novella
Active Member
There's No Place Like Home
I had a best friend once. We spent all our time together and when we were not together we were on the phone together. I didn't analyze it, just felt lucky that someone felt so much like I did that we would practically have the same thoughts. She's the only person who ever gave me clothes that I would actually wear. We could stay on the phone not talking for twenty minutes, and think even that was fun.
We met when we were 14. She was belting out a Grace Slick song in the girls bathroom where I usually smoked. I couldn't believe she would sing that loud in public, let alone in school where it might stay with you forever. I hopped up onto the windowsill and lit my cigarette and waited for someone to rag on her.
"Nice song," this girl Pat said, smirking.
"**** you!" the singing girl said. That's when I knew we would be friends. Her name was Honor.
The friends I had before seemed put off by her. They thought she was strange. I put it down to some weird type of jealousy. It was years before I met her old friends, and I didn't like them. One named Jeannie had an apartment that smelled like cabbage, and another one, Colette, had a very fat butt and a loud mouth. So, most of the time it was just the two of us. And then we had Kevin.
He was peripheral at first, but then something about his sarcasm, his smugness, the way he held his cigarette between his thumb and index finger, like Belmondo in Breathless. It may have been affectation, but it worked. We were open, he was cryptic. We wanted guys, he was standoffish. We made plans, we did things.. Kevin floated along nearby, nodding his head to some silent tune.
The triangle had a symmetry and perfection, a new coolness that required all three of us. We weren't two friends, we weren't two couples. We were the essentials of a tribe, three like minds parsing the weirdness of high school.. It was like that for eight years, through college, through moving away from our parents' houses and into Manhattan. During those years our boyfriends and girlfriends were superfluous to the tribe, outsiders who we saw on the side. They didn't blend in and we didn't ask them to. When I was 16 my boyfriend Danny wanted me to spend less time with them. I loved him to death, I craved him, but I knew his days were numbered.
There was a solidness to us, a fallback place that we all relied on. Years later it occurred to me that our parents—Honor's father and mother, my own father and mother, and Kevin's disaster of a father—were quiet lifelong alcoholics who'd been retreating into the etherworld every night for decades. But I didn't see that connection at the time. What we seemed to have in common was not caring about anything and caring too much about everything. It was always the end of the world, of some emotional irreplaceable moment that we could never recapture, but we were ready to watch it pass and give commentary on it while it disappeared over the horizon.
When we were 18, it would have all come to a natural end. The end of high school, and we would move on to other things. Then my mother was murdered, and I began to float, and they clung to me like weights. I didn't notice what they did. They were just there, each pinning me to the ground so I did not disappear over the horizon. By the time I could hold my own on the earth, things had started to crack.
First, Honor became angry with me, out of the blue. She said I had always made her do things she didn't want to, that she had lost herself, following me around. I didn't remember anything like that. I remember just being. I was blameless.
When we first argued, Kevin wandered off. He wasn't in it for the fighting. It went like that for a while. One time Honor and I were struggling to work something bad out, and Kev took a pencil and a straightedge and drew a long line across the white wall of my apartment. In tiny letters at the very end he wrote 'kevin draws the line' and then he left.
It was never the same after that. We tried to pull it back together, but Kevin took up Yukon Jack and Honor took up witchcraft. And I fell in love with someone else.
There's an empty place where they used to be, but I know it will just stay that way. Like leaving home too late and finding out that it's too late to ever call anyplace else home.
I had a best friend once. We spent all our time together and when we were not together we were on the phone together. I didn't analyze it, just felt lucky that someone felt so much like I did that we would practically have the same thoughts. She's the only person who ever gave me clothes that I would actually wear. We could stay on the phone not talking for twenty minutes, and think even that was fun.
We met when we were 14. She was belting out a Grace Slick song in the girls bathroom where I usually smoked. I couldn't believe she would sing that loud in public, let alone in school where it might stay with you forever. I hopped up onto the windowsill and lit my cigarette and waited for someone to rag on her.
"Nice song," this girl Pat said, smirking.
"**** you!" the singing girl said. That's when I knew we would be friends. Her name was Honor.
The friends I had before seemed put off by her. They thought she was strange. I put it down to some weird type of jealousy. It was years before I met her old friends, and I didn't like them. One named Jeannie had an apartment that smelled like cabbage, and another one, Colette, had a very fat butt and a loud mouth. So, most of the time it was just the two of us. And then we had Kevin.
He was peripheral at first, but then something about his sarcasm, his smugness, the way he held his cigarette between his thumb and index finger, like Belmondo in Breathless. It may have been affectation, but it worked. We were open, he was cryptic. We wanted guys, he was standoffish. We made plans, we did things.. Kevin floated along nearby, nodding his head to some silent tune.
The triangle had a symmetry and perfection, a new coolness that required all three of us. We weren't two friends, we weren't two couples. We were the essentials of a tribe, three like minds parsing the weirdness of high school.. It was like that for eight years, through college, through moving away from our parents' houses and into Manhattan. During those years our boyfriends and girlfriends were superfluous to the tribe, outsiders who we saw on the side. They didn't blend in and we didn't ask them to. When I was 16 my boyfriend Danny wanted me to spend less time with them. I loved him to death, I craved him, but I knew his days were numbered.
There was a solidness to us, a fallback place that we all relied on. Years later it occurred to me that our parents—Honor's father and mother, my own father and mother, and Kevin's disaster of a father—were quiet lifelong alcoholics who'd been retreating into the etherworld every night for decades. But I didn't see that connection at the time. What we seemed to have in common was not caring about anything and caring too much about everything. It was always the end of the world, of some emotional irreplaceable moment that we could never recapture, but we were ready to watch it pass and give commentary on it while it disappeared over the horizon.
When we were 18, it would have all come to a natural end. The end of high school, and we would move on to other things. Then my mother was murdered, and I began to float, and they clung to me like weights. I didn't notice what they did. They were just there, each pinning me to the ground so I did not disappear over the horizon. By the time I could hold my own on the earth, things had started to crack.
First, Honor became angry with me, out of the blue. She said I had always made her do things she didn't want to, that she had lost herself, following me around. I didn't remember anything like that. I remember just being. I was blameless.
When we first argued, Kevin wandered off. He wasn't in it for the fighting. It went like that for a while. One time Honor and I were struggling to work something bad out, and Kev took a pencil and a straightedge and drew a long line across the white wall of my apartment. In tiny letters at the very end he wrote 'kevin draws the line' and then he left.
It was never the same after that. We tried to pull it back together, but Kevin took up Yukon Jack and Honor took up witchcraft. And I fell in love with someone else.
There's an empty place where they used to be, but I know it will just stay that way. Like leaving home too late and finding out that it's too late to ever call anyplace else home.
