The Rules of Inheritance

by Smith, Claire Bidwell

  It is my first month and I’m still trying to figure out where I fit in. It’s a small school—there are only thirty-seven of us in the tenth grade—and the philosophy is one that encourages individualism and creativity. There are town meetings, independent studies, tons of art classes. There are kids with blue hair and some who wear pajamas to school every day. When I graduate, three years from now, I’ll do so barefoot, with flowers in my hair.

  My mother was immediately enchanted by the school, and even if I am intimidated at first, I will look back on my experience here with wonder and gratitude for years to come.

  Zoe and I end up sitting next to each other in Ms. Cusak’s class. Although our friendship builds slowly, it doesn’t take long to discover that we both hate sports and math and, in turn, Ms. Cusak.

  Zoe has just moved back to the States from Paris, where she’s lived for the last five years because her stepfather works for the UN. She has a magnificent tangle of inky black hair and amber-colored eyes. At fifteen, Zoe is not what kids my age usually think is beautiful, but I think she is anyway.

  She is exotic too, with her flared jeans and ratty cardigans. She is the first in our class to own a pair of Doc Martens, and she got them in Europe no less. Zoe has smoked a cigarette and she’s been drunk before.

  Zoe’s parents are divorced. She hates her stepdad and misses her own all-too-absent father. She is full of rage and self-loathing and she speaks in a quiet whisper most of the time. All of these things I find out later, not in those first few weeks of school.

  But they are things I can tell about her already, things that aren’t surprising to hear come out of her heart-shaped lips.

  Zoe is shy, and our friendship starts out slowly. I’ve always made friends easily, but with Zoe it is different. There are rules to abide by. She has to be handled gently. I have to be careful not to push her too hard, too quickly.

  Otherwise she just turns off.

  Her lips close and a lock of hair falls over her face and suddenly she’s gone. I am intrigued and eventually obsessed. Something about Zoe blinds me to everything else. I feel about her the way I’ve never felt about a friend before: impatient and possessive, needy and desperate.

  Although I have arrived at school already attached—Liz transferring in the same year—I drop her immediately for Zoe. I don’t take the time to acknowledge how much this hurts her.

  I can’t.

  In the last two years, since my parents’ cancer diagnoses, something about me has changed. There is a rip inside me, a tiny tear in my fabric, a darkness waiting there, and everything about Zoe threatens to help me make sense of it.

  We are living in Atlanta again, having given up on Florida offering our small family anything but misfortune. My mother has spent the last two years seeing shrinks, taking shark-cartilage capsules, and doing some kind of weird art therapy.

  She spends hours in the basement, working tirelessly on a disturbing collection of decoupage masks, carefully laying them out to dry at the end of each day. At night she drinks red wine on the couch until she is sloppy, and my father sits at the dining room table, bills and papers spread out around him, trying to figure out how to support our family.

  Although my father has been in remission since his radiation treatment, he is now seventy-three years old. His hair wisps around his ears in white tufts and he is slow to push himself up out of chairs. He leaves the house most mornings in a suit and tie, returns from each job interview defeated and deflated. Empty-handed.

  I hide in my room, trying to just disappear from it all.

  THIS IS THE YEAR that everything changes between me and my mother. One day I shift from wanting to be her, to wanting to be anything but her. It’s not as conscious as that, of course, but we both feel it in the ways I begin to withdraw.

  Later it will be hard for either of us to tell whether this individuation was a result of my mother’s cancer or simply my perfectly timed teen angst. Whatever the case, I begin keeping secrets from her. Just little things, mostly omissions.

  How was school today, sweetie?

  Fine.

  It was actually great, but I don’t want her to know that. I don’t want her to have the satisfaction.

  Are you making new friends?

  Uh-huh.

  I’d love to hear about them sometime.

  Maybe later.

  I don’t consider whether these responses might be hurtful to her. I only know that if I say more than a few words, the anger simmering just beneath my skin might gush forth. The rage living inside me is new. It’s not something I’ve ever felt before and I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know enough to connect it to the most obvious source.

  The first day I saw my mother in the hospital, a year and a half ago, it felt like something was being taken away. I walked down the long, sterile corridor, my hand in my father’s, as we approached her room.

  The room was washed in a soft, gray light and my mother’s eyes were closed, her hair limp and shapeless against the pillow behind her head.

  When she opened her eyes and spoke to me, it was in a voice that wasn’t hers.

  Hi, sweetie.

  There were tears in her eyes and she reached out for me.

  My father nudged me from behind, and I moved forward to embrace this woman who wasn’t my mother.

  A year and a half later and I’m still not sure that I trust her.

  ZOE IS AN ARTIST. Her pencil never stops moving over a page. With just a flick of her oval-shaped fingernails against a no. 2, I’m looking into a mirror, a perfect portrait of myself, shaded in Zoe’s lead, staring back at me while fractions and decimals swim by.

  It’s hypnotic to watch, and I am often left feeling kind of helpless.

  We meet that first week of tenth grade, and by Halloween we are inseparable. Zoe spends almost every weekend at my house. We hole up in my basement room, and my mother makes occasional appearances, bringing offerings of brownies or pretzels. She likes that Zoe is an artist, but it only annoys me that they have a shared connection. I want Zoe for myself.

  Zoe and I each have a boy at school that we are in love with. Hers is Ethan. He is a transfer too. Divorced parents; long, scraggly blond hair; a painter. He is mocking and cruel, and none of us can get enough of it.

  Mine is Henry. Shy, sweet Henry, who likes to draw and has a permanent bump on his forehead.

  Coincidentally, Henry and Ethan are best friends. I run cross-country with them after school. Zoe has third-period art class with them. We compare notes every night on the phone.

  Neither I nor Zoe has any real experience with boys. I’ve kissed a couple of them, but they were awkward, fumbling experiences that weren’t at all what I was expecting.

  When it comes to boys, I’ve always been the same. I’ve always been the girl who gives too much too easily and expects the same in return. I don’t remember which boy was first. In the beginning they were all the same: smooth and hairless and vulnerable, emulating or disobeying their fathers—there was nothing original about them yet.

  Maybe there never is.

  Suddenly—maybe it was the first week of sixth grade, I don’t really remember—suddenly, I loved them all, their soft eyelashes and downy cheeks, the slight swelling in their biceps, the way their hair clung with sweat to their smooth, tan foreheads.

  Then, back then, I could never be as beautiful as they were.

  And suddenly an ache, this ache, filled me up so fast. And suddenly—it was all so sudden back then—I could not remember the time before the ache and I could see no way past the ache. So I followed the boys with my eyes, my skin warming as they walked past, sweaty and musky from gym class. I followed them at night when I closed my eyes and lay in my canopied bed, cicadas ringing at the windows.

  I followed them like this, silently, throughout three torturous years of middle school and into the fringes of high school. Sometimes they seemed to notice my footsteps behind but I never spoke up. I was never sure where it was they were go
ing, what I was following them toward.

  Some part of me understood though, I know that now. I know that because the first time I reached the end of that path I knew exactly where we were.

  The body has memories that begin before we do, I think.

  My body knew Henry before I did.

  I LOOK FORWARD to cross-country practice every day after school, and not just because of Henry.

  I love running. After a day folded behind desks and dry-erase boards, sack lunches and confusing friendships, running feels like screaming.

  I can feel my whole body open up, the muscles harden and sing with meaning. I love the feeling of sweat sliding down the new curve of my breasts, the hard pavement beneath my feet. I can’t even describe what it feels like to run behind, and not just follow, Henry.

  It is his calves that captivate me first. They are muscled and covered in a coarse bristle of hair. Running behind him, I watch as the muscles tense and resolve, swell and soften. Eventually my eyes travel up to his forearms with their smooth, pale underbellies, his Adam’s apple and unruly brown hair, his limpid brown eyes and wide forehead. I want to mother him. I want to smother him.

  I want to do things to him that I won’t know how to do until I am doing them.

  But we’re not quite there yet. Right now it’s still the very beginning of the thing.

  It all begins innocently enough, but it’s here where Zoe and I begin to divide. Where she is content to cast secret glances at Ethan in art class, I have seen something I want and I cannot shake the idea that I can have it.

  I devise a plan.

  I notice that Henry is always at school by the time I get there. His father has to drop him off early on his way in to work. So I ask my mother to drop me off early as well. On these early mornings I lean my back up against my locker, pull my knees to my chest, and cast furtive glances at Henry. If I time the thing right, there is usually no one around for at least fifteen minutes.

  When you’re in tenth grade, that’s a long time.

  By the second week I’ve worked up the courage to ask him a homework question, and I can tell he has inched a little closer to me—not close enough so that we are sitting together, but close enough so that we can keep our voices soft.

  By the third week we begin to talk about our lives. His parents are divorced. He lives in a two-bedroom condo with his father on the opposite side of town. His mother lives nearby. He has two older brothers, one of whom introduced him to the Velvet Underground and neither of which lives at home anymore.

  I tell him about the quiet triangle of my family, always isosceles, never equilateral. Not that I even understand those terms yet. I won’t take geometry until the next year and even then I won’t begin to comprehend the knife-sharp angles that come with equidistance.

  Before long, Henry and I have created a secret friendship—the fragile kind we pretend doesn’t exist when we pass each other in the hall between classes. At some point, later that fall, close to winter, we move our friendship to the telephone. It is safer there, our whispers encased in the snakelike black cords that wind their way through Sandy Springs, across town, and into a small two-bedroom condo in Smyrna.

  But on the nights that I fall asleep thinking about Henry, I dream about Zoe. The dreams are black and white, her amber eyes the only color.

  ZOE AND I STILL spend every weekend together. We speak every night on the phone and match our footsteps on the path to English class. We hate the same people and turn our scorn, our slitted eyes, toward them at the same moment.

  We hate everyone really. No one can do right. Why do they wear that outfit, drive that car, stop to pick up that person’s book? We sneak my father’s big black Lincoln Town Car out in the middle of the night and coast up and down the darkened streets of Atlanta, knowing that there is more somewhere but not knowing which direction to turn.

  Zoe lives in a crumbling, charming kind of house. It is messy there, the floors warped in some places, both Zoe’s and her mother’s hair tending to frizz in the humidity that traps itself under the eaves. We don’t spend a lot of time there, always preferring the anonymity of my basement, the ease of sneaking out in the middle of the night. Sometimes we walk out to the middle of the road in my quiet neighborhood and just lie down on the still-warm asphalt, the night air cool on our bare skin.

  Sometimes I talk to her about my parents. But as resentful as I feel about the doctors and the hospitals, about my father’s age and my mother’s stupid shark-cartilage capsules, my venting doesn’t seem justified. Is having parents with cancer really that much worse than having parents who are divorced?

  I tell Zoe bits and pieces about my tentative relationship with Henry, but not everything. I can feel her tense when I talk about him, can see her lips begin to close if I go too far. So I keep most of my secrets secret. Although I yearn for a girlfriend with whom I can share these things, I don’t tell her that Henry has admitted that he thinks about me late at night. I don’t tell her that this knowledge, this confession, thrills me, that I can feel myself opening in places I didn’t know were closed.

  Instead Zoe and I talk about ourselves, about the kind of women we think we’ll be, about the places we’ll live and the sound our footsteps will make one day on the hardwood floors of our studio apartments in some big, nameless city.

  We talk about this future as though it is one single existence, not hers or mine, but just this single collective vision of the grown-up us we will become.

  ONE WEEKEND I sacrifice my standing Saturday date with Zoe for one with Henry.

  He and I go to a music store together and wander up and down the aisles, our bodies gently bumping and pushing again back off each other’s.

  At this point he is still unsure of the thing. He wants to be friends, just friends. I want him so much I can’t breathe.

  Some of the most erotic moments I’ll ever experience happen in those early days, in those moments after we’ve swung shut the car door and realized that we are alone together in the silent, heavy air.

  The next weekend he invites me to his house, wants me to meet his father, to see his room. I am nervous as we stand in that small space, his bed the focal point. I gently touch each of his drawings hanging on the walls, take in the soft, plaid comforter pulled boy-neat at the corners, the books stacked on the nightstand, the dresser and the blinds on the window.

  So this is where Henry is alone, I think, and I can feel myself opening.

  We walk out into the woods behind his house. There is a train track running through the kudzu-covered oak trees. Cicadas hum in the warm spring air and we place pennies on the railroad lines and then step over them, going deeper into the woods.

  We find a fallen tree and sit down side by side, our breath practically the only sound. At first we just put our arms around each other, but it isn’t enough. When his mouth finally finds mine, I feel the ache shift for the first time in my life. It is as though there is a warm lake inside me.

  By the time the train roars by we are on the ground, in the leaves and damp soil, Henry above me, my fingers kneading into the warm skin of his back. It will still be another month before I lose my virginity but I can feel him come against me, his face buried in my neck, the sunlight filtering through the trees above me.

  Babes in the woods. We are lost, all right.

  IT’S HERE WHERE Zoe exits stage right. She and I still spend our days together at school, and she still spends the night on the weekends, but all I can think about is Henry.

  At school it becomes difficult, yet thrilling, to pass Henry in the halls or to sit across from him in English class and pretend not to know what the soft curve of his abdomen feels like against my palm.