Chapter 15 #2
I locked eyes briefly with Eleanor’s reflection on the screen and pushed my hair over my shoulder, baring the side of my neck in her direction. I wasn’t the one who was trying to take back anything.
Bea’s picture lit up Margaret’s phone, and she left the room to answer the call.
I kept promising myself I’d give up on the Eleanor who’d kissed me, but I only made that promise for the pleasure of imagining I’d be forced to break it. I wanted Eleanor to force me to break it.
“Hi,” I mouthed.
In response, she gave me a look of such angry susceptibility—an almost outrage against whatever I might say next, against the corridor I’d attempted to open between us—that I shut my mouth quickly, developed pristine posture, crossed one of my legs over the other, and felt I had no interest in ever taking a risk again in my life.
So when Margaret came back and asked if I could sleep over, I said no, without even messaging my mom to make sure I still couldn’t. When she asked Eleanor, Eleanor said yes, and Margaret started to text. The three of us had finally been invited over to the basement.
“I’m telling Bea we can come,” she said. I wondered if she also explained why I couldn’t, or if she didn’t mention me, or if Bea hadn’t in fact included me in the invitation in the first place and Margaret had just been being polite when she asked whether or not I could sleep over.
I stayed long enough to help them choose outfits. Eleanor first, with me and Margaret sitting on the floor. She opened all the drawers in her dresser. Her shirts were organized by color.
“I liked the halter situation,” Margaret said about a dress with the face of a Renaissance baby angel printed on its chest that Eleanor kept trying on and then taking off again.
“The halter dress is a mood,” I confirmed.
Eleanor shook her head, but I figured she might want to try it on again. In an effort to be helpful, I got up to retrieve the dress from her bed, where she’d folded and then discarded it. She walked farther away from me, so I followed, dress extended. She turned around.
“I said I don’t want it,” she said.
Then she pushed my hands away with real force.
My balance slid backward. I stumbled. Then my body was reacting.
I surged forward, slight but with immediate and aggressive purpose, putting my hands on her upper arms and pushing Eleanor back.
She had to step her foot to the right to regain her posture.
Only a second had passed. I read shock on Eleanor’s face, close and beneath me, and then embarrassment.
She turned her head away from mine. Her cheeks colored.
We’d caught ourselves in a strangeness that could not be easily dismissed.
When had we ever touched each other like that before?
And I didn’t want it to stop either. I had the urge to get into a fistfight.
I wanted her to push me down onto the floor.
I wanted more of whatever there was between us, more of whatever it was she seemed determined to withhold.
“What is happening?” Margaret asked. She’d gotten up from the floor and was reaching toward us as though to intervene.
“Nothing,” I said. “She doesn’t have to wear the dress, obviously.”
Eleanor turned to her dresser and closed a drawer.
I said I had to go to the bathroom. I averted my eyes from the family photos that lined the hallways of Eleanor’s house as I half-ran, though only a fraction of them actually contained her face.
When I got to the bathroom, I cried without letting my breathing change.
Then I came back out, and we all left for dinner.
When I got home, my mom asked, “Did you really spend the whole day playing on the computer?”
—
Neither Margaret nor Eleanor volunteered any information about what happened with Bea and Olivia after I left, and no one posted anything about it either.
For the next week, our group chat was quiet.
I could only conclude that the two of them were talking to each other without me, making plans to which they didn’t want to invite me, not without assurance first that I wouldn’t be allowed to attend.
I asked them to go play Putt-Putt, but they declined.
i cant today! family stuff, Margaret texted, which could have been real, except that she didn’t offer any alternative availability. Eleanor waited until Margaret had replied and then sent a version of the same. She certainly wasn’t going to agree to be alone with me.
I was almost grateful. Every time I saw my friends I seemed to make my life worse.
But by the following Wednesday, I couldn’t stand the stagnation either.
I painted my nails. I paced around my room in my underwear with my hair blown dry.
It was so hot outside, my mom had finally capitulated to air-conditioning, and a cool breeze blew through the vent in my ceiling.
I tried to make sense of the information I had.
Eleanor was a tightly controlled person and then reckless when circumstance aligned with desire.
I knew that. It didn’t surprise me that she’d kissed someone without a plan for how to behave afterward.
What surprised me was that I was the one she’d kissed.
Maybe what she really wanted was to be better friends with Margaret, to supersede our almost-since-birth primacy.
I had thought Eleanor valued her remove, but then again, before the last few weeks, I’d never experienced that remove myself.
I’d thought she liked to recuse herself from the demands of our higher entanglement, to roll her eyes at our extravagances of intimacy and wear her own outfits and go home early, but now she went home with Margaret, and I walked in circles around my room by myself.
I’d thought she felt sufficiently loved by us, but perhaps she had not.
I was not, after all, at that moment, feeling sufficiently loved.
Sick with thinking, I threw myself onto my bed and read Ginevra and made use of my hands and blankets.
I had my whole brain to fill with thoughts other than Eleanor.
I got dressed and went for a long walk. I came home and irritably cleaned my room.
I folded my laundry. I emptied all my various bags and backpacks and put away their contents: phone chargers, the clear plastic ziplock bags I used as wallets, each with a couple of dollars, a hair tie, and a lip product.
I took my bathing suit out of the side pocket of a large canvas tote bag, the bag I’d brought to Eleanor’s pool the week before. I shook out the rest of its contents.
Onto the floor fell a printed picture of Eleanor bare from the ribs up, taken on a disposable camera, lying on the plush carpet of her bedroom floor, one arm partially visible in the corner, her hair a curved line against her jaw, the pink of her nipples hard against my irises.
I turned the picture over. The back of the photo stock showed the name of a pharmacy, which meant she’d brought the camera there, waited an hour at least, and then returned to retrieve the developed film from a pharmacy employee.
She’d brought the pictures home. She’d waited to see me again.
On the first day she saw me after we kissed, she’d hidden this image in my bag.
I had her permission to look at it. She’d given the picture to me on purpose, so that I could look at it.
That was the only explanation for its presence in my possession. I turned the image over again.
In the picture, her nails were painted with silver glitter. She held her favorite necklace taut in her mouth. Her tongue pressed through the gaps in its letters.