Troop 292

We drove up to San Francisco with Radio Disney, all hissing AM waves, and met up with the other half of our caravan at Stephanie’s mom’s apartment in Nob Hill. I thought we’d go straight from the parking garage to Chinatown, but Stephanie’s mom, Mrs. Russell, said she needed to bring a box of dishes upstairs, and it would just take a minute.

The apartment was beiger than I would have expected. Compared to their house in Saratoga, it was rather plain—there were no ornate golden mirrors or marble palace floors. There was off-white carpeting, a brown leather sofa, a glass kitchen table, and a Plasma TV. Mrs. Russell put the dishes away in the kitchen cupboard and said there were two bathrooms down the hall if anyone wanted to go before we left for the fortune cookie factory.

The other girls had to go, and I pretended I did, too and got in line behind Mallory, but I only wanted to peek inside Stephanie’s room. It was sparer than her room in Saratoga, but there was still a four-poster rose petal pink canopy bed with a matching duvet and six fuchsia, pink, and white fuzzy throw pillows.

Stephanie and I had always been friendly, but this was the first year that a real friendship felt possible. She’d invited me over more than the once-per-year obligatory playdate that her mom granted each girl in the troop. We’d had three summer swimming playdates and jumped off the diving board onto inflatable flamingos and eaten Reese’s cups and popcorn with chlorine drenched fingers.

“Mom, I need the phone,” Mallory shouted, “Lindsey’s supposed to call!”

Mrs. Kraus handed it to her, and Mallory smiled her rainbow-tinged Skittles teeth and opened her texts, ignoring me. Stephanie and Mallory used to be best friends, but after Mallory switched to Catholic school, they didn’t see each other outside of girl scouts. None of us had met Lindsey, Mallory’s supposed-new best friend. We’d never even seen a picture or heard her voice on the phone.

Mallory took her phone into the bathroom, and I went into the bedroom, shut the door behind me, and sat down on the bed pretending, for a moment, that this was my life. The girl who lived in this room could travel the world, eat buttery French pastries, and bask in the Monet waterlilies I’d only ever seen printed in art books. The best part of the room was the window above the white dresser overlooking the city—the little white dots of sailboats and yachts bobbing on the Bay and the crisp lines of buildings, stacks of windows, and avenues curving their way up and down the hills.

Mrs. Russell said we were ahead of schedule for the fortune cookie factory tour, and, if we wanted to, we could take the long way through Union Square.

“Just for window shopping,” she added.

On the way down the hill, we walked past the Ritz, and Mrs. Kraus said to Mrs. Russell that maybe, if the girls were good, we could go to tea after lunch. Mrs. Russell said that was fine in a voice that suggested she was uninterested in arguing.

“I didn’t really like the tea when we went last time,” Mallory said, “all the desserts had fruit.”

If Mrs. Kraus heard her, she didn’t say anything. I imagined Mallory spitting miniature berry pies and Sacher-torte cakes out into her napkin, taking something that would’ve been so delectable to me and throwing it away.

Three blocks later, we made it to the Juicy Couture store. It was so pink, so velour, so gold-plated, we couldn’t just go past it.

“We have to stop,” Mallory said, and we all joined in with a chorus of please.

“Okay,” Mrs. Russell said, “but just for fifteen minutes.”

We all spread out inside to find our favorite color sweats. In fifth grade, Stephanie had two Juicy tracksuits—one in navy and another in olive green. The rest of us made fun of them. But now we understood. Britney, Paris, everyone in the magazines was wearing them. And for just $129 for the bottoms and $169 for the jacket, we could, too.

I picked up a black velvet velour tracksuit that read Juicy on the butt in silver rhinestones and took it into the dressing room. It fit, sort of, but I could tell there was something wrong. My hips were too wide, my torso was too long, and the top of the pants felt suffocating against my pelvis. I took them off and went out to the little sitting area next to the dressing rooms. Everyone else came out in their track suits to show them off, forming a little velour rainbow of pink, white, and navy in front of the big three-way mirror.

“Did you like yours?” Stephanie asked and took a mirror selfie.

“Yes,” I said.

She was just being nice. She wasn’t trying to draw attention to the fact that I was the only one who didn’t show hers off. She’d always been naturally thin, and thin girls didn’t understand.

They all went back into their dressing rooms to change, and Mallory was the first one out. She walked to the front of the store to find Mrs. Kraus and ask her to buy the white track suit. I followed her out slowly, but I could hear her from across the room—please, please, please, please, please.

“For the love of God, Mallory,” Mrs. Kraus said, “fine, but another color. The white will get ruined.”

I stood behind a rack of jackets and watched her go over to the table, look at the colors for a minute, and pick up a pink jacket and pants. She carried these back over to Mrs. Kraus along with the white set, and again I heard the chorus of please, please, please, please, please.

Stephanie came up behind me, poked my lower back, and asked what Mallory was doing.

“She’s bitching to get one of the suits,” I said.

I’d never said ‘bitching’ before, and I wasn’t even sure that it really worked here, but Stephanie nodded.

“My mom says she can be a brat,” Stephanie whispered, “and with those Skittles, she’s going to rot out her teeth.”

“She’s going to end up like one of those kids in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, sucked into a river of melted candy.”

Stephanie laughed. I turned back to Mrs. Kraus and saw she was handing the cashier both sets to ring up. Mrs. Russell stood by the door, lips pursed.

We walked up to the cashier and saw the total: $649.64.

“Mallory,” Mrs. Kraus said, “this is ridiculous. You girls are ridiculous.”

The fortune cookie factory was less of a factory and more of a store. Our guide took all of us behind the counter and explained how quickly the workers had to take the cookies off the conveyer belt before they hardened. An elderly Chinese woman sat facing the conveyer belt and removed six flat cookies with a toothpick. She didn’t look at us, as if she was used to constantly having tourists and middle schoolers peer over her shoulder while she worked. She picked up one cookie, folded it around a fortune in less than three seconds, and placed it on a second conveyer belt of completed fortune cookies. She picked up the other five flat cookies and threw them into a large bin before beginning the process all over again.

“Now, you might think this is rather inefficient,” the tour guide said, “but our second best-selling cookie is the reject fortune cookies.”

He put a gloved hand into the bin of rejects and passed out two or three cookies at a time to the group.

The cookie was about the size of my palm and incredibly thin. It tasted exactly like a fortune cookie, but the experience of eating it was different. It felt more like a communion wafer than a cookie, almost dissolving on my tongue.

The tour guide showed us the number one best-selling fortune cookie—a chocolate-infused fortune cookie.

“These don’t come with the tour, but we’ve got boxes of them for sale at the cash register,” he said and ushered us back out into the entryway.

Mrs. Russell bought a box of the chocolate ones and said we could each try one after lunch. I thought we were heading to lunch, but the tour was shorter than they expected, so we were given thirty minutes to shop in the gigantic Old Shanghai store.

The store was enormous, filled with everything from rice crackers to lanterns to insect bracelets to miniature water features.

“Make sure you girls don’t touch anything,” Mrs. Kraus said.

I wanted to touch everything. Mrs. Kraus followed her daughter Mallory over to the jewelry, so I went to the ceramics display on the other side of the store. I was used to being ignored, doing mostly whatever I wanted, and I knew how to handle myself around breakables. I didn’t pick anything up or bump into anything—I simply used two fingers to lightly stroke the rims of the bowls and vases, walking up and down the aisles, touching everything. I picked one glazed vase and let my palm slide down its body.

“Emma!” Mrs. Kraus called out.

My arm lurched forward, lightly knocking into a sturdy vase. I went back to the center of the room, where Mrs. Kraus stood with three girls ringing up matching purses.

“Emma, what color do you want?” Mrs. Kraus asked.

She held up three purses—one in pale blue, purple, and pink.

“I don’t need one,” I said.

“Don’t be silly, all the girls are getting them. Just tell me which one you want.”

“The purple,” I said, “thank you.”

If it was up to me, we would have gotten dim sum for lunch, but Mallory and Stephanie needed to go somewhere that served plain cheese pizza or penne pasta with butter. I could count the number of times my family went out to eat all year on one hand’s worth of fingers, but when we did, it was special. It was for food we couldn’t make at home, or it was a place in the Chronicle’s Top 100 Restaurants with $ or $$ next to it. I’d looked up Tony’s website the night before on the family desktop computer and picked out exactly what I was going to get: a small Cal Italia pizza with four cheeses, Croatian sweet fig preserve, prosciutto di parma, balsamic reduction, no sauce for $15.99 plus tax and tip. I didn’t know what balsamic reduction was and I’d never had figs before, but my mom said I would like them.

We were seated in the back of the restaurant—a tight, old building covered in signed pictures of celebrities who’d eaten here and written things like “best slice West of NY” across Jerry Seinfeld’s face.

“Does everyone want sodas?” Mrs. Kraus asked.

We all said yes, and the waiter went around the table and took our drink order. Mrs. Kraus and Mrs. Russell each got a glass of white wine, which struck me as a bit odd. I couldn’t remember adults drinking alcohol at girl scout events before.

“Girls, we’ll order a few large cheeses and pepperonis to split,” Mrs. Kraus said and gave the order to the waiter without waiting for our response.

I wanted to say that I would opt out of that order and get my own pizza, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak up over the other girls, over the adult ordering, over every other person in the restaurant eating the pizza they wanted to eat.

Mrs. Russell said she would get a chicken Caesar, so Mrs. Kraus said she would have the same. It was my last chance before the waiter disappeared, off to put in the order and shut me out of figs and balsamic reduction.

“Excuse me,” I began, but he turned away and walked back into the kitchen.

The pizzas were good, but throughout the whole lunch, I couldn’t break away from a simmering, low-burning anger. This pizza was nothing to the other girls. They were hungry, and someone sat them down at a table and told them what to eat. Eating out was nothing to them, they didn’t have a sophisticated palate, the mixture of flavors was entirely lost on them. They liked cheese pizza because toppings were yucky. And finally, when I had this moment alone, when I had this twenty-dollar bill, I couldn’t even spend it on what I wanted to eat.

I ate more pizza than I was hungry for, letting the grease drip down my hands and pool on my plate. I didn’t care that I was full—I wanted to get my money’s worth.

By the time the check came, I was livid. Mrs. Kraus had ordered way too much food and we left almost two whole uneaten cheese pizzas on the table. I passed my twenty down to Mrs. Kraus, and after she calculated the bill, she handed me back 74 cents.

Even with all the pizzas, it felt like I should have gotten a few dollars back. Across the table, Mrs. Kraus handed four dollars back to Stephanie. It didn’t make any sense why her mom wasn’t just paying for her meal. I looked down at the purple purse Mrs. Kraus got me in Chinatown and saw a price sticker for $2.99 on the side of the purse. I peeled the sticker off and stuck it on my napkin.

We walked down Columbus Ave. past coffee shops, pasta bars, and seedy liquor stores to pick up the Powell & Mason line up to Nob Hill. Mrs. Russell said she would stand on the outside with anyone who wanted to try it. Mrs. Kraus sat down on the outside bench with Mallory, and the rest of us lined up in front of Mrs. Russell, holding onto the pole and hanging off the side of the cable car.

“We’ll just stop and check the prices for high tea,” Mrs. Kraus said, “maybe there’s something a la carte.”

The conductor rang the bell again, and we were off. I’d been on a cable car once, the weekend after 9/11 because my dad thought there would be no lines, but I’d never stood on the outside. The cable car wasn’t very fast, but there was enough wind to whip my hair in my face, and we were surrounded by other cars and motorcycles zipping ahead up the hill.

In that moment, I forgot everything I was angry about—I shut my eyes and let the city vibrate around me. I opened them as we plateaued on top of the hill, and I could see the afternoon fog rolling in from the ocean, blanketing the marina.

The Ritz was something I’d only ever heard of—part of the world of the Plaza in Eloise or Home Alone 2—somewhere where lobby men stood one foot on the curb and one in the street, ready to open the car door, and collect your bags before you could even protest. They looked like what I imagined the little soldiers standing outside Buckingham Palace would look like if they were transported onto Stockton Street. The building even resembled an ancient Roman temple, complete with a Neoclassical pediment filled with winged Gods holding tablets and babies.

Our troop had tea once, at a tea shop in Los Gatos on Valentine’s Day with our mothers. The whole place was covered in pink and white paper lace hearts, and the sandwiches were crustless peanut butter and jelly cut into the shape of hearts. We took turns passing around the sugar cubes and plopping them into our tea, watching them dissolve, and then sipping up the sweet grit. Even that place must have been more than ten dollars.

The lobby was all marble and crystal chandeliers—marble pillars, marble floors, marble desks, marble tables. We were greeted by a man in a suit who didn’t blink twice at two women escorting six eleven-year-olds into a five-star hotel. To the side of the front desk, there was a large table covered in the most beautiful display of flowers I’d ever seen—tall, long stemmed, pink trumpets. I wanted to touch them. I didn’t, but I did let the back of my palm brush against the cool marble pillar as we walked to the lobby restaurant.

The price for tea was listed in small font below the menu: $65 PP.

“That’s probably a bit too much for this crowd,” Mrs. Kraus said, waving her hand in a circle in our general direction, “we’ve done it before when we’ve stayed here, but with a smaller group.”

One of the girls said she needed to get Advil for her cramps, and Mrs. Kraus said there was a shop that sold toiletries by the bathrooms. As we walked down the hall, I became acutely aware of why we were in this hotel. Mrs. Kraus had no intention of taking us to high tea. We’d just eaten. She only wanted to show us where her family stayed when they came to the city. That even though they didn’t have Mrs. Russell’s Nob Hill penthouse, they were still plenty rich. This was their second home.

I didn’t know what exactly the Kraus family did, other than what I’d gathered from my mom, which was that they were rich, but Mrs. Kraus’s parents were still alive, and the majority of the family wealth was in their name.

Mrs. Russell said she would take anyone who wanted to go to the bathroom with her and Mrs. Kraus could take a group of us into the shops. Mrs. Kraus went over to a display of lotions and carved soap animals, ignoring us. I’d seen the soap chicken in her hall bathroom before—a large soap hen standing next to a soap nest of soap eggs. I’d used one of the eggs to wash my hands before realizing there was a pump of hand soap next to the faucet. In that moment, I’d thought about slipping the used soap egg into my pocket to hide the evidence, but I put him back with his other egg brothers.

I walked through an aisle of chapsticks and miniature toothpastes and loofas with the rest of the girls. Stephanie pulled a tube of cherry chapstick off the display and said maybe she’d get it.

“That’s my favorite flavor,” I said.

I unlocked and locked my new purse, holding the metal snap between my fingers before refastening it and releasing it again.

“Or you could get it,” she said.

“I don’t need it.”

She glanced over the top of the aisle to where Mrs. Kraus was standing, asking the cashier if they had any more boxes of assorted macaroons. Stephanie took the purse out of my hands, opened it, and dropped the cherry chapstick inside. She gave me a little nod and smiled.

I should have put it back. But there was a rush, a feeling of excitement, like walking out the door was going over the first drop of a rollercoaster. If I made it, I’d be safe, but here I was at the precipice of danger.

Stephanie didn’t say this, but it felt like she needed me to say yes, like we were forming some secret friendship pact around the cherry chapstick. I smiled back and nodded. We looked around for the other girls—no one else had noticed what we’d done. I shut the purse and walked to the front of the store, silently, slowly, fully composed. But inside, I was flying down the biggest rollercoaster of my life, pulsing, throbbing forward.

The cashier said nothing. Mrs. Kraus saw we were making our way out of the store and gave up her pursuit of the macaroons. It was time to go home.

We walked back down the hall into the lobby and met up with the rest of the girls. I had made it out. I was safe. There was only one more door, one more hurdle.

The man in the suit, the same one who had greeted us when we walked in, was listening to someone in his earpiece, nodding.

“Miss, I’m sorry, but I need to take a look in your bag,” he said.

I looked up at him, unfastened the clip, and opened it. Inside was 74 cents and a cherry chapstick. I picked it up slowly, as if it might detonate. I thought I might drop it or let out a little wail of shame, but I didn’t.

“I put it in there,” Stephanie said, “I was going to get it, and we were playing, and I put it in her bag by mistake.”

Mrs. Russell took out her wallet and handed the man a twenty-dollar bill.

“I don’t have anything smaller,” she said, “but you can keep the change.”

“It’s fine,” he said, “we only need the chapstick back.”

I handed it to him without meeting his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly.

We went outside, back into the wet fog and wind. I thought Mrs. Russell might scold me, but instead she turned to Stephanie and said that it was good she was honest, but she needed to be careful.

“You girls are getting older, and if it was something more expensive, you could have gotten Emma in trouble.”

“She really needed it,” Stephanie said.

Mrs. Russell ignored her, but Stephanie’s words felt like a gut punch. I didn’t say that. She knew I didn’t say that.

I got in Mrs. Russell’s car for the drive home and sat in silence until we made it out of the city. Nobody had blamed me for what happened, but I was filled with a sense of shame. Not for stealing the chapstick, but for a growing suspicion that there was some reason why no one blamed me, specifically.

Mrs. Russell’s voice snapped me out of my thoughts.

“It was so inappropriate.”

I thought she meant stealing the chapstick and felt myself wither further into my seat, wishing I could burrow into the leather.

“The idea of buying all of that for Mallory in front of everyone,” Mrs. Russell added.

I didn’t know who she was talking to. Perhaps she wasn’t talking to any of us, but just couldn’t contain her disgust any longer. None of us responded.

And then, something in her eyes relaxed, and she looked back at me in the rearview mirror.

“Emma, do you still play clarinet in band?”

I said that I did.

“You know,” she said, “I played clarinet throughout middle school. And when I was your age, I decided I wanted to get really good at it.”

I nodded. I had no clue why she would talk about middle school band. Stephanie had played the flute for one semester in the fourth grade and immediately quit. It was hard to imagine Mrs. Russell playing any instrument or doing much of anything besides being a polished blonde woman.

No one else was listening, but she went on talking.

“So, I practiced every day that summer, and at the beginning of the school year, we played for the conductor, and I made it to second chair. But no matter how much I practiced, I could never beat your aunt Lisa.”

I smiled, not knowing what to say. I knew my dad’s sister and Mrs. Russell had known each other since the third grade—they were even in the same Brownie troop. But I’d never heard Mrs. Russell mention her before. Aunt Lisa found it amusing that Jennifer Drinkwater (who she referred to only by her maiden name), the girl who frequently threw parties when her parents were out of town, was my girl scout troop leader, but other than the occasional smirk when her name was mentioned, Aunt Lisa never said anything about her, either.

“How is she?” Mrs. Russell asked.

Stephanie looked at me with curiosity. We all knew that our parents had grown up together but never spoke about it.

“She’s good,” I said, “she lives in New York. She works at NBC.”

“She was always going to be really successful,” she said, “you remind me a lot of her.”

No one had ever told me that before, but Aunt Lisa, maybe even more so than my mom, was the person I saw myself in the most. I knew my mom didn’t dislike Aunt Lisa, but she seemed to dislike the parts of her that showed up in me.

“My mom says she has a Scarlett O’Hara Complex,” I said.

Mrs. Russell’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

I didn’t know why I said it. I’d never even seen that movie.

“My mom said Aunt Lisa grew up wearing homemade prom dresses,” I began and paused for a second, trying to remember my mom’s exact wording, “and she vowed to never suffer the indignities of being poor again.”

Stephanie looked at me like I’d just pulled my shirt off in the middle of the car, exposing myself, like the words left me naked. They had come out of me so easily, as if I was journaling them, expecting them to remain forever private.

“Oh,” Mrs. Russell said and gave a little fake laugh, “I only meant that you both work hard.”

I wanted to throw up. I almost asked Mrs. Russell to pull the car over, but we were just one exit away from home. I breathed in and out slowly through my nose. No one is going to remember this in a few days, in a few hours, you do not need to be ashamed. But I didn’t believe that.

We got off 85 at Wolfe Road and went past the dying shopping mall with the crappy Macy’s, streets of low-rise apartments, and sandwiched-together gray and brown Eichler homes, until we crossed into Saratoga, and the houses had a bit more breathing room. Three blocks later, Mrs. Russell pulled into my cul-de-sac.

The house usually looked fine to me, but today, I felt like I could see every piece of chipped paint my mom complained about in high resolution. The grass in the front yard was dead, reduced to little patches covering a muddy dirt plot surrounded by overgrown juniper bushes housing the black spiders that crawled inside under my bedroom window. The liquid amber trees, whose colorful leaves I loved, looked haphazardly placed, and their roots stretched out under the concrete driveway and front walk, creating earthquake cracks and chasms in the ground.

“Bye,” I said, “thank you for the ride.”

“Tell your mom I said hi,” Mrs. Russell said.

Stephanie gave me a small, silent wave, and I shut the door. I was the cookie tossed into the bin of rejects, surrounded by a cul-de-sac of neatly manicured lawns, backlit olive trees and Japanese maples, and tiled driveways.

Inside, my mom was sitting at the kitchen table folding a basket of white cleaning towels with the Oscars Red Carpet show on in the background.

“How was it?” she asked.

Part of me wanted to confess the whole thing, the chapstick, Gone with the Wind, the betrayal of something that I couldn’t quite name. They were her words that I’d spoken. Sharing her secret judgment felt somehow unforgivable.

“It was good,” I said, “I got a purse.”

I turned to the side to show it off to her, and she nodded and looked back at the TV. I sat down next to her and put my hand into the laundry basket to see if the towels were still warm. They were, and in that moment, I wanted to be small enough to climb into the basket and dry away all the damp of the day.

“You want to help me finish?” she asked.

I said sure, and pulled one out of the basket, mimicking her fold, halving them twice before adding them to the short stack on the table. On TV, Nicole Kidman was in a long, red dress with half of a bow resting on her right shoulder, posing for the cameras. The commentator said it was Balenciaga. I tried to picture myself in that dress. I tried to picture myself on the red carpet, a red carpet anywhere, not just at the Oscars, in a long, red evening gown.

My mother used to tell me about the dresses her mother had for insurance conventions and lament the fact that she didn’t own any gowns like that. I didn’t see what the fuss was about—she could go to any department store and buy a long dress. But maybe those weren’t gowns. Maybe this red Balenciaga dress was what my mother meant.

I couldn’t see myself in it. But I could see Mrs. Russell in it. Maybe not red, maybe on her it would be black. It might be red on Stephanie, though. Someday, those closets filled with Juicy tracksuits would be brimming with gowns of every color of the rainbow. Someday, she would be on a red carpet just like this one.

SARAH DESTIN is a Ph.D. candidate at Florida State University in Creative Writing. She is the recipient of the Edward H. and Marie C. Kingsbury Fellowship Award, and her work has recently appeared in Bennington Review, Mid-American Review, The Pinch, and other journals.

Get new stories, sports musings, or book reviews sent to your inbox. Drop your email below to start >>>

NEW book release AWRY by duncan b. barlow. Order the book of stories of which Brian Evenson calls “meticulous and precise, painful and surprising.”