“How did everyone act at school after you kissed Scottie?” Susan asked, her eyes on the snowy road. She didn’t quite smile, but the expression on her face was the closest I’d seen to happiness since her dad died. She hadn’t come back to school yet, and she was avoiding Instant Messenger, so she didn’t know the gossip.
I wasn’t ready to tell her everything.
“Brad’s really pissed-off,” I said, stretching my legs out in front of me, feet on her dashboard.
I was smearing salt from the road and melted snow everywhere, but Susan didn’t mind. None of us took care of our cars. Cars, to us, were just trash receptacles for holding our bodies and whatever waste we brought with us from one place to another. None of us went very far, and we were lazy. If we took the empty water bottles and Emmylou’s cups out of the cars with us, we’d have to find a place to throw them away.
“But what did he say?” she pressed.
“Not a whole lot,” I said.
“He must have said something,” Susan said.
“He told me he loved me after your dad . . . you know,” I said, “and I didn’t answer him.”
Susan reached over and shoved me, her expression both interested and fearful. I knew she was glad I didn’t say it back, that I didn’t love Brad, but knowing for sure that he loved me must have also hurt her.
“How could you not have told me this?” she said, turning up the heat in the car. Her cheeks flushed, bringing out the red in the cable-knit sweater that poked out from her black peacoat. We were both wearing the same outfit, all from Abercrombie, but my sweater was hunter green and my peacoat was gray.
I shoved her back.
“There’s been a lot going on,” I said.
“When I saw you and Brad go upstairs at the party,” she said, “did you guys have sex? Did you finally do it?”
I couldn’t bear to tell her about it, because I was embarrassed about how it felt but also because I knew she didn’t really want to hear the details.
“You never tell me anything,” she whined.
“That’s not true,” I lied.
Susan pulled into the parking lot of Gerald’s Turkey Farm, where they sell Thanksgiving sandwiches year-round, little plastic containers of gravy, and also entire turkeys.
She got out of the car, then leaned in through the open door.
“We’re not done talking about this,” she said.
While I waited for her to come back, I bit my nails down to where you can’t bite them anymore. Then I just sat there, waiting. The fact that her dad had just died, Susan said, would make the store owners more likely to buy ads.
Our yearbook was called The Tide. The name hadn’t changed since long before Sandra went to Hopuonk High. When I thought of the tide, I thought of the awful smell when it was low—like rotten fish, like the inside of a dog’s mouth. Tides have to do with the way the sun and moon line up, which decides how the water moves. We learned it all in primary school, along with everything about the Pilgrims. It honestly scared me—how everything was always moving, how space made decisions for us and for the starfish that washed up and got stuck between rocks in the tide pools, only to be picked up and prodded by children. But I guess it was a good name for the yearbook, really, because we were just like those starfish.
Hopuonk, at one point, had some kind of downtown where you could walk around, browse the shops, enjoy yourself. Scituate, the next town over, had a town center like that. Ours still had the buildings, but they were empty except for a Chinese takeout place; Ocean State Job Lot, which was where you went to get cheap stuff; and a surf shop that hadn’t been repainted since the 1970s.
Instead of a real town center, everything in Hopuonk was organized by which beach you lived near, and which crab shack and ice cream parlor was next to that beach. Each one had its own packie to buy liquor and cigarettes and Hostess cupcakes and Slush Puppies.
If you looked at The Tide, you would see about eight million pictures of me. It made it seem like I’m everywhere, all the time, in the center of everything.
I was flipping through a paper sample of the yearbook that Susan brought with her to show the businesses.
There I was, at the junior semiformal, wearing a turquoise dress that showed my belly button. Sandra made me get it. And there I was, standing in the front row of Key Club—Hopuonk High’s community service club. You know, the people who collect cans of food for poor people during Thanksgiving and Christmas, the people who tutor primary school kids who have trouble with reading and math, the people who tell each other how awesome they are. I only went to two meetings, but I was still in the photo.
And there I was again, in my Emmylou’s apron, standing with Heather.
Heather also appeared a lot. In her cheerleading uniform. In her Abercrombie cutoffs. Standing next to her flashy new Volkswagen Jetta. You mostly saw that she was blond and tall, that her boobs were big, and that she made duck lips constantly.
Then there was Susan, who was pictured less. The yearbook showed her on every court at dances, but always on the edge. There she was, between me and Heather, smiling without showing her teeth. There she was again, in the background of a picture of Brad in his lacrosse uniform, staring at his back.
The rest of the yearbook was predictable. There were a million photos of Brad, captain of everything. Then there was Scottie, the joker, in his Hawaiian shirt and oversized sunglasses. There was PJ onstage, wearing costume makeup, holding a bouquet of flowers padded with baby’s breath.
Corvis was only pictured twice: once at the front of the National Honor Society photo, and one other time with Kristen.
The yearbook tried to capture everything, but of course, it couldn’t. In the back, there were empty pages for us to write stupid messages to each other, which weren’t any of the things we really wanted to say:
Dear Brad, I wish I could love you, but I’m defective. I hope one day you go to Asia and tell me what it’s like, and let me know if it’s real.
Dear PJ, I thought you were my friend. But you’re not.
Dear Heather, why do you have to be such a bitch all the time? Why do I also feel like I want to show you what an orgasm feels like?
Dear Corvis, I wish I were you. Or not you, but like you. You’re the only one who wouldn’t switch places with me if you had the chance, and it makes me feel bad.
Dear Susan, I love you. Not like a friend.
Of course, I knew I would just write, Stay sweet, never change! and hate myself.
The Vampires
When Susan and I were six, we saw a family of vampires at Humming Rock Beach. We were collecting jellyfish and storing them in Sandra’s cooler, and there they were—vampires. It was an entire family, all very pale, wearing black Victorian outfits with collars buttoned up to their chins.