The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [113]
Every time we hear that song we think of that night, and how happy we were. Bean looked over at Rose, her hands gripping the wheel, forehead tight with concentration as the streetlights flipped across her face, light and dark, light and dark. In the back, Cordy leaned against the seat, singing along and staring out the window.
When we passed out of the town limits, Bean suddenly pushed her head out the window, threw herself into the night down to her shoulders, and howled wildly at the moon. Scared the crap out of Rose, too. Then Cordy clambered over to the side and held her hand as we raged against the dying of the light, and behind us, Rose’s nattering criticisms turned to laughter, and then we joined her in laughing in the face of the darkness. A half a mile of quiet pasture lay between the end of town and the Deee-Lite, but it felt like the world spread wide before us, our futures and our open lives.
It felt unnatural and pedestrian to come down from our giddy high and find ourselves in the parking lot of the Deee-Lite, where the families had long since gone home and the pavement had become a place where romances kindled and extinguished, where rumors spread and friendships were destroyed or cemented, where this all-American life outside Barney and the Coop and our no-television world spun its thread. And though we each in our way wanted to be part of that world and all its shiny idealism—Bean with her teen magazines, Rose with her romances, Cordy with her curious dreams—we realized we could be so much more than that, the way we were that night.
The ice cream was only important to Cordy, we think. She got sprinkles on a twist cone, and Bean had a banana split, and Rose, assuredly, had vanilla, and paid for all three with her allowance money. She spent more money than anyone else, but she always seemed to have the most, too. Rose, parsimonious, would count the coins carefully out of her hand as though she were allotting parts of herself to the disinterested cashier, but she had never denied us anything we asked for, either.
We let Cordy get a large cone, something our parents always refused on the grounds that it would give her a stomachache (and may we just point out that they were absolutely correct). But she ate the whole damn thing anyway, leaving her mouth covered with sprinkles and dried soft serve, and her hands sticky and smelling of milk. Rose and Bean were talking and laughing, while Cordy ran circles around one of the tables outside, the plastic ones with the cockeyed umbrellas, making herself sicker by the second.
There might have been a full moon. Certainly when we think back, we remember it as so tremendously bright; images coming in sharp relief, museum-perfect, display-lit. And that, too, might have had something to do with the mood, the way even Rose, perfect as a petal, came with us, and laughed when we were about to kill ourselves hanging out the window, and whispered and joked with Bean about the boys who skulked past, loose hips and curled lips. Cordy lay back on one of the tables, her head hanging upside down over the edge, and watched as Bean sauntered over to a trash can, pebble and plastic, coming scandalously close to a couple of boys who were smoking, watching the parade. Rose covered her mouth, laughing silently as Bean swished her nonexistent hips, and of course you know the boys’ silent eyes followed her, the way they would for years to come.
We were so happy when we got back in the car to come back. It seemed the danger had been in the leaving,