They don’t have our names yet, but I know it’s only a matter of time. I click the TV off. Tate sleeps on.
JUNIOR YEAR
I notice Tate for the first time that summer, a few months after my I have my breakdown in the girls’ bathroom and Elise walks away from her old clique for good.
I’d seen him around in school before then. Even in a school filled with rich, ambitious, smart kids, Tate Dempsey is Hillcrest royalty: star of the lacrosse team, student government, an athlete’s body, and golden good looks. We have a couple of classes together, but even with Elise in tow—especially with Elise—we live in different worlds. I would catch a glimpse of him in the hallways sometimes, heading to class with some new, adoring girl beside him, or hanging out on the front lawn after school tossing a football around with his buddies. I would think how he wasn’t so much a real teenage guy as the billboard for one. You know, something from a J. Crew catalogue, or the hot guy on a teen TV show who’s really in his twenties—square-jawed, strong and sure among the crowds of boys still figuring out their gangly bodies and tufts of new facial hair.
But as the year passes, I realize I was wrong. He isn’t loud, or arrogant, like some of those popular guys, but almost quaintly polite: holding open doors if you’re behind him in line, presenting his arguments in a low, confident voice in class. He doesn’t ever interrupt, or pick on the nerdy kids, or swagger around like he owns the place; instead, he has this air of mild embarrassment about him, as if he knows just how much wealth and privilege have been heaped upon his broad shoulders. Everyone else in school seems to take their status for granted, like they don’t realize pure luck is the only reason they’re not crammed in a public school across the city, taking the bus home, walking up four flights to a tiny apartment when they get done with their after-school job.
Maybe it’s because I wasn’t born into this world that I see how random it all is—especially for us kids, who haven’t built anything of our own yet, just taken what our parents can provide. My classmates act like they’re entitled to their good fortune, but Tate is different, and I admire him for it.
“Don’t tell me you’ve got a thing for Golden Boy,” Elise says with a smirk one afternoon, when she catches me watching him from across the library.
“What? No.” I quickly turn back. She’s sitting cross-legged on the chair beside me, chewing red licorice and doodling in the margins of her world history homework. We have study hall last period on Tuesdays, but Elise is so restless, we barely ever make it through the hour. “It’s not like he even knows I exist.”
“Which makes you lucky,” Elise replies, arching an eyebrow. “He’s like, a total man-whore. He’s already dated four different girls this year.”
“Really?” I can’t help shooting another glance to where Tate is sitting at a table of the popular kids, his sweatshirt sleeves pushed up over tanned forearms, blond hair falling in his eyes. “I don’t know, he seems nice.”
“Trust me, he’s just another ass**le jock, but with better hair.” Elise yawns, slamming her book shut. “Speaking of ass**les, I’m so done with Hitler.”
“Stumptown?” I suggest, naming the coffeehouse that’s become our regular. “Or we could catch a movie.”
“Pie.” Elise’s eyes brighten. “I’ve been craving it all day. Dusty’s has the best, and all the college boys are going to be out studying for finals,” she adds mischievously.
I laugh. “You had me at pie.”
We grab our stuff and head for the exit, past Tate’s table. He doesn’t look up.
As we near the doors, Lindsay and her group saunter in, armed with razorblade smiles and perfectly glossy bangs. “Aww, look, it’s Hillcrest’s new favorite dykes,” Lindsay sneers as we pass.
Elise doesn’t say a word, doesn’t even look around, just flips up her middle finger as we pass, linking her other arm through mine. As we push through the doors and outside, I glance over to check her expression, but there’s not even a flicker there, just a determined smile. “Peach or pecan?” Elise asks as we head down the steps onto the front lawn.
“You even have to ask?”
“You’re right,” she replies gravely. “I should have known. Both.”
• • •
It’s startling, how completely they cut her out of their clique, and how fast Elise sheds them, like some unwanted skin. She’s grown up with them, after all: sleepovers and birthday parties and after-school hangouts going back years. But in a day—in an instant—she was done. I feel guilty at first, wondering if she regrets her choice, giving up so much and getting only me in return. I didn’t yet know that Elise never looked back. Once she made a call, there was no other choice in her mind—she just kept moving forward, never regretting a thing. “Screw ’em,” she’d say whenever Lindsay would aim a new barb in her direction—her resentment for me nothing compared to the betrayal of a former friend. “We don’t need anyone but each other.”
And we don’t, not those first few months. The world of girl friendship and intimacy that has always seemed so foreign to me suddenly opens up, just the way I’d glimpsed that very first afternoon. It may sound wrong, but I’m the happiest I’ve even been that summer, even with my mom’s chemo treatments starting up again, and that sickly-sweet medicated smell lingering over my parents upstairs bedroom again. Because I have a place to escape now, a place of my own in the world, full stop.
I’m not alone anymore.
• • •
Elise and I fall into friendship like it’s gravity. We eat lunch together in the shade of the far trees on the east lawn and toil over our homework at coffee shops downtown. We trade clothing and music, passing notebooks filled with lyrics and doodles in the back row of every class we share, and learn the exact texture of each other’s bedroom floors from long nights sprawled on our stomachs, watching trashy reality TV. But soon we want more, and weekends become an adventure: fibbing to our parents about sleeping at the other’s house, then sneaking out in our best tight denim and chunky boots. It almost doesn’t matter where we go, as long as it’s somewhere nobody knows us, where we can be anyone we want to be.
Elise buys us fake IDs from some MIT student hacker, and although the door guys look twice, they always let us through. Rock shows, and dive bars, and the college haunts that line Boylston and Beacon—most of the time it isn’t even about the alcohol, we just want to see the world waiting for us, after the battle of high school. One night we put on our best vintage dresses and red lipstick and take the elevator up to the lounge on the top of the Hub, a skyscraper high above the city. We sip cocktails from sugar-rimmed glasses and watch the lights over the river, fierce with the knowledge that this will all be ours one day, for real.