“It was my mother’s,” Stephanie said, with an awkward laugh. Her dress was kind of Holly Hobbie — ish, but she liked the simple print of yellow sunflowers on a black background.
“Sorry,” Mitchell said. He looked at her dolefully but without pity. He was the only person in her life who hadn’t treated her like a fragile flower after her mother’s death.
“You think it’s strange that I’m wearing her dress?”
“A little,” Mitchell said. “So what? You should do more strange things.”
Stephanie took this as a jab at her conventionality — one she would have welcomed before her mother’s death, but which now felt like a criticism. Lately she felt overly sensitive. She couldn’t handle Mitchell’s or anyone’s wisecracks; it was as if they put real cracks in her.
“It’s a little bit long,” Mitchell said. “Maybe you should shorten it.”
“You think so?” She and Mitchell often altered items they bought at thrift stores, usually with help from Mitchell’s mother. But this wasn’t the same thing, exactly.
“Definitely. I’ll go get my mom’s scissors.”
He left the room before Stephanie could protest. She had the sense he’d been looking for an excuse to leave.
Lying back down on his bed, she returned her attention to his collaged ceiling. Next to Robert Smith was Tuesday Weld, peering out from beneath a fur-collared coat, which was draped over her head, as if she needed to hide from something just out of frame. The photo was from the cover of Matthew Sweet’s album Girlfriend—Stephanie’s favorite album, at one time. Mitchell just liked the cover — the romance of it, the lavender light, the borrowed glamour. He’d told Stephanie that her mother reminded him of Tuesday Weld. Stephanie couldn’t see the resemblance, but one day when Mitchell was over, they got out her mother’s old yearbooks and looked at pictures of her as a teenager. Then Stephanie got it: the bright blond hair, the delighted smile, the little nose and teddy-bear eyes. Her mother was a dream. Looking at those photos, Stephanie felt cheated. What happened to that buoyant girl? And at the same time she wanted nothing to do with that kind of femininity. It was no coincidence that Stephanie had decided to dye her hair after looking at those yearbooks, and no coincidence that she began to distance herself from her best friend, Bethany, who was on the junior varsity cheer squad and wore silk ruffled shirts and Red Door by Elizabeth Arden perfume and whose goal in high school — if not explicitly stated — was to like and be liked by absolutely everyone.
Her father, Sam, was in those photos, too. He seemed like a nice person. And also exactly the kind of guy she had grown weary of. She and Mitchell had a love-hate relationship with the football players at their school. They were so banal and clueless, so spoiled and doted upon, and yet physically, they were rather outstanding. There was one player in particular, Brett Albright, who was so attractive that Stephanie had to look away when she saw him in the hallway. He was always tanned, no matter what the season, and he wore his sandy-brown hair cut very short, almost a crew cut, which highlighted his sharp, grown-man’s jaw. According to her father, Brett was small for a football player, but Stephanie thought his body was perfect: his torso a classic inverted triangle, and his arms and legs thick with muscle — but not too thick. His only flaw was the oily patches of acne on his forehead and sideburn area, but even this seemed a piece of his masculinity. Once last spring he came to her house for dinner, and Stephanie spent the whole meal thinking of what it would be like to run her fingers along the stubble at the back of his neck. When she told Mitchell that later, he said he would have thought of running his fingers along something else.
Stephanie wondered if Mitchell had ever fooled around with any of the boys at her school. She thought not, because he would have told her, but then again, maybe he wouldn’t have.
The one person she thought she knew best in the world, her own mother, had it within her to shorten a rope, fashion a slipknot, and climb a wooden stepladder. But Stephanie could not actually imagine that moment in her mother’s life. And when Stephanie looked back on her childhood, she sometimes felt as if her mother had not really lived with their family at all, but instead had wandered in and out of their lives, like a visitor. It was as if they were on the road, and her mother was walking in a field beside the road, a wide field of tall grasses, or maybe corn, so that sometimes you got a glimpse of her, but mostly you did not see her, you could only sense her presence behind the screen of wild growth.
And yet even from this distance her mother was perceptive. It was her mother who had first noticed Mitchell’s proclivities. “Well, he’s different, isn’t he?” was how she put it, after his first visit to their house. “Different how?” Stephanie asked. And as soon as the words were out of her mouth, the pieces came together and she saw it, too: he liked boys, not girls. In that instant all of Stephanie’s fantasies were blown away. She had thought she was in love. She had thought being in love was easy, like having a best friend.
Now it was funny to remember that she had ever thought Mitchell was straight. She had been so naive when she started high school, a lamb of a girl who believed her football-coach father was beyond reproach and that her mother’s blue moods were normal, the price of motherhood. It was Mitchell who taught her to examine her family, to see them as an outsider might. The two of them had formed their own little unit of judgment. They practiced being smart together, training their newly acquired analytical skills on everyone, especially their families. They were both obsessed with their parents. Mitchell’s father was a preacher who thought AIDS was a message from God. He had no idea his son was gay. Stephanie thought he had to have figured it out by Mitchell’s senior year, when it was obvious that her and Mitchell’s four-year friendship had never evolved into a romance; but on prom night, when she and Mitchell posed beneath the cherry tree in Mitchell’s front yard, both of them wearing ragtag looks inspired by Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain, he made a remark about the importance of chastity. They had laughed hard about that, harder than they laughed when Stephanie’s mother, upon seeing her ill-fitting baby doll dress said, in a completely befuddled and nonbitchy way, “Is it the style not to look pretty?”
“My mom thought you might be hungry.” Mitchell stood in the doorway brandishing a pair of yellow-handled scissors. In his other hand was a plate of chocolate-chip blondies, cut into neat triangles.
Stephanie reached for one, though after months of front porch offerings, sweets no longer felt special. By some miracle, she had not gained a pound. It was working at the Red Byrd, she decided. Or maybe it was like people said: she was young, she could eat what she liked. Stephanie had always had a hard time remembering that she was young.
“All right, off with your dress,” Mitchell said. He tossed one of his T-shirts her way so she could cover up. Stephanie stepped behind his open closet door to change, realizing halfway through that her backside was reflected in Mitchell’s full-length mirror, which hung on the opposite door. But he wasn’t even looking! In moments like this Stephanie thought Mitchell’s mother must have some inkling of his sexuality. Why else would she let them stay up here by themselves for hours?
Mitchell flattened the dress across his desk and held it in place while she cut it. She didn’t bother to measure and mark it; she just let the sharp blades slide quietly through the fabric. She thought of her mother’s clothes on her father’s bed. She’d left them there on purpose, wanting him to be disturbed by their presence. She was disturbed by his weird suggestion that she take them with her to college. They weren’t even her style.