Girl Trouble - Kerry Cohen

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falsettos, no care about who might hear.

      That Halloween, her oldest brother died in a car crash. His friends, who were twins, and their mother were in the car too. They all died suddenly, inexplicably. Poof. Four lives snuffed out. The rest of us found out when Lisa didn’t show up at school the next day, or for two weeks after.

      My mother and I went to her house to pay our respects. Their hallway, lined with mirrors, was covered with butcher paper, one of the Jewish traditions done while sitting shiva after a loved one’s death. I don’t remember what we brought. Probably food. Lisa’s mother wept most of the time we were there. Lisa sat near me. I wanted to say the right thing, to say something, but everything I could come up with seemed wrong, seemed disrespectful to the fact that she was grieving. In the end, I said nothing.

      I wonder now if this was why when she returned to school everything was different. Probably she wanted nothing in her life that came before her brother died. Probably she wanted to start over, to forget, to pretend to be someone who only ever had one brother and not two. Probably I’d disappointed her by not saying the things she needed to hear. I didn’t know any of this at the time, and of course I still don’t know the reason. But I remember sitting at my desk in class, aware of her, my best friend, now gone and replaced by this person I didn’t know, who didn’t seem to want to know me anymore. And friendships would never be easy again.

       Nina

      WHEN I THINK OF NINA NOW, I THINK OF HER FINGERS. Long, delicate, cool fingers. She entwined them with mine, soft and fragile, like a baby bird, as we walked down the elementary school hallway. Fingers that lightly held me together against the chaos of my life at home. Which is what best friends were supposed to do.

      Days I came home from school unsure what I’d find. My mother crying on the phone. My mother in bed with the door shut tight. When my father came home later the silence between them was so loud I could barely think. I ducked away, not wanting to hear the things said, things like, “You could have called if you were going to be late. I made this fucking dinner.” Things like, “How dare you come home night after night like this?” Sometimes my mother screamed at him, so out of control you couldn’t understand what she was saying. Sometimes she spat out things I knew I shouldn’t have heard, things about another woman and fucking and pain. My father, though, was always quiet. His lips pursed in disgust. He didn’t love her anymore, and a part of me was terrified that I didn’t either.

      But then Nina. Nina with the caramel skin and thin silky hair the same color. She had a high, quiet voice. She wore red tortoiseshell glasses and thin white blouses that buttoned to her neck.

      My mother painted the house room by room. Paint chips splayed on the dining room table. She didn’t bother with dinner anymore. She stood over the colors, forehead furrowed, and pulled one to the side to examine it. She moved certain ones next to others. She left paint chips taped to walls. Everywhere I went in the house, there they were, like emblems of something about to arrive. Tiny passports. She started with the downstairs bathroom. Then she moved on to the guest room. Then the master bedroom. My father came home fewer and fewer nights. When he did come home he slept in the guest room, now a soothing cappuccino brown, while my mother sobbed upstairs. I stayed in my room, afraid to disrupt this strange, bursting silence. Once, though, I came into the hallway to see my mother standing there by the stairs. Her eyes were faraway. She was frozen, a strange statue.

      “Mom?” I said carefully. “Are you okay?”

      She didn’t seem to hear me. I waited. Finally, she walked toward her room and shut the door.

      So whenever I could, I stayed at Nina’s for dinner. Her mother was a psychiatrist who saw clients in her home office. Her father was rarely home. Sometimes Nina and I hid behind the banister upstairs and watched her mother’s patients arrive. I wondered about them, all those people, about what they talked about behind the closed door.

      In the summer, Nina planned to go to the camp where she went every year with her old best friend from Saddle River, Anastasia. I’d never met her, but Nina kept a picture of the two of them on her desk in her bedroom. A stack of correspondences, replete with red and pink hearts and sparkly rainbow stickers, sat in the desk’s drawer. The day she showed me, I smiled and nodded politely, doing my best to mask my jealousy. I begged my mother to let me go to the camp with Nina.

      “You’re not the only one around here who wants things right now.”

      “I know,” I said.

      But my father paid for me to go; and Nina, Anastasia, and I traveled on the bus into the Adirondacks. They knew the other girls, and I watched as Anastasia leaned to whisper into select girls’ ears, her long blond hair falling lightly against her face. The girls listened eagerly, and by the time we stood to exit single file from the bus they were all speaking her name: “Anastasia,” they said. “Look.” “Anastasia, over here. Come stand by me.” But Anastasia leaned against Nina.

      We slept twenty girls to a cabin. Rows and rows of bunks, like in an asylum, lined the musty room. Nina and Anastasia had already claimed each other as bunkmates, so I smiled at a small girl with dark eyes and frizzy hair and threw my duffel on the lower bunk.

      “Do you know Anastasia?” she asked in a small voice.

      I shook my head. “Nina’s my best friend,” I told her. “And Nina knows her.”

      “Oh.” I saw the confusion in her face as she watched Nina and Anastasia across the room, where Anastasia was French braiding Nina’s hair.

      During dinner we stood in line to get trays of rice and hot dogs and pale iceberg-lettuce salads with tiny strips of carrot. We sat at the long wooden tables. My hair was in a ponytail and Anastasia leaned close, peering into my face.

      “What?” I said.

      “What is that?”

      “What?” I tried to cover whatever she saw with my hands. I looked at Nina, but she was busy eating, trying to look like she hadn’t heard a thing.

      “Do you have a hair coming out of your chin?”

      “No!” But later, I examined my chin in the cloudy mirror of the bathroom and found an eyebrow hair that had fallen and gotten stuck there. I considered telling Anastasia, to even save the little hair, but I thought better of it.

      The next day, we lined up at the swimming pool. I could feel the way my thighs pressed against each other. Anastasia, like Nina, was sleek and lovely, like the horses we could see grazing in a pasture across the way. The other girls admired Nina’s braid. They begged Anastasia to do theirs next.

      We splashed into the water, one at a time, to reveal our swimming skills so we could join the appropriate instructor. I was given a tag with a yellow sticker to signify I was in the lowest group. The best, like Anastasia, got blue stickers. Intermediate got red. Yellow stayed, while red and blue got to move on to crafts. Their instruction would be later. I watched as Nina and Anastasia walked off together, arm in arm, a gaggle of girls in their wake. Our yellow group got kickboards and traveled up and down the length of the sparkling pool kicking and blowing bubbles.

      When we got out an hour later, one of the younger counselors approached me.

      “You’re burned,” she said.

      I looked at her, confused.

      “Your back,” she said. “It’s all red.”

      I pressed my shoulder and watched as the angry pink turned to white, then back to pink.

      “Come with me,” she said. “I’m taking this one,” she called to the other counselors.

      I followed her across the way, near where the horses were, into a small shack. She turned me around, clucking and shaking her head.

      “I’m a CIT,” she told me, which meant she was fourteen

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