Think What You Want

“I still can’t believe this is happening,” Jules says.

We sit in the kitchen, at the small breakfast table in the sun nook, drinking coffee spiked with bourbon. Jules is on her second mug, her oversize sweatshirt concealing her small frame, her hair pulled back in two low pigtails. They make her look like she is trying to get away with something, sneaking some more bourbon into the mug. They make her look a little like her fourteen-year-old self, the girl I met our first day of high school.

My grandfather had just moved us from Tennessee to Peekskill, New York—a small town on the Hudson River. Jules’s family had moved there from New York City. Her father was an investigative journalist for the New York Times—a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist—not that Jules had any airs about her. We met while applying for after-school jobs at Lucky’s, a local dog-walking service. We were both hired. And we took to walking our assigned dogs together every afternoon. We must have been a sight: two small girls, fifteen rowdy dogs surrounding us at any given time.

I was a freshman at the public high school. Jules was at a prestigious private school a few miles away. But those afternoons were just the two of us together. I’m still not sure how we would have gotten through high school without each other. We were so removed from each other’s actual lives that we told each other everything. Jules once compared it to how you confide in a stranger you meet on a plane. From the beginning, this is what we’ve been to each other: safe, airborne. Complete with a thirty-thousand-foot perspective.

That hasn’t changed, now that we’re the grown-ups. Jules has followed in her father’s footsteps and works for a newspaper. She’s a photo editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, focusing primarily on sports. She eyes me, worried. But I’m eyeing Bailey in the living room, snuggled into Bobby on the couch, the two of them talking low. It seems harmless. And still, my thought is, I have no idea what harmless looks like. This is the first time Bobby has been over when Owen hasn’t been home. This is the first time when it’s been up to me alone.

I try to check on them while pretending not to check on them. But Bailey must feel my gaze. She looks up at me, less than pleased. Then she stands up and deliberately closes the glass living room door with a thud. I can still see her, so it’s more of a ceremonial slamming. But it’s a slamming all the same.

“We were sixteen once too, you know,” Jules says.

“Not like that,” I say.

“We only wish,” she says. “Purple hair rocks.”