Big Summer(24)

“How’s the littlest Snitzer?” Darshi asked as I sat down on the couch with Bingo beside me. Darshi’s braces had come off in eighth grade, and she’d swapped her glasses for contacts the following year. She still had her curls, but now they were an orderly tumble, glossed with argan oil and falling halfway down her back. She was still petite, but her narrow hips were now curvy and her chest was no longer flat. In college, Darshi had come out as bisexual, but only to her closest friends and her older brother. For the past six months, she’d been dating a woman named Carmen, whom she’d met at a dance sponsored by Columbia’s gay-straight alliance, but she hadn’t yet told her parents about Carmen, or about her sexual identity. Her plan was to finish her dissertation first. “That way, it’ll balance,” she’d said, using her hands to mime a scale. “Girlfriend on one side, doctor on the other.”

I’d told her that I thought her parents would be fine, that they loved her and would be happy that she’d found someone with whom she could build a life. Darshi had just snorted. “It’s cute that you think that,” she’d said.

In the living room, I gave Bingo’s ears a scratch. “Ian’s fine. And guess what? I got the job with Leef!”

“Congratulations!” she said. “Now show me the clothes!”

I went back to my bedroom and put on the Jane dress, then the Pamela pants, then the Kesha blouse with the Nidia blazer, and, finally, the swimsuit, the Darcy. I twirled and posed as Darshi clapped and cheered, and took a few pictures for use once the campaign began. Most of the influencers I knew had partners—husbands or guys who referred to themselves, unironically, as Instagram boyfriends, and who’d obligingly interrupt date night or a picnic in the park to snap shots of six different outfits. I had my tripod, my mom, and Darshi.

Once I’d rehung everything and zipped it all back into the garment bag, I put on my favorite pajamas, wine-colored silk in a paisley pattern. I’d found them in a secondhand store on the Upper East Side and imagined they’d once belonged to some elderly male Wall Street potentate, who’d worn them to sip whiskey and puff a cigar, after a long day of exploiting the proletariat. In the living room, Darshi, in blue sweatpants and a Lathrop School sweatshirt, poured us both glasses of wine. “To Daphne. May this be the first of many wonderful things.” We drank, and when the food arrived, we filled our plates, and we watched All the Single Ladies. Or, rather, Darshi watched, hooting and scoffing, and I kept my eyes on the screen, half of my attention on the machinations of the women as they attempted to win the favor of a handsome bachelor named Kyle; the other half on how I was going to tell Darshi my news.



* * *




By the third week of sixth grade, Darshi and I had settled into a comfortable friendship. Most days, I sat with her and her friends at lunch, and we’d spend time together outside of school, browsing for clothes at the Housing Works thrift shop or hanging out in the Barnes & Noble on Eighty-Sixth Street. We both liked to read, although I loved mysteries and romance, and Darshi adored horror and true crime. Darshi lived with her parents and two brothers in a two-story, four-bedroom brick house in the Whitestone neighborhood of Queens that had a yard and a two-car garage. I’d spent the night there, and she’d slept over my house, too. Darshi and I got along, but Darshi knew that she would always be Drue Cavanaugh’s runner-up, that once or twice a week Drue would call out “Daphne! Come sit with me!” and I would go without a backward glance. I knew that Drue wasn’t a good friend and that I should have let go of the idea of being part of Drue’s crowd, but I couldn’t make myself do it.

All through sixth grade and into middle school and beyond, I was Darshi’s friend, but I was Drue’s creature. I became a regular guest at the Cavanaughs’ apartment on the Upper East Side, which had floor-to-ceiling windows that gave panoramic views of the city, the Hudson River, and Central Park. I met Abigay, the Cavanaughs’ cook, who had freckled cheeks and a gap between her front teeth that you could see when she spoke or when she smiled, and could make any dish you could think of. “What’s your pleasure, my ladies?” she would ask, in her singsong Jamaican accent, when Drue and I came into the kitchen (Drue would dump her bags by the door, a move that would have gotten me a lecture had I attempted it at my house). The first time I’d heard that request, I’d asked for apples and peanut butter. Drue had taken her hair out of its bun, then gathered it up again. “How about gougères?” she’d asked. Abigay had pursed her full lips and given a nod. Soon, the house smelled of buttery, cheesy baking dough. “What are gougères?” I’d asked Drue, and she’d shrugged and said, “I don’t know. I just read about them in a book.”

In return for this largesse, for the invitations and the snacks and the chance to sit with Drue at lunch, I would pass messages to Drue’s crushes and break up with them when she was through; I kept watch when Drue shoplifted at Saks and Barneys, and I wrote English papers after Drue would narrate for me a general idea about what she wanted to say, usually lying sprawled on her bed, staring up at her ceiling. And every time, after a few days’ worth of attention, Drue would ignore me, looking right through me, as if I had ceased to exist.

I hadn’t yet heard the word “gaslighting,” but I knew that Drue made me feel like I was crazy, like I couldn’t trust my own ears or eyes. I also knew that, by every available metric, I belonged with Darshi, and Frankie Fogelson, David Johnson, and Joon Woo Pak. The smart kids, the dreamy, artsy ones, the misfits, the geeks. They were generous, loyal, and kind. But none of them was as alluring, as interesting, or as much fun as Drue. She made me angry and resentful, and she made me doubt myself and even, sometimes, hate myself, but she also made every day that I was with her an adventure. For every time that Drue cold-shouldered me, ignoring me in class or in the lunchroom, there’d be a day when she’d grab me as I walked into homeroom, voice urgent as she whispered the details of her night or her weekend into my ear, asking for help, for advice, needing to know how she should deal with the two boys who both liked her, needing me to read over her history homework. Needing me.