Harvard Summer Review: To All the Girls I've Loved Before

1999 Harvard Summer School Writing Program

To All the Girls I've Loved Before

Holly moved the week after we graduated from eighth grade. She would miss my birthday by three days, the annual family trip to Vegas by three weeks, and--as far as I was concerned--the drama of my life, forever. I was crushed in that acute way only 13-year-old girls can be crushed--my entire life was about to end. And Holly had the gall to be excited.

She was moving north, to a nothing little town called Cottonwood, which was down Highway 5 from Redding. Redding, I discovered in later years, was a bastion of rednecks in dusty pickups with gunracks. Men wore Stetsons with complete sincerity. People sat in brightly lit bars or cineplexes or their own living rooms and stared off into the distance. I must have intuited all this in the moment she told me she was leaving, because I hated Redding and Cottonwood--and all the distance between--before I'd ever even set foot there.

But for Holly, Cottonwood was her very own Promised Land. She had her horses and her family--not just Boomer and Mike, who had always been at home, but the brothers I'd only heard about, Eric and Russell, who lived with their respective wives and kids in neighboring towns. An hour drive brought everyone together. Holly set her sights on the whitewashed arena out back and the prefab stalls, the garage she was going to convert into an enormous tackroom--I doubt she saw much else. And when I finally came to Cottonwood that August, I realized that Holly finally had what she'd always wanted, the ranchhouse we dreamed up during all those days at Huntzberger's. That dream felt hollow and empty to me now that the reality of it was hers.

We spent a day at the house before we packed up Mama Harding's van for our vacation. Holly showed me around--her huge new room, her great new barn, her cute new cats. I faked excitement when I could, but it was a flimsy guise. Everything new and different just seemed to put distance between us--a distance you could hear in my voice, soft and flat, and see in my walk, slow, always a few steps behind. Early the next morning we drove north to pick up Eric, Christy, their kids, and Russell, whose own wife and kids were staying home. With Mike and Boomer in tow it was almost the entire family--plus me, the honorary Harding. Everyone, myself included, pitched in money to rent a houseboat on Lake Shasta for the week. I split the cost 50/50 with my parents, who were doing everything in their power (mainly withholding money) to make this friendship difficult for me. "You have money?" asked Dad. "Ummm . . . some," I answered hesitantly, "from graduation and my birthday." We were eating dinner. There was silence for a moment. "Well, if that's how you want to spend it," he said flatly, as he left the table. I stared at his empty plate, my eyes large with disbelief. I could go? I thought to myself. I glanced up at my mother, feeling her eyes on me. She glared at me coldly, saying nothing, and fed Curtis another spoonful of baby food.

Shasta Puddle, as we called it that year, had sunk dangerously low from years of poor rainfall and drought. The water line was nearly a hundred feet below the natural treeline, leaving a wide strip of dry, pale earth lining the perimeter of the lake. "Looks like God gave Lake Shasta a shitty haircut," Holly and I joked. Mama Harding, Christy, and the kids walked up to the rental office, while the rest of us wound our way down the rickety makeshift walkway to the boats. "Cute boys," I whispered to Holly as we walked by the guys, teenagers with deep tans and workboots, who handled the boats for the houseboat company. Even though I leaned close to Holly and spoke low, Russell, a few feet ahead, turned around and gave me a smirk. I flushed red and looked elsewhere. I'd never met him before this trip and, frankly, he made me nervous. Holly's other brothers saw me as just another little sister to harass, and I loved feeling like family. Russell didn't tease, didn't harass; he just watched and smiled occasionally, remote and mysterious, making me feel shy and self-conscious. While we waited down at the boats, Russell threw the Nerf ball to Boomer and Eric, who dove off the end of the dock, catching the ball in mid-air before splashing clumsily into the muddy water. Mike sat on a railroad tie and smoked. Holly and I chatted with the boy who was checking the boats near us--"So, watcha do around here?"--until Mama Harding and Christy came down to the docks with the keys in hand and we were off.

We putted out through the muddy inlet towards the clear blue middle of the lake. I felt, finally, as if I were with Holly again, and I put all the hurt back in a drawer and shut it--safe for later. We claimed the top of the houseboat and stripped down to our bikinis, leaning on our elbows and posing--knees up, toes pointed, nonexistent chests out, heads tossed back--just like Julia Roberts in Satisfaction. It was our movie obsession of the summer. "Yo, dudes. DUDES!" we called down to her brothers--a perfect imitation of the beach scene in the movie. Holly was Julia Roberts, and I was Billy. Boomer hollered back "Yo, geeks. GEEKS!" in a girlie voice, sashaying around the deck, swinging his hips side to side. The brothers went off, howling with laughter, the occasional "Geeks!" bubbling up through the cacophony. Holly just rolled her eyes and pursed her lips, sick of the ridicule. I smiled to myself and looked out to the shore: it felt like home.

Russell drove the houseboat, or, rather, stuck it in gear and waited for it to putt along in the open water. He'd lean on the wall with a Coors at his side and a faraway look in his eyes while he drove, shouting "Ramming speed! Full steam ahead!" as he shifted the engine into high. He was Holly's dad's son from another marriage, so he looked nothing like the all-American, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Hardings. Russell was dark, tall like the others, but older, quieter. I eyed him warily for the first day or two, avoiding him as much as I could on that small houseboat. Finally, on the third or fourth day he reached down and helped me back onto the boat after swimming. The ladder was invariably in the shadow of the boat, in the dark water that sent chills up my spine, out of fear, not temperature. The Harding brothers teased me relentlessly. "C'mon chickenshit, get in the boat," and I would swim into the dark water and scurry up the ladder too quickly, either slipping or scraping myself in the process. I was fine if Holly was behind me, but alone I was terrified. Russell saw me swim in and called out "Come on in, you'll be fine." He set his beer down and wrapped one arm around each of mine and pulled me up, while I climbed the stairs with my feet. "Light as a feather," he said as he let me go. He paused. I stood there shivering, a pool of water spreading out around me on the deck. "You'll be quite a girl in a couple of years." He picked up his beer and walked into the cabin.

I didn't tell Holly. That should have been the first clue. In the two years of our friendship--two years that felt like 20--she knew every sordid and not-so-sordid detail of my everyday existence: what I wore, what I said, how I said it, what they said, why they said it. If, miraculously, something happened without her, Holly rested sure that nothing happened without her knowledge: I divulged everything. At any other point in our lives, I would have run to Holly and whispered excitedly, "Ohmigod, Hol, your brother Russ says I'm gonna be hot in a couple of years, can you buh-lieve it?!" But, by August I had spent months miserable, wallowing in my abandonment, fearful of facing the high school cafeteria without her. This little secret, though--this little "nothing"--was my first step away from Holly.

I spent the rest of the trip taking other little steps. I'd leave Holly lying in the sun on the deck and walk into the cabin. "Hey Russ, can I drive?" and he'd let me, most of the time. If he really wanted to get to a certain cove, though, he'd say, "In a bit," and I'd sit on one of the stools and take sips off his beer. Russ never stopped me, just smirked. Holly walked in one time. "Where'd you go?" she asked, staring at the beer in my hand. "Uh, I'm right here," I said, trying to act as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Late on our last night, after we had said goodnight, Holly turned over in her sleeping bag to face me. "You like Russ a lot, huh, Laur." I wanted so bad to tell her and throw the entire game, but I just shrugged instead, staring up at the sky instead of back at Holly. "Yeah, he's cool, I guess," and left it at that. We didn't say another word.

We stayed at Eric and Christy's the night we left Shasta Puddle. It was late and everyone was exhausted from too much sun and too much of each other. Eric went into town for KFC, bringing buckets and buckets of chicken back for the horde of people now populating his small house. Holly and I took two sides of mashed potatoes and gravy each and went out to the screened-in porch. We slopped up the food with two fingers, just as we always had. In fact, almost everything seemed as it always had, except that somewhere along the way I opened the drawer, took my hurt back, and clutched it to my heart, which felt as if it were breaking.

By nightfall the house was full--all couches and most of the floor space already claimed by the time Holly and I came in from the porch. Holly was telling me about her new friend Emily. "What kind of name is Emily?" I kept thinking. And every new detail Holly offered ("Em rides horses too, isn't that great? She's going to be at the same high school as me, isn't that great?") brought my terror closer and closer to the surface. "I'm being replaced. I'm being replaced," I said to myself, over and over, like a mantra. Mama Harding called us in to decide where to put us for the night. I was glad for her voice, that night was falling, that the conversation had to end. "We'll stick you two in the van for the night," she said. Holly grinned at me like a little kid and I relaxed in relief. Holly grabbed a bottle of Coke out of the fridge, I stole Boomer's bag of Doritos while he dozed on the couch, and we were set.

The caffeine and sugar didn't put a dent in our fatigue. We giggled for a bit, debated about who was cuter--Judd Nelson or Emilio Estevez--and then started to drift off. The crickets outside were almost deafening, and all the windows of the van were fogging up from our breath. Holly's breathing slowed and became regular, loud, almost a snore. I listened for a bit, my eyes closed. I pictured Huntzberger's, the first time Holly took me there to ride, our long summer days, and Holly's old house on Fayton Court. Late nights watching TV in her living room. Sneaking out to the park. And at the same time, I couldn't get Emily out of my mind. My brain whirred in panic for several minutes before I spoke. "Hol?" I whispered. "Hol? You awake?" She groaned, "What, Laur?" I started to tear, silently. "Hol, I . . . I . . . I'm so afraid of being alone." She rolled over, "I'm right here, Laur. Go to sleep." I stared at the ceiling of the van, where the old upholstery hung loose, pinned up by the two interior lights so it looked like a circus tent. I tried to shut everything out, all the noises, all the memories, just so I could talk, but I couldn't even breathe. And by the time I decided I could tell Holly what I really meant--that I wasn't talking about being alone in the van--she was sound asleep.

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