Текст книги "Luckiest Girl Alive"

Автор книги: Jessica Knoll

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

CHAPTER 10

I felt very still and purposeful after I’d been excused from Headmaster Mah’s office. I may have let Mr. Larson down like he would never let me down, but I couldn’t dwell on that now because the next step was clear. Get to Olivia. Apologize for causing a scene and getting her into trouble at home. Do whatever was necessary to get back into her good graces. I felt this was possible because it served Dean’s interests to keep me happy. Olivia would follow Dean’s lead, I was sure of it.

I tried to track her down before lunch. Looked under the door of her favorite bathroom stall, even. But no luck. My next opportunity was lunch. Which meant I had to get to her before the others sat down, which would be easy because Olivia was usually the first person holding court at the table on account of the fact that she never walked the lunch line. I found her in her usual seat, performing her favorite disordered ritual: shredding a Swedish fish apart at the tail¸ rolling the pieces into balls before popping them in her mouth. A half-moon bruise saddled the right corner of her mouth, and I felt sick. I wish I could say it was because the thought of what her father did to her roiled my stomach, but I was fourteen and selfish. That bruise was my funeral.

“Liv,” I said, hoping the sound of her nickname would soften her to me.

“Huh?” she asked, as though she’d thought someone had said her name but she wasn’t sure. I sat down next to her.

“I’m so sorry about Saturday.” I remembered what Dean said to me and added, “I should never smoke after I drink. It makes me so fucked up.”

Olivia turned toward me and gave me a smile so eerie, so detached from human emotion that I still sometimes start awake in the middle of the night, haunted by the memory. “I’m fine.” She pointed at my cheek, at the cut covered clumsily with concealer. “We’re twins.”

“There you fucking are, Finny.” Dean was next to me, holding a lunch tray overflowing with sandwiches and chips and soda. He slammed it down next to me. “What the fuck? I thought we had a deal?”

I said I didn’t understand.

“I just came from fucking Mah’s office,” he said. Then announced, loudly, to the group gathering at the table, that he had gotten a warning about an “incident” that had occurred over the weekend and that he might not be able to play in the big Haverford game this week. This aroused a scandalized gasp from all.

“That’s fucking bullshit,” Peyton fumed, and Liam nodded ferociously even though he didn’t play soccer.

“Well,” Dean mumbled. “I can play if nothing else happens between now and then.”

(I always wished I’d said, Then, just don’t rape anyone in the next two days.)

Dean gave me a withering look. “I thought we were cool?”

“It wasn’t me,” I whimpered.

“So you weren’t in his office earlier this morning?” Dean demanded.

“I was, but I didn’t go there on my own,” I said. “Mr. Larson and him called me in. I didn’t have a choice!”

Dean narrowed his beady eyes at me. “But how did they know to call you in if you didn’t say anything?”

“I don’t know,” I said, lamely. “I think they just assumed.”

“Assumed what?” Dean’s chest heaved with a mean laugh. “They’re not fucking David Copperfield fucking mind readers.” Dean crossed his arms over his chest to the chorus of group laughter. It was something I would have joined in on if the barb hadn’t been directed at me. There was something so bizarrely charming in the fact that Dean knew who David Copperfield was, referenced him like that. “Just get out of here, TifAni. Go bite Mr. Larson’s dick or something.”

I looked around the table. At the smirks on Olivia, Liam, and Peyton. Hilary didn’t do that to me, but she didn’t look at me either.

I turned and walked out of the new cafeteria, beneath the plaque on the last beam that bragged, THE BARTON FAMILY, 1998.

I thought Mr. Larson would take it easy on me at practice later that day, after all I’d been through, but he was more ferocious than ever. I was the only one who couldn’t complete the mile test in under seven minutes and thirty seconds, and everyone had to run laps because of me. I hated him. Walked out on final stretch even though Mr. Larson once proliferated that old wives’ tale that our muscles would get bulky if we didn’t stretch them taffy thin after we ran. He called at me to come back, but I just said my mom was picking me up early and I had to go.

I usually took the train home from school, but that day Mom was picking me up so we could shop the presale at Bloomingdale’s in the King of Prussia Mall.

I never used the showers in the locker room after practice. No one did. They were gross. But that day I had to make an exception because I didn’t want to spend the next few hours shivering in my sweaty clothes while trying on wool peacoats. I quickly washed up under the water, which smelled neglected, like it had been sitting in the pipes since the place was a boarding school. Wrapped in a towel, I walked to my locker on the sides of my feet, trying to limit the amount of skin the gummy floor could contact. As I rounded the corner, Hilary and Olivia came into view. Neither of them played a sport or had to take PE, and I’d never seen them in the locker room before.

“What are you guys doing?” I asked.

“Hey!” Hilary said, her odd throaty voice peppier than usual. She’d thrown her hair into a high half loop since I’d seen her in Chem. One strand of bleached berry blond hair escaped, so brittle and overprocessed it pointed straight up in the air, a sharp spoke in her crown. “We were looking for you.”

“You were?” My voice went up.

“Yeah,” Olivia chimed in. Under the sallow laboratory-like lights, her nose appeared seeded with tiny black kernels. “What are, um. What are you doing tonight?”

Anything you ask me to. “I’m supposed to go shopping with my mom. But I can do it another night if something is going on.”

“No.” Olivia glanced at Hilary, nervously. “It’s fine, we can do it another time.” She started to walk away, and I panicked.

“No, really,” I called after her. “It’s not a big deal. I can just tell my mom we’ll do it another night.”

“Don’t worry about it, Tif.” Hilary turned, her profile practically samurai. There was something like remorse in her alien eyes. “Another time.”

They hurried away. Damnit. I’d been too eager. I’d scared them off. I pulled my clothes on angrily, fought a brush through my wet hair.

I was sitting on the curb outside the gym, waiting for Mom, when Arthur dropped his book bag on the ground next to my feet and sat down. “Hey.”

“Hi,” I said, almost shyly. It’d been a while since we’d spoken.

“You okay?”

I nodded, and I meant it. That interaction with Olivia and Hilary had revitalized me. There was a chance still.

“Really?” Arthur glanced up at the sun, his eyes turning to slits behind his glasses, the lenses smudged sloppily but somehow with intent, like graffiti on an abandoned building wall. “Because I heard what happened.”

I twisted my head to look at him. “What did you hear?”

“Well.” He shrugged. “I mean everyone already knows about the party at Dean’s house. What happened with Liam. And Peyton. And Dean.”

“Thanks for listing them all like that,” I muttered sullenly.

“And the morning-after pill,” he added.

“Jesus Christ,” I groaned.

“They all think you busted up Olivia’s party because you were jealous she and Liam were hooking up.”

“People think that?” I buried my head between my knees, strands of wet hair sliding over my arms, snakelike.

“Is it true?” Arthur asked.

“Don’t people wonder how I got this?” I pointed at my cheek, which I hadn’t even bothered to cover up with concealer after my shower.

Arthur shrugged. “You fell?”

“Yeah.” I snorted. “And Dean caught me.”

I spotted Mom’s red BMW pulling into the drive. It stood out like a sore thumb among the somber black and tan sedans and SUVs. Of course TifAni FaNelli’s mother drove a whore red car, her skank was genetic.

“I have to go,” I said to Arthur.

The morning arrived, brittle and bright. Fall in earnest, and I excitedly strapped myself into the new black peacoat Mom had bought me the night before. I’d found it at Banana Republic, and it wasn’t on sale like the ones at Bloomingdale’s. But Mom said I looked so sharp that she would get it for me anyway. She had to split the purchase between a credit card and cash and then told me not to tell Daddy. God, it grossed me out when she called him Daddy.

On the train ride to school, hope was still a fat shiny balloon in my chest. Hilary and Olivia weren’t done with me yet. The air held a new charge, and I looked “sharp.”

When I walked into school, I felt something else. A pulse. The hallways pumping, alive with it. That morning, a small crowd of freshmen and sophomores, outcast upperclassmen, clumped together at the entrance, rubbernecking something epic. I neared the Junior and Senior Lounge, a place where only juniors and seniors were allowed, a deadly serious rule that even parents and teachers respected. They’d hover in the doorway, calling the name of the student they were looking for rather than step inside and see for themselves.

This time, when I approached, the crowd did part. A wide berth that formed in slow-motion-movie time.

“Oh my God,” said Allison Calhoun, another freshman who’d snubbed me on my first day but started kissing my ass when she saw that Olivia and Hilary had taken me on. She giggled maliciously into her hand.

When I fought my way to the lounge’s state line, I discovered what had drawn the crowd. My running shorts—the ones I’d worn yesterday for practice—were tacked to the bulletin board on the far wall beneath a handwritten sign that read, SNIFF A SKANK (AT YOUR OWN RISK . . . SHE STANKS!). The words were written in bright bubble letters, their color and shape as happy as a message for a bake sale to raise money for kids with cancer. Only a girl could have written them. A realization hardened in me as I remembered Hilary and Olivia, acting so oddly nice in the locker room the day before.

I pushed back out of the crowd the same way I came in. There was a bathroom right across the way, and I locked myself into a stall, remembering how I’d gotten my period yesterday, had been so relieved when it arrived because it meant the morning-after pill had worked. The run had jogged it all loose. When I’d taken off the shorts, they’d been stained a brownish red. I couldn’t even imagine how dirty and gross they looked, how the terrible combination of sweat and period blood must smell. I’d been so distracted by Hilary’s and Olivia’s sudden kindness I hadn’t even noticed the shorts were missing when I packed my bag.

The door opened and I heard the tail end of a spirited debate: “Deserves it.”

“C’mon, it’s pretty mean, don’t you think?”

Silently, I climbed on top of the toilet, tucking my legs underneath me.

“Dean takes it too far,” another said. “It’s all fun and games until she tries to kill herself like Ben.”

“Ben can’t help being gay,” the first girl said. “She can help being a whore.”

Her friend laughed, and I swallowed a thick sob. I heard the water run and the sound of paper towels crunching in their hands. Then the door yawning shut behind them.

I had never cut school in my entire life. I can’t even call in sick to work now, all that good Catholic girl obedience milled into my bones, but the day had broken me, bulldozed any fear about what might happen if I didn’t follow the rules. All that mattered was honoring the humiliation, so crushing, it left me short of breath. I waited right where I was, working a section of hair between my fingers over and over (“self-soothing behavior” according to The Women’s Magazine’s body language expert), until the first-period bell stopped ringing. I gave it another five minutes to ensure I wouldn’t run into any stragglers in the hallways. Then I climbed off the toilet seat, silent as Spider-Man, pushed open the door to the bathroom, and walked briskly down the hallway and out the back entrance. I’d take the train to Thirtieth Street Station. Wander around the city for the day. I was halfway out the parking lot when I heard someone calling my name behind me. It was Arthur.

“I think we have some leftover lasagna in here.” Arthur peered into the refrigerator, buzzing noisily.

I glanced at the display on the stove: 10:15. “I’m fine.”

Arthur bumped the door shut with his hip, a casserole dish in his hands, the top crusted yellow with cheese. He cut a generous slice and slid the plate into the microwave.

“Oh.” He licked tomato sauce off his finger and dropped to his heels, rummaging around in his backpack. “Here.” He flung my shorts at me.

They were light as paper, but when they landed in my lap I emitted a baritone “oof” as though someone had kicked me in the stomach.

“How did you get these?” I smoothed them out on my lap like a dinner napkin.

“They’re not the fucking Mona Lisa,” he said.

“What does that mean?’

Arthur zipped his backpack shut and rolled his eyes at me. “Haven’t you ever been to the Louvre?”

“What’s the Louvre?”

Arthur laughed. “Oh, dear.”

The microwave beeped, and Arthur got up to test his dish. With his back to me, I took a quick whiff of my shorts. I had to know what everyone else had smelled.

It was bad. The odor was sharp, primeval, inhabited your lungs like a disease. I stuffed the damp mesh ball into my backpack and propped my head on one hand, the tears snaking a silent, diagonal path across my nose.

Arthur sat down across from me, letting me cry while he shoveled piles of steaming red-sauced meat into his mouth. Between bites he said, “When I’m done with this I’m going to show you something that’s going to make you feel a lot better.”

Arthur polished off the loaf of lasagna in minutes. He took his plate to the sink and dropped it in there, not even bothering to rinse it. With a little wave of his hand, he started for the door in the corner of the kitchen. I’d assumed it was a door to a pantry or closet, but Arthur opened it to reveal a cold black rectangle. I’d later discover that Arthur’s old house had no shortage of doors—leading to back stairwells; closets; rooms mountained with books and papers, lumpy, floral-print couches sagging in the corners. At one point, Arthur’s mother’s side of the family had money, but it was so tied up in trusts, complicated legal decisions made of their past, that no one would ever spend it. Mr. Finnerman had walked out on Arthur and his mom eight years earlier, which had destroyed Mrs. Finnerman but which she tries to pretend didn’t. “Just one less mouth to feed!” she’s fond of saying whenever she’s feeling pitied. Mrs. Finnerman had gotten a job at Bradley not long after Arthur was born, knowing Mr. Finnerman was never going to wake up before noon, would never pull his own weight, that her position would ensure her son a spot, and a break, financially. Not everyone is flush on the Main Line, but the priorities are certainly different than the kind I’d grown up with. Education, travel, culture—this is what any pennies pinched should be used for, never flashy cars, loud logos, or personal maintenance.

Still, on the Main Line, coming from a family that used to have money was infinitely more acceptable than coming from a family with money that was new as could be. It was part of the reason Arthur despised Dean. Arthur had property that would yield a much higher return than the latest Mercedes S-Class: He had knowledge. He knew mysterious things like to pass the salt and pepper together and that steak should always be cooked medium rare. He knew Times Square was the most despicable place on earth and that Paris was divided into twenty arrondissements. Soon enough, with his connections and his grades, he would be accepted into Columbia, where his mother’s side had legacy.

His hand on the doorknob, he turned to me. “You coming?”

Closer, I made out a few dingy steps before the dark swallowed them whole. I’d always hated the dark. I still went to bed with the hallway light on.

Arthur patted along the wall until he found the light switch, and one lone bulb shuddered on. A cloud of dust puffed up beneath his foot with his first step. He’d kicked off his shoes when we first walked into his house, and his feet were swollen, the skin ripe and shiny like a baby’s.

“This is not what my basement looks like,” I said, trailing not far behind. The floor was gray concrete, the walls ripped open, orange fluffy innards exposed. An army of clutter anchored one side of the basement—discarded furniture, boxes of scratched records, dusty paperbacks, old New Yorkers slumping with mildew.

“Let me guess.” Arthur grinned at me over his shoulder. Beneath the jaundiced bulb, his acne purpled. “It has carpeting.”

“Yeah, so?” Arthur continued toward the mess against the far wall and didn’t answer. I made my voice carry across the room. “What’s wrong with carpeting?”

“It’s tacky,” he declared, wading through the boxes. For the rest of my life, I would live only in places with hardwood floors.

Arthur squatted to the ground, so that for a moment I could see only the greasy swell of his hair. “Oh my God”—then came his laugh—“look at this.” When he stood he was holding a dead deer head high in the air, like a sacrifice.

I wrinkled my nose. “Please tell me that isn’t real.”

Arthur stared into the animal’s gentle eyes for a moment, as if trying to decide. “Of course it’s real,” he concluded. “My dad hunts.”

“I don’t agree with hunting,” I said, tartly.

“But you agree with hamburgers.” Arthur dumped the deer into an open box. One sculptural antler curled into the air, a bony beanstalk that led to nowhere. “You just let other people do your dirty work.”

I folded my arms across my chest. I meant I didn’t agree with hunting for sport, but I didn’t want to argue with him and prolong this little field trip. We’d been downstairs just a few minutes, and already I felt pruney and cold, like skin that’s been resting for hours underneath a damp bathing suit. “What do you want to show me?” I pushed.

Arthur doubled over, digging through another box, examining whatever he exhumed and tossing it aside when he determined it wasn’t what he was looking for. “Aha!” He held up what looked like an encyclopedia and waved me over. I sighed and followed the path he’d forged through the junkyard, realizing once I was by his side that it was a yearbook he had in his hands.

Arthur flipped to the back inside cover, tilting the page so I could read the note next to his pink fingertip.

Art-man,

I’m not going to get all gay and shit and tell you what a good friend you are, so fuck off!

Bart-man

I read the note three times before I understood. Bart-man was Dean, a play on his last name, Barton. “What year was this?”

“Nineteen ninety-nine.” Arthur licked his fingertip and began to turn the pages. “Sixth grade.”

“And you were friends with Dean?”

“He was my best bestie friend.” Arthur giggled nastily. “Look.” He stopped on a collage of candids. Students joking around at lunch, making funny faces on Super Saturday, posing with a giant green dragon, the Bradley mascot. There was a photo in the lower-left-hand corner, fuzzy in the way all photos appear after a few years, so that our past selves seem quaint and old world, and we realize, a little disdainfully even, all we know now that we didn’t then. Arthur and Dean were winter white, their crackled smiles in desperate need of a swipe of Chap Stick. Arthur was a hefty kid, though nothing like he was hulking next to me now. But Dean. He was so puny, his arm around Arthur’s bulldog neck so slight and fragile, he could have been someone’s kid brother.

“That was right before the summer he had his growth spurt,” Arthur explained. “He got big and turned into an asshole.”

“I just can’t believe you were ever friends.” I brought my face closer to the yearbook page and squinted. I wondered if girls at Mt. St. Theresa’s upper school said that to Leah now. I just can’t believe you were ever friends with TifAni. They’d laugh their disbelief—that’s a compliment, Leah. If they weren’t saying it now, they would be soon.

Arthur snapped the yearbook shut, nearly nipping my nose. I let out a soft yelp, startled. “So don’t act like you’re the first to encounter the wrath of Dean Barton.” He thumbed the cover’s heavy gold font thoughtfully. “He will do anything to make people forget that he used sleep over at the fag’s house.”

He tucked the yearbook under his arm. I thought we would go then, but something in the corner caught his attention. He pushed deeper through the boxes and stooped, trading the yearbook for his new discovery. His back was to me so that I didn’t see what he had in his hands at first, just heard his giddy little laugh. When he turned, the body of a long, lithe rifle pointed at me. He brought the gun closer to his face, resting his fleshy cheek against the handle and hooking his finger around the trigger.

“Arthur!” I shrieked, stumbling back. I lost my balance, and my hand came down hard on an old swimming trophy. It was my bad wrist, the one I’d landed on when Dean slapped me, and I bellowed something incoherent.

“Oh my God!” Arthur doubled over with fierce, silent laughter, leaning on the rifle like a cane. “Relax”—he gasped, his face flushed a furious red—“it’s not loaded.”

“You’re really not funny.” I hobbled to my feet and squeezed my wrist, trying to blunt the pain.

Arthur wiped his eyes and sighed, exorcising the last ripples of his laughing fit. I glared at him, and he rolled his eyes mockingly. “Seriously”—he flipped his grip, holding the rifle by its muzzle and extending it to me—“it’s not loaded.”

I released my wrist reluctantly, taking the handle, a little slick from Arthur’s grasp. For a moment we were both holding it, a pair of track runners caught on camera passing the baton. Then Arthur let go and the rifle’s full weight was in one hand. It was heavier than I realized, and the barrel swung to the ground, scraping the concrete floor. I slipped my other hand under its cool belly and hoisted it upright again. “Why would your dad leave this here?”

Arthur stared at the steel nose of the gun, his glasses foggy and smudged in the trembling light. I almost snapped my fingers, yodeled, “Anyone home?” but in an instant he jutted out his hip and made his wrist go limp. “Why,” he said, his voice gone light as a feather, “to make a man out of me, silly.” He lisped the last word, “sthilly,” popped his hip more, and I laughed, not sure what the appropriate reaction was, only that laughing was what he wanted from me.

It was nearly November when the temperature turned on us, drove out the last lingering warm pockets of summer. Even so, drops of perspiration roiled beneath my sports bra as I rang Arthur’s doorbell. The assistant girls’ field hockey coach, who had been subbing for Mr. Larson for weeks, had no idea what she was doing and just told us to run five miles every day. Anything to get rid of us for an hour so she could flirt with the Bradley athletic director, who was married with two kids in the lower school. I’d taken to cutting through the woods and smoking at Arthur’s for miles three through five. Either Coach Bethany didn’t notice that I didn’t come back with the rest of the team or she didn’t care. I’m thinking the latter.

Arthur cracked open the door just enough to wedge a square of his face in the frame, a pimpled Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said.

“Who else would it be?” I’d been coming by after cross-country practice for the last few weeks, ever since the day I cut class. The school caught me, no big surprise, and Mom and Dad grounded me, also no big surprise. When my parents asked why I did it, what was “so important” that I had to leave school grounds in the middle of the day, I told them I’d had a craving for the penne alla vodka slice at Peace A Pizza. “A craving?” Mom shrilled. “What are you, pregnant?” The corners of her face slouched in as she realized high schoolers get pregnant all the time and how humiliating it would be for her to have to take her fourteen-year-old daughter shopping at A Pea in the Pod.

“Mom!” I huffed, indignant even though I had no right to be. She hadn’t hit that far from the mark.

I think Bradley suspected something had happened in the lounge that day, something that had violated the Bradley code of moral excellence, but Arthur had removed my shorts before they figured out exactly what, and I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to tell them.

Worse than the sudden drop in my stock—Mr. Larson was gone, without explanation. “He’s left us to embrace a new opportunity” was all the administration would say. I confided in Arthur, only Arthur, about the night I spent at Mr. Larson’s house. His eyes bulged behind his filthy glasses when I told him how we’d slept in the same room. “Holy shit!” Arthur gasped. “Did you have sex with him?”

I gave him a disgusted look, at which Arthur laughed. “I’m just kidding. He has a girlfriend. A hot one. I heard she models for Abercrombie & Fitch.”

“Who told you that?” I snapped, instantly feeling thick and squat, a fat little loser Mr. Larson took pity on once.

Arthur shrugged. “That’s just what everyone says.”

Even though I was grounded, my parents had only a vague sense of when cross-country practice ended, so I could easily hang out with Arthur most days. For the first time, I was grateful I lived so far away that I had to take the train home. “Sometimes practice is an hour and a half, other times two,” I told Mom. “It depends on the mileage of the day.” She took me at my word, and so all I had to do was call her from the germy pay phone at the Bryn Mawr station and say, “Getting on the six thirty-seven.” By then, practice had been long over and the initial blast of my high had mellowed into thick, warm sludge. I’d place the phone in the receiver, watch the creaky 6:37 come to a stop with an exhausted white puff. Either I was moving more slowly or everything else just appeared to be.

Arthur’s eyes darted over my shoulder, to the squash courts behind me and the parking lot behind that, nannies waiting to pick up kids from practice, their beat-up Hondas pulsing with a commercial-free stretch of Y100. “People have been coming by, ringing the doorbell, and running away.”

“Who?” I asked, feeling sick.

“Who do you think?” He looked at me accusingly, like I’d brought them to his door.

“Can you just let me in already?” One quivering bead of sweat escaped my sports bra. Took its time snaking into my underwear.

Arthur swung open the door, and I ducked in underneath his arm.

I followed Arthur up the stairs, three flights that moaned noisily beneath our weight. He had moved out of his bedroom and into the attic over the summer, he’d explained to me the first time he brought me up there. “Why?” I’d glanced around the bare-bones room uneasily, rubbing away the goose bumps on my arms. There was no insulation in the walls, and as a bedroom it felt makeshift, vulnerable. Nothing homey about it. Arthur had stuck his hand out the window and tapped the crusty belly of the pipe against the ledge. Some black ashes fluttered away, like charred snowflakes. “Privacy,” he’d said.

He’d taken very few possessions with him when he moved, even his clothes remained in his old bedroom, so that every morning before school he used it as a sort of dressing quarters. But one very important object had made the journey north with him, was granted a prime position on a stack of textbooks that served as his nightstand: a picture of him as a child with his father. It was summer, and they were at the shore, laughing and looking out at the mucky brown ocean. Someone had glued pastel-colored seashells all over the picture frame. I’d picked it up once, quipped, “This looks like a kindergartner’s arts and crafts project,” and Arthur had snatched it back. “My mom made it for me. Don’t touch it.”

Beneath this cherished picture was the Bradley middle school yearbook, which played an integral role in one of our new favorite pastimes: defacing the class pictures of the HOs and the Hairy Legs. It was more fun to destroy them in their middle school form—braces, frizzy hair, lanky limbed, and ugly.

We would do this after we’d smoked and stumbled down the stairs, jelly legged and giggly, to raid the kitchen. Mrs. Finnerman held office hours in her classroom until five, then stayed another hour or two to catch up on paperwork, so the place was ours until then. It was the perfect arrangement she didn’t know about.

Some people lose weight, can’t eat, when they’re stressed. I thought I’d be one of those when everything first happened, but once the acid-flavored anxiety of what would become of me dissolved to reveal what had become of me, the hot new girl already washed up seven weeks into the semester, food had never tasted so good.

Arthur had figured this out years ago, and he was an enthusiastic partner in crime. Together, we came up with all kinds of concoctions to feed our emotional voids—nuke Nutella and it becomes a hard chocolate cookie. This was pre-Nutella ubiquity, and I’d asked, “What the hell is this?” when I first came across it in the cabinet. “Some weird European shit,” Arthur had said and shrugged, and I’d made a face at it, impressed. Or we’d plop a roll of cookie dough on a baking sheet and shove it in the oven without even breaking it up, roasting it as a log until the outer ends were golden and the inside was raw, eggy mush that we ate with a spoon. All the clothes Mom had bought me at the beginning of the semester were rebelling against me, the opening of my khakis spread like my legs with Peyton’s head between them, refusing to close no matter how hard I ran.

Today, after we clattered down the stairs into the kitchen, the yearbook tucked underneath Arthur’s arm like my future mother-in-law’s vintage Chanel clutch, Arthur announced that he wanted nachos. He held the doors to the kitchen cabinets out wide, a conductor directing his symphony.

“You’re a genius,” I said, the corners of my mouth pinching hungrily.

“You mean a genachos.” Arthur gave me a sassy look over his shoulder, and I laughed so hard my knees buckled. Then I was lying on the tiles of his old kitchen, tiles Mom would have called “fuddy-duddy.” The word “fuddy-duddy” made my sides itch even harder with laughter.