When We Were Friends (4 page)

I’d heard this before from her, many times. It used to make me feel special.

I lifted the scissors. “Let’s cut your hair, okay?” What I’d do was I’d chop it all off, and not a cute pixie cut either. Choppy, sprigged-out baldness.

I thought again about Sydney’s smile, how it hadn’t touched her eyes. Maybe she did feel bad after all; maybe that’s what it meant. Or—less likely but still possible—maybe after I left she’d burst into sobs of shame that she hadn’t wanted to show me. We’d go out for drinks and she’d say,
Look
. She’d say,
Look, I never meant to hurt you, I was just a kid
. And I’d say,
Sure, it wasn’t so bad, you didn’t hurt me
. I’d say,
It’s over now, I hardly even remember
.

But I couldn’t stop the scenes from replaying in my head, in the same agonizing slow-mo that they’d played out when I was there. Alone at the cafeteria table watching her whisper behind a cupped
hand, the group at her table laughing, staring, bent in whispers that I pretend aren’t about me. I am an artist with great talent who will be famous someday, whose work will be sold to rich people at auctions. In private I am funny and cool, have brilliant comebacks that regretfully surface hours too late for actual use, but that crack me up anyway. So I’m destined for greatness, I know it’s true. I’ve felt the heat of destiny ever since I first picked up a crayon, so the person they’re whispering about isn’t me, just the loser they imagine is under my skin.

Blimp!
a boy calls, and I stand to throw away my lunch, pretending not to hear.
The
Hindenburg’s
rising!
Sydney shrieks and the girl beside her makes the sound of an explosion and I walk from the room amid a cloud of laughter. Laughter echoing in me for twenty-one years.

We were ten when we decided to found the Cutters Club, a secret society of which we were the only members. Our club activities typically included some or all of the following:

• Signing to each other in class—using a secret sign language with elaborate hand gestures we’d devised for each letter—usually about how much we hated our moms, our teacher, and boys.
  
• Completing Mad Libs with words relating to sex or bodily functions.
  
• Writing poetry to go with each of my paintings, the combined brilliance of which we were sure would wow the art world.
  

These were daring enough activities on their own, but making them club activities seemed to add a whole other dimension of audaciousness. And the day we came up with the club’s name, that was our bravest day of all.

We were hanging out at Sydney’s apartment when she brought up the idea. Her apartment had a rooftop deck overlooking the town, where we lay on towels with Sprites and a kitchen timer to tell us when to flip. We had just about gotten to the unbearably sweaty stage of tanning when she said, “How come you picked Tricia for your gymnastics partner?”

The truth was I’d chosen Tricia instead of Sydney because Tricia never teased me for being too scared to arch into a back bend. But I said, “I feel bad for her. She can’t even cartwheel right.”

“But I
so
hate her, don’t you? I mean she’s not just dumb, she’s partly retarded. You know she still moves her lips when she reads to herself?”

“Don’t use the word ‘retarded.’ ”

“Whatever, I’m just saying you want to be careful. You spend too much time with her, you’ll get stuck in her retardo world.” She leaned up on her elbows. “Hey, you want to try something? It’s called blood sisters.”

Blood sisters
. It gave me a shiver, both in a bad way and a good way, like picking a scab or touching a snake. “What’s that?”

“It means we share blood.” She gave me a slim smile, daring me. “We both cut ourselves, and then touch the cuts together so we get each other’s blood mixed in our body.”

“Eeew,”
I said, but then I shrugged. “Okay, let’s.” So we went inside, for a knife.

Sydney’s kitchen was even smaller than ours, a galley with avocado-colored Formica counters, and a half-sized fridge holding mostly Budweisers and nonfat yogurts. And also, a block of knives with black handles and sharp, serrated blades. Sydney approached them, widening her eyes at me in mock terror. I gasped exaggeratedly (in alarm that I’m sure sounded quite real), and she grinned back as she chose the knife. Long and skinny and curled at the tip, the kind you’d use to cut roasted chickens.

We sat on the floor of her bedroom facing each other, Sydney’s eyes fixed on the knife. “You know what this means, right? We’ll be like real sisters, except even more related. Almost like twins.”

I gave a shallow nod. “Cool,” I said.

And then without hesitating, she squeezed her eyes shut and sliced the knife across her palm.

The slash on her skin was a brilliant red, brighter than I’d remembered blood could be. She started breathing fast and I thought maybe she was going to throw up, and I suddenly loved her more
than anybody in the world, that she’d risk puking in order to share blood with me.

She looked down at the oozing slash, her face pale. “After we do this there’s no going back,” she said. “My blood’s going to be inside your veins until you die.”

“I know,” I said, wondering if parts of me would suddenly change, if I’d start liking Barbies or grow the tiny boob-bumps I’d just today noticed under Sydney’s bathing suit. I took the knife and hunched my shoulders and then fast, before I could think of what I was doing, I sliced the knife across my palm.

I sucked in my breath, scared at first I might have cut my hand in two, but when I looked down there was just a large blob of blood, shiny and oval like something that might look nice on a ring.

We watched each other as she reached for my hand, holding it so tight I could feel my cut screaming. I looked into her eyes and both of us were halfway crying because it hurt, it hurt more than anything we’d ever known. But we both knew this was much more important than the pain. We just gritted our teeth, and held on.

I put about as much faith in Star’s prophecies of doom as I did in my grandmother’s stories about Elvis. I was reasonably sure I’d never see Sydney again, but I couldn’t deny that I thought about her every day. Every hour of every day, wondering if she’d call to offer me the painting job. At the end of the conversation she’d pause and say, “Let’s have coffee,” and I’d shrug. “If you want,” I’d say. And she’d want.

But two days passed, then three. And I hated the fact that I cared, hated that I’d let myself give a damn when Sydney obviously didn’t. She could at least have called to say they’d found someone else for the job. She’d think I’d interpret it completely casually, but I’d know what it meant. That she couldn’t face what she’d done to me.

But a week went by without a word. I got a call from a natural foods shop that would pay me three thousand dollars for approximately two weeks’ boring work, walls painted with wooden barrels of beans and crates of tomatoes. And so I took the job, set out with brown paint and wide brushes, and let the strokes drown any other thoughts.

And then, just when I’d managed to stop obsessing, she called. I was in the back mudroom I used as a studio, working on a still life. The room was cluttered with my canvases, the semi-abstract images I’d been painting over the past few years, of children catching butterflies in nets or blowing dandelion fairies, of young mothers with babies, a man’s hand resting on a woman’s knee or playing with her hair. But since seeing Sydney, looking at these paintings had started to hurt for a reason I didn’t quite understand. I’d turned them all to face the wall, and the only images I’d painted in the past week were a bowl of unrealistically neon fruit and the painting that was in front of me when Sydney called, a perfect vase of flowers on a shiny glass table.

“Listen,” she said. “I’ve thought about calling you probably fifty times since last week. I actually picked up the phone twice but then, I don’t know. I guess I got scared.”

“Really,” I said.

“It was just weird to see you, it brought a lot of stuff back. And it made me compare my life then to now, and what I thought my life would be now, and I hated where that was making my mind go. I don’t know, I’m not explaining myself well.” She paused, then said, “I was wondering, d’you want to go get coffee or something? Jacqueline’s with her dad for the weekend, so I’m all alone and I could use somebody to talk to.”

I looked down at the smudges of paint on my hand, spread my fingers, and then nodded for several seconds before I said, “Okay, why not.” And smiled.

•   •   •

We met at Chelsea’s, a café in downtown Hilton Village. Hilton Village was a planned community, set up in the early nineteen hundreds to house shipyard workers during World War I. The homes were mostly English village style, Jacobethan or Dutch Colonial, with steeply sloped gables or hipped roofs. Which made the town quaint from the outside but inside, many of the homes, like ours, were showing their age: walls in desperate need of replastering, small rooms with chipped hardwood floors, narrow staircases and low doors. Downtown was charming though, with its wide brick-paved, tree-lined sidewalks and pavilions, and I walked through it slowly, waving at the shopkeepers and passersby I knew, stopping to chat, stalling.

This was what I’d wanted. Almost exactly, but what would we possibly talk about? I understood for the first time how Star must feel, how terrifying it could be to leave the confines of your home because it was so uncontrolled. Anything could happen.

My last meal with Sydney had been at Custard Queen. I hadn’t been out with her for weeks. Star had stopped going outside that year, and I stayed home after school partly to keep her from freaking about the myriad of dangers I might be encountering, and partly because I hadn’t had anything better to do.

But that morning Star had done a reading as she’d begun to do nearly every morning. Something important was going to happen today, she said, something that would change my life forever. So I’d invited Sydney out for ice cream so we could try and guess what it might be.

I’d sat with a dish of pistachio, pushing it forward so Sydney could taste, but Sydney wrinkled her nose and pushed it back. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “You know Mike Garnett? On the swim team? Well we’ve been dating for a while now, and he’s been taking up a lot of my time.”

I’d choked in surprise—
they had?
—and a pistachio flew across the table. Sydney flinched, following it with her eyes. And in that one look, with that one stiff-faced recoil, I’d understood what Star had meant. Everything had changed.

Now I turned down an alleyway toward the café, stood behind one of the spindly trees along the sidewalk and checked my watch to ensure that I’d be fashionably late, then steeled my shoulders and entered.

Chelsea’s was my favorite café. Partly because the walls were filled with my paintings and I’d sold quite a few of them from here. But mostly because Chelsea was the kind of person you had to love. She treated everyone who came into the shop like her new best friend, and she showed the customers she knew an affection that seemed completely genuine and personal. These things also made Chelsea’s the perfect meeting place to attempt to prove the awesomeness of my life.

Sydney was already at a table, so she got to see Chelsea’s reaction when I came in. “Lainey!” Her face lit up, and she came from behind the counter to take both my hands into her own. So I gave my attention to her rather than Sydney.

“How’s Steve?” I asked.

“Oh you know.” She rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “It’s baseball season, so I could stride across the room butt-nekkid and he’d tell me to get out of the way.” She shrugged. “I’m glad you’re here, by the way, it’s perfect timing. I just took out a batch of those toffee bars your mom loves. Should I pack you a box?”

“That’d be great, thanks,” I said, and raised a hand to Sydney.
See, I am known in this town, and loved
.

“You’re the one she’s here to meet?” Chelsea smiled at Sydney. “Lainey’s one of my favorite people, you know.”

“You’re full of it,” I said.

“No, really! You’re one of my top ten favorites. Or, if you count Colin Firth, Nora Roberts, and Tibetan spiritual leaders, at least one of my top twenty. You want the usual?”

I glanced at Sydney’s table and saw she was drinking black coffee, nothing else. “I’ll have a medium,” I said. “Just black.”

Chelsea raised her eyebrows. I was a drinker of full fat doubledouble mochas with extra syrup and foam. But thankfully, she didn’t comment.

I sat across from Sydney at the small round table, wishing I had silverware to play with. Instead I rubbed my thumb over the faded polyester rose on the table, like I was testing it to see whether it was real.

I’d planned to play this completely nonchalantly, no anger, no excitement, the same way I’d talk to a potential employer about a job I didn’t particularly want. But as soon as I opened my mouth, I failed. “So look,” I said. “I don’t know why you called. But more than anything I’m thinking, my God, what nerve you have to want to get together after however many years, pretending like nothing happened between us. Wanting to go out for coffee like you’re suddenly my best friend.”