Girlfriend Material Read online

  Tina reached over and gently ruffled my hair, then went back inside. A few minutes later I smelled coffee brewing, and I heard my mom’s voice. She and Tina talked in the kitchen for a few minutes, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then the two of them emerged through the screen door, each holding a steaming mug of coffee.

  “Good morning,” my mom said to all of us. She pulled out the chair next to mine and squeezed my shoulder as she sat down. “Good morning, honey.”

  “Morning,” I said.

  “Just look at you girls,” said my mom, taking in Sarah and me as if we were hanging on the wall in a museum.

  “Can you believe we were ever that young?” Tina asked.

  “You know,” said my mom, looking at Tina, “I think I was exactly one year older than Katie is now when you and I met.” Even though she hadn’t yet said anything she shouldn’t have, I couldn’t help getting a bad feeling about where my mom’s reminiscence was leading, which might have had something to do with how her voice was shaking slightly, like she was on the verge of tears.

  I took a bite of my bagel, but fear of what my mother was about to say made it hard for me to swallow.

  “And here we are”—she gestured at herself and at Tina—“and here you are”—she gestured from me to Sarah.

  Now there was no way to hope that my mom was not headed over a cliff. But there was nothing I could do: one cannot prevent the inevitable.

  A single tear slid slowly down my mom’s cheek. “Here you are,” she repeated. “The next generation of wonderful lifelong friends.”

  Tina put her hand on my mom’s shoulder. “It’s just crazy to think about,” my mom concluded. I could feel my cheeks blazing. I forced myself not to look at Sarah as I heard her chair scrape the deck. “Isn’t it crazy?” my mom asked of no one in particular.

  “Crazy,” echoed Sarah. But the way she said it implied the only thing that was even remotely crazy was my mother.

  Was it any wonder I could not be close to this woman? When she wasn’t forcing me to give up everything I valued and make my way across the country in some desperate attempt to get my father’s attention, she was humiliating me in front of the only representative of my peer group for miles.

  If my phone hadn’t rung at that very second, I would have had no choice but to hurl myself off the deck and into the body of water I now knew was the bay. As it was, the buzz of the incoming call saw me leap out of my seat, mouth still full of bagel, shouting, “I’ve got to take this” even before I checked to see who it was.

  I finally managed to swallow what was in my mouth. “Hello?” I said, heading off the deck and down the path to the guesthouse.

  “You are not going to believe what I did last night,” said Laura.

  “Oh thank God,” I said, looking over my shoulder to make sure I was out of earshot of the deck. “Thank God you called. I am in hell. I’m not kidding. I know traditionally they depict hell as this fiery underground cavern with little red men holding pitchforks, but it turns out hell is a woodsy summer community where—”

  “I fooled around with Brad Lander last night!”

  I always thought it was an exaggeration when characters in books describe their blood running cold, but now I actually felt it happen: my body temperature dropped several degrees. “You what?!” There was no planet on which I could imagine Laura fooling around with her brother’s best friend, Brad. I’d only left Salt Lake City thirty hours ago. How had the universe as I knew it shifted so dramatically?

  “Okay,” she said, “I know you don’t like him, but—”

  “I don’t not like him,” I said quickly, thinking, I thought we both don’t like him.

  “He’s really nice,” said Laura. “He was telling me about how he misses his brother because they were on the football team together last year, and now that his brother graduated it just doesn’t feel the same without him. And it was, like, sooo nice. He’s really … I don’t know …”

  I forced myself not to supply the word dumb.

  “He’s just really … sweet,” Laura finished. “I was hanging at home last night and totally missing you, of course. And he came upstairs because he thought Tom was supposed to be home, but naturally my stupid brother had screwed up and he was at the gym, so Brad and I just sat there talking for, like, an hour. And then he said he’d always kind of had a crush on me, only he thought I thought he was too much of a jock and everything, and then I said, ‘I don’t think that,’ and then he said,‘Really?’and then he kissed me. And Kate, I’m not joking, he is such a good kisser. And we went outside and sat by the pool and he gave me his sweatshirt to wear because it was kind of cold, and he said he’s totally going to explain everything to Tom and”—she screamed—“I just totally like him!”

  “Wow,” I said. “That is just so—” Brad and Tom had once held a contest to see who could hock a lugie farther across the pool.

  Brad won. “I know!” She screamed again. How was this happening? How had my best friend gotten a boyfriend and I’d gotten … Sarah. “So,” I said, racking my brain for something to say that wouldn’t reveal how totally sorry for myself I was feeling, “are you—”

  I had no idea how I was going to finish my sentence, so I didn’t exactly mind when Laura interrupted. “The crazy thing is that he liked me this whole time,” she said.

  “That is crazy,” I said, wincing as I remembered Sarah using the same word earlier.

  Laura started listing all of the times Brad had noticed her without her noticing he was noticing her. There was the day she first wore her new black bikini. There was the time he’d watched me and Laura do handstands in her pool. There was the afternoon he and Tom had stolen an entire tray of chocolate-chip cookies Laura and I had baked and we’d called them both degenerate thieves.

  The list, it seemed, was endless.

  She continued narrating Brad’s myriad but heretofore underappreciated good qualities, but I was too busy trying to figure out how to sound supportive to focus on the stories I was supposedly supporting. By the time I tuned back in, she was in the middle of explaining how Brad had managed to sneak into a second movie at Trolly Square after the one he’d paid to see had ended.

  She’s your best friend, I reminded myself. She’s your best friend, and if she’s happy, you’re happy. “That’s hilarious,” I said. “Did he really do that?”

  I heard my mom calling.

  “Katie! Time to get ready to go to the club with Sarah and Tina.”

  Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place.

  “I’m really sorry, Laura, but I have to go. My mom’s calling me.”

  “Nooo! Wait. Will you call me later? I have so much to tell you. And I want to hear about Cape Cod.”

  Well, my mom and I are roommates and she never stops talking, and the girl who I’m supposed to be best friends with has made it pretty clear she sees me as a pathetic leech who arrived to suck the fun out of her otherwise perfect summer.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll tell you all about it.”

  I really wanted to be happy for Laura, and I wasn’t exactly proud of myself for how I was feeling. But when you’re embarking on what’s clearly going to be the worst, loneliest time of your life, is it fair that your best friend in the world is setting sail for a summer of love?

  THERE WAS NOTHING SUBTLE about how my mom and Tina pushed me and Sarah to drive to the club together while the two of them drove in Tina’s car; their whole We have to run some errands on the way was about as opaque as a plate-glass window. They hadn’t thought of everything, though, and Sarah and I managed to go the entire drive without exchanging so much as two words due to her blasting the radio too loudly for even the briefest of chats. Attempt to prevent conversation, or preference about volume at which to appreciate Moby?

  You be the judge.

  I didn’t really mind Sarah’s not talking since I was so totally freaked out by the conversation I’d just had with Laura. I kept remembering this thing
my dad had said to me back when I was in junior high and I complained to him about how stupid all the boys were and how none of them liked me or Laura. My dad was nice enough not to point out that these two things should have canceled each other out (i.e., if the boys were so stupid, why did I care that they didn’t like us?). He told me not to worry, that things would get better when we got to college, which is when guys get more interested in interesting women. I asked him if he thought maybe high school would be an improvement, but he said probably not.

  Now, I have to tell you, when you’re twelve, hearing that your life will improve when you’re eighteen and that there’s nothing but a romantic wasteland between here and “Pomp and Circumstance,” is kind of depressing. But at least I’d thought Laura and I were in the same boat. I mean, she’d never had a boyfriend either.

  Actually, for one brief second last fall it had looked like I’d be the one to prove my dad wrong. This senior had a big party, and Laura and I went with these other freshman girls, and I kind of hooked up with this guy Tim, who was in my year. I mean, we didn’t, like do anything major, we just kissed. He was in my English class and I’d kind of thought he was cute when I met him—he went to a different junior high, so I’d only known him for a few weeks when we kissed at the party. And the thing was, and this is just so embarrassing I can’t even believe I’m saying it, I kind of thought … I don’t know, not that he was going to fall madly in love with me or anything, but that he’d want to … well, let’s just say I didn’t expect him to walk into English Monday morning and go Hey, and then completely ignore me for the rest of the year like he hadn’t spent the better part of a Saturday night giving me a tonsillectomy with his tongue. A couple of weeks later he started going out with this other girl, and he and I basically never spoke again.

  To cheer me up, Laura said we should make a list of all the things we didn’t do that girls at our school who had boyfriends did. We didn’t flip our hair around and giggle and squeal the second a guy came within a ten-foot radius of us. We didn’t pretend we couldn’t do our math homework without help from one of our male classmates. We didn’t spend every waking second wondering if what we were doing was attractive to the opposite sex.

  Then we made a list of all the things we liked to do. We liked to read books and talk about them. We liked watching old movies. We liked being really, really good tennis players. We even liked when we could beat the guys on the tennis team. After we’d finished the list, we high-fived. No wonder the guys at our school didn’t want to go out with us. Like my dad had said, we were waaay too cool for them.

  But now it turned out that it wasn’t that guys didn’t want to go out with us.

  It was that guys didn’t want to go out with me.

  I’d been expecting the Larkspur Golf and Country Club of Dryer’s Cove, Massachusetts, to be really fancy, something like the Olympia Club in Salt Lake, which we don’t belong to but Laura’s family does. Olympia has valet parking and a brand-new clubhouse, inside of which pretty much everything is pink marble or brass. Larkspur, on the other hand, just had a dirt parking lot, and the clubhouse looked like an actual house, albeit a large Victorian one. There weren’t too many of the Mercedes SUVs and BMWs and Hummers that you saw at Olympia, either. In fact, almost every car in the lot seemed to be a Subaru wagon. I had a minute to wonder how people ever found their cars when there were so many identical ones before I had to hustle to catch up with Sarah, who was headed down a pebbled path that had a hand-lettered sign saying “Pool” at the head of it.

  As I followed Sarah, I felt not unlike a puppy struggling to keep up with a much larger dog. I swear, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Sarah had said, Hey, Kate, look over there before dashing off in the opposite direction. As soon as we sat down, it was clear that despite our lounge chairs being next to each other, Sarah wasn’t any more interested in talking to me poolside than she had been bayside.

  I forced myself not to try and make conversation. If she didn’t want to talk, that was fine with me. I opened the Agatha Christie again, trying to focus on the intricacies of a village murder and not the fact that my best friend had a boyfriend and the girl sitting next to me was probably hoping I’d drown in the pristine pool before lunch.

  I’d barely made it through a sentence when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, Sarah shoot her hand up in the air and wave at someone. She was off her chair in a flash, though she did say something to me over her shoulder. It was either, Excuse me a sec or Please be gone when I get back. I kept my book up in front of my face as I watched her walk around the edge of the pool and embrace a shortish girl with a towel wrapped around her waist.

  I was more relieved than I care to admit that Sarah didn’t point over to my lounge chair and mime vomit-ing. This whole day was making me feel like I was going into junior high instead of junior year.

  Okay, I had to stop. What did I care if stupid Sarah thought I was lame? I was only going to be here for at most two months, not the rest of my life. Starting tomorrow, I’d say I just wanted to hang out at the house. Was that such an awful way to spend the next eight weeks—sitting on Tina and Henry’s beautiful deck and admiring the body of water I now knew was the bay? I could write. I could read. Let Sarah have her car and her club all to herself.

  There was the squeak of flesh on rubber as a girl sat down on the lounge chair next to mine. I noticed Sarah hadn’t left anything on the actual chair, just her bag at the foot of it. Should I say something about its being occupied? Clearly. But what was I supposed to say? Excuse me, that’s my friend’s chair. Hardly. That chair belongs to a girl who hates me because I ruined her summer, which is 39 hilarious since I too am a victim of the world’s vagaries rather than an agent in this affair. Seemed a bit too much information to give to a complete stranger.

  “Um, someone’s sitting there,” I said.

  The girl was pretty, but not quite as pretty as Sarah; she looked more like the pretty girls at my school than a super-model. Her hair was blond and straight and she had on a pair of jean shorts and a PrincetonT-shirt. She was eating a peach, and some of the juice dribbled down her chin.

  “Yeah,” she said, swiping at the juice and wiping her hand on her shorts. “Sarah. I saw you guys come in. I’m Jenna.”

  “Kate,” I said.

  “I go to school with Sarah. You’re the girl who’s staying with her, right? You and your mom?”

  What had Sarah told her friends about me? You’re not going to believe the loser my mom’s saddled me with for the summer. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m the one.”

  “I’ve been to Salt Lake. My family goes skiing at Deer Valley sometimes,” she said. Deer Valley is this really fancy ski resort that a lot of people from the East Coast and California ski at. When I ski with my friends, we usually go to Alta, which costs about half what Deer Valley costs. This may have something to do with the fact that at Alta they don’t have tissues for you on the lift lines or heated seats on the chair lifts.

  “So,” she continued, “I’m sorry about your parents.”

  “My what?” I said, confused.

  “Your parents? I’m sorry about their getting divorced,” she explained.

  “What?!” My screech could have cut glass. I cleared my throat and brought it down a notch. “Oh God, they’re not getting divorced. They’re just going through this thing they go through.” What had Sarah said to Jenna to give her the idea that my parents were getting divorced? Could Tina have said something to Sarah? In which case, had my mom said something to Tina? My stomach started to wind itself in a tight knot as I imagined their conversation: I don’t want to say anything to Kate, but I’m going to ask Mark for a divorce.

  I forced myself to take a deep breath. This was insane. My parents were not getting divorced. No doubt Sarah and Jenna were just confused because they were used to New York women whose lives were just a little too busy for them to solve their marital crises by taking monthlong cross-country vacations.

  Jenna seemed to accept
my response. “So,” she said, “how do you like Cape Cod?” As she asked, she waved at someone. I assumed it was Sarah and the girl she was talking to.

  You mean aside from your rumor-mongering friend? “It’s nice,” I said. “The air smells really clean.” I took a deep breath, not sure why I’d chosen to utter this particular observation.

  “Oh, I know,” said Jenna. “I love how you can always smell the ocean here. We’ve been coming up every summer practically since I was born.”

  We seemed to have exhausted our reservoir of small talk, so it was lucky that just then two guys emerged from the pool, dripping water, and stood at the foot of Jenna’s lounge chair. They didn’t spray us with water like the guys at my school would have, but I didn’t know if that was because there was something intrinsically civilized about East Coast guys or if it was just that they didn’t know who I was.

  One of the guys was much hotter than the other. He looked as if maybe his great-great-great-grandparents had come over to this country on, like, the Mayflower, or as if he’d stepped out of a Ralph Lauren ad: chiseled jaw, blond hair that was long but not too long, piercing blue eyes. If you opened up a magazine and saw a picture of him playing polo, with the words “All-American” printed underneath, you’d definitely buy whatever he was selling.