Kim Gunderson was a ballet dancer and tiny, about my height. She wore a lot of black clothes, leggings with oversized sweaters and cool boots, and talked really fast. I’d heard rumors that she was gay, but no one knew for sure. Cathy Schaeffer was almost as pretty as Shauna, with long white-blond hair, pale green eyes, and a serious rack. Cathy was crazy and funny, always doing wild shit at parties. She also smoked, which was why the girls came out back.
I’d known all of them as long as I could remember, even used to be friends with Shauna. When we were twelve or thirteen, she liked this game where we’d call a girl up and ask her to come over, then call her a couple of hours before and say we didn’t want her to come anymore—sometimes we’d just take off before the girl arrived. Shauna was also really good at mimicking people—she’d call a boy and say she had a crush on him using a different girl’s voice.
When I told Shauna I didn’t want to play the games anymore, she stopped talking to me for a week. I was devastated, especially when she and our friends walked by me in the hallway like I no longer existed, whispering and rolling their eyes. I went home crying every day. Finally, Shauna came up to me after school and said she missed me. I was so relieved I forgot what had even started the fight in the first place, forgot I didn’t like how she was treating people.
Shauna was the daughter of a cop, Frank McKinney. Everyone knew him. He coached baseball teams and hockey teams, stuff like that. McKinney, as most people called him, wasn’t around Shauna’s house a lot when we were kids—he was usually at the station. Shauna’s mother had died in a car accident when Shauna was five, and her grandma looked after Shauna but she wasn’t very with it. At birthday parties she’d serve up a bunch of chips and hot dogs, put in a movie, then disappear into the other room for hours. Frank McKinney and his wife had had Shauna when they were eighteen or something. He was a big guy but not fat, just muscular and tall, and he walked with a confident swagger. He had a Tom Selleck mustache, a deep voice, wore sunglasses, and chewed gum, snapping it between his teeth. You could tell he was a cop even when he was in casual clothes by the clipped way he spoke, using short words and acronyms. And you could also tell his job was really important to him—he sent his uniform out to be dry-cleaned, kept his shoes polished, and his police cruiser was always clean.
Sometimes I got the feeling he was kind of lonely—he spent a lot of time sitting by himself, reading a book in the kitchen or watching the news. I don’t think he dated much, and the few times he had a girlfriend they didn’t seem to last long. We all felt bad that Shauna didn’t have a mother and we knew it bothered her too, the way she would talk to our moms when she was at our house, polite and sweet, helping clean up after dinner, like she wanted them to like her.
Most of us kids were kind of scared of McKinney, but it wasn’t like that for me. I just felt sad for him, though I was never really sure why. Whenever I thought about him, it was always that one image that held fast, him sitting in the kitchen for hours, the newspaper or a book in front of him, a cup of coffee, and the way he’d look up and out the window like he was wishing he was out there in his car, on patrol. Like he was wishing he was anywhere but in that house.
*
When we got to high school, I was getting tired of the way Shauna was constantly trying to play the rest of us against each other, saying one of us had talked about the other, leaving someone out of an invite, or making mean comments about our clothes and hair, then adding, “Just kidding!” The next day she’d tell you that you were her best friend and give you one of her favorite items of clothing, jewelry, or a CD she made just for you, which would make the others jealous. It felt like every week there was a flare-up and someone was upset. I was also getting tired of not being able to wear what I wanted—jeans and T-shirts, not skirts and blouses, which Shauna had decided should be our uniform.
When we were in ninth grade I mentioned to Shauna one day that I liked a boy named Jason Leroy. She told me she’d help. She threw a birthday party at her house and invited a few boys. Her dad was working and her grandma was supposed to be supervising, but she vanished into the TV room with a glass of something and a vague “Have fun, kids.” Before the party, Shauna told me she heard Jason liked me but he was into “real women.” She said I had to give him a blow job, and if I didn’t, I was a chicken—they’d all done it. I was nervous at the party, but Jason kept smiling at me and asked me to go into one of the bedrooms. After we were necking for a while, he hinted that he wanted a blow job. When I balked, he said Shauna had promised him I’d do it and that’s why he was there with his friends. If I didn’t go through with it, he’d tell everyone he had a threesome with Shauna and me.