Chapter 18 #2
“We all kiss each other all the time,” Margaret said, pushing back.
“Who cares?” But she wouldn’t look at me, refusing to observe my obvious feeling.
The stakes of kissing Eleanor, our best friend, were different than the stakes of kissing anyone else, and intuitively, she knew that.
Just like I knew that kissing someone in a game, in front of and for an audience, wasn’t the same as kissing them when you were alone, though I didn’t say so.
I needed Margaret to acknowledge the betrayal before I could concede to its mitigating circumstances.
“You’re not allowed to kiss Eleanor anymore,” I said quietly, my voice like a stretched rubber band in my throat that I couldn’t allow to snap. I did not want to cry in this parking lot.
Margaret scoffed. “Because all of the sudden you like her?”
“Not all of the sudden.” It had been weeks. It had been the whole summer spent wishing. It had been before that too, though I hadn’t realized.
Margaret raised her chin. “And how was I supposed to know that?” A fair and unfair question.
She was the daughter of a lawyer. I was the one who’d failed to tell her Eleanor kissed me.
I was the one who hadn’t been honest about how I felt.
But I recognized the look on her face as the one she gave her mother when she knew she’d done something wrong but could still win the argument.
It was a look that had, more than once, led her mom to break a plate.
“You did know,” I said, realizing this was true, my voice creaking, tears falling hot and fast on my cheeks now. “You knew.”
She shook her head, but her eyes remained on the cars, her arms crossed, determined.
I’d never had to tell Margaret how I felt in order for her to read my feelings.
I shouldn’t have had to ask Margaret not to hurt me, even in ways I hadn’t explicitly said I could be hurt.
Not when she knew. Not when I’d never made her notarize her own vulnerabilities—the ones that were too painful for her to say aloud—before I started trying to protect her from them.
She’d known, and still she’d done this to me.
For my silence, maybe she’d chosen to punish me.
“You don’t get to tell me how to be a good friend,” she said.
A sob clawed its way out of my chest and broke into my mouth.
I did my best to smother the sound. I wiped my nose with the back of my hand.
Margaret’s face turned red. She seemed to inch farther away from me, her eyes darting over my shoulder.
The other kids in the parking lot gave us plenty of space.
No one stood in our immediate vicinity, though they must have been watching or at least aware, while they lingered waiting for their rides.
I was too overwhelmed to turn around and check whether or not we’d gained an audience.
I almost didn’t care. None of these people mattered to me.
Teenage girls always manage to have their hearts broken at least once in a public place.
“Why didn’t you just tell me, once you knew?” I asked when I’d caught my breath.
At last, Margaret looked at me. Tears had appeared in her eyes, but she blinked them back. “Why didn’t you just tell me you kissed her?” she asked.
In reply, I wanted to scream and then vomit on my shoes.
I couldn’t answer. I didn’t all the way know why myself.
I hadn’t truly considered the decision as I made and sustained it, as the weeks passed, weeks in which Margaret’s coldness had held me at a distance, a distance for which I now saw I was responsible.
I knew everyone Margaret had ever kissed. She’d told me right away, as they happened. I knew what the boys had been wearing, what their underwear looked like. I even knew the size of their dicks as measured by her hand. But none of those boys had been Eleanor. None of them had been our best friend.
The parade of vehicles began to move more swiftly, pairs of lights pulling past us, briefly spotlighting our faces.
When Nancy’s car slid up in front of us, Margaret climbed into the front seat.
I sat in the back. Margaret didn’t bother to accuse her mother of having lied about the time of her arrival.
She didn’t complain about the fact that we’d been waiting for her to show up.
Neither of us said anything at all, which made Nancy look at Margaret and then at me through the rearview mirror, trying to understand what had happened between us.
I watched the highway while Nancy drove, the dashed line of glowing streetlamps, the orange taillights before us, and the white high beams heading in our direction.
I kept my eyes on these bright stamps against the black surface of night as they blurred and rippled before me, never glancing into the passenger-side mirror, because I didn’t want to see Margaret’s righteous anger, her conviction of having been wronged by me or, beneath it, her sadness.
I asked to be taken to my house instead of Margaret’s.
When Nancy pulled into my driveway, I got out of the car, and Nancy lingered until she saw me open the front door.
She seemed to want to give me a chance to change my mind.
I waved to indicate my thanks. Margaret would know the wave was meant for her mother.
I had to run to disable and then reset the house alarm, then up the stairs to reassure my parents I wasn’t an intruder, merely their daughter arriving home instead of spending the night where she’d said she’d be. I whispered I was going to bed.
My dad mumbled, “Alright.”
I thought for a moment that my mom, who always knew everything, would wake up and demand I tell her what was wrong.
I waited in case she did, but she only rolled over in her sleep.
I closed the door and walked to the bathroom, where I took off all my clothes but didn’t wash my face or brush my teeth.
Nor did I turn on any lights, just felt my way around in the dark.
Then I got into bed naked, put my softest pillow on top of my face, and wondered what was wrong with me.
I remembered a conversation I’d had with Margaret the previous summer. Her mom had dropped us off at the mall. We went to the makeup store to play with deeply used eyeshadow samples, and Margaret told me her dad was moving out.
“His new apartment is so clean,” she said, and pressed a line of metallic-blue powder across her inner wrist. “I didn’t know he cared about cleanliness.”
Margaret’s house, as long as I’d known it, was densely populated with objects: mail, receipts, potted plants, and spilled purses. It’s terrible to discover that what you had considered a family trait in fact belongs to only one parent and is perhaps barely tolerated by the other.
“That’s disturbing,” I said. I walked to the end of the aisle to soak a cotton swab in makeup remover.
The back of my hand was striped with shades of lip gloss I wanted to clear away.
When I returned, I found Margaret in front of a floating circular mirror, using an index finger to hold down one of her eyelids.
“Oh my God, don’t,” I said. “Don’t actually put that on your eyes, please.”
She stuck out her tongue at me. She held up the middle finger of her other hand and then used it to swipe purple pigment across her eyelid.
“Ugh, looks terrible,” she said, examining the results in the mirror.
“Close your eyes,” I replied. She closed them, and her eyelids quivered. “Don’t actually close them all the way,” I amended. “Just look down.”
She looked down, and her eyelid stayed flat.
With my makeup-remover swab, I carefully retraced the line Margaret had made to remove the purple without disturbing the rest of her makeup, but I had to hold the swab steady by balancing the heel of my hand against the top of her cheek.
When I pulled my hand away, a thin coat of her tinted foundation remained on my skin.
She blinked several times and examined herself in the mirror.
“I’m sorry this is happening. When does he officially move out?” I asked. It occurred to me that if my dad moved into an apartment by himself, I had no idea what the apartment would look like.
“A month ago,” she answered, and walked off toward the perfume aisle.
The things Margaret didn’t tell me obeyed a limit of significance.
Minor pleasures and embarrassments she might keep to herself, but if something really important happened, she’d tell me.
If not at once, then soon. If not soon, then eventually.
I had only to tolerate the interim. This was the condition on which I allowed Margaret to keep the secrets she did without feeling wounded.
Once I know what a rule is, the rule becomes reason and weapon enough to corral my feelings.
Margaret knew that about me. She understood the threshold of nondisclosure I would accept, and she required no promise of threshold from me in return because I’d never kept anything from her in the first place, not before Eleanor.
I didn’t run after Margaret and ask why she hadn’t told me as soon as her dad mentioned leaving or signed a lease or packed his bags or actually left. I knew why. She didn’t want it to be true. She wanted our friendship to exist for as long as possible as though her father still lived in her house.
I would have blown up our friendship, the dynamic between the three of us, by kissing Eleanor more if she’d let me, but she didn’t let me.
Instead, she became suddenly close with Margaret in a way I suddenly wasn’t—the result, I now knew, of her honesty and my lack thereof—such that I became preoccupied instead with trying to return us to how we’d been.
I wanted Margaret to go back to being my best friend.
I wanted to reassume our old standard of closeness.
That was my priority. Only then could I consider trusting her with my secrets and desires.
A flawed configuration of events, it was now clear to me, for secrets and desires are at the heart of our selfhood, and no one can be your best friend if you don’t let them see who you are.
The pillow on top of my face created a comforting double dark. Soon I closed my eyes and slept heavily until morning.