Sometimes, when she sees the two of them side by side, her mind automatically compares them. It's not by choice really; it's an instinct, drilled into her by Brooke, a constant reminder-always trade up.
This is the motto. If we had one, I mean, Brooke had said. You know like three for one and one for a-
I get it, she had replied back.
I don't know if you do, Brooke had answered. Look, once you start trading down, it all goes down Shit Creek. Before you know it you'll be like Misty Rae, the acne chick with saddlebags who gives free hummers in desperate attempts to get invited places. She just keeps trading down lower and lower, because that's how she started. But you've always got to trade up-something better, faster, finer…."
She hadn't meant to keep listening, but Brooke kept talking because she knew she was being heard. If there was anything Brooke was really good at, it was striking fear into her heart like a match on a cigarette. Toxic. Dizzy.
She's right, Peyton had thought. Because if I don't keep trading up, I'll end up with something worse than Nathan, and no one but me knows how bad that could really be. Terrifying almost.
So when she looks at Nathan and Lucas, in spite of her shame at the act, her mind makes cold and impersonal calculation. Height. Tone. Face. Mouth. Gossip. Possibility. It's nothing person, she wants to tell him. It's just….who I am.
Or who I was.
She's not sure she wants to do that anymore, and that's the problem. Ever since that night at the café, she's felt a stab of shame everytime she's made any calculations. Which girl to stand by or not to stand near. Who to hang with at lunch today. How short her skirt should be in case Mr. Hopkins wasn't persuaded by her English essay alone. These kinds of things. When she realizes her mind is making them for her, she feels a pang of guilt she didn't know before.
I know why, thinks Peyton.
It's your fault Lucas. Your fault again.
She tries to shut her eyes and block out his conscience that's seeped into hers, waking it up from a long dormancy. But she sees his penetrating look of quiet questioning every time something loud and ugly comes out of her mouth, not judging, just looking at her.
And she knows for the first time what regret is.
The heat comes in during the spring at an uncertain point, making moist halos around the streetlights, bursting magnolia blossoms and dogwoods into trembling bloom, making the river stir. Over the marshes a pale Carolina moon rises at night, coloring the reeds in black, swaying gently in the wind.
It makes her remember things, flashes of moments, pictures.
It's evening, river evening, the kind where the sun takes it's own sweet time setting, burning deep orange and purple and fuchsia over the reeds in Marsh Downs by Orchard Lake. We're on the edge of the swamps, on the bank, watching the herons move with a slow grace through the glassy waters. The sun is dying, drowning in the water, sinking between the reeds, the sky is deep blue-mauve, a thick, warm, damp twilight setting over the sky. There's one small star that's shining fiercely, twinkling over Duck Point.
She's home alone. She pads over to the door quietly, footsteps muffled by the carpet, and checks all the locks. There seems to be something pressing outside at the door, the inky black southern night, suffocating, thick with memories. A 11 year old Brooke flashes before her eyes, a scrawny girl with a crooked mouth and big moppet doll eyes like she'd just been scared or something.
And there was Nathan too, before they hit junior high. Before they understood the meaning of the word popularity. Before he was anyone in particular except a boy they hung out with sometimes, because they lived close by then, all of them. It was a small class of about 130 kids-almost all she knew by name-come up together since grade school for the most part. She sits on the couch and wraps a blanket around her shoulders, shuddering a little.
It's night; summer night, thick and beautiful, muggy; there's a river breeze blowing, and it smells like red clay. They're standing in front of Collier's, Nathan's got his foot propped sole to the wall behind him, leaning back against it. He's just wearing a white undershirt and some jeans, rolled up at the bottom, to show off the new red Chuck Taylors. Orange streetlights shine down on us, and little lights shine out from the windows. Three old men in chairs are sitting out in front of Stover's Dime in wooden chairs, under the overhang; they're smoking, the tips of their cigarettes glowing like little red fireflies in the dusky night. Their voices softly carry in the stillness, a sporadic laugh or two punctuating the quiet garble. They're telling stories tonight, river stories. Billy Calhoun left a few minutes ago, to go home for dinner. Mrs. Calhoun yelled down the street for him to come; she's always yelling down the street, not because she really has to, but because she wants everybody to notice.
"Where's Brooke?"
A shrug.
"She's late. She's always late." Nathan says, popping out the penknife, and begging to carve a reed like Owen Mills showed him last week.
"You got the string?" he says, and Peyton hands it to him. Biting the end off, he quickly ties it through, and secures it with a deft movement. Curious and impressed, she ogles it.
"What is it?" she asks amiably, and he shows her.
"A whistle. See, you can hang it around your neck. Here, blow in it."
She blows, just because he looks so damn proud. It makes a squawk; she wrinkles her nose. She doesn't like the sound.
"What you tryin' to do, call ducks?"
"Maybe."
"What you want a duck for?"
"Dinner," he says grinning, and they chuckle. He's an idiot sometimes.
Brooke's here, suddenly appearing from the little alley to our right by the Red Rock Public Library. Her face looks strange tonight, but beautiful. She saunters towards them slowly, leaning against the building next to him.
"What's that?" she says, taking it curiously from his hands. He's a slightly awkward, unsure, watching her in an almost embarrassed way. She doesn't laugh like Peyton did.
"I like it," she says, and her smile lights up the whole sidewalk. They don't even need lamp posts anymore. He looks at her curiously, and she smiles at him again in the darkness. Peyton feels left out all of a sudden. He rubs the back of his neck and dares to look up at her again; her eyes are like mahogany under the harsh orange light, melted into his. They just stand there, breathing for a while, heavily.
"Can I keep it?" she says softly, and Nathan looks up, surprised.
"Yeah," he says, so low you can barely hear it. "Don't lose it."
Peyton looks at the whistle, trying to figure out what's special about it.
"It's just a duck whistle, dang. Shoot, Nathan'll make you a dozen a day. Lose it if you want," she says obliviously. jumping up and amicably offering them both an arm.
Linking arms, they walk for a few steps, but they're not saying anything. She's just looking at the daggone duck whistle in her hand like she's never seen one before. And Nathan, he's just staring at the sidewalk.
They hear the sound of a ball being bounced then, and that's when the three of them looked up and Peyton remembers watching the blond boy emerging from a shadow on the other side of the street, driving the ball, oblivious. He does a fake little half step. They stare. In the next moment he looks up and sees them, loses the ball and quickly reclaims it. They stand there on opposite sides of the street as though those few yards of pavement were an ocean-Nathan's cheeks are red-no one says anything really-
"Isn't that your brother?" Brooke whispers then, as the blond boy starts dribbling again, looking down at the pavement, quickly moving away from them. "Lucas?"
The boy doesn't answer. He stares straight ahead, and shrugs, and starts walking. We take two quick halfsteps and catch up. He's forgotten about her, about that awkwardness that hung there for a moment, ripe and blossoming.
She'd known back then that he had liked Brooke-by the end of seventh grade everyone did-but then came eight grade and basketball camp and the varsity team and Ginny Lakowsky making out with him in the back seat of his dad's car.All the boys slapped him on the back and his dad made him start lifting weights. Brooke was hard by eight grade too, hard and fixed the way she is now, because of what happened, things Peyton's not still entirely sure of except that they had walked in one day on a half empty bottle of Jack and Brooke's mother, naked, straddling a man on the kitchen counter and that was all she ever knew. Brooke never opened her mouth again. But she watched Peyton with sharp eyes, guarding her, guarding the secret. She saw what happened to Nathan, and that boys invited Ginny Lakowski and Lila Slater to their boy-girl parties first, and Brooke and Peyton were only tacked on at the end to make sure there were enough girls for spin the bottle. Then Peyton and Brooke started getting asked out by boys. That was the summer that Brooke and Peyton saved up enough money from babysitting to go to cheerleading camp, and to take gymnastics lessons; the fall of ninth grade they made the team and got to wear those skirts to school on game day, and that was the end of the three of them running around Marsh Downs and Orchard Lake and Mickler's Creek.
That was the end of anything innocent.
That was where they were now.
She sits alone on the couch and turns on the TV to drown out the memories, the sound of the humid night pressing its way in. She presses the power button and it turns black, cutting off the sound abruptly. She heads to the computer and clicks on the webcam, but there's no one there. She pulls out her sketchpad, but her pencil writes words instead of drawing the smooth curve of a line.
"Tonight, I'm sleeping on the couch, or rather, laying awake; the pale blue electric light outside filters quietly through the curtains, making dark blue shadows on the still objects in the living room. It throws pale lacy shadows from your curtains across the carpet, striking a vase of unmoving reeds in the corner. I feel empty and alone, and hollow like a shell; I'm brittle and breakable, my fingertips curled up tight around the edge of the thin blanket. The blue shadows swallow me, still and humming, while the black, Southern night covers the house, creeping in under the door and through the air vents. Memories suffocate me, pulling me under like a seeping tide; I can't breathe, and then, scared, I struggle to draw in air over and over, but not too loudly, as though I'm afraid of being heard breathing."
She pauses for breath, her own words paralyzing her with fear.
"I'm scared," she writes underneath. "That I'll never be good enough for you. That I'll never forget. That the waters will just close up over my head, something I thought about everytime we went to Orchard Lake in the evening. The water was so black, so still under the sky, like oil-I remember the year we turned eight, Roy Blanchard drowned in the lake when he and his friends went swimming at night. I though about that everytime I looked at the water, how it must have swallowed him like the night, quick and silent, a gust of wind on a candle and then the moon went dark."
She stops point blank, fingers trembling.
"It would be the same thing to love you and then to have lost. To disappoint you. I'm afraid it's too late to change, I'm too scared to change. Where will I go now? What will I do? I can't be nobody anymore after being somebody, I can't rely on you alone. I'm too scared."
She slams it shut, pauses, looks at it, opens it again cautiously.
Everything honest she's ever written she's torn up and thrown away.
Diatribes about Brooke's stupidity. Rants about Nathan's insensitivity. Truth about her life or her habits. Anything vulnerable. Hundreds of dead trees passing through her bedroom straight to the garbage or the toilet or the lighter.
This time, she doesn't rip this out.
She leaves it there, toying with the idea of showing it to him, wondering if she's ever done anything so personally revealing. She'd feel less naked taking off all her clothes than giving him this.
But at least she doesn't throw it away.
Making progress, Peyton, she tells herself, and calls Brooke, begging her to come over.
"I'm a little under the weather," she tells the redhead who is giggling on the other end of the line, watching a sitcom. "I need someone to drown my conscience, sedate me into oblivion, remind me of all those great things that are really important like……trading up. Someone fantastic and shallow."
"Bless your heart, tramp," Brooke had replied, laughing. "I'll be right over with a cocktail in my hand and some dirty details."
She hangs up, looking around the kitchen, wondering if she has anything to eat, remembering Brooke doesn't really eat. She pours some Southern Comfort into the ice trays to toss into their Diet Coke- and lemon- plus- Brooke's- preferred poison, digs up half a bag of sugar-free gummi worms and a bag of Baked Lay's from a Subway combo she never opened. Rifling through her CD's, she slams down some No Doubt, a compromise between her and Brooke to set the mood.
After all, you can't expect miracles, she tells herself. Two steps forward one step back. The important thing, she thinks firmly, is that you keep moving.