Hiding Read online

  He did it with kids in the neighborhood, too. When a new kid would come along, riding his bike or something, Carol would ask him little questions about whether he was actually moving into the neighborhood or was just visiting family or friends. And if the kid was just a visitor, and Carol knew he could get away with BSing him without any, you know, future repercussions, he’d start his routine. Like if the kid was riding a new bike or hover board or something that was popular, Carol would say to the kid, “Oh yeah, I have one of those.” And he’d act very natural and sort of disinterested, but look at the hover board or whatever with sort of squinty eyes, and say, “Mine’s a little better, though. It has these cool braking features I don’t see on yours—that lever you can press your foot down on?” By this time the kid would be dying to see what Carol was bragging about, but Carol would sort of shake his head. “No—it’s not here,” he’d say. “It’s up at the cabin in Maine.”

  That was the thing.

  Every time Carol would mention something he had that I knew for a fact he didn’t have, he’d say it was up at his “cabin in Maine,” which he said was on this beautiful lake and surrounded by huge mountains. I knew he was just making it all up—but even if it had been real I doubt the cabin would be much to live in, because it’d be crammed floor to ceiling with all the stuff he said was up there that other kids had and he didn’t.

  Anyways, I don’t know if Carol acted weird and did all this stuff when he met Suzie that day. I doubt he did, because like I said, he was really good at asking all these questions to find out whether whoever he was talking to was going to actually live in the neighborhood or not, and seeing as how there was a moving truck and everything, he was undoubtedly aware that she was here to stay. But he asked her a zillion questions anyway, so by the time I showed up in the afternoon he had worked up what you could call a complete dossier on Suzie, who he said was sort of skinny like a string bean, with a round face and short black hair cut in bangs and freckles on her face.

  “Her mom’s divorced,” Carol told me about Suzie. We were standing in the street in front of his house and looking at her house on the corner, which still had plenty of unpacked boxes on the porch. He spoke from the side of his mouth and made it all sound very secretive, which he was very good at. So good, in fact, that his mom had managed to get him into a bunch of TV commercials—spots, he called them—shunting him off to New York or Hollywood every once in a while, to be in some commercial for cereal or toothpaste. That must be what made him feel so comfortable with lying—and from what I could see was what supported their whole household, because I never saw Carol’s mom ever go to work.

  His mom was divorced, too, so he winked at me, like he knew something deep about what that meant. “She’s okay, but her mom’s gross. She weighs, like, six hundred pounds. Kind of makes you wonder, you know?”

  “Wonder what?” I said.

  He squinted and grinned at me. “Wonder if her daughter will become a whale,” he said.

  Carol liked figuring everything out about people because he had this very nosy, brassy mom who sort of primed him to get all the facts about the people he met. I’m not saying she was nosy just to judge people like everybody else around here, but more to see what she could get from them, because you always had the feeling she was one of those people who sort of lived by their wits. She was what you’d call a hip mom, and dressed hipper and more casually than the other neighborhood moms—really, I guess, in a more sexy way. Carol called her by her first name, and she did stuff like smoke pot with him once in a while—at least he said she did, but he could have been lying. But even if that was a lie, her whole attitude and the sort of confidential way she talked to us made her different from any other mom I knew.

  Carol looked like his mom, too, like they were peas in a pod, with sandy hair in bangs and freckles and eyes they always squinted at you when they talked, even on cloudy days or when they were inside the house—I guess some people just have a knack for doing that, especially people who don’t, you know, tell you everything they’re thinking. I swear, they were, like, addicted to squinting. They even squinted at each other when they talked among themselves.

  Suzie wasn’t there anymore; she’d gone back in next door to eat lunch. Carol and I went and sat inside the big screened-in porch in front of his house—the veranda, he called it—waiting for her to come back. Actually, his place was two houses: a duplex, one side of which various people moved into and out of all the time, which was a very rare thing in my neighborhood. It was sort of a house for transient types; at least that’s what my dad called it when I told him Carol lived there.

  We sat in big wicker chairs with these dusty flower-embroidered cushions, and Carol went on to tell me that Suzie’s mom worked in some job for a contractor downtown, so Suzie was alone most of the time, and that she liked to ride her bike up and down the street a lot, and that she was all set to go to this private girls’ school out in some county about fifty miles away, for which she was going to have to be picked up by a yellow bus every morning, even though that detail wasn’t particularly relevant right then, because it was just the start of summer, and school for anybody, public and private both, was, like, three months away.

  It was about this time that Suzie came back out and I saw her for the first time.

  Carol was right about her.

  She was just a sort of skinny average kid, except that her face was really round and sort of pretty. Her hair was cut in bangs around her face, sort of further setting off the roundness—except that it worked well because her hair was really black. Her skin was very pale and her eyes were this sort of crystal blue with a sparkle that I hadn’t seen too many times in other people, except maybe my mom, because she has eyes like that too, and they’re the kind of eyes that seem to go very deep because they are so bright, and they give you the impression that the person who has them is very sensitive, but whether that’s actually true or not I can’t say, because sometimes with my mom the crystal just turns to ice.

  But anyways there she was, dawdling in the screen doorway, still eating half a sandwich. She had on this striped shirt like Waldo in the Where’s Waldo? book, so in truth I’ll say she could have looked a little silly, but the odd thing was the way her face and really her whole head didn’t go much with her body, which was just this sort of string bean kid’s body like Carol had said.

  “Hi,” she said, smiling at me. “I’m Suzie.” And just from the way she said it, I knew immediately she wanted to be friends.

  “Hi,” I said. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”

  The best thing about her face was how friendly it looked. She smiled a lot, for one thing—a bright toothy smile between big red lips—and it was pretty hard not to get affected by that smile, because, like those crystal blue eyes, the smile seemed to shine. She seemed like she was always in a really good mood and very friendly, and her voice was friendly too, with a little tinkle of laughter in it.

  We did a bunch of things that day, like walking in the woods at the end of the street, and after that, at sunset, just sitting on Carol’s porch in the big dusty wicker chairs, drinking iced tea Carol’s mom brought out to us.

  “Hey—can you show us your house?” Carol asked Suzie, sort of all of a sudden. He was pretty eager to further check out who she was, I could tell.

  “Can’t,” Suzie said. She smiled at him. “My mom’s a real stickler about me never bringing anybody inside while she’s gone.” She sucked on her straw until it bubbled super loud. “So’s not to mess anything up,” she explained.

  I sucked my straw too, just to make the same noise. All Carol did was sit there looking bummed, because I guess he really wanted to check out her house, but he got over it soon enough.

  We sat and talked until after dark. And without even trying we all became friends.

  I saw her a lot after that. Pretty soon I was seeing her almost every day, because her house was at the bottom of a hill I liked to ride my scooter down, on this sort of secluded st
reet with the houses back behind the trees, where there were never a lot of cars.

  Sometimes I found her riding her bike like Carol had said, but the reason she did it was to dry her hair after she’d taken a shower.

  I figured this out when once I found her standing in the street with her legs over her bike. I sat on the curb. “I hate using hair-dryers because they always bake my hair,” she said. “Did you ever notice that? How they just bake your hair? I mean until you can smell it?”

  I told her I understood perfectly, but what I really liked was what she did next, which was big and dramatic, like something I’d never think of doing.

  She pedaled way up the street to the top of the hill, turned in a big loop, and soared down yelling, “Wheeee!” When she got to the bottom she slammed on the brakes in this terrific skid, right in front of me. We talked for a minute until she got her breath, and then she did it again.

  I swear, she did it, like, twenty times. The whole bottom of the street was covered with skid marks by the time her hair was dry. She used to do this all the time, and I loved to watch.

  Sometimes Carol was there, and he’d tell us all about what commercial he was up for or already did and what TV star he did it with, or about some political candidate his mother was rooting for, because his mom discussed politics with him a lot, and since both Suzie and I knew nothing about politics, he’d ask us in this sort of condescending way why we didn’t know anything about the candidate, because it was important to be up on things like that.

  But the truth is, I couldn’t relate too well to Suzie when Carol was around because the stuff he said sort of hogged the atmosphere. I mean, he had this way—what with his squint and everything—of really just hogging the atmosphere, the whole atmosphere. I was glad when he started coming around less and less—his mom was always taking him out of town to be in more commercials—but that didn’t stop me from coming to see Suzie.

  I’m not saying that I stole his friend or anything. It’s true that he met her first, but he and Suzie never truly hit it off.

  Suzie and I got along really well. I have to admit that the first few times I rode my scooter down the hill I did it sort of accidentally-on-purpose—I mean just to bump into her. But after a few days we were saying to each other that we’d meet there again the next day.

  It wasn’t long before we’d talk about almost anything, no matter how personal. She told me all about how her dad had left and moved to Cincinnati and the whole ordeal of that, and I told her about my dad and mom and the problems they had sometimes. We’d sit on the curb right next to each other, feeling very close, and I guess we sort of accepted each other as confessional types, because neither of us ever said anything to make the other feel embarrassed or wrong about what we said. I mean, we sort of sympathized with each other a lot, because we really did have a lot of stuff—at least home stuff—in common.

  But the big thing is, we liked each other. We saw each other just as we were and that was all we needed. It was great not to hide from her. I guess I felt I could get away with that because her life was so busted up, there was no threat that she’d turn around and judge me. We became pretty close, and sometimes in the evening she’d even come out in her PJs to talk. When her mom called her back in—because her mom had all these rules about just when she could go out and exactly what she was allowed to do—I’d see her run up onto the porch through the dusk, and I’d wait outside on the street until she showed up at her bedroom window and waved good night down to me.

  Now, I won’t say I loved her.

  But I really, really liked her.

  We definitely had feelings for each other, but the amazing thing is that we knew all of each other’s dirty little secrets, and it didn’t matter. I felt I could tell her anything, like there was no pretense, you know? She didn’t hide from me, either. And we didn’t have to wear masks and imply things about how rich our parents were or how great we were in school or how cool our lives were in general. I couldn’t wear a mask anyway—it wasn’t something I was good at doing, faking. You might think I was, because I say I’m good at hiding, but wearing a mask isn’t like hiding at all. With a mask, people always know you’re right behind it, and they always try to peek through. With hiding they don’t see you at all.

  After school started, Suzie confided in me all about the problems she had getting along with these nasty girls in her class, and about how much pressure her mom put her under because they couldn’t really afford her school on her mom’s skimpy salary—this very expensive prep school, it was—so her mom had, you know, these very heavy and extreme expectations and everything.

  Suzie could tell me anything. And I could tell her anything too, all about how I felt so out of place sometimes, in the neighborhood, I mean, and how I felt we just didn’t fit in like other families there, because I hadn’t been brought up doing the same stuff that most other neighborhood kids had, and I just couldn’t relate to them. And when I told her these things I noticed she would hold my hand.

  I would never have thought to criticize or judge her—all I wanted to do was know she was feeling okay and things were decent with her, and I think that’s what she felt about me.

  Maybe I was in love with her but I didn’t know it at the time, because when things changed I really got confused.

  And things did change.

  It happened after two summers, after what I’ll say was a pretty blissful time we’d had just hanging out and being friends.

  And it wasn’t just puberty.

  I mean, I guess that’s sort of what it maybe boils down to, but that wasn’t all of it.

  We both went through it at the same time.

  And to tell you the truth, at first it wasn’t a big deal.

  We still saw each other almost every day. We still talked and were close.

  But something had happened to her that was pretty incredible, even though I didn’t notice it at first.

  She became really beautiful.

  I mean, she became almost a woman.

  How it happened I don’t know. I mean, you couldn’t tell by looking at her mom how Suzie would turn out, because her mom was really pretty fat. I’d seen her by then, although she wasn’t the whale Carol and his mom made her out to be—I think they said that out of sheer competitiveness or something. Suzie never got fat. She just really filled out, and whatever tendency she had toward fat, let’s just say it all went into the breast area.

  That doesn’t happen to every girl, you know. Just a few in this right-off-the-bat way.

  I guess it really happened gradually, but I hadn’t paid attention. She was no longer a skinny kid, and her body now fit her face, but what difference did it make to me? We still talked to each other about everything and I still sat on the curb with my feet on my scooter and watched her ride her bike up and down the hill to dry her hair; that’s all that mattered to me, I suppose.

  It was the day that Carol came back from a trip to New York that it got ugly. I mean an ugly thing happened.

  We were sitting on the porch again, the veranda, all three of us, and I forget how it started, but after bragging to us about some commercial, Carol told some semidirty joke. And then Suzie told one she’d heard at school, and then I did, and we were all laughing, and then we did this wrestling thing we always did, just wrestling one another down until they squirm, and then laughing some more.

  But this time I swear Carol had this sort of squinty look in his eyes when he looked at Suzie—I mean an exceptionally squinty look—like almost a pissed-off look. I’d noticed it on his face since he’d first seen Suzie that morning. At first he wrestled with me and of course lost because he couldn’t beat me in a trillion years, and then he wrestled Suzie down onto this big dusty divan that was stuck against the wall under some windows.

  He got her on her back and pinned her arms with his knees so his hands were free, and they were both laughing their heads off, until he raised his hands over her breasts, and I imagine you’ve gathered from what I said t
hat she had really big breasts by now, and he made his fingers like pincers, and then in this weird voice he started saying, “Squeezie squeezie squeezie!” like a frickin’ pervert.

  She gave up struggling and just stared at his face. I saw her eyes were very hard—I mean the crystal had become icy—and her whole face, which was usually so pale, blushed deep red.

  “Get the hell off me,” she said.

  He rolled off looking like she’d bitten him—I mean embarrassed as hell—and she got up from the divan and straightened her clothes. She said to him, “How dare you do that to me! I thought you were my friend.”

  I’d never heard her voice like that before, so sharp, I mean.

  She glared at him, and he didn’t say a thing but just sort of looked at the floor. And then she left, just walked out and crossed the yard and went up the stairs to her house and closed the door.

  I didn’t see her for a week after that.

  I saw Carol.

  I thought he’d acted like a total moron, but I guess he just felt so embarrassed that he said some pretty nasty things about Suzie to sort of save face. “Jesus,” he said. “So she’s got a big pair of tits! Is she uptight about them? My mom says she’s ridiculous. Get over it!”

  He looked at me with his eyes wide open. I knew he wanted me to agree with him, but I didn’t say a thing. It never even seemed to occur to him to consider her feelings. I don’t know what we talked about next—not much, probably, and I must admit I avoided him for a while after that, like a few weeks. His whole routine had made me sick.