In New York, she thought as she walked south down the darkening cavern of Lafayette, people would “get” what she was trying to do with her music, although she had to admit that she didn’t always “get” it herself all the time. She described her music’s genre as “anti-folk” when she had to call it anything. Her best song, or the one that audiences typically liked best, was a sort of mock ballad about a breakup called “I Want My Tapes Back,” in which she rhymed “I hope you know where they are” with “under the seat of your car.”
Her father had been a professional musician at one point in his life. He had gone on tour with the Allman Brothers and had played on two of their albums; Laura had cherished a record sleeve that had his name in tiny print in a long list of credits. Then he had come back to Ohio, married her mom and had three kids—two boys and Laura—and opened a guitar store. He had died when Laura was ten, in a car accident that would likely have been survivable if he’d worn a seat belt. Her mother had reacted by becoming extremely—and, Laura felt, perversely—religious. Laura had felt like the whole thing was proof that there was no God. But that wasn’t how the rest of her family saw things.
She loved her mom and her two older brothers, but she often felt like she didn’t quite speak the same language that they did. Words didn’t quite mean, to Laura, what they meant to her mom. Most of Laura’s choices—her haircuts, her plans, her friends—were “interesting.” The music she liked and the songs she wrote were “funny.” Still, as long as she didn’t ask anyone for money, the worst her family could do was subtly disapprove. She was an adult and no one could actually prevent her from doing anything, and anyway, no one cared enough about what she was doing to try to change her mind. She was a free adult! She stretched her arms to the heavens as she walked down First Avenue, turning onto her street—her street!—then swung them back to her sides, suddenly self-conscious.
* * *
The key that Callie had given her didn’t quite fit the lock and required delicate pressure and just the right angle. She thought of knocking but didn’t want to disturb Callie if she was home. When she finally got the door open, though, Callie was sitting at their small kitchen table, so absorbed in her complicated beauty routine that she hadn’t even heard the jangling in the hallway. She had her makeup all over the table and a cigarette burning in an ashtray, a tumbler full of Diet Dr Pepper and vodka next to it. It seemed incredibly bohemian to Laura that Callie smoked inside their apartment. Disgusting, but also bohemian.
Callie looked up at her, taking all of her in for a brief moment. “We’re going out,” she announced. “You should wear my green dress; don’t wear your Ohio clothes.”
Laura went into Callie’s bedroom, where she extricated the dress (which wasn’t exactly clean, but smelled mostly pleasantly of Callie’s perfume) from the deep pile on the floor. She’d become aware within minutes of her arrival in New York of her entire wardrobe’s humiliating inadequacies. Most crucially, she had the wrong kind of jeans: flared denim with no stretch, so that there was an empty crease underneath her small butt, underscoring its smallness. Callie had jeans that looked like they’d been custom-fitted to her body and that ended just millimeters from her pubic bone. She worked in a boutique and also took photographs and did makeup, and her own makeup, as always, was perfect. Like Laura, she wanted to perform, but it wasn’t clear yet what her talent was exactly. Callie could get up on a stage and everyone would pay attention, but she hadn’t figured out what to do to keep that attention going. For as long as Laura had known her, Callie had always taken up to an hour to get ready to go out. When she was done with her makeup she would look like she wasn’t wearing much at all; she would just look like the most dewy, ideal version of herself possible.
When Laura came out of the bedroom, Callie gave her an approving once-over. “Perfect. Okay, so we’re going to see this band, and then we’re going out with the band afterward,” she said.
“Anyone I’ve heard of?”
“Maybe? They’re kind of becoming a thing. They’re called the Clips—I know, so stupid, but all band names sound stupid.”
“So true,” said Laura. “Like, Pearl Jam. Can you imagine the moment of thinking that was a good name?”
“Nirvana,” said Callie, rolling her eyes.
“Nirvana is actually a good name, though.”
“Forget everything you know about Nirvana for a second and then just think about the name. Aren’t you expecting something with panpipes that plays in the background at a spa?”
Laura thought about it and decided that Callie, as usual, was right. Laura had gotten in the habit of trusting Callie to point them both in the right direction. Ever since they’d first met, as high school freshmen, she’d happily submitted to being Callie’s protégée. True, Callie could be condescending; during that first year of their friendship, she’d coached Laura about what was cool and what wasn’t in a way that was sometimes brutal, and often shifted dramatically without warning. One week it was absolutely mandatory that they both wear cutoff jean shorts and peasant blouses, but then the next week Laura showed up to school in a version of the same outfit and Callie found it so unacceptable that she made her change in the bathroom. The next trend was baggy carpenter corduroy pants and Western-wear shirts, and Callie had actually brought spare ones in her backpack to prevent Laura from suffering the humiliation of wearing last week’s style one moment longer than necessary. It was mysterious and somewhat magical, the way Callie understood what would make them cool; she seemed to receive messages about it from the ether.
Back then, Laura had wondered what made Callie choose her; she’d thought maybe it had to do with her musical talent. Now that she was older she recognized that Callie had seen that Laura had the potential to be someone whose prettiness and talent burnished Callie’s own. She had been the one who had decided what kind of teenager Laura would be: the kind who played guitar and smoked cigarettes in the courtyard when she should have been studying. They had both still been near the top of their class, though; their school was easy, and no one tried too hard at anything besides football. Callie was known then as an “artist,” monopolizing the art classroom’s darkroom to enlarge giant black-and-white photographs of her own face.
“Your face is fun to put makeup on,” she had said one night when they were in Callie’s bedroom getting ready to go to a party (upperclassmen, parents out of town). Callie’s own face, already anointed with glitter that smelled like vanilla cake, hovered close to Laura’s as she dabbed something cool onto Laura’s eyelids with a velvety-damp wand. “I can make you look however I want you to look.”
Laura wasn’t an idiot. She understood, even at fifteen, that this would always be a good friendship exactly to the extent that she wanted to be molded. But also, taking responsibility for her own self-presentation felt, mostly, like work she could happily outsource. And Laura wasn’t purely Callie’s sidekick, or at least, like most good sidekicks, she could take over as the heroine if the situation demanded it. Once, junior year, they had been driving around aimlessly in Callie’s rusted-out old car, talking about nothing and singing along to the radio. Then the car had broken down. They weren’t far outside of town, but neither of them recognized their immediate surroundings; it soon became clear that they were really lost, and it was cold out. The joint they’d smoked had not helped. At first it was kind of an adventure. Then as they kept walking, getting colder, talking about how maybe they should flag someone down to help them and deal with the consequences if that person happened to be a serial killer or a molester, it became less of one. It was Laura who spotted the first recognizable landmark. She turned up a side street that led to a gas station and dealt with the details of getting a tow truck and a ride back to her house, where she made Callie a cup of tea and put her to bed in the upper bunk of the bunkbeds in her still-childish bedroom.