“What?” Claire says, and the word is so sharp and loud that down the street, a dog barks, and inside Claire’s house, Cole stirs, cal ing,
“Mommy?”
Claire gets up and goes inside. I can’t hear what she says to Cole but I hear the sound of her voice, a faint, calm thread. Eventual y, it fades into silence.
I sit on the porch, waiting until I start to think Claire isn’t coming back out. She final y does, though, a pack of cigarettes in one hand, a lighter in the other.
“I thought you were quitting,” I say, and she says, “I thought you wouldn’t stil be here,” and sits back down next to me.
“I don’t know the whole story,” I say.
“Are you sure you want to?”
I nod and Claire pul s out a cigarette and lights it. Its scent rises up to me, harsh and with a chemical tinge that reminds me, weirdly, of the hospital. I wave the smoke away.
“It’s funny, but I didn’t start smoking until I got the job at the hospital,” Claire says. “I was so excited back then. Final y, I had my GED, I had a job, I could take care of me and Cole—wel , at least take care of us if we lived at home. But that place, it just—”
She looks at me. “There’s no good way to die, you know? No way I’ve seen, anyway. It al ends with tubes and bedpans and IVs and I just—
smoking gets me out of there. Gets me outside, gets me away from al the—”
“Sick people?” I say, and she shakes her head.
“Away from my life. This isn’t—I wanted to go to col ege, Abby. I wanted …” She sighs. “I wanted Tess. But she—she didn’t want me. Not like I wanted her.”
“She must have, because I know you two—”
“Yeah, we had sex,” Claire says. “And she even said she loved me. But she didn’t—I asked her, right before senior year, to stop with the guys.
To stop pretending. I mean, I know it’s Ferrisvil e, but it’s not like we’d have gotten lynched. Your parents already knew, and mine—wel , what did I care then? I was going to get out of this place.”
“Wait a minute,” I say, thinking of the picture of Tess and the guy on the beach. Of the anger in Tess’s eyes and how I assumed it was because Claire had hurt her, gone off with a guy like Tess had, only for real. “I thought —”
“You thought I got pregnant and broke Tess’s heart.”
“Yeah. I mean, before that, back when I thought you were just friends, I thought she was mad at you for—I don’t know. I thought she was judging you. You know how Tess could be. She liked things to be—”
“How she wanted them,” Claire says. “Believe me, I know.”
“But you two weren’t just friends, and she—”
“Tess couldn’t do it,” Claire says. “Wouldn’t do it. Wouldn’t stop being who everyone thought she was, even though it wasn’t who she was. She said that if we—she said if we told everyone we were together, we wouldn’t be who people thought we were. That’s just how she said it too. ‘If we do this, Claire, nobody wil think we’re who we say we are.’” She looks down at the ground.
I think she’s going to cry so I say, “Claire?” and touch her shoulder.
She looks at me and I see she isn’t going to cry. She’s furious, so angry her mouth is working like it’s ful of words and she’s trying to get them to come out in order.
“It was such a load of crap,” she says. “Tess just—she wanted to be Homecoming Queen like everyone said she would be. She wanted everyone to keep trying to dress like her, be like her. She didn’t want—she wanted to be
“Wait,” I say, because this is not what I pictured, this is not what I pictured at al . I can see Tess being the one to break Claire’s heart. I remember the pictures and can see them for what they are now, how Claire used them to show Tess what she’d felt they’d lost. What she thought Tess had given up. “My parents said Tess—they said she —”
Stupidly, absurdly, I lower my voice, as if someone might hear, as if what I’m going to say could be somehow overheard. As if Tess could somehow hear it now. “They said she had to go see a doctor. They said she was upset and—”
Claire shrugs. “Maybe she was. Maybe after she told me we had to be who people thought we were, and I said no when she wanted to mess around and then went off and screwed Rick and got pregnant, proved I could be straighter than she ever could—yeah, then maybe she might have gotten upset.”
“No, I think she—I think my parents meant she was upset over you.”
“Over me?” Her voice cracks on the last word. “She wasn’t upset over me.”
I think of Tess refusing to let any of us even say Claire’s name. I think about the day with the meatbal s. I think about how Tess always turned away whenever she saw Claire, or Claire and Cole, like she didn’t want to see them. Like she couldn’t.
“Look, I know how Tess is—was,” I say, and it hurts to say that, to put Tess in the past tense. Even now, hearing that she broke Claire’s heart because she wanted to keep on being the girl everyone wanted, the girl who was always just out of reach, it hurts.
I didn’t know I loved Tess this much. Not until now.
I look down at the ground, blinking hard, my eyes burning.
