Keeping The Moon(40)

Morgan blinked again. I wondered if she was going to cry.

Then she straightened up to her full height and took a deep breath. “Jealous!” she shouted, pointing a long bony finger at

Isabel, who just rolled her eyes. “You always have been! Since the very beginning!”

“Oh, please,” Isabel said indignantly.

“You are,” Morgan said, turned on her heel, and went down the hallway to the bathroom. “Because you weren’t his type.”

“Oh, that’s right, Morgan,” Isabel yelled, following her even as the bathroom door slammed shut. “I want to be the one engaged

to a baseball player who’s already balding, cheats on me with other women, can never give me a straight answer about the rest of

our lives, and couldn’t get over the Mendoza Line if his life depended on it!”

There was a silence. Then Morgan opened the door.

“His batting average,” she said coolly, “has greatly improved this season.”

“I don’t give a shit!” Isabel screamed.

The door slammed shut again.

“Mendoza Line?” I said.

Isabel stomped back to the living room, cranking up the music. “It’s a baseball thing. It means he sucks.”

“He does not!” Morgan yelled from the bathroom. “He doesn’t even lead the team in errors anymore!”

Isabel grabbed her cigarettes and kicked open the screen door. I watched her strike a match, its orange glow lighting up her face,

before she moved down the porch, out of sight.

The disco was still blasting. My face felt like it had been dipped and set in concrete. From the kitchen window I could see Mira’s

house, quiet and peaceful. I wondered if she knew that she didn’t really need wrestling at all. Morgan and Isabel were like Triple

Threat and Saturday Cage Fights rolled into one.

I turned down the music, then walked down the hallway and knocked on the bathroom door.

“What?” Morgan said.

“I really need to wash my face,” I said.

“Oh.” I heard her get up. “Okay.”

She unlocked the door and I pushed it open, sliding inside. She was sitting on the edge of the tub, her mask streaked and muddy

from crying. I pretended not to notice.

I went to the sink and ran the water until it was warm, then carefully washed off the mask, watching the green run down the drain.

Morgan handed me a towel.

“Colie,” she said as I patted myself dry, noticing that my skin did actually feel very nice, “do you have a best friend?”

I looked down at the towel, folding it carefully. It was, after all, Morgan’s. “I don’t have any friends,” I said.

“Oh, that’s not true,” she said in the quick, knee-jerk way of guidance counselors and teachers.

“Yeah,” I said. “It is.” I handed her the towel.

There was an awkward silence, made even more noticeable because the bathroom was so small. I had nothing to look at but my hands,

Morgan, or my own face in the mirror.

“Well,” she said, and I could tell she was uncomfortable now, sorry she’d even brought it up, “sometimes they’re more trouble

than they’re worth.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. Trouble or not, at least she wasn’t alone.

“I love Mark so much,” she blurted out. “And Isabel is just wrong about him. I would know if he wasn’t the one. I mean, I’d

have to know, right?”

“She’s just worried about you,” I said. “She doesn’t want you to get hurt.” I could understand this, because it was not

unlike the way my mother had always taken care of me.

“She needs to butt out,” Morgan sniffled. “This is my life. She’s my best friend but this is my life.”

There was a silence. Morgan was still sniffling, dabbing at her face with the towel, which was now splotched with green. This was

my first true confessions session in a bathroom, a Girl Moment, plain and simple. I had to say something.

“When I first met you, you said Isabel wasn’t so bad,” I told her. She looked up, her clear skin showing through in patches.

“You just said she could be a real bitch sometimes. And that she was friendship-impaired.”

“Oh,” she said. “I did?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, she is impaired,” she admitted. “She didn’t know how to be friends because she’d never had one. Until me.”

I could feel my own earlier admission hanging in the air like smoke between us. And now I might have told Morgan about my fat

Harvest Dance, and all the schools I’d suffered through and left behind. But, again, there was something that stopped me, that

prevented me from opening myself like a book to the spine, leaving the pages exposed.

“I’m just saying,” I told her, “that maybe you should remember that about her when you guys fight like this.”

She nodded. “I do,” she said softly. “I can’t ever forget it. It’s, like, part of who she is, you know?”

“I know.” And I did.

Outside in the living room, the music suddenly cut off. There were a few minutes of silence, broken only by the sound of Isabel