Chapter 14
July cleared its throat, and the last of the early-summer storms stomped their feet.
Thursday morning after the Fourth, my mom invited me out for a walk.
Great sheets of water had fallen throughout the early hours, downing tree branches and knocking over the potted plants that flanked our front door.
Bright green leaves littered the sidewalk, and Amelanchier berries thrown from their branches like bombs stained the concrete a bloody purple.
My mom wore her tall black rain boots over stiff straight-legged jeans, her hair loose upon her back.
“I think it’s been enough,” she said. By which she meant, I could see my friends again.
The first thing I felt was alarm. I’d been waiting for this news, but that didn’t mean I was ready for it.
I didn’t know why she’d decided I was. Perhaps she understood that summer days have special length and weight and pitied me.
Perhaps she’d grown tired of my sullen dragging about the house.
Perhaps she’d noticed my conspicuous reading of classic British literature in the living room and approved of my effort.
She didn’t explain. She didn’t apologize for the way she’d made me feel about Eleanor either, but then I wasn’t sure she even understood what she’d done to me those few weeks before.
I couldn’t explain it myself, and I never managed to hold on to my anger at her tightly enough to prevent it from leaking away.
“Well,” she said. “Who are you contacting first, now that you’re free?”
I shrugged. I didn’t know how either of my friends would receive me, whether or not they’d forgiven me, whether or not they’d even been mad at me or merely annoyed with my talent for conjuring problems from thin air.
“One of them or the other,” I said. A lingering instinct to protect my life from her remained.
We walked into the street to avoid a section of the sidewalk guarded by an orange mesh net. Two squares of cement had risen at the center where they met, pushed up by the rising and falling temperatures of winter, and now needed to be repaired.
“I can always insist you stay home for a few more days if you want me to,” my mom suggested.
I looked at her in surprise. Sometimes my mom made me feel like a clear glass suit of armor with a big red heart inside.
She read in me my feelings at nearly the same pace at which I felt them.
This habit that she’d been practicing for the entire length of my life still managed to catch me off guard.
Back home, I called Margaret, no video.
“Is El mad at me?” I asked when she picked up. It was the most direct question I could manage.
“What do you mean?” Margaret responded in the good-natured, inquiring tone of voice she used on people she didn’t care about very much.
“Because she’s not in trouble,” I said. “She didn’t get in trouble.
She never gets in trouble. You’re the one with the real reason to be mad at me.
” I realized as I said it that this was the right thing to say.
“Is your mom still holding it against you?” I asked, and paced across the wood floor of my room. The panels groaned beneath me.
“Only when she can’t think of anything else,” Margaret answered in a more familiar tone. “El probably just wants you to know that she has the right to be mad at you if she feels like it. Like you did do something she could be mad about.”
“Because Eleanor’s never done anything anyone could be mad about,” I said.
After we hung up, Margaret invited me to Eleanor’s house via the group chat.
Fifteen minutes later, I biked over. The aftermath of that morning’s rainstorm was an unabashedly sunny afternoon.
No clouds, no risk of clouds, just July heat like a clarified broth pouring over my shoulders between the intermittent shade of the large elm trees that lined almost every street between my house and Eleanor’s.
Their branches arced over the roadways, making verdant tunnels through which birdsong and the clanging of machinery rang.
All summer long, jackhammers and cement trucks worked on cordoned-off halves of streets, fixing the potholes that pockmarked the pavement.
I focused on avoiding them. I promised myself I could be normal.
I could be the same as I’d ever been, whoever that was.
I walked my bike up Eleanor’s long driveway and into her backyard, following the paved path lined by neat rows of hydrangeas to reach the pool—ovular, with a crisp blue bottom and a row of surrounding lounge chairs, cream-and-black pillows on each and a chest of beige towels rolled neatly into cylinders.
Eleanor’s house resembled a hotel, all its elements present on purpose.
Her mother, Kim, had been educated as an architect, a career later derailed by the arrival of the first of her children and then eventually transformed into her present occupation as an elegant interior designer for the wealthy Midwest by the time Eleanor was born.
The family home functioned as a résumé, their sinks all flanked by scented hand soap and towels that matched the wallpaper.
Eleanor and Margaret were already lounging in their bathing suits, and I knew right away that Margaret must have slept over the night before, though neither of them had said so when they invited me.
I hesitated among the plants, not yet noticed, and watched while Margaret handed Eleanor half a lemon, and Eleanor began to squeeze its juice on top of Margaret’s head.
Margaret’s hair was already wet and clung to her neck.
Eleanor gave the lemon back to Margaret, and they changed position.
Margaret got onto her knees behind Eleanor and squeezed the fruit onto Eleanor’s head.
Eleanor’s hair could hardly have gotten any lighter, but still she diligently stroked the liquid down through its ends.
I felt a vise briefly lock around my breathing.
My pulse began to beat between my legs. Lemon juice dripped from her hair, which she wore in a blunt cut just above her shoulders.
Her shoulders had been deeply pinked by the sun since the last time I saw her in person, as had her collarbone and the high tops of her cheeks.
I had not yet allowed myself to masturbate while thinking about Eleanor, because thinking about Eleanor’s body with purpose seemed like a mean thing to do to me.
All these years there’d been a distance between us.
Now I knew the sensation of its sudden, temporary, exquisite disappearance, and I had to hide that knowing from myself, if I wanted to go on as I had been.
I called out my presence, and my friends in unison stood up to hug me.
I didn’t kiss Margaret on the cheek, so I wouldn’t have to kiss Eleanor.
Their bodies smelled like lemons and sweat, but one point of difference immediately occurred to me—that the smell of Margaret’s body, however familiar, did not and had never made me want to press my face into her chest and neck.
I pulled my dress up over my head.
“Would you like a lemon?” Eleanor asked.
They’d wrung the one in Margaret’s hand to a pulp, but she’d go inside and fetch another for me if I wanted.
I shook my head. I couldn’t possibly stand there and squeeze lemon juice into my hair in front of her after what I’d felt upon seeing her do the same.
I couldn’t rub sunscreen into myself either. I’d just have to sit there and burn.
“How’s Starter Penis?” I asked Margaret while I arranged myself on my chair.
Eleanor appreciated both my tone after the absence and the fact that I hadn’t immediately addressed her. I could tell because she allowed herself, briefly, to look me in the eye. Besides, Margaret never could resist a friendly invitation to assume the role of protagonist.
“He’s good,” she drawled, propping herself up onto an arm bent at the elbow. “But we’re actually calling him Parking Lot now. We feel it’s more respectful.”
Her wrists and fingers glinted in the sunshine, light reflecting off her bracelets and rings.
Some of them leaked green copper from having been worn too many times in the pool.
The metal must have been hot in the July sun, but Margaret loved the tan lines that looped like white vines up her hands as a reward for this commitment to appearance.
“Also, apparently he’s Olivia’s new neighbor,” she added after a moment.
“What?” I said.
Margaret explained that his family had recently moved into the house, which she and Eleanor found out when they went over there the night of the Fourth. Other boys had been there too.
Margaret retrieved Eleanor’s phone from inside the large, fine-mesh bag beside her chair.
The same phone Eleanor had not used to text me.
It had a new case, encrusted in rhinestones and deliberately evocative of the ultra-femininity that Eleanor enjoyed both making fun of and embodying.
She wore a melon-colored terry-cloth bikini that probably wasn’t supposed to get wet.
Margaret took her hotness much more seriously.
She had on a black bikini made of a bandage-like fabric designed to secure the body into curvature and a pair of sunglasses with miniature lenses.
She held El’s phone in front of El’s face to unlock it, then held the phone in front of mine to reveal a dark image in a windowless basement with a beaten couch that could have belonged to any house in the Midwest. Margaret, Eleanor in my shirt, Bea, and Olivia sat interspersed with boys I didn’t really know but recognized from social media as attractive people who attended a different school in the area.
We were all aware of each other like that.