“I don’t think so,” Jensen says. “We go there a lot; we’ve had a lot of practice.”
“Is that so?” Ryan asks, looking at me.
“You’ll have to wait and see,” I say.
After a while, the boys give us hugs and go off to roam the mall, probably to check out sneakers or electronics. Jensen and I go to Forever 21 but don’t buy anything. Then we stop at the candy store and load up on sour gummies and malted-milk balls. She calls her mom and asks if she can bring a bag of clothes so she can sleep over at my house. We then call my mom to make sure it’s okay, after the fact. My mom asks where we want to go to dinner, and it already feels like nothing bad has ever happened between us.
• TWENTY-TWO •
The school year is ending, and Kenzie and Leigh aren’t friends anymore because Leigh smokes pot and Kenzie’s become really straightedge when it comes to drugs. Anyone who doesn’t smoke or do drugs draws a big X on their hands, and even though they’re trying to do the right thing, the teachers tell them to wash it off. Brittany Gottleib spends all her time with her boyfriend. He broke up with her when she thought she was pregnant because her period was late, but they got back together when she finally started bleeding again. She’s never around, but it doesn’t really matter. We never liked her much anyway. Brittany Tomassi suddenly becomes really cool and starts hanging out with the popular rich kids. Her mom travels a lot for business, so when she’s home alone she throws house parties that we’re never invited to. She gets her hair chemically straightened and looks beautiful every day. Kenzie lives down the street from her, so they hang out sometimes. Kenzie’s parents sell vitamins to Brittany Tomassi’s mom. Kenzie says hot guys come in all the time with their shirts off, sweaty and asking for protein shakes.
Brittany Rosenberg kind of went off the deep end for a while, but then came back to us. Apparently she gave Chris Saul a blow job. He wanted her to blow him and Milo at the same time, and she asked me if it was a good idea, and I said I had never even blown one guy and wasn’t sure how it would work. She says Chris and Milo have a very strange dynamic. They would “share” girls, as they called it, and she didn’t like the idea of being used like that, even if she wanted to lose her virginity as soon as possible. “I think they might do stuff together—like, without girls, too,” Rosenberg tells me. The boys continued to have raging parties all throughout high school and even after they graduated, when they returned home for college breaks. I didn’t attend another one, but sometimes Kenzie or Leigh would go. There were rumors that Milo got some girl pregnant after college, that he paid child support but didn’t live with them. People say he’s not openly gay but that if you catch him on a night out, it’s obvious. I wonder why it’s “obvious” when I couldn’t tell. Rosenberg could, though, and maybe you had to be with him in that way to really know. I feel sorry for him; the rumors that haunted him in high school have continued following him long after. I wonder if he wishes people would just leave him alone and let him live his life. There were so many boys at school who felt they couldn’t be themselves, who were closeted for so many years until they graduated, moved to big cities, and started over. Girls, too, pretending to be someone else until we felt free enough to break away. Ultimately, Rosenberg says she should have just stuck with fawning over Mitchell. “I’m keeping it in my age bracket from now on,” she jokes.
Jensen starts sitting with us at lunch again. She also starts asking for my history papers again and stealing Rosenberg’s desserts. “You don’t need these Oreos, you already got creamed!” Jensen says one day, and we all laugh, even Rosenberg. “At least she didn’t steal Kenzie’s SweeTarts,” I say. Jensen gives me a high five for that one.
We start going to the bathroom after lunch together, just Jensen and I. We talk more about boys, who we should like next, what a penis feels like, that kind of stuff. One time we see Leigh in the bathroom. We watch her sniff something off the blue sink, and then she asks us for a tampon.
Jensen and I are in my mom’s car one Friday after school. So is Dylan Kramer. Dylan’s a drug dealer who lives in my neighborhood. Our moms met at our country club’s pool, and when my mom found out Mrs. Kramer had a son who was new in town, she wanted to help him “acclimate.” So, for the last couple weeks of school, he’s carpooled with us, and we haven’t said two words to each other. Sometimes my mom tries to make conversation, but he doesn’t respond. He listens to rap on his headphones, and his shorts are always too long. He smells like weed all the time.
Jensen sits in the back seat with me, and Dylan is in the front. I ask if she wants to play a game—maybe the alphabet game, where we find restaurants and stores and street signs with letters from A to B to C and so on until we reach the end. We always have to wait for the La Quinta to get past Q. She mouths “no” and seems embarrassed that I asked.
My mom asks Dylan what he is doing tonight. He takes one earbud out of his ear and says he’s going to a party at Brittany Tomassi’s house. He must not realize that we used to be friends with her. “Are you girls going?” my mom asks, and we stare at the backs of the seats in front of us. “Can they go?” my mom presses, and Dylan looks confused and shrugs and puts his earbud back in. When we drop him off, his mom says that Dylan’s older brother Harris is driving and that he could pick us up at 8:00 p.m. It is arranged that Jensen and I are going to our first real party together.
“How did this happen?” Jensen asks when we get upstairs to my room.
“Magic, or something,” I suggest.
“We need to get ready!” she yells, and turns on my CD player. My Spice Girls CD isn’t in position one, luckily, and Brad’s Eminem CD is, so we play it and get ourselves into the mood to go to a party. We practice booty dancing, where we put our hands on our knees and swivel our butts up and around and around. She borrows a pair of my Brazilian jeans and a tight white tank top, and I wear another pair of very similar jeans with a black tank top that has Guess printed on it. She is adamant about scrunching her hair, so I let her, but I know wearing it straight would be better. We both wear our Coach purses and kitten heels. She shows me how to put eyeliner on the inside of my eyelids—my “waterline,” she calls it—and we both hope Kenzie won’t be at the party.
“She’s such a slut,” Jensen says, and I agree. “And she stuffs her bra!” Jensen contemplates stuffing hers for the night, but I let her borrow a push-up bra instead. It’s my favorite one, but I let her wear it, because it seems more important that she does. Maybe this will resolve the last bit of tension from our fight, if we both kiss boys tonight and have a good time.
* * *
—
We see Brittany Tomassi as soon as we walk in, and she takes us to her room. It’s weird to be back at her house, even though it’s only been a few weeks. She fixes Jensen’s hair and lets me borrow a different pair of her jeans, the Buffalo ones that she got in New York. Kenzie is here, too, and we avoid her when she tries to talk to us, because she is drunk. Jensen is nice to her for some reason, and I just stare at her chest in her push-up bra and notice everyone has their boobs pushed up except me.
There are a lot of junior and senior boys at the party; we only know of them from fawning over their yearbook pictures or watching them play at football games. One named Demetri asks for Jensen’s number, and I hear her say mine instead. “This way we can talk to him together,” she says, but I’m not sure she understands that it may not be like that anymore. We have to grow up, grow apart, be ladies now and not dumb girls.
Dylan approaches us and says he is going to smoke a blunt and asks if we want to join. I say “No” right away, but then Jensen nudges me. “Why not?” she asks. Why not, why not, why not, repeats in my head, and I say “Sure” instead to Dylan, who leads us into the courtyard and sits us down on the steps. He and his brother roll the blunt, and a small crowd forms. Harris shoos some people away and is selective about who gets to stay.
“How d
o you know these girls?” he asks Dylan.
“They’re the Brittanys,” he says, and I realize we are the last of our kind, a dying breed. Dylan shows us how to put our lips on the tip of the blunt and suck the smoke deep into the back of our mouths, how to pout a little and then let it out slowly.
We feel it right away and lie down on the steps. Everyone else in the circle smokes and then walks away, and it’s just us two. I feel like time has slowed down. I notice it’s warm, but I don’t feel sweaty and sticky. My body has adjusted its temperature to the night, and I feel connected to the earth.
“Do you remember when you beat up Billy Millman?” I ask, after a long silence.
“Ha!” Jensen laughs. “Yeah, why?”
“Why did you do it?”
“Because you’re my best friend.”
“You’re, like, my person,” I say.
“I know,” Jensen says. “But it won’t always be like that. Someday we’ll find other people.”
“I can’t imagine having a best friend other than you.”
“Not just that. Like, boyfriends, then husbands. That’s just the way it goes.”
“But what about this?”
“We’re not going to end up like those old ladies who recognize each other in supermarkets.”
“Is that you, dearie?”
“Oh my, it’s been fifty years!”
“Has it? Well, I’ll be damned!”
Jensen looks up at the stars and then at me. She stares into my eyes so deeply, like she wants to kiss me, or tell me some deep, dark, incredible secret no one else has ever heard. I think that if she tries to kiss me I’ll let her. It’ll be like a sign of love, of friendship—not forever, but for now, something we can remember having.
You cut your hair, you moved away, you made new friends, friends I couldn’t stand. We grew apart. But I know you. You’ve always had so, so much love to give.
“I definitely feel it,” Jensen says, and then I realize she’s really high, and I’m really high, too. We laugh at nothing, and I can feel the little hairs on her arm sticking up, excited. We lie with our shoulders touching on the steps, closer than we’ve ever been, and stare up at the sky full of stars. It’s only here that they’re visible, far enough from the city, close enough to the swamp so you can hear the frogs croaking late at night. It feels like the middle of nowhere, and it feels so good.
• EPILOGUE •
June in Las Vegas. Mom likes to walk everywhere. Dad doesn’t, but we do it anyway. All anyone can talk about is Brad going away to college. It’s so hot that my shorts stick to the back of my legs, and my hair is a mess. I forgot my straightener and have to blow-dry my hair if I want it to look normal. I give up after the second day and start wearing my hair in an obnoxious bun that Jensen calls “the Bell.” You put your hair in a ponytail and then, on the second loop, you stop midway and let the hair flop into a ringlet that resembles a bell. I’m dying to talk to her; I haven’t in four days.
Every morning, my mom and I go to the pool and I listen to my John Mayer CD, Heavier Things, all the way through. Half of the album I spend on my back to tan my front, then, at song number six, “Home Life,” I flip. We get lunch from the pool bar at the Mirage, where we always stay every year, and I always order chicken fingers or a Caesar salad wrap with fruit on the side. Dad is in the casino most of the time, trying to win back the money the trip cost, and Brad travels from game room to game room but is required to have dinner with us every night.
Mom insists that we do at least one cultural activity as a family per trip. Last summer we went to this museum in the middle of the desert that had a circular room with all the stages of the big bang theory in little models. It showed how the continents came together—Pangaea—then separated. The stages were all placed next to each other, which made it seem quick, but really it took hundreds of thousands of years in between to break apart. It happened slowly but looked fast in the models. I remember thinking it would have sucked to be alive then, but I realized no one was alive then except dinosaurs. It made me wish I had paid more attention in science, but my teacher had scabies the year before and it was all we could talk about.
We’re at a place on the Strip that has deals for activities and outings: you can see ten magic shows in two days for a hundred bucks, you can ride a roller coaster on top of the Stratosphere hotel. Brad sits on the steps outside the store while Mom and Dad are inside. I stand, too hot to sit, and lean against a newspaper dispenser. I’m so bored I could die. Mom comes outside for a second, and I decide it’s now or never.
“Mom, can I please use Dad’s phone?”
“I was just going to tell you, it’s going to be a little while longer. It’ll be worth it, though, because tomorrow we’re going to see the Grand Canyon!”
“What’s the big deal?” Brad asks. “It’s just a big hole in the ground.”
“It’s history! It’s culture!” she says.
“Mom, please?” I ask, again.
“Fine, but just for five minutes. He’ll get charged if you go over his minutes, and he only uses that phone for work.”
She goes back inside, and Dad comes out to where I’m standing. “I know Mom said five, but I’m giving you two.” He hands me the phone with Jensen’s number already dialed, as if he doesn’t trust me to make a phone call.
“I’ve made phone calls before,” I say, as he walks back inside.
I dial and wait. Jensen picks up on the second ring.
“Ugh, finally!” she says.
“I know. I was dying.”
We’re both silent for a second, letting the anxiety of not having spoken in a few days sink in. We normally talk to each other incessantly. We wait for a few moments to go by and then I break the silence.
“Did Sebastian call?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve been going to the Hillsboro Club every day with my parents. They always try to cram in time with me before I leave for camp. My mom lets me drink Amaretto sours, so it’s fine, but it’s so boring. I wish you were here.”
“Are there any guys?”
“I kissed this one kid, Tony. He’s like, my mom’s coworker’s son, and it was weird, but good, I think. What are you doing?”
“My parents are trying to get a deal on a tour of the Grand Canyon. I don’t get what the big deal is—it’s just a big hole in the ground.”
We both laugh; then it settles.
“What if Ryan’s been calling your house and you’re not home?” Jensen asks.
“Maybe it’s better this way,” I say.
We continue talking about nothing, and I start to pace, then make a beeline for the parking lot, where I’m definitely not supposed to go. In the hot desert sun, I walk and talk to Jensen and press the phone against my ear. It’s making me sweat, but I want to hear her better through the static. I look around for a cell tower to see if I can get closer to one. I wonder if it’s been more than five minutes, let alone two, and I see the mountains in the distance and think about how far away we are from each other. I don’t ask about the other girls. I only think about what I have to look forward to. I think about sophomore year and everything in front of me. I keep walking and talking to her on my dad’s phone. We could talk forever, if only someone would let us.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my mom, Ilene Ackerman, who read the first draft of this novel, when it was something I had created by writing for an hour a day at the Starbucks in Studio City, California. Thank you for being my mom and for holding me through all the experiences I went through when I was fifteen. Thank you for bringing me chocolate milk every day after school and for being quiet when I didn’t want to talk, for playing Billy Joel and Barry Manilow, and for letting me be who I needed to be then.
Thank you to my husband, Carl, my dearest one, for also reading the manuscript when it was just a stack of pape
rs. Thank you for helping me see these girls cinematically through your eyes, for helping me find the moments of joy in the writing, for laughing at the funny scenes and crying at the painful ones. Thank you for loving me, no matter what.
Thank you to Alan Heathcock and my fellow participants at the 2016 Writing By Writers workshop in Chamonix, France. Thank you, Alan, for telling me that the collection of stories once known as Boca Bitches needed to be a novel, which is now this novel, The Brittanys. Thank you for prying open the door when we all got stuck in that lift before workshop and for teaching me that every story needs empathy, authenticity, urgency, meaning, and originality. Also thank you for being a badass in general.
Thank you to my friend Marianthi Hatzigeorgiou for being there then and now and for your Greek expertise, of course. To Erika Gallion for all the coffee dates and six-dollar lattes, for your sweet friendship, and for being my hype woman, always. To Rebecca Jensen for going through it with me—you know what I mean—and for letting me use your name for my narrator’s best friend. To Casey Fisher for always answering texts and coming back to me with positivity and love. To Kelly Grzinic for the long drives, the cigarettes, the cookies, the yoga, and the appreciation for the beauty of life.
To Jo Ann Beard, whose novel In Zanesville heavily inspired me to write The Brittanys, my own version, my coming-of-age tale for my generation: Thank you for coming to FAU in the spring of 2015 and for your lessons that I will never forget. Thank you for your body of work, which has shaped my path as a writer and carried me through. Thank you for emailing back and forth with me when I was in the Redwoods, writing and crying, and you told me it would all be okay, that one day I’d be in your position because not so long ago you were in mine.
Thank you to the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, where I wrote and cried, as mentioned previously, and where I took hikes with Sally the dog. But most important, it’s where I learned to sit down for an hour a day and do the damn work. Thank you to the city of Santa Cruz for being the love affair I needed. I hope to see you again someday soon.
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