133 lines
8.9 KiB
Plaintext
133 lines
8.9 KiB
Plaintext
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
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\f0\fs24 The moment the Honda cleared the end of the driveway, Emma was moving.\par
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\par
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She was through the kitchen, down the hall, and into her parents' bedroom before the sound of the engine had faded off the street. The room smelled faintly of her mother's perfume and the coconut oil her father used on his hair on weekends, and the bed was made with the military precision that Elikapeka applied to all horizontal surfaces in the house. Emma arranged three pillows against the headboard, settled herself against them, pulled the notepad from where she'd tucked it under her arm, and lifted the receiver.\par
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\par
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Outside, through the window, the canal caught the late-morning light and threw it back at the sky in broken pieces.\par
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\par
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Susanna picked up on the second ring.\par
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\par
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"I need your brain," Emma said.\par
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\par
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"Good morning to you too."\par
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\par
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"Good morning. I need your brain. I'm making the boys list for my party and I need you to tell me who is worth inviting and who I should throw into the ocean."\par
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\par
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There was a pause, and Emma could hear Susanna rearranging herself, getting comfortable, taking this seriously the way Susanna took anything involving boys seriously\u8212?which was to say with the focused intensity she usually reserved for game-day stunts. Susanna had been a varsity cheerleader since sophomore year and she maintained a mental catalog of every boy in their class with the thoroughness of a librarian who happened to be seventeen and deeply opinionated.\par
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\par
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"Okay," Susanna said. "Who do you have so far?"\par
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\par
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"I have nobody. That's why I'm calling you. Start talking."\par
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\par
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"Tyler Marsh."\par
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\par
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Emma wrote it down. "Okay, yes, obviously."\par
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\par
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"Jake Ferraro."\par
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\par
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"He's going to spend the whole party trying to do backflips off the diving board."\par
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\par
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"Emma. That is literally the best possible thing to have at a pool party."\par
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\par
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She wrote it down. "Fair point. Who else."\par
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\par
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Susanna went through names with the brisk efficiency of someone reading off a grocery list she'd memorized. Emma wrote, hesitated, crossed out, wrote again. When Susanna said Drew Cavanaugh, Emma made a sound like a small animal had been stepped on.\par
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\par
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"Absolutely not."\par
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\par
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"He's funny."\par
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\par
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"He told Jessica Bowen that her swimsuit looked like a shower curtain. At a pool party, Susanna. Who does that."\par
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\par
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"Okay, fair, cross him off. What about\u8212?"\par
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\par
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"Already crossed off. Keep going."\par
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\par
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By the time they hung up, Emma had seven names on the notepad and her hand was slightly cramped. Seven boys. She looked at the list with something close to satisfaction and then reminded herself that she had at least four more calls to make and that the list was going to change, because lists always changed.\par
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\par
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She dialed Mai Lin.\par
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\par
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Mai Lin Wen answered on the fourth ring, sounding like she'd been awake for exactly as long as it took to reach the phone. "What."\par
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\par
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"It's me. Are you still sleeping? It's almost eleven."\par
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\par
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"I was reading. What do you want."\par
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\par
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"I want you to help me make the boys list for my party."\par
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\par
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A pause. Emma could hear Mai Lin sitting up, could practically hear her becoming alert. "Read me what you have."\par
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\par
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Emma read the list.\par
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\par
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"No," Mai Lin said immediately.\par
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\par
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"No what?"\par
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\par
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"No to Tyler Marsh."\par
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\par
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Emma's pen hovered. "He's at the top of everyone's list."\par
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\par
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"He spent forty-five minutes at Sarah's party telling me about the differences between various types of fishing rod. Forty-five minutes, Emma. I timed it. He had no idea I was timing it because he had no idea I was a person."\par
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\par
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"He's good-looking, though."\par
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\par
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"So is the canal behind your house and I don't want to have a conversation with it either. Cross him off."\par
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\par
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Emma crossed him off with the pen stroke of someone who had been pushed into something she wasn't entirely sure about. "Fine. What about Jake Ferraro?"\par
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\par
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"Jake can stay. Jake is funny."\par
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\par
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"He's going to do backflips off the diving board."\par
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\par
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"I know. It's going to be great. Keep Jake."\par
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\par
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They went through the rest. Mai Lin cut one more\u8212?Carter Somebody who Emma had barely remembered adding and felt no grief about losing\u8212?and added one, a quiet boy named Daniel Park who Mai Lin said was extremely interesting and also happened to look like something out of a magazine, which Emma filed under relevant data. The call ended with six names, and Emma looked at the reduced list and felt the particular satisfaction of collaboration.\par
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\par
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Three more calls, and the list rebuilt itself.\par
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\par
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Hannah Eliot was the call Emma made with a slightly clenched jaw, because Hannah was unavoidable the way weather was unavoidable\u8212?you could dislike it, but you couldn't not account for it. Hannah came from the kind of money that had its own gravitational field and she moved through high school social life accordingly. Emma didn't hate her. She just found her exhausting in the way that overly confident people were exhausting when you were also an overly confident person and there was only so much room for it.\par
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\par
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"Harrison Webb," Hannah said immediately.\par
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\par
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"Isn't he a senior?"\par
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\par
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"Yes."\par
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\par
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Emma wrote it down. There was nothing else to say about that. Hannah added one more, someone Emma vaguely recognized from a basketball game in February, and the number crept back up.\par
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\par
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On it went. Calls four and five were easier\u8212?shorter, sharper, more about confirming names she already had than adding new ones\u8212?and by the end of call five she was looking at fifteen names on the notepad. She'd used two pages, crossing out and rewriting until the handwriting looked like a construction project. But fifteen. Fifteen boys, vetted, approved, sorted through by the collective wisdom of her closest friends and at least one enemy she was maintaining for strategic reasons.\par
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\par
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She looked at the list.\par
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\par
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She picked up the pen.\par
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\par
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She put the pen down.\par
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\par
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She thought about what her mother had said that morning, which was that the boy cousins counted in the total, which was a position so absurd on its face that Emma had let it pass without full engagement because she'd been dealing with the larger battle over the Hayes cousins and couldn't fight on two fronts simultaneously.\par
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\par
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But now.\par
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\par
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She counted the cousins. Three boys on the Hayes side who were remotely close to her age, which meant if the total stayed where her mother had said it would\u8212?somewhere in the vicinity of thirty-five\u8212?then three boys on her list had to come out to make room for three boys who were going to stand at the edges of the yard and talk about whatever Hayes cousins talked about at parties. Boat engines, probably. Her mother's side had an entire vocabulary about boats and Emma had been unable to acquire it despite years of exposure.\par
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\par
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She looked at the list again.\par
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\par
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She picked up the pen.\par
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\par
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She did not cross anything out, because crossing names out right now would feel like accepting a loss she hadn't actually accepted, and Emma Hayes did not pre-emptively accept losses.\par
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\par
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She tore the page off the notepad and looked at it and thought about the expression on her mother's face that morning when she'd said, *that is not negotiable*, in that voice. The voice that was not louder but was somehow denser, heavier, occupying more of the room than voices usually did. Emma had understood from roughly age eight that when that voice appeared, the conversation had moved into territory where winning looked different than it had a moment before.\par
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\par
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But the cousins counting in the *boys* total was a separate question. That hadn't been explicitly stated. That was an interpretation, and interpretations were subject to argument, and Emma was going to make that argument with the list in her hand and the kind of careful, reasonable logic that her mother occasionally responded to when it was presented without what Elikapeka called *the architecture of grievance,* which was Emma's mother's poetic way of saying *don't be dramatic about it.*\par
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\par
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Emma would not be dramatic.\par
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\par
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She would be precise and reasonable and she would point out that cousins were family, which she now accepted, fully and without reservation, and that the boys she'd invited to her party were *guests* in a different category, and that conflating the two categories was a methodological error.\par
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\par
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She looked at the fifteen names.\par
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\par
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She looked at the ceiling.\par
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\par
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She pressed the notepad to her chest and made a sound that was not quite a word, not quite a scream, but somewhere in between\u8212?the sound of someone who had done everything right and was now confronting the specific injustice of other people's rules.\par
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\par
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Then she got up, smoothed the bedspread, replaced the pillows, and went to wait for her mother to come home.
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