Renee dragged Blue off to get beers from the keg, then they wandered toward the pool. In the deep end, partygoers jumped in fully clothed, clutching their beers and pulling unsuspecting people in with them, everyone shrieking and laughing. Blue and Renee plopped down on the scratchy concrete edge of the shallow end, took off their flip-flops. Their bare legs dangled in the fire-blue water, swaying in unintentional sync. Renee’s calves were long and lithe, her toes pointed gracefully like a gymnast’s in midflip. Beside them Blue’s legs looked scabby and thick. Somewhere along the way Renee had transformed from a tomboy like her into a coy, contained beauty and carried a new self-consciousness in how she presented herself, as if she was always aware of her angles. She’d become the exact opposite of her mother, who drank too much and always had stains on her shirts and lipstick on her teeth. Blue suspected that was the point. If Renee was perfect, if she was like a girl in a magazine, no one would leave her, no one would regret that she had been born.
Renee pulled her long, sleek hair into an effortless knot, and Blue wondered if femininity was an inborn trait she’d failed to inherit or something she’d just never been taught or bothered to learn. Just the fact of Renee’s perfectly pedicured toes wiggling in the water seemed so mysterious—it would never occur to Blue to paint her toes! Or her fingernails for that matter. It seemed exhausting, and yet she often envied Renee for being the kind of girl her own mother had wanted, for looking the way the world insisted a girl should look. Life was hard on girls who existed outside that expectation. For years Blue had never faced any kind of reflection—mirror, window, photograph—beside Renee without feeling some dim, peripheral inadequacy. But that night it hadn’t mattered. That night she had Jack in her memory and her best friend beside her, their legs kicking side by side in the water.
“I’m going to miss this,” Blue said, staring ahead.
“Not me,” Renee said. “I’m so ready to skip this town.”
The words stung. Blue understood it wasn’t about her, that Renee was running from her awful home life and toward a new version of herself, but still she wanted to say, “What about me?” She didn’t understand wanting to leave. Here was where they had each other. There was where they would not. She felt ill equipped to be without her friends. How could Renee feel so differently? Beneath the din of the crowd, she could hear the quiet knock of water against the pool drains. A hollow, lonely sound.
“I’ll miss you, obviously,” Renee said. “But we’ll visit each other all the time.”
A sudden pierce of regret. If only Blue had studied harder, she could be joining Renee at Duke, the two of them in matching sweatshirts casting long fall shadows as they walked across a golden-lit quad. Instead she’d spent her high school years rebelling against her parents by screwing around in school. And while everyone else was charting their futures, she had no idea what she wanted to be when she grew up, only what she didn’t want to be—a robot like her mom and dad, going to jobs they hated day after day just so they could take fancy vacations and drive a BMW and belong to a country club they never had time to visit. Blue wanted more than that—she just didn’t know what.
“It’s just not going to be the same,” Blue said, staring into the pool. Emotions were hard for her to talk about and also to have, and she was suddenly congested with them. She took a huge sip of beer.
“You’ll only be twelve hours away by car, twenty-three by train, three and a half by plane. Which means that if you ever...you know...want to be a pain in my ass, or miss my random trivia or whatever, the shortest distance is only two hundred and ten minutes.”
Blue shook her head. “You mapped it out?” That made her feel a little better.
“And priced it.”
“Dork,” Blue said, laughing.
They bumped shoulders and watched the party grow and left the conversation at that. Soon the crowd turned friendlier with drink, and they found themselves pulled into a game of beer pong. Maya reappeared nearby, sitting on Check’s lap and telling a story with her big hand gestures to a small crowd gathered around them. Blue spotted Hannah leaning against Henry’s chest, his arms wrapped around her, her face relaxed and content. Blue waved, they waved back and then she saw Hannah tilt her head to Henry for a kiss, and Blue’s heart torqued with feelings both painful and lovely, remembering Jack, missing Jack, the feelings so big she didn’t know what to do with them. A Ping-Pong ball landed in her beer and she guzzled it down.
The night moved, blurred and swayed. Color and spin and murmuring voices, one occasionally rising over others. The air was charged, dense with humidity, lusty as an oyster. Blue went to the bathroom, lost her friends for a bit, wandered off to smoke pot behind the garage with a few guys she didn’t know. She remembered looking back at the party, at her friends in their respective pockets of fun as she turned the corner and disappeared into the shadows. She remembered the electricity of youth humming inside her, that sense of ripeness, life plucking her from childhood into its mouth, all of them being pulled toward bright futures, tugged back by their love for one another, none of them knowing what horror was waiting for them on the other side of that night.
As she looked back on it now, she was struck by how detached she was from the memory, as if she was recalling someone else’s life. She had walked into that night one person and came out another. Reincarnated into a colder world, a distrusting soul, an exhausted heart. And with a new enemy—Renee.
HANNAH
“I wish you’d just tell us what she did...” Hannah said.
Both she and Maya had always suspected they were missing a piece of the story, that what happened between Blue and Renee that awful life-changing night went deeper, darker than they knew. But Blue would never say, and now Hannah could tell she’d walked too closely to the edge. She could sense the barbed wire around Blue, feel its sharp prick. Blue could be remote, sometimes even harsh, when she was hurt, but Hannah understood that was how she protected herself. She suspected that was the case for most harsh people. Still it was the kind of thing that made her want to return to her apartment, close the door like a coffin, escape from people and their power to take themselves away. Too dangerous, the world.
And yet she missed Renee. She hated to think of her without them, of how lonely she must be. It wasn’t hard to imagine. It was how Hannah had felt her whole life before she met Maya back in elementary school. Hannah had been on the swings by herself after classes had let out. She did this often, lingered behind until it got dark. It was easier to stay than to go home where no one even noticed she was gone. She liked to be outside where her aloneness was both visible and concrete. Sometimes if she swung high enough, the wind would seem to blow right through her chest and dissipate some of the heaviness there. At home, the feeling was concentrated, the air dense with it, the closed door behind which her mother stayed an ongoing rejection: Keep Out. How quiet she had to be as she passed that room where her mother slept and slept, how light and undemanding each footstep, each heartbeat—a soft little shadow without needs.