Long Island Girls

Chapter 1

All Ages Rock Show

Susan puts a salty, slightly stale Sunchip in her mouth, and the moment she bites down on it, Katie says, “I love you, but you’re the loudest chewer in the entire world.”

Susan’s sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor of Katie’s bedroom with her back against the bed as she flips through the newest edition of SPIN magazine, already the September issue even though it’s still August. It’s three weeks before their senior year of high school, smack in the middle of suburban Long Island, land of strip malls.

Behind her, Katie is lying on her stomach atop the tightly made bed, painting her nails with Hard Candy polish, a navy blue. Katie’s room has been cleaned by someone else; even the CDs are dusted. It smells like fresh laundry and brown-sugar lotion from their town’s newly opened Sephora.

“Do you want me to just suck on it?” Susan says, with her mouth full.

Katie snorts. “Yeah, could you?”

Katie blows on her nails and her breath catches the back of Susan’s neck. Susan shivers and puts her hood up. It’s ninety degrees out and so humid the air has a texture to it, but inside, the AC is blasting hard enough that Susan has goose bumps beneath her black sweatshirt.

Death Cab for Cutie poses on the cover of the magazine in her lap, the baby-faced lead singer clutching a bloody heart like a sacrificial offering to some discerning deity of alternative music.

The image is a little too on the nose for Susan, more cloying than cool.

Now that they’ve gotten so big, the band no longer sounds like a tender secret between her and her headphones.

It is hard for her to reckon with the idea that music can be both popular and good.

Still, she loves SPIN in a way that verges on obsession, and she plans on reading every word, cover to cover, the mainstreaming of Death Cab be damned.

She puts another chip in her mouth, feeling self-conscious as she gently crunches down on it.

“Better?”

“No.” Katie laughs.

Susan and Katie are both Jewish, both a few hormonal months into seventeen.

They like the same indie rock bands and they get their clothes from the same combination of Delia’s, Goodwill, and merch tables at shows.

People often ask if they’re sisters. Most of the time, though, Susan feels like she’s a dimmer version of Katie.

Katie is louder; she was edgy first; it’s her opinions that tend to dictate the shape of things.

They both have brown hair, though Katie’s is red in the sun, while Susan’s color remains flat and neutral.

Katie’s eyes are wide and blue, while Susan’s are small, a muddy sort of hazel.

When they’re alone, Susan is confident that she and Katie are cool.

Once other people are around, though, it feels less certain.

They don’t get invited to house parties, and they’ve never sat at the popular table at lunch.

They’re not exactly losers—boys pay attention to them, which counts for a lot.

They’re something else: the weird artsy girls, self-proclaimed music snobs, whose Saddle Creek T-shirts and Sub Pop pins make their English teachers smile in the malodorous, yellowing halls of their overcrowded public school.

“What are you reading down there?” Katie asks.

Susan swallows, wipes the salt from her lips on her sleeve.

The magazine is open to an interview with the lead singer of a band Susan has been listening to a lot lately. In the grainy black-and-white photo next to the column, he’s cute in that gentle, androgynous way all the indie guys are these days.

Susan brings the magazine closer to her face. “It’s the lead singer of What-What,” she says.

“Hmm?” says Katie. “Who is that?”

“You know. The band name that’s two question marks. It’s pronounced What-What.”

“How the fuck do you know that?” Katie is laughing.

“It says so. In the first sentence: Jonny Lakes, the New York–born lead singer of the band called?? (pronounced What-What), is only just getting started. So fucking pretentious to name your band with symbols.”

“Are they good?” Katie asks. “If they’re good, they’re allowed to be pretentious.”

“Yeah, they’re great. They have a new album. I haven’t heard it yet.”

“I wanna hear it,” Katie says, whining. “I hate when you discover new music without me.”

“You wanna go to Tower?”

“Yeah, but not right now. Let’s just go use the computer,” Katie says. “We can kick Greg off it.”

Katie is already on her feet and bounding down the hallway, and Susan struggles to keep up.

She came over straight from her shift at the mall’s jewelry kiosk, and she’s tired from standing and being polite all day, especially to the needy guys who come to buy expensive-looking garbage for their girlfriends, gold-plated copper chains and mood rings that Susan knows from experience will turn their skin green.

Meanwhile, Katie has spent the summer loitering in different parking lots, eating blue raspberry Italian ice until she gets a Smurf tongue and then using it to make out with Jake, who is two years older than them and has been Katie’s boyfriend since she and Susan were freshmen.

Sometimes, if Jake has other plans, Katie comes to visit Susan at the jewelry kiosk, where she brings her a caramel Frappuccino and then pretends to be looking for something to buy.

Susan likes when Katie visits, but it also makes her nervous; she’s terrified of seeming like she’s not working, of losing this job that she very badly needs.

Unlike Katie, Susan’s parents don’t just give her money.

Susan follows Katie down the hall, entering the all-beige living room just in time to hear Katie cry, “Jesus fucking Christ, Greg!”

Katie’s twin brother is hunched over the family computer like a gargoyle, and at the sound of Katie’s voice he lunges for the mouse. Katie gets to it first, holding it hostage so she and Susan can see what’s on the screen.

It’s a photo of a girl splayed out on an unmade bed, wearing nothing but a black lace thong and white tube socks.

Susan’s and Katie’s mouths fall open simultaneously.

“Give it back,” Greg whines, but Katie holds the mouse just out of reach.

The girl in the photo has tiny, perfect triangular boobs, pointed improbably upward and framed by tan lines, the summertime ghost of a very small bikini.

A too-flat stomach punctuated by a belly button ring.

Straightened long dyed-blond hair partially obscuring her face but revealing enough to show lots of black eyeliner and clear lip gloss.

Her head is hanging off the bed, her neck arched back, showing off a Tiffany necklace, the chunky one with the heart that all the Long Island girls wanted for their sweet sixteens last year.

Eyes closed, lips parted, arms over her head.

Jarringly beautiful. She could be posing, or sleeping, or just somehow kind of blissfully unaware.

“Katie, come on.”

They ignore him.

The photo was clearly taken in a teenager’s bedroom, as evidenced by the posters and mess. A camera’s abrasive flash shows in the smudgy mirror on the wall, obscuring the photographer’s reflection but for their sneakers.

Greg finally jumps on Katie, tackling her to the floor.

“Ow! What the fuck!” she screams as he wrestles the mouse back and then clicks the window closed. The page vanishes, whisked away into the ether.

When the photo is gone, all that’s left is the desktop background: a family portrait of Greg, Katie, and their parents on vacation in Miami, smiling and sunburnt, the sky and the sea the same glowing shade of digitized sapphire, dotted with icons for Microsoft Word and AOL and Solitaire.

“I hate you,” Greg shouts at Katie.

“You’re such a fucking perv,” Katie cries as she gets up, sounding both delighted to have caught him doing something bad and totally grossed out by what that bad thing was, as though Susan and Katie had never looked at porn together. “And on the family computer? What’s wrong with you?”

He ignores this question, its judgment. “Nice haircut,” he says to Susan as he slinks out of the room.

“Shut up,” she replies, eyes down.

“No, I’m serious,” he says. “It’s very Tegan and Sara.”

He’s not wrong. Last week, Susan had taken a photo of a John Frieda shampoo ad to her mother’s hairstylist. She hadn’t gotten a real haircut in ages, and up until that day it was the same as it had always been: to her waist and parted down the middle.

“This is a horse’s tail,” the hairdresser said, holding her split ends up. “You came to me just in time.”

But the haircut Susan left with was not at all like the choppy bob in the magazine photo.

If anything, it was more like a mullet, with short, uneven bangs and layers that ended just below her collarbone, not unlike one of the sisters on the cover of If It Was You, a Tegan and Sara album from a couple of years ago that Susan listened to so many times she started to hear it in her sleep.

“It’s a fashion mullet,” Katie declared when she saw her.

Katie would have admitted if Susan couldn’t pull off such an alternative hairstyle.

Rather, she told her, “You look like you’re going to Misshapes,” which was the nicest thing she could have said.

Susan and Katie are too young to have ever been to the party in the city so instead they’ve spent hours scrolling through the photos posted online, marveling at how impossibly hip everyone looked—while also laughing about it.

They feel strongly that self-seriousness is the death of coolness, and this gives them a shadow of maturity.

When Greg is gone, Katie throws herself into the desk chair.

“Who do you think that photo was of?” Susan says when he’s out of earshot.

“Could have been anyone,” Katie says. “Some skank.”

“Katie!” Susan gasps.

Katie shrugs. “Sorry,” she says, though she sounds anything but apologetic. With a wicked grin she adds, “Can’t believe she kept her socks on.”