We’re in your garden eating dried apricots when you tell me you’re moving to France.
I straighten my spine, swallow the waxy fruit.
“I want the wine,” you say, hanging your head under a fuchsia and closing your mouth around it whole. You retract your jaw and retch, and I can’t help but smile ever so slightly.
It is this shrub you dared me to pose naked in front of three Septembers ago. I was cold and glowed pink like the fuchsias, too nervous to say no and ruin our friendship back then. But what would you have done if I did? Why did you want me to do that anyway?
You stared in a numb, wraithlike way as I crouched in the grass with my hands on my knees, pulling my shoulders in, and then you laughed and told me to put my clothes on before the boy next door ‘sees and vomits’.
“It’s not that good,” I say.
“What’s not?” you ask.
“The wine.”
“Oh? And you know this, how?”
“My dad brought some back once, after a work trip. A Cote du Rhône, I think it was.
He let me try a sip.”
We lounge on the striped garden chairs. Your long legs hang over the side of yours. The limbs of a poor critter are glued in something sticky on the glass table between us. Its body appears to have broken free and flown off, high above the neighborhood, legless and dying.
We spend a lot of time in your garden.
We thought we saw the neighbor boy watching us from his window once, so you kissed me like a wild sucking thing and then the two of you started dating, until his parents moved away. Maybe to France.
“Well, I’m still moving there,’ you say. ‘Comprenez vous?”
Your accent is terrible, but I suppose it’s sweet that you’re trying. Although the apricot in your mouth is a hindrance, like a tiny shrunken head you scrunch and slop between your teeth.
“You’ll be ok though, won’t you?” you say.
I blow air through my lips so that they vibrate softly. “I guess so,” I reply.
“But what will you do, Laura? I’m your only friend.”
“That’s not true. I’ve got Jack.”
You pucker your nose. “Who’s Jack?”
“My boyfriend.”
“Oh, yeah. Mr. Cargo Pants. Has he even eaten you out yet?”
“Don’t be stupid,” I say.
“He hasn’t, has he?” You fold your arms over your chest. “Knew it.”
“Of course he has.”
Your face cracks like a crème brûlée.
I don’t remember life without that face. Our parents had us make friends when we still walked with our arms snatching at the air and our chins stuck out, little jelly cheeks wobbling. But as we grew, our cheeks defined themselves and so did our characters. We became girls, and girls can be strange things. One week we wore stick-on earrings and kitten t-shirts and did all the best friend quizzes in the magazines, the next we were buying bras we had no flesh to put in yet, and you plucked your brows into two cruel arches. You started the humiliation, climbing up on my shoulders and pushing down on my head, even if it meant I drowned in the water.
But the only friendship I know is ours. That’s not true for you though. You palled up with Bunny a few years back, the girl who split her chin open in swim class – we all remember the blood clinging to the chlorine like fiery octopuses. And didn’t she have a baby in the girls’ bathroom? That one cubicle was out of order for months and Bunny was out of class for just as long. The teachers said it was just bad pipes and mono. But maybe you know the truth?
“Well, I bet it was really bad,” you say.
“Actually, it was really fucking good. And we’re gonna do it again tonight.”
“You aren’t?”
“Yep,” I say, snapping a fuchsia from the bush and twirling it between my fingers like a headless fairy. “I think I’ll give him head too.” – I won’t use the techniques you once taught me though, sliding your jaw up and down on a stick-of-rock candy you bought for the explicit purpose.
Your lips pinch. “It won’t last if that’s all it is.”
“What do you care, anyway? You’re moving to France.”
You don’t say anything. And then: “Did you tell him about the time you peed your pants in the grocery store and my mom had to buy new clothes and help you change into them in the backseat of our car?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Oh, come on, Laura. It’s funny.”
If you say so. And you do. You often do. “Why are you being weird?”
Your brow crumples and you pluck the shriveled skin of an apricot from your mouth, swipe it on the table. “What do you mean?”
“It’s like you’re jealous.”
That’s the first time I’ve done that – pointed at the thing, circled it. Or is ‘jealousy’ just a way to explain the sometimes-strangeness of girls? One thing is for sure, we aren’t women yet. Maybe then it will all make sense.
“Jealous of what, pray tell?” you ask.
“Never mind.”
“Good,” you say, sniffing the sweet peas. They’ve outgrown their patch. “Jealous. Ha!”
The sky today is colorless, with long, thin clouds raked through it like clawed glass, and I wonder for a moment if the insect actually made it, out in the world without their legs.
“When are you moving?” I ask.