Perhaps it was better not to count.
There was a diagram of a human heart on the board, and Mr. Browne was using his long, skinny pointer stick to identify different parts. (“Of the four chambers, the left ventricle contracts the most forcefully.”) He had a perpetually glistening forehead and kept a dirty handkerchief in the pocket of his crinkled khakis, always pulling it out, wiping his brow, putting it back. When he got excited about something, he crumpled it into his hand, squeezing it and shaking his fist with the disgusting thing inside it.
Helen rarely heard the words he was saying. He spent the end of the class talking about what can go wrong with the heart: murmurs, irregularities, diseases present at birth. But Helen wasn’t paying attention.
—
She had forgotten to bring clothes to change into for gym that day. She sat on the bleachers watching her classmates chase after a plastic orange ball with their plastic hockey sticks.
Marla Steinberg, who never changed for gym, was sitting a few spaces away from her on the bleachers, keeping time with the stopwatch the teacher had handed her. She had a purple streak in her brown hair and safety pins pierced into her infected-looking ears. Their teacher had put them in charge of time and scorekeeping, and Helen turned over a laminated number on the small flip chart in front of her each time one of the teams scored.
Helen turned to Marla, who had large breasts—the largest of any girl in the seventh grade—that bounced prominently with her slightest movement. “Do you know when this period’s over?” Helen asked.
Marla shook her head and made a tsk sound. “Fuck. I know. I once had that shit for three weeks.”
“What?”
“How long’s it been for you?” Marla leaned in. Her boobs bounced in her low-cut tank top. “Cramps? How bad?”
Helen shook her head. She hadn’t gotten her first period yet. “I said, do you know when this period is over? Like, the game period.”
Marla burst into a cackle. “Oh my God. You said this period!”
Helen waited for Marla to finish laughing.
Marla finally looked down at the stopwatch. “Two minutes and thirty-two seconds,” she said. Then she considered Helen as if she hadn’t thought to look at her before. “You’re really pretty, you know.”
“Thank you,” Helen said, trying to strike the appropriate mix between humility and self-awareness. At twelve—almost thirteen—years old, she had already been called pretty enough times to know that one couldn’t act too clueless or too conceited in response. She of course also knew that she was, indeed, pretty.
“What are you doing after school today?” Marla asked.
Usually Helen walked home with her neighborhood friends, Kayla and Kelly and Kim. They had been her friends since nursery school, friends that always seemed to be ready to spend time with her.
“Nothing,” Helen said.
After ninth period, Kayla waited for Helen at her locker. “You wanna come over and do homework?” Kayla asked. “My mom made blondies.”
“I have plans,” Helen said, and left to meet Marla Steinberg and her friends in the woods behind the gym.
They were all pierced and dyed—a nose ring here, a streak of pink there. They lived in Mamaroneck, the town over from Larchmont. (“The other side of the tracks,” Helen’s dad called it. Helen had protested that no train ran between the towns. “It’s a matter of speech, Helen,” he’d sighed.) They were smoking a joint, which Helen had seen only once before, at a party at Matt White’s house. The party was awkward, because although only Helen and Kelly had actually been invited (Kelly was sort of boring but very pretty), Kayla and Kim tagged along, and Helen felt like they expected to be taken care of the whole time. She was interested in having more friends like Marla—girls who could take care of themselves.
Marla passed Helen the joint. At Matt White’s, Helen hadn’t tried it. Now she took the flimsy, damp thing from Marla and pinched it between her thumb and pointer finger as she’d observed Marla and her friends doing.
There was pink lip gloss around the tip of the joint. Helen put her lips over it and inhaled. All she could taste was strawberry pink lip gloss.
“You have to pull harder,” one of the girls said, her eyes already bloodshot.
Helen nodded and sucked in the smoke as she’d been instructed. She felt it fill her lungs and an astonishingly fast rush to her brain, and she coughed, her eyes watering as a bitter taste came up through her throat.
Marla laughed. “Atta girl.”
They leaned against the base of a large oak tree. The girls discussed how pathetic the boys at school were, their terrible parents, their plans to run away to California. The weed seemed to make them animated, energized. But Helen felt like she was thinking twice as slowly as they were; every time she was ready to add something to the conversation, they had already moved on to another topic. She would laugh whenever the other girls laughed at something, trying to disguise herself as a member of their group, but once she heard herself laugh right after they had finished, and they looked over at her, entertained. Then they went back into their conversation. She was grateful for that, their not calling attention to her inexperience.
Being outside with the girls as it started to grow dark reminded her of camp, when rain pounded on the canvas of the platform tent at night, and wind pulled at the bottom sails and sent a cool August breeze through the tent, and she felt the need to melt farther into her flannel sleeping bag. It was a feeling of deep contentment and safety—it was something that could not be reproduced anywhere else. She loved being so close to the elements that she could almost taste them, flirting so much with being in the rain that she could see the canvas covering of the tent swaying slightly in the storm. Being safe and inside but just barely. She couldn’t feel like that in a house with a roof and walls.
“Living outside changes everything,” she said then.
“The girl’s a fucking poet,” said Marla.
Leaving the girls on the mossy ground, Helen used the lowest branch of the oak tree as a ledge and propelled herself up two more levels of branches until she landed on the perfect one, long and wide enough to lay her whole body on. If Kayla and Kelly and Kim were here, they would have yelled, “Get down, Helen!” But Marla and her friends watched with amusement from below and lit a second joint. Helen, high enough already, let a gust of cold almost-spring breeze run over her and closed her eyes.
—
“You’d be amazed at the amount of activities people did just to get in,” Fiona told Helen at dinner a few weeks later. “One kid I know has his own patent for some glue he invented. It dries extra fast.”
“Cool, Fiona.”
“Whatever. It’s not my problem if you don’t get into college.”
“You’re right. It’s not.”