Chapter 22
I woke up in the middle of the night that night with my mouth open and pushed a button on my phone.
The screen came to life, revealing a banner with a message from Margaret she’d sent forty-five minutes earlier.
She said she needed me to come and get her from Olivia’s house.
She wasn’t in real danger, she reassured me.
i’m goood, the message said, but if u see this.
Olivia lived fifteen minutes on foot from my house, which meant she also lived roughly fifteen minutes on foot from Margaret’s house, a distance Margaret had crossed more than once by herself in the middle of the night, even though when she’d told me she’d done so, I always gave her a look that meant she shouldn’t have.
i’m coming, I responded, stay where u are, so she couldn’t change her mind or decide she’d asked too much.
I woke my parents up by making a conspicuous sound when I opened their bedroom door and then putting a hand on my mother’s shoulder, her skin hot from sleep.
“No one is dying,” I began, “but I need to go get Margaret and bring her back here. She told her mom she’s coming.” If she hadn’t yet, I’d make her.
My mom blessedly didn’t ask me to explain. “Your dad will drive you,” she said. Even in the middle of the night, you couldn’t sneak up on my mother.
“No, he can’t.”
“He can drop you off at the end of the block, and you can walk up to the house by yourself.”
I glanced at my phone—still no confirmation from Margaret. I refused to be discouraged. I was enamored with the idea of being needed by her.
“Fine, but I’m walking home with her. We’re not getting in the car. And Dad can’t talk to Margaret until tomorrow. Neither of you can.”
The negotiation concluded, my father rose from bed in the dead of night without complaint in his matching suit of pajamas and put on the slippers he wore to get the newspaper from the end of the driveway in the mornings.
He didn’t say anything. He gave me a little pat on the shoulder that meant, Alright.
Olivia’s house was the only one on her street with the lights on.
Margaret sat on the lip of its open front door with mascara on her cheeks.
I walked to her quickly. She took my hand when I offered to help her up.
Neither of us let go once she was standing.
She smelled like liquor. I’d never smelled alcohol on a person like that before. My parents hardly drank.
Through the front door, I could see into the living room and beyond that into the kitchen.
Olivia sat on top of the counter with her arms crossed over her chest. Bea stood beside her, her eyes on her phone.
At the last possible moment, Bea allowed her eyes to meet mine.
We had an alliance when it came to Margaret, though neither of us knew exactly what the alliance was.
Margaret and I walked home in silence, holding hands. She didn’t explain. I didn’t apologize. Half a block ahead of us, my dad rolled slowly in his car. We didn’t even laugh at him. Instead, we listened to the birds who still sang for each other in the unknown hours.
At home, I gave Margaret a pair of my pajamas even though she was already wearing her own. She took hers off and put mine on. We slept together in my bed. Her body blazed like a hot stone, heavy and solid on the mattress beside me.
—
In the morning, my mom looked very pleased to see the two of us descend the stairs.
She handed me a house key attached to a tassel, and we left.
A ten-minute walk brought us to the Metropark at the heart of Doan, a marsh enclosed by a steel weir plate.
Through the marsh cut a wood-plank walkway with no railings.
On either side of the path swayed living walls of marsh grass, bowed by the hot wind of an overcast morning.
That late in summer, cloudy weather served as a sedative, and we found the park all but empty.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Eleanor,” I said.
I’d been the one to take us apart from each other, by kissing our best friend, who had previously belonged to us equally, by wanting to kiss her more and then by allowing Margaret to find all this out from someone other than myself.
I knew what I would have felt in the other direction: humiliated.
“You’re supposed to be the one who tells the truth,” Margaret said with real hurt in her voice and a confusion, too, at having been surprised by me.
“I know,” I answered because that’s who I’d been. “I’m sorry.”
Margaret nodded. We both still wore our pajamas, braless, in flip-flops. The wind blew my shirt against and away from my bare chest in gusts.
“I kept thinking I’d tell you as soon as I knew for sure what was happening,” I said.
“Like if she never wanted to hook up again, I would have told you it happened the one time after I’d had a chance to recover.
And if she wanted to make out all summer, I would have told you it was ongoing.
But instead, it felt like neither. And the neither was horrible.
Like intolerable. Like if I told you what happened, then I’d have to tell you what happened next—and what if nothing happened next?
I’ve been waiting around to find out if Eleanor likes me, trying to act normal.
If you’d been waiting too—it just felt too bad. But I’m sorry, and I’ve missed you.”
This was all true, though its truth was partial, only as much as I could manage.
Margaret listened without looking at me.
The small hairs around her face whipped at her cheeks and forehead.
The wood supports of the walkway had been drilled down into the marsh bed.
Beneath the path grew great marsh grasses, six and eight feet tall, the water, that time of year, down at their ankles.
In spite of my lifetime of visiting this marsh, my body still sharpened at the sense that, beyond a few planks of wood, between me and the water stood five feet of grass, of nothing, of air. Margaret took my hand and squeezed it.
“Liking El does seem hard,” she said with sympathy.
“Does liking me seem easy?” I asked.
“For me,” she answered. “But probably not for Eleanor.”
Among the high grasses grew stalks of rose mallow, pale-pink heads of hibiscus that nodded and rippled in the gray wind.
“I can’t believe she told you,” I said. “I can’t believe, after all that, you already knew.”
“Why?” Margaret asked. Her voice became pointed. “Because she’s only your best friend and not mine?”
“No. Because I thought she was ashamed of kissing me. I thought she wished it hadn’t happened. She acted like it never happened.”
“That’s not true,” Margaret shook her head. “Neither of you ever acted like it never happened. I was there. You were both making severe googly eyes at each other the whole time.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
The idea of our attraction being legible from the outside made my heart flutter with pleasure and alarm. I wished I could have watched us myself, though I’m sure I would have cringed from the sight.
“It was mostly entertaining,” Margaret said. “I’d never seen you do it before.”
This was almost too much for me, Margaret spectating my behavior. I felt so much safer being the one watching hers.
“Tell me what happened last night,” I said.
“Ugh, idiocy,” she replied with an imperious roll of the eyes. “Total idiocy.”
Margaret, I gathered, had grown fed up with her summer internship at the firm of Bea and Olivia, sick of being on the receiving end of the good fortune of being invited to join in other people’s fun.
She was fun! She instigated fun on Bea and Olivia’s behalf before their desired audience of boys.
Boys liked hanging out with Margaret without them.
She had excellent cleavage. She’d been receiving text messages.
She’d been liberally contouring her boobs all summer.
It was already August, she reasoned, so if she pissed Bea and Olivia off a little bit, there wasn’t all that much to lose.
Lightly sloshed, Margaret had decided to reveal something impressive.
Something to remind the troops of her sexual magnetism.
“I told them about the head-in-the-parking-lot situation,” she said at my side. “Which I thought they would find salacious, given how often we go drink in this boy’s basement.”
It was like Margaret to make an admission to me in this way—telling me something in the middle of telling me something else more interesting so I couldn’t interrupt. But I didn’t miss it, what they’d been up to.
Margaret had been ready to be admired. She’d been ready for a little sporting jealousy.
“Unfortunately, Olivia had already been boning him for weeks.”
“What!” I said. “I’m sorry—what?”
She nodded with ironic solemnity.
“Full-on sex?”
“Full-on sex. Penetration. P in V.”
The arrangement of the information was funny—Margaret always made it funny—but she looked away from me after speaking.
“I know,” she said to whatever she imagined I was thinking.
We passed a woman and her child out for a walk and hoped they hadn’t heard us. I spoke more quietly.
“Did you know?”
Margaret crossed her arms and kept walking. “How could I have known? She never told me.”
“No, but you knew,” I said, realizing that she had.
She sighed. “I didn’t know they were having sex. I didn’t know they were hooking up. I obviously would not have spontaneously announced that I sucked his dick if I knew that.”
But as she said so, I gave her a laughing look, because some part of Margaret’s personality definitely would have loved to make that announcement.
“Lol, that would have been very hardcore of me,” she said. “No—but I did think maybe she was into him.”