Chapter 14 #2
One of the boys from the friend group was missing.
He must have been the one to take the picture.
Margaret must have asked him. Eleanor hated asking anybody for anything, Bea would have asked Margaret, and Olivia typically let Bea bear the discomfort of being in charge.
I wished I could have been there to see Margaret decide that she cared more about having the picture than about pretending she didn’t need one.
Suspicious red cups were visible on the carpeted basement floor.
The photo had been framed to include them.
“But El is refusing to post her content,” Margaret said.
“You should have posted it with yours,” Eleanor replied.
Eleanor never posted pictures of herself smiling in a line with other people.
Though she posed with the group when occasion called for it, she let others use their digital real estate on such generic images.
The pictures she posted were most often candid adjacent.
She liked to be caught in the act of attractiveness, the image slightly blurred by movement.
Margaret sighed. She couldn’t be the one to post a picture including both herself and a boy with whom she was then trying to hook up.
It was too forward an indication of interest. But the Fourth was only two days prior, which meant we were still within the acceptable window for Eleanor to post about it.
“What happened to your plan of never speaking to him again?” I asked.
“Well,” she said coyly. “We’re just texting.”
Margaret always phrased things to preserve the maximum possibility of interest.
“And, I mean, like,” Eleanor continued in Margaret’s inflection, “how were you supposed to know he was your mother’s sister’s daughter’s best friend’s new neighbor when you committed to a lifetime of silence?”
Margaret grinned at her. “Exactly. I couldn’t have known he was my mother’s sister’s daughter’s best friend’s new neighbor when I put his dick in my mouth. So now plans have changed.”
I had to laugh at that.
“She hasn’t told Bea or anyone about him either,” Eleanor said. “She almost gave it away, though.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You did! She asked him in front of everyone else if he liked going to the mall like nine minutes after they had supposedly just met for no reason, and then the next time we looked at each other we started laughing all deranged.”
I could imagine it. “What did he say?” I asked.
Margaret waved the question away. “Everyone started talking about the next thing. And other than that, I’ve been very secret agent about the fact that we hooked up.” The story was already over. I’d failed to notice its ending.
Margaret lowered her pool chair into its most horizontal setting and shifted to lie down on her stomach before unhooking the back of her bathing suit to tan that expanse of her skin uninterrupted. I wondered if I should do the same, if the sight of my bare back might have any effect on Eleanor.
Kim then made a rare appearance on the rear deck of the house, accompanied by a contractor.
The two of them carried clipboards and pointed to various aspects of the house’s exterior.
She had pure, naturally white hair, horn-rimmed glasses, tiny wrists, and a smile like a pamphlet, crisp and official.
I wanted to wear all her silk skirts and heeled boots when I grew up.
She waved to us before retreating indoors. Eleanor didn’t wave back.
“She’s in a bad mood because none of my siblings are coming to her party,” Eleanor said. Her parents were throwing an anniversary party in August. Margaret and I had already promised to attend.
In solidarity, Margaret offered, “I slept at my dad’s over the weekend.” She made a displeased face. “His fridge never has any food, and his bathroom doesn’t have a trash can.” The lack of a waste receptacle in a bathroom was, we understood, inherently hostile to the presence of a teenage daughter.
But the topic of parents passed quickly. What they really wanted to discuss were their prospects for adventure that night.
“I still can’t have sleepovers,” I said. My mom had told me before I left.
“We’ll probably just end up playing The Sims again,” Margaret said, to comfort me, supposedly.
I adjusted my pool chair into a state of greater recline and rolled onto my stomach.
Without my clothes and prostrate, I felt the full force of the sun’s attention, the midday heat of midsummer bearing down upon my body.
Sweat welled on my lower back, behind my knees, beneath my breasts, my pores open.
A water strider sat watchful on the pool water beside me.
Its tiny feet dented the iridescent surface.
I closed my eyes for several minutes. When I opened them, I caught Eleanor with her hands in my purse.
“Do you have any good lip gloss?” she asked.
I nodded but turned away rather than watch her touch the gloss to her lips.
Still, I heard the doe-foot applicator pucker and sigh as she pulled the wand from the tube.
Then she got up and said she wanted something to drink.
I turned back toward her when she spoke.
Her bikini cut a high V across her butt cheeks, and she adjusted the suit by running the tips of her fingers beneath the edge of the fabric up to her hips before she began walking toward the house.
When she opened the back door and entered its dark interior, I spoke to Margaret.
“I feel like a hundred years have passed,” I said.
“I know,” she replied, and swept her sticky hair from her face.
“I missed you,” I said.
“I missed you too,” she answered. But nothing eased between us.
In pain, I stood and leapt into the deep end of the pool.
The water seemed to reach up and snatch me from the air as I fell.
I went slack from the shock of the cold, hung suspended for a second in the chlorinated water.
Then I pushed off the paved base and began to swim with my eyes barely open.
I kicked into momentum. My hair trailed heavy behind me, long legs propelling me across the bottom of the pool in a few strokes.
Half a minute later, I came up heaving. Eleanor stood at the edge of the pool, holding bottles of water.
“They drank, but we didn’t,” Eleanor said. “Just so you know.”
I nodded. Then I pressed my hands onto the lip of the concrete and wriggled my body from the pool like a regular hooked fish.