Friendship by Emily Gould Page A

acknowledge Bev’s existence when he encountered her at school. His official girlfriend was a fellow senior, a person with teased bangs and a big gaggle of teased-bang friends. But Trevor had worked for several years after school at Bev’s dad’s lumberyard, shouldering stacks of two-by-fours and loading them onto trucks, the kind of work her dad had begun to hire more workers to do because he’d lifted those heavy things for so many years now that he couldn’t anymore. Trevor and Bev had been acknowledging each other with nods and grunts since she was a seventh grader, and then, when Bev started high school and finally grew breasts, he started occasionally saying full words to her, such as “Hi” and her name.
    At first this attention had led Bev to make the classic mistake of ascribing to Trevor all the virtues of the characters in the books she read, people she found infinitely more interesting than anyone she knew in real life. She hadn’t even had what most of the isolated, book-loving heroines of the books had: one good teacher or wise old relative or like-minded confidante. She’d been realistic enough to know, at least, that she couldn’t expect Trevor to become her confidant. Maybe, though, she thought, he would become her boyfriend. She excused their initial clandestine make-out session to herself with this hope. It would be worth a little bad behavior if Trevor would elevate her from “almost friendless, library-dwelling weirdo” to “senior’s girlfriend.” Not to imply that she had let him kiss and touch her unwillingly, with some mercenary goal in mind. It had been her idea, actually, to ask him to go for a walk to the perimeter of the property with her, and she had spread out her hoodie on the grass and motioned for him to sit.
    He’d sat and looked at her with wide-set blue eyes. He smelled sweaty and pleasantly sour, like wood shavings, and dirt ringed his big neck. In a few years he would begin to look like most of the men in Bev’s hometown, still thick around the shoulders and arms but with pregnant-looking guts and ham-hock thighs from fast-food lunches and hot-dish dinners. But right then, at eighteen, he was a perfect specimen, if a little Neanderthalish. Bev wanted to see him naked. She imagined him naked and herself fully clothed. In her mind’s eye she saw him kneeling in front of her in the cornfield—naked, begging—while she stood over him wielding mysterious, enormous power.
    “You know I have a girlfriend,” he said.
    “Yeah, but I thought this could be, like, a casual thing. No strings attached, et cetera.”
    He’d grinned, showing a broken tooth that hadn’t been capped. “Damn, Beverly, I thought you were some kind of holy virgin! But if you’re okay with it…”
    “I’m okay with it. This is just for fun,” she’d said, and he leaned in and kissed her.
    She hadn’t been expecting anything, really, so she’d been surprised at both the vehemence of the kiss and its subtlety. Other boys—not that there had been many, just a couple of pro forma Bible camp closet fumblers—had mashed their tongues into her mouth carelessly. Those boys had seemed fundamentally uninterested in kissing, more occupied with semi-covertly rubbing their boners against some part of her—her knee, her hand, the side of her leg, it didn’t seem to matter—just like little dogs. Trevor, she realized right away, was different. He had kissed her collaboratively, teasing her, letting her tease him back, having a kind of conversation with her that was much more interesting than anything he’d ever said to her with words. For the remaining moments that she was still capable of conscious thought, she’d thought he would be a good person to have sex with.
    But sex, when they tried it a few clandestine-make-out-full weeks later, was almost ruined by Bev’s body, which was undermined by guilt in a way that her mind was somehow not. “It’s okay,” she said numerous times, but it wasn’t,