was swept clean.
Maggie opened the top drawer. Inside was the California bikini. She held it to her face and smelled the sharp chlorine smell. The color was faded, and the underwire in one of the cups was bent. Maggie felt to the back of the drawer to see if Helen could possibly have meant something else, but that was the only thing left in there. Then she heard the front door close, and feet on the stairs, and without thinking she slipped into Debbie’s room and shoved the suit to the bottom of her beach bag, under her towel.
She thought of something Helen had said once about Maggie and Debbie, who had been best friends since first grade, although Maggie was thoughtful and serious and studious and Debbie was often called “pea brain” by the members of her own family: “Debbie likes Maggie because Maggie makes her feel special, and Maggie likes Debbie because Debbie makes her feel normal.”
She had thought of that all the rest of the day, and now, as she and Debbie sat in the development house, waiting for the boys to come, it kept running through her head: Debbie normal, Maggie special. She took a deep breath.
She hated the air this time of the summer, the thick heavy air of July, like something woolly twisted around your head, clogging your nose, making it hard to breathe. Her hair felt like wet wash on the back of her neck. During the afternoon she had made a clover chain and had forgotten to take it off her head. The flowers were browning now, and brittle. Debbie’s hair had been cut into a funny kind of pageboy, and each night she took pink foam rollers and rolled the ends over them, so that each morning her hair all around turned under like the curve of a comma, although by night the curve was gone.
“This must be what Helen will do all the time,” Maggie said. “She’ll just call a bunch of guys and say, ‘Come over, we’ll watch television. If I like you, you can stay. If not, I’ll kick you out. It’s my house, I run things. You’re not my husband. I do what I want.’”
Debbie looked doubtful. “I don’t think even Helen would kick Richard out,” she said.
Richard Joseph was the coolest boy in Kenwood. Everyone said so. He was fourteen, but sixteen-year-old girls were interested in him. He was tall and had blond hair and blue eyes and hair on the back of his hands, and a smile that started slowly at the corner of his mouth and then moved to the middle.
“I don’t know how Mary Joseph ever came to have that boy with the bedroom eyes,” Mrs. Malone had once said about him.
Richard Joseph played bass guitar in a garage band. He had mooned a table of mothers from the high dive at the Kenwoodie Club and managed to convince the manager that the elastic in his trunks had snapped. And once, at a party during Christmas vacation, he had asked Maggie to dance. She was the youngest girl he’d ever noticed, and most of the girls at Sacred Heart thought he had done it just to embarrass her.
So did Maggie. She did not know what to expect from the evening. It seemed as though meeting boys, alone, here, on the second floor, was completely different from seeing them at the swimming pool, or in the rec room of somebody’s house. Debbie had told her father she was staying at Maggie’s, and Maggie had left a note saying she was staying at the Malones.
“They’re coming,” Debbie said in a whisper, which seemed unnecessary, since the two boys were singing “She Loves You” in not particularly close harmony, the flats and sharps carrying like trumpet blasts through the still night. Maggie saw a light go on in a house not far from her own.
“SSShhhhh,” Debbie hissed, leaning out the window in a great cloud of Chanel No. 5. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” the two boys sang, playing imaginary guitars on the front of their madras shorts, paying no attention. In a minute their heads came into view at the top of the crude ladder the construction men had nailed into place until they were ready to put in the stairs. “Cool,” said Richard, his wavy yellow hair bright even in the dark. “Really cool,” said Bruce, who was Richard’s permanent audience, a thin boy with spiky light hair and long legs who reminded Maggie of