“Who said anything about throwing up?”
She yanked her shirt back down and glared at them. “Hello—salmonella?”
Somehow it sounded less insane when her mother said it. Imogen and Bree stared at her, speechless. Then they both cackled. “Salmonella?” they repeated. “Salmonella?” Their eyes glittered. A look of silent understanding passed among the three of them. There was no averting what was coming next.
With a gasp, Mari shoved past Imogen and dove toward the TV room. They flew after her, unleashed, made swift by their socks on the linoleum. Over and around the leather sectional they chased her, careful to avoid the glowing fish tank, no one shrieking or laughing because upstairs Bevin was already asleep. Just their heavy breathing filled the room, and when the two of them finally pinned her to the floor, she could feel how all of their chests were heaving rapidly, in unison, like they had run a mile together with matching strides.
Chariots of Fire was one of her top-five favorite films. Though she didn’t like to run herself, the sight of British men running was very moving. Whenever they sang “Jerusalem” in morning meeting, she and Imogen and Bree would entertain themselves by surreptitiously acting out the words; they would mime the seizing of the bow, and the spear, and the countenance divine shining forth upon the hills, and they would attack the low note in “arrows of de-sire” with fake solemnity, but even as they joked around, Mari found the song unspeakably beautiful. That ardent phrase—“Bring me my chariot of fire!”—stirred her.
When it touched her face, the cake batter was not cold, as she thought it might be; it felt only thick and wet. Her eyes were closed at this point. And her mouth too, of course. Nothing—not Duncan Hines, or egg-borne bacteria, or anything not her own—would cross the threshold. Her lips were squeezed so tightly shut that they tingled. No one was getting in or out: she kept herself intact, impervious to the panting weight of Imogen and Bree on top of her. With satisfaction, she felt their bodies slacken, the energy dissolving—they were thwarted, and there was nothing to do now but smear batter on Mari’s face. Even with her eyes shut, she could tell when it was Imogen doing it and when it was Bree. Like in Chariots of Fire, where the two men ran extremely fast but for different reasons: the Scottish one because he believed so much in God, the Jewish one because he wanted to fit in and show that he was better than all the anti-Semites he met in college. The perfunctory swipes across her cheek—that was Imogen, having already lost interest in the whole thing—but in the precisely centered dabs on her forehead, her nose, her mouth, her chin, she felt the warmth of Bree’s attention, her thoroughness and care.
After they hoisted themselves off her, Mari made her way unsteadily toward the hall bathroom, eyes slitted and face sticky, and it was here that she caught a whiff of the cake baking in the oven. She had never smelled anything like it before. Initially it reminded her of the cloying scent of Play-Doh, which she had always hated, and in fact hated so much that when small she’d refused to touch the stuff, but as she inhaled again she found something spreading underneath the sweetness, a smell similar to that of butter and eggs and vanilla and flour but not quite the real thing, a smell that was artificial but also intoxicating and somehow more intoxicating for being fake. She didn’t have to taste it to know ahead of time how much she was going to like this cake. How moist it would be, and warm, how its faint chemical aftertaste would make her go back for more. Wiping off her face above the sink, she decided to tell her mother that from now on the only kind of cake she wanted for her birthday was yellow cake from a box.
* * *
In the middle of seventh grade, Mari heard the Smiths for the first time, on a late-night radio show that played the day’s most requested songs. She had to spend extra money when buying their record because it was imported from the U.K.; it had a Dutch-blue cover with a black-and-white photograph on it of a handsome man in profile, in a tank top—a man who turned out not to be one of the Smiths, despite a superficial resemblance to their bass player. Printed tinily on the inside record sleeve was every word to every song, which was how she learned that the correct words were I am the son and the heir and not I am the sun and the air, as she’d originally thought. At first she felt unsophisticated for having heard it this way, but then it occurred to her that maybe the ambiguity was deliberate, a mark of genius.
Once she bought the record, the Smiths became the most important part of Mari’s life. She made friends with a girl in her class named Melanie because Melanie was the only other person she knew who’d heard of them. For Mari’s birthday, Melanie wrote a pretend letter in which Johnny Marr, the guitarist, declared his love for her, and though Mari put the letter in her treasure box, she didn’t plan on rereading it. Speaking as herself, Melanie pointed out that the similarity between Mari’s first name and Johnny’s last name couldn’t be entirely coincidence.
Imogen and Bree didn’t have strong feelings either way about the Smiths—Imogen liked soft rock with soaring choruses, and Bree listened to the kind of dance music played on Kiss 108—but still they were Mari’s best friends. She went back and forth between trying to convert Imogen and Bree to her excellent tastes and wanting to keep the Smiths as something sacredly her own. But how could you help but share that which took up so much space in your mind? She talked about them daily, and though her friends wouldn’t necessarily know a Smiths song if it hit them over the head, they could recite the names and instruments of the band members, and could recognize them in photos; they now knew that Manchester was a city not only in New Hampshire but also in Northern England, that there was nothing Morrissey relished more than going to a stationery shop and sniffing envelopes. They trailed behind Mari and took turns carrying her book bag as she drifted down the dim aisles, inhaling, grazing the reams of paper with her fingertips, attempting through her senses to transport her soul elsewhere.
When that didn’t work, they went across the street to get pizza. Each of them could order automatically for the others: Bree always got sausage and mushroom with a medium-size Sprite. Imogen liked Hawaiian, her favorite meat product being Canadian bacon, but Dino’s didn’t offer that by the slice; you had to order a whole pizza. For just a slice, she’d take pepperoni, as long as there wasn’t too much oil pooling in the pepperoni cups. Mari had stopped eating animals of late and wanted only two cheese slices and a free cup of water. Without needing to confer, they headed to the booth in the back corner so that Bree could gaze up at the wood-veneer wall and enjoy the signed photograph of the baseball player who looked like Bruce Boxleitner, star of Scarecrow and Mrs. King. That was her favorite show, just as Imogen’s was Jeopardy!, just as Mari’s was Masterpiece Theatre.
The facts in which they were fluent could fill a three-drawer file cabinet: age at which ears were pierced; history of broken bones and origins of scars; score on most recent math test; recurring bad dream; favorite words in French; despised body parts; last book read; secret sources of pride; pet peeves; pet names; scents of deodorant and hair conditioner.
There were also things about each other that they didn’t know.
For example: Mari got her period in the sixth grade, right before she turned twelve. By the time she exited the bathroom—sobered, walking strangely, feeling diapered—her mother had already placed calls to her father (he was at work) and both of her grandmothers (California, Ohio) to tell them the news. From that moment forward, Mari never spoke of her period to anyone. Discreetly, she carried the necessary implements in an unassuming cotton pouch made to look like a mouse. She had found it in the top drawer of her mother’s dresser, a home to scarves and handkerchiefs and the occasional purposeless gift from relatives abroad. It was an abstract, teardrop-shaped mouse, with a few inches of silk cord extending from its bottom and where the tip of its nose would be, a single snap. With this snap as the only form of closure on an otherwise openmouthed mouse, the pouch was not capable of safely holding much—not money or makeup and certainly not jewelry, nothing small. But Mari discovered that it
did well enough with pads, and in fact the pads made the mouse look plump, almost like a stuffed toy, and soon the sight of it nestled in her book bag ceased to cause her any embarrassment, so that eventually, a year later, when she had graduated to tampons, she kept these along with her pads inside the same mouse, which by then had lost its tail.
One winter afternoon, as the seventh graders were packing up their binders in the final minutes before the bell rang, Mari’s book bag tipped over onto the floor, and the force of the fall sent the tailless mouse sailing out of her bag like a missile, nose first, and a single slender-size tampon came shooting out of the mouse’s open mouth. It was like one of those fireworks that explodes only to reveal that there’s another, smaller explosion right inside it. The tampon slid across the homeroom floor without resistance, and Mari watched its journey in frozen horror. It didn’t make the slightest difference that only girls went to her school. Girls in her class thought that periods were disgusting: see how someone had tortured Holly Maynard by leaving a used-looking pad, colored red with a felt-tip marker, on the seat of her chair.
Yet three rows ahead of Mari was Bree’s solid dachshund body, which happened to be bending down patiently to retrieve a highlighter from beneath her desk just as Mari’s tampon came gliding toward her; she scooped it up, tucked it inside the sleeve of her sweatshirt, and sat back up without glancing around to see where it might have come from. Mari dropped onto her knees to recapture the mouse, and Bree bent over again to pick up the highlighter for real, and there among the legs of chairs and desks and classmates their eyes met. Nodding at the cotton pouch clutched in her hand, Bree mouthed to Mari, “I have it.”
After the last bell they found themselves laughing uncontrollably in the empty restroom across from the admissions office. Bree had Mari’s tampon—and she also had her period—not right then but in life—and she also had gotten hers the year before. In February. Only weeks after Mari. How could they be such complete and utter idiots? Their laughter made them hold on to each other for balance. “Remember when I said that the gyros from lunch were giving me a stomachache?” Bree asked. “That was cramps!” Mari was laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe. To think that they had been suffering silently, side by side, this whole time: it felt like both the saddest and funniest thing that had ever happened to them. As she wiped her eyes on her sweatshirt, Bree asked, “Are we going to tell Imogen?” but before she had even finished the question she was already saying, at the same time as Mari, “No.”
* * *
It was hard to imagine Imogen having bodily functions. Of course they had on countless occasions heard her peeing in the next stall over, but the girl who emerged a few seconds later appeared not responsible for the sounds. Her bathroom at home was spotless: on the sink sat a cake of soap, a boar-bristle brush, a tube of baking soda toothpaste. The porcelain had a lovely soft look to it due to age and abrasive cleaners. A tarnished silver baby cup held Imogen’s toothbrush, and though it looked like an antique from the Victorian era, like something you’d find inside a glass case, she used it every morning and night when brushing her teeth. On its rim was a pale crescent of mineral residue.
Imogen’s house was full of such objects. There was a low-slung leather rhinoceros, long enough to sit on, with Liberty of London stamped on the underside of its ear. There was a needlepoint sampler hanging on the wall that said: Children aren’t happy with nothing to ignore / And that’s what parents were created for. There was a collection of Edward Gorey books—not the big paperback compilations that Mari owned, but original editions, of varying small sizes, with jewel-colored book jackets—The Doubtful Guest, The Hapless Child, The Epiplectic Bicycle, The Glorious Nosebleed. There was a zither and a tabla. A hand-carved bellows beside the fireplace. Dark blue candles, in pewter candlesticks, that were lit every night at dinner. Also a candle snuffer.
Suffusing everything was the faded smell of woodsmoke from the fireplace, and the stronger smell of eucalyptus branches in earthenware jugs. On top of that, when he came in wet from outside, the musty smell of Hamish.
Hamish was Imogen’s cairn terrier, and she also had a brother named Nicholas. He was older than Imogen by four years. He was large and shaggy and beautiful, not an athlete but the co-captain of the debate team at his school. For Mari, who didn’t have siblings, his presence was slightly stupefying. If they encountered each other in the kitchen, he would greet her with an electric smile and a booming “Hey you!” but then have nothing more to say. They would go about their business in cordial silence. Wanting to feel like Johnny Marr, she once asked Nicholas if he would show her how to play a chord on his guitar, and after a strenuous minute of wrestling her hand into position, he finally said, “Huh. You’ve kind of got stubby fingers, don’t you.”
When Bree first became friends with them, she was unrestrained on the subject of Nicholas. She embarrassed both Imogen and Mari by acting ridiculous as soon as he left the room: shaking her head in disbelief, fanning her face with her hand. Eventually she caught on and cut it out, or at least she stopped doing it in front of them. But that didn’t mean her worshipful feelings had changed. At school, during midday lulls, Melanie liked to liven things up by going around the lunch table and making each girl disclose the identity of her crush, and the moment it was her turn Bree would pause, look down at her tray, try not to smile. “No one” would be her faltering response, a performance that was tedious for Mari to watch. She could only imagine how bad it had to be for Imogen.
Yet Imogen continued to invite them both—not actually invite, because inviting was a nicety no longer needed, but simply to accept that on any given weekend Bree and Mari would be coming over. By the eighth grade, they had reached an unspoken agreement that among the three houses, Imogen’s was the one they preferred—the closest to school, the most comfortable, the coziest, her parents visibly amused by their enthusiasms. As if in anticipation, the pantry at Imogen’s house was kept magically full. Every Friday afternoon they would find it restocked with the snacks they liked most: cheese-flavored popcorn, kettle-cooked potato chips, the dark chocolate biscuits with the picture of the French schoolboy pressed into them. No oranges or bananas looking tired in a fruit bowl on the counter, but a basket of washed strawberries chilling in the refrigerator, or freshly cut cubes of pineapple, waiting to be eaten—which they wouldn’t hesitate to help themselves to, feeling healthy in advance of phoning in their order at Dino’s.
Imogen’s father didn’t complain about driving them to the video rental place, where the decision-making process was long and difficult, Mari going off on her own to comb through the old titles, in search of A Taste of Honey or Billy Liar or anything else about growing up working-class in the north of England, and Imogen and Bree tracking her down in the back of the store to say that the only black-and-white movie they would consent to was Psycho. Mari was in the thick of developing her sensibility, an essentially solitary endeavor, yet she liked doing so within earshot of familiar voices in the comedy section a few aisles away. Without a word she’d wander off, following the pulse of nameless feelings and associations, knowing that at some point her friends would have to come find her. When they did, they were bearing copies of The Blues Brothers and Better Off Dead, but in the end they settled on Psycho, not unhappily for Mari: Anthony Perkins had certain qualities—delicate features, button-down shirt, near-black hair, pained smile and perpetual unease—that marked him as probably belonging to the shadowbox she spent every spare moment assembling.
She was not alone in pursuing large, private, ongoing projects. It had become impossible to deny the fact that Bree’s appearance was changing. The glasses were gone: her parents had finally relented and deemed her ready for soft contacts. Her hair, which she’d been growing out, turned red overnight—or Titian, as she described it jokingly, like Nancy Drew’s. She corrected anyone who said she’d dyed it, pointing out that “henna is all-natural and actually good for you.” Though she remained as short as Mari, she had grown confound
ingly slim, and was now behaving like a thin person—wearing tops with spaghetti straps, slicing off the legs of her old jeans—and while Mari tried not to take it personally, she did experience an occasional pang of abandonment. Cow no longer applied in the affectionate plural.
Not all Bree’s self-improvements were successful. One morning she arrived at school looking different in a way that Mari couldn’t pinpoint.
“It’s my eyebrows,” Bree said. “You hold a pencil along the side of your nose and where the pencil meets your eyebrow, that’s where you start plucking.”
She took a yellow pencil from inside her desk and pressed it up to her cheek to demonstrate. Now Mari saw what was strange about Bree’s face. She asked, “Are you supposed to pluck from that side of the pencil or this side?” and touched the raw gap between Bree’s brows to show where she meant.
“Ohhhhhhhh.” Bree exhaled, letting the pencil fall. “I wondered why mine didn’t look like the picture. You’re saying they’re too far apart.” She smiled bravely at Mari. “But that’s what makeup is for, right? I can always fill them in.”
The rigors of change did not discourage her. It required trial and error, dedication, regular servicing. She had taken to shaving not only her legs and armpits but also the tops of her feet, her underwear line, and rather weirdly, Mari thought, her forearms. She had figured out a way to isolate the body part she most despised—what she coldly called her double chin but was really just a little softness, a minor lack of definition—through a series of muscle contractions.
“It’s like sucking in your stomach,” she explained, “but instead I’m sucking in the area under my chin.”
Mari confessed she hadn’t noticed, and that in her opinion Bree’s chin, her jawline, looked perfectly fine.
“That’s because I’m sucking in all the time,” Bree said. “I’m making it look fine.”
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