Keeping the Moon(31)
Author: Sarah Dessen

“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 going through the stacks of CDs. Then a click as she shut the top of the player and another as she hit the button.

The music started.

“At first I was afraid, I was petrified . . .”

Morgan went to the sink. She splashed at her face, again and again, until the water didn’t run green anymore. Then she lifted her head and smiled at her reflection, at the bits of green speckled here and there along her hairline. “She’s so crazy,” she said to me softly. But she was smiling.

“Kept thinking I could never live without you by my side. . . .”

And outside the door, suddenly, I heard Isabel singing along. “But then I spent so many nights thinking how you did me wrong!”

“And I grew strong!” Morgan yelled back. “And I learned how to get along!”

The door flew open and there was Isabel, arms over her head, hips shaking, eyes closed as she channeled some long-ago disco queen. Her face was green, her curlers bobbing madly.

“And so you’re back from outer space,” she sang, off-key.

“I just walked in to find you here with that sad look upon your face. . . .” Morgan moved forward, past me, snapping her fingers over her head while Isabel turned and started shimmying down the hallway. Morgan followed, skipping from side to side, doing some sort of strange booty-slap.

It was like the first night I’d seen them, and I wished I was back on Mira’s roof, watching from a safe distance.

I walked behind them, keeping my eyes on the door. It was like being caught in some weird tribal ritual, firewalking or glass swallowing, and not knowing the correct way to carefully extract yourself. I dodged when they started doing the bump, Isabel’s energetic hip swings knocking Morgan halfway across the room, and put my hand on the screen door. They had completely forgotten me.