Dream of the Blue Room by Michelle Richmond

the letting go. And after that the pulsing, and the softness of Amanda Ruth motionless on top of me, her breathing as heavy as my own, her heart so fast I could not count it, could not number the beats of it, though I wanted to assign a number or a name to the thing that we had done, wanted to add it up and mark it down.
    All summer we lived like that. Gradually we ceased to fear her father, making love in the secluded shade beside the pond or in the boathouse. She insisted on doing it in the barbecue room where we had spent one long terrified afternoon, and in that room she was more passionate than anywhere else, as if by her boldness she could erase history, undo the thing that had been done.
    By midsummer, it was as if Mr. Lee had disappeared. He no longer came to the river on Friday evenings. He had fired two of his employees at the print shop and had to work weekends. Mrs. Lee stayed in her room until late afternoon, when we made burgers or shrimp on the grill, thick hush puppies fried to a golden brown, crunchy and slightly sweet, drizzled with lemon juice. We ate on the deck behind the house in the good light of summer, listening to the slow wash of the river, the bark of dogs in the distance, the voices of mothers calling children home to supper. We drank lemonade over crushed ice, and Mrs. Lee seemed happy to have us there.
    “It’s so much better with just us girls,” she’d say, and then act as if she felt guilty for having said it. Sometimes I would catch on her a sweet tangy whiff of alcohol, and once we found three wine coolers hidden beneath a paper sack in the pantry. “Not that I don’t love your father,” she’d say to Amanda Ruth. “It’s just more relaxed this way.”
    The week before Amanda Ruth left for college, we had the place to ourselves. It rained for six days straight. We played house in the near-to-flooding boathouse that rocked on its spindly stilts, only venturing up to the cabin for food and showers. Nights during the rains we thought it might wash away. The river had risen dramatically, flooding several of the low-lying houses. It stopped within inches of the floorboards of the boathouse.
    On our last night, we sat at the end of the pier with our legs hanging over, submerged to our calves. The river was cold from the rain, murky from mud and silt that had floated downstream. Although the rain had stopped the grayness had not lifted; it would hang on for a couple of days, that stultifying softness that seems appropriate only for sleeping. We’d done our share of that, and now my whole body felt heavy, my brain soggy, my senses blurred.
    “I have a surprise for you,” Amanda Ruth said.
    “What kind?”
    “A trip.”
    “Where to?”
    “The University of Montevallo has an exchange program with China, a sister city called Yibin on the upper reaches of the Yangtze. I’m going next summer. I want you to come with me.”
    “That would cost a fortune.”
    “I’ve done the calculations. If we both work parttime and take out student loans, we can do it.”
    “It’s the other side of the world. We don’t speak Chinese.”
    She laughed. “You can get a language partner at Hunter, and I’ll get one at Montevallo. Just watch. By May I’m going to win you over.” I didn’t tell her that going to China sounded about as plausible as going to the moon.
    Amanda Ruth became serious. “What about us?” she asked. “Are we going to see other people?”
    The question struck me as odd, forced me to think about us in a way I had not before. She was my best friend, the person I trusted most, the person I most desired to spend time with. But I had never thought of our relationship as one that could last in the way boyfriends and girlfriends could last, something that could be permanent. I assumed I would go away to college, have boyfriends, fall in love in the proper manner. The men I met in New York would be different from the clumsy and brutish boys I had known thus far; they would be