Continued, Girl’s Girl
I couldn’t sleep that night. I didn’t want to have to wake up in daylight and be expected to eat breakfast or answer questions.
Had my life changed, or not? I turned off all the lights in my bedroom and got into bed naked.
I lifted my laptop onto my chest and determined to spend the next six hours submerged in the Technicolor balm of animated television.
I put on my favorite show. Unfortunately, it was also Eleanor’s and reminded me inevitably of the start of our friendship.
I met Eleanor when our lower schools pooled into a single campus for seventh and eighth grade.
She had her own preexisting friends, but none of them close.
She was aloof but too pretty to be ostracized.
She had a complete set of rainbow gel pens, but she didn’t like to share them.
Other kids found this off-putting. She attended birthday parties and playdates without becoming anybody’s best anything.
Margaret claimed Eleanor as our friend first. I didn’t want to share Margaret any more than she already insisted on being shared, but my being against it did very little to slow the start of our friendship.
Margaret and Eleanor bonded through a shared willingness for truancy.
They both lied for a week straight about having their periods in order to avoid swimming for gym.
Our school had a frigid, acerbically chlorinated pool.
Every class was obligated, at some point, to take swimming as a gym rotation.
The school considered buoyancy a life skill, or they wanted to justify the district’s financial investment in an enormous rectangle of cold water.
On any given pool day, at least one kid claimed to have an ear infection or an upset stomach.
The pervasiveness of the impulse to skip meant that all excuses were met with skepticism from the gym teacher—except for having your period.
Having your period didn’t require a doctor’s note and repelled questions from adults with and without uteruses.
No one wanted to tell a twelve-year-old to put in a tampon.
The only downside of the excuse was its time limit, a week tops.
After that, everyone would think you had some sort of monster biological functions, because everyone did know the meaning of a girl’s otherwise unexplained abstention from swimming.
This was embarrassing enough to prevent the full eighth of the class who might have actually been menstruating from saying so.
Willingness to use a period as either a ruse or a real excuse implied a level of confidence with your own reproductive happenings that was rare among us.
I remember resenting Margaret and Eleanor for that confidence as much as I initially resented their togetherness.
The rest of us, maybe forty at a time, swam laps or splashed behind kickboards or floated on our backs, covertly butterflying our hands to stay afloat.
So many small flapping bodies set the water into a chaos of intersecting waves.
I was a good swimmer, which made me too proud to swim in the shallow end, where I would certainly have been less miserable.
Instead, I swam in the deep end, where I felt overwhelmed by arms and legs on either side of me and was unable to easily touch my toes to the bottom of the pool and rest, in spite of my already advancing height.
To be made, in the middle of the day, to strip down to a one-piece bathing suit in front of everyone you know and then emerge forty-five minutes later, sopping wet and shivering with red goggle rims around your eyes, is undignified, but no one cares about the dignity of a twelve-year-old.
Of course, I couldn’t tolerate exempting myself from an obligation.
I couldn’t lie to the gym teacher about blood falling out of my vagina.
So I had to swim, and Margaret and Eleanor didn’t.
They spent their vacation from the water sitting together high up on the yellow wood bleachers.
I saw their heads turning continually to speak to each other, their mouths to each other’s ears, probably so they could hear over the din of the water and the complaints of the swimmers and the chastisements of the gym teacher reminding us not to stop between laps.
After class, I’d ask Margaret what they talked about, but she had nothing to report other than that she liked Eleanor and thought I would too.
Five days is not very long in adult time, but a school week is sufficient to change the life of a barely teenaged person.
By Friday, Margaret had solidified her claim on Eleanor by inviting her to our weekend sleepover.
Naturally, I was alarmed. Constant vigilance, really, is necessary to hold on to your friends at that age.
Not that I thought Margaret would throw me off.
We were too deeply bound. Half of her pairs of underwear were mine that she’d never given back.
But I might become her old, default best friend, her obligatory childhood best friend, instead of her shiny, chosen, new best friend—which I intended to avoid.
At the sleepover, Margaret left us alone in her room for a while to go placate her mother about some recent inflammatory behavior on the part of her father. Eleanor and I sat on the floor in our pajamas. The conversation turned to TV.
“Serena can’t be your favorite,” I said. “She’s Sailor Moon.” I considered choosing the show’s protagonist an abdication of the responsibility of expressing a favorite. Eleanor called Sailor Moon by her Japanese name, Usagi, before realizing I wasn’t familiar.
“Alright,” she said, and considered. “Then, Sailor Uranus.”
Known to me as Amara, Sailor Uranus split her time between contributing to the group effort to protect the planet from sexy and thematic alien invasions and pursuing a career as a professional teenaged race car driver.
She was tall and wore button-down shirts and spent all her time with her cousin, Sailor Neptune, known to me as Michelle.
But Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune were secondary members of the cast. They only appeared in a subset of the show’s total episodes.
As a result, I thought Eleanor had become annoyed with me for refuting her original answer and so chosen the character with the funniest name.
“Mine is Mars,” I said.
Sailor Mars had amazing long black hair and was mad at everyone all the time.
“Ugh,” Eleanor sighed in agreement. “Yes, totally.”
What I wanted from Eleanor was proof that she understood the primacy of my friendship with Margaret.
That she wanted to be our friend—my friend too—but also would be fine with Margaret and me hanging out without her, as we had done for a decade.
At that age, it’s dangerous to befriend anyone who too obviously wants to hang out with you.
Adults instructed us, especially the girls, to be nice as a blanket statement without understanding the tight social confines in which we lived.
No one could get away from anyone else, having nowhere to go and no way of pretending you were busy.
There weren’t any boundaries except for the ones that we ourselves enforced when it came to the couple of hundred people we saw all day, five days a week, for three quarters of the year.
There was so little space in the social life of that era that every new friendliness was essentially a threat to the existing version of peace.
I didn’t want to create any obligations of friendship that I would then feel compelled to follow through on unless I was sure I wanted the friend.
I offered to draw Uranus’s symbol on the flesh of Eleanor’s inner arm with a permanent marker if she would draw Mars’s symbol on mine.
By the time Margaret came back, we were covered in squiggles.
She pouted, so we drew all over her next.
When Margaret inscribed an inside joke of ours on my leg with the black pen, Eleanor didn’t ask what it meant or suggest she wanted the same.
She let Margaret’s claim on me stand because she was smart and because she was proud.
She was aware that we were desirable friends to have at school, but there were other desirable groups she could have attempted to join instead—and didn’t.
We accepted Eleanor as ours because it was clear to us that she would be.
In the wake of the kiss, it occurred to me that in addition to being ours, she might also be mine.
At the time of my first sleepover with Eleanor, I had watched and rewatched the old nineties English dub of Sailor Moon through an illegal video-streaming service that required you to take a break every seventy-two minutes or give them your credit card.
To my outrage, the prompt to pay usually fell at some point in the middle of an episode.
Three years later, I figured there had to be a better option.
A bit of searching led me to discover subtitled versions of the episodes that were also available to stream for free online.
The subtitles hewed much more closely to the original Japanese audio, which the network had heavily censored in its dubbing for American audiences based on what they deemed appropriate for children.
In my bed in the middle of the night, I found out that Amara’s and Michelle’s real names were Haruka and Michiru.
Also, Haruka and Michiru weren’t cousins. They were in love.
Blood moved hard through my body. I reviewed what I knew: They blushed at each other, they held hands, and Haruka liked to drive Michiru around in her yellow convertible sports car.
Now that I was paying attention, the two of them were very obviously boning.
Eleanor, I realized for not the first time, was much better than I was at using the computer.