Because he asked me to, I shrug.
The truth: Clarissa recently spent the night with the first boy I ever thought could be a real boyfriend, the first boy I thought I loved. Eric was his name. He had big, friendly ears that he pinned back with cosmetic surgery a couple of years ago for his thirteenth birthday—bar and bat mitzvah year—the same year everybody but me gets their face and body fixed. I met him at Jewish summer camp, and he wrote me a love ballad called “Jazzy Girl,” which he sang as he dipped me across a keyboard for a kiss in the camp computer lab. Next thing I heard, Clarissa lost her V-card to Eric. The two of them tell me they only dry humped, but still I cry into my mattress, I cry on the phone to my father, I cry to Ashanti, I cry off fifteen pounds. I swear I will never speak to Eric or Clarissa again—I hope you two get AIDS—but many years later, when Eric takes his life in a motel room in upstate New York, Clarissa will be the first person I call.
I correct myself: I’m on the rebound. My best friend fucked my boyfriend. Once a fat bitch, always a fat bitch I guess.
BURN! They both scream. Let’s get you shwasted!
Harley and Nelle bring me a large glass of Red Bull and vodka. It’s weird to swish the vodka in my mouth, something as familiar to me as water, but somehow new, like this, when it’s mine. The three of us drink this combination all night, their fingers clinking the ice around in the glass. We cuddle up in Craig’s bed as the boats drag by. The later it gets, the more I feel understood by these girls. They both stroke my hair, my thighs. They move their hands up my shirt and slowly tickle my stomach—Such a sick bod! / Thanks, it’s the mono—and I don’t mind this. For the first time in years, I don’t mind being touched. The caffeine from the Red Bull has my heart feeling huge and my lips are numb and wet and I’m biting them and pinching them to feel more like Harley and I have never been drunk before, I have never seen yacht lights flashing through windows, I have never seen girls’ faces this close up to mine, talking.
Craig takes out a disposable camera and tells the three of us to pose. He flashes the camera while we smile together in bed, on the floor, in the baby crib of his guestroom. Our faces are flushed, and we’re holding hands in every picture. Nelle’s green hat—we all took turns wearing it. I find the photos twelve years later, each photo scissored out in the shape of a heart. On the back of one are words, though I cannot remember who wrote them, or when. They read, Best Friends Forever.
I am a new person after our school’s holiday break. I don’t care about any kids in my grade; I continue ignoring Clarissa; I start lining my lips with dark lip pencils to make them look bigger. Harley and Nelle have decided to adopt me—File the paperwork, it’s official—and they pick me up from school at three thirty on the days I show.
Harley is sixteen now, older than me and Nelle, and she drives like a maniac. She weaves around other cars on I-95, plays chicken in the wrong lanes, uses turbo. She’s been driving crazy since years before she got a license, Nelle tells me, but none of this matters to us. The way we see it, Harley is beautiful, and she can legally drive, and that’s the end of it.
From my school, we go straight to Harley’s house. Her mother usually stays at her boyfriend’s apartment, but sometimes she’s passed out on the couch with a half-drunk glass and a bottle of nasal spray. Her father lives somewhere out west. Harley’s room feels so grown-up with navy-blue walls, clicking beaded streamers at her doorway, an open shower in the middle of her room, a mattress on the floor. My room at home is still pink with porcelain dolls and twinkle lights lining the perimeter, but I don’t tell them this.
Tonight, we’re going to a bonfire party off Dixie Highway called The Circus. Public school kids. Bass music. Nelle stands at the bathroom mirror smudging on charcoal eyeliner, a cigarette bit between her teeth. In my memories of Nelle, there’s never a moment that she is not smoking. Fuck, it’s making me water! she says, fanning the smoke from her eyes.
You ever smoke before, Chinky? Harley asks me. The two of us are sitting on the love seat in her room. Why you always staring at her?
I haven’t.
Ugh, you are such a Martian.
I’ll try, I say. I mean, I love the way they smell.
It’s nice out—let’s go outside.
The three of us sit on the wood planks of Harley’s deck, palm trees whistling. A streetlight glows close and our eyes are gold with it.
We like cloves, says Nelle. Bali Hai’s. They taste like doped-out candy.
Harley puts one between my lips. Suck, she says, lighting it.
I hold the thick flavor in my mouth. I switch between trying to breathe through my mouth and my nose. I don’t know how to inhale, but it’s true, I do taste the bright sugar. Nelle and Harley exhale the smoke from their nostrils in teapot streams.
Let it out of your nose, that’s how you know you’re doing it right.
I listen to the paper crackle between my teeth. The sound is amplified in my head, and I pretend that each crackle is a strand of my brain dying out.
Do you have parents? I ask Nelle. I mean, how do you come here every night?
My mom’s always up my ass, she says, but Harley’s mom covers for me on the phone. Says we’re watching movies or doing math problems or something. My sister’s in college.
And your parents let you—
Her dad’s dead, says Harley, if that’s what you’re trying to ask.
Nelle doesn’t look at either one of us when Harley says this. She takes a longer drag, snap-cracks her knuckles against her knees.
Well, I’ve always wanted a sister, I say. So that’s cool.
And what about you, shoe princess? Nelle says. Don’t you spend a lot of money on prep to be skipping every day?
My dad moved to New York last year, I say. For the business. And my mom doesn’t give a shit about school.
Isn’t your whole family in prison or something? Chillin’ with Martha Stewart?
Harley jabs Nelle with an elbow—Rude.
What! Nelle says. I mean, it’s on the frickin’ news.
It’s cool, I say. The prison thing.
What’d they do again?
Different stuff. Mostly money.
Do you miss them?
Nah.
Well, we’re your sisters now, says Harley. Nelle nods. Like blood.
At the bonfire, the three of us sip Coronas and sway our hips to Biggie Smalls—bitches I like ’em brainless, guns I like ’em stainless—thumping out of a boom box. We’re in the middle of a parking lot behind a block of abandoned warehouses near a great stretch of trees, and the fire is piled high with tires and cardboard boxes fluttering inside a metal trash can. Groups of older kids laugh around the orange sparks, sucking on cigarettes, kissing. A senior from Nelle’s public school walks over to us and wraps his arms around her waist. Hey, Pimpstress, you smoking tonight?
His name’s Monty, Harley whispers to me. He’s in love with Nelle and he’s always got green.
Monty plucks a cigarette out from behind his ear. It looks like it’s been wrapped with a brown paper bag.
That a joint? I ask. I don’t recognize this. The only joints I have ever seen are my mother’s, and those are always wrapped white.
A blunt, says Monty. He chuckles at me. Where’d you find this girl?
She’s our prep school tropical princess, says Harley. Ain’t she cute?
Monty lights the blunt and takes it in, passing it over to Nelle, who passes it over to Harley.
I’m assuming you’re a weed virgin, too? she asks.
I nod.
Open your mouth, she says. Harley sucks the blunt until the burning worm almost reaches her nails. Before I know what’s happening, she presses her mouth to mine, exhaling the smoke down my throat. I hold her by the back of her head—I hold her right there—I don’t want our faces to part.