Seniors got everything. There was no bigger prize than the last year of Argyll.
But now here I was, a senior, and all I felt was tricked. In a yearbook meeting yesterday, while I was choosing photos for a spread called “The Year in Moments,” I actually felt kind of sick about it. Why hadn’t I ever gone to a Pumpkin Patch mixer or Winter Sugarplum? Why hadn’t I shown up for the Valentine’s Dance with DJ Howard? Why hadn’t I stuck around for a single Spirit Day rally?
Of course, Mimi, Gage, and I always had our shy excuses for not going. Somebody was either babysitting, or had a cold, or needed to cram. When the reality was that Mimi Kim, Gage Hornblow, and I were the class grinds, the brains, the eggheads. We made the honor roll, sang in chorus, went to bed early for Saturday matches, and used any extra hours in the art studio. We weren’t the giddy girls who jumped around to “Rock Lobster” unless it was with each other, up in Mimi’s room with her light-up mirror set to “evening.” We’d never paint our faces the blue and gold school colors. We never felt free enough to cruise Lincoln Academy’s homecoming, hooting at guys while waving blue-raspberry Slurpees.
It had been years since that fall freshman mixer at Lincoln, when I’d slow-danced to “Forever Young” with Matt Ashley. I couldn’t even hear that song without remembering Matt’s hunter-green wool sweater rough against my cheek.
After the dance, he’d kissed me good-bye—in the dark, on the mouth, with a relaxed confidence, a molten memory that burned me up every time I replayed it. But he’d never used the scrap paper he’d stuck in his pocket after scrawling my phone number while we’d stood shivering outside the school, waiting for parent pickups.
Would it be strange to arrive at Matt’s party? I knew so much about him already, from all he’d told me that night. Like where he lived and that he was one of four Ashley kids, with a married older sister and another, younger sister, plus a brother in elementary school. I imagined myself at the Ashleys’ front door, politely invited in by the older sister even though Matt had said she lived in Boston. Of course parties weren’t tame like that, but my palms went clammy to imagine the wild reality of Matt’s bash, starring a bunch of rowdy Lincoln guys getting wasted with Nectarines.
I often wished Argyll were coed. Mimi, Gage, and I were more of a clump than a clique, but if we’d had some boys in the mix, then Lincoln guys probably wouldn’t seem so scary. We’d given up on their dances after that first one, too, where the girls had hunkered all night by the snack table munching graham crackers. My second chance with Matt Ashley wasn’t any incentive for them to return.
While I waited in line to dump my lunch tray, my head was noisy, trying to persuade Mimi and Gage all over again.
And then I went numb. Pins and needles in my fingers that quickly sparked up my arms and down my spine. I could feel the seconds unwind in slow motion as I fell, my tray and plate clattering to the floor, my leftover chili con carne landing in a splat like warm vomit beside me. I was pitching and jerking, a fish on a line, as the Nectarine table flash-focused its attention on me.
Blink blink blink.
No. Nothing had happened.
Only the terror of it.
Slowly and with care, I used my knife to scrape my leftover food and I dropped my utensils into the large metal tub, my hands shaking.
A hard slap, a bucket of ice water.
I had close friends. I was a straight-A student. My early-action application to Princeton, halfway complete and due in two weeks, was spread out on my desk at home, ready for another round of thought and care.
It was just a dumb homecoming game. I’d probably hate to be there anyway.
I walked back to the table. I knew Gage and Mimi felt slightly uneasy with how I’d reminded them what so many other seniors were doing today. I could sense it by the way they gathered up their trays and murmured about being busy.
“Call me if you change your mind about tonight—I’ll come get you,” said Gage as they left.
“Okay, thanks.” I was shamefaced by her easy kindness.
It was only afterward, walking the glassed-in hallway with its view of the nearly empty student parking lot, that everything resparked.
It was Friday! Homecoming weekend! Senior year! I wasn’t crazy to want to be part of it. Was I? I wasn’t!
Mom worked till six. There was nothing to do for the rest of this afternoon but head to the Arts Center and draw my right hand until my left hand ached.
On the way, I stopped in the bathroom, and there she was. Claire Reynolds. Staring at herself in the mirror with tears in her eyes.
three
“It’s fine.” Claire’s gaze was hard on me. “The best trick to stop crying is to watch yourself cry. Right?”
I was nodding, like Obviously, though I’d never done this.
Claire now used her thumb pads to wipe away the wavy gray traces beneath her eyes. She yanked out her elastic and I itched for a sketchbook to capture the moment, the fall of her hair, the tilt of her chin, the plant of her boots. Instead I went to a stall to pee and when I came out, Claire was holding a stick of dark eyeliner between her teeth like a cigarette, with the pointy end in her mouth.
“What are you doing?” I asked as I went to wash my hands.
She waited a few seconds before she removed it. “Heating it up. It goes on smoother if it’s warm.” Then she leaned into the mirror and black-bordered one entire eye. She liked me watching, so I kept watching. It looked edgy and dangerous but not fake. She used her finger to resmudge. Then she moved to the next eye.
“Stay away from me, right?” she said when she was done. “I’m trouble.”
My heart leaped—but no, she was joking, just delivering a line like an actress. I’d been watching her too long. I dried my hands. “Fair enough.”
“Want me to do your eyes? I’m not uptight about germs.”
“Oh.” When I turned, she stepped close, wielding the eye pencil. I could smell fruity gum on her breath. I nodded permission.
“You’re so short.” She leaned over me as her fingers Clockwork Oranged my eyes apart to apply the liner. “What’s the deal with this boy haircut?”
My heels lifted; I was five feet two and not quite okay about it. “It’s longer than my brothers’ hair.”
“Ah, so you all go to the barbershop together?”
Yes, actually. Mr. Al on North Wayne Avenue. We were a package deal: me and Peter at full price and Owen’s haircut for half. It had made sense for years, but now with my face offered up for Claire’s makeover, it sort of didn’t. “I like my hair.”
“I don’t. Grow out the top.” She laughed. “You’re like a surfer dude with boobs.”
It was a mean laugh, and a mean thing to say, and I knew from that moment, and that comment, that Claire Reynolds could hurt me too easy. It should have been a warning. I could never argue I wasn’t warned.
Claire took me by the shoulders and turned me to the mirror. “Face the strange. I think we found the real you.”
“Oh!” My eyes, a standard-issue maple brown that matched my hair, were now bracketed in kohl. I looked older—knowing and jaded by things that hadn’t yet happened to me. Could makeup really do that?
The mirror and I both knew my milestones. Braces. One dead grandparent. Two dead hamsters. Epilepsy. Not much had happened to me at all.
In fairy tales, mirror images sometimes speak and tell your fortune.
The girl who stared into my eyes seemed to be someone from my future. I saw things in her that I didn’t know about myself.
“Do I really look that different, or do I just think I do?”
“Aw, that’s cute.” Claire laughed again, but this time not unkindly. “You look good. Let’s go somewhere.”
four
Cars at Argyll were divided into three groups: new, not bad, and crap. Half the girls in the senior class had been given b
rand-new cars last year along with their driver’s licenses. Favorite models: Jeep Cherokees, Volkswagen Cabriolets, BMW convertibles. Favorite colors: red, black, or white.
Not-bad cars, likely parent pass-downs, were secondhand gray or navy Volvos or Saab station wagons, with the occasional Mercedes nudging in. “It’s not bad,” a girl might say. “It’s not what I wanted, but it’s not bad.”
Crap was the third- and fourth-hand Toyotas, Buicks, and Caddies bought from uncles or dealerships, with dings and broken cigarette lighters and patch jobs and stains and rust. But crap was a step up from nothing, crap would be mine if Mom ever got a new car and I inherited her six-year-old Corolla.
Claire drove something totally different: a circus-orange VW Beetle, tucked in the lower school faculty parking lot. However she came to drive this car—as a pass-down or lender—it seemed like a decision she’d made about herself, another way she seemed older than the rest of us. I decided not to tell her she wasn’t allowed to park here, or that she appeared too tall for this car, the way she had to scoop her spine and fold her legs into the shape of it.
I’d never been in a Beetle myself, and while I was sized better for it, buzzing down Conestoga Avenue in a car this small felt surprisingly dangerous—the herky-jerky manual gearshift, the putt-putt engine, the fact that we were six inches from the road below. I had to fight a nerdish impulse to put on my seat belt as my feet nudged for room in the messy heap of cassette tapes and plastic cases.
Meantime, Claire rummaged intently in the cassette-packed glove compartment. She relaxed only after she got the first track going.
The sound was dark, slow punk.
“The lead singer of this group is dead,” she said. “Ian Curtis. He hanged himself.”
“Oh.”
“Joy Division. Do you know them?”
I wanted to lie so badly. “No.”
“They’re New Order now.”
“Well, duh. I’ve heard of them.”
“He was only twenty-three. Just a kid.”
“Twenty-three seems kind of old to me,” I said. “He was an adult, actually.”
Claire looked troubled, like I’d come to an unexpected conclusion about Ian Curtis, though it seemed obvious to me. “Well, just think of all that music we’ll never have, because he’s not around anymore,” she said.
At the next light, Claire turned onto Lancaster Avenue. “My aunt Jane told me this funny thing the other day. If you follow Lancaster all the way to the end and then you make a right, it takes you smack into West Philly. Aunt Jane said it used to be called Lancaster Road, and it’s the oldest long-distance paved road in the United States. I’ve been meaning to try it.”
“No no no no. You don’t want to do that,” I said. “I’m positive your aunt didn’t mean you should actually drive it. Lancaster Avenue gets totally sketchy after Overbrook.” We were coming into Haverford. The next light would take us to Lincoln Academy. “Hey—let’s cruise by Lincoln and see the football game? It’s homecoming today, I don’t know if you knew—you turn here.”
“We’re taking this all the way down the Line.”
“You mean drive into Philadelphia—now?”
“Sure.”
“Why?”
“Give me one good reason why not.”
I didn’t have an answer. I’d figured when Claire said “Let’s go somewhere,” she meant somewhere normal. Lincoln. Friendly’s. The King of Prussia Mall. I hardly ever went into Philadelphia unless it was for a school trip or to spend a birthday dinner with my parents.
“Theoretically, I’m cool to go into Philly,” I said. “But.”
“But?” We’d stopped at the red.
“But I’m wearing my school uniform.”
“Um, so am I? More important, I’m craving sushi. I hear there’s a place on Chestnut Street. There’s no good sushi around here, haven’t you noticed?”
I’d never even tried sushi, barely could picture it. “My mom will have a cow if I’m home late.”
“I’ve got a quarter. Call her when we get there. You can tell her you’re at my house doing homework.” She cruised straight through the green. “And I’ll have you home by six thirty. Does that work?”
“I guess.”
We were zipping into Ardmore. Claire was singing along with the song.
I settled back in my seat and held my breath to slow my speeding heart. There was really nothing else I could do. I was along for the ride. I was along for the ride! Even if it felt like we were entering a stranger’s house by the back window. Joy Division was a grim soundtrack to my smoking nerves. The bass line vibrated under my feet as if the songs were seeping into me.
After a few minutes, Lancaster Avenue had narrowed by half. But in the golden autumn afternoon, the dive bars, barred windows, and blighted stretches of row houses didn’t match the dangerous ghetto I’d always heard about. What I saw was plain old depressing. I used my elbow to lock my door anyway—Claire gave a snort when she heard the sound. “You need to get out more.”
Ten minutes later, Lancaster ended in a right-hand turn onto 34th Street.
“Holy moly, we’re at Drexel?” I sat up. “It’s like this road is a portal into the middle of the city.”
“Holy moly,” said Claire, wryly emphasizing each syllable.
But seriously! We’d swung in with the traffic, the Beetle weaving in and out like a clown car among the cabs and buses. We putted past churches and storefronts and glass-windowed office towers, hugging the middle of 34th as it intersected Walnut Street and then Sanson Street before we turned onto Chestnut.
“It’s like a magic trick.”
“You’re a nerd, right?” Claire quirked an eyebrow. “Confess.”
My cheeks heated. “No. Not even at all, really.”
“It’s fine,” said Claire. “I’m done with fake people. Nerds are for real. Authentic.”
I didn’t like being called a nerd, especially an authentic nerd—but I didn’t know how to deny it more forcefully, or if I even had the right.
“I skipped third grade,” I told her. “I’m the youngest in the class. I won’t be seventeen until July.”
“You baby! I was eighteen this past June, I’m over a year older than you.”
“But I have the second-highest average in the class, after Gage.”
“You’re such a nerd to say that. A nerd baby. Okay, Hinata,” she said. “Watch for signs. We can park on the street.” She cranked down her window. “I’m so in the mood.”
“Same!” I didn’t know what Claire’s mood was, and did it even matter? In my whole history of dipping into Philly for chaperoned class trips or dressed-up family outings, it had never even remotely belonged to me. Now, in a single car ride, a new idea of the city had jiggered loose. Suddenly all I wanted was to stuff this afternoon with as many sights and sounds and tastes as could fit. I was up for anything.
I tried and failed not to bounce a little in my seat.
five
There was a pay phone up front at Hinata.
“Who?” asked Peter.
“The new girl. Mom will know. Claire Reynolds.” I held my breath against the bleat of a fire truck. “We’re doing homework at her house, will you tell her?”
“Yeah . . .” My brother was already hanging up.
Back at our booth in the empty restaurant, Claire had ordered for us, and the waiter returned to set down a pot of green tea along with two mugs.
Claire poured. She didn’t ask for sugar, so I didn’t. The tea was too hot and tasted like grass, but Claire cupped it under her chin and sipped like it was the best thing she’d had in days.
“I knew this guy at Strickland,” she said, her eyes gleaming through the steam, “and one weekend last fall, we left campus and came down here. We saw South Street, mostly. And Old City.” Something about the way she
spoke—too casually, throwing down her words like she was playing cards as her body held so still—alerted me that something was up. The way you just know things about people with hardly any evidence other than a bone-deep hunch that “this guy” was somehow important.
“Are you still going out?”
“We never went out, we just hung out for a while.”
“What was your old school like?”
“Strickland? Eh, all those days blend together into oatmeal.”
“The guy, too?”
She hesitated. “No. Not the guy. Jay was very French. As in he could speak French fluently, not the lame way you learn it at school. His dad worked for the UN, and his mom was from Toulouse, so Jay was really into arts and culture. A progressive, he liked to call himself.”
That sounded slightly snotty, which also reminded me of French people. “Why’d you two break up?”
“I told you, it wasn’t like that. He was—he turned out to be . . .” Claire frowned into her teacup. “It’s better for me to remember the good stuff.” When she glanced at me, her face was unguarded in pain. “Do you have anyone you think about? Someone your mind can’t get rid of?”
I tried to look wistful. “I guess maybe that’s a story for another day.” In the heartbreak department, I had only Matt Ashley, and he was no story at all.
She nodded, and I wished I could give Claire something realer.
The waiter appeared and set down a wooden serving board that startled me almost as much as the gaudy, candy-colored objects arranged on top of it.
“I thought you said it was fish.”
“Haven’t you ever seen sushi?”
I shrugged, like maybe I just didn’t recall. Each piece of food looked like some weird sculpture for an arty dollhouse.
“Okay. Sushi lesson. Watch me.”
Tell Me No Lies Page 2