All day at school we spent our classes making eyes at each other and passing notes. In choir, Tidbit and I switched sections—her singing the alto part, her voice straining, me pitch-y and off, freaking Chelsea out when I matched my voice to hers during the chorus of “Sigh No More, Ladies.” In Algebra we watched the second half of some movie about a math prodigy. Two minutes before the bell rang, Micah dropped a note onto my desk, as I knew he would. Until next year, Kitty-Cat, it said. A cat rode the back of a penis-shaped space shuttle, its body colored in with pen. In French, Marlena and I gave an elaborate speech about our summer plan to open a pop-up Slushee shop at the beach—our first step toward reframing the Slushee as a luxury food. When we finished, Erica and Cassie clapped, and Mrs. Lupin shouted, “Brava, deux pois dans une cosse!”
During AP English—another movie, this time A Separate Peace—Mr. Chung called me out into the hall for my student conference. I really liked Mr. Chung. I liked the questions he wrote in the margins of my work in his skinny hybrid cursive and I especially liked that he let me read whatever I wanted from the AP list as long as I wrote a paper, and as long as I turned it in when I said I would. He asked me what I wanted to do with my future, quoting a line from a Machado poem he’d made us memorize—I wanted to tell him, honestly, that when I let myself dream I imagined a room full of books, but I felt suddenly shy. Before I got up, he slid the short story I’d written for our creative writing exercise, the final assignment of the year, across the desk. It was about a hotdog-eating contest that sparked a chain of vomiting that spread like a virus to everyone at a local fair, except two girls, best friends, who document the whole thing. I’d written it in a couple nicotine-fueled hours after reading a Stephen King short story with a near identical plot, changing the characters to classmates and the setting to the Kewaunee fairgrounds. After finishing a draft, I read it out loud to Marlena and she laughed so hard she kept saying she was going to throw up. Mr. Chung’s comments were on the last page, underneath a small, red-inked A+. But why THIS story? What if you took on a subject that actually matters to you? Back in the classroom, I rolled the pages into a little telescope and looked through them, first at the TV and then out the window at the snow.
After English, Marlena threw herself against the locker next to mine as if she had traveled a great and wearying distance. “I didn’t skip a single class today.”
Something that actually matters to you.
How about how I hear her all the time, telling me she didn’t skip, her voice as perfectly alive as it was in that moment, and every time I do, I’m afraid that she already knew that would be her real last day at KHS. I should have asked why she sounded so sad. I should have listened to what she wasn’t saying. She kept talking, went on about her classes, something about Chelsea—whatever it was is lost, vanished to wherever what’s forgotten goes. Something that actually matters.
I interrupted to show her my grade. She looked at me with tenderness and a little pity too, the way I’d seen her looking at Sal, plus something mine and hers alone, a look that drew an outline around the space between us and made me aware, suddenly, of all the history we didn’t share. More years as strangers than friends; but I could barely remember my life before.
“Obviously, stupid. You are going straight to the top.”
“You’re smart as me. Smarter, probably. You just don’t try.”
“What am I going to do? Jet off to college and let Sal take care of himself? Five years and you won’t even remember this place. That’s why we have to treasure this time by getting your freak brain very drunk.”
“Well, that goes without saying, ma chérie.” I matched my tone to hers, but I kind of hated that she didn’t try and argue when I said she was smarter than me.
“To reward you for your great academic effort, as soon as the sun sets I shall make you the filthiest of martinis, and you shall drink it from a chalice.”
“How dare you imply I would ever not drink from a chalice.”
All of KHS was keyed up, from the cultish cross-country team to the art nerds to Chelsea’s crowd to the faceless in-betweens. But we were different. We glowed. Last day of school, snow in June, secret mansion party—like the four of us had injected something special and potent into our veins.
*
I rode with Ryder and Greg in the lead car. Marlena and Tidbit rode with Jimmy; Marlena in the front, Tidbit in the back. Ryder refused to leave Silver Lake before dark, and took us on a solid forty-five-minute drive around Kewaunee before curving, with genius levels of roundaboutness and misdirection, back toward Kewaunee and eventually Coral Springs, where the Hodsons’ summer estate spread along an acre of prime Lake Michigan coastline.
“Is that the same car,” Ryder said about a hundred times, his eyes flicking from the rearview to the side mirror, back to the rearview.
“The same car as what?”
“The same fucking car, Cat! The one that’s been hovering since we left your house.”
“This is so incredibly stupid,” Greg said.
But I didn’t mind. I loved being folded up into the dark envelope of the van, blowing cigarette smoke out of the cracked passenger-side window, next to Ryder, where she normally sat. Those quiet minutes had all the promise of the party, all the promise of that night and the rest of the nights we’d all spend together. I reached inside my coat pocket and extracted the last of my stolen almonds, popping it, stale and flavorless, into my mouth. There, in the car with them, separated from Marlena, I was more a part of the group than ever before. And was it wrong to like how they treated me when she wasn’t around? I fiddled with the radio and Ryder indulged the way I changed every song after a verse or two. Greg, who liked me–liked me, though no one acknowledged it, leaned between the front seats. They treated me like her, like something lovely and breakable and precious.
In Coral Springs, window light simmered through the trees, warm little fires that bobbed in and out of view. The summer people were already there, gin and tonics sweating in their palms as they clinked glasses on their lake-view porches or toasted marshmallows in their backyards. The kids caught fireflies in mason jars and kept them on their bedside tables as tiny temporary lamps—Mom and I were the ones who unscrewed the caps and dumped their buzzed-out bodies down the toilets. So many rich-people things we’d never done, or never done to their levels of catalogue beauty. Our marshmallows shriveled on the stick over the pit where we burned our trash. We caught fireflies with our bare hands for an instant or less before they struggled away; sometimes we clapped them between our palms so we could smear their iridescent guts on our cheeks.
“This neighborhood,” said Ryder, shaking his head, but excitement had hijacked his fear. The beauty here was contagious, welcoming. Nothing like the beauty in Silver Lake, wild and rough against the portable houses and our beat-up cars.
“Jealous, much?” asked Greg.
“Fifty years ago, probably wasn’t even rich people who lived here,” I said.
“Actually, that’s false. This place has been an upper-crust Chicagoan Methodist enclave for at least a hundred years, if not longer,” said Greg. “Pretty sure you have to like, donate your firstborn to the Republican party to build here.”
“But once there were Indians!”