Chapter 26
DIANE FOLEY WAS the tallest girl at the party.
That was the first thing that Anna Denton noticed.
It was the last weekend of summer, that weekend just before Labor Day when parents and kids have all just about given up.
Anna herself had just about given up. Most weekends, she either holed up in the attic with a book, despite the interminable and oppressive heat, or sprawled out in the spiky grass of the backyard and imagined herself running through a sprinkler, which her parents refused to invest in.
“Waste of water,” they said. It was a rare moment of agreement between them.
Still, somehow, her ever-arguing parents had met friends—friends!
—through one of the Welcome Wagon women who came by with coupons to the local businesses and a jar of beach plum jam for them to sample (too tart, Anna herself had decided, though her mother oohed and aahed at the localness of the whole thing).
Which was how they had been invited to a barbecue at the Connors’s house, over on Broad Street, in a tidy little gray house with a small backyard and a wide, spacious living room with brand-new skylights that allowed all the summer sun indoors.
Truth be told, Anna had never seen anything that modern before; she had only ever lived in houses that were older than sin, as her mother put it, afflicted with termites and rot and all kinds of other problems that her parents were always talking about on the phone with contractors.
The house was within walking distance of their own. Anna had chosen a flowered sundress from Laura Ashley, purple and pink and white, with tiers that made her look a little like a wedding cake.
“It’s a little dressy,” her mother observed, but Anna didn’t care.
All summer, she had been in shorts and T-shirts, bored to tears and wishing she had some occasion to change into anything else—even a bathing suit.
Finally, here was a chance to pretend that summer hadn’t been one giant and complete disaster.
Kaitlin Connors was hanging around the backyard when they arrived, wearing jean cutoffs and a faded Guns N’ Roses T-shirt.
Anna’s mom wouldn’t let her buy Appetite for Destruction, a tape she coveted.
She had flipped through so many tape decks at Sam Goody, and studied the macabre metal art (it was a giant cross, with each of the five band members’ faces—turned into skulls—superimposed on the cross), wishing she could just take the tape home with her and memorize all the words to “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Paradise City.” That summer, of course, was the summer of Lies, the summer of “Patience,” and Anna had none for her mother, who would turn the radio off any time she heard Axl Rose crooning. Just a little patience. Oooh.
Dear lord, could she use that patience now.
“What are you wearing?” Kaitlin asked. She was old townie blood.
Her father worked for the water department.
He had been born in Newburyport. His parents had been born in Newburyport.
If anyone could lay claim to the legacy of the North Shore of Massachusetts, it was the Connors family.
Joe Connors was a volunteer fireman who bought thirty-racks of Bud Light for all the guys in the neighborhood when he wasn’t busy getting bruised on the weekends down at the North End Boat Club.
Marie Connors was from Newburyport, too, South End; she taught math at the high school and was one of those ordinary teachers who believed that you could do just fine by heading off to a state school, moving home, marrying a football star and planting roots where you grew up.
No need to see the world if you lived in the prettiest little place on earth.
“I was hot,” Anna said by way of explanation.
She pulled the dress out a little from her body and fanned her face.
Kaitlin just laughed. She had long blond hair, like every other girl with a cute ’80s name.
Jennifer. Amanda. Ashley. Melissa. Tiffany.
It was pulled back into a ponytail with a hot pink scrunchie.
“That is why I have shorts and a T-shirt on,” Kaitlin said. “Well, come on. Everyone is over here. We have grape tonic and Doritos. My mom doesn’t care what we eat at these things.”
One hurdle crossed, Anna thought. Kaitlin ushered her over to a long white plastic table, which had clearly been set up with younger guests in mind.
On it were bottles of generic sodas from Market Basket—tonic, as Kaitlin and half of Massachusetts called it.
Grape soda, yes, and orange, too, plus root beer and cream soda, not that Anna could ever tell the difference.
A bag of Doritos, already decimated, lay open on the table. Anna eyed it suspiciously.
“You have to get those early,” Kaitlin said, shrugging.
The Smartfood, though, was still relatively untouched. Anna stuck her hand into the bag. “My mom won’t buy this,” she told Kaitlin.
“In our house, that’s health food,” Kaitlin said. “Popcorn and cheese.”
From the corner of her eye, Anna saw a girl she vaguely recognized from school.
Green eyes. Tall. Tomboyish. Cropped hair cut just below the ears.
Anna had a strange sensation, almost like she knew that this person—a person she knew nothing about, really—was going to be involved in her life somehow.
She was just a kid. How she could have understood that Diane Foley was about to become her friend was some kind of kismet, she would later believe.
But it was true. Anna could feel it even then, right there in Kaitlin Connors’s backyard, that their lives were set to align.
“Hey, Di, over here,” Kaitlin called. Di had been talking to a much shorter boy who was also in their grade, but Anna could tell from the glazed-over look in her eyes that her interest was limited.
“Yoo hoo!” Di loped over in what Anna would come to recognize as her signature gait: long, graceful strides that almost seemed to sidestep anyone that got in the way.
“Nice dress,” Di said. It was hard to say whether or not she meant it.
Like Kaitlin, she wore jean cutoffs, which rode higher on her tall, slim legs.
White T-shirt, V-neck, stretched out a little.
Green eyes. A headband right in the center of that short hair.
“Your mom got Smartfood!” She reached over Anna for the bag.
“It’s my favorite, too,” Anna said.
“You to go Kelley,” Di said, mouth full of popcorn. “But not my class.”
“No,” Anna said. “But aren’t we both in Kid Stop?” That was the after-school program held in the South End, where her mom insisted on sending her so that she could meet other kids.
“Hey,” Kaitlin said. “You guys wanna go inside? Play video games?”
“My mom will kill me,” Di said. She put her hands around her own neck, simulating strangulation. “She’s really against it.” Anna smiled. Her own mother was exactly the same way.
“Mine, too,” she said. Di smiled back. Even in her stupid dress, on a stupid hot evening, with the smoke from hot dogs and hamburgers billowing up from the grill, it had never been so easy—it would never again be so easy—to make new friends.
They poured themselves big plastic cups of grape soda.
Tonic! They found a cool patch of crabgrass over by Marie Connors’s raised beds of tomatoes and cucumbers.
Kaitlin went inside for a notebook and colored pencils, and, in the waning August light, they wrote their futures out, playing a childhood game called MASH, figuring out who they would love and where they would live, and what they would grow up to be, as if three girls could ever truly predict the future with just these simple charms.
Had she missed something on that stifling August day, all those years ago?
There was the smell of charred hot dogs, the purple ring that the grape soda left on the plastic table, the heavy, thick air that came around that time of year.
No relief from the heat. Di’s eyes were so green, they looked the way the water looked in midsummer, emerald and glass, shiny and practically transparent.
One night, during Anna’s freshman year of college, she came home for a long weekend, and she and Di drove up to UNH, where Kaitlin was living the high life, as they liked to say.
Up in Durham, she was sharing some beat-down house with a bunch of kids from school, and it felt romantic and grown-up; it was where Kaitlin would fall in love, first with a kid named Scott, and, later, with heroin, snorted off dashboards in cars and then shot up in dark New Hampshire alleyways.
We knew her when, they’d say later. Way back in the day.
It was cold for October, with a threat of snow, the way it used to feel back before the climate made everyone feel on edge all the time, and Anna and Di got high before driving up.
They felt good, or they felt great, or they felt invincible, the way best friends always feel when they’re young and in the middle of conquering the world, and then right before they pulled into the driveway—it was littered with cheap cars that were all on the verge of ending up at some New England chop shop—Di looked at her.
Anna would never forget it. Emerald gone from those green eyes for just a second.
“You know, you’re not so great,” she said.
“What?”
“You’re not so great. You’re ordinary.” Di was staring straight ahead, looking at the windshield. Through the windshield. Into the veiled and velvet black of the night.
“Believe me, I don’t think I’m that great,” Anna said. She moved to get out of the car. Di was high, she was high, this place in the woods was giving her the creeps, and all she wanted was to be inside, even if Kaitlin’s house was as terrible inside as it was outside.
But Di grabbed her by the wrist and looked at her dead-on.