The Best American Essays 2015 by Ariel Levy

flank of Wheeler Crest. Headlights never appeared. In the nearest town, thirty minutes from home, was a two-screen movie theater, two coffee shops, the high school. But that was all very far away. If the neighbors looked out their windows on those autumn nights, they would have seen two tall girls, walking slowly.
    When I was a child, before I knew Elizabeth, the house where she would someday move with her father, Russell, was a bad place. The man who lived there owned a white wolf that battered its body against the screen door. The man left suddenly without explanation, and Elizabeth and Russell took his place, fleeing an eviction in the town. For a few years Elizabeth and I had been reading
Calvin and Hobbes
comics together behind our choir folders and hiding in the locker room during PE. When she moved to Swall Meadows, isolation made us the focal point of each other’s lives.
    For Russell, the move made sense. Rent was cheap in Swall, and he was still able to work as a cabinetmaker for new apartment complexes in town. The neighborhood placed him four hours from the nearest city. In Sparks, Nevada, Russell could gamble and visit the Wild Horse Resort, the corners of his suitcase lined stealthily with condoms—we found them accidentally, snooping in the hotel room, when he let us come along on one of his trips.
    Elizabeth’s house was small and flat and always dirty. Outside, white Christmas lights shone year round, illuminating a plastic baby skeleton that hung from a tree in the front yard, a relic from a past Halloween. Inside, Russell decorated with mirrors, antique paintings, old army knives—one designed for killing, curved in such a way that suction would not trap it in the body, meaning it could be removed and plunged in again and again. Most of the light fixtures were broken and without bulbs. The kitchen floor left bare feet tacky with food scraps and dirt tracked in by Sara, the German shepherd. The windows were always closed, and the furniture and carpet took on the smell of steak and sawdust. I spent most of my time in this house.
    During the autumn when we were sixteen, the neighbors who drove Elizabeth and me to and from school turned up the heaters in their Hondas. The Hydes tried to make us talk. The O’Brians, who owned a sailboat in San Diego, listened to classic rock on KRHV and left us to stare out the windows at the bitterbrush and the frozen surface of Crowley Lake.
    On each November day, the neighbors dropped us at our respective houses after school. Both were on Mountain View Drive, hers slightly south, mine higher up against the incline of Wheeler Crest. For a few hours I would sit on the floor in front of the neglected fireplace, waiting for Elizabeth’s text message.
    sleepover bears?
    I could picture Russell bent over his workbench in the garage, his hands cold, scraping a knuckle. When the sun fell behind the mountain and the light dropped, he would amble inside for his first bottle of wine, Elizabeth waiting in the kitchen doorway.
    â€œHow was school?” Russell would ask, rinsing a dirty glass.
    â€œFine.”
    â€œSleepover bears again?”
    Russell called me “Kendra Bear.” Elizabeth was “Boo Boo Bear.” He could not acknowledge that his daughter was a woman, who had sex with men and kept her life a secret. Her mother lived in Palm Springs, makeup tattooed on her face, and Elizabeth hated both of them more deeply than a child can hate.
    It took ten minutes to reach Elizabeth’s door if I ran down Mountain View Drive as fast as I could. The thinning soles of my Converse slid on pavement that had been sloughing into dirt for decades. My nose turned pink and my eyes watered from the cold, my black sweatshirt too thin for autumn. Pressed into the flank of the mountain, Swall Meadows sits in chilly, sharp-shadowed light once the sun sets. For a few hours after evening comes to our neighborhood, the valley below still glows golden.
    We