Likes by Sarah Bynum (e novels to read online .TXT) 📗

of late and wanted only two cheese slices and a free cup of water. Without needing to confer, they headed to the booth in the back corner so that Bree could gaze up at the wood-veneer wall and enjoy the signed photograph of the baseball player who looked like Bruce Boxleitner, star of Scarecrow and Mrs. King. That was her favorite show, just as Imogen’s was Jeopardy!, just as Mari’s was Masterpiece Theatre.

The facts in which they were fluent could fill a three-drawer file cabinet: age at which ears were pierced; history of broken bones and origins of scars; score on most recent math test; recurring bad dream; favorite words in French; despised body parts; last book read; secret sources of pride; pet peeves; pet names; scents of deodorant and hair conditioner.

There were also things about each other that they didn’t know.

For example: Mari got her period in the sixth grade, right before she turned twelve. By the time she exited the bathroom—sobered, walking strangely, feeling diapered—her mother had already placed calls to her father (he was at work) and both of her grandmothers (California, Ohio) to tell them the news. From that moment forward, Mari never spoke of her period to anyone. Discreetly, she carried the necessary implements in an unassuming cotton pouch made to look like a mouse. She had found it in the top drawer of her mother’s dresser, a home to scarves and handkerchiefs and the occasional purposeless gift from relatives abroad. It was an abstract, teardrop-shaped mouse, with a few inches of silk cord extending from its bottom and where the tip of its nose would be, a single snap. With this snap as the only form of closure on an otherwise openmouthed mouse, the pouch was not capable of safely holding much—not money or makeup and certainly not jewelry, nothing small. But Mari discovered that it did well enough with pads, and in fact the pads made the mouse look plump, almost like a stuffed toy, and soon the sight of it nestled in her book bag ceased to cause her any embarrassment, so that eventually, a year later, when she had graduated to tampons, she kept these along with her pads inside the same mouse, which by then had lost its tail.

One winter afternoon, as the seventh graders were packing up their binders in the final minutes before the bell rang, Mari’s book bag tipped over onto the floor, and the force of the fall sent the tailless mouse sailing out of her bag like a missile, nose first, and a single slender-size tampon came shooting out of the mouse’s open mouth. It was like one of those fireworks that explodes only to reveal that there’s another, smaller explosion right inside it. The tampon slid across the homeroom floor without resistance, and Mari watched its journey in frozen horror. It didn’t make the slightest difference that only girls went to her school. Girls in her class thought that periods were disgusting: see how someone had tortured Holly Maynard by leaving a used-looking pad, colored red with a felt-tip marker, on the seat of her chair.

Yet three rows ahead of Mari was Bree’s solid dachshund body, which happened to be bending down patiently to retrieve a highlighter from beneath her desk just as Mari’s tampon came gliding toward her; she scooped it up, tucked it inside the sleeve of her sweatshirt, and sat back up without glancing around to see where it might have come from. Mari dropped onto her knees to recapture the mouse, and Bree bent over again to pick up the highlighter for real, and there among the legs of chairs and desks and classmates their eyes met. Nodding at the cotton pouch clutched in her hand, Bree mouthed to Mari, “I have it.”

After the last bell they found themselves laughing uncontrollably in the empty restroom across from the admissions office. Bree had Mari’s tampon—and she also had her period—not right then but in life—and she also had gotten hers the year before. In February. Only weeks after Mari. How could they be such complete and utter idiots? Their laughter made them hold on to each other for balance. “Remember when I said that the gyros from lunch were giving me a stomachache?” Bree asked. “That was cramps!” Mari was laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe. To think that they had been suffering silently, side by side, this whole time: it felt like both the saddest and funniest thing that had ever happened to them. As she wiped her eyes on her sweatshirt, Bree asked, “Are we going to tell Imogen?” but before she had even finished the question she was already saying, at the same time as Mari, “No.”

It was hard to imagine Imogen having bodily functions. Of course they had on countless occasions heard her peeing in the next stall over, but the girl who emerged a few seconds later appeared not responsible for the sounds. Her bathroom at home was spotless: on the sink sat a cake of soap, a boar-bristle brush, a tube of baking soda toothpaste. The porcelain had a lovely soft look to it due to age and abrasive cleaners. A tarnished silver baby cup held Imogen’s toothbrush, and though it looked like an antique from the Victorian era, like something you’d find inside a glass case, she used it every morning and night when brushing her teeth. On its rim was a pale crescent of mineral residue.

Imogen’s house was full of such objects. There was a low-slung leather rhinoceros, long enough to sit on, with Liberty of London stamped on the underside of its ear. There was a needlepoint sampler hanging on the wall that said: Children aren’t happy with nothing to ignore / And that’s what parents were created for. There was a collection of Edward Gorey books—not the big paperback compilations that Mari owned, but original editions, of varying small sizes, with jewel-colored book jackets—The Doubtful Guest, The Hapless Child, The