Chapter 12
The Fourth of July fell on a Tuesday that year.
The holiday presented a problem for me in its undeniability as an occasion for seeing people.
Everyone would be going out and posting about it.
Everyone would be wearing outfits. Eleanor would be going out and wearing an outfit. And still, I hadn’t heard from her.
What Margaret would have advised me to do, had I been in a position to receive her advice, was to post a very fire photo of myself.
So I elaborately composed my hair and makeup in the bathroom for as many hours as I could stretch the activity, while listening to music and slinking around in front of the mirror, making eyes and cheeks at myself, examining myself from various degrees of profile, raising and lowering my chin and eyelashes, opening and closing my mouth, occasionally singing.
In these kinds of wars, you have to make clear to the other party that your hotness cannot be ignored, that your hotness is inherent to the situation at hand and ongoing, and if you want to occupy the hottest version of yourself, then you have to call her up and out.
I faced the mirror with my hair blown dry and my eyeliner applied and stood on my tiptoes, and it felt possible that I could will Eleanor into texting me back by means of my face and body, even before I took the picture.
That my hotness could curl the ribbon between us, and Eleanor would feel it from the other side.
Then I kissed the cold mirror with my eyes open, in case I could see what I’d done wrong when I kissed Eleanor with my eyes closed. Then I licked it.
I took my picture in the driveway instead of the garden because the driveway suggested a second location.
Yes, it could have been considered pathetic to post a picture of myself that implied I was going somewhere when I wasn’t, but all of us basically did that all of the time.
And more importantly, whatever I posted would definitely appear at the top of Eleanor’s feed, as all of her and Margaret’s posts always appeared at the top of mine, and I wanted to be hot in front of Eleanor more than I cared about anything else.
If Eleanor was going to pretend not to have kissed me, then I wanted to remind her that this was the person she was pretending not to have kissed.
I situated myself beneath the power lines that loped above the sidewalk of my street.
Right away, sweat rose to my surface. Clouds made an oven of the late-afternoon air, but an intermittent light also touched the neighborhood, sparkling off the hoods of cars and sharpening the shadows of leaves thrown onto the streets by the trees above them.
Inside my house, I felt safe, but I also felt stranded.
Out here I could hear all the insects, the swelling ambient noise of the season.
A woodpecker thrummed against one of the trees on my street, and a jackhammer somewhere in the surrounding blocks operated in fifteen-second bursts.
If I strained, I could hear the faint tinkling music of an ice-cream truck.
This was why I came outside so often. The perfect splendor of Ohio high summer articulated my aloneness back to me in gold script.
It said that I was experiencing a trial of the heart.
I was being shunned by my first lover. I had the right to a grandeur of melancholy previously unknown to me, and this right made me feel beautiful.
I set up my tripod on the cement and used a timer to take my picture.
I posed with one of my hands in my hair, then on my hip, resetting my phone over and over again.
I arched my back, tilted my head, and changed the angle of my shoulders.
Eventually, I felt an awareness and turned to see a rabbit standing on its hind legs on the tree lawn fifteen feet in front of me, belly exposed.
Its black eye met mine, all pupil, before it dashed across the street.
“Are you going somewhere?” my mom asked me when I returned to the house through the side door a few minutes later wearing nine layers of mascara and a crop top.
“No,” I said, and I made a bowl of cereal and carried it back upstairs to my room to eat while I looked through the two hundred photos of myself I’d taken and decided which one to post.
happy 4th! I texted Margaret.
happy 4th!! she sent back an hour later.
I watched the fireworks from the end of the block with my parents and our neighbors.
I didn’t want to walk to the field behind the school where the real show took place because my friends would be there, and even though my mom would surely have let me say hello or even watch the fireworks with them, I’d still have to go home at the end of the night, and the two of them would leave together.
Also I couldn’t bear to stand again on that same field where Eleanor had kissed me, now that we were estranged and what had happened between us had gone unacknowledged.
I waited until the next morning to post my content and then waited another three hours for Margaret to post hers.
First a picture of herself and Bea in various states of patriotic undress, standing in front of the black SUV I now recognized as Bea’s car.
And then a second picture of herself with Eleanor, who had her arm around Bea’s best friend, Olivia.
Eleanor was wearing my shirt, pale-blue pointelle. The one I’d lent Margaret. The shirt cast a triangular shadow, lifting as it did from the skin above Eleanor’s belly button.