The Next Best Thing (12 page)

What happened to us was a classic story, one that most women have their own versions of: “The Tale of the Lost Friend.” Sarah and I sat together at lunch, we played together at recess, we spent as many afternoons together as our schedules would allow. (Sarah had recorder lessons and, with her brothers, took fencing classes in Cambridge; I had piano and ice-skating lessons in the winter, and between my face and her allergies, there was usually a doctor’s visit once or twice a month.) Starting in junior high, we’d call each other every night to talk about what we were wearing the next day, and whether Jared Marsh (my crush) or Jason Biller (Sarah’s) had noticed what we’d worn the day before. The summer before high school, we spent afternoons in my backyard on towels, in bikinis, with Hawaiian Tropic oil on our bodies and Sun-In in our hair. I was planning on joining the swim team, and Sarah, still tall but much less gawky, with her braces off and her headgear reserved for nights, had traded her glasses for contacts and was thinking about volleyball or maybe basketball. “And then there’s homecoming,” Sarah said, as if I could have forgotten. The homecoming dance, the first dance of the school year, the Saturday night after the fourth football game of the season, in the school gym. Any student with the ten dollars for a ticket could attend.

On our first day of ninth grade we wore the outfits we’d shopped for and chosen together: Calvin Klein jeans, ribbed sweaters (red for her, plum for me), rubber-soled suede work boots—a fad that had swept through Framingham the previous spring—and oversize gold hoop earrings. My bus got to school first, and I waited for her by the front door, eager for her opinion: I’d gotten up at five-thirty to be sure that my hair, which I’d set in hot rollers, and my makeup were both perfect. I’d curled my lashes and smoothed on foundation under my
grandmother’s supervision, and she’d allowed me a squirt of her Shalimar. Following her instructions, I sprayed the perfume in front of me, then walked through it, allowing the scent to adhere to my clothes, my skin, my hair. Now I waited, squinting, peering over the tops of my classmates’ heads, the boys in varsity jackets, the girls squealing laughter, smacking gum. I saw the top of her head first, then her ponytail, bobbing with each step. As Sarah drew closer, I saw she was talking to a boy named Derek Nooney, who lived in her neighborhood and rode her bus. Derek had gotten taller over the summer and had a juicy crop of acne spread over his forehead and his nose.

I pushed myself off the waist-high brick wall where I’d been sitting and stood by the door, where I knew she couldn’t miss me. Sarah was wearing her Calvins and her red sweater, like we’d planned, and a floating silver heart around her neck that I’d given her for her birthday after saving up to buy it at Tiffany. “Hey, Sarah!” I said, and waved. She looked up. Her face was closed. “Ohhi,” she said, running the words together like she was desperate to get them out of her mouth. She turned, bending her head back down to Derek, saying something I couldn’t hear. Her remark was followed by the bellow of his goatish laughter. The two of them slipped past me as the bell rang, joining the throngs of students streaming through the doors.

Sarah and I didn’t have lunch together. Rather than try to find people I knew in the wilds of the enormous cafeteria, a high-ceilinged room that clanged with the noise of a hundred different conversations, forks and knives, salad greens being chewed and sandwich bags unwrapped, I took my lunch to the lawn outside. It was mild and sunny, the temperature still in the eighties, and I had a copy of
Black Beauty
tucked into my backpack, which I’d bought with a birthday gift card at the L.L.Bean outlet store two weeks earlier, after Sarah’s mother had dropped us off for a back-to-school shopping trip. My diary was in there, too.
Write
it down,
I heard my grandmother say . . . but I couldn’t think of the words I needed. Derek Nooney was in the remedial math class. Up close, he smelled like spoiled yogurt, and he used to throw clods of dirt at the short bus that took the handicapped kids to the vo-tech after lunch. The only thing he had to recommend him was that he was a boy. Maybe that was all that mattered.

That afternoon, for the first time, there wasn’t a sitter waiting for me when school got out. I was almost fourteen—old enough, my grandmother had decreed, to be home alone for the hours between when school got out and when she’d be there to start dinner. I waited for Sarah by the school doors, in case that morning had been an aberration, a cruel joke, a mistake. She was with Derek again, the two of them walking so close their shoulders were touching. This time I didn’t say anything to her, and Sarah, whom I’d seen naked, and crying, whose bikini line I’d helped wax, who’d slept in my bed and borrowed my pajamas and eaten a hundred dinners at my table, barely looked at me. I pulled my baseball cap low over my forehead (hats weren’t allowed in school, but I put one on as soon as the last bell rang) and went back inside. No way was I waiting for the bus and watching the two of them ignoring me, maybe even laughing about me. The late bus, for kids who had after-school activities, came at four. I’d ride that instead.

I was wandering down the hall, looking for an empty classroom to sit in, figuring I’d get started on my homework, when Mrs. Seeley, my English teacher, called my name.

“Ruth? Ruth Saunders, right? Are you here for the school paper meeting?”

I shook my head. “I missed my bus,” I mumbled.

“Room 112,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard me, and then stood there, watching, until I gave up and went across the hall to Room 112, where there were eight or nine kids who all seemed
to know one another already. Mrs. Seeley followed me and shut the door. I looked around.

“Okay, everyone, I’ve brought you a new recruit. This is Ruth Saunders. What are you interested in? News? Sports? Current events?”

“We need someone to do the social calendar,” said a girl whose fine light-brown hair was coming loose from its ponytail. She wore hot-pink elastics in her braces, which matched her shirt. “It’s easy. You just talk about what’s coming up. Dances, football games, cupcake sales . . .”

Great,
I thought as she handed me a stack of announcements. So I’d join the school paper and spend my time typing up all the activities I’d never get to participate in or be invited to. On the other hand, Grandma had already started talking to me about the importance of extracurricular activities and how I should find something I enjoyed, something I was good at, something with writing, something that would impress the colleges to which I’d eventually apply.

Room 112 was the school’s media room, with a dozen laptops on a long table against one wall. The ponytail girl, whose name was Brittany, helped me open a new document, gave me a word count, and showed me how to title the document, how to format the headline and the byline, and where to send it when I was through. I sighed, trying to put the image of Sarah and Derek out of my head, and started typing.
The JV cheerleading squad will be holding a bake sale to raise money for the library every day at lunch the week of September 20,
I typed.
Don’t forget the Sadie Hawkins Dance on November 3. The Salvation Army welcomes your donations of winter boots and jackets. Please leave them in the bin outside the guidance office.
And then, when I was done and no one was looking, I wrote,
WHICH freshman has a zit on his or her forehead that rivals Mount Vesuvius, and WHEN will it finally erupt? Send your best guesses to the editor. Winner gets a cream-filled
Hostess cupcake
. I snorted and then hit
SEND
. A minute later, I heard Brittany’s shout of laughter from across the room . . . and, for the first time since that morning, I felt as if the world might be a place I wanted to live in.

“We can’t print this,” Brittany said when she came back to my desk.

“Why not?” I was surprised by myself. Normally I didn’t talk to strangers. I didn’t like them looking at me.

“Because it’s illegal?” Brittany said . . . but she didn’t sound very certain. “Or libel. Or slander. One of those.”

“Why? I’m not naming anyone. I’m not even saying if it’s a boy or a girl. It could be anyone, really.”

“Hmm.” With the tip of her tongue, Brittany twanged the elastics that hitched her top braces to her bottom ones. “Let me ask Mrs. Seeley.”

Mrs. Seeley, of course, put a stop to things, citing the school’s anti-bullying policy. “How would you feel if someone wrote that about you?” she asked. I hung my head, blushing, thinking that kids were probably thinking worse things about me, and saying them to one another, all day long. I could walk her down to the girls’ room at the end of the hall and show her what I’d seen on one of the stall doors. By 3:45 I’d turned in my copy, along with a typed-up list of the school lunches for the week ahead, and was trudging out to wait for the late bus when I heard someone calling my name.

“Hey, Ruth! Wait up!” There was Brittany, with even more of her hair flopping around her flushed cheeks, and a boy, a senior, whose name I didn’t know.

“We have an idea for . . .” The boy looked around, even though the halls were empty. “An underground paper.”

“What do you mean?”

“Instead of the official paper, it’d be something we did on our own and distributed ourselves,” said Brittany.

“That thing you wrote,” the guy continued. “About the zit. That was funny. We want to have a gossip column, and if we do them all as blind items . . .”

“You know, where you don’t say anyone’s name,” Brittany said.

I nodded. I knew what blind items were. I’d seen them in Suzy’s column in
Women’s Wear Daily,
to which my grandmother subscribed (she was, she joked sometimes, the only woman in our zip code, possibly our state, with a subscription). “‘WHICH very-married socialite was spotted on a very private Jamaican beach, cavorting with a man young enough to be her son, while her husband was stuck in Manhattan for Election Day?’” I quoted.

This time, the look the two of them exchanged was puzzled.

“Like that, but with kids who go here,” I said. “Like, WHICH going-steady senior was spotted at Howard Johnson’s sharing a sundae with a girl who’s definitely not his girlfriend?”

“Who?” Brittany asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. I just made that up.”

“So you’re interested?” Brittany asked.

I looked at the clock. There were five minutes until the bus came. “What if we get in trouble?”

Brittany and the boy exchanged a smile. “We’ll cover our tracks,” said the boy. “If you’re interested, write something up, and give it to Brit by Friday. We’ll be in touch.”

The bus came groaning up to the curb. I took a seat in the back, yanked my cap down again, pulled out a notebook, and opened it to an empty page. When you looked like I did, people went out of their way to not see you, to act as if you weren’t there. This was lucky—it meant that I could go almost anywhere, and that I saw and heard a lot that wasn’t meant for my eyes or ears. I uncapped my pen and began.
WHO is the Goth girl who wipes off her black eyeliner and unlaces her Doc Martens once a week for
Girl Scout meetings?
WHICH cheerleader is doing more in the bathroom after lunch than freshening her lipstick?
WHICH teacher, who’s been telling everyone she did Weight Watchers over the summer, actually had a gastric bypass operation over summer vacation?
DID that varsity wrestler really get a fat lip during last week’s meet . . . or did he get his mouth stuck on his old girlfriend’s new braces?
I was so involved in what I was writing that I almost missed my stop. It was mean, I knew. It made me no better than all the kids who called me Frankenstein and whispered about my face. But, I had to admit, it felt wonderful.

The next morning, I gave Brittany what I’d written. At lunch-time, when I was preparing to buy some milk, take my book, and sit outside by myself again, she found me in the cafeteria and grabbed me. I saw Sarah’s eyes widen as Brittany whisked me past Sarah’s table and over to her own, which was in one of the prime spots, underneath a window, and filled with other juniors and seniors. “So how much of this stuff is true?” she asked.

I squirmed, wishing for my hat. The Goth Girl Scout was Mandy Pierce, and I knew her secret only because we went to the same dentist and I’d seen her there one afternoon in her uniform, sash and all. The teacher was Mrs. Gerlach, who taught typing. I’d heard her talking about Weight Watchers and getting to school early to walk on the track in the teachers’ lounge, where I’d gone to drop off that morning’s attendance count, but I’d seen a copy of
Eating Well After Weight-Loss Surgery
tucked in her purse, along with bottles of vitamins and a protein shake in a glass bottle. I didn’t know any bulimic cheerleaders, but I’d heard enough gossip to figure I was safe in what I’d written, because there had to be at least one; and the wrestler was Sarah’s older brother. I’d heard the story about how he’d hurt his lip from Sarah the week before, back when we were still talking.

I told Brittany what I knew. “Can you do this every week?” she asked, and I pretended to think it over before answering with
a casual, “Sure, I guess,” even though I wanted to jump up and down, to shout with joy, to march over to where Sarah was sitting, more or less in Derek Nooney’s lap, and tell her that maybe she had a boyfriend, but I had friends . . . and a job.