his head while moving past her as if his life depends on it. She watches him take the stairs two at a time and then, after he has disappeared from her sight, turns back to us. She lifts one hand to shield her eyes again, and then gives us a hesitant wave before slowly closing the door.
expiate (verb): to make up for doing something wrong (see also: Jamie…apologizes?)
3
“MATT IS A TOTAL SADIST.”
“Trace,” I say, pretending to be shocked. “Did you finally open that vocabulary study guide I gave you, like, a year ago?”
She rolls her eyes at me. “He is.”
I’m tempted to remind Tracy that I spent almost all of freshman year telling her that Matt had turned into a sadistic jerk, but we’ve been getting along so great, the last thing I want to do is say I told you so. Even though I kind of do want to say it.
Tracy pulls a pair of super-soft yoga pants and a blue T-shirt that she knows I love out of her dresser and hands them to me. “Here. And don’t forget the leave-in conditioner. There is nothing worse for your hair than chlorine. Matt’s hair felt like straw all the time.”
“Gross,” I say as I pull her silk T-shirt over my head. I know it’s ruined—it now feels more like Styrofoam than silk. As soon as I get it off, Tracy rushes it into the bathroom to begin a special washing ritual in her sink involving a “delicates” soap—I had no idea there was such a thing—that comes in a black bottle shaped like a corset.
“I’m really sorry about your shirt,” I say as I follow her slowly. I hate Tracy’s bathroom. I try to avoid using it because the entire thing is full of mirrors—there is literally no escape from looking at yourself, unless you’re in the shower. And looking at myself is not one of my favorite things to do. I actually took the mirror off the back of my closet door this summer because I was constantly checking my hair and my face to see if anything good was finally happening.
It never was.
Tracy, on the other hand, has what Caron would call a “healthy sense of self-esteem.” She checks herself out constantly to make sure that the outfit she put together works from every angle and that her hair and makeup are achieving maximum effect. When I watch her do this, I don’t think, my best friend is vain, like I used to. Instead, I think, What is it like to actually enjoy looking at yourself? I mean, it’s not that I expect to look in the mirror and see Giselle. But there’s got to be something in between “I’m so gorgeous” and “I’m so hideous.” Right?
There’s got to be.
“Don’t worry about the shirt,” Tracy says as she swishes it around in the water over and over in a figure-eight pattern. Unfortunately, I can tell she just doesn’t want me to feel bad. I know it’s totally killing her that the shirt got trashed before she even got to wear it once.
“I’ll get you a new one if it’s ruined, okay?”
“Uh-uh. If it’s ruined, Matt is getting me a new one. And he’s also getting Conrad some new pants.”
“Yeah, good luck with that,” I say.
“I should threaten to call his mother. She always liked me. I bet she’d love to know he was trying to drown a freshman for fun.” She lifts the shirt out of the sink, gives it a sniff and puts it back to soak some more. “Blackmail might work. And if it doesn’t, at least I’ll get to tell his parents that he’s having sex, and his birth control method is to say to the girl, ‘You worry about it.’”
I look at Tracy in the mirror. “I thought you said you guys used a condom.”
Tracy sighs. This is a conversation we had over and over last year, when Matt kept trying to convince Tracy that she should be on the Pill, and I kept telling her that she had to make him use a condom. “We did, Rosie. But only because I had them. He was only thinking about himself. So not worth it. Be glad you’re still a virgin.” She points at a bottle sitting on the edge of the tub, knowing that of course I had already forgotten all about it. “Don’t forget to use that leave-in conditioner.”
Tracy closes the door behind her, leaving me standing in the room of mirrors in my bra and the loose-fit white capris I borrowed from her—I couldn’t get my runner’s thighs into her skinny jeans if I covered them in cooking oil. I turn to face the shower curtain and peel the damp clothes off, trying not to catch a glimpse of myself—I don’t feel like seeing my naked body in the mirror while wondering if it’s weird that I’m still a virgin.
I’m a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore—it shouldn’t be weird that I haven’t had sex yet. But somehow, when Tracy points out that I’m a virgin—which has happened more than once since she slept with Matt—it feels weird.
Once the water gets hot enough, I stand under it for at least 10 minutes, feeling the heat soak into me. It’s the warmest I’ve felt since Jamie pulled me out of the pool, his hands hot against my skin, his eyes practically on fire with anger.
Is he mad at me? He’s the one who stood me up, I keep reminding myself. So what is he so pissed off about?
Caron says I have to stop feeling like everything is my fault. And she follows that up with a question about whether I feel like Dad’s death was my fault. My mother always looks like she’s going to vomit when we get to that part.
I turn off the shower and dry myself while I’m still standing behind the curtain. Then I put on the yoga pants and T-shirt and get away from those mirrors as fast as I can.
Tracy is on the floor, meticulously working her way through Vogue with a Sharpie in one hand and a pad of Post-its in the other. I sit down next to her and get to work on a back issue of Elle, carefully tearing pages out that Tracy has marked by folding the corner down.
I have no idea why she wants some pages and not others, because all the models and outfits look pretty much the same to me. But as Tracy carefully explained when I first started helping with her magazines, each outfit is an individual work of art that needs to be studied. When I looked skeptical, she reminded me of the monologue Meryl Streep has in The Devil Wears Prada, where she smacks down Anne Hathaway for laughing at a bunch of magazine editors who are trying to describe the specific shade of blue on a belt. I knew the speech she was talking about—when I first heard it, it made me see fashion as a kind of art, and I’d never thought of fashion that way before.
As I play the role of Tracy’s assistant, I take a look around the room. A year ago, I would have been on her orange shag rug and she would have been in the beanbag chair, asking me whether or not she should sleep with Matt. Now, the shag has been replaced by a flat black rug with gray lines that I think are supposed to be flowers, and two clear plastic armchairs sit where the beanbag used to be. And we’re doing something meaningful—or at least, meaningful to her.
To be truthful, I don’t actually know what we’re doing.
Tracy’s walls are covered with magazine pages and blog photos, but they’re not just taped up as part of a collage, like they would be in most girls’ rooms. She has painted one entire wall with special magnetic paint so she can use these tiny magnets to hang up the images, which she moves around daily and covers in different colored Post-its. Sometimes
