Summer, 2002:
"Okay, switch."
All I have to say is the magic word — "switch" is the magic word — and her hand sticks up to the top bunk, peek-a-boo. I give her the magazine I just finished with and she hands me a new one that has a gold front page, ooh la la.
The girl on the front has bright yellow hair and black glasses on her face but she doesn't look like a nerd, at least not really. Her undies are white and are giving her a bad wedgie but my new friend says they like the feeling of a wedgie with those underwear and it doesn't bother them, how? I think if I had a wedgie that bad, it would bother me lots. I would pick it out all day even though Daddy says sometimes it's not sanner-terry. My new friend also says the girls can't be naked on the front page because that's just not decent so the naked stuff is on the inside. I guess it makes sense why the girl on the gold front page has a notebook covering her boobies.
"You know you don't have to sit in here with me, right?" I can tell by the way she talks that she is holding her mouth in her hands. She is probably like me, laying down on my belly with my hand underneath my chinny-chin-chin. "You can go out to the lake and go swimming with everyone else, I'm fine here."
"I don't know how to swim."
I told a little lie but little lies are okay as long as they're little so you don't hurt no feelings. I know how to swim good, actually. I got a silver medal and a certificate saying I passed swim classes, I'm a winner, yay. I only told her I don't know how to swim 'cause I don't want her to feel bad that I'm in here. She lied to me too, so I think that makes us even. She don't want me to know it, but I do. I know she's not really feeling sick. I know she just don't wanna go outside in a bathing suit around everybody else.
"Nobody ever taught you how to swim?"
"Nope," I turn to the next page and WOW her boobies are so big that they touch her chin! How do they grow like that?! "How do you think you get big boobs?"
"I think if you're fat, they just come with the territory." I hear her turn the page too. "Plus I think it's in your genes."
"What's in my jeans? I don't have a lot of jeans, I have skirts."
"Not your jeans, stupid. Your genes. Like genetics."
"Oh!" Duh, Rachel. You dumbo. Why would big boobs hide in denim jeans? Where would they go? In the back pockets? "So you mean like, if my Daddy has big boobs, I would have big boobs too 'cause he could pass that down to me?"
"More like your mom," she moves and I know it because the bed goes squeeeeeeeak. "If your mom has big boobs, you'll probably have big boobs too."
"I don't know if my mom has big boobs…"
I like my new friend a lot, a lot, a lot. But sometimes she makes me feel uncomfy. I don't want to think about my mom always. Thinking about that makes me sad like I was that time everybody in class made a card for their mom but I had to make it for my Dad and Daddy and everyone pointed and laughed, "Rachel Gaychel" and I was sad.
"Do you ever think about your mom a lot?" She asks and my eyes are a little bit wet.
"Not really." I lie to her again but this time it's just 'cause it's not her business and she can mind her own beeswax. "Does your mom have big boobs?"
"Ew, Rachel, gross!" She laughs so I know she's just kidding. "She has mom boobs! They're like… like…"
"Like mom boobs?!"
"Yeah, like mom boobs!"
"Mom boobs are saggy," I stick my tongue out at the thought, nasty. "And they have to wear bras all the time or else they'll roam all over the place."
"And sometimes they gotta put deodorant under them so they don't sweat 'cause they sag reeeeal bad. At least that's what my sister says."
Both of us laugh really really hard and the tears that made my eyes wet when I thought about my mom come rolling down my cheeks, river. But they're not sad tears, so they don't make me feel bad. They're happy tears and only make me wanna laugh harder.
"I do think about my mom sometimes." I only tell her that after we're done laughing 'cause I feel bad for lying to her. She just made me laugh lots, so why would I lie to her? That's not very nice. "I mostly just wonder what she looks like."
"Do you know anything about her?"
"Not really. My dads always said if I wanna know something, alls I gotta do is ask but I don't want to ask them."
"So they did tell you that you were adopted?"
"I'm not stupid, ya know. I know how the birds and the bees work. I know that only a mom and dad can have a baby. So I must have a mom somewhere. She just didn't want me, I don't think."
"Well that's stupid." Her hand plays peek-a-boo again but this time she's not handing me no more magazines. Her hand just stays on my bed and I think she wants me to hold it. I like her pink nail polish. It's pretty.
"It's stupid?" I lay my hand right on top of hers and it makes me feel tingly inside to touch her. It's a million butterflies are flying inside of me.
"Yeah," her thumb rubs mine nice. "I don't see how anybody couldn't want you, Rachel."
"Are you for serious?"
"Uh-huh. You're a really good singer and a really nice friend and you're really pretty and you always smell good. Somebody's gotta want you. It just don't make no sense."
"Then I wonder why she gave me to my dads then… I wonder why she don't want me to know what she's like…" I am very sad talking about this, but somehow having her hand skin on my hand skin makes me feel really good. I hope she never takes it away.
"What if she died? What if that's why she isn't with you?" She gives me a suggestion, I think it's called.
"Well that's really sad, don't you think?"
"Of course it's sad, but it makes sense. What if she died after she had you but you were a baby, so you were too little to remember?"
"Maybe."
"What do you think she'd have been like?" She asks me that really hard question. How am I supposed to know? I think she knows that it's a hard question because she answers it herself. "She was probably a really good singer, just like you. With long, brown hair. Like yours."
"You think so?!" That makes me feel excited inside! What if that's true?! What if my mom was a good singer that looked like me?! What if she wasn't too ugly to be on Broadway like me?! "...Maybe she won a Tony!"
"Totally! She totally won a Tony! She was probably… um… what show do you think she was in?"
"Mmmm…. RENT! No, no, wait, FUNNY GIRL! Or WICKED!"
"She was probably even the green girl in Wicked! No, wait, she was pretty 'cause she looked like you. So she was the princess in Wicked. Definitely the princess."
"No, she was Elphaba. Elphaba's the star and she was definitely the star. She got standing ovations every single night. And made the whole audience cry when she sung Defying Gravity. They nominated her for a Tony right after her first show 'cause she was just that good."
"And when she had you in the hospital, she was singing it to you then. It made you stop crying. 'Cause you knew that she was your mom and you loved her even as a little itty bitty baby." She moves in the bed beneath me again but her hand is still there, good. "What do you think her name was?"
"...Bette. Like the Divine Miss B. Bette Midler, in case you didn't know. She's the witch in Hocus Pocus."
"Classic. Middle name?"
"Middle name, Dolly. Like —"
"Dolly Parton, I get it. Clever. She have a last name?"
"Streisand."
"Bette Dolly Streisand. She was an incredible woman. Like her incredible daughter."
Even though I know we both don't wanna, she takes her hand away from mine anyway. She starts flipping through the Playboy magazine again and it's almost like us holding hands for that long never even happened. I can't really explain why 'cause I don't actually know why, but it feels like we did something wrong by holding hands.
I turn to the next page of my magazine and try to be interested in the pretty girl laying on the car with her legs all open sesame, but I am not interested in that anymore. I want to hold her hand again. I want to hold it really bad. It is like something in my body is making me want to do it so bad that it is hard to control it.
"What about your mom?" I ask her a question just because I wanna hear her voice again. "What's she like?"
"I'll let you know when I figure it out myself." She tosses her magazine onto the floor. "She's nice, I guess. She cooks dinner every night and kisses us before bed. But she's usually gone in the morning and on the weekends. I don't even really get to spend summer with her. She and my dad are always on vacation somewhere and me and my sister have to go to sleepaway camps."
"You get to go to a camp every summer? Neat-o!"
"It's not that great, Rachel. Sometimes I just want to stay home and go on vacations with them. Sometimes I wish I had just one week after school lets out to just… be with my parents, you know?"
"They send you away as soon as school is out?"
"Every single year without fail. I hate summer camps."
"...You like this one though, right? You're gonna come back next summer, aren't you? I never made a friend before, I —"
"I'll come back to this camp every single year, I promise. Only for you, though."
Daddy said that sometimes love means doing things for people that you don't really want to do. Does this mean that she loves me? She don't like summer camp, but she says she'll come back to this camp every single year just to keep being my friend. That must mean love, huh?
"I'm really glad you decided to be my friend." I let my hand fall over the edge of the bed and hope that she will hold it again. "I don't have a lot of friends back at home."
"Somehow, I don't find that very hard to believe." She giggles and so do I because I'm starting to learn when she's making a joke, ha.
"I'm for serious, though. Sometimes I don't feel like I really even belong in the world. Nobody ever wants to be my friend. Everybody says they don't like me."
"I'll be your friend forever, okay? Stop worrying about those other little shits."
She makes me laugh every time she says a bad word and this time is the same. I laugh all over again and she didn't hold my hand like I wanted her to, but that's okay because I'm not mad. I mostly just want a little snack, so I use the ladder and climb off the top bunk.
Looking at her feels not right, probably 'cause I wasn't looking at her for a long time. She was on the bottom bunk and I was on the top and we were minding our own beeswax just talking. She looks at little different to me when I look at her after all this time. Her sloppy ponytail looks pretty to me all of a sudden, and her Totally Spies! t-shirt and shorts look like really good clothes to me. She is very very very pretty. Prettiest girl I ever met, probably.
"Want one?" I ask her when I pull the box of Nutty Buddy Bars from my snack suitcase.
She looks at the box for a second like she really wants one, but she shakes her head and says, "No, I'm good. Thank you though."
I know she wants one and I know she's lying to me and I think we are close friends enough to tell each other don't lie. We need to tell the truth or else we will not be friends anymore because friends don't lie to each other unless it's to not hurt feelings except why would she hurt my feelings by not wanting a Nutty Buddy? She makes no sense, zip. Zero. Zilch.
I throw a Nutty Buddy on her bed anyway since I know she wanted to say yes. I look at her and I say, "How come I haven't heard you coughing? Or throwing up? Or going poop?"
"What the hell are you going on about now, you little nutcase?" She opens up the Nutty Buddy and see! I was right, she did want one! Ha ha.
"You said you're sick and that's why you didn't wanna go swimming with everybody else. But I haven't heard you coughing or nothing. You don't seem sick to me."
"I had a headache, actually, I —"
"You shouldn't worry about them other little shits. Isn't that what you just told me?" I sit on her bed next to her and we eat our Nutty Buddies together. I said a bad word, uh-oh, but I don't think it's that bad really. I won't get in trouble since nobody heard me. "You shouldn't worry about the other kids thinking you're fat."
"...Thanks, Rachel," she smiles at me like she doesn't want to show teeth but that's okay because I know it's a good honest smile.
She looks down at her fingers that have melted chocolate all over them, ick. I think she's going to lick them clean because she brings them up to her mouth except I'm totally wrong! She doesn't lick them off, she wipes the chocolate on my face!
"HEY!"
"You looked like you needed a little more chocolate!" She giggles and tries to push me away when I want to smear chocolate on her face too. "NO!"
"IT'S PAYBACK!"
She fights me just a little. But I still end up getting chocolate on her too.
There's an owl going HOO HOO HOO outside our window and the other two girls that we share a room with are snoring sleeping. I have to use the moonlight coming through the cracked open window to see my steps as I climb off the top bunk.
She's sleeping too. She's not snoring or anything, but she's rolled over on her side and her mouth is open, slobber on the pillow… ew. I'm quiet and careful getting out of the bed because I don't want to wake our roomies up. Just her I want to wake up.
"Hey…" I whisper kinda loud and tap her on the shoulder. "Wake up… wake up!"
"Hmm… sea…horse, octopus…" she mumbles as she wakes up and I laugh at her a little bit. Aww, she's cute! "Pony… hm, what?"
"I'm not a pony, silly."
"Rachel?!" She's a little loud so the other girls roll around in their beds until I tell her shh! "What?! Why are you waking me up?!" She's whispering now, but still loud.
"Just get up, okay? And shhh!"
"Not until you tell me what's going on!"
I wanted to save it as a surprise, but I don't think she's gonna get up out of bed without me telling her, so I guess I must. I stand on my tip-tip-tippy toes and grab the two towels and bathing suits I rounded up when she was in the bathroom way earlier. I hand her the pink and yellow one that I got from her suitcase and keep my dark blue one with the white polka dots.
"We're going swimming, come on!"
"What time is it?" She yawns but she sits up and stretches so I think she's going to come with me, probably.
"I dunno, but I just saw the counselor cabin light go out, so everybody's sleeping. Come on!"
"...Okay."
The both of us are really sneaky quiet when we leave our cabin so we don't get caught and lucky for us, we have the cabin closest to the lake so it's not a far walk. Both of us didn't bother to put on shoes 'cause that would have made a whole lotta noise and got us in trouble. We walk bare-feet in the grass and stop beside the tree that we first met behind.
"Here, gimme your towel," I say and she hands it right over. I hang both our towels up on a tree branch that is low enough for us to reach. "You can change, I won't look."
"I won't look, too."
Our backs go facing each other so we don't look and we take our pajammies off so we can put on our bathing suits instead. It's like that feeling that I can't control again, like when I wanted to hold her hand so bad that it was the only thing on my mind. I want to look even though I told her I wouldn't. I want to look so, so, so bad. But that's wrong, I know it. Friends don't look at other friends naked, that's a weirdo thing. It's not good to wonder if your friend looks like the Playboy girls with no clothes.
I am a little embarrassed because I want to look, but it's only embarrassment on the inside. Sometimes inside embarrassment is worse than outside embarrassment though.
"You ready?" She asks me and for some reason, I kind of feel like she wanted to look at me too. I could be wrong, but I feel that way so maybe I'm not wrong.
"Let's just jump in!"
"You said you can't swim, though."
"And you said you were sick. I didn't want you to sit in the room alone, so."
"So you lied to me."
"Just a little," I shrug my shoulders and hold out my hand for her to take. She does.
And we hold hands as we run and jump deep into the lake.
