‘I think we’re supposed to let them off first,’ he said, in his loopy I-didn’t-grow-up-here accent. And there they came, Claire among them, shoving each other and laughing, all of them with clear skin and hiking backpacks even though there was nowhere around to hike.
Claire noticed me cowering behind Vishal. ‘Summer!’ She stopped short, holding up the line in back of her. ‘When did you get on?’
‘I was here,’ I said quietly. ‘I got on before you.’
‘Claire, c’mon!’ A girl behind her shoved her playfully.
But Claire didn’t move. ‘I didn’t see you.’ She seemed honestly sad.
‘I was here.’ My voice sounded pathetic. Claire noticed, too; her lip stuck out in a pout.
The next day, she made a big point to sit with me on the bus. The day after that, too. The whole time, she was up on her knees facing the back of the bus, laughing with them. ‘Just go back there,’ I said on the third day, pressing my body against the cold, drafty window, my knees curled up to my stomach because I’d stupidly chosen the bus seat above the wheel.
‘No, it’s okay.’ Claire moved her knees to the front. ‘So what’s been going on with you? Are you liking school? Wasn’t I right-isn’t it easy to find your way around?’
‘I’m busy reading this,’ I snapped, staring at the oral report schedule for my American History class. I was to give a report about the Gettysburg Address on November 14, more than two months away.
‘Summer.’ Claire wore shiny lip gloss. Her earrings were dangling silver pears.
‘Just go.’
Claire shrugged, then monkey-barred from seat to seat, listing sideways when the bus went over bumps. Maybe I should’ve told her to stay and sit with me. Maybe I should’ve asked why she hadn’t suggested that we both go back and sit with them. But I was afraid what the answer might be-what fatal flaw of mine prevented her from introducing me around. I told myself I was being charitable, a real friend, letting her go off there alone. I’d given her a gift.
By the time the end of the year rolled around, if Claire and I passed each other in an empty hall, all she might say was, ‘Steal any Monopoly money lately?’ I hated her by then. I’d begun to blame Claire for everything that was going wrong-that, two weeks before, I had woken up and realized I’d peed in the bed. That a window in our front room had been broken, and my father asked my mother to call to have it replaced but she argued that he had fingers, he could call to have it replaced, and it still wasn’t replaced because they were at some sort of standoff, and there was still a huge crack in the window, sloppily sealed up with duct tape. That I would probably die an old maid without ever kissing a boy. That my father had begun to spend whole Saturdays in bed, and that my mother didn’t take me shopping anymore.
One late May afternoon, I was in keyboarding class, typing line after line of the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Two girls in the front row leaned close together. ‘Claire Ryan is moving to France,’ one whispered to the other. ‘They’re taking the Concorde.’
I typed a whole line of nonsense so it seemed like I wasn’t listening. France?
I found out later-not from Claire-that her father had taken a position at his company’s Paris office. They had rented a three-bedroom apartment in someplace called Montmartre. I wanted to ask Claire about it, or wish her well, or tell her good riddance, but so many people always surrounded her, all the way up to the very end, that I never had the chance.
The excited chatter that Claire was returning from France had started a few weeks ago. Claire hadn’t told anyone the news herself, but someone’s father worked with Mr Ryan and had found out the details. Claire would be attending Peninsula again, but she would be in tenth grade with me, not eleventh. People nudged Devon Reyes, Claire’s old boyfriend, saying that Claire had probably learned a few tricks, living in a country that was so obsessed and open about sex. And me? I didn’t have any reaction to the news, and no one asked me for comment. The time we were friends felt as far away as my birth.
But it surprised me that Mr and Mrs Ryan were getting a divorce-Claire had never seemed worried about her parents’ marriage. After Mrs Ryan and Claire left our apartment, I followed my father into the kitchen. ‘Perhaps Mrs Ryan just needs a private vacation,’ I called out to him, as if we’d been dissecting the Ryans’ divorce for hours. ‘You know, some time to herself. And then, after a while, she’ll move back into the Pineapple Street apartment, and everything will be fine. It’s probably what all couples need, I bet.’
My father looked at me for a long time. His eyes were watery. ‘Maybe,’ he said, eating from a bag of pretzels, letting loose salt fall to the floor. He tried to laugh, but it came out as more of a sniffle.
The night after Claire came over, my father declared we had nothing to eat in the house, which wasn’t an exaggeration. We hadn’t gotten the hang of shopping for ourselves yet. But now that we were on our own, we could go out to dinner wherever we wanted, which usually meant Grimaldi’s.
Grimaldi’s was this pizza place down under the Brooklyn Bridge. The pizza was so good that people lined up on the streets for a table. My mother hated eating there because the tablecloths were checkerboard, there were too many children, and they only served pizza for dinner. She hated that all the tables had wobbly legs, and that the wine specials were on a little card-stand next to a pot of fake flowers. As my father, brother, and I piled into the little dining room, I tried to see Grimaldi’s imperfections through her eyes; I scoffed at the place’s paltry selection of sodas, offering Pepsi instead of Coke. I sneered at the paper napkins. That awkward autumn when Claire was pretending she was still my friend, she came here with my family. Just as we were sitting down in a booth, Claire spotted some of the girls from the bus across the room, sans parents, sharing a basket of mozzarella sticks. Claire waved at them enthusiastically, but I shrank down in my seat. ‘Why aren’t you waving?’ my mother hissed. I shrugged; Claire pretended not to hear. Later, I heard my parents talking in the kitchen. ‘Summer should have more girlfriends,’ my mother said in a low voice. ‘Does it matter?’ my father answered. My mother murmured something I couldn’t hear.
I caught a glimpse of Claire this morning in the courtyard at school, just as I was dashing outside to the breakfast cart to get coffees for the popular girls in my first-period French class. Claire was talking to Melissa Green, one of her old friends. Melissa had a frozen, terrified smile on her face, trying to focus only on Claire’s eyes and not the rest of her body. When Claire said goodbye and turned away, Melissa’s expression twisted. She ran back to a gaggle of waiting girls and they started whispering.
‘So what do you think Mom’s doing right now?’ I asked my father as our Grimaldi’s waitress took our order and trudged away.
‘I don’t know, honey,’ my father said wearily.
‘You should try and call her,’ I suggested.
‘She’ll call when she’s ready.’
‘Mom probably wants you to call,’ I said. ‘She could be surrounded by younger guys, wherever she is. She could get tempted, just like Mrs Ryan was tempted by that younger French man.’
My father set down his fork. Even Steven, who had been poring over advanced calculus problem sets-he was a freshman at New York University, but lived in our apartment instead of the dorms-looked up with mild interest. ‘Excuse me?’ my father sputtered.
I repeated what I’d heard from the girls in French class. ‘She had an affair with a younger Frenchman from their local boulangerie. Claire caught them. And that’s why she’s so fat: she ate to console herself. It makes perfect sense.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’ My father looked aghast. ‘And Claire’s not fat.