Social Suicide 1998

The moving truck showed up on a Saturday, and Kelsey's mother had a chair by the kitchen window before it finished backing in.

"Two women," Diane reported. "No husband."

"Maybe he's coming later."

"He's not coming later. Look at the boxes."

Kelsey looked at the boxes. She didn't know what she was supposed to see. Then she did: the labels were in two handwritings, one small and square, one big and looping with the i's dotted, and the same two handwritings were on boxes that clearly went to the same rooms.

KITCHEN in square. kitchen!! in loop. Both boxes onto the same dolly.

"Roommates," her father said, not looking up from the paper.

"Wonho."

"What."

"That's what I said. Roommates." He turned the page.

Diane made a noise that was not agreement, and kept watching, and Kelsey stayed at the window longer than she meant to, because the next thing off the truck was a drum kit. In pieces. A woman with a lawyer's haircut carried the bass drum down the ramp like it had personally wronged her.

The girl on the curb had not carried anything.

Kelsey noticed her the way you notice a wrong note. Everyone else on the block was doing something — the two women going in and out, the truck guys, Mrs. Petrakis pretending to water a hose. This one was sitting on the curb with a skateboard flipped upside down under one sneaker, rolling it back and forth, and smoking a cigarette with the total calm ofsomebody who had never once been asked to put one out.

Jeans, beat to hell at the knee. A plain shirt that said DUDE RANCH. A flannel tied around her waist even though it was seventy degrees, and Vans that had clearly been through something. Headphones on, wire running down to a Discman on the concrete beside her.

Twenty, maybe. Older than Kelsey, anyway.

And a dog. Kelsey hadn't seen the dog at first because it was sitting exactly in the girl's shadow, a small fluffy something with husky eyes and a pomeranian face and an expression of deep personal grievance about the entire day.

Kelsey went over. Kelsey always went over. It had never occurred to her not to.

"Hi! I'm Kelsey. I live right there." She pointed. "The green one."

The girl took one headphone off. Just one. She looked at Kelsey for what felt like a full second longer than people usually did, and then she said, "Sage."

"Are you helping?"

"I am not helping."

"Is that on purpose?"

"I offered. My mother said I'd drop something, and she's right, so." Sage tapped ash onto the street. "I'm on dog duty."

The dog, hearing itself referred to, moved slightly closer to Sage's leg and continued to hate everything.

"She's so cute."

"She's five and she's furious about it. Ronnie."

"Hi, Ronnie."

Ronnie did not acknowledge this in any way.

"So those are your — " Kelsey glanced back at the house. The lawyer-haircut woman was on the porch, reading something on a clipboard. The other one, the loopy-handwriting one presumably, had just come out with a lamp and was laughing at something the truck guy said, and she was — Kelsey didn't have a word for it. She looked like she'd been on a magazine.

"My moms," Sage said.

A beat. She put the headphone back on, then took it off again, like she'd decided to be fair.

"I consider them both my moms. It's not weird."

“Okay," Kelsey said. Fast. Too fast. She heard it come out too fast.

Sage heard it too. Something happened at the corner of her mouth, and it wasn't offense, exactly; it was closer to there it is.

"You're going to be fine," she said, which Kelsey didn't understand, and then she put the headphone back on, and that was apparently the end of the interview.

At six o'clock Diane handed her a tray with three lidded containers on it and said, "Go."

"Why me?"

"Because you already went over there. I saw you. You've been introduced." Her mother straightened the containers by a quarter inch. "Kimchi, japchae, the rice. Tell them the japchae is better warm. Don't tell them I said it's better warm, just say it like it's something everybody knows."

"Mom."

"Go."

Kelsey went.

The lawyer-haircut one answered. Up close she was maybe forty-five, and she looked at the tray and then at Kelsey with the flat attention of somebody who was already figuring out what she was going to say before Kelsey had said anything.

"Hi. I'm Kelsey, from — my mom made you dinner. Welcome to the block."

"Cait." She took the tray. "That's very kind. Tell your mother thank you."

"Sure. I'm — she said the japchae's better warm."

"Noted."

"And this is — sorry — you and — "

"My roommate," Cait said, with absolutely no change of expression, "is Aimee. We've bought the house together. You'll see a lot of us."

It was seamless. It was so seamless that Kelsey almost bought it, and then Aimee came around the corner behind her holding a wine glass and going "Is that the neighbor? Cait, is that the girl from the green house, get her inside — "

"She's dropping off food, Aim."

"She can drop it off inside. Hi! Hi, sweetheart, oh my God, look at you. I'm Aimee." She hadKelsey's hand in both of hers. "Are you in school? You're in school. What grade?"

"Senior. I graduate in June."

"June! Cait, June — "

"I heard."

"Where are you going after? Do you know? You don't have to know. Nobody knows. I didn't know anything at your age and look, I own a house, come in — "

Over Aimee's shoulder, Sage was sitting on the stairs with Ronnie in her lap, and she was watching the whole thing the way you'd watch a show you'd seen every episode of and still loved. She caught Kelsey's eye. She mouthed the word roommate and held up two fingers, and then she put her chin on Ronnie's head and let her mothers keep going.

Kelsey did not go in. Kelsey said something about her own dinner and got back across the driveway and stood in her kitchen for a second longer than she needed to.

"Well?" Diane said.

"They said thank you."

"And?"

"And nothing. They're nice."

Her mother looked at her for a moment, and then went back to the stove, and said, to the pot, "Roommates," in a tone Kelsey would think about later.

The drums started at nine-forty.

Their houses shared a wall along the driveway side — the garages were basically one garage with a line down the middle — and Kelsey was lying on her bed with the radio on when the first thump came through the floor.

She turned the radio off.

She hadn't decided to. She just did it.

It wasn't the way she'd expected. She'd expected noise. What came through the wall was tight. Fast, and then faster, and then a fill that went all the way around the kit and landed on the one like somebody slamming a door on purpose. Then it stopped. Then it went again, the same section, slightly better. Then again.

Kelsey lay there with her hand still on the radio dial and listened to somebody next door playthe same eight bars eleven times in a row, and she couldn't have explained why she didn't move.

On the twelfth time, it was perfect. Then nothing.

She turned the radio back on and it sounded stupid and she turned it off again.

Michael honked at ten.

Two short ones, from the curb, which was what he did instead of coming to the door; Kelsey's father had opinions about this that he had shared with no one but Kelsey's mother, who had shared them with Kelsey. Kelsey grabbed her jacket and went out.

The porch light next door was on. Sage was on the top step with a cigarette, Ronnie against her hip, and she watched the Camaro idle at the curb the way you'd watch weather.

"That your boyfriend?"

"Michael. Yeah."

Sage nodded. She looked at the car for one more second. She said nothing at all, in a way that felt like a paragraph.

"He's — we've been together two years."

"Cool," Sage said, warmly, and took a drag, and that was it.

In the car Michael leaned to look past her at the porch. "That the new people?"

"That's their daughter."

"Huh." He pulled out. "She looks like trouble."

"You don't know her."

"I'm just saying. She looks like she's got a lot of opinions." He glanced in the mirror.

"Whatever. We're going to Danny's, right?"

She got home at eleven-ten.

The porch light next door was still on. Sage was still on the step — a different cigarette, the last one of the night, Kelsey somehow knew that without knowing how she knew — and Ronnie had given up and gone to sleep against the door.

Kelsey stopped at the bottom of her own steps. She didn't know why. She was going to saygoodnight, that was all; that was a normal thing to say to a neighbor.

Sage got there first.

"Hey." She put the cigarette out on the step, carefully, and stood, and scooped the dog.

"Your mom's noodles were really good. Tell her the whole tray's gone." A pause. "Warm. She was right."

And she went inside with the dog before Kelsey could answer, and the porch light went off, and Kelsey stood in her driveway with her jacket still on and the exact words she was right going around in her head like a bar of something she couldn't stop playing.

She hadn't said that. About the warm.

She'd said it at their door. To Cait. Sage had been on the stairs.

Kelsey went inside and didn't turn the radio on.