The Girls' Almanac

by Emily Franklin

  “Yeah,” Jenna says. Her lips feel perfect, not too wet, not flaked. She checks her mouth for residual cheese and thinks about leaving a note for herself in her purse not to eat cheesy snacks, just in case she might get kissed.

  She can feel Peter’s knee tipping toward hers. They have their backs against the closet wall, flanked by wooden tennis rackets, stacked board games, and with a rush of worry, Jenna suddenly understands that she will always look for boys like Peter, who don’t talk, or who can reach for her hand only in the protected darkness of the coat closet. But then, Peter is reaching for her hand, is shifting closer to her, and touches her hair just the way a boy ought to, tangling his fingers near the back and nearly elbowing her cheek.

  “I heard you like me,” Peter says.

  Jenna feels each cell inside her racing to find the correct path, is aware of her blood, her heart, and—the way she has imagined so many times before—waits for Peter to kiss her. She is dimly aware of Gabrielle stuck upstairs, of the fact that the closet door could open at any time, ruining her moment and her chance of being kissed, maybe even dashing any hope of being Peter’s new girlfriend.

  “I do,” she says and then feels ridiculous, as if she’s trying to be in a wedding, so she adds, “like you, I mean.” In the dangle of coat arms and windbreaker sleeves, Peter puts his hands on Jenna’s shoulders and kisses her.

  Upstairs, Amanda Lyons displays a turquoise plastic monkey. Sitting cross-legged on the taupe carpet, the girls have demanded integration, sliding themselves between the boys. The baggy purse sits next to Gabrielle, leaning against her leg like a toddler. As she listens to Amanda, Gabrielle wonders if maybe her father wishes he’d thought to buy her a purse along with her bright red parka. Thinking about her father trying to do right by her, outfit her in the way a mother might, makes her slouch. Then, remembering her dad didn’t actually offer a bag she rejected makes her proud—he knows she is not the sort of girl to want to carry a purse. Simultaneous to this thought is Gabrielle’s acknowledgment that she is, however, the kind of girl who might carry a bag to make her often unseen cousin happy.

  “So, whoever ends up having it,” Amanda reiterates, “chooses who they kiss.”

  “Whom,” Seth corrects, and he is handsome enough to get away with the remark.

  “Shut up!” Amanda smiles at him. Gabrielle imagines Amanda in the closet with Seth and then tugs at the neck of her shirt; not used to wearing turtlenecks, she feels constricted and bored, but not only that—bored and nervous.

  To prepare for the game, Amanda asks Gabrielle to help her. Gabrielle senses she is showing the other girls how to be a hostess, how to be nice to the stranger they can later pick apart, but she is grateful enough that she complies. Together, they empty the contents of the Scrabble bag.

  “Don’t bother cleaning up the letters now,” Amanda says when the tiny squares of s, u, e, g, and ten-point z fall to the floor. “I’ll do it later.”

  Gabrielle places a pile of red, green, and yellow monkeys into the sack, and Amanda smiles at her. “Jenna said you might move here?”

  Gabrielle nods. “Maybe.”

  “Cool,” Amanda says and holds the turquoise monkey in her hand.

  “It would be,” Gabrielle says, even though she hasn’t thought it through. “But it’s not up to me.” She thinks of her father eating French bread, how right now he could be spreading the butter or eating soup or deciding where she will live next.

  “Everyone ready?” Amanda asks but doesn’t wait for an answer. The turquoise monkey is added to the sack of plastic monkeys, and the sack is passed from one kid to the next. Hands reach in, pull out a green or a yellow, and collective sighs exhale. When Seth holds the bag, he does a dramatic swish of his right hand, waving his fingers in calisthenic form. He pulls out a red monkey.

  “This is lame,” Greg says and slides out of the circle to get a snack.

  “It’s down to two monkeys!” Dina Montello says, her hand already in the sack. She closes her eyes, and when she looks at what her hand has found, she frowns. Then she reconsiders, flips her hair, and says to Gabrielle, “Looks like you’ve got the monkey.”

  Even though she knows the color of it, Gabrielle goes through the ritual of extracting the turquoise monkey from the bag. Dangling it by its curled tail from her pointer finger, she taps it so it swings slightly. Then, as quickly as she revealed it, she closes it in her palm, and only the question mark of the tail sticks out.

  Jenna wants to ask what, if anything, this means, if the fact that Peter’s lips have been on hers, that for a few minutes he was allowed to hug her really tightly means they are going out. Then she thinks of the advice her mother gave her about boys, how going to them is a surefire way to scare them off.

  “We should go,” Jenna says. “My cousin’s upstairs.” She feels proud, coy, like she’s supposed to.

  “Yeah,” Peter agrees. “So’s my girlfriend.” When Jenna doesn’t respond, he softens his voice and asks, “You know that, right? Dina Montello asked me out, like, ten minutes before you got to the party.”

  Jenna can feel that she’s going to cry and presses the one nail she hasn’t bitten into her palm so she doesn’t. “I didn’t…So then how come…” She stands up, bumping into something furry, and remembers that Amanda Lyons’s mom wears a mink.

  “Dina told me to bring you down here,” he says. They are both standing up halfway, jangling the hangers.

  Jenna puts her hands on her cheeks, willing them to stop blushing before Peter opens the door. “I’m so embarrassed,” she says.

  “Oh.” Peter says and tries to hug Jenna. “Look, she told me to bring you in here, but she didn’t tell me what to do. I did that…” They both think back to the kiss that already feels miles—grades—behind. “I kissed you because I liked you, too.”

  “Liked, as in the past?” Jenna slides her fingers through the square holes on a tennis racket. The thought of being in a such a big closet jammed with old sporting goods, out-of-date athletic gear, and unworn jackets makes her feel impossibly small, and lonely.

  “I guess so, yeah.” Even as he says this, Jenna thinks that she still has a chance with him, that he might reconsider until, in the half-cocked door, light shocks them. Peter is saying, “Just tell everyone that nothing happened,” as Dina Montello opens the door.

  She stands with her hands on her hips. “You guys are missing everything!”

  Dina locks hands with Peter, and they head up the stairs two by two in front of Jenna, who lags slightly behind. In the middle of the circle, Gabrielle is having a full-fledged kiss with Seth. They are on their knees, with the boys cheering and a couple of the girls agog, wondering why they didn’t get the turquoise monkey.

  “Hey.” Dina kicks Amanda with her socked foot and pulls Peter down so he’s practically on her lap. “Gabrielle, you staged this!”

  This forces Gabrielle and Seth to break their kiss and instantly reminds Gabrielle of who she is: namely, not the girl who gets to kiss the smartest, best-looking boy at the party without ramifications.

  “Just admit it,” Dina says and nudges Amanda.

  Seth whispers to Gabrielle in a Russian accent, “Tell them nothing.”

  Amanda shrugs and then, fearing Dina’s wrath, adds, “She did put the monkeys in the bag.”

  Outside, a car horn beeps. Parents have begun to arrive, and Jenna looks at the strewn snacks, the scattered letters, trying to spell words so she can avoid staring at Peter and Dina, who are dancing in the corner, even though there’s no music.

  “Can we go?” Gabrielle asks Jenna.

  “Where were you the whole time, anyway?” Jenna asks when the girls are back at the closet, reclaiming their jackets.

  “I was here, where were you?” Gabrielle slips into the red parka, relaxing into the foreignness of it.

  “Here.” Jenna thumbs to the closet as if she half-expects it to refute.

  “Oh.” Gabrielle watches Jenna flip her hair and then smooth it. “A
re you okay?”

  “Yeah—fine.” Jenna looks as if she will break any moment. “What about you?”

  “Same.” Gabrielle nods. She takes a last look in the purse and finds she has unknowingly filled it with something; the turquoise monkey sits quiet inside the folds of faded brown cloth, its curved tail caught on the coin pocket. She thinks about showing the illicit contents of her bag to Jenna, whose zipper is stuck, but doesn’t.

  With one hand, Gabrielle fixes Jenna’s zipper, and with the other, she tucks the monkey into her new coat pocket so she won’t forget him when she gives back the jeans, the turtleneck, the purse. Outside, the yard smells like burned leaves, and Gabrielle can still taste cranberry on her tongue. The sharpness of that flavor will always remind her of this party, pull her back to one of those nights, the ones between childhood and the adult world in which nothing really happened.

  The Shortest Night

  The first thing Lucy’s mother told her about dressing for a date was this: if you can’t get your hands into the pockets of your jeans, then they are simply too tight. Ginny said this to her the summer she turned fourteen as she packed a trunk for overnight camp. The camp was Camp Lenox, in the Berkshires, and they’d picked it out of the pile of brochures that arrived during the course of the long winter. The lake gleamed on the cover, and inside, the Lincoln Logs–style main lodge promised Ping-Pong and indoor games when it rained. This appealed to Ginny, who hoped Lucy would be high scorer on the soccer team, as she was at school, or win the blue ribbon for diving. Neither happened because Lucy tore the ligaments in the bottom of her right foot. But that was midway through the summer.

  “Ping-Pong”—her mother smiled as she read aloud—“pottery shed, archery range. You’ve always been good at archery, haven’t you?”

  Ginny often asked questions that required nothing but a nod, and Lucy nodded as she glanced at the pictures on the back cover of the brochure in her hand. Ginny might have liked the shooting range and the potential for basket-weaving sessions, but Lucy’s interests differed. The photographs on the back were the same as all the rest—sporty, filled with wide grins, cookouts, and watermelons—but they stood out to Lucy in one way. While all the other camps had girls around the fireside singing songs and cheers, girls playing all the roles in The Sound of Music and Peter Pan, Lenox had the real boys to fill those roles. Camp Lenox for Girls was really Camp Lenox for Boys, and had been since the 1920s, but the parents had complained, so the owners built Camp Lenox for Girls.

  Camp Lenox had only one cabin for girls the summer Lucy went, and for all her memories of that June through August, she can’t remember the name of her bunk. They all had placards far above their decor and structural soundness: Shangri-la, Bluebell Ridge, Pine, and Spruce. Maybe Lucy’s cabin had a name like this, perhaps it was just a number.

  Ginny looked at Lucy with her eyebrows raised to ask if she would like to spend eight weeks tucked into the woods and hills of the Berkshires. And while Ginny pictured her daughter growing into more athletic prowess, Lucy envisioned being asked to dance, an event that in what she thought of as her real life, her life at school, had not occurred.

  Looking back at that moment, Lucy sees that, even then, she fancied herself as part of a breed of girls who got asked to dance, who enjoyed the first time makeup snuck into camp without parental knowledge, who liked the sturdy, shiny boys called Jake or Dan. Usually these girls came from Connecticut or New York maybe, even California, and it was with great pity that they saw Lucy—no eyeliner, long, unstyled hair, and actually wearing the camp uniform.

  She doesn’t remember being dropped at Camp Lenox, cannot picture the spillage of girls and their trunks; it seemed as if they all just appeared there, sitting on the edges of their bunks, putting cassettes, pictures, and candy into the small shelves at the bases of the bunks. Actually, Lucy hadn’t brought anything to put into these spaces, but she realized the shelves fit a week’s worth of rolled up socks perfectly, and left just enough room to house her journal.

  It amazes her now to think of the names of the girls; Gabrielle, two Kims, Beatrice, Heidi, Bethany. Those are the ones she remembers. Gabrielle approached her first.

  “Do you have any pads?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Lucy said, glad she’d brought them, even happier that she’d started her period the year before with the Jewish tradition of being slapped in the face by mother or grandmother as a “welcome to the world of being a woman.” Ginny had done it, hard, then recoiled and hugged Lucy in a panic, whispering “Sorry, sorry” until Lucy had kissed her. Lucy handed Gabrielle a box of maxipads and looked at the woman on the front of the box, her gauzy dress flowing around her as she walked on the dunes of some beach.

  “Lucy, right?” Gabrielle said.

  “Yeah.” She nodded.

  “I already memorized everyone in here; it was pretty easy with the name tags and all. You don’t have a name tag, but you’re on the address list, so you must be Lucy.” Gabrielle stood with her hands on her hips, a stance Ginny flatly despised as indicating what she perceived to be insolence. Later, Lucy found out that Gabrielle had only a father, no mother, and she wondered if that made the difference in gestures.

  Lucy smiled. The two Kims came over and sat on her bed. They looked at each other, and then one nudged the other. One was thin, wiry, and with a permanent toothy grin; the other full-faced, also smiling, and with a figure people would deem “large-boned” even though everyone knew what that really meant. The whole camp called them Doublemint when they were together and split the name when they were apart: with Thin Kim as Minty, her sidekick, Double.

  That first night, the girls had an orientation meeting on the floor of the cabin. Their counselor, Pam, sat them down and asked a series of ridiculous questions meant to open up what she called their “secret selves” and make them closer.

  “Now, a couple more questions,” said Pam, who had worked at Lenox the summer before and was now back as a senior counselor after a year at Brown.

  “Pam, do you have a boyfriend?” asked Bethany, the tall, pretty girl from Greenwich who had been soccer captain for her high school as only a freshman.

  “Girls,” said Pam in a tone that let the campers know she did, “let’s get back to the point. Heidi, if you had to be a hammer or a nail, which would you be? Let’s go around in a circle.”

  “A hammer.”

  “No doubt,” Minty said, serious as she popped her gum.

  “Me, too,” agreed Double.

  It was Lucy’s turn. She was looking out the cabin screen at main camp where there were lights and noise, one last party before the boys arrived tomorrow.

  “Lucy?” The group looked at her. She knew any comment except a straight answer would be seen as a rebellion, an attack on Pam, since everyone seemed eager for her to ask the next question.

  Lucy started to laugh midsentence. “Ah…I guess I’d be a—a Simon and Garfunkel song,” she said and thought how, if her friend Kyla were there, she’d be laughing, too, and they’d leave the circle to skip rocks into the late light of the flat lake.

  “Very funny, Lucy,” said Pam. No one laughed.

  That was the moment. In every one of Lucy’s stories she felt there was a single moment that, had it been paused or altered just slightly, would have changed the entire outcome. That was her moment; she’d been the cool, name-tagless girl but had gone to the other side, no longer a joiner. At fourteen, loners are seen only two ways—cool or weird—and no girl strives for either; all want just the low-flying haze of not being singled out. At that point, Lucy became both, treading water somewhere in the middle.

  After a loose-egged breakfast the following morning, they had swim tests. Bethany and Lucy tested out of required swimming. Both girls had both grown up swimming and sailing, so while the others swam their laps and did the dead man’s float, Bethany and Lucy went to the boathouse to rig one of the small sloops.

  James, the English boating instructor, set them up, then called t
hem into the Sail Shack, one of the few buildings that actually suited its name. James was tall, sandy-haired, with a full mouth. He bit the side of his cheek and marked something on the paper in front of him.

  “So, Bethany,” James said, looking through a file. “You seem like you know your way around boats.” Lucy wondered for a minute if that meant she knew her way around more than just the jib sheets and Turk’s head knots. She looked at the scar James had on the third knuckle of his left hand and wished he’d explain it. The smoke from his cigarette looped up into the buggy air and hung there. He suddenly realized his error and put the cigarette and his soft pack away, tucking it inside an upturned brass bell on the desk.

  “Boats are cool.” Bethany shrugged, leaning her lanky frame on his desk. Lucy waited for James to ask her something, if she liked the ocean or lakes better, if she even knew how to sail. He said nothing.

  Bethany kept looking at him. He glanced up at her and smiled. Lucy grabbed a towel from the rack in the corner and headed for the boats. She clipped the small sail into place and lowered the rudder. Bethany ran up the dock.

  “Don’t untie it yet. James wants to see you in the shack. He says I can take out my own boat.”

  Lucy climbed out and walked the length of the dock, her wet footprints leaving a trail behind.

  “Hey,” she said to James, who was smoking another illicit cigarette and jumped when he saw her standing in the doorway.

  “I didn’t expect you now,” he said. “I thought you’d go sailing first and then stop by.”

  “Bethany said you wanted me to talk to you right away.” She paused and then said, “Don’t worry about the smoking thing, it’s really not that big a deal.”

  “You’re the business, Lucy, the absolute business,” James said, taking a drag from his freshly lighted Camel, and she laughed for the first time since arriving at Lenox. She watched James smoke his cigarette. He noticed her doing this, put it out on the edge of the desk, and flicked the butt end into a half-filled bucket of sand by his bare feet.