Читать книгу Girl Trouble - Kerry Cohen - Страница 12

Lisa

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN I DIDN’T THINK ABOUT FRIENDSHIP. It just happened. Jeffrey in preschool. Chanel in kindergarten. Karen and Erica and Jon and Jonathan and Fosca and Liz. We were just friends, because friendship just happened. This was before my parents’ messy divorce, before my mother left me, before I had fallen under the sway of boys and their sweet desires. It was before life started its slow trickle around me.

Lisa was my third-grade best friend. We were inseparable. I slept at her house more than she slept at mine. We had practice crushes on one of her older brother’s friends. Practiced kissing on her pillows. Lisa could play “You Light Up My Life” on the piano, so she’d play and we’d sing in our falsettos, no care about who might hear.

That Halloween, her oldest brother died in a car crash. His friends, who were twins, and their mother were in the car too. They all died suddenly, inexplicably. Poof. Four lives snuffed out. The rest of us found out when Lisa didn’t show up at school the next day, or for two weeks after.

My mother and I went to her house to pay our respects. Their hallway, lined with mirrors, was covered with butcher paper, one of the Jewish traditions done while sitting shiva after a loved one’s death. I don’t remember what we brought. Probably food. Lisa’s mother wept most of the time we were there. Lisa sat near me. I wanted to say the right thing, to say something, but everything I could come up with seemed wrong, seemed disrespectful to the fact that she was grieving. In the end, I said nothing.

I wonder now if this was why when she returned to school everything was different. Probably she wanted nothing in her life that came before her brother died. Probably she wanted to start over, to forget, to pretend to be someone who only ever had one brother and not two. Probably I’d disappointed her by not saying the things she needed to hear. I didn’t know any of this at the time, and of course I still don’t know the reason. But I remember sitting at my desk in class, aware of her, my best friend, now gone and replaced by this person I didn’t know, who didn’t seem to want to know me anymore. And friendships would never be easy again.