“Oh, no?”
“I know nothing about football. It isn’t fair to say I hate it.”
“Okay, well?” Amanda turned her palms to the ceiling. “Then why would we go? Plus, I’ve got swim practice.”
“Friday drills are optional,” Madison said. “And it’s fun. Zo? Barker said that it’s, you know. Fun. It’s Friday.”
She watched Amanda close her locker and lean into it, pressing her forehead to the chilled metal. Amanda had always been the one person for Madison, the one she felt close to in the way other people talked about feeling close—to sisters, to friends, to mothers or grandmothers. Madison had Lily, but that was different. Amanda was her one choice to seize the real intimacy that was presented in every book, by every movie, as a fundamental part of being a teenage girl.
Even when they were small, she’d begged Isabel to let her call Amanda’s house in the middle of the night because she was trapped in the paranoid fog of some dream in which Amanda had been angry with her. These late-night elementary school phone calls, along with their accompanying afternoon marathon chats, had been the primary reason Isabel caved and allowed Madison to install her own phone line.
But that had been a long time ago, and all this past summer it was clear that Amanda wanted Madison to know that things had changed between them. That they were sophomores now, and no longer beholden to the ties that had bound them together as children, whatever those ties had actually been.
Madison didn’t understand why they would be growing apart. She couldn’t see that either one of them had changed at all. But it was hard to miss, by the end of the summer, that her best friend had almost completely lost interest in her.
She watched now as Amanda performed her own exasperation, forehead pressed up against the metal. And she could see that there was a small, unacknowledged part of her friend that enjoyed this, that felt a little thrill at letting herself be this cruel. Madison could tell. It must feel the way it used to feel when they’d shoplift chocolates together from Greenwich Pharmacy, while their mothers stood chatting, oblivious. All these small slights, over the summer. Amanda didn’t just want Madison to move on; she wanted to feel that electric charge, of being wanted by someone you no longer want.
“So the actual reason,” Amanda said, “is that Zo? Barker told you to come watch the football game, so you’re going.”
“Amanda, they’re not so terrible.”
Sometime in August, as if they’d sniffed out what was happening with Amanda, all of a sudden Zo? Barker and her sidekick Allie Wasserman—girls who had previously shown little interest in Madison beyond a healthy fear of her parents—were inviting her places, asking her along. Madison had never had any real expectation that Amanda would go along with it, would allow them all to become friends.
“Can you just explain one thing to me, though? Can you explain why she is so obsessed with that umlaut over her name? I’ve seen her when it gets left off some name tag. You’d think they’ve printed ‘Raging Slut’ in its place, she goes totally nuts. Does she think anyone’s actually going to be confused and pronounce her name Zoo? Or Zoah? Do you think it upsets her that it would rhyme with ‘Ho’?”
“I really think if you’d spent any time with them—”
“Right, Mad, but the thing is—I have no interest. I mean, truly. Zero. You go ahead. Make new friends. And Chip’s playing, right? But you know I have less than nothing to talk about with those girls.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Madison, I don’t have a lot they’re interested in. Okay? Maybe in two years they’ll decide that my father has something to do with admissions and they’ll want to go to Yale and I’ll get randomly invited to Zoo’s next party. But until then, there’s not exactly any magazine that named my father as the country’s top CEO last year. You know?”
Madison could immediately see the regret on Amanda’s face, her wrinkled nose and her gaping mouth. But as with most regret, it had flooded her synapses just a few seconds too late.
“You’re telling me you think Zo? Barker reads Institutional Investor? I doubt it.”
She tried to keep her voice dry, condescending, even. Amanda almost never violated this, their last unspoken rule. Their fathers.
“You know I don’t care about that,” she continued.
“Obviously, Mad. But you are one in a million. Most people around us aren’t like you. And they definitely wouldn’t be like you if they were you. You know what I mean?”
“Hardly ever,” Madison said, sliding her lock shut and turning back to Amanda.
Amanda reached out with one finger and deftly lifted a strand of hair that had slipped down to hang loose in front of Madison’s face, tucking it back behind her ear where it belonged.
“They can love you for different reasons than I do!” Amanda said. “You’re, you know. There are lots of things to like about you.”
It sounded like an insult, maybe even an accusation. They stood in silence, their classmates rushing past on either side.
“Look,” Amanda said, “I’m not trying to be a bitch. If you want to go to the game, you should go.”
“I don’t,” Madison said, and her voice had changed, flattened. She turned back to her own locker, her books, and ignored her friend’s gaze. She thought of Amanda’s father, of how they’d sat in on one of his Micro lectures at Yale a few years ago, in a soaring lecture hall with high windows that filled the room with late-afternoon light and rows upon rows of rickety wooden seats that would retract with loud, slapping sounds each time some lazy underclassman stood to duck out early. Amanda had flinched each time, as if the students were actually flipping off her father with each squeal and smack, and Madison had held her hand. Toward the end of the lecture, Jake Levins began calling out the slouching undergrads sitting in the first few rows, actually pointing at them with his index finger. It was something Madison loved about Amanda’s father, something that reminded her of her own father, even if their methods were different. He could look at you with such vehemence that you understood him, wordlessly: he knew you didn’t know what to say, but you were going to answer him regardless.
Amanda was still watching her.
“Mad,” she began, “I know it’s been a weird September so far, but you’re taking it easy, right? Don’t get stressed out yet, over nothing.”
Madison rapped her locker once with her knuckles.
“You know I don’t understand anything he does,” she said. “It’s not like he’s going to talk to me about his job.”
“That’s not what I asked,” Amanda said, but Madison had already turned away.