The Leftovers. Tom Perrotta
She scarfed down her glazed donut in three quick bites—it was so airy inside, almost like there was nothing beneath the sugary coating—then gathered up her trash.
“Ugh,” she said, dreading the prospect of the test she was about to take. “I guess we better go.”
Aimee studied her for a moment. She glanced at the display case behind the counter—tiers of donuts arrayed in their metal baskets, iced and sprinkled and powdered and plain and full of sweet surprises—and then back at Jill. A mischievous smile broke slowly across her face.
“You know what?” she said. “I think I will have something to eat. Maybe some coffee, too. You want coffee?”
“We don’t have time.”
“Sure we do.”
“What about my test?”
“What about it?”
Before Jill could reply, Aimee was out of her seat, moving toward the counter, her jeans so tight and her stride so liquid that everyone in the place turned to stare.
I have to go, Jill thought.
A feeling of unreality came over her just then, a sudden awareness of being trapped in a bad dream, that panicky sense of helplessness, as if she possessed no will of her own.
But this was no dream. All she had to do was stand up and start walking. And yet she remained frozen in her pink plastic seat, smiling foolishly as Aimee turned and mouthed the word Sorry, though it was clear from the look on her face that she wasn’t sorry at all.
Bitch, Jill thought. She wants me to fail.
AT MOMENTS like this—and there were more of them than she would have liked to admit—Jill wondered what she was doing, how she’d allowed herself to get so tangled up with someone as selfish and irresponsible as Aimee. It wasn’t healthy.
And it had happened so quickly. They’d only gotten to know each other a few months ago, at the beginning of summer, two girls working side by side in a failing frozen yogurt store, chatting during the slow times, some of which lasted for hours.
They were wary of each other at first, conscious of their membership in different tribes—Aimee sexy and reckless, her life a cluttered saga of bad decisions and emotional melodrama; Jill straitlaced and reliable, an A student and model teenage citizen. I wish I had a whole class of Jills, more than one teacher had written in the comments box on her report card. No one had ever written that about Aimee.
As the summer wore on, they began to relax into what felt like a genuine friendship, a connection that made their differences seem increasingly trivial. For all her social and sexual confidence, Aimee turned out to be surprisingly fragile, quick to tears and violent bouts of self-loathing; she required a lot of cheering up. Jill was better at hiding her sadness, but Aimee had a way of coaxing it out of her, getting her to open up about things she hadn’t discussed with anyone else—her bitterness toward her mother, her trouble communicating with her father, the feeling that she’d been cheated, that the world she’d been raised to live in no longer existed.
Aimee took Jill under her wing, bringing her to parties after work, introducing her to what she’d been missing. Jill was intimidated at first—everybody she met seemed a little older and a little cooler than she was, even though most of them were her own age—but she quickly overcame her shyness. She got drunk for the first time, smoked weed, stayed up till dawn talking to people she used to ignore in the hallway, people she’d written off as losers and burnouts. One night, on a dare, she took off her clothes and jumped into Mark Sollers’s pool. When she climbed out a few minutes later, naked and dripping in front of her new friends, she felt like a different person, like her former self had been washed away.
If her mother had been home, none of it would have happened, not because her mother would’ve stopped her, but because Jill would’ve stopped herself. Her father tried to intervene, but he seemed to have lost faith in his authority. He grounded her once in late July, after finding her passed out on the front lawn, but she ignored the punishment and he never mentioned it again.
Nor did he complain when Aimee started sleeping over, even though Jill hadn’t consulted him before inviting her. By the time he finally got around to asking what was up, Aimee was already a fixture in the house, sleeping in Tom’s old bedroom, adding her own peculiar requests to the family shopping lists, the kind of stuff that would have given her mother a heart attack—Pop-Tarts, Hot Pockets, ramen noodles. Jill told the truth, which was that Aimee needed a break from her stepfather, who sometimes “bothered” her when he came home drunk. He hadn’t touched her yet, but he watched her all the time and said creepy things that made it hard for her to fall asleep.
“She shouldn’t live there,” Jill told him. “It’s not a good situation.”
“Okay,” her father said. “Fair enough.”
The last two weeks of August were especially giddy, as if both girls sensed an expiration date on the fun and wanted to drink every drop while they still could. One morning, Jill came down from the shower, complaining about how much she hated her hair. It was always so dry and lifeless, nothing like Aimee’s, which was soft and radiant and never looked bad, not even when she’d just rolled out of bed in the morning.
“Cut it off,” Aimee told her.
“What?”
Aimee nodded, her face full of certainty.
“Just get rid of it. You’ll look better without it.”
Jill didn’t hesitate. She went upstairs, hacked away at her dull tresses with a pair of sewing scissors, then finished the job with the electric clippers her father kept under the bathroom sink. It was exhilarating to feel the past falling away in clumps, to watch a new face emerge, her eyes big and fierce, her mouth softer and prettier than it used to be.
“Holy shit,” Aimee said. “That is fucking awesome.”
Three days later Jill had sex for the first time, with a college guy she barely knew, after a drunken spin-the-bottle marathon at Jessica Marinetti’s house.
“I never did it with a bald girl,” he confided while they were still in the middle of the act.
“Really?” she said, not bothering to inform him that she’d never done it at all. “Is it okay?”
“It’s nice,” he told her, nuzzling her scalp with the tip of his nose. “Feels like sandpaper.”
She didn’t start to feel self-conscious until school started and she saw the way her old friends and teachers looked at her when she walked down the hall with Aimee, the mix of pity and loathing in their eyes. She knew what they were thinking—that she’d been led astray, that the bad girl had corrupted the good one—and wanted to tell them that they were wrong. She was no victim. All Aimee had done was show her a new way of being herself, a way that made as much sense right now as the old way had before.
Don’t blame her, Jill thought. I made the choice.
She was grateful to Aimee, she really was, and glad she’d been able to help her out with a place to stay when she needed it. Even so, all this togetherness was starting to get to her, the two of them living like sisters, sharing clothes and meals and secrets, partying together every night and then starting up again in the morning. This month they even got their periods at the same time, which was kind of freaky. What she needed was a breather, a little time to catch up on schoolwork, hang out with her dad, maybe go through some of the college material that kept arriving in the mail every day. Just a day or two to get her bearings, because sometimes she had a little trouble locating the boundary between the two of them, the place where Aimee left off and Jill began.
THEY WERE only a few blocks from school when the Prius pulled up silently beside them. It was one of those things that never used to happen to Jill but happened all the time now that she was hanging out with Aimee. The passenger window slid down, releasing a cloud of pot-scented reggae into the chilly November morning.
“Hey,