The Myth of You and Me (17 page)

What my father
didn’t know was that I wasn’t only envious of Sonia. I was a snake and a crybaby in other ways as well—I was envious of Will. Because of him, Sonia’s time was no longer automatically mine. I didn’t drop by her house unannounced anymore, because sometimes Will would be there, and, worse, their faces would be flushed, their lips red and swollen. We were often a threesome, but it was hard to endure the ends of those evenings, when they drove off together while I walked to my front door alone. I made some halfhearted efforts to spend time with other girls I knew from school. They were willing to include me, inviting me along when they cruised Main. But they knew why I was with them—that I had, essentially, been dumped—and I felt like a stowaway, squeezed into the backseat of some stranger’s tiny car.

At the beginning of junior year, I started dating a boy named Dustin, because he asked me out and because I hoped if I said yes I’d fall in love with him. He was a Southern Baptist, and our relationship consisted mostly of our fumblings in the dark of my living room or his car, his guilt about these fumblings, and his attempts to bring me to Christ. Still, being with him was preferable to playing chaperone to Sonia and Will. He gave me a Bible with my name printed on it in gold, wanting me to read the Gospels, but the first time I touched it, it fell open to Song of Songs: “For love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame. Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot wash it away.”

“You know what my mother says?” Sonia asked me. It was toward the end of Christmas break, and I was spending the night at her house. “She says we’re too young for love, that in a year Will and I won’t remember each other’s names. She says this isn’t love.” She sighed. “If this isn’t love, what does love feel like?”

I had no idea. I’d had no luck falling in love with Dustin, and I couldn’t give that name to what I felt for Will. I shrugged. “It feels like what it feels like,” I said.

She stared at me for a moment like I’d posed her a riddle, and then she laughed. “I can always count on you for the answer,” she said.

I didn’t particularly want to talk about love. So far this night hadn’t gone the way I’d anticipated. Sonia had been calling it a girls’ night, a night when we wouldn’t even talk to our boyfriends on the phone. We hadn’t spent enough time together lately, she’d said, and I’d agreed, repressing the impulse to be sarcastic in response. I’d imagined we’d draw pictures, watch movies, make up dance routines in celebration of how we used to be, but so far all we’d done was talk about Will. Sonia’s father was out of town, her mother up in her room, and we were sitting on the couch in the living room,
Dirty Dancing
waiting in the VCR, talking about Will.

“I have to tell you what happened last night,” Sonia whispered. “I’ve been dying to tell you.” Her voice trembled with repressed excitement, and I knew what she was going to tell me. I wanted to hear it and didn’t want to in equal measure.

“Where’s your mother?” I whispered back.

“She can’t hear me,” she said. “She’s upstairs.”

“Okay, tell me,” I said, but then I couldn’t let her say it, so I said it first. “You had sex.”

“We had sex!” she said, her voice rising enough on the last word that I shushed her, casting a worried glance toward the stairs. “I have to tell you about it, okay?” Her eyes searched my face. She wore a confused, slightly worried expression, and I realized that I wasn’t behaving like a girl whose best friend had just lost her virginity. I should have been curious, giggly, exclamatory— not reluctant and subdued.

“Yes, yes,” I said. “Tell me.” As I listened, I did my best to think only about Sonia, to convince myself this story had nothing to do with me.

They drove out a country road to a dark and quiet field. It was only a few miles from her house, but to Sonia it felt like they had left the earth, or perhaps more like the earth had disappeared, like they were suspended in space, holding on only to each other. There was discomfort, the strange feel of the condom, but still it was perfect, so perfect that in the morning Sonia couldn’t quite trust her own memory, so she got out of bed and found her shirt in the hamper. There were three little pieces of grass still stuck to it. She picked them off and lay them side by side on her bedside table. Evidence.

“Can you believe I did that without you?” Sonia said.

Taken aback, I laughed. “You had to, didn’t you? It would’ve been sort of kinky otherwise.”

“You know what I mean,” she said. “All these big events in my life, you’ve been there. But for this one, you couldn’t be. It wouldn’t have been real if I hadn’t told you.”

“Oh, Sonia,” I said. I felt myself to be on the verge of something, though I wasn’t sure what—maybe I was about to confess my shameful crush or, finally, bravely, rid myself of it and reaffirm my love for my best friend. But then the phone rang, and her mother called from upstairs to say that it was Will.

Sonia hesitated. She glanced at me as if for my permission to go, but I looked away, wanting her to choose me without my telling her to. “Coming,” she called. Then to me she said, “I’ll be right back.” She patted me on the leg as she went. I heard her running up the stairs.

Only a few minutes later—minutes I’d spent staring at the digital clock on the VCR, determined that if Sonia wasn’t back soon I’d leave without a word—I heard footsteps on the stairs. I turned, awash in gratitude and relief, but it wasn’t Sonia who came into the room. It was Madame Gray.

“All alone?” she asked, as if she knew exactly what I was feeling. “I’ll keep you company.” She sat beside me on the couch and patted me on the leg, exactly as Sonia had. “I remember when my best friend first got a boyfriend,” she said. “It was hard for me. I felt left behind.” She turned toward me, the most sympathetic look I’d ever seen on her face. “That’s just how it is, you know,” she said. “Women always choose men over other women.”

I wanted to protest, but what could I say? Clearly she was right. To my great embarrassment, I felt my eyes well with tears.

“Oh,
chérie,
” she said. She handed me a tissue from a box on the coffee table and watched as I dabbed at my eyes and swallowed hard. She tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “I know,” she said. “I know.” She rubbed a circle between my shoulder blades, and I forgot everything I knew about her and felt only grateful for the comfort. “Tell me something,
chérie,
” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

In the same soothing voice, she asked, “Is she having sex with him?”

I almost said yes. In a flash before I spoke I saw myself repeating the story Sonia had just told me, ridding myself of it by putting it in her mother’s hands. Then I caught myself. “No,” I said. “Of course not.”

“But you hesitated,” she said.

I tried to smile at her. “I was surprised by the question, Madame,” I said.

She took her hand from my back. She said, “If she’s doing it, I’ll catch her, you know.”

“She’s not.” I offered her my most sincere expression, but she continued to look at me with suspicion. “I’d better go see if she’s off the phone.”

That night, lying next to Sonia in her bed, I couldn’t sleep, even after her part of our conversation had turned to disjointed murmurs and she’d dropped off. I was shaken by that moment of hesitation, when I almost told her mother what she wanted to know. I could have lied without missing a beat if some part of me hadn’t wanted to betray Sonia, hadn’t wanted her mother to punish her for having what I could not. How could I want that, no matter what else I felt?

I got up and went to the bathroom, where I stood for a long time, staring at my face in the mirror. I was just about to go back to bed when I heard a whisper outside the door. “I know what you’re up to, you slut,” it said. “Don’t think you’re getting away with it.” I froze, convinced the voice belonged to Sonia, that somehow she knew. I opened the door to face my accuser, and instead of Sonia there was Madame Gray. At the look of surprise on her face, I realized she’d also been expecting Sonia, but she didn’t apologize, didn’t speak at all. She just watched me as I inched around her out of the bathroom. She stared at me as I fled back into Sonia’s room.

I climbed back into bed and lay there, breathing hard, unnerved by the reminder of what I’d almost brought down on Sonia’s head, convinced Madame Gray’s accusation had been meant for me, no matter what she herself had intended. Sonia rolled toward me, the warm weight of her back against my shoulder. “Did you have a nightmare?” she asked, the last word dissolving into a yawn.

“Yes,” I said.

“Poor baby.” She reached down and squeezed my fingers. “It’s all right.” She fell asleep holding my hand.

Much to Dustin’s
delight and surprise, the very next day I agreed to go with him and his youth group to a revival he’d been pestering me about for weeks. There were sermons, and giant video screens showing people witnessing and weeping, and a Christian rock star who wailed over some electric guitars about his love for Jesus while everyone swayed and clapped. There were hymns, and frequent altar calls, in which people made their way down the aisles to the stage and let the minister lay his hands on their heads and whisper something mysterious in their ears. They’d nod, their eyes closed, their faces suffused with joy. Through all this, I could feel Dustin watching me from his seat beside my own. “What did you think of that?” he’d ask, during every break after a sermon or a witnessing or a song. He’d search my face, hoping for a sign the songs and the videos were working.

“It was okay.” I’d shrug, even though my traitorous heart swelled and yearned when three hundred voices sang “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” and Dustin’s face would collapse with disappointment. During the last altar call, I could feel his hope and excitement overwhelming him. He took my hand and squeezed it hard, and though I could feel his eyes trained on my face I wouldn’t look at him. He wanted so badly for me to kneel in front of the stage. He wanted me to cry. I took my hand from his and gripped the armrests like I was on a roller coaster. I didn’t think about Jesus. I thought about Sonia and Will, how I felt and what I’d almost done, everything I had to make up for. It came to me with the force of religious conviction that I had to rescue Sonia from her mother. I had to persuade her to apply to the same East Coast colleges I was considering, as far from Clovis as possible. I had to take her away. That was my responsibility.

I had a strange experience then, as around me people wept and sang and hurried down the aisles, almost tripping in their eagerness to prostrate themselves before the giant video screens. I’d feel nothing like this again until I started doing drugs in college. While I sat still, hanging on to my seat, everyone and everything around me began to speed away, faster and faster, spreading and dissolving into blurred streaks of color. Even Dustin was indistinguishable. There was only me, the lines of my fingers clear and sharp, the armrests cold and hard beneath my hands. I could hear myself breathing. I watched my chest rise and fall. I didn’t think about anything. For a moment I felt, with a dazzling clarity, the incredible joy of being left alone.

14

I
looked up
to find that I was ten blocks past where the camera-store clerk had said the magazine office would be. I turned around, telling myself that seeing Will Barrett changed nothing. I had to concentrate on the task at hand—giving Sonia the package, learning what was inside it, getting back on the road. Purpose and pride, as my father always said.

The office of the magazine was on the top floor of an old house. In the lobby I found an imposing gray desk with nothing behind it except the name of the magazine mounted on the wall. No one seemed to be there. It was four-thirty—perhaps everyone was gone for the day, but then why had the door been unlocked? I stood there a moment in indecision before I heard a woman’s laughter—not Sonia’s. I followed the sound past the desk into a large room with slanting wooden floors, low ceilings, and stained-glass windows divided by gray cubicle partitions. It was an odd mix of quaint and sterile.

No one was in the first set of cubicles. I ventured farther into the room, and there, gathered around a conference table, was a group of people. One of them was a girl, tall and dark-haired. I tightened my grip on the package, but then she turned her head, and no, she was someone else, an Indian girl, about a year or two out of college, with a round face and red highlights in her hair. They all looked at me now. There were five of them: a short, curvy woman in her late thirties—I was sure she had been the one laughing—the Indian girl, a broad-shouldered boy about the same age, and two men who looked remarkably alike, lanky and white, in their late twenties or early thirties, with long, narrow faces and receding brown hair. One of them had a manuscript in his hand. There was that expectant silence that follows interrupted talk.

I found myself speechless under their gaze. I crossed my arms and assumed what Sonia used to call my Egyptian statue look—legs braced, looking down my nose from a great height.

“My, my,” the curvy woman said, and I waited for a comment on my size that didn’t come. She waved me over. She didn’t seem intimidated by me at all. When I reached her side she touched my arm, like she knew me, and then turned her attention back to the man holding the manuscript.

“Where was I?” he asked.