“You never asked her about it?”
“No,” I said. Why should I have? Whatever had brought Julia into my life was a good thing. An amazing thing.
“Did you like Julia’s mother?”
82
What an odd question. But then, it was coming from Laurie. “Sure.”
“But Julia fought with her.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t add “And?” but Laurie must have sensed it because she just said, “You didn’t fight with your own parents, right?”
Oh, please. “I didn’t want Julia’s mother to be my mother. We just got along for a little while.”
“Then what happened?”
“Julia didn’t start acting perfect.”
Laurie nodded. “What did you do when you were at her house?”
“Regular stuff. Like, right after Thanksgiving that year, she had a slumber party, and everyone who was invited came. That’s the way Julia was. People just wanted to be around her. We all stayed up talking for hours, but then, when everyone else had fallen asleep, Julia woke Caro up. We went out into the hall, and Julia told her off for all the things she and Beth and Anne Alice had done to me. She made Caro cry and I sort of felt bad for Caro, but not really because finally I wasn’t the one crying.”
“This is the same Caro you’ve mentioned before?”
I nodded, and Laurie scribbled something as I thought 83
about what happened after that. Caro had run off to the bathroom and we’d snuck downstairs and laughed about it. I felt so great. So free. We watched television for a while, and then Julia opened the cabinet where her mom kept her liquor and said, “What do you think?”
I can still remember the bottles. Brown, green, clear.
We dared each other to try something. Julia had rum. I had vodka. It tasted awful, made my mouth and throat feel like they were on fire. But after a while my stomach felt warm, and then I felt warmer all over and everything seemed brighter. Better.
We ended up reading the best bits from her mom’s stash of romance novels out loud to each other, laughing.
It was so much fun. Right before we finally fell asleep Julia made me swear that since we’d be best friends forever and ever, we’d always tell each other everything.
It was an easy promise to make. I couldn’t imagine not telling her everything.
“When did you start drinking together?” Laurie said, and I looked her right in the eye and said, “I don’t remember.”
I knew what she’d do with that memory, how she’d twist it all around.
“Okay,” Laurie said, and I could tell she knew I was lying. “Did you drink together a lot?”
84
“On the weekends, a little sometimes, when I’d stay over at her house and her mom was off trying to fi nd Mr. Right. I’d stopped hanging out with Caro and Anne Alice and Beth, and it felt great, but for a while I worried that maybe Julia would decide she wouldn’t want to be my friend.”
I knew as soon as I’d said that I’d screwed up, because Laurie’s interested expression was real. But she didn’t say anything except, “Why did you drink?” which was such familiar territory that I wondered why she was going over it again.
“When I drank I had fun. I felt fun. When I drank, I didn’t think about my parents signing off on my straight As report card with a quick ‘great job’ before heading off to yet another romantic dinner out. I didn’t worry about being the only person who laughed at a joke some total loser made in class. I didn’t worry about anything, and me and J would watch television and goof off.”
What I didn’t tell Laurie was when drinking changed for me.
The second semester of eighth grade, Julia got asked out by a ninth grader. He asked her to a party, and she said she’d go if I could come. She always did stuff like that for me. She always made sure I fi t in.
85
I was really nervous about going, and when we got there I didn’t know what to do. I felt totally out of place.
I was the tallest person there, and even with my hair in a ponytail I still felt like it stuck out. Plus there were so many people and the music was so loud—it was totally overwhelming.
I followed Julia around until the guy she was with told me to get lost. I started to run off, feeling as small and stupid as Beth used to make me feel, but then Julia said,
“Amy, wait,” and told the guy to go to hell.
I couldn’t believe it. He was a ninth grader! But she did.
We went into the bathroom after that, and she pulled a bottle of peach schnapps out of her purse. She had some, I had some, and after a while we went back out to the party.
And it was fun! I even sort of talked to a few people. J got her first hickey.
And then, amazingly enough, we—not just Julia, but both of us—got invited to another party. That time, I drank before we went and wasn’t nervous at all.
“So drinking was fun?” Laurie said.
“I thought we were talking about Julia,” I said, and I knew I sounded pissed off, but we were supposed to be talking about her. “And you know what? Julia was fun.
She hated being bored. Before she got her license, we took the bus everywhere. And I mean everywhere. By the 86
time she got her car, we already knew where everything remotely interesting in Lawrenceville and Millertown was. And when Julia started seriously hooking up with guys she never once dumped me to spend all her time with them. So many girls do that, you know? They hook up with someone a few times and drop everything because they think they’re in love. Julia was like that, actually, always thinking she was in love, but no matter what, she never blew me off for someone else.”
“Even for Kevin?”
Fucking Laurie. “Even with him.”
“Do you think—?”
I cut her off before she could finish whatever stupid thing she was going to say. “When I ended up in the hospital six weeks before she . . . before she died, Julia was the first person I saw when I opened my eyes. She’d stayed with me the whole time, told everyone there she was my sister.”
And when I’d woken up, and she’d told me that, she’d rested her head on my shoulder and said, “And really, you know, you are.”
“You haven’t ever said—” Laurie cleared her throat.
“What about your parents? Were they there?”
“As much as they’re ever anywhere,” I said. “But Julia totally took care of them. They were all, ‘What 87
happened?’ and when I reminded them that they could have taken three seconds to talk to the doctor, she said,
‘Mr. and Mrs. Richards, let me tell you what really happened,’ and when she was done with her story my mother was talking about some campus party she’d heard about, where this girl who drank a lot of what she thought was punch, but was actually mostly vodka, had to have her stomach pumped.”
“Did she say anything else?”
“She told me she was glad I hadn’t gotten as sick as that girl and to be more careful about taking drinks from strangers. And just so you won’t ask, Dad nodded along with everything Mom said and asked me to promise that I’d be more aware.”
Laurie scribbled stuff down, and I thought about how Julia had grinned at me after they left, walking off hand in hand like always to get coffee while they waited for me to be discharged, and said, “You know, they were really worried.”
When I rolled my eyes she sat down next to me and said, “Really,” and then we’d laughed over the story she’d told.
She’d said, “God, they’re so much easier than my mom!” and she was right. Julia’s mother would have cried and screamed and started in on J the second she woke 88
up. She didn’t trust Julia one bit, always wanted to know where she was going and who she’d be with. She’d question her over and over till Julia would yell, “Fine, whatever, I’m going,” and leave.
“What happened after that?” Laurie said.