While she dated 56, all her friends from church and school became afterthoughts at best, strangers at worst. Senior year, she’d tried reconciling with Stacey. They spent an afternoon after church walking through town, talking about why they’d stopped speaking.
“You got to being his groupie.” Stacey reached out and tucked a strand of Tina’s hair behind her ear. Her fingers felt so pleasant as they drew down the back of her earlobe. “You became somebody else, and I didn’t care for that girl at all.”
It was difficult for her eighteen-year-old self to hear that and not grow defensive. Her best friend from childhood, whose house she’d once practically lived at on the weekends, who had the revolting and incredible ability to fart whenever she wanted, which she deployed to hilarious effect, whose brothers she coveted because she had none of her own—Tina simply couldn’t love her anymore. She’d become extremely close with Lisa Han, Tina’s least favorite person in high school. Vulgar, know-it-all, and cruel, Lisa stalked the halls with an unmistakable arrogance and swagger. Maybe Tina had dropped her friend for 56, but in turn Stacey had chosen such an odious replacement, there was no chance of repairing the friendship.
“Are those rumors true?” Stacey asked her abruptly. “About you and him and the guys on the team?”
It was the same panic she’d felt with Dr. Marsha. The same fear. She glared at the ground, hating that she could not meet Stacey’s eye, and therefore hating Stacey.
“Of course not,” she said. “It’s dumb rumors he started just to hurt me. So no one else would date me.”
Of all the things she regretted, lying to Stacey was close to the top. It was impossible to not wonder if things would’ve turned out differently if she’d had courage in that moment.
Six years later when she met Beauty, it was like coming up for air. Her first real best friend since she was a ninth grader. Beauty spotted her reading a book about Lizzie Borden at lunch on her second day of work and said, “You’ve gotta let me borrow that.”
“You’ll have to ask the library. It’s theirs.”
“Then let me know when you turn it in. I can’t get enough of that stuff—it scares the crap outta me.”
Beauty had a funky sense of humor, an ability to leave Tina gasping for breath over some absurdity. She called the Walmart regulars “the village bizarre.” It meant the people who came in frequently but only to push a cart, gab, blab, and gossip with whoever they could manage to run into, and who left after only buying a six-pack of pop. (In their dullest moments at work, Beauty did an impression of a character she called “Mr. Raithenth,” which was just her crossing her eyes and asking Tina for some raisins with a lisp. “Uh, excuthe me, Mith. Where can I find the raithenth?” It never failed to bust her gut and occasionally have her in tears.)
And maybe it had been Beauty, a few years earlier, who first laid the kindling for an idea. Tina had been complaining about sleeplessness. She was working sixty-, sometimes seventy-hour weeks, her dad had just broken his hip, and she was so anxious trying to fall asleep, fearing the exhaustion she’d feel the next day if she didn’t, that she’d stare at the ceiling for hours in a self-fulfilling loop.
“I can get you something to help,” Beauty told her. “My cousin in Dayton makes G.”
“What’s that?”
“G. Liquid G. People take it at raves and stuff. The right amount’s like a really good sleeping pill and too much is like a date rape drug, so just be careful.”
Tina turned these words over in her mind for a long time before giving Beauty the go-ahead. She experimented on herself at first, and the stuff did help her sleep. Then later, she tried it on Cole. It came in mini Ziploc bags of white powder. She was trying to think of a place to hide it where her mother would never clean and went rummaging through her closet. There was a box, still untouched from when they’d moved to Van Wert. Among the junk, she found the four copies of the Jaguar Journal she’d saved from freshman year. Beneath those was the picture book story of Jesus. Creased with wear, the covers fell open automatically to the page she’d spent so much time studying as a child, the one that began to teach her what kind of courage it takes to overcome true fear. What kind of love. She placed the baggie in the page and returned the book to the box.
Two miles down the dirt road, there was a turnoff into the woods. This wasn’t where 56 had taken her, but she’d noticed the road from the occasions they’d parked in the field. About a year ago, on one of her increasing number of visits back, she’d taken a drive to see where it went. She followed it now. After creeping through the woods for about five miles over leaves, branches, and the crunch of caked mud, fried crisp by the summer drought, the path finally terminated in a small clearing carved out of the forest like a bowl. The woods fell away, and she cruised across the tall grass to the opposite edge of the clearing. She parked the car and shut off the lights. Then the engine. Outside, the crickets chattered, and the fireflies made the night sizzle. She took a moment to breathe in the air, to watch the stars, so bright out here in the country, an indecipherable map to somewhere better.
There’d been stars like this on the night it all began, the same stark, clear, cloudless sky. Maybe that was wrong, but it helped her remember why she was here now. Because she owed it to herself to return to all the corners of her memory where she rarely ventured.
She’d plotted it so carefully, her first time. As dictated by her young theory, Love was giving the person you cared about something you’d never given anyone else, the one thing only you could give him. During the winter of her freshman year, after football season had ended, she constructed an alibi involving FCA. Fifty-six had the perfect idea: his friend and teammate Ryan Ostrowski (No. 63) was throwing a party to celebrate their 10–2 season, one of the best finishes for New Canaan football in a decade. He basically had his own place because his dad was long gone and his mother drove a truck that took her down south for weeks at a time. The team was getting a keg from the brother of Jake Levy (No. 16), and most of the upperclassmen would be there. Fifty-six said that Strow had promised them the basement guest room.
At school that Friday, she spent her entire day composing. The contents of that letter were mostly lost to time, but she remembered explaining how dear he was to her, how much she loved him, and how she couldn’t believe she was so lucky that they had somehow ended up in the same continent, country, and small town, in the same high school, born in the same wonderful age. How God must have planned for them to meet and fall in love. After going through three drafts, she carefully printed out the final version, folded it into a thick, tight triangle and taped it shut. She wrote 56 across blue notebook lines.
The party was more than she had expected. Everyone she could think of from the senior and junior classes was there, along with many sophomores and a scattering of freshmen. Red Solo cups cluttered every surface of the Ostrowski house, a humble little bungalow at the end of a dirt lane, far enough from the neighbors that it was unlikely they’d be bothered. The music was headache inducing, vibrating out of a car stereo and subwoofer rigged together in a complicated knot of electrical cords. Ostrowski greeted 56 with a high five and a one-armed embrace. Strow greeted Tina with the back of his index finger grazing her cheek and a Solo cup of warm beer. She sipped it because she didn’t want to seem lame but planned to pour it down the toilet later. She’d always considered Ostrowski fairly gross. He was beefy, bordering on fat, with a shaved head and a little goatee overwhelmed by the pudge drooping from beneath his chin. His acne was total. Zits not only conquered his face, but you could see them through the hair on his skull, on his neck, even on the palms of his hands. She made her way into the dim recesses of the crowded living room, stood with her beer, pretending to be part of a conversation between a few juniors she barely knew. The loathed Jess Bealey was there, as were Matt Moore and Tony Wozniak. She recognized Kirk Strothers, the rat-tailed cretin who 56 had remained friends with even though Strothers had been expelled. He now sat on the couch in a daze, staring at Mackenzie Boylan’s chest. Tina knew many of the faces, but not the people. She kept smoothing parts of her outfit, picking threads and hairs from her black pants, pressing at a wrinkle in her top, tugging her jean jacket so that it fit correctly on her chest. She had an urge to check her makeup in her compact but resisted. She watched as 56 moved from room to room and thought about the compact wad of her note pressed into her back pocket.