“How long did they go out?” Meredith asked.
“Since last spring. He’s such a dick. She was about to break up with him. They were about half broken up already. It’s not like he needs an excuse to get drunk. He just likes to add some drama to it. He’s very tortured.”
“I can see that,” Meredith said. Across the room Jeremy was talking to Missy Carmody, a seventh-grader, a well-known desperate wannabe. Missy took the beer can from Jeremy and smelled the opening before taking a swallow. The outlook was bleak for Missy Carmody.
Meredith turned to Becca. “What would she want?”
“What?”
“You said it wasn’t what Lisa would want. What do you think she’d want?”
“Oh, she’d want some moping,” Becca said. She was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “I don’t mean that in a bad way. I think most people would want some moping. Wouldn’t you?”
“Sure,” Meredith said. She imagined herself gone. Really gone. Body and spirit. Her desk vacant, her bed empty. How long would the moping last? Who would mourn her most?
“There was this thing we used to do,” Becca said. “Lisa and me. We’d take her dogs out really late, like after midnight. We’d walk around her neighborhood and everywhere there were lights on we’d try to guess what the people were doing inside. Sometimes it was obvious because you could see the TV, and once we saw shadows of people making out. But usually you couldn’t see anything, just the light behind the curtains, and so we’d make up stories. Lisa was really good at it. Her stories were crazy.”
“That sounds fun,” Meredith said.
“It was,” Becca said, and for the first time Meredith thought, She was her friend, her best friend. She was . . .
“It was fun,” Becca said. “But it was also kind of sad sometimes. You know? ’Cause it . . . ” She trailed off, her eyes moving to the basement stairs. “Loser alert,” she said, smirking. “Who invited them?”
It was a group of five or six nerdy eighth-grade boys, including Steven Overbeck, who despite what Meredith thought were good looks were not good enough looks to overcome his nerdy status. At the end of the day even the handsomest nerd ranked lower than a boy who was ugly but cool. At the end of the day, for the guys, physical appearance had almost nothing to do with popularity.
“I’m surprised they stay up this late,” Becca said.
“I’m surprised they’re not trick-or-treating,” Meredith said.
Becca laughed. The boys were lingering around the Ping-Pong table, cheering on a ninth-grade match, trying to look like they fit in. Meredith accidentally caught Steven’s eye and he smiled and nodded at her, raised his Sprite in greeting.
“Do you know him?” Becca asked.
“He sits behind me in social studies,” Meredith said.
“He’s like nine,” Becca said. “Once in English last year he asked if he could draw a watch on me. A watch. Is that the weirdest thing you’ve ever heard?”
Which watch? Meredith wondered. The watch with the springs sticking out? The one with monkey paws for hands?
“It’s pretty weird,” she said.
?
“Can you move your legs?” Lisa said. Even though it was a question, she didn’t ask it. It was the kind of question your mother said: “Can you set the table.” “Will you get the door.”
Meredith pulled up and sat with her legs crossed. She actually liked sitting like this under normal circumstances, often sat in this position (Indian style, her father called it, until she informed him this was offensive) on the floor while playing battling animals with Evan or hanging out with her friends. Of course the bathtub wasn’t as comfortable as her bedroom floor, not nearly wide enough for crisscross-applesauce, so her knees were both pressed against the porcelain sides, and since she was sitting a little cockamamie already so as to avoid the spigot . . .
“I’m tired,” Lisa said, drawing out the word so that it sounded like a sickness. “Are you tired?”
“What time is it?”
“What time isn’t it?” Lisa asked.
“It isn’t time for social studies,” Meredith said. “It isn’t time for English. It isn’t time for—”
Lisa drew another hash mark on the shower wall under the word BITCH.
“For what?” Meredith asked.
“For you being a bitch. All I asked was what time isn’t it?”
“I don’t think that’s worthy of a bitch mark.”
“What are you even doing here?” Lisa asked abruptly, a sour look on her face.
“What do you mean, what am I doing here?”
“I mean what are you doing here? In this place. It’s not like he needs you for anything. It’s not like—” She stopped midsentence. She rubbed at her nose and then her eyes. She looked like she was getting a cold.
“What?” Meredith asked.
“Nothing.” Lisa closed her eyes and rubbed a spot between them, like she had a sinus headache. “Forget it. Never mind.”
“No, what? It’s not like what?”
“I’m sorry, but I just don’t understand the purpose of you,” Lisa said, her eyes still shut, her lips twisted into a grimace. “What’s the purpose of you?”
“I don’t know. I guess . . . company?”
Lisa stopped rubbing the spot and opened her eyes. She stared at Meredith for five long seconds. Then she made another mark on the wall.
“What?” Meredith asked. “What was that for?”
“For company . . . ” Lisa said, mocking her. It wasn’t how Meredith had said it at all. She couldn’t understand how Lisa could have heard it that way.
“I just—” she started.
“Look, it’s my pen, so I get to make the marks.”
What did the man think of the marks on the shower wall? It was a Sharpie—a permanent marker—that Lisa was using. Why had Meredith not considered this before? It wasn’t like those marks were ever going to go away. They couldn’t just wipe them off with a towel. How long had it been since the man had taken a shower anyway? Was it possible there was another shower in the house? Or maybe that he showered at work?
“What do you think his job is?” she asked Lisa.
“Who?”
As if there were any other his, any other who.
“His.” A gesture with her head toward the rest of the apartment.
“Oh, he works at a store,” Lisa said. “He works at Best Buy.”
“How do you know?”
Lisa sneezed. She didn’t have one of those cute, tiny, guinea-pig sneezes. She sneezed like an adult, a full body affair.
“Gimme me some toilet paper,” she said.
Meredith pulled some off the roll that was sitting on the edge of the tub. Long ago they’d dispensed with putting it on the roller. They used it as napkins and Kleenex.
“So how do you know?” Meredith asked.
Lisa wiped her nose and tossed the wad of toilet paper in the direction of the wastebasket. “Know what?”
“That he works at Best Buy.”
“Oh, he told me. He told me he could maybe get us a TV for in here.”
“For in here? Where could we even put a TV?”
“We could mount it,” Lisa said, annoyed. “We could like . . . I don’t know. We’ll figure it out.”