Chapter 4
By Friday, I was back at Margaret’s house with an itchiness between us. I found her to be too pleased with herself. She flitted around her room with authority and half an eye on her phone at all times.
“Don’t ask me what we’re doing tonight,” Margaret said. “I’m serious. Don’t even look at me with that face. It’s too early for discussion.”
She maintained an almost superstitious attitude about social plans while she was in the process of seeking them out.
She wanted our silent and appreciative awareness of her efforts without any questions or comments on her progress.
To speak an intention was to limit the luminous sensation of possibility.
In tank tops and underwear, we crossed the wood floor of Margaret’s bedroom to the tile in her bathroom and back again, moving between our clothes and our makeup.
“How’s Starter Penis?” I asked instead.
“We’ve been talking,” she said, drawing out the word talking.
She pulled up their text thread on her phone and scanned through their recent messages, so I could see the frequency of communication between them, but with quick enough strokes that I couldn’t read what either of them had said.
“What do you talk about?” I asked. I had hardly flirted with anybody in my life. I had no idea what you texted someone you wanted to hook up with. “Like what do you say?”
“Honestly, it’s vague,” Margaret said. “It’s ambiently horny.”
She thought he might invite us somewhere that night.
I could tell she was convinced he would.
She gestured at one of the seven complete outfits I’d brought to her house and dispersed onto her floor for our mutual perusal, and I tried it on.
A black halter top with flower-shaped cutouts on either side of my waist and matching skirt.
“Oh my God,” she said when I walked into the doorway that connected her bedroom to her bathroom. Hair tools, Q-tips, tubes of mascara, eyeliner pencil stubs, and open eyeshadow palettes leaking colorful dust covered every available surface. “You look so hot.”
I raised my arm into the air in answer and let my fingertips graze the doorframe. My hair, which reached beyond my ribs, skimmed the skin of my waist exposed by the cutouts.
“Thank you,” I said.
I thought she was about to tell me about Wednesday night unprompted now that we were in person and alone together, but she didn’t. She just applied primer to her cheeks and forehead and waved her hands in front of her face to dry the product.
To my envy, Margaret lived in the attic of her house, with her own bedroom and bathroom and an ancient storage closet in which we’d once found old journals belonging to Margaret’s mother.
I refused to read them, so Margaret read them and gave me quotes and summaries until she decided she didn’t want to read them either, and we put them away.
Margaret’s attic, though blessedly private, was also hot in the summer, the best efforts of its in-window air conditioner insufficient for the heat that had been seeping upward all afternoon.
We walked back to the bedroom to stand in front of the enormous industrial fan at its center.
The fan whipped our hair from our cheeks and necks.
I took off my halter top outfit, but instead of immediately trying on one of the alternatives lying on the floor, I stood there with Margaret, talking in our underwear, trying not to sweat. Half an hour later, Eleanor arrived.
We watched her climb the stairs to the attic two at a time.
She held a small, monogrammed tote bag beneath her shoulder and a metal water bottle like a missile in her hand, ice cubes jostling within as she climbed.
Her platform sandals made her tall, though still not as tall as I was. She hugged me first. Our ears touched.
“So what are we doing after dinner?” Eleanor immediately asked Margaret with a sly look of provocation on her face.
My eyes rimmed hers.
“We’re throwing an orgy,” I said before Margaret could sour. “We’re defending the planet against an invasive force of hot acrobats wearing leotards and large ruffled collars,” a reference to Sailor Moon.
“Fun,” Eleanor replied, and let it drop.
She walked in front of me into the bathroom, where music played from Margaret’s phone.
We’d set the phone into a glass cup from the kitchen to amplify its sound, so the emphatic bass line pulsed in the confined space, its beats overlaid with women’s voices singing in ethereal tones.
Eleanor sat down on the closed lid of the toilet, lifted the phone from the cup, and, without anyone’s permission, began to edit the queue of songs.
Margaret resumed her makeup routine using her mother’s products, which she couldn’t share with us because she wasn’t supposed to be using them in the first place.
I plugged my straightener into the wall outlet next to the sink and began to section my hair.
She tapped concealer onto her various blemishes, careful not to thin the product in its application.
I ran a brush across my scalp for the sensation of its bristles’ rake.
My hair’s natural wave expanded with static.
She started fanning her face again to set the layer.
I passed the wand slowly down the length of a section and observed the strands’ silken realignment.
I didn’t wish I had straight hair, because then I would’ve missed out on the pleasure of straightening it.
Eleanor returned Margaret’s phone to the glass cup.
She required less time for assembly than the two of us because in place of wearing much makeup, she maintained a complex and multilayered skincare routine.
She pressed all her serums into her face by herself before she came over.
Her skin looked dewy and reflective. I’d seen the process many times when I slept at her house.
I’d watched her fingertips sink into her cheeks.
Once, I told her she could bring her skincare with her like we brought our makeup, but she refused on the basis that then she’d have to use someone else’s towel.
Still, she wouldn’t miss getting ready together as an event.
What we loved was to feel attractive in each other’s company, to spur each other on to greater beauty and to experience this ascension as a series of steps we could teach each other to perform—first bronzer, then contour, then a smudged and smoky eyeliner.
We complimented each other as we worked, and we accepted all of each other’s compliments without the reserve or suspicion that usually results from a person commenting upon your appearance.
Whatever my friends said about me, I believed them.
Margaret’s phone dinged in its cup. She turned from the mirror immediately and picked it up.
She grazed the message with her eyes, testing for its tenor, and then looked away.
She glanced at herself in the mirror, flicked her hair once, and then returned her phone to the cup without typing anything back.
She was disappointed. I saw her note the time on the lock screen and wondered how long she’d determined to wait before replying.
I picked up a fluffy makeup brush from my zippered bag and began dusting bronzer in between my boobs, at first haphazardly, then with greater precision, running the brush along the curve of the left and then the curve of the right to exaggerate their shadows.
Then I picked up a smaller brush, coated it in a pearlescent highlighter, and tapped the shimmering powder onto the tops of each.
Margaret, who had begun to apply further coats of mascara, paused with her mouth open to watch what I was doing in the mirror.
Though I consciously restrained my gaze to the foreground of the reflection, where Margaret and I stood by the sink, I felt Eleanor’s presence both behind and in front of me as I moved the brush up and down my chest. I knew she regarded my movements through the mirror from her seat.
I also knew I couldn’t look at her if I wanted her to continue looking at me.
“Wait,” Margaret said, admiration obvious in her voice. “Are you contouring your boobs right now?”
The question broke Eleanor’s gaze. I felt its withdrawal and followed. She lifted Margaret’s phone and scrolled in a rote manner through the list of songs on the screen. Then without apparently adding any of them to the queue, she put the phone down again. I nodded.
“Okay, she’s a genius,” Margaret announced, so I felt like a genius. “Do mine?”
I gave a baby dramatic roll of the eyes and smiled when I said, “Of course.”
Margaret was right about the reasonableness of her plan superstition, at least in the sense that we didn’t actually need to know where we were going or what we were doing that night in order to get dressed.
It was summer. It was Friday. We would ready ourselves into a state of hotness sufficient for whatever the universe might be so good as to offer us.
Unspoken but also agreed upon, we would ready ourselves into a state of hotness usable by Margaret in getting this boy to hang out with her. Presumably, he also had friends.
I enjoyed being considered eligible for this service more than I enjoyed performing it.
Given the choice between hanging out with exclusively Margaret and Eleanor and hanging out with Margaret and Eleanor plus other people, I almost always would have chosen to spend my time as just the three of us.
And I hated having to ask my mother for additional permissions in real time with my friends waiting to find out whether or not my presence was about to become a problem.
Whenever my mom said no to me, my organs melted in my stomach.
Also, I didn’t care very much about hanging out with boys.
Margaret left and came back in a new bra, the straps of which could be hooked together into an X across her back to draw her boobs toward the center of her chest. Then she reached into each cup and moved her flesh up and forward, so that her nipples were all the way at the edges of the fabric.
I could see the pink rims of her areolas folding over the lace of the bra.
The effect provided as much cleavage as she could, at that time, possibly have had.
I stepped back and bent over slightly, Margaret being a few inches shorter than I was, to repeat the process on her chest, dragging the bronzer brush along the center of each curve and tapping the highlighter brush along the tops.
“You are both deeply extra,” Eleanor said.
A thread of exasperation had entered her voice.
I felt the moment arrive, the moment most optimal for Margaret to spontaneously reveal she’d snuck out with Bea.
Eleanor and I were both present, and Margaret was in the midst of not getting exactly what she wanted from the boy she was texting.
As the seconds passed, I realized she wasn’t going to take the opportunity.
She wasn’t going to say anything. And I realized Eleanor had seen all this occur to me because she’d observed the same.
Which meant that if I didn’t ask my best friend now, at the last instant before what she hadn’t told us could become a secret she’d genuinely withheld, then I was a coward, and I couldn’t stand to be a coward in front of Eleanor, who hated cowardice, so I asked defiantly, “How was Wednesday night?”
Margaret took her time to reply. She pushed her chestnut hair over her shoulder and leaned toward the mirror to insert a small stud earring in the shape of a butterfly through the hole in her right ear.
Then she told the story easily, without embarrassment, without accounting for not having told it already, and without inquiring how I’d known to ask.
She and Bea had continued hanging out after their shared family dinner.
Bea had a car and could drive them wherever they could find to go.
They went to a late movie, the two of them.
Their mothers assented because anything the cousins did together could be considered family time.
Then they continued on to the playground, where they saw a mixture of people from our grade and Bea’s.
“Olivia was like fully drunk,” she said, Olivia being Bea’s best friend. “She kept trying to get people to sit down on the ground with her.”
“As one does,” I said, as though I had any idea.
I’d made the three of us all promise we’d get drunk for the first time together, just us. Not because I worried about missing out on some specific invitation but rather because I feared the effect of cumulative divergent experience. I didn’t want my friends to turn into other people without me.
“Olivia is suspicious,” Eleanor responded, “because she posts group photos in which she’s only edited her own face. Or like max, also Bea’s face. Why does she think no one will notice? Though she’s very good at blow-drying her hair.”
I agreed. I liked Bea and Olivia, and also they annoyed me. Margaret’s phone illuminated again. She whirled to lift it, but didn’t respond to this message either. When her eyes returned to ours, she pointed at Eleanor.
“Get your bag,” she said. “I want to see what you’re wearing.”
The monogram on the bag read BYE. Inside, a couple of neatly folded items of clothing. Eleanor only ever brought one outfit.