Chapter 3
The next morning, I woke up late to abundant sunshine. Light speared through my bedroom windows, forming crisp, elongated rectangles on my bedspread. I made a series of full-body yawns, like a stretching cat. Then I picked up my phone and began to move through the internet.
Eleanor appeared at the top of my feed. She’d posted a photo of herself, half-seated on her bathroom counter in a pair of jeans that gapped from her waist, her back to the mirror and her torso twisted to look over her shoulder.
Her white-blond hair framed her face, which was partially obscured by the rectangle of her phone, the lens of its camera hovering in front of her right eye.
The slightly upward tilt of her chin directed the bathroom light to fall cleanly on top of her cheekbones, throwing the contours beneath them into flattering shadow.
Her heart-shaped face looked rounder in life.
The image was like a vision of the future, her child’s softness falling away and the dramatic truth of her bone structure rising to the surface.
I looked at the picture for a long time.
I spread my fingers across the screen to zoom in on the gap between her jeans and her waist. She’d bought the too large pants from the secondhand clothing store we sometimes went to together for this effect, for the sake of taking this kind of photo.
If she’d tried to wear them in real life, they would have fallen off.
I liked it. I commented with flames. A few seconds later she liked my comment.
I was aware that I greatly enjoyed looking at Eleanor, but the nature of that looking was then still obscure to me.
I took pride in her beauty, Margaret’s too.
I took pride in my own appearance, whenever and for as long as I could manage it.
I had been known to stand in front of a mirror and make a variety of faces.
I took a screenshot of the post and then a minute later deleted it.
I could always come back and look through her profile if I wanted to.
I kept scrolling: a Sailor Moon meme; a pristine purse on a shoulder; a friend from school, pores blurred to within an inch of her life; and then a chain of girls from the grade above us posting photos of ice cream cones.
None of them had shared the whole group together.
Instead, there was a sequence of hands and ankles in the backgrounds of images, a chorus of laughter overheard on a video, the fact that all the ice cream cones had come from the same place and that all the images were taken at the same time of day.
In other words, there was a sufficient accumulation of information to declare that a group of girls had all been together without any of them having to say so.
None of them were tagged. They knew it wasn’t necessary.
I kept looking, my thumb alternately tapping forward and holding videos in place.
I could tell that, at some point, some of the girls had gone home, probably because their mothers made them.
The rest continued posting into the evening.
The lighting dropped to night. Then the girls themselves began to appear in the pictures, standing on the train tracks that cut through our neighborhood.
They hadn’t actually gotten on the train.
Whether or not they would have been allowed to go anywhere, they didn’t in fact have anywhere to go.
The transit line led to office parks and eventually the hospital.
Rather, the infrastructure served as a destination in itself.
Any non-domestic location, any place that could be gotten to without a car and that didn’t belong to a family, had value as a setting.
I flipped through a series of brightly illuminated flash photos of the girls posing against the tracks.
They wore sweatpants and sweatshirts, but their hair was straightened and then curled, and their black eyeliner made their eyes large and visible.
Finally, at the end of the night, they wound up at the playground of the lower school near my house.
There they met two other girls who I could see in the background of a video.
One of them had on a cool jean jacket—I recognized her—and the other one was Margaret.
In such circumstances, I typically called Eleanor—the only person to whom I was willing to complain.
After two rings, Eleanor’s face bloomed into my screen.
Every time I video-chatted her, she was walking from one place to another.
Her face slid back and forth across the rectangle in my hand, trees shifting behind her head in rhythm with her step.
From the way she glanced down at me through the screen, I knew she’d seen the video of Margaret.
“I can come over at three,” she said.
I invited Margaret too, but she didn’t text me back.
In the meantime, I felt obligated to pick a fight with my mother. Actually she picked the fight with me, but I lacked the restraint to decline. We were sitting on the couch. She gestured at my yesterday’s curled-up socks on the ground.
“The key is to put things away as you use them,” she said.
She was always coming up with keys.
“Then you’re continually cleaning up instead of just sometimes,” I said.
“No, then you never really have to clean up because it’s already mostly done.”
I tucked my legs underneath myself, depressing the cushion. “I’m not talking about housekeeping right now,” I protested. I’d been telling her I wanted Eleanor to come over.
“I’m just saying,” she went on. “We could both do better.”
I couldn’t fathom her determination to irritate me over something as unimportant as socks. She had terrible priorities. I hated her priorities.
“You always turn what I’m talking about into something else that I’m not talking about. That’s not how people have conversations.” A wary look entered her face, which only inflamed me further. “Stop telling me what to do for like five seconds,” I said.
“Okay, Mina, okay.” She stood up.
“Where are you going?” I was mad at her, but I hadn’t released her. Of the two of us, I thought, only I should have the right to leave a conversation.
“To get some water from the kitchen,” she said.
One benefit of mothers is the permanent availability of a person with whom to disagree.
Margaret, on the other hand, I wasn’t yet really within my rights to upbraid.
Yes, she’d said she couldn’t hang out on account of family plans, but then she’d been with Bea, and Bea was family, Bea’s mom being Margaret’s mom’s sister.
And I never could have gone with her anyway.
I wouldn’t have been allowed to go, and I didn’t sneak out.
Which meant Margaret should have told me.
She shouldn’t have made me find something out about her from the internet.
Still, even I, who considered friendship an ethical undertaking, couldn’t be mad at Margaret for not having told me something that happened only six hours ago.
I would have liked to confide in my mother because then she would have comforted me, but I couldn’t in any way reveal that Margaret had hurt me, even if the hurt was slight and temporary, because then I’d have to come back later and convince her that everything was okay, and some part of her wouldn’t believe in the reconciliation.
She never forgot anyone who had ever wronged me.
I also couldn’t explain what I’d seen without alarming her.
If I made it seem like Margaret participated in compromising or forbidden situations, situations in which I could at some point become embroiled, then she might not let me sleep over at Margaret’s house as often as she did, which was already less often than both Eleanor and Margaret were allowed to sleep at each other’s houses or my house, and I didn’t want that.
Not that she would ever meaningfully separate me from Margaret by her own standards—we’d been best friends since kindergarten, she loved Margaret—but she might by mine.
She was mystified by the intensity of my feelings in general but especially by the ferocity of my friendships, what I needed from them, how I twined my life around them.
Why did I want to have so many sleepovers?
my mom sometimes asked. Why couldn’t I just hang out and then come home to rest in my own bed?
What was so important about being unconscious next to someone who you were going to see the next day anyway?
I thought these questions were a trick—she wanted me to admit that we stayed up all night carousing.
It’s true she underestimated the quantity of togetherness lost by going home after dinner instead of the next morning, but even if we did go straight to bed, it seemed obvious to me that sleeping next to someone was an act of intimacy unavailable during regular visiting hours: to wear your pajamas and wash your face above the sink, to watch a girl’s eyes flutter closed.
Both my friends, at least, understood this.
When my mom returned from the kitchen, she brought me a glass. I took it.
At three, El glided into my driveway on her bike, standing on its pedals. She wore a green pleated tennis dress and no helmet. Her pale-blond hair licked her temples in the humidity, the air of the afternoon lousy with thoughts of rain. She hugged me briefly.
“I haven’t showered,” she said. She’d come straight here from practice.
“It’s fine,” I answered. “You always smell good.”