Courtney sighed and said, “Don’t say that word with Ashley sitting right here.”
“It’s cool. I get what she means,” I said. I’m always saying things are cool when maybe they aren’t. Sometimes I have so much to say that I can’t say anything at all.
* * *
The doorbell rings and it’s the boys. Things were easier before them. The first boy came in sixth grade. Travis Wilson and Courtney walked around school hand in hand and even kissed at the spring formal before they broke up that summer, when she decided he was taking up too much of her time. The second boy came the next fall. Brandon Sanders wasn’t so bright, but he was pretty, and Kimberly liked having him around because she was going through her awkward phase when everybody called her Big Courtney. She needed to feel pretty. To feel wanted. I think that’s why she let him touch her boobs, and down below, too, which he then told the whole school about so that the boys ran around saying “Sniff my fingers” as a joke for a month straight. We became known as the “fast” girls, which meant that the other girls talked shit about us, but also wanted to be us. The third boy came for Heather. Charlie Thomas played in a band in his garage, and Heather would sit around and listen to them practice. Sometimes she would drag us along, too. Her relationship with Charlie ended when she caught him with the lead singer, Keith, and we probably should’ve seen that coming. Soon enough we were under attack, and there were more boys and more boys still. Boys with muscles. Boys with money. Funny boys. Skinny boys. Boys who were men and should’ve known better. Boys who told me how cool I was and asked if they should buy my friends red roses or pink roses or no roses at all. Boys at school dances who brushed up against my fingertips and thighs and told me how pretty I was before running off to dark corners with my blond friends.
Our boys are drunk.
Michael immediately walks over to the boom box and turns off our good vibrations. In the front yard, you can hear the hum of Courtney’s gardener pushing a leaf blower across the lawn.
“This song is shit, you guys,” he says, fumbling with the radio dial.
Michael is Kimberly’s douche boyfriend. He’s got these big, beautiful, sleepy eyes that always look like they’re on the verge of winking at you. But it’s not that you’re in on any joke, it’s that you are the joke. Like, if we were one of those third-grade coat hanger Styrofoam solar-system dioramas, he thinks he’s the sun and Kimberly is the Earth, even though Earth isn’t all that important unless you’re on it. He’s joined by Trevor, because Michael and Trevor are best friends who go everywhere together. Trevor is tall, with floppy hair that he lets fall into his face before he pushes it back. Michael is shorter, with tightly curled hair and muscles like a pit bull. He’s on the wrestling team, but nobody much cares about the wrestlers. Michael is handsome because his face comes together in a way that people think is interesting, which is why people care about him even though his sport is full of boys in leotards bending each other into pretzels and shoving their skindogs in each other’s faces.
Kimberly and Michael have been together since the end of ninth grade, before he shot up in height, so that for a while she was very tall and he was very short, but they were both beautiful, so nobody gave ’em too much shit. Kimberly has already picked out their children’s names—Christy, Linda, and Naomi, after the models. And if they pop out a boy, his name will be Georgi, after the Italian who gave us free cookies. I think Kimberly mostly likes Michael because he’s from New York and doesn’t give a fuck, and she spends her summers there with her father. He wooed her and all the rest of us with those gruff vowels that drag out around corners and stop abruptly against consonants. Later, we found out that his real accent isn’t nearly that thick and that he’d stolen those vowels from the outer boroughs. But by then it didn’t matter; Kimberly was hooked. Heather says it’s classic daddy issues.
We know Michael and Trevor about as well as you can know boys our age, by which I mean we laugh at their jokes and yell ugh when they annoy us and don’t rat them out when they do truly stupid shit, like light branches on fire and set them in the middle of the road just to see how passing cars respond. Honestly, sometimes being friends with boys our age is exhausting. It feels like it’s a lot of listening to a bunch of jibber jabber about everything they like and why what we like is silly. Just because sometimes our music comes wrapped in glitter doesn’t mean it’s empty.
Michael finally decides on Power 106 and “How I Could Just Kill a Man ” blares out of the speakers. He raises his hands in the air and they become weapons, his thumb and index fingers cocked like two guns.
He drunkenly swaggers through the lyrics he doesn’t know. Like I said, Michael grew up partially in New York, so he likes to pretend he’s more street savvy than the rest of us, even though he grew up in Midtown and lives in Brentwood.
Trevor joins in at the chorus. The song sounds like the streets, defiant and raw. Somebody’s streets anyway, definitely not ours.
He and Michael yell a few more verses and then run and cannonball into the water.
Kimberly giggles at her boyfriend, and Courtney yells, “What the fuck?” because now she’s wet again.
A plane flies overhead. Trevor traces its path through the sky with his finger.
“God, I can’t get wait to get out of this shithole,” Trevor says. “Move somewhere with a little fucking culture.”
He just got his acceptance letter from NYU three days ago, and all of a sudden now everything about Los Angeles and California sucks. He also went to India with his parents last summer and now he’s oh so deep and a vegetarian. Kimberly and Michael make out across from me, which is awkward enough, but even more so after what happened last week. Normally I’d be talking, too, but the deeper she thrusts her tongue into his mouth, the more I feel like a dog with a mouthful of peanut butter.
“LA has plenty of culture,” Heather says.
“Yeah? Like what?”
“I mean, maybe if you actually ventured out of the Westside…”
“Dude, just ’cause you’ve gone to a taco stand or two doesn’t mean you know shit, either.”
Trevor and Heather are always fighting, mostly because both can be equally insufferable. They both act like they’re the only ones who watch CNN or read the newspaper and the rest of us know nothing about life just because we can’t quote Sonic Youth deep cuts. Heather says the rest of us are book smart but not life smart, that we’re sheltered from life’s realities. But, like, I’m black. I’m not that sheltered.
“You guys want to go somewhere else?” Michael says. On his left ear are three freckles and a sunburn that gets worse by the minute.
“Venice?”
“Mars.”
“The Beverly Center?”
“God, you guys are so lame sometimes.”
“Shut up and shave your pits.”
“Nobody’s ever home at the house down the street from mine. Some Saudi prince bought it and they’re doing major construction on it. They’re, like, never there. And they’ve got a bitchin’ pool.”
“Why do we need to go to another pool when we’re already at a pool?”