1.
Two fourteen-year-old girls, one beautiful and one just okay, are running away from home on a northbound Amtrak. A Friday in August: California is all dried out, ready to catch fire beneath a bad-mood sun. Miniature navy window curtains recall the pressed and pleated skirts girls wear on television but which Judy and Meghan have never worn. They are publicly schooled and more or less poor. A plastic table between them accommodates their homey mess. Seatback veils—dandruff absorbers—wisp up, then lower, all by themselves.
The girls chew their cuticles and turn their heads fast to remember their ponytails. They scoff at the name of the train line, the Coastal Quest.
“Courtney is totally mental.”
“Courtney S. or Courtney N.?”
“Duh.”
“Mental and crazy.”
“She’s kind of a mental slut.”
“She kind of has a mustache.”
“I heard she sleeps with a stuffed animal.”
“She probably practices stuff on it.”
“I bet she practices stuff on her dog.”
“Melissa definitely practices stuff on her dog.”
“Ew, her dog’s name is Cootie.”
“Ew, more like Coochy.”
“Coochy cooties.”
“Ew!”
Meghan, the pretty one, starts it, but Judy, anxious today, has the compulsion to keep it going. They talk until it’s painful, until their subjects are obliterated and the babble blends with the train’s manic engine, its determined, rattling charge, though they perform cool indifference. Whatever, who cares, eye contact–less. Meghan, as in most things, is better at the act than Judy. Judy has a tendency to slip into earnestness.
“Is it weird, though? To do a blow job? How do people breathe?” A change in her vocal register—a mix of doubt and hope, wanting to believe what she thinks she believes.
“If a guy really wants it, you just … Like, when I did it with that Mexican guy last year at day camp, it’s not like I didn’t want to, but…” Meghan shakes her head. She’s discovered this way of cutting herself off, enviable to Judy, right at the edge of disgrace. Her long fingers are lost in French-braiding her thick blond hair, adroit as weaving spiders. There’s a disconnect between them, an imbalance of experience that makes Meghan a kind of mentor and Judy an involuntary test taker. In addition to Bacardi, pot cookies, hangovers, and cigarettes, Meghan has been through all the bases except the last one and is already armed with descriptions and advice (finger-banging is like a tampon left in too long; if a guy eats a lot of pineapple his sperm will taste sweeter), while Judy, besides two back-to-back Zimas, her own experimental finger, and a parking lot make-out with Jessie M.’s twin brother, has done almost nothing. She wants to more for the advance of it—the awkward but necessary stepping forward—than for anything like physical pleasure, which she suspects is mostly a myth.
“Josh B. probably, like, dreams of you blow j-ing him.” Meghan holds the finished braid, waiting for a hair tie. Judy is, among other roles, the keeper of the friendship’s hair ties.
“God, barf,” Judy says, raising her pelvis to get into her pocket. Last week, Josh called Meghan’s house to say that he and Jared were going to the pool. Tell Judy to wear her two-piece, he’d requested, that blue one, and Meghan’s eyes went huge. Had Judy buzzed with excitement, with something like pride? She had, before it bottomed out despondently. When they arrived at the Van Nuys rec park in their bikini tops and shorts (Judy’s blue two-piece was the only suit she had) and waved to the boys in the water, her stomach swarmed—a hive of anticipation, as Josh, whom she’d spent most of middle school coveting at a distance, emerged from the ladder streaming wet. But his pale skin looked thick as mozzarella, purple bacne splayed across his shoulders, and there was something tumorous and alive about the pouch beneath his belly button. Judy tensed in a different way. He grinned at her—right at her—then trotted over and wagged his head so water sprayed and his hair spiked. Treading in the deep end, Jared called Josh a fucktard for the girls’ benefit, which Josh rejoined with a wet armpit fart, a casual mooning. No Fear! his board shorts announced on the thigh, wet and clinging, as he settled behind Judy and set to rubbing her shoulders. His cold legs gripped her, and his hands squeezed and pinched. You’re tight—relax. Damn, girl. Glad you wore this thing, toying with the knot at her neck. Pulling not hard enough to untie it, just hard enough to show that he could. Oh my god, you guys, get a room! Meghan sang.
Last year, Josh had been the best skater in school. Judy had drunk in the sight of his body, waiting for his smile when Meghan hollered something funny. How had he become repulsive? The change made her feel apart from herself, not today who she had been yesterday. She wanted only to wriggle away from his touch. Obscurely, Rick, her mother’s new husband, seemed to be to blame.
“I don’t know, he used to be fine but, like, something happened,” Judy says now, handing over the rubber band.
“You just don’t like guys once they start liking you.”
What guys? Judy wants to know. Meghan is always making a precedent of things that have happened only once. “At least Jared is, like, sort of nice.”
Meghan pipes an aria of laughter—“Judy and Jared, b-l-o-w-i-n-g!”—and looks around to see if any of the other passengers (men in baseball caps, mothers in sandals, children in pajamas, and a homeless-looking couple) are as titillated as she is.
The braid, fixed and symmetrical when Meghan turns, is a perfect, glowing cord—a spinal, fairy-tale thing, the density of which Judy will never feel on her own head. “You’re perverted,” she says, but something churns in her, that familiar Meghan-jealousy. Her own hair is unspectacularly brown, cowlicked and staticky and frizzing at the temples in heat and during rain.
The train runs inland just enough that everything is ugly. Withered palms tick by—dead-body dumpsters, stock-still pit bulls, the junky rears of strip malls no one is supposed to see. Judy has the backward-facing carnival seat, the one that makes you feel not propelled forward so much as dragged from behind, into the future against your will. Simi and Oxnard crackle through the intercom—kiddie pools and broken fences, graffiti on fast-forward. It’s hardly different from the setting of their lives (they’re only twenty, thirty miles from home) but everything is tweaked strange by this sudden autonomy—the fear that comes with acting out the illicit—a heart-fluttering sensation like hands let go.
Last week, the girls spent a whole afternoon at the twenty-four-hour Kinkos to cut, paste, and ditto, serial-killer style, old permission slips and various sign-up sheets imprinted with the school logo to make elaborately fake dossiers outlining an elaborately fake two-night field trip to Yonderwild Cabins and Outdoor Center at Lake Arrowhead. They nailed the verisimilitude right down to the mint-green paper, used their most adult handwriting to address the envelopes to their own houses, mailed them from the post office nearest Ulysses S. Grant High School, then flung their ripped-open contents at their stupid respective mothers. WHAT, Mom, you didn’t even know that the ninth-grade summer trip was next week? Child neglect! Jesus H. Christ! I need forty-six dollars, cash. It was exactly the sort of project to fill the late-vacation days, when their eyes were numb to the television and their beds gummy with so much shed sunburnt skin. So pleased were they by their own thorough craftiness that they almost wished Bonnie or Rita would squint into the fine print, detecting something fishy, something off, if only for the chance to make up even more. But neither Bonnie nor Rita were that kind of mother.
“Do you think they’ll figure it out, though?” Judy asks. “What if they’re at, like, Vons, and they run into Stephanie? Or Melissa’s mom? Or Mrs. Lombardi?” These worries, vague all along, are solidifying now as she says them. What would her mother think? What, if she discovered Judy missing, would she feel?
Meghan sighs. She has one hand on a doorstop copy of Stephen King’s It, which she’s been adamantly opening and closing for so many months the book has become a kind of permanent, spooky accessory to her otherwise beachy beauty. “Yeah, like your mom is going to run into anyone anywhere,” Meghan says. “Except maybe the bar.”
It stings because it’s true, and because Meghan knows enough to say it. Meghan’s mother, Rita, won’t uncover the girls’ lie because she works sixty-hour weeks catering sets in Studio City. Every morning and every night she’s at the gym, training for one of her competitions. (Judy knows Rita best tornadoing through the front door after a 5:00 a.m. power-pump session, slick-faced and yapping, hardly able to complete a sentence before she’s grinding a shake and running the shower. A 1994 calendar features Rita as April: a look on her face like childbirth, her calves and quads as orange and greased as a Thanksgiving turkey on a grocery-store coupon.) But Bonnie’s hobbies have no place on a wall calendar. Judy’s mother follows an inverse regimen (sleep, drink, sex, repeat) when she isn’t working at Sunset Dialysis, hooking real kidneys up to fake kidneys. Whiskey, tequila, the antiseptic sting of vodka when you think you’re reaching for a glass of water—red wine that leaves stains on the granite, the coffee table, Judy’s open social studies textbook. The Trail of Tears, ringed maroon. Judy wishes she could say that this is all the fault of Rick, her mother’s new husband—something that started with him—but it’s been this way forever, and if anything, Rick’s presence has made Bonnie’s drinking more of a party, at least, and less of a sad movie.
Judy looks deliberately out the window and makes her voice blasé. “What are you going to say if Cassie asks you how It is and you have to admit you can’t read?”
When she looks back at Meghan she can’t help but grin. But Meghan affects a vampy, open-mouthed stare and mumbles, “Juvenile.” She shoves the book back into her pack, swapping it for her Discman, the slipped-on headphones a signal that they’re done talking. Judy doesn’t have a Discman yet, only a Walkman still, which she decided to bring, then put back, then decided to bring, but finally put back again while packing this morning. Now she wishes she had it: Tom Petty singing in sweet agreement—You don’t know how it feels … to be meeeee—a song she and Meghan played on repeat and crooned a cappella, walking arm in arm down Magnolia, every single afternoon of eighth grade. But Meghan says they are over that song now (It’s old) and over Tom Petty altogether (He’s old). With high school in sight, they like this now—the boppy horns and nasty lyrics fuzzing out of Meghan’s headphones, a chunky-guy band Judy has listened to begrudgingly but hasn’t yet “gotten into,” even as she knows that, next year, if she wants to be one of the girls who loiter in the parking lot of Tribal Expressions after school, who wear purple lipstick and burn patchouli sticks and date skaters—if she wants to be one of the girls that Meghan will effortlessly become, she’d better give this music a more generous chance. If the CD is on at the party tonight, Judy decides, she’ll dance.
Instead of the Walkman, Judy opted to haul along her beading caddy with the broken latch, which she wiggles open now. She’d asked for a Caboodle last Christmas but got this cheapo generic instead. Through the tangle of begun and abandoned projects, of fishing line and crimp beads, she hunts for the spool of stretch cord, thinking she’ll start something new. A bracelet appears in her mind like a holy vision: alternating green and pink groupings culminating in a tarnished silver fleur-de-lis. Or green and black and then a pewter skull and crossbones. She’ll pretend to stumble across the bracelet casually, then present it to Cassie in some offhand moment—Oh, I made this thing I don’t want; do you, like, want it?—handing over one or the other, the flowers or the bones, depending on who Cassie turns out to be. And maybe Cassie, whoever she is, will wear it to the party that night and say to everyone, Isn’t it cool? My friend Judy made it!
Meghan and Judy—but mostly Meghan—met Cassie last month, because Judy now has a computer: Rick’s living-room Hewlett Packard, which Judy is allowed to use as long as no one is expecting a phone call, or when Rick and her mother are upstairs (which is often—they lug up cartons of orange juice and handles of vodka and don’t emerge for hours, playing something the girls have termed screwdriver motel), is just one of many treasures in the paradisal new house. At Rick’s, a liquidy TV evokes the screen at the AMC, a second refrigerator in the garage holds back-stocked soda and frozen egg rolls, and sprinklers come on automatically each evening, ensuring a flush green border of uniform, unspotty lawn. Judy has, at long last, her own room—aqua walled, light filled, with a ceiling fan decaled with glow-in-the-dark stars and a mattress and box spring all to herself (in the old apartment at the Valley Arms, she and Bonnie had shared, to her growing shame, a water bed in the single, cramped bedroom). All of this is possible because Rick is rich-ish, she’s training herself to remember: to focus on the positives of this new life and leave the one big negative—Rick himself—way-down submerged, like a floaty stepped on underwater. Never mind that Judy locks and relocks her door each night. Has woken more than once in a cold sweat, hallucinating hands on the knob. That Rick’s hands—at first just regular—now strike her as too full of cartilage, too big and too powerful, something in their mass implying lies and an unfair advantage, even as he lint-rolls, harmlessly, fastidiously, the polos and sport coats he wears to coach junior varsity volleyball. That his smell—mayonnaise and rubber, warm beer and the Black Ice car fresheners that hang five deep from the rearview mirrors of the Camrys and Corollas at Rick B’s E-Z Driving School—is sharp in her nose the moment she enters the front door and then, eerily, fades. The smell doesn’t really go away—she only acclimates to it, she knows; the subtlest betrayal by her senses.
After they moved in with Rick in June, it was hardly a question that Judy’s new house would become the girls’ default hangout (Meghan’s own apartment, a moldy garden-level at the Sandpiper, was only a small step up from the dark hovel at the Valley Arms). On dazed, soggy-butted, chlorinated afternoons, the HP entirely their own, the girls dragged an extra chair over to the desk, dialed up, listened to the modem’s crunch, waited, waited, and—online! They clicked and watched, hesitant at first, explorers in an abstract territory teeming with glitchy life. Each new screen led to another screen, each underlined link led to another choice of links. There was a burrowing quality about it all, more like an ant farm than a web.
W, w, w, dot, Meghan typed. She’d discovered the website last spring in Ms. Olicky’s computer class. A purple screen constructed itself inch by inch, with the words Through Thick N Thin loaded in a Chicken Soup for the Soul font. Clip-art flowers on the left and a graphic of a woman’s waist, encircled by a measuring tape that cinched and uncinched in jerky stop-motion. At first the site seemed to promote some churchy brand of health advice—something for old ladies—and Judy had thought Meghan was joking or misled. But if you scrolled down to the chat window’s babble, it became clear that the cryptic screen names were as living and messed up as real people, real girls, and just as united by common enemies: muffin tops and cellulite, double chins and stretch marks, bikinis and calories and unvanquishable feelings of helplessness. Look, look, look, Meghan would point to Judy, whenever the screen names swapped tips. Ipecac, salt water, mustard seeds. Toothbrushes down the throat, of course, cabbage soup, and laxatives. If anyone you knew had Ritalin, try to get some Ritalin. Text after text appeared, a conversation you had to elbow—keystroke—your way into, and before Judy knew it, Natural_blondie was born, a two-dimensional Meghan existent mostly in exclamation marks and misspellings, desperate questions tossed one after another into the stream of other desperate questions. That summer, Rick’s computer went from novelty to necessity; for hours at a time, Meghan hunted and pecked, her face bowed to the keyboard, oblivious to anything else. When Judy suggested maybe they should tan in the backyard? Or walk to the gas station for chips?—a lost look clouded Natural_blondie’s eyes; the glazed vacancy of the newly addicted. Judy, having no idea what to think, ventured into the kitchen to eat handfuls of Froot Loops from the box.
Cassie_freakme_81 appeared again and again—a being Judy thought of as existing solely in the chat realm but who was, Meghan argued, her good friend now and super nice, only a few years older than they were but with the top-tier stats Natural_blondie aspired to. Cassie weighed 116 at five foot nine, bragged of a thigh gap large enough to fit a pool noodle through, and had recently been discovered by Wet n Wild cosmetics—she’d done some shoots and her photographer was a-maze-ing. Meghan summarized, “Cassie lives in San Luis Obispo. Her boyfriend is a basketball player at the college. She wants us to visit.”
“Both of us?” Judy asked.
Meghan rolled her eyes. “Of course. Of course she wants to meet my best friend in the entire freaking universe.”
“Yeah, but who is she?”
Meghan blew air through her lips. “I’ve lost four pounds in five days. I trust her. She wants us to come to this party next week.”
It was true; Meghan was looking skeletal and ecstatic, her hipbones flaring like wings where her cutoffs sagged, her casual eighth-grade eating disorder evolving, to Judy’s alarm, into something full-blown—serious. Meghan had decided on a number, ninety-nine (as in pounds), arbitrary but magic, that she’d convinced herself was the secret to becoming a model—a dream she claimed she’d had since she was five years old but which Judy suspected she’d formulated more recently. Tall, projected to be but not yet Cassie’s reported height, Meghan stepped on the scale every time she visited the bathroom, tracking the numbers in a sophisticated notebook filched from Rita. 7/27 9:36 a.m.: 106 lbs., 7/27 1:42 p.m.: 106 lbs., 7/28 9:40 a.m.: 105 lbs., 7/29 10:02 a.m.: 103 lbs!, and so on, stars and frowny faces in the margins. But that August at Judy’s, not long before the party invite, she had a sort of breakthrough, when Cassie_freakme_81 typed, Try eating only expired food it really wrks!—and Meghan, steeling herself against the challenge, systematically scoured Rick’s kitchen. She sampled bluing bread, cheese growing hairstyles, salsa not meant to be effervescent but which now, lid off, effervesced. Judy tried to talk her down, but her eyes burned with determination: she was a suicide hanging from the ledge. Poor already-skinny, already-beautiful Meghan tasted and choked on her feast—then spewed her brains out all over the downstairs bathroom.
Beyond the immediate consequences (benefits?) of eating mold, the method had, too, a Pavlovian conditioning effect. A week later, Natural_blondie wrote, Food is totally over for me now! I don’t even want it anymore, and detailed her gross success. They’d switched to instant messaging, and Freakme’s response burbled up. U HAVE to come celibrate with me and my bf this wknd! Were having a party.
Meghan turned to Judy, the sockets of her eyes too lavender, Halloween looking, even as she smiled sweetly. “Judy? Can we? I want to.”
What could Judy do? She said, “Our moms, though?” knowing they weren’t the real problem; the real problem was that Cassie_whoever was a name without a face, a blurry Someone, maybe not a teen model at all but a lonely basement murderer straight off Dateline. And yet Judy knew how easily disappointment could become wrath when Meghan did not get her way. At the end of sixth grade, she’d ousted Melissa from their threesome while Judy stood by mute, and the best friendship became theirs alone, poised meanly against anyone who threatened. Meghan was powerful like that; capable of doing things before the thought had even occurred to Judy. Obliquely Judy felt that, if she wanted to learn the secret to life’s entry, she’d better stick with someone like this: braver than herself, and savvier, who knew, among other things, how to convincingly lie to train conductors.
Copyright © 2022 by Leigh N. Gallagher
