They got to know you. That’s the worst part. You hung out with hooked arms, maneuvering little shops in the mall, kicking around various selves in the dressing rooms. You were there when they slurped through straws at the food court, their mouths disgusting and alluring.
You’d held back your disturbing: that you suck on a chewed fingernail until disintegration, that your nightmares caused bedwetting until fourth grade, your wordless neediness that throbs like something gross and sore and sexual. Instead, you exaggerated parental flaws and how fucked up and boring everything is.
You straw-poked a smoothie and asked, “How much sugar is in this?”
Bernadette said, “Sugar’s fine.”
Nicolette nodded, decisively. You noticed Nicolette agrees with Bernadette about everything, and Bernadette agrees only with her present self.
They took you to the mall twice. Together, you smoked in a graveyard. Once, you drank vodka and lemonade at Bernadette’s house, which was massive. The rooms beige to differing degrees, the fridge over-full of food that was rotting at the back, fresh and vibrant in front. The pool, glimpsed through the patio doors, sparkled. Bernadette’s brother swam with friends, their arms veiny and lean.
You took your lemonade out there and kicked your feet in the water. Bernadette’s brother swam over and said, “Don’t I know you from school?”
“Who, me?” You hoped to sound coy or flirtatious, not surprised that he saw you at all. Often, even in small groups, even under the intense gaze of Nicolette and Bernadette, you felt like a nonperson, someone soundless.
Nicolette and Bernadette did not come out to the pool. They called out from the shade, hands visoring their eyes, “Hey!” Nicolette said.
Bernadette said, “Are you coming?”
You turned to say bye, but he’d swum away.
You tracked wet feet from concrete to parquet to carpeted basement. You lazed on pillows with Nicolette and with Bernadette. Also, with neither of them because they both stared at the ceiling and talked about themselves.
“I wish I were a mermaid,” Nicolette said.
“You’re too fat,” Bernadette said.
Nicolette decided not to say anything.
“Or a famous murder victim,” Bernadette’s hair splayed underneath her head like she was already dead.
“I wish I were blonde,” you said to fit in, to fill the air with any wish.
Nicolette and Bernadette ignored you.
Hours went by on the basement floor. You had to leave. Neither Nicolette nor Bernadette offered to drive you. You took a Lyft to a bus stop a block from home and tried to walk off drunkenness. You opened the front door, hoping your parents wouldn’t notice your intoxication and hoping they would.
No one was home. You wished you’d stayed and slept in Bernadette’s basement, curled up between them, become someone among them. You wanted to be absorbed into the sympatico syllables of their names and the linked arms of their stride.
Now, you wonder if it was talking to Bernadette’s brother that did it. Or going home early, or the inanity of saying you wish you were blonde (instead of your real wish: that you were not yourself, but that you could be there to see yourself be not-yourself).
Maybe it was something you didn’t think to curate that made them hate you, something you would never notice but that is glaring to everyone.
Maybe they hated you all along.
Maybe they asked you to hang with them out of pity, or some weird tradition. Scoop an outcast into the group for long enough to get the dirt, and then cast her out onto the rocks of socialization with powerful knowledge.
You wonder if this has only happened to you when you hear it from Maddie’s lips, “I don’t know what you did, but Nicolette and Bernadette really don’t like you.”
Maybe there is another girl, somewhere behind you, who looks up at the sentence and feels twisted relief at no longer being their focus.
You don’t actually want to know.
What if Nicolette and Bernadette felt it come off you? That heavy need, the desperate taste in your mouth—did they smell it? The sweat that rolled down your armpit as you sang with the window down in the back of Nicolette’s car—was it your voice?
You almost made it through the whole school year as somebody.
Anyway, today that’s the word: they don’t like you. Maddie said it, and Gina, also Hayley and Benny and Aidan and others that know you through Nicolette and Bernadette. Some of them met up with you in the mall. Some handed you the slobbering glass end of a bowl and a lighter. One of them kissed you, but it doesn’t matter which (unless? maybe that’s why?). It was all a beautiful illusion of wholeness, oneness, us-ness, me-ness.
Benny says, “I’ll see you around.”
Aidan laughs, “Hilarious. They’re such bitches.”
Hayley says, “Bernadette hates you the most, I think.”
Gina says, “If you didn’t like them, why did you hang out with them?”
Maddie shrugs, not looking at you, and turns back to the board.
In the parking lot, you search for them. You hope Nicolette’s car will drive up and Bernadette will roll the shotgun window down and say, “Are you coming?”
You’ll think “It’s all in my head. They like me.”
Instead, a soda crashes at your feet, ice exploding on the pavement. The brown cola splatters into glitter and you’re standing there with wet shins and Nicolette’s blue car is already at the light waiting for green, and the two of them are laughing over their music at you, you, you, and you smile because you’re in their laughter. They’re taking you with them.