We Run the Tides E-Book

Vendela Vida

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 323

Beschreibung

'Smart, perceptive, elegant, sad, surprising and addictive. And it's also FUNNY.' Nick Hornby 'What We Run the Tides probes so poignantly is the volatility of female adolescence... Knowing and powerfully enigmatic.' Observer Teenage Eulabee and her magnetic best friend, Maria Fabiola, own the streets of Sea Cliff, their foggy oceanside San Francisco neighbourhood. They know Sea Cliff's homes and beaches, its hidden corners and eccentric characters - as well as the upscale all-girls' school they attend. One day, walking to school with friends, they witness a horrible act - or do they? Eulabee and Maria Fabiola vehemently disagree on what happened, and their rupture is followed by Maria Fabiola's sudden disappearance - a potential kidnapping that shakes the quiet community and threatens to expose unspoken truths. Suspenseful and poignant, We Run the Tides is Vendela Vida's masterful portrait of an inimitable place on the brink of radical transformation. Pre-tech boom San Francisco finds its mirror in the changing lives of the teenage girls at the centre of this story of innocence lost, the pain of too much freedom, and the struggle to find one's authentic self. Told with a gimlet eye and great warmth, We Run the Tides is both a gripping mystery and a tribute to the wonders of youth, in all its beauty and confusion. 'We Run the Tides is hypnotic, knowing, and propulsive as it examines girlhood, friendship, and the strong pull of the past.' Meg Wolitzer

Leseprobe

First published in the United States in 2021 by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Published in hardback and trade paperback in Great Britain in 2021 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Vendela Vida, 2021

The moral right of Vendela Vida to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 958 5

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 104 7

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 959 2

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

This book is dedicated to my childhood friends and teachers,who will immediately recognize that this is a work of fiction.

Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape from routine?

Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice?

—Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

1984 – 1985

1

We are thirteen, almost fourteen, and these streets of Sea Cliff are ours. We walk these streets to our school perched high over the Pacific and we run these streets to the beaches, which are cold, windswept, full of fishermen and freaks. We know these wide streets and how they slope, how they curve toward the shore, and we know their houses. We know the towering brick house where the magician Carter the Great lived; he had a theater inside and his dining-room table rose up through a trapdoor. We know that Paul Kantner from Jefferson Starship lived or maybe still does live in the house with the long swing that hangs above the ocean. We know that the swing was for China, the daughter he had with Grace Slick. China was born the same year we were, and whenever we pass the house we look for China on the swing. We know the imposing salmon-colored house that had a party at which masked robbers appeared; when a female guest wouldn’t relinquish her ring, they cut off her finger. We know where our school tennis instructor lives (dark blue tudor decorated with cobwebs every Halloween), where the school’s dean of admissions lives (white house with black gate)—both are women, both are wives. We know where the doctors and lawyers live, and where the multi-generation San Franciscans live, the kind of people whose family names are associated with mansions and hotels in other parts of the city. And most important, because we are thirteen and attend an all-girls’ school, we know where the boys live.

We know where the tall boy with webbed feet lives. Sometimes we watch Bill Murray movies with him and his friends at his house on Sea View Terrace and marvel at the way the boys can recite all the lines the way we know every word of The Outsiders. We know where the boy lives who breaks my necklace one day by the beach—it’s a silver chain my mother gave me and he pulls it violently and I run from him. We know where the boy lives who comes to my house the day I get a canopy bed and, mistaking it for a bunk bed, climbs up and breaks it. It’s never properly fixed and from then on the four posts tilt west. We suspect this boy and his friends are responsible for writing in the wet cement outside our school, the Spragg School for Girls. “Spragg is for girls who like to bragg,” the cement says. It’s hard to tell if the words were traced with a finger or a stick, but the imprint is deep. Ha! we say. They don’t even know how to spell “brag.”

We know where the cute boy whose father is in the Army lives. He just moved to San Francisco and he wears short-sleeve plaid shirts that were the style in the Great Lakes town he came from. We know his father must have a position that’s fairly high up because otherwise why wouldn’t he live in the Presidio where most people in the Army live? We spend little time thinking about Army hierarchy because their haircuts are so sad. We know where the boy with one arm lives, though we don’t know how he lost it. He often plays tennis at the park on 25th Avenue or badminton in the alleyway behind his house, which is the alleyway that leads to my house. Many of the blocks in Sea Cliff have alleyways so the cars can park in the garages in the back, so the cars don’t interfere with the view of the ocean, of the Golden Gate Bridge. Everything in Sea Cliff is about the view of the bridge. It was one of the first neighborhoods in San Francisco to have underground power lines because above-ground power lines would obstruct the view. Everything ugly is hidden.

We know the high school boy who lives next door to me. He comes from a family that was prominent in the Gold Rush—I learned that from my California history textbooks. Photos of his parents frequently appear in the society pages of the Nob Hill Gazette that’s delivered to our doorstep every month, free of charge. The boy is blond and often has a group of his high school friends over to watch football in his living room. From my garden I can see when they’re watching a game. There’s a three-foot gap between the edge of our property and his house and sometimes I leap through his open window and land on the floor of his living room. I am that daring. I am a daring enigma. I fantasize that one of them will invite me to the prom. And then one afternoon one of the boys grabs the waistband of my Guess? jeans. I try to get away, and I run in place for a moment like a cartoon character. The boys all laugh; I’m upset for days. I know that this gesture and their laughter mean they think of me as a little girl and not as a prospective prom date. After that their window is kept closed.

Then there are the Prospero boys, the sons of a doctor, who lived in my house before my family bought it. They are legendary. They are a cautionary tale. When my parents toured the house, the floor of what would become my bedroom was littered with beer bottles and needles. The windows were broken. When I talk to older boys and tell them I live in the Prospero boys’ old house I get attention, and, I imagine, momentary respect. No one can believe what lunatics those boys were. Moms will shake their heads and say how sad it was, those boys, their father being a doctor and all.

The Prospero boys are the reason my parents were able to buy the house for the price they did. It was destroyed by these boys. No one else wanted to think their children would grow up to have parties and use needles and spray-paint obscenities on the walls of their own home. My father has always been able to look past the damaged lives a house has witnessed. That is his secret power. He grew up in a rented third-floor apartment on an alleyway in the Mission and, like many of his friends, had multiple jobs by the time he was fifteen. Newspaper-delivery boy, grocery-store employee, doorman at the Haight Theatre. He tore tickets six nights a week and on his day off he’d go see movies. When he was in middle school he biked all the way to Sea Cliff to go to the beach and he saw the majestic houses and said to his friends, “One day I will live in this neighborhood.” One day he did. My mother grew up without money, too (she grew up in a large, happy family on a farm in rural Sweden), and together they are a thrifty pair—no meals out at restaurants, no heat turned on unless there’s company, and sometimes no heat even then, just the strong smell of fish. My sister, Svea, who is ten, is the only one in our family who likes fish, but it is served weekly because we are Swedish.

In the front room of my house there are five large windows that look out on the Golden Gate Bridge. On foggy days the bridge is blanketed in white, no trace of it visible. On days like this, my father used to tell me that robbers had stolen the bridge. “Don’t worry, Eulabee,” he’d say to me, “the police are after them—they’ve been working all night.” By midmorning when the fog began to burn off, he’d say, “Look, they got em! They’re putting the bridge back.” It was a story I never tired of, and reinforced two lessons that reigned over my childhood:

1. Hard work conquers all obstacles.

2. Good triumphs over evil (which is always lurking).

There are alerts, of course, and warnings, and in Sea Cliff these warnings come in the form of foghorns. First one foghorn, and in the distance, another. The deep bellowing foghorns are the soundtrack to my childhood. When we go to the beaches, which we often do, huddled in sweaters and with mist on our faces, the foghorns are even louder than they are in our houses. They punctuate our confessions, our laughter. We laugh a lot.

When I say “we,” I sometimes mean the four of us Sea Cliff girls who are in the eighth grade at the Spragg School for Girls. But when I say “we,” I always mean Maria Fabiola and me. Maria Fabiola is the oldest of three children—the youngest ones are twin boys. She moved to Sea Cliff the year we started kindergarten. Nobody knew much about her family. Sometimes she says she’s part Italian. Other times she says she’s not, why would you think that? Other times she says her grandfather was the prime minister of Italy. Or could have been prime minister. Or she was related to the mayor of Florence or could have been. She has long dark brown hair and light green eyes—even in black and white photos you can see their ethereal color. There are dozens of photos in her home of her and her cousins sitting atop horses, or on the edges of swimming pools surrounded by grass. The photos are taken by professionals and displayed in identical silver frames.

Maria Fabiola is a noticer, but also a laugher. She has a laugh that starts in her chest and comes out like a flute. She is known for her laugh because it’s what people call a contagious laugh, but it’s not contagious in the usual way. Hers is a laugh that makes you laugh because you don’t want her to laugh alone. And she’s beautiful. An older boy wearing corduroy OP shorts near Kezar Stadium once said she was hot and with any other girl we would call bullshit but with her we believe it—the compliment, the boy, the corduroy OP shorts.

She wears a thick stack of thin silver bracelets on her arm. We all wear these bracelets, which we buy on Haight Street (three for a dollar) or on Clement Street (five for a dollar) but she wears more of them. When she laughs her hair falls in front of her face and she sweeps it out of her eyes with her fingers, causing her bracelets to cascade up and down her arm. The sound of her bracelets is like her laughter: high-pitched and delicate, a waterfall of notes. She has perfect hair and always will.

When we were in kindergarten Maria Fabiola and I began walking to school together with older girls who went to Spragg. These girls would pick up Maria Fabiola at her house at the top of China Beach and wind their way up El Camino del Mar and collect me. Together, we’d walk the wide, well-paved street to pick up another girl who lives in the house that looks like a castle (it has a turret) and then continue to school. The older girls passed down their knowledge of houses to us, and we combine this with the information we have from our parents. When we become the older girls at Spragg, we teach the younger girls about the houses, about who lives where, about which gardeners are pervy. From grades kindergarten until fourth we wear plaid green jumpers over white blouses with Peter Pan collars. In fifth grade through eighth grade we wear pleated blue skirts that stop right above the knee, and white sailor middies. It is the see-through white middies that provoke the gardeners’ comments. “You are not so little anymore,” they say, staring at our chests.

When we are thirteen Maria Fabiola and I walk with two other girls: Julia and Faith. Julia used to live a few houses up the street from me, in a home that looked like it could fall into the ocean. Her mom is a retired professional ice-skater with a wall of medals so Julia skates, too. Julia has shoulder-length light brown hair that shines blond in the sun and has blue eyes that she insists on calling “cobalt.” She briefly dated a boy from Pacific Heights until one night on the phone she asked him what color her eyes were and he said “blue,” and he was done for. Julia’s half sister, Gentle, is seventeen. She’s the daughter of Julia’s father and his first wife, who was a hippie. Then Julia’s father made money and the first wife couldn’t stand the hypocrisy, so she left him and Gentle and moved to India. That’s when Gentle’s father married the ice-skater.

It’s hard for Julia to have a half sister like Gentle. Gentle used to attend the Spragg School for Girls until she got kicked out. She goes to Grant, the public high school, which makes her one of the only people we know who goes there. The kids who go to Grant look huge and their coats are enormous. They give the finger to cops and even firemen. She used to babysit for me and Svea sometimes until my parents found out that one night, when I was eleven and she was fifteen, she taught me how to smoke.

Gentle has long tangled mouse-brown hair and wears bell-bottoms. She used to have hippie friends but now we usually see her alone. She’s often drunk, stoned, on acid. Once we were at the playground by the golf course next to Spragg and we saw a crowd gathering and laughing at something. Julia, Maria Fabiola, and I went to see what it was and there was Gentle, naked and swinging from the monkey bars. Julia was furious. She ran home to tell her mom and didn’t come to school the next day.

After a business scandal that was on the front page of the Chronicle, Julia’s family had to move to a small house on the other side of California Street, beyond the border of Sea Cliff. They said they were only living there while doing construction on their main house, but I haven’t seen any workers at their old house and I overheard my father tell my mother that he read in a real-estate report that it had been sold. Now they have no view of the ocean. Now they use their garage for a spare room and park their cars on the street. Between the scandal and having to move, we all feel bad for Julia, but we mostly feel bad for her because nobody would want a half sister like Gentle. My mom says she respects Julia’s mom because it must be incredibly challenging to be a stepmother to such a lost girl. All the music Gentle likes is about drugs. Or the bands do drugs, or look like they do drugs. Everything about Gentle is grubby and unwashed but this is the eighties and the eighties are clean, and the colors are bright and separated.

Then there’s Faith. She’s one of us. Faith moved to San Francisco last year in seventh grade, and lives in a house that extends an entire block on Sea View. She has long red hair that on some days makes her look like Anne of Green Gables, and on other days like Pippi Longstocking. She plays goalie on the soccer team and is always diving for the ball, her hair streaming behind her like a flag. She has this air about her like she knows she’s special, and maybe it’s because she resembles famous literary characters or maybe it’s because she’s adopted. Her father is a lot younger than her mother. They had a daughter but she died and so they adopted Faith to replace her. The dead daughter’s name was Faith, too, which I think is strange and Julia thinks is horrendous because her favorite word is “horrendous.” But Faith doesn’t mind that she was named after the dead daughter. In fact, sometimes she says she feels like she’s twenty because the original Faith lived to be seven and Faith is now thirteen. I don’t know what Faith’s mom was like before the original Faith died, but she now acts like life is a large broken car she’s pushing down the road. She walks diagonally, as though she’s making her way through a rainstorm, even on the fairest of days.

The four of us—Maria Fabiola, Faith, Julia, and I—own these streets of Sea Cliff, but it’s Maria Fabiola and I who know the beaches the best. Maybe it’s because our houses are closest to the shore. Her house is situated above China Beach and mine is just up the street—a four-minute walk.

We take the boys from Sea View to the beach and under their gaze we see how agile we are. We can feel our power as we race on all fours over the cliffs—we know their crevices and footholds, their smooth inclines and their rugged patches. If there were an Olympic category for climbing these cliffs, we would enter it; we scale them as though we are in training. After an afternoon at the beach, the pads of our fingers are rough, and our palms smell of damp rock, and the boys are dazzled.

China Beach is adjacent to a bigger beach, Baker Beach, and they’re separated by a promontory, but Maria Fabiola and I know how to traverse between the two beaches at low tide. We know how to read the ocean, how to navigate the slippery rocks so that if we time it perfectly we can wait until the ocean starts to inhale its waves and, through a combination of climbing and scurrying, make our way to Baker Beach. Once, on a class outing to China Beach, we knew the tide was right to make a mad dash around the bluff and end up at Baker. Other classmates followed us. When our teachers yelled for us to come back, Maria Fabiola and I timed the waves and ran. Our classmates didn’t know the beach the way we did, hesitated, and got stuck on the other side. The teachers panicked. We assured them it would be okay. We climbed over the bluff and held our classmates’ hands, watched the ocean, and guided our classmates back to China Beach. We tried to remain humble but we were heroes.

2

Maria Fabiola and I have been best friends since we were in kindergarten at Spragg, and we have been placed in different homerooms almost every year. Separately we are good girls. We behave. Together, some strange alchemy occurs and we are trouble. This happens at school, and it happens when we’re not at school. Last year I got into trouble with my parents and with my neighbors for telling a lie that involved her. Maria Fabiola and I were selling lemonade. We weren’t getting many customers in front of my house, so we moved our stand in front of a bigger one on a corner. A Chevy full of teenage boys pulled up, and the boy in the passenger seat leaned out the window to talk to us. “If that’s your house, can we marry you when you’re older?”

Maria Fabiola and I looked at each other and laughed. We didn’t correct their assumption.

“We’ll take that as a yes,” the boy said. As the car drove off, he yelled out the window, “We’ll be back!” To some, that might sound like a threat, but to us it was a promise.

Mrs. Sheridan, a neighbor I’d known most of my life, was our first customer. “What do we have here today, Eulabee?”

“Lemonade,” I said, pointing to the sign that said “Lemonade.”

She bought one cup, which she drank on the spot, and then bought a second. “And what’s your name?” she said to Maria Fabiola.

“Maria Fabiola.”

I would have thought Mrs. Sheridan might recognize her from all the times she’d been at my house, but apparently not. Her non-recognition of Maria Fabiola made me look at my friend differently. And for the first time I saw what everyone else must be seeing: she was no longer who she used to be. Her hair, once straight, had become wavy. Her body had swelled, stretching the fabric of her shirt and the back pockets of her jeans, so now the pockets tilted inward toward each other at an angle. The lie flew out of my mouth, a fabrication intended to collapse the distance spreading between us. “Maria Fabiola’s not just my friend,” I said to Mrs. Sheridan. “My parents recently adopted her. She’s my new sister.”

Mrs. Sheridan, who wore a large cross on a thin chain around her neck, thought this was wonderful news. I did, too. It was hard, at first, to see what Maria Fabiola thought of my lie—her full lips were pillowed together into a pout—but she began to repeat the fib, and then embrace it, and this pleased me. We proceeded to walk around the block, ringing the doorbells and knocking the knockers and I introduced Maria Fabiola to every neighbor as my new adopted sister.

We rang a few more doorbells, almost all of which were answered. Did no one in Sea Cliff work? Each neighbor accepted our lie as truth. The ease of deception made the lying less fun, so we stopped and returned to my house to get a snack. We made ants on a log—peanut butter on celery with raisins on top.

“I didn’t know you were such a good liar,” Maria Fabiola said. She seemed to be evaluating me with new eyes.

“I didn’t either,” I said.

We continued eating without talking, the snap of the celery the only noise.

Maria Fabiola’s mom came to pick her up in her black Volvo. Her mother had dark hair and wore large sunglasses so opaque that sometimes it appeared she had difficulty seeing through the lenses. She often lifted them up in an attempt to get a better view, and then let them fall back over her eyes as though disappointed at what things really looked like. She quickly whisked Maria Fabiola away. I hoped nobody saw her leave. Maria Fabiola’s departure had no part in the narrative of my newly fabricated family life.

It wasn’t long before the phone started ringing. Neighbors were calling to congratulate my parents on the new addition to our family, and to ask if we needed help with the transition. Hand-me-down clothes, food, anything at all.

During the phone calls, my parents were very attentive and intrigued. I couldn’t see their faces because I was hiding in the hall closet, standing inside a long raccoon fur coat that belonged to my mother. I knew the inside of this coat well. Its lining had a complicated brown and black and white pattern, into which my mother’s initials—G.S.—had been stitched and camouflaged. I had been told that if anyone ever stole the coat, she would be able to identify it as hers by pointing out the initials, but it was never explained to me why anyone would want to steal the coat and I never saw my mom wear it outside of the house—or in the house, either. Even the raccoon coat couldn’t muffle the sounds of my parents’ voices; I could hear they were befuddled, and angry. The closet door was opened. I had been hiding inside the long raccoon fur coat since I was little so it was not such a good hiding place, really. Five minutes later I was retracing my steps around the neighborhood, ringing cold doorbells and apologizing to stern faces.

3

My dad comes home one day in September and says that an episode of a TV show I haven’t heard of is going to be filmed at Joseph & Joseph. Joseph & Joseph is the art and antique gallery he owns on the other side of town. My father’s name is Joseph and when he was coming up with the logo he wanted an ampersand because he thought it looked more impressive. One small setback: he didn’t have a partner, so just repeated his own name. Now an episode of a not-well-known detective show is going to be filmed at the gallery and my dad has asked if Svea, my friends, and I want to be in the establishing shot. I don’t know what an establishing shot is, but I call Maria Fabiola, Faith, and Julia, and we plan what we’re going to wear. We’re disappointed when we learn that whoever’s in charge wants us to wear our school uniforms.

My father’s antique gallery is South of Market. He found a small block he liked so he went door to door and offered cash to each of the owners of the houses. A couple of the owners remembered my dad from when he was a kid delivering newspapers. They were happy to take the cash; they were happy to leave. Then my father built Joseph & Joseph. The gallery hasn’t changed the neighborhood much—outside its large French doors, men sit drinking straight from the bottle. But once you step inside Joseph & Joseph, it feels like you’re in a giant dollhouse.

Two floors of the building are filled with antiques. There’s also an auction room, which is often rented out for parties. My father has photos of himself with O.J. Simpson, with Mayor Dianne Feinstein. In the photo I can see her beautiful legs. My dad talks a lot about Dianne Feinstein’s legs. Once, after describing them, he said “Yowzah.”

My favorite thing in the gallery is a Chinese spice cabinet. It’s almost six feet tall and four feet wide, and has forty-two drawers that are deep and long. I love opening a drawer and inhaling and trying to guess what spice was stored there. Then I close the drawer and open the next one. It’s like a library card catalog for smells.

My father has a secretary named Arlene. Arlene is the sister of my dad’s best friend from their days growing up in the alley. My dad is loyal to his friends from the neighborhood. Arlene’s hair is so long it extends past her belt, and she’s partial to blouses with ties and burgundy pants. She can be grumpy sometimes and I know this means that it’s her time of the month. I first learned this from my dad and I hate that he knows this. I hate that I know this. I keep a chart in my calendar of when she’s grumpy toward me on the phone or in person, and it tracks: she’s testy toward me every four weeks.

At other times she’s sweet and attentive. She gives me baby aspirin when I have a headache, and she lets me touch all the antiques, even the indoor marble fountain with the naked angel balanced precariously on top. The water spouts from the angel’s mouth like projectile vomit.

On the day of the filming my mother drives Svea, Maria Fabiola, Faith, Julia, and me to the gallery after school. She has brought me a new, freshly pressed uniform, but this embarrasses me, so I don’t change into it. But Maria Fabiola, who spilled mustard on her uniform that day at lunch, says she’d like to use it.

When we get to the gallery, half the furniture has been moved to make way for lights and cameras. My spice cabinet hasn’t been touched. Arlene has ironed her hair so it’s exceptionally straight today, and my dad is wearing his silver tie, his best tie, even though he’s not going to be on camera.

Maria Fabiola takes the hanger with my newly pressed blue uniform skirt and my white middy into the bathroom and changes. When she comes out, I can’t help but stare. The middy, which is loose on me, is tight on her. I usually wear a white T-shirt under my middy but she’s not wearing one. Nor is she wearing a bra.

The director, who isn’t dressed up at all and doesn’t have a director’s chair (a disappointment) tells us it’s time for the establishing shot. We go outside the building and see a camera has been set up. Faith, Julia, Svea, Maria Fabiola, and I are supposed to skip in front of the gallery like we’re heading home from school. It occurs to me that we were instructed to wear our uniforms because this will make it look like the gallery is in an upscale part of town, a part of the city where there are private schools. The reality is that there aren’t any private schools within walking distance of Joseph & Joseph.

We skip in front of the entranceway in one direction. Then we walk back to the starting point and skip again. After the third take the director talks to an assistant and the assistant talks to my dad and then my dad whispers with my mom. I watch their mouths moving but can’t make out what they’re saying. Finally my mom comes over to me and my friends. “This time, girls, let’s try it without the skipping. Oh, and Maria Fabiola, the director doesn’t want everyone looking so similar. Can you put on your uniform sweater?” Maria Fabiola does as instructed and then we walk in front of the gallery two more times.

“And . . . cut!” the director yells. He doesn’t use a megaphone, but still my friends and I find it exciting that he’s using official movie language.

We’re thanked and told this episode of the show won’t air for a few months, but not even this delay can dampen our moods. My mom drives us home, and we’re all hyper, including Svea, who’s happy because my friends are paying attention to her and Faith’s even braiding her pretty hair.

That night in the kitchen I ask my mother what the whispering on set was about. “Oh, that,” my mother says. “I don’t remember.”

“Yes, you do,” I say.

“Well, don’t tell your friends, but the director thought that Maria Fabiola’s appearance was distracting.”

“Distracting?”

“That’s the word he used,” my mother says.

“Huh,” I say, trying to act casual.

That night, I do a two-way call and I inform Julia and Maria Fabiola that the director thought Maria Fabiola was “distracting.” Maria Fabiola starts laughing and I join her. Julia is silent and then tries to act like she’s not the slightest bit jealous.

“Sorry I wasn’t laughing before,” Julia says, “but I was distracted.”

I hear Maria Fabiola’s bracelets jingling and I know she’s running her fingers through her long, long hair.

4

Iam at Faith’s house the night her father kills himself. All four of us are there. It’s Faith’s birthday and we go to the Alexandria Theatre on Geary to watch The Breakfast Club. We watch the movie with rapt attention and with glee. When we leave the theater we are delirious. “Don’t you forget about me,” we say to each other over and over again. We want all the boys from the film to pay attention to us. We want to want. We want to love. We want to want love. We are on the precipice of having real boyfriends, of making out with them. We know this. We can feel this urge pulsating through our bodies, but we don’t know what to call it—we won’t call it desire—or how to express it to each other or to ourselves. And so we continue to laugh and sing “Don’t you forget about me” until Faith’s mother arrives at the theater in a ridiculous red raincoat, made more ridiculous by the fact that it’s not raining. She puts her finger to her lips and says, “Shhh.”

Faith’s birthday dinner is at Al’s Place on Clement Street. Faith’s father, who is handsome and at least a dozen years younger than Faith’s mom, joins us after work. He orders a steak and what on TV they call a stiff drink. Faith’s mother orders a diet soft drink, which she sips through a straw, from which she hasn’t successfully removed the paper wrapper. A piece of white paper sticks to her lip for half the meal. When she excuses herself to use the restroom, Faith’s father orders another stiff drink. Faith’s father asks us each a few questions and tries hard to get my name and Julia’s name straight. He remembers Maria Fabiola’s name easily. Everyone remembers Maria Fabiola. Her looks have recently become troublingly arresting. Her body has blossomed more, and this has gifted her face an expression of constant surprise, as though even she can’t believe her good fortune.

We return to Faith’s house after dinner and a sad slice of cake. Faith gives us a tour because Maria Fabiola hasn’t been inside before. “Never?” Julia asks. “I have a lot of after-school activities,” Maria Fabiola replies. She and I have the same number of after-school activities. We started taking ballet together at the Olenska School of Ballet when puberty began to take over our bodies, making us clumsy and laminating our curves with fat. Not that our instructor, Madame Sonya, thinks there’s much hope for us—she often quotes Isadora Duncan, who said that American bodies aren’t made for ballet. Still, while the dance classes haven’t done much for me, they have helped define Maria Fabiola’s figure. In addition to ballet, we go to dancing school every other Wednesday. All of us at Spragg go to ballroom dancing school because that’s where you meet the boys who go to the all-boys’ schools.

Faith’s house is decorated with Laura Ashley patterns—tiny pastel flowers on white curtains, tiny pastel flowers on tablecloths, tiny pastel flowers everywhere. The house is clearly bigger than their home in Connecticut was because their furniture can’t fill all the spaces. And so it’s the kind of house that has a couch in one room, a desk in another. I know Maria Fabiola isn’t getting the full tour because Faith’s parents are home. The full tour includes the stack of Playboys her dad keeps in a shoebox in his closet, along with a gun—“the gun’s just to scare burglars,” according to Faith. The full tour includes the piles of pathetic diaries her mother keeps under her side of the bed. Each page lists what she’s eaten on a particular day and rates her intake as good or bad. The diaries never detail anything else about her days besides her food consumption.

Without the prolonged stop in her parents’ bedroom, the tour doesn’t last very long. After five minutes we end up back in the kitchen and start making popcorn. I look around—suddenly Maria Fabiola isn’t with us. Faith’s mom asks if we want to run to the corner store to buy Virgina Slims. She often sends Faith to the store with money and a note giving her permission to buy cigarettes. “Not on my birthday!” Faith yells. Her mom picks up her stained purse with its long fraying strap and leaves to get them herself. We don’t end up eating the popcorn because it’s burnt.

A cool saltwater breeze enters the house and we follow it through the open back door and into the garden. Faith’s father is outside in the dim light having a drink. He’s sitting on a short white bench that I realize is a swing. It’s the kind of swing that you see in musicals or plays set in the South. Seated next to him on the swing is Maria Fabiola.

“Let’s ride the elevator,” Faith calls out.

“I’m speaking with your friend, Faith,” her father says.

“It only fits three anyway,” Faith says, with an accusatory glance at Maria Fabiola. Then Julia and I follow Faith inside. The walls of the elevator are decorated with long ribbons that have been stapled at the top and the bottom. There’s an assortment of colors like those at Baskin Robbins: strawberry, pistachio, banana, and mandarin. “The previous owner decorated it like this,” Faith explains, though it’s evident that the frivolity of fluttering ribbons is antithetical to her mother’s entire being, which might be why we had to wait until she left to enter the elevator. We ride up and down and up and down the four stories of the house until I feel claustrophobic. When I get out on the bottom floor, Maria Fabiola is coming in from the garden, wearing an expression I can’t decipher.

“How was the elevator ride?” she asks, in a condescending voice.

“Honestly,” I say, looking at her, “I feel kind of sick.”

Faith’s mother returns home, and the four of us girls seclude ourselves in Faith’s room, also covered in little flowers. Her books (few in number, and young for our grade) are too neatly aligned between white bookends that are meant to resemble owls but look more like melted moons. On her floor is a circular shag rug, and we run our fingers through its long, cloud-colored fibers like we’re stroking blades of grass in heaven.