When We Were Friends (5 page)

“I used to be.” Sydney smiled at me crookedly. “I mean when you’re that close to someone, whatever happens, that never completely goes away. I’ve been thinking how you share all my same memories, so many things only the two of us know. And I hate how we lost our connection to all that history.”

“That sounds lovely,” I said. “Actually I’ve gotta say it’s the loveliest bullshit I ever heard.”

“Lainey …” She slumped back in her chair. “I just thought, I don’t know, maybe it’d be good for both of us if we made amends. I wanted to say something when you came by last week, but I didn’t have any idea how to talk about it. What could I do, apologize? Try and explain? You’d probably have hit me.”

She seemed suddenly so wavery around the edges, so pained, that I had the ridiculous urge to comfort her. Instead I said, “I’m usually not big on violence but yeah, I might’ve.”

“Lainey, look. Can I show you something?” She unzipped the purse hanging from her chair, reached inside and pulled out an envelope. “I found this in a box of old things when I was moving out of David’s house and trying to decide what to bring and what to throw away.”

She handed me the envelope. Inside was a handful of photographs, all taken the summer before junior year. She watched me flip through them, then said, “I didn’t throw these away.”

“Well I’m touched,” I said sarcastically, but in truth, I was a little touched.

In the photos we were dressed in clothes somebody should’ve stopped us from wearing, jeans shorts that were both too tight and too high-waisted, bright-colored tank tops that bunched around our breasts. We were posing for the camera, supermodel poses, our backs arched, chests bared and heads thrown back. Laughing. And studying the photos, the thing that struck me was how very young we were.

A month later would be the Custard Queen talk, and soon after the teasing would start. All those kids I’d been so scared of, had their cheeks and chins been this round? Their smiles this unguarded? How were the actions of children, who’d probably had no idea what they were doing, still echoing so strongly inside me? They probably didn’t even remember who I was anymore.

And I didn’t know how to process this. Looking at our laughing faces, I found myself wanting to cry.

Instead I shoved the envelope toward her. “It was a long time ago,” I said. “If it still hurt after all these years, that’d be my fault more than yours.”

“But you’re still pissed off.”

“I’m not exactly a huge fan of yours, but I’d say I’m over it.”

“Yeah.” Sydney stared down into her coffee, gripping her cup with both hands. “I know what it must’ve been like for you. Don’t you think I know what I did?”

I pictured the little girl in the photo, her arm around me, smile revealing the flash of her braces. “Do you?” I said. “Do you really?”

“Part of me wants to say how it was just high school, but I know high school is everything. And part of me wants to say how it wasn’t just me; I mean there were people who outwardly treated you much worse than I did. But yes, yeah, I guess I can call myself the ringmaster of all the awfulness.”

The ringmaster. Apt description.
Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, come see the astonishing Lainey Carson! Marvel at the zit on her chin and her inability to dribble a basketball without tripping!

The Custard Queen trip had been the beginning. Sydney’s five-ring stage debut came two weeks later, after she’d invited herself over and then mysteriously left after ten minutes. I found out why the next day, when she got up in front of our English class. In my mind she looked pale and hesitant; she wouldn’t meet my eye. But maybe that was just a veneer I’d laid over the memory.

The assignment was to create a character study to read out loud. And Sydney’s piece was called
The Diary of L
.

There are things in your life
, she read,
that you can play over and over in your head so many times that they just stop feeling real, becoming more like something you’ve imagined. One of those things happened to me today, when Aaron Walsh smiled at me and I of course did nothing to show I even noticed, because I am a loser
.

She steeled her shoulders, then went on:
Oh I hate myself so much, you know? I wish there was some mating ritual, like peacocks have, or penguins. A series of set steps you follow, he smiles you smile, he nods you nod. We bow our heads together and then … make babies I guess. Oh what do I do?

I sat there paralyzed, listening to her read, each of my words through her mouth like a pointed jab, bleeding me empty. In my head,
Sydney, why, why!
Until her voice trailed to silence.

Were there tears in her eyes? I seem to remember there were tears. But then somebody laughed, and then somebody else, and Sydney lifted her head and beamed at them like she was accepting congratulatory pats on the back.

Everyone of course knew who “L” was, and by the end of the day, word had passed around the entire school. In the halls for the entire year, all the boys made smooching noises when I passed and the girls followed me with their eyes, faces shadowed with amusement. And Aaron Walsh, the object of every one of my fantasies for the past year, started calling me
Bubble-Butt
(“Hey, Bubble-Butt! What’chya doin’ Bubble-Butt?”) to prove to his friends that I made him sick. Which was what Sydney had been doing in her own way. Proving superiority to avoid association.

And it wasn’t even the awfulness of this, or the taunts that
would follow me every day after. (Every day through today, for Christ’s sake, and who in their thirties still obsessed about high school?) It wasn’t the embarrassment of people knowing I had a crush on an unattainable boy, or—from a separate diary entry—that the fart in gym class everyone had blamed on Darren Coe had really been mine. It was that Sydney had done this to me. Sydney who’d danced with me to The Bangles behind my closed door; who’d practiced hickeys on my arm just to see if she could make it work; who’d sat with me poring over
Seventeen
magazine for makeup tips and
Will You Make a Good Girlfriend?
quizzes, then helped me draw mustaches on all the models’ faces. Sydney, who I’d loved more than I loved myself, had stolen my diary with the intention of destroying my life.

“You can move past high school,” Sydney said now, “which you obviously have, but you can’t ever really
get
past it. I haven’t gotten past high school either, really.”

“Here you go,” Chelsea said, setting a pastry box, two plates and a coffee on the table. “And I’m bringing the plates because the bars’re still warm, which makes them irresistible to anyone with a nose.”

I stood so I wouldn’t have to look at Sydney. “Could I actually have one of the cupcakes? Those chocolate ones with white icing?” Without waiting for an answer I brought my plate to the display case, and pulled out the cupcake with the most prodigious icing swirl.

I smiled thanks at Chelsea and walked back slowly, trying to fashion the right response in my head. As I sat back down I said, “It may be disappointing to hear, but I’ve moved past it
and
gotten past it. Like …”—I swept my arm toward the wall—“d’you know all the paintings here are mine? This is what’s important in my life now. I don’t think about the past; being an artist means living in the present.”

Sydney looked around the room, squinting. “Nice,” she said slowly. “Very … Picasso? Van Gogh? I don’t know enough about art to say something intelligent. But I remember the art teacher, what
was her name, with that frizzy long braid? She said you could become famous.”

“Ms. Douglas. She said I could become renowned if I wanted. That’s actually the word she used,
renowned.
” I remembered when she’d said it, how I’d ducked my head, my face burning, repeating the word silently over and over. “And I got a scholarship to Pratt Institute, which is like the most competitive art school in the country.”

And then I tried to think of what else to tell her, what else I had to be proud of. All I had was my art, and even that had come up short. I’d never gone to Pratt because I’d had to start working to help support Star. I’d gone to community college part-time, got an AA that had turned out to be a waste of money. And then I’d left home for a total of two months, renting an apartment in SoHo, trying to break into the New York art scene. But then my Nana Sterling passed away, and two weeks later Star attempted suicide. I’d immediately given up the apartment, had my things shipped back to Virginia and never left again.

So what else did I have to use as evidence that I’d gotten past high school? A series of failed relationships? A job painting kidney beans? I took a bite of cupcake.

“Well you’ve done a hell of a lot more than me,” Sydney said. “I got a communications degree, which I realize is for people who can’t figure out what to major in, but I was sure I could make it in broadcast journalism. People kept telling me I had the look for it, a kind of attractive authority. But nobody said how impossible it is to break into. I tried for almost a decade interning while I was waiting tables and getting nowhere. And then the one shot I had, filling in for a radio journalist at a local station, I completely froze. I sucked at it.”

She traced her finger along the inside of her cup handle. “At the time I didn’t let myself regret any of it. I’d gotten married to David and I didn’t have to work anymore. But then he left me a few months after Jacqueline was born, and now he’s back living with his parents so their lawyers can try and hash out divorce papers and threaten me
into signing them. And that’s the extent of my accomplishments. Impressive, hunh?”

I watched her face, the pain behind her perfectly blue eyes, and found myself wanting to apologize. An impulse I restrained, of course, but I did push the box of toffee bars toward her. “Want one?”

She glanced at the box, longingly I thought, before saying, “No, thanks.”

Of course. One couldn’t weigh ninety pounds and still eat toffee bars. And what good had two decades of dieting done her? How could you enjoy life when you were always worrying about the potential for cellulite?

I remembered the food amalgamations we used to create in Star’s kitchen: sundae amalgamations, where we’d put everything from Gummy Bears to Goldfish crackers on top of ice cream, as well as cereal amalgamations, frozen waffle amalgamations and grossest of all, Tater Tot amalgamations. Standing on chairs to pull things from the shelves and freezer, tasting each other’s concoctions, screwing up our faces in disgust but then finishing them anyway. Had I ever had so much fun since those days? Had she?

“It’s like I was saying over the phone,” she said. “You have this vision in high school of what your life’s going to be, you’re sure you know your potential, but then you grow up and realize you hit your peak years ago, and it was more of a grassy knoll than a mountain and you’re already on your way down it. Is it like that for everybody? Is there any adult in the world who’s not disappointed?”

What had I thought my life would be like? I’d had vague notions that I’d get married someday, but it had all been sort of nebulous, the man’s image blurry like a photo where he’d been moving too fast. As for career, well yes I’d been told I could become a real artist, but I’d known the odds and I’d never actually believed I’d be one of the lucky few. So was I disappointed? No, that was the wrong word. Sure, I wished things could’ve been different, but I knew why they weren’t. Mostly I was just unsurprised.

“Remember when we were so sure we’d grow up to be writers?” I said. “We wrote that book—”

“About dogs in space! I forgot about that. We alternated chapters and we wrote about three gazillion pages by hand, which we sent to some publisher in Boston.”

“Houghton Mifflin! We were seriously sure we could get published by Houghton Mifflin. We went and sent them our only copy, and then we waited for them to send us the money and a contract.”

“And some nice assistant sent the pages back with a little note saying she enjoyed the story and”—Sydney made air quotes—“hoped we’d grow up to be real writers someday. I was crushed.”

“Me too. I thought we’d write sequels, have screaming groupies who’d accost us in parking lots and throw us their underwear.”

We smiled at each other, and then Sydney shook her head. “I’ve never had another friend like that, you know? Not even close.”

Was she being serious? She sounded like a Lifetime movie. But when I looked into her eyes, I found only wistfulness.

I considered telling her about Pamela, to show how making a best friend in adulthood really was possible. But then I realized that A) I’d mostly be using it as evidence I truly had Gotten Past It, B) it wouldn’t be helpful to Sydney at all and C) there was no way I could compare my friendship with Pamela to what we’d had as kids. Yes, I loved Pamela as much, probably even more in some ways than I’d ever loved Sydney, but there were things in Pamela’s life that I’d never share. Whereas in my friendship with Sydney, we’d shared everything.

So instead I tried to look just as wistful. “Yeah,” I said softly, “I guess I know what you mean.”

And so there we were, improbable as it might seem, friendly again. I wouldn’t say we were friends, I didn’t like her or trust her enough—and wasn’t quite adult enough—to take things to that next level, but I could see the possibility of at least wanting to forgive her.

On the day Sydney read my diary aloud I’d filled the hole left in me
with a red knot of loathing, and for years I’d let it fester, trying to ignore it. But now that it was dissipating, what would take its place? Not just nostalgia, although nostalgia was the main emotion I’d felt over coffee. Hell, nostalgia wasn’t even a real emotion, just the outlines of what I’d lost. I needed something bigger to fill the space, but I had no idea what that something might be.

When we left the café I held out my arm, meaning to shake Sydney’s hand, but she tucked herself into it, hugged me for a full minute, both palms pressed at my back. Then pulled away and slid a finger under a lock of my hair, lifted it and rubbed her thumb against it, a gesture that seemed even more intimate than the hug. “We’ll do this again soon,” she said, and I nodded because I couldn’t find a way to tell her that no, we wouldn’t.