“Why didn’t the nurse call us?” Helen’s mother asked.
“She said it was nothing to worry about,” Helen said.
“She’s right,” her dad said. “Low blood sugar runs in the family.” He pulled affectionately on Helen’s ponytail. He made her a strawberry-banana smoothie to drink with her dinner, which she finished in a few greedy gulps.
—
A few days later, Helen and her family went to visit her grandparents in Florida during spring break. She spent her days in the pool at their retirement complex, lying on a float and thinking about Marla. Helen had a best friend from camp, Sarah, but that almost felt like it couldn’t count, because she lived two hours away and so was only really Helen’s best friend two months out of the year. School was where real life was supposed to be, Helen suspected, even though she always felt like a more real version of herself in the summer.
But with Marla, it felt like there was hope for a real-life friendship. Marla was so blunt and a little bit bad, but she also seemed to care about Helen in a deep, unprejudiced way. Helen trusted, without question, that Marla wouldn’t tell anyone about her fainting. The girls she grew up with in Larchmont were sweet, but they were so good. If they’d been with Helen when she’d fallen, they would have immediately called her parents or maybe 911. Helen knew that Marla had a single mother who bagged groceries at the Stop & Shop and an older brother who was on the verge of failing out of high school and that once Marla turned fourteen her mom was going to make her get a part-time job to help with the bills. Her life was not easy; in fact, it seemed pretty hard. But she was a good friend; she laughed with Helen, she took care of her when she was hurt, and, moreover, she seemed happy. There was something to this, maybe: Being sheltered from the bad things didn’t really bring you any more joy. It just made you dull.
Helen felt hands pushing into the bottom of the plastic float she was lying on. The float tilted, and she fell into the water, her whole body going under.
“Liam!” she shrieked when she came up for air, splashing her older brother.
He laughed, then picked her up and threw her several feet across the swimming pool into the deep end. Her tiny body floated through the air and landed with a graceful plop.
“Come in, Fee!” she yelled to her sister.
“I’m good,” said Fiona, who was sitting in the shade. She was still wearing her cover-up; she hadn’t swum this entire trip. All she did was read. Sometimes Helen felt like she was missing out on having an older sister: the kind who was supposed to teach you how to paint your nails with your left hand, or how to kiss a boy, or how to shave your legs so you didn’t cut yourself. The kind you were supposed to be able to steal clothes from: You would fight about it, but the fights wouldn’t mean anything, because you lived in the same house and you knew where to find your sweater; it was just in the closet in the room next to yours.
When they were kids, it was different. Fiona used to play. But in the past few years, she’d seemed to stop caring about Helen because she was so preoccupied with her own stuff, always studying and doing as many extracurricular activities as she possibly could. Helen knew that Fiona thought she could become a different person in college, because once she’d said something like “Do you think I should go by my middle name when I get to school?”
“Why would you do that?” Helen had asked.
“I don’t know,” Fiona said. “Just for an experiment. College is all about experimenting, you know? And for finding out who you really are.”
But what if she was really just someone mopey and boring? That’s what college seemed to turn her into, anyway.
—
When Helen got back to school the next week, Marla had disappeared. The rumor was that her family had picked up and moved to Texas. Helen had no reason to believe this was true, but she also didn’t have any reason to believe it wasn’t. She tried calling Marla’s cellphone several times, but it was always off.
April 30 was Helen’s thirteenth birthday. There were fifty-six days until camp and no birthday wishes from Marla. Helen now had no interest in spending time in the woods with the other Mamaroneck girls; Marla was the common thread between them all, and without Marla there, Helen found little to say to them.
For Helen’s thirteenth birthday, she saw a movie at the mall with Kayla, Kelly, and Kim while their moms got frozen margaritas at Chili’s. After the movie, they met their moms at Chili’s for dinner and cake. The cake came, they sang “Happy Birthday,” and Helen cut herself a generous piece.
“God, to have that metabolism again,” Kelly’s mom said.
“I know,” said Helen’s mom. “I can’t feed her enough, and she’s still a beanpole.”
Every other girl at the table, Helen knew, had gotten her period. It didn’t bother Helen; in fact, she dreaded the day she’d have to start wearing an underwire bra. Life was so much easier without curves.
Helen finished her piece and asked for another, just to spite them.
—
When Helen got home, she tried calling Marla again. Once more, it went straight to voicemail. She decided to leave a message this time.
“Hey, Mar,” Helen said. “I hope things are good, wherever you are.” She paused. “It was my birthday today. I wish you could have been here. I’m officially a teenager now. Still no period, though.” She was talking into a void. “I miss you. I wish you said goodbye.” She cleared her throat. “Call me if you get this.”
She hung up and cried for just a few minutes, just enough to get it out of her system. She hadn’t realized how angry she was with Marla for dangling the promise of a friendship in front of her face and pulling it so abruptly away.
Maybe her real life wasn’t meant to be at school after all.
“John, where are you going?” Helen’s mother asked from the front seat.
“I’m taking 684,” Helen’s father said.
“We never take 684. We take the Taconic.”
“Yes we do. We always take 684 to 22.”
“Are you serious? We’ve been taking the Taconic to Marigold for as long as I can remember.”
“Hon, that might have been true when Fee was little, but I can tell you, for the past five years, I have never once taken the Taconic.”