‘Some things aren’t like that,’ Claire said. Her face was getting redder and redder. ‘It’s not always black and white, yes or no. Thomas, Frannie’s father? He’s gay. He’s down there in Louisiana with James, his boyfriend. They’ve been together for two years now. He came out shortly after I got pregnant. I should have known, really-I sensed he was unhappy, even when we were dating. I’ve heard enough from people about how this was a selfish decision, how I shouldn’t be bringing a child into the world without a proper father. You wouldn’t believe what people said to my face. But he’s a good guy, Summer. He’s a great father. James is a good person, too. He’s a lawyer-he set up a trust fund for Frannie, for when she gets older. So how’s that for things not being black and white?’
She whirled around, storming into the pool. I followed her, feeling like my head was detached from my neck. The pool air smelled humidly of chemicals. The lifeguards sat on their high chairs, twirling their whistles. The pool was large, with twelve lap lanes, a shallow swimming area, and a diving well. There were normal-height diving boards as well as two higher ones, the highest one seemingly grazing the skylights in the vaulted ceiling.
Frannie was already in the shallow end, bobbing with a few other girls. Claire dropped her towel onto a plastic chair and pulled jerkily at the strap of her suit. My nose and eyes stung with chlorine. I walked over to her and touched her arm. ‘I’m sorry.’
She sighed and rolled her eyes. ‘It’s all right. I probably would’ve found out some time, if that’s what his father’s got. But God, Summer. Is this some sort of complicated revenge? Did you come here just looking for a way to ruin my day?’
‘…Revenge?’
Claire wagged a finger in my face. ‘You were the one that found me. I was cautious about it, but I thought, Jesus, we’ve been out of school for years, we’re different now. But maybe you aren’t. I mean, maybe you want revenge for…for I don’t know, everything I knew about you, when we were young.’ She stared me down. ‘It’s not like I wanted to know any of that stuff, Summer. It’s not like I sought it out.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I whispered.
Claire shook her head. She concentrated hard on a flyer for synchronized swimming classes that was taped up on the wall. ‘That one summer, when we were at Long Beach Island? You were going into eighth grade, I was going into ninth? We were such good friends. And then when school started you just…stopped speaking to me. The same thing happened when we were older, too.’
I stood up straighter, astounded. ‘I stopped speaking to you?’
‘Yeah, you did.’
I let out a barking laugh. Finally I said, ‘You could have introduced me to your friends, you know. The first set of friends. The people that were on the back of the bus.’
Claire wrinkled her nose. A long moment went by. ‘Why didn’t you just ask me to introduce you?’
I stared at my bare feet, coughing out a laugh. ‘You don’t ask about that kind of thing, Claire! At thirteen years old? The last thing you do is ask! And besides, you stopped speaking to me, too. After that.’
Claire took her bottom lip into her mouth. ‘You’re right. But I thought I was bothering you. You always seemed so…irritated when I said hi.’
I turned away. How could our rift have been even remotely my fault? She was the one who ignored me when we started school. She was the one who shunned me after our argument in Prospect Park, avoiding me for months. She was the one who didn’t bother writing from San Francisco and turned away from me that following autumn.
I ran my hands up and down the lengths of my arms, feeling a headache coming on. Was it possible I’d pushed her away first? I considered eighth grade. Whenever I saw Claire coming down the hall, surrounded by her sparkling, captivating friends, I always pretended like I was busy. I pointedly looked in the other direction when she waved to me; I feigned deafness when she called my name from the other end of the hall. Why did she need me, after all, when she had all of them? A few years later, when we’d sort of become friends again, I said to her, leave me alone, and eventually, she did.
I’d been ashamed by her pity, yes, but I might have turned away from her for other reasons, too: maybe I hadn’t wanted to invest anything in her. Maybe I figured that if I did, Claire would eventually abandon me, just as my mother had. The past suddenly twisted, making me feel uncomfortable and a little breathless. I wondered who else I had pushed away. Who else I was still pushing away.
‘Do you think about school a lot?’ I blurted out. ‘Peninsula?’
Claire shrugged. ‘I do, I guess. But not any more than I think about anything else.’ She rested on her heels, assessing me. ‘You think about it a lot, huh? Of course you do.’
There was no way I could deny it. ‘Probably too much.’
She kicked off a flip-flop. ‘I don’t know. It happened. It sucked. School sucked. End of story. There’s nothing we can really do about it. And who knows who I would’ve been if it wouldn’t have happened the way it did. I would’ve been really different, I think.’