So many things become beautiful when you really look.
“No breakfast. Thanks, though.” I go to my mom and wrap my arms around her. She yelps, surprised. I guess it has been a couple of years since we’ve hugged, except the mandatory two-second squeeze on birthdays. “Love you.”
When I pull away she stares at me as though I’ve just announced I’m quitting school to become a contortionist in the circus.
“What?” my dad says, dumping a pan in the sink and wiping his hands on the dishtowel. “No love for your old man?”
I roll my eyes. I hate it when my dad tries to “teen-speak,” as he calls it, but I don’t call him out on it. Nothing can get me down today.
“Bye, Dad.” I let him wrap me in one of his infamous bear hugs. I’m filled with love from the top of my head to the bottom of my toes, a bubbly feeling like someone’s shaken my insides up like a Coke bottle. Everything—the dishes in the sink, Izzy’s bagel, my mom’s smile—looks sharp, like it’s made out of glass or like I’m seeing it for the first time. It’s dazzling, and again I have the desire to go around and touch it all, make sure that it’s real. If I had time I would, too. I would put my hands around the half-eaten grapefruit on the counter and smell it. I would run my fingers through Izzy’s hair.
But I don’t have time. It’s Cupid Day, and Lindsay’s outside, and I have business to take care of. Today I’m going to save two lives: Juliet Sykes’s, and mine.
LET THERE BE LIGHT
“Beep, beep!” Lindsay shouts out her window as I scurry down the icy walkway, sucking the cold air into my lungs, loving the way it burns, loving even the bitter stink of Lindsay’s cigarette and the exhaust that’s clotting the air. “Hot mama! How much?”
“If you have to ask,” I say, sliding into the passenger seat, “you can’t afford it.”
She grins and hands me my coffee before I can reach for it. “Happy Cupid Day.”
“Happy Cupid Day,” I say, and we clink Styrofoam cups.
She too looks clearer to me than ever before. Lindsay, with her angel’s face and messy, dirty blond hair and chipped black nail polish and battered leather Dooney & Bourke bag that always has a film of tobacco and half-unwrapped Trident Original at the bottom. Lindsay, who hates being bored, always moving, always running. Lindsay, who once said—“It’s the world against us, babes”—drunk and looping her arms around our shoulders when we were out in the arboretum and really meaning it. Lindsay, mean and funny and ferocious and loyal and mine.
I lean over impulsively and kiss her cheek.
“Whoa, lesboing out much?” Lindsay shrugs a shoulder up to her cheek and wipes off my lip gloss. “Or just practicing for tonight?”
“Maybe both,” I say, and she laughs long and loud.
I take a sip of my coffee. It’s scalding and has to be the best coffee in all of Ridgeview, in all the world. God bless Dunkin’ Donuts.
Lindsay chatters about how many roses she expects to get and whether Marcy Posner will, as usual, break down and cry in the bathroom during fifth period because Justin Streamer dumped her three years ago on Cupid Day, thus permanently sealing her fate as only medium-popular, and I look out the window and watch Ridgeview go by in a blur of gray. I try to imagine how, in only a few months, the trees will shoot their tiny stems into the sky, the barest spray of flowers and green breathed over everything like a mist. And then, a few months after that, the whole town will be an explosion of green: so many trees and so much grass it will look like a painting still dripping wet. I can imagine it waiting under the surface of the world, like the slides just have to be flipped in the projector and summer will be here.
And there’s Elody, teetering down the lawn in her shoes with no jacket on and her arms wrapped around her chest. When I see her, radiant and alive, the relief is so huge I let out a tremendous shriek of laughter. Lindsay raises her eyebrows at me.
“She’ll freeze,” I gasp, by way of explanation.
Lindsay twirls her finger by her ear. “She’s totally cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.”
“Did someone say Cocoa Puffs?” Elody says, getting into the car. “I’m starving.”
I twist around to look at her. It’s all I can do to keep from climbing into the backseat and jumping on her. I feel an overwhelming urge to touch her, make sure she’s really real and here and alive. In some ways she’s the bravest and most delicate of all of us. I wish I could somehow tell her this.
“What?” Elody scrunches up her nose at me, and I realize I’m staring. “What’s wrong? Do I have toothpaste on my face or something?”
“No,” I say, and again the laughter bubbles out of me, a surge of happiness and relief. I think; I could stay forever in this one moment. “You look beautiful.”
Lindsay giggles, checks Elody out in the rearview. “There are some bagels under your butt, beautiful.”
“Mmm, butt bagels.” Elody reaches into the bag and pulls out a bagel, half squashed, then makes a big deal of taking an enormous bite out of it. “Tastes like Victoria’s Secret.”
“Tastes like thong floss,” I say.
“Tastes like crack,” Lindsay says.
“Tastes like fart,” Elody says, and Lindsay spits coffee on the dashboard, and I start laughing and can’t stop, and all the way to school we’re thinking of flavors for butt bagels, and I’m thinking that this—my life, my friends—might be weird or screwy or imperfect or damaged or whatever, but it’s never seemed better to me.