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  I saw his face in my mind, the dimple in his chin and those squinty green eyes, and felt something warm in my chest. I first noticed him in my history class last year. I liked how confident he was and that unlike others he never made fun of our awkward professor. At first we hung out as friends. Recently it had turned into something else although I wasn’t sure what it was, even if we’d begun sleeping together. I liked that we were in the same state now—the baseball team spent spring breaks training down the coast—although our worlds couldn’t be more opposite. Most likely he was asleep in a dry, warm bed after a hard day of wind sprints and batting practice. Tonight I was sleeping in a house the size of a box.

  I felt a twinge of nausea—because of exhaustion or nerves or maybe just the beer and fried mozzarella and tomato sauce—and said, “Maybe one of us should go to the door first.”

  But no one moved.

  Then suddenly someone inside the house rolled up the blind and opened the window. Light from the house poured into the yard. We saw a few legs and torsos and heard music. Bad Company. In the beginning, I believed every word that you said; Now that you’re gone, my world is in shreds.

  Ducky sat forward, her voice an octave higher. “Look, he’s having a party!”

  “God, we’re ridiculous. I’ll go.” When Sarah opened the door, empty beer cans spilled (ping, ping, ping!) onto the street. Lee rolled down her window. And then we watched as Sarah opened the gate, stopped on the step, and knocked. The door flew open and a tall guy, barefoot and in striped parachute pants and an open flannel shirt, his chest bare, stood in the light of the doorway. He had long, curly black hair and a huge smile. Sarah jumped into his arms, laughing, talking, laughing.

  “Look! See? Everything’s fine! This is going to be so fun.” Ducky pushed open the car door and ran up the sidewalk toward Sarah.

  Now Lee and I were alone for the first time since she told the Sigma Chis about my mother. She turned to me. The lights from the dashboard seemed to exaggerate her high cheekbones and make her smooth and full lips especially shiny. “I’m sorry about today. I shouldn’t have said—”

  “Can we please not talk about this now?” I asked.

  Ducky had started down the sidewalk and soon thrust her head in through the window. “Donny wants you to pull into the driveway and park in front of the shed. Lock the doors, too, because he said there’ve been lots of break-ins lately.”

  “Okay,” I said. Ducky turned and ran back up to the door.

  Lee raised her eyebrows, her lips curved into a partial smile that seemed careful, as if testing me. She said, “Sarah’s drug dealer.”

  I smiled and so did she, a genuine one this time, and a rush of calmness swept over me. Because in just those three ironic words, Sarah’s drug dealer, Lee was speaking a language, our language, that we’d cultivated these past four years. Sarah didn’t do drugs, ever, and Lee and I spent many nights speculating as to why and what her dead father, a pharmacist, might have to do with it. Sarah, Ducky, Lisa, Amy—Lee and I discussed them all, not because we were gossipy or mean but because we found them interesting and wanted to understand what made them so.

  This was how we usually were. This was one of the reasons we were best friends. I turned the car into the driveway and thought about what Sarah had said—we’re living on the wild side!—less than twenty-four hours ago as we left North Carolina. I smiled at Lee again. Yes, let’s have fun. Let’s live on the wild side.

  In the headlights I saw the shed door hanging by a top hinge and the entire structure leaning precariously to the side. Scrubby grass grew in patches along the driveway. Several palm trees, black with rot, lay stacked on their sides. A ten-speed bicycle, missing its handlebars and front wheel, leaned against a pile of wood.

  “Not the best neighborhood,” Lee said. “This doesn’t feel right.”

  I’d never known anyone so affected by how surroundings looked and felt. But I wanted to keep the conversation light. I didn’t want to go back to how I was feeling only a few moments ago. “Hey, we’re living on the wild side, right?”

  Lee nodded. And for right now, this moment, we were okay.

  CHAPTER 2

  Donny had friends over. Butch, a tall guy with red frizzy hair and a ZZ-Top beard. Stacy, with hair bleached and teased high on her head, who wore jean cutoffs and a tight white tank top with the word SEXY in sparkly green across her chest. A half-dozen girls by the sink whose names I didn’t catch. And a group of guys near the refrigerator who were older—maybe twenty-five—and barely looked when Donny introduced us. Last was Smitty, Donny’s roommate, who hugged each of us and said we were the most beautiful women he’d ever met.

  “Ya’all are college girls, huh?” He wore jean shorts just visible under a tank top that said This Bud’s for You. His blond hair was shaved above both ears and hung long across the back and top. He had a silver tooth in front, top row, which sparkled when he smiled and caught the light. It matched the chain around his neck.

  “Not only are they college girls, but Sarah’s gonna be a doctor,” Donny said.

  She punched him in the arm. “Don’t jinx it. I gotta get into med school first.”

  “You will. You girls can do anything you want!” Donny looked at each of us, but stopped at Lee. He grinned, the skin wrinkling in the corners of his mouth. Lee turned away as she took a long pull from her beer.

  Guys liked Lee, partly because she acted so indifferent but also because of how she looked. She was tall and thin with olive-colored skin, long, shiny black hair, a small nose and mouth. She wasn’t beautiful, Ben said once, but “interesting-looking.” Somewhere on her dad’s side she had Wampanoag blood and we used to joke about this. My relatives had been in New England for centuries, and maybe our ancestors had had Thanksgiving together. Now I wondered if they fought each other.

  “They’re sorority girls,” Donny said.

  Smitty raised his eyebrows. “Really? I don’t know any sorority girls. But you don’t seem the type. And I was meaning that to be a compliment.”

  Ducky grinned. “See, Lee? Thanks. Because we aren’t typical sorority girls.”

  Lee shrugged. I wasn’t sure why this had become the topic of the day. Maybe we weren’t as preppy. Maybe we were bigger partiers and carried around, except for Lee, an extra fifteen pounds more than the average sorority girl. But Lee had been right. There wasn’t much variety between the houses and within our own.

  And this had ultimately been a disappointment. The first couple of years, I loved coming back to the house each day. It was a huge and intimidating structure, four stories, redbrick with a sloping lawn, able to house eighty girls easily. There was always so much energy and stimulation. After dinner we sat around, sometimes twenty of us, and laughed and talked. It had been a wonderful surprise—so different from the long-drawn-out conversations about books, politics, and war at my parents’ house—to find happiness in nonsense conversation and joking around.

  Maybe I had patience for this because Lee and I, alone, discussed meatier topics. Our classes. Lee’s obsession with Patricia Graceson, the visiting film professor. Our interest in Freud. But by the time school started this year, I’d grown tired of communal living and vapid conversations and Lee wasn’t around much; she spent most of her time on her senior film project. And then after winter break, when she was around, all she talked about were these worries and how awful she felt.

  “Donny, what can we do for these not-typical sorority girls?” Smitty asked.

  “Only one thing.” Donny grinned. “Get ’em stoned.”

  He pulled a joint from his pocket and lit it. He passed it to Lee, who took a long drag and gave it to me. I held it between my finger and thumb and let the pungent smoke drift up to my face. Most everyone smoked, even Ben when it wasn’t baseball season. I rarely did it because I could never be sure how it would affect me.

  Ducky, who was on her third beer, was laughing with Smitty. Sarah and Donny were talking about something that had happened in eighth
grade. Lee was getting more beers. Across the room, Stacy was drinking shots of tequila with Butch. And the guys by the refrigerator were passing their own joint.

  These people couldn’t be more different from the Sigma Chis. And this house was unlike any place I’d ever been. Small, just one room, with scummy tiles on the floor—black sludge in the corners—cabinets so grimy that they no longer were white. Low ceilings, dim lights. A giant water heater that jutted out from the wall next to the bathroom. A pale pink phone on the other wall, its dirty cord long and bunched on the floor. A single black La-Z-Boy chair with a floor lamp next to it. We were in a questionable neighborhood. On the wrong side of the tracks.

  Not one of our friends was having a spring break experience like this. Julie and Lisa were skiing in Vail. Amy and a group were in Fort Lauderdale. Susie was in Chicago. Which was where my mother was. Or maybe she was in Denver?

  What would she think of this place?

  I put the joint to my lips, inhaled, and immediately burst out laughing.

  Someone turned up the music, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” and when Ducky yelled, “This song is perfect! Because that’s where we are!” we laughed so hard that Sarah had to cross her legs so she wouldn’t pee in her gym shorts.

  “We’re not in Alabama, sweetie, we’re in Florida!” Donny yelled.

  After that we kept yelling, “Sweet Home Alabama” and laughing. More people arrived, a girl in a halter top with bleached, feathered hair and a guy with a mullet wearing too-tight jeans. The room was spinning because the pot was so strong and I’d had too many beers and not enough food or sleep.

  Outside, it had begun to rain again—we could see it through the huge floor-to-ceiling window—and flashes of lightning lit up the puddles in the muddy lawn. And then suddenly there was another flash and we turned to the window just as a huge naked man leaped into the room from outside, slid on the rain water that had pooled on the floor, and knocked over the halter top girl and the guy with the mullet.

  Everyone started screaming at him. When he got to his feet, I saw that he wasn’t naked but wearing a tight white Speedo. He had hair everywhere, down his back and legs and arms, and he was at least six feet eight. People seemed to know who he was and eventually went back to what they were doing. Not us. We watched him, even Ducky, who was so drunk that she kept scrunching her nose and forehead, as if trying to focus. He stumbled around the room, bouncing off people, the walls, the water heater. Where were his clothes?

  The music was so loud that it was impossible to hear anyone talk. But during a break between songs, I heard Sarah ask Donny what was wrong with him.

  “Probably acid,” Donny said. “That’s his thing.”

  We glanced at each other. Lee was the only one among us who’d ever done acid. A quick burn started across my chest. It was a nervous, cautionary feeling—one that I recognized from earlier in the car but couldn’t name—that told me that maybe this wasn’t a good idea. These people were too old, too hard-core. I walked over and dumped my beer into the sink. Someone had to get sober, which would be me, as always. I was the responsible one, the person to count on if you needed a lifeline in the middle of the night, my mother used to say to me.

  Ducky, Sarah, and Donny started dancing. Lee bobbed her head as she watched. And when others began to leave and the Speedo giant ran back out the window, as if being chased, I felt a bit silly. I’d overreacted. After all, we had Donny. He and Sarah knew each other not from eighth grade but from fourth. That was a lot longer than I’d known anyone and it made me feel that we had a right, a claim, on Donny, and that we belonged here as much—maybe even more—than anyone else.

  We stayed in the corner, listening to music and dancing for another hour. Although we’d found a boost of energy, I felt myself starting to fade again and looked around, wondering how we would sleep. The grimy floor was swimming with spilled beer and cigarette butts. The patch of dry floor near the La-Z-Boy was big enough for only one sleeping bag. And then the music stopped and I heard Lee tell Smitty about her documentary, the one she’d submitted for the film internship.

  “Patricia Graceson is this amazing person,” she said. “She grew up with nothing, one parent with schizophrenia and the other a drug addict. But she made something of her life. She got her PhD and eventually made a film about malnutrition among children in Africa. My film is about her and her life.”

  “Whoa! That’d be real interesting, I bet.” Smitty was so stoned that his eyes were slits and he swayed from side to side, a persistent grin on his lips.

  “But it’s not just about what she does,” she said. “It’s about how she lives. What comes out of the film is this Socratic idea that the unexamined life is not worth living. That’s what gives the film its heft and what people can relate to.”

  Socratic idea? Heft? I cringed.

  Smitty scrunched his forehead, as if trying to make sense of what she was saying. Not only had he not gone to college, he probably hadn’t graduated high school, either. These were the types of people Lee had grown up with. How could she not notice how uncomfortable this made him? I hated when people, when anyone, did this kind of thing. I flinched as sweat broke out on my sunburned neck.

  “Wow,” Smitty said. “You’re gonna be a famous movie director!”

  I frowned. It was one thing to produce a twenty-minute short film and another to be a famous movie director. While her film was good, it wasn’t perfect. Watching it, I always had the sense that it needed something although I had no idea what that was.

  “Not everybody has the luxury to live an examined life,” I said. “Some people have to work three jobs to put food on the table. Or they have to take care of sick relatives. They don’t have time for anything else.”

  Lee’s smile faded. “I know that.”

  “Well, don’t be so judgmental.”

  “You don’t have to tell me what it’s like to worry about putting food on the table.” Lee frowned and lowered her eyes.

  “Seriously?” Smitty laughed. “I got no fucking idea what you’re talking about.”

  Of course Lee knew what it was like to struggle. It was one of the things we talked about. And she typically wasn’t pretentious or oblivious to people’s feelings, either. What was wrong with me? Why was I so frustrated? I walked to the window, my cheeks stinging, and looked out. The lightning had stopped but I heard the rain smacking the puddles. I thought about how sunny it had been when we walked into the bar today. Ducky had started us off after the Sigma Chis moved to our table with their plates of food and pitchers of beer. “I’m Ducky. This is Sarah, Lee and—”

  “This is the famous Eleanor Michaels’s daughter, Clare,” Lee had said.

  The boys looked at Lee and then at me. I was so shocked that I felt my mouth fall open. It had been a long time (junior high?) since a friend talked about my mother like this in public in front of me.

  “Who’s Eleanor Michaels?” the tallest one asked.

  “She wrote Listen, Before You Go,” the blondest one said. “The Vietnam book.”

  “Never heard of it,” the tallest one said.

  “I read it,” the blondest one said. “In high school, I wrote a paper on it. I talked about the death foreshadowing. At first, you don’t realize how much of it there is.”

  “I didn’t get it,” the shortest one said. “It was supposed to be about the war but there aren’t any battle scenes. I mean, it takes place in, like, Vermont.”

  “You’re joking, right?” the blondest one asked. “That’s not really her mom?”

  “It’s true,” Ducky said.

  The inevitable onslaught of questions followed. Are the characters based on your family? Are you Phoebe, the heroine of the story? Is her book going to be a movie and will you be in it? Are you a writer? Which was always the worst question because I had no creative abilities. Eventually we stopped talking about my mother and her book but something lingered. A carefulness. A deference that didn’t belong to me. A laugh and look
from one or two boys that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. This was more than enough reason to be angry with Lee. Wasn’t it?

  “Clare.” Lee came up behind me and I turned from the window. “Can we talk? About today? About what I said? I know you’re mad.”

  “Did you notice how they acted after you said that? It changed everything. It always changes everything. I’ve told you that.”

  “I know. I’m so sorry,” Lee said, her voice just above the music. “I’m sick about it. I don’t know why I said it.”

  Across the room, Sarah was trying to get Ducky to sit in a chair, but she kept standing on it and dancing. Donny lit another joint. Someone turned off the music. I wanted to stay angry with Lee but felt it slipping away. Because really? What she said wasn’t the reason we left. That was because the boys were boring, after all, and we were ready for the next exciting, unpredictable thing. But I couldn’t let it go.

  “I’m just surprised, after everything I’ve told you about my mother.” Well, I hadn’t quite told her everything. But almost. Certainly Lee knew how difficult and demanding my mother could be. And how in junior high and high school people had tried to friend me to get to her. “I guess it makes me mad.”

  Lee’s voice was hushed. “But you’ve been mad at me for months now.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. But it was, wasn’t it? This problem between us felt complicated and I didn’t understand it. Before winter break, we were fine. Normal. Things started to change when we returned to school in January. That first night, we stayed up for hours, talking about her aunt’s embezzlement charge and how she’d cut Lee out of her life. Lee was devastated. Why did she steal from her company? Why won’t she answer my letters? Why is she acting like I don’t exist? Every night after that we went over this. It took hours to get Lee to a place where she wasn’t so upset, but the next night we had to start again. It was like I had to pull her out of a dark hole.