The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [35]
The thing is, she felt kindly toward her outlaw smoker because his face reminded her of Sean’s this morning. Not in its particulars, but in the emotions. She had planned to keep Sean in suspense about the night before, but he looked so guilty that she couldn’t bear to goad him. She thought, hoped, it might happen, but even as she was piloting him up the stairs, she realized he would be no good to her. A shame. She always had a crush on him. She was surprised, in fact, when he chose Gwen to be his girlfriend, because she assumed he was hers for the taking should she decide she wanted him. She always chalked his relationship with Gwen up to the circumstances, which had been so very Picture for a Sunday Afternoon. Sean, carrying Gwen in his arms. Heck, the summer before he couldn’t have made it three steps holding her, given how much she once weighed. Gwen clinging to his chest, crying, dazed, that pretty little trickle of blood on her forehead. Who could compete with that? Mickey thought she could, but she was wrong. For a few months there, they acted like they were married, or were going to be. It was nauseating.
Yet Sean and Gwen didn’t even make it to Christmas of that year as a couple. And Mickey was glad. She wonders how Gwen feels, seeing him now. Childhood sweethearts seem to hold a lot of power over people. McKey’s forever hearing of this friend or coworker who has rediscovered someone at a reunion or on the Internet and ends up running off with them. McKey finds that baffling. Who would want to be with the person who remembered you as you once were? She has cut her ties with almost everyone who knew Mickey and she can imagine a day when McKey morphs into yet another persona, shedding her current set of acquaintances and coworkers.
Still, she wishes she had found a way to sleep with Sean, drunk as he was. Just the once. She bets she’s better than Gwen, despite Gwen’s success rate at landing impressive husbands. Of course, the first one turned out to be a faggot, and McKey has a feeling that even Dr. Wonderful, who put in a brief appearance at the reception after the funeral, isn’t quite the prize he seems. They never are. Sean, however—Sean tempts her, if only because he belongs to someone else. The thing she can’t work out is whether she wants to steal him from his wife or from Gwen.
Chapter Twelve
Summer 1979
In the spring of the year she would turn fourteen, Gwen did a very odd thing: she asked her parents to take her to visit a classmate, Chloe, who had been stricken with mononucleosis. That was not the weird part, although the two were more friendly than friends, but their school was small enough that Gwen’s parents did not question her suddenly fervent desire to visit this particular girl. No, the weird part was when Gwen, after spending a polite twenty minutes chatting with Chloe and catching her up on class gossip, asked to use her bathroom and then stuck Chloe’s toothbrush in her mouth, praying that there were still germs on it and she, too, would get mono. We all found out, too, because Gwen told Mickey and Mickey told Tim, who told Sean and Go-Go.
It was an article of faith at the time that mono was a good way to get skinny. We all knew some girl who had lost weight that way. Chloe was already skinny, but another girl at the Park School had caught the so-called kissing disease and appeared six weeks later, suddenly slender, her eyes now huge in her face, cheekbones and collarbones sharp. Gwen was desperate for a similar transformation, but her parents refused to let her diet. That is—they would not let her try Scarsdale, very trendy at the time, or any of the strict, rigid diets that approached religions, with their arbitrary lists of things allowed and things forbidden. The Robisons were happy to make healthy meals for her, to substitute fruit for dessert, to fill the refrigerator with cut-up carrots and celery and hummus, quite avant-garde at the time.