“I don’t owe shit to anybody, especially not to someone who just accused me of being a bad friend. After everything I’ve done for you, Jenny. I constantly invite you to stuff you could never get into on your own, and you never even say thank you.”
Her mother was sick, and now her best friends were arguing because of her. She wanted to speak, to beg them to stop, to tell them how much it hurt to see them angry with each other. But the drugs were in the way, and she couldn’t form words.
“Nobody ever helps me,” Kate said.
“Helps you with what? I want to help Aubrey because her mother is dying. What’s your problem?” Jenny said.
“My mother died, too, when I was only ten, and all I got was blame.”
“From Keniston,” Jenny said, skeptically.
“Exactly.”
“Oh, come on, Kate. You always harp on that but we both know that’s not true.”
“How do you know? You weren’t there. He blamed me because I wouldn’t visit her. I couldn’t. She’d been so beautiful, and then she was skin and bones. Tubes in her, and there was this bag attached to her, full of shit and God knows what. It smelled.”
Aubrey heard sniffling. Kate was crying.
“I understand,” Jenny said.
“No, you don’t! Nobody does. Keniston forced me to visit her anyway. He never cared what it felt like to me. He just said I was a bad daughter. People always think the worst of me.”
“This is not the time for self-pity.”
“Oh, first I’m a bad friend, now I’m having a pity party. Admit it, you hate me.”
“I don’t hate you. This is about Aubrey. We should try to help Aubrey, that’s all.”
“I would be no help. I freak in hospitals. I said so. Shut up about it and stop forcing your goody-goody ideas on me.”
“Can you please lower your voice?” Jenny whispered urgently.
“God, she can’t hear us. She’s wasted out of her mind. I’m tired of trying to measure up to your ridiculous standards.”
“You’re taking this way too personally.”
“It is personal. Everything with us is personal. You do things to show me up, Jenny, to prove to everyone you’re better than me. Well, two can play that game. I had sex with Lucas, you know.”
Jenny made a strangled noise. “But … you said nothing happened. You said you had to pack.”
“Not then. Not at Thanksgiving. Just the other day. And don’t act like you don’t care. I know he was the guy you talked about, the one you lost your virginity to. I knew and I did it anyway.”
There was another long silence. Aubrey held her breath, listening hard, glad she had the drugs to make her feel nothing, or she would’ve hated Kate right then. She didn’t ever want to hate Kate. Kate was her dearest friend.
“Why?” Jenny said finally, in a small voice.
“Because I felt like it. Because he wanted to. Because I am not constrained by your uptight, narrow-minded definition of friendship.”
The silence stretched out.
“I was right,” Jenny said, her voice harsh. “You are a bad friend. You’re a bad person.”
Jenny got up without another word and left the room. Aubrey peeked at Kate through her lowered eyelashes, which were wet with tears, and saw that Kate was smiling. A sick, ghoulish smile, like she’d been punched in the stomach, but a smile nonetheless.
11
Shecky’s Burger Shack was the only place on College Street open twenty-four hours. Like generations of Carlisle students before her, when Kate got the midnight munchies, she went for a Sheckyburger. It was at Shecky’s, at 2 A.M. on the Tuesday before her awful fight with Jenny, that Kate ran across Lucas Arsenault after not having seen him for a couple of months.
Kate was wasted at the time, although unlike her usual drug binges, this one had a purpose. She was working on a group project with Griff and the Three Rs (Rose Mackie, Rebecca Levine, and Renee Foster-Jones, who lived downstairs from the Whipple Triplets in mirror-image suite 302) for their Beat poets class. They planned to replicate known drug experiences of the Beats, document the spiritual and artistic insights they gleaned from the drug use by recording themselves saying profound things while stoned, and juxtapose their remarks to lines of Beat poetry in a slide show. Everybody agreed the idea was brilliant, but unfortunately the execution left something to be desired. It must’ve been the strain of weed. Every time one of them tried to say something profound, they said ridiculously pretentious stuff instead and gave each other the giggles something awful. When Kate’s turn came, she intoned, “God created the earth. The earth created the Sheckyburger,” and all hope of productivity was lost. They shut off the tape recorder, grabbed their coats en masse, and stampeded down the stairs for a Shecky’s run.
The plate-glass window was steamed up when they arrived, and bright white light spilled through onto the icy pavement. Shecky’s never slept—it was like a little slice of New York in Belle River. Kate walked in and smelled the charring meat and grilling onions and accumulated years of grease from the French fries and laughed out loud.
“Shecky’s proves that God exists,” she said to her companions as she got in line at the counter.
The scarred wooden booths, the cracked linoleum under the garish fluorescent lights—her home away from home. Her father’s initials were carved on the table of the third booth from the door, the souvenir of a Shecky’s run Keniston Eastman pulled thirty years before. When Kate did her admitted-student visit last spring, she’d carved hers right next to his (though she would never tell him this).
They placed their orders with the skinny kid behind the counter. Either all townies looked alike or the same exact kid also worked slinging crap from the steam tables in Eastman Commons. When Renee greeted the kid by name, Kate figured it was the latter.
“Look at you, Miss Socialist, making friends with the proles,” Kate said.
She thought she’d said it in a nice way, but Renee gave her some righteous side-eye. “My brother works at McDonald’s, and he’s a human being. Timmy’s a human being also.”
“You’ll have to excuse me. I am profligate, because I’m a blonde.”
“And I’m a socialist because I’m black, is that it?”
“Do your homework. That’s Frank O’Hara, Beat poet.”
“That’s stupidity, is what it is,” Renee said, and turned her back on Kate.
The townie kid must’ve overheard their exchange, because Kate’s order was the only one that was delayed. By the time she got her bacon cheeseburger with fries, extra mayo, and double pickles, the others had finished eating and were nodding off at the table.
“Get it to go,” Griff said, yawning. “I’m crashing.”
“Me, too,” Rebecca said.
“I’m outta here,” said Rose.
Renee hadn’t acknowledged Kate since she made that socialist remark, but she was leaning against Rebecca with her eyes closed and mouth open, quasi-passed-out.
“Go without me if you’re so exhausted, but I’m eating my burger while it’s hot,” Kate said.
Griff sighed in annoyance. “If you get kidnapped walking home alone, I’ll blame myself.”
“I don’t give a crap about your white liberal guilt.”