“It was my mother’s,” Stephanie said, with an awkward laugh. Her dress was kind of Holly Hobbie–ish, but she liked the simple print of yellow sunflowers on a black background.
“Sorry,” Mitchell said. He looked at her dolefully but without pity. He was the only person in her life who hadn’t treated her like a fragile flower after her mother’s death.
“You think it’s strange that I’m wearing her dress?”
“A little,” Mitchell said. “So what? You should do more strange things.”
Stephanie took this as a jab at her conventionality—one she would have welcomed before her mother’s death, but which now felt like a criticism. Lately she felt overly sensitive. She couldn’t handle Mitchell’s or anyone’s wisecracks; it was as if they put real cracks in her.
“It’s a little bit long,” Mitchell said. “Maybe you should shorten it.”
“You think so?” She and Mitchell often altered items they bought at thrift stores, usually with help from Mitchell’s mother. But this wasn’t the same thing, exactly.
“Definitely. I’ll go get my mom’s scissors.”
He left the room before Stephanie could protest. She had the sense he’d been looking for an excuse to leave.
Lying back down on his bed, she returned her attention to his collaged ceiling. Next to Robert Smith was Tuesday Weld, peering out from beneath a fur-collared coat, which was draped over her head, as if she needed to hide from something just out of frame. The photo was from the cover of Matthew Sweet’s album Girlfriend—Stephanie’s favorite album, at one time. Mitchell just liked the cover—the romance of it, the lavender light, the borrowed glamour. He’d told Stephanie that her mother reminded him of Tuesday Weld. Stephanie couldn’t see the resemblance, but one day when Mitchell was over, they got out her mother’s old yearbooks and looked at pictures of her as a teenager. Then Stephanie got it: the bright blond hair, the delighted smile, the little nose and teddy-bear eyes. Her mother was a dream. Looking at those photos, Stephanie felt cheated. What happened to that buoyant girl? And at the same time she wanted nothing to do with that kind of femininity. It was no coincidence that Stephanie had decided to dye her hair after looking at those yearbooks, and no coincidence that she began to distance herself from her best friend, Bethany, who was on the junior varsity cheer squad and wore silk ruffled shirts and Red Door by Elizabeth Arden perfume and whose goal in high school—if not explicitly stated—was to like and be liked by absolutely everyone.
Her father, Sam, was in those photos, too. He seemed like a nice person. And also exactly the kind of guy she had grown weary of. She and Mitchell had a love-hate relationship with the football players at their school. They were so banal and clueless, so spoiled and doted upon, and yet physically, they were rather outstanding. There was one player in particular, Brett Albright, who was so attractive that Stephanie had to look away when she saw him in the hallway. He was always tanned, no matter what the season, and he wore his sandy-brown hair cut very short, almost a crew cut, which highlighted his sharp, grown-man’s jaw. According to her father, Brett was small for a football player, but Stephanie thought his body was perfect: his torso a classic inverted triangle, and his arms and legs thick with muscle—but not too thick. His only flaw was the oily patches of acne on his forehead and sideburn area, but even this seemed a piece of his masculinity. Once last spring he came to her house for dinner, and Stephanie spent the whole meal thinking of what it would be like to run her fingers along the stubble at the back of his neck. When she told Mitchell that later, he said he would have thought of running his fingers along something else.
Stephanie wondered if Mitchell had ever fooled around with any of the boys at her school. She thought not, because he would have told her, but then again, maybe he wouldn’t have.
The one person she thought she knew best in the world, her own mother, had it within her to shorten a rope, fashion a slipknot, and climb a wooden stepladder. But Stephanie could not actually imagine that moment in her mother’s life. And when Stephanie looked back on her childhood, she sometimes felt as if her mother had not really lived with their family at all, but instead had wandered in and out of their lives, like a visitor. It was as if they were on the road, and her mother was walking in a field beside the road, a wide field of tall grasses, or maybe corn, so that sometimes you got a glimpse of her, but mostly you did not see her, you could only sense her presence behind the screen of wild growth.
And yet even from this distance her mother was perceptive. It was her mother who had first noticed Mitchell’s proclivities. “Well, he’s different, isn’t he?” was how she put it, after his first visit to their house. “Different how?” Stephanie asked. And as soon as the words were out of her mouth, the pieces came together and she saw it, too: he liked boys, not girls. In that instant all of Stephanie’s fantasies were blown away. She had thought she was in love. She had thought being in love was easy, like having a best friend.
Now it was funny to remember that she had ever thought Mitchell was straight. She had been so naive when she started high school, a lamb of a girl who believed her football-coach father was beyond reproach and that her mother’s blue moods were normal, the price of motherhood. It was Mitchell who taught her to examine her family, to see them as an outsider might. The two of them had formed their own little unit of judgment. They practiced being smart together, training their newly acquired analytical skills on everyone, especially their families. They were both obsessed with their parents. Mitchell’s father was a preacher who thought AIDS was a message from God. He had no idea his son was gay. Stephanie thought he had to have figured it out by Mitchell’s senior year, when it was obvious that her and Mitchell’s four-year friendship had never evolved into a romance; but on prom night, when she and Mitchell posed beneath the cherry tree in Mitchell’s front yard, both of them wearing ragtag looks inspired by Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain, he made a remark about the importance of chastity. They had laughed hard about that, harder than they laughed when Stephanie’s mother, upon seeing her ill-fitting baby doll dress said, in a completely befuddled and nonbitchy way, “Is it the style not to look pretty?”
“My mom thought you might be hungry.” Mitchell stood in the doorway brandishing a pair of yellow-handled scissors. In his other hand was a plate of chocolate-chip blondies, cut into neat triangles.
Stephanie reached for one, though after months of front porch offerings, sweets no longer felt special. By some miracle, she had not gained a pound. It was working at the Red Byrd, she decided. Or maybe it was like people said: she was young, she could eat what she liked. Stephanie had always had a hard time remembering that she was young.
“All right, off with your dress,” Mitchell said. He tossed one of his T-shirts her way so she could cover up. Stephanie stepped behind his open closet door to change, realizing halfway through that her backside was reflected in Mitchell’s full-length mirror, which hung on the opposite door. But he wasn’t even looking! In moments like this Stephanie thought Mitchell’s mother must have some inkling of his sexuality. Why else would she let them stay up here by themselves for hours?
Mitchell flattened the dress across his desk and held it in place while she cut it. She didn’t bother to measure and mark it; she just let the sharp blades slide quietly through the fabric. She thought of her mother’s clothes on her father’s bed. She’d left them there on purpose, wanting him to be disturbed by their presence. She was disturbed by his weird suggestion that she take them with her to college. They weren’t even her style.
“That’s pretty short,” Mitchell said, examining the new hem.
To Stephanie’s oversensitive ears, this sounded like criticism, but she tried not to take it the wrong way. She wondered if Mitchell was sick of hanging out with her. She should have just gone to work. She liked waitressing because any awkwardness with customers or coworkers was dispelled by the fast pace of the dinner rush. And the exhaustion she felt at the end of the night was a satisfying distractio
n. Before she drove home she would sit out back with Jon and Becky, the line cooks, listening as they bellyached over their shift drinks. Once she asked for a cigarette and they admonished her, telling her never to start, that it was the filthiest habit. And even though that had been annoying, she felt protected. They were constantly telling her she was “a strong young lady” and somehow that felt like an expectation that she had to fulfill. She found she liked having an expectation—or at least she liked it when it came from Jon and Becky, whose ideas about her were based on observation, rather than, say, her father’s stoic ideal.
She put the dress back on. The new hem hit midthigh, and it was jarring to see her mother’s dress so radically changed. As always, Stephanie thought her knees looked bony and overly large. Her father said they were strong, athletic knees, the kind that wouldn’t blow out. Everything came back to sports for him.
“Looks better now,” she said, pulling on her jean jacket. She put her hands in the pockets and found the half pack of cigarettes she’d scrounged from one of the booths. She held up the rumpled package. “Want one?”
Mitchell frowned, his long features turning dour. He had a haunted, thin face, one that had always reminded Stephanie of photos from the Civil War, the daguerreotypes of teenage soldiers. She remembered, with a twinge, the intensity of her old crush on him.
“You think you’re going to look like Marlene Dietrich with a ciggie in your hand? Please, you’re Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.”
This time she was sure she wasn’t imagining the irritation in his voice. “Why are you being so mean?” she said. “All night long you’ve been acting like you don’t want me here.”
“Sorry, I’m just stressed,” he said. “I’m supposed to go to school next week and now my dad’s saying I can’t even bring my car. He’s still pissed I’m not going to Frostburg. I have to take the bus from Hagerstown. It’s going to take, like, ten hours.”
“You can’t take the bus to college! Let me drive you. My dad’s not coming with me. It would just be the two of us.”
“Your dad isn’t taking you?”
“It’s one of his double practice days. I mean, he offered, but I could tell he didn’t want to. And we would have had to take two cars with my brothers coming along and all my stuff. But there’s room for you.”
“I couldn’t. It doesn’t even make sense. Boston is so far out of your way.”
“So what? Come on, how much fun would we have?”
“No, it’s okay. I might not have to take the bus. My mom is looking into Amtrak. It will be good. I have too much shit anyway. Fresh start.”
“Yeah, I get it,” Stephanie said. But she was surprised that he would turn her down so quickly—surprised and hurt.
“So what are we going to do tonight?” Mitchell said.
“Sarah’s having a party,” Stephanie managed to say. It was dawning on her that Mitchell was really going to leave. She could see it now, she could imagine him waiting on a brick platform, wearing his long black coat and one of his mother’s crocheted caps, carrying his big duffel and maybe a backpack. And then he would board a silver train and be whisked up the Eastern Seaboard to Boston, a city full of students, a city full of people as smart as he was. He was just a few days from starting a whole new life. And she was happy for him. But she was sad for herself. She no longer felt optimistic about leaving Willowboro. It felt like some other girl had decided to go to Swarthmore, and now she wasn’t confident she could fulfill that girl’s fancy private-school ambitions. She wasn’t even sure that girl would ever return. If it was just a matter of keeping the ambitious girl’s seat warm, of biding her time in sadness, in grief, then she could do that. But the more Stephanie thought about it, the more ludicrous that idea seemed. You couldn’t “sub in” for yourself, waiting for some previous happiness to return. Because you would never forget the sad shit that went down. It got engraved onto your brain. Stephanie pictured her mother’s brain, intricately engraved, like some Roman sarcophagus.
“I don’t want to go to Sarah’s,” Mitchell said. “It’s just going to be a bunch of football dudes. And everyone’s probably already drunk by now. Let’s go to the dollar theater.”
“Not everyone will be drunk,” Stephanie said. “Dan will be there. He doesn’t drink.”
“Because he’s Mormon,” Mitchell said.
“That’s basically why you don’t drink.”
“I’m not Mormon!”
“No, but you come from a religious family.”
“You think that’s why I don’t drink?” Mitchell asked. He seemed genuinely curious, open to the fact that he might not know himself as well as he thought. It was this sincerity that Stephanie had first noticed about Mitchell, even before she knew anything about him, when he was just an interesting-looking boy in her freshman geometry class, a boy who always finished his in-class assignments early and used the extra time to read the Jean M. Auel novels forbidden in his household.
“I don’t know,” Stephanie said. “Maybe you’ve absorbed certain puritanical attitudes.”
“Well, look at your family,” Mitchell said. “The attitudes you’ve absorbed. I mean, your dad?”
“What about him?”
“Um, hello? He basically presides over a kingdom of ’roided-up homophobes.”
“No one on my dad’s team uses steroids!” Stephanie wasn’t going to touch the homophobia. She and Mitchell had never talked about the fact that her father was obviously uncomfortable around him. They had never talked about it, because what was there to say?
“This isn’t even coming from me. You’re the one who’s been complaining. Didn’t you just tell me he was going to coach a practice instead of taking you to college?”
“One thing doesn’t have anything to do with the other,” Stephanie said, even though she was as hurt by her father as she was by Mitchell. Her mother hadn’t hurt her in this way; even at her most spaced out and distant, Stephanie always felt her mother was with her in spirit.
“Hey, what’s the matter?” Mitchell said. “Your dress doesn’t look that bad.”
“I’m just sad because we’re leaving in a week, you know? I don’t want to say good-bye.”
“You say it like I’m dying!” Mitchell joked. And then realized his mistake. “Oh, God. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Stephanie said. The problem was that Mitchell was excited to go away to college and she wasn’t, and he knew she wasn’t, and he’d been trying to conceal his own excitement out of courtesy, but now he was getting tired of hiding his true feelings. And Stephanie felt guilty, but at the same time, she felt jealous, because it was like Mitchell got to go away to school and assume some fabulous new identity while she became—what? She didn’t know. And it scared her that she didn’t know, and it scared her that she didn’t know if this rift between them—if that’s what it was—was occurring because they were naturally growing apart, or if it had to do with her mother’s death. She couldn’t see her life clearly anymore, and clarity was the most important thing to her; it was her secret power. Her mother had taken that from her.
“Let’s just go to the party,” Mitchell said. “You can smoke your filched ciggies, and I’ll have pretzels and lemonade with Dan. It’ll be positively thrilling for all involved.”
“Don’t do me any favors,” Stephanie said. “I can go by myself.”
“No, no, no,” Mitchell said, shaking his finger. “Friends don’t let friends go to the suburbs by themselves. If worse comes to worst, we can always cruise the dual.”
“Cruising the dual” meant driving on the dual highway outside of town, driving but never exiting, just going around and around in circles and taking in the sights of the commercial strip. It was a “classic” Willowboro activity, so classic that Stephanie and Mitchell had never bothered to try it, although they’d always said they would do it before they left for college. Tonight would be the perfect night to give it a whirl—or it would be the perfect night, if only Stephanie could b
e the girl she used to be, the impatient overachiever who liked nothing better than to view her hometown from a certain ironic distance.
DEAN COULD TELL from the way Stephanie moved that she’d been drinking; she’d lost her specificity, all the micromovements and small gestures that made her special to him. Her dark hair was in a low ponytail at the nape of her neck, with a few long strands left loose. She came in through the side door and headed straight to the refrigerator for a glass of orange juice.
“Stephanie,” he said quietly, so she wouldn’t startle. He was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting.
“Dad!” She turned around, surprising him with a warm smile—an intoxicated smile, but still.
“Late night at the Red Byrd?”
“Yeah, and then I went out.” She sat down at the table to drink her juice. “Sorry, I should have called. I feel bad, you waited up.”
Her lie was so transparent that he was reminded of the fibs she told when she was a little girl, how obvious they were, and how stubbornly she clung to them. Lying, in small children, was a sign of intelligence.
“Steph, the boys and I went to the Red Byrd for dinner.”
“You came to check up on me?”
“I wanted to see you,” Dean said. “And the boys did, too. You left them alone.”
“It was only for, like, fifteen minutes.”
“They’re little kids.”
“I’m sorry.” She got up and poured herself some more juice. “Mitchell called and he really needed me to come over—he’s going through a hard time—so I got Katie to cover my shift. And I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want it to be some big thing. But I had to go, he’s my best friend.”
It bugged Dean that Mitchell was her designated “best friend.” Why couldn’t she be best friends with another girl, a typical girl, a girl who was happy, who didn’t view high school as one big hard time?
“How much have you had to drink?” Dean asked.
“I wasn’t driving,” she said. “Mitchell dropped me off.”
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