by Jo Ann Beard
My mother happened to be passing by when I came out of the bathroom for the tenth time.
“You got a problem?” she asked.
Sometimes when you’re cruel to others, it’s because you’ve gotten yourself into a situation you can’t get out of.
I feel terrible.
“You should,” Felicia says.
Hector jumps down off the rock and disappears. I do a combination of sliding and jumping, but I still kill my ankles. “Ouch, fuck,” I say.
“Good,” she says.
“Now who’s the asshole?”
“Not me,” she says. “I’m the victim.”
“You’re the one who abandoned me in my moment of greatest need!”
“How’s that? Because somebody else wanted to walk with me that night? What about all those cheerleaders you’re such good friends with—they weren’t exactly holding your hand.”
“I wasn’t their sidekick!”
“I never wanted a sidekick!”
“You didn’t?”
“No!”
“So you just abandoned me in my moment of need!”
“Why do you keep saying that? You just don’t want to be friends with me anymore and you’re looking for a way to make it my fault.”
We stare at each other.
“I just feel strange,” I say. “Like everything I was doing I can’t do anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “And it’s sort of going away.”
“You are?”
“No, the feeling is sort of going away.”
“Why are you acting so weird?” she asks, peering at me in the dark.
“I’m trying to tell you—this is how I am now. I’m weird.”
She thinks about that.
“I’m weird too,” she says finally.
We head up the hill, trudging along, me in my cheerleader jacket, her in her coat with the bottomless pockets. Once, we unstitched that coat’s lining, removed over a dollar in change, and stitched it back up. We spent the money on penny candy.
“Remember that candy that looked like a record?”
“Not really,” she says.
“Remember? It was a piece of black licorice wound into a circle with a candy dot in the center?”
“Oh yeah. You liked them, not me. I liked the little pop bottles with one sip inside them.”
“Remember when sip was my favorite word?”
“Yeah.”
“What was yours?”
“When yours was sip, I think mine was crimp. Now it’s eucalyptus.”
“I like the word, I don’t like the smell.”
“I think I like the word because of the smell,” she says. “Where did you get those boots?”
“In a box of clothes my mom brought home.”
“Anything else?”
“No, these were the only thing,” I say. “Some love beads.”
“Your sister should wear those, see if it does anything.”
“It would be like putting garlic on a vampire.”
“Ha. But actually she’s nice,” Felicia says primly.
“So’s yours,” I say primly back.
We climb the last hill, walking slower and slower. Either the bonfire is bigger or the party is; everywhere are flickering people.
“What’s your favorite word right now?” Felicia asks.
“If it’s just a word, then ’tis. But if it can be a phrase, then ’Tis new to thee. From Shakespeare.”
“’Tis new to thee,” she repeats. “If we can have Shakespeare, then mine is Monster, I smell all horse-piss, or whatever that was.”
“Ha. Van Leuven and Ringgold are madly in love with each other.”
“They are?”
“Maybe. Tommy Dalton tried to kiss me.”
“Jed Jergestaad did kiss me, and now he’s walking around with Martha Van Dalle again. It’s so embarrassing.”
“I was sitting with her neighbor Petie.”
“You were?”
“She started crying because she was abandoned,” I tell her. “Which is a terrible feeling.”
“I didn’t abandon you! You’re the one who abandoned me!” She swipes at her nose.
“You’re making your nose all red.”
“I am?”
“Not all red,” I say.
“Good thing it’s dark out here,” she says. “Who was that kid? He was cute.”
“A friend of Galen Pierce’s, from Red Rock. I know.”
“Red Rock lets them out for the weekend?”
“I don’t think he was let out, I think he got out.”
“You mean escaped?”
“No, he just got out. He was done being there.”
“Too bad he isn’t an escapee.”
“I know,” I say. We’re standing on the edge of the party now, throngs of people I don’t recognize. “Where are we?”
“Insanesville,” Felicia answers.
There’s an abrupt scream that morphs into screaming laughter. Only a matter of time now before we’re turned in to the cops or there’s a fight, or both.
“Hi,” someone says to Felicia.
“Hi,” Felicia answers.
“Hi,” the same person says to me.
“Hi,” I answer.
“Who was that?” Felicia asks me.
I don’t know; everybody is starting to blur together. Somebody pushes us and we almost fall over. Straight ahead is the pavilion, and then beyond it the glow of the bonfire, where Hector is, and probably everyone else: Cindy Falk, Maroni, Patterson, Luekenfelter, Gretchen Quist, Dunk. All of them mixed together like a bad salad.
“Where are we going?” I ask Felicia.
“We’re following that kid back to the fire,” she says, but neither of us takes a step.
“Have you had any of that punch?”
“Not yet. Didn’t we all sign a vow in seventh-grade health not to drink or smoke?”
“Are you kidding?” I ask her.
“Maybe,” she says. “But I did sign the vow.”
“So did I, but I said ‘today’ to myself while I was signing it,” I tell her. “That’s what everybody did.”
“They did?”
“Either way, no vow can last longer than that school year.”
“It can’t?”
“Otherwise what happens when you’re thirty and you go to a cocktail party? Is the vow still in effect?”
A girl staggers past us and kneels on the ground, holding her long hair away from her face. She’s staring at the ratty grass, concentrating.
“Are you okay?” Felicia calls.
The girl nods, still staring at the grass, and then she vomits.
It feels weird right at this moment to not be anybody’s sidekick. Hard to explain, but when I look at the moon, it seems like it’s paying attention to me, instead of me paying attention to it. It’s way up there now. Hi, moon, I say silently to it. Yes, I’m high, it says back. The moon has a sense of humor.
“Do you guys have any gum?” the girl who vomited asks us.
“Sorry,” Felicia answers, “these pockets don’t work.”
“I might have one Chiclet somewhere,” I tell her.
“Can I have it?” she asks.
It ends up being in my front pants pocket, and I hand it over. Also in there is the five-dollar bill Galen Pierce gave me. I just realized: five dollars means I’ve got eight altogether.
“I’m going on a field trip to Chicago, for art,” I tell Felicia, who looks aghast.
“What about the curse of the mummy?” she asks.
The thing I couldn’t do I’m getting to do. Me, riding on the bus and staring out the window at downtown Chicago, me seeing buildings that look like ears of corn, me seeing stairways full of clouds and all the other things Ringgold is so excited about that are impossible to picture until you’re there, having your mind blown. I’ll probably wear what I have on right now, but I may put my hair in a French braid that day, just so I don’t have to th
ink about it.
Somehow the party has absorbed us, we’re in the middle of a bunch of strangers, so we move on to the bonfire, which is blazing away with what looks like part of a picnic table in it.
“What happens when the cops come?” I ask Felicia.
She thinks. “The back way through yards, down to Twenty-first, and over the Grassy Knoll. Meet up under the buckeye tree.”
“Going through yards is where we always have our problems.”
“Because you don’t stick with me,” she says.
“It gets too confusing.”
“Not if you just follow.”
I don’t want to follow.
“Which is why I said the buckeye tree.”
“Hi,” says Hector, handing each of us a bottle of beer.
Everybody we’ve ever known is at this bonfire, but none of them is paying any attention to us. Everyone is drinking. The beer I’m holding smells dark and awful but not unfamiliar.
Hector tips his bottle up and drinks it, inch by inch, until it’s gone.
“Try that,” he says.
It’s like the magic baby bottle I used to love so much. I look at Felicia and she looks at me.
Bombs away.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to early readers of this manuscript: Mary Allen, Joe and Lucy Blair, Jill Ciment, and Peter Trachtenberg. Thank you as well to Elizabeth White, for a friendship that has spanned years and continents.
Contents
Front Cover Image
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
Begin Reading
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Jo Ann Beard
Copyright
About the Author
Jo Ann Beard is the author of The Boys of My Youth, a collection of autobiographical essays, and other works of nonfiction that have appeared in the New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and other magazines and anthologies. She has received a Whiting Foundation Award and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
Also by Jo Ann Beard
The Boys of My Youth
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by Jo Ann Beard
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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First eBook Edition: April 2011
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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
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ISBN: 978-0-316-17516-6
