When Gwen started picking me up for school in the morning, my attendance record improved. We’d go back to her house after school and do homework in her room until it was time for my shift, and then she’d drop me off at the Frogurt Palace. Now that I had a ride everywhere, new vistas of time opened up. My floundering GPA slowly began to right itself.
Gwen never talked about missing her friends in New York, where she had attended a famous prep school for girls. “Everyone knew everyone there,” she said when I pressed her for details. “Imagine being in the same classes together since first grade. It was really boring.”
I knew that New York couldn’t possibly be more boring than Wheatsville. But even if the suburbs were not as novel to her as she pretended, Gwen clearly liked having her own personal tour guide to Wheatsville’s low-rent charms. When we weren’t watching movies, we hit the pancake house for bowl-shaped Dutch babies filled with powdered sugar and lemon slices, or the kitschy-quaint gift shops along the Riverwalk for hand-pressed stationery, or the grocery store for a picnic of fruit and fancy chocolates—Gwen always managing, discreetly, to pay. At night we strolled aimlessly around the Riverwalk, kicking pebbles into the oily water, or hopped the wall at the public library to roam the sculpture garden. And all the while, wherever we went, we talked and talked about life, art, boys, the movies we watched together, and the books from my father’s old bookshelf I’d started plowing through in an effort to catch up to Gwen’s vast and seemingly innate knowledge.
Now that I wasn’t high all the time, I’d started waking up earlier, before Mom and Lily got up. The house was so quiet and peaceful that I found myself able to finish my homework every morning before Gwen came to get me. In the shelter of my thoughts, I sometimes pretended I was just doing a little extra studying before heading to my private school on the Upper East Side, where I’d known the girls so long they bored me to tears.
Over the summer, Gwen and I holed up in her basement viewing room and lived together in the films of Godard and Truffaut and Varda, Pasolini and Visconti and Fellini. By fall, a shared fantasy language had begun to infect our reality. After Blow-Up, we mimed a tennis match in Millennium Park; inspired by Daisies, we bought black-and-white dresses from Goodwill and practiced drawing thick rings of eyeliner around our eyes to match its reckless heroines, Marie I and Marie II. Even though I was taller, it went without saying that she was Marie I.
“We even look the same,” she said, snapping a photo of us as the Maries with the retro Polaroid she got for her seventeenth birthday.
We looked nothing alike, but I wasn’t going to be the one to say it.
* * *
“I’m pretty sure the missing Corn Queen from three counties over is buried under this log.”
We were picnicking in the forest preserve late in the afternoon spring of senior year. The seventeen-year cicadas were out, screeching their heads off.
“I do hear those local pageants get very competitive,” Gwen said, kicking her heel on the underside of the trunk. “Do you think the runner-up hired a hitman, or was it an amateur job?”
“It was probably a satanic cult. Those were very big when I was in pageants. These woods were supposed to be swarming with D&D-crazed teens who needed little blond beauty queens to chop up for their rituals.”
Gwen looked around appreciatively, taking in the slant of light through the twisted tree trunks. “To be fair, this is where I’d go.”
I nodded. “There was also a wandering meth lab that roamed from grove to grove in an old ice-cream truck, luring junkies with its haunting jingle.” I took a bite of bread and spoke around it as I chewed. “And, of course, sex traffickers.”
“It’s a wonder your mother let you out of the house.”
I snorted. “There were probably more pervs by the yard in that kiddie pageant culture than in a federal prison.”
Gwen unwrapped her chocolate bar. “I got flashed on the subway when I was nine. It’s a rite of passage in New York. When he caught my eye, he lifted his newspaper and I could see it, like, lying in his lap.” She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “That’s one thing I’m not looking forward to about—” She stopped herself abruptly.
“You were going to say ‘going back.’ ”
Her face flushed an ugly red.
“You got into Columbia.”
She was silent for a second, and when she looked up her face was white. “Mac, I’m a legacy.”
“It’s okay.” It was absurd to feel disappointed. Sure, I’d managed to drag my GPA out of the gutter, and my standardized test scores were the same as Gwen’s. But it wasn’t like my dad had been a professor there. “At least I got a full ride to Urbana College.” I chucked a hard elbow of bread into the trees and grabbed an apple with a fake smile. “Just imagine, Urbana College! A whole thirty minutes away.”
Gwen had been studying her chocolate bar wrapper, but now she looked up. “It’s actually a good school.”
“I didn’t notice you applying.” She looked like she’d been struck. I forced my voice to soften. “Anyway. Congratulations. I’m glad one of us is going somewhere.”
“Thanks.” It was barely audible.
I pictured the Columbia brochure. Velveteen quads nestled in thriving metropolis. Then I took a deep breath and picked up a paring knife to cut the bruises out of my apple. “Can I visit?”
“Whenever you want,” she said eagerly. “You can even stay at my parents’ place—they have plenty of room.”
“They’re moving back, too?”
“Well, with me in New York, there’s no reason—”
“Right.” I dug the blade in. No reason for anyone to stay here a second longer than they had to.
“What I mean is, my dad’s job at the lab finished up last year. They’ve been staying for me. I wanted to finish high school here.”
There was a pause while I took it in. I cut a slice off my apple and tried to think of something to say.
“Anyway, undergrad doesn’t matter,” she went on smoothly. “It’s what you do next that counts. After graduation you can get an apartment with me in New York and become a filmmaker.”
“What will you do?”
“I don’t know, publishing or something.” She shrugged. “Maybe grad school. It’s a long way off.”
Four years. It did seem long. Impossibly long.
Gwen studied my face. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she reached into her backpack and pulled out something in a frame. “This is for you.”
It was the Polaroid of us from last summer, arms around each other in matching dresses, mounted on a piece of handmade paper from the stationery store. She had written a quote along the edges of the photograph in neat, flowing script: The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream.—Virginia Woolf
“I picked the quote because it’s sort of about cameras, if you read it a certain way,” she said nervously. “Is it too weird?”
I stared at the words, as measured and beautiful as ringing bells, too overwhelmed to parse their meaning. I had no objection to buried treasure, but floating smoothly sounded more like Gwen, and therefore, I decided, more like me. “It’s perfect.”