The thing about the ’90s, which had seemed like a drag but in retrospect was quite nice, was depression. Everyone had depression, and the people who didn’t, did; they just hadn’t realized it yet. We were all very worked up about drugs, and whether depression was normal or something to be fixed, and there were a lot of very earnest surveys going around about whether you couldn’t get out of bed some mornings and how often you thought about death and whether you ate too much or not enough or not for the right reasons, or if you slept too much or not enough or not for the right reasons: any of these, we had been told, could be symptoms of depression. It was kind of great.
Not that I’m, like, into a crippling illness. But weren’t things better when we were a nation of melancholics? In our plaid, with our disheveled hair? Now all we’ve got is anxiety. We’re all sped up. Now it’s racing hearts, racing minds, ragged breath, nervous sweat. Nobody’s depressed anymore. Everybody’s anxious. I find it boring.
To be honest, I was never that great at depression, though I did try. By tenth grade, I had stopped showering regularly or wearing deodorant, the better to advertise my bohemian melancholy. I shopped exclusively at Goodwill, and swam in corduroy pants many sizes too large, belted with gray shoelaces. I wore training bras, little cotton things made for eleven-year-olds, and huge shapeless sweaters. I smelled of BO and mothballs.
There was a phrase, and I don’t know where it came from, that Lacie and I loved: I roll out of bed looking this hot. We’d sex-growl it, tossing our hair, joking but serious, aspiring to effortless beauty, a sort of sleepy hotness. To me, now, no better phrase epitomizes the ’90s, and what it meant back then to be a teenage girl.
But while I shuffled along in shit-colored clothing, my hair a ratty disaster, Lacie found little calico tunics and sweatshirts with wide necks that left her pale clavicles exposed. We were both grunge, but I looked like a golem and she looked like the Little Match Girl, all pale skin, dark locks, and mysterious eyes.
The day she dreadlocked my hair, we had waited in front of the high school after the final bell. “What are these plants anyway?” Lacie kicked the cement planter with her Docs. “I look at them every day.”
“Hostas. My mom made me help her plant some last summer.”
“They’re everywhere. They’re, like, the symbol of the suburbs.”
Other kids streamed around us, their black violin cases swinging, their sports jerseys silver and slick. A crew of boys from our grade, all scraggy shoulders and loose hair, ambled by, shoving and smoking. Lacie looked, and I looked, too, but Leo was not among them.
Another kick to the planter. “We could just go?” I suggested.
“He said today.” Kick. The rubber made a satisfying thunk. She ticked her eyes up to the flag, limply clutching its chrome. “Fucking flag.”
“One day Mr. Pawling forgot to put it up.”
“Hah.”
Then Leo was blocking the sky, backpack swaying from one shoulder; then Leo was leaning over and giving my best friend a kiss. I studied the new scuff marks on my shoe. We turned to go.
I still didn’t know the exact moment it had happened. One moment he was watching her slap her legs in the firelight; the next, they were together all the time. Completely, inviolably. I gathered that as the fire was winding down, there had been a walk by the creek, a confession of feeling, some making out, but whenever I brought it up Lacie always got smiley and vague. She did ask me if I minded, though; I’ll give her that. I had pretended confusion, then outrage, exclaiming “Seventh grade was a million years ago! And I didn’t even like him like him!”
Now, down Glovings, Lacie and Leo walked in the dead middle, defiant. They were talking, Leo’s voice a soft rumble from barely parted lips, Lacie’s head tilted as she gave quiet, serious nods.
Behind us, a car.
“I mean, fuck that shit,” Leo said.
The car grew louder as it slowed, drawing close. The engine thrummed inside me, agitating me; I braced for the horn. Nodding vigorously, I drifted sideways, not as if I was responding to the car, but as if the left side of the road abruptly intrigued me. Leo kept talking.
A red blast of sound.
I jumped. Lacie jolted. We leapt to the curb. And Leo, Leo of the lazy saunter, broke none of the rhythm of his stroll as idly he made his way to the grass.
In a fresh roar the minivan surged past us. A woman, all mouth, hurled out the single epithet, “Move!”
Leo ran after her and feinted as if throwing a rock. “Fucking bitch!”
“Don’t use that word!” Lacie was giggling. My heart was still a furious flutter.
“What?” He swung his arm around her. “Fucking? You don’t like that word?”
“No,” she said, her grin wider, turning into the crook of his arm. “Not that one.”
He mouthed something in her ear, and she laughed, scrunching more deeply into him. Casually I kicked a pebble. Shoved my hands in my pocket. Whistled a tune, though I couldn’t whistle: what came from my mouth was air.
* * *
—
Finally Leo peeled off toward his house, and we made the right and then the left to University Place. In Lacie’s kitchen we microwaved dinner plates of Ritz crackers topped with American cheese before heading to her room.
Tacked to Lacie’s corkboard were new cutouts, which I studied like a map. A hazy black-and-white photograph of a café in Paris; an elaborate doodle of jointed broken branches; a blueprint. Pages from the Delia*s clothing catalog, laughing girls in chartreuse and violet pants with baby T’s snug around their cheery round breasts.
“Do you think we could do it today?”
“Sure, if you want.”
She perched on the bed, and I sat on the floor in the crook of her thighs. With a comb she divided my hair into sections. The line of the comb’s teeth against my scalp was cool and calming, as were her fingers, humming lightly through my hair, setting my scalp tingling. “Am I hurting you?” she murmured when she tugged the first braid tight. “Do it as hard as you can,” I told her, and closed my eyes.
The Saturday before, we had gone in Grogan’s car to a Phish show in Camden, and I was still buzzing with all I had seen, the long, lanky girls with ribbons in their hair, the scruffy boys bare-chested in corduroy shorts, the nitrous and burritos and buds for sale. Some of the girls had dreads, clumps as fat as sausages framing their faces, and I had seized on this hairstyle; it seemed the perfect way of announcing my allegiance to all things alternative while I worked on my wardrobe.
“Just don’t wash your hair for a month,” Lacie coached, giving me a gentle pat on the back. “And keep twisting the braids and running your fingers over them.”