and blah blah blah.’ She calls me Sally ’cause she sucks and I don’t let her use my nickname, but anyway I totally called bullshit on her. I said, ‘Listen, Marjorie, life is already full of so much sadness and bullshit that fun is an entirely mandatory part of living. Otherwise we might as well become wax figurines and wait until the harshness of the world melts our faces off.’”
She tries to clean up her cone by taking a big bite off the top, then ferociously licking the sides, but drops of green are collecting on the pavement by our feet.
“I agree with you, I think, but I can’t run away with you.” I squint into the last of the sun, watching the door nervously and wondering how long it’ll be until Kate and Liz come out. “My parents would send a search squad for me, and it’d be a poor use of tax dollars.”
“How about just for the weekend?” She tucks a piece of rebellious hair behind my ear. “Think you can swing two days?”
“Depends. Where do you have in mind?” I ask it as if I wouldn’t go anywhere in the world with her.
“I know of this great moon festival down the Cape. If you go home right now—”
“But I haven’t finished my gelato.”
“—and pack a bag full of the items I text to you, we can leave in an hour.”
“I’m sure you came up with a perfectly sound plan in the last one hundred and twenty seconds, but I’m not much of a surprise person, so if you tell me where we’re going I can make sure that I have things like—”
She grabs my shoulder, smudging gelato from her fingers onto my onesie.
“Danny? Look at me.”
“Yes?”
She pauses and I try to hold her gaze. The problem is that looking at her is like looking into a megawatt lightbulb; I’m just so human and she’s just so bright.
“Trust me.”
When I get home, my mom grills me about wearing footie pajamas in ninety-degree weather, then inundates me with updates from my therapist while my dad is engrossed in his bird watching. It’s all good things to report, surprisingly—Harvard is looking like a go come fall.
“And this came in the mail,” she says, beaming as she hands me my MCAT practice book.
I hold it against my chest with equal parts love and disdain, then break the news to the two of them as gently as I can. “So I’m going away with a friend for the weekend. Only two nights.” I figure it’s best not to ask them for permission because that would be an opportunity for them to say no.
“What? Where?” my mother asks. I wish I could do something to decrease the levels of worry in her voice, but alas, everything I do seems to have the opposite effect.
“I’ll text you the address as soon as I know. It’s a surprise,” I add, “which is fun or something.”
Usually when my dad has his face pressed into his binoculars he only contributes things to the conversation like the migratory patterns of wood warblers, but today he seems to be listening for once.
“Sara wouldn’t tell you where you’re going?”
And my mom prods, “Yeah, she must have some more information.” Her BlackBerry goes off but she doesn’t even blink, which is how I know she’s entering mama-bear protective mode.
“I’m not going with Sara.” I slam the MCAT book down on the counter. I know I shouldn’t be short with them when I want something, but come on. “I have other friends besides Sara, you know.”
My dad tears himself away from the window, and he and my mom share a brief look.
“No need to be snappy,” my mom says in the tone she uses when she’s speaking for both my dad and herself. It’s a tone she uses frequently lately, if you want to know the truth.
“Sorry, the heat is getting to me.” I unzip my onesie a bit and sprawl out on the suede couch. “It’s my friend from poetry class. The whole class is going for team building.” I don’t know why I add the last part. Every liar knows that the easiest way to get caught fibbing is through unnecessary elaboration.
“Team building in poetry?” my dad asks, letting the binoculars hang from his neck.
“Yeah, we’re going to embody words and probably play… Scrabble.”
They’re both very quiet, and then my mom’s eyes narrow.
“Is there something you’re not telling us?”
I tap my thumb on the pointy end of my dad’s key and rack my brain for something more plausible. Her BlackBerry starts ringing and it’s that song from Annie about how the sun’s gonna come out tomorrow. She frowns down at it and picks it up. “This is terrible timing, but I have to take this. I’m supposed to meet a client in five minutes. Jim, can you handle this, please?”
My dad says yes, but he’s already glued to the window again. My mom answers her phone as she leaves the house, and I try to scoot out too.
“Just a second, Danny.”
I turn around and face my dad. I can tell he feels awkward, so I try not to look at the rings the binoculars left around his eyes.
“I meant to tell you that your dean said we have to fill out some paperwork this week to make sure you can go back in the fall, now that we have the therapist’s approval.”
I feel my face morph into a visage of dread.
“You do want to go back in the fall, don’t you?”
I blink at him. Neither he nor my mom have explicitly asked me that. I don’t know that I’ve explicitly asked me that.
“Of course I want to go back,” I say, playing with the zipper again so I can listen to the plastic teeth clack. “Just because I had one hard term doesn’t mean I’m going to throw it all away.”
“That’s my girl.” Something flies past the window, and he whips his binoculars into position.
“I’m gonna go meet my friend now, okay? I’
ll text you when I get wherever we’re going.” He gives a distracted-sounding yes, and I thank the universe that my parents each have something else to do besides worry about me.
I should feel guiltier about the fight with Sara, but I’m excellent at tucking things into a brain drawer and not opening them for a while. So instead of worrying about how we’re going to come back after the shit-storm of things I only partially meant, I do what Bugg texts me to do:
Be outside your house at 9:45 with a backpack (it must be a BACKPACK) full of:
- a bathing suit
- tongs
- something very personal
- six tampons
- two EpiPens (one is probably enough but just in case)
- the extract of vanilla
I wave good-bye to my dad and wait on the porch steps with my knees together to avoid exposing my granny panties. (As a side note, Sara never wears granny panties, just lace thongs that never get period stains on them.)
When I see headlights my heart flutters.
“Get in,” Bugg yells, opening the door of her ancient VW convertible and driving slowly along the curb.
“If you slowed the car down, it’d greatly decrease the chances of me breaking my leg by trying to get in.” I walk quickly beside the car and the straps of my backpack chafe my shoulders.
“Come on, this is your female equivalent of a James Bond moment.”
“Well, I guess I could try—”
“Oh my God, Danny, no! You just failed your first test of the night. You can’t do things other people tell you. THINK FOR YOURSELF! BEING YOUR OWN PERSON IS THE ONLY WAY TO HAVE FUN!” She speeds the car up slightly, and I pant past another house that looks just like the last.
“Stop! I can’t take the pressure! Is this what hazing feels like?”
Love & Other Carnivorous Plants Page 9