Dark Water - Laura McNeal [15]
“That’s different.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said, though I knew it was.
“Can he mime hanging himself?” Robby asked as my mother hurried toward the car holding her coffee cup.
She opened the car door as I said, “Just stop it.”
“Stop what?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
It didn’t feel like I was headed toward any good discoveries, but I was. I was headed, though I didn’t know it, for the river.
Thirteen
By the start of second period, the foggy haze had started to burn off. I wanted to sit in the sun and read or just look at the newly visible turquoise sky and not think about my father or what my note would do to Amiel, but this was school, so Greenie and I just kept shambling toward the redbrick bunker where we had drama with Ms. Grant.
Greenie Coombs became my best friend the last summer of making things up. We were in fourth grade, way too old for playing with Barbies, which is why we were so close: we had to protect our secret. We wanted to give Barbie and Ken a wedding—not just a wedding, actually, but a rehearsal dinner, ceremony, reception, and honeymoon. It was very involved. We found a birdhouse that looked like a chapel at a garage sale and spent five whole dollars on it. We made breath of heaven flower arrangements for the tiny dinner tables and a purple lantana bridal bouquet and a redwood Lincoln Log reception hall and satin dresses for the whole bridal party. Greenie was good at turning one thing into another—at seeing how an acorn cap could be a goblet—and I was good at sewing and believing. Thinking back, it feels like the last time, before Amiel, that I was happy.
Greenie had a pretty face even then, but she was heavy around the middle and her thighs rubbed together. Her hair was black and straight, like a horse’s. Her skin was olive and her eyes were green, which was why her brother had given her the nickname. She breathed with her mouth open, which even I could see made her look dim-witted, though she wasn’t, not at all. She was good at math, like Robby, so she didn’t mind my being good at book reports and vocabulary tests.
Everything was perfect until eighth grade. Greenie was an early bloomer, and while I stayed the same shape, skinny as a tree that grew straight up, the layer of fat around Greenie’s middle seemed to move up to her breasts. She got her braces off and started keeping her mouth closed. Then her legs stretched and became thin. By the end of the year, the sort of boys who didn’t do their homework began to hover around her locker, never the least interested in me. We stayed friends mostly because Greenie and I had this history together, our secret power to bring inanimate things to life.
I remember that we drifted into second-period drama class that day without interest, though it was our favorite class and Ms. Grant our favorite teacher. The room was always cold because the floor was glossy white concrete and the walls were brick. We were supposed to be brainstorming for a one-act, five-minute play, and as usual Greenie and I were partners. Ms. Grant left the class unsupervised, as she sometimes did, and went into her office while fifteen or twenty of us lay sprawled on the various pieces of furniture that had been donated for stage props. I spent some time at the bookshelves where Ms. Grant ran a lending library of British theater productions and foreign films, looking for something that featured Marcel Marceau. A big droopy guy named Hal told me I should watch Les Enfants du Paradis, which turned out not to feature Marcel Marceau at all, but was directed by Marcel Carné and featured a totally different famous French mime. I signed it out and put it in my backpack, and while I was throwing out lame ideas for the plot of our one-act, five-minute play, Greenie started in a very low breathy voice to tell me about her upcoming date with this boy named Hickey.
“You’re kidding, right?” I said.
“You know that guy who drives a Honda with Texas plates?” she asked, ignoring my attempt to laugh at her boy