Golden
Andrea Dickherber
Copyright © 2020 by Andrea Dickherber
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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For Knox, Quinn and Rooney.
Follow your bliss, always.
Contents
FRESH
1. The Summer Before
2. Freshman Fall
3. Freshman Winter
4. Freshman Spring
SCREWED
5. Sophomore Fall
6. Sophomore Winter
7. Sophomore Spring
BONGS AND BONGS
8. Junior Summer
9. Junior Fall
10. Junior Winter
11. Junior Spring
THE END
12. Senior Fall
13. Senior Winter
14. Senior Spring
Acknowledgments
About the Author
FRESH
1
The Summer Before
The piece of this story that matters the most began in the summertime, when Midwestern air conditioners groan with overuse, the balance of chlorinated water and urine in pools everywhere takes a disastrous turn and the clichéd fantasies that plague teenage minds while they lie awake at night in their bed, or in someone else’s bed, stand the greatest chance of coming true. It began the summer before we went off to high school. The summer my parents spent traveling in Europe. The summer I spent living with Rudy.
I awoke the first morning of that summer staring at Rudy’s hair, a tangled mess of shiny espresso strands, stretched out across her pillow until they almost tickled the edge of my nostril. Buttery sunlight was melting through her velvet curtains, but she was still sound asleep, her mouth parted slightly to let breath move in and out. I leaned back against the soft leather headboard and rubbed at the crusts of sleep in my eyes with closed fists. It was barely eight.
There’s something special about the hours after midnight at a sleepover. In the dark, the restraints that bind your personality loosen their hold and the most secret bits of yourself come bubbling to the surface and ooze out of your mouth.
We stayed up, lying under the covers in Rudy’s queen size bed, our elbows bent to prop up our heads and the volume on the TV turned down low, the screen casting eerie blue light over the foot of the comforter. Under the cover of darkness, with the reward to my revelations being a gleam in her green eyes and a friendly laugh tumbling from her mouth, I told Rudy about my excessively sweaty armpits, my love for the metallic, greasy taste of fried chicken livers, the time last year when I’d gone searching for a new razor blade to shave my legs and accidentally walked in on my parents together in the shower. A sleepover was the place where it was safe to spill your secrets, and I always felt an irresistible pull to ingratiate myself to other people by laying out my own flaws for a cheap laugh. When we fell asleep, both of us snuggled beneath her down comforter, our shoulder blades pressed together, my heart was still fluttering with anxious excitement. But in the clarity of morning, I felt scraped raw – my insides a hollow of embarrassment. I scolded myself for revealing so much so soon, for leaving the impression that I was one of those loud, annoying girls who forces herself on your lunch table in the cafeteria with her cheap plastic lunchbox of weird smelling food and her poor hygiene.
I sighed quietly, cupping my hand over my lips and breathing into my palm. I winced at my sour morning breath. Why couldn’t I have been born more dainty and less disgusting? I breathed with my lips parted, airing out the rank cave of my mouth.
Rudy’s bedroom was decorated in shades of purple, the furniture a rich color of wood I couldn’t identify. Her comforter was white and floral, and the first thing I did upon awakening was check to make sure my unpredictable period hadn’t arrived in the middle of the night and bloomed out upon the white fabric. It hadn’t, thank God. On the surface of Rudy’s desk sat a shiny silver computer, a white lightning bolt dancing back and forth across the solid black screen. There were no posters tacked to the walls, no glittered or sequined collage picture frames sitting on the dresser. I worried that I had no idea how to be a teenager at all.
My eyes throbbed behind heavy lids. I just wanted to sink into the pillow and sleep forever, but my mind itched with activity. She would wake up soon, I reassured myself, and I waited for nearly an hour, my eyes closed so that if she opened hers she wouldn’t find me staring at her face.
“Rudy,” I whispered finally. Her head jerked, and she rolled toward me, long black eyelashes still pressed shut over her light green eyes.
“Rudy?” I felt self-conscious just saying her name out loud. I pressed my cold fingers against the warm skin of her shoulder. Her eyes twitched beneath her eyelids, and she pursed her lips.
“Hm?” Her eyes fluttered open and she squinted at me, disoriented.
“Sorry.” I blushed. “I was just going to say, I think I’m going to go eat breakfast, if that’s okay?”
Clouds of sleep cleared from her eyes and she nodded.
“Yeah, of course. I’ll come with you.”
“You can sleep if you want. You don’t have to get up.”
“No, it’s okay.” She smiled a pearly-white smile. “I’m starving anyway.”
Rudy lived down the street from my family, in what was easily the largest house on a street of huge homes. They had a pool and a four car garage and a housekeeper who cleaned their three story spread, excluding the basement, which primarily housed an enormous wine cellar that, months later, Rudy and I learned to raid inconspicuously.
My parents and I were the newest to move to the gated neighborhood, following my father’s promotion and rapid climb up the corporate ladder, and our new house still didn’t feel like a home to me even after a full year of living there. Everything was made of granite and stainless steel, and my bedroom was on the east side of the house, where the vents were extra gusty and it was always too cold. Three quarters of the year my father was absent from our sparkling new home, out of the country on business, and my mother, who when we were living in our modest two story colonial in Boston had pined desperately for this life of luxury, now alternated between moping around the house in her collection of silky bathrobes and coordinating house slippers, or spending a few days at a spa being botoxed or strategically removing and injecting plump fat cells into another part of her body, to entice my father to stay home more often or to bring her along as arm candy on his next trip across the world (something he hardly ever did). And while they were gone, they would leave fourteen-year-old me in charge of the homestead. Our housekeeper, Helen, would pick me up from school and be at our house a few hours of each day, but she left by six o’clock to go home to her own family, to cook greasy, comforting fried chicken and macaroni and cheese dinners and kiss her rowdy children’s foreheads. I was left all alone inside this massive marble structure. I didn’t get a lot of sleep those nights, huddled in the living room with all of the lights turned on, watching late night television with my comforter wrapped around me more for protection than warmth. It wasn’t a tortured existence, and I suppose I shouldn’t complain; my parents were always around when it counted, when they were to be seen – before school proms and at awards ceremonies and to see me off to college – and they
lavished me with any material possession I could have asked for, but those nights by myself, terrified of the dark, endless corridors of our lonely new house, I would have given up every single meticulously hand-stitched pair of designer jeans in my closet just to have a family that was present.
That wish began to unfold in early September, after our first summer in St. Louis, at a neighborhood “picnic”. It was far from a picnic – no red and white checkered tablecloths, and no one would have considered sitting on the ground. My parents were both in town, my mother sporting a freshly tucked chin and a new dress that slipped over the small curve of her waist, having dragged my father and I along to keep up appearances and prove we belonged with the wealthy, tennis-bracelet-wearing neighbors who now surrounded us.
The Goldens had hosted the picnic in their own sprawling backyard, and I had gazed up incredulously at the enormity of their house through the tinted glass of the back window of our car as we pulled onto the brick pavers of their circular drive. Their house was a matching dark brick, jutting angles and almost comically massive fall flowers in multi-colored blooms sprouting up anywhere they had the space (but still tactfully, of course). The grass was a shade of green I had previously only seen in artificial sources, like food dye or children’s crayons, and it hugged the flat yard as snugly as a fitted sheet. A valet stepped out from underneath his little white tent to greet us, a drop of sweat trickling down the side of his neck. He must have been dying in the heat of that late summer weekend, dressed in a full black tuxedo and a matching hat perched over his closely cropped black hair. He was young, though not too close to my own age – twenty or twenty-one, I thought. I often found myself making a game out of studying people around me, imagining in my own mind what I thought their lives were like (because at that time I thought that any life that I imagined was invariably more interesting than my own). He could be a college boy, trying to squeeze the last few bucks out of summer before he went back to school. He was good looking, and his eyes were soft and kind, so he probably would have a girlfriend, a nice, pretty, but not beautiful girl, and maybe he was even saving up all the money he made parking rich men’s cars so that he could buy her an engagement ring. He would most definitely drop down on one knee to ask, I thought, as he took my father’s keys and held the car doors open for my mother and I to step out, and he directed us toward the copper gated path that led to the tinkling party noises emanating from the backyard. I glanced back to see him hop into the front seat of the car and drive it off to its own party, sitting in a row of similarly shiny, expensive automobiles (ours was, though not obvious to me, the least impressive of them all), and I decided he wouldn’t propose in a restaurant or something obvious like that – a park, maybe. He looked like the outdoorsy type. As we rounded the side of the house, me teetering perilously on three-inch heeled sandals that didn’t agree with the bricked pathway, the expanse of the yard came into view like flipping a page in a magazine. Like Alice entering Wonderland.
There was a huge tent, the obese mother tent of the one the valet had waited underneath, and professionally decorated tables were laid out beneath it, splashed with linens in all the fashionable fall colors (this particular year, that included burnt orange and a deep shade of purple). There were even more flowers in back, both growing from the ground and floating in pretty vases. Candles glittered everywhere I looked, despite the fact that it was still very much daytime. On the edges of the tent, the catering staff stood behind long tables filled with finger foods – shrimp satay and stuffed olives and peppers and bruschetta – their hands gloved in plastic, their eyes looking both bored and slightly intimidated. I was still getting my bearings, gazing around at the party and at the glittering water on the uncovered pool that lay several feet behind the tent, when my eyes landed on Rudy, the only other picnicker I had spied under the age of thirty. She was standing beside one of the round purple tables, laughing as she spoke to an older couple, the woman in a brown pantsuit with hair pulled back severely, the man just beginning to bald at the crown of his head. In contrast to the visible aging of the couple, Rudy was awash with youthful beauty in every sense of the description: long, dark hair pulled loosely into a shining braid, a brightly colored dress flowing effortlessly over her thin curves, never-ending, tanned legs growing out from underneath her dress. Her eyes were so expressive, so attentive, that even though the gross older man’s eyes were devouring every inch of Rudy’s youthfulness, it seemed she either was too naïve to notice or too self-assured to care (this was one of Rudy’s mysteries I never did figure out).
“This way, dear.” My mother threaded her arm through mine so we were linked at the elbow and pulled me in another direction, steering our family toward the beaming man and woman who were clearly the host and hostess, the owners of this castle, the king and queen of our neighborhood.
“Mr. Golden, Mrs. Golden.” My mother, because she was the initiator of all things social, as my father and I retreated into the background, reached out cordially to shake the man’s hand, and offered the woman a dainty, unfeeling hug.
“Please, call me Kat,” the woman said, smiling warmly up at the three of us. She was plumper, soft and rounded in all the womanly places, and a good four inches shorter than I was in my heels, but she still radiated beauty in a way I couldn’t quite describe.
“This is a wonderful party. We’re so happy to have been invited. You have a lovely home,” my mother continued, with the appropriate degree of reverence, though careful not to appear overtly impressed.
“Thank you!” Mrs. Golden smiled again. Her husband had fallen into manly conversation with my quiet father, and she reached for his wrist, giving it a little squeeze. “Charles had quite a bit to do with the design of the house. The gardening’s my forte, however.” I learned later that unlike many housewives on our street, she truly meant this – Mrs. Golden spent days and days every summer laboring over her gorgeous flowers. The lawn-care company tended to the grass and the trees and the bushes, but no one but Mrs. Golden touched the flowerbeds.
“And who is this beautiful young lady?” She tilted her face toward me, and I blushed suddenly at being acknowledged.
“This is my daughter, Jillian.” My mother placed a thin arm around my shoulders, her fingers lighting softly on my arm. “She’s about to begin her eighth grade year. She’ll be a freshman at Ogden Academy next fall.”
Ogden Academy was the most prestigious (and by that virtue, most expensive) high school in our area, and though I had a full year before I would enter high school, my mother took great pride in telling people, even people to whom it would mean nothing, that this is where I was going to attend school.
“Fantastic!” Mrs. Golden clapped her small hands together, and the gold bracelets around her wrists clanged against one another. “Have you met my younger daughter, Ruth Ann? She’ll be attending Ogden for high school next year as well.”
I shook my head politely, still smiling at her.
“She’s just over there, in the blue dress.” She pointed toward where Rudy stood, now alone, talking with one of the caterers as she bit down on a piece of shrimp. “You should go join her. Save her from us old folks.” She winked at me, which was normally something that made me cringe, but she managed to do it without being obnoxious.
I obliged, parting from my parents and walking across the yard to where Rudy stood.
“Hi.” I came up behind her and stuck my hand out shyly to shake hers. “I’m Jillian.”
She wiped her fingers on a gold edged napkin, and then grasped my hand in her own. “I’m Rudy. Nice to meet you.”
“Yeah, you too.” I was so painfully shy, so utterly intimidated by the entirety of the two months since we had moved into this opulent neighborhood, and it seemed to all culminate in this one, singular experience. I had met no friends thus far, and yet I could think of nothing to say, nothing at all, and I was sure I would remain friendless.
“Your family just moved here, right?” Rudy picked up a glass of lemonade
from the table nearest to us, and took a sip.
“Yes. We moved in July,” I said. I’d never met her before, but now, suddenly, I imagined her watching me in my sweaty t-shirt, hauling boxes into the house, and I immediately felt both embarrassed and flattered that she had noticed.
“Where are you from?”
“Boston.” I felt a familiar pang in my chest for my old friends and our old house and my old, less-lonely life.
“I’ve never been to Boston. Do you miss it?”
I nodded. “I miss my friends.”
We had agreed to write old-fashioned letters, and I lived for the days when an envelope arrived in the mail, my name scrawled across the front in girlish cursive and a Boston postmark in the corner.
“It’ll get better. I promise it’s nice here,” Rudy smiled.
One of the caterers, a man with orange-red hair and freckles covering his face and neck, appeared at our side, pushing a silver tray of food between us. “Appetizer, ladies?”
“What are they?” I stared down at the bits of food – green lumps coated in a layer of oily, crumbling beige, cradled inside little paper cups.
“Jalapeno poppers.”
“Sure. Thank you.” Rudy took one, and I did the same, eyeing the pepper skeptically.
Rudy lifted it in her dainty fingers and bit off half. Cheese and clear juice trickled from her mouth, and she cupped her palm under her chin to catch it before it dripped onto her dress. Watching, I resolved to avoid any embarrassing mess by eating the entire thing in one bite.
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