Continued, Girl’s Girl
We walked home from dinner inefficiently, unwilling to acquiesce to the universe’s disinterest in our pleasure.
It was such a lusciously golden evening, only a week before the summer solstice, the boundaries of daylight near their loosest of the year.
The sun wouldn’t set until after nine, the sidewalk still warm to the palm I laid on its dimpled surface to check.
Having nothing else to do, we took more pictures of ourselves in the perfect after-dinner light.
Sitting, squatting, standing, with the sky as a background, with the grass as a background, with the camera set to self-timer on the hood of someone’s car, Margaret on top of a fire hydrant holding on to the stem of a stop sign, Eleanor refusing to lie down on a front yard because she didn’t want grass stains, me with my head tipped back and my hair swinging between my shoulder blades.
Shouldn’t something happen to us? Shouldn’t a star fall on our heads?
Hadn’t our bodies shaken anything loose from the universe?
The pulse of these questions in my chest felt like enough for me.
There is safety in longing for what you know you won’t get.
I didn’t want to have to say no to something as always.
I didn’t want to prevent my friends from scaling a fence or jumping into some house’s pool or stealing an orange traffic cone with no plan for where to put it.
Please don’t make me, I thought. Please, please—and yet I had my own summer urgency too, the sense that something had to happen to us, and we were wasting time if it didn’t, that we couldn’t return to school in two months exactly the same as who we’d been when we left it.
Eventually, an SUV full of boys we recognized drove by and honked at us, which, we agreed, represented at least some comment from the populace on our efforts.
Bea called Margaret back, and I felt vaguely sick.
When Margaret answered the video chat, Bea said, “Hey, babe,” from the passenger seat of a car that evidently wasn’t hers.
Bea had naturally auburn hair, which she dyed a deep brown and then straightened too often for the health of its ends.
I didn’t want to get roped into Bea’s night, because I had limited faith in Bea’s judgment and no faith at all in Margaret’s ability to refuse her older cousin.
She held out her phone so the camera included me and Eleanor.
We put our arms around her waist and squeezed our cheeks into her cheeks to fit.
She mentioned the boys with an eye roll.
“We were like, Hello, yes, we’re walking down the street. Congratulations.”
Bea laughed and then looked offscreen to provide directions to the unseen driver beside her.
“What are you up to?” Margaret asked, which was as close as she’d come to requesting an invitation.
Margaret always tried to approach Bea from even ground, which rarely proved possible because Bea had been born a year before Margaret and hadn’t wasted any of her time since.
She owned a vibrator I’d seen a picture of and had third piercings, both her ears decked with dangling metal.
Instead of answering, Bea said she had to go because they were about to merge onto the highway and she needed to focus.
We circled as many additional blocks as we could reasonably justify and returned to Margaret’s house dissatisfied with the uselessness of our good looks.
No one else was home. We changed into our pajamas but couldn’t stomach the removal of our hair and makeup.
I didn’t say anything, but Margaret still knew I felt relieved and as a result became irritable with me.
“Mina,” she said. “Why didn’t you bring back the shorts I lent you?” She was wearing one of my softest sweatshirts when she said this, which she’d taken from my house six months ago without asking.
Eleanor intervened by setting up a playlist of music videos on Margaret’s laptop in the living room.
We began to dance. We alternated between sexual thrusting and donning blankets like capes to run around in circles with only half-hearted enthusiasm.
Nancy called at ten-thirty, and Margaret left the room to answer.
She found it easier to finesse her mother without the two of us actively listening.
In her absence, Eleanor and I fell onto the couch, relieved from our duty of merrymaking.
The sun had set. The night ran hot and clear.
A soft commotion of summer insects sounded through the living room’s raised windows.
Frogs carried on long-distance conversations.
Eleanor picked up a section of her hair and began braiding its strands.
She’d sat so close to me on the couch that when she shifted her weight the cushions collapsed between our bodies and our thighs touched knee to hip.
“Mar makes me tired,” I whispered. Margaret’s resentment of our failure to produce an adequate escalation annoyed me.
Us sitting at home on a Friday night marred her emerging narrative of this summer as transformational, as replete with unarticulated potential, as who knew what might happen so long as it wasn’t nothing.
“Like I’m sorry I’m not a boy she can hook up with to make this night sufficiently legendary,” I said.
I found her need to make pace exhausting, and I thought Eleanor, who famously loved playing video games and going to sleep, would agree with me, but instead she paused her braiding and gave me a look. Her gray eyes bore into mine.
She was waiting for me, I realized. She was waiting for me to ask her to braid my hair next, as I always did, as I hadn’t yet.
And I had an instinct, an unbidden knowing, that she’d started touching her own hair because she’d wanted me to ask her to touch mine.
But then she turned sharply away. Her face colored, the rosacea on her cheeks pinkening.
I hadn’t asked fast enough. Worse, I’d caught her wanting me to ask.
“Aren’t there things you want to have happen?” she said.
By which I imagined she meant, didn’t I want to proceed into the next version of myself, whoever she was, to find out who I’d be once I’d dipped myself further into the frigid and thrilling waters of being alive?
At fifteen, that meant pursuing any course of action unavailable to a child—doing anything that we wouldn’t and couldn’t have done before.
Didn’t I want to find out of what I was capable?
I did, but did it have to be right now? Only a week or two had passed since the end of school, and summer seemed to unfurl before me like an infinite golden carpet. We still had plenty of time to surprise ourselves.
Margaret finished her phone call, but she didn’t immediately descend the stairs.
Instead, we heard her walking around in the attic, her footsteps setting the wood floor to creak and groan through the house.
A pause, then the sound of water rushing through the pipes.
Then she came back down to the living room with a look on her face I didn’t like.
“I know what we’re doing tonight,” she announced. “We’re going out.”
“We’re going out?”
Her mom wasn’t coming home. Nancy had spent the evening on a date and called to inform Margaret she wouldn’t return until morning.
Nancy didn’t know her daughter had two friends preparing to sleep at her house, because she didn’t know we were over at all.
I didn’t know Margaret’s mom had begun going on dates.
Did Eleanor? Margaret’s parents’ divorce wasn’t even all the way finalized. My face burned.
“Let’s walk to the Metropark,” Margaret said.
“And what?” I asked.
“And like walk around.”
The Metropark closed at eleven. It would be pitch-black.
Once we got there, she’d make me stumble around in a marsh in the dark.
I shook my head—please no. And yet, I saw real uneasiness and even fear on Margaret’s face, reminding me suddenly of the time she’d read her mother’s journal to me.
The entry had been dated a year or two into Margaret’s life.
I like myself less now than I did before, it said. We laughed after Margaret read this.
“Adults are dumb,” she said.
I agreed. “Adults are literally so dumb.” But I could tell she wished we hadn’t read it.
A fierce protectiveness rose up in me, a need to shield her from that desperate, sunken feeling, that unarticulated weight. I realized we couldn’t just sit there. We’d have to follow her out of the house.
Margaret turned to Eleanor, and Eleanor said, “We could sleep at the high school. Like camping.”
Then Eleanor gave Margaret a look that meant she obviously would have said yes to this adventure if it were just the two of them, and she gave me a look that meant, I know you saw the look I just gave Margaret but you’re not going to do better than this and you’re welcome. The look meant, Be grateful, and I was.
We stuffed old pillows and picnic quilts into a couple of enormous synthetic blue bags, closed every window, locked and relocked every door, checked the garage, checked the attic just in case, set the house alarm, and made a run for it out the front door before the alarm could activate.
The sidewalks of Doan had darkened, gone hushed and tentative.
We crept and slunk and whispered. After twenty minutes, we reached the low brick buildings of our high school, its parking lot empty.
Margaret and Eleanor ran to the nearest structure and looked through its somber windows into its vacant classrooms. I hung back.