kim, part three

years passed. we wrote each other letters, her handwriting blocky and calculated, like chinese characters or the handwriting of a elementary teacher on a peice of butcher paper. like "Goals For The Year!" she stopped swimming, she lost a lot of weight. she wrote me about getting drunk in the woods with timmy teck,her neighbor and a wresler who i would later develop a massive crush on and keep a picture of in my wallet, the plastic red hello kitty one, like i was waiting for him to come alive.
she started straightening her hair. i knew this because she sent me a school picture of her in her woodward uniform, smiling coyly at the camera, looking much older than me, much older than anyone i considered my friend. her tight blond ringlets were now brittle and motionless, the most obvious of all her changes. atlanta was just so big, it was just so huge, there wasnt much else for her to do.

sometimes in letters or on the phone she would say "remember when we used to say we weren't best friends, we were more-than-a-best-friend-best-friends?"

"duh."

"its still true, right? i mean it is for me, it would just be so sad if it werent for you."

kim had this thing about being lonely- it was the essence of sadness for her, and she had an uncanny and sometimes obsessive way of noticing it. like when she went to the bathroom, there had to be 2 sqaures of toilet paper before she flushed, so that the one who was about to be vanished into obscurity wouldnt be alone. anything was OK as long as you werent doing it by yourself.

ive inherited this from kim. sometimes, its satisfying. sometimes, it plagues me.

"of course kim. of course."

and it was true- even though seventh grade was turning out to be the apex of my popularity, no one else's friendship had ever come close to kim's. it made the weeks of not talking bearable, it made all the changes forgiveable. it was something we both understood, it was something we both needed so badly that it was ingrained in us- no matter what decisions we made or how far apart we got, it was inevitable that we were at each others core.

i went to visit her over christmas break of my seventh grade year. it had been almost a year since we had seen each other, and, like i when i came back to LA and matt told me lauren was nervous, there was soemthing unsettling and fractious about it. she and sandy picked me up from the airport, where i had taken a red van shuttle from birmingham. the trip was uneasy and awkward- being in such close proximity with strangers, in such total silence for over two hours, made me feel like i had forgotten myself, like i had left myself behind in birmingham on the concrete bench beside the pick up point. like i just wasnt there.

they drove up in sandy's green mazda that kim would wreck a few years later. the story of her getting the gas and the brake mixed up as she was reversing out of a babysitting job's driveway, and especially the way she told it, was one of the funniest things id ever heard. so typical of kim, to make a simple mistake and to destroy the one thing she was expected to keep safe, and then to drive away, leaving shards of glass in the driveway and a dented tree, feigning ignorance about the entire situation to this day. kim got out and gave me a rough hug. i always felt so fragile around her- we were both tall but she was always a little taller, and since we were children i had been softer somehow, more easily bruisable, easier to crumple up.

i sat in the backseat and we went to her house, the one in stoneybrook that we had thrown the clothes out of years before. nothing had changed on the inside, but her room was now littered with clothes and pictures, drawers opened and makeup containers dotting the carpet like a pattern. though it felt authentic to her, and homely in many ways, it was intimidating because it all looked so busy, so grown-up. like she was past the age of having her mom tell her to clean it up (though she wasnt, and sandy probably came in more than twice that first hour i was there to yell at her for the state of things- her counting device, which didnt work when we were five, had gotten even more embarassing and futile).

"so when i say 'i got this,' that means i stole it. if i did buy it, ill say i bought it. ok? even when moms not in the room."

"oh...ok. well like what did you steal?"

"you mean what did i get? like this shirt, these pants, a couple of these dresses. me and jenny do it all the time, she taught me how. ill get something for you tonight! its fun."

"where are we going?"

"well, we could just go over to brandon's house. lindsey and all them are going. but we should go to the store first, i bet you didnt bring any makeup."

we got her dad, harland, to take us to the excerds. harland is funny and unbothered, crass and loud. he was this father figure mold that i had never even seen before- he made us sugar french toast (as sandy nagged us in the background to eat three grapes, three grapes with every meal) and watched cartoons with us, sleeping so late on sunday mornings that we had to wake him up by walking into the room and just screaming. he got mad but it never lasted. he and kim had a great relationship, i was always a little jealous.

"ok you wait in the car dad. we'll be out in a minute."

we went to the makeup isle and kim got out a maybelline black eyeliner stick. its not that i was completley clueless about beauty, i was just still in the bonnie bell lipgloss and pinching my cheeks stage, which, according to the standards of the other girls at altamont, was exactly where i should have been. but see, thats the difference with atlanta.

"ok. put this in your pants." she whispered, handing it to me and looking around like a real pro. it was all very impressive.

"in my pants? what if it beeps when i leave?"

"it wont i promise."

she got a few tubes of lipstick and some of the pink bottled mascara and we start to walk out when harland, hands in his pockets whistling, crosses our path.

"hey we're ready to go."

i can barely stand it, the laughter is pushing out of my mouth. i have to turn my head. she catches a giggle as it squirts past her pursed lips. harland looks his usual confused self.

"well we came all this way for you to not get anything?"

"no dad. duh, we're getting this"

kim pulls a tube of lip gloss from behind her back. i hadnt even noticed it was there.

"now can we go puhleese?"

harland shakes his head with fatherly misunderstanding.

we walk out and get into the car, kim and i both in the backseat. i remember the one time we did this in the car with my father, after the olympic soccer game in birmingham, when he made kim stay in the car after we had gotten home to lecture me about how rude it was, how my mother and he didnt raise me to act this way. as soon as he opened the door for kim to get out she said, in one of her bravest moments, "you didnt raise her at all."

but this is before all of that. this is before deaths and sickness. this is before being hospitalized and missing months of school because of an eating disorder. this is before sex and cocaine and stealing hundreds of dollars worth of things from little boutiques in virgina highlands. this is before timmy teck decides to like me and we all get so stoned that i think he's the hulk, chasing after me. this is before dropping out of school, living at home again. this is before all of that, and we have no idea.

we have a few dollars worth of stolen makeup and our hearts are pounding. we are fresh, we are practically infants. we have no idea what most of those things even are, those things that are pulling us towards them with a reluctantly evil yank. we will put on the eyeliner that night and i will never use it again. it will still be in makeup bag when i graduate college. we will smoke a cigarette outside of her window, we will climb into bed together and eat capn crunch cereal straight out of the box. we will wake up to the sounds of sandy and harland yelling at each other and we will think, my oh my, how we have grown.