One Saturday, Lacie said we should go pick out material for costumes. I assumed she meant a trip to Joanne’s, up Baltimore Pike, but when I offered to drive she looked at me curiously and said, “I was thinking we could go into the city.”
On the train out we sat with our feet up, Lacie with her hair in a messy bun held together by a mechanical pencil (alone in my room, I had tried to copy this style, but I could never get the bun to stay). She wore blue jeans, not her usual flowy skirt or dress, as if to say Today is for work.
“What did you guys do last night?” I knew she had been with Leo.
“Nothing.” Lacie leaned her head against the glass. Behind her profile, the soccer fields strobed past.
Nothing. What did that even mean? Did “nothing” include sex? Was it code for sex? The usual spin cycle began in me: longing to know more, fear of knowing more, annoyance that Lacie wouldn’t spill. Agitation that I could be so close and yet so far away.
Yes, she had told me they had done it, but in a handwritten note passed between third and fourth period, and that wasn’t the same as telling. She had marked off boundaries just as our stage was marked off by masking tape. I wanted to rip it up; I wanted to run ourselves together. I wanted to know all the things she knew.
Normally I never would have asked, but in the warmth and isolation of the train, with bright cheap billboards and loopy graffiti blinking past, I found myself saying, my voice furred with shyness, “This is weird, but what’s he like?”
“What do you mean, what’s he like?” She looked at me, amused. Then she laughed. “Wait, Rose, do you mean sex?”
Not exactly. I wanted to know if he liked to snuggle, if he ever pulled away, if they fought, if they had pet names, if they talked on the phone a lot, if she had discovered his emotional issues. Yes, his emotional issues: I was dying to know.
But sex would work. Blushing, I waited. Sometimes, in moments like these, I could almost feel the gears in Lacie winding up.
Slowly, stabbing the seat back with her forefinger, she said, “He always falls asleep right afterward. And I get so lonely I feel like I’m going to scream.”
“Yeah?” I quivered with the weight of what she had confided. “That sucks. He shouldn’t do that.”
“It’s okay.” Her eyes closed. She seemed so faraway to me in that moment, faraway and yet in need of my protection. I wanted to spread my arms over her like giant wings, I wanted to protect her from all the boys, from Leo, but instead, I stared out the window, buzzing with her, watching the athletic fields of Drexel fly past, and then the winking blue of downtown.
We got off at Market East and Lacie led me past noodle shops to a street that looked perfectly ordinary, gray and commercial, until I noticed that every single store window was cluttered with mannequins dressed in awkward, unmistakably homemade dresses of yellow or purple or green.
“My mom always starts here.” We went into a low, crowded shop with fabric stacked three deep. A squat older woman materialized from the back, crooning Yiddish and pressing Lacie to the double rolls of her breasts and belly.
At great length Lacie explained our mission. I blushed when she introduced me as the playwright, though the storekeeper only nodded tolerantly before continuing to pepper Lacie with questions. Like a frugal housewife at the fishmonger, Lacie expertly picked among the cloth, often lingering over two samples that looked identical before, with a sigh or shake of her head, moving on. After she had worked her way around the perimeter, she took the old woman’s hands in her own—and I had never seen Lacie make such an adult, confident gesture—and promised solemnly to return soon.
For the next three hours we looked. Up and down that tiny street, in and out of airless shops that smelled of detergent and mold and rattled with giant fans. One by one a series of bent Jewish men and women listened to Lacie describe my play. I blushed when she called it fierce, and studied my feet when she said it was a blend of modern and ancient. I was flattered; I hadn’t realized she had spent so much time thinking about the world I had made.
Then together Lacie and the shopkeeper would cluck and sigh over silk or muslin or lace, fingering bright prints, pacing the crowded, narrow aisles, sometimes holding a length up to my chest and sighing thoughtfully before issuing judgment: not quite.
I began to tire. It was just the same thing over and over. “Whatever,” I started saying when she asked my opinion. “It looks good,” and consternation came over her face. But I was hungry. It was past two, and we hadn’t had lunch. Her fingers over the bolts of fabric were invasive, her careful consideration overly mannered, but I tried to bite back my impatience. I had never seen Lacie happy in this particular way before: utterly intent, critical, definite in her opinions and unafraid to share them. And—I had to keep reminding myself of this—she was doing this for me.
Finally she said, “Yes. This is it.”
I stared silently. Surely she was joking. “Pink?” I croaked.
“Yes.” She nodded happily, and the proprietor beamed. “And black silk for Adam.” At my look of disbelief she laughed. “Just wait for it,” she said. “You’ll see.”
For two weeks she didn’t show me a scrap. She wouldn’t even show me the pattern she had chosen; she had made a separate trip back to the city for that. About her, in class, there was a happy, distracted air.
Other things were changing too. When I passed Leo in the hall now he would give me a wordless high five. For an hour afterward I would glow with the force of the smack. In rehearsals he sometimes stood with his arms crossed, nodding, as I talked. Once, with Grogan and a few other guys, I heard him call me “so fucking smart,” and though it wasn’t clear he meant me to overhear, he seemed pleased when he caught me smiling. Before, his attention had slid over me, frictionless, but now it snagged.
Sometimes, too, when I stepped into Lacie’s place to show her how to say her lines, his hand would linger on my arm. Longer than necessary, his hand would stay, holding me.
* * *
—
We choreographed the killing. We staged it. It was important to get it right; even Leo said so. I think he sensed that his reputation might survive getting onstage if this moment wasn’t botched. But if everyone laughed—and I thought it nearly inevitable that they would—his murder would become a joke, and there would be a lifetime of people coming up to Leo in the hall, mocking his bug-eyed disbelief, his stagger backward, his slow crumple to the ground. He didn’t want that. I didn’t want that. So we practiced it again and again.
The key was the length of the stab. She had to gut him. She had to drive the retractable knife up to the hilt, and it was essential, absolutely essential, that they lock eyes; it was essential, absolutely essential, that neither of them make a sound. If they groaned theatrically, either of them, we were sunk; if they cried out, we were done. It must be quiet.