Sixteen

by Megan Mccafferty

  That was it, then. The end of Pyrrho’s philosophy. A hairy oval in the flats. And I was done, and stepped to the side.

  The others came toward us and cried out.

  I guess they took my arms. They led me—I don’t know. I was sitting down.

  They scooped at the mud. I cried, cradled in the arms of my discus-thrower, complaining of what had been done to me.

  Pyrrho reached out his gaunt hand to claw at my ankle. He was watching me with wide eyes.

  Things smelled like old rinds. The grass itself smelled of mildew. I withdrew my leg so Pyrrho could not reach me.

  In the vivid silence of the mud plains, I scraped at my discus-player’s chest with my dirty hands. There was the sensation of falling, though I sat on wet dirt.

  They asked me what I was doing, who I thought I was.

  I could not answer.

  We do not know what a body is, except in a position. We cannot picture a body without a stance. When we think of ourselves, it is not a clean self, for we are lying or stooped or standing or weeping or gagging for breath. I do not know whether there is such a thing as a body at all, or just a procession of forms; and I do not know, once we were discovered, what I did with my hands.

  That night, on our hilltop, we stared at the sky, which was full of the revolving gods. Dipsus fed Pyrrho grapes. Menalcus and my discus-thrower went down to the river to skip stones. I lay outside the circle with my hands by my sides.

  “This is a strong time,” said Pyrrho.

  The last of the locusts called in the bushes.

  I did not know how to answer him, or who would explain to me even how to start.

  Fifteen Going On . . .

  Megan McCafferty

  fifteen

  Hope will be gone in fifteen minutes.

  Hope is not my best friend. She cannot possibly be my best friend. That’s what my mother is saying to me in her tightest pursed-lipped tone.

  “She cannot possibly be your best friend, Jessica Lynn Darling.”

  “Jessica Lynn Darling” always defines declarations of importance. And Hope being my best friend is a first-middle-last-name impossibility for one reason: My mother likes Bridget better.

  “When did Bridget stop being your best friend?”

  Bridget and I stopped being best friends around the same time she became so much more than just the prettiest tow-head in the sandbox, on the swing set, at the Brownie meeting. She’s now an intolerable blonde who bitches and moans about modeling for mail-order catalogs because she finds it “unsatisfying.” If she thinks that is unsatisfying, she should try life as the Class Brainiac with a Caucasian fro and a bra that could serve better as an outie belly-button protector.

  Bridget should try being me.

  Bridget still lives across the street from me, as she has for all of my fifteen-going-on-sixteen-going-on-sixty years. Therefore, in my mother’s mind, Bridget is still my best friend. This was true enough through sixth grade, a time when the ties that bind were indeed determined by who lived across the street from you or who sat next to you on the five-minute bus ride to school. But things changed once we hit middle school and Bridget became the type of girl guys wanted to get naked, while I remained the type of girl guys ignored unless they needed to copy geometry proofs. Things changed, whether my mother wants to believe it or not. And she definitely does not.

  I’m tired of talking to her, so I decide to let my mother think that Hope’s departure is yet another example of how I take things too seriously.

  “You’re right, Mom. Bridget is my best friend. I feel much better now.”

  I stomp upstairs to very self-consciously sulk. I want attention, but not from Mom.

  From who, then?

  fourteen

  My mother assumes she knows everything about my social life. Not that there’s much to tell when you’ve got only one friend you don’t hate, and your first and last kiss was a Jell-O–tongued travesty that occurred precisely 698 days ago and is unlikely to repeat itself anytime soon. So, for a lack of anything else going on, if Hope and I were really that tight, my mother would certainly know all the ins and outs about it, right?

  But the building of a friendship isn’t something one chronicles like a documentarian narrating the assimilation with local natives: The potential best friend and I are interacting in a comfortable social atmosphere for approximately 2.5 hours daily. We will increase it to three hours next week. By mid-Novemberthe transmutation from acquaintances to best friends will be complete.

  No. It didn’t work like that. Hope and I didn’t even acknowledge our friendship to each other. We would never write a big fat BFF!!! on any of the bizillion notes we exchanged detailing all the many things that were wrong with everyone who wasn’t us.

  The notes came after the eye-rolling, the mutual, synchronized eye-rolling at the lunch table whenever Bridget and my other so-called friends, Manda and Sara, discussed their version of current events, i.e., how many calories were in a mouthful of ejaculate, or whether a toothbrush or an index finger was the most effective binge-and-purge method, to be used, presumably, if the answer to the former was more than could be found in a shot of peppermint schnapps.

  It was our mutual, synchronized eye-rolling that said, “I hate them, too.”

  Hope is the type of person who instantly makes everyone comfortable. Even with all the eye-rolling and notes, I doubted she felt as strongly about the friendship as I did.

  That is, until one summer sleepover before freshman year when the Clueless Crew was at cheerleading camp and it was just the two of us at her kitchen table. This didn’t happen often. Her older brother, Heath, was often grounded, and therefore a semi-permanent fixture in the Weaver household. But on this night he was out with his friends, a pack of heavy-lidded boys in musty flannel and trampled jeans who smelled like tobacco juice and stood too close on purpose and made me sweat with nervousness and something else, something I definitely hadn’t felt during that one and only kiss.

  Together, alone, we could be ourselves. And so Hope and I ate canned pineapple rings covered in whipped cream and rainbow sprinkles because we were starving and really wanted ice cream sundaes but Mrs. Weaver hadn’t gone food shopping in ages.

  “You know what I’m afraid of even though I know it’s stupid and irrational?”

  Hope’s question made me contemplate the source of what, at the time, were my most recent stupid, irrational fears: the huge underground zit on my chin. My blood pulsed through the bulge so it had a heartbeat—it had taken on a life of its own. Part of me thought that it wasn’t acne related, but indisputable evidence that a species of intergalactic pod people had chosen to colonize right on my face.

  Or, I thought, it could be the humble beginnings of a three-hundred-pound, Jabba the Hutt–looking tumor, like the one I’d watched a woman have surgically removed on the Learning Channel.

  Or, as a third, even more stupid and irrational variation of the same fear, it could be a buba. I learned in history class that bubas were the red, bulbous cysts that marked the first stage of the bubonic plague. Oozing always followed the throbbing. When the bubas dried up and turned black—the third stage—your medieval ass was doomed. You were dead within thirty-six hours, and not even the lowliest peasant would dare come close. No one so much as covered you with a sheet. No respect for the departed. You just rotted and stank. Alone for eternity.

  There was no way that Hope’s fears could be as bizarre as my pimple paranoias, but I was eager to find out for sure.

  “What?” I asked.

  She stuck the spoon into the center of a pineapple ring, then pushed her flame-colored corkscrews out of her face.

  “I’m afraid that if I use a tampon, it will somehow free itself from my vaginal canal and float around my body until I die of Toxic Shock Syndrome.”

  I laughed so hard that I fell smack on the linoleum. When I quieted down, Hope said something that let me know that our friendship was not one-sided, as I had feared.

>   “Now you know what you’re getting into, being best friends with me.”

  thirteen

  I look up at the Sophomore Friendship Shrine that borders my bed. The pictures are all relatively recent, of Hope and me from spur-of-the-moment sleepover photo sessions. Me, red in the face, doing a headstand. Hope, eyes shut, in mid-gyration, doing her best booty-shaking Britney imitation. These pictures often make us wonder what possessed us to pose in all our pajamaed splendor in the first place. They are both hideous and hilarious, and for that reason, I love them. They make me feel like I fit in at Pineville High even when I don’t and never will because the size of my brain and my boobs are in inverse proportion to what’s required for popularity.

  I’ll want to look at the pictures later. But not now. I don’t want to be forced to look at me and Hope and all the fun we’ve had together. The Sophomore Friendship Shrine doesn’t create the proper moping atmosphere, and that’s precisely what I need right now. I look at my watch, and sigh loud and deep for no one’s benefit but my own.

  I don’t want to ask for a ride. This is not a time to ask my mother for favors. Years from now, I don’t want her saying, “Remember that day I drove you to that girl’s house for your final farewell? What was her name again?” I don’t want her becoming part of this moment that should be between only Hope and me.

  Even though it’s sub-zero, I decide to run because right now Hope is the closest she’ll be to me for, well, ever, and I’ll never be able to run to her house again. It’s only five-tenths of a mile away. We measured it on the odometer in my mom’s Volvo when we were trying to persuade her that it wasn’t too far for me to walk or run by myself in the post-dinnertime darkness. Half a mile is close enough for me to get there in about three minutes, but far enough for the Pineville zoning Nazis to have put us into two different elementary schools, keeping us apart for the first twelve years of our lives for no good reason at all.

  I lace up my sneakers and dart out the door before my mother tries to make me feel better by reminding me that when I’m older I will look back on all of this and laugh, laugh, laugh as hard as I did that day on the cool linoleum floor.

  twelve

  I am running. My lungs seize with each freezy breath, but I like the sharpness of the pain.

  It’s a very melodramatic touch.

  Though I can usually tune out everything around me, today it seems that whichever way my head turns, my eyes settle on something that somehow relates back to the thing I don’t want to think about. As I pass the kiddie park, for example, I see the bench where Manda went down on a senior third-stringer on the football team before this year’s Homecoming dance. It was a bet. The guy got a case of beer and Manda got a new private nickname from Hope and me: the Bench-warmer.

  Manda revealed her sin to Hope during a drunken confessional through the stall walls of the girls’ bathroom. Manda would tell things to Hope that she wouldn’t even share with the other members of the Clueless Crew. To her credit, Hope kept her secret, which is to say, she only told me. We both decided that if we couldn’t dodge Manda—and we couldn’t, though we tried—the least we could do was avoid sitting on that bench. I was still pissed at Manda for ruining my park for me.

  “If she’s going to be a skank—”

  “And she will,” Hope interrupted, but not in the annoying way that Sara does. Sara interrupts because she thinks whatever she has to say is more important than anything I could possibly say. Hope interrupts because what she has to say is the same as what I would say, that is, if Hope hasn’t already said it.

  “Then why does she have to do it in the place that holds so many happy childhood memories for me?”

  Hope was quiet for a moment, and in the silence she doodled a cuter, caricaturized version of me, with smoother hair and a way-too-wide smile on my face. Then she put down her pen and said, “Your memories are your own.”

  “So?”

  She shook her head, as if it were a no-brainer.

  “Only you can wreck them,” she explained. “Or not.”

  eleven

  I’m running faster now, but still slow enough to notice a blur of Milwaukee’s Best beer cans precariously piled in a curbside recycling bin. It reminds me that tonight is New Year’s Eve. Tonight, the Clueless Crew and everyone else will get trashed to celebrate surviving the turn of the new century. Everyone else, that is, except the Weavers, who have chosen this monumental night of all nights to embark on the first leg of their journey toward a new life. If this doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about Hope’s parents, nothing does.

  I doubt that Y2K will bring the apocalypse in the form of earthquakes and locusts, but my world is definitely coming to an end, albeit in a more subtle but no less devastating way.

  High-school students get drunk. Even the ones in the honors classes, like me. I try not to feel bad about it every time I do it, which isn’t often. But even with my participation in planned bouts of drunkenness, I still don’t feel like I’m having the time of my life that is promised to me in all the teen sex comedies of the eighties golden era.

  Tonight will bring many bonding moments thanks to Beast and Boone’s Farm. I am expected to do the chugalug love thing, too, especially now that I have a reason to drown my sorrows. Parties always depress me, and I have no reason to think that tonight’s will be any different. I hate watching pissdrunk Prince Charmings hit on girls less aesthetically attractive than I am, but dumber, thereby making them somehow more overall attractive than I am. These guys think they’re being funny and clever when they use ironic pickup lines that not so deep down, they really mean.

  That’s a nice sweater, but it will look even better on my floor tomorrow morning. . . . Are you tired? Because you’ve been running through my mind all night. . . . What’s your favorite letter of the alphabet? Mine’s U, baby. . . . Are those space pants? Because your ass is out of this world. . . . Your father must be a thief because he stole the stars from heaven and put them in your eyes. . . .

  Hope made me realize that I wasn’t the only one who hated parties. But she had different reasons, ones I wouldn’t understand until later, until it was too late.

  ten

  I glance at the watch again. Ten minutes left. Tentententen. The number sounds in my head with the pound of each foot on the pavement. Tentententen.

  I think of the Top 10 lists Hope and I compiled to make our boring Pineville afternoons less so: The Top 10 Things That Went Wrong with Jessica’s First Kiss (#1: Squeegee!); The Top 10 Reasons Why Pineville Sucks That Don’t Seem to Bother Anyone Else (#1: Six liquor emporiums and zero bookstores); The Top 10 Advantages of Being a Virgin (#1: You can buy a VW Beetle with all the money saved on abortions).

  I remember our last list: The Top 10 People We Ranked On in Our Last Phone Conversation Even Though We Know It’s Really Bad for Our Karma but We Can’t Help Doing It Anyway Because They Annoy Us So Goddamn Much.

  “Shouldn’t the Clueless Crew be designated as numbers one through three?” I had asked, ever the follower of rules and regulations.

  “No,” Hope replied. “They get the top spot because they’re one person with three heads.”

  “Like one-third of a Hydra,” I said.

  “Right,” she said. “The Sara head shuts guys up.”

  “The Bridget head turns guys on,” I said.

  “And the Manda head sucks guys off!”

  This last line was said simultaneously, which would have been miraculous if it didn’t happen all the time. We had elevated the concept of Us vs. Them to an art form. An admittedly immature one, but an art form nonetheless.

  nine

  I’m not running anymore. I’m sitting, sweaty and sad, on the curb outside Hope’s house. In nine minutes, it will be forever referred to as the House That Used to Be Hope’s House. I’m shivering because it’s cold, but for other reasons, too.

  I want a passerby to notice me and ask why I am sitting there looking so pathetic.

  I want to ta
lk to someone about Hope.

  I want to talk about why she’s my best friend.

  I want to talk about how she’s the only person at Pineville High, in the world even, who understands what I say and why I say it and how Hope would appreciate my pursuit of the proper moping atmosphere and how it is possible to create a lifelong bond in less than four years and how I’m afraid that calls and e-mails will start out strong and slowly fade away because she will be much better at moving on than I will and how I hate us having to call and e-mail each other at all, instead of being able to just pop by each other’s houses unannounced and how Hope would totally understand why I might get drunk with the Clueless Crew tonight and not hold it against me even though she has more than one reason to and how unfair it is that Hope’s parents are moving to Tennessee because her brother died of a heroin overdose in New Jersey and how they think that she will be spared the same fate if they take her away from here, from me.

  I want to talk about how this idiotic parental logic proves that I know their daughter better than they do.

  eight

  But no one passes by.

  seven

  I imagine Hope in her room, still packing even though her parents have warned her to be ready to go. She is totally unaware that I am sitting on her curb, fewer than fifty yards away, but senses I am nearby.

  We spent our last night at Helga’s Diner, a hole-in-the-stripmall kind of place that is still undiscovered by the rest of our class. It’s our favorite getaway, where we escape to Patsy Cline, coffee, strawberry pancakes, and tales of love gone wrong from our favorite waitress, Thelma. At one A.M., after six hours and enough caffeine to guarantee that both of us are hyper-awake until the next millennium, my mom dragged us out of our booth and drove us back to our respective homes. Thelma was relieved when we left, saying she couldn’t take any more crying and carrying on from her two favorite customers.