* * *
—
Not until the next morning did she ask, “So, what were you and Leo doing driving around at one in the morning?”
I was lifting my cereal spoon high, so that I wouldn’t have to bend my neck; I must have looked like a toy soldier. Without turning my head I said, “I was giving him a ride home.”
“Where was Lacie?”
“She didn’t want to go to the party. She had a headache.”
My mom sat down at the table and looked at me a long time. Not like a police inquisitor, but rather in a camera’s searching pan. Wondering where her daughter had gone. I didn’t mind. I was wondering the same thing. According to our usual script I should be psychologizing why Lacie had skipped the cast party, and how that had made Leo feel, and why I had gone, and how I had missed that curve, and why we were so lucky. Between my mother and me there usually existed an abundance of words, but I had scared myself, stepping into this new skin. I was too frightened to speak from it.
* * *
—
At school, reaction was surprisingly mute. A minor car accident that didn’t involve drugs or alcohol or serious injury simply did not interest anyone, though Lacie, who had been mostly ignoring me, came up long enough to say, “I’m glad you’re okay.” As if by agreement, Leo and I ignored each other.
The pain in my neck was exquisite. Any tilt or lean set off shuddering spasms. If I made a sudden turn, I saw stars. I looked fine, though; the pain was private. I kept thinking darkly that the doctor had been wrong, that I had injured my cervical spine in some invisible, permanent way. No one could see the damage I had done. But I knew it was there.
So things might have stayed—simply put, no one seemed that interested in the circumstances of our accident—had The Swarthmorean not run a small item in its police blotter the following Friday:
EMTs responding to a 911 call found an immobilized vehicle on the side of Yale Avenue at approximately 1:12 A.M. early last Sunday morning. The driver did not appear to be intoxicated, and a passenger, treated for minor injuries at Crozer-Chester Medical Center, was soon released.
The following day, my mom came back from the Swarthmore Co-op with a funny expression on her face.
As she slung the milk onto the fridge’s top shelf and tumbled apples into the crisper, she kept darting glances over to the couch, where I sat ramrod-straight, gingerly turning the pages of A Delicate Balance. Finally, folding a canvas bag, she announced, “I saw Janet just now.”
“Yeah? What did she say?”
“Actually, she didn’t talk to me.”
“She didn’t see you?” Lacie’s mom and my mom were not exactly friends, but they were friendly.
Deliberately, my mom stacked the remaining canvas bags in a lumpy tower. She petted them as if they were alive. “Honey. I don’t know how to say this. But if there’s anything you want to tell me, I’m here to listen. It can feel so terrible to hold things inside.”
“Did she ignore you? Like, on purpose?”
She faced me. “I’m not saying that. I’m just saying, if there’s anything you need to tell me. Or maybe there’s something you need to tell Lacie? Is that it? It might make you feel better.”
From the couch I pushed off like a rocket and began to pace. While my mom had cooked for me these past seven days, I had just sat there. While my mom had put away the groceries, I had just sat there. I had let her take care of me, and now her insinuations felt like a second violence.
“It’s really beautiful, how you’ve been friends for so long….”
“Okay. I get it, Mom. Stop.”
She took a deep, shaky breath. “I’m just saying. This is a significant time in your life. So you might want to think about what kind of person you want to be.”
* * *
—
Knocking on that cornflower-blue door with its tatty wicker wreath of soft cotton flowers, I felt all the years of my knocking run through me. This is home, too, I thought, and not even the open dismay on Janet’s face erased the feeling.
“Luce!” she called, her eyes fixed on me.
When Lacie appeared, hair damp with grease, sweatpants food-stained, face smushed from sleeping, her arms were crossed. “What?” she said. “I’ve got nothing to say to you.”
We stared deep. It was weird to think of her becoming a stranger. Yet she already looked strange to me. New creases in her face. A new stain on her incisor. “Okay,” I whispered.
A silence like the silence of a wave before it breaks. If she had invited me in at that moment, I would have wept; I would have sat on her bed and told her everything, and I know, I know, she would have listened, and told me it was all right. I think—I like to think—we could have found each other in that moment.
But instead her gaze hardened. “I heard the party ended early.”
“Yeah, we ended up not even going—”
“But wasn’t the accident at one in the morning? That’s what the paper said.”
I didn’t move.
“Huh?” She wiped away a tear. “What were you guys doing all that time?”
She jerked back into the dark of the house and, real quick and neat, slammed the door. The brass knocker landed a beat behind the door with a dull thud. I stared at the cornflower wreath, gently rocking, then pulled loose a stalk of ersatz straw. All the way home, I mangled it in my pocket.
* * *
—
Our senior year, we didn’t talk. We didn’t sit together at lunch. We had one class together—Social Studies—and we sat on opposite sides of the room.
Every so often I would forget and smile at her in the halls, or wave or say What’s up, and the look that she gave me every time was one of utter confusion. As if she couldn’t figure out who I was; as if she was wondering if I had mistaken her for someone else. Behind her eyes, none of our history.
I could never forgive her for that.
Sometimes I think this was when the trouble started. Sure, I had idolized her before then, but most of us have a friend we admire when we are young: someone just a little bit cooler, a little bit stronger and more daring. Then we grow up, and see through them; they lose their magic when their faults become clear.
But I never got to diminish Lacie. She became instead a glimmer. A dream I could almost remember. I spent senior year looking for her. Listening for her: she was a refrain, the wisp of a pop song, a hook in my head. There she was, walking with Kathy, safety pins up the sleeve of her sweater. There she was, among Grogan and the two Steves. She was wearing more black. She had joined the literary magazine. A photo of hers was hanging in the art wing. Then, one day, with Leo: they had patched things up. All winter I watched them, stewing. Thinking: they have erased me. What we made together is gone, rubbed out like chalk.