“Hey, Sarah,” Alice said. Sarah was pretty and heavily freckled, with curly hair cut short enough that it bounced out from behind her ears. She always had extra tampons in her bag and she had died of leukemia before she was thirty. They hadn’t been friends except in the way that everyone was friends when you had biology homework to talk about. She was the second person in their grade to die, after Melody Johnson, who died in a skiing accident during spring break of their senior year. God, Melody would be walking around, too. Alice wondered if she could warn her, tell her that she had a premonition, tell her about Sonny Bono, tell her to insist that her family go to the beach instead. But there was nothing that Alice could say to Sarah, who was smiling at her in the bathroom. “Hey, Al. How wack is this shit? I am so tired of talking about college and we haven’t even applied yet. Yesterday my mom went on a ten-minute rant about how women’s colleges weren’t just for lesbians, but guess what? It’s all lesbians.” Sarah was a lesbian, too, as her mother no doubt guessed, as were half a dozen other girls in their grade, but no one would come out until college or years after.
“So, what time is your party tonight?” Sara asked.
“Tonight?” Alice looked at Sam.
“We should be done with dinner by eight thirty?” Sam supplied. “What did we tell people, to come over to chill at nine? That seems good.”
Sarah and Sara tucked their lip glosses back in their bags. “Dope. See you later.”
There was a flush in the occupied stall. Alice pushed Sam into the shower stall and drew the curtain. “Are you going to pee in here?” Sam whispered. Alice shook her head. She didn’t know how to explain, where to start.
Suddenly, a hand pulled the curtain aside. “Thought I heard my ladies.” Phoebe Oldham-O’Neill was wearing jeans so long with bells so big that it looked like she didn’t have any feet. Alice was the tallest of her friends but it was true for her, too; her pants were so long that they dragged on the ground, creating a seismograph of filth along the raw bottom edge. Phoebe kissed them both on the cheeks, her oversized nylon jacket shushing itself every time she moved her arms. Phoebe’s breath smelled like Newports and every other inch of her smelled like the first floor of Macy’s, like an entire bottle of CK One was being sprayed out of her pores. Alice felt drunk on the idea of how many of her friends smoked, how adult they had all seemed and felt. How the cigarettes had been giant flashing signposts, to themselves and each other. You could never trust someone who smoked Marlboro Lights, the Diet Coke of cigarettes—those were for the girls with pale lipstick and overplucked eyebrows, the girls who maybe also played volleyball and had sex with their boyfriends in their beds which were still covered with stuffed animals. Girls who smoked Parliaments were neutral—it was as close as you could get to not smoking, but still, you could flick your thumb against the recessed filter, and you could bum one to anybody, the type O negative of smoking. Girls who smoked Marlboro Reds were wild—those were for girls who had no fear, and in their whole school, there was only one, a tiny girl with brown, wavy hair to her waist whose parents had been in a cult and then escaped. Newport girls were equally harsh but listened to hip-hop, and those girls, like Phoebe, wore lipstick and nail polish like vampire blood, rich and purple. Newport Lights girls were like that, only virgins. The girls who smoked American Spirits were beyond everyone—they were grown-ups, with keys to their boyfriends’ houses. Alice had to laugh at the secret rooms of her brain, where this information lived and had been sleeping. She had smoked Newport Lights, and yes, she was a virgin.
Sam looked at Phoebe. “Did you get it?” She batted her eyelashes.
“I did. My brother was being super stingy, but he finally caved.” Phoebe’s older brother Will was a freshman at NYU and Belvedere’s main source for drugs that weren’t just weed.
“What did you get?” Alice asked, even though she knew the answer. She felt like she should close her ears, like she was a teacher who had just walked in on these girls, and if she wanted to, she could get them all thrown out of school. They shouldn’t be saying any of this in front of her—sometimes, in her real life, Alice would walk to the corner and see some of the high school students smoking a joint and she would spin around and go the other way.
“Birthday surprise,” Sam said, and kissed the air. “Thanks, Pheebs. We’ll meet you out there, okay?”
Phoebe nodded, as serious as a marine. She would get expelled in the spring, and vanish for a decade before resurfacing in the Catskills as a potter who charged her crystals in the moonlight.