‘You have a lot of things to do. I don’t.’
‘Well, you have to come with me.’ Mrs Ryan’s expression didn’t falter.
‘I can ride the train by myself.’
‘Seriously. Time to go.’
Claire put her head down. ‘Fuck off.’
My father’s eyes widened. Mine did, too. I’d never heard Claire swear.
Mrs Ryan swallowed, then stood up straighter. ‘Fine.’ She turned around stiffly and started back down the stairs. My dad and I stood there, waiting to see if Claire would move. She didn’t. My father looked blank. He wasn’t good at dealing with things like this.
Claire sighed. ‘Unbelievable,’ she eventually said, and stood up. The doorway down from the roof to our apartment suddenly looked too narrow for her to fit through.
My father and I walked them to the door. We watched them out the window as they marched toward the subway, not talking, not touching. The wind blew, shaking the plastic bags caught in the trees.
‘Did Claire ask you anything about it?’ my father murmured out of the corner of his mouth.
I shrugged. ‘It’s none of her business.’ Or yours, I wanted to add.
‘Claire’s your best friend.’
‘Was. Two years ago. For like a second.’
He jingled loose change in his pockets. ‘It’s okay to talk about it, you know.’
‘I don’t need to talk about it. There’s nothing to talk about.’
He looked at me desperately. The jingling stopped.
‘There isn’t,’ I repeated.
He pressed his thumbs into his eye sockets, breathed out through his mouth, and made a funny choooo noise, like a train pulling into the last station stop and easing on its brakes. Then, he patted my arm, sighed, and went into the kitchen to turn on the TV.
Claire was born one year, one month, and one day before I was. When we were friends for like a second two summers ago, she liked to remind me of this when she held me down and tickled me: ‘I am one year, one month, and one day older than you,’ she would say, ‘so I have full tickling privileges.’
She was going into ninth grade and I was going into eighth. We were forced to be around each other a lot that summer because our mothers, who both worked in the events department of Mandrake & Hester, a high-end private bank, had become best friends and rented a share on Long Beach Island. When my mother told me about it, I panicked. Spend eight weeks at the beach with a girl I didn’t know? I didn’t even like the ocean. And I wasn’t very comfortable with strangers.
My mother wanted me to like Claire-and even more, for Claire to like me-and at the beach, it didn’t seem that hard. Claire’s long, ash-blonde hair became knotted and caked with sand, and her full, pretty lips were constantly coated with Zinc. She wore ratty t-shirts and cut-offs, and she roughhoused, tackling me into the surf. She indulged my need to spy on our mothers, who liked to sunbathe on the beach and read magazines. We had a foolproof system: the lifeguard stand was on a mound by the dunes, and all we had to do was duck behind where the lifeguards hung their towels and our mothers had no idea we were there. They talked about chauvinistic men at the office, places they wished they could visit, the new male teacher at their ballet studio in Tribeca. I waited to see if my mother would talk about me-maybe in a bragging way, hopefully not in an irritated way-but she never did.
In July, our mothers signed us up to be junior counselors at the town’s day camp. Claire was the only person I spoke to and who spoke to me. Everyone loved Claire, though. She could play the guitar, beat anyone in a race across the sand, and she petitioned the camp to let us build a twenty-person ice cream sundae, exhausting the kitchen’s supplies. Three different junior counselor boys had a crush on her, and kids followed her around as if she was made of cake icing.
That fall, I switched from St Martha’s, a private Catholic school in Brooklyn Heights, to Peninsula Upper School, where Claire went. Seventh through ninth graders were in one building, and high-school sophomores through seniors were in another. Claire was the only person I knew who went there, but I certainly didn’t know who Claire was. If I had, I wouldn’t have acted like such a juvenile around her, stealing stacks of orange-yellow 500s from the bank when we played Monopoly, constantly playing the beach house’s Nintendo even though I barely touched our console at home. And I certainly wouldn’t have done that dance when I won the Mega Man Six tournament, the finale of which involved flashing Claire my pink bubble-printed underwear.