Chapter 23 #2
I raised my miniature cup in salute, and they raised theirs.
Then we all drank and appeared humbled by the taste.
I’d made the mistake of taking a test sip of my vodka first and felt my organs shudder and chastise me.
However, I was determined to make use of my rule-breaking—having come this far, I couldn’t fail to actually get drunk—and so consumed the rest of the liquid in a single swallow and followed it as fast as possible with orange juice.
Margaret did a little panic dance as though she’d drunk the whole thing, but I saw the second half of her shot still sitting in her cup.
And Eleanor knocked her drink down in one gulp but then looked like she didn’t know if it was coming right back up.
Then we sat around on the floor, waiting to be transformed.
I’d never been influenced by anything but a high fever until that night.
I thought I’d know the minute alcohol made a change in me, the moment I felt like anything other than myself.
We grew impatient with the lack of results and drank more thimbles of liquor.
We took pictures of ourselves on the floor of Eleanor’s bedroom, hanging upside down off the edge of her bed, positioning our lips to maximize our cheekbones, and absolutely believing they were the best pictures we’d ever taken in our lives.
But these were all activities we’d do at a regular sleepover, and I failed to notice a shift in the urgency of my thinking.
I did feel a frisson in the distance between myself and Eleanor, like a plucked nerve.
I thought—I knew—she felt me thrumming from the other side.
“I hope we have every first together for the rest of our lives,” I said extravagantly. “No one is allowed to smoke weed or have a baby without me.”
“That’s a little unreasonable,” Eleanor responded, as though I’d really meant it, because in fact I had.
“Well, I’m an unreasonable woman,” I said, because I wanted to grow up to be one. I noticed that my voice sounded angry. What I felt was thrilled because Eleanor took my flippant remarks seriously, because she heard the truth in my frippery. Her graphite eyes defied mine.
“If you’re going to be so loud,” she said imperiously, “I think we should go outside.” She got up and left the room without checking whether or not we’d follow. Margaret looked at me, as though expecting explanation, and I shook my head.
At night, the pool made a dark lake. Margaret sat down at its edge and put her legs in the water.
Eleanor kept walking, and I went after her.
Low, illuminated metal lamps lined the paths of the garden, which were paved with stones set deeply into the earth.
I felt their rough caress beneath my bare feet.
Eleanor walked on tiptoe to the end of a path flocked by the shadows of great leaves.
She pivoted on raised feet like a ballerina to face me, then lowered down onto her heels slowly, with deliberate control.
“We don’t have to do every single thing together,” she said with her shoulders back and her posture sewn up tight. “We’re allowed to be our own people.”
Her tone was haughty. She sounded like she was mad at me, but alcohol dulled my ability to feel immediate alarm. Instead, I felt aroused, being alone with her and receiving such a deliberate look. I liked that she was accusing me of something. An accusation is a kind of claim.
“I know we don’t, but isn’t it more fun this way?
” I said and smiled, a little stupid, fizzing with love for Eleanor being who she was, so private and a little violent, for her elfin face and gray eyes, her high cheekbones and pink mouth, for her hotness, which I seemed to have spent years trying not to fully notice but which alcohol blazed upon me in potent clarity.
It occurred to me that I’d never once seen her eat a lollipop, and this seemed a shame.
Eleanor turned her face over her left shoulder, and I admired her profile, the line of her nose, her pointed chin.
She impatiently exhaled. She didn’t want me to smooth the serration of her mood.
She’d been waiting to tell me something, I realized.
“Like yes, I’m having a good time,” she said, and then after a brief pause, “but I’ve been drunk before.”
“What?” I said, a lag between what Eleanor was telling me and what I understood. “With who?”
She rolled her eyes. “With no one. By myself.”
“You promised,” I said, indignant, like I still thought she could be wrong.
“You made us promise,” Eleanor said. “You put us on the spot and literally insisted that we promise. What was I going to say—no?”
“Yes. You could have said no, obviously. Then it wouldn’t have been a promise you made me.
” Heat flooded my face, seeped into my chest. I told myself I wasn’t allowed to cry, because this was a stupid thing to cry about.
Still my cheeks got wet, and I wiped them away.
I knew that by the standards of other people, she was right—that it was a weird or at least unreasonable thing to get this upset about—but the standards of other people didn’t matter.
They were less than us, and she should know that.
“So you literally lied to me just to get me to go away? You gave me your word, and you never even planned to keep it?”
One of Eleanor’s legs had begun to tap up and down an inch impatiently. “I didn’t like write you a letter in blood, Mina. All I did was say okay when you asked for something and then later change my mind.”
I breathed in, and my throat felt narrow. “You’re wrong,” I said. “Stop acting like nothing we do to each other matters.”
“Margaret’s been drunk before.” She shot this at me.
Did she know about Margaret getting kicked out of Olivia’s house, or had she been present for those other unnamed nights Margaret had alluded to but not explained?
I remembered Eleanor standing above me while I swam in her pool after the Fourth, deliberately reassuring me that they hadn’t gotten drunk in my absence.
She’d wanted me to know that she kept her word.
“You’re fine pretending for Margaret. Did she even apologize to you for breaking her promise?
” Eleanor held her chin high. “Of course not. Of course you skipped that part and forgave her anyway.”
Here, this was what she’d wanted to tell me, to force me to acknowledge.
This was what I’d done: become friends with Margaret again, gone backward toward who we used to be, the three of us, made an exception for Margaret’s behavior in my eagerness to resume our friendship, like I always did, that I wasn’t willing to make for Eleanor, or at least, caught off guard, that I wouldn’t make for her immediately.
“When did this happen?” I asked.
“I don’t know. A couple of days ago.” So, after I’d told her we were all about to get drunk together.
“What was the point of that, to hurt my feelings?”
“No! Mina, God. I just like doing things by myself, especially when it’s for the first time.”
That was a lie or at least a blind. She’d done it to make a point.
She’d done it so she could accuse me like this, so she could yell at me, and I’d have to answer, which meant she wanted me to answer.
She wanted me to treat her differently, and this was the way she’d found to say so.
Anger and betrayal began to drain away in favor of understanding.
“You know how things are with Margaret,” I said in a conciliatory tone. Eleanor was the one to whom I complained, the one I invited over to receive my frustrations before I put them all aside and acted like they hadn’t happened. She was sick of it.
“Yes, I do know,” she said, and swayed a little on her feet. “This is exactly the position I didn’t want to be in.”
“What position?” I took a step down the path toward her, plants shoulder-high on either side of me, the moon in the sky.
She exhaled angrily, and I thought I heard a catch in her breath. “Margaret demonstrating oral sex on you and me wondering if you’ll ever like me as much as you like her!”
I couldn’t believe she’d said it. I felt like Sailor Moon with the power of the planets beaming down into my naked rainbow body.
I closed the rest of the distance between us, so I stood directly before her, looking down on her face from above.
In her eyes, I saw tears. She blinked at them.
A droplet of water clung to her pale lashes.
“It’s not about how much. It’s about what kind, what way.” I picked up her hands from her sides and held them. They were smaller and colder than mine. They were delicate. “You don’t have to wonder,” I said. “I love you.”
I spoke without thinking. Everything Eleanor had done to hold me at a distance suggested that she wasn’t a person who wanted to receive a proclamation of love or be expected to respond to one, that she hadn’t responded to my text messages because she knew that given the slightest opportunity I was a person who would say too much, who would deliver my heart on a platter after having been kissed only one time.
Yet I could see that I’d said what she wanted to hear.
A perfect vulnerability came over her features, that same expression I’d only ever seen once before, right after she kissed me on the field.
It was an expression of intense hope and yearning.
“I won’t say it again until you ask me to,” I told her, in a whispered voice.
She nodded quickly, her eyes on mine, so I’d know this was right.
“And I won’t tell anyone else I’ve said it at all,” I promised, keeping still my eyes on hers, so she’d understand what I meant and who I wouldn’t tell.
“It’s just yours, for only you to know and keep. ”
“Yes,” she said, like that was all she could get out.
Then she took her hands from mine and slid them around my waist. Clasping me tight, she pressed her brow against my chest. I felt her tears wet my skin.
I closed my arms around her in a kind of embrace I’d never known before, so closely and completely did our bodies align, her breasts below mine, pressed against my stomach.
“Will you be my girlfriend now?” I asked, still quietly but above a whisper because I had to be sure she heard me.
She nodded into my chest. We didn’t kiss.
We just stood there in each other’s arms for as long as we could manage, and then we stepped away.
We were still too new for more. I felt overjoyed and wrung out, like I wanted to go to sleep before my life had the chance to become any less perfect than it was right at that moment.
We walked back to the pool and found Margaret prostrate.
When she tried to sit up, she melted back down sideways.
“Mina is my girlfriend,” Eleanor announced to neither of us, to both. An enormous bursting pride shivered through me. I grinned and blushed and grinned.
“Yay!” Margaret said.
Then a glaze came over Eleanor’s face, and she threw up in a bush.
“This happened to me last time too,” she moaned, standing up. Then she spit into a pit of flowers. We all laughed, and I brushed back Eleanor’s hair. Then we helped Margaret to her feet, and she wrapped her arms around us. Her body felt heavier than I expected, the way she clung to our shoulders.