Action heroes have at least three ways of being shot. Hero One: takes a single bullet to the wrong location and goes down fast with no last words. Hero Two: takes an uncountable amount of lead to vital organs, stays upright long enough to save someone, falls bravely. Hero Three: takes an entire .45 clip to the brain, stumbles off camera, and everyone knows she’ll be back.
I am Hero Three.
And Hero Three is currently sitting on the freezer in her garage pulling lead out of her brain and figuring out how to build a better couch. The Daily Sit is uncooperative, which is in keeping with its ornery personality. Despite this, I love the Daily Sit fiercely. I need the distraction.
Last night Janie Lee and I walked to the Fork and Spoon after the failed Hexagon meeting. She cried into her milk shake (and then mine), and I made her go home and play her violin to me over the phone until she calmed down. She felt terrible about the whole not-standing-up-for-my-vagina thing, and I felt terrible for suggesting she silence her desires for Woods.
We’ll recover. The only real fights we’ve ever had—ones in which we didn’t speak for multiple hours—were over Green Day being sellouts, and Star Wars episodes I to III. This wasn’t a fight. But it is something that will weasel its way into future arguments.
How could you be so selfish? future Janie Lee might ask.
You know, I was thinking the same thing when you let Woods put me on the guys’ side of the Hexagon board, future Billie might respond.
You’re the one who held me back from Woods. You’re the reason we aren’t together, future Janie Lee would yell back.
Yeah, well, maybe you’re not supposed to be with him. Maybe you’re supposed to be with me. I wouldn’t have yelled that part, but I would have thought it.
Friendship relies on history—on history being positive even when it’s painful. I have to find a way to erase last night the way Woods erases Einstein. I am not sure how. So while the Hexagon is at school, I’m taking a mental health day. Neither Mom nor Dad questioned my “migraine.” The moment Dad left for visitation ministry, Mom retreated to her studio, and I parked myself in the garage to think about the fact that I had two meet-ups last night. The one with Janie Lee. The one after Janie Lee fell asleep on the phone.
I arrived at the elementary school before Woods.
Rusted playground equipment rose out of the scattered pea gravel like a metal graveyard. I squinted at the run-down ball field, where we will hold the KickFall tournament. The grass in the outfield was the shin height of a giant.
I shimmied up a triangular-shaped antenna fastened to the school building with some luck and eroded hinges. The rungs were familiar with my weight and didn’t complain in the least. When I stepped out onto the roof, heat from the day, trapped in the tar-like substance, pressed into the rubber of my tennis shoes. I was sweaty from biking over, but the extra heat was pleasant against the chill.
While waiting for Woods, I stared at the tiny metropolis of Otters Holt: the token caution light, miles and miles of electrical transmission towers pulling power from Kentucky Dam, and the massive dark caverns of the limestone quarry. Power and darkness were everywhere. The evening was quiet except for a barking dog and the Vilmers’ bleating goats. Otters Holt by night was all ghost, no town. The elementary school beneath me needed every ounce of love we planned to show it now that youth group community service was slowing down.
Woods was stepping off the antenna—a fact I was ignoring–not ignoring. He loped toward me, jacket draped over his arm. “Thought you might be cold,” he said. The silky fabric of his favorite windbreaker landed on my shoulders. He hugged me from behind, leaving his arms in a knot around my chest. Leaving my heart in a knot.
“You think Hattie is feeding those goats?” he asked.
“Do you really have to feed goats?” I asked.
We lifted our shoulders in unison. He was a full head taller than me and always had been. When we stood this way, I was eight years old again, with a spray of freckles, bowl-cut hair, and pockets filled with fossils and special rocks. Back then, Woods wrote sloppy lists on his Dad’s yellow legal pads. They said FOUR THINGS BETTER THAN COTTON CANDY and IF SANTA WERE PRESIDENT OF OUR CLASS and POP ROCKS PLUS VINEGAR AND STUFF.
“Van Gogh would be inspired by this view,” he said, his lips nearly against my ear. “Paint me something that looks like this for when we’re old.”
Seventeen-year-old me returned.
Woods Carrington always smelled either like he needed a shower or he’d just toweled off. Oatmeal and honey oozed from his pores. He must have “forgotten” again to tell his mother to get his manly-man shampoo at BI-LO, and he’d showered in her bathroom. I wanted to eat him. Instead, I bumped my head against his chin, told him he was right about Van Gogh, and mentioned the shower. He confessed that he might just be a honey and oatmeal guy. We rocked, left, right, left, sharing balance, neither of us eager to break apart.
“And you are a”—he smelled my hair—“hayfield and epoxy girl.”
Elizabeth McCaffrey, born 1999—d. ? IN LOVING MEMORY: a hayfield and epoxy girl.
“Let’s play Beggar,” I said.
We claimed a corner of the roof where the old gym slopes to meet the lower cafeteria wall. It was a cave cut from brick and glass, sitting well beyond the range of Mrs. John’s security light across the street. We opened a ragtag deck of cards, and Woods’s fingers moved nimbly over them, the cards singing as they slapped against the old cooler we keep on the roof for a table.
The wind lifted his cowlick, teasing hair that was usually contained by a baseball cap. His hair was the one disorderly thing about him. Everything else could be described as neat-as-a-pin, an item on a list, well-ordered. I was glad he hadn’t worn the cap. He looked boyish in it, and I needed to remember we were not eight.
“Let’s build a house up here and never move,” he said after the cards were dealt.
“Only if you buy us a dragon,” I said.
He grinned as if he knew a guy with dragon eggs, and I’d better want what I’d asked for. That was where I’d gotten into trouble with him. Woods and I had never had many things in common. He was music, and I was sports. He was peppermint tea, and I was an energy drink. He was class president, and I was named an “Art Alien” by an underground school blog. But we lived life on the same frequency, leading and striving and wanting. Inside both of us lurked someone young and someone ancient.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
I answered, “Love,” and he scrunched his nose appropriately.
“What’d you wanna go and do that for?” he asked.
I said, “I needed a word for my favorite card game.”
I thought, Because of your damn whiteboard, Hexagon bullshit.
He swatted at my cards, laughing.
Beggar is a game we learned on a youth ski trip, and while the others abhorred it, Woods and I wasted centuries on the rooftop with a deck of cards and a game of luck. I rarely won. Woods maintained I was secretly competitive, which drove me crazy. I wasn’t nearly as competitive as all the guys believed. I was just good at stuff they didn’t expect girls to be good at.
He dealt, and we played.
He won four straight games.
“Tell me everything you’re thinking,” he said, when I threw my cards atop the cooler.
He rested his weight on his palms, leaning away from me for the first time that night.
I began. “One. Other than my imaginary gigantic balls, I don’t understand why you put me on the guys’ side of the board. Two. Other than your imaginary gigantic balls, I don’t understand why you put Mary Dancy on the board at all. You don’t even know her. Three. When I said I don’t know how I feel about Janie Lee, I meant it. Four. The real messy awkward truth is . . .” He prepared himself by affixing his gaze to Mrs. John’s front porch. “Honestly, I always thought . . . well, I always thought . . . we’d give it a go.”
He said two barely audible words. “Me too.”
I was prepared for Billie, we can’t, or Billie, I’m sorry, or Billie, you’re like a brother to me. Nothing in my emotional response arsenal went with Me too.
I said, “I guess I always thought it worked like this. You talk. You kiss. You fall in love, buy a Buick, and never leave Otters Holt. There’s sex in there somewhere.”
“Me too. Except the Buick. We can do better than a Buick.”
At that precise moment, the wide neck of my sweatshirt had fallen off my shoulder, and he stared at my naked collarbone. Under his lingering gaze, I did not doubt he knew that I was made of girl. I righted the fabric, and he trapped my hand with his. “B, there’s a lot of people I love, but there’s no one like you.”
Exposed skin will do that.
My brain crunched thoughts so loudly it sounded as if I were snacking on Doritos. “What does that mean?” I asked.
“I don’t like Mary Dancy,” he said.
“But you’re attracted to Janie Lee,” I argue.
“And so are you, but that doesn’t change this. Us.”
When we were younger, I tried to teach Janie Lee and Woods how to make friendship bracelets from cross-stitch thread. Each bracelet was made up of a certain number of strands, a certain pattern of cinching knots against each other. This was friendship. We were four strands. Then five strands. Six strands now. And a series of knots, all in neat little rows, made up our history. I had always thought, always believed, we would stick to that design and I would know the future, because I knew the pattern.
Woods was untying a knot. The pattern was changing.
He touched the small of my back, beneath my sweatshirt. His fingers brushed the recessed place at the bottom of my spine. “You have to know that you’re my second skin.” His thumb moved like a metronome.
“And who is Janie Lee to you?”
He spoke, and as he did, I said the word with him. “Music.”
Music in the way she moved, music in the way she spoke, music in the way she listened. She was a melody we both hummed.
He breathed on my chin, my cheek, my neck. His teeth were so near my earlobe I heard his breath inside my chest. “What do we do with all this love?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. Gerry had kissed me, and we’d been fine afterward. Perhaps we were holding our relationship like crystal and it was one of those pink bouncy balls. “Maybe you should kiss us both and see how you feel.”
He didn’t laugh.
I thought I would be nervous.
I thought it would be a big deal.
I thought Saturn might fall out of the sky and cause a tsunami on the other side of the planet.
But when he kissed me, and I kissed him (and I feel like I have to say it exactly that way because it was equal), we were what we’d always been: friends.
I’d really only kissed four people at that point: Fifty, Renley (who moved away freshman year), Gerry, and now Woods. But it was enough to compare. Kissing Woods made me want to say, “If we haven’t found someone we’re in love with by the time we’re forty, let’s get married,” or “Let’s be each other’s backup plan.” Because he was someone I would marry and raise dragons with and let cut my yellow toenails at seventy, but he wasn’t . . . Well, he wasn’t even Gerry.
Elizabeth McCaffrey, born 1999—d. ? R.I.P.: She never bought a Buick.
I know passion isn’t everything, and relationships aren’t just physical, blah, blah, blah, but we were perfunctory. Shockingly perfunctory. And hiding seventeen years’ worth of collapsed desire took all my energy.
“That was nice,” he said, lips hovering inches above mine. And then he kissed me a second time as if the first hadn’t quite convinced him.
I felt polite.
“Yes, that was very nice,” I said when it was over.
We both wiped our mouths with our sleeves.
I used my poker face, I used my sweet voice, I embellished. “If Janie Lee kisses like that, we’re all really going to have a problem,” I told him.
Because it was one thing to tease him about his imaginary gigantic balls, but it was quite another to deflate them.