The False Friend by Myla Goldberg Read Free Book Online

vent had not been opened, and without Huck to press against, she was cold. Through theclosed windows she heard the slam of a car door from across the street, then male voices punctuated by female laughter, footfalls on the street, and finally silence.
    She shifted to the edge of the mattress and, in an attempt to feel less marooned, tucked the bedding around her into a makeshift sleeping bag that recalled her first sleepovers. Mrs. Pearson had called them their bachelorette nights, Djuna’s father either cloistered inside his study or overseas at one of his mathematics conferences. During his absences, Celia and Djuna were each allowed to wear one of Mrs. Pearson’s negligees over their pajamas. They sipped milk from wineglasses while Mrs. Pearson drank Scotch, and stayed up watching rented videos. Mrs. Pearson’s only rule was that their picks not “abound with gratuitous sex or violence.” Like much of what Djuna’s mother said, it was a phrase Celia had intuited more than understood. “Acclimatization,” Mrs. Pearson decreed whenever she had decided that a selection rated R or PG-13 conformed to her amorphous standard. “This is the culture you live in, so you might as well get used to it. Paternalism at any age is condescending.”
    Most of their choices—
Freaky Friday
or
Gremlins, E.T
. or
The Karate Kid
—would have been perfectly acceptable to Warren and Noreen. And because Mrs. Pearson never asked Celia if she was allowed to watch movies like
Flashdance
at home, Celia was never placed in the awkward position of having to lie. She and Djuna would bookend Mrs. Pearson on the pomegranate-colored couch, an antique prettier and more comfortable than anything Celia’s parents owned. Celia favored Mrs. Pearson’s cocktail arm, to savor the clink of the ice. Afterscreening something like
Blue Lagoon
, Djuna’s mother would ask if Celia had any questions in the same voice that proclaimed the superiority of silk over cotton, Glenlivet over Glenfiddich. That voice took Celia for a far more cosmopolitan creature than she was, an impression Celia was loath to compromise. Her mind awash in visions of Christopher Atkins mounting Brooke Shields, she had waited until cocooned within Djuna’s sleeping bag to learn how little she actually knew. Even in the darkness of Djuna’s bedroom, Celia had been able make out the dolls that Mr. Pearson brought back from his frequent trips. To Celia, the international collection proved her friend’s worldliness, a quality perfected by Mrs. Pearson’s fingers curved around a whiskey glass. Under the dolls’ collective gaze, Celia was presented with a litany of organs, orifices, and gender combinations in the blasé monotone Djuna reserved for knowledge of the highest order. Accompanying this lesson was the intimate, sweet-tinged musk of Djuna’s unwashed sleeping bag, which wafted out the opening in warm puffs whenever Celia moved. This scent was as individual as a fingerprint, complex and private—the smell of a young body when it is still all smooth clefts and hollows, containing the promise of changes to come. Such cognizance was beyond Celia at the time. She had known then only that being privy to such redolence was simultaneously distasteful and thrilling, and she had attended her friend’s lecture in a state of self-conscious motionlessness periodically interrupted by small, calculated gestures to assure and chastise herself with the scent’s continued presence. By the following morning her nose had acclimated, the smell forgotten until next time. As Celia lay in her parents’ guest bed,its fresh sheets fragrant of nothing, she elegized a green nylon sleeping bag lined with red flannel. Sometimes as she climbed inside, she had told herself that she was entering a crocodile’s mouth. This was Celia’s last waking memory before her mind became briefly, blessedly blank.

CHAPTER
4
    S ince they’d moved in together, Celia had only ever left Huck behind in order to attend