Rules for Being a Girl

“What are you doing here?” I ask, but then I notice the hunch of her narrow shoulders like she’s shielding herself from a blow, and some dormant best-friend instinct sputters creakily to life. “Are you okay?”

Chloe shrugs, squinting at the 3D sea-glass sculpture on the wall in the hallway instead of looking at me. “Can we talk?” she asks.

I glance from her to my mom, who’s slipping discreetly into her office, then back to Chloe again. “Sure.”

I pull a hoodie off the row of hooks next to the front door and we head outside to sit on the porch swing, the chain link groaning quietly as we rock back and forth. We’ve had almost every important conversation of our friendship out here: sixth grade, the two of us trying valiantly to decipher the primitive dick-and-balls cartoon Brandon Farrow had scribbled on the back cover of her notebook; freshman spring when she told me her sister was leaving college to do inpatient eating-disorder treatment; last year when I was deciding if I wanted to lose my virginity to Jacob. I used to think I could tell Chloe anything. But now I don’t know what to say.

In the end it turns out I don’t have to.

“Can I ask you a question?” she begins, picking at the polish on her freshly painted thumbnail. She still isn’t looking at me. “Why did you trash Bex’s car?”

I whirl around, shocked all over again. “That’s what you came here to yell at me about?” I demand. “His douchey car? Because if it is you can just—”

“Can you calm down?” Chloe interrupts, finally turning to look at me. Her eyes are hot as flame. “I’m not yelling at you. Do you hear me yelling at you? I’m just asking you why you did it.”

I shrug. “Why do you even care?”

Chloe huffs a breath out. “Marin,” she says, tilting her head back against the swing. “Come on.”

“You come on.” I’m being a baby—I know I’m being a baby—but I can’t help it. I don’t know how to not be hurt by what she did.

“Look.” Chloe peels a flake of polish off her pinky nail, flicking it onto the floor of the porch. “I know I haven’t been a very good friend to you lately—and I know that’s even an understatement, probably,” she says, holding a hand up when I let out a sound of protest. “And you don’t owe me any kind of explanation. But I’m listening, if you want to tell me.”

So: I tell her. I tell Chloe everything, from Bex’s first day back to my call with Kalina, to his grip on my arm that day in the stairwell. “He wanted to get back at me for telling, and he did,” I finish finally. “So I guess I just wanted to . . . get back at him too.” I reach one foot out and push off the porch railing harder than I mean to, and we go swinging forward quickly. “But the only person I actually ruined anything for was myself.”

The swing creaks back and forth, back and forth, and Chloe doesn’t say anything. When I glance in her direction her face is almost as white as the clapboard on the front of the house.

“I’m sorry,” she says, her eyes filling so suddenly with tears that I can’t keep from gasping. “Marin. I’m so, so sorry.”

Right away I shake my head. “Hey,” I say, holding my hands up, palms out in shocked surrender. Our friendship has felt like one bizarre, inexplicable missed connection after another lately. But I wasn’t prepared for this. “It’s . . . okay.”

“It’s not!” she says, and she’s up off the swing now, pacing across the porch. “It’s a lot of things, Marin, but it is definitely not okay.”

“Chloe,” I say, curling my fingers around the edge of the porch swing. My voice is quiet. “What’s going on?”

Chloe shakes her head, her eyes flicking to her car in the driveway like she can’t decide if she wants to dive behind the wheel and peel away into the sunset or just take off on foot and never, ever stop. I know that look—I’ve seen it in the mirror a lot lately—but in the end she just sits back down beside me, clearing her throat like she’s preparing to give testimony in a courtroom. She takes a deep breath.

“I thought he loved me,” she confesses, then immediately digs the heels of her hands into her eye sockets, rubbing until her mascara smudges. “Oh my god, I can’t believe I’m saying that out loud right now. I sound like a fucking idiot. I thought he loved me.”

“Who?” I ask—even though I already know, in some secret part of my brain. Maybe I always did.

Chloe rubs her thumbs underneath her eyes, wiping the mascara away. “Who do you think?”

It started in October, she tells me. He took her to his apartment, in the Victorian house with the built-in bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. He wanted to lend her a book. They listened to records; he cooked her pasta. She told her parents she was at the library.

He told her she had an old soul.

“When you told me what happened between you guys I just kind of lost it,” Chloe admits. “The way you described it, him being a creep—it didn’t feel like that to me. Or not at the time, at least. I thought we were . . . a couple.” She rolls her eyes and another tear slips down her cheek. “We did couple stuff. Like—I went with him to the Cape back in the fall.”

My eyes widen. “You did what?”

“Can you not?” Chloe shakes her head. “I know now it was stupid.”

“I don’t think it’s stupid,” I promise. “I just—what, to a hotel?”

She shrugs. “His family has a house.”

“Of course they do.” I run my fingers through my hair. “I’m sorry. I’m being an asshole. I just—when?”