Falling in Place by Ann Beattie

said. “See you.”
    “Bye,” Mary said.
    “There they go,” Angela’s father said. “Communicative. Well-educated. Happy. Are you girls happy?”
    “Give up,” Angela’s mother said. “Everybody doesn’t have to subject themselves to your cross-examination day and night.”
    “And such respect for the
law,”
Angela’s father said. “Such belief in the power of the law. I’m proud to be a lawyer, in spite of the fact that my family would like me to shut up like I’m some stupid store clerk. As it is, you’ve robbed me blind. If your mother didn’t kick in for her couturier fashions, we’d be starving.”
    “I told you not to tell him what blue jeans cost now,” Angela’s mother said to her. “Was I right?”
    “All this withholding of evidence,” Angela’s father said.
    “Bye,” Mary and Angela said again.
    “Goodbye,” Angela’s mother said. “At least you’re not going out to gamble.”

It was a half-mile walk to the Bergmans’ house. Angela had a silver flask with the vodka in it in her purse. It was a tiny purse, on a long strap, and it hung at her waist. The flask made it bulge
.
    Mary’s eyes hurt. She had looked into the mirror too long, staring as she pulled out hairs. She touched her finger to her brow and it felt swollen
.
    “Do my eyes look okay?” Mary said
.
    “Sure. That lavender is nice.”
    “It feels like the skin is swollen underneath my eyebrows.”
    “So?” Angela said. “It’ll go away by the time we get there.”
    “I should have held an ice cube there after I finished. Before I put the make-up on.”
    “I thought you didn’t like the way it felt.”
    “But I didn’t want to go to the party with swollen eyes.”
    “You can hardly tell,” Angela said
.
    “If they were swollen, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”
    “You think you’re going to die of this or something?”
    “I don’t mean that. I mean, you wouldn’t let me make a fool of myself, would you?”
    Angela gave her a disgusted look and shook her head. “Right,” Angela said. “Actually this is a pig party, and that’s why I’m taking you.”
    Mary stopped by a wall thick with clumps and swirls of honeysuckle and picked a flower. She sat on the wall, crushing the honeysuckle underneath her. Angela looked at her from the road, sighed and went to where Mary sat. She picked two flowers from the honeysuckle vine and with her free hand pulled her T-shirt out of her jeans so that she could put one flower in each cup of her brassiere
.
    “I don’t even believe that you’ve got such an insecurity complex,” Angela said. “If you’d feel better if you had a drink, say so.”
    “Go without me,” Mary said. “I don’t want to go.”
    “I’m going to be really insulted if you don’t come,” Angela said. “I’m going to think that you don’t think I’m your friend.”
    Mary twirled the vine through her fingers. She was always in this position: Her father was going to think she wasn’t nice if she didn’t pretend that John Joel was thin; her mother thought she had flunked English just to rebel against her. Now Angela wasn’t going to be her friend if she didn’t go with her
.
    “If you keep being moody when you grow up, you’re never going to get somebody to live with you,” Angela said. “Maybe if you’d practice smiling, it would help a little.”
    Mary was already sure that she wasn’t going to live with anybody. She didn’t want to. She wanted to live alone, and not have to listen to what people expected all the time. She hoped that when she was twenty she didn’t have one friend. She hoped that everybody at the party hated her so she could practice not caring, so people’s opinions wouldn’t matter to her when she was an adult. She would have told Angela what she was thinking, but she couldn’t stand the sound of her own voice. Boys wouldn’t ever like her, because she would never be able to think like Angela. In a million years, she wouldn’t have thought to