I was in my room, reading my mom’s book from the exact place she’d left off, when Marlena opened my bedroom door. A flicker of annoyance—no matter how bad I wanted to be friends, I hated to be snapped out of a book.
“Your mom said you were in here. My dad’s in the zone. He’s shoveling your driveway now. I think he’s trying to be charming.”
“I noticed.”
“This place looks like a prison cell,” Marlena declared, scratching at her neck. She wore a man’s button-down over a T-shirt that, like the one I’d seen her in before, canoed along her collarbone, its neck cut out.
My room consisted of a mattress on the floor, a box serving double duty as a hamper, a taped-up picture of Haesung and me beside a torn photo of a shirtless model from an Abercrombie catalogue, six plastic drawers stacked three deep and positioned side by side. Two boxes in the corner nearest the closet that I hadn’t bothered to unpack. What was even in them? Stuff from my old room, a bulletin board, my American Girl doll, a couple ceramic horses that were a gift from my Nana, a week’s worth of Concord uniforms that I was saving for no good reason.
“I have an idea,” Marlena said, and left.
Soon she reappeared with two half-empty cans of paint, one yellow and one blue, Michigan colors, and a James Taylor CD, guitar songs full of campfire smoke that reminded me of Dad. We levered off the stuck-on lids with spoons and peeled away the skin of dried paint to get to the still-wet insides. We wiped trails on our jeans, each other’s arms, messing ourselves up on purpose. No paintbrushes, so we opened a brand-new pack of kitchen sponges that we found under the sink. We moved everything to the center of my room and then went to work, dropping the sponges in the paint and dabbing the excess off on my hamper-box. We each took a wall. Marlena sang as she painted, harmonizing with James Taylor, going higher or lower depending on the song. “You have a really good voice,” I told her, shyly.
“I have perfect pitch,” she said. “I used to get all the solos—gospel, pop, everything—until I missed too many rehearsals.” After the CD hiccuped and started over, I joined in singing too, stumbling my way through the words. I never had enough confidence to follow anything but the strongest voice. When “Fire and Rain” came on, Marlena talked for a while about how the magic of a song is in its transitions. She paused and replayed the tracks in different places, but I sort of lost the thread.
“So what do you miss the most,” she asked, frowning at the comet she was trying to paint. “Your boyfriend? Your best friend?”
Haesung had reached out since the move a grand total of four times. I responded to all her emails almost instantly, even the one that was just a chain forward. I felt like I knew Haesung so well—that she kept candy hidden from her parents in a shoebox under her bed, that she was hopelessly in love with our French teacher. I was there the day she got her period, and had coached her through the insertion of her first tampon. We’d spent almost every Friday night since childhood sleeping over at one of our houses. In the months before I moved, I’d sometimes try and push her to do something new—sneak out after midnight and walk down to the 7-Eleven, rent a movie like Eyes Wide Shut, even steal a little bit of Jimmy’s pot. Ugh, Cath, she’d say. You’re such a spaz. Or worse, she’d just ask why.
“My dad, I guess. Though I think that makes me a traitor. Can I say my school?”
“No. No you cannot.”
“It was a really good school,” I said, startled by the feeling in my voice. I’d campaigned hard to get my parents to even let me apply to Concord—neither of them had gone to college, let alone private school. When I’d had to leave, I felt my small life was over. I’m embarrassed to remember how silly and overblown my tantrums must have seemed to Mom and Dad; to Jimmy, especially. I withdrew, and Mom used the returned tuition to cover some of the moving costs.
“So you’re not just a nerd! You’re a genius.”
“It’s not—it’s just, my life was one thing, and now it’s really different.”
“I know what you mean. Like when you get a replacement puppy after your old one gets hit by a car.”
“Yeah, and the replacement has no legs.”
“And instead of puppy dog eyes it has, like, pieces of coal.”
“Or no face at all, just a deep, unshakable feeling of mortal sadness when you have to look at it.”
“Eww, I know people with faces like that. My boyfriend has a face like that when I tell him I don’t want to fuck. He literally goes…” She extended her tongue and crossed her eyes, until, finally, I laughed.
After her James Taylor CD restarted for the third time, she asked me if we had anything to drink. In the kitchen, I spent a long time trying to decide whether to bring her a glass of orange juice or just plain water. I chose water with a couple of cubes of ice. I hadn’t noticed the matchbook-sized silver house, a kind of brooch, pinned to her T-shirt, but I did when she pressed on it with her pinky, springing it open and taking care to catch the bluish pill that rolled out of the little cavity. She popped the pill into her mouth and sucked on it for a minute before, I think, crushing it between her teeth. Then she took a gulp of water, making the face you do when something is bitter.
“What was that?”
“So nosy.”
“What was it?”
“I get headaches.”
“Oh,” I said. It was odd, sure, but no odder than that she had a trio of marker-drawn hearts on the back of her right hand, or that her mascara was ever-so-slightly blue, or that her old-lady house pin was nicer, even in miniature, than all the houses in Silver Lake. She finished the water and sucked one of the cubes into her mouth. Then she sent me to go hunt down scissors.