Margo brings up cheering, a last-minute formation change or something, and Dana and Rachel start discussing it with her. They aren’t excluding Jennifer, but it’s obvious she can’t participate in the conversation. Surely, this is part of Margo’s plan to make her feel so uncomfortable that she’ll leave. Well, that’s not going to happen. Jennifer hangs her jacket on the back of a kitchen chair and stands there, smiling, downing her Punchy Punch. Jennifer even asks Margo for a refill. She is not going to let Margo make her feel unwelcome, even if it is Margo’s house.
After all, Jennifer used to come here all the time.
“Is the bathroom still upstairs?” Jennifer asks, setting her just-emptied glass down.
“Yeah,” Margo says, in a voice that adds of course it is.
Jennifer takes the stairs slowly. Framed pictures of Margo and Maureen line the walls. Jennifer knew Maureen didn’t like her. It made coming to this house, especially near the end of their friendship, pretty uncomfortable. Especially because Margo really looked up to Maureen. She always had, even though Maureen wasn’t all that nice to Margo, either.
When she gets to the landing, Jennifer stares down a hallway full of closed doors. She can’t remember which one leads to the bathroom. She tries one and opens it to Mr. and Mrs. Gable’s bedroom. They are inside, lying on the made bed, watching television. Mrs. Gable gasps, literally gasps at the sight of Jennifer, and she nearly spills her large goblet of red wine on the white duvet.
“I’m so sorry,” Jennifer says, quickly backing up. “I didn’t know you guys were home.”
“We’re in seclusion,” Mr. Gable deadpans.
“Better we are here, if things get out of hand.” Mrs. Gable sets her wine on the nightstand and beckons Jennifer forward. “So how are you, dear? It’s been so long. We’ve missed you. Are you doing well? How are your parents?”
“They’re fine. How’s Maureen? Is she liking college?”
“Who knows with that one? She hardly ever calls.” Mrs. Gable glances around the room, her eyes settling on a laundry-cloaked chaise lounge. “Do you want to come in and chat awhile?” She bites her lip, and then says, “I always ask Margo about you. How you’re doing and whatnot.”
Jennifer’s throat tightens up. Margo’s parents were always good to her. She misses them. And she likes that they’ve missed her, too. It’s cruel, the way things worked out.
Jennifer watches Mr. Gable discreetly squeeze his wife’s thigh. “I’m sure Jennifer wants to get back to the party.”
“Right. Of course.”
“I’m actually looking for the bathroom. I’ve forgotten which door it is.”
Mrs. Gable seems sad that Jennifer didn’t remember. “Third on the left. Right across from Margo’s room. It’s really so good to see you, Jennifer. Don’t be a stranger.”
Jennifer promises she won’t, and closes the door. Her hands are sweating and she wipes them on her skirt. She walks down the hall, reaches for the bathroom doorknob. But instead of opening it, she turns around and stares at the closed door to Margo’s bedroom.
The urge to see it is overwhelming.
She listens to hear if someone might be coming. There’s nothing but party noise downstairs.
She takes one step. Then another. She opens the door and inches inside.
Jennifer always loved Margo’s room, and it looks exactly as she remembers. It was made for a princess: canopy bed, huge armoire, a window seat where they’d sit and talk for hours. There are stuffed animals propped up with the pillows on her bed.
Even though Jennifer is where she shouldn’t be, even though she and Margo aren’t friends anymore, it comforts her to be back in this room again. Despite the fact that eighth grade was forever ago, and that Margo would probably always pretend otherwise, they had been friends.
Margo’s cheerleading uniform hangs from a bedpost inside a plastic dry-cleaning bag, ready for tomorrow’s football game. And from the door of the armoire Jennifer thinks she spots Margo’s homecoming dress.
She tiptoes across the thick cream carpet for a closer look.
After a minute of simply staring, Jennifer rubs the hem stitches between her fingertips. The style is not what she expected Margo to choose for senior-year homecoming. She imagined something fun and flirty, carefree. With a skirt that would lift when she’d spin on the dance floor. This dress is tight, dark, sophisticated. And, in Jennifer’s opinion, totally wrong for homecoming. Though she concedes that the green will look great with Margo’s skin.
But the dress? It’s like Margo has something to prove. That she’s too good to care about being homecoming queen, about high school stuff. That all this is below her.
Except Jennifer knows the truth. Or at least, she did. Margo does care about what people think of her.
Before she can think better of it, Jennifer opens Margo’s armoire. The insides of the doors are covered in peeling stickers — rainbows, horses, glow-in-the-dark stars. Clothes hang from the dowel rod and sit folded in messy, teetering stacks at the base. Jennifer can’t see to the back, to the place where Margo used to hide things she didn’t want anyone to find.
She reaches her hand deep inside and feels around.
“Oh my god.”
Jennifer whips around and sees Margo standing in the doorway.
“What the hell are you doing in my room?”
Jennifer can’t breathe. “Nothing, I —”
“Oh my god,” Margo says again, though this time it’s with less shock and more anger. She charges forward and slams her armoire doors shut, almost severing Jennifer’s fingers in the process. “You’re lucky, you know that?” Margo is shaking, and she flaps her hands as if she were wicking off the overflow of energy. “If it weren’t for everyone else here right now …” Margo trails off, but Jennifer watches her hands clench into fists. “You’d better go back downstairs right now,” she says in a low growl. “And if I see you up in my room again, I don’t care what people say about me, I’ll drag you by your hair and throw you out the front door.”
Jennifer sprints past Margo and charges downstairs. Dana and Rachel are still in the kitchen. That’s surely where Margo is headed, to tell on her. She doesn’t know where to go.
“Hey! We need an Asshole in here!”
Jennifer follows the voice into the dining room and finds a large table encircled by senior boys. Empty beer cans are everywhere.
“I’ll play,” she says, quickly taking a seat. Her heart is racing, and as she is dealt in, Jennifer keeps glancing toward the kitchen, expecting Margo to burst in at any moment and make good on her threat.
Jennifer briefly looks at the cards in her hand, as if she has a clue how to play. While Justin shuffles the cards and deals the next round, he goes over the rules of Asshole, but Jennifer doesn’t pay much attention, aside from the basic function that she must get rid of her hand as quickly as possible.
“Asshole needs to sit left of the President,” Justin says.
Jennifer stands up, her legs unsteady, and trades seats with a boy sitting next to Matthew Goulding. Like a seasoned poker player, Matthew studies his hand stoically with a ball cap lowered over his brow.
He is Margo’s longtime crush. Or at least, he had been when Jennifer was still in the loop. She thinks back, cycling through the gossip and whispers from the last four years. Have they ever hooked up?
No, she doesn’t think so.
They play a few rounds. With each new hand, Jennifer has to give her best two cards to the President. And the President gives her his two worst cards. It is designed to be almost impossible to rise up from the very bottom.
Jennifer plays dumb about the valued cards in her hand. From the little she’s picked up, she knows that aces and twos are the cards to have. But instead, she inches her chair close to Matthew and flashes him her whole hand, letting him pick through whatever it is he wants.
Jennifer can hear the party going on in other rooms: video games being played by boys, girls arguing over the music, the
sliding glass door leading to the deck opening and closing. But she is content to stay right where she is.
An hour goes by, and Jennifer has lost every round. She has the most cards of all the players. Not that she minds. The last time Matthew won, he’d given her a two card, which was the most valuable. Plus, she’s got a nice buzz going.
Ted, another senior who is playing with them, is clearly drunk. He’s spilled his beer twice, and during the last hand he leaned back too far. His chair tipped out from underneath him, and his head cracked against the wooden hutch. Ted didn’t seem hurt, though. He couldn’t stop laughing.
After Matthew wins again, he says, “Okay. This is getting boring,” in a friendly way, and hands her a leftover two card. For the rest of the round, he helps Jennifer. They become a little team. She shows him her cards, and he points or nods at the ones she is to throw down. She keeps watching, hoping Margo will walk in and see them there. The others around her still win, but Jennifer manages to come in second to last.
“I didn’t lose!”
“Congrats.” Matthew rises to his feet. “You’re now Vice Asshole.”
Jennifer glumly watches him go.
Justin says, “We need more beers.” He says it and looks at Jennifer. “Vice Asshole gets the beers.” He points to a door inside the kitchen. “There’s a fridge in the basement.”
“I know that,” Jennifer mutters.
She squeezes past the other card players at the table and goes into the kitchen. As she does, she catches sight of Matthew outside on the deck through the glass door. Matthew hops up on the corner of the table. He is smiling, talking to Margo.
Each step down into the dark, cool basement falls with a thud. There are laundry machines, Mr. Gable’s tools, and an old yellow refrigerator that Margo’s family put down here when they had their kitchen redone. Jennifer and Margo used to play school in the basement, but the teaching charts and fake tests are gone from the walls.
She opens the fridge and tries to figure out how best to carry the most cans back upstairs. The basement door opens and shuts.
“Hey,” Ted slurs. He holds the banister as he descends the stairs slowly, calculating each step.
“Hi.”
Ted walks up behind her and perches his arm up on the open refrigerator door. “You getting beers?”
“That’s my job!” she says, immediately regretting the cheeriness in her voice. People are not supposed to like the job of Vice Asshole.
“Here,” Ted says, like an offer to help her. But instead of taking the cans, he guides Jennifer toward the washing machine. The fridge door shuts, leaving them in darkness.
Ted closes his sleepy eyes before he leans in, and it takes a bit of adjusting, but his mouth lands over hers. It is wet and warm and slightly sour. His arms go around her waist and he pulls her against him.
Jennifer closes her eyes. It is her first kiss. She knows Ted is wasted, but it’s okay. This was a boy who, last year, threw a hot dog at her. And now, he is kissing her.
And if Ted will kiss her, maybe other boys will be interested in her, too.
Her kissing gets suddenly more inspired. She thinks of the things she’s seen on television, the way women run their fingers through a guy’s hair, so she does that. Ted seems into it, kissing her hard and fast, his nostrils pumping out hot air, muscles tightening.
The basement door opens and then closes. And then opens again. Each time, a wedge of light finds them.
Jennifer knows whoever is looking can see her and Ted. She brings her arms up around his shoulders, parts her legs as much as her pencil skirt will allow and lets Ted’s leg slide in between hers. Interlock.
A boy laughs. It sounds like Justin. He says, pretty loud, to the people upstairs. “Whoa! Ted must be wasted. He’s making out with Jennifer Briggis!”
Ted peels his lips off of Jennifer. “Shut up, dickhead,” he calls out. But not in a way like he’s angry. Like he thinks it’s funny.
The door slams shut again, and they are finally back in the darkness. “Don’t listen to him,” he says, and pushes her hair back. “I’m not that drunk. Seriously.”
She looks up at him, searching his glassy, watery eyes for a glimmer of truth. And when she doesn’t find it, she closes her eyes and keeps on kissing him.
argo and her friends only smoke when they drink. They never buy the packs themselves, just bum them from real smokers. Still, Margo knows she shouldn’t do it. Honestly, she is this close to a full-blown addiction.
But after her fight with Jennifer, it is all she wants. She goes outside onto her deck and smokes four in a row all by herself. Well … mostly she lets them burn down in her fingers, only taking a drag every few minutes.
She is too mad, her chest squeezed far too tight, to inhale.
A replay loops in her mind, the moment of going upstairs and finding Jennifer rummaging through her things. Paranoia sets in, and her hands shake, the smoke wiggling up to the sky in a frantic curl. How long had Jennifer been in her bedroom? What had she been after? What had she hoped to find?
And then it hits her.
Jennifer had been looking for the Mount Washington embossing stamp.
Finding the stamp would be Jennifer’s ultimate vindication. She’d walk downstairs with it over her head for all Margo’s friends to see. It would practically guarantee that Jennifer would be voted homecoming queen. And, as a bonus, Margo would spend her senior year friendless and alone, the way Jennifer had as a freshman. Karma, full circle.
Is that what she deserved?
Obviously Jennifer thought she was a horrible person. But Margo can’t believe that Jennifer really, truly, thought she’d been the one who wrote the list. Maybe it was crazy for Margo to think otherwise, after everything that’s happened, but Jennifer should know her better than that.
The glass door behind her slides open. Margo turns and sees Matthew.
He pauses, half-outside, half-inside. “Hey. I came out to get some air. But … you look like you want to be alone.”
“It’s fine,” she says, turning back to the yard. She thinks about putting her cigarette out, because she knows Matthew doesn’t like smoke, but it seems fruitless at this point. Everyone already seems to think the worst of her anyway.
Still, Margo is glad for his interruption, eager to think about something other than Jennifer. But that’s exactly who Matthew brings up.
“Jennifer Briggis depresses me big-time,” he says, hopping up on the patio table. “I’ve never seen a person try so hard to be liked.”
I’m the same way, Margo thinks, staring off into the dark, “At least half the people here tonight think I put Jennifer on the list. They think I made it.”
“Yeah,” he says, swinging his legs. “I know.”
Matthew’s confirmation makes Margo go wobbly. She grips the deck railing to steady herself. “Jennifer thinks I did it. I guess I can’t blame her.” Her eyes well up, and everything goes blurry. “She has every reason to hate me.” Margo spins around and looks at Matthew. “I was terrible to her.”
It is the first time she’s said it, without a caveat, excuse, or blaming someone else. She begins to cry.
Matthew climbs off the table and stands next to her. “You okay?”
She wipes her face on the sleeve of her cardigan. “You must think I’m an idiot, crying over this stuff.”
To her relief, Matthew shakes his head. “I don’t. Actually, I’m proud of you for saying your piece to Dana and Rachel about the whole ‘Vote Queen Jennifer’ thing.” He rubs her shoulder. “For the record, I think it’s a terrible idea, too.”
“Dana and Rachel have their hearts in the right place,” Margo says. But her own heart? She’s not exactly sure.
“I guess. But it’s crazy to me that Jennifer’s going along with it.”
“Of course she is. She wants to feel beautiful. Every girl inside my house does. That’s why we all get so wrapped up in the list, in homecoming.” It sounds like Margo is sticking up for Jennif
er, but really she’s defending herself. For caring about the list, for being upset that she might not get to be homecoming queen.
“I don’t think that’s it,” Matthew says. “You girls want everyone else to think you’re beautiful.”
She says, “Maybe,” though it is definitely true. It just sounds so pathetic.
“I don’t think you made the list, Margo. If that makes you feel better.”
“It does.” Another couple tears fall. Margo blushes. “I’d better get back inside.” Margo grinds out her cigarette into the wood and looks at him. “Can you tell I’ve been crying?”
Matthew reaches out and touches her cheek, catching her last tear on the tip of his finger. “No.”
“Thank you for saying that, and for listening to me.” She heads for the patio door, her heart racing.
“I’ll dance with you tomorrow night, even if you don’t win,” he calls after her.
A dance with the boy she’s loved forever. It is wonderful to look forward to something that has nothing to do with the list or being homecoming queen, something that has no guilt or sadness attached to it.
It is only good.
The party starts to break up around midnight. Every time Margo has made a lap for trash, she has kept an eye out for Jennifer. Not to apologize, exactly. Because, when it comes down to it, Jennifer shouldn’t have been in her room. But she’d maybe smile or something small like that, to make things a little more civil. But she hasn’t seen her for hours.
Dana and Rachel help her clean up. The three friends are in the kitchen, rinsing out empty beer cans and putting them in the recycling bags, when the basement door creaks open. Jennifer and Ted emerge from the darkness.
The curls in Jennifer’s hair have mostly uncoiled and it is mussed in the back. Ted is red-faced and squints at the light. “Shit,” he sighs, and quickly stumbles off.
Dana, Rachel, and Margo avoid looking at each other.
“What time is it?” Jennifer says, and then makes a weird swallowing noise.
“Um, it’s after midnight,” Dana says. “How long were you guys down there?”