Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier Read Free Book Online Page B

appeared on the lawn that day, Gwyn disappeared, moved away. And for what felt like an eternity, I was Gwynless, which turned out to be an awful thing to be after spending so many hours in her light. I was a sick weed, growing needlessly and clumsily. And out there on that other coast, she was blossoming like a wild rose. I heard the rumors: She and her dad were off living in L.A. Mrs. Sexton was too unfit to take care of her (that was before she did the rehab thing, though the effects of that were obviously temporary, something I didn’t bother mentioning to my parents). I got Hollywood postcards from Gwyn occasionally, with pictures of Mann’s Chinese Theater and the Walk of Fameand lots of Marilyn Monroes and too many exclamation points but no return address. Even Mrs. Sexton didn’t seem to know what it was.
    —Last I heard they were on Venice Beach, she said, looking right through me the one time I mustered up my nerve to go over and ask. It sounded so exotic. I imagined Gwyn drifting slowly in gondolas (or dancing around, more likely, like in that old Madonna video). I imagined her crossing the Bridge of Sighs with shadowy men who spoke in delicious, disturbing accents.
    And then just as abruptly as she’d come and gone, Gwyn reappeared after junior high, back to live with her mother.
    I remember seeing her that first day in earth science, the same old Gwyn but her legs had gone all long and she stretched them out from her desk to right under Tony Mahoney’s seat in front of her. She leaned back lazily as if it were Club Med and not room 104 where owlish Mr. Witherspoon worked himself into conniptions over igneous rock and made us believe the collision of the very tectonic plates we were riding upon was imminent.
    I can see it well, as if I’d photographed it: She stuck a blow pop in her mouth, crunching immediately through to the gummy center (an old habit). I had a sort of back and side angle view of her. Her hair was more gold than white now, flaxen, and twirled up in about a dozen braids, wound and pinned so the nape of her long neck showed clearly, unadorned. Then she turned towards me—I’d been staring, stunned, wondering whether I’d misjudged the back of the head—and blew a huge grape bubble and popped it. She sucked in the strands (none caught on her gloss), winked at me, and grinned the Gwyn grin.
    —Hey, Boopster, she said.—Remember me?
    I nearly leapt out of my chair to bear hug her, then remembered: We were in high school now, you weren’t supposed to do that to your girlfriends. So I stayed put.
    —Rabbit? I said in my best James Bond.—Veronica Rabbit?
    And then she jumped up and wrapped me in her arms, closer than a papoose.
    As children, Gwyn and I grew into a friendship made up of silences and secret stares, one that can happen only between two people who don’t fit in—in our case, the rich little girl who lived like an orphan and the brown little girl who existed as if she were still umbilically attached to her parents. But we could look each other in the eye, go porous in our created world, sliding easily from one to the other. Many times I didn’t know where Gwyn left off and I began. But from high school on there were a few differences, of course: Puberty had gone all out in the interim of our friendship and now neither of us fit too well in our seats. My hips had erupted lavalike from the waist and there had been much volcanic activity in my chest as well, which I downplayed with plaid shirts and big sweaters—you know, fat clothes. I had, in other words, been branching out into new areas horizontally while Gwyn had gone vertical. But the two of us still fit. And from that moment, we were inseparable again. We never talked about those years in between, just carried on until they became a mere blip on the radar. Our plates came together and we were on the same planet again; seamless.
    But now that Dylan had arrived on the scene, I could feel a tiny crack forming, still