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Upon learning that Peter Lasko was a lifeguard at the Glendale pool, the girls began spending long afternoons there, splashing hilariously in the five-foot section, which happened to place them at his feet. At the campfire, in their bedrooms, the girls rehearsed the sexy number, the one with the mink stole, swooping around and shimmying their shoulders. At least Perri and Josie did those things. Kat insisted she wasn’t interested in boys. She said it was silly, to talk about love at fourteen, when most grownups couldn’t figure it out. She said she never pla
“I don’t want to get married either,” Perri said. “But maybe we should have boyfriends, once we go to high school. Lots of girls in middle school had them.”
“My father wouldn’t let me go out with boys yet,” Josie said quickly, as if this explained everything.
“There are ways to have a boyfriend without a parent knowing,” Perri said. “You didn’t have a boyfriend because no one liked you that way.”
“Shamit did,” Kat said. “He gave her a card on Valentine’s Day, and that little tiny box of Godivas.”
“Shamit doesn’t count,” Perri decreed, and while Josie agreed, she was a
“Why did you fall in love with Daddy?” she had asked her mother.
“Because he was drop-dead gorgeous,” her mother had said promptly. “And exotic. I never saw anyone like your dad until I went to Gri
She then produced a photograph from college, and Josie could almost see that her father had been attractive once, if not her idea of drop-dead gorgeous.
“He played rugby,” her mother said dreamily. “Senior year, we found an apartment off campus and furnished it with items people put out for bulk trash-tables and chairs that looked perfectly good with just a coat of paint. I made deep-dish pizza from scratch, and we had our first di
It was so much more than Josie wanted to know, yet also less. She wanted to be assured that her romantic horizons were as open as anyone’s, but her mother’s anecdote seemed to suggest that the only 100 percent American boys who might like her would be in pursuit of some exotic fantasy figure they had seen in a magazine. And the Indian boys, the Shamits of the world, would like her either in spite of the fact that she had an Anglo mother or because of it. She couldn’t win.
“I’m going to go out for cheerleading,” she a
“Cheerleader? We’re not cheerleaders,” Perri said.
“I could make it,” Josie said, aware that her use of the first-person singular was cruelly accurate. She could make it, while Perri, with her gawky height and complete ineptness at all sports, would be hopeless. “I’m good at that kind of gymnastics-cart-wheels and round-offs. And I’m light, so I could do the things they need the smaller girls for.”
“You’d be great,” Kat agreed. “Do you think our parents would let us make a little fire here, grill hot dogs and roast marshmallows?”
“We can ask,” Perri said, “but they’d probably insist on supervising.”
It did not have to be said that no activity, no matter how desirable, was worth bringing outsiders to their circle. Even if they did not consider themselves the Ka-pe-jos anymore, even if they visited the circle only once a month or so, the place was still sacred.
When Kat’s father moved out, she refused to talk about it, even to Perri and Josie, and she stopped eating. By the end of their first semester as freshmen, she was almost too thin-and too beautiful, if such a thing were possible. Kat’s fat had been like Nana’s suit, hiding something gorgeous and true, and Josie was almost worried for her friend as she observed the commotion she created in the high school. Kat, however, seemed oblivious, wearing her old clothes, ill-fitting and baggy as they were, and ignoring the boys who buzzed around her. And it turned out that cool kids didn’t have boyfriends and girlfriends anyway. Everything was about hooking up, hitting this or that, friends with benefits. Given that choice, Kat preferred safe, platonic relationships with boys they had always known, such as Seth and Chip.
Her only concession to her new body was an increasing physical ease. She began ru
They had trumped the system, built a friendship that transcended the confines of the school’s cliques. Yes, they were cheerleaders, but they didn’t take it seriously, and Perri may have been a drama geek, but she wasn’t a geeky one. They ate lunch together and continued to see each other on weekends. It began to seem their friendship could survive anything.
Then Peter Lasko, home from first year of college and back in his lifeguard chair, had fallen in love with Kat. Perri had always said she wasn’t jealous in the slightest, and she did have a sort-of boyfriend of her own that summer, the boy who was playing Beau to her Mame in the summer production. And when Peter dropped Kat, brutally and swiftly, their friendship continued as if it had never been interrupted, as if Kat hadn’t spent most of the summer with Peter. There were no recriminations, no envy. If anything, Perri seemed to forget that she and Josie were the ones who had once hung around the community theater’s rear entrance waiting for Peter to emerge. She told Kat he wasn’t anyone special, that Kat was better off without him. These were the right things to say, of course, and Perri said them with uncharacteristic tenderness.
But if Josie were pressed to find the precise moment when things began to fall apart, she would go back to that summer when Perri was Mame, when Kat was newly thin, when Josie was learning to fly to the top of the pyramid-and Peter Lasko had taken Kat from them, however briefly. Although they never acknowledged it out loud, it proved that something, someone, could come between them. Separated once, they were all the more vulnerable to being separated again.