She linked her pinky in mine and shook.
“Got any Oreos?” I asked.
Corvis smiled.
* * *
—
We walked through the dark streets, plastic shopping bags of Double Stuf Oreos in our arms.
Scottie’s truck was parked by The Mooring, where everyone would see it in the morning.
Corvis wasn’t crying anymore. Her face was still blotchy, but she was suppressing laughter. In her pajamas, with her messy hair, she looked young.
“Okay,” I said, pointing to Scottie’s truck. “Spotted.”
Corvis shot me a look.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Ready.”
We dug into the Oreos, ripping the packages open with our teeth like dogs. One by one, we pulled the cookies apart and stuck them, frosting side down, to his windshield. The whole time, we laughed, and everything felt electric, and it felt like we were outlaws.
“Save the other halves,” Corvis said.
We kept going until the glass surfaces on his truck were completely covered. It was balmy outside, and the cookies stuck easily.
By the end, we had a whole shopping bag full of other halves.
“These are going to be such a pain in the ass to get off,” Corvis said.
“Scottie’s so dumb he’ll probably turn on the windshield wipers and break them,” I said.
We sat on the ground, surveying the damage. It looked great. And once the sun came up, which would be pretty soon, the frosting would stick even better.
We lit cigarettes, looked out over the water, and ate the other halves of the cookies between drags. It was a good combination, even though without the frosting it was more noticeable that Oreos taste like cardboard.
“Corvis?” I asked. “What were you writing in that letter?”
Corvis sighed and ate another other half.
“Nothing. I don’t know,” she said.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone.”
“I guess I was trying to explain to Kristen why I broke up with her, but I’ve already said it all to her face, and it didn’t get me anywhere. I thought if I wrote a letter, she’d have to hear me out. She couldn’t interrupt me.”
“You can’t make people listen,” I said, surprising myself. Talking to Susan, especially this year, had begun feeling like I was talking to a brick wall—no matter what I said, she heard what she wanted to hear. “It’s not your fault.”
“I know it’s not my fault.” Corvis looked close to tears again, but she swallowed and regained the expression of determination. This was something I’d seen Heather do many times, and it occurred to me that Corvis and Heather had a lot in common, that they actually would have been friends if they’d been allowed. If they would have allowed themselves.
“So,” Corvis said in a small voice, “it’s not my fault?”
I reached for her hand and squeezed it. She squeezed back.
Corvis McClellan was my best friend.
“It’s not your fault,” I said again. “You’re one of the good ones.”
* * *
—
Veronica Michaels called later that morning, with even more suggestions about how my life should go.
If the photo shoot went well, Johnny Moon and his publicist wanted me to play the hot girl who dies first in a horror movie called At Dawn They Bite. If that went well, they wanted me to play the hot but spoiled older sister in a TV series called Homecoming, about a family where the mom, who was married to this fancy criminal defense lawyer in San Francisco, gets a divorce and moves back to her hometown in Wyoming. They would shoot the pilot in Vancouver, starting in August.
He also gave me his cell phone number. He had a cell phone.
I thought of what Brad said, about everything already being decided for us. As it turned out, he was partially right in my case, though the outcome wasn’t what I’d dreamed of. I was both the center of attention and an object, something to be fixed up and moved around. Like a cake topper you throw away after the wedding. Like a token.
Now that I had a new father, I also had a new name: Taylor Garland Moon.
“We just can’t wait to see the splash you make,” Veronica continued. “You can come out here this summer, and we’ll get everything started. Once the Vanity Fair issue hits the stands, people will know your face.”
So before even meeting me, Johnny Moon had already decided I could go to California and be with him. I’d wanted to win him over with my personality, but once again, my face was the important thing.
“Stop,” I said to Veronica, shooing Sandra out of the kitchen with my hand. “I’m not doing this.”
“What do you mean, you’re not doing this?” Veronica asked, her voice changing. She always sounded both cheerful and mechanical, but for once she sounded kind of human.
“This isn’t what I signed up for,” I said.
My insides were exploding—I couldn’t believe I was turning this down, especially since I had no idea how else to leave Hopuonk. Still, I just couldn’t do it.
“This is what it feels like, all the time,” I said. “Everyone watching me, everyone expecting something, but at least here it’s just one town. I’m not about to let the whole world see me that way. Plus, I haven’t even met him yet. I haven’t even talked to him. Why hasn’t he called me?”
“I don’t understand.” Veronica’s voice sounded panicked now. She didn’t answer my last question. Instead, she said, “This is every girl’s dream.”
“I want to meet him,” I said. “Just not like this.”
“I don’t understand,” she repeated.
“I’ll keep the name,” I said, “but cancel the photo shoot, and everything else.”
After I hung up, I dodged Sandra in the hallway and shut myself inside my bedroom. I knew Sandra would be disappointed that I wasn’t going to be on the cover of a magazine, and I didn’t know what else I would do with my life, but I took the plane ticket out of my purse and ripped it into shreds over my trash can.
Wherever I was going, I needed to do it on my own.
The Pinecone
While I sat there in my folding chair at graduation, I thought about Sandra, and what she must have felt in one of these same chairs, back in 1979. It was May 30th, 2000, a date that had been unimaginable to me not long ago.