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

her legs and armpits but also the tops of her feet, her underwear line, and rather weirdly, Mari thought, her forearms. She had figured out a way to isolate the body part she most despised—what she coldly called her double chin but was really just a little softness, a minor lack of definition—through a series of muscle contractions.

“It’s like sucking in your stomach,” she explained, “but instead I’m sucking in the area under my chin.”

Mari confessed she hadn’t noticed, and that in her opinion Bree’s chin, her jawline, looked perfectly fine.

“That’s because I’m sucking in all the time,” Bree said. “I’m making it look fine.”

Imogen usually didn’t contribute to these conversations. There wasn’t any disapproval in her silence, or squirminess, and she didn’t act bored. It just felt as if she had politely stepped away for a moment. In fact, she seemed to have excused herself altogether from the fray—the consuming, frantic efforts of creating a self. She still looked like the girl who had befriended Mari in second grade, and Bree in sixth—same heavy curtain of hair, same orderly teeth and narrow body and marvelous skin—except that she was taller now, of course. She liked particular things but was not given to obsessions. She was known for being good at sports, singing in a clear contralto, and leading the student council with Cabinet-level skill. She was curious about other people. She could do complex math problems in her head. She had a delighted-sounding, unrestrained, bell-like laugh. When Mari stopped to think about it, her feeling of wonder was undimmed—what stroke of fortune had befallen her at age seven—for how did she ever get so lucky as to have Imogen as her friend?

But by the eighth grade there was something about Imogen that Mari couldn’t quite put her finger on—that refused to be asked about, that was at once much bigger and subtler than the accident involving Bree’s eyebrows—something that had to do with her sense of Imogen staging an imperceptible retreat. Imperceptible because she was still firmly at the center of everything: a school day felt desultory without her there, the weekend shapeless if not spent at her house. Yet Imogen occupied this position while also making herself absent. Sometimes literally—one Friday afternoon she startled Mari and Bree by appearing in her kitchen clad in the gym clothes she had brought home over the weekend to be washed. She passed right by them—they were standing in the pantry, opening a new box of Petit Écolier—and headed for the back door. “Where are you going?” they called after her. “Running,” she called back. “On your own?” Mari asked incredulously. “For fun?” But Imogen didn’t hear her; the door had already swung shut.

Still, she was Imogen; she commiserated and argued and teased; she planned birthday parties; she initiated cookie-eating contests; she filled the car or the locker room or the kitchen with her laugh; at the same time she was elsewhere, and Mari couldn’t tell if her gaze was turned inward or directed at a spot so far in the distance that it was beyond Mari’s ability to see.

For several months, Mari endured the uncertainty of whether she and her friends would be going to high school together. Life as she knew it felt suddenly provisional. Bree said that her family was waiting to see if the school would give them more financial aid, and then there was the question of where Bevin would be going, the possibility of added tuition. “Can’t they just put her in public school until sixth grade,” Mari asked, “like they did with you?” Imogen’s having a sibling was also proving to be a problem, with her parents making her apply to the boarding school from which Nicholas was about to graduate, on the tiresome principle of exploring one’s options. “But why be in someone else’s shadow?” Mari said. As for Mari, she was threatening to enroll at her enormous local high school and take her chances on getting into the alternative program where students voted on things and called teachers by their first names—a threat that her mother failed to treat at all seriously.

In the end, Mari and Imogen and Bree decided to stay at their school. A relief that also felt slightly like a prison sentence. Four more years of all girls—and despite the promise of coed leadership conferences and community service outings, or the annual spring musical production with their so-called brother school, this felt like a long time.

The question of how and where to meet boys began to circulate among their classmates, gaining urgency, and resourcefully Bree started the summer by finding one in her backyard. Mari and Imogen were sitting cross-legged on the floor of Imogen’s room, eating frozen fruit bars, when Bree told them. His name was Alex, he was fifteen, and he lived in the other half of her house.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “My parents aren’t like yours. When I say they’ll kill me, I’m not talking metaphorically. They will kill me.”

“But all he said was hi,” Mari clarified.

“And smiled,” Bree said. “And then took his shirt off.”

“That’s something I always want to do,” Imogen said, “when it’s hot out and I’m playing basketball.”

“The thing is,” Bree said, “he hadn’t even started playing yet.”

Mari had been in Bree’s backyard only a couple of times because it wasn’t really a backyard, more like a paved-over area where extra cars could be parked. At one end a basketball net had been erected. Two wide wooden porches hung off the back of the house and overlooked the parked cars, or when there weren’t any cars, a makeshift half-court. The porch on the first floor belonged to Bree’s family, and it was where they kept the hibachi and Bevin’s Big Wheel, along with her old stroller and play castle and other abandoned baby equipment.

“How did you not notice him before?” Mari asked.

“I did. He was just shorter then and a little chunky. There’s four of them. My mom calls them the