Chapter 17 #2
I noticed I wasn’t breathing properly. Short shallow breaths seemed to catch in my chest. We all knew they were telling me something I should already have known about people who belonged to me.
I said I had to go to the bathroom. I allowed for a moment in which Margaret could say she’d come with me, but she didn’t.
She remained where she was with her arms crossed, standing between Bea and Olivia.
If she came with me, we’d probably never find them again.
But if I left Margaret, I might not be able to find her either, which meant she’d decided.
Whatever happened to me next that night didn’t necessarily have to involve her.
I walked fast through the blare of the fairgrounds.
I felt dazed. I felt like the music of my life had suddenly cut off, leaving me alone on the dance floor, sweating and disoriented in the musicless air.
Shame’s mighty drumbeat swelled to fill the vacuum, pounding in time with my heart.
I skimmed the faces in the crowd as I walked.
There were so many versions of myself running around this weird party, so many brown-haired white girls in deliberately small clothing holding their phones, holding their friends’ hands, taking each other’s pictures, eating each other’s food, embarrassing themselves and realizing it, realizing they were tired and pretending they didn’t want to go home, girls who were drunk, girls who were crying, girls who were tying each other’s shoes and fixing each other’s hair, girls with eyeliner smudged by sweat, girls radiant in the artificial light.
I could have been any of them. There was no reason in the world I had to be myself except that I was.
Fairgoers gave up on the regiment of portable bathrooms at night.
Boys relieved themselves in the grass beside the reeking blue chambers.
They pissed at the fair’s perimeter. I passed rows of boys with straightened posture, their hands down their pants as though guiding a rudder, their chins a little upright.
The girls made more of an effort to disguise themselves, walking in pairs toward the opaque woods that abutted the fairgrounds.
I fell in among them and soon left behind the fair’s broad lights.
I tried to stray from the most obviously trodden paths and found the unused parts of the woods dense with brush.
Great bushes tangled at the feet of trees and between them grew dense weeds and grasses, a mass of blackened foliage.
When I turned on my phone’s flashlight, bugs swarmed to meet the beam, a cone fluorescing in the dark.
“We can watch for you,” a voice said from behind me. “We already went.”
I turned around to see two girls standing surprisingly close to me.
The one speaking had a round face and heavy winged eyeliner.
The other had a hand on her hip and an engraved metal flask in the other.
They both appeared at ease, as though it were the most natural thing in the world that they should be drunk and helping a stranger pee in the woods, whereas for me, this was an event.
I was entering for the first time in my life a real link into the chain of great bathroom encounters between girls who don’t know each other.
“No one is coming,” the girl with the flask said. “But we’ll watch in case.”
I thanked them shyly, turned off my flashlight, and slid my phone into my shorts pocket.
I walked a few more paces into the trees, too afraid of the night to go farther but not wanting to pee directly next to people I’d just met.
I had to stomp on a patch of waist-high grass and then slide my foot across the ground to hold it down and create a space for myself to squat.
The girls stood sentinel mere feet behind me, our backs to each other.
Blades of grass began to come undone, scratching against my legs and bare ass.
I hesitated. I cursed having a body. But then the girls began to talk to each other, in an easy, general way, and their voices gave me cover.
I let myself begin and willed myself to hurry.
Then I was up and quickly returning. The woods righted themselves behind me, erasing where I’d stood. The first girl handed me hand sanitizer from her purse. We all turned to leave. I reached for my pockets and audibly inhaled.
“My phone,” I said.
My phone had slid from the too-small container of my shorts into the opaque brush beneath me.
I’d never get back to Margaret. I’d never find a ride home.
The only number I had memorized was my mother’s, which meant I’d have to call her.
I’d have to call my mom on some stranger’s phone and tell her I’d lost my phone and my friends and ask if she’d drive all the way out here and pick me up.
I’d have to wait a long time for her to drive down the highway to fetch me, the stupidest girl in the world.
My throat tightened. I was ready to cry.
“Don’t worry, bb,” the girl with the flask said. Her eyes were glazed, but her voice was clear. “We’ll find it. You just had it. It’s here.”
Endearments from people I didn’t know usually made me itch, but the confidence in her voice, the way the two of them began moving in calm and systematic steps, up and down, bent half over with their phones held out in front of them, flashlights on, eyes trained to the ground when they could have just left, made me flush with gratitude that I wasn’t alone.
“Found it,” the eyelinered girl said, her voice deep and raspy. She held my phone up in the air for me to see. Her short fingernails were painted shiny black. Relief popped like confetti in my brain. I hugged them.
“Oh my God,” I said. “Thank you!” And then, “Are you my fairy godmothers?”
They looked at each other and laughed. The look held an intimacy, a mutual ownership I thought I recognized.
There was more than one reason two girls might leave the fair for the privacy of the woods.
This possibility emboldened me. Besides, I loved to trust someone.
I was tired of having no one to trust, and also I felt in that moment that the world had delivered me into their presence, and that the world knew better than I did, that it had to, because I knew nothing, and in that case, it was alright to ask.
“I have a question for you, if that’s okay,” I said.
They nodded. “My best friend kissed me,” I went on.
“And not in the regular way. In a different, on-the-mouth way. But she won’t talk to me about it or acknowledge that it happened, which could have meant she thought the kiss was casual.
But then, she gave me a printed picture of herself naked, which was not casual.
Like, she fully gave me a picture of herself naked to look at.
But she still acts like I’ve never seen her naked except in the normal ways I’ve seen her naked. ”
“Lol the normal ways,” said the girl with the black eyeliner and fingernails. “What are the normal ways?” Her voice held an almost sarcastic lilt, but I could tell she took what I’d said seriously, as though this were a question she had previously asked herself.
“The ways that aren’t on purpose,” I said, though I knew it didn’t exactly make sense.
She closed her eyes and then opened them, looking me dead on. “Anytime you choose to be naked with someone, you choose to be naked with someone.”
I nodded. “The girl I mean,” I said. “She was here with me today, and then she left me and my other friend here alone and went home. What should I do?”
The girl with the flask swayed a little.
Then she rested her chin on her friend’s shoulder and considered.
“Okay, the highest-key thing you could do is send a picture like right now. Not a picture you’ve already taken, a picture you take right now, when she knows you’re out here without her, but she doesn’t know exactly what you’re doing.
Then she’ll be like, fuck, what am I missing? ”
“Great idea,” her friend said. “Incredible idea.” She tilted her face against her friend’s, still resting on her shoulder. “She used to do that to me, and it made me feel deranged.”
I wanted El to feel deranged. I wanted to derange Eleanor.
“You could take off your shirt,” she said. “To make it even with what she gave you.”
“No, I can’t,” I answered, suddenly nervous that once again I wasn’t up to the task of being a teenager.
“That’s fine,” she reassured me. “You look fly already.”
I nodded, moved by her gentleness, and took a step back. The eyelinered girl squatted down to the ground with my phone. The other put her flask in her little purple purse and held her flashlight up to illuminate me.
“Now walk toward us,” she said.
So I walked toward them with what I hoped to be an alluring expression on my face, my cheeks slightly drawn between my teeth for the sake of my cheekbones, and she tapped the round white button many times, and then we all huddled around my phone to review the results.
Our foreheads touched. My illuminated silhouette cut against the massive vertical lines made by the trees around me.
I looked intriguing. I looked like a gesture toward my most beautiful self while in the middle of doing something unexplained.
It was the kind of picture Eleanor would appreciate.
I didn’t let myself agonize over which of the minutely different images was best. I chose one and sent it to her immediately.
The girls walked me back out of the woods maybe twenty minutes after I’d entered it.
I wanted to hold both their hands but felt shy.
We followed each other online before we parted.
Margaret of course wasn’t where I’d left her, and her phone went straight to voicemail.
I wondered if she’d even noticed yet that it had died.
If I’d lost someone, I would have waited for them at our last meeting place.
Instead, Margaret had wandered off. It would take her forever to come looking for me, even though her mom was due to pick us up in half an hour.
She’d use the whole thing as an excuse to be late to the carpool line. I had to find her.
As I stared at the space where Margaret should have been standing, worry flashed through me, quickly replaced by indignation.
We shouldn’t have been separated in the first place.
She should have come with me to the woods in order to explain what had happened with Eleanor.
She should have been the one to take my picture and tell me how good I looked.
In a group of two people, these were the rules of the bathroom: You didn’t go alone.