Chapter Text
Though her mother had assured her that her first day of school would be fine, when Beatrice woke up on Monday the first thing she noticed was that Edgar was not moving in his cage.
She had gotten into the habit of rolling over to say good morning. Being that he was her only friend in Atlantic City, his wire house held a place of honor on her bedside table. On breaks from her home schooling lessons she would bring him cut up carrots and pieces of lettuce and let him run over her shoulders and stick his whiskery nose in her ear.
“He’s dead.” Her father said when Beatrice called him upstairs to investigate. She detected a hint of relief in his voice. Edgar had, after all, been something of a compromise between two people who did not want a pet at all.
But Beatrice had learned at an early age that the cheat code to get her parents to provide things to her was to casually mention that she’d been hearing them fighting. And there was a lot of material to work with that summer. Every time she rounded a corner in their home, it seemed, they were yelling at each other—I can’t keep dealing with Beatrice at home, we need to find a school for her, or nothing you said about this place was true or I hate this house, etc etc, so on and so forth.
It was hurtful at first, but in her tenth summer on earth, which occurred in a big dusty Victorian in an Atlantic City suburb, Beatrice Weingand had found the best way she could to cope. She’d redeemed fights like shiny quarters into a gumball machine, coming up with books and new clothes and, finally, Edgar.
Her father responded to her sobs by saying: “Hamsters don’t live very long Beatrice, we told you that when we got him,” and then, “If you keep throwing a fit you’re going to be late for school.”
School, too, was a compromise. They were decidedly not Catholic, but there were no non-denominational private schools in the area. The only other option for her was a Quaker school.
“Absolutely the hell not,” Her father said while Beatrice hid under the tablecloth of the dining room table, “She’s going to turn out more of a crybaby than she already is.”
For that one, she’d gotten a shiny new bike, helmet and everything.
Despite the assurances to herself that she would not show up for her first day at the Academy of the Holy Names as a crybaby homeschool freak with a weird accent, Beatrice arrived at the curb crying in her mother’s car.
Like her father with Edgar, her mother looked only wincingly sympathetic.
“Beatrice,” She said slowly, both hands on the wheel, while Beatrice sniffled and hiccuped, “You’re going to be late for school.”
New Jersey, 2004. Beatrice exited her mother’s car praying that she could clean her face enough that none of her new classmates could tell she’d been crying.
She had her book bag over her shoulders and her journal clutched to her chest—Lisa Frank, not her choice, but her mother thought the plain moleskine ones were boy notebooks. In it, all of her deepest thoughts and fears.
Holding onto it all the way into class, where the teacher made her stand in front of a group of identically dressed, bored looking ten year olds and be introduced.
“Class, this is Beatrice.” Beatrice focused on her breathing. She kept her notebook clutched close to her chest. “Beatrice is from London, England, and before she joined us here she was being home schooled.” A series of snickers from the class. The teacher soldiered on as if it hadn’t happened, “This is fantastic, because we just started our unit on geography—"
Beatrice wondered what it was that made her radioactive—was it the British thing? Or being home schooled? Her classmates gave her a wide berth the entire first half of the day.
When recess came, she floated out to a large oak tree and sat beneath it, opening her notebook.
“Hey, Beatrice?” Briefly and and stupidly hopeful, Beatrice looked up only to find two boys, the source of the snickers from earlier. One was taller and one was shorter, and they both stood towering over her. “Did you come out here to cry some more or what?”
So it might not have been either thing—she just hadn't arranged her face carefully enough before she entered the school. Beatrice frowned and said nothing, dipping her head back toward her notebook.
“I want to hear your accent.” Beatrice folded her lips over her teeth and kept writing, keeping her head down, “C’mon, say something in British.”
“British isn’t a language.” She snapped finally, looking up. Beatrice knew it was a mistake by the way they grinned, wolffish. “I think I’m going to go to the swings.”
But after she stood they stopped her from walking forward. The shorter one reached out for her notebook.
“Hey, stop it! That’s mine.”
“I wanna read it. What’s crybaby Beatrice writing about in her diary?”
They both gripped it, engaging in a tug of war. Beatrice willed herself not to start crying again. Her grip slipped and she stumbled backwards, landing on her butt in the dirt.
It was going to happen, she realized. She was going to start crying. To make things worse, in the background Beatrice could see a girl approaching them with an uneven gait, coming, perhaps, to share in her humiliation.
“Hey!” When she got close enough, Beatrice could see that the girl was in a full, crisp Academy of the Holy Names uniform. Skirt down to her knees, crew neck sweater, the whole bit. She had hair that might have been curly under proper care and attention, but as it was frizzed out except where somebody had gathered some of it into a bun at the back of her head. The rest waterfalled around her shoulders.
The only thing that stuck out on her were her shoes, which were dirty and scuffed and had a hole in the top where her socked big toe had begun to poke through.
Well, that and her left leg, which was stuffed into a brace that extended up under her skirt. Beatrice stared at it openly in the way that children did before their mothers taught them any better.
The two boys turned to look at her and seemed to have a similar thought process, both of them getting stuck on the girl’s leg. She used this to her advantage and took a sudden step forward, using the might of her upper body to push one of the boys to the floor.
He fell with an oomph, looking bewildered. The compatriots exchanged a glance, as if debating the wisdom of getting into it with somebody who was a) a girl and b) in a leg brace, two things that broke ten year old boy code as far as starting fights went.
“Leave her alone,” The girl said, “What the hell’d she do to you?”
She swore, too? Beatrice and her tormentors shared a moment of camaraderie in which they all stared, dazzled, up at the strange interloper.
“What are you looking at? Give me her diary.”
Still gawking, the smaller boy did. The girl took it, then kicked a scuff of dirt in their direction with her good leg. “Get the hell out of here.”
They did, standing up and scrambling off. Beatrice stayed on the ground, her head spinning. She realized only after the girl got her hand in a warm clasp and pulled her up that she’d given in and begun to cry.
“Those guys suck,” The girl said, and then, “I’m Ava.”
“Beatrice.” Beatrice stuttered, sniffled. Tried to stop the torrent of tears, couldn’t. “I’m sorry.”
Ava’s face screwed up. “For what?
“That I’m crying. I’m a crybaby.”
“What? You’re not. Those guys knocked you over.” Ava handed Beatrice her diary back. She brushed some dirt from the front of Beatrice’s sweater, then pulled her sleeve over the heel of her hand to wipe the tears off her cheeks. She touched Beatrice like they’d known each other forever. “I’d cry too. I cry all the time, anyway.”
Beatrice looked on at her, this strange girl, her savior. “Really?”
“Yup.” She popped her P, “And the day before that, too.” Behind them, the bell rang. Ava’s face lit up, “Wanna go to lunch together?”
It was within two hours of meeting her that Beatrice learned that Ava was an orphan. That explained the shoes, she thought, and the brown paper bag that was indicative of the school’s free lunches.
Her impression of orphans mostly came from Disney movies. She imagined Ava returning home at night to a treehouse that she shared with a gaggle of dwarves.
“I got a fat scholarship to come here.” Ava said through a bite of dry-looking ham and cheese, “They let in a couple poor kids a year. Even bought me a uniform.” She looked down at the front of herself, “Just one, though.”
The thing about the closed feedback loop of childhood was that everybody had almost everything in common. To Beatrice, though, their similarities seemed uncanny.
For one, they were both from abroad. Beatrice told Ava about her father, how he’d moved to London for a year to bring the finer points of American evangelism to a church there. He’d met Beatrice’s mother in the congregation and stayed for a decade more.
Beatrice arrived somewhere early on. Once, looking at her parents’ wedding album with her mother and having just learned how long a baby stayed in its
mother’s stomach, she’d asked about the date of their wedding in relation to her own birthday. Her mother had told her not to worry about it.
There was some ambiguity in the story of what brought them back to America. Beatrice, especially as she got older, had the feeling that her mother had been swindled by certain promises; a big house and lots of money. Her father’s family owned beachfront rental properties all up and down the Jersey shore and had town council seats to match. A big side-of-the-highway church to preach at when he wasn’t raking in summer rental income.
Beatrice just had a feeling, a little itch in the back of her brain, that told her that her mother had heard rich but had no understanding of how far the glitz and the glamor of that concept could be from Atlantic City rich, which was their reality.
And then there was Ava. Also European, also stuck in New Jersey on account of one unlucky American parent. Specifically, because her father was a native New Jerseyian and they’d died on I-95, she was stuck in American foster care. Well, technically she’d first been released into the care of a nearby aunt who had soon decided that the state’s monthly check was not enough to cover the leg braces, physical therapy, mental therapy, etc. and let Ava loose back into the wild.
Beatrice had never decided if she thought Portuguese foster care would be better, exactly, then the foster parents of Atlantic City, New Jersey. Other than that the location of her parents’ untimely demise had landed Ava squarely in Beatrice’s jurisdiction, and for that Beatrice felt supremely grateful.
It used to make her scalp tingle to think of how close they’d been to not meeting. Still did, sometimes.
And so what was there for two girls to do, stuck in New Jersey not by choice, but by the cruel hand of fate? Up until that point, both of them basically friendless? The girl in the leg brace with a sailor’s mouth and the nerd with a funny accent, small for her age? They became best friends before the lunch bell rang.
At first, when Beatrice came home and reported breathlessly to her mother that she’d made a friend in school that day, her mother looked relieved. When she met Ava for the first time, standing in their kitchen in her leg brace and her uniform—she hadn’t been kidding about it being her only one, and by midway through the week it was dirty and wrinkled and smelled like kid sweat—the relief started to look more like concern.
“Ava,” She said before they went upstairs to Beatrice’s room to play, “We’re doing a load of laundry this afternoon. Do you want me to put your uniform in? It looks like you might have gotten some…dirt on it, playing.”
This was a lie, and one that Beatrice recognized immediately. They never did laundry on Wednesdays. And she would not realize until many years later that it was a lie likely told to protect Ava from the scrutinizing gaze of Beatrice’s father at dinner that evening.
“It’s quiet in here,” Ava remarked as they sat on Beatrice’s floor and flipped through National Geographic magazines.
“My mom’s probably napping before dinner.” Beatrice sniffed. “She sleeps a lot.”
Ava threw one National Geographic down and retrieved another from Beatrice’s stack. She was wearing Beatrice’s clothes, sweatpants and a t-shirt. “Do you have any video games or anything?” She asked, “Or a TV?”
“Not in my bedroom. My dad thinks video games are bad for developing brains.”
“Huh. But boobs in magazines are okay?”
Beatrice blushed. “It’s scientific. Do you always talk like that?”
“Like what?”
“So…vulgar.” Ava’s face screwed up, uncomprehending. “Swearing and stuff.”
“Oh. I guess.” Her eyes went back to the magazine in her hands. She flipped a page. “Maybe my foster mom has one of these laying around.” She muttered under her breath.
“What’s it like?”
“Foster care?” Ava shrugged, eyes not leaving the glossy pages in front of her. “It’s okay, I guess. If you hate your parents and they hate you, you just get new ones. And sometimes you get free shit because people feel sorry for you.”
She wasn’t exactly being convincing, but her explanation did lend itself to Beatrice’s fairy tale imagining of what Ava did when she went home after school—the treehouse, the kindly helpers. Animals, perhaps, doing her chores.
There was no way for Beatrice to ever assess this explanation for veracity. They were friends, yes. Best friends, even, and each other’s only friends, certainly. For one year, and then two years, they did everything together.
Sleepovers at Beatrice’s. After school homework help and Beatrice’s. Never at Ava’s—she never offered, and Beatrice never thought to ask, her house being more than big enough for the two of them.
Ava had gotten her leg brace removed before the beginning of sixth grade. She’d walked with a cane for a few months, then unassisted. The leg was mottled and scarred and twisted and caused her a little grief, but more often than not she could catch up on kid stuff she missed.
Beatrice taught her to swim at the community pool. They were working on bike riding that fall, Ava atop an old hand me down that was too big for her and in one of the helmets that firefighters gave away on safety days at school.
They were just kids, their brains moldable, their love easy and sincere. Sometimes Beatrice thought that the best explanation for their thriving relationship was that they were becoming people together.
Taking on qualities and traits. Personalities. Learning how they felt about things laying together on Beatrice’s floor, eating chips and flipping through magazines.
Ava, for instance, ate like a barnyard animal deprived of food for a week and then let loose on a bag of oats. When Beatrice’s parents took them out for dinner before a sleepover, she could kill a burger in two minutes flat. Like somebody was trying to take it from her.
She was all manners otherwise. All thank you ma’am and no sir, I’m full, to Beatrice’s parents, although at school she was the crowned queen of swears and filthy drawings.
Beatrice swore that there was no other twelve year old girl on the eastern seaboard who could draw a penis or a pair of breasts in sharpie on a bathroom stall faster than Ava Silva. She should know, because she stood in there with her, shifting anxiously from foot to foot and adjusting the hem of her skirt while the marker squeaked across metal.
“Ava, somebody’s going to catch us.”
“Shh, I’m concentrating.”
“Ava, did you hear that—didn’t that sound like Sister Agatha’s boots?”
“Hold on one second—ok, there.” Ava, sitting side saddle on the toilet, pivoted her body so that Beatrice could see her handiwork.
A pair of cartoonish breasts and childbearing hips. Beatrice blushed. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen any…you know. Other than National Geographic, I guess.”
“Boobs?” Ava frowned. “What about your own?”
“I don’t really look at them.”
“What?”
“Ladies? It’s well past the bell for second period—"
“Fuck, it was Agatha—“
“Is that you, Ava Silva? You are on your third strike before detention—"
The headmistress’ office smelled like freshly oiled mahogany and nail polish remover. Beatrice normally had the pleasure of being seated across her grand desk because she had received an award—no tardies for a whole year, for instance, or a high score on an aptitude test.
That day, she sat next to Ava, both of them slunk low in their chairs. She could see Ava’s knobby knees poking out from underneath her skirt.
“I expected this from Ava,” Sister Agatha said, “But Beatrice? How did you drag her into this?” Beatrice looked over at Ava, chin tucked to her chest and arms folded. Her jaw was tight. “With your grades, Ms. Silva, and your attitude problem, you are one misstep away from expulsion. How would you like to spend the rest of your sixth grade year at Brighton Avenue School?”
“It was me.” Beatrice blurted before she realized what was going to come out of her mouth. Two heads swiveled to look at her, each equally shocked. “It was my idea. Ava didn’t even want to.”
“N-no, Sister Agatha—" Ava tried, but Beatrice rolled over her.
“I made her do it.” She continued. “It was all me. So I should get the punishment.”
Sister Agatha’s face transitioned from shocked to shrewd to weary. Her eyes zeroed in on Beatrice, affixing her with the kind of intensity Beatrice was not-so used to receiving from people in positions of authority.
“Alright, Beatrice.” Agatha said, “I suppose I’ll have to call your parents and tell them what you’ve done.”
Beatrice had been on the receiving end of many adjectives in her short life. Clever being the most often used, followed perhaps by mousy. This was the first time that she ever felt particularly brave.
She tried to channel Ava, her disinterested affect. She crossed her arms and shrugged her shoulders. “Okay,” Beatrice said, “So call them.”
*
Part of the punishment was scrubbing the stall with foul smelling chemicals until their parents came and got them. They did so in silence.
It wasn’t that Beatrice didn’t think that Ava was capable of thoughtfulness, just that she’d never seen her look quite so thoughtful as she did sitting on that toilet seat trying to erase her bespoke nude from existence. Whatever it was, Beatrice was inclined to let her quietly work through it until she came up with something worth saying.
“Why’d you do that?” Ava asked after a while. She stopped scrubbing and turned to face Beatrice, who was standing next to her working on an unrelated filthy word. “You didn’t have to lie for me.”
Peevishness creeped into Ava’s voice. Beatrice frowned. She had no idea why she’d done it. “I know.” She said, and kept wiping. The word wouldn’t budge.
“I can take care of myself.” Ava continued, her face red hot, “I don’t need you to protect me. I’d be fine in public school. This place sucks anyway.”
“I would be sad if you left. Plus, it wouldn’t be fair.” Beatrice sniffed. She focused as hard as she could on the word, afraid that if she looked at Ava, Ava would see the expression of absolute sincerity on her face and be disgusted. “You’re just as smart as anybody here. You deserve to be here. I want you here. I never get in trouble, so it’s fine if I get blamed, sometimes.”
There was a moment of awful stillness next to her. She’s grossed out, Beatrice thought, nice going. This was just like her—to take any scrap of affection and go running miles away with it. Beatrice felt tears burn behind her eyes.
But then there was some shuffling, and when she turned she found Ava standing, looking at her. Her eyes were twinkling. The rag was dangling from her hand.
Before she could think at all about what could be doing, Ava pitched forward and kissed her. Not on the cheek, on the mouth. It was quick—but still—on the mouth. Those words spun like a record in Beatrice’s head, on the mouth, on the mouth, on the—
When she pulled back, Ava’s eyes were big and glassy like twin planets. All that defensive sharpness had sloughed from her and she looked gentle and affectionate again. This might always, Beatrice thought, be the Ava that she loved the best.
“Thank you.” Ava said, smiled a little, and returned to her seat on the toilet. “How long do you think they’re going to make us do this?”
Acting like it had never happened. Beatrice figured she ought to follow suit, but it was hard, what with her heart thumping like a madman.
“Until we’re finished, probably.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Ava, please. They’ll make us do the other stalls next.”
*
The drive home was long and silent and punctuated by her mother laying a hand on her father’s bicep and muttering something like, “She’s just a kid, Sam, go easy on her.”
The funny thing was, Beatrice barely noticed, what with the kiss and everything. Her mouth was burning and she touched it just about every second.
When they got home, she was sat at the kitchen table. Not even given a snack, which Beatrice found troubling.
Her father sat across from her and her mother stood behind him, leaning against the sink. Beatrice found it odd that he couldn’t be bothered to show up after school under normal circumstances, when she would have liked to see him, but when she needed to be punished it was suddenly priority one.
“Your mother and I have been talking,” Her father said, removing his glasses and rubbing a hand over his forehead, “And we think it‘s a good time for you and her to take a trip to see your grandparents.”
“In Cherry Hill?” Beatrice asked, her brow knitting.
“In London.” Her mother piped up from the background, “We’re going to spend the summer there.”
Beatrice’s first instinct was to say no. She sat on it like an unruly animal she was trying to subdue. Summer was only a month away, and she’d had such elaborate fantasies of spending it eating popsicles and swimming with Ava. “The whole summer?” She said instead, her voice small.
“Yes, Beatrice, the whole summer.”
“But—" Beatrice swallowed dryly, “—Ava’s here. And she doesn’t have any friends,” Her eyes darted between her parents, begging them to track her logic, “Or any parents. And if I leave, she’ll have nobody.”
Her father turned over his shoulder to exchange a glance with her mother, then turned back to Beatrice. There wasn’t a trace of empathy on his face, just concern. “Beatrice, Ava is a disobedient child who is clearly leading you to be disobedient, as well. Perhaps some time apart would be better for the two of you.”
Beatrice started grinding the toe of her shoe against the floor. Ava wasn’t disobedient. She was nice and funny and brave. She was the only girl in their grade who wasn’t afraid of picking up bugs. She’d even eaten one once, on a dare.
Somehow, she thought that these things were not going to be persuasive arguments to her parents. “Fine,” She said instead, “But I’m not going to like it.”
When her mother rolled her eyes, her father put up a hand to signal her to cut it out. Like she was Beatrice’s age. Beatrice felt strange watching it happen.
“You don’t have to like it,” Her father said, “It’s not about you.”
There was no doubt in Beatrice’s mind that it wasn’t.
*
There was only the matter left of how to break the news to Ava. They’d ride circles around one of the emptier Wawa parking lots on the weekends and then walk down to the beach, sitting out and talking about nothing. Too cold to swim, and Ava not quite ready for the ocean anyway.
“My dad said we’re all going on a trip to London this summer,” Beatrice said finally, when the day was too close to keep avoiding. She let sand run through her fingers. “My mom’s brother is basically royalty. In London. He’s half-related to the Queen, I think. Or something.” Sometimes Beatrice just said something to impress Ava. She rolled her eyes when the boys in their class climbed trees and tackled each other in front of girls, testosterone fever, as her mother called it. Dumb.
But she must have had a touch of it, because she was often lying or climbing trees or similar when Ava was in eyeshot. Showing how fast she could swim against the choppy waves at the beach.
“That’s fun,” Ava said somewhat distantly, then smiled. She always smiled, like what Beatrice had to say was really and truly impressive, “I’ll miss you though.”
That was Ava, too. Impressed, but more concerned with Beatrice than any of the rest of it.
At night, after she’d brushed her teeth and put on her pajamas, Beatrice would kneel by her bed, hands clasped, and say her prayers. Her father no longer sat in there with her to make sure she was doing it correctly and so she could mostly ask for whatever she wanted, although the vague fear that her father would find out from God that she’d been praying for a new TV for the living room in the same way he found out from her mother that she’d thrown a tantrum or not eaten her vegetables when he came home from work kept her on the straight and narrow.
Twelve was the first year she ever really started praying for Ava. It was maybe the first year she realized that there might not be another person out there doing it.
When she asked for things for Ava, instead of clasping her hands together, she put her head in her palms, heels digging into her forehead, and concentrated as hard as she could so he would know she was totally serious. More serious than she was asking for a new TV or a little brother or sister to keep her company.
Mostly along it was the lines of: “God, please keep Ava safe and take care of her.” Something generic and broad. A catch all. But that fall, the fall before she spent an entire summer abroad, communicating with Ava only through e-mails and letters, she asked for something else.
“God, please give Ava a bike that fits. A nice one. You can even do that instead of the TV, if that’s too many things.”
Beatrice had no idea how many things a person could ask God for before he closed up shop on you. She tried to be economical, in that regard.
*
On the flight to London, during which Beatrice did not cry, though her ears popped and she wanted to throw up during the shaky descent into Heathrow, she pulled out her Lisa Frank notebook and began to write.
The second they stepped over the threshold into her grandmother’s house, she asked to use the computer in the computer room. Her mother looked unsure, but ultimately consented.
As she sat in that the desk, she opened the web browser and navigated over to her e-mail. Beatrice opened up a new message and began to type.
Dear Ava…
*
When she returned from London at the end of August, she waited exactly one evening before asking her father if she could spend time with Ava. It was more a courtesy than anything else.
When she asked, Beatrice’s father frowned and Beatrice understood instinctively that the easy days of sleepovers and weekends at the beach were coming to their penultimate chapters.
“Only for a couple hours,” He said, “And then you have to come home and help your mother make dinner.”
They made the most of those “couple of hours”. Beatrice brought all the sweets she’d jammed in her suitcase, lying to her mother and saying they were all for her—Beatrice didn’t care for sweet things, not as much as other children, but Ava did—-and they ate them on a boardwalk bench overlooking the ocean.
Ava had grown a little taller over the summer, and much tanner. Her hair was shorter, her limbs long and scrawny. She still ate like she was starving and talked a mile a minute, exploding with a summer’s worth of stories for Beatrice.
She’d brought her backpack and, inside, she produced a yellow folder, the kind that could be purchased for a dime from Wal-Mart. Within it were print outs of every email Beatrice had sent.
There were dozens, if not near fifty. They ranged in length from a few paragraphs to two printed pages. Ava pulled one from the bunch that was crumpled at the edges like it had been held and held and held again.
“This one is my favorite,” She explained, “I like the longer ones. You’re a great writer, y’know.”
“Not really. I was just talking about my day.” Beatrice sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. She surreptitiously eyed the folder that lay open on Ava’s lap while the other girl was preoccupied with the pages. Ava had doodled all over the inside of it.
“Yeah, but they’re like stories. I read this probably a million times.”
Beatrice’s eye caught on one of the doodles. It looked like a heart with initials doodled into it—if she wasn’t mistaken, those initials might have been AS + BW.
“What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“That thing you’ve drawn right there—"
“Nothing. I drew lots of stuff.” Ava snapped the folder shut quickly, her face going red. “Do you wanna hear about my new house?”
Her new foster home, she explained, was a short walk from the boardwalk. She said this like it was a good thing, although Beatrice had seen those houses and felt skeptical.
“Do you want to come over?” She asked, a smear of chocolate on the corner of her mouth. Beatrice must have betrayed her shock on her face, because Ava blushed as if she were embarrassed, “Not inside. The house is kind of a mess. But I have something I want to show you.”
So they walked together past the end of the boardwalk to a part of town that Beatrice had never been and knew without asking that she’d have to lie to her father about having gone to. Ava’s house was, like Beatrice’s, a large victorian, but one with an overgrown lawn, broken railings leading up to the front porch, and a beware of dog sign posted prominently over one of the windows.
“Just a sec,” Ava said, “Wait right there.”
Beatrice, somewhat to her own personal shame, needed no encouragement to not go any closer to the house. She stayed put on the sidewalk while Ava ran around the side to the free standing garage, ducking in and coming out a few seconds later.
She was wheeling a bike. A brand new bike, shiny and red, with a pink helmet. She was smiling like she’d just won the lottery.
“Ta-da!” She announced when she joined Beatrice on the sidewalk, a skip in her step. “Sick, right? Those old crones at church finally came through. They had a day where foster kids could come in and get whatever they want. Bikes and clothes and basketballs and shit. I’ve never been happier to be a charity case.”
“You’re not a charity case, Ava.” Beatrice blurted. And, in the next second, Ava gave her a look that she’d never seen on her face before—it was hurt, or disappointment, or something of that ilk. She looked betrayed.
“Either way, let’s go get yours and we can ride a little. I’ve been practicing. Want to see?”
Beatrice sat on the curb and watched Ava ride back and forth down the street. On a bike that fit her, she went fast and confident, her helmet on but the straps flying unclasped under her chin.
“Watch this,” She said after a few turns, rode down to the end of the block, then started pedaling toward Beatrice. In front of Beatrice’s eyes, she took her hands from the handlebars and kept pedaling quick as she pleased.
“Ava!” Beatrice balked, “Put your hands back!”
“Sorry, Sister Beatrice.” She laughed and kept going, the bike swerving this way and that.
“Ava!”
“Okay, okay.” Ava’s hands went back on the handlebars and she turned around to pedal back to where Beatrice was then standing, hands on her hips and looking incensed. Instead of looking cowed by this, Ava, strangely, blushed. “You look cute when you’re frustrated.”
Beatrice was too annoyed to read anything into it. “Do you remember Max Morrow from the year below us, who got hit by a car on his bike and went into a coma and—"
“Alright, I hear you. Jesus.” But Ava was still smiling fondly, “Go on, I’ll get you my spare helmet and we’ll ride to your place. Hands on the wheel, I swear to God.”
It was that afternoon, sitting on Ava’s handlebars as she guided them gently through the streets towards Beatrice’s suburb, that she considered that Ava’s new bike might constitute some kind of proof as to the existence of God. She didn’t tell Ava that she’d prayed for it, nor that before seeing the bike she’d been waffling privately on the topic of God’s existence
If the bike didn’t prove it in Beatrice’s thirteen year old mind, it made the topic very confusing in the years to come. But something about it—the bike, and Ava’s house with the overgrown lawn and broken porch—Beatrice couldn’t get the stone out of her stomach, thinking about how much she didn’t know, how much she could learn, and how much things could change.
*
By the beginning of 9th grade, Beatrice’s parents had what Ava called “a category five stick up their you-know-what” (replacement words Beatrice’s) about Beatrice and Ava spending time together. It was not forbidden, per se, but there were certainly more rules in place than there had been four years prior.
That, and Beatrice’s father was always trying to get her to hang out with girls from church, one in particular. Lilith, also British, in competition with Beatrice for who could seem more disinterested in spending time together. Stuck up, even by her family’s standards.
There was another, Angie Cardoni, who was a year above them at Holy Names and sang in the choir. She had curly brown hair and a mole on her chin and a voice that stood out amongst the others, deeper than a person would expect from looking at her.
She, at least, was tolerable. They even had lunch together sometimes when she and Ava didn’t share a period. Angie was funny, and she had similar
interests; music and sports and debate.
Ava caught wind of this and took on a sour attitude, as if she’d ever spared a thought to Angie Cardoni before finding out that she and Beatrice shared a lunch period, which to Beatrice’s knowledge she had not.
“I heard she’s a slut.” Ava said once, in the middle of a conversation in which they were talking about Angie trying out for the girl’s soccer team, while they were sitting at Beatrice’s kitchen table working on a math worksheet. Beatrice lifted her head from her notes in shock and looked over her shoulder to make sure that her mother wasn’t nearby.
“Ava,” She hissed, “Don’t say that word. And especially not in my house.”
Ava shrugged, unrepentant. “She is. She gave Stan Winnicki a handjob underneath the bleachers last year. And…”
“And what?” Beatrice eyed her. Ava sucked her teeth and scribbled aimlessly on her paper. She suddenly seemed like she’d never heard of eye contact.
“Nothing. It’s just a stupid rumor I heard. Probably not even true.”
“Well, that sounds like it’s between her and Stan Winnicki.” She sniffed, “And not any of our business.”
“You’re always such an adult about everything.” Ava was grinning then, leaning back in her chair with both arms thrown over the back of it. All pretzeld up. “Would you give Stan Winnicki a hand job?”
“I don’t know, maybe.” Ava barked out a laugh, and Beatrice cracked a smile. “Pick a different word.” She said.
“Fine. Angie Cardoni is a loose woman.” She said the last part with a mid-century affect, her tongue curling around the vowels.
Beatrice, still smiling, shook her head. Ava could say what she want about Angie, but she was filling an important gap in Beatrice’s life.
She and Ava’s interests were diverging in a few select ways. There were normal things, like how Beatrice started to focus on debate team and other extracurriculars and college prep, upon her father’s insistence. Ava was more concerned with soft skills, such as getting together enough change to see a movie at the dollar theater, bike riding, people watching on the boardwalk.
And, most perplexingly to Beatrice—boys.
Atlantic City Beach Patrol in particular, whom Ava had deemed very sexy. Her last and most recent foster home cared less than the others about Ava’s beach attire and so she’d bought her first bikini and worn it Baywatching up and down the shoreline at North Carolina avenue.
Beach Patrol hadn’t noticed, Ava being 14 and most of them being 21 or older. Beatrice had. She’d noticed, specifically, the fatty place where her thighs connected to their apex, exposed by the risky cut of her bottoms.
But Ava had never deemed Beatrice to be very sexy. She hadn’t expressed any interest in Beatrice’s opinion of her body beyond normal girl stuff, do I have ogre toes or asking Beatrice to paint her nails while they watched a movie.
That sort of thing didn’t matter so much at first. The Ava liking boys thing felt very normal, and irritating only because Beatrice herself couldn’t seem to emulate it.
Not that a one of those differences stopped them. They could spend all day and all week stuffing each other’s lockers full of notes and eating lunch together and still blow the weekend away at the beach or talking all night in Beatrice’s bed.
The sleepovers were the first thing that started ringing serious alarm bells in Beatrice’s head. Not the home kind that went off when there was a fire or carbon monoxide, the sort that would wake firemen out of their beds to go shooting down poles.
As they got older—fourteen to fifteen, and so on—life made good on the puberty threat. The noticing of the sweet baby fat that lingered on Ava’s thighs became less of an oddity and more of a very serious problem, and became attached to other, more obvious cravings.
The boobs, for one. Beatrice spent a lot of time praying that God would say enough is enough in Ava’s boob department and let them both rest. It was not to be.
Not to mention that her foster mother was too busy at that time with the other kids to sit Ava down and have the bra talk until the situation was already well past dire. Those were a harrowing few months.
Beatrice spent a lot of time ruminating on how different her life would be if she had been born a boy. Not for any particular reason, just a thought experiment. Really.
Chiefly, she was of the belief that had she been born a boy, none of this would be a problem, as she and Ava would never have been permitted all that girlish closeness. Bed sharing and hand holding and laying out together.
But, wretchedly, there was no escaping the fact that Beatrice was a girl. And so, Instead, Beatrice and Ava slept together in bed. Instead, Beatrice had to come up with different reasons for why the feelings she had about it were normal girl-type behavior.
The warm, empty feeling in her stomach. The hyper awareness of Ava’s body and all its twists and turns. A certain sense like she was about to vomit.
If Beatrice was a boy she probably would have diagnosed these as symptoms of a crush. Love, basically, for a sixteen year old. Ava being nice as she was to Beatrice, interested in her interests, and so on. And the way her body made Beatrice feel on top of it.
Not that Ava seemed to have any clue in the world what was going on. If she knew anything about the hot jumble of nerves Beatrice became, she probably would have gone running.
Instead, at night in bed, she often reached for Beatrice’s hand. And she liked it when they slept facing each other. Breathing each other’s air and all that. It was incredible in addition to being completely sick and twisted.
Once she said, “Sometimes I wish we were sisters.” Right as her eyes fluttered shut. And wasn’t that something. Beatrice had feelings for Ava that were almost certainly not sisterly, but what was a girl to say to such a thing? I don’t? Better to just agree and pray it went away like Beatrice had the first time she’d seen Princess Leia in that metal bikini watching Star Wars with her dad in middle school.
It didn’t.
Beatrice had been sort of aware of her girl problem before she’d started noticing Ava. Aware enough to acknowledge the odds that she, Beatrice, would be born gay—less than 10 percent by a long shot—and the chances that she would be born gay to a father who preached about the myriad sins of homosexuality? Had to be lower. She’d bet money on it.
After she’d tried everything in her teen arsenal, which was fretting about it, then praying about it, then Googling it, then fretting again, Beatrice resigned to just forget about it.
But then, of course, there was still Ava. Ava, who started running track their sophomore year, something the guidance counselor had apparently told her would be a good outlet for her energy.
“She’s always talking to me like I’m a border collie,” She said, “Instead of a person.” But she joined the team anyway. Holy Names running kit and all, with the short shorts and tank top. And Beatrice in the stands watching her, cheering her on. Then Beatrice hugging her sweaty body when she placed.
On Wednesdays and Fridays, Ava had back to back practice and a shift at her after-school job, which was stocking shelves at a gas station in Egg Harbor. She would change from one uniform to another in the backseat of Beatrice’s Honda Fit, a sixteenth birthday present, and Beatrice would stare resolutely forward, turning the rear view mirror away from her eyes.
So, yeah. Beatrice had a problem. A girl problem. An even bigger Ava problem.
Ava had problems, too, of course, though they were more of a mystery to Beatrice. She was forthcoming about the most minute details of her life. How many times a day she peed. How her protein shake tasted in the morning. Was Scott Salmon’s ass looking fine in his jeans that week—Ava’s answer, yes.
But her living situation was never a topic of conversation until it was. At the beginning of high school, she got placed with a family that had a gaggle of foster kids. All at once, Ava went from bouncing from house to house, mostly solitary, to a big home in the suburbs with two older foster siblings, sisters who were a year ahead of them at a different school, and two younger.
“It’s not like a group home, though.” Ava said once, as though Beatrice would have been well acquainted enough with the concept to think that it might be, “They treat us like we’re they’re kids. We all have dinner together and stuff. And every year we go on a trip. I mean, mostly just to the beach or whatever, Lancaster. But still,” Her eyes were sparkling. She sounded downright giddy, “A trip. Every single year. I mean, can you believe it?”
Beatrice liked Ava’s last foster family too, mostly because they went to Beatrice’s church and thus Ava started going to Beatrice’s church. They made her wear these dresses that made her look about 50 years old and like a secretary and not the boyish, confident Ava Beatrice was accustomed to.
The company at after service juice and cookies was much appreciated. Ava’s presence had jumped her in Beatrice’s father’s eyes from heathen street rat to good God-fearing Christian and thus they were allowed to stand off in the corner of the conference room and giggle over their dentist’s paper cups of apple juice, Ava in her too-big floral printed dress from Ross Dress For Less.
“At least they buy me clothes,” She said, drinking all of her juice in one go like she was knocking back a shot of tequila, “And not just shitty hand me downs from the other fosters.”
The word shitty caught the attention of Lilith, standing a few feet away with her parents, who turned her head and glared. Beatrice worried for a minute that Ava might flip her off, which would bring more unwanted attention down on them.
She stuck out her tongue instead, a show of self restraint. Beatrice thought it made her seem pretty mature, all things considered. Like the sixteen year old woman she was.
Sixteen was a good year. Or it was a steady one—as Beatrice got older, it became harder for her to decide which was which. Ava’s new family provided her with stability. New clothes, even if they were occasionally recognizable as coming from the Circle Thrift in Ducktown.
They rode their bikes on the boardwalk after school and ate pizza and boardwalk fries, price gouged and all the tastier for it. Sometimes if they were crafty enough they could sneak into the pool at the Hard Rock Cafe, a con that was Ava’s idea and relied on her charms to be successful.
This lasted for—oh, about 10 seconds. Give or take.
Ava turned 17 that winter, two months after Beatrice, on a Tuesday. They had their customary celebration of cupcakes and soda and movies in a fort on Beatrice’s bedroom floor the weekend before.
On Wednesday morning they shared a home room. From her adjacent desk, Beatrice could see Ava with bags under her eyes. Her knee jiggling, paying even less attention than usual.
She didn’t find out what was going on until free period. Ava joined her at a courtyard table, a look of nervous excitement on her face.
“You’ll never believe what happened last night.” She said.
Her foster sisters, she explained, had taken her to a party for her birthday. Not a stupid church party, but a real high school one, with boys and alcohol.
Something about hearing Ava describe drinking with older senior girls made Beatrice look back on their weekend celebration and see it as kiddish. Beatrice had certainly never had a drink of alcohol before, not even on holidays.
“It was awesome.” Ava said, “And they got me some booze as a birthday gift.”
Beatrice flicked a tree seed from the table. “That’s great.”
She thought no more of it except for the vague sense of unease it brought on.
But really, it was that half-innocuous thing—the alcohol, the party, that started the whole damn story. Beatrice didn’t know at the time, but nothing would ever really be the same because of it. Then again, maybe she did, somewhere in the back of her head—maybe that was the unease, the itch.
At church that Sunday, Beatrice played piano for the choir before joining Ava in the reception room. Ava, already with two cups in her hand and a tote bag in her shoulder.
“I brought something special today,” Was the first thing she said when Beatrice approached, waggling her eyebrows, “Look in the bag.”
Beatrice parted the top with her fingers. Head phones, some school books. A cheap little water bottle full of brown liquid.
“Ava, what is that?”
“Beatrice, hey!” Angie approached from behind, waving. Beatrice didn’t have to look at Ava’s face to know that she was grimacing.
“Hi Angie.”
“I just wanted to come over and say that you played amazing today.” Angie held her hands behind her back and rocked onto her heels, “Everybody could really feel it, I could tell.”
“Angie, sorry, I actually need to pull Beatrice away for something.” Ava interjected, tilting her head and making a mock-apologetic expression, “Girl emergency. Bea, can you come to the bathroom with me?”
The women’s bathroom lights only worked half the time, and so the whole room was cast in shadow when they arrived. Beatrice probably should have been tipped off that something was going on when Ava pulled them both into the same stall, shutting and locking the door, then setting the juice cups on top of the toilet and taking the water bottle from her totebag.
Her dress that day was covered in big, garish flowers. She had on tights underneath, and sneakers. “You played amazing today, Beatrice.” She said in a high pitched mimic of Angie’s voice, then scoffed and rolled her eyes. One of her hands fiddled with the cap on her water bottle. The next thing was muttered under Ava’s breath. “She wants you so bad.”
Beatrice reared back slightly, forgetting for a moment the mystery of the Deer Park bottle. “What?”
“Nothing.” Ava responded, “It’s stupid, forget about it.”
“No, tell me. You said she wants you so bad. Why?”
When Ava met her eyes, her cheeks were pink. Her eyes had gone dark and serious like she was chewing her way through a math problem. Beatrice was suddenly aware of how small a space they’d crammed themselves into, even each of them standing with their backs against a stall wall.
Her hand stopped fiddling with the cap. Beatrice’s eyes drifted to it. They took in the long curvature of her fingers, the bumps of her knuckles. Her short, blunt nails like smooth stones.
“I heard that she does stuff. With girls.” Ava said, keeping dead on eye contact with Beatrice all the way through the sucker punch end of her sentence. She turned a deeper, sweeter red, like a peach coming into ripeness. “Not that that’s a bad thing.”
Beatrice wondered if she’d mistaken her shocked silence for reproach. In reality, she felt like a trap door had opened in her brain and all the words had fallen out.
So Angie did stuff with girls. What stuff, Ava left up to the imagination, but Beatrice had to guess that it wasn’t your garden variety hand holding and hair braiding. The guess was based on the fact that Beatrice had to spend a considerable amount of mental energy not fantasizing about doing stuff with girls.
So Angie, too, then. Beatrice felt like an astronaut finding signs of life on a lonely planet.
“Well it’s not good, is it?” She murmured. Ava’s mouth tightened. She took a step forward, bottle crinkling in her hands.
“You don’t really think that, Bea.” It wasn’t a question. She ducked her head in, eyes flicking all over Beatrice’s face. Beatrice wondered what she was seeing. “I know your dad says all sorts of stuff when he’s preaching, but that doesn’t mean you have to believe it.”
“I don’t know.” Beatrice responded horsley. Ava was too close, her scent becoming too intoxicating.
There was this thing about Ava—everybody seemed sort of afraid of her. Even the boys who wanted her, even her foster parents. They were all trying to tone her down. She had to imagine that was half the reason for the dresses. To hide the woman that Ava was rapidly shaping up to be.
Beatrice realized that she might be a little afraid of Ava, too. Not like the others were, no. She wasn’t afraid of who Ava really was, she was afraid of what Ava could do to her. Like the big bad wolf, coming to blow Beatrice’s straw house down.
“What’s in the bottle, Ava?”
Ava stepped closer until her knee was pressed in between Beatrice’s knees, the cloth of their modest church dresses mixing together in a fabric shuffle. She unscrewed the cap of the bottle and brought it up right underneath Beatrice’s nose.
A scent wafted up. Beatrice’s nostrils wrinkled, then relaxed once she recognized it. “Ava,” She whispered fiercely, “No.”
“Beatrice,” Ava said. She was already taking Beatrice’s half-full juice cup from her hand and tilting the bottle toward it, “Yes.”
“My father is out there. And your foster parents.” She stopped just short of putting a hand over Ava’s to stop her pouring. It was something about Ava’s knee between hers. About their skirts all muddled together. About the smell of alcohol acrid in the air between them, and Ava’s breath underneath that, and her smile, and that glint in her eye. The essential Avaness of her. “Somebody will catch us.”
“Oh, they’ll catch us?” Ava’s voice was low and teasing. She filled Beatrice’s little cup to the brim and then sipped a little off the top to stop it from spilling.
Even in the low light, Beatrice could see a droplet stuck at her top lip.
“Yes,” She said to the droplet, “They’ll smell it on us.”
“Oh no.” Ava giggled. She’d passed the cup into Beatrice’s hand and taken about filling her own. “You’re right. This is a bad, bad idea.”
As she said it, she placed two fingers on Beatrice’s hand, guiding it up to her mouth. Beatrice let it happen, docile as a lamb. Looking at the droplet. Waiting, she realized, to see the pink of Ava’s tongue appear and lick it off.
The cup was at her lips before she realized what was happening. All those years ago, her father had called Ava disobedient. A word that meant nothing to her at 10. At 17, it was warm syrup dripping down her body and collecting low in her stomach, just beneath her bellybutton.
Beatrice swam in that feeling. In Ava’s attention, her approval. In the person Ava made her feel like she could be; confident, sure, a little loose. Brave.
Then, she tilted the cup back and took a sip.
*
They burst out into the playground, a thing of asphalt and metal structures of questionable architectural fortitude. Beatrice’s head was light and she was giggling at near everything Ava said.
A game was fashioned on the hopscotch squares. Who could do the whole thing with their eyes closed while the other watched on in hysterics. Brilliant stuff.
Beatrice did a turn, nearly falling on her hands and knees before she hit the middle. Body going this way and that. When she made it to the end where Ava was whooping and cackling, she opened her eyes and looked to the side, toward the back door.
Lilith was there, her arms crossed, frowning. She watched them for a moment before turning to go back inside.
A rock formed deep in Beatrice’s stomach. “What’s up? Was that Lilith?”
“I’m sure it’s nothing.” Beatrice responded. Her head was foggy. She dropped so that she was sitting on the asphalt, hands propping her up behind her back. Ava did the same. They watched the door.
“You don’t think she knows, right?” Ava sniffed, “I mean, we’re not being too silly.”
But right as she said it, Beatrice’s father and Ava’s foster father stepped out of the back door, arms crossed, Lilith behind them. Pointing. Dirty snitch.
Ava sat up straighter. “Shit.” She said.
Yeah, Beatrice thought. Shit.
***
Beatrice had never seen her father stumped. So stumped, in fact, that for many hours he could not even cobble together a useable punishment.
When she’d been caught with the graffiti, he’d made her play the piano for residents at a local retirement home on Saturday mornings. That, at least, was creative.
But after they’d been caught with booze on their breath and half a water bottle of whiskey, Beatrice had to wait in her bedroom for four hours just for him to call her downstairs and tell her she was grounded until the end of junior year.
He didn’t even seem all that angry. Beatrice couldn’t help but feel a little resentful over the whole thing. She’d gotten drunk at after church juice and cookies and the most he could give her was a half-hearted punishment and emotion that was closer to embarrassment than to fear or worry.
One thing that he could not enforce was a ban on seeing Ava at school. He didn’t even try, possibly knowing that the threat would have been impotent.
They found each other at lunch on Monday, sitting at a mostly empty table, comparing punishments.
“Well, we’re not going to Hershey park.” Ava shrugged, still hunched over her food. “They’re taking the two younger kids and leaving us.”
“Ava, I’m sorry.”
“I don’t care.” But Ava was refusing to make eye contact, focusing instead on moving her hamburger helper from one side of the lunch tray to the other. Under the table, her knee was jiggling. “We have a plan, anyway. We’re going to throw a party on Friday. While everybody is gone.”
“Ava.” Beatrice’s voice got low, “What are you talking about, a party? We just got caught and grounded. I’m basically on house arrest.”
“Might as well make the best of it.”
“But what about—" Beatrice started, stopped, then tried again, “—Might they kick you out? Your family. If they caught you doing something again. Like—move you to a new placement?”
Ava’s knee stopped jiggling. Her eyes darted over to Beatrice’s face. She was so rarely in a bad mood that at first Beatrice didn’t even really recognize the expression on her face as annoyance.
“What the hell do you know about it, Bea?” Ava snapped, “Not like you’ve ever asked about where I was getting placed before.”
It was like the clap of thunder right before rain came pouring down. Beatrice could think of nothing to say. Ava was right—she didn’t ask. She didn’t think that Ava would want to talk about it, necessarily.
But there was something else. Something deeper and more shameful, a fear of knowing that only grew and spread roots the more that she knew Ava and the more that she loved her. How utterly stupid it was, immature, selfish.
Before she could voice any of this, Ava’s shoulders slumped and she spoke again: “I’m sorry. It’s just being grounded and—I got a D on that stupid essay for English. I’m worried they actually might get my scholarship this time.”
“Give it to me, I’ll take a look.” Beatrice said, “I can read it and then we can go over it together.”
It was a pathetic substitute for what Beatrice should have said. Ava still managed a little smile.
“Thank, Bea,” She said, then, “Your best friend Angie Cardoni will be there.”
“She’s not my best friend, Ava, you are.”
“Okay so I’m your best friend. Ipso facto, you have to come to my party.”
It was sound logic. Still— “I can’t. You know I can’t.”
“I think you can.” Ava shrugged and turned back to her food, “Because I think you had fun when we were drinking together at stupid juice and cookies, and if we hadn’t gotten caught, this wouldn’t even be a conversation.”
“Big if.”
“Honestly? Getting caught was kind of fun, too. Exciting.” She tilted her head toward Beatrice. Raised an eyebrow. Beatrice struggled to keep her face neutral and in the end, as she always did, she cracked. “Aha! See, you’re smiling. You agree.”
“I never said anything.”
“Luckily I can read you like a book.” For a brief and breathless moment, Beatrice’s heart skipped and stuttered. As a hadn’t meant anything by it. There was no way.
“Ava, you just got a D on a book report.”
An abrupt laugh. Ava shoved her shoulder and then moved her body to crowd into Beatrice’s.
“I don’t know why you’d even want me there,” Beatrice admitted after a moment, “I’m a nerd.”
“Hey, only I can say that about you.” Ava nudged her, an impish smile on her face, “Of course I want you there, like—duh. For a nerd you think you’d know that.”
But Beatrice still wasn’t sure. Ava was grown up, or near to—she was drinking with senior girls and getting caught and liking it, and boys were noticing her. Beatrice was still Beatrice. Plain and sensitive. Boys talking to her only to ask if they could buy an English paper off of her.
Still, the way Ava looked at her. Like she was telling the absolute truth. It wasn’t like Beatrice could argue with it.
“I’ll think about it, Ava.” She said, and that was that.
*
The night of the party, Beatrice lay in her bed and stared at the ceiling. She kept her ears open for the creaking of her parents downstairs, the opening and shutting of doors, the running of the faucet.
When they stopped somewhere around 10, she told herself that she should just forget about it, turn off her lamp, and go to sleep. Then she thought—it was only really a few rungs down the trellis beneath her window, a gentle landing, and then three or four feet to the garage where she stored her bike.
From there, it was barely a twenty minute ride to Ava. Tempting but, no. She couldn’t.
Beatrice repeated those words in her head, no, I couldn’t — even as she opened her window and peered down to the trellis. Even as she toed on her house shoes and a pair of jeans and swung one leg over the threshold. It just isn’t reasonable.
Two, three, four steps down the trellis. Confident, like she’d done this a million times before. The windows of her house were empty and dark but the air sparked with something—the promise of summer, the damp chokehold of spring. No fireflies yet, but a buzzing.
Mud squelched underneath the soles of her feet. She brought the garage door up with a metal squeak, looking over her shoulder the whole time. I can’t, she thought, I’m going to go back inside now, and Monday Ava can tell me all about it at school —
But it was the oddest thing. Suddenly, she just was. The rubber of Beatrice’s bike tires were on the road and Beatrice was pedaling in her muddy clogs and her house was getting smaller and smaller behind her.
The suburbs were dead quiet and for once, instead of suffocating, it felt freeing. She went faster, harder, unafraid of a surprise meeting with a car.
Without thinking about it, she took one hand off the handlebars, then the other. The bike swerved but she righted it with her hips. She kept going as fast as she could without tipping over — and suddenly, Beatrice wasn’t riding, she was flying. Swear to God.
*
Beatrice had seen the front of Ava’s house on several occasions but this was the first time she’d ever been invited inside. She tossed her bike down on the well appointed lawn where a half a dozen others already lay and went up the front walk.
The house was like some she’d seen inside her father’s copies of Today’s Christian Living. It was big, and there was furniture, but it looked as though it had all been left there from the open house staging. The only art on the walls were big prints of Bible quotes.
The one by the front door above the key dish said by many hands the work of God is done. Beatrice stared at it for a moment while she kicked off her muddy shoes.
It was hard to parse Ava out of the throng. The party looked like a mix between Holy Names kids and older students from Brighton Avenue, probably her foster sister’s friends.
She found her after a moment, leaned against the wall with a cup in her hand and a boy that Beatrice recognized as JC. Swim team. Floppy hair. Very handsome, if other girls were to be believed.
He said something and Ava laughed so hard she spilled a little beer on her shirt, then laughed harder. Watching it, Beatrice realized that she was the biggest idiot in New Jersey. Perhaps even on planet Earth herself, to have ever thought that Ava really wanted her at this party.
With all the older girls, the cute boys. What was Beatrice? The rising captain of the debate team and avid churchgoer. Didn’t even have a TV in her room. Was standing in the living room in socks with cartoon smiley faces in them, like a dolt.
“Hey, Beatrice!” She turned to see Angie standing behind her. She had two cups in her hands and a smile on her face, “Wow, I didn’t think you’d actually make it. I heard you got grounded.”
“I—yeah, I did. I snuck out.”
“Shit. That’s awesome.” Angie said, like it really was. “Did you come all the way on your bike? Sorry, here—uh, I noticed you come in and got you a drink. I hope that’s okay.”
Beatrice accepted the cup, wondering why it wouldn’t be okay, and why Angie seemed so suddenly shy. She took a sip from it and winced.
“Yeah, it’s no whiskey and apple juice at church reception, but it’s okay.” Angie said, laughing, then they were both laughing. “This house is huge. Have you been here before?”
“No. Ava usually comes over to my house.”
“Oh. Maybe we could, I don’t know. Look around together? That’s my favorite part of parties. Seeing other people’s houses.”
Beatrice took a glance back over her shoulder at Ava and found her two seconds away from being totally attached at the mouth with JC. She turned back to Angie and smiled.
See another person’s house they did. They went room to room methodically, like a pair of archeologists roping off sections of a dig.
A mud room and a craft room. Two rooms for a boatful of foster children, each door adorned with a foam name tag of the sort you could easily take down and replace with another. Irvin and Carson on one, Jody, Jenna, and Ava on the other.
Beatrice had to feign a normal amount of interest when they flicked on the lights to Ava’s room. She glanced over the bunk beds, the sea foam green walls, and the boy band posters as if she’d seen it all before. As if she was not desperately guessing which twin mattress was Ava’s.
The last room was the only one on the second floor. It was as bland as the rest of the house. Beatrice clocked it immediately as a parent’s bedroom.
“So this is where Ava’s folks sleep, huh?” Angie said, stepping in and spinning around, “Could use a little art.”
She plopped down onto the mattress, which bounced underneath her. Looking at Angie, Beatrice understood instinctively that she ought to go sit next to her.
The thought made her stomach churn. She did it anyway.
Sitting next to each other, the conversation that had been flowing between them for the last twenty minutes seemed suddenly far away. They sipped their drinks and pretended to be interested in the bedspread, each of them leaning back on hands that were close enough to be almost touching.
“So, grounded, huh?”
“Mmhmm.”
“Gnarly.” Angie smiled. Beatrice looked at her and wondered why she hadn’t noticed earlier how pretty Angie was. There was an off center dimple on her left cheek and a dashing crinkle to her eyes. Her heart started to hammer.
“Have you ever been grounded?” Beatrice asked. The stupidest question on earth, of course.
“Not really.” Angie tilted her head so that her cheek rested on her shoulder, “A tip is that if you play the good church girl thing long enough your parents really start to believe it.”
“But you’re not…not what you just said?”
Angie studied her face for a moment before her smile turned strange. “Beatrice, come on.”
“What?”
“I know you’ve heard something. What was it? Did I blow Father Vincent?”
Beatrice bit her upper lip and scrunched her face. “That’s disgusting.”
“I know!” Angie laughed. “I swear, I don’t care.”
“You gave Stan Winnicki a handjob.”
A startled laugh erupted from Angie, “Oh my God, ew!” She took a sip of her drink and shook her head, “No, never. I mean, Stan wishes.”
She didn’t seem all that angry, which she should have been, especially considering what Beatrice had just accused her of. “So you know that people say that stuff about you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And it’s not true.”
“Not really.”
“Then why do they say it?”
“What else?” Angie asked instead of answering. She tucked her head into another sip of beverage.
“Nothing.”
“You’re lying. I promise whatever it is I’ve heard worse.”
Beatrice took a deep breath. She released it. If the San Winnicki thing was a lie, the other thing probably was, too. She thought back to how excited she’d been to find out. Embarrassment oozed over her.
So she’d say it, and Angie and laugh and say ew. Big deal. It didn’t have to hurt, even if it really did. Beatrice squared her shoulders off and responded, “I heard that you do stuff. With girls.”
She repeated it faithfully as Ava had delivered the news to her. The startled laugh that she expected never came. Instead, Angie’s face shifted into a near-wince. Almost apologetic.
“That’s,” Angie said, “Not a lie.” Like a rubber band ping ponging around a glass bowl, Beatrice snapped from despair to confusion to understanding. Not a lie, also known as the truth, also known as Angie Cardoni liked to do stuff with girls. “Not in a weird way, though.”
“I don’t think it’s weird.” Beatrice blurted, which was news to her. But it came out with the sincerity of something just learned about oneself in the last half millisecond. No time to bury it under shame. She was too busy looking at Angie and her crooked dimple and her nice eyes. “I sort of—“
Realizing that not only was Beatrice about to say something she wasn’t prepared for, but that she was about to spill the beans on possibly the biggest secret of her adolescent life, she shut her mouth. It was the alcohol medley in her cup and the joy of meeting a like person for the first time was making her want to wave her arms and shout me too!
But it was too late. Angie’s smile had turned funny again and she was looking at Beatrice like Beatrice had just said every thought she’d ever had out loud, and also delivered Angie sketch proof of some of her more R-rated dreams about Ava.
Feeling a brushing sensation, Beatrice glanced down. Angie’s pinky was overlapping hers on the bedspread. How odd.
“I get it.” Angie said, “I think that’s why people say all that other stuff about me. Because of the gay thing. I wouldn’t tell anybody.”
“I didn’t say anything.” Beatrice muttered. But it felt like she was, just then, palms sweating and heart pounding and stomach in a Christmas bow. Her body was running its mouth all over the place.
“Oh. So you’re not—“
“Well, I don’t—“
Their sentences overlapped. Angie was sort of leaning her body in towards Beatrice’s, which was alarming for so many reasons. This was the most attention she’d been paid by a person, not Ava, in maybe her whole life. And it was coming from a very overwhelming source.
She was starting to get the idea, for one thing, that Angie Cardoni was going to try and kiss her. It felt too outrageous to be true, but there they were, holding pinkies, getting all close and breathing all heavy.
“I’m not not.” Beatrice offered. She hoped then that Angie would kiss her so that she could stop talking about it.
“Can I kiss you?” Angie asked, lending a horrible credence to the mind reader theory and in lieu of trying to untangle whatever had just been said. She was already tilting her head in close enough that Beatrice could smell the Altoids and liquor on her breath.
She could have said no. But that would have implied she didn’t want to be kissed, which would have been a lie. And what was lying if not a sin in the eyes of the lord? “Okay, sure.” Beatrice sighed, and that was it.
They leaned in. Their lips connected. Another domino fell.
The only thing that Beatrice knew about kissing was that it was fertile soil for anxiety. There was the possibility of using too much tongue, or too little. Knocking teeth or noses. Too much enthusiasm or cold fish syndrome.
This was clearly not Angie’s first time at the show, which Beatrice tried not to let psyche her out too much. Her head was packed and noisy already. She’s tilting her head maybe you should tilt yours—should you do something with your hands—no they’re sweating too much put them on your lap—
All the while Angie was slipping a warm tongue into her mouth and Beatrice could barely enjoy it.
And then Angie took one of Beatrice’s damp palms and put it on her waist, over her babydoll t-shirt, and it felt so nice that Beatrice momentarily forgot to be nervous. It was like the touch defused some kind of bomb. Red wire snip, yellow wire snip. And Beatrice was slumping against her, and that hand was crawling up to flatten itself between her shoulder blades.
Just when she’d gotten used to the hip thing, Angie took that hand and swerved it around to the front of her body, over her chest. Over her left breast, specifically.
The hand wringing Beatrice of two seconds ago was in the backseat and her body was calling the shots. Everything after was a blur. Angie lying flat on the mattress, Beatrice hovering over her. Them still kissing like the stupid house would explode if they stopped.
Beatrice’s hand on her chest. That was the wildest thing—that it was happening at all, that Beatrice was letting it happen. These were things she’d only seen the contours of in her wildest dreams, before she blinked them away.
They pulled apart briefly, panting.
“You can touch me.” Angie sighed. Beatrice stared down at her. Weren’t they already touching? It felt like a trick question.
“Okay.” She said, eager to resume the kissing, and when their mouths collided again Angie took her hand from her chest and moved it down, down—Beatrice could have stopped her, yes, but again, it wasn’t good to lie—down further, until it was at the snap of her jeans, and then further than that—
Beatrice sprung up as if she’d been burned. Angie trailed after her, breathless. “Woah, I’m sorry. I thought—“
“No, you didn’t do anything wrong.” Beatrice’s eyes were wild. She could feel her hair sticking up in all ways around her head. “I think I have to go home.”
“Beatrice—“
“No, uh. Thank you. For all that.” All that? Beatrice was going to throw up. She shuffled backwards off the bed on her knees and stood, watching as Angie sat up on her elbows. Her jeans were undone, unzipped.
She turned toward the door—
“Beatrice, wait—“
“Bea, hey.”
—and opened it directly into Ava’s face. She had a hand extended as if she were just about to knock or enter.
“I’ve been looking all over for you. Jody said she saw you come in and disappear.” Ava’s brow knitted. Her eyes darted from Beatrice’s stricken face over her shoulder, trying to discern what was in the bedroom. “Is that Angie?”
“Yes.” Beatrice responded, then snapped her mouth shut. She closed the door all but a crack behind her, holding the knob with both hands.
“O-kay.” Laughing in a stilted key, Ava took half a step back, as if trying to get a wider viewpoint of the situation. “What were you guys doing in Tom and Barb’s bedroom?”
“Nothing.”
“No need to be weird. I don’t care.” She tilted in, crossing her arms, as if ready to partake in a secret. Trying to break the tension, probably. Smooth things over. Classic Ava. “What, was she giving you a hand job?”
Beatrice’s stupid face. Couldn’t stay neutral. Couldn’t lie. She felt it contort into a telling expression, and she saw Ava’s features slacken in response. Instant, like the call and response in the songs they sang at church.
It really was a wonder she hadn’t done better on that book report.
“Woah, Beatrice, what?”
“I have to go home.” Beatrice was now dangerously close to vomiting. “Thanks for having me.”
She shouldered past Ava and down the stairs, knocking bodies with people all the way down. Ava trailing after her, inhibited by shorter legs and the obstacle course of people.
By the time they broke out onto the front lawn, Ava was a few paces behind. Beatrice got her bike from the pile, leaving the helmet behind, and pushed off with a foot.
“Beatrice! Come on, let’s talk about this.”
But Beatrice was already peddling as fast as she could. Her bike bucked as she rode it off the curb and onto the dark street, the street lights flickering faster and faster above her head.
She made it two thirds of the way home before she gave in, got off her bike, and puked on the Thompson’s lawn. A real mess, alcohol and her mother’s meatloaf, all over their green grass and the front of her shirt.
She walked her bike the rest of the way home, the acid of vomit still in her mouth. All Beatrice could think about was Ava—Ava calling for her, Ava running after her. Ava getting smaller and smaller in the background as Beatrice rode away as fast as her legs could possibly carry her.