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They’re lounging round the Chateau, smoking weed in the stale air that still smells like chickens even after the unfortunate demise of John B’s rooster, when JJ says ‘I just, like, don’t think rich people can be gay.’
Kie notices a small hole in the fabric of the sofa and begins to pull at the loose threads with her finger. There’s a pregnant pause where they all silently weigh up whether or not it’s worth the hit to their sanity to dispute JJ on this - sometimes, when they’re all hanging out and he says some bizarro shit like isn’t it weird that, like, on your feet, your big toe is the longest, but on your hand, your middle finger is the longest? Imagine if your middle toe was your longest toe, man , and they’ll all make eye contact and implicitly agree that engaging with him would just be an exhausting and largely unpleasant experience for everyone involved.
Today, though, Sarah must be feeling argumentative, or maybe she’s just bored; you can only listen to Pope and John B argue about Alien vs Aliens so many times, and Kie’s certainly hit her limit. Maybe that’s not the case with Sarah, though. Maybe Sarah likes hearing Pope say the original Alien is a prime example of how mundanity can be used to harness horror. Maybe she likes listening to John B scoff I can’t believe you like it because it’s more boring as though he didn’t say the exact same thing last weekend when they had this exact same argument high in the empty middle school parking lot.
Whatever. Kie likes to think she’s given up on trying to interpret Sarah Cameron. She no longer aims to discern meaning from her actions - nowadays, Sarah is just a collection of impulses and wide smiles and she’s Kie’s friend and she’s fun to be around and Kie does not remember the end of her Kook year, sitting up in her room like some stupid girl in a paranormal teen love story trying to figure out what she’d done to make the delightfully damaged hearthrob recoil from her.
That’s a silly analogy. It sounds glamorous, romantic, comes with the expectation of a happy ending. The knowledge that this is a second act lull, and a third act triumph is guaranteed. Kie thinks she would like that, would like certainty. Nothing was certain with Sarah Cameron. They existed in that strange, nebulous space reserved solely for teenage girl friendships, clinging to each other like bubblegum, sweet and sticky and ephemeral. One piece can only last you so long; a brisk, ten-minute chew, and then it’s spat out, still damp with saliva. They were strangers, and then they were rescuing sea turtles and she was thinking this is the best day of my life because every day is the best day of your life when you’re 15 and then they didn’t speak to each other anymore, and that was that.
They’re friends again now. It’s water under the bridge, sea ebbing and flowing as they get baked on beaches and swap giggly, exasperated glances when JJ tries to explain hollow earth theory to them with faintly concerning sincerity. They’re always giggling now. They’re sunkissed and stoned and sometimes they have girls’ days , where Sarah paints her nails and she gives Sarah half-serious surfing lessons. Sarah talks about John B, sometimes - Kie’s never sure what they say about him, really, but it turns boys are an endless well of conversation she can tap whenever she feels like. Sometimes she thinks that part of why she started seeing Pope was so that she would have something to talk about on girls' days but sometimes she uses plastic straws and wonders if JJ’s some kind of secret savant, so everyone’s wrong sometimes, and this is likely one of those cases.
They’re always giggling, now. They’re normal teenage girls who have juvenile love affairs with their friends, or try to at least. Sarah has very nice blonde hair and smiles all the time. Kie is fun and likeable and easygoing and she doesn’t call the cops on people’s parties.
(Nothing was funny back when they stopped talking. She’d picked at the beds of her nails until they bled and felt startlingly alone for someone who still had, like, at least three friends. She thinks maybe trying to understand Sarah Cameron has always been overrated. And Kie is Fun Kie now, likeable and easygoing, and she does not hound Sarah for wearing environmentally un-friendly flip-flops made of synthetic rubber, but the harder she tries to be normal the harder she seems to find it to relate to her friends and she spends a lot of conversations laughing in lieu of having something to say and picking at holes in the furniture and thinking ugly things she does not say out loud. Everything in her head seems to have gotten a lot less pleasant and everything in her mouth is beginning to wither.)
Anyway. Sarah’s rolling her eyes, back pressed against the bottom half of the sofa so her head lolls against the cushions. ‘JJ, what the fuck are you talking about?’ she asks, lips pressed together, halfway between exhausted and exasperated. It’s almost a rhetorical question; by now she’s too jaded to expect a coherent answer from him.
Sprawled on the sofa, JJ shrugs, hair flopping in his eyes like a singer in a boy band or one of those gay little dogs with the long flowing fur. Kie isn’t usually homophobic inside her own head. She’s making an exception. ‘It’s just like, rich and gay are different vibes, man. I dunno what to tell you.’
John B, perched on the arm of the couch, worries at his lip with his teeth like Hilary Duff and Wanda Sykes are going to burst through the door at any moment and call him out for casual gay-bashing. ‘Is that homophobic? I feel like that might be homophobic.’
Kie’s still picking at that hole in the couch. She wonders if it’s a cigarette burn, or just general wear and tear. JJ shakes his head firmly, because he is apparently an expert on gay issues now despite not being fully aware of homosexuality until like a month ago, and only knowing one other gay person, who happens to be his own boyfriend. ‘Nah, dude, definitely not. It’s more homophobic to say that rich people are gay, actually.’
Sarah’s blinking, lashes fluttering and eyes screwed up. Kie’s inner elbow itches. She looks over at the dirt and cobwebs congealing in the corner of the window, an ugly, black smear on the white pane. Thinks about pressing her forehead to the glass. Nothing good has ever come from giving JJ what he wants, and she wishes they would stop. ‘Why would you ever think that? Like, ever?’ Sarah’s asking, somewhere between baffled and bitchy, sucks on her vape and blows a shitty little cloud without inhaling properly. Sarah’s actually quite bad at vaping; Kie thinks she just does it so JJ doesn’t get a superiority complex about being the only one in the group with a nicotine habit. Not that she consumes much nicotine - JJ once rolled her an actual cigarette and she had to go and lie down after three puffs because she was too dizzy. This is what Kie thinks about as she looks out the window and pointedly does not listen to their conversation - failed attempts to prove yourself.
‘No, I kinda get what he means,’ Pope chips in, delightful as ever and also probably the only one of who has anything remotely substantive to say. Conversations go like this a lot when they smoke together - one of them, usually JJ or John B, will make some stupid, stoned observation, and the rest of them toss it around a bit until Pope interjects with something actually intelligent and they all go hmm and have to take a moment to sit around and digest it. ‘It’s like, in the past, rich people were more able to be gay, because their money gave them the resources to protect themselves from discrimination. But in doing this, they were automatically divorcing themselves from regular gay communities, who were just struggling to get by day by day. It’s like a paradox.’
‘Yeah!’ JJ’s nodding emphatically now, slaps Pope’s knee. ‘Exactly! That’s exactly what I meant!’ JJ’s always been tactile with him; he is even more so now, because they are a couple, after all. Kie might have failed to mention this thus far. An innocuous mistake. They’ve been dating for over a fortnight now and nothing is different, because JJ’s always been very touchy and a bit weird and Pope’s always been very normal about this in a way that invited it but also everything’s different in a way that no-one else seems to have picked up on. She had wondered, briefly, at one point last week, if she was crazy. She decided against it. She can’t be crazy. She has a good sense of direction and is their voice of reason even if she lets everyone else think it’s Pope. She doesn’t know what it is, then. Maybe she’s just perceptive. She doesn’t feel very perceptive. She looks out the window and tries not to pay attention.
This is how it happened: Pope had casually come out to them as bisexual when they were all drunk in the hot tub just under a month ago. It was a nice moment, and they’d all toasted with their beers to his broadening romantic prospects, and everyone was really normal about it except from John B who got kind of misty-eyed and kept trying to hold his hand. Whatever. The point is that everything was fine. Then, 12 hours later, JJ came out as gay, and another 12 hours later he came out as Pope’s new boyfriend and Kie had felt somewhat disconcerted by this in a way she couldn’t quite understand at the time and still doesn’t now.
Incredulous scoffs from John B and Sarah the idea that Pope’s observation was exactly what JJ meant. ‘There’s no way that’s what you meant,’ Sarah scorns, slouching back against the cushions. Kie’s knee bounces. She’s doing a bad job at not paying attention. She quite likes JJ and Sarah’s whole blonde-on-blonde hatred thing.
‘Yeah, and like, there’s tons of rich gay celebrities,,’ John B says earnestly. ‘Like, I think Ellen’s at least a millionaire.’
JJ takes a hit from his blunt and exhales with a long-suffering sigh. ‘Dude, we’ve been over this. Ellen’s like, not a real person, man.’
The rest of the group erupt into confused dissent at that; Kie stays quiet, even though she has a decent amount of opinions on the discussion at hand (being gay, not the status of Ellen’s personhood). Kie knows a lot about gay people, actually. She can identify at least six different pride flags and hasn’t eaten at Chick-fil-A for, like, two years, which isn’t just because the nearest one is a decent hour 15 minute drive away in Chesapeake.
JJ doesn’t know any of this. He thought Ru Paul’s drag race was ‘like, something to do with cars.’ She has half a mind to write a letter to the Gay Times or something, and tell them that JJ is a fraudulent homosexual who probably doesn’t know the difference between bisexual and pansexual, and fell asleep fifteen minutes in when John B tried to show them God’s Own Countr y (there is a lot of context to this - John B had gone through a brief Catholic phase wherein he believed that he was hearing spiritual voices and had a direct link to God, and had put on the movie after seeing the title on Netflix and mistakenly believing it had something to with religion. It did not, and his Catholic phase came to an abrupt end when he realised that he was not, in fact, hearing voices because he had a direct link to God, but because JJ’s cousin had been selling them bad ecstasy).
Putting that can of worms aside, she isn’t sure why she has this burning urge to expose JJ, make it evident that he’s doing this wrong. She isn’t sure of many things nowadays. Sarah meets her eyes across the room, jerks her in JJ’s direction and pulls a face like can you believe him . Kie giggles politely in response and it’s the first noise she’s made in like five minutes and it’s not even fucking genuine.
It’s like this: JJ has been gay for approximately three weeks and he’s already making it everyone else’s problem. On an unrelated note, Kie is beginning to think there is something fundamentally wrong with her.
Well, not exactly. That sounds very melodramatic. Silly, and if there’s one thing Kie’s never been, it’s silly. Always down to earth, practical, telling John B he’s an idiot when two cats in the neighbourhood go missing and he decides they need to launch a full-scale investigation into a potential pet-napping ring, giving a firm no when JJ says something like alright, hear me out: wouldn’t it be sick if we tied my dirtbike to the back of the Phantom and went, like, water-skiing, hiding the keys when Pope says Kie, can I borrow your dad’s car for something?
And maybe the word fundamental is an over-exaggeration. It’s hardly some big, universe-swallowing problem. Her days go on as normal; she wakes up, brushes her teeth, argues with her parents about silly things like who used up the last of the milk, hangs out with her friends, surfs, occasionally engages in some light mystery-solving. It’s more of a growing sense that she’s missing out on something everyone else is in on, that her life is slightly off-kilter, headed down a track that’s taking her further and further away from everyone she knows and she doesn’t know when she started down this track or how to get off.
This sense of wrongness has been there for some time, sitting in her throat like a cherry pit trapped mid-swallow. She thinks she first became properly aware of it when she and John B had that shit little kiss they don’t talk about anymore. It was awkward, and clumsy, and she wasn’t even sure if she thought John B was good-looking - she’d tried to assess it objectively on several occasions, look at him critically, but she always got stuck on his big, doe eyes, unable to decide if they were delectable or disconcerting.
She’d gone for it anyway, though, because he was the leader of the group and she was the only girl, and logic and every piece of media under the sun suggested they should at least give it a try. She remembers that John B’s hair was really soft, like, really soft, and at the time she’d wondered if she was weird for noticing this, and then she’d decided that John B was weird for being a 16 year old boy and having the silkiest model tresses she’d ever run her fingers through. Her hands had smelt like apple shampoo for the rest of the day, and it was nice and cloying in equal measures, which sort of describes John B himself now that she comes to think about it.
They never really spoke about the kiss in detail and she assumes John B just chalked it up to raging teenage hormones or something. She tries to do the same, although she is excruciatingly aware that for her it was a conscious, logical decision. Whatever. Two days later John B is embroiled in the most epic star-crossed teen love affair since Romeo and Juliet and their little liaison dissolves into the chaos like a grudging dad in the crowd at a One Direction concert.
She’s not even sure if Sarah knows. Most likely John B’s told her. Probably. Kie doesn’t know what they talk about when they’re alone.
Anyway, this thing, this growing sense of wrongness was easy enough to brush off at that point - John B, god bless him, was earnest as lamb, and although she wasn’t exactly sure what her type was she was fairly sure it wasn’t boys who teared up at home remodelling shows on a remarkably frequent basis because they’re just so happy with their new kitchen, Kie . It was when she slept with Pope that it really presented itself as a problem, bloomed from a pit to a fully-formed cherry, stem scratching the back of her throat and berry cramming itself up against the sides of her oesophagus.
There was nothing wrong with Pope; he wasn’t overly sentimental and he didn’t have Coraline-esque button eyes. He’s objectively attractive and he’d been responsive and just gentle enough and the fire had flickered over their shoulders and the stars twinkled over their heads and the ocean kissed the shore in a calming rhythm and she remembered being proud of herself for having such a picturesque first time, one she could recount for years to come to moony eyes and jealous smiles, other girls torn between admiration and envy, one that would make Sarah grin and squeeze her arm and say shit, Kie, you’ve turned him into a romantic already . (Kie doesn’t agree with this assessment. If anything, it’s the other way round. She thinks, in another life, Pope could turn her into a romantic, if she let him.)
But her self-congratulation had been short-lived because once they got down to the actual act she had realised that she wasn’t quite sure what to do, or say, or if she was even enjoying herself. She felt like she was watching them on a screen, very far away, and the volume was turned right down and she didn’t have subtitles and she was lost in a plot she’d done her very best to follow. She could’ve asked Pope to stop but then that would’ve been a waste of the beautiful setting, and she’d probably never lose her virginity in a more movie-perfect way than this, she reasoned, so she thought of the teen dramas that used to play in the background during sleepovers with Sarah, Pretty Little Liars and Gossip Girl and the like. They’d never really paid attention to them, preferred to go into her kitchen and compete to see who could make the biggest sandwich only using what was in the fridge or break into her dad’s office to steal his fountain pens and use them draw tattoos on each other’s arms. They’d just put them on the TV because it was the done thing at sleepovers like that, a facsimile of typical teenage girlhood.
But whatever, Kie wracked her brains and swished her hair like a CW actress with a fresh blowout and did her best to parrot the lines she could remember from their admittedly tame and infrequent sex scenes, imagination filling in the gaps where the PG-13 rating had failed her.
And then it was over, and she’d admittedly had a fairly mediocre time, so she treasured the story, embellished her memory of the event for sharing purposes, and then did her best to deal with things like an adult because Kie refused to be a coward or a liar. Maybe it was just that her and Pope were too good friends, she reasoned, and she told him as much, and he was fine and everything was normal, and then Pope was gay (bi if she's being technical, sorry), and JJ was gay as well and nothing was normal anymore.
She doesn’t harbour the same resentment towards Pope for this that she does JJ. Pope’s hard to get irritated at and JJ’srather easy to get irritated at, so that’s a start, she guesses. She thinks it’s more like this: Pope had done his bit for her, he’d given her his best shot; he’d liked her, and given her an excellent story. She owed him, and he was lovely and gorgeous, so really it was inevitable that some man would fall in love with him somewhere along the line, and maybe his taste in men was a little questionable at present, but he deserved to be happy, really, so she had no reservations there.
JJ was different. For starters, he was just, like, a lot more annoying about the whole thing than Pope, all smug and constantly coming out with gleeful, gloating my boyfriend s, confidently interjecting his beliefs about gay issues into conversation like he has a PhD in gender studies and didn’t get thrown out of their sociology class for throwing chairs because I was bored, and there was still a whole half hour left .
But. Kie is not a coward or a liar, so she’ll admit to herself that there might be another reason. Because, for a while, she’d been wondering whether JJ had something fundamentally wrong with him too.
Well. Maybe she should rephrase that. There are a lot of things fundamentally wrong with JJ, but what she’s referring to, specifically, is the sense of disconnect that’s been growing since her failed fling with Pope. This is what she had noticed, at the time: JJ’s never had a serious girlfriend. She knows this much. Her knowledge of any other relations he may or may not have had with women is spotty, and she’d like to keep it that way, thank very much, but she was willing to bet he wasn’t the Casanova his cartoonish anecdotes made him out to be. JJ talked about his experiences with girls like a cross between a 12 year old boy trying to impress their friends on Xbox Live and a romance novel marketed at middle-aged women, overly lewd one minute then eye-wateringly romantic the next. It was a load of shit. None of them ever called him out on it though. She doesn’t know why.
And then there’s this: John B and Sarah are in midst of the most insane love story ever told, and her and John B had their dry little smooch and there was her thing with Pope, and then there’s JJ, just JJ, who has always been on the edge of their bizarre love square. And maybe she was adding up 2 + 2 and getting 5 and she sort of hoped she was, because JJ was frankly the last person she wanted to have deep personal struggles in common with but. She had wondered, nonetheless. Watched and wondered and waited.
But then JJ was out and she felt oddly blindsided and a little stung, as though she was expecting some kind of two-week notice, hey, Kie, just giving you a fortnight-long adjustion period to the news of my impending homosexuality . It’s fucked. She couldn’t care less about who JJ sleeps with, like really, genuinely, there is nothing on earth she wants to think about less.
And yet after she heard she sat in her room and felt pathetically betrayed, like a scorned lover or a teenage girl, like someone whose partner has just let it slip that they’re married, like she was walking across a glass floor only it wasn’t glass at all, there was nothing there, and now she’s been wrong-footed and is falling from a great height and won’t die but will definitely break an arm or something at least. How dare you , she wanted to say to him, but that would be awkward and get her funny looks because JJ is the weird blonde kid in her friend group who she likes and tolerates at the same time and the deepest conversation they’ve ever had is about whether or not they would try crystal meth if the opportunity presented itself.
(She would like to know where he found the words for it. How he got let in on the secret. This is JJ, and his entire world can be traced from the start of the Cut to the edge of Figure Eight; he’s like a goldfish, doing laps around the same bowl and then getting so fucked he forgets it all ten seconds later. Well. Maybe minus the last part. She’s not sure how many goldfishes dabble in recreational drug use, but you know what she means. Kie, on the other hand, goes on vacations abroad and retweets thinkpieces about tokenism every time Marvel announces their first gay character and reads articles with titles like 10 Queer Indie Artists You Should Be Supporting Right Now . How did he find the words.)
She’s lying in the hammock at the edge of the Chateau with John B, passing a joint back and forth as some shit country song by Taylor Swift or Carrie Underwood leaks tinnily from his phone (it’s definitely Taylor Swift, but she likes to pretend her music taste is so distinguished she doesn’t recognise her voice right away. 10 Queer Indie Artists You Should Be Supporting Right Now, remember? She’s not supposed to be attuned to mainstream pop. She wonders if everyone likes the things they like because it makes them look a certain way - merchandise, songs linked on your Instagram story, what is an interest in isolation? What do you like, curled on your bed in the middle of the night like a hairless cat, bare and vaguely repulsive in your nakedness?
Maybe she hates Taylor Swift because of internalised misogyny, she considers, or maybe she’s smart enough to see past that narrative and discern that she just doesn’t like her music very much. There’s always a deeper level of self-awareness you could be operating on. She is beginning to find this concept rather exhausting. She has thought of herself as being very self-aware for a very long time; she shakes her head at all her friend’s stupid antics and only allows herself to get carried away on fitting occasions. She is decently wealthy and fairly well-versed and yet she is beginning to realise she doesn’t understand herself much at all. Kie is beginning to think there is something fundamentally wrong with her . Something , vague and inscrutable, a growing sense of unease. What is true self-awareness, how do you become fully conscious of yourself - by controlling and constructing your every movement, aware of the image you’re creating, or by spontaneity, trusting your basest instinct? She thinks about how she has stopped trying to understand Sarah Cameron, about actions without roots, impulses and wide smiles. She wonders if this makes her laid-back and amiable or just a coward.)
Whatever. Jesus. If she was really self-aware, she would recognise that she’s being super pretentious, but she’s never been very good at discerning the line between pretension and passion. Fuck, she doesn’t know very much does she? It’s like this, Kie: there’s a void that stretches from your neck to between your thighs and that’s why you didn’t feel anything when Pope touched you, and there is something inherently evil about the idea of a void, the absence of something, black holes are a threat every time someone flies a spaceship in a movie. You have a void, so you are a void, so you’re evil, or maybe not evil, just wrong. There should be something where you are but there’s just you and you don’t know what that means. You will lie here with John B and think about how you don’t even know whether he’s good-looking or not; his face is a blur of features and maybe your black hole is beginning to swallow other people up and maybe that’s why you don’t know much of anything anymore.
Shit. She’s doing it again. She feels it’s important to underline that all of this spawned from a thought about Taylor Swift.
So, the music’s playing, and the phone’s right there, lolling against her bare thigh, but she’s too stoned and too comfortable to bother changing it, and also Taylor’s about to get to the bridge and it’d probably be rude to interrupt her. The others are over by the house somewhere because JJ had sworn he was going to beat his record for number of beers shotgunned in a minute tonight, no, you guys, don’t understand, I just have like, a really good feeling , so Pope’s acting as timekeeper and Sarah’s being an independent adjudicator. She has no interest in watching JJ cough and dribble beer over himself though, definitely not for a whole minute - ten seconds might be kind of funny, but a minute is just pushing it - so she’d headed out and John B had followed her. They’ve been holding hands for like three songs now, elbows knocking together and thighs chafing. John B had just slipped his palm into hers halfway through the chorus of Fade Into You and while she would probably never initiate such a gesture, it was quite nice, actually, so she had given his fingers a little squeeze and allowed him to stay there. She’s looking down at their clasped hands now, and wondering if John B hands have always been this big and she’s just never noticed, if being with Sarah has legitimised him in some way to her, made him a real man who now has accordingly large man hands. Maybe she’s just high. Whatever.
John B’s humming along to the music, eyes shut. ‘Good song,’ he murmurs contentedly, insightful as ever, half-nodding as though to say so true, John B .
Kie’s caught somewhere between a wince and a grin, exhales and feels the polyester of her funky little shirt rub up against his bare arm. ‘You know how I feel about Taylor.’
John B sighs with a significantly more world-weary air than you would expect a 16 year old named John B to have, but he has almost died like twelve times, so maybe it’s fitting. ‘You don’t know her like I do.’
Kie rolls her eyes, head bouncing against the canvas. ‘Oh my god, John B. Parasocial relationship much.’ This is the kind of thing she says to assert her worth as a worldly girl who knows things, or at least uses Twitter; these are the kind of things she says to prove that she has long arms which extend far beyond the OBX and long legs which may very well carry her out of here one day. Now, if all goes to plan, John B should ask what does that mean? and she will explain to him with the grace of a parent broadening their child’s horizons and feel, for a moment, like she could eat this whole island for breakfast.
John B is silent for a minute, seemingly contemplative, and Kie smiles to herself, tucks her hair behind her ears and feels things fall into place. But John B’s never been good at doing what other people want him to do so instead he just sniffs, takes a hit of his blunt, and says ‘Yeah, man.’ Pauses again, exhales sagely, looks out onto the horizon like a character on a promotional poster. ‘I loved that movie.’
Kie wrinkles up her face in confusion. ‘ What? ’ she asks, nose scrunched, halfway between laughter and irritation. She’s beginning to notice she’s been torn a lot recently, halfway this and halfway that, the person she would like to be and the person she is becoming gradually more and more sure she is. Maybe it’s just a mood swing or her time of the month or maybe she’s just a gigantic bitch and isn’t able to hide it anymore. Maybe that’s feminist, actually, but proabably not. She says maybe a lot now too.
John B is still the picture of indolence, stretches his legs so that his socked feet spill over the sides of the hammock. ‘The movie Sarah made us watch, y’know. Parasocial , or something. About the family that conned their way into working for rich people.’
A bubble bursts in Kie’s throat, and to her surprise, she finds herself laughing. It is a ridiculous, sitcom-level contrivance, but it's achingly John B because of that, warm and good and all-American, canned laughter ready for when the real thing fails so that there's never a beat of silence. There is something about being around him that makes one feel entirely fixable. ‘Parasite ? D’you mean Parasite ?’
John B’s grinning, does a silly little hand gesture - palm flat, twisting his wrist in a circle - as if to say close enough . ‘Okay, that’s basically what I said,’ he tells her, words muffled by her peals of laughter. Realising that she’s not going to stop giggling any time soon, he changes tack. ‘Hey, I think we could do that, y’know,’ he says a little more seriously, turning his head to face her, eyes wide and earnest like the prettiest Fresian on the farm.
She laughs, again. ‘Do what? Con our way into a rich family?’ It’s strange, the way she talks about class with the other Pogues; in conversation, there tends to be a glass wall of sorts around her own socioeconomic status. They all know she’s different, can see it clear as day in her perfectly straight teeth and the way dirt seems to roll right off her. But they don’t talk about it, not really, only on the odd occasion when someone, usually JJ, is pissed at her and wants to bring her down a peg or two by calling her a rich girl playing pretend.
She is not rich, actually; she knows this because she reminds herself of it frequently, repeats it like an incantation. She is upper-middle class, thank you very much, although she never says this to JJ because she doesn’t think it’s what he wants to hear. She doesn’t tell JJ this either, but here’s her take on the situation: she thinks they’re all playing a perpetual game of pretend, the whole lot of them, herself included. When they were kids they existed in a kind of class-less utopia, where perhaps divides could be felt, but never named, never fully realised. They’re friends. Nobody wants to grow up. This is a universal truth, and she’s perfectly normal for acknowledging it.
John B’s nodding now, face warm and bright and sunkissed in a way that makes Kie think of egg yolk. Weird. That’s weird, right? God, she was just being normal and all. ‘Yeah, come on! We could get Pope in there as a tutor and stuff -’ another silly little hand gesture, this one a sort of wiggling motion with his palm to indicate Pope worming his way into this imaginary rich family - ‘it’d be so sick, dude.’
Kie’s still laughing, shaking her head. The conversation tails off pleasantly, dissipates like a popsicle under the sun; they sit there in warm, agreeable silence as Taylor tails off one song and Sugarland begin another, and god , John B’s music taste really is beyond hope. She’s looking at their hands and she’s thinking about how they haven’t been this close in months, not since the little middle school will-they-won’t-they thing they underwent in June at the ripe age of 16. She’s thinking about that kiss, about the weird, stilted way kids brush lips in school plays when the script calls for it, about braces and chapped lips and the taste of Gatorade and the fact that John B is currently married. She feels very small all of a sudden, and she thinks this is why she says, out of the blue, ‘Hey, John B? Did you ever tell Sarah that we, y’know, kissed?’
John B, mid-drag, chuckles and half-coughs as he exhales, sputtering a little, and something in her chest twinges with irritation like an elastic band snapping, thinks that John B isn’t recognising the severity of the situation and then tells herself it’s not serious at all. She’s Fun Kie. He’s wriggling around the hammock to get comfortable, tilting his head up to the sun like they’re not even having this conversation, eyes screwed up in somnolent bliss and she thinks that he may not be beautiful but god, he’s desirable. The sun drips down his forehead, trickles across the bridge of his nose, and for an ephemeral moment she wants to live in his bones like cold lives in the battered skeleton of the Chateau during winter, like scorned ghosts live in big, beautiful houses.
Then she catches sight of the mole on his left thigh, and remembers when they were in third grade and JJ told everyone your moles marked where you’d been killed in your past life and pointed to John B’s leg as an example, told everyone he’d been stabbed in the thigh and John B was so horrified he cried in the toilets for like ten minutes, and she gets over it pretty quickly. The Chateau smells anyway, which is why she’s out here in this hammock in the first place.
‘Uhh, yeah, I did, actually,’ he grins, turns his head to meet her eyes like they’re in on a joke together, mouth twitching expectantly, and she smiles back, because this is the answer she wanted, or maybe it isn’t, or maybe she doesn’t care either way. Maybe she can’t make up her mind as to how she feels about it because she wasn’t there. She was just an anecdote, an outline, a scorned ghost in a big, beautiful house.
In any case, she laughs, digs him in the ribs with her elbow because that was a selfish question, asked to satiate her curiosity rather than spark conversation and she doesn’t really have anything to say to him about it. ‘Oh, yeah?’ she teases, and decides that will suffice.
John B seems happy enough, grinning, nodding, eyes crinkled at the corners and she feels it again, that pang of wanting, because aside from the whole being framed for murder and almost killed by middle aged men thing being John B seems remarkably easy, actually. He likes Taylor Swift without pondering the implications this has for fourth-wave feminism or, like, the inherently performative nature of self. Maybe that’s just a boy thing. Kie doesn’t know. She doesn’t know much. She’s said this already. Sometimes she feels she’s trapped in a tight, constrained loop, a perpetual cycle of repetition, and other times she feels she’s very smart and worldly and her horizons are as broad as she wants them to be, and other times she feels like a small child who’s been left behind, whose kisses still feel like school play rehearsals and PG-13 TV shows.
‘Yeah,’ says John B, smiling all over, and they go back and forth like this for a few moments - Yeah? Oh, yeah? Yeah? - grinning, getting more and more up in each other’s faces, until the genesis of the exchange is entirely forgotten, until they’re sitting up in the hammock, torsos almost touching, chests puffed up, and pulling faces, stoned and stupid. She gets the sudden urge to push him, tackle him over the side onto the grass below, so she does and then they’re screeching, wrestling, rolling back and forth in the dirt.
It’s like this, Kie: you have a void that stretches from your neck to your thighs, but you can still feel John B’s hand when he places his palm in yours, and you can still feel the warmth of his flesh as you scuffle in the undergrowth, and you can look at the mole on his thigh and remember, and you might not know who you are but you know where you come from.
(She does not ask John B what Sarah said, when he told her. She has given up trying to understand Sarah Cameron, remember?)
It’s a few weeks later and they’re round the Chateau again, except they’re playing tipsy Monopoly this time, which is exactly what it sounds like and also something they haven’t done in years because last time they did she tried to strangle JJ with her bare hands, plus she’s done some reading since then and decided that board games which encourage single people to exert ownership over a significant chunk of the housing market are bad, actually.
The game is going a little better this time, which is to say that no-one’s tried to kill anybody yet, which is to say that the most pandemonium that’s occurred so far is when Sarah refused to sell JJ the last yellow he needed to complete a set and he threatened to eat one of the dice if she didn’t hand it over and had to be physically restrained. Aside from that, it’s passed without incident, which is to say the game has run for about four hours and John B’s almost cried like, twice; he was the first one to fold, anyway, declaring bankruptcy two and a half hours in and going to play Wii Sports in the next room to help him ‘decompress’. It’s a close battle between the rest of them for about another hour, but Sarah’s eventually the next one to call it quits, and they all laugh and tease her about the fact that having multimillionaire real estate developer daddy didn’t help her much in the end, and she flips them off but stays in the room with them rather than joining John B, lolls across the sofa gives running commentary like it’s the Superbowl. At one point, she leans forward and rests a hand on Kie’s shoulder, whispers guidance in her ear, and Kie is starkly aware of the weight of her palm, the way one is aware of a thorn in their side, or a cherry pit in their throat.
JJ, the conniving little shit, is the next one to fold, declaring bankruptcy like five minutes before the end when it becomes clear Pope’s going to win and scooting over the couch to form a hasty, eleventh-hour alliance with him. He spends the next short while giving Pope subpar financial advice, which makes Kie wonder how he actually managed to get this far through the game in the first place (a question to which the answer is almost certainly cheating). He kisses Pope enthusiastically when he wins and spends the rest of the night bragging tastelessly about ‘their’ victory and last year Kie tried to strangle him with her bare hands but she’s fun now, so she sits on her palms and laughs at John B and Sarah’s story about the time they got French toast in a diner but John B thought French toast was just another way of saying croissants and was dismayed when they brought a plate of like, actual toast to him.
More funny anecdotes are shared and new ones are created; there’s a huge pandemonium about removing a massive spider Sarah unearths beneath a sofa cushion, with her and Sarah fighting for the more humanitarian approach and an increasingly hysterical trio of teenage boys imploring them to ‘ kill it! Just kill it , Sarah!’. The two of them win because Sarah Cameron has never lost an argument in her life and John B is kind of in love with her, which is such an understatement it sounds perversely funny even in her own head. They go out the back door and set the spider free into the cool evening air, just the two of them. It’s not a warm night but Kie is boiling hot, disobedient flesh simmering. She wonders if she has a fever coming on, or if maybe she’s already sick.
Sarah jokes about keeping the spider, hiding it in one of the boys’ shoes just to hear them squeal when they slip them back on. They debate whose reaction would be funniest and Kie proposes John B, a suggestion which Sarah readily agrees with, and she only feels a little bit mean. They’re laughing and Kie doesn’t feel that drunk but she must be worse than she thought because she can only see Sarah in flashes, a glimmer of blonde here, a blurry profile shot there. Sarah’s hands are cupped around the spider, and her nails are painted, multi-coloured and messy enough to exude a kind of effortless chic. When she opens her hands to let the spider go her palm looks naked in the fading light. This is the longest they’ve been alone together for a couple days.
They go back inside and John B shares his subpar ideas for potential tattoos (shoelaces tattooed over his real feet so it looks like he’s always wearing sneakers) and JJ shares the theory that Jack from the movie Titanic is a time-traveller. He receives very little audience support on this and gets overly defensive because JJ has always been bizarrely willing to shed blood defending the most inconsequential things. He’s reclining genteely on the sofa like a manicured socialite, one leg folded neatly over the other, but gesturing emphatically with his hands as though he’s a professor mid-lecture, so his vibe is a bit all-over the place and really rather off-putting.
Kie thinks about Sarah's artfully dishevelled nail polish and bare hands and wants, suddenly, with a fervour that startles her, to be a part of things. To perforate the film she’s beginning to feel dividing her from her friends, to slip through the birth canal and out the other side, shiny and earnest and fully-formed. She cannot help but feel like she’s been stuck in-utero forever, swimming around in the dark, a perpetual gestation, a never-ending childhood. Her body is not yet whole. She’s so sick of sitting on her hands and biting her tongue.
So she speaks out, says god, really, JJ? or something like that and it goes down about as well as you would expect. ‘I literally saw it on Reddit, Kie!’ he declares, slicing the air to ribbons with violently expressive hands. Her own palms tingle. She wonders if they’re beginning to go numb. ‘Like it’s legit, I don’t know what to tell you!’
Sarah’s shaking her head, sprawled across the sofa, feet on John B’s lap. Kie thinks there is a bible passage about Judas washing Jesus’s feet, or something, but that doesn’t fit here, ugly and cumbersome, bogged down with connotations of tragedy, kisses that kill, bloodied mouths swollen and splitting open. John B and Sarah will live a very, long happy life. Kie isn’t religious. She used to go to Sunday School, back when her mother would lay out little white outfits for her and her body belonged to God, or her parents, which is probably better now, when it belongs to nobody, herself least of all.
‘I’ve seen that movie like a hundred times, JJ, and that’s definitely not what they were going for,’ Sarah tells him, rolling her eyes with a long-suffering air even though she’s only known him for a few months now. They have the same terrible music taste, and Kie thinks that’s part of why they don’t like each other, because they’re supposed to be different and they cannot acknowledge that they’re the same, in a way. She reminds herself that she’s supposed to be joining.
JJ pulls himself up to rest on his elbows, really getting into the argument now. ‘Man, just think about it, okay? In the movie, he talks about man-made shit that didn’t exist in 1912 - the roller coaster on Santa Monica Pier - and his haircut and his backpack weren’t popular for, like, at least another 20 years!’
Pope, next to him on the sofa, throws his hat into the ring. Kie eyes the arch of his throat, the wholeness of his Adam’s apple. ‘Whatever, okay? Who cares about Titanic? That movie is horribly historically inaccurate’. He’s gesturing too, and the air seems to bend around the curve of his fingers.
JJ leans over and shakes his shoulder earnestly, seemingly of the opinion that he’s providing some important information. ‘No, dude - that boat actually sank!’
Sarah groans theatrically - Pope, laughing, buries his head in his hands. Kie rolls her eyes; the smallest reaction of all. ‘Look, JJ, sometimes movies are just shitty and get things wrong,’ she informs him, because correcting people is somewhat of a passion of hers, provides the same little thrill as teaching John B the meaning of parasocial, which she's just now realising she never got actually round to. It's a buzz not dissimilar to the one you get from drinking wine, the feeling of being chic and adult and moderately superior. ‘Not everything is like - a conspiracy, or a mystery or whatever.’
John B, quiet up until now, nods firmly to himself. ‘I believe JJ,’ he says, which elicits more wild groans and peals of laughter from Sarah and Pope. Kie finds herself joining in, as John B raises his hands in defence, neck of a beer bottle clasped between his fingers. ‘He makes good points!’
‘See!’ JJ jabs his finger triumphantly in John B’s direction, a wild, swooping movement. ‘ Thank you , John B! My man!’ He reaches out and they do a little bro-slap handshake. Pope and Sarah are somewhere between amused and pained. ‘Titanic is a tragic romance, not sci-fi,’ Sarah says, poking John B in the thigh with her foot.
‘And why can’t it be both?’ John B asks sagely, which strikes Kie as either wildly beautiful or unfathomably trite.
Pope, clearly not interested in debating John B on genre-bending, rolls his eyes and changes tack. ‘What possible reason could you have to time travel back to the Titanic anyway? I mean, you’re just going to die, where’s the logic in that?
JJ’s running his fingers over Pope’s forearm now, stupid, pointless movements; he informs him, wisely, that ‘No, dude, he didn’t have a choice. It was like his job. He had to stop Rose from committing suicide, because that could’ve caused a delay in the ship’s course and kept it from crashing, altering the course of history forever .’
Kie finds herself laughing. Sarah’s still giggling too, shaking her head and dragging her hands down her face, ephemerally stretching out her features. It is strange seeing her face like that, blurry and in flux. Her profile usually looks so certain, like a statue or a poster. JJ’s still talking, on a roll now. ‘I’m telling you guys, you have to look into these things, it’s all out there. Man, have any of you heard the theory that Breaking Bad is actually a prequel to The Walking Dead - ‘
He’s drowned out by groans and jeers: even John B, his former ally, pings an empty can at him, which he hurls right back, laughing and saying fuck you all . Kie’s chuckling and thinking about time travel and living another life that we all fancy would be different but would probably be strikingly similar. She has a vision of her and Sarah in a 1950s kitchen - John B is out at work, a mechanic or something, and Sarah has bouffant hair and red lipstick and looks very beautiful. They’re hugging and she’s saying we have to see each other more but the clock’s about to strike 5 and John B will be back soon and he’ll need his dinner, and Kie could stay and watch Sarah cook but that feels unfathomable, like some kind of intrusion so she’s going home, or is just about to go home but is lingering a little, stretching out the moment. The linoleum feels cold beneath her feet and when she looks down she realises she has no shoes on and feels a profound sense of shame.
Anyway. She’s giggling and it goes on like this for a few more hours; the room is very bright and very loud and they’re all laughing, and there are food wrappers everywhere, garish and neon and crumpled across the floor and she is oddly aware of them, feels them in her bones like rats under the floorboards. There is a heat trapped in her cheeks like an insect trapped in amber. She’s drunker now, and she keeps running her hand over her thigh like it’s the most fascinating sensory experience in the world, like she’s never touched herself before and maybe she hasn’t. She’s thinking about Barbie dolls, smooth, hard plastic and blank expanses between their legs, and wondering if maybe that’s what’s wrong with her, that’s why she can’t just enjoy herself like a normal person. Her flesh doesn’t feel smooth, or hard - it’s warm, and sticky where JJ spilt beer on her, and prickly because she doesn’t shave her legs anymore, as a statement. This is also a point against her being some kind of East Coast Barbie because she reckons Barbie’s thighs are always smooth. Kie’s no Barbie. She’s not even blonde and she doesn’t know how to be a woman properly and she’s ideologically opposed to dolls with tiny waists anyway.
There is a terrible shriek from across the room - JJ’s trying to do a headstand against the wall, with the key word being trying , because he’s quite shit at it, really, tottering back and forth like a baby deer in stilettos. Pope’s trying to steady his shins as he, John B and Sarah yell mediocre advice at him - lean backwards, JJ, stretch your legs out, stretch them out properly! - but they’re all laughing so hard they sound half-choked, and JJ’s gymnastics attempt is thus short-lived, lurching forward and bringing Pope down with him. They’re a twisty, disorganised knot of limbs on the floor and Sarah is laughing so much it sounds like she’s crying.
Kie’s looking at Pope, his face creased with pure, easy joy like an orange on a summer’s day, bright and crinkled and filling. She’s thinking about how he won Monopoly, and how this could be considered a metaphor for his general ability to win at life and success at being a smart, talented and well-liked person, even though Monopoly is a luck-based game and doesn’t have anything to do with player skill. She’s drunk and she thinks this is maybe the smartest metaphor ever conceived. She thinks about how JJ co-opted his victory and he didn’t even really mind because he is sound and decent and would never try to strangle someone with his bare hands unless they, like, really deserved it. She thinks maybe the reason she’s so much angrier at JJ than him is because she’s jealous that JJ’s able to love him right and she isn’t, and maybe that’s all it comes down to. Maybe she is not unknowable. Maybe she’s quite simple really.
Pope picks himself up off the floor and flops down next to her on the sofa, still laughing; JJ stays on the ground, breathing hard like he’s run a race and grinning like he’s won one. John B and Sarah are crowing at him, speaking over each other, voices pitchy and hands fluttering like a flock of birds and she realises, suddenly, that she has no idea what they’re saying, no idea at all.
Pope is very warm on the sofa next to her. She thinks about John B slipping his palm into hers on the hammock and places her hand on Pope’s forearm instead because she might not be a coward, but she’s not that brave either, and she’s never been especially touchy anyway. Pope seems unsurprised by the contact ,although he’s probably drunk enough that she could say John B’s mother is actually seminal pop singer Gwen Stefani and that’s why he never talks about her, because she left him for chart success with 2004 hit Love Angel Music Baby. and he would say oh, nice . He tilts his head vaguely in the direction of her shoulder, not quite touching but almost. Her skin hums like he’s touching her anyway, sings with his weight. She’s not sure what this means. It feels like a good thing. She squeezes his arm and says sorry , right in his ear, overloud but quiet enough that no-one else can hear them. Her mouth sounds like it’s stuffed full of sweets, voice slurred like she’s talking around a cherry pit.
Pope just laughs, places his hand over hers and squeezes her fingers loosely. She wishes he would squeeze harder. She wishes she had tried harder. Theirs is a sad story that ended wrong. Theirs is a happy story that could never have ended any other way. ‘Sorry?’ he repeats, still smiling, eyes glinting like there’s something trapped in them, an insect in amber. ‘Kie, what’ve you got to be sorry for?’
I ruined it, she wants to say. You’re wonderful and there’s nothing wrong with you and I ruined it anyway. You kissed me and I think there’s something wrong with me but you could’ve made a romantic of me anyway. I am prickly and it’s not just because I’m making a statement about not shaving. I would like to be fun. I would like to have the best day of my life again because it’s not fair that it only happened once. It’s not fair that she’s had the best day of her life ten times over since then. I think I’m being left behind. Hold my hand. Kiss me on the sofa even though your gay boyfriend is drunk on the floor behind us and you’ll have to go upstairs and rub his back when he starts throwing up in about fifteen minutes. That’s all I’m asking for. One kiss. Just fifteen minutes. You could fit my whole life into fifteen minutes. Everyone else is moving. I think I’m being left behind.
But she doesn’t say any of this, because this is not a TV show or a piece of literary fiction about lost love. They’re a bunch of tipsy teenagers in an over-bright living room and there’s food wrappers and Monopoly money all over the floor and she has to be quick before JJ starts spewing everywhere. So she just says ‘For how it ended with us’, which is sort of the truth, if you squint.
Pope looks momentarily bemused, then shrugs it off, smiles at her. ‘C’mon, Kie, you don’t have to be sorry for that,’ he says, like it’s just that simple. Nudges her in the ribs with his elbow. ‘It all worked out, anyway,’ he grins, and if this were a TV show or a piece of literary fiction about lost love she would say for who , but it’s not, and she’s not sure what do to, really. She should probably just laugh. Whatever. She’s tired of laughing just to feel involved.
She’s saved by the sound of retching as JJ promptly throws up all over the floor, because for someone who frequently engages in casual substance abuse he really is startlingly bad at knowing his own limits. The others scramble to his aid, groaning and hefting him to his feet, Sarah saying Jesus, JJ, I told you not to do a headstand , which is a lie none of them correct her on. She doesn’t move, because her limbs feel thick and outwith her control and this is JJ’s own fault anyway and also she doesn’t want him to throw up on her new shorts.
Her fingertips are still warm from Pope’s arm, but when she presses them to her own forehead they’re cold against her clammy flesh, and she thinks about the synthetic chill of a vibrator and how her body has never been enough for her. Kie has never used a vibrator, or even seen one in real life; she’s heard about them on TV, and thinks of them as a forgein concept, adult and vaguely unreal, like hip problems and mortgages. She imagines ordering one off the internet, on her parents laptop after they’ve all gone to bed, wonders what the packaging would look like - pink and discreet, wrapped up prettily. Swathed in tissue paper like a pearl in an oyster, something precious. She doesn’t know if this reverence is sad or empowering. She thinks it’s supposed to be empowering - female sexuality and taking back control and all that, y’know. She leans back and thinks about slipping into the gap between couch cushions, living amongst spare change and lost treasures.
Half an hour later she’s by the kitchen sink with Pope, scrubbing his socks for reasons she will redact, but allude to by saying that JJ’s currently slumped over the kitchen table, head down and a half-drunk glass of water at his elbow. She’s found a method online that promises a mixture of water and vinegar will remove the stain, but Pope’s gagging because he hates the smell of vinegar so, naturally, she’s grinning and wafting the bottle under his nose.
‘Stop ,’ he tells her, twisting away, but he’s laughing, sticks his finger into the sink and flicks water at her in retaliation. She yells, kicks him lightly on the shin; JJ, voice muffled by the table, groans ‘Shut up’, quiet in a way that is uncharacteristic but not unwelcome. Pope, still chuckling, reaches out and rubs his shoulder, a tight, sympathetic little circle. Kie goes back to her phone, starts narrating the instructions. It says 50/50 water and vinegar, but they’ve not really got any proper measuring equipment so they’re trying to fill half a tablespoon up with water, and then pour vinegar on it, which is going about as well as you’d expect given that they're both decently inebriated.
Pope’s holding the spoon, already half-full with water, but he can’t keep his hands still, wandering in tiny, aimless movements back and forth. She puts her hand on his wrist, laughing, attempts to steady him. ‘Stay still,’ she chides him, lining the lip of the vinegar bottle up with the edge of the spoon.
‘I am still!’ he declares defensively, moving his arm in an indignant motion which almost unseats the water and sends them both cackling.
‘Oh, yeah?’ she asks him as their giggles dry up, is reminded irresistibly of her conversation with John B a few weeks ago. She wonders if other people say the same thing all the time or if she's just bad at talking to people.
‘Yeah,’ he affirms, grinning and standing very straight with his arm stuck out, an exaggerated show of stillness. She shakes her head, smirking, leans in and begins to pour; ‘If you spill that on me, I’ll kill you,’ he informs her as he watches her own admittedly unsteady hands, faux-serious but also not entirely joking and that starts her off on another round of laughing which in turn causes her to drip vinegar all over his hand, which in turn leads to further bickering and a slightly more heated water fight. She is thinking about all her missed opportunities, Pope and John B, and whether it’s a feminist subervision of the whole ‘women fixing men’ thing for her to wish they would fix her, or if it’s just a bit pathetic.
Their scrapping dies down and then they’re back to scrubbing the socks, actually making a distinct effort to get the stain out. It’s surprisingly stubborn, and she smirks and asks Pope how attached he is to them, really. JJ, head still on the table, reaches his hand across his body and up over his shoulder, palm open and wanting in the warm glow of the kitchen. ‘Sorry ‘bout the socks,’ he mumbles, the first noise he’s made in about five minutes. Pope, laughing, takes his cue and threads their outstretched fingers together. ‘You should be,’ he informs JJ, but there’s no heat in his voice. ‘These are $7 a pack.’
JJ lifts his head from the table, blonde and rumpled like an early 2000s starlet after a night on the town. ‘Legit?’ They both nod in affirmation. Kie doesn’t know if anyone ever buys JJ socks. She’s not sure how he’s ever actually managed to acquire a pair, if she’s being honest. He shakes his head, an unusually precarious movement, probably because any more vigorous motion would have him bent back over the toilet. ‘That’s fucked,’ he remarks groggily, face flushed and eyes bright like a china doll, or a Barbie. ‘I’m gonna do something about that one day.’
They laugh, her and Pope, and she feels a glimmer of something pass between them, solidarity or desire or maybe just love. This could be their kitchen, a beautiful couple giggling at their irresponsible friend’s drunken exploits, taking him home and tucking him into bed. This could be their kitchen, college roommates and best friends who take turns picking an interesting documentary to watch with their evening meal. This could not be Sarah Cameron’s austere 1950s kitchen. She is barefoot, but so is Pope, although not exactly by choice. She has a sudden, miraculous urge to squeeze his hand and is angered by the fact that this urge never materialised itself when it needed to. It’s a different kind of wanting, she knows that now. She just wants to be close to him, and here they are, elbow-to-elbow in a kitchen made of love. She is suddenly unbelievably grateful for him, for all of them, for JJ and his weak stomach, for the warmth of the Chateau’s wooden floors beneath her feet. It’s Friday and she’s in love.
Pope shakes his head, smiling at JJ like an idiot. It’s Friday and he’s in love too, although she still reckons he could do better. They’ll talk about that later, maybe, when JJ returns to his stupor and she's had a few more drinks. ‘Yeah, one day,’ Pope repeats, grinning, and JJ nods, mollified, leans their clasped hands against the back of his chair, gives one last hazy squeeze, and drops back onto the table, head resting on his forearms. They get back to washing the socks, and within minutes he’s making these weird heavy breathing noises that sound like a warthog with a sinus infection, but that Kie’s pretty sure are snores and god she doesn’t envy JJ much, because they’re very different people and she would like it to stay that way, yet she cannot help but covet his ability to fall asleep in about three seconds flat.
Her and Pope are still scrubbing away with a toothbrush, and he gives her this sideways glance and she can tell he’s about to say something a little more serious than their previous conversation about the injustice of overpriced hosiery. She's not in the mood, mainly because she's happy, and happiness is contingent on not thinking about things too hard and that sounds sad but she thinks it’s quite nice actually; happiness is in the knowing rather than the pondering, in the instinctual, bone-deep sense of comfort you never have to question. She is happy, here in this kitchen, with Pope by her side and JJ behind her somewhere, vague, and easy to ignore if you so desire, but still unmistakably present.
But Pope is a feeling drunk, always wants to talk about emotions and that time they were in the fifth grade and her mom told her she’d never find a nice boy if she insisted on borrowing John B’s clothes and wrestling her friends in the dirt every recess, and how did that make her feel (in case you’re wondering the answer is fine, actually - at the time she’d just looked up at her mother like she was an idiot and said but Mom, I always win .)
She supposes given the current circumstances she’s lucky he’s not taking her to task for being withdrawn, or possibly homophobic, even though she’s been trying to keep all her microaggressions towards JJ in her own head. She wouldn’t be surprised if Pope found a way to read her mind. He wouldn’t have to read it. She’d let him in if he asked, serve everything up to him like a platter of food, raw and rotting at the same time, fresh with blood yet writhing with maggots, and said what do I do about all this, then?
That’s another thing. She knows what the word microaggression means, whereas JJ most definitely thinks it refers to an angry person under five foot.
Pauses. That feels a little mean, actually, and she wonders if that’s entirely accurate or if she has somewhat of a tendency to embellish JJ in her head, to make him less of a real person and more of a Joey-Tribbiani sitcom-esque figure. To keep him at a distance, behind a screen - to get rid off him easily, flicking off a switch and staring into the ensuing blackness. Christ. That is mean. She thinks she’s a mean person sometimes. She doesn’t want to be. She had spent a few months last year wondering if that was why Sarah Cameron had ditched her after all. Too mean. Too mean, and too much, always banging on about deforestation in Peru or something else no-one worth knowing seemed to care about.
Her hands are hot and soapy. She knows what Pope’s going to say before he comes out with it, a tentative ‘Hey, Kie?’ She scrubs away with the toothbrush. ‘You know that thing you said earlier, about being sorry for - ‘
‘It’s okay, Pope,’ she says, and means it. She keeps rubbing at the shoes without looking up, less of an attempt at avoidance and more of an attempt at peace.
Pope’s brow creases, a little confused by her interruption. He’s so good. He just wants to alleviate what he perceives to be her guilt. He could have saved her. Maybe she doesn’t need to be saved. Maybe she does, but just in a different way. Maybe he could save her that way, too. ‘No -‘ he’s trying to explain, earnest, words so whole they're almost too big for his mouth‘ - what I mean is you’ve got nothing to be sorry about. You were never obligated to like me, just because - ‘
‘I know,’ she tells him, lets the toothbrush slip through her fingers into the sink and turns to face him. Flicks a tiny, pathetic arc of water in his direction, not enough to start another brawl but enough to lift the mood, convince him she’s being sincere. And she is. She will love him in whatever way she can, and that will be enough because it always has been. She’s spent the last few months chastising herself for not loving him but she’s loved him all her life. ‘I know,’ she repeats reassuringly, light and easygoing. Maybe she is not unknowable. Maybe she’s quite simple, really.
He scrutinises her, hesitant, clearly trying to figure out if she’s lying to save his feelings. She must be convincing, because his face splits into a broad grin all at once, and he splashes her right back, and despite the suddenness of the situation it does not feel like the beginning of something; more like the middle, a prolongation, thinks about the middle of a baked good, warm and oozing sweetness.
She would like to bake something right now, wants to grab Pope’s arm and propose that they craft a three course meal or at least a hearty stew, throw open John B’s cupboards and search for ingredients, look up recipes on her phone. She would like to watch him eat, to make loud noises of appreciation when something’s good, really good, to feel food slip down her own gullet, easy as a whisper. To tear off scraps of bread and throw them at one another, and then eat them anyway because they’ve both washed their hands and being willing to share in each other’s filth is one of the main tenets of friendship. To coax JJ into eating something, not so much that it’ll start him off again, but enough to steady him. Maybe they’d get one of the side plates out of the cupboard and make him up his own smaller portion. Maybe she will forgive him for a crime he never really committed. There is so much love in this kitchen where she does not need to linger and never has to go home.
It’s a Friday night, again, and they’re drinking, again. Kie’s worried she’s giving the wrong impression of them. They do hang out without getting stoned or wasted, do wholesome things like repaint the Phantom while dancing to Elton John. It’s just that they’re teenagers, after all, and they therefore must engage in semi-regular bouts of debauchery, because this is what teenagers do, probably, or in the movies at least. Whatever. It’s Friday night, and this carries its own set of connotations, sounds like the opening line of an upbeat pop song or a banging club tune. It’s Friday night on an island at the edge of the world, or at least America, and it's their duty as rebellious youth to drink shitty beer and laugh like they’re trying to expel a lifetime of air from their lungs, or at least 16 years.
They’re at that special stage of summer where 10 PM means the sky is purple, like violets or your tongue after too many of those awful blue alcopops John B loves. The colour’s cool against their hot, busy flesh and the air seems to dance through their fingers, although really it’s just moving, like swallows migrating or fish heading upstream. JJ has the bright idea of going to the kids’ park, because ‘I miss swings , man’, and yeah, Kie would never admit it but maybe she misses swings too; maybe everyone does at 17, because the others agree readily, enthusiastically, even, whoops and cheers echoing off the facade of houses, and she wonders, dimly, when the street became so narrow, or their voices became so loud.
They careen through the park, jumping the small fence that encircles it with exaggerated bravado, like they’re athletes going for a long jump gold. John B trips, stumbling childishly, curls bouncing like the ears of a golden retriever, and they laugh uproariously, Kie most of all, throwing her head back. Her teeth glint in the night like gravestones, the white, marble gravestones of the wealthy, the suburban elite. Every mouth is a graveyard, if you think about, she tells herself; her baby teeth are long gone. This is the kind of thought she thinks she is very smart for having, but would never say aloud because it would probably make John B cry, like third grade and the mole on his and the thought that he might have died before and would definitely die again.
Sometimes, she wonders if what she really needs is to leave the OBX and go to some metropolitan liberat arts college on the West Coast where girls have septum rings and vibrators and don’t shave, and boys exist who aren’t her best friend or her worst enemy. Other times, she thinks she’ll probably be buried here, maybe even right here in this park, in the sandpit where her and Pope and JJ and John B used to play a very complicated game called Sand that involved running around throwing, you guessed it, sand in each other’s faces until someone else’s parent intervened, or one of them cried. Kie never did; the others all did, at one point or another.
Stuff like this is why she laughed the hardest of all when John B fell over - it’s about being better than others or maybe just proving yourself. Maybe the first thing is just an ugly way of putting the second thing, or the second one a polite way of putting the first. You have to be smart and you have to be superior and you have to be sensible and you have to shake your head and sigh because that way nobody can tell that you don’t know anything, not really. She’s missing out the most important part of the John B story, which is that he laughed along with them, and that after they finished laughing they’d picked him and Pope had brushed grass off his shirt and she’d rubbed her knuckles across the top of his head and slung her arm round his shoulder when he squealed.
Now she’s lying across the swings with Sarah, draped over the seat stomach-first, limbs dangling. The boys are somewhere over their shoulder, seemingly under the mistaken impression that if they shove JJ hard enough he’ll manage to fit down a slide made for elementary school kids. Even though they can’t see them, Kie can still hear them, Pope’s repeated exclamations of it’s not gonna work! , JJ’s imperious demands to push harder, John B! You’re not pushing hard enough, man! , John B’s defensive chorus of I’m pushing, I’m pushing!
She’s lying with Sarah, and she knows there hasn’t been much of Sarah in this story; she’s been a presence across rooms and a shared smile and the odd sentimental anecdote. And it’s not like Kie doesn’t see her, they even have the occasional private girls day, remember? It’s just that there doesn’t seem to be as much of Sarah nowadays, even when she’s around. They haven’t fought like they did last time, cold shoulders and fiery tongues and pain sharp as that plumping gloss Sarah used to slather over Kie’s lips at sleepovers. They haven’t fought, not even close. They’re friends, really and truly, normal girl friends. They talk quite a lot and they always make each other laugh and it’s always nice, fun. They’re having fun now, lying on their stomachs and chattering tipsily about ice cream flavours, feet scuffing at the ground as they push the swings back and forth, swaying gently in the cool air.
‘I love it, Kie, like I don’t know what to tell you,’ Sarah says, giggling at nothing as she pushes haphazard strands of hair out of her face, baby hairs white as a wedding dress against the mauve sky.
‘ Mint chocolate ?’ Kie’s laughing, face screwed up in exaggerated parody of disgust. Her legs hang in mid-air like damp bedsheets on a washing line and she cannot feel her toes, or even her fingers for that matter. ‘No food should be that green. It’s just not natural.’
Sarah gives this huge, breathy laugh, spiralling wildly through the stillness of a park Kie has known her whole life. ‘Mint is green!’ she squeals indignantly, knocking her swing to the side so that it crashes into Kie’s, sending them spinning in opposite directions. ‘Not, like that green!’ Kie defends herself as the world begins to steady, breathing hard like she’s run a race, or is still running one, and the finish line is just out of reach. ‘That’s artificial green. It’s probably really bad for you, if you think about it. Like, how do they even get that colour?
Sarah’s chuckling, shaking her head in fond exasperation, and Kie thinks to herself that this is probably how it should be, how it will be, the palatable, fluffy chatter of female friendships, and she tries to be pleased about this. ‘You know what is good, like really, really good?’ she says, placing a hand on the chain of Kie’s swing, eyes bright like a china doll, or a Barbie, excited and expectant, knows Kie will say no, what? Her makeup’s bleeding out, concealer separating in her pores and grey mascara sweat rimming her lower lash line but she manages to look artfully rumpled, like a rockstar’s girlfriend in an old Polaroid. Sarah has always known exactly how to be a woman, or rather, women have always been like Sarah.
‘No, what?’ says Kie. She smiles. Sarah’s gently rocking her swing back and forth as she waits for her prompt, fist clasped around the chain and rings glinting in the dusk like a mouth full of veneered teeth.
‘The butter pecan stuff from Haagen-Daz,’ Sarah tells her, hair matted by the breeze, face earnest and glowing like this is some sort of divine confession, as though her favourite luxury ice cream is a shard of information to be treated with the utmost reverence. She is so effortlessly self-assured, Kie marvels. She treats every part of herself with kid gloves, with love, like it’s something that matters, and it does matter precisely because of that. Kie has dreams wherein she just coughs for hours trying to get rid of this cherry pit, hacking and gasping with her hands over her mouth. When she pulls them her fingers drip her own blood, maraschino red. Maybe it’s time to try the Sarah Cameron approach.
Anyway. Kie respects this confession like any true friend would, by throwing it back in her face and making fun of her for it. ‘ Haagen-Daz? ’ she splutters incredulously, raising her hands in mock-defense. ‘Oh my god, Sarah, we get it, you live on the Cut -’
Sarah’s laughing again, yanks on the chain of her swing properly this time so that the seat jerks abruptly, enough to send Kie giggling but not enough to unseat her. They are stable like that nowadays, delicate. They’d fake-wrestled on a beach once, back in ninth grade, over something stupid, the last wine cooler or a pretty little shell shaped like an ear, and Kie remembered thinking that Sarah, with her sharp elbows and wiry fingers, was a far more formidable opponent than any of the boys. She’d ended up spluttering sand and had found it in the creases of her clothes and dips of her flesh for weeks, and it was just play-fighting but Kie could still recall the way her muscles sung like a burn, and it was just play-fighting but Kie had put more of her breath into it than she’d put into the hundreds of times she’d fought the boys combined.
She doesn’t know why there was such a heady intensity to it; everything was life and death in those days, we have to save these turtles or they’ll die, you have to come round to mine tonight or I’ll die, this boy is so boring I’m gonna die, come pick me up? The last one was always Sarah and Kie always came and Sarah would run up to the car, grinning, throw the door open and collapse into the passenger seat and say thank god you’re here and Kie knew she meant it, as much as she could, anyway.
Sarah’s grinning now, rolls her eyes affectionately and says ‘Pot calling the kettle black, rich girl,’ and Kie giggles along because it’s a witty little observation and Sarah’s funny and she’s losing her, has lost her in a way, but there’s still a pretty sizeable chunk of her left. She is thinking about the wild passions of teenage girlhood and how all friendships like theirs have an expiration date. They are the opposite of milk, meek and mild and carrying connotations of motherhood, but they curdle twice as fast.
And there’s nothing Kie can do about it, really - it’s not her fault or Sarah’ or John B’s or anyone else’s. If she had to blame anything she would blame time, that tricky little imp, for sucking her girlhood from her bones before the rest of her was ready, for rearranging her body, or perhaps rearranging the world around her so that her body no longer fit in it. She still kisses like it’s a dress rehearsal. Her skeleton, once strong and calcium-rich, appears to have weathered away around the edges and now she’s just sharp splinters of bone that stab and pierce and repel and do not seem to fit nicely into the folds of anyone else’s flesh.
She hangs, suspended, in mid-air and thinks about how she used to feel Sarah Cameron’s hot breath against the back of her neck at sleepovers and how they would stay up the whole night talking, giggly and feverish and nonsensical to anyone who wasn’t them, and how Kie always answered when she called, even at the crack of dawn with some hair-brained scheme about breaking into school before 8 AM and setting the class fish free in a local pond. How they would talk on the phone for hours and exchange texts with a voracity that could be considered concerning, obsessive, like when they make those documentaries about teenage lovers who go on to kill their parents and tell you about the hundreds of texts they would send each other every day to underline how wrapped up in their own world they were, lost to some holy fervour. How they would swap clothes with care and reverence because they understood the inherent divinity of sharing garments with your friends, of moulding yourselves in their image, in being so openly, explicitly greedy. I am taking something from you and you are taking something from me. We’re both giving too. Isn’t this a wonderful thing? How they lived behind each other’s eyes and Kie’s English teacher wrote in her school report that they were joined at the hip and how Sarah was lolling on her shoulder as she tore the report open and laughed delightedly at that remark.
Growing up and growing apart; and what that means if you are linked at the hip, tendons snapping and flesh tearing, thighs streaked sanguine and gaping voids. She will never know Sarah Cameron like she did when she was 15.
But she’ll know her forever in the way you know all your closest friends, keep scraps of them in your pockets, concert ticket stubs and crumpled receipts from buying beer at the local convenience store. It’s a lilac summer’s night and they’re laughing together the same way they always have and she’s right there and Kie can lean over and touch her if she wants.
So she does, reaches out and twines their hands together. Sarah accepts this touch gratefully, almost hungrily, is quick to squeeze her palm, rake her thumb across the back of her wrist. Kie wonders if she, too, is aware that things are different now, and if this flash of contact is her way of assuring Kie that it’s still okay. That she’s right here; that they’ll know each other forever. Kie can feel Sarah’s blood beating in her fingers. She can feel her own too, can feel her whole body, dangling loosely over a swing seat and humming with the assurance that her bones will grow full again, that she’ll fit somewhere one day. That she fits here, now, sweaty hands clasped.
This should be where the story ends. It isn’t.
A few hours pass. It’s 2 AM, now, and JJ’s put on Resident Evil ; they’re half-watching, dripping over couches and slopping onto the floor like spilt beer, tipsy and tired. She’s sprawled across the big sofa, a pillow behind her head, and JJ and Pope on the floor at her feet, tangled in a load of cushions and throws because JJ has a thing about sleeping on the floor, swears on his life that it helps build muscle and that ‘dude, like 90% of my guns are from no-mattress nights’. She doesn’t know if John B and Sarah are awake, or even alive - she stretches, joints pop like candy, and cranes her neck to peer at them from across the room. They’re curled up on the loveseat like a pair of kittens, illuminated by the glow from the TV, young and innocent and beautiful as though a couple in a movie.
She spots the mole on John B’s thigh and corrects herself on that last thought. They’re not a couple in a movie. They’re just John B, her lame friend John B, and Sarah, her marginally cooler friend Sarah who isn’t even that good at vaping but perseveres nonetheless. They’re fucking married, so they can’t be that young to start with, and they’re all getting older by the minute, and they’ve both had people try and kill them on multiple occasions so they’re not really particularly innocent anymore, and the beautiful thing is in flux because she still can’t tell if John B is attractive or not, and he’s not her boyfriend so it doesn’t really matter anyway. He’s Sarah’s, and that’s a wonderful thing. She feels full and sated and sleepy.
She shuts her eyes and feels the world melt away like butter, hot and syrupy on her temple. JJ and Pope are having a conversation that sounds like this: JJ whispers, proudly, I’ve seen this movie like a hundred times and Pope whispers back I know. I’ve been with you for like forty of them and JJ says I know like, all the words, no joke, I’ve got this thing memorised and Pope, chuckling, says prove it then and JJ asks how. Recite it along with them Pope tells him, and Kie can hear him smirking despite the fact that that’s properly impossible and also she’s not even fully conscious. Fine JJ says, and starts speaking along a beat behind the movie, blatantly just parroting the dialogue a second after them and Pope’s laughing and saying you’re literally just copying them, and not even well and JJ, ever-competitive says no, listen, man and keeps going, even more behind this time if that’s even possible. See, dude? he says, I’m literally Milla Jojovich and Pope’s still laughing, says no, she had to learn her lines so she actually knows what they’re saying and then there’s the sound of further laughter and the all-too-familiar thud of a pillow hitting someone in the face and Kie falls asleep and dreams about nose rings and her Spotify wrapped and women in black leather shooting zombies.
She comes to an unidentified period of time later with a bleating in her bladder, an urgent request for relief. The room looks like it’s been dipped in ash, dark and murky, outlines vague and indistinguishable - getting up, trying to traverse the floor, scattered with cans and DVDs and Monopoly game pieces that John B still hasn’t picked up, seems distinctly undesirable. She turns over onto her stomach and tries to settle back down but that just furthers the pressure on her bladder, ratchets the request up into a command, yet getting up still seems monumentally unappealing, so she flips onto her side and does her best to think about boring shit, toast without butter and Pope and John B arguing about Alien vs. Aliens . But fuck , now she just wants toast and she’s hungry on top of needing to pee and she should probably listen when to her body when it talks to her anyway, so she aciquiesces, hauls herself off the couch and stumbles towards the door, steps awkwardly over what could be one of her sleeping friends but might also just be a misshapen cushion.
Once she’s out of the room it’s a little brighter and she totters up the corridor towards the bathroom. The light’s on, which is weird, but the door hangs half-open like an invitation so she figures it’s probably empty and whoever was in there last just forgot to turn the lights off.
She’s proved sorely, horrifyingly wrong when she pushes the door open and spots a flash of blonde hair and a guy’s back, standing over the toilet. Even disregarding the sliver of blonde, she can call from the fact that he’s wearing a ratty backwards cap at like, 3 AM that it’s fucking JJ, of course , so she swears furiously and slams the door shut with a violence that largely disreagrds the fact that it’s like, 3 AM. Exclaims ‘JJ, what the fuck! Close the door!’
There’s the sound of a zipper being pulled up, a short sharp hiss that JJ, with his general talent at being a cunty little blonde, somehow manages to make sound indignant. ‘Oh, sorry! ’ he yells back, doesn’t even have the good grace to put on a faux-remorseful voice; just loud and brash and unapologetically grating. ‘I forgot it was my responsibility to shut the door when I’m peeing alone in the middle of the night!’ Pauses while he flushes, not wanting his little speech to be interrupted by the hissing of toilet water. ‘Oh, wait, here’s an idea - why don’t you fucking knock , Kie!’
She scoffs, rolling her eyes and slouching against the doorframe. ‘Yeah, I’ll just start knocking on open doors , will I?’
‘Well, it would be good manners!’ he mutters sarkily, quieter so that she almost has to strain to hear him through the door. JJ is the first person to know when he’s beaten, and always the last one to admit it - he always soldiers on through arguments, but with the sheepish half-reticence of someone who knows his defeat is only a matter of time. There’s the sound of a tap running, and then the dissonant squeaking of flesh moving against the bathtub and Kie thinks Christ what now and what does it take for a girl to do a fucking piss in this house and if John B’s bread is too mouldy for toast I’ll kill him in his sleep . She’s trying not to be mean. Some things cannot be tolerated. JJ grumbles ‘You can come in now,’ and, almost despite herself, she pushes the door open, reluctant, the way you lift the lid off a musty old.
Her uncertainty is validated when she sees him sitting sideways in the bathtub, back pressed up against one side and legs dangling awkwardly over the otherer. She groans aloud, grabs the toilet paper off the top of the tank and chucks it at him. ‘Oh my god, get out. I’m trying to pee.’
He attempts to catch the toilet paper, but fumbles it so that it bounces off his temple and skitters into the bath. The impact echoes with a dull, empty thud, the flatness of which would have been disappointing a few weeks ago, but Kie doesn’t think she actually wants to maim JJ anymore, unless he’s a shit the next time they play Monopoly again. She’s just tired, and she wants to pee.
JJ shrugs, picks the toilet paper up and lobs it idly between one hand and the next. ‘Well, I -‘ he indicates himself with a funky little hand gesture and Kie wonders how she didn’t always know he was gay and then flagellates herself because that’s defenitely homophobic, ‘-‘m comfy so I’m not going anywhere.’ He leans back against the wall like he’s reclining on a beach, sunning himself and hiding a trashy horror magazine in some op-ed about compulsory civic service in France so his boyfriend thinks he’s cool. ‘Just piss, I don’t mind.’
Kie’s head buzzes like a swarm of angry bees, or maybe that’s not exactly true - who the fuck says bees buzz more when they’re angry, like, what kind of crap fucking bee psychologist came up with that one? She reckons that bees are probably just doing it out of a sense of fear, or self-preservation, or both because they’re probably the same thing actually. Maybe anger is the same thing too. Maybe she’s trying too hard to personify bees. She has always rooted for them, used to wear save the bees shirts to birthday parties and family reunions as a kid in the hope that someone would ask her about it, and she could educate them about the importance of the bees to the ecosystem, and the subsequent tragedy of their endangered status. She has always liked the underdog.
Maybe she should have just said her head was ringing. Maybe she will always be an annoying know-it-all, prone to tangents and lectures and caring too much. Maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world.
Kie’s head’s ringing, and the bathroom is awfully bright, white like spotlights and the skeletons of things long buried and she’s not surprised by JJ’s attitude but she is disgusted by it. ‘Well, I mind!’ she hisses, indignant and unhappy that she’s run out of harmless household objects to throw at him - the nearest thing is hand sanitiser, but she’s worried the dispenser might poke him in the eye, or that he’d somehow manage to swallow some and die from internal poisoning and the last one sounds ridiculous but knowing JJ it is entirely plausible, maybe even likely.
JJ shrugs again, blue-eyed and innocuous like the world’s greatest ingenue since Snow White or Sandy from Grease. ‘Man, I’m literally gay. Just pee.’
And, like, there are issues with this that Kie doesn’t even want to unpack; she could tell him that her aversion to pissing publicly isn’t because she’s afraid that some boy’s going to find her really hot and fall in love with her while she’s peeing but rather because she’s a normal person who doesn’t want to pee in front of other people, only she’s really rather tired now, and her irritation has actually somewhat abated her desire to pee in the first place, and that bathtub does actually look like a decently comfortable place to rest for a moment. And her biggest issue with what JJ said is less the second part and more the first and this is a petty little grievance that she’s more or less over, but she has never brought it up with him before and she’d like to hear what he has to say about it before she dies and if she’s going to unwreathe something that’s been sitting in her chest for a while it may as well be here, inebriated in the middle of the night in a bathroom that’s respectably-sized but feels like the smallest one in the world, or maybe even the universe.
So she snorts derisively, clambers gracelessly over the side of the bath, elbows banging off the wall and skin squealing against the smooth surface of the tub like a mouse on a bender, and half-says, half-slurs ‘Please. You didn’t even know what gay people were until like two months ago.’ She feels drunker all of a sudden, and she doesn’t know if this is psychosomatic or not.
JJ shrugs, again , is doing a lot of shrugging and here she was thinking she was the only person who didn’t know anything. JJ’s shrugs are never really expressions of inadequacy though, of not knowing - they’re more flippant, acknowledgments and affirmations. Yeah, I didn’t know. Yeah, I’m not moving. Yeah, just pee in front of me . ‘Not my fault,’ he says easily, like they’re talking about nothing at all, mac and cheese recipes and the weather and their favourite cartoons from when they were kids. But it makes something click for Kie, in a weird kind of way. Like, huh. She guesses it wasn’t.
And it’s because of this that she says what she says next, because their knees are knocking together, bruised and dirty from the park - Kie’s marks from slipping tipsily off the swingset, JJ’s from that awful plan about cramming himself down a slide made for six year olds. Because their four battered knee caps in a row look like a fist that’s been in a fight, one full appendage, bloodied but whole. Because they’re both loud and stubborn and prone to being slightly out of the loop, a little behind everyone else; because he’s her double in a way, her shadow self, and that’s definitely a curse but she wants to know what it means for her. ‘I think there might be something fundamentally wrong with me,’ she says, drunkenly casual like they’re two girls sharing lipgloss in a club bathroom. Shimmies down in the tub to get more comfortable, tilts her head back and kicks her legs out JJ-style.
JJ snorts, looks straight ahead like this is nothing noteworthy, not even worth a glance in her direction. They’re both wearing garish Hawaiian shirts, his halfway unbuttoned to showcase the smear of dirt on his chest from when John B got fed up with bossiness and just shoved him off the slide, and she thinks that as well as girls in clubs and whole fists they could be cool beer dads watching a football game. ‘Well, yeah, Kie.’ He puts a hand up to one side of his mouth like he’s telling a secret, affects a silly little voice. ‘I could’ve told you that a long time -‘
She grabs the toilet paper from its resting place, wedged between JJ’s back and the edge of the bath, and pelts it at him again. ‘Shut up,’ she says, rolling her eyes the way you roll a cigarette - bored and disaffected, a placeholder, an excuse for some air. She knows there's more coming.
They’re quiet. There’s a little digital alarm clock on top of the bathroom cabinet that Kie can tell is running several hours ahead. She wonders, vaguely, what time it actually is, or if time even exists in this weird liminal space. She almost laughs. Listen to her. Liminal space like it’s not John B’s gross bathroom with a wet towel crumpled in the sink and what looks suspiciously like armpit hair in the plughole. She thinks she’s just trying to come up with excuses to justify her own candour.
Time to buy a watch. She actually might.
‘You never properly dated anyone,’ she tells the smudged mirror across from her that she’s pretending is JJ.
‘Mmm.’ He hums in half-agreement, not entirely on board with that statement. His feet dangle loosely over the edge of the bath and his socks have surfboards on them. ‘I like, had girls that I spoke to at parties. We went on dates, sometimes.’
She snorts, shaking her head. ‘Taking Mallorie McBride to the arcade and making her watch while you try and beat John B’s score on Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing is not a date.’
JJ grins, cocking his neck to look at her for the first time in a while. ‘She told you about that?’
Kie nods silently, head tilted back now, and eyes shut. She’s sleepy and brave all at once. She could keep talking, or she could doze off in this tub with JJ right now and be confident that she could continue this conversation in the morning.
JJ chuckles, shakes his head like an uncle laughing at his own awful joke while everyone else picks at their roast and looks down at the tablecloth. ‘Man, that was a good day. I almost beat it, you know, Kie. A few seconds faster - whew! ’ He makes a popping sound, slashes his hand across the air in a straight line. ‘I would’ve been golden, man.’
Kie murmurs disagreeably. ‘She said she left fifteen minutes in.’ Her eyes are beginning to feel heavy, like memory foam mattresses and lumps of tar. She is remarkably comfortable here, despite the surprisingly narrow breadth of John B’s tub; she’s comfortable in her own body, feels cherished by her skin, wrapped up like when you’re a kid and you and your friends play at being toilet paper mummies, swaddling each other in flimsy white scraps of tissue. Encased in laughter and warm hands with dirt under their nails from a rousing game of Sand .
It was so easy to be things then, some toilet paper and you’re a mummy, a pair of dress-up wings and you’re a fairy. But it could be easy now, too. Isn’t that weird? You can just be anyone you want, whenever you want. You can say things and take them back, change your mind over and over, dye your hair or chop it all off, shave your eyebrows or shove a stud through your nose or run from the law and disappear a fugitive, a 17 year old myth.
Maybe the body isn’t a void. Maybe she has mistaken space and malleability for the absence of something. Maybe the hole from between her neck and her thighs was put there to give her breathing room. She’s breathing now, although not too deeply because the bathroom smells like wet dog even though John B has never owned one in his life. The air is hers and she can feel it slip into her chest, like one palm into another.
JJ ‘s laughing, rubs his temples with his fingertips so that his stupid hat gets pushed up his forhead. ‘Oh, shit, yeah!’ A pause. When he speaks, it’s with the faintly smug air of a cheerleader regaling a jealous gaggle of admirers with a sweet tale that only serves to engender their envy; she’s always thought that JJ could’ve been a vicious mean girl in another life if he’d been taught to implode rather than explode. ‘I’m like, a really good boyfriend now actually. Ask Pope. Last week, right, he had that cold, so I drove round like five places getting him all sorts of shit, soup and cheesecake and that weird coffee he likes and I remembered to ask for all the freaky stuff, you know, the soy milk, and the half-sweet no-whip light ice stuff.’
Another pause. Kie thinks it is sweet that he still remembers, even now, boozy in John B’s bathroom at some unspecified hour that is either very late or very early. ‘And, y’know, maybe I borrowed his dad’s car to do it but Heyward never found out and I never got in trouble, so that probably makes it okay anyway. The point is that I’m like, a way better boyfriend to boys than I was to girls.’
Kie snorts with laughter; his cap sits awkwardly at half-mast on his forehead so she leans over and plucks it off, presses it down on her own head with slow, inebriated fingers. ‘That’s ‘cause you’re gay,’ she tells him blearily, slumped carelessly like a marionette with cut strings. The cap feels quite nice, surprisingly. It definitely looks better on her anyway, that’s for sure. It’s still sort of warm from his scalp and she can’t tell if that’s nice or gross. She should probably take it off, actually. She doesn’t know how often JJ washes his hair and she doesn’t want a repeat of that time John B accidentally caused a lice outbreak in their class and her mom had to go through her hair with a fine tooth comb every day for weeks.
JJ shrugs again, offhanded. ‘Yeah,’ he says, an affirmation, an acknowledgement. He prods at the faded bath curtain with one of his feet. ‘Hey, Kie?’
‘Yeah?’ she replies, an unintentional echo. Reaches out absently and pokes his foot with her own. She doesn’t have any socks on.
‘You almost definitely have something wrong with you,’ he says, looking straight ahead. ‘No sane person cares about like, the branding of women’s razors or dolphins or the carbon footprint of tofu that much.’ He's faux-serious, but he begins to crack toward the end, and shatters completely when she harrumphs and elbows him in the ribs a little too hard, at which point he folds like a deckchair, laughing.
She rolls her eyes and bides her time until he’s finished because he’s her echo and she knows he’s got more to say and she is supposed to be hearing him out, after all. He regains himself, still grinning, tucks his rumpled hair behind his ears and stretches indolently and says ‘Nah, but it’s like - you’re like one of the weirdest people I know, right, probably third, but first and second are John B and Pope so y’know -’ Shrugs for the umpteenth time. ‘It’s like, there’s probably something wrong with you, but you’re not going to die from it.’
And remember about 18 thousand words ago when she said that sometimes she thinks JJ is a kind of secret savant? Well, this is one of those times, even though what he said makes very little sense, really - she thinks maybe it’s just what she wanted to hear. She is not going to die from this. She might not be a child anymore, and that might feel like a kind of death, but she knows now that one day she will be an adult, will bend the world back into the shape of her body. She looks down at her palm and does not pretend that she’s a palm reader looking at her hand from an outside perspective - rather, she pretends that she herself has somehow acquired the ability to read palms and is looking down at her own body and tracing the creases of her skin and predicting a long and happy life, happy enough at least, happy in the way everyone is.
And maybe it’s bullshit and she’ll be miserable at 20 and divorced at 30 and still trying to prove herself at 40, but she doesn’t think so. Kie is not a coward - her legs are unshaven and long enough to carry her out of here one day if she wants, but she’s quite petite overall, so they’re also small enough to tuck up neatly beneath her if she wants to hang around for a while. She sees so much all at once, herself surfing in Spain, gaping at pyramids in Cairo, walking down the road to the gas station with the rest of the Pogues and blagging their way into a couple cases of beer, standing outside a club with JJ, sharing a cig and feeling a girl with a septum ring watch her from across the smoking area. The passionate friendships of her girlhood are over, but her adult life will begin soon. Her legs are unshaven and her body can be a statement and a toilet paper mummy and a conduit for her own pleasure all at once.
And this probably should have ended with her sprawled over swing seats with a Sarah Cameron she cannot fully conceive anymore, because that would’ve been the end of everything when she was 15, would’ve sat in her bedroom and picked at her nail beds until they bled and felt like she was never going to care about anyone else for as long as she lived, and they weren’t going to care about her either, a spinster by her sophomore year.
She’s 17 now, and she’s still sad, of course, but she’s sad in the way everyone is sad, and she’s happy too, edging her way into the fifth stage of grief, and Kie thinks that maybe all stories should end like this, instead: sprawled in a bathtub with your weird gay friend in a dirty bathroom that may or may not be a liminal space and feeling like you’re going to live forever.