“When did you decide you’re not having kids? I’m so lost—”
“Dad, seriously. Be cool when Blythe comes over. She’s upset about her mom. And I don’t want her freaking out. This is a new friend.”
All of a sudden my bed is white and sparkly. And I’m so proud of myself. I throw all my shoes and clothes into my hamper—shove it in the closet. Everything. Boxes. Books. Everything goes in the closet. I stack two bowls with pretzel crumbs and three empty water glasses together and hand them to my father, pressing them against his chest.
“Please take these down for me.”
“What’s wrong with her mother?”
“Bipolar.”
“Oh.”
His face looks worried. I see the crease between his eyebrows.
“Everyone has problems, Dad.”
The doorbell rings. It’s Blythe.
“Dad?”
He looks around my room. “It looks great. Don’t worry. I’ll be cool.”
I stand at the middle of the steps watching my dad let Blythe in. I think even he’s surprised how together and pretty she is. Her hair tonight is all swung to the side, wavy. Shiny. She’s wearing a strategically washed-out sweatshirt and tight black jeans with holes in the knees. She gives my father the whole it’s so nice to meet you shtick. I wave my hands toward her, grab her hand, and lead her up the stairs.
“Aww, your room is cute,” Blythe says.
“Can you stop calling everything I do cute?”
“You are cute, Ali. Can I have a tour? Show me everything. I want to see everything.”
I look at her strangely, because I don’t know exactly what that means, but I laugh and show her all of the main points of my life. The third place ribbon I won the year I was on the swim team. The old dollhouse I had with the super put-together nuclear family.
“What do you keep under there?” She’s staring at the black boxes under my bed. They’re filled with my stupid pictures of Sean Nessel. I never finished ripping up all the scrapbook pictures.
“Nothing is under the bed.”
“There’s always something under the bed. No one has nothing under their bed. And you have black boxes.”
Blythe bends down on the floor and eyes the boxes. She looks up at me with puppy dog eyes and smiles sideways. “Ali. There are secrets packed away in these boxes, aren’t there?”
“Honestly, it’s nothing.”
“Oh my God, I have to see now.”
She pulls at one of the boxes, laughing. She thinks it’s something embarrassing from my childhood, and because Blythe Jensen isn’t used to hearing no from anyone, she won’t take no from me. I’m telling her to stop. She’s not listening.
“You said you had to talk about your mother!” I say now, my voice shaking. I shove her back with my foot and then try to block her with my thigh down to the ground. I’m all contorted in front of her, between her and the black boxes filled with photos of Sean Nessel.
She crawls away, coughing because I guess I got her in the belly.
“Seriously, Ali, what the fuck?”
“What the fuck with you? I told you not to look at those boxes and you—you just can’t stop.”
“I didn’t know it was so serious. I thought you were doing your Ali snarky thing.”
“It’s pictures of Sean Nessel if you really want to know. I was in love with him. Stupid me. So in love with him. I used to clip pictures of him. I used to clip out everything he did.”
Does hiding it matter anymore? It just makes me look crazier than I already am. What am I trying to protect anyway? Myself? I’ve already lost it all. I drag one of the boxes out and dump it in front of her. All the cutout hearts and cutout tiny stars and the black paper and the glitter and the markers and the newspaper clips and the printouts. The feathers and gold ribbon that I used to line the book.
“Here it is. Here it all is. My life before that horrible night. This was everything. Everything that I dreamed of is here right in this box and now it’s just nothing.” I start ripping up collages and pictures. Just tossing them to the side.
I see that I’ve freaked out Blythe now. I’m crying and she’s just sitting there on her knees, not realizing what she got into with me and this black box thing. She’s going to leave. She’ll leave and we’ll never talk again.
But she takes a deep breath instead and stares at me. She’s not laughing anymore.
BLYTHE
I want to tell her everything. I want to tell her how Sean cried to me. That I understand her having a whole box filled with photos with idiotic hearts glued to the edges. I want to admit that I have this weird loyalty toward him that I don’t entirely understand. That my friends don’t entirely understand. My boyfriend’s best friend. That I’ve become his confidant. I recognize the collage books and I know what it feels like to be obsessed with someone. I get it. Some of Ali, in a way, reminds me of Dev. So honest and good. Her face, the way she’s so scrunched up and confused. It reminds me of how Dev gets frustrated about the injustices of the world. It makes me want to tell her things.
She’s crying and I feel bad. It’s a soft cry. Her father is downstairs, and I know she doesn’t want him to hear.
“Have you ever heard of something called the Initiation?”
“A little. I always thought it was a rumor.”
“Not a rumor. It’s a thing that happens when you’re in the ninth grade. And you have to be really hot.”
She laughs, snorting out her tears. “Oh, I guess I wasn’t really hot.”
“Not hot. You have to be . . . you have to be developed. You have to seem older. You have to seem like you’re down for anything.”
Ali sits back, wraps her arms around her knees.
“I was asked to be in the Initiation. You get asked by senior girls. And I stood in a room with a bunch of senior boys. Me and Donnie. We . . . we sat on the floor. Got on our knees. And we . . . you know.”
But Ali is staring at me. She’s not filling in the blanks.
“Know what? What do I know? What did you do?”
“You really never heard this, Ali?”
“I heard that girls get chosen and people hook up.”
“It’s more than that. It’s like we walk into this room. And all the guys are sitting there on chairs. They’re all smiling, but they’re not supposed to. My initiation leader, Amanda Shire, is yelling at them. Like a dominatrix or something. ‘Get that smile off your face. I’m going to smack it off your face, you pervs.’”
And it’s true, everything I’m telling her. I remember thinking to myself when I walked in there, all of us in a straight line, that maybe this won’t be so bad because Amanda Shire has the whole thing under control. Maybe it’s even a joke, I thought. Maybe it won’t happen at all.
“And then she reads out all these rules. She starts saying, ‘No touching. Keep your hands in your lap. No touching heads. No touching hair. No moaning. Keep your mouths shut. We don’t want to hear a word. Not a fucking word.’”
“And you . . . just stayed there?”
“What was I going to do, run? I thought it was an empowerment thing. I thought we were in charge of it. Amanda Shire. Calling me lil sis. Telling me that this would put me in control of my body. There were a lot of girls getting attacked by guys in school. A lot of cover-ups. And so this was her antidote. She said it would put us in charge of the act. Get it out in the open so that we were no longer conquests.
“But I knew that was a lie. That was a lie right when I stepped in front of Kramer, this senior. He smirked. Jittery. His nails bitten down to the edge like some attention deficit hyperactive maniac.
“‘Stop smiling, Kramer,’ Amanda Shire was saying. ‘I’m going to tell her to cut it off.’ This made them all laugh more. They loved it. They loved the challenge of it.
“She was like a drill
sergeant. ‘Get on your knees, girls. Guys, unzip your shorts. Do not pull down your pants. If you pull down your pants, you’re out of here.’ I sat on my knees and looked over at Donnie, who sat on her knees, staring at me like what are we doing here. Her face blank when the guy in front of her pulled it out. Jason something. I can’t even remember his last name. Isn’t it weird how we blank out those details?
“It was the first time I saw a penis in the daytime. Hard and long, like it didn’t belong here. Like they were grotesque animals with masks covering them, skin stretching and veins. All the most vile parts of the human body. I closed my eyes tight.
“‘Girls, you’re going to sit up and put your mouth over it. These perverts aren’t going to come in your mouth. I’m not going to let them. You’re going to do a few sucks, and I promise a few sucks will get these hormonal assholes off. Close your eyes, you fucking perverts. Close your eyes because you’re about to get the best thing you have had in your life. Virgin mouths. Young mouths.’”
Ali just stares at me. “This is crazy, Blythe. You never told anyone this?”
“I know girls came before me and they came after me. And now I’m the one who is supposed to run the Initiation. It was passed down to me by a senior last year. To me. Me. ‘Good luck,’ was all she said. Imagine the hypocrisy of it. Screaming at eighteen-year-old boys, ‘Don’t touch them! Don’t touch them!’ As our mouths are wrapped around their penises. In broad daylight!”
I don’t even know how to process the whole thing. I don’t. I never have.
But now I’ve told this to Ali. This secret that I’ve never talked about with anyone. I’ve only told Dev the surface details. Not everything. I never talked about how when we left, guys were shaking hands and laughing. Pointing at us as if we were cattle. Two of the girls were crying. I never told anyone that. How Amanda Shire screamed at them for crying— This will make you stronger. You’re not weak. Stop acting like weak bitches! You want to get raped? You want them to think they can have you? You just had them. You have the power.
“Donnie and I walked home that night spitting on the ground. Trying to wipe all traces of them. Kramer drove up next to us. Another guy was in the passenger seat. ‘You girls shouldn’t walk home alone. Let me give you a ride home.’ We were so scared they were going to kidnap us or something, I don’t know what we thought. Crazy thoughts. I snatched her hand and ran the opposite way, tearing through someone’s backyard. ‘This was supposed to make us more empowered?’ Donnie kept saying after that night.”
“What was it like the next day?”
“It was like Donnie and I became queen of the freshmen. They catered to everything we did. It was crazy. The attention we got,” I say. “So I went with it—it was so stupid. What was I supposed to do? Tell someone? Cry about it? It would make me seem vulnerable and weak. And if I told someone? Can you imagine the response? ‘No one forced you into it, did they?’ Those boys looked at us the next day and lifted us up because they felt guilty, and that’s why we became queen of the freshmen. I walked around pretending I was happy because that’s what they wanted from me. ‘See? I’m not damaged. I’m not sad.’”
Ali sits down next to me and our arms touch. I lean my head on her shoulder because, in a way, we are exactly the same person.
We’re both holding on to secrets.
And we’ve held our secrets tight, and we have that together. And we’ll hold on to those secrets, maybe forever.
“Sometimes guys make mistakes, Ali. You know this, right? Even in the Initiation. I know there are guys who regretted it. There are guys who wished they didn’t do it.”
She nods. And I think that I’m getting her to understand.
I reach out for her hand. “Sean’s one of those guys,” I say to her. “He’s not perfect, Ali. But he was crying afterward. Crying to me like a scared child. Doesn’t that say something about him? That he had guilt?”
But she doesn’t answer. Not a word.
17
ALI
Three weeks into our friendship, and I understand now that there’s a difference between Blythe and the rest of the world.
She’s the aqua sea. She’s the beach filled with shells. The wind that you wait for. Blythe is all the good things. The calm things. The together things. The harmonized music. Everyone else is the clutter.
Blythe and I walk out of C-wing down to the first floor and cut over to B-wing through the freshman tunnel. “You don’t have to say hi to everyone you see,” Blythe says. The hallway is her runway, and she’s a fucking Chanel model strutting with her books tight to her chest and her blond hair blowing back untamed as if there’s a perpetual fan on her face. “Flash a peace sign. Or just nod.”
We cruise down the first floor of B-wing, and I see Sammi in front of her locker. Her face is in a wild smile, and I almost call out her name, until I think of what Blythe has just said and give her the peace sign instead. It’s kind of this jokey thing; I expect Sammi to flash me a peace sign back.
But Sammi slams her locker. She doesn’t take it as a joke. “I can make signs too,” she says loudly. She gives me the middle finger.
“Lovers’ quarrel,” Blythe says, smiling. She giggles and walks a bit faster.
Sammi storms down the hall, the opposite way. We can’t connect on anything lately, she and I. I almost want to let her go, but the way Blythe looks at me, like I’m a leper for not going after her. What kind of friend am I?
I’m too exhausted by the drama around her, though. I’d have to trail her until she spoke to me, and explain and apologize. I know this sounds awful—it is awful. I don’t want to hurt Sammi. The last thing I’d ever want to do is hurt Sammi. But I’m so deep down in my own rabbit hole that it’s hard to see anything else.
“A true friend won’t take that shit,” Blythe says. “If I ever flashed Donnie a peace sign—forget it. She’d cut my fingers off.”
I tell Blythe I’ll see her later and chase after Sammi. I notice the worst thing—she’s got toilet paper on her shoe. I can’t let her run away with toilet paper on her shoe.
“Sammi!”
“Fuck off.”
“Sammi, you have toilet paper on your shoe.”
She looks down, annoyed, rips the toilet paper off her boot, and clenches her jaw.
“That’s what you’re catching up to me for? To tell me about toilet paper—right after you throw me a peace sign? With Blythe Jensen?”
I look around, tell Sammi to lower her voice.
“Why, is it a secret now? Your friendship with her is, what, something we shouldn’t discuss? Maybe it has a password too? Like a diary where you lock it up and only give one person the key?”
I’m too tired to fight her. I’m vanishing. Really. If she only knew how I was disintegrating.
“I’m sorry. That’s all I can say right now.”
“This isn’t what our friendship is about.”
“I know.”
But this is what happens when you have nothing to say. When everything feels like dust.
“I have to go to class.”
“I know . . . Sammi, I’m so sorry about that stupid peace sign.”
“You need help, Ali,” she says. “I wish you would talk to me.”
I nod my head and let her walk away.
* * *
* * *
Later Sammi texts me.
What is going on with you?
Nothing, I write.
Nothing is the worst answer ever.
I don’t write back.
You can’t just keep pretending that nothing is going on with you.
Why? It’s so much easier that way.
* * *
* * *
The next day, Sammi texts me when I don’t show up for lunch. I’m in Blythe’s car. Donnie and Blythe are sitting in the front seat. I’m in the back. In the Blythe
bubble, eating hummus and pita chips while they howl along to a song by a crooner with a deep voice filled with pain. It’s a song about how if they got hit by a bus or a train, it would be fine, an honor even, if they could just die together.
Sammi texts me through their bellowing.
Where are you?
“Who’s texting you, your mother?” Donnie says.
Blythe smacks Donnie.
“What?” Donnie says, clutching her arm. “What did I say?”
“Her mother lives in New Mexico.”
“Oh, well, how was I supposed to know that?” Donnie looks over at me, puzzled. “Sorry, Ali.”
“It’s fine.”
“Aren’t you going to pick up the damn phone, though? Seriously. You have a stalker. At least change your ring tone.”
Sammi’s text screams out:
ALISTAIR
Why aren’t you answering my texts?
“It’s Sammi.”
“Shit, you need to straighten things out with her, Ali,” Blythe says, her mouth full of chips.
“Isn’t she your best friend?” Donnie says.
“Yeah.” And I text Sammi back.
Sorry. Just seeing this now.
Bullshit
“You can’t blow off your best friend, Ali,” Blythe says.
But they’re back to scream-singing, their faces so close to each other, their hands grabbing each other’s shirts. The way Sammi and I used to be, that close.
“I’m not blowing her off,” I say, but they don’t even hear me. I just don’t want to talk. I don’t want to answer questions. I don’t want her to ask me how I am. What’s the answer: I’m fading away, Sammi. I’m disappearing.
“How many times has she texted you?” Blythe asks.
I look at my phone. Too many times.
“I swear if you ever blew me off like that, B,” Donnie says, and shakes her head. “Snap of the neck.”
“That’s exactly what I said the first time it happened,” Blythe says, giving me a playful smack. “Isn’t that what I said?”
Something Happened to Ali Greenleaf Page 10
