“Stace.” Kaylyn beckoned her to hang back. They were on their way from the locker room to the court for a game against Mansfield Senior, arch nemesis of Jags volleyball. It was Stacey’s first game on varsity, and she had so much raw energy, she thought she might be able to break a nose with her spike if she got the right set. So when Kaylyn slipped a little blue pill into her palm, smiled, and bounced her dirty blond eyebrows, she already wasn’t thinking clearly.
“What is it?” Stacey asked her.
“Adderall, darling—nothing wild.”
“What’s it do?”
Kaylyn laughed. She had her hair pulled into a tight Dutch braid, so sturdy it looked like you could use it to climb to a castle keep. Stacey had a couple inches on her, but Kay had the most penetrating green-eyed stare. She vivisected you every time she glanced your way.
“It gives you hallucinations of spiders crawling all over your skin.” And Stacey’s face must have gone dumb with shock because Kaylyn burst into bright laughter. “Jesus, Moore, it’s for concentration. It’s an ADHD med. It’ll help you focus out there. I wouldn’t poison you. Although I admit, one time I did feed Jess Bealey an ex-lax–laced empanada on Mexican food day in Spanish. Slut had it coming, though.”
Stacey so did not want to take that pill, but Kay’s eyes were on her, waiting, and her palm seemed to draw it up to her mouth of its own accord. That game, she regretted every moment on the court, where she felt jumpy and wired and three times sent the ball sailing over the heads of Mansfield and into the crowd.
Yet for all her devilish qualities, there was subterranean delicacy to Kaylyn as well. Stacey saw it on the rare occasions she needed a breath from her inhaler, which she hated doing in front of people. In their last game of the season, Kaylyn got a vicious asthma attack. No one could find her inhaler, and they had to stop the game. Lisa and their coach rubbed her back while the team tore apart the visitors’ locker room. When the inhaler was finally found (on her seat on the bus), Kaylyn wrapped her lips greedily around the device and depressed the canister with her thumb, but she still looked terrified. Like maybe despite the medicine, her next breath still wouldn’t come.
It wasn’t until after Kaylyn graduated in ’03, along with Rick, Ben, and Bill, that Stacey came to think of her differently. She asked Lisa if she thought she’d visit Kaylyn in college.
“Not likely.”
They sat cross-legged on the carpet in her room, looking at Lisa’s books. She pulled and piled them, agonizing over what to put in Stacey’s hands next. Gaia still sat on her shelf, unnoticed.
“We grew up in the same neighborhood, then played volleyball, and then our boyfriends were gay for each other. But I don’t think we have anything in common.”
“That actually sounds like the definition of friendship, Han. Like long-lasting, maid-of-honor-at-your-wedding friendship.”
Lisa flipped her hair back in an exasperated gesture. “You’re kind of a nag, you know that?”
“Just curious. Seems like you and Kay and Hailey went from dudettes to enemies and none of you even knows why.”
“Dudettes,” she repeated, smirking. “With Kowalczyk, it’s different. That was stupid freshman chick shit because she was being a total monster to Danny.” Lisa and her Rainrock Road club. Her loyalty to Dan Eaton had no explanation, no comparable situation in her life, and no limits. She simply loved this goofy neighbor kid and was as protective of him as of a three-legged puppy. “With Kaylyn, you know… Trust me. She’s two-faced. So like Bill used to win over my stepbrother by buying him packs of basketball cards—when Alex was that age where it was all he cared about. Not to mention he worshipped Bill, loved watching him play and all that. For his birthday, Bill bought him this expensive card, you know, supposedly worth fifty bucks or something ridiculous. This Shaquille O’Neal rookie card. And this became Alex’s total obsession. He had this fishing tackle box that my stepdad gave him, and he kept all his favorite cards in it, but this Shaq card he kept in a hard plastic case in his pocket. Took it everywhere. Then one day it goes missing, and he was, like, freaking out. Crying, screaming at us, the whole thing. So even though he’s a shit, I helped him look for it, and we tore the house apart, but it never turned up. Anyway, like a year later I was at Kaylyn’s house spending the night—I think you might have been there—we were in the living room hanging out, and I wanted to change into shorts. So I went to her room and was looking through her drawers for a pair. I’ll admit I got kind of snoopy once I opened the top drawer because she had all these little knickknacks under her clothes, lots of strange stuff. But then I found this little sandwich bag with some pieces of cardboard inside, and as I was looking at them, I realized it was my brother’s Shaq card. She’d shredded it and then kept the pieces. I never told anyone. But from that moment on, I just never trusted her.”
“She stole your brother’s card, and that’s why you don’t talk anymore?”
“No. That’s not at all what I mean. I mean she’s not— You don’t really know Kaylyn, Stace. You just don’t. Like there are issues at play. Alex’s card is just a good example.”
Stacey didn’t believe that this story was anything more than a cop-out. Lisa was a bad liar, bad at masking whatever hurt boiled inside her, but she didn’t take it any further. Kaylyn was gone anyway, and all Lisa was saying was maybe that was for the best.
Leaving Vicky’s All-Night Diner, Stacey walked Bethany Kline to the same beige sedan she remembered from high school, the fender dinged, a hubcap missing. Bethany hugged her again.
“Thank you so much for seeing me,” Bethany breathed into her ear. “Even if you don’t end up writing her, thank you for doing this. I know it couldn’t have been easy for you.”
Stacey started to say something, stopped, and just said, “Yeah. I will think about it.”
Bethany squeezed her hand and gave her a weak, hopeful smile. In her car, Bethany reversed into the square and gave Stacey a little wave before heading west, back to her house on Rainrock Road. Suddenly Stacey felt the tension she carried, her whole body coiled with some evolutionary pressure. She tried to release it, to picture foul water draining down a sink. The conversation had been nothing she’d expected yet everything she should have anticipated, and now one thing rang in her mind: Lisa had come home. She’d been back to New Canaan.
She still had to deliver her letter, just a short walk from the square, but there she was: hesitating, and when she realized that hesitation was possibly guilt or pity or remorse for what she’d written, she loathed herself. To decide if this letter was something she wanted truly or just selfishly. This fucking town, she thought.
New Canaan, sclerotic in every capacity. Slow to adapt to manufacturing’s flight to the far-flung corners of the Orient, to the progressive urges of a demographically shifting nation, and obviously to the tolerance of anything but heterosexual behavior. Bethany had simply reacted to her world, the closed circuit from which she came. Yet it was so strange for Stacey to see her broken like this, to see the fight drained out of her. The woman who’d stood outside Kroger’s handing out pamphlets to support Issue 1 back in ’04—how hard had it been for her to get over her own prejudices? Probably as hard as it was for Stacey’s younger self to admit to everything it took her so long to admit to. You make someone your devil for long enough, and you want to hold on to that. There’s something rapturous about hating another person, especially if you have a goddamned good reason. And had Election ’04 not been during her first semester in college, wouldn’t she have been right there beside Bethany, gathering signatures to get the “protect marriage” amendment on the ballot? Hadn’t her own parents gone with Bethany to pass out a few themselves? Hadn’t Patrick spoken on the issue in church? Stacey bought into the whole spiel back then. It seemed perfectly logical to her that people’s perversions were the result of wandering from the path of Jesus Christ. Too many people had put down the Bible and replaced it with hedonism and false idols: celebrities, musicians, all the other monsters under the bed. Hell, her first vote was for the reelection of George W. Bush. She could still hear some of the rhetoric coming out of her mouth as a teenager. Not that she went on about it all the time, especially not once she started dating Ben, who was not religious and was the first person she ever heard articulate why he was not. It’s a strange feeling: to be ashamed and embarrassed of who you used to be. Even with the excuses of youth, inexperience, and influence—her church, her parents, her older brothers, her friends, almost everyone she knew—it still made her deeply uncomfortable to think of herself back then, who she might have hurt without knowing it.