“I had sex with someone else,” Bailey said quietly.
“Yeah?” Fran looked at her curiously.
“Yeah. I think that’s something I’ll probably always do.”
Fran nodded but didn’t ask any more questions and Bailey didn’t offer up anything else, but she knew they understood each other in a way that hardly anyone else could. Fran and Augusta had loved Bailey since she was a little girl, since before boys or sex or money or kids. Maybe most people sought out that kind of unconditional love inromantic partners, but Bailey didn’t. She got it from her friends, and it was the gift of a lifetime.
At the end of the day, it was a bag of Swedish Fish that did them in. Van wanted Bailey and Dylan to spend Labor Day at his weird Yankee family’s nightmare starvation cottage in Maine. Bailey could deal with the place when the rest of her friends were there, but not without them, so she refused. Van didn’t want to leave her alone with Dylan for the long weekend, so they settled into a grouchy détente where instead of taking the baby for walks on the beach or around the castle, they stayed home and got on each other’s nerves. Van turned off the air-conditioning when Bailey wasn’t looking. Van rewashed bottles Bailey had already done a fine enough job on. He bought a little machine that he used to check for radon in the basement, he obsessed over mold in the vents, and one day he went all around Budweiser Manor with a little pencil and counted exactly how many plastic bottles they had in the house. (There were 167, which, in fairness, seemed like an astronomical number, but as far as Bailey knew they weren’t selling contact lens solution in refillable clay pots, so it was what it was.)
Things came to a head one morning when Bailey was eating Swedish Fish while sitting on the Peloton. Dylan was napping and she’d changed into workout clothes, but once she’d started the class, the beefcake instructor in a tank top telling everyone to crank that resistance and get up out of the saddle, Bailey was overcome with a strong sense of ennui. There was no way the beefcake instructor had children. If he was up in the night, it was because his hookup was sneaking out of his bedroom at 3:00 a.m. He looked bright-eyed and freshly groomed and had the comportment of a man who knew how many thousands ofpeople watched his classes and paid special attention to his slightly too-tight shorts. He was playing Lady Gaga and dancing on the pedals and the whole thing was frankly exhausting.
There was a half-eaten bag of gummy candy on the desk and Bailey leaned over, leaving her feet clipped into the bike, and snagged the package. Maybe if she just had a couple she’d feel less like a slug in a puddle of Dramamine.
Bailey was spacing out, nibbling the head off a fish and listening to the instructor talk about Britney’s discography, when Van walked in. “Are you eating Swedish Fish WHILE you work out?”
“Oh, not really.” Bailey blushed.
“Sugar is the absolute last thing you want to have before a ride.” Van reached to take the bag out of Bailey’s hand. “This has an insane glycemic index. Your blood sugar is going to spike—that’s the glucose level in your blood. I know it feels good now, but during your workout you’re going to crash and burn.”
“Are you kidding me?” Bailey snapped.
“What?” Van looked genuinely mystified.
“I KNOW that!” Bailey felt herself grow hot with annoyance.
“Okay?” Van looked around and peered at the screen, as though the beefcake might be able to explain why Bailey was so mad.
“You know what?” Bailey twisted her feet out of the pedals and slid off the bike in a dismount that was less graceful than she’d hoped. “You’re unbelievable. You think you are just the expert on everything.”
“Bailey, it’s just that processed sugar is so bad for you—”
“So is ninety percent of what I love. This might sound insane to you, Van, but not everybody lives according to your code of ethics at all times.” Bailey was building up a head of steam. “I like tequila, I like reality television, I like Botox and manicures, and sometimes when nobody is looking I take a big slug of pickle juice from the jar.”
“Pickle juice isn’t actually—”
“That’s not the point. You just have an entirely different standard for how people should live, and that standard is not only unattainable, but it’s tiresome. I don’t want to spend my whole life feeling guilty because I am culturally less than you are, or because I can actually lie on the couch and relax while you have to move around constantly FIXING things. We’re made different, Van. You don’t like that I buy things just because they are beautiful. You don’t like that I use wrapping paper instead of old newspaper. That I wear antiperspirant instead of deodorant. You don’t like my sisters or my parents. Honestly, Van? I’m not really sure you like me.” Bailey couldn’t tell if she was angry or sad, if she was making shit up or telling the truth. She pulled off her cycling shoes and stared at him.
“I like you so much, Bailey,” Van said quietly. But he didn’t go to her and she didn’t go to him either.
For her entire life, Bailey would always feel a jolt of guilt whenever she thought about the first time she kissed Van. She was fifteen, it was the night of the Halloween party, and she was dressed as a white witch, silver makeup and hair sprayed with chalk. Every year the upperclassmen built a maze in the Cave, the lockers under the cafeteria, duct-taping together cardboard boxes to make tunnels. Some alleys were dead ends, some had strobe lights or tape recorders that played the sounds of screaming, some had kids hiding behind black curtains with plastic hatchets. (A senior named James had petitioned to hide with a chainsaw to scare the freshmen but was denied.) Bailey and Augusta had gone to the party together but, somehow, they had beenseparated in the crowd of teenagers in rubber masks and wigs, and so Bailey had wandered down to the Cave. From the door she saw Van across the room, standing on top of the stairs. He caught her eye and pointed at the maze, wordlessly inviting her to go in. She grinned and ducked down into the entrance: a big oval monster mouth carved with X-ACTO knives. She crawled along on her hands and knees. The tunnels smelled like a mix of floor polish and glue, and as Bailey felt her way along the path, she heard people calling out, laughing, the thrum of the dance party upstairs. There were other people in the maze, and sometimes she could feel the walls shake as someone crawled past in a neighboring tunnel. There was a shriek and then laughter. She crawled until she reached a dead end where it was so dark she couldn’t even be sure what she was touching, some paper pasted to the walls, bumpy and damp. Bailey turned around and retraced her path, back into the middle of the maze. She heard someone crawling toward her and she stopped and waited until there he was, Van, a small flashlight in his hand.
“Hi.”
“Hey, isn’t a flashlight cheating?” Bailey teased. They were face-to-face, both on their hands and knees.
“I helped build the maze, so I don’t need to cheat.”
“Oh, so you just crawl around looking for sophomore girls in distress?” Bailey took the flashlight and shone it at the floor, letting her eyes adjust.
“Nah, I was only looking for you.” Van wasn’t wearing a costume. He had on a dark T-shirt and Bailey could see his collarbone where it gapped away from his chest. He had a freckle there and Bailey suddenly reached forward and touched it, her fingertip right below his neck. Van froze for a moment and then leaned toward her on his hands,and she met him with a kiss. She moved her fingers across his shoulder and into the back of his hair. He smelled like fresh laundry and Speed Stick and Bailey felt his tongue with hers. And then, a mental image arrived, unbidden: Van walking up the path to the school, wearing his bike helmet and backpack, straps over both shoulders. Who walked around like that? She pulled away.
“Don’t tell anyone about that, okay?” she whispered.
“Okay,” Van whispered back, and she couldn’t quite read his smile.
Two weeks later they had sex in his childhood bedroom while his parents were at the American Repertory Theater in Boston watchingKing Lear. They slept together off and on from that fall out, they went to concerts, they swam at the reservoir, they spent countless nights sneaking off together at various parties, they came to be so close, but whenever Bailey thought about their first kiss, she felt a rush of shame for the terrible thing she had said.
Van moved his stuff out that week. They cried and they hugged Dylan between them, and Bailey promised Van could come over whenever he wanted, he could sleep in the guest room, he could take Dylan on trips and read him bedtime stories every night of the week. She could tell it was a relief to Van as well, that he had been struggling just as much as she had.
