Lessons from a Dead Girl(2)

“I have a secret,” she tells me, grinning. She pulls a marker in the shape of a mouse out of her jacket pocket. The cap is the mouse’s head, and when she pulls it off, there’s a marker tip inside. She gives me the head to hold in one hand and takes my other hand in hers, turning it over palm up. Then I watch, amazed, as she carefully writes L.G. + L.M. = F.F. along the crease in my hand that she says is my lifeline. When she’s done, she writes the same thing on her own palm.

“There,” she says, smiling as if she’s won a game. “Know what it means?”

I think I do, but I shake my head no anyway. Us? F.F.? I try not to smile too eagerly.

“Leah Greene plus Laine McCarthy equals Friends Forever,” she says. Her lips part to show her white teeth as she grins at me.

My whole body smiles at her soft words. They don’t make any sense, but at the moment I don’t want to think about that.

Leah takes my hand again and pushes our palms together just as the bell rings. I look around to make sure no one sees us holding hands, but Leah doesn’t seem to care. Her hand is warm and dry, and I feel a strange, thrilling tingle shoot right up my arm when we touch, as if she has magic inside.

Friends forever. But why?

“Don’t show anyone,” she says as we race side by side to the students already lined up to go inside. Some of the girls eye us curiously.

I squeeze my hand shut and hold our secret in it. Any time I start to wonder why on earth Leah Greene wants to be my best friend, I tell myself not to think about it.

All that day, each time we see each other, we wave our closed fists and grin. I feel so deliriously happy, I think my lips will crack from smiling so hard. I sneak peeks at the purple letters on my hand to remind myself it isn’t a dream. I feel taller. Better than the girls around me. I feel a difference in how I walk. How I answer Mrs. Faughnan’s questions. I’m not no one anymore. I’m friends with Leah Greene. Friends forever.





F.F. with Leah Greene means I sit next to her at the popular table at lunch. It means I get invited to birthday parties. I have friends, even if they are second friends, the way you have second cousins. They’re distant and it’s not quite clear how you are connected, but the connection means you’re invited to all the big events out of obligation, even if they don’t speak to you or acknowledge that you’re there.

Just before school gets out that year, Leah pulls me from our group during recess and leads me out to the field again, just like she did that first time she declared our friendship. She pulls a marker out of her coat pocket. This one is red. It’s the thick kind my mom uses to make sale posters at the antique store my parents run.

Leah carefully holds my hand still while she writes F.F. on my palm. Then she writes the same on hers and presses our hands together, just like the first time. Like before, my hand tingles when she touches me. I smile when I feel it, that magic spark between us. I check her face to see if she felt something, too. She smiles back at me.

“It’s permanent,” she says, putting the marker in her pocket. “Like us.”

We grin at each other so our teeth show. My insides dance.

Some other girls come over and plead with us to come play Leah’s version of tag, which involves the girls chasing the boys until the last boy gets caught and has to pick a girl to kiss. I’ve never been picked. The girls smile at Leah but seem to sneer at me when she isn’t looking, as if they know I hate this game and why. No boy would ever kiss me.

Last year, someone left a note on my desk that said, Are you a boy or a girl? I put it in my pocket and waited to reread it when I got home. Alone in my room, I carefully unfolded the note, trying to touch it as little as possible. It was written in messy pencil on yellow lined paper. I stared at the words and cried.

Christi walked in on me and made me show her the note. I tried to crumple it up in my fist, but she pried it out of my fingers.

“People are jerks,” she told me. “Ignore them.” Then she took the note and threw it in the woodstove.

Leah gives me her special half-smile before running away from us. Her long hair whips back and dances behind her, and we all run to keep up.

After school, my mother picks us up in our old, beat-up minivan. Leah’s mom asked my mom to take Leah for the afternoon so she could bring Brooke to a doctor’s appointment. Christi is at piano lessons, so when we get home, it’s just Leah and me.

We race up the stairs side by side, but when we get to the top, Leah pushes past me and runs down the hall to my room. I chase after her, and we leap onto my bed so the headboard thuds against the wall.

“Let’s play in the doll closet,” Leah says.

The doll closet is a crouch-in closet in the upstairs bathroom that Christi and I share. It has a child-size table and chairs to sit at and a wooden play stove and refrigerator my father made for us when we were little. It also has lots of our old dolls and stuffed animals and the plastic cups and plates we used to play with for pretend tea.

“Come on,” Leah says, opening the closet door and motioning for me to go in first. I click on the night-light by the door and sit at the little table.

Leah comes in after me and closes the door behind her. It’s late spring, but it’s cold in the closet. It smells like dust and plastic toys. The dolls seem to watch us suspiciously. Sometimes Leah and I come in here and pretend we’re husband and wife and all the dolls are our babies. We make a joke out of it since we’re way too old to play with dolls. Leah gets to be the wife because she has long hair and mine is short. Once we put our hands over our mouths and pressed our faces together, pretending to kiss. Leah said only real friends like us could practice like that because we would never tell anyone. It’s our special secret. It makes me feel special to have it with her.