Page 23 of Next Time Will Be Our Turn
“Gotcha.” Ellery did so, and soon, the tiny apartment started smelling surprisingly good. After we added the potatoes and water, Ellery located an ancient bouillon cube in a cupboard and dropped that in, then we waited for the mixture to simmer.
I settled back down on the love seat, marveling at how comfortable I felt here. The banter was ongoing, and I’d just cooked a proper dish for the very first time, and it felt like anything was possible. The question slipped out of me before I realized what I was saying. “How come you’re not out with your girlfriend?”
“Oh, she has other stuff going on.”
It was a weird thought to have. At sixteen, I foolishly assumed that when someone had a boyfriend or girlfriend, they would spend every free moment with them. It’s strange to think how much I learned about relationships from Ellery’s relationship with her girlfriend.
“What’s her name?” Why did I ask that? Maybe I was genuinely curious. Or maybe I wanted to hurt myself a little. Maybe it was a little bit of both.
“Trish.”
“How long have you guys been together?”
“Hmm, about six months.”
The only relationship I’d had, back when I was fourteen, had lasted eight months. But I wasn’t sure if anything you had at fourteen counted as “real.” There was so much I wanted to ask Ellery, but every answer she gave me stung a little, like digging a fingernail into a scab. I wanted to know if Ellery had a nickname for Trish too. I wanted to know what Trish called Ellery. I wanted to know if they’d had sex with each other, and if so, how often they did it, and if it was mostly Ellery who initiated it or Trish, or if they both jumped on each other at the same time. And I didn’t want to know any of it. I wanted to pretend that there was nothing outside these walls, that the entire world consisted of me and Ellery and her tiny, jungly studio apartment with windows that were steaming up with the heat from the bubbling pot of soup.
When the soup was done, she ladled it into two chipped bowls and we settled down on the love seat, next to each other, and she turned on her TV.Friendswas playing, so we watched that. I told Ellery she was such a Joey, and she told me I was a Rachel, and I wondered if that was how she saw me—spoiled and clueless and achingly adorable. I wondered if that was a good thing.
The next day, Ellery called and asked if I wanted to make a seven-layer bean dip. I had no idea what a bean dip was or why anything should have seven layers, so I said yes. Not that I wasever going to say no to her. She drove us to a nearby Ralphs and we got the ingredients, many of them new to me, like refried beans and guacamole and sour cream, which sounded repulsive. When the seven-layer dip was made, I said it looked like “a wrong trifle” and Ellery laughed for a full minute. Then we dug in with our tortilla chips, which promptly broke, so we dug in with spoons and slathered the mix onto our chips. I told Ellery I’d never tasted anything so decadent and bingeable, and she said, “Yep, this stuff’s dangerous.” Incredibly, between the two of us, we managed to polish off the whole thing over the course of the afternoon while I read aCosmomagazine (Ellery: “Tulip, don’t read that bullshit, it’s meant to make us hate ourselves.” Me: “Bellery, it’s the Bible. Shush.”) and Ellery readNational Geographic.
Over the next year, we fell into an easy routine with each other. Actually, I fell into an easy routine with my new life in general, going to badminton and hanging out semi-regularly with Winnie, James, and one or two other members from the club. But most of my free time was devoted to Ellery, because although I enjoyed the company of my other friends, there was no one who made me feel as comfortable and safe as Ellery did. Some days, we’d go for walks. Other days, she’d teach me how to drive, and we’d go down to the supermarket to get ingredients for some wonderfully American-sounding dish before cooking it at her place. One time, after we’d made and inhaled an entire dish of Buffalo chicken dip, Ellery said, “Holy hell, I need a nap after that.”
“Me too.” I wasn’t really thinking when I said it.
Before I knew it, Ellery was climbing onto the love seat. “You take the bed.”
“What?”
“Shh, it’s naptime.”
I watched, open-mouthed, as Ellery stretched out on the couch. She was so ridiculously tall that her legs dangled off the side. Within two minutes, her breathing had slowed and her face became slack. She really was sleeping. I sat perched on her futon bed, wondering what to do. I was tired. We’d worked on parallel parking today, and my belly was full of rich Buffalo chicken dip and chips, and I didn’t much feel like going back to my own apartment, which may or may not have a grumpy older sister in it. In the end, I settled down on Ellery’s bed, placing my cheek gingerly on her pillow. It smelled of her, and I let my body relax, sinking into this bed that had the memory of Ellery all over it. I closed my eyes, feeling safe in this little cocoon, and let my guard down, drifting away with a small smile on my lips.
After that, naptime was a regular occurrence for me and Ellery. We’d be hanging out as usual, curled up on her bed, not touching, doing our own thing, and one of us would yawn, and that would signal a nap. Eventually, she stopped napping on her love seat and simply went to sleep next to me on the futon bed. Still not touching. It wasn’t that we never touched each other. In fact, we touched every chance we got. Whenever we walked, I was always reaching out and catching the sleeve of Ellery’s shirt to tell her to slow down because not all of us were half giants. Ellery was always teasing me, then when I got annoyed, she’d laugh and wrap an arm around my shoulder and squeeze for a second before letting go. I was always punching her arm, and she was always messing up my hair, and we found myriad ways to touch each other, but they were all innocent touches, gestures of affection between two very platonic friends.
Did I ever wonder why Ellery was spending so much time with a kid so much younger than her? Of course I did. Endlessly. And on the rare occasion that we didn’t spend time with each other, I was acutely aware that she must be off with her girlfriend, and I’d torture myself wondering if they were, right at that very moment, making love. Touching each other in a very different way than how Ellery and I touched: naked, without the barrier of friendship between them.
“Huh, not wasting time with that weird tall chick today?” Iris would ask in a mocking tone, knowing full well that whenever I wasn’t with Ellery, it wasn’t by my design.
I would pretend not to have heard Iris, and she’d tell me I was turning into a stuck-up bitch, and I would go quietly into my room and climb out the window and go for a walk and look up at the LA sky on my own and marvel at how something could be so beautiful and heartbreaking all at once. I’d never, up to that point, been in love with someone who was so close and yet so incredibly out of reach. And to make matters more complicated, I still hadn’t figured out by then that I was in love with Ellery, because she was a girl, and I was a girl, and I was into boys, and that was that. I attributed the yawping pain to sheer loneliness, to wanting what Ellery had with Trish instead of wanting Ellery herself.
The only thing worse than unrequited love is not realizing you’re in love in the first place. Burying that love so deep inside you that it becomes unrecognizable, even to yourself, then wondering why you are festering from the inside out.
Chapter 9
MAGNOLIA
1998–1999
I wasn’t aware, at the time, what kind of demons Iris was battling. To me, she was just Iris—bossy older sister who thought of my existence as a personal affront. Whenever she was at home, she was locked in her room, chatting on the phone to her friends and bitching about life in general. In the evenings, she was rarely at home. Despite her keeping a distance from me, I knew she was still keeping an eye on me, still judging me to no end. Once, after James dropped me off at home, I came inside to find Iris waiting for me, her arms folded across her chest.
“Who was that?” she demanded, as though she were my mother.
“James,” I answered obediently. Even though her tone annoyed me, she was still my older sister. “My friend from badminton.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to let strange guys drive you home.”
“He’s not a strange guy, he’s someone I know from badminton. We’ve been friends for over a semester now.”
