Chapter 27
We commemorated the end of summer at Eleanor’s house, all of us actually in the pool instead of merely gathered around it. Margaret tied her hair on top of her head, so it wouldn’t get wet. Eleanor wore a pair of goggles and her Alone Time necklace around her neck. I floated on a noodle.
“I walked in on my parents having sex,” Margaret announced.
“What!” I exclaimed at the same time as Eleanor demanded, “When?” and made a splash.
Margaret glamorously raised a hand to shield her face. “Yesterday.” She deposited the word. “No plan to get back together. They signed their divorce papers and were feeling nostalgic.”
“These people!” I said in my own removed tone of displeasure, because that was what Margaret’s delivery seemed to call for.
“They could have at least absconded to a hotel for their wrongdoing,” Eleanor agreed, sensing the same.
“Well, they locked the door to my mom’s office. I literally got out the key and unlocked it.”
“You did?” I asked, a little shocked, even for Margaret.
“They didn’t deserve to pretend they were getting away with it.
” A momentary silence followed this statement, which Margaret cut through by dunking herself underwater.
She came back up in a rush, dark hair plastered to her cheeks and neck.
“What if you guys break up?” she asked, looking at neither of us.
Eleanor’s and my eyes met in alarm. My heart began to percuss.
Then Margaret threw her head back into the pool, hair underwater, face a flat oval up to the sky, and groan-shouted in the silliest, almost operatic voice, “What if all my parents get divorced?”
This idea of Margaret being our baby made us start laughing and laughing, a little hysterically, because once we stopped, we’d have to answer her or stand there in silence. Eleanor bounced up and down off the bottom of the pool.
“I don’t know!” she said.
I didn’t know either. I’d hardly even asked myself the question. I felt attacked by Margaret suddenly shouting my inner fears into the ether while I bobbed nearby on a pool noodle. But she’d yelled them at the three of us, all together, and the alchemy of our friendship stirred in response.
“We’ll fight over you,” I said, a rush of adrenaline slinging through me, prickling in my armpits. “But we won’t make you testify.”
Eleanor nodded in her goggles. “We’ll buy you so many presents, but we won’t make you say mean things about us to each other.”
“You promise?” Margaret asked.
—
On the last night before school, Eleanor posted a picture of the three of us—me in the middle, Margaret with her arm around my waist, and Eleanor on my other side, licking my cheek.
I cradled my phone in my hand, my face on my pillow.
I thought of all the photos the three of us had ever taken, ever made visible on the internet.
I wondered if anyone would be able to tell what the picture meant about who we were to each other by looking at it. At least by then we knew.