Chapter 8 Magnolia #2
The only time I’d picked up a knife was to slice a cucumber up for a salad. “I don’t really know how to cook.”
“Neither do I. That’s why it’s going to be awesome.” Ellery jumped up from the futon and went to the fridge. “Let’s see what we’ve got…Ooh! Leeks and potatoes. We could make leek and potato soup.”
I’d never had leek and potato soup and, in all honesty, that combination sounded pretty sad to me, but of course I was never going to say that to her.
“Come on, sous chef. You’ve gotta give me a hand.” Ellery plopped a couple of leeks onto the kitchen counter.
I poked at a leek. “What do I do with these?”
“Tulip, have you never cooked before?”
I shook my head. Maybe I should’ve felt stupid, but the way Ellery said my nickname made it feel like I could never go wrong with her.
“To be fair, the only thing I’ve cooked is grilled cheese,” she said.
“I only happen to have leeks and potatoes in the fridge because I grew them.” She pointed at the balcony, where there were massive pots of plants I didn’t recognize.
“These will go to waste if we don’t do anything with them, so we gotta be brave, Tulip! ”
“Okay, Bellery. If we fail, it’s on you.”
The next fifteen minutes or so we spent hacking the leeks and potatoes into misshapen, ragged lumps.
Ellery had one kitchen knife, which was dangerously dull, so she chose to use that herself (“Kids shouldn’t play with knives.
” “Still not a kid.”) and handed me a butter knife to slice the leeks with.
In the end, our arms were aching from gripping the dysfunctional knives, but we had a pile of sliced leeks and potatoes.
I consulted the one cookbook that Ellery had.
“Heat some oil and stir-fry the leeks for a bit.”
“Gotcha.” Ellery did so, and soon, the tiny apartment started smelling surprisingly good. After we added the potatoes and water, Ellery located an ancient bouillon cube in a cupboard and dropped that in, then we waited for the mixture to simmer.
I settled back down on the love seat, marveling at how comfortable I felt here.
The banter was ongoing, and I’d just cooked a proper dish for the very first time, and it felt like anything was possible.
The question slipped out of me before I realized what I was saying.
“How come you’re not out with your girlfriend? ”
“Oh, she has other stuff going on.”
It was a weird thought to have. At sixteen, I foolishly assumed that when someone had a boyfriend or girlfriend, they would spend every free moment with them. It’s strange to think how much I learned about relationships from Ellery’s relationship with her girlfriend.
“What’s her name?” Why did I ask that? Maybe I was genuinely curious. Or maybe I wanted to hurt myself a little. Maybe it was a little bit of both.
“Trish.”
“How long have you guys been together?”
“Hmm, about six months.”
The only relationship I’d had, back when I was fourteen, had lasted eight months.
But I wasn’t sure if anything you had at fourteen counted as “real.” There was so much I wanted to ask Ellery, but every answer she gave me stung a little, like digging a fingernail into a scab.
I wanted to know if Ellery had a nickname for Trish too.
I wanted to know what Trish called Ellery.
I wanted to know if they’d had sex with each other, and if so, how often they did it, and if it was mostly Ellery who initiated it or Trish, or if they both jumped on each other at the same time.
And I didn’t want to know any of it. I wanted to pretend that there was nothing outside these walls, that the entire world consisted of me and Ellery and her tiny, jungly studio apartment with windows that were steaming up with the heat from the bubbling pot of soup.
When the soup was done, she ladled it into two chipped bowls and we settled down on the love seat, next to each other, and she turned on her TV.
Friends was playing, so we watched that.
I told Ellery she was such a Joey, and she told me I was a Rachel, and I wondered if that was how she saw me—spoiled and clueless and achingly adorable. I wondered if that was a good thing.
The next day, Ellery called and asked if I wanted to make a seven-layer bean dip.
I had no idea what a bean dip was or why anything should have seven layers, so I said yes.
Not that I was ever going to say no to her.
She drove us to a nearby Ralphs and we got the ingredients, many of them new to me, like refried beans and guacamole and sour cream, which sounded repulsive.
When the seven-layer dip was made, I said it looked like “a wrong trifle” and Ellery laughed for a full minute.
Then we dug in with our tortilla chips, which promptly broke, so we dug in with spoons and slathered the mix onto our chips.
I told Ellery I’d never tasted anything so decadent and bingeable, and she said, “Yep, this stuff’s dangerous.
” Incredibly, between the two of us, we managed to polish off the whole thing over the course of the afternoon while I read a Cosmo magazine (Ellery: “Tulip, don’t read that bullshit, it’s meant to make us hate ourselves.
” Me: “Bellery, it’s the Bible. Shush.”) and Ellery read National Geographic.
Over the next year, we fell into an easy routine with each other.
Actually, I fell into an easy routine with my new life in general, going to badminton and hanging out semi-regularly with Winnie, James, and one or two other members from the club.
But most of my free time was devoted to Ellery, because although I enjoyed the company of my other friends, there was no one who made me feel as comfortable and safe as Ellery did.
Some days, we’d go for walks. Other days, she’d teach me how to drive, and we’d go down to the supermarket to get ingredients for some wonderfully American-sounding dish before cooking it at her place.
One time, after we’d made and inhaled an entire dish of Buffalo chicken dip, Ellery said, “Holy hell, I need a nap after that.”
“Me too.” I wasn’t really thinking when I said it.
Before I knew it, Ellery was climbing onto the love seat. “You take the bed.”
“What?”
“Shh, it’s naptime.”
I watched, open-mouthed, as Ellery stretched out on the couch.
She was so ridiculously tall that her legs dangled off the side.
Within two minutes, her breathing had slowed and her face became slack.
She really was sleeping. I sat perched on her futon bed, wondering what to do.
I was tired. We’d worked on parallel parking today, and my belly was full of rich Buffalo chicken dip and chips, and I didn’t much feel like going back to my own apartment, which may or may not have a grumpy older sister in it.
In the end, I settled down on Ellery’s bed, placing my cheek gingerly on her pillow.
It smelled of her, and I let my body relax, sinking into this bed that had the memory of Ellery all over it.
I closed my eyes, feeling safe in this little cocoon, and let my guard down, drifting away with a small smile on my lips.
After that, naptime was a regular occurrence for me and Ellery.
We’d be hanging out as usual, curled up on her bed, not touching, doing our own thing, and one of us would yawn, and that would signal a nap.
Eventually, she stopped napping on her love seat and simply went to sleep next to me on the futon bed.
Still not touching. It wasn’t that we never touched each other.
In fact, we touched every chance we got.
Whenever we walked, I was always reaching out and catching the sleeve of Ellery’s shirt to tell her to slow down because not all of us were half giants.
Ellery was always teasing me, then when I got annoyed, she’d laugh and wrap an arm around my shoulder and squeeze for a second before letting go.
I was always punching her arm, and she was always messing up my hair, and we found myriad ways to touch each other, but they were all innocent touches, gestures of affection between two very platonic friends.
Did I ever wonder why Ellery was spending so much time with a kid so much younger than her?
Of course I did. Endlessly. And on the rare occasion that we didn’t spend time with each other, I was acutely aware that she must be off with her girlfriend, and I’d torture myself wondering if they were, right at that very moment, making love.
Touching each other in a very different way than how Ellery and I touched: naked, without the barrier of friendship between them.
“Huh, not wasting time with that weird tall chick today?” Iris would ask in a mocking tone, knowing full well that whenever I wasn’t with Ellery, it wasn’t by my design.
I would pretend not to have heard Iris, and she’d tell me I was turning into a stuck-up bitch, and I would go quietly into my room and climb out the window and go for a walk and look up at the LA sky on my own and marvel at how something could be so beautiful and heartbreaking all at once.
I’d never, up to that point, been in love with someone who was so close and yet so incredibly out of reach.
And to make matters more complicated, I still hadn’t figured out by then that I was in love with Ellery, because she was a girl, and I was a girl, and I was into boys, and that was that.
I attributed the yawping pain to sheer loneliness, to wanting what Ellery had with Trish instead of wanting Ellery herself.
The only thing worse than unrequited love is not realizing you’re in love in the first place. Burying that love so deep inside you that it becomes unrecognizable, even to yourself, then wondering why you are festering from the inside out.