Beth and Lacy started out as friends in the Ninth grade because they had to. Nobody else would have them. Beth was on her fifth city in ten years with her military father and reclusive mother while Lacy had been “re-zoned” into Lincoln high by a matter of ten feet on some city hall map and ripped away from the two friends she had in middle school who were now attending J.F.K. High across the Flathead river. They were both drifting around in unknown skies and during the second week of classes, like two solitary clouds, just came together as one. Lacy was sitting by herself at the lunchroom table, tray untouched with a spoon sticking upright in a mound of red Jell-O; she was writing furiously in pencil some unknown thoughts in a brand new blue spiral notebook. Although the outer cover was turned down out of sight it said at the top in bold black marker:
LACY FORESTER- OPEN UNINVITED AND FOREVER FEEL PAIN.
If found please call 555-5673- Thank you.
Beth had made her way out of the lunch line and with tray in hand surveyed the room. At fourteen years old new schools were old hat to her and she could read a room better than Bill Clinton. She had learned to stay away from the “popular” tables, the crowded judging eyes and fake laughter that only meant ridicule and pain at some point and was about to settle into a small group of girls in secondhand clothes and intelligent eyes when she saw this girl with soft straw colored hair and a long freckled neck totally alone and writing something in a notebook with a intensity that made Marcy smile. So she made her way over and stood on the other side of the table from her.
“Hi,” Beth said.
“Hi,” Lacy mumbled without looking up.
“Mind if I sit down?” Beth asked the top of the straw colored head.
Lacy picked her head up slightly and squinted at this intrusion. She stopped writing but the pencil remained in her white-knuckled grasp.
Her eyes gleamed with brief suspicion and then said quietly, “Go ahead.” At which point she returned to her notebook and continued writing but after Beth had settled into her seat Lacy added, “If ya want my lunch you can have it, I didn’t touch anything except the Jell-O, but it had something crunchy in it.”
Beth busted out laughing so loudly at that Lacy almost jumped out of her skin. She put her pencil down and looked at this crazy raven haired stranger across from her laughing like an idiot and then she started laughing too. From that point on, either in or out of school, you could rarely find one without finding the other. They had, at that moment friends always seem to do, found each other without even knowing it.
They rapidly learned everything friends need to really ever know about each other. Lacy hated this town and longed to get out of school and as far away as possible. Beth had seen too many towns and cities and one was just as stupid as the next as far as she was concerned. Lacy had broken her arm falling from a tree when she was nine. Beth had discovered her older brother’s dead body in the garage while the old dodge truck idled its poison exhaust into the air when she was eleven. Lacy had seen the ocean when she was six and still remembered the sweet salt air and light breeze that blew kisses at night. She thought that was where she might like to live someday. Beth thought that sounded like a wonderful idea. Lacy’s dad drank too much. Beth thought her dad didn’t drink enough. Lacy was a wonderful writer and her stories and poems made Beth cry and laugh; often at the same time. Beth was an exceptional artist and spent hours creating sketches and later, in their junior and senior years, paintings to Lacy’s stories and poems. They were friends in every way and their battles were united, their pain shared and their joy connected throughout the years.
One day towards the end of their freshman year they were sitting in the park by the river, arguing over why Reggie Anderson could or couldn’t possibly be the stupidest boy in school when Lacy said suddenly, “I’m so glad you moved here. I was so scared that all my friends were going to J.F.K. and now I don’t even miss them.”
Beth thought about it and said with sadness painted over with past truths, “Yeah, me to, but don’t get too used to it. My dad always says this is the final move and it never is.”
Lacy nodded understanding and said, “My dad always says he won’t drink anymore and he always does.”
They spent the remainder of the afternoon throwing rocks in the river and calling out every name of every coastal town and city they could remember, debating each in promise for potential future homes.
That first summer passed by mostly in each other’s company, with alternating sleep-overs and in the planning a tree fort that never was built and when their second year began in the fall the bond they shared was strong. It’s strange how two seemingly small, frail and somewhat frightened girls can be such a force when united. They felt older, wiser, maybe even better simply being in each others company. They weren’t outcasts with their peers but they weren’t popular either. They weren’t stoners or jocks or brainiacs or nerds. They were kind of tweeners. They preferred to float around in between all the lines of social demarcation and were neither loathed nor loved by anyone. Lacy hated gym class because she had no boobs and Beth told her she could borrow some of hers until she had her own. They both discovered pot around the middle of that sophomore year thanks to Randy Licklighter and would hang out with the stoners occasionally and get high after school. Sometimes they’d help the booster’s make up banners and posters for homecoming and dances and things due to Beth’s artistic ability but more often than not they preferred to just be with each other. They would talk or Lacy would write and Beth would draw and they would make fun of the world as they knew it.
The summer of their sophomore year only two things really happened. The first was when Beth showed up at Lacy’s door on a day so beautiful the meanest of men would crack a smile. She had a fat joint in her pocket and a little cooler with six beers swimming in ice.
“C’mon, let’s go to the park,” Beth said.
The river flowed by effortlessly and the sun warmed their hair as Beth lit the joint and sucked in deeply, then exhaled with forceful relief and as she popped open a beer and handed it to Lacy said, “My folks are splitting up.”
“What?” Lacy said wide eyed.
“Yeah, about a week ago my dad said we were going to have to move again and…”
What!” Lacy said.
“It takes months sometimes until we know for sure; I didn’t want to say anything until I was- so last night they start fighting about it. My mom said he promised no moves until I could go through high school. My dad started yelling about his career, about some promotion he’ll get for basically doing nothing except going to some god-forsaken place nobody else wants to go to… and then they started fighting about some lady named Carol my dad works with…and this morning they said they were getting divorced.”
“I can’t believe it.” Lacy murmured shaking her head and taking the joint from Beth. “What are you going to do?” She looked at Beth then hard and frightened, “You can’t leave.”
“Mom loves it here. Says she has roots; finally. That she has real friends and that she wasn’t packing up, pulling her daughter out of school and hoping a tiger would change his stripes…or something like that.” Beth opened up her own beer and lay down in the soft grass and watched the clouds overhead drift slowly in and out of each other. “I ‘m staying here with mom; I’m not moving, I wouldn’t want to- even if he wanted me to go with him.”
The rest of the day Lacy leaned up against a tree and wrote a story called Fearless and Beth sat Indian style by the river and sketched a drawing she titled River in Cloudless Skies.
The second thing that happened came slowly and neither one of them really ever saw it until about a week before the fall term. They had blossomed physically: Beth had boobs at an early age but had up to that point been lopsided with them. Like a child with too big a head they didn’t fit the rest of her but her hips had come that summer and her legs had grown long and strong. She was full, balanced; her mother said she looked voluptuous with both pride and worry. Lacy, on the other hand, had grown almost three inches and had now had the lean, athletic build of a swimmer. Her hair was full, lush, and flowed around her face like a blanket. Her mother told her she was beautiful; her father’s gaze, too often drunk with a strange love, made her uncomfortable.
They both floated through the halls into their junior year with a feeling of deliberate dedication to accomplishing… something. They both understood the cusp of decision approaching rapidly. They knew that the clock was turning towards the future and they both felt they were running full stride into its arms. Ready for whatever it had to offer.
Lacy read and read and wrote and wrote. She excelled in her English classes without effort and debated her teacher’s theories sometimes to the point of argument. Beth had graduated to canvass exclusively that summer and brought color and life to her trove of sketches she herself sometimes could not believe. Her grades slipped to barely passing in most subjects except Art and her mother, now alone, was consistently called into conference with worried teachers speaking of potential unrealized. They stuck together though, Lacy and Beth and before a blink of an eye found themselves on the other side of high school politics. They were beautiful but ambivalent. They were smart but unconcerned with clubs or gossip or parties. They had never really “fit” anywhere but suddenly found it difficult to drift between the lines of teenage order and were without warning or cause, alone.
“Let’s just go.” Beth said one Friday after school.
“He’s an asshole. His friends are assholes… what for?” Lacy replied
“It’s just a party.” Beth said. “Christ, my mom doesn’t even come home anymore until Sunday morning, we can stay out all night.” She rolled her eyes with a smile. “Uncle David takes care of her on the weekends.”
So they walked in through the beer can littered yard and into the house and mingled, and drank and laughed and smoked with people that would never remember if they were there or not. They found themselves later in separate rooms upstairs with two boys they had spoken five words to in three years. Making out and playing, and when it started going to places they didn’t want to go picked themselves up and left. They drove home together in the night laughing about the silliness of it all.
That Monday morning they were whores. They had screwed half the boys at the party it seemed and had become in an instant, without ever uncrossing their legs, the easiest girls in school. They didn’t tuck in like turtles after that though. They embraced the thought of it all and wore slippery clothes, winked at the cute boys and stared defiant at their empty-headed girlfriends. They decided that if they were going to have all this sex in the minds of so many they might as well have the fun along with the reputation.
Beth dated Jasper for two weeks, lost her virginity and a week later he asked Stacey Miller to the prom. Lacy “stole” the quarterback, Evan Novak from his student council girlfriend, fucked him twice with little pleasure and then, during the third encounter, before the boy could get his pants off, looked up at him quite seriously and asked him if he could please leave. When the school doors opened to start the summer they were damaged goods. Rumor usually becomes truth at any age but has no fury and permanence like it does at that age and they both reveled in the solitary comfort of being finally, utterly comfortable in their friendship and themselves.
That last high school summer Beth won an award for a painting she had sent in to a “Young Artist” contest sponsored by Coca-Cola- twenty-five hundred dollars and a life-time supply of Coke- which she didn’t even drink. Lacy received her first acceptance from the New Yorker on a story titled “We Only Live Twice,” and placed it on top of a pile of rejection letters bound by a green rubber band. She read the acceptance letter with a pounding heart as she walked into her house and found her father passed out on the couch with a bottle of scotch in his hand.
They wrote and painted that summer and put pins in a map Lacy had placed on her wall. All along the seacoast the pins went: red for absolutely, green for maybe and blue for if we have to. They wrote and painted and thought and talked and knew in some few short months the world would open up before them and were giddy about finally getting swallowed up by it all.
The final year was quick and silly. Beth did what she had to do to pass and Lacy forced her mouth closed to avoid arguments with her teachers and they went through the months. In the final quarter her advanced English class required a poem. So Lacy wrote it. The theme mattered little to her but she pondered and thought and squeezed out the best she could at three in the morning at the small desk in her room. It carried weight and benign deliverance and her teacher accused her of plagiarism. She said she had talent but this was beyond the scope of her age and gave her an F. An easy thing really to challenge that; “look it up somewhere.” is all she would have had to say but it somehow not only didn’t matter, but actually made her feel large and talented and full of promise.
The poem was called “Damaged Girls” and her teacher loved it so and after searching for the rightful author and finding none, framed it and placed it on her classroom wall where it still hangs today. Marcy took the poem to canvass with oil and created a living thing called “Without” which brought her some mild appreciation in the fickle world of art.
Graduation finally came and they took their diplomas to mild applause from their peers and proud smiles of Lacy’s parents and Beth’s mother and new boyfriend Bob. That month after packing their clothes and papers and canvas and brushes into Lacy’s beat up old car they moved to New York. It took some years as it always does but sometimes, thankfully, talent cannot be denied and Beth secured a publisher for a short story collection, Marcy found a sponsor and gallery for her art and they went about the business of doing what they were both, always born to do. They lived in a flat on the lower East side and dated sporadically. The boy’s and sometimes men they saw never managed to do anything more (with the exception of sex) for either of them that they already didn’t do for each other. Beth attempted one relationship that lasted a half year but found it distracted her from her work and the wall street wizard she had initially thought possessed a heart of gold soon discovered it was really more a heart of mildly splintered affection.
They both did well quickly and on a trip they took to Charleston discovered an old broad house streaked with sea sand and salt with a wide ocean facing porch and a widows walk perched on the roof. They remain there together today. So many years later; two damaged girls, writing and painting by the shore.
Recent Comments