With Friends Like You

Chapter One

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I could describe Daisy a lot of ways, but I guess the simplest way is to say that she was my first love.

Not in the romantic sense but in the even more fleeting type that only happens among a certain type of adolescent girls—one magnetic, the other malleable.

Even now, so many years later, married, and definitely not a poet, I’ve never felt more spiritually, and instantly, platonically connected to another person than I did to Daisy.

At least, that’s the way I remember the year we shared a dorm room.

We were both eighteen, assigned, by chance, to share two hundred square feet.

My mom unpacked a couple of IKEA bags full of plastic hangers and battled with a fitted sheet before declaring that I was an adult.

I’d have to handle my own bedding. And the smell of a Hickory Hot Pot coming from the adjoining dorm room was giving her a gag reflex.

I walked to the vending machine to get a Diet Coke, and when I got back Daisy was there, spreading a Laura Ashley comforter over the bed by the window.

“Hi. I’m Daisy. I grabbed this one, but if you want the window, we can switch. I have SAD…” I looked at her. “Oh, seasonal affective disorder. So I need a lot of sunlight.”

Fifteen years later, and I kept thinking about that sentence: “I have sad.”

She unpacked an electric teakettle, a white brick of a clock radio without an iPhone hookup or anything, quartz crystals and scented candles, and one of those Waterford ring holders.

She pulled a Tiffany table lamp that looked straight out of a Hollywood prop department out of styrofoam popcorn and plugged it in on the bedside table between our twin beds.

“Is this okay? One for you”—she flipped on the lightbulb on the right—“and one for me,” she said, flipping on the bulb on the left.

“Yeah,” I said, stuffing my twelve-dollar-and-ninety-nine-cent Sk?rhamn desk lamp back into a bag.

Daisy’s grandma, whom she called Queenie, an elegant woman who looked like she got her hair freshly set each week, hung a print of Kandinsky’s Circles in a Circle on the wall. Daisy hardly glanced at the abstract work. “It’s upside down,” she said.

It was August; Daisy found a scorpion under her bed.

We both signed up for American Satire and Elizabethan Poetry.

There were so many parties in those first weeks of college and we didn’t get invited to any of them, and we wouldn’t have gone even if we’d been invited.

Daisy drank hot tea and watched French New Wave films, while everyone else was doing keg stands.

She had her Paris Review subscription forwarded to the dorm and knew how to drape a scarf, even in college.

We decorated our dorm room with Daisy’s Rothko-esque paintings, a Bronte sisters box set, a framed poster of Manhattan, twinkle lights.

Daisy put an Oriental rug that looked like it belonged to the Romanovs over the scratchy apricot carpet.

We hung Cot’s The Storm on the ceiling, the fairylike teenagers, Daphnis and Chloe, running for shelter in a rainstorm, staring down at us.

We hardly ever turned on the lights. Daisy said fluorescents killed everything.

Instead, we used candles and the Tiffany light, which washed everything in muted stained-glass colors.

Daisy said that streaming murdered art movies and had a sizable collection of DVDs—Hitchcock movies, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

, Kubrick. She had Mike Nichols and Elaine May on vinyl.

I didn’t even know how to play a record, but Daisy said she just liked having Nichols and May around.

After a required Intro to Calc class that we both struggled in, the teacher’s aide—a grad student from Bogotá—started to walk with us after class.

He asked me for coffee, offered to tutor me.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that he was talking to me to get closer to Daisy.

She had no interest in him, and he soon lost interest in talking to me, too.

She’d been so cool and blasé about it, brushing off this engineer who played soccer and came from a wealthy family and carried himself like he’d stepped out of a cologne ad.

I couldn’t decide if I loved Daisy or if I wanted to be her—or both.

But I knew pretty early on that being around her made me feel more like myself than I’d ever felt before.

Daisy and I ate at the sushi place followed by the frozen yogurt place downstairs almost every night, because we couldn’t stand the girls in the cafeteria, all bike shorts and pep.

We both dreamed of leaving Texas for an ivy-washed school “up east”—a Seven Sisters college, maybe.

Or no college at all. It’s too boring and whiny to explain why we both ended up at a land-grant party school in Central Texas, best known for its football team and a fraternity’s bonfire ritual that killed twelve students in 1999.

If you didn’t grow up like we did, it’s impossible to understand how hard it was to leave.

How big and encompassing Texas is. A larger landmass than France.

Twelve years of Texas history. Even if you had the grades and ambition and means to go out of state, all anyone asked was “Why would you ever leave Texas?” I’m Texas born and Texas bred, and when I die, I’m Texas dead, engraved on my grandpa’s tombstone.

I know, I know, everyone loves Austin, but we were eighty-seven miles from Austin, and even Austin wasn’t ideal when all you wanted to do was host dinner parties and be Sylvia Plath.

We acted like orphans who had only each other.

I called my mom once a week, and every couple of months she’d take me out to dinner with her newest boyfriend.

The last one took Daisy and me to Benihana.

I watched the chef sharpen his knife, the drizzle of oil, the culinary acrobatics of shrimp and rib eye, thinking it was all so tacky and ostentatious and who would finish all this food, definitely not my anorexic mother. And what was Daisy thinking?

That night Daisy told me her stepdad hit her mom.

He’d accused her of cheating. She’d threatened to leave, and then—wham—right in her face with a closed fist. I didn’t know how to react.

I asked what he was like toward Daisy. “Fine,” she said.

“I think he wants to fuck me,” and she took a string cheese out of the mini-fridge.

It was Daisy who asked me the things my own mother should’ve asked.

How was your day? How did the exam go? Did you make any friends?

Did you meet any boys? It was Daisy who told me to stop torturing my hair with blow-dryers and flat irons and to wear it curly.

She bought me drugstore mousse, blew it into a cloud in her hand, scrunched it into my wet locks. “There. Naturally pretty,” she said.

The days and nights rolled together in one string of conversation and chamomile tea.

Daisy would lie on her floral comforter, wet hair wrapped in a towel.

Me, in a hotel robe and boxer shorts. We stayed up late talking.

No, we weren’t “talking”—that isn’t quite right.

We were slicing our insides open, knotting our intestines into bows, becoming a conjoined organism.

Soulmates, she called us. Daisy was an artist. I was a poet.

We’d go to Paris. After graduation, we’d move to New York.

We’d be broke and free and get our noses pierced.

Daisy would turn on Chopin. I’d lie back on my faded duvet, listening, closing my eyes, Daisy’s words and the music rolling over me—Cooper Union School of Art, open mics at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe—until I fell asleep.

She’d turn off the Tiffany light between us. Only the twinkle lights sparkled above.

I didn’t sleep well in my mom’s house, too much anxiety about how I would become someone else. But when I was with Daisy, I slept ten, eleven hours straight. Deep, dreamless sleep through my alarm, through the cafeteria breakfast and Intro to Humanities, those nights when we shared a dorm room.

I was supposed to go home for spring break, but my mom went to Hawaii with the new husband.

Daisy and I decided to drive to New Orleans.

I proposed Café Du Monde, and she said not to be silly.

We’d go to William Faulkner’s bookstore first. We wandered into a curio shop, dusty and velvety red and filled with voodoo dolls and Wiccan trinkets.

Both of us, at the same time, on opposite sides of the store, strapped butterfly wings to our backs.

We bought a bottle of Stoli at the supermarket and took long swigs, two girls in butterfly wings passing a bottle in a brown paper bag between us on a sidewalk in the French Quarter.

I rested my head on Daisy’s shoulder, and we stayed like that for a long time, until everything went fuzzy and we felt the humid air on our thighs and somebody tossed us purple and gold beads even though it wasn’t Mardi Gras.

We wandered the streets, past the neon bars and the Creole town houses, floating over cobblestone, pretending we could fly.

We ran away from our own stories, flew toward our futures, leaving anyone who wanted to trap us behind, a tiny, tiny dot in the distance.

We were witches, wild and drunk and together and so, so alive.

At school, I was back at a desk staring at a calculus exam. I tried to find Daisy, but she’d already dropped the class, wiggling out, in her way, of anything that got between her and her art. If only she’d been there, maybe I would’ve had the answers.

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