Golden

by Andrea Dickherber

  Rudy and I had always, for the year and a half that I had known her, been a twosome. We had other friends, but they were more acquaintances than anything, really. Girls we played sports with, girls we were partnered with for science labs or history projects or the other Ogden girls who lived near our neighborhood and occasionally came over on a Friday night to ride to a party with us and use sleeping over at Rudy’s house as an excuse for their parents’ benefit. No one else ever really stuck, though, and I had taken pride in this, thinking Rudy had chosen me to be her best friend because I fit all the qualities she liked best and everyone else around us had fallen short. But there was something about Celine that Rudy was drawn to as well (and it didn’t help that Celine had no other friends in the state, and was unafraid to be the third wheel). So, beginning that fall, we became an awkward threesome. Or, at least, awkward to me.

  That first time I met Celine in math class, I had found no reason to dislike her. In fact, she was the type of person who normally would have intrigued me. But once she began to infiltrate my friendship (that’s what it had felt like!) I began to pick her apart, usually only in my own mind, but sometimes out loud in front of Rudy when it was just the two of us, in the form of snide but subtle comments. Celine was a vegetarian, something I thought of as fake and showy and disingenuous. She bought strange clothes sometimes, expensive clothes made by special companies who touted, in large words on the tags of their products, that they did not test on animals or employ child laborers, but looked remarkably similar to the clothes you could buy from JCPenney at the mall. And, most obnoxious of all, in my mind, she was the type of person who had a personal anecdote for every conversation. If Rudy and I were talking about a boy, she would bring up a past boyfriend from one of her previous schools. If we were wishing we could go to Vermont with the rest of our class for a ski trip over Christmas break, she chimed in with something from her collection of travel experiences. She thought she was world-wise and charming, and I, at sixteen, found this utterly intolerable.

  6

  Sophomore Winter

  In November, my cross-country season ended with a personal best at the district meet. The boys, as a team, had won the district meet and sent four individual runners – Peter, the twins and an exceptionally talented and shy freshman boy – to the state meet, while Tawny had been the only Ogden female to advance. Afterward, because the weather had grown colder, and because I now had to compete with Celine for Rudy’s attention, I started to neglect my running. Instead, I would sit around the house with my mother on Saturday mornings, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper (realistically, I only read the entertainment and crime sections, but it made me feel adult to share the newspaper with her), waiting for Rudy to call me when she woke up.

  In early December, Rudy clipped an ad from one of my magazines. It was one of those perfume advertisements with the sticker you peel off, and underneath, there’s a sample of the perfume. Rudy loved the smell of it, and she’d taken the clipping home with her and set it on her dresser, and before we went out one Saturday night, I saw her press the paper against her wrists, rubbing off some of the sampler smell. For Christmas, I gave her a huge bottle of that perfume, and she had squealed and wrapped me in an enormous hug. Celine gave both Rudy and I homemade drawstring purses, wrapped in matching butcher paper. Rudy hated carrying a purse, but she smiled and thanked Celine for the gift, and she brought it with her once when we went with Celine to a movie. She wore the perfume I gave her every day of Christmas break. I felt more secure than ever in my position as Rudy’s best friend.

  By late January, when we returned to school, Ogden’s boys basketball team still held a perfect 18-0 record. Rudy and I had never really attended basketball games (we had gone to a grand total of three home games our freshman year, largely so Rudy could have an excuse to see Houston). Rudy and Houston had broken up months before and, consequently, we had not been to a single game the first semester of our sophomore year. But this was the best the team had performed in a decade, and the school became electrified with an anticipatory energy that was hard to ignore. The cheerleaders had begun to hang handmade posters on the lockers that belonged to basketball team boys and on game days, when the boys wore their uniforms the entire day at school, it wasn’t uncommon to see someone run up and slap one of the players’ a high-five or hoot and applaud them in the hallway. I even heard a group of three or four junior girls had spent the weekend before a Monday night game baking plates of cookies that they had then delivered to each member of the Varsity team at their families’ homes.

  The first week of February, I found myself at my first basketball game of the season, pressed between Rudy and Celine in the crowded bleachers of the student section. We were three rows up from the court, in the first row of seats open to the general student population (the first two rows were unofficially reserved for student spectators – primarily boys – who had earned their coveted seats by attending every single game, wearing ridiculous costumes and generally making fools out of themselves cheering on the team). We cheered with the rest of our classmates, and we got thoroughly wrapped up in the game itself.

  Ogden won. And basketball fever went rampant.

  It was a dreary, rainy Sunday in February when the idea of Zach Smith first developed. Rudy and I were sitting at the Goldens’ kitchen table finishing homework, textbooks spread out in front of us. We were both quiet, the faint hum of someone else’s TV show on the other side of the house the only sound besides the rain beating softly on the back porch. I was playing with the edge of the blanket wrapped around my legs when Rudy put her pencil down and looked up from her history study guide.

  “You know what we should do?”

  “Hm?”

  “What if we made a fake person? Like a profile on chat.”

  I waited, confused, but she appeared to be waiting for my response.

  “Why?”

  “We could see what people really say about us. And I bet we could find out all kinds of hilarious stuff about other people,” Rudy said. “It’s not like we’d be mean or anything. It would be funny. Just for fun.”

  “But how could we do that? How would anybody know her?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t plan it all out or anything,” Rudy shrugged. “I just thought it’d be entertaining.”

  I looked over her shoulder out the window, where the rain was picking up, pinging off of the brick sidewalk like ricocheting bullets.

  “What if we said it was my cousin? Like from Boston?”

  Rudy perked up, the corners of her mouth twitching into a smile. “Yes! That’s perfect. And we could say he’s thinking about coming down for the summer, so he’s trying to get to know people.”

  “He?”

  Rudy nodded enthusiastically. “Girls will be more willing to talk to a cute guy than to a girl they don’t know. They might find her threatening.”

  “Okay,” I said, befuddled. “How do we set it up? Do we need an email address?”

  “I can’t remember,” Rudy said. “Hang on, I’ll go get my laptop.”

  She dashed out of the room, and I closed my math book and pushed it aside to make room on the table. It was things like this, I thought briefly, that made me a C student.

  “Here, scoot over,” Rudy set the computer down in front of me, and I moved to the edge of the chair to make room for her beside me.

  “What should his name be?” I asked. The momentum of the idea was shaking me out my rainy-day-induced hypnosis.

  “Bond. James Bond.”

  “Bradley Pitt.”

  “Theodore Bundy.”

  “You’re really creepy,” I said, and Rudy laughed.

  “Seriously though,” she said. “What about Ryan? Or Zach?”

  “I like Zach. What’s his last name?”

  “Your last name?”

  “No, that’s too weird. Make it my mom’s maiden name. Smith.”

  “Zach Smith, it is,” Rudy opened up a web browser window and started typi
ng.

  We sat, squeezed together in one oversized kitchen chair, while we picked out “Zach’s” hobbies – soccer, weight lifting and Scrabble (the last one had been at Rudy’s absolute insistence) – his school, his favorite movies and books. We picked out a photo of an attractive looking guy from some obscure modeling website. He had white-blonde hair like mine, and if I had met him in real life, I would have been too intimidated by his good looks to speak to him unless he spoke to me first.

  “Who should we suggest he make friends with?” Rudy traced over his face with the cursor as she thought.

  “Callan and Jen. And the rest of those junior girls,” I said. “And guys on the soccer team. And Celine.”

  Rudy snorted. “I bet Jen won’t even accept it. I don’t think she talks to people she doesn’t already know.”

  “Make sure you hide his friends list, too, so nobody can see he doesn’t have any friends yet.”

  “Right.” Rudy nodded.

  “Hello, girls.” Mrs. Golden pushed through the kitchen door carrying an empty popcorn bowl in one of her hands. Instinctually, my heart leapt like I’d been caught red-handed, and I felt the urge to shield the computer screen with my hands. “How’s the homework coming along?”

  “We’re taking a little break,” Rudy said.

  “Mmhmm,” Mrs. Golden smiled and stopped behind our chair. “And who is this cute boy? Should I know him?”

  Both of us burst into a fit of giggles. We shared a look, and I laughed so hard I nearly slid off of the seat of the chair.

  “What?” Mrs. Golden’s face was the picture of confusion. “What? What does that mean?”

  “It’s my cousin,” I said, giggling.

  “From Boston,” Rudy added.

  “Oh, okay.” Mrs. Golden still looked unsure as she took her empty bowl to the dishwasher and placed it inside. “What’s so funny about him? He looks like a very nice boy to me.”

  Laughter bubbled out of us again, and Mrs. Golden left the room shaking her head without waiting for an answer. When she was gone, we closed the laptop and Rudy returned to her own chair and flipped back to where she had left off on her history guide. I reopened my math book, but now I felt too stimulated to return to my geometry problems. The rain outside had stopped, but the clouds still hung low overhead in the sky, and I alternated between staring out at their hulking, grey masses and staring down at the tiny black numbers printed in my textbook. We had intended to come back to the profile later, to see if anyone had accepted our online friendship requests, but as the afternoon dragged on it slipped further and further from our minds. By the time my mother called me to come home for dinner, Zach Smith had been completely forgotten.

  “What’d you guys do yesterday? I tried to call you, but you didn’t pick up.” Celine stared at me from across the lunch table the next day at school.

  She bit into an apple, and I felt my cheeks flush. I had ignored her call while Rudy and I were studying.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I think I left my phone on silent. We were just studying, though.”

  Celine nodded. Her feelings appeared totally intact.

  “So,” she said between bites. “Your cousin added me online.”

  For a split second, I had no idea what she was talking about. Then I remembered. I felt Rudy’s foot tap against mine underneath the table, reminding me to speak.

  “Um, yeah. Zach. He’s trying to meet some people here,” I mumbled.

  “He might come stay with Jill’s family this summer, for a month or something,” Rudy added.

  “Oh, that’s cool. Is he single? He’s really hot,” Celine glanced at me. “Sorry if that’s weird to say.”

  “No, that’s okay. I mean, we grew up together.” What did that even mean? I was making no sense, I thought to myself. “Yeah, he’s single though.”

  “He just seems so cool. I saw he was into soccer, and obviously I am too,” Celine continued.

  I literally could not believe my ears. I stole a glance at Rudy and the look on her face convinced me I couldn’t be hallucinating. She widened her eyes quickly so that only I could see, and I gave her a weak smile intended to convey the message that I had no idea what the hell was going on either. Beside us, the other girls at the table were listening as they moved food around their lunch trays.

  “Yeah, he’s a pretty cool guy,” Rudy said, and then she shoved a handful of fries into her mouth.

  “You’ve met him before?”

  Rudy nodded with her mouth full. She was chewing extra slowly.

  “Zach came down for Thanksgiving,” I improvised. “With his family. That’s when he met Rudy.”

  “You didn’t have a thing with him, did you?” A flash of guilt flickered over Celine’s face, until Rudy began to shake her head. “Oh, great. I think I’m going to try to talk to him. Maybe we could get to know each other before he comes.”

  “Yeah, sure.” I took a gulp of water.

  “If I’m even here this summer. I might go back to Washington, to help with that environmental campaign, you know,” Celine said.

  “What’s that for again? I mean, what would you be doing?” Rudy jumped at the opportunity to embark on another subject, and Celine dove into a description of her passion to prevent the pollution of the ocean. To my great relief, it lasted until the end of our lunch period. We dumped our empty trays onto the conveyor belt beside the dishwashing room and Celine said goodbye and dashed out of the cafeteria, still nibbling the apple she’d been eating all hour. I turned to Rudy.

  “What just happened?” I asked.

  Rudy took a deep breath. “I think we’re in some serious shit.”

  Celine hadn’t had a single boyfriend over the year she’d been at Ogden (neither had I, but in my mind this fact revealed less about me than it did about Celine). She hadn’t gone on a date, and she went to every dance alone. When Rudy and I talked about guys in her presence, she didn’t even seem to be particularly interested in anyone from our school, and I was beginning to harbor the secret suspicion that Celine was a lesbian. Never in a million years had I expected her to be interested in Zach, my fake cousin, a random photograph on the Internet.

  That Monday after school Rudy and I had gone straight to her house and pulled up his profile on the computer. Immediately, we were bombarded with friend requests and friendship acceptance notifications. It seemed as though half of the school had developed an interest in him, and my stomach sunk down within my abdomen.

  “Good Lord,” I said, wide-eyed. “That really spread fast.”

  “Zach has more friend profiles than I do,” Rudy laughed. She pulled up the first message from Celine, and as we read it, I felt dirty, though it contained nothing more intimate than a simple greeting and some questions about Zach’s soccer career.

  “What’re we going to do? Tell her it’s fake?”

  “If we tell her he’s fake, she’ll probably freak out. After she said all of that at lunch and we went along with it,” Rudy answered.

  “But we couldn’t tell her then, in front of everyone else.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not what she’ll think. I don’t want to hurt her feelings.” Rudy bit her lip and paused for a second. “I think we should just keep going with it. It’ll die out soon, and she’ll forget about him.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I agreed hesitantly. “So, do we message her back?”

  “It can’t hurt, I guess. We don’t want to make him seem like an ass.”

  “We don’t?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Our response was nice but short, and after a few days without hearing back from Celine, we thought we had dodged a particularly unpleasant mess. But that Friday Zach got a long, hopeful message from Celine, and when she met us at Rudy’s that night to leave for a concert, she started asking questions. The entire thirty-minute drive Celine leaned up from the backseat of my car, her elbows perched on the backs of both of our seats as she inquired about Zach’s childhood and his family and even his plans f
or college. She was obsessed. Rudy and I plied her with answers we made up off of the tops of our heads, digging ourselves deeper and deeper. By the end of the car ride I was so weighed down with a guilt I hadn’t expected to feel, I could barely enjoy the concert and when I looked over at Rudy midway through our favorite song, I could see on her face that she felt the same.

  The thing was, there was no way out. At least no easy way.

  The district basketball game was scheduled for a Wednesday night and by that time, Rudy and I had been sucked into the hype. We painted navy blue stripes on our faces and wore tall navy socks with shorts even though the temperature had fallen again and it was only twenty-five degrees outside after the sun went down. I sat at Rudy’s vanity while Celine curled plastic ribbon into long spirals with the open blade of a pair of scissors and tied it in bunches around my ponytail. We pulled into the school parking lot nearly half an hour before game time. It was already packed. Rudy circled the lot for ten minutes before we gave up and parked down the street, running and skipping all the way into the sports lobby, partly because of the excitement and partly because of the cold. My socks chafed against the goosebumps on my calves while we ran.

  The game turned out to be a blowout. In the first quarter, our boys pulled ahead by twenty points. By the end of halftime they had extended their lead to thirty, and the opposing team’s players looked dejectedly at the scoreboard as they wiped sweat off their brows with the backs of their hands. Their coach screamed at them, his meaty face red all the way up to his hairline, but they never gained any positive momentum. The second half of the game was just a showcase of Ogden’s best basketball skills.

  The game ended 87-55 and when the buzzer sounded Rudy and I rushed out of the bleachers and onto the court with the rest of the students, celebrating wildly with our team.

  The team advanced through the sectional tournament, though they won no more of their games by a point margin greater than ten. Rudy and I drove to every single game, some of them more than an hour away, and I learned everything there was to know about basketball in a single month (or at least it felt that way). Ogden’s last game before the state championships was decided by a single basket, shot from outside the three point line by a senior named Rusty Phelps. He wasn’t a starting player, but after our star had fouled out in the middle of the fourth quarter, the coach put him in and left him for the remainder of the game. Rusty had bad acne, white capped pustules, angry red scabs and faded, healing brown marks. It covered his forehead and the sides of his mouth and though I felt sorry for him, every time I saw him I couldn’t help but think how awful it would be to kiss him. The potential of my lips brushing against one of the infected bumps made me feel like I could throw up. I assumed the same went for all the girls at our school; I had only ever seen him talking to boys. And he wasn’t a particularly great basketball player either; he wasn’t one of the boys whose jersey number students would paint on their chests or faces and as far as I could tell, he spent most of his game time sitting on the bench cheering on his teammates. But somehow, as the final seconds ticked off the clock, Rusty ended up with the ball in his hands, and he was steadying it, then he was raising his arms, then he flicked his wrist and sent it spinning through the air. I could feel the crowd around me, all of us taking one collective intake of breath and holding it as the ball hit the rim of the basket and when I saw it fall through the hoop (really, all I could see between the shoulders of the students jumping and flailing in front of me was a tiny flash of orange in the white of the net) I threw my arms around Rudy and squeezed her so hard she squealed, and I was so happy for our team – I was ecstatic – that as I soon as I saw Rusty Phelps get swallowed up by his teammates, I forgot him entirely.