They do not know that girls become teenagers become girls again. That girl, this girl. Charlie, Fatima. Girls who smoke fake cigarettes in attics and then real cigarettes on porches. Girls who cut Barbie hair and then real hair, who slumber party with girls and then with boys and then with girls again, who paint nails, paint lips, paint eyes for each other and for fun and then for necessity, to compete with, to be like other girls. Look at that girl over there. Girls who are always that girl over there, that girl with the long hair, short hair, short skirt, shaved legs. The Jewish girl, the Muslim girl.
~
And when they are young, the girls play in backyards, counting rattlesnake tails on grass tips, climbing up slides and trees, digging holes and tunneling through meadows. They put on lipstick and smoke fake cigarettes in the attic. They make up games in apple orchards and have slumber parties there, under the stars. They cut Barbie hair and make worlds of Legos. Once, when they’re young, one girl gets poison oak. Fatima. Charlie doesn’t, and this is a good thing, to not be itching and pink with calamine at school. But Charlie still feels left out, left behind.
~
Charlie has her bat mitzvah, and Fatima is there with her family. Charlie recites the haftarah and messes up only a few times. Charlie’s mother makes a toast to Fatima’s family: she’s charming but tipsy. “To peace in the Middle East,” Charlie’s mother says. Fatima and Charlie ignore her and sneak off to suck helium from balloons.
~
One slumber party, Charlie and Fatima are dared to kiss each other. They do, and Charlie feels something more than a dare. Afterward they look at each other until Fatima laughs and kisses Charlie again but this time it’s a small peck on the nose. The other girls at the slumber party applaud. Later in the night, Charlie and Fatima curl their sleeping bags together, and Charlie can feel the warmth of Fatima’s body through the fabric. Their bodies are sexless bodies, still girl bodies, just-good-friends bodies.
~
The girls grow older, and their bodies are not sexless. The summer before high school, Fatima kisses a boy in the dark at a party. Charlie, forever excluded from the girl-body changes, is too small for kissing boys, too much a girl still. With all the girls at school already changed and kissing boys and shaving legs, she decides there is something wrong with her body; maybe she should tell her mother, see a doctor. Fatima comforts her by saying she doesn’t have to worry about cramps and what color pants to wear on what day. This only makes it worse: more unshared between them.
~
In the fall, the two girls are split into different high schools—one to public, and one to private. The private school girl, Fatima, is good at school; she takes honors math and aces all her classes always. Charlie is good at people; she makes friends with Kay and the others in the popular crowd. She learns about pot and blowjobs. Fatima and Charlie still see each other on weekends, and the gap between them is forgotten, suspended. They are girls again, lying on the grass, looking at the clouds all full of shapes.
~
When they are sixteen, they both drive safe, first-car station wagons. And one night, they race out to the beach, less than an hour before curfew. They are fast. The roads are narrow, winding through redwood trees and apple orchards. Charlie leads the way, gravity swinging her through every turn, the headlights of Fatima in the rearview mirror like an interrogation. The girls go faster and faster, until it feels like they must fall off at some point, end up in a ditch or a field of blackberries. This happens to teenagers every day. They know it, but they also know: not us, this doesn’t happen to us. And it doesn’t. They spill out of their cars, parked above a stretch of sand and ocean. The moon is a silver orb in the waves. They giggle and run down the driftwood steps. Fatima pees in the sand. The wind whips across the beach, and she screeches, saying she peed on her shoe. They spin out onto the beach together, toward the water. They turn around, shivering, and sprint back to their cars, speed to their homes, just under curfew.
~
In high school, Charlie has a job and Fatima doesn’t. Charlie works at an ice cream parlor and has to sing when she gets a tip. Charlie gets her period, six months after her license, and she realizes it’s all true about the cramps and the bleeding through. She plans her outfits carefully, checking between each class, because god, that would be the worst thing ever.
~
Soon, both girls have boyfriends. Charlie dates boys but doesn’t feel much for them. A dull unattracted ache. She doesn’t fantasize about the boys but about Fatima. They go to the clinic together because Fatima is having sex, and Charlie is worried for her. They both get birth control pills, and a few months later they are both having sex. Sex, it turns out, is just like everything else that happens, exciting before the first time, and then just another so-so thing that girls have to sneak around to do in the backseats of cars or the backrooms of parties.
~
Then it’s New Year’s Eve their senior year of high school, and Fatima calls Charlie, who’s not at a party but drinking by herself in her bedroom. Fatima is somewhere drunk, and she’s crying. She’s scared, she says, she’s driven somewhere, and she doesn’t know where she is, and her boyfriend is angry at her, and where the fuck is she? And also, has she mentioned how much she loves Charlie. Fatima loves Charlie. Like love love. Fatima’s drunk. Fatima’s at a payphone and Charlie can do nothing. She just listens to her friend crying in some unknowable place. Charlie falls asleep like that, face pressed into the phone.
~
Fatima doesn’t repeat the thing about loving Charlie. Charlie doesn’t remind her. Charlie breaks up with her boyfriend and doesn’t try to date anyone else for the rest of senior year.
~
The next year, Fatima is at college down south in San Luis Obispo and Charlie is at community college. Charlie also works at a busy restaurant. She’s a hostess, and the waiters and bussers won’t stop yelling at her. Several nights after shifts, she cries herself to sleep. She starts eating less and throwing up the food she eats. She shrinks her body smaller.
~
When Charlie visits Fatima, they drive to the ocean late at night. They are practically adults now. They roll a joint and smoke it, remembering the stupid games they used to play, the boys they’ve slept with. They sit there with the smoke all around them and the sea somewhere out beyond the windshield. They can’t see it, but they know it’s there—a dark cloud moving against the earth. It’s comforting, being together at the brink of something immense. They start talking about running, about just letting it all fall away—dorm rooms and table settings and all the friends they only sort of know or like. Mexico is only a day’s drive. Let’s just go, they say, let’s go now. We can still get out of this, step out of our lives and start again however we want, wherever we want. They crank open the sunroof and lean back in their seats, watching the stars stuck to the black sky, pleased with themselves and their great liberation of thinking. The world seems to spread out for them again, like it did when they were girls, digging in a creek bed, something profound within grasp. Let’s go, they say again. Mexico.
~
They don’t go to Mexico.
~
Charlie starts dating women. Secretly. Shamefully. She can never tell Fatima. Fatima, whom she love loves. Fatima, who has a serious boyfriend now. A Muslim boy, a boy her family approves of. “How weird is that?” Fatima says. Charlie says nothing. Several nights, after talking to Fatima, she cries herself to sleep.
~
The summer after her freshman year, Fatima travels to Morocco with her boyfriend. It’s a wild thing for Charlie to imagine: leaving the country, flying in a plane to Morocco. Fatima sends a postcard. It’s worn and wrinkled with a whole city sprawled out to the edges, and in it she says, I love you, Charlie. She doesn’t mean love love, but Charlie cherishes the card all the same.
~
Charlie receives a promotion at the restaurant: she’s now a waitress. She earns more tips and has to smile and flirt with the young men who come in and flirt with her. She dates more women. One woman tells her: “Charlie, there’s nothing to be ashamed of.” Another woman says, “You’re a goddamn lesbian. Deal with it.” Charlie keeps it a secret. She continues throwing up.
~
The next year, Charlie and Fatima hardly see each other. Between school and work, Charlie is too busy to visit. And Fatima goes to her boyfriend’s family during breaks. The next summer, Fatima travels to Morocco again. This time, she comes back engaged to the boyfriend, the fiancé. At work, Charlie carries the postcard in her apron pocket, the paper worn so thin she can curl it easily in her palm.
~
Before the wedding, Fatima visits Charlie in San Francisco, where she now lives in an apartment in the Haight. “I’m fucking happy,” Fatima says. “Then I’m happy too,” Charlie says. The fucking happy girl has to pick up her fiancé at a place and take him to do something. So, the two girls—Charlie and Fatima—sit across from each other at Charlie’s table with only an hour. They stir honey into their mugs. Each girl attempts to speak, but they can’t find much to say. They talk about their families, the past, and the pineapple turnovers they used to eat from tin cans. When Fatima leaves, they hug, and Charlie stands in the doorway for a long time, listening to what she imagines is the sound of her friend’s car turning off her road onto another road, lost in all the other cars and people of the city. Behind her, inside, the empty mugs are on the table, handles pointed in opposite directions, a sticky jar of honey between them, two spoons slanted up to the sky.
