Crossroads

A weariness had overcome her. Her words seemed childish, too. She’d imagined that colleges would be charmed if she wrote about her brother, and that it would be easy to explain why she admired Clem, but she wasn’t feeling it this morning. For one thing, Clem had come home at Thanksgiving and told her, in strict confidence, that he had a girlfriend in Champaign, his first ever. She ought to have been purely happy for him, but in truth she’d felt a little bit left behind. Until then, despite being younger, she’d considered herself the more worldly and socially advanced one.

Clem’s friends in high school had mostly been slide-rule types, guys with dandruff-coated glasses, defiant body odor. She’d felt sorry that he couldn’t do any better than this, but he claimed to have no envy of her social position and only a “sociological” interest in her people. Coming home late on a Saturday night, she invariably saw light under his bedroom door. If she knocked, he set aside the book he was reading or the science problem he was cracking and listened, as only he in her family could, to her little tales of life in Camelot. He pronounced clear-eyed judgments on her friends, which she brushed aside in the moment (“Nobody’s perfect”) but privately recognized the justice of. He was particularly harsh about certain guys of her acquaintance, such as Kent Carducci, who wouldn’t stop asking her out on dates and who, according to Clem, tormented Clem’s friend Lester in the locker room. Still only a tenth grader, she’d walked up to Kent one day at lunch hour and spelled out, in front of his jock buddies, why she would never go out with him: “Because you’re a bully and a jerk.” Though Kent apparently continued to snap wet towels at Lester’s butt, Becky was keenly attuned to the hierarchy and detected a subtle new shunning of Kent by the highest tier. She was tempted to report this accomplishment to Clem, but she knew it was the hierarchy itself, more than any given member of it, that he disdained. And yet, as if he recognized it as the field of her own sort of excellence, he never pushed her to drop out of it. How grateful she was for that! It was one of a hundred ways she knew he loved her. Sometimes it happened that she dozed off on his bed and awoke to find herself tenderly covered with a quilt, Clem asleep on the rug by the bed. She might have worried that there was something weird about their friendship, that she felt close to him in an almost married way that maybe wasn’t healthy, that she wasn’t as physically repelled by his beanstalk body, his scarred and pimpled face, as a sister ought to have been, if she hadn’t been so sure that everything Clem did was good and right.

Even after he went off to college, he’d remained the star she navigated by. There were some fairly debauched, parentally unsupervised parties she found it necessary to attend because no sophomores and almost no juniors had been invited. In principle, Clem hated this kind of exclusivity even more than her parents did, but where her father gave her gentle lectures about remembering those less fortunate than her, and her mother worried aloud that she’d gotten pretty full of herself, Clem understood how important to her it was to be at the center of things. “Just be careful,” he said. “Don’t forget you’re better than the rest of that crowd put together.” She was protected at the parties, to an extent, by having been the leading vote-getter in the all-school cheerleader election, thus automatically a co-captain of the squad, despite being only a junior; if she raised her voice to wail that she hated the music, then, voilà, some unseen hand would lift up the needle and put on a Santana album. But the pressure to fuck up was still intense. She might not have been able to wave away the burning doobies she was offered if Clem hadn’t warned her that marijuana’s long-term effects on the brain were not well studied. At the infamous New Year’s party at the Bradfields’, where there was barfing in the back-yard snow and a disgusting truth-or-dare thing happening in the basement, she might have gone upstairs with Trip Bradfield, who was twenty and relentless, if she hadn’t been seeing him through Clem’s eyes.