Those Girls (18 page)

I
sat at my desk with Drew’s stories, swallowing, digesting, and savoring each word for the thousandth time. Pages and pages had been written about this beautiful girl—a girl who took care of everyone she loved, who thought of others before herself, who showed no sadness, weakness, or self-pity. She exhibited strength and creativity after she was abandoned by the only man she’d ever trusted. This girl was not me; I was not like that at all! All I did was second-guess myself and feel unsure and unworthy and selfish—how did Drew not see that?

Drew had made me into this person that I wasn’t. For whatever reason, he clearly saw something lacking in himself, so he invented it in me. Maybe I had done the same thing. Maybe we all do that. Maybe I had invented Drew, too.… He had become this creature to me, this savior. This thing that if acquired would make me whole and make me happy—but it wasn’t playing out that way. The sex that I had had with Drew hadn’t changed anything. I was still miserable. He was still with Veronica.

As flattering as they were, the stories made me self-conscious, made me wonder what I was doing that made Drew see me this
way. I wondered how other people saw me, where the gap was between how others thought I was and how I thought I was—and who was right and wrong? On the last page of the last story, he wrote:

I knew that one day she’d find a man who’d tell her secrets about the world and the truth about things; things that I didn’t know and truths that I didn’t understand yet. He’d be able to make her feel safe and taken care of, the way I felt when I was with her. And it broke my heart, because I knew I’d lose her. Because I wasn’t a man, not yet, anyway. And I’d never catch up; I’d be too late, because already, she was no longer my girl, but something of a woman.

Again, that word.
Woman.
It made me uncomfortable, like I should be wearing nylon stockings and carrying compacts of pressed powder. I was only sixteen; I clearly was not a woman. Nor did I want to be—yet, anyway.

I folded Drew’s stories up again and took them downstairs. I sat at the piano and stared at the keys. I started banging away, a G chord, then a C. I let my fingers walk around and didn’t think much about what kind of song I was writing or why. I took the pencil off the mantle and started writing some of the notes.

This is about you, it always was, it always is

I stopped and wrote down the chord progression.

I’m not what you need, I’m just me, and just barely…

I looked at his pages again, and words swirled in my head and rhymes and rhythms, and this idea that rhythms are relations between what you believe and what you believed before, which I’d read in a book.

I kept going. I had all these words in me about how being an adult means knowing who you are, and how being a friend means seeing someone for who they really are, not just who you need them to be.

I lost hours at the piano and wrote the song in one sitting. I called it “Grow Up.”

It was a ballsy move, but sometimes a day at the piano will do this to me; I’ll fly on this adrenaline of creation and musical transcendence and, if only for a fleeting moment, believe that I am stronger and smarter and capable of more than I really am: I called Pete and told him that I had a new song I wanted us to learn before the prom.

M
ollie and Alex were a few people in front of me in the cafeteria line, so I tried to keep my eyes straight and not look at them looking at me and feel them whispering and giggling and pointing and everyone else looking and whispering and pointing and knowing that I used to be whispering and giggling and pointing with Mollie and Alex, but I wasn’t now, because I was a big fat backstabbing whore. Like I couldn’t hear them, like I wasn’t a real person with feelings and ears who maybe had a side of the story also.

I sat down at a table by myself and heard Nikki Clayman’s shrill voice a few tables over.

“They’re still not talking to her,” she said loudly enough that I could hear it over the clang and clatter of the cafeteria.

“Would you?” some other girl asked. I didn’t look over to see who.

“Should we invite her to sit with us?” Nikki asked giddily. Like she’d be doing me some great favor. Like I needed her charity.

Then from another corner, I heard Mollie’s insane cackle. It echoed through the room and resounded over my head like a thundercloud.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I picked up my sandwich and walked out. I tried to appear calm and collected. Look like maybe I forgot something in my locker, or that I had an appointment I forgot about, or maybe was just done eating and was moving on with my day—not like I had lost the cold war of Harwin social scorn, or like the looks and the whispers had gotten to me and I’d been broken and humbled and would accept and acknowledge the disgrace and exile that had been passive-aggressively thrust upon me. I would not cry in the cafeteria; they didn’t deserve that. I would not run out in shame and be fodder for even more gossip and conversation—I had given them plenty to work with for one semester.

I choked back the tears and weaved through the tables and out of the glass double doors on the far end of the room so that I wouldn’t have to walk past our—or Alex and Mollie’s—table. I felt their eyes on the back of my head, but I refused to let them burn through it and push the tears out.
Keep it together, Veronica. Let them talk. This, too, like everything else, will blow over.

Head down, tears still at bay, I skulked through the halls until I made it outside. I gasped in the fresh air like I’d just freed myself from drowning. It was a beautiful day, a day that Mollie and Alex and I maybe would have gotten our lunches and eaten them on the steps by the art building.

Hums of children laughing and playing resonated from over by the lower school, and I found myself following the sound. Little girls, who looked like they were in second or third grade, ran around the playground in their little tunics and shiny Mary Janes jumping and squealing and smiling. I walked over to the
grassy hill behind the swing set and sat down with my half-eaten sandwich, overwhelmed with warm feelings of nostalgia and extreme pangs of longing for simpler, happier times.

Alex and I had first become friends on this very playground. I had just moved from New York, and she was the first person to be even a little bit nice to me. I didn’t come to Harwin until fifth grade, so groups were already pretty much solidified and cliques set and locked. Alex and Mollie ran the best one, obviously.

One day at recess, Mollie summoned me over to the seesaw. She looked me up and down and said, “You’re tall—you seesaw with Alex. We’re too little!” Alex looked at me and looked at Mollie, took my arm, and took me over to the seesaw at the end of the row. Not to the empty one next to Mollie’s, on which she and Lily Garrison, who has since failed out of Harwin and been shunned to public school never to be heard from again, were already gleefully popping up and down in all their petite prepubescent glory.

“Mollie is so annoying,” Alex said as she threw a knobby knee over her end of the seesaw. “She thinks she and Lily have this bond because they’re both sixty-five pounds and don’t have boobs yet.”

I laughed. I was so excited to know that there was a chink in the Alex Holbrook–Mollie Finn armor, that they weren’t an impenetrable force that couldn’t be infiltrated. Maybe there was room for me.

“How tall are you?” she asked as we began to see up and saw down.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

She said, “Let’s go back-to-back.”

She jumped off the contraption, sending my end plummeting to the ground. I dusted myself off, and she reached out her hand to help me up. Worn-looking friendship bracelets were stacked three inches thick up her thin arm. We stood ponytail to ponytail. She rested the flat of her hand over the tops of our heads, then spun around, keeping her hand out flat in front of her freckled face like she was saluting me.

“Looks like we’re the same height,” I said.

She smiled and said, “I need a tall friend! Let’s be tall friends.”

The young girls sang on the swing set at the bottom of the grassy hill, kicking and pumping their legs in time with one another. Two of them were perfectly in sync, gliding to and fro on beat like pendulums, while the third one, the smallest one, pumped her little legs faster, which was only slowing her down and throwing her rhythm off more.

The two synchronized ones giggled and sang a song that neither I nor the slower one knew. The little one just pumped harder and harder and, finally, caught up! I found myself strangely excited for her, proud. The three of them swung up and back as one unit, perfectly in time, and I took a satisfied bite of my sandwich.

Then the blond one said, “One… two… three!” and the first two flung themselves off the swing and landed hard on their little Mary Janed feet. They linked arms and ran off laughing, ponytails bouncing behind them, leaving the little one on the swing alone, head down, pumping her scrawny legs back and forth, having finally gotten the rhythm down.

I
stood in my prom dress and stared at myself in the mirror. I stared so long that I didn’t even recognize myself by the time I blinked. I stood there in that black dress with all that eyeliner, hair straight and silky, ready for my drummer quasi-boyfriend to take me where, as I understood it, the plan was to drug my friend and then go on to perform in front of hundreds of my peers, one of whom was Drew, my best friend, life’s obsession, and now the holder of my virginity, writer of my memoirs, and intimately invested in a song I was about to sing onstage. If I told the Alex from a year ago that she’d be standing here now, she’d never have believed me.

At this point, I wasn’t sure Mollie would actually go through with the roofie thing. I wasn’t sure if we had actually worked out the technical physical logistics of this plan or if we’d been kidding, but I went along with it, hoping that she’d decide that we were kidding. And I understood where this twisted plan came from. I understood jealousy and pride and the idea of revenge—the notion that causing someone else pain would somehow soothe your own. Even if I knew it wasn’t true, I still understood the impulse. Mostly, I understood that
Mollie needed to feel like she could fix it, take control of what she felt had just happened unfairly to her. So I said okay and went along with it, like I was on board, because even if I wasn’t in real actuality, I was in theory. Even though I understood why Veronica’d done what she’d done, too.

And honestly, I had other things on my mind.

And I was mad at Veronica, too—irrationally, but I was. I also wanted to see her suffer. I knew she didn’t deserve it, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t deserve to suffer, either, but I was. I didn’t deserve to feel the way I felt every time she and Drew made out in front of me, every time she said his name, every time I thought about the two of them touching or fucking or posing for a prom picture—but I did, and whether she did it on purpose or not, it was her fault.

But, more important than all of that, I was about to get up and sing in front of all of Harwin for the first time. I’d sung in front of many of them before, but there was something different about this concentrated audience. Word had spread about me and the Cunning Runts and word around town was that we were good, that I was good, and I knew Harwin girls and knew that meant that two hundred finely tuned, highly critical ears and eyes would be on high alert, scanning me and my performance for signs of imperfection to exploit. They all desperately wanted me to fail. To believe that no one had anything that they didn’t and that this band was just another pathetic cry for attention, from another pathetic, unspecial, insecure girl who was no better than them or a threat to them in any way. And in some ways, I feared it was, and that I’d be exposed.

And I would be, in a way: in a way that I’d fully signed up for. I wondered if they’d know that “Grow Up” was about Drew. If Veronica would know. Drew would definitely know. Would he be mad? Flattered? The song was really a response to his stories, a reaction, not a critique of it, and I was worried he wouldn’t take it that way. It was going to be like we were having an actual conversation via our art, and that was kind of cool. I hoped he’d get that. But maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe I’d misinterpreted his stories. Maybe he’d hate the song, and hate me, and I’d have to be okay with that. I made this choice to put it all out there, and fuck it, I had to stand behind it now.

I had never been the type to put myself in a position where people had an opportunity to make judgments about me or form opinions. That was Mollie and Veronica’s job. They seemed to like their names being on the tips of everyone’s tongues, to have eyes on them and buzz and mystique surrounding them. I did not. I stayed neutral, on the sidelines, bit my tongue, and never stirred the pot or made a scene, because I never wanted to give anyone ammo to—god forbid—not like me. Or not think I was cool. But all of a sudden, I’d made all these choices, subjective choices, and it was out there for all the public to judge whether they’d been right or wrong.

What the hell was I thinking? Like one day, just like that, I decided that I didn’t care what people thought. Maybe I wanted so badly to be someone who didn’t care what people thought, that if I just acted like I was someone who didn’t, then maybe eventually I would become said person. Had it worked?

Sort of.

It had to have, because I’d gone too far to turn back now. What was done had been done, what was said had been said. And I was still alive; I was still me. The band, the music, was about making
me
feel good, and if people didn’t like it, they could walk away, and it made no difference. Drew or anyone.
You don’t do this for them; you do it for you. You do it for you.
I repeated this to myself. Over and over. Fuck everyone.

There was a knock on my door, and I told whoever it was to come in.

“You wanna go in five?” Josh said. He was all squeaky fresh in his new tux and haircut.

“Yeah, five minutes,” I said.

“Nice dress, Morticia,” he said.

I gave him the finger.

“So, are you guys gonna be bitches to Veronica tonight, or are you going to cut her a break?”

“Cut her a break! She slept with Mollie’s boyfriend!”

He plopped down on my bed and cracked his knuckles. “Like you didn’t do the same thing to her.”

He knew?

“How did you…”

“I didn’t really,” he said. “I came home from Veronica’s that day and heard him in your room, and I’ve seen how you’ve been acting lately, and I put two and two together.…”

“Am I a horrible person?” I asked, and I sat down next to him.

“You’re all horrible,” he said. “Girls are horrible. I think that’s normal. I think that’s why you’re all friends.”

I laughed a little.

“So what now?” he said. “Is this a huge secret that we’re never to speak of again, or are you going to tell Veronica?”

I dropped my shoulders and exhaled in complete and utter relief. “I don’t know!” I said. “It feels so weird now. Everything is different, yet nothing is… I’m so confused.”

It felt so good to talk about it out loud. I wanted to unload everything on him, give him every gory detail, know what he thought. If what happened was normal, if sex was always going to be this complicated. Figure out if he still thought I was his cool, complicated big sister, or if he all of a sudden felt sorry for me.…

“He’s probably pretty confused, too,” he said. “He’s been through a lot in the last few weeks, maybe give the kid a minute to catch his breath.”

“Yeah…,” I said. “But, Josh, you don’t understand. It was so intense.…”

“Yeah, I don’t really need the details,” he said. “I’m your brother, gross.”

I laughed a little again. “Sorry,” I said, catching his eye in the mirror.

“But you’re okay, right?” he asked, holding my gaze.

“I’m okay,” I said. And I went back to fidgeting with my dress.

He got up and brushed off his pants. “You almost ready to go?”

“Two minutes.”

He looked handsome in his tux, all grown-up-like. I felt better going into the night knowing that he would be there. So much had changed—there were so many things up in the air and different than they used to be, that were complicated and shady and that had gotten lost or forgotten or out of control. But not Josh; he was still there, and our relationship was the same, no matter how horrible or different I allowed myself to become.

I slapped my cheeks and straightened the dress. I told the strange-looking girl in the mirror to have fun, to fuck it all, to focus on the music and her cute date, the fact that she even had a date, and ignore her pounding chest and the uncertainty of her relationships and the looming threat of public humiliation. I told her not to worry about her psychotic best friend and her demonic plans. I even told her she looked beautiful, and I never tell her that.