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“If I tell you,” Tara said, giving a comical grin, “you might get scared.”
“Ha,” I replied, shoving the pasta into my mouth. “I doubt it. Come clean.”
“Well,” she began, dabbing at a bit of dropped tomato sauce with her napkin, “I used to be friends with her in middle school. We were pretty much inseparable. But when high school started, she got prettier, and I got, well…” she rolled her eyes, “I didn’t. She’s been a bitch ever since.”
“So she’s superficial,” I said. “You know, when I met her for the first time, she practically gave meaonce-over. I could tell right then and there that we’d be enemies.”
“Enemies?” Tara raised her eyebrows. “Wow, that’s heavy.”
“It’s true.” I took a sip of water. “She made it clear she doesn’t like me, so I don’t like her.”
“That makes two of us,” Tara replied. “No, take it back. Ihateher.”
“That ketchup prank,” I said, turning to look at her.Reallylook at her. “Is that as far as she’ll go, or does it get worse?”
I expected her to return my question with a smirk, or a half-assed bit of sarcasm. Instead, she replied, “She destroyed my paintings.”
She kept her eyes down at her plate and took in a deep breath.
“I was an honor’s roll kid. All my teachers loved me, but my art teacher, Ms. Reilly, she was the best.”
She smiled as she said it, and that innocent, pure sentence made me feel a pit in my stomach. It was just like when she lent me her own clothes—it didn’t make sense for someone to hurt her.
“She encouraged me to put together a portfolio and submit it to this top art school in New York. I was psyched. They were giving out full-ride scholarships for the program. I spent months working on it.”
She paused, looking around the room as if realizing her surroundings for the first time. As if she were waking up from a good dream into dry reality.
“I’d made these beautiful portraits. Did some still life. You name it. Just before it came time to submit it, I’d dropped it off in Ms. Reilly’s classroom so she could take a final look. When I came back to pick it up, she wasn’t there, but the classroom door had been unlocked. Only two people had keys to that room—me and Ms. Reilly.”
“Vivian stole it?” I suggested.
Tara nodded. “Basically. She does that sort of thing.”
“How’d you know it was her?” I asked, trying to sound sensitive. “I mean, why would she do something like that, anyway? That’s just… cruel.”
She let out a heavy breath. “I saw her as I was heading back to the classroom and she’d told me she made, ‘just a few improvements,’” she said, making a high-pitched imitation of Vivian’s voice. “Improvements, my ass.”
“But… why?” I just couldn’t wrap my mind around that fact that even someone with a shitty sense of amusement would pick on someone like Tara. “Sorry, we don’t have to talk about it. It’s just—”
“She doesn’t like it when someone’s better than her,” she said. “She can’t deal with it. She’s insecure, that’s why.”
“That doesn’t excuse what she did,” I said, putting a hand on Tara’s shoulder.
“I know it doesn’t,” she said, letting out another breath. “If it weren’t for her, I’d be in art school, not… this place.” Tara shrugged, as if she didn’t just say the most depressing thing I’d heard all week. “I guess it’s hard for me to be too angry about it when I know her so well. In middle school, she was everything to me. We were best friends. I just… don’t know what changed.”
We fell into a solemn silence as we continued picking at our food. I imagined Vivian’s face, went back over her words in my head. After she’d eavesdropped on Eric confessing his petty crush on me, she’d basically threatened to ruin my life, which was exactly what she’d done to Tara. And she’d succeeded.
I let out a sigh and glanced around the cafeteria. The dessert counter was a few yards away, and it looked like they were serving up ice cream sundaes. I nodded toward the counter.
“I think I’mgonnaget some,” I said, standing up to clear my plate.
“Ooh, good idea,” Tara laughed, following suit. We brought our dishes to the conveyor belt of dirty plates and headed over to the dessert table. I couldn’t help but think about Eric, when we’d gone to the ice cream social together. It’s where a friendship had blossomed and died all at once, even if I didn’t know it.
“Yup,” Tara said, digging into her cup of chocolate ice cream as we headed back up the stairs to the first floor of the dining hall. For a cafeteria that conducted all its operations in the basement of a grimy building that was made in the fifties, they didn’t fuck up the cooking as much as they could’ve. “That was so good.”
“Agreed.”
Moments after we stepped back outside, my ice cream had already melted at the bottom of my paper cup. It was a nice night for a somewhat hectic day, and I took in a deep breath of warm air. The sky was a deep indigo, typical for a southern summer night, and fireflies were blinking in and out across the dewy grass of the quad. Groups of students sat stretched out on the lawn, laughing, chatting. For the first time since I’d stepped on this campus, I really felt at ease.
