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can and then giving
up and jamming his hands into his pockets. The woman holds
open the screen door for him and he slides in sideways so as not
to touch her or let her touch him. She asks him something and
he shakes his head while moving past her as if his life depends
on it. She watches him take the stairs two at a time and then,
after he has disappeared from her sight, turns back to us. She
lifts one hand to shield her eyes again, and then gives us a hesitant wave before slowly closing the door.
expiate (verb): to make up for doing something wrong (see also: Jamie…apologizes? )

3
    “MATT IS A TOTAL SADIST .”
“Trace,” I say, pretending to be shocked. “Did you finally open
that vocabulary study guide I gave you, like, a year ago?”
She rolls her eyes at me. “He is .”
I’m tempted to remind Tracy that I spent almost all of freshman year telling her that Matt had turned into a sadistic jerk,
but we’ve been getting along so great, the last thing I want to
do is say I told you so. Even though I kind of do want to say it.
Tracy pulls a pair of super-soft yoga pants and a blue T-shirt
that she knows I love out of her dresser and hands them to me.
“Here. And don’t forget the leave-in conditioner. There is nothing worse for your hair than chlorine. Matt’s hair felt like straw
all the time.”
“Gross,” I say as I pull her silk T-shirt over my head. I know
it’s ruined—it now feels more like Styrofoam than silk. As soon
as I get it off, Tracy rushes it into the bathroom to begin a special washing ritual in her sink involving a “delicates” soap—I
had no idea there was such a thing—that comes in a black bot
tle shaped like a corset.
“I’m really sorry about your shirt,” I say as I follow her slowly.
I hate Tracy’s bathroom. I try to avoid using it because the entire
thing is full of mirrors—there is literally no escape from looking
at yourself, unless you’re in the shower. And looking at myself
is not one of my favorite things to do. I actually took the mirror
off the back of my closet door this summer because I was constantly checking my hair and my face to see if anything good
was finally happening.
It never was.
Tracy, on the other hand, has what Caron would call a “healthy
sense of self-esteem.” She checks herself out constantly to make
sure that the outfit she put together works from every angle and
that her hair and makeup are achieving maximum effect. When
I watch her do this, I don’t think, my best friend is vain, like I
used to. Instead, I think, What is it like to actually enjoy looking at
yourself? I mean, it’s not that I expect to look in the mirror and
see Giselle. But there’s got to be something in between “I’m so
gorgeous” and “I’m so hideous.” Right?
There’s got to be.
“Don’t worry about the shirt,” Tracy says as she swishes it
around in the water over and over in a figure-eight pattern. Unfortunately, I can tell she just doesn’t want me to feel bad. I know
it’s totally killing her that the shirt got trashed before she even
got to wear it once.
“I’ll get you a new one if it’s ruined, okay?”
“Uh-uh. If it’s ruined, Matt is getting me a new one. And he’s
also getting Conrad some new pants.”
“Yeah, good luck with that,” I say.
“I should threaten to call his mother. She always liked me. I bet
she’d love to know he was trying to drown a freshman for fun.”
She lifts the shirt out of the sink, gives it a sniff and puts it back
to soak some more. “Blackmail might work. And if it doesn’t, at
least I’ll get to tell his parents that he’s having sex, and his birth
control method is to say to the girl, ‘ You worry about it.’”
I look at Tracy in the mirror. “I thought you said you guys
used a condom.”
Tracy sighs. This is a conversation we had over and over last
year, when Matt kept trying to convince Tracy that she should
be on the Pill, and I kept telling her that she had to make him
use a condom.