Beth

Sophie Nunberg

Sometimes Beth doesn’t show up to take me to school, Beth doesn’t answer the phone and so my mom has to drive me. At eleven, I am too young to take the bus alone but probably too old for a nanny. Beth reappears at the end of the school day, in her beat up maroon Jeep Cherokee that I am still not sure belongs to her. She tells me that fluid built up in her brain, that the tumor is still there but it’s benign, and then she says that she had to have it drained. Her brain drained. I never consider until I write this down that these words might have been nonsense. That the fluids are excuses for her ravings. She is  a woman on the edge, a woman who calls me a brat, spoiled, selfish, ungrateful. But she is my friend, maybe my only friend. Kids my age don’t like me. I know why and don’t blame them. Adults always prefer me and Beth is in her thirties, with a mop of wild, ginger hair and skinny bones like a bird. She stands with perfect posture, a relic from wearing a back brace for an entire year. That year where she fattened up in bed. She sees the way weight clings to my adolescent form and drags me out of my bed, off my laptop, away from my copies of Sweet Valley High. In seasonless San Francisco, every long drive is with all the windows down and our hair whips each other’s faces. She drives me outside the borders of the city and into the unsullied, dry hills. She takes me to places where we can scream, where she swears there is no one for five miles. This is a novelty for a city-slick kid like me. This is baptismal. To be alone together. We scream into canyons and our voices reverberate and come back to us. Later, she screams at me with the car doors locked. She holds a pocket square to her nose. It is soaked. She calls my mother a cunt. This is the first time I hear the word out loud, from Beth’s puckered, chapped mouth. Its consonance so sharp against the softness of her hair, I reach out to touch the coils.