Those Girls (23 page)

M
ore than a week had passed since the prom, and I still hadn’t gathered the nerve to talk to Drew. I did talk to Fernando. I told him that I needed space and that I thought we should just be friends. He didn’t seem too broken up about it. I told him that I still wanted to play in the band, and that I hoped things wouldn’t be weird. He just laughed and asked, Why would they be? And I realized that they wouldn’t, because in the end, neither one of us ever really cared about the other one like that anyway.… Only when real feelings are involved do things get weird. Like how they were with Drew.
Weird
wasn’t even a strong enough word to describe what was going on between the two of us, or even what was going on between me and Mollie or me and Veronica. It was like everything that had lived under the surface and allowed us to be friends had been blasted onto a 3-D HD screen, and now we didn’t know how to relate to one another anymore. Honesty. The ultimate destroyer of comfort. Everything was out on the table now, and I didn’t know if that would ultimately lead to us all being closer or us all never being able to look one another in the eye or trust one another again. All I knew was that the floodgates had been
opened, and everything had to bleed out before we could close them again. I had to talk to Drew, but I was still grounded.

Mr. Boardman was back in school. I couldn’t look him in the eye, either. I just kept seeing that caught expression on his face when we found him in the laundry room. I couldn’t believe he had the balls to continue teaching us, and I wondered if he really thought that any of us bought his story. I wondered if Veronica was the first, or if there were other girls at Harwin or other schools he’d taken advantage of, and I thought about how horrible a man he really was, and who else in our lives that we saw every day, and trusted with things, were capable of such ultimate betrayal and sickness. I was mad at everyone. Disgusted with humanity. I didn’t know how to get back to feeling like a worthwhile human being again, or believing that any human wasn’t a lying, evil sociopath.

So I decided to start with myself. If I could become someone I respected again, maybe there were other people out there like me.

About ten days after the prom, Drew’s Pathfinder was waiting for me in my driveway. My heart jumped into my throat, and the pressure mounted between my eyes. I walked up to his window like I was walking the plank. Drew and I hadn’t gone this long without talking since we were eight years old. It’s like ten days had set us back eight years.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” he replied. “Can you go for a drive?”

“Probably not. Warden will be home any minute.”

“Can you just get in the car?”

I looked up at my house, and it looked like the lights were out. Josh’s car was in the driveway, but he wouldn’t sell me out. “Okay, just for a minute.”

I hopped up into his car and was immersed in that same familiar smell of pot and Polo Sport that had once made my heart flutter and my soul melt. I avoided eye contact and vacillated back and forth about what I was going to say, how this was going to go. He looked incredibly serious, his hands firmly planted on the wheel at ten and two. Ice-blue eyes locked on the horizon.

“So, Veronica and I ended things,” he said, “obviously.”

“Oh,” I said. “I guess I didn’t realize that was that obvious.”

“But she told me what happened that night. Not that it changes what she did with Sam, but she told me what you guys did to her.”

“It was Mollie’s idea.…” I knew that was the wrong thing to say. That that was a statement in the opposite direction of the mature, moral cleansing that I’d planned on embarking upon.

“Please, Alex.” Again, my name sounded so foreign in Drew’s mouth.

I sat in silence with my head down, ready to take my berating like a woman.

“I think I just need a break from all you girls…,” he started.

“What?” I said. “Even me?”

“Especially you,” he said. “I don’t even know you! You drugged your friend? Who are you? Who does that?”

“It was just supposed to be a joke! Drew, I know things got messed up, but—”

He cut me off before I could finish. “Well, it’s not funny. None of this is funny. You guys are all insane, and I really just don’t want to be involved anymore.” His eyes stayed planted on the horizon over the steering wheel. I tried to catch his eye, get him to look at me, fall into the comfort he used to find there, but I couldn’t.

“Drew…” A tear rolled down my cheek, and I felt gut-punched. I slapped my hands on my thighs, then hid my wet, blotchy face in them. The bleeding had begun.

“Things got complicated with us, and I think it’s best for everyone if we all just take a break.…”

I didn’t know what to say. It’s not like I could defend myself or talk him into wanting to be my friend. Or more than that. “Is that what you came here to say?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Okay.” And I opened the door to his car. “I just want you to know…” I knew I should stop myself, but I couldn’t. I was in full purge mode, and I couldn’t leave anything unsaid. “I really do love you. I always have. I still do. And I’m sorry.”

“Me too, Holbrook,” he said, and ran his hands over his head, as he often did. “And I probably always will. But everything is just too fucked up.”

“Okay,” I said. And I turned to grab the door handle.

“Wait,” he said, and he grabbed my arm.

I looked at him, and he at me, for the first time in the course of this conversation. I had that same feeling I did the day of his father’s funeral, of wanting to run away, but forcing my eyes to stay on his, because I knew if I locked them there long enough
they’d settle, calm down, feel at home there, and fall into his the way I’d seen his fall into mine. He put his hand on the back of my neck, pulled my face in, and kissed me, just a soft press of his lips on mine. He pulled away and said, “Bye.”

MOLLIE, VERONICA, AND I
all had to report to Harwin for community service at eight
AM
. It was a Saturday, the day all the girls and Crawford guys were supposed to go to Six Flags. Last year, Veronica had given Austin Markel a hand job on the back of the bus on that trip; it had been the talk of the Harwin halls for weeks.

Our first assignment was to clean up the lower school playground. We each had a bucket, a sponge, and a giant trash bag and were told to get to work. It was a gray day, but warm and a little muggy. Veronica’s hair was frizzing, and Mollie had hers back in a bandanna. Veronica avoided eye contact with both of us, and we all dispersed to separate corners of the playground when Cottswald told us to get scrubbing. I went to the swings, Mollie to the sandbox, and Veronica to the seesaw.

I started scrubbing, making a game for myself of picking off the rust, and wished that we had music and that this wasn’t actually what we had to do, but that we were in some sort of cleanup montage and we were sprucing up the park for the big fund-raiser that we were putting on to raise money to get to the finals in LA for the big sing-off that no one thought we’d win, but that we totally would with some trick number at the last minute. But there was no music. No sing-off. Just birds chirping, cars zipping by, and the awkward silence that festers
between three girls who used to be best friends, but didn’t know how to be anymore.

All of a sudden, I felt something hit me in the back of the knee. I looked behind me, and Mollie was smirking. I looked down to find the headless Barbie doll that had hit my leg. I picked it up and threw it back at her. She put it in her bucket upside down, split the doll’s legs open, and placed the bucket in the middle of the sandbox. She took a Ken doll and bent him over so that his face was planted in headless Barbie’s crotch. I started to laugh.

I picked up a tennis ball and threw it at Veronica by the seesaw. It hit her in the back of the head.

“What the hell?” she said.

Both Mollie and I fell over laughing as she rubbed her head. She threw a soapy sponge at Mollie and missed. Mollie ran to pick it up, and then squeezed it over Veronica’s head.

“You whore!” she yelled, and Mollie laughed and threw the sponge at me.

I grabbed my bucket and tossed the whole thing on Mollie, who was then fully soaked from neck to knees.

“Oh my god!” she said. “I can’t believe you just did that!”

“Don’t mess with me,” I said, and then sat down on the seesaw as she wrung her shirt out.

“You guys, my hair smells like dishwater,” Veronica said.

“An improvement from booze and jizz?” Mollie retorted, and we all lost it.

“Too soon!” Veronica yelled back, and she hopped on the
other end of my seesaw. Instinctively, we began bopping up and down.

“What the fuck, guys,” Mollie said. “I wanna saw!” and she sat in the middle and swayed back and forth as we bopped up and down.

“Girls!” Headmistress Cottswald yelled from over the hill. “What are you doing? No seesawing! Cleaning!”

We all got off and went back to our corners, fighting the smiles breaking through our cheeks.

Mollie took the porno Barbie bucket from the sandbox and put it smack in the middle of the teachers’ bench.

I swallowed my gum I laughed so hard.

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Many, many people played a part in the inception, formation, and publication of this book. First, I’d like to thank my parents, brother, and grandfather for being my biggest supporters and cheerleaders, as well as for being better publicists than money could ever buy. Thank you, Maggie, Laura, and Liz, for being my best friends, the coolest and smartest girls I know, and for entertaining me, challenging me, and providing me with enough material over the course of the last twenty-five years to fill up this book. I’d like to thank everyone at the University of San Francisco Masters of Fine Arts program for providing me with a safe and productive creative environment, and for giving me the motivation and support to write the best story I could. In particular, I’d like to thank Lewis Buzbee, Nina Schuyler, and Karl Soehnlein for the appropriate balance of encouragement and critique I needed to build the foundation of this novel. Thank you to Brian Gilton and Nino Urisote for being my friends, readers, therapists, teachers, sounding boards, and drinking buddies. Thank you for getting me through the blocks, the doubts, and the performance anxiety, and for conceiving some of the best parts of this book. I truly could not have done it
without you two, and you continue to keep me moving, writing, and believing that other people think I’m funny and care what I have to say. Thank you to my editor, Farrin Jacobs, and my agent, Kirby Kim, for taking a risk and allowing me to tell the story I wanted to tell, the way I wanted to tell it, and standing behind it and me, when many would not. Thank you for making my dream a reality.

And last, but really most of all, I’d like to thank Josh Mohr. Thank you, Josh, for being the first person to take this seriously as a book and me seriously as a writer. Thank you for being my friend, my mentor, my inspiration, and my barometer of sanity and perspective. Thank you for every genius piece of advice that you’ve given me; for deep talks in Dolores Park; for telling me to kill Rachel; for understanding my characters; for understanding me; for having a sense of humor; for being the best, coolest, most talented, and kindest guy I know. This book would truly not exist without you; I would probably not have finished it without you. Thank you for taking me under your wing. Thank you for being the prolific adviser, the wealth of knowledge, and the exceptional soul that you are. Thank you for being you, and also, thanks for being really, really good-looking—that really helps.