The Girls From Corona Del Mar by Rufi Thorpe Page B

disappointment, a kind of contained disgust, was present throughout the rest of my life in almost all of my human relationships. Always, people were turning out to be a bit less than they could have been, a bit more what you had uncharitably suspected. Even I was less than I had hoped I would be, and it was Lorrie Ann, in large part, who made me aware of this, not through her own perfection, but because she was the only witness to the thing I regret most in my life.
    When I was twelve, Lorrie Ann and I were pretending to be best friends with this other girl, Meghan Farmer. With a callousness that is common in twelve-year-old girls, but would be shocking in adult women, we verbally agreed that our friendship with her was “just pretend.” Truthfully, the idea had been mine and Lorrie Ann had fought me, stubborn as a donkey, every step of the way, but together we lured Meghan into the friendship, pooling our money to buy a Best Friends Forever necklace with three interlocking charms from Claire’s at the mall in order that she be part of a dance routine we were doing for a talent show. The three of us choreographed a horribly sexual bump-and-grind routine to TLC’s “Waterfalls,” which miraculously won first place.
    Also, we admired Meghan’s breasts, which were already huge. Unfortunately, the more we got to know Meghan, the more we didn’t like her. She wasn’t very good about brushing her teeth. I had also noticed that she seemed to wear the same pair of underwear for multiple days in arow. She loved to make the “Whoot-whoot!” sound for no reason. At first this had seemed festive and exciting, a kind of wonderful conversational punctuation mark, but after a while, it was just loud.
    In any event, Lorrie Ann and I had agreed to meet Meghan at Auntie Anne’s Pretzels at the mall, and so, since Lorrie Ann and I lived just a few blocks apart from each other, she was supposed to come by my house around two so that we could walk the mile and a half to the mall together.
    It was fall, which, frankly, is almost meaningless in Southern California. But I remember that it was fall because I remember that my little brother Alex, the youngest one, had just had his second birthday the weekend before. I also remember that it was a Sunday because the reason that we couldn’t all meet in the morning was because Lorrie Ann was at church.
    Normally my mother didn’t work Sundays, and so I had counted on her being home to watch the boys. We had a sort of informal understanding: my mother absolutely took advantage of me as free help with the boys, abandoning them to my care six days out of seven, and in exchange I was entitled to be as rude and demanding as I wanted. It was also understood that she would keep me in makeup and nice clothes, or the nicest we could afford. Since my mother was slender, we often shared clothes anyway, and it was from her that I developed a taste for fine fabrics. In any event, when my mother had unexpectedly announced that morning that she and Paddy were taking the day to go to the beach and “rekindle their romance,” I was infuriated.
    “Why are you going to the beach?” I asked. “It’s fucking cold! It’s almost winter!”
    “We’re going to the Fun Zone. We’re going to ride the Ferris wheel and play skee ball. We hardly even see each other anymore, Mia.”
    “I don’t care!” I said. “I don’t care if you two never fuck again!”
    My mother was calmly putting on makeup in the bathroom, and I watched her in the mirror from the doorway. She finished with her eyebrows, then turned and sat on the pot to pee.
    “You can go with your friends to the mall another day.”
    I felt Paddy move behind me in the hall, walking swiftly, just the current of air as he passed. He and I hardly ever spoke. I watched my mother pee, thinking that every year she began to look more and more porcine, her fake-blond curls more and more reminiscent of Miss Piggy.
    “You know who you really never see? Your