Emma Cline - The Girls

—

I asked Teddy for a drink. Lemonade, I figured, soda, anything but what he brought me, his hand shaking nervously when he passed me the glass.

“Do you want a napkin?” he said.

“Nah.” The intensity of his attention seemed exposing, and I laughed a little. I was just starting to learn how to be looked at. I took a deep drink. The glass was full of vodka, cloudy with the barest slip of orange juice. I coughed.

“Your parents let you drink?” I asked, wiping at my mouth.

“I do what I want,” he said, proud and uncertain at the same time. His eyes gleamed; I watched him decide what to say next. It was strange to watch someone else calibrate and worry over their actions instead of being the one who was worrying. Was this what Peter had felt around me? A limited patience, a sense of power that felt heady and slightly distressing. Teddy’s freckled face, ruddy and eager — he was only two years younger than me, but the distance seemed definitive. I took a large swallow from the glass, and Teddy cleared his throat.

“I have some dope if you want it,” he said.

—

Teddy led me to his room, expectant as I glanced around at his boyish novelties. They seemed arranged for viewing, though it was all junk: a captain’s clock whose hands were dead, a long-forgotten ant farm, warped and molding. The glassy stipple of a partial arrowhead, a jar of pennies, green and scuzzy as sunken treasure. Usually I’d make some crack to Teddy. Ask him where he got the arrowhead or tell him about the whole one I’d found, the obsidian point sharp enough to draw blood. But I sensed a pressure to preserve a haughty coolness, like Suzanne that day in the park. I was already starting to understand that other people’s admiration asked something of you. That you had to shape yourself around it. The weed Teddy produced from under his mattress was brown and crumbled, barely smokable, though he held out the plastic bag with gruff dignity.

I laughed. “It’s like dirt or something. No, thanks.”

He seemed stung and stuffed the bag deep in his pocket. It had been his trump card, I understood, and he hadn’t expected its failure. How long had the bag been there, crushed by the mattress, waiting for deployment? I suddenly felt sorry for Teddy, the neckline of his striped shirt gone limp with grime. I told myself there was still time to leave. To put down the now empty glass, to say a breezy thank-you and go back to my own house. There were other ways to get money. But I stayed. He eyed me, sitting on his bed, with a bewildered and attentive air, as if looking away would break the rare spell of my presence.

“I can get you some real stuff, if you want,” I said. “Good stuff. I know a guy.”

His gratitude was embarrassing. “Really?”

“Sure.” I saw him notice as I adjusted my swimsuit strap. “You have any money on you?” I asked.

He had three dollars in his pocket, wadded and limp, and didn’t hesitate to hand them over. I tucked the bills away, all business. Even possessing that small amount of money tindered an obsessive need in me, a desire to see how much I was worth. The equation excited me. You could be pretty, you could be wanted, and that could make you valuable. I appreciated the tidy commerce. And maybe it was something I already perceived in relationships with men — that creep of discomfort, of being tricked. At least this way the arrangement was put toward some use.

“What about your parents?” I said. “Don’t they have money somewhere?”

He cut a quick glance at me.

“They’re gone, aren’t they?” I sighed, impatient. “So who cares?”

Teddy coughed. Rearranged his face. “Yeah,” he said. “Let me check.”

—

The dog banged at our heels while I followed Teddy up the stairs. The dimness of his parents’ room, a room that seemed both familiar — the stale glass of water on the nightstand, the lacquered tray of perfume bottles — and foreign, his father’s slacks collapsed in the corner, an upholstered bench at the foot of the bed. I was nervous, and I could tell Teddy was, too. It seemed perverse to be in his parents’ bedroom in the middle of the day. The sun was hot outside the shades, outlining them brightly.

Teddy went into the closet in the far corner, and I followed. If I stayed close, I was less like an intruder. He reached up on his toes to feel blindly through a cardboard box. While he searched, I shuffled through the clothes hanging from fussy silken hangers. His mother’s. Paisley pussy-bow blouses, the grim, tight tweeds. They all seemed like costumes, impersonal and not quite real, until I pinched the sleeve of an ivory blouse. My mother had the same one, and it made me uneasy, the familiar gold of the I. Magnin label like a rebuke. I dropped the shirt back on its hanger. “Can’t you hurry up?” I hissed at Teddy, and he made a muffled reply, rummaging farther, until he finally pulled out some new-looking bills.

He shoved the box back onto the high shelf, breathing hard, while I counted.

“Sixty-five,” I said. Neatening the stack, folding it to a more substantial thickness.

“Isn’t that enough?”

I could tell by his face, the effort of his breathing, that if I demanded more, he would find a way to get it. Part of me almost wanted to. To gorge myself on this new power, see how long I could keep it going. But then Tiki trotted in the doorway, startling us both. The dog panting as he nudged at Teddy’s legs. Even the dog’s tongue was spotted, I saw, the crimped pink freckled with black.

“This’ll be fine,” I said, putting the money in my pocket. My damp shorts gave off an itch of chlorine.

“So when will I get the stuff?” Teddy said.

It took a second to understand the significant look he gave me: the dope I’d promised. I’d almost forgotten that I hadn’t just demanded money. When he saw my expression, he corrected himself. “I mean, no rush. If it takes time or whatever.”

“Hard to say.” Tiki was sniffing at my crotch; I pushed his nose away more roughly than I’d meant to, his snout wetting my palm. My desire to get out of the room was suddenly overwhelming. “Pretty soon, probably,” I said, starting to back toward the door. “I’ll bring it over when I get it.”

“Oh, yeah,” Teddy said. “Yeah, okay.”

—

I had the uncomfortable sense, at the front door, that Teddy was the guest and I was the host. The wind chime over the porch rippling a thin song. The sun and trees and blond hills beyond seemed to promise great freedoms, and I could already start to forget what I’d done, washed over by other concerns. The pleasing meaty rectangle of the folded bills in my pocket. When I looked at Teddy’s freckled face, a surge of impulsive, virtuous affection passed through me — he was like a little brother. The gentle way he’d mothered the barn kitten.

“I’ll see you,” I said, leaning to kiss him on the cheek.

I was congratulating myself for the sweetness of my gesture, the kindness, but then Teddy adjusted his hips, hunching them protectively; when I pulled away, I saw his erection pushing stubbornly against his jeans.

I could ride my bike most of the way there. Adobe Road empty of cars, except for the occasional motorcycle or horse trailer. If a car passed, it was usually heading to the ranch, and they’d give me a lift, my bicycle half hanging out a window. Girls in shorts and wood sandals and plastic rings from the dispensers outside the Rexall. Boys who kept losing their train of thought, then coming to with a stunned smile, as if returned from cosmic tourism. The barest of nods we’d give one another, tuned to the same unseen frequencies.

—

It wasn’t that I couldn’t remember my life before Suzanne and the others, but it had been limited and expected, objects and people occupying their temperate orbits. The yellow cake my mother made for birthdays, dense and chilly from the freezer. The girls at school eating lunch on the asphalt, sitting on their overturned backpacks. Since I’d met Suzanne, my life had come into sharp, mysterious relief, revealing a world beyond the known world, the hidden passage behind the bookcase. I’d catch myself eating an apple, and even the wet swallow of apple could incite gratitude in me. The arrangement of oak leaves overhead condensing with a hothouse clarity, clues to a riddle I hadn’t known you could try to solve.