Being Goldie
Goldie writes her name in big, cursive letters. She has always liked the look of her name, the way the letters loop together. She writes it over and over again, up and down the sides of the paper until the words overlap, closing in on the white space of the paper. There is at least one page like this for every entry in her diary. Her mind often wanders as she recounts her day, listing what she’s eaten, her steps, and so her pen forms the letters of her name without thinking, tracing the familiar arcs across the page.
Goldie started keeping a diary when she was in third grade. Her aunt gave her one for her birthday–a slim, pink notebook with Alice and the white rabbit on the cover. She isn’t sure if this was the origin of their connection. If she loved Alice because her face adorned her first diary, the first of many, in fact, or if her aunt had purchased the notebook because she already loved the young girl who dreamed herself out of her reality. Either way, it is there, between the pages of this perfect pink book that Goldie finds a place where she can be herself entirely.
She hears footsteps in the hall and slams the cover closed, stuffing the current notebook—a plain blue one—under her pillow.
“Knock, knock,” her mother says as she raps her knuckles on the door to Goldie’s room. Goldie sits cross-legged on her bed, her gray sweatpants looking dull against the floral bedspread. Everything in her room, having been chosen when she was eight, feels babyish and boring. Goldie has taped up posters to hide the purple hearts her mother painted on the walls. Posters of boys from screens with perfect hair and perfect teeth.
Goldie has taped up posters to hide the purple hearts her mother painted on the walls. Posters of boys from screens with perfect hair and perfect teeth.
“Can I sit?” her mom asks. Goldie can’t be sure when it happened, but there comes a time when your parents begin to only exist in other spaces. In the kitchen, the living room, the front seat of the car, and so even though this house belongs to them and technically this is their room, it feels entirely hers. And her mom with her flats and pearl earrings and pursed lips just doesn’t quite…fit.
“Goldie?” her mom says, concern creeping into her voice.
“Hmm?” Goldie finally says. “Oh, yeah. Sure.” She moves over a bit, a gesture, so her mom has space to sit down.
“Oops,” her mom says, pulling Goldie’s stuffed bunny from under her. Goldie snatches the toy and holds it under her chin the way she does at night when no one is around.
“So, how was the first week?” her mom says, tucking her leg underneath her as she turns to face Goldie. Her mom is pretty, she thinks, although she’s past the age where teenagers notice it. Once, when Goldie was a freshman, she was waiting for her mom in the office and a senior boy was there, chatting, making her mom laugh. She had never seen her mom giggle like that.
“Mom?” she said wanting to somehow make it stop.
“That’s your mom?” the boy said, turning to Goldie as if seeing her for the first time. She knew he was a senior because she had seen him in the musical. Goldie hated musicals but her friends had dragged her and it was something to do on a Friday night. “You two could be sisters.” Goldie crinkled her eyes and bared her teeth, the semblance of a smile.
“Ew,” Goldie said, after the boy left. “That kid is a creep.”
“He’s sweet,” her mom said.
Goldie wonders what it would have been like to have her mom as a sister. To have a sister. Probably not so different from her brother, actually. Benji is a good listener, a gentle soul. He even lets her paint his nails sometimes, though she suspects it’s just to be allowed into her orbit.
“It was okay.” She stops there but when she sees the change in her mother’s face, her eyes, she decides to continue. “I joined a new club.”
“That’s great!” her mom says a little too loudly. “Anyone you know in it? Any…friends?” Goldie hears the pause. It has been a while since Goldie has brought anyone home. Her mom has never asked her about it directly, but it’s hard to hide when your mom works at your school. And Goldie has heard her whispering with Benji. It’s not that Goldie doesn’t have any friends. The photo collage above her bed would suggest otherwise. Would suggest that she has a core group of girls with whom she jumps, bikini-clad and smiling as the camera captures them mid-air and takes scrunch-faced selfies, the sun peeking in like a photo-bombing stranger.
They are nice enough. But Goldie just never knows what to say to them. Never laughs with them. Always feels like she is putting on a performance in order to have fun.
But the pictures are old. From last summer before she stopped responding to texts or sitting with them at lunch. Before she realized she doesn’t actually enjoy being around them all that much. Not that they aren’t nice girls. They are nice enough. But Goldie just never knows what to say to them. Never laughs with them. Always feels like she is putting on a performance in order to have fun.
And she is okay with it. Starting senior year sort of friendless feels like she has come full circle. She arrived here in the fourth grade not knowing anyone and she will leave this town in much the same way.
“Not really,” she says, but it’s not the whole truth. Her mom simply doesn’t ask the right question. Instead, the truth bounces around inside her mouth, crawling on her tongue and she spits it out before she chokes. “Nic, actually.”
“Oh?” her mom says and Goldie can tell she is trying to hide her enthusiasm. All her mom knows of their friendship is that it ended abruptly in the eighth grade. Goldie has written pages and pages about it in her diary. Some tear-soaked and others distorted from the pressure of her pen. But she hasn’t spoken the words aloud to her own mother.
“Yeah. Looks like we are actually going to be paired up.”
“Well,” her mom says, “that might be nice.”
“I doubt it. She hates me.”
“Goldie.” Her mom puts her hand out as if to brush Goldie’s hair back but then stops mid-gesture. Goldie feels the weight of its absence.
“It’s fine, Mom.”
“People change, you know. You’re not the same person you were in middle school.” Goldie clenches her jaw. She strokes Bunny’s ear. “And I’m sure she’s not either.”
“Maybe.”
“What does Benji have to say?”
“Mom, you know how he feels about her.”
“Still?” Goldie shrugs. “You two were just so close. I thought she was a good influence on you.” Goldie rolls her eyes. Of course her mom would say that. Nic is one of those girls who comes over and gives your parents heart-eyes. She finishes her whole plate and puts everything in the dishwasher and says please and thank you and what a lovely meal. She gets straight-As and never makes her parents worry. Not like Goldie.
After this year is over, Nic will be off to some amazing school and they won’t be neighbors anymore and maybe then Goldie can finally breathe.
“Give it a chance. Who knows? Maybe you’ll end up being friends again.” Goldie scoffs. Her mom stands to leave. “Dinner will be ready soon.”
“I’m not hungry,” Goldie says instinctively. Her mom’s frozen smile makes Goldie pause. Reassess. She considers her body the way her therapist has taught her. How it feels in this moment. She has not eaten since lunch. Half a turkey sandwich and a clementine. She breathes. Four long breaths in. Hold. Four long breaths out. With each breath she searches and what she finds is not quite hunger, not the rumbling belly she remembers feeling at the end of a long day of elementary school, scouring the snack cabinet for something salty. But there’s something there.
“I mean, I’ll be there in a minute.” What her mom said before makes her fingers itch for the suitcase under her bed. She said Goldie was a different person now, that Nic was too. But how different? And different how?
When she is sure her mother is gone, Goldie places Bunny back in his spot on her pillow. She pulls out the gray carry-on that hasn’t been on a plane since they visited her uncle in Chicago in sixth grade. Now, it is the home of her journals in chronological stacks. She rarely reads them anymore—there was a time in middle school where she was obsessed with reliving her every heartbreak and friendship drama—but she has since lost interest. Instead, she chooses to focus on the future.
As she unzips the bag, she is reminded of the pensieve from Harry Potter. Like this suitcase her mom bought on clearance at Marshall’s will begin to tremble and swirl, revealing all of her distant memories.
Goldie finds the one she is looking for. She dates each notebook with a Sharpie and some years have more volumes than others. Eighth grade takes up the most space. But she starts even earlier. There, behind images of unicorns, patterned flowers, and Alice and the white rabbit, is the history of her friendship with Nic.
There is the moment that they meet. A week after the Navonas move in and their mothers conspire to get them both into the yard at the same time. Oh, look. There’s our new neighbor. We should go and say hi.
Nic is quiet at first. Sort of boring. She is always reading books by herself. But then they go for a bike ride and Nic shows Goldie the willow tree at the park whose branches touch the ground, creating a dome, a hidden place where magic exists.
They play wiffle ball in their front yards, letting Benji play too.
Nic is so weird. She watches these old horror movies with her parents. And Benji is OBSESSED with her. He is always hanging around trying to talk to her. What if they got married? Then I’d have a sister!
Nic is quiet at first. Sort of boring. She is always reading books by herself. But then they go for a bike ride and Nic shows Goldie the willow tree at the park whose branches touch the ground, creating a dome, a hidden place where magic exists.
After they watch Overboard, Goldie yells out Arturo! as Nic crosses the street back to her house and she watches her friend turn, cupping her hands over her mouth and shouting back Catarina! until one of their parents tells them to quiet down. One time, Nic asks if she can be Catarina, but it doesn’t make sense because her name is Goldie so she should be the Goldie Hawn character and not Nic.
Nic is hanging out with Olivia again and they didn’t invite me. It’s fine. I mean, I don’t even like Olivia. She’s weird and chubby and way too loud.
For Nic’s twelfth birthday, Goldie knows she wants to do something special. More than just decorating her locker with pictures of magazine cutouts. So she gets together with Nic’s mom and they plan a whole surprise sleepover with dinner at a restaurant and a Harry Styles piñata. It is everything.
Nic is seriously the best friend I’ve ever had. I don’t know what I would do without her.
So, on Goldie’s birthday she is expecting something great. Not surprise-party-great, but something. When she gets to school, her locker is just a locker. Beige. Blank. In homeroom, Nic says she has a gift at her house but she couldn’t get a ride early to decorate. But Goldie doesn’t hear. All she hears is not enough, not enough, not enough. Nic is Goldie’s best friend. But, it seems, Goldie is not Nic’s.
For the next week, Goldie looks right past Nic in the hallway and walks with Benji to school and tosses her hair over her shoulder when they pass each other in the bathroom. And each night she goes home and cries a little and writes down what she eats—three slices of apple, a bottle of water, five baby carrots—and rubs Bunny’s ears.
She approaches the stack from eighth grade now. Passes by the summer they went to the local day camp and were the oldest people there and made friendship bracelets and ate Blow Pops and listened to Taylor Swift and swatted mosquitos.
And there it is. The night that Nic tells Goldie her secret. Like the turning over of an ignition. A low rumble that starts far away, turning once, twice before becoming a gentle hum.
Nic needs my help. It’s what a good friend would do. I know I should talk to her about it first, but she’ll lie the way I do. And when what? I don’t want this for her. I know I can help her. I have to.
Goldie notices something missing in her words. A feeling that accompanies the engine’s thrum. And when she reads through the lines she sees it. Jealousy. And when she looks even closer: relief.
Nic, who never makes her parents worry, who always gets straight-As, and says please and thank you, who is such a good influence on Goldie is maybe not so perfect after all. Is maybe a little bit broken.
And Goldie knows broken. She might not know how to fix the broken in herself, but she can do this for her friend. Nic doesn’t have to sit alone in the dark like Alice when the broom dog sweeps away her path.
Then, there, on a page that’s nearly illegible, her letters sharp and trembling, leaning on each other as if they might fall down.
She hates me. She hates me. She hates me.
“Goldie! Dinner!” her dad’s voice calls from the bottom of the stairs. Goldie wipes the tear from her cheek and places the notebook back into the suitcase.
“Be right here!” she calls back.
“Hey.” Goldie looks up and sees her brother in the doorway. He’s smiling, like always. He just joined the drumline group at school and he’s wearing a shirt that says their name: Battery Operated.
Goldie stands to join him, but he takes a step into her room. There’s something on his mind. She can see worry behind his big, brown eyes. They are the same color as hers, a golden brown, but where his are wide and open with full lashes like a stuffed toy or an animated character, hers are smaller, sometimes barely visible behind her eyelids. It makes her look sinister, which, she thinks, is fitting, considering her reputation.
“I need to tell you something,” he says and looks down at feet. She does too and sees he’s wearing the socks she bought him last year for Christmas, penguins wearing tophats. “Remember the other day when Nic…fell?” Goldie hears the longing in the way he says her name. As if it doesn’t belong to him.
Goldie remembers. It was weird. Nic is never late. But there she was, practically running across the intersection with the rest of the late-comers, Goldie and Benji included. And there, of course, was Caleb Montgomery.
She nods.
“Well…what would you say if I told you…it was kind of my fault?” Goldie looks up at the cartoon eyes of her baby brother. She doesn’t respond, only stares. He launches into his story. “Okay, so you know how I maybe, might have a crush on her—”
Goldie rolls her eyes. “Since you were, like, eight, yeah.”
“Right. Well, I thought I might, you know, make my move this year. And then it was fate or something because there she was, and she’s never late.” Goldie nods, listening. “I was just going to talk to her, you know? But she didn’t look up when I called her name. It was like I wasn’t even there.”
Goldie has a feeling she knows where this is going.
“Then I saw Caleb. And she’s just staring at him like she’s in some vortex and he’s sucking her in.” Benji pauses and looks at his sister. He wants to say more, she can tell. “I overheard you guys once. When she slept over? I heard her say she liked him, so I knew she was there, you know, for him.” He pauses. “Sorry I was eavesdropping.”
Goldie can’t help it. She laughs. “Dude, it’s not like you were discreet.” She brightens when she sees him smile, too. “But Benj, are you saying, you…tripped her?” His smile disappears.
“Maybe? I mean, I definitely didn’t mean to. I just thought if I could, like, get in the way, I could stop her from talking to him.” He pauses, rubbing one foot against the leg of his pants. “But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.”
Now Goldie is confused. If this isn’t what he came in to confess, then what is?
“Kids! Dinner!” An exasperated cry enters the room along with the smells of roast chicken. Benji looks towards the door but doesn’t move.
“Coming!” he shouts. He turns back to Goldie who stands with her hands on her hips. She feels her phone buzz once in her pocket but she ignores it.
“I saw her later. To apologize. Only when I went to tell her the truth, I…lied. I told her you tripped her.” Goldie eyes widen. “It just, sort of, slipped out. She basically already thought you did it, anyway, and I just didn’t really…correct her. I’m so sorry, Goldie. I’ll make it right. I promise.”
Goldie feels her phone again. She takes four deep breaths in, holds, then lets out four deep breaths. She can feel the dried trail the tear has left on her face. Can still see the afterimage of her words on her eyes: She hates me. She walks to her brother who stands, almost trembling, at her door. She puts a hand on his arm in the place she has punched too many times to count.
“It’s okay,” she says. “She hates me, anyway.”
“Goldie, that’s not—”
“I mean it. It’s really fine. Better, even. Who knows?” She shrugs. “Maybe this way you two still have a chance.”
“I don’t know. It feels…wrong. Like we’d be starting on a lie.” Goldie sees his cheeks turn pink. “Not that we’re…starting anything.”
“It’s not a lie, Benj.” When he looks at her, she adds, “Not really.”
“What do you mean? You didn’t do it.”
“No. But she already blames me for everything. And maybe, I don’t know, there’s part of me that’s a little happy to see her get hurt.” Benji shakes his head and his bangs fall into his eyes. “Maybe happy’s not the right word,” she supplies, though it’s for him.
“You don’t mean that.”
“You know I always wanted a sister, right? When you were born, I was too young to process it, but when we got older I was so annoyed that you were a boy.”
“You’ve mentioned it once or twice,” he says, a shy smirk on his face.
“Listen. You’re…good. And I’m, well…not.” Before he can protest, Goldie continues. “Let me do this for you.” She pauses before adding, “For both of you.”
Goldie gives him a playful shove towards the staircase. The scent of chicken is stronger out here and at first her stomach does an uncomfortable twist, but she breathes and settles it.
Ahead of her, Benji clomps down the steps and the photos of the two of them as babies rattle on the wall. Goldie feels the buzz of her phone again. She pulls it from the pocket of her sweatpants and sees a new message. Maybe: Nic
Hey. It’s Nic. Not sure if you deleted my number but I got yours from the list. Let’s get there around 11 tomorrow so we have time to set up.
Goldie has therapy on Saturday mornings across town so getting there at eleven will be tough. But she can’t tell Nic that. Certainly not after everything that happened.
Goldie has therapy on Saturday mornings across town so getting there at eleven will be tough. But she can’t tell Nic that. Certainly not after everything that happened. Besides, no one outside of Goldie’s family knows the truth. She doesn’t want Nic’s pity. She’s not sure she even wants her forgiveness. Goldie never apologized because she didn’t do anything wrong.
No, her mom is wrong. They will not end up being friends again, because Goldie doesn’t think she’s a different person than she was in middle school. She’s still there, that Goldie. All her choices and anxieties and misdeeds. It’s like living with a ghost.
She types then deletes, aware of the three dots appearing on Nic’s screen. Finally, she writes, Yup and hits send.
She taps the button to save Nic’s number but her fingers, as if guided by some unseen force, stop suddenly. Instead, she will leave it as Maybe: Nic.
As she shuts her phone, she looks up and sees her reflection in the silver vase her mother keeps on the credenza outside the kitchen. Its surface is textured, purposefully imperfect. She steps closer and as she does, her face and body become distorted, trying to take its shape, as if she takes up too much space, and if she can only become smaller, then she might, somehow, fit.
Juliana Zalon is a teacher, editor, and writer who lives in the suburbs of NYC with her husband and two red-headed sons. When she’s not teaching real-life teenagers or creating imaginary ones in her novels, she writes her observations about being a mom for the Westchester County Mom Collective. Her flash fiction was featured in the anthology On Work from Unleash Press. She was a semifinalist for the Norman Mailer High School Teacher Writing Award and had a piece published in the New York Times Metropolitan Diary. She has degrees from the University of Michigan (Go Blue!), Teachers College, Columbia University, and Concordia University.