Chapter 18
By the time I found Margaret, she looked different.
She was standing in line for the freshly squeezed lemonade the fair sold in souvenir cups, and she’d put her sweat-curled hair up into a ponytail on top of her head, the tips blond.
Bea and Olivia were gone. Instead, she lingered among a knot of people I didn’t know, telling a story in over-the-top terms. She tipped her head back to laugh deliberately.
She always provided just a little bit more than was called for in a given situation, and people found this a relief.
In her presence, they could do less. They could participate in her momentum.
But she was so good at offering this to people that sometimes they partook in her as an experience instead of treating her as a person.
Which pissed me off. I didn’t like when people did that to her, and I didn’t like when she let them.
Her conspiratorial tone of voice, her exaltation of the inappropriate, the taboo, the more—these facets of her personality, which I loved, also served to entertain other people, which I hated.
First because I wasn’t sure she understood the difference between what I gave her in my friendship and what everyone else did, as though my love were fungible for the love of other people.
And second because she really did need the love of people who weren’t me or even other people specifically, like Eleanor.
She needed the opportunity to react to the presence of generalized, even anonymous, social attention, which made me afraid.
Margaret made me afraid that I lacked some connection with the world, a connection she knew how to access that I did not.
“TG you found me,” she said, the abbreviation deliberately casual and offhand, cutting off my complaints before I could make them.
“You were gone for eighty years.” She didn’t withdraw from the lemonade line or the group she’d been talking to, so I had to answer to everyone and at least attempt to match her tone.
“I lost my phone in the woods and found it again. Classic.”
“Mine is dead,” she said. “Can you text my mom we’re fine?”
Nancy answered almost immediately. She wanted my confirmation that we were ready to leave.
Margaret took the phone from me to type out a brief and noncommittal affirmative.
She wanted to leave room for any last-minute possibilities.
Nancy responded again, wanting us to reiterate the location where we’d agreed to meet.
This was a game they’d taught each other how to play.
“I don’t know what we’re doing next,” Margaret said to the group when asked by one of them.
I gave her a look that meant we needed time to get to the parking lot on the other side of the fair, and she gave me a look that meant once her mom arrived, she wouldn’t leave without us, and therefore punctuality was unimportant. Nancy had to wait if we made her. My phone vibrated again.
“She’s here,” I said. That’s how long I’d had to wander around before I found Margaret.
“She’s saying that because she wants us to start walking.”
Even if that were true, Margaret was bargaining with me over mere minutes.
I imagined Nancy, having driven almost an hour to retrieve us, arriving at the front of the car line to find that we weren’t there.
People holding neon-orange batons would try to tell her she had to go to the back of the line and circle around.
She’d roll down the window and yell for sure.
My phone started ringing.
“Fine, let me say goodbye,” Margaret said.
She hugged each individual person and told them how pretty they were and insisted they all go to the theater to see the horror movie I’d refused to attend because I didn’t need any additional reasons to be afraid or have my heart beat fast. When Nancy called again, I held out the phone.
“Pick up and tell her we’re by the exit but don’t see her yet.”
If Margaret said so, her mom wouldn’t believe her, but if I said so, she would. Margaret wanted to make use of my credibility.
“I’m not going to do that,” I said.
She looked at me like I was the one who owed her a favor, like offering to let me lie to her mom was an act of generosity on her part that I had been too stupid to accept.
“Okay, then tell her we were confused and went to the other exit but are on our way to her now, since we are.”
I also wasn’t doing that. I simply wasn’t going to pick up my phone and lie to Margaret’s mother for the sake of fixing a problem she’d knowingly created, one I’d tried to prevent.
“Let’s just go,” I said, and put my phone into my backpack.
If we didn’t pick up, then we wouldn’t have anything to explain.
I thought Margaret would protest further, but instead she nodded.
She’d already established me as the friend who’d refused to help when asked, which I realized had been part of the point of her asking. She wanted me in the wrong.
We took off toward the exit. I ran faster than Margaret and surged ahead of her, weaving through the crowd, spurred on by anger and the strange pleasure of running through a crowd at night.
Ten minutes later I got to the exit, breathless and spiked by adrenaline.
I saw a massive shining pickup truck, a black station wagon, three silver vehicles all in a row.
None of them was Margaret’s mom’s car. When Margaret appeared a minute later beside me, she laughed.
She paused to catch her breath, resting her hands on her knees.
Then she stood up and deliberately didn’t look at me, mad that I’d once again made things difficult when they didn’t have to be, that I’d ended her night early unnecessarily.
The candied lights of the fair loomed behind us.
Only narrow white beams from the waiting cars split the darkness of the parking lot.
Margaret began to scan the groups milling around us, looking for anyone she knew or recognized, checking to see if there was a person on earth she could talk to other than me.
God forbid a single minute should pass without some sort of stimulation to entertain her.
“You can’t tell me to lie to your mom,” I snapped. “You know I can’t do that. It’s honestly mean of you to ask me to do that.”
Instead of responding, Margaret checked the line of cars again.
She saw no reason to argue with me or even acknowledge what I’d said.
The night would be over soon enough. She pushed her bracelets up and down her wrists.
The scene in the lot was almost quiet, the high buzz of the fair behind us, each call from a car audible and distinct.
When I opened my mouth to speak again, Margaret glared and cut me off.
“Actually,” she said under her breath, “it’s a very normal thing for a person to do for their supposedly best friend.
” My chest constricted. “I’m not asking you to hide a crisis,” she went on.
“Like you literally cannot bring yourself to imply we’re in one parking lot when we’re supposed to be in another? ”
Her voice was terse, irritable, haughty. Margaret hated fighting with anyone other than her mother, and I knew she especially hated that I was forcing us to have a confrontation in public. I crossed my arms.
“That’s exactly my point,” I said. “You want me to lie for your convenience, just so you can have fifteen additional seconds of mediocre fun. No, not even fun, just the appearance of fun, the slim possibility of fun, just to be absolutely sure there isn’t any fun being had by anyone in the world that you’re not a part of. ”
“What am I asking that is so unreasonable?” she shot back. “You’re the one who turns every regular situation into a problem, based on a moral code you don’t even follow.”
An SUV at the front was holding up the line. Some friend of the passengers leaned through their open window, saying a protracted goodbye. The cars behind them began to honk and flash their lights.
In the commotion, I raised my voice. “I’m sorry, what?”
“You didn’t really lose your phone in the woods.”
What a bizarre allegation.
“I did lose my phone in the woods.”
“You kissed Eleanor!” Margaret cried accusingly, as though I’d torn the words from her. The car beside us laid on its horn. She lowered her voice to say, “I know because she told me—immediately, right after it happened.”
And I hadn’t. I felt an immense downward pressure, like gravity had accelerated for me personally. My neck bent into my shoulders defensively. The SUV at last pulled out of its spot at the front, and the line of cars behind it reanimated. White beams from the moving vehicles flared across my sight.
“You knew?” I whisper-screamed. “You knew—and you kissed her!” The revelation of Margaret’s betrayal crowded out my awareness of my own.
I allowed it to. “What is wrong with you?” I’d hardly ever kissed anyone in my life.
Before Eleanor, I’d never kissed a girl.
I’d certainly never kissed anyone I loved, and I’d loved Eleanor before she kissed me, even if it was a love I hadn’t been aware could yield that kind of desire.
The tangled immensity of my feelings for Eleanor, all my thwarted efforts to return us to that brief and perfect moment of transparency on the field, the way she’d left me, again, only a few hours ago after so nearly saying aloud at last what she wanted—all of it rose up in a great tide within me, and the first tears trembled in my eyes. I willed them not to fall.