Chapter 10

There was really only one person there.

Why are my brakes squealing?

Because they’re excited. He laughed at my feeble joke. I remember the day I stopped making them altogether. The day that the effort it took to please others was too much for my suffering mind, my aching body. I still thought of them. But it didn’t matter anymore.

She drove me home from church that night, that night when my body rejected home. When it rejected friends and neighbors and…. Love? At the stoplight I realized that she was trying to act calm. I wonder what she was feeling then. I wondered if she thought I was faking.

All it took was some antacids. All it took was a magic pill, a pill with which I had created a placebo effect so strong that it worked.

I got this shirt at a maternity store. It was striped, rainbow, tight. She told us this as we sat on the merry go round at borchard park. Eating our ice tickles, our otter pops of the Gods. It was hot. It was dark. We all laughed.

Too much history. Too long. Too little knowledge or sharing or anything else real. Too late to start.

That night, I wanted to open up. To read to her parts of my soul. The dark parts, that no one ever sees.

I’m tired. My eyes hurt. I’m going to bed.

I know the people who care about me because they care about my writing, I told him.

Does she? The truth is, I don’t know. Part of me wants to share. Part of me wants to keep this going. This 10- year old friendship we have based on who we were 10 years ago. I know she doesn’t know who I am now. Do I know her anymore? Almost 2 years apart. Almost long enough to forget.

Grace is one of those people that does magic simply by existing. I don’t know what kind of magic it is. It depends on what t role you play. Are you part of the spell or just a bystander? Thing is, she hypnotizes people into paying attention only to her. And leaves out everyone else. Sometimes she picks you. Most of the time she doesn’t.

With Grace, I find myself more on the outside than on the inside. With Grace, I find myself begging for validation, for concern and not getting it. I can actually declare the relationship I have with Grace at this point in my life to be entirely unhealthy. Then again, most of my relationships are entirely unhealthy.

Magical, he called her. He hated me. I could never really figure out why. And even today, he adores her. Despises me.

Grace is a polarizer. There is no middle ground.

Right after I came home, I found solace with Grace, about to leave on her mission, and Sam, who had come home early from hers. She seemed so much happier than I. We drove down to the temple together, her with the assurance that that period of her life is over. That time seems so warm compared to now.

We would go out to dinner, proud to be in each other’s company. They were both strikingly beautiful; no matter where we went, people would stare. With Grace, people always stare. She looks like you plucked her straight out of a 50s catalog and placed her haphazardly into the bleak post-modern era in which we find ourselves.

Her last morning, Grace got a group together to go to Denny’s. Right before she entered the MTC. The Denny’s where Kathryn used to go with Jake and Natalie their freshmen year, when I and Grace remained in California. The Denny’s where Giorgiano and I used to go to have late night hot chocolate and talk. The Denny’s where Erica, Diane, Tina and I all would walk after midnight on Sunday night, to feed our voracious 18-year old appetites. It is a place of memories, good and bad. Of jokes, and sugar packets, and unrivaled people watching. That morning, crisp and new, countless people came. I was there. I watched her enchant a group, casting her spell over all at once. They looked at her adoringly as they cast sideways glances at me out of the side of their eyes.

At that point, she was the golden girl. I the rejected band whose seemingly pure makeup was tarnished and retracting to reveal what it really was. Brass. A brazen counterfeit of what it should be. The stuff of cheap trophies and saxophones. Before I left, people looked at me like that.

The morning was what was significant. It was April in Utah; nothing beats it. Warm, but not baking. Mysterious as the sun climbs over the mountains. If it were a color it would be mint green. If it were a fruit it would be an apple. She left, and over the next year and a half, our friendship would be characterized by sporadic postcards and letters from the Midwest; exchanged as a peace offering, while both knew that we could never be the same again.

How do you explain what it’s like to go through the hardest times of your life to someone who still sees you as 17?

That morning, we got up early and met at Denny’s at 6:00. Kathryn, Abbey, Stooph, Grace, and I. Kathryn was peppy, abbey quiet, Stooph loving, Grace cranky, and me insane. I thought to almost 3 years back. To what it felt like in march of 2007, before anything had happened.

Are we genetically destined for catastrophe? Is it programmed into our genome? Would we have acted different if we had known?