“Naw, she didn’t listen to me. We barely say a word to each other anymore. And it’s about more than that. She and Kaylyn—they’ve got this fucked codependent thing. You know Kay’s back? Dropped out of Toledo. They’ve been hanging out.”
“I don’t get it, are you jealous?” She hoped the word jealous didn’t sound as jealous as it did to her own ears. Whenever Lisa spoke of a person for whom she carried love, Stacey wanted to attach her mouth to her and siphon it off.
“Not exactly. Kay was always hanging on Bill when we were dating, always flirting with him like she didn’t think I saw. But you don’t understand, that girl is severely more fucked up than…”
“Right, your brother’s baseball card or whatever.” Stacey was angry—and fearful. Maybe it was irrational, but she wondered if either Hailey or Kaylyn had been with Lisa first. Maybe just a night like their Casablanca night, but it would be more than enough to make her crazy. For some reason, Ashcraft she could live with, but not another girl.
“No. Not that. I got ahold of this thing.” She hunched forward, sitting like a guy with her elbows propped on her thighs, strands of oil-black hair falling in her eyes. Stacey had the urge to tuck them behind her ear, and it made her stomach queasy with longing. “I just know some bad shit about Kaylyn. It’s been making me a little nuts… figuring what to do about it.”
“What is it?”
“She’s just a total psycho. That’s all I can think about her anymore.”
“What is it?” she asked again.
“It’s a videotape. Kay and some guys from the football team. It’s…” She hesitated.
“What?” she demanded.
“There’s cocaine in it.”
Understand at the time, this truly was amazing to Stacey. She’d never heard of such a thing in New Canaan. That anyone, let alone her once-close friend, had access to cocaine was beyond wild.
“Like they videotaped themselves doing it?”
“Something like that.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“I have no clue.” Lisa sniffed and stared out over the gossamer fog. Then she said, “Man, fuck her. Fuck Kowalczyk. Fuck Kaylyn. Fuck all these people. Four years from now I’ll be drinking wine in Florence, and they’ll both just be teenage bullshit I’ll barely remember.”
Almost four years later, when Stacey was home for Christmas her senior year of college, she went to her mom’s gym and bumped into Hailey Kowalczyk in the locker room. They stubbed toes on their hellos, jammed fingers trying to find common ground for the brief time it took Hailey to change from nursing scrubs into workout clothes. Skipped over Rick Brinklan’s parade, which Hailey had attended but Stacey had not. Hailey and Danny, she learned, had broken up, and she was now seeing Eric Frye. Then Stacey asked her if she ever heard from Lisa. It was all they had in common other than middle school basketball.
“We still write to each other every now and then. She’s in Vietnam, working at some hospital running an English-language program.”
“How is she?” Stacey asked with great effort to keep her voice even. A flare of that old irrational jealousy.
“She loves it. And I miss her. We kind of had our drifting apart in high school over stupid teenage stuff but…” She trailed off. “Want me to tell her you said hi?” she offered.
She was much taller than Hailey. She wanted to loom over her and say, Why you? Lisa thought you were a fucking phony. Why you and not me?
Then she was stuck on that bike wondering what Lisa could have possibly been thinking, and if she’d ever tracked down her dad in Vietnam, and of the complex transpositions of history that had likely brought Lisa’s father from that country to Ohio and the daughter he abandoned all the way back to his ancestral home. In all of Stacey’s travels to come, all her notions of wanderlust, she never dared tack her pushpin to Southeast Asia, where Lisa had chosen to make her life. Had she ever harbored any ambitions to do so, they dissipated after her heart was broken by that conversation with Hailey Kowalczyk.
A compact blue sedan idled in the shadows between the streetlights. At the passenger side, leaning in to speak to the driver, was a man who elicited memories of standing in the student bleachers holding Ben’s hand and hurling classist chants at teams from towns far bleaker than New Canaan (It’s all right / It’s okay / Y’all are gonna pump our gas someday). Bubbling up from the depths of memory, his nickname for Stacey popped to the surface: “Little Moore.”
Back when Todd Beaufort and her brother Matt were friends on the football team, all those intimidating older boys used to call her that.
Todd spoke to a figure ensconced in the dark behind the steering wheel. The face missing. Buried in shadow. Now he glanced her way, and she almost raised a hand to wave.
Todd had always been her favorite of Matt’s friends, probably because when Todd came over to their house, he went out of his way to be nice to her. It was likely also how he turned his eye toward Tina. He ended up dating Stacey’s childhood friend for the better part of high school, though by that point she and Tina barely spoke. There was a lot of gossip that the Todd-Tina celebrity dyad didn’t end well. There was a reason she and Tina grew apart, however, and where others saw Todd as the villain, Stacey always saw Tina as more complicit. Sometimes being that beautiful, coveted girl at that age can almost be a curse (she thought of Kaylyn as well). Tina allowed herself to become enveloped by Todd and quit any activity that failed to bow to his wishes. She thought of the time as seventh graders when the two of them sneaked to the edge of the basement stairs to try to hear what Matt, Todd, Curtis, and their other friends were talking about. All they could hear, though, was the air conditioner and the occasional guttural guffaw of older boy laughter. While Stacey made new friends through volleyball, Tina hovered over her new love sycophantically, lost interest in anything else. When they finally broke up, grotesque rumors circulated about her, all of them ridiculous and likely fabricated by the football team, but they made Stacey wary. Tina made an aborted, half-hearted effort to reconnect with her, but by then Stacey had a new crew of friends. Tina retreated from the social scene, lost so much weight that people whispered about an eating disorder. Stacey lost all track of her after graduation.
Stacey lowered her hand when Todd glared her way. He looked drunk. Not to mention fat and tired and old. Even more so than Jonah. He turned back to the car without noticing her.
She’d felt sorry for him then and felt sorry for him now. When she was a sophomore they’d been in the same study hall, and he’d asked her a question about algebra. He was studying for the SAT and absolutely needed a higher score so he could play college football. He showed her what he was having trouble with, a very basic 3x=15, solve for x question. How was it possible that he’d made it to his senior year unable to do an equation he should’ve learned in seventh grade when she and Tina were still elementary school girls spying on him from the basement stairs? Stacey spent most of the study hall that semester tutoring him. He did eventually get the score he needed, although from the looks of things now, it hadn’t led where he’d hoped.
He popped open the door of the car and climbed inside. When the driver pulled away, Stacey took a step back into the shadows of the alley. She wasn’t sure why. She let the car go by and saw Todd Beaufort’s bleary face beneath a red ball cap, cut through with a wounded, hopeless expression. She continued to the bar.