1999
The two girls lolled on the overstuffed sofa, eyes heavy, knees knocking together, as the final credits of the movie rolled up the screen. Their teeth were furred with Pixy Stix sugar and their tongues dip-dyed bright blue from the snow cone maker Jenny’s mom had bought her three years ago, for her tenth birthday. They had known they were too old to play with it now – kids’ stuff, really, to be relegated to the corner of the basement, along with the jumbo tub of Barbie dolls, and the matted plush dog Jenny used to sleep with – so they’d both hidden their delight when the slush had curled out of the machine and into their waiting paper cups. They’d also rolled their eyes at each other when Jenny’s mother had appeared in the doorway and asked if they wanted hot chocolate. Though Jenny had been embarrassed, she’d also been secretly relieved that she was for the moment behaving like any other normal mother, and now two chocolate-rimmed mugs sat on the floor in front of them, sunk into the deep pile of the basement’s shag carpet.
‘Do you want to do the Ouija board?’ Isla said. Her thick mass of spongy blonde curls was piled high on her head, and her eyelids were crusted with liquid liner from a makeover session earlier in the evening.
Jenny shook her head. ‘Not right now.’ The Ouija board had freaked her out ever since an incident at a sleepover with her soccer team the year before, when the arrow had jumped frenetically across the board, calling out threats to each of the girls gathered around it. When Jenny had told her mother the story, her mother had heavily suggested that the culprit was not, in fact, the spirit of Becky Tassenhoff’s mean dead aunt, as suggested, but Becky Tassenhoff herself, whose parents had been going through a nasty divorce – much like Jenny’s own parents had the year before – and who’d been showing signs of the strain. Still, the Ouija had said that Jenny’s hair would all fall out, and she’d spent the next six months waking up in a panic, expecting to find handfuls of her long auburn hair lying limply on the pillow in great tangled tufts.
Isla threw a couple of pillows onto the floor and plonked down on top of them. Their sleeping bags were rolled out already, but it was still too early to climb into them. ‘Julia Roberts is so pretty,’ she said, picking at a piece of fluff in the carpet.
‘You totally look like her,’ Jenny said, reaching up to touch the French braid Isla had threaded into her hair earlier in the evening. It was lopsided, Jenny could feel that without looking at it. She itched to take it out and do it herself, straight this time, but she didn’t want to hurt Isla’s feelings.
‘God, I wish.’ Isla kicked idly at one of the pillows and twisted herself into a new tangle of limbs. Isla had started growing at eleven and – now five foot eight – showed no signs of stopping. She was a string bean of a girl, all elbows and knees, with long, flat feet attached to her skinny legs like flippers. On the days she came home crying because one of the boys in her class had called her Lurch or ironing board or Gumby, her mother would brush her damp curls away from her eyes and tell her that one day she’d appreciate her long legs and slim frame. Trust me, she’d say, holding her by the shoulders with her plump hands, one day they’ll all be jealous of you. But Isla couldn’t see how that was possible, with her flat chest and knobbly knees, and her wide-set eyes too big for her face. She wanted to be like Tina Walker, tiny and petite except for her massive chest, which she displayed to full effect in scoop-necked Abercrombie shirts. ‘What do you think it would be like?’ Isla said.
Jenny glanced at her. ‘What would what be like?’
‘Being Julia Roberts in that movie.’
Jenny thought about it for a minute. ‘Pretty bad, I think. I mean, Richard Gere is old, even if he is rich and kind of good-looking.’
‘But imagine being so pretty that a guy would pay all that money just to sleep with you,’ Isla said.
‘I guess.’ The thought made Jenny deeply nervous. In fact, any mention of sex made her squeamish, and while Isla had leaned forward during the scene where Richard Gere had led Julia Roberts into the bedroom, Jenny had secretly closed her eyes. Her mother, following her father’s affair and subsequent desertion in favor of his twenty-three-year-old tennis instructor, told her that sex was a drug just as bad as heroin, and that she should protect herself against it at all costs.
‘Do you think our lives will be like that?’ Isla asked, flipping over onto her stomach and looking up at Jenny from underneath her curls.
‘I hope not,’ Jenny said. A cool sweat broke out on the back of her neck. ‘I don’t want to be a prostitute.’
‘Not that!’ Isla laughed. ‘I mean, do you think our lives will be glamorous like that? And exciting?’
The thought settled between the two girls. At the moment, in Jenny’s mom’s basement in suburban New Jersey, it seemed unlikely.
‘Maybe,’ Jenny said uncertainly. And then, more firmly this time, ‘Sure.’
‘Seriously?’
Jenny shrugged. ‘Why not?’
Isla picked at the last few chips of polish still clinging to her thumbnail. ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m going to be stuck here for ever. Like Danny.’ Isla’s older sister had fallen pregnant during her senior year of high school, and now lived in the condos off Route 13 with her two-year-old and the father of her child, a guy called Jimmy, who had a Kawasaki motorcycle and an unconvincing moustache.
‘You are not going to be like Danny. We just have to have a plan. My mom always says that you can’t do anything without a plan.’
Isla eyed her doubtfully. ‘Do you have a plan?’
‘Sort of. In my head at least. Do you?’
Isla shrugged. ‘Sort of.’
‘Wait, I know what we should do.’ Jenny jumped off the couch and ran up the carpeted steps in her socked feet. She returned a few minutes later holding a purple velour-covered notebook and a sparkly silver pen. She’d got the notebook for Christmas last year, but it had been too pretty for her to use – surely anything she’d write in it wouldn’t match up to its beauty? But this, she decided, was important, and should be treated as such. She curled back up on the sofa and cracked open the spine. ‘Okay,’ she said, voice firm, ‘we’re going to write down all of the things we want to do with our lives.’
‘All of the things?’
Jenny nodded. ‘That way we’ll have a plan that we can follow, and we’ll both know about each other’s plan, so we’ll know if the other person isn’t following it. It’s called accountability.’ Jenny had heard the word on an episode of Oprah a few weeks ago, and was very pleased with her use of it here.
‘So, like a life list?’
Jenny nodded triumphantly. ‘Exactly.’
Isla thought about this for a minute. She didn’t like the idea of sharing her dream of being a doctor, even with her best friend. She’d once hinted to her father what she wanted to be when she grew up and he’d laughed and patted her on the head, and told her that maybe, if she studied hard, she could be a nurse. She looked up at Jenny’s face staring down at her, her green eyes wide, and knew that if there was one person she could trust, it was her. Plus, she knew Jenny well enough to know that once she got a plan in her head, there was no dissuading her, and if Isla wanted to go to sleep anytime that night she’d better get on board with the life list idea.
‘Okay,’ Jenny said, brandishing her sparkly pen like a weapon. There was a tuft of pink feathers affixed to the top of it, and it bobbed gently as her pen moved across the page. ‘You go first.’
Isla groaned. ‘Fine. Where do we start?’
‘I think we should be super detailed about it. Like, not just where we want to be when we’re thirty, but where we want to be in six months, and two years, and so on. It’s called mapping.’ The details of the Oprah show had come flooding back now, and Jenny pinked with pleasure at being able to recall them.
‘I want to be hot,’ Isla said, ‘like, psycho hot.’ Jenny started scribbling in the notebook. ‘Wait, you’re not writing that down, are you?’
‘Of course I am! It’s called visualization.’ Maybe she could teach a course on this, Jenny wondered. She was obviously some sort of genius at it.
‘God, this is so embarrassing.’
They heard heavy footsteps on the floor above, and then a light appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘Girls, it’s late,’ Jenny’s mom called. ‘Lights out soon, okay?’
‘Fine, Mom!’ Jenny called, rolling her eyes at Isla. ‘Okay, where were we. Psycho hot … What’s next?’
The pages filled up with the girls’ aspirations and dreams, until finally, just as the early morning light began to sneak through the small, high windows, the full picture of their futures had taken shape.