top of a table in the hallway. Her grandmother speaks mostly German, and even when she does speak English, I don’t understand her. It’s fine though, because she’s usually asleep in bed by the time I come over. It’s like Deena lives by herself, except she has to whisper and play music on her headphones instead of out loud.
“Grandma’s okay,” Deena says. “She just needs to sleep a lot. She’s almost seventy.”
Their apartment has the same layout as ours, but it looks completely different because it is so dark and quiet, heavy drapes over the windows, so many creaking chairs and tables that you have to zigzag to walk across the room. But Deena’s room is the opposite: pink everywhere. Pink bedspread, pink pillows, even a pink throw rug. There are two lamps with pink lightbulbs in them. Deena says plain white lightbulbs make everything ugly, and she has to have a lot of light in her room or she gets depressed.
She has bought copies of Tiger Beat magazine and taped up pictures from it on her walls, boys without shirts looking out thoughtfully, the flash of the camera reflected as a glint in their eyes. Deena has seen The Outsiders seven times, and has pictures of all of the stars: C. Thomas Howell, Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise, Ralph Macchio. She knows their names from the movie: Sodapop, Ponyboy, Johnny. She memorized the poem that Ponyboy says at the end when he’s dying, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” and she recites it for me, looking up at the posters. She wrote the cast of The Outsiders letters, and some of them wrote back, sending her more photos of themselves with their real signatures on the bottom. She has taped these up as well.
“Are you going to send them pictures of you?” I ask. “It seems fair.”
She laughs, and her laugh is the opposite of what you would think it would be for someone so pretty. She makes loud, wheezing sounds, her mouth open wide. “You’re a nut.”
We go to her house at night to do homework. “Because it’s quiet there,” I tell my mother. “You can actually think.” But really, I am the only one who does homework. Deena reads Tiger Beat, or paints her fingernails, or her toenails, or my toenails. Sometimes she gets out a book and looks at the pages, but she plays her Madonna tape in her Walkman loud enough so I can hear it, moving her lips to the words of the songs, not the words on the page.
She does not do well in school. The teachers are nice to her, smiling at her even when she doesn’t say anything, and when they hand back quizzes and tests, they have to fold hers in half so no one can see her grade. I don’t know if she really isn’t smart, or if she just doesn’t try very hard. Or maybe she doesn’t try very hard because she knows she isn’t very smart so what’s the point. She doesn’t seem worried about it. “Madonna didn’t go to college,” she says.
“Neither did my mother,” I say, and we both know what this means. Deena likes my mother, but no one would want to be like her, on food stamps with a retarded baby, always changing diapers and wearing her robe, even in the middle of the day, so it is too embarrassing for Deena to come to my house and that is why we always come here. My mother is the opposite of Madonna.
“But I hate school,” Deena says, lying back on her bed. “I really, really hate it.” She rolls her essay up into a sort of telescope, looks at me through it, and then back up at the posters on her wall.
So we are not the same, but still it is wonderful, having a friend like this. Travis is my friend, but he is not always around, and lately I am so nervous about what I say around him that sometimes I can’t say anything at all. I don’t want to say anything dumb. But with Deena, I can say anything, and she’ll just laugh.
They’ve built a McDonald’s across the highway in the field next to the Kwikshop, where I used to see the deer. Deena and I watch its construction with anticipation, realizing that once its doors open, we will have somewhere to go, somewhere to be besides where the school bus takes us. But I am also worried about the frogs and the white-tailed