Whenever Kim came over, she asked for milk. She drank glass after glass, the white liquid glugging down her long throat. They only drank powdered milk at her house, Kim explained. My family was poor, but Kim’s dad had been laid off from the lumber mill for a long time. Whenever I went over there, he was sleeping on the couch. Kim’s mother supported them by working as a manager at Carl’s Jrs.
After class, Kim and I ran around our high school begging nickels and dimes off the other students until we had enough for Its-Its ice cream bars and my favorite fruit, kumquats. I walked beside Kim, who was much taller than me, biting into the teardrops of citrus, the sour juice spraying into my mouth. We went to the thrift store and pawed through flannel shirts, or the bead store, with its tables of tiny attainable shards of color.
“Do you think I could be a model?” Kim said once.
“Well, you’re tall enough,” I said, averting my eyes, believing I’d tactfully avoided the fact that I didn’t think she was beautiful like that. Once, we took photos of each other in the horse pasture behind my house, wearing my mom’s hippie clothes: paisley ruched tops, scarlet silk skirts, gold lace shawls. Kim took a photograph of me with my shirt off. Later, when I got the pictures developed at Payless, I was horrified by my overflowing breasts and white tummy. Just flabby, unkempt.
At Kim’s house, her cat tried to talk to you. It met your eyes and chirped like it was having a conversation. The cat was the only thing Kim had that I wanted. When she opened the fridge door, there were post-its on all the food. “Mine.” “Do not eat!” We tiptoed past her sleeping father, blinds drawn above him, the TV droning softly. Her brother was always listening to Metallica in his bedroom.
Sometimes I saw him hitchhiking around town, like he was practicing running away.
Kim had cut up Sassy and Seventeen magazines and covered her room with the pictures. Half the wall by her bed was blanketed with pouting, angular women. She was also saving trash to use in craft projects: milk jugs, plastic ties, rubber bands. For awhile we both sold necklaces at a craft fair. She loaded strings with beads, making ropes that flopped against the chest. She never sold any of them, but I did all right.
I spent the night at her house a lot, even though Kim preferred my place, with its milk and computer games. But there was freedom at her home because her parents didn’t care what we did. Once, we rode her bikes a mile to the beach and ran around barefoot on the cold sand, giddy, shrieking with laughter. It was the only time I successfully rode a bike without falling off. The day felt significant to me for a long time afterwards, a step toward some imagined future.
Mostly though, we gambled over card games. Poker, War, especially Speed. We bet the coins we’d scrounged, a jumble of pennies and nickels in the center of Kim’s bed. Sometimes she got mad at me over money. She would give me a dollar here or there and I wouldn’t pay her back fast enough, and her anger would ferment for days and then explode on me. That’s how I learned some people get upset when they lend you money, and it’s better not to mess with them in that way. When we played cards, I never let her win. Not once did she win the pile of coins. Why did she keep betting against me when she knew I was faster than her? I can’t say, but she always did, and I always took her money. I’d come away from her house with a pocket jingling with $4 or $5 in coins, which was a lot to me at the time. I rolled them in paper tubes and took them to the bank. By the end of high school, I had $5,000 from all my penny-pinching. It didn’t even cover the first year of college. By then, Kim and I were no longer friends. We had a big fight that seemed to come out of nowhere, Kim screaming at me, rejecting me, throwing our friendship away. It hurt so badly, I buried my mouth in the rug in my bedroom. It was white and thick. My parents bought it on sale when they remodeled, spreading it all over the second floor of our house like cream.
Joy Lanzendorfer is the author of the novel Right Back Where We Started From. Other work has been in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Poetry Foundation, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Smithsonian, and many others.
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