She was my first adult friend. By this I mean our friendship was the first I’d formed entirely beyond the gates of adolescence, where my school friends gathered still, firm in their maturity now, but steeped too in our first meeting as little girls. I could see their childhood faces, kind of chubby, just below the surface; the same way I watched my mother’s expressions flitting around my grandmother’s mouth. I was twenty seven. Officially in the “mid-to-late” stage of my twenties though in firm denial of this fact. The adult friend had been transferred to our office from another city. Her teeth were straight like iron rods. We were house-sitting for her parents. Her boyfriend was out of town. We would lie by their pool and water the garden. We would sleep in separate rooms.
“This is you,” she said with a smile, pushing open the door to the study. There perched a little pull-out couch. A towel had been folded on the bed. The towel looked at me and said “guest.” I glared back at the towel, mouthed “no, friend.”
Did she know that she was easing the splintered stake of adulthood between my ribs as she ushered me inside with my travel bag? I would not show her how this caused blood to soak my shirt. As I crossed the threshold I could almost feel a hand unraveling the girlish braid that fortified my spine. I was once a girl hanging from that braid, until the braid was gone, and so was the girl. Now I was just a woman in the mirror, with too-long hair.
When my new friend showered I drifted into her childhood bedroom. I suspected she would remain classified as a “new-friend” for a decade or so, until we got to experience some shared tragedy like the death of a parent or loss of home due to fire or drought. The bedroom had been notably de-childed. I looked at her bookshelf, and I loved it, the way it sighed its spine-names in a bookish chorus. I longed to arrange them by colour. I loved her coats which hung on the back of the door like an ilk of forgotten butlers still committed to their service. I loved the photograph of her and her brother on the desk. She hadn’t mentioned him, though I could tell from their frowning eyes, he was her brother. I loved the teddy bear wedged between the books. I thought about fishing the bear out, placing it amongst her pillows. I loved how un-lived in the bedroom was. How it begged to be haunted by a little girl.
“It’s a transplant room,” she said, a towel pinned across her chest like a toga. She’d stepped from the ensuite into the bedroom and caught me plunging the teddy bear between her pillows. Water droplets were accumulating along the curve of her earlobe. “My old stuff got donated when we moved. My parents bought new things when we got here, little-girlish things to remind them they have a daughter.”
Then the water droplet slipped to her shoulder and surged into the groove between her neck and her collarbone. It was quiet. The quiet coiled into a tight spring. Then she propelled herself forwards, leaping upwards and onto the bed. I stepped backwards inadvertently, surprised by the sudden eruption of her limbs. Her body made a dent on the covers and the room let out a small sigh. The teddy tumbled off the pillows and landed face-down beside her. She laughed, tucking the towel deeper beneath her arms, hiding her naked body from me, but it was there and it was shining at me. A transplant room. The comment lodged strangely in my side. It seemed at this moment that nothing was in its rightful place. I looked at her and smiled, but it was a transplant smile. I kept my real smile hidden at the back of my mouth, tucked wet behind my molars.
I’ve always had a lot of friends. I found it easy to entice the girls at school by showing them how to make friendship bracelets with colorful threads and beads, then later how to french braid, then later, later how to french kiss, first with the back of your own hand, then with each other. “Imagine your tongue is a tulip,” I’d say, “let it stem outwards from the black soil of your mouth.” They nodded eagerly. I learned good-listening by watching my mother. I had three brothers, one father and later one step-father. If my mother didn’t listen well there would be blood. I learnt this young, and the girls loved me for it. For teaching them how to listen instead of bleed.
Most of all though, they loved me for the poor hand I was dealt in love. Nothing secures a friendship like this. They loved each time my heart sapped its grease onto the floor of the school hallways. It made them glow to catch me, to stroke my little heart like the pet hamsters they neglected. The ones their parents hoped would teach them how hard it is to care for something with lungs, an intestine, a set of tiny eyeballs. Contraceptive-hamsters, bought to stop them having babies when they fucked their boyfriends in the bushes. To teach them a little lesson. These little pets expired, but I remained, to be kissed and cooed at instead.
These years at school ushered us formally into the world’s two groups. There were those who were loveable and those who were unlovable. It was a happy blessing to receive clear categorisation after years held hostage to our sweating, shifting bodies. And how happy we were, the unlovables, to receive the excess tenderness from those who could be loved in abundance. We watched them hate each other. The loveables would squint at their rival’s heart-shaped faces. Their eyes would circle one another’s widening hips, fearing another would lure their lover from the riches of their own loveliness. And we watched, like a fleet of lambs, waiting to bolster their hearts with our waning. How we loved to wane and wilt for them, so that they could lift us. So that they could speak sorcery to us; utter “your time will come” over and over, with their fingers crossed behind their backs. That was the condition. They would love us, so long as we remained unlovable.
This tenderness was all that I had known. We slept curled up like rodents, we woke to a face full of hair, sucked the ends of each other’s braids, walked around this way, like elephants trunk to tail. We scrawled tattoos in pen across our arms. We held slices of apple behind each other’s earlobes and pushed safety pins right through. Listened to the gristle and pop of that thin flap of flesh tearing under pressure. Kissed the wetness when the punctures bled. Kissed the scabs when they formed caps around the cheap metal earrings. We said terrible things about each other, then stabbed our thighs with forks at meal time. We would hold that blow. Such was the intensity of these friendships.
As adults we worked in the same offices, complained about the same pervs loitering in the grocery store parking lots. I worked in PR, which meant I wrote emails to help big companies look like humans. All the big companies seemed to want this above all else. And who better to ask about humanity than unlovable little girls? So Monday through Friday I zipped up to the fifth floor of the office in the life, wearing my adult clothes. But I was no adult and this was in part thanks to the continuity of my childhood friends. Like dolls, we could only move our joints so far, only so far as the distance we shared. My world was the girls from school, their parents, their brothers and sisters, their hallway light switches, their wire dish racks. They were my armor. I remembered their secrets. Could arrange these girls into infinite categories — by dental practice; by obscure allergy, be it nettle, grapefruit, anchovy; by the number of pillows on their beds. It was a kind of elixir to stave off adulthood.
Then she arrived from out of town. My first friend forged in the fire of maturity. She marked me when we slept in different rooms. When the door closed behind me my innocence was plucked, and it stung. A pleasure-sting. Like when the boy parted my legs and enjoyed me. The boy had refused to kiss me when we played spin-the-bottle. Then he’d asked me to the prom but never picked me up. I wore my dress and looked sad, but that night was the best of my life. The pain oozed and my friends flocked like bees thirsting for pollen. They fell headfirst into the serrated petals of my rejection and sucked with all of their affection until their bloody tongues turned to ointment. So when, two weeks after the prom, the boy wanted to crawl inside of me I let him. If pain were the result I would endure it. He would not try to love me but I knew any rejection I suffered was a resource that would nourish the hearts of my girls. Yes, I remained unloveable. As unlovables we were the most loved, for we were threatless. That is a rare thing for a woman to be. And that was how I loved to be a girl. I was not curved like a knife’s blade. I was not tough like the handle.
But she was a woman. She was the adult friend. She went to salons to get her legs waxed, she had a loyalty card for a hot yoga studio. I could not tell if she had been raised loved or unloved. I needed not only to read her, but to place her within a certain context. Her hair was short and held the memory of having once been blonde. It was now the colour of wheat in the rain, not quite darkened fully, not yet. Her expression crowded her eyes and changed rapidly, as though someone were dropping and lifting a curtain each time she blinked. Where did you come from? I asked when she arrived. There was very little I could discern alone.
She had made me coffee on her first day at the office, then sat across from me on the cherry-red stools in the kitchenette. I swung my legs backwards and forwards as she told me she had a background in marketing. And this sounded so sweet and far away. I knew I would listen to what she had to say about those markets. Later I proof-read one of her briefings. She used semi-colons like they were nothing. She had full mastery over her own expression. I vowed to learn if she had been loved or unloved. And whatever the outcome, I would embrace her best I could.
The first night at her parents’ house I lay awake on the fold-out bed and watched the trees outside cast shadows against the wall. Was this her first time too? I pictured her standing at the foot of the fold-out bed, anticipating my arrival. Folding the towel in ritual, feeling the weight of its estrangement against her warm hands then dropping the sheet across the bed like a mask over her own face. Was she missing the fleet of lambs who’d raised her? Were they out there somewhere now, bleating for her once-blonde hair?
I was not unhappy on the foldout bed. I enjoyed casting my thoughts across the room like a giant net. I enjoyed hauling my impressions back towards me; how shiny the mirror is, how soft the sheets felt; how lonely the room sounds with its empty walls. Privacy felt inviting after the day we’d had, exploring the trails that wound around her parent’s house.
“I never get to walk here,” she had said, letting the gusts of wind redden the planes of her face. “Maybe once or twice, that’s it.” Despite this claim to newness, she spoke the language of the outdoors in a way I’d never learnt. “Nurse logs,” she said knowingly, crouched like a child in the undergrowth. “See how this dead stump is feeding the new seedlings.” She picked up a long, striped feather. “Red-tailed hawk,” she said, disrupting the bristles with her fingers, then slipping the feather into her pocket. Later she paused at a wooden stile, climbed to the top step, pointed to each hillcrest that lined the horizon. “Blackthorne, Hewitt’s, Tumps,” she named each one. And each time we reached a peak she wanted to climb the next. “Just one more”, she kept saying as we rose and fell and rose again, my feet turning raw inside my trainers.
Perhaps she had no ties to anywhere. This would account for her lightness. Though I could picture her, awake now too, missing the knowledge of another body, pressed to the same raft that would deposit her at the sloping banks of a dream. And the ambiguity of her groupness left me lonely. It enhanced my desire for the girls I knew, whose own meadow-minds I could roam at will. But I was alone. And the task of deciding who she was fell on me entirely.
The second day we lay by the pool. She wore an oversized linen shirt and I could make out a black bikini underneath, the way dark stones glow at the bottom of a lake. I looked at her body through my sunglasses. I did not desire her, though she was beautiful. I desired to look at her the way I looked at my other friends. As though we shared a body. As though I was entitled to look, look and keep looking, as I did my own body. As if the point at which we were, arbitrarily, pulled from one girl into many was still within grasping distance. We suffered this surprise in our early teens. People began to look at us differently. This amounted to cutting us up into little pieces, into different girls. It was violent. We wept in the school bathrooms. We burnt each other with cigarettes. We fell apart like wet clay. Each rip caused sores which we tended. They healed but left marks evidencing the days of our sameness. But her body was not shared. And there were no marks to remember the removal of any friend, least of all myself. We approached one another as strangers. She was smooth and new and long.
As the sun rose in the sky she pulled off the shirt and in doing so revealed a long scar on her lower abdomen, poking out of her bikini and curving around and up towards her waist. I looked away, though I longed to ask about it. But adults do not do this. We learn as children the many things that adults do not do, so that we can do those things over and over until there is no more time. We utilize our childhood-permits until they expire. At that point we cannot touch each other’s scars. We cannot lick them. I would have rolled onto my front to show her my own, a scar that split my back into two panels. I would have lied, as I had so many times before. I’d have said, “shark attack, it was a shark attack, I swear” as I had in PE changing rooms, on summer camps, though we lived one hundred miles inland. The scar ran in a straight line from where they’d opened my back and straightened my stooping spine. But I did not ask, because we did not share a bedroom. And I did not offer my own story. Because we did not sweat into the same sheet.
That night a chill descended. She was worried about her parent’s lettuces growing in the garden. She fretted like an aunt of mine. We said goodnight after a great day—the last day. She would drop me at the train station tomorrow. It was a weekend away. Just two days spent together. This was because we had grown up now. The limited paid leave dispensed by the office would be saved up and spent with partners. She was taking a week next month to lie beside him at the ocean. She would slurp frozen-cocktails from plastic cups. Her tongue would turn blue. Her boyfriend would love her for it, for being so silly and beautiful at the same time. No, as adults we squeezed our friends into pockets of time, into weekends and evenings and early morning walks where our hands drank warm coffee through styrofoam cups. She wore a silk robe as she thought of the lettuces. I wanted to part it slightly and look at the scar.
She was thinking about the lettuces as she said goodnight, so I began to think about my inbox. How the companies would need their hearts revived on Monday. I thought that if the companies really wanted to be human they should ask for scars. I would suggest this in the weekly meeting. Say that someone should hurt the companies to make them more likable. Logically speaking, if no one loved the companies, it was certain that someone would start to love the companies. This is called pity, and it is extremely human. This revelation might satisfy my boss, I thought. Might make his mustache twitch like it did when he swallowed a smile. And this was another mark of the adult-friend. She was not the only thing on my mind. I climbed beneath the covers thinking of my own life, of my boss’ mustache, of the coffee machine in the office that looked so graceful dripping away the hours against the mid-morning light.
Later the room made a noise like being woken. I had been dreaming, and the dream was still hot on my skin when I opened my eyes. The room looked up and she was at the door, wrapped in a blanket. “I can’t sleep”, she said, shuffling towards me. She dropped the blanket by the side of the bed and crawled in next to me, lifting and dropping the covers in the dark. She no longer wore the robe. I could not tell what she wore. Then I felt the brush of fabric against my leg. I was relieved to also be clothed. In the dream, my fingernails, inexplicably long, had been carefully puncturing a chain of crescent moons along the neat line of her scar. Her skin had broken easily. It had been juicy as an orange and the liquid pooled beneath my fingernails. I opened her up, all the way. It was warm when I slid my hand inside. I swallowed the dream, anxious that she might sense its remnants as she settled down in bed beside me.
When she was still at last the bed sighed like an ocean being reunited with a creature it had lost. Her hair seemed longer and though I could not see it, I could hear it smudging against the pillow. I considered asking about the lettuces. I thought they’d be on her mind.
The silence was sending the room back to sleep. I had not spoken. I wondered if she knew I was awake.
“I saw you looking,” she said to the darkness. “At the scar.”
I winced. She knew, I thought to myself. The dream rose in me like bile. Inside the wet folds of her abdomen I had retrieved the red-tailed-hawk feather. It had been a challenge to tug it from her side. The flesh had sealed around it. Once free, I’d sucked the blood clean from the stem and swallowed whatever little globules of flesh were left on my tongue. Then I’d plunged the sharp end into the skin of my forearm, letting the nib pierce down through the sinewy layers until it became a part of me. I would have taken flight, had she not opened the door and woken me. I waited for her to speak. I sucked on the remainder of the quiet.
“I gave my kidney to my brother,” she said at last, her tone neutral. A wave of sleep rose up to meet us. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with this information and could not remember the first time I thought of my own kidneys. Children do not speak of kidneys. Children are all heart and stomach. Yet she had two, and now only one. The other is floating somewhere, far away, breathing different blood.
I realised then that her hand was resting on my arm, in the exact spot where I had plunged the feather. I moved my own hand, to be certain that nothing sharp and bone-like protruded from that point, and mistaking my touch for something else, she clasped my hand, and poked her fingers between mine. It took a moment to grow used to having her there.
“Shark attack” I murmured back to her eventually. Her last waking breath was swallowing its own tail. In the dark I could see her mouth loosen into a smile. Or perhaps I could hear it. The clicking noise that gums make as they unslick teeth from their resting place. An adult-scar for the adult-friend, I thought to myself, registering a beginning forming either side of the bed. “I thought it was from a shark attack,” I repeated as the night closed its circuit.

Imogen writes poems and stories in Ithaca, NY. She teaches writing at Cornell University, where she recently earned her MFA.
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