Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,3

decided that Callie, as usual, was right. Laura had gotten in the habit of trusting Callie to point them both in the right direction. Ever since they’d first met, as high school freshmen, she’d happily submitted to being Callie’s protégée. True, Callie could be condescending; during that first year of their friendship, she’d coached Laura about what was cool and what wasn’t in a way that was sometimes brutal, and often shifted dramatically without warning. One week it was absolutely mandatory that they both wear cutoff jean shorts and peasant blouses, but then the next week Laura showed up to school in a version of the same outfit and Callie found it so unacceptable that she made her change in the bathroom. The next trend was baggy carpenter corduroy pants and Western-wear shirts, and Callie had actually brought spare ones in her backpack to prevent Laura from suffering the humiliation of wearing last week’s style one moment longer than necessary. It was mysterious and somewhat magical, the way Callie understood what would make them cool; she seemed to receive messages about it from the ether.

Back then, Laura had wondered what made Callie choose her; she’d thought maybe it had to do with her musical talent. Now that she was older she recognized that Callie had seen that Laura had the potential to be someone whose prettiness and talent burnished Callie’s own. She had been the one who had decided what kind of teenager Laura would be: the kind who played guitar and smoked cigarettes in the courtyard when she should have been studying. They had both still been near the top of their class, though; their school was easy, and no one tried too hard at anything besides football. Callie was known then as an “artist,” monopolizing the art classroom’s darkroom to enlarge giant black-and-white photographs of her own face.

“Your face is fun to put makeup on,” she had said one night when they were in Callie’s bedroom getting ready to go to a party (upperclassmen, parents out of town). Callie’s own face, already anointed with glitter that smelled like vanilla cake, hovered close to Laura’s as she dabbed something cool onto Laura’s eyelids with a velvety-damp wand. “I can make you look however I want you to look.”

Laura wasn’t an idiot. She understood, even at fifteen, that this would always be a good friendship exactly to the extent that she wanted to be molded. But also, taking responsibility for her own self-presentation felt, mostly, like work she could happily outsource. And Laura wasn’t purely Callie’s sidekick, or at least, like most good sidekicks, she could take over as the heroine if the situation demanded it. Once, junior year, they had been driving around aimlessly in Callie’s rusted-out old car, talking about nothing and singing along to the radio. Then the car had broken down. They weren’t far outside of town, but neither of them recognized their immediate surroundings; it soon became clear that they were really lost, and it was cold out. The joint they’d smoked had not helped. At first it was kind of an adventure. Then as they kept walking, getting colder, talking about how maybe they should flag someone down to help them and deal with the consequences if that person happened to be a serial killer or a molester, it became less of one. It was Laura who spotted the first recognizable landmark. She turned up a side street that led to a gas station and dealt with the details of getting a tow truck and a ride back to her house, where she made Callie a cup of tea and put her to bed in the upper bunk of the bunkbeds in her still-childish bedroom.

The only flaw in Callie’s plan for Laura was that it had failed to take Laura’s mom’s finances into account; though they’d both gotten into NYU, Callie’s family was willing and able to pay for it, while Laura’s family—reasonably, Laura thought—refused to let her take out enormous loans when she could go to a good school much closer to home. She had feared that they would lose touch once Callie was in the city. But Callie was not the kind of person who would leave a project unfinished. They also both found that it was hard to create the kind of easy intimacy they had with each other with anyone else. They had a legacy of secrets and inside jokes. Combined, they were more powerful than they were apart. So