April 1997, West Newton, Massachusetts

Blair Hurley

Lisa and I are best friends. In the winter, when the maze of neat white houses and backyards is layered with snow, Lisa and I pretend that we’re secret agents.

The world of tailored lawns and shade trees is Amarilla, a hostile dimension of evil Amarillans bent on destroying the world. The only safe place is my house, our secret underground base; even Lisa’s house is subject to invasions from time to time.

We lean against a snow drift with our laser guns pressed to our chests, listening for enemy patrols, our cheeks red and our breath coming short and fast in the biting air.

Lisa’s ski-jump nose, poking over the top of a scarf, is red. She turns over on her stomach and palms a snowball with an instant-detonation device inside. There’s the growling sound of an Amarillan tank grinding through the slush in the road.

“Car!” I cry, but Lisa shakes her head.

“It’s an Amarillan tank!” she hisses. “Ready weapons!”

Just at the right moment, we hurl our grenades and duck back under the snowdrift with our hands clapped over our ears. The explosion shakes the ground and makes my ears ring, and we know we’ve scored a direct hit.

Lisa has me on speed dial and calls my house whenever “Brick” is on the radio. I grab the phone, and before I can even say hello, Lisa laughs, “It’s on!” and hangs up.

I race to the stereo and tune to WKSS, and lie on my bed with my chin in my hand, listening enraptured. It’s amazing to think that down the street, in the gloomy, high-ceilinged rooms of her house, she’s listening to it too, and it’s almost like this moment of telepathy between us, thinking the same thoughts.

Now we stand up laboriously, our jackets and snow pants dark with water, and trudge down the sidewalk to her house. It’s a Saturday, and I’m sleeping over. As we walk the block and a half through the gray slush, the streetlights start coming on, casting pale cones of light on the muddy road that intensify as the sky dims.

Lisa’s mother, a tall, smiling presence, with dark bangs like Jane Fonda’s shading her eyes, always has hot chocolate ready for us by the time we’ve clomped into the yellow kitchen, and we sit at the table and make false passports for our secret-agent identities.

After just a few minutes, Lisa pushes the markers. I follow her at a run up the twisting stairs to her room, and she closes her door, revealing the giant poster of Leonardo DiCaprio. “I just loooove him so much!” she squeals. I smile feebly and shove my hands in my pockets. He’s just an actor.

I let her go on for a while the way I always do, then I say we’d better finish our passports in time for the smuggling operation we have to carry out tomorrow. Lisa gives me a look I’ve seen on my older sister’s face before, exaggerated patience, as if I’ve let her down somehow.

The next day, back at home, I watch my mother plucking her eyebrows in the bathroom mirror. Hers is a strange world of elegance and poise and shaved legs that I don’t understand. I shuffle into my room and move my model horses around a little bit, but they don’t seem to come alive for me the same way they used to – they’re just cold lumps of plastic - and I put them back on my shelf, feeling fear like a cold breeze down my shirt

When I go to bed in my dad’s enormous old T-shirt, curled under two flannel blankets, I can see the big flakes falling in the light from the streetlamp. I squinch my eyes tight, praying the way every kid, except kids in California and Florida, maybe, knows how to pray: snow day snow day snow day please please please.

It’s the silence that wakes me in the morning. No cars whisking by; no dogs barking or snow blowers throttling; not even the harsh cawing of the spring crows. Just thick, muted silence. I pull myself out of bed slowly — even the rustling of the blankets seems too loud – and tiptoe to the window as if it’s Christmas morning and I’m looking to see what’s hanging in my stocking.

Snow day, snow day! The phone rings, and I know it’s Lisa, telling me to get suited up because there’s a battle afoot. I only hang in the kitchen long enough to tell her to meet me at the street sign on the corner, and then I open the door and step into Amarilla.

I check for the laser gun in the holster at my hip and make sure that it’s dry, then I clamber on top of the hard-packed snow and shade my eyes with my hand, scanning the territory.

Lisa is slogging through the snow toward me, but there’s someone with her. It’s Rachel, a girl in our class who lives a couple of streets away. She always wears glittery eye shadow and has straight dark hair pulled back with the butterfly clips everyone just has to wear.

“Rachel got her mom to drive her over,” says Lisa. “And guess what? We have another snow day tomorrow! So we can all sleep over at my house!”

“Great,” I say. But I’m trying to think of something fun we can all do – after all, Rachel doesn’t have the security clearance to visit Amarilla. But then I feel like icicles have formed in my veins and are snapping one by one.

“I already explained to Rachel all about Amarilla. She’s a visiting agent from another dimension. Now come on, I think I see an enemy tank-” Lisa darts off with her finger and thumb out as a laser gun, and Rachel bounds after her, laughing.

I trail along numbly, not even bothering to keep a secure perimeter, while Lisa and Rachel try forays into enemy territory. Rachel isn’t even doing it right, I hiss bitterly to myself.

She doesn’t know how to cover Lisa’s back when she makes an attack, doesn’t even think to call in reinforcements on an invisible cell phone. She doesn’t build ice igloos for shelter, just crouches in under the trees and stares at her fingernails. “Don’t you see?” I want to cry out. “She’s not one of us.”

Rachel gets tired of the game fast, and we all wind up at Lisa’s house for hot chocolate. Rachel leads the way to Lisa’s room and orders her to pull out all of her makeup. Lisa laughs, and they take turns putting glittery-purple eye shadow on each other, rubbing rouge into their cheeks.

They ooh and aah over the Leo DiCaprio poster, and talk about the look Danny gave Debbie on Friday, and suddenly I feel a sore spot in the back of my throat. Maybe I’m not one of you.

I’m no good at lying. I always blush, and my eyes shift all around when I try it. But this time, I find myself fumbling for some excuse why I can’t sleep over. Anything to get me out of that house, back to my safe pink room with no eyebrow pencils or spaghetti string tank tops.

As I’m going down the stairs, sleeping bag rolled under my arm, I hear Lisa say my name. I look up in the dark stairwell: she’s standing at the top with the light from her bedroom behind her. “Blair?”

I look up at her. She doesn’t know what to say. I don’t know what to say. We’re only 10 years old.

Then Rachel comes out and stands beside her, leaning over the rail; half of her hair is tangled up in curlers, and the other half hangs down. Lisa has makeup on one eye but not the other. I can feel my face growing hot. It’s so easy for them, so easy – just step effortlessly out of one world and into the next.

“I’ll probably see you tomorrow,” I say brightly, wave just like it’s any other night, and put on my boots and my hat and parka in the dark kitchen and walk home.

Upstairs, it’s dark: my sister at a sleepover, the cat tucked into a sweater someone’s left on the floor. I can see the shadows of my model horses on my white wallpaper. I drag myself to the bed and lie on my stomach with my face to the side.

The phone rings. I don’t move, but Mom and Dad must have the door closed downstairs, because it rings again. On the third ring, I reach under my bed and pick it up. “Hello?”

A pause. Then a voice I know. “It’s on.”

I wait for the click. But this time, she doesn’t hang up right away. I can hear her breathing on the other end, or maybe it’s just my own breath echoing back in my head.

A car drones past, a dog starts barking, and still we’re frozen on either end of the line. As long as I don’t hang up – as long as she doesn’t hang up — it’s like we’re tuned to the same radio station, frozen in time.

I move to the radio and turn it on soft, listening to the chorus of “Brick.” I can’t hear anything at all on the other end – then the filtered notes of “She’s a Brick” coming back at me, perfectly synchronized with mine. I press the receiver to the speaker, and I listen to her “Brick” coming right back. And I know it’s not anybody’s fault.

Blair Hurley has been writing from a young age and has had short stories published in The Best Teen Writing of 2005, the Virginia Adversaria, Quality Women’s Fiction, The Claremont Review, and The Armchair Aesthete. She is a junior at Princeton University, majoring in English and pursuing studies in creative writing.

Posted by Common Ties on Monday, November 5th, 2007 | Email This Post

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 12:03 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.