That night, during Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board, Kath and Lizzie raise Taylor all the way above their heads and she floats there, weightless, for a miraculous half-second before she comes tumbling down. They play MASH and learn the names of their future husbands, and when Lizzie falls asleep, Kath and Taylor try to get her to wet herself by putting her hand in a cup full of warm water, but it doesn’t work.
The movie remains a staple at their sleepovers for the next several weeks, but then Taylor’s mom finds the tape and confiscates it, so they switch to Candyman. Taylor stays obsessed with the movie for a month or so, but then out of nowhere she starts hanging out with Greta Jorgensen, whom neither Kath nor Lizzie can stand, and so they’re in a fight for a few weeks, and by the time they’re friends again, the sleepovers feel like a long time ago.
Still, in tenth grade, when Taylor tries to explain to Kath why she’s dating Jason McAuliffe, she says, “I like the way he looks at me,” and Kath remembers the boy in the pool. The boy in the pool, Kath decides, is a boy who will kiss your feet and be grateful for it, a boy who suffers, a boy who will suffer for you. She uses this concept as a way to explain to herself why Taylor spends most of high school dating a series of burnouts and depressive alcoholics; why it becomes a common experience at parties for total strangers to ask her what her pretty, popular, high-achieving best friend could possibly see in him—“him” being any one of a dozen sad and useless boys.
Kath comes out uneventfully during her senior year of high school, and soon she’s so consumed by being in love with her first real-life girlfriend that it’s easy for her to forget all the time she spent mooning over Taylor. Or not to forget, exactly, but to remember it slightly falsely, as just a very intense adolescent friendship, which, in some ways, is exactly what it was. What remains in the wake of her crush is the habit of observing Taylor very, very closely, straining toward interpretation, reading all her signs.
One night, when they are both very drunk, Taylor gets morbid and weepy about yet another breakup, and Kath says, “You are such a disaster. I can’t believe I spent so much time in love with you.”
This shocks Taylor out of her crying fit. “You loved me?” she says.
“Never mind. Forget I said anything,” snaps Kath, and after they sober up, neither of them mentions it again.
* * *
The three friends scatter across the country for college. Taylor meets a new boy, Gabriel, during welcome weekend, and over the course of the next four years, she and Kath drift apart. The relationship with Gabriel, which Kath hears about mostly through Lizzie, is apparently all-consuming, an endless series of fights and tearful resolutions: they scratch and claw at each other, then tend each other’s wounds. For the first time in their lives, Taylor’s passions threaten to derail her. Senior year, she and Gabriel break up, and he flees to California. She follows him and puts college on hold when he agrees to reconcile. Lizzie goes to visit her and reports that she’s not doing great: she’s lost twenty pounds, which is maybe standard in L.A., but she’s also downing vodka tonics pretty much nonstop, and she’s got shadows under her eyes, and a ring of bruises around her upper arm.
“Do you think we should, like, stage an intervention?” she asks Kath, but Kath refuses to get involved.
“She wants what she wants,” Kath says.
Don’t we all?
* * *
A decade later, Kath and Lizzie live in Brooklyn. Lizzie works at an education nonprofit; Kath’s an attorney, specializing in contract law. Kath dates men and women, while Lizzie is hapless about romance in an ironic, self-deprecating way. Taylor’s still out in California. The relationship with Gabriel is finally over, but before it ended, there were infidelities, suicide attempts, police involvement. Lizzie knows more of the details than Kath does. Every once in a while, the three of them will Skype, and during these calls, Kath and Taylor do most of the talking, in brief intense bursts, as though nothing has changed—but the calls are always instigated and organized by Lizzie, and when Lizzie’s too busy to facilitate, months will pass where Kath and Taylor do not talk at all.
Free of Gabriel, Taylor seems to be doing a lot better. She’s switched jobs, found a new therapist, finished her degree. And, Lizzie reports, she’s started dating someone, this producer or something, a guy named Ryan, who seems really good for her. “That’s amazing!” Lizzie screams, over Skype one night, when Taylor announces that she and Ryan are engaged. “That’s the best news I’ve ever heard!”
On the couch beside her, Kath experiences a moment of confused dislocation, as though her soul has suddenly relocated into her body from very far away. Ryan? she thinks, Who the fuck is Ryan?—before coming to herself and offering her own congratulations, doing her best to echo Lizzie’s ecstatic tone.
“Of course, I want you both to be in the wedding,” Taylor says.
Kath nods, and Lizzie says, “We wouldn’t miss it for the world.” But as the conversation moves toward venues and shoes and dresses, Kath registers a faint discomfort, as though Taylor wants to tell them something she can’t quite bring herself to say. The reason for this becomes clear the next morning, when Kath and Lizzie are at brunch and a text message arrives to Kath’s phone.
Kath’s face contorts so dramatically that Lizzie freezes, a forkful of eggs Benedict halfway to her mouth. “What?” Lizzie demands, and when Kath doesn’t answer right away, she repeats, “What’s wrong?”
Kath turns her phone around to show Lizzie the message.
Lizzie’s eyebrows knit together. “Oh.”
“Is she serious?” demands Kath. “I’ve never even met this guy. Doesn’t she have any friends in L.A.?”
“Wow, where did that come from? What a rotten thing to say.”
Kath says, “You’re the one who’s been there for her this whole time. If she was going to ask one of us to be her maid of honor, she should’ve asked you.”
“Well, she didn’t. So.”
“So, I don’t want to do it.”
“You have to,” says Lizzie, but she’s wrong. That night, Kath drinks three beers in quick succession and calls Taylor on the phone. “Listen . . .” she begins, and then launches into a long, rambling monologue, sentimental and self-serving. “I’ve always had really complicated feelings about weddings . . . They’re just not really my thing . . . Money’s kind of tight right now . . . June is my busiest time at work . . . I know that she won’t show it, but I’m afraid that Lizzie will be really hurt . . .”
Taylor listens bravely, interjecting only the occasional “yeah,” and “sure,” and at the end of twenty minutes, they’ve agreed that Lizzie will be the maid of honor and that Kath will be an “honorary bridesmaid,” with exact responsibilities TBD.
“The wedding-industrial complex is inherently capitalist and anti-feminist, and I don’t support it,” Kath tells Lizzie the next time they meet for drinks.
“Alternative explanation: you’re a heartless bitch.”
“I’ll read a poem or something,” Kath says. But she doesn’t get off so easily. A few days later, Lizzie informs her that she is in charge of planning the bachelorette.
“So, like, tiaras and penis straws?”
“No,” says Lizzie. “Not tiaras and penis straws. Do me a favor: pull your head out of your own ass for two seconds, and try to figure out something she’ll like.”
So Kath tries. She tries so hard she surprises herself. She emails the other women in the wedding party to ask if any of them are vegetarian or religious or pregnant, then makes a spreadsheet to coordinate everyone’s preferences and availability. She narrows the possibilities down to three solid options and sends out a poll. When the results are in, she calls Lizzie and announces they’ll be spending the bachelorette weekend at a cabin in the Sierras. “You did good!” Lizzie exclaims, when she sees the cabin website: huge fireplace, lux hot tub, gorgeous views.
Kath is proud of what she’s accomplished. She and Taylor have a couple of good conversations, just t
he two of them. She learns more about Ryan: where he comes from (Colorado), how he and Taylor met (eHarmony), and what Taylor loves most about him (his steadiness, his honesty, his concern for the environment, his close-but-not-too-close relationship with his mom). Maybe this will be the start of a flourishing second act of their friendship, the distance bridged, the old wounds finally healed.
But then: disaster. Lizzie, knees curled up on Kath’s couch, drinking wine: “So, here’s the thing. Taylor’s embarrassed to tell you, but she wants to change the plan for the bachelorette.”
“What? She doesn’t like the cabin?”
“No, I mean, she did. She does. But I guess what happened is, Ryan decided he’s going to Vegas with his friends, and it’s going to be all gambling and blackout drinking and strippers, and Taylor feels like a girls’ weekend in the mountains can’t compete.”
“Strippers? I thought Ryan was, like, Mr. Responsible.”
“He is. It’s out of character. Which I think is why she’s so upset.”
Kath shivers. “So, what now?”
“She just wants something a little . . . wilder. Like what bachelor parties are supposed to be for guys. A last chance for a little excitement, before she settles down.”
“If she thinks of marrying this guy as the end to all excitement, maybe she shouldn’t be getting married,” Kath says.
“Don’t be melodramatic. Can you plan something else, or not?”
“I can’t think of anything she’ll like.”
“Just try, okay? She needs this. Be her friend.”
Kath, trying, runs through a hundred ideas, but is dissatisfied with all of them. What’s the female equivalent of a guy taking all his friends to Vegas? A pack of shrieking, tipsy ladies shoving dollar bills into some greased-up hunk’s banana hammock? That’s not wild or sexy or transgressive, it’s a joke. A dude dressed up as a police officer knocking on the door, then ripping off his pants? Thinking about it too hard makes her angry: ardent Taylor, who wants more passionately than anyone Kath has ever met, deserves more than these insulting parodies of lust. But what does Taylor want?
* * *
Hey Liz, is there any flexibility in the budget for Taylor’s thing?
Idk, maybe? Why?
If I threw in some extra $ for a surprise for Taylor, could you too?
Sure, I guess. Whatcha planning?
Ahhhhh, I don’t wanna tell you yet. It’s a crazy long shot. If I make it happen, you’ll find out.
Here’s the first difficulty: she doesn’t even remember the name of the movie. Taylor had taped it off cable by accident, trying to record something else. But she’d set the timer wrong, and so she’d ended up with this sleazy softcore horror film none of them had ever heard of; a movie that, even at age twelve, they’d known was terrible, and that they’d have been embarrassed to watch were it not for the fact that the boy who starred in it drove Taylor wild.
The boy. Did she know his name? It feels like she did, at some point. First name, one syllable, she thinks. Chad or Nick or Brad. And maybe he had three names, the way a lot of actors back then did—Chad Michael Nickerson. Nick Bradley Chaderson. Brad Chad Daderson.
No. It’s gone.
Okay. So what actually happened in the movie? Well, there was a sex scene. In a pool. Between the teenage boy, Chad-Brad-Whoever, and an older woman, who later turned out to be some kind of vampire; she can remember that scene nearly frame by frame. But, unsurprisingly, googling Movie sex scene pool vampire woman doesn’t get her anywhere. Neither does adding 90s or Cinemax. Or oral sex. What else? She strains to remember. Wasn’t there something about . . . a gravedigger? A resurrection? She has an image of the boy and the woman lying together in a coffin, the boy nestled against the woman’s chest. There was something about a knife, right, that had to be hidden. Or was that a different movie? This feels impossible, but she knows it’s not. Nothing is lost any longer. She just needs a detail. Something searchable. Just one thing.
It’s 3 A.M. when it comes to her, another scene. The woman, and another man, and the boy. They were all three of them vampires by then, lying in bed together, drinking each other’s blood. What the fuck was this movie, twelve years old and they were sitting around giggling and eating popcorn and watching horror porn. But the man, who was maybe the woman’s husband or vampire master or maker—he gave the boy a . . . scar, or a tattoo? She can remember the boy on his back, and the man and the woman looming over him, and they wrote something on his body and it said, it said . . . she can’t remember.
But she can almost remember, because Taylor wrote it in her notebook the next week in class. There was a heart, and a knife dripping blood, and a quote, and the quote was something about love. Kath remembers because later Taylor had forgotten the notebook at her house and Kath never gave it back; she’d read that quote a dozen times, tracing Taylor’s daydream with her finger:
Love is—
Love is—
Her memory like a skipping record, bumping continually up against the scratch.
Love is, love is.
She backs up, relaunches—
Love—
Love—
Love bears—
Love breeds—
And hurls herself over the chasm.
Love breeds monsters.
That’s it.
That’s enough.
* * *
From IMDb:
Jared Nicholas Thompson is an actor, writer, and producer who is best known for his debut performance as the unnamed Boy in the Pool in the movie Blood Sins (1991), a straight-to-video horror release which became a staple of late-night cable television in the early 1990s. He also appeared in the films Save Me (1994), Pushing the Limit (1995), and Fatal Exposure (2000), as well as the Lifetime Original Movie A Sister’s Promise (1993). After a decade-long hiatus from acting, during which he worked as a carpenter, a professional dancer, and a mother’s helper, Jared returned to the industry to work behind the camera as a screenwriter and producer. His most recent project is the web series DadZone (currently in development), which he created in partnership with his longtime friend and collaborator Doug McIntyre. Thompson currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife and six-year-old son.
The boy in the pool is now a man, pushing forty, with a soft webbing of lines around his eyes. He has a Twitter account and a YouTube channel, as well as a tiny, passionate coterie of female fans who maintain his Facebook page and call him, presumptuously, by his first name. Most of these women seem to be fans of his performance as The Boy in the Pool, though they feign an interest in his more recent projects in transparent bids for his attention: So excited for @jnthompsn’s new series #dadzone—been a fan ever since #boyinthepool. Jared faithfully retweets all of the #dadzone mentions, while ignoring the more lascivious references to his earlier work (tracked down old #skinemax crush @jnthompsn—omg still super hotttttt), and Kath crafts her first message with that in mind.
The opportunities available to actors who achieved the peak of their fame as nameless characters in 1990s softcore horror porn films must be limited: Kath writes to him at 7 P.M.; he answers her a little after midnight, and two days later, they set up an appointment to Skype. His face appears on her computer screen, sharper than memory, a vivid emissary from a time before.
Jared’s voice is soft, a little raspy, and he has an unexpectedly high, fluting laugh. He’s older, but almost eerily unchanged: the same pale skin, dark hair, and wide uncertain eyes. Kath spends the first few minutes of their conversation dancing around the specifics of why she’s calling him, feeling him out. His expressive face might be his greatest asset as an actor, but as a negotiator, it betrays him utterly. When she hints that he might not be quite what she’s looking for, he wilts; when she praises him, he fills and straightens like a freshly watered plant.
She explains the opportunity to him, skirting around the details, and emphasizing how much she’ll pay him: five hundred dollars for showing up for two hours, another five hundred as
a bonus if it all goes well. He hesitates before agreeing, and she wonders if he knows what’s really going on. She’s certain that if she’d mentioned the words bachelorette party, he’d have refused her offer—he visibly aches to be taken seriously, burdened by what she imagines as an aging ingenue’s misplaced pride. But what’s the definition of bachelorette party, anyway? They’re just a group of women who are interested in meeting him, that’s all. Chatting politely. Flirting a little. Seeing if they can convince him to take his shirt off. Maybe trying to coax him into the pool.
Having secured the surprise guest of honor, Kath relocates the party from a cabin in the Sierras to a hotel in downtown L.A. Instead of girls-only hikes and campfires and sleeping bags in the basement, there will be a group spa day, aromatherapy massages, karaoke, dancing, and lots of free-flowing wine. She organizes, reserves, orders, corrals—then flies into LAX, where Taylor picks her up. It’s their first time seeing each other in person in . . . how long? they demand of each other as they hug. Time goes by so fast. Can it really have been so many years?
Taylor’s rose-gold engagement ring, capped by a blocky, prismatic diamond, sprays rainbows onto the roof of her car. She, too, has changed little in the intervening years—the only real difference Kath can detect is a certain thickness around the knuckles of her hands. Her Echo Park bungalow, which she shares with Ryan, is beautifully appointed, with bright geometric art glowing on its smooth white walls. There’s a dry-erase board hanging from the refrigerator, and on it is a list of wedding-related tasks in Taylor’s careful, rounded handwriting; the list is labeled: Honey-do.
Lizzie arrives that night, and unlike Kath, she remembers to bring a hostess gift. Even though it’s the first night all three of them have been under the same roof since high school, they go to bed early, and the bachelorette kicks off the next morning with a heavily Instagrammed brunch.
As the day goes by, they move from brunch to the spa to the sangria bar for happy-hour drinks, and the whole time, Kath compulsively searches Taylor’s face for any signs of what the future holds. In ten years, will she be surrounded by abundance: healthy children, an overgrown garden, a joyfully messy house? Will she have a couple extra pounds around the middle, a few wild, untamable gray hairs? Or will she be one of those women who subsist on salad and stress, their bodies Botoxed and bleached and starved into submission, locked in an endless war against the flesh?
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