Late to the Party - Kelly Quindlen Page 0,1
the car, but I couldn’t tear my gaze away from the pool.
“Codi!” Maritza called. “Come on!”
I took one last look and ran after my friends.
* * *
It hadn’t rained on the first day of summer in years. I knew this because for the last five years in a row, Maritza, JaKory, and I had gone swimming on the first day of summer. It was tradition to meet at my house, pack a cooler full of snacks, and flip-flop our way through the burning late-May sun to the clubhouse at the front of my neighborhood. “Clubhouse” sounds bougie, but all the neighborhoods in the suburbs of Atlanta had clubhouses, and all the clubhouses had pools, and all the pools were filled with toddlers in soggy diapers and kids who’d just finished swim team and brave mothers who’d recently moved down from the Midwest or Northeast and were hoping to make friends in this transient half-southern, half-everything-else place. And then there was us: three teenagers splashing around in the shallow end, totally engrossed in playing a game of Celebrity, or practicing back twists, or guessing what songs JaKory was singing underwater.
We’d started this tradition the day after sixth grade ended. That was the day Maritza and JaKory had shown up at my house with swimsuits, squirt guns, and their summer reading books, and I had been so nervous and excited that I’d painted their portraits as a way of thanking them for coming. Embarrassing, I know, but you have to understand that before that sixth-grade year with Maritza and JaKory, I’d never really had a best friend, at least not the kind who lasted more than a single school year. And I knew it was the same for them, because when I’d gone to their houses a few days later, Maritza had taped her portrait to her mirror and JaKory had tacked his above his favorite bookshelf.
“You made me look so pretty and cool,” Maritza had said, beaming at me.
“My mom said you really captured my essence,” JaKory had said, trying not to look too pleased.
I’d soaked in their compliments without saying anything, but in that moment, I felt like I’d swallowed the sun.
We’d rediscovered those portraits this past Christmas and nearly died laughing. They looked nothing like my friends. Maritza’s likeness should have been gawkier, her eyebrows thicker, her nose more beak-like. JaKory’s should have captured his knobby elbows, ashy legs, and worrywart expression. I’d painted my friends as I saw them instead of how the world saw them, and now I was starting to recognize the difference.
“You made us look like we were the shit in sixth grade,” Maritza had said, laughing, as we passed the portraits back and forth.
“Blissful ignorance,” JaKory had said, shaking his head in amusement. “Remember when we spent a whole month choreographing dances to that Celine Dion song? We had no idea how uncool we were.”
“Oh god,” Maritza had muttered, going still. “I think we still don’t.”
I thought about that conversation for weeks afterward, wondering if it was true, if that was really how other people saw us. Maybe they did. Maybe to them Maritza was just the gawky, outspoken, frizzy-haired dancer, and JaKory was the skinny, neurotic, Tumblr-obsessed black nerd, and I was nothing but the shy, reclusive, practically invisible artist who never raised her hand. Maybe that was why nothing real ever happened to us.
With our junior year behind us, things were supposed to feel big and important and, as JaKory described it no matter how much Maritza and I begged him not to, “pregnant with potential.” But the thing is, nothing felt big or important or bursting with potential to me. We’d gotten older, and taller, and maybe a little less awkward than we’d been the year before, but I’d come to know adolescence as a rolling stretch of hanging out with my friends the same way we always had, without anything new happening.
You know how adults are always talking about teenagers? When I was in fourth grade, my family drove past a house that had been rolled with toilet paper, and my dad shook his head and chuckled Teenagers under his breath. My mom griped about Teenagers every June, when dark figures hung over the monkey bars of the clubhouse playground long after closing hours, but she never actually seemed mad; she seemed wistful. And then there’s all those shows and movies, the ones where thirty-year-old actors pretend to be high schoolers, and they go on dates and drive their fast