Chapter 2 Annie

CHAPTER 2 ANNIE

1991

Bolton Landing

What you need to know about me and Amanda is that no friendship like ours had ever existed. We basically redefined the medium, elevated it to an art form. Seriously, that’s how we felt. We were like all young people in that way, in full belief that we were revolutionizing the human experience. Those older models, all failures; let us show you how real living is done!

I’ll set the stage: 1991. Summer in upstate New York. Small-town theater camp, opening morning. I was standing in line for registration. The girl in front of me was wearing jelly sandals. I complimented them. She made eye contact and said, “Thank you for noticing,” which awed me—the self-possession of it. We were nine years old.

Amanda Kent, ladies and gentlemen.

Turns out, Amanda’s home life was only slightly better than mine. Her mom had died giving birth to her little sister, Kerri, and her dad spent all his waking hours beneath the hoods of cars, running a repair shop in the next town over. Amanda and her dad, they got along fine, but he was more like an uncle than a dad, and so she was especially close with Kerri, who was four years younger. The two were different in almost every way: Kerri had light hair and loved playing with dolls; Amanda was essentially the person Van Morrison is singing about in “Brown Eyed Girl.”

One other thing to know about Amanda: She loved clothes. When we were young, she’d want me to come over and play dress-up. Her dad had kept all her mom’s old things in a box in the hallway closet—clothes and makeup and other stuff grown-up women cared about, like pantyhose, which seemed to me like a form of medieval torture. Dress-up wasn’t really my thing. But I’d bring a book and sit cross-legged on the carpet at the foot of Amanda’s bed. She never minded my indifference; she really just wanted an audience.

She would disappear into the hallway bathroom, and I’d read a few pages. Then she’d present herself in the doorway, do a quick spin and a catwalk, strutting in and out of the room. Nothing subtle in her performance. Clothes made sense on her, which one afternoon she explained was the entire point of fashion.

It was seventh grade, I think. I had just reacted to one of her combinations. She’d taken these fake pearls that had seemed so First Lady–ish at Goodwill and paired them with a cheap black leather jacket. The high-low of it was really working.

“That just looks right on you,” is what I said.

“Good.” She flopped onto the bed. “I was reading the latest issue of Cosmo and there was this part about how to understand your style and the advice was basically like ‘make your outside match how you feel on the inside’ and that makes so much sense to me.”

Matching your outside to your insides seemed like no small feat, so I said, “Isn’t that, like, asking a lot of clothes?”

Amanda was still flat on the bed; she made a small huh? sound. I closed my eyes and tried examining my insides, but could only feel my brain, its whirlpool of thoughts. What type of clothes matched that?

I tried again: “I mean, does anyone even know how they feel on the inside?”

A second later, a pillow came crashing into my head.

“Come on, let’s go to Goodwill,” she said. “We’ll try to match your insides to your outside.”

She was off the bed already, grabbing for my hand, and her hand was never something I turned down.

After wandering the thrift store for a few minutes, something caught Amanda’s eye, and she beelined to the front counter. Behind the cashier were these bags mounted to the wall. Mostly purses. And purses, if you hadn’t already guessed, didn’t interest me. But then Amanda was pointing at this canvas tote bag with the words T HE S TRAND N YC : 18 MILES OF BOOKS printed on the front.

“Can we see that one?” she said.

“We get a bunch every summer,” the woman said, handing it over. “People from the city bring them up—use ’em to lug stuff up here, then we see ’em in here before they go back.”

“Oh yes, this is so you,” Amanda was saying, holding it up to my shoulder.

“Why’s it me?”

“You’re all quick-witted and rawr ”—here she snarled like a big cat—“like a New Yorker… plus you love books!” She shrugged and added, “Makes perfect sense.”

But when she went to hand it to me, I stepped back. “Nah, it’s not quite right,” I said, even though it was right. She was absolutely right. But I didn’t have any money right then—not even the dollar the bag cost.

She looked at me for a moment and said, “Well, okay, I’ll buy it.” She knew every layer of what had just happened, of why I’d said no. She knew, in that split second, that if she said “Is it about money?” that my next two thoughts would be “I wish my mom remembered my allowance,” followed closely by “Why doesn’t she love me more?” And that was not a healthy thought train.

Amanda had four quarters in her pocket. She fished out the coins and dropped them into the woman’s cupped hand.

On the way out, I walked ahead, bowing my head and digging my hands into my pockets. Amanda caught up and draped her arm around my shoulders. She held the bag out to me, like, obviously I got this for you , but I told her it was okay, that she should keep it. She squinted, trying again to read my fine print.

“Okay, Annie-baby,” she said after a moment, slinging the bag over her other shoulder. “But know that every time I use it, I’m gonna think of you.”

She used that Strand bag so much. Even though the bag was totally Amanda’s, I always thought of it as mine. So years later, when I found it in the back of my car, it almost felt right for me to have it.

I have it still.