Chapter Text
when we were kids
laying around the lawn
on our
bellies
we often talked
about
how
we'd like to
die
and
we all
agreed on the
same
thing;
we'd all
like to die
fucking
Charles Bukowski
*
It only takes a minute of the two of them sitting on the stairs together for the fight to begin afresh. It had never died, really, not all the way. But watching Van set up the camera in the living room, the reality of the corner they’ve backed themselves into, breathes new life into the argument.
“You’re still upset with me,” Lottie says, somewhat rhetorically. Of course Natalie is still upset with her; she’s been upset with her for days, a tenacious snowball rolling downhill, destination unknown.
Still, Natalie lies about it. “No, I’m not.”
“I know when you’re upset with me.” Lottie doesn’t even look at her—her face is drawn with a faraway expression, not angry, not sad. Considering.
“If you say so.”
Lottie does turn to her then. “It’s just sex. Right?”
Natalie isn’t even sure if she understands what just sex means anymore. Is sex just anything? “If you say so.”
“Have you thought about it before? With me?”
A nod. No point in denying it, really. “Yeah. Have you?”
Lottie’s answer comes quick. “I’ve thought about it a lot.” The silence between them lingers—did Natalie understand this before? That Lottie has been thinking about it—that she’s been thinking about it a lot? Before she can decide, Lottie follows this up with: “We can still be friends.”
Brisk, decisive. Doesn’t make a lot of good sense. Very Lottie. From underneath Natalie’s irritation, a little burble of warmth.
“Hey, you guys ready?” Van calls from the living room, craning her head around to the stairs. “We’re burning daylight here, people.”
“If you say so,” Natalie says for a third time, then rises, and descends the stairs to the living room. After a half a second, Lottie follows.
One week prior
The night that they kiss for the first time, Lottie declares: “I’m done letting my libido ruin my life,” out of nowhere. Although she wants to, Natalie understands that sitting on the couch at a party is not the place to split hairs between Lottie’s “libido” and Lottie’s indomitable need to be loved, unbroken in the face of a myriad of professional attempts on its life.
Getting to the party in the first place had been something of a Rube Goldberg machine. It’s an Amherst Guy Party and Natalie is generally not a fan of Amherst Guy Parties due to their general proclivity toward date rapeyness.
But, like most things that semester, Natalie and Lottie’s life is ruled by Jackie and Shauna’s most recent friendship-ending argument. They have to go to the party because the Smith lacrosse team is going to be there, and if the Smith lacrosse team is going to be there then Melissa is going to be there, and if Melissa is going to be there Shauna is going to be there.
And Jackie needs Shauna to know that she is doing just fine without her, thank you very much, so of course she promises to keep Nat and Lottie in shitty beer if they accompany her and then promptly wanders off once she realizes Bobby is there. At this point, Nat is immune to the bullshit.
Anyway, the libido thing is pretty abrupt. Generally Lottie would say something like that upon laying eyes on a girl she wants to screw, but she’s looking at Nat when she says it, and they’re sequestered together not talking to anybody else.
Natalie wants to tell her that it’s not her libido that has ruined her life, but her piece of shit, worthless father. Before she can, Jackie emerges from the crowd like the second coming of repressed lesbian jesus and takes Lottie by the hand.
“Sorry Nat, can I borrow her for a second?”
Natalie is going to protest—she’d actually like to know what the fuck Lottie means by that, exactly—but Jackie removes Lottie with astounding quickness and, to Natalie’s chagrin, she is replaced in the next second by an Amherst Guy.
“Hey,” he says. “I’m Tyler.”
She suppresses a grimace and squeezes her shoulders toward her chest in an effort to minimize contact. Even if she were looking to hook up with guys right now, Tyler couldn’t be farther from her type. He looks like his idea of punk is less Fugazi and more Blink-182.
“Nat.”
“So how the hell do you know Lottie Matthews?” A likely question given Lottie’s quasi-celebrity status, and one that has been asked before. No matter how many times they arrive together—which is a lot—people are always curious.
Nat opens her mouth, “Uh—”
*
They meet at a party freshman year, and within an hour of their acquaintance Natalie finds out that Lottie Matthews is a hotel heiress.
“Like Paris Hilton?” Natalie asks, passing her a joint as they sit shoulder to shoulder on the roof of the party house. “Pretty much like Paris Hilton.” Lottie replies without an ounce of humility. Natalie decides then and there that she likes her tremendously.
They move in together the next semester. It becomes foggy, at times, whether it’s just the breakneck speed of a college friendship between girls or something unique to the two of them. In her most vulnerable hours, Natalie desperately thinks that it has to be the latter.
The months that follow are the champagne times—the salad days—in which both Nat and Lottie glow in the light of each other’s suns. Their differences are charming at best and irrelevant at worst.
Natalie is delighted when she realizes that Lottie is both a lesbian and something of a scoundrel. Makes sense in theory, but is so much more pleasing in real life.
This combination, of course, is their downfall in the end. For as long as Natalie has known her, Lottie has talked a big game about not caring if her father ever found out about her proclivities. But then, he does find out, along with the entire readership of TMZ, when Lottie is photographed lip-locked with a D-list DJ at a nightclub in Boston.
Natalie tells her it’s a bad idea before she goes. This has nothing to do with her crush, which begins somewhere in sophomore year as a fluttering, breaks out as a full blown sexuality crisis by Thanksgiving, and by DJ-Gate is simply an open, gnawing wound that never goes away.
It actually has everything to do with that. Natalie has come to understand why dogs in heat howl, and so she tells Lottie not to go to Boston. Lottie goes anyway, and within two weeks the gravy train stops, and the telephone calls begin to pour in.
Natalie wonders sometimes whether Mr. Matthews is angrier that Lottie was caught with a woman or a DJ. Either way, he’s pissed. The first few days, Lottie seems unphased—just another argument to add to the burning bonfire—but by the time he sends somebody to tow the Benz out of their driveway she has an air of grim determination.
They pay $650 a month to rent a big house in the deep dark Northampton woods that their friends call Baba Yaga’s house, ghoulish with its white wood and drafty windows and lack of neighbors.
They used to laugh about how cheap it was, $650. Sometimes Lottie would cover the whole thing just because she was feeling particularly generous or fond of Nat, or had just gone on a good date. But then, TMZ. And the phone calls. Sometimes from Lottie’s father, sometimes from her weeping mother. Sometimes from a lawyer.
Lottie starts waiting tables, junior year. Paris Hilton with an apron and a notepad, asking would you like fries with that?
“Was it worth it?” Natalie asks her once. They’re sitting on the roof of Baba Yaga’s house this time, drinking shit beer. There’s foam on Lottie’s upper lip, and she sucks it off. So much has changed since freshman year. Their financial situation. The way Natalie feels about watching Lottie’s tongue poke out to lick beer from her upper lip.
“Hm?”
“The kiss,” they have the picture framed in the dining room like Catholics memorializing JFK. “That girl up in Boston.”
“Oh,” Lottie twists her face up and laughs somewhat manically. “Fuck no,” she says. “Way too much tongue. Honestly though, I wish I’d done something worse.”
“Worse?”
“Worse,” Lottie confirms. “Something that would have really hurt him. Hurt his business.”
“So your big regret is that you didn’t get photographed eating cooch.”
“Yeah,” Lottie says. “I guess it is.”
They laugh and laugh.
*
“—Dunno,” Nat says. “I think we met at a party or something.”
“Makes sense,” Tyler nods. “Is it true that she’s. You know. A mega dyke.”
Natalie wants to be offended on Lottie’s behalf or defend her honor or something, but honestly. She’s going to laugh her head off when Natalie tells her about this later. “She sure is.”
“No dudes at all?”
“Uh, not that I know of.”
“And do you two…” he trails off. Natalie glances into the throng and her eyes catch Lottie’s. She’s already watching them, an odd sort of look on her face. Natalie sucks her teeth.
“No,” she says simply.
“Yeah, you’re too hot to be lezzing out like that. She is too, I guess.”
Natalie considers telling him that she has been trying to lez out half-heartedly for a year and a half and with a desperate, singular focus for about six months with no success. One it had become clear that the Lottie thing wasn’t going to happen, she had tried for just about anybody.
Before she can, Lottie appears in front of them. “Hey Nat?” She says, arms crossed. “Can you help me with something really quick?”
“Hot,” says Tyler.
“Sure,” says Natalie, ignoring him, eyes only for Lottie. She takes her outstretched hand and follows her into the crowd.
*
Natalie wakes up the morning after the party certain of two things. First, she is hungover as fuck. Second, her and Lottie Matthews had kissed. With tongue.
The first part is par for the course. The second has never happened before in the entirety of human history.
Natalie can’t even contain the butterflies while she’s puking in their downstairs bathroom. She gargles the taste of last night’s Hamm’s out of her mouth thinking about how Lottie’s face had changed right before she’d leaned down and pressed their mouths together.
She’d been so delighted by this forbidden knowledge that she’d almost wanted to keep her eyes open while it happened, which was probably why Natalie was not getting a lot of open invitations from women for kissing. Or any, really, before Lottie.
A clattering in the kitchen alerts her to the fact that Lottie is awake and probably putting on coffee. “Shit,” Natalie swears, taking in her reflection in the mirror. Face busted to shit, hair a rat’s nest, reeking of beer like she’d slept in a puddle of it. The bathroom reeks like sweat and vomit. She pushes the window open.
She runs the faucet into her cupped palm and then dumps the water onto her head, dousing it until it lays flat. The next palmful goes into her face, and the next into her armpits. These are the extent of the things she has control over, as nothing can be done about her grown out shag and dark roots.
These are things that Lottie sees every day, anyway, and she’d kissed Nat all the same. Natalie leaves the bathroom.
“You’re up early,” Lottie says without turning to face her. She’s fussing with their ancient coffee machine, trying to eyeball the grounds as she dumps them in with a spoon. “I didn’t think I’d see you until noon.”
“Hangover woke me up.”
“Poor you,” she turns then, spoon still in hand, and smiles at Natalie docile as a lamb. Lottie looks incredible. Hangovers bounce off of her like a balloon off of teflon. For a second, it seems like maybe she doesn’t remember the kiss, she’s acting so normal. But the mood shifts quick, like the air before a summer storm. “Feeling better now?”
“Puking helped.”
“Is that what that sound was? I thought raccoons got into the trash again.”
“You know what? I’d love to see you get taken down a peg.”
“I’m too beautiful for hangovers.”
“Then what am I?”
She means it as a joke, but the layer of eggshells beneath their feet is so thick and it lands like a lead fucking balloon. Lottie flutters her eyelashes, then turns back to the coffee maker.
“Well,” she says. “You’re Natalie.”
Shit, had the kiss really been that bad? Could a bad kiss be salvaged? Natalie hadn’t been expecting a love confession, but considering that they’d been about 2 seconds away from rounding second before Van ruined everything by busting into the bathroom, she had been hoping for a warmer reception than this.
“Crazy party last night, huh?” She nudges, holding onto her nerve with her fingernails. Lottie takes a couple of mugs from the cabinet above her head.
“Really crazy,” Lottie agrees, sloshing coffee into both of their mugs. “I barely remember parts of it.”
Natalie’s heart plummets. “Yeah, but—”
The wall phone rings, and Natalie does not miss the way that Lottie looks a touch relieved when she turns to answer it.
“Oh, hey, Jackie,” Lottie says, passing Natalie her coffee. Natalie comes and puts her ear to the other side of the phone, trying to hear Jackie’s end of the conversation. “Seriously, again? How many parties is Shauna going to this weekend?” Lottie lowers the receiver and tilts her head to Nat. Because of where she’s standing, when the phone moves, their mouths are close.
Natalie licks her lips. Thinks about last night, Lottie’s face. The smell of her soap and how beautiful she’d looked, even in that shitty bathroom light. “Nat?”
“Hm?”
“Did you just hear a word I just said?”
“Um?”
Lottie puts the receiver back to her mouth. “Natalie’s daydreaming again. We’ll be there. Okay, sure. Come over around five. See you then.”
“We’ll be there?” Natalie says, her brain catching up at warp speed: “We’ll be where?”
“If you’d get your head out of the clouds,” Lottie replies, then devilishly taps the tip of her nose with her finger, like nothing is different between them. Like nothing is changed. “Then maybe you’d know.”
*
A double header of a party is not unheard of and almost never unwelcome. Natalie might even be considered one of the country’s great lobbyists for hair of the dog as a hangover cure, but she’s got bigger things on her mind than a campus party.
She’s trying to solve the great mystery of love and the greater mystery of Lottie Matthews. Natalie thinks that she understands Lottie pretty well most days, considering that the two of them could probably star in a Disney Channel original movie about friendships bridging the divide between cultures.
She knows, for instance, that all of Lottie’s feelings live in subtext and that Natalie is more likely to understand her emotions from the way she cuts carrots or brushes hair from her face than from anything Lottie actually admits to her out loud. She also knows that, for a person to whom the word heiress wholeheartedly applies, Lottie has a surprising depth of spirit and character.
So Natalie decides to let the kiss thing be for a few hours, even if her whole body vibrates every time Lottie so much as glances in her direction.
“Why are we going to another party again?” Natalie asks as they suit up to dribble the ball outside. Lottie takes her scarf from the coat rack and wraps it around Nat’s neck, two loops.
“Because Jackie and Shauna would do pretty much anything to destroy each other. At least this time she said she’d bring beer to the pregame.”
Natalie is more in danger of losing her scholarship for failing her women’s studies midterm than suddenly being shitty at soccer, but soccer is infinitely more appealing to her than reading about whatever Andrea Dworkin is up to. Even still, Lottie tries to simultaneously engage her academically while they practice. Bless her.
“Sum up what she thinks about pornography in a few sentences.”
“I don’t know. Bad? I don’t think she’d like Ben teaching this class, either,” Natalie shoots the ball over to Lottie, who catches it with her foot. They are out on the sprawling backyard of Baba Yaga’s house, hewn in by birch trees naked in the mid-October chill.
“Her husband is gay.”
“Yeah, but Ben’s not a radical feminist. He calls his computer a stupid bitch when it won’t turn on.”
“Do you agree or disagree with Dworkin’s position on pornography?” Natalie groans, taking the ball and dribbling it halfheartedly across the grass. Leaves crunch underfoot.
“I don’t disagree but the stick in my ass isn’t as big as hers. Porn has its place in the world.” Natalie says, and kicks the ball back over to Lottie.
“So eloquent,” it could be a dig, but Lottie smiles like she means it.
“What about you? Agree or disagree?”
“I think porn is boring.”
Natalie barks out a laugh, her breath fogging the air in front of her. Lottie is dribbling the ball up the yard and Nat is tracking her. “Oh yeah?”
“I mean, what’s fun about watching two or three people who barely know each other insert tab A into slot B?” Natalie is desperately curious what inserting tab A into slot B looks like in the porn Lottie is apparently watching. Also—two or three?? “It’s missing the best part. It’s like soup without salt.”
“The salt being?”
“Knowing how badly somebody wants you. Looking at their face and seeing it.” Lottie kicks the ball and, unprepared, it slams into Natalie’s shin.
“Ow!” She exclaims. “Fuck!”
Jackie arrives promptly at five with a smile and a six pack and Natalie excuses herself to go look for sticks to start a fire in the living room stove. The intermittent tension in the house is oppressive enough without Jackie Taylor, who has the delicacy and discretion of an elephant, getting involved.
She needs the fresh air. She picks through the birchwood forest in her jeans and Docs and bomber jacket, grabbing fallen branches and replaying the kiss again and again in her head. If the cold wasn’t already pinkening her cheeks, the memory of Lottie’s palm against the back of her neck would be more than enough, or the curve of her breast against Natalie’s torso, or the way her party dress had given so easily to Natalie’s efforts to push the hem upward.
By the time Natalie is walking back toward the house, she’s almost worked up the nerve to bring it up again. Maybe she can get Lottie alone somewhere at the party.
She comes up along the side, lost in thought. The bathroom window is open and she can hear Lottie and Jackie’s voices drifting out of it. The hum of the hair dryer. The faint sound of their pregame mixtape. It’s mostly unintelligible, but as she gets closer, Natalie hears something that she thinks might be her name.
Her heart stutters in her chest and she pauses. The right thing to do would be to keep stepping noisily so that they hear her approach in time to pivot their conversation.
Instead, Natalie lightens her footfalls and, arms full of branches, comes as close to the bathroom window as she can without announcing herself.
A voice, Lottie’s: “—where the hell you were, anyway?”
“I was with Bobby.”
“Not keeping tabs on Shauna and Melissa?”
“Sorry, who’s Melissa?” Jackie’s voice is all faux-innocence. “Shauna needs to get over herself.”
“Maybe she’s waiting for you to apologize.”
“I mean, can you believe she’s been sitting with her in class and not me? It’s so obvious how bad she wants my attention. Well, I’m not giving her the satisfaction.”
“I thought you just asked who Melissa is?”
“You’re changing the subject. We were talking about you and Nat.”
Natalie plasters herself to the side of the house and clutches the sticks to her chest, where her heart is trying to bust through her ribcage.
“Not really much to say,” Lottie says, but even Natalie can hear the squirrelly undertones in her voice.
For once, Jackie mirrors exactly what Natalie is thinking: “Uh, what?” She balks. “Van said she saw you two about to go full Bull Durham on the bathroom counter.”
“So what, it was a party. We were both drunk.”
“Nuh-uh sister, you are not getting off that easy. I’ve never gotten so drunk I macked on Van—and trust me, I’ve had the opportunity,” thank you, Jackie! “But I get it. I mean, Nat’s a little—she’s kind of a dweeb, isn’t she?” Jackie, what the fuck!
“Jackie, what the fuck? Nat’s your friend.”
“I don’t mean it in a bad way! I know she’s really trying the whole girl thing and I’m so proud of her. But you’d think for somebody who had such a reputation in high school, she’d be a little smoother with the ladies,” Natalie sees one of their hands reach onto the windowsill where a beer rests and pick it up, presumably taking a sip. “Plus, she’s literally studying to be an accountant.”
“It’s a learning curve, okay? I think she’s doing her best,” Lottie replies, not denying what Jackie is saying at all. Natalie frowns. “I think the accountant thing is sweet. She’s really good at math. You wouldn’t expect that from her.”
“Hey, I’m trying to let you off the hook here,” says Jackie. “The whole falling in love with your doofus best friend thing is something probably best kept in a John Waters movie, right?”
“It’s not like that.”
“Okay, so then…what?”
“What do you mean what?”
“I mean, if you like her. Or you don’t think she’s cute, or something?”
A beat of silence. Natalie barely restrains herself from biting down on her fist. “What’s with the third degree?”
“I actually don’t think that that’s an unfair question. Or, you know. It shouldn’t be hard to answer.”
“I mean, Nat is my best friend, okay? Dating her would be like…I don’t know. Dating my cousin, or something.”
Instant fatality. The only thing stopping Natalie from dropping to her knees as if shot is the fact that Jackie and Lottie would become instantly aware that Natalie has just borne witness to every humiliating beat of that conversation. Fuck—hadn’t Lottie been the one to kiss Nat? That’s the way she remembers it, anyway.
Wounded like a fucking animal and unwilling to hear whatever Jackie is saying about the party tonight, Natalie takes a few silent steps back and then continues forward, purposefully loud.
It has the desired effect, because Lottie sticks her head out the window and smiles as if she hasn’t just pulverized Nat’s heart.
“Hey handsome,” Lottie says. “Is that a big bundle of sticks or are you just happy to see me?”
“Both,” Natalie says, and blushes at her own earnestness.
If Lottie notices the damper on Natalie’s mood, she doesn’t remark upon it. Natalie shuffles into the house and begins to busy herself getting a fire started in the stove.
“Okay, Little House on the Prairie," Jackie says as the two of them emerge from the bathroom. “Why don’t you guys just turn the heat on? It’s freezing in here.”
“We’re trying not to use too much electricity,” Nat grunts, throwing a match into the stove and blowing to get the flames go higher. She pivots where she’s crouched to face Lottie and Jackie. “We maybe haven’t paid the bill in one or two…or six months.”
“Okay, well,” Jackie crawls over the back of the couch to sit in front of Nat, hands on her knees and smiling like she’s not just been complicit in the total dismantling of Natalie’s ego. Lottie stands behind her, arms crossed, frowning. “I was just telling Lottie—”
“Jackie, don’t. She doesn’t care.”
“I was just telling Lottie,” Jackie repeats, louder, “That Gigi is going to be there tonight.”
“Gigi? Who is—”
“Gigi. Georgia, from Econ.”
“Oh,” the fire now a going concern, Natalie sits on her butt next to the stove and knits her brow. “Okay?”
“See, I told you she doesn’t care.”
“Shush, Lottie,” Jackie says without looking at her. “She dabbles in girl kissing and told me last week that she thinks you’re cute.”
Natalie tries to rack her brain for what this person even looks like. She thinks that maybe she’s a brunette? “Oh. She said that?”
“Well, she said she liked your shirt. Same thing though, trust me.”
“Gigi isn’t even a real name,” says Lottie. Natalie can see her shoulders tensing. “It’s a name for a crusty little white dog, not a person.”
“I’ll point her out to you at the party,” Jackie continues as if Lottie has not spoken. Lottie rolls her eyes.
“Don’t bother.”
Natalie watches Lottie’s reaction hawkishly. If she hadn’t just been brutally cousinzoned, she might identify it as jealous. But that isn’t right. Is it?
She can’t help the confusion that follows, nor the irritation that follows the confusion. “Why shouldn’t she bother?” Natalie asks, and Lottie’s eyes snap to her.
“Well, you don’t—” Uncertainty flashes across her face. Lottie shifts from foot to foot. “—you don’t actually want to date Gigi do you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know Gigi. Why wouldn’t I want to date her?”
Jackie’s eyes are flicking between them like a spectator at a tennis match.
“I just think you can do better.”
“Do you know Gigi?”
“Well, I’ve never met her, but I—”
Frustration tugs behind Natalie’s ribs. “Then why do you care?”
Lottie’s face tightens and she squares her shoulders. “I don’t care.”
“You don’t care?” Natalie squints. “You just—”
She doesn’t get to finish her sentence because, a half second later, the lights go out and plunge the house into darkness. Jackie squeaks.
“What the hell just happened?” She asks. Behind her, Lottie groans and drops her head into her hands.
“I think six months of unpaid electric bills just happened,” says Nat.
*
Natalie holds the flashlight for Jackie while she punches numbers into their old Texas Instruments calculator. At Jackie’s other shoulder, the two of them standing next to where she sits hunched over their kitchen table, Lottie bites at a nail.
“Okay, that’s $75.63…” Jackie murmurs, punching the number in off of the paper in front of her. “Which brings your total outstanding electric bill to…$327 and forty cents.”
“God,” says Lottie. Nat crosses herself. Jackie turns in her chair.
“This seems like a problem.”
“This is a problem,” Lottie crosses over to the kitchen counter where they keep a coffee can with a slot cut in the lid and a construction paper face. A sign next to it says feed me rent money!
She dumps the can’s contents on the surface of the table and quickly parses through. “We’ve got like $350 here.”
“Yeah,” Nat says, “And rent is due in two weeks.”
“Maybe Mr. Martinez will give us a break.”
“I think Mr. Martinez lost his patience for that two or three breaks ago.”
“Okay, Tiny Tim collective? Not that I’m not sympathetic, but can we discuss en route to the party?” Jackie shivers. “It’s fucking freezing in here.”
They take the back way to the party, through the woods behind the house. Lottie doesn’t like it, says that nature gives her the creeps. Nat finds it peaceful.
On the walk over, Lottie ignores Nat until Nat gets so irritated that she starts ignoring Lottie. They don’t really do this—that is, squabble—and Natalie feels that it’s obvious that the two of them are fumbling through this attempt at it. What’s worse, she doesn’t even know why. It can’t be the electricity—this is not their first set of dire financial straits, and they have only ever laughed their way through them—and the Gigi thing just doesn’t make sense.
If Lottie wanted to, she could. Natalie had made that abundantly clear last night when she’d done everything short of shoving her pants down and bending over. It’s embarrassing now, in light of the revelation outside the bathroom, and it’s even worse that it feels like Lottie is punishing her for showing interest in another person.
It’s true that there is a sliver of possessiveness baked into the friendship. Folded into the batter that made them. Lottie likes staking her claim over Nat—when she had money, she liked to buy her things that were obviously just a touch too expensive for Natalie to afford on her own. A pair of shoes, even the jacket that Natalie is wearing that very evening.
Up to four hours ago, Natalie had liked it too. Now she considers taking the stupid jacket off and whipping it into the woods.
“Are you guys okay?” Jackie asks when they arrive at the house. She stops them in front of the front door, turning around and crossing her arms. “Because you’re acting pretty weird.”
“Fine,” Nat mumbles, at the same time Lottie says: “Just tired.”
Jackie’s face softens a touch. “Is it the electricity thing? Because you guys know that you can come stay with me for as long as you want.”
“Jax, you have six roommates.” Nat says, crossing her arms against the cold.
“And room for two more. You can bunk up in Mari’s room.”
“It’s not the electricity thing. At least I don’t think so,” Lottie’s eyes shift over to Natalie. “Nat?”
“We’ll figure it out.” Nat says, and shrugs.
“Okay, well, then let’s put on our pageant smiles and try to have fun tonight, okay?”
Upon entering the din of the party, Natalie decides that, notwithstanding the latent pangs of her hangover, she needs a drink immediately. She does not get her wish, because Jackie says “Oh, there’s Gigi!” And whisks her into the crowd to make the introduction.
Gigi has curly brown hair and a full mouth and a nose ring. She is not bad looking by any stretch of the imagination, which is horrible news for Natalie, who begins to sweat immediately upon coming within three feet of her.
After making the introduction but before she swans off on some made up excuse to leave the two of them alone, Jackie pulls Natalie close and whispers: “You’ll do fine,” into her ear. Dweeb and doofus notwithstanding, Jackie has an inner core of terrible sincerity.
It gives Natalie a little burst of confidence. Yeah, maybe she will do fine.
*
She does not do fine.
It’s an odd thing, really. Natalie isn’t uninteresting, unfunny, or unhot. She is the opposite enough of all of those things to have had several boyfriends and be the subject of a number of scandalous, jealousy-driven rumors regarding her promiscuity.
This is exactly why Nat hates discovering things about herself. She can never just be normal about them—like a pot left to boil with no lid, hot water splashing over the sides. Even the revelation, at the age of fifteen, that she loves sex had been damning to her. The girl thing is worse by several degrees. For a little while, she’d thought it would be just the same as boys and that she would have the same success rate with it. But, it turns out that boys are different. Specifically, they’re idiots—soft-bellied and docile. Girls are like bait rabbits running Nat stupid across the racetrack.
“I’m going to go…get a drink,” Gigi says about ten minutes into their stilted conversation, and does not invite Natalie along nor really wait for her reaction before disappearing into the crowd. Natalie sighs and her shoulders slump.
When she turns to see who among her friends have witnessed yet another generational wipeout, they have all disappeared. Natalie makes a pit stop in the kitchen for a cup of punch and then ascends the staircase in search of them.
The place is huge. It’s not a house in Northampton, it’s somebody’s Northampton House. On the second floor, she opens doors at random, encountering empty spaces and, in one, somebody getting a blowjob on an immaculately made guest bed.
“Jesus,” she hisses, slamming the door shut. She knocks on the next one.
“Come in,” it’s distinctly Van’s voice. Natalie breathes a sigh of relief and enters.
She steps into another bedroom neat and impersonal enough to be a guest room. There is a double bed pressed against the wall on which Van and Taissa sit, not quite touching. Van is showing Tai something on a magazine page.
On the floor, the rest of the girls sit in a circle, passing a joint. The room is hazy. Jackie is there, and Lottie and Mari to each side of her, and Gen between them. Shauna and Melissa, notably, are nowhere to be found.
Natalie briefly locks eyes with Lottie, but looks away, deciding she’s still a little pissed at her. She jams her way between Gen and Mari and makes gimme hands at the joint.
“Nat!” Says Jackie. “Where’s Gigi?”
“Downstairs probably,” Nat says, taking a toke and then a long sip of Jungle Juice. Jackie frowns.
“How did it go?”
Natalie shrugs, and says nothing and everything at the same time. On reflex, she glances over at Lottie, whose posture has relaxed considerably. She looks almost a touch relieved.
“Aw, Nat,” Mari coos, putting a hand on her shoulder, and Lottie locks up again. “Want to play truth or dare with us?”
“This is so juvenile,” Tai says, looking up from the magazine.
“Can it, Harvard,” Mari squeezes Nat. “It’s Lottie’s turn to pick. Truth or dare?”
“Nat, what happened?” Jackie throws up her hands. “She liked your shirt!”
“Ugh, Jackie. I really don’t want to do a whole postmortem tonight,” Natalie says, and keeps the joint moving.
“You might not want to, but you need to.”
Lottie says: “Jackie, ease off her, yeah?”
Mari says: “Lottie, she’s right. Nat’s been chasing pussy for like…six months now. Has it been six months, Nat?”
Nat blushes. “About that, yeah.”
“There’s no reason for it,” rocking back onto her hands, Mari lets her eyes drag up and down Nat’s body. “You’re cute.”
“Mari, put it back in your pants. Trust me, it’s not as big as you think,” Lottie says sternly.
“Lottie, I’ve got it, okay?” Says Natalie, and rolls her eyes when Lottie frowns and turns petulantly away.
Mari smirks. “I didn’t realize Nat’s mom came to the party.”
“Mari, enough.”
“What?” Mari gapes at Nat. “But you just told her to back off.”
“Yeah, because I can tell Lottie to back off, you can’t.”
Now Mari rolls her eyes. “Forgot you two were dating, my bad.”
“We’re not dating,” Lottie and Nat say at the same time, catch each other’s glance, then turn away.
“Hey, can we stop talking about Nat’s virginity for a second?” Asks Van. “It’s bumming me out.”
Natalie looks around the room like she’s in her own personal version of The Truman Show. “Um, not a virgin?”
“She needs to break the seal,” Jackie continues, as if nobody in the room has spoken. “Now, for a heterosexual woman, I have kissed a lot of girls.” Beside her, Lottie makes eye contact with Natalie again, This time, she screws up her face in a kind of yikes expression, pulling the corners of her mouth back, knitting her brow. Despite herself, Natalie bites back a snicker. Jackie, without looking over, holds up a flat hand to Lottie’s face. “Charlotte Matthews, I want you to know that I see your face and I am choosing to rise above it.” Lottie’s face breaks into a beaming smile, pointing at Natalie. Natalie smiles back. For a second, everything feels normal again. “Natalie, have you ever seen boobs?”
Only to come to a screeching halt. Natalie breaks eye contact with Lottie to look over at Jackie, laughing in disbelief. “What! I’ve played women’s soccer my whole life. I’ve seen tits like you wouldn’t believe.”
“No, I mean. On purpose. Because somebody wanted to show them to you.”
She wants to come up with another pithy response, but cannot. Natalie doesn’t even know for sure if her mother breastfed her. “Uh. I mean—”
“See.” Jackie points at her, smug. “That’s the seal.”
Lottie is back to looking pissed, or exhausted by this conversation, or both. “Jackie, stop being a cunt.”
“I am not! I want Nat to get some ass as bad as anybody.”
“Nat will get ass on her own time.”
“Hey, I’m right here.” Natalie huffs. This time, instead of looking away, Lottie looks directly at her. She crosses her arms and sets her mouth.
“I’m on your side.”
“I’m on your side, too,” interjects Jackie. “Which is why I dare Lottie to show you her boobs.”
There is a brief, beautiful moment of shocked silence before the room erupts into a rapturous clamor. Natalie loves her friends, but they are sadists.
Lottie, arms still crossed, is red all the way up to her hairline. “I didn’t say truth or dare.”
“I’m using executive authority.”
“This isn’t a dictatorship, Jackie.”
“Raise your hand if you want Lottie to show Nat her tits,” says Gen. All hands, except for Lottie and Nat’s, fly into the air. Even Tai. “That was the democratic process at work.”
The little spark of a thrill Natalie feels in her ribcage is accompanied by a heaping spoonful of shame. It doesn’t help that she can’t read the expression on Lottie’s face, behind her blush. She needs to see something in the neighborhood of obvious reproach to put a leash on her own semitreasonous feelings.
Lottie emits a single strained laugh. “No.” Natalie glances away, keeping her eyes on the floor. “You’re all pigs. I’m not going to nonconsensually flash Nat.”
“Would it be nonconsensual?” Jackie asks, a little smile quirking at the corner of her mouth.
“Fuck it, I’ll do it if Lottie’s too chickenshit,” Mari says, passing the joint aside and sitting up on her knees. “I like helping the needy. Nat, is this going to make you sick or something?”
Natalie feels like she’s just been sucked up into a tornado and is being blown around, blind and battered. Now she’s the one who’s turning red. “Uh, definitely not,” she stutters.
“I’ll let you touch one if you want,” Mari continues. “Weed always makes me horny.”
A wolf whistle from somebody. Tai makes a face. “Ew, Mari.”
“What? It’s better when people are watching. What do you think, Nat?”
Before Nat can open her mouth to express that she would definitely be open to touching one, Lottie interjects.
“Wait, it was my dare.” All eyes in the circle go to her. On the bed, Van chokes on smoke and begins to hack violently. But Lottie isn’t looking at any of them—she’s looking at Nat. “I’ll do it.”
The world stops spinning so suddenly that Natalie feels as though she gets shot off of it and into orbit. For a second, she doesn’t think she’s heard Lottie right. Then, she wonders if it was some kind of auditory hallucination. But then, shit, fuck her sideways—Lottie is on her hands and knees and is sort of shuffle-crawling to kneel in front of Natalie.
She would pinch herself, but what if she wakes up alone and cold in bed? At least if she’s going to spend another morning jerking off, she can do it to the mental image of whatever Lottie’s chest looks like in this dream.
“You gonna let her touch one, Lottie? I mean, if you’re taking over Mari’s offer.” Natalie can’t focus on anything that’s not Lottie for long enough to discern who says it.
Lottie studies Natalie and Natalie, in what she hopes is a gesture of nonchalance, leans back on her hands. Her legs are stretched out in front of her and Lottie is kneeling beside them, her denim skirt pushed up at her thighs, almost but not quite touching.
Natalie wonders how many inches there are between the hem of that skirt and the middle of her underwear, the lacy kind that Natalie has handled a hundred times before, doing laundry, or trying to find something in Lottie’s room. The scrap of fabric is like a wind up toy; inanimate, and then, with a few twists of the key at its back, screaming with life.
“I guess if that’s the dare,” Lottie says, not taking her eyes off of Natalie. Natalie doesn’t look away, either. “And if Nat wants to.”
“Sure,” Nat responds with artificial coolness. “If that’s the dare.”
The terms settled, Lottie’s hands go to the buttons at the front of her sweater. They’re little gold pearls, deceptively delicate, and they compliment the studs in Lottie’s ears. Lottie talks a lot of woo, but her shit always matches.
She undoes one. Natalie clenches her thighs reflexively in a way that she hopes is not noticeable. The fact that she cannot keep herself from dropping gaze between Lottie’s face and the swell of her breast beneath the sweater is embarrassing enough.
The second button goes, and a little strip of skin is revealed between Lottie’s collarbone and the dip of her cleavage. She stops and takes her hands away, giggling self-consciously. Natalie thinks that maybe she has come to her senses.
“Sorry,” she murmurs, half-to herself. “Forgot.” Then, angles her arms around, up and under her shirt, and fidgets beneath the fabric. Natalie realizes what she is doing a second later when she reaches to pull her bra from the long sleeve of her shirt. A little sliver of girl-magic.
The fabric of it is blue and lacy, and it has no underwire and so loses its shape completely in Lottie’s hand. Underneath her sweater, Natalie can now see the definition of her breast; the curve of it, and the hard point of her nipple.
As if to make sure that Natalie will not survive for the actual show, Lottie passes the bra over to her. Natalie stares down at it for a moment, dumbfounded.
“You’ve got pockets, I don’t,” Lottie urges softly. Natalie takes it, feels the rough texture of the lace on her palm. Then she puts it into the pocket of her jeans as if it is no big deal at all to have Lottie Matthews’ bra stored on her person.
Lottie sits back on her heels and continues with the buttons. Natalie is no longer trying to pretend that she’s not staring. Her mouth is full of spit and she keeps needing to swallow it back.
The fabric of Lottie’s sweater parts between her breasts, then down to her navel. Her muscles are straining just slightly, working to keep her posture. She’d confessed to Natalie that she’d had it pierced once, in eleventh grade, and that her father had made her take it out when he’d found it.
The proof is there, mottled white scar tissue just above her belly button. Natalie chews on her lower lip with how badly she wants to lean forward and lick it. She wipes at her eye with three fingers instead, a quick swipe.
Lottie reaches the bottom of the sweater and pauses. Her fingers toy with the last button. Fighting through the fog of…whatever the hell is going on, Natalie tears her eyes away from Lottie’s almost oh my god exposed chest and looks up to her face.
Behind the weed haze and the low light and with Lou Reed crooning from the stereo in the background, Lottie looks otherworldly. Natalie can tell from her expression that she’s having an emotion that Natalie wouldn’t have been able to understand even if she knew what it is.
As far as Natalie is concerned, there hasn’t been anybody else in this room for a very long time. It’s just her and Lottie sharing this moment, her and Lottie about to tumble over this cliff together.
A few things happen at once: Lottie’s fingers undo that last button, the sweater comes slipping off her shoulder, the door flies open, and reality comes rushing back in.
“Bobby, what the hell?” Jackie stands from where she’s been sitting in the circle this whole time, Nat acknowledges somewhat dazedly. Her idiot boyfriend of the week is standing in the doorway, squinting incredulously.
“Are you girls okay? It’s like the fucking Amazon Rainforest in here.”
“Jackie, your boyfriend ruins everything!” Somebody calls, and somebody else throws a piece of popcorn that hits Bobby on the side of his head. He flinches.
“I was just coming to tell you that a neighbor called the cops, damn! Fuck me for trying to help.”
“Have you ever heard of knocking, Bobby?” Jackie demands, stomping over and pulling him out of the doorway by the collar of his shirt. The rest of the girls stand and start to gather their things; downstairs, they can hear others doing the same.
Natalie looks at Lottie. She’s clutching her sweater closed, looking about as bewildered and Natalie feels. “Should we get out of here?”
Outside the house, bundled in their jackets, they see Jackie and Bobby fighting by the side door.
“Hey Jackie,” Natalie calls. “You want us to walk you home?” Jackie waves her off without even breaking her shouted statement. Natalie rolls her eyes and shrugs. “Let’s go.”
They start back through the woods in silence. The moon looms large that night and cuts their path with a silver glow. Natalie doesn’t know what to say or how to act. She’s still a little horny, a little irritated, a lot confused.
Lottie glances behind her at the house before it disappears behind the trees. “Do you think we should have left her with him?”
“Eh, they’ll be fine.”
“He seemed sort of mad, didn’t he?”
“She’s just going to make him fingerbang her later while she thinks about Shauna.”
“I mean, when we watch Cold Case Files, the last person to see the victim alive is always like, yeah, I left her arguing with that dude. What if Jackie disappears and then next week they find her body frozen in the woods behind the Clark?”
“Christ, it’s going to be cold when we get home.” Natalie pauses, her brain catching up to Lottie’s statement, and stops walking. “Wait, why is Jackie dead in the woods behind the Clark?”
Lottie stops walking too. She stares over at Nat, owlish. “You should just come…sleep with me in my bed.”
Oh, fuck this. It’s not like Lottie and Nat have never shared a bed together but things are obviously different. She’s chafed that Lottie even asked. “Yeah, maybe.” Natalie grumbles, and keeps walking. It takes Lottie a second to follow.
“Are we in a fight?” She calls to Natalie’s back. When Natalie doesn’t respond right away, she continues: “Nat, if we’re a fight, you have to tell me if I ask. It’s the law.”
“I’m not a cop.”
Putting her long legs to good use, Lottie catches up to her and then cuts her off, standing in front of Natalie so that she can go no further. “I don’t want us to be in a fight. I’m sorry about the Mari thing. It was stupid, okay? I just hate it when she tries to one up me.”
Natalie crosses her arms. “It’s fine.”
“You know it activates my monkey brain.”
“I said, it’s fine.”
Lottie’s mouth puckers and she scuffs at the leaf-covered ground with the toe of her shoe. “You probably would have preferred it if it were her. She’s cute.”
“Honestly, Lot, two women have never competed over showing me their boobs before. The room is still spinning.”
“Is it about earlier? About Gigi?”
Natalie considers lying, but then again, it would probably be futile. Lottie has a way of ferreting out the truth of things. “I just wasn’t aware you had so many feelings about it.” She says, and starts walking again, bypassing Lottie’s roadblock.
“Nat, stop for a second,” Lottie catches up to her and puts a hand on her shoulder, turning her around. “Stop. I just know how important this is to you, okay? As your best friend, I just…” she pauses, moistens her bottom lip. Is Natalie imagining that her eyes flick down to her mouth and back? “…want what’s best for you.”
“Well. What a humanitarian.” Natalie responds. She hopes she sounds nonchalant, even if her body feels like it’s full to the brim with bees, or worms, or some other squirming insect. “I’m not mad. I’m just—I’d like to remind you that I did my own sexual decision making for nineteen years before I met you.”
“I’m aware. And that’s why I think you need me, Natalie.”
“Oh, fuck off!”
“I’m serious - have you not considered that you need me?”
“Lottie,” Natalie is laughing. She shrugs Lottie’s hand off of her shoulder, but the two of them still stand close. Close enough that Lottie’s breath fogs right into Natalie’s face. The worms. The bees.
Lottie laughs too, but sobers quickly. “Does it have anything to do with…” She trails off as if struggling to verbalize what she means, which is how Natalie knows that she’s talking about It. The big It. The It that has been haunting the narrative since last night.
No, no, no. Natalie does not want to talk about this right now. Her ego is too freshly crushed, her body, that sly traitor, is too confused. “If we stand in this forest for any longer we’re going to end up on Cold Case Files.”
“We should talk about it,” Lottie continues. “Right?”
“Right,” Natalie replies tersely. “I guess we should.”
Instead of talking, they stand in silence for a few seconds, until Natalie decides that the only way she’s going to make it through this is by controlling the narrative. “We were just drunk, yeah?” She says, followed by a pitiful attempt at a laugh. “I mean, Jackie does it all the time.”
“I don’t think we should rely on Jackie as a role model.” Lottie pauses, then looks away. “I just think we function better together as just friends. Don’t you?”
It’s exactly what Natalie expected, and still it hurts worse than she could have imagined. She doesn’t understand anything anymore. For the first time since forever, anything includes Lottie. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, totally.”
The moonlight colors Lottie’s inscrutable face. God, Natalie wishes she could break her open and look inside. Would she even understand what she saw if she did?
There’s a touch of relief in Lottie’s expression but a hundred other emotions color it as well. “I’m glad we agree,” she says. “We shouldn’t make a big deal out of it.”
“No, we shouldn’t.”
Lottie opens her mouth as if to say something more, but Natalie has heard enough. She’s cold and tired and more heartbroken than she’d like to admit. All she wants to do is crawl into Lottie’s bed and hold her for warmth. She feels pathetic.
“Come on,” she grumbles. “We’ve got a cold house to get back to.”
*
Upon returning home, Natalie says:
“If you can get the fire going again, I’ve got an idea.”
She goes around the house to where Mr. Martinez keeps some of his bullshit under a tarp. There’s wood, paint, and a pile of bricks, an old tent. Natalie takes a brick and brings it back inside, setting it on the metal top of the wood stove.
“Give it twenty minutes or so to get hot, then we can wrap it in a towel and stick it in the bed.”
“Look at you, survivor man. Where’d you learn that trick?”
“You know, I hate to give Jackie Taylor the satisfaction, but it is from Little House on the Prairie."
Natalie dresses down into her pajamas while Lottie watches the fire. She puts her long underwear on under her sweatpants, an old sweatshirt, fuzzy socks. Then she takes her turn at the vigil while Lottie undresses and then, a half hour later, they are together beneath Lottie’s comforter with the brick wrapped in a dish towel at the foot of the bed.
The room is darker than dark. They lay facing one another, hands tucked under their cheeks. Each of them is crowding the brick with their socked feet, toes just barely touching.
“Hey—you’re taking more than half.”
“Get off my lawn, Nat. This is my half of the brick,” Lottie gives her a playful little nudge with her foot, and Natalie laughs. Then she says: “Maybe we can just share the whole thing.”
“What?” Natalie says, then: “Oh.” When Lottie slides her foot against Natalie’s, so that they’re entangled over the warm mound of the brick. Natalie wants to say that she knows better, after the events of the last twenty four hours, but hell—she’d kept Lottie’s bra in her room instead of returning it. She doesn’t know better, and she’s not sure she’s ever going to learn.
“Out there, when we were talking before. I wanted to say something else, but you kind of cut me off.”
“Sorry, but it’s really okay. Bygones.”
“No, not bygones,” Lottie says, and shuffles closer. “Nat, I—this year has been hard. It’s been so hard. Everything was one way for my whole life and then overnight it just…changed. And the only thing that hasn’t changed is you. Your friendship means everything to me,” Lottie pauses, and her voice breaks. She’s crying, Natalie realizes. “God, Nat. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“Oh, Lottie,” Natalie says tenderly. She wraps Lottie into her arms and lets her cry into the front of her sweatshirt.
“I can’t fuck this up,” Lottie says. She pulls her face from Natalie’s shirt and tilts her chin up—her tear stained cheek brushes Natalie’s chin, and her breath smells like cheap vodka. Natalie feels an obscene tug in her lower stomach. God, she could kiss her, could taste the salt on her mouth. Upset and vulnerable and desperate to please, Lottie would probably let her.
The thought makes Natalie so horrified with herself that she almost pulls back, but doesn’t. Lottie needs her.
“Hey, what’s there to fuck up? You’re fine. We’re fine. I’m sorry I was upset before.”
“Don’t apologize for being upset. You were right, I was acting crazy.”
“You’re not crazy,” Natalie pulls her face back and tilts her head to press her cheek against the top of Lottie’s head. She needs to be as far away from her mouth, from her pretty face, as she can possibly manage. “Hey, we’re going to figure it out, you know? We always do. We’re scrappy.”
“We’re scrappy,” Lottie repeats faintly. She presses her body forward and into Natalie’s, squeezes her like this platitude has pleased her. Fuck, fuck it all. “Yeah, we are, aren’t we?”
They fall asleep like that, tangled together until it feels impossible to tell who’s body belongs to who.