Those Girls (22 page)

W
e didn’t get kicked out of school. We got suspended for a week and banned from all school activities for the rest of the year, which was only a month, but still. No bonfires, no pep rallies, and no annual Harwin-Crawford Six Flags trip. We were sentenced to hours of community service. Literally cleaning up the school, walking around picking up trash, scrubbing windows, and scraping gum from under desks. I actually thought that Cottswald was joking when she doled this out. I could see the fucking glimmer in her eye when she came up with this plan.
Ha
, she was thinking.
I’m gonna make these spoiled little brats work
.

My parents were hysterical. My mom didn’t stop crying for a week. She made me go to church
every day
after school.
Every fucking day.
Said she prayed for my soul, and that Jesus would forgive my sins. Made me say Hail Marys, in front of her, before bed. It was hell. But at least I wasn’t expelled. Cottswald said that we were pillars of the Harwin community and she believed in second chances. The truth was that between V’s family and mine, we paid for half the school’s endowment, and there was no way that they were going to throw that out on
the tiny technicality of us breaking a rule that everyone breaks. She said she respected the fact that we all came forward and accepted responsibility for our actions. But fuck that. I couldn’t believe that Alex sold us out. All of a sudden she was Little Miss Righteous? After months of lying to her best friend? About something as
huge
as the fact that she and Drew had sex? I couldn’t believe it. Why did she hate me so much? What had I done?

We were all on pretty serious lockdown, so it was hard to talk. We had no phones, no computers, no free time. I wanted to talk to her, but I was pissed. Alex had agreed to a plan, and then decided my fate and my future and what I was and was not obligated to accept responsibility for with no warning. She took the power away from me and gave it to Veronica. Veronica held our futures in her hands now. She could blackmail us, extort us at any moment. Didn’t Alex see that? Information is power, and you never give up the power. Maybe she did understand that, though. Maybe that was why she’d kept the Drew secret. Maybe that was why she kept so many secrets, because she was playing the same game I was. And winning, at that.

Our first day back in school after the suspension was tense. We all kept our heads down and went to class. Sat in the back, didn’t make much noise, and avoided one another like we’d just had a one-night stand… or a threesome on New Year’s Eve. At lunch I sat at our table, but neither Alex nor Veronica showed up. Where were they? Were they not eating? Were they eating together? Were they friends now? How had this turned into everyone being mad at me? Of all of us, I was the only one who
hadn’t fucked someone else’s boyfriend. How was I the bad guy here?

At the end of the day, I sat on the hood of Alex’s car and waited for her. I saw her come out of school and slip her sunglasses on. She saw me sitting there and proceeded toward me.

“So, you wanna talk?” she asked.

“I do,” I said.

“I need to get home,” she said. “I’m on a serious leash.”

“We all are,” I said.

“Maybe tomorrow,” she said. “I really can’t deal with you yelling at me right now.”

“Alex, I’m not going to yell at you.”

She fiddled with her car keys and looked at the ground, at her untied green Converse that were still not in uniform.

“I just want to know why you decided you hate me so much. I want to know what I did to you,” I said.

“Jesus Christ, I don’t hate you,” she said.

“You just decide to screw me over with this whole Veronica thing, and also decide not to share the biggest news in your life with me? What the fuck? I’m your best friend.”

She took her sunglasses off, cleaned the lenses with the stretched-out sleeves of her sweater, and put them back on. “Mollie, the fact that you see it that way is the reason I can’t deal with talking to you right now.”

“That I see it what way?!” I started to choke up a little. “Tell me how I’m supposed to see it! I thought we told each other everything. We used to tell each other everything. I thought we always had each other’s backs.” I lost my breath, because maybe
this was really the end of Mollie and Alex. Maybe it had ended a long time ago and, like with Sam, I was holding on to the illusion that as long as I made it look like everything was okay on the outside, everything would eventually, actually be okay. Was this like that? Was it the same thing?

“We do,” she said, staring off onto the lacrosse field. “Well, we did. I had just fallen too deep into your hole of deceit and denial, and I needed to get out. The Veronica shit was wrong. It felt wrong for us to let her get in trouble. I’m sorry I brought you into my moral meltdown,” she said. “But I think some consequences could do us all some good.”

“I wish you’d talked to me about it first. We could have gotten away with it.… We could have had a plan.”

“I guess I just decided I was done with your plans,” she said.

That was a dig. I’d always thought she looked up to me, took her cues from me, but this whole band thing, her keeping the Drew thing from me, it was because she saw through me after all. She knew I was a sham. Alex, the one person I thought would always see me as the Mollie I wanted everyone to see, no longer trusted or revered me. I didn’t know where to go from here. I sniffled and tried to catch her eye.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was apologizing for, but I knew I needed to apologize. “I miss you,” I said.

“I missed you, too,” she said.

“I never went anywhere!”

“Mollie, you have not thought or talked about anything but Sam or how many calories you ate in the last three years.… It’s
always about your boyfriend, your sex life, your parents, your fat ass. Eventually, I just stopped trying to get your attention.…”

I looked down at my nail polish and let what she said sink in. And tried to ignore the fact that she’d just called me fat. Had it been that bad? I searched my stomach for an argument, but I knew I didn’t have one.

“So, that’s what this band thing has been about?” I asked. “It wasn’t about you being mad at me, more about… you just doing something for you?”

She laughed. “Yes, Mollie. As shocking as it is, not everything I do is about you.”

I fought a little bit of a smile. I could feel the genuine warmth returning to the space between us. My shoulders dropped and my knuckles unclenched. Release. Finally.

“So, you boned Drew?” I asked, and knocked her on the shoulder.

She smiled a little, crossed and uncrossed her arms, and said, “It’s really complicated.”

“Isn’t everything?” I wanted to hug her.

“I guess we’ll see.…”

“Does he know everything? About Veronica, the prom, everything?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m going to tell him if he doesn’t.”

The girls squealed from the fields, running and laughing. We’d all been kicked off the tennis team.

“What do you think he’s going to do?”

“I think that he’ll hate me,” she said definitively.

“And you’re okay with that?” I asked.

“I have to be,” she said. “I’ve gotta get home.” She motioned toward her car.

“Okay,” I said. “See you at manual labor camp?”

She smirked, got in her car, and drove off. I stood there, watching the girls play lacrosse, running around, ponytails bouncing, a distinct odor of shit from the grass fertilizer wafting over the parking lot. I thought about what Alex said, about the toxicity of secrets and lies and self-absorption. For the last three years, my life had been entirely dedicated to creating the illusion that I was somebody I clearly was just not. And after all that, clearly, it hadn’t even worked.

I was still angry—angry at Sam, at Veronica, even at Alex a little now. But I was angry at myself, too, which I guess I hadn’t admitted yet. I’d let my anger at myself, my frustration with Sam and Alex, my jealousy of Veronica, and my fear of exposure completely misdirect my emotions, and I got myself here. Everything I did explicitly to prevent all this from happening explicitly led to all this exactly happening. Fuck. It was all my fault.

V
eronica! It’s been ages!”

“I know, Mrs. Finn. How are you?” I asked.

“Frankly, somewhat disappointed in you girls.”

I bowed my head but smiled a little, enjoying the sentimental feeling I had being at Mollie’s house, talking to her mother, and being made to feel like a child.

“I know, Mrs. Finn,” I said. “Is Mollie home?”

“She’s not supposed to have friends over right now,” she said, when Mollie emerged behind her.

“Mom, she doesn’t have to come in. Can I just talk to her quickly on the porch? Please? It’s about school.”

Mrs. Finn looked at Mollie and rolled her eyes. “Okay, quickly!” she said. “You’re still in trouble!” She scooted Mollie along with a hand on her back. “Veronica, can I get you something to drink, sweetheart?”

I smiled. “No, thank you,” I said. “I promise, this will only take a minute.”

Mollie nudged me outside, and the two of us sat on the steps to her front porch. We sat side by side and looked out onto her yard where our whole childhood, sleepovers in tents, snowmen,
Slip ’N Slides, played out like a movie in front of us. Her porch wrapped around her house, and as kids we’d run around it like banshees and swing on her porch swing, paint Easter eggs, and watch thunderstorms. Mollie’s house was the best.

“I’m glad you came over,” she said. I just looked down at her little legs knocking into each other. She was so small; I wanted to take her under my arm and hold her on my lap like a little baby. She was so mean, and her presence and domain so large—it had been a while since I’d sat this close to her and remembered that really, she was a very little person.

“I just want to talk,” I said. “I want to understand. Was it just the Sam thing? Was it always Sam? Because…”

“It wasn’t just the Sam thing,” she said. “The Sam thing just gave me an excuse.”

I was quiet for a minute. “Why do you hate me, Mollie? Because I thought about it a lot, and I think the only reason that I ever even hooked up with Sam in the first place was because I was pretty sure that you hated me anyway.…”

She sighed and twirled a piece of hair around her finger.

“You just made me so mad,” she said. “You’re so pretty. You eat whatever you want. Boys love you. Girls love you. You’re always having a good time. You never worry about anything. Sam always had this thing with you, and it made me crazy. It wasn’t fair. I admit it. It wasn’t even about you; it was about me and my bullshit. Apparently, everything has been—”

“So you roofied me? Your bullshit led you to drug me?”

“I guess so,” she said. “And the Alex thing. The Alex thing pushed me over the edge.”

I scooted over and looked at her. “What Alex thing? What did Alex have to do with it?”

She rolled her eyes and looked at me like I was a moron. “Come on! Like you didn’t know that it killed her to see you going out with Drew?”

“It was her idea!” I said.

“Veronica… come on. She’s been in love with him forever. How could you have done that to her?”

I leaned back on my elbows and looked out over Mollie’s front yard. It was warm, hot almost. Like summer was really just around the corner, like we’d officially made it back through to the other side.

“I really didn’t know,” I said. And I meant it. Alex had said she wanted us to go out. I would never even have thought about Drew if she hadn’t mentioned it. If Alex had told me to stay away, I would have. Why would she have told me to go out with him? Why didn’t people just
say
what they
meant
?

“Well,” she said. “Now you know.”

I could have stopped there, but as long as Mollie was having such an honest moment, I was going to take advantage of it. We might never be able to talk like this again. I felt like we were sitting in some alternate universe, where we actually spoke real words and told real truths to each other, and that the portal to the next dimension would close any minute and we’d go back to doublespeak, secret code, and roofie-ing each other, so I better ask questions now while her answers might still be in English.

“So, at that party freshman year… Sam really did like me?”

“Oh, get over it!” she said. “Yes, he did. But look at it this way, you lucked out. He could have been your problem all these years.…”

“So, you really did tell people I had chlamydia!”

“You did!”

We both laughed. “It was a yeast infection!”

“Sure,” she said. She put her hair up in a ponytail. “So, what’re you gonna do now?”

“Break up with Drew,” I said. “Start clean.”

She just nodded, and had a satisfied look about her. “I should probably go back inside. My mom’s probably got a stopwatch.”

“So, now what?” I asked. “Are we friends? Were we ever?”

“Sure, we were,” she said. “Now? I don’t know. Would you even want to be friends with a maniac like me?”

“I probably shouldn’t,” I said. “You’re a pretty evil bitch, now that I really think about it.”

“I know,” she said. “But I’m gonna try to work on it. You’re a good person, V. I really am sorry.”

“Okay,” I said, and I got up and stretched out my back. “I appreciate hearing that. And I’m sorry I slept with Sam. Not cool.”

“Yeah, but I’m still really glad you didn’t get raped by Mr. Boardman,” she said as she headed back inside.

“Gee, me too!” I replied. She smiled a small but sincere smile and closed the door.

I WAITED A FEW
days before talking to Drew. I needed to process how I felt, physically feel better, and really think about
what I was going to say to him before I said anything, which was sort of a new thing for me. Because Drew was a good guy. In all of this, between me, Mollie, and Alex, he was probably the most innocent and oblivious. He meant well, and I needed him to understand that nothing anyone had done in all of this really had anything to do with him at all, which was probably slightly emasculating and offensive.

I drove to his house and asked him to come for a ride with me. We never went for drives. It was his and Alex’s thing, but it felt appropriate. We were pretty silent in the car. I wasn’t sure exactly where I was going to start or how I was going to phrase what I needed to say. I pulled into a park and suggested we sit on a bench.

“Weird,” he said. “I’ve never been to this park.”

“I have,” I said. I had with Jon Glick, freshman year. We shotgunned beers, and I gave him a blow job right on the very bench we were sitting on.

Drew cracked his knuckles and looked forward out onto the meadow, where there were girls sunning on blankets and groups sitting around with beers and guitars.

“So, you fucked Sam,” he said, with a crick of his neck.

“So, you fucked Alex,” I said, with a swivel of mine.

His pool-blue eyes swelled and widened. He hadn’t expected me to say that.

“She told you?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Veronica…” He trailed off. “It was right after my dad…”

“Drew, honestly, you don’t need to explain.”

“I don’t?” He looked out at the girls tanning, then at my legs and feet. I tried to bend around to catch his eye, but I couldn’t.

“We were never really supposed to be together,” I said. “You’re a great guy, but let’s face it… you were never my guy.”

“I really wanted to be,” he said.

“That’s nice to hear,” I said.

“I was so mad at you that night,” he said. “When I found out about Sam, and when I saw you so drunk.”

“Right, well… the drunk thing wasn’t exactly my fault,” I said.

“Whose fault was it?”

“Alex didn’t tell you? They drugged me.” It was funny how that just rolled off my tongue now, like it was already becoming a funny story or wacky shenanigan from our youth. My crazy friends and that time they slipped me a mickey…

“They what?!” His eyes pulsed.

“They found out about the Sam thing and decided to exact revenge by roofie-ing me at the prom and having me pass out and publicly humiliate myself.”

He rubbed his temples. “Are you joking? They drugged you? And then you almost were legitimately assaulted by your teacher?”

I hadn’t really even put it in that exact an equation yet. “Yeah, I guess so. But it’s not like they planned that part, and whether he intended molestation is still up for debate.”

“Do you have any idea how fucked up that is?”

“I suppose I do,” I said. But then it all played out, Sam, the
threesome, the fact that I was dating Drew, Alex and Fernando, it all began to roll out in front of me, and I was beginning to understand how it all worked. “But no more fucked up than anything else that we’ve done to each other this year,” I said. “A tangled web we’ve weaved…” I didn’t really know what that meant, but I’d heard it said and it seemed appropriate.

“I can’t believe Alex would do something like that… intentionally hurt someone like that. Mollie maybe, but not Alex…”

“People do crazy things for love,” I said.

He finally looked up, smiled a little, and put his arm around me. He laid his head on my shoulder, and I felt almost a motherly affection toward him.

“You’ll always be my first,” he said.

“I’m honored,” I replied.

We got up and went back to the car and rode home in complete silence. I dropped him back at his house and kissed him good-bye. He asked if I wanted to come in and hang out, just as friends, watch a movie or play a video game or something, but I said no, because for the first time in my whole life I realized that I just wanted to be alone.