Continued, Girl’s Girl
I entered my house on a cloud. I had been kissed.
Other truths belonged on the ground where they had nothing to do with me.
I could have run up to my room but didn’t.
I could have said nothing but I was bad at being quiet.
I texted Eleanor an emoji of a sunrise. I traipsed into the kitchen.
My mother wasn’t there. I continued into the living room and found her folding laundry.
I fell upon the tuffet of waiting towels, still warm from the dryer.
She wanted my help, naturally. I picked up a towel and folded it in half and then in half again.
“No. Let me show you,” she said, and began demonstrating for the hundredth time her method of thirds.
“Stop,” I said, and sat down on the arm of the couch. “I want to tell you something.” I didn’t mean to be dramatic. I just couldn’t immediately say the words. “Eleanor kissed me in the field behind the school last night—this morning.”
My mom looked at me from above her towel.
“She kissed you.”
“Yes.” She kissed me. I wanted to print the words on a billboard. I wanted to wear them on a T-shirt.
“In the field behind the school, this morning.”
“Yes.”
“Why were you in the field behind the school? It’s only seven. What time was this?”
Here was the point at which I could have lied but didn’t. “Because we slept there,” I said, almost angrily, because I already knew by then where we were going.
“You were supposed to sleep at Margaret’s.”
I stood up. “I was very near Margaret’s. I was fine. I wasn’t at a party. No one else was there, only the three of us. I’m trying to tell you about like a life event.” My body was getting very hot.
“You told me you would be at Margaret’s, and then instead you were somewhere else.
You weren’t even at a house. You were in the middle of a field”—she didn’t need to say, a field where anyone could have scooped me up and driven me blindfolded across state lines or into a shallow grave or the mouths of coyotes—“which is something I would not have agreed to, had you asked me, which you did not.”
Having said all this, she looked as though she were about to resume folding the towel, so I pulled it out of her hands and threw it on the ground. “Could you stop doing laundry for like one minute of your life?”
She didn’t like that at all. She removed a strand of hair that had stuck to her face.
“I didn’t ask permission, but I didn’t have to tell you either. Everything was fine. Everything was completely fine. I slept on some grass and walked home. I’m telling you right now, of my own volition, because I wanted you to know. I could have said nothing!”
I burst into tears. Nothing had ever happened to me, and now one single thing had happened to me, and I’d shown it to her, and she was ruining it. She was corroding its perfect surface every second we stood there together having a fight instead of a high five.
“I’m the good one,” I said, my voice plaintive and desperate. I refused to wipe the hot water from my face. “You don’t know how good I am. I’m the responsible one. I say no to everything. I’m the least fun person I know, and it’s all for you!”
She had no idea what this meant, and I couldn’t explain it to her.
I couldn’t tell her all the times I’d stopped my friends from being reckless without revealing their recklessness.
I couldn’t put myself into context without making her want to take me away from my life.
And it wouldn’t have mattered anyway—she never judged my character against the rubric of anyone else’s behavior, only her own standard of right.
“You’ve broken my trust,” she said in a straightforward tone of voice that asked me to hear what she meant, but I had no desire to understand.
“You’ve broken my trust,” I shouted back.
“I’ll just lie to you from now on. I’ll just tell you nothing.
My friends don’t tell their moms anything.
No one does! It’s just me, and I won’t anymore.
” I considered this a very grave threat.
Just saying it out loud made me ache. But her face hardly moved.
I hated that nothing appeared to be wrong with her, that her expression could remain so neutral.
I couldn’t understand it, I who wore my feelings like clothes and could hide nothing.
“Aren’t you going to say one friendly thing?”
She straightened her shoulders, collecting herself. “It’s wonderful that you and Eleanor kissed,” she said. “It is. I’m glad for you. I should have said that first. Congratulations.”
The words coming out of her mouth were so measured, so discordant with my pinnacle of feeling. I began to spin away from her in disgust.
“Mina,” she said, and I stopped. She almost looked apologetic. If she felt sorry, it was for what she had to say next, which was that she was going to call Margaret’s and Eleanor’s parents and tell them what we’d done.
—
I ran away to my room, and it didn’t feel far enough. I sat in my closet to have more doors between us, and the gesture felt stupid. I felt stupid. My emotions crested above my head and fell on top of me like a bucket of cold water. I texted Margaret and Eleanor what was happening because I had to.
IM SORRY, I wrote.
I didn’t report the exact contents of my conversation with my mother, just what they could expect from her and why.
I did make it clear that I’d told her about the field on my own, that I’d manufactured our mutual demise for no reason.
She’d forced no explanation from me. We hadn’t been caught; I’d given us away.
Guilt and shame beat their fists against the windows of my heart, and I knew they wouldn’t stop until I told my friends the whole of what I’d done.
I was desperate to get it over with, so I could feel better.
I sent a bunch of messages in a row. The chat looked wildly lopsided, all my blue text filling up the right side of the screen.
Maybe I should have called them on the phone or on video, so they could have seen my dumb miserable face, but I couldn’t bear to be looked at by Eleanor so immediately under such dramatically worse circumstances, and I didn’t want to be seen by Margaret either.
ahhhh ok, Margaret responded. A minute later she sent, lemme go deal.
And then she said nothing else. Eleanor sent nothing at all.
I assumed they were talking to their moms and also to each other, in a separate text, which they had a right to do, which I would have done if I were them, but I wanted to dig a hole in the ground and live there for the rest of my life.
I needed someone to tell about my misery, but usually I told my friends about my mom and my mom about my friends, so I wrote a very long note for myself in my phone in order to avoid further exacerbating the word-count ratio in our group chat.
The note was full of self-loathing because given the same circumstances, I knew I’d make the same mistake again. Then I put my phone into a shoe.
I was the least chill person on earth and I knew it. Everyone else had a skeleton, and I was just a bunch of organs. I couldn’t keep a single thing to myself if it mattered. I needed to leash myself like a dog. I needed to tell myself to sit or I’d show everybody my belly.
I tried instead to remember the kiss in its perfection, my body as it had been, but every minute that passed took me further and further away from the self I’d been in the moment El had kissed me.
The self I was now, in my closet, would not have been kissed.
Had it really happened? Was there any reason in the world to believe it had happened beyond my own memory of it?
I took my phone back out of the shoe and realized I hadn’t taken any pictures by the school or in the field.
My last images were of the three of us, on Margaret’s street, the golden light still cradling our faces.
The clock on my phone read 8:00. Somehow, the whole rest of the day remained for me to further ruin my own life.
I needed time to pass faster, so I crawled into bed and went to sleep for a few hours.
When I woke, my mom came in to inform me that the calls had been made; Nancy and Kim said they were grateful to my mom for reporting their daughters’ misconduct.
They weren’t really, or they weren’t especially. They could have done without the information, I later heard from Margaret, though neither of them would have admitted as much to my grave and upright mother.
Nancy was mostly embarrassed, and she yelled at Margaret for embarrassing her.
Margaret shouted back that it was embarrassing her mother had sex sleepovers with random men while she was in the middle of having wholesome, childhood sleepovers with her friends.
They screamed at each other for a while about whose behavior was least becoming and who had the right to criticize whom.
It could have been worse, however. My mom thought we’d snuck out while Nancy slept in her bed.
She thought Nancy had been duped by us, instead of absent, because I hadn’t told her Nancy wasn’t there.
Not out of virtue—I’d simply failed to say so, and then we were in the middle of our fight.
Nancy didn’t correct her either. She would have been humiliated by my mom knowing, or by having to inform her, that we’d been left alone unsupervised on account of her dating life.
But considering that mention of her absence had never been made, considering that nothing actually bad had happened—no abuse of substances, no fraternizing with the opposite sex, no breaking of family heirlooms, et cetera—considering that Nancy was a very busy person with a real and demanding job and an almost ex-ed husband and a romantic life she was attempting to restart for the sake of her dignity, she decided her daughter had to spend the rest of the weekend cleaning out their scary basement, and that was about it.
Eleanor’s mom had an even more circumspect attitude.
“Maybe you should let me know the next time you plan to go camping,” was all Kim said.
Then she went back to designing somebody’s chic living room.
Her daughter could randomly decide to sleep in a field if she felt like it.
Eleanor had her phone set to share her GPS location and a sound head on her shoulders.
She was a teenager, after all, and could have done worse.
Her siblings had all done worse. That’s what Eleanor told Margaret had happened, and then Margaret told me.
Eleanor didn’t tell me herself because she didn’t respond to my texts at all.
—
I remained awake late that night, aware I wouldn’t be able to go anywhere in the morning.
I sat on top of my comforter and stared out the window beside my bed.
Huge trees obscured the world beyond my backyard.
Only partially visible above them hung the moon.
Was she sorry for me? It seemed possible.
The blackened palette of night blunted reality.
Still, I felt deeply shaken by what I’d missed in myself.
Prior to Eleanor kissing me, I would not have said that the nature of my friendship with her differed from the nature of my friendship with Margaret—only that Eleanor and Margaret were themselves different people, and that our friendships therefore manifested differently.
An inadequate characterization, apparently.
Eleanor had proven that by kissing me—I, though I hadn’t known it yet, by wanting so badly to be kissed.
I should have known. I should have noticed.
I hadn’t considered Eleanor a person I could kiss.
Because she was a girl, yes, but even more so because she was a person I already loved and had loved for years.
The sexual interactions of my life thus far had exclusively involved people who weren’t important to me.
They could be easily discarded. In middle school, I’d had a boyfriend I never talked to.
We served a purpose for each other. Kissing Eleanor could not serve a tidy purpose for me.
Kissing Eleanor radically reoriented my inner life.
The rest of that weekend, I wasn’t able to help myself.
I texted her. When she didn’t respond, I sent more messages.
I sent too many. I said I wanted to kiss again.
I apologized for getting her into trouble, even though I hadn’t, in case she’d feel compelled to reassure me.
I sent references to the sun, to the field, the occasional lone emoji as though I might catch her off guard.
I sent a screenshot of Sim Ginevra’s baby, whom I had aged up to be a purple-haired toddler of perfect computer cuteness.
I cropped the image to exclude the baby’s name, so that she might ask me what it was, but she didn’t.
I texted in our usual style in case she was waiting for a sign of my willingness to ignore what had happened, but she wasn’t.
Not that I would have been able to hold my tongue had she sent me even one neutral text, which she did not.
On Sunday night, I deleted all those messages from my phone, just to hide from the shame of having sent them, to avoid looking at the long, lopsided screenplay of my unanswered texts.
But then the trouble was, it was like I’d never sent them in the first place, because there was no proof I had—beyond my humiliation, which lingered persistently, without the grounding effect of evidence and without relief.
El’s silence forced me to conclude that whatever she’d wanted from me at the time, before I’d gone and ruined it, she didn’t want anymore.
I’d proven myself unready. And yet, when she posted a picture of herself in a bikini sitting by her pool only a few hours after she would have received my last message, I couldn’t help feeling the photo was directed at me and taking it personally.