All The Things We Didn’t Say

Later, my mother and I would watch the boats on the East River through binoculars, making up stories about some of the yachters. The man in the sailboat named Miss Isabelle still lived on his parents’ estate. The man in the yacht with a naked woman figurehead had made his fortune by patenting the long plastic wand used to separate one person’s groceries from another on the belt-how else could a man with such a tacky comb-over own a boat that big? When it was Steven’s turn with the binoculars, he always aimed them at the buildings across the water, watching the people still in their offices, working. ‘What do you think they’re doing in there?’ he asked out loud on more than one occasion. ‘I bet they’re doing math,’ my mother or I always suggested, struggling to remain straight-faced. Steven’s love of math was an ongoing joke between my mother and me; we were convinced that he slept with his graphing calculator under his pillow.

Claire’s belt was fastened on the very last notch. ‘So my new neighborhood is weird,’ she informed me, as if we’d been talking every day. As if I knew everything about her-which I kind of did. ‘Last night, I saw a man dressed as a woman.’

‘How did you know?’

‘I looked at his arms.’

I’d never been to her new neighborhood before, this mythical Alphabet City. When kids at our school traveled into Manhattan, they went to SoHo to shop, or to the Upper East or West Sides to visit grandparents. No one ventured into the East Village, and definitely not to the avenues with the letters.

The Staten Island ferry chugged away from the west side of the island, spewing a contrast of black oil and crisp white waves behind it. ‘So.’ Claire tapped the top of the grille. ‘What’s new with you?’

‘Not much.’ I kept my eyes on the ferry. ‘Same old, same old.’

Claire curled her hand around a rusted spatula. ‘I heard about your mom.’

A hot fist knotted in my throat. What did everyone know about my family?

Before I could reply, a noise interrupted us. Claire’s mother clomped up to the roof. My father followed. ‘Time to go,’ Mrs Ryan announced.

Claire crossed her arms over her chest. ‘We just got here.’

Mrs Ryan gave her a tight smile. ‘We have a lot of things to do today.’

‘You have a lot of things to do. I don’t.’

‘Well, you have to come with me.’ Mrs Ryan’s expression didn’t falter.

‘I can ride the train by myself.’

‘Seriously. Time to go.’

Claire put her head down. ‘Fuck off.’

My father’s eyes widened. Mine did, too. I’d never heard Claire swear.

Mrs Ryan swallowed, then stood up straighter. ‘Fine.’ She turned around stiffly and started back down the stairs. My dad and I stood there, waiting to see if Claire would move. She didn’t. My father looked blank. He wasn’t good at dealing with things like this.

Claire sighed. ‘Unbelievable,’ she eventually said, and stood up. The doorway down from the roof to our apartment suddenly looked too narrow for her to fit through.

My father and I walked them to the door. We watched them out the window as they marched toward the subway, not talking, not touching. The wind blew, shaking the plastic bags caught in the trees.

‘Did Claire ask you anything about it?’ my father murmured out of the corner of his mouth.

I shrugged. ‘It’s none of her business.’ Or yours, I wanted to add.

‘Claire’s your best friend.’

‘Was. Two years ago. For like a second.’

He jingled loose change in his pockets. ‘It’s okay to talk about it, you know.’

‘I don’t need to talk about it. There’s nothing to talk about.’

He looked at me desperately. The jingling stopped.

‘There isn’t,’ I repeated.

He pressed his thumbs into his eye sockets, breathed out through his mouth, and made a funny choooo noise, like a train pulling into the last station stop and easing on its brakes. Then, he patted my arm, sighed, and went into the kitchen to turn on the TV.

Claire was born one year, one month, and one day before I was. When we were friends for like a second two summers ago, she liked to remind me of this when she held me down and tickled me: ‘I am one year, one month, and one day older than you,’ she would say, ‘so I have full tickling privileges.’

She was going into ninth grade and I was going into eighth. We were forced to be around each other a lot that summer because our mothers, who both worked in the events department of Mandrake & Hester, a high-end private bank, had become best friends and rented a share on Long Beach Island. When my mother told me about it, I panicked. Spend eight weeks at the beach with a girl I didn’t know? I didn’t even like the ocean. And I wasn’t very comfortable with strangers.

My mother wanted me to like Claire-and even more, for Claire to like me-and at the beach, it didn’t seem that hard. Claire’s long, ash-blonde hair became knotted and caked with sand, and her full, pretty lips were constantly coated with Zinc. She wore ratty t-shirts and cut-offs, and she roughhoused, tackling me into the surf. She indulged my need to spy on our mothers, who liked to sunbathe on the beach and read magazines. We had a foolproof system: the lifeguard stand was on a mound by the dunes, and all we had to do was duck behind where the lifeguards hung their towels and our mothers had no idea we were there. They talked about chauvinistic men at the office, places they wished they could visit, the new male teacher at their ballet studio in Tribeca. I waited to see if my mother would talk about me-maybe in a bragging way, hopefully not in an irritated way-but she never did.

In July, our mothers signed us up to be junior counselors at the town’s day camp. Claire was the only person I spoke to and who spoke to me. Everyone loved Claire, though. She could play the guitar, beat anyone in a race across the sand, and she petitioned the camp to let us build a twenty-person ice cream sundae, exhausting the kitchen’s supplies. Three different junior counselor boys had a crush on her, and kids followed her around as if she was made of cake icing.

That fall, I switched from St Martha’s, a private Catholic school in Brooklyn Heights, to Peninsula Upper School, where Claire went. Seventh through ninth graders were in one building, and high-school sophomores through seniors were in another. Claire was the only person I knew who went there, but I certainly didn’t know who Claire was. If I had, I wouldn’t have acted like such a juvenile around her, stealing stacks of orange-yellow 500s from the bank when we played Monopoly, constantly playing the beach house’s Nintendo even though I barely touched our console at home. And I certainly wouldn’t have done that dance when I won the Mega Man Six tournament, the finale of which involved flashing Claire my pink bubble-printed underwear.

On September 3, I barely noticed a tall, beautiful blonde girl climb aboard the school bus. ‘Get your butt over here!’ a guy at the back of the bus screamed at her. Other guys made whooing noises. ‘Where’ve you been all summer, Claire?’ a girl cried.

Claire? I started up, alarmed. The blonde girl in the pink shirt and form-fitted jeans took off her pale sunglasses. There were those familiar blue-green eyes, that lush, pink mouth, but her hair was so smooth, her clothes so brand-new. She whipped her head around, as if looking for someone. I slumped down in the seat and pretended to be fascinated by my lunch, a cold can of Coke that had sweated through the brown paper lunch bag, a smushed PB&J, crammed into a Ziploc. Finally, Claire walked to the back and fell into a seat with one of the girls.

‘Anyone sitting here?’ asked an Indian boy who I would later learn was named Vishal. My hand was still saving the empty seat next to the aisle for Claire. I curled it away into my lap and squeezed myself as close to the window as I could.

When the bus pulled up to our school on Lincoln Street, I stood up, but Vishal grabbed my sleeve. ‘I think we’re supposed to let them off first,’ he said, in his loopy I-didn’t-grow-up-here accent. And there they came, Claire among them, shoving each other and laughing, all of them with clear skin and hiking backpacks even though there was nowhere around to hike.

Claire noticed me cowering behind Vishal. ‘Summer!’ She stopped short, holding up the line in back of her. ‘When did you get on?’

‘I was here,’ I said quietly. ‘I got on before you.’

‘Claire, c’mon!’ A girl behind her shoved her playfully.

But Claire didn’t move. ‘I didn’t see you.’ She seemed honestly sad.

‘I was here.’ My voice sounded pathetic. Claire noticed, too; her lip stuck out in a pout.

The next day, she made a big point to sit with me on the bus. The day after that, too. The whole time, she was up on her knees facing the back of the bus, laughing with them. ‘Just go back there,’ I said on the third day, pressing my body against the cold, drafty window, my knees curled up to my stomach because I’d stupidly chosen the bus seat above the wheel.

‘No, it’s okay.’ Claire moved her knees to the front. ‘So what’s been going on with you? Are you liking school? Wasn’t I right-isn’t it easy to find your way around?’

‘I’m busy reading this,’ I snapped, staring at the oral report schedule for my American History class. I was to give a report about the Gettysburg Address on November 14, more than two months away.

‘Summer.’ Claire wore shiny lip gloss. Her earrings were dangling silver pears.

‘Just go.’

Claire shrugged, then monkey-barred from seat to seat, listing sideways when the bus went over bumps. Maybe I should’ve told her to stay and sit with me. Maybe I should’ve asked why she hadn’t suggested that we both go back and sit with them. But I was afraid what the answer might be-what fatal flaw of mine prevented her from introducing me around. I told myself I was being charitable, a real friend, letting her go off there alone. I’d given her a gift.