When I hope to become friends with a woman, we usually meet, early on, at bars. Dim places with complicated wine lists and small plates for sharing. We order elegant, expensive things, adjusting our choices to each other. The pretty circle of tuna, the way the raw gems tumble onto the plate when you tap the shape with your knife. The dense wedges of focaccia, rosemary threaded into the dough. Like sex and cooking and watching bad television, like eating, like existing in the world after twilight, talking has become difficult for me without a drink. After a little while, an hour, less if it isn’t going to work, I begin to notice the way she interrupts and charges forward with her story or asks me question after question. How she requests a second drink—when I do, which is usually before hers is done, or when she’s ready, or not at all. How she eats, carefully moving a portion to her own plate, napkin unfurled on her lap, or if she’s comfortable right away, using her fingers. If she picks. The quality of her listening. Her tone when she mentions her partner, the last person she fucked. Whether she cares what I think. Any and all tics, hand talkers, fidgeters, lip biters, eye contact avoiders, the woman I instantly adored who got too close when she was trying to make a point, who would put a hand emphatically on whatever part of me she could reach and try to touch me into understanding. I notice, and I begin to see the outline of the best friend, the girl she shaped herself around, according to. For so many women, the process of becoming requires two. It’s not hard to make out the marks the other one left.
Outside, I stood unsteadily near the entrance. The streetlight released its soupy glow. The entire world was a circle, shrinking, with me at the center. Its radius was short. I pulled out my phone, held it in my hand as I walked across the street and into Washington Square Park, where I sat on the lip of the fountain.
Sal answered on the second ring. Hello? he said. A question. I had to concentrate to keep my consonants from melting into vowels. It’s you, I said. I was drunk enough that it was no problem to pretend us talking on the phone was normal. He didn’t sound as old as he had on the voicemail. I almost said so. I experienced our conversation as if watching myself from an intimate distance. Saying, easily, of course I remember you, I’m so glad you called, tomorrow, sure, is six okay, sounds perfect, I look forward to it, see you then. And then, a little wobble in my voice, It will be good to talk about her, with someone who knew. I leaned into the silence coming out of the phone, the word yeah, when it finally came, after a solid pause. Yeah.
I hung up and texted Sal the address of the bar where we would meet the following evening, a place near work where you could also get coffee and tea. Why did he sound reluctant? This was just the sort of thing she would have liked. The two of us, after so many years, the drama of it, this further proof of her enduring appeal.
The park was full of people. Three beautiful girls, nineteen or twenty or so, clicked by in heels, their hair bobbed and shiny; I watched them magnetize the particles in the air, so that they drew the attention of everyone they passed. After a while, I got up to leave, but nobody looked at me.
Michigan
Five years after my short-lived days as a high school dropout, in a college English course, I learned Aristotle’s rule for story endings. I saw myself, jeans split at the knees, sitting beside my mother in Principal Lacey’s office, gnawing a Bic pen. So maddeningly young. How had I tricked myself into thinking that the murderer chasing us from the opening paragraph wouldn’t wind up killing someone in the end? Despite the fact that all along I knew. Surprising and inevitable—does anything better describe the feeling of getting found out in a lie?
The day I got caught in that one, Mom consulted my schedule, which was stuck to the fridge, and timed her day so that she’d be hungry exactly as I left World History and headed to Lunch Hour A. On the drive into town she picked up a five-dollar pizza from Spicy Bob’s, the takeout window inside the Shell station. She had no game plan, and wandered the perimeter of the cafeteria three times, pizza box in hand, before texting: At school with SPICY BOB’S, come out come out wherever you are! After a few minutes she popped into the main office to ask if they could call for me over the intercom. And so began what I imagine was a stand-up routine of miscommunication, with Mom insisting that I’d been coming to school since the start of the semester, and Mrs. Tenley (the attendance officer) insisting even harder that I’d never appeared at all and that my absence had led her to assume we hadn’t completed our relocation.
The second I got Mom’s text I’d asked Ryder to drop me off downtown, saying only that I needed to meet someone. I walked the remaining half mile or so to school with the straight-backed resolve of the wrongly accused.
“I told you she’d show,” Mom said. Her confidence wilted as Mrs. Tenley dragged us into Principal Lacey’s office, where we waited in fidgety silence for a procession of concerned adults to refill their coffee cups and arrange a sickle moon of chairs. Principal Lacey’s purple razor-burn bristled across his cheeks. In addition to him and Mrs. Tenley, we had to explain ourselves to a beaky, note-taking woman (“Oh, gosh, just call me Cher,” she said, during introductions) who was either a psychologist or a social worker.
“I went to the library, I don’t know. I walked around. You can ask the librarian,” I said, wondering if she’d remember the two hours I’d spent there, when Mrs. Tenley asked me to account for the six weeks I’d missed.
“But why?” asked Mom.
*
Earlier that day, I’d met Marlena and Ryder at the bus stop. I’d picked my outfit with special care, knowing that I was going to see Ryder first thing. My jeans flapped open-mouthed over the knees, and my shirt was a plaid button-down of Jimmy’s from years ago, too big but not huge, a safety pin hinging it closed at the intersection with my black push-up bra. A few buttons had long ago fallen off; I’d replaced each of them with a safety, having noticed that Marlena often DIY’d her clothes with staples or pins, preferring those quick fixes to sewing. The bus was inching like a caterpillar over the white hill into Silver Lake when Ryder drove up in his van.
Marlena opened the glove compartment and pulled out a jar of peanut butter that she tossed at me. Her peach-colored cotton dress flared at the waist. Underneath, she wore a pair of jeans. No staples or safety pins in sight.
“Be careful with that,” Ryder said, staring at the bus in the rearview. Marlena and Ryder had been on a break, as she called it, for a couple weeks. One day they were cold and pissy with each other, the next so flirty they shut everyone else out. Today, they were in between.
“Money, money, money,” said Marlena.
“My money,” Ryder corrected.
The jar weighed nothing. I opened it. All the peanut butter from its past life had been cleaned out, though a faint nutty smell remained. The inside was painted a muddy color, so that a first glance might trick you into thinking it contained peanut butter still; albeit a rotten, overly dark variation. At the bottom, a couple of plastic baggies, each big enough to hold a child’s retainer. I pulled one out, holding it by the seal up to the van’s salt-smeared window. The purplish crystals looked like rock candy without a stick. Fun, almost, though I knew better.
“Barney Blast,” said Marlena.
“It’s meth, right?” I realized I’d never said meth out loud. Marlena and I always danced around the word. “Why is it purple?”
“Meth?” said Ryder, mimicking me. Perhaps I’d called it the wrong thing. They said ice, or crystal, or even, jokingly, redneck cocaine, but I would sound even lamer calling it something like that. “Yes. It’s meth. A few drops of food coloring, that’s it. It’s all about the marketing. Doesn’t fuck you up different, but I can make people think it does, just because of how it looks.”
“Also he charges more,” said Marlena. “Because even though it’s absolute shit it’s very cute.”
“Now I know all your secrets.” They trusted me enough to let me come along—I felt grateful almost, honored. I would have done anything they asked.