On my way out, I crouched by her chair. I picked up the three wrappers—twisted cellophane, from rolls of Smarties—and tucked them into my jean pocket. It was only four, hours earlier than I ever left. I didn’t tell anyone I was going.
When I reached the mouth of the subway, the walk sign turned to green and I changed my mind, darting across the street and down the block to the North Park Hotel, where there’s a lounge I’ve always liked. It was quiet there that time of day, just a couple of old ladies chatting quietly at the corner of the bar. I sat in one of the low couches by the window and shrugged off my coat. I would have a drink, and then I’d call Sal. I wanted so badly just to text him. The conversation would be more comfortable without the intimacy of voices. But a text wouldn’t have the right gravity—and anyway, the drink would help.
The waiter came and we performed the ritual, exchanging our handful of words. I ordered a martini. It cost fourteen dollars. The waiter nodded, took the leather-bound menu, and disappeared. The people walking by kept their heads down. They thought their private thoughts. I liked the ones who ran across the street the instant the hand went red, into the slow-moving wall of traffic. The martini arrived; the waiter shook and poured. Just one, dry and salty. Splinters of ice floated on the surface. Two fat green olives drowned on the plastic spear. I ate them last, so tight with gin that they bit me back.
Michigan
Kewaunee High School was a squat brick building in the middle of a cornfield, and with the snow swirling around it I was reminded of one of those bunkers where scientists live for years in Antarctica, conducting tests of the earth’s magnetism. Jimmy dropped me off and I joined the students funneling through the front doors. I believed, back then, that Marlena and I were pulled together by an invisible current. That morning, when she blew in, bringing a considerable amount of snow with her, coatless, hatless, wearing Keds and baggy jeans soaked almost to the knee, I felt a grateful wonder at the fated-ness of our friendship, though the school lobby was probably the most predictable place for us to meet. The first bell had rung ten minutes earlier. I was sitting on the stairs, alone. Stalling.
“Hey!” she said, leaning against the railing so that she filled my view. Instead of a backpack she carried a small tote with nothing on it but the sentence “Dogs like books too!” It didn’t appear to have any books in it. She fished out a pack of Parliaments.
“You can smoke in here?” I asked.
“Are you an idiot,” she said, tucking a cigarette behind her ear. Her thermal shirt was mustard-colored, and above her right breast that pin she always wore caught the lobby’s fluorescent light. “I had a night.” She grabbed the puff at the top of my knit hat and tugged it off my head, dropping it onto the muddy tile. “Not a good look for you,” she said, and I wondered if it was happening, if she would be cruel to me now that we were at school. “Want to get out of here? The first day back is always bullshit. They’re just gonna phone it in until next week.”
Botany/Soil Ecology had begun a few minutes ago. I’d already missed homeroom. “Like, skip?” One morning the previous April, I’d ditched choir with Haesung for the first and only time. We met in the bathroom farthest from the rehearsal room. We were so nervous we spent the whole time locked in separate stalls, jumping onto the toilets whenever someone opened the door, lest they recognize us by our feet.
“Like, skip?” Marlena parroted. She twirled a strand of my hair around her finger. “You’re seriously the cutest person I’ve ever seen.” Her hand was so cold it lowered the temperature of the air around it. “I have to get something from my locker. You probably saw the shop lot when you came in? No one will be out there in this snow. You can wait in the houses. I’ll be like, five minutes.”
She sprinted up the steps, her tote bag banging against her hip, and vanished behind the swinging doors.
*
Outside, the snowstorm had mellowed, flakes whirling from everywhere at once, like the spray from a snowmobile. I unlatched the gate that surrounded the shop class lot, white crystals peppering my eyelashes. The area was empty except for a dozen doghouses, some as big as sheds, others so small I’d have to crawl to get inside. Staked into the ground near the entrance a wooden sign dripped blue letters: “$150 Dollars! Treat your DOG like a KING and SUPPORT KHS Football! GO FIGHTING VIKINGS!” All the Os doubled as smiley faces.
I ducked into the biggest doghouse to wait for Marlena. Inside it was cold and dry, snowdrifts piled against the back corners, the wood crystallized with a glaze of ice. One entire wall was covered with the word “PIZZA,” gouged again and again into the wood. At the very bottom in different handwriting: “FUCK YOU FATTY-TITS.” I sat down, my back against the words. After thirty-two minutes exactly I would leave, I decided. Whatever happened in Silver Lake wouldn’t carry over here; this was a lesson. But seventeen minutes later, when I heard footsteps dragging through the snow outside and Marlena appeared in the door, blocking out the light, I had to admit that so far, almost everything I’d predicted about her had turned out wrong.
“Funny you figured out which one is ours,” she said, and I felt a wary relief. Her tote had been replaced with a backpack, and she was now, for the first time since I’d met her, wearing an actual winter jacket. She’d put on some makeup. Her eyes were black-rimmed, and her cheeks sparkled when she tucked her hair behind her ears. “Ryder did that. Not the pizzas, the fuck-you part.”
“I thought maybe you weren’t coming.”
“I had to get some stuff.” She shrugged off the backpack. “My sheet music, books, all that jazz.”
“You took forever.”
“Well, I’m here, aren’t I? Chill.”
“Okay, sorry, sorry,” I said. “So what now?”
She pulled an Altoids tin from her coat pocket and popped it open. “First, we’re going to smoke this joint.” She plucked out a joint, slightly skinnier than the ones Jimmy hid in a playing card box in his top desk drawer, and sniffed it before lighting one end and sucking on the opposite side. A few seconds later, smoke curled out of the corners of her mouth. Her voice went tight, as if she were squeezing her words through a straw. “Your turn.”
“No, thanks.”
Still, she held the joint toward me, its smoke giving off a sweet smell, like Jimmy’s sweatshirt after he got off a shift.
“No.” I kind of wanted to, but I was too afraid to try it now, at school of all places.
“You want to hang, you have to smoke.” She raised one of her eyebrows slightly, as if in challenge.
“I don’t want to.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m just kidding. Your face! Oh my God. You really think I’d make you smoke weed? Who do you think I am? You know me better than that by now, I hope.”
I forced a smile and tried to shake my head like “You got me!” The cloud of smoke was making me dizzy.