Those Girls

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To Maggie, Laura, and Liz, for being my biggest supporters, my best friends, and the reason I will always know the difference between these girls and those

S
ame shit, new year. The first day of eleventh grade. Mollie called at the ass crack of dawn to ask if I’d pick her up for school. Was a really sunny day, September—my favorite time of year. Everything, everyone, is so fresh and unsoiled: new books, new shoes, a new haircut, like summer is some sort of master cleanse reset button. I figured Mollie’s request for a pre-school rendezvous was to orchestrate a united front against Veronica, who would surely come bouncing in with her usual tales of European slutcapades that neither of us was impressed by anymore.

When I pulled into her driveway, Mollie was already waiting for me. Mollie, my best friend since kindergarten. I don’t totally remember how we became best friends or when we decided to call ourselves such, but the fact that Mollie Finn and Alex Holbrook are best friends is pretty much the only absolute truth that I (and the rest of Greencliff) know to count on. I have no memory of a time when this wasn’t the case.

We’ve done everything together. Besides both being lifers at the esteemed Harwin School for Girls, we took tennis, gymnastics, and horseback riding lessons. Brought each other on
family vacations, to religious functions, and to holiday dinners. We even had our first kiss on the same night, at the same time (not with each other, obviously).

At school, people actually get up and move over if one of us walks into a room and there isn’t a seat next to the other one. Without even being asked. It’s just understood that we are supposed to be next to each other. All the time. Alex-and-Mollie, one compound word, rolled off the collective Greencliff tongue like Romeo-and-Juliet or Sodom-and-Gomorrah.

We brought Veronica in when she came to Harwin in fifth grade. I liked her first—Mollie thought she was snobby. I liked that Veronica was tall (like me) and that she did dumb things like run around naked (which was cuter when we were ten) and make up words to songs, and that she would talk to anyone about anything and seemed to be just completely missing the embarrassment gene, which I sometimes felt was the only one I possessed. Mollie started dating Brian O’Connell in seventh grade, so I started going over to Veronica’s house after school instead of hers. We’d swim in her pool and try on her mom’s clothes and make amateur music videos. We’d do stuff that Mollie would be too regimented and self-conscious to do. Stuff that Mollie might try to do with someone else but couldn’t with me, because I knew her too well. I’d see the awkwardness in her eyes; I’d see her scrutinizing herself from the outside, judging herself, wondering what she looked like, who was watching, what they thought, and if they thought she looked dumb or fat or like she was trying too hard. She’d see me seeing her looking like she was trying to look like she was having fun. And then no one would be having any fun.

Anyway, then we got to high school, and Mollie and Veronica (not me) started getting invited to the senior parties. They hooked up with older guys and were the “hot freshmen,” and that’s how Veronica officially became our third. We’d auditioned other ones here and there over the years, like Jessica Sawyer (lived too far away), Liz Masterson (had a really strict mom), and Emily Canter (kleptomaniac), but Veronica was just the one that stuck.

But through all the guest stars, Mollie and I never drifted. We never fought (out loud) or disagreed or veered from our self-proclaimed title of best friends. Even if we weren’t sure why we chose each other anymore, of all the other best friends we could have chosen, what we knew was that it was working for us, and it made us feel protected and powerful in the fickle and volatile Greencliff private school battleground. Our best-friendship was our life raft—I imagine the army employs the buddy system for similar reasons. It was our job to make sure the other was never left behind. Even when I stopped going to Mollie’s house after school, I’d call her at night and we’d talk about Veronica or Brian or our parents or how we were so lucky to have each other, someone else who truly understood what it was to hate everything.

She stood in her driveway now, planted next to her mailbox like a lawn ornament, arms crossed, biting her thumbnail, tapping her snakeskin ballet flats.

“Can we stop at a drug store?” she groaned, slamming the door of my antique Volvo.

“Sure. Why?” But I already knew why.

“I need to take a Plan B.”

“Again?” I said, exhaling my morning Marlboro Light, backing out of her cul-de-sac. “You do realize that Plan B is not actually a recognized form of birth control.”

“The condom broke. Fuck you.”

I rolled my eyes. Mollie was always having some sort of pregnancy or STD or UTI crisis—in my opinion a convoluted way to keep her active sex life a relevant topic of conversation.

“You really want to take it again? You puked for, like, twenty-four hours straight last time.”

“Better to puke today than every day for the next nine months.”

She pulled her silky blond hair into a ponytail, opened her mouth, and applied eyeliner in my rearview mirror, which meant that she was expecting to see her boyfriend, the glorious and notorious Sam Fuchs, at some point midday. No one wore eyeliner to an all-girls school unless they were expecting an unexpected visit from a boy.

“You’re probably not even ovulating. People try for like years to get pregnant and can’t. All odds and Sam’s roid-raged, THC-saturated sperm considered, I very seriously doubt that you managed to conceive last night.”

“This morning…” She snickered.

I knew she wanted me to ask how she managed that, but I refused to take the bait. Mollie was having sex. I was not. And she felt the need to remind me of this on a daily basis. Because, for the first time, we were not in the same place at the same time, and she seemed to revel in that.

I had news of my own for her for once. News I’d been
putting off sharing for weeks but knew I’d eventually have to tell her. I figured now was the perfect time to slip it—while she was busy in her own vortex of self-obsession.

“By the way,” I choked out as we turned into the parking lot, “I’m doing something kind of random.”

She looked at me cross-eyed. “Uh, what?”

“I’m trying out for a band.”

She laughed. “You’re joking? When?”

“Wednesday.”

As we pulled into the suburban shopping center, silver, white, and navy SUVs pulled in and out of the spots around us. Greencliff moms with frosted ponytails wearing full-body Lululemon armor bounced in and out of the CVS and Starbucks and tanning salon holding toddlers and lattes, pushing strollers and fingering their smartphones. Dads puttered around the parking lot in business suits, clutching paper coffee cups, noses buried in
Inquirer
s and
Wall Street Journal
s on their way downtown into Philadelphia. Greencliff was already abuzz, and dew hadn’t even burned off the asphalt yet.

“I need to do something different,” I said as I shifted into park. “I’m kind of bored. Aren’t you bored?”

“What kind of band? A metal band, an R&B girl group, a marching band, perhaps?” She glared at me cockeyed and scrunched her slopey freckled little nose.

I chose to ignore her snark and pretend her questions were supportive and genuine. “Remember my old piano teacher?” I chewed my cuticles to avoid her glare. “Mrs. Farber, with the cankles?”

She nodded, eyes still skeptical and accusatory.

“Apparently, her son’s band needs a keyboard player. She thought of me. Random, but what the hell, right? All we do is sit around and drink and smoke and talk shit, it’ll be nice to do something, make something, for a change…”

“So you’ve known you’re gonna do this and you
just
mentioned it? Does Veronica know?”

“No, I sort of forgot.”

I lied. For a number of reasons.

Mollie twirled her golden ponytail around her finger and threw those stupid Tory Burch flats up on my dashboard.

“Since when do you forget to mention shit? You mention when you’re out of conditioner. You mention when your foot itches, and when your mom buys a new brand of hummus. But whatever, you’re joining a band. Sweet. All these years, who knew you were such a repressed emo-rocker chick?”

I shrugged and watched the cars on Franklin Avenue whip by. I knew this was how she’d react. Mollie didn’t like change, surprises, or deviations from her status quo, but I was not going to be intimidated out of my decision this time just to soothe the beast. I was going to do something I wanted to do, without her approval, for once. Damn it.

“Anyway”—she rummaged through her backpack; I couldn’t tell what she was looking for—“can we deal with my fucking unborn child, so I can participate in your future coke binges and backstage orgies?”

I cracked a smile, maybe released a short nasal exhale that resembled the beginnings of a laugh. “One day you really are
going to get pregnant with a little demon Fuchs baby and no one is going to believe you. You’re the girl who cried pregnancy.”

“That’s not even funny. If you were having sex, you would understand how not funny that actually is.”

“You’re right. Subjecting a child to being a ‘Fucks’ for the rest of his life is not a laughing matter at all.”

“It’s F-uuuu-chs. Like fuck-YOU-chs.”

We laughed, and she dabbed her running eyeliner with her knuckle. “Want anything?”

“Diet Coke.”

I waited in the car and lit another cigarette while she ran into CVS. I turned up the radio, grabbed the wheel with locked elbows, swiveled my neck, and car-danced to some horrible pop song, as I like to do sometimes.

My phone vibrated somewhere, and I reached down through the mess of books, papers, wrappers, snacks, and mangled packs of cigarettes in my bag to find it.

It was a text from Drew:
Not even 9 am and I just saw someone get punched in the nuts. This place is disturbed. I miss summer. Sesh after school?

I wanted more than anything to tell him to fuck the
after
and to come meet me right now. I then had a short fantasy about the two of us ditching class and driving to the stream in the Meadowfields. We’d go swimming in our underwear and have long, heated discussions about the decline of the music industry and how much we hated everyone in and everything about our blond-haired, blue-eyed popped collar of a town. We’d talk until it got dark and go swimming again. Our slippery,
naked skin would find each other’s under the water; we’d lock glowing eyes in the wet moonlight and realize how happy we made each other. He’d kiss me, and I’d look knowingly into his eyes before I kissed him back. I’d wrap myself around him, and he’d carry me out of the water, and we’d make slow, throbbing, Harlequin love on a smooth, flat rock under some sort of weeping tree. Afterward, he’d tell me how long he’d wanted to do that, and I’d smile coyly, knowing that after that moment we would be together forever.

I texted back:
I feel your pain. I’m currently waiting in the CVS parking lot to assist Mollie with another contraception crisis. I’ll call you after practice. Good luck, soldier.

I’d known Drew almost as long as I’d known Mollie. He lived down the street, and when we were little, we played Chutes and Ladders in his tree house and went sledding on snow days. He goes to Crawford, the brother school to Harwin, and somehow we’d successfully made it through the awkwardness of middle school with our platonic friendship still intact. We enjoyed watching our friends hook up and break up from the sidelines, where we were free to mock, judge, and ridicule the romantic follies of our misguided, hormone-ridden peers; it was all very
what fools these mortals be
. We thought we were so much better off, out in my driveway smoking weed, laughing at poor, abused Mollie and Veronica and their latest ventures in sex and delusion.

I turned up the radio.

“Nice moves,” Mollie said, tumbling back into the car.

“Nice dead baby.”

Mollie stuck out her tongue and snorted at me.