In gym that day we learned the promenade and the do-si-do. Leo slapped a stray basketball her way and called her stupid: “You think it’s summertime?” he cried. A pass and a turn to our corners later, I felt her hand quivering in mine. “You should wear pants,” I told her. “Then he’ll leave you alone.” It was the first time we had spoken, but the drama of her refusal to wear warm clothes, coupled with her odd silence, had captivated me. I felt we had been talking for weeks.
“Why?” she spat back, her little white face flushing red. “This isn’t cold. Boston’s cold.”
At recess she paced the tennis courts alone. That day I joined her. She seemed neither grateful nor surprised. Immediately we fell into somber conversation. It made sense, walking beside her. I was lonely, too, though young enough that I didn’t know it.
At last Ms. Keener decided: we must perform for our parents. A professional caller was hired, and we endured extra rehearsals, the reluctant boys threatened with revoked recess. On the chosen night my mother brushed my hair and talked me into a skirt.
The gym from afar was lit like a birthday cake. Inside, the square of raised wood gleamed. Parents, jackets crumpled on their laps, watched from the bleachers as we circled and swiveled, bowed and curtsied, even the most rebellious of us momentarily thrilled to step into this courtly vision.
In my chest that night there beat a melancholic sense of my own importance. I was Lacie’s only friend in her new home. For weeks we had been drifting together, and now, under the motionless basketball nets, she looked so vulnerable, with her bright paisley shorts and thin calves, that I knew I must protect her. But she must not know that I was protecting her; she must not remember that she was the new girl. I trembled with feeling; the other kids twirled, and the caller called, but all I knew was the trust in her hand, the delicacy required to lead her through the dance.
* * *
—
Into that easy rhythm of my house–your house–my house we fell, tromping between homes with sleeping bags beneath our arms. Her family had two kids, mine had three; her house had one floor, mine had two, but these were just facts, the way the dates of the Civil War were facts, necessary but unremarkable. For me, at least, it was so; looking back, I’m less sure about Lacie. Once she said, “Your house is bigger than mine,” and I said, “You guys get more pizza.”
Her mom waitressed at the Inglenook until it burnt down one gloriously cold winter night. We all heard the sirens and ran, and our parents let us; our parents came too. Yellow flames jumped from the turret, and the firemen, burdened with tanks, forged through pale brown smoke. With a pop the windows burst and glass rained down, shards tinkling as they fell. Lacie and I stood, side by side, not moving, not talking, memorizing. I thought, This is happening to me, and right there is the church where I was a flower girl, and next to the church is Borough Hall, where the mayor gave me a ribbon one Fourth of July.
Afterward, when I walked down that street, I would think of the fire and the ribbon and the day I was the flower girl; I would hear little ghost whispers from my past childish life. Then Lacie would call, or jump the curb with her bike; then Lacie would suggest we make some prank calls, or spy on the neighbor. Though she was silent at school, at home she was reckless. She wanted to do everything.
Pain interested us. We were constantly perfecting our swagger. Once I dared Lacie to let a bee sting her. In a field of clover we watched a honeybee sink in its pointy stinger. Lacie gasped but did not cry. The next day she was not in school. I ran home after the last bell and called her: her arm and then her face had swelled up like a balloon, and she had spent the night in the hospital. “Awesome,” I said; “awesome,” she agreed.
For revenge we captured dozens of bees in glass jars and froze them to death. Then we zapped them back to life in the microwave. Mostly they exploded but one, left forgotten on the countertop, stirred after an hour. Gently, he flapped his cellophane wings.
Excited, we turned to proper science. We classified rocks and collected coins. We investigated whether her dog preferred Cheetos or Cheez-Its and experimented on earthworms. Lacie shrieked, “Keep chopping!” when she saw how they still wriggled.
One afternoon we microwaved CDs, looking for the blue sparks Lacie swore would fly. A thin burnt smell filled the air, and the smoke alarm shrilled. Her mother threw us from the house. “Do you think we could get lost in Swarthmore?” Lacie asked. We rode bikes to Baltimore Pike and the college woods and the condos, to Chester and Media and back behind the community pool, but no luck: everywhere we went, we knew where we were.
Boys, we were obsessed with boys. We wanted to smash them, destroy them, drive them mad; we wanted to bottle them and freeze them like the bees, but we settled for the soccer field. I loved them all: Leo Kupersky, who ran fast and light like a baby deer; Jesse Grogan, with his dirty blond mop; Mike Sibley, one of the Sibley boys, that legendary band of brothers who were all thick-necked, ram-headed, and put on earth to play ball. By sixth grade they were following us home, smacking Lacie and sneaking kisses. I smacked them back with my trombone case. I was nobody to them, just her protector, just an obstacle, just the girl who talked too much in class.
“I hate boys,” I said. “Me too,” Lacie agreed, and when my mom said, “Lacie’s going to break hearts,” I ignored it. I didn’t know we had hearts to break.
The time came for us to write a novel; I told her, gravely, that we must know our characters better than we knew ourselves, and so we sat in her parents’ parked Volkswagen and made lists of all we knew, not writing but preparing to write, filling entire notebooks with our heroine’s likes and dislikes, the names of her aunts and uncles, the ages of her cousins, the grades on her spelling tests. We drew a map of her hometown. We decided that she had a sister, and so we wrote down the name of the sister and what she smelled like and what she sounded like, and we stipulated who got to ride in the front seat when and where the family went on vacation. All afternoon in the hot car we worked, passing the notebook back and forth, saying, “No, no, what if she…” and “I think we should say that…” and “We don’t know enough yet, we’re not ready.” We wrote until we had created a model of the world as complete as the world we were in, but it was so beautiful, this world, all that we had mapped and all that we knew, that we could not bring ourselves to begin. Leaving the lines under “Chapter One” blank, we climbed from the car and rode bikes down to the creek, where there were baby salamanders under the rocks.
As befitting an entity called Ivy Prep, our training was both self-important and useless, presented as exhaustive even as it degenerated into an empty exercise of form. None of us—there were seven new tutors circled around that gray kidney-shaped conference table—wanted to complete the twenty officially released SATs, as instructed by the agenda, and after a few days, when we had only reviewed the first section of the first test, it was clear we didn’t need to, though our instructor, a beefy, middle-aged man who had once written screenplays, continued to make frequent reference to all the officially released tests as listed in Appendix A of your agenda. Appendix A, like all the pages of the agenda, was embossed with the crimson-and-gold insignia of Ivy Prep. That first morning, as the screenwriter talked, I rubbed the stamp until its ersatz gold stuck to my sweaty finger.