Girl at the Edge

by Karen Dietrich

  Clarisse’s room has vaulted ceilings and a floor-to-ceiling window covered with vertical blinds. Their plastic edges make a tiny sound as they move together and apart, set in motion by the hissing AC vent. Clarisse doesn’t have any stuffed animals or dolls, no bottles of perfume or nail polish cluttering a vanity. Everything is out of sight.

  “Wow, your room is really clean,” I say.

  “Oh yeah? Well, let me show you something.” Clarisse walks over to the double doors that take up half of an entire wall. The doors are white with silver-toned handles curved like question marks on the ends. Clarisse twists the question marks with both hands and swings the doors open with a ta-da motion.

  It’s a large walk-in closet, and inside, there is a fuzzy orange folding chair in a corner. There’s a bookshelf littered with makeup instead of books—uncapped tubes of lipstick, half-empty blush compacts, and cylinders of mascara standing on end, arranged in an orderly line. On the bottom shelf are four cans of compressed air, the kind you find at an office supply store, used for cleaning computers and other electronics. Each can has a thin red straw taped to it, which can be placed over the nozzle to make it easy to reach tiny spaces—the intricate circuitry of a laptop or the charging port of a cell phone. There is crumpled clothing pushed to the edges of the small room. Inside-out jeans and T-shirts and socks peek out from the rubble, which includes a few empty plastic water bottles and Pixie Stix candy wrappers, those pastel-swirled straws that hold flavored sugar.

  “My mom never comes in here,” Clarisse says. “And just in case she ever tries, I keep it locked.” She pulls a small silver key from inside her shirt, her bra I’m guessing, although she moves so smoothly it seems as though she just plucked it from a secret compartment inside her rib cage.

  Clarisse sits down cross-legged on the floor of the closet, and I join her, matching my shape to hers. I eye the makeup on the shelf, wondering if we’ll paint each other’s faces, turning ourselves into giant doll heads. All week, I’ve been imagining the classic sleepover activities we might engage in tonight, the ones you see girls doing in the movies—maybe we’ll conjure the dead with a séance or sneak vodka from an unlocked liquor cabinet. I pick up a bottle of nail polish and read the name of the color on the label. Mint Condition. It’s a chalky pastel green color, and through the frosted glass of the bottle, it looks like green milk.

  “You should put that color on your toes,” Clarisse says in a voice so casual it makes me smile. This is what a friend sounds like when talking to another friend. The sound of pure ease of conversation, like unconscious speech. I’m out of my mind on Clarisse’s friendship right now, her voice cool and comforting as white noise, a box fan whirring in the bedroom corner to lull you to sleep. I shake the nail polish bottle, and the small silver-mixing bead inside makes a lovely little sound, a tiny bell ringing.

  I twist open the top of the nail polish bottle, and with the small brush, I sweep Mint Condition on my baby toe, concentrating deeply and trying to avoid painting all the skin around my toenail, which is inevitable in spite of my efforts. Clarisse grabs one of the cans of computer duster from the shelf, and pulls the trigger gently to let out just a small whistle of air.

  “So have you tried it before?” she asks.

  “Yeah, I’m not too bad at it,” I say. “See?” I flash my finished baby toe at Clarisse. I go back to biting my tongue gently in concentration as I paint the next-to-baby-toe.

  Clarisse laughs. “No, not nail polish. This stuff.” She wiggles the can of air close to my face for a moment. Then she puts the nozzle in her mouth, and ssssssssss—a sharp inhale, like she’s breathing in a long ribbon of clouds.

  Clarisse rests the can in the triangle of carpet she’s created with her thin legs. She waits a few seconds, and then places the nozzle in her mouth again. Another pull of the plastic trigger, another hiss, another inhale, and she smiles without teeth, the biggest grin I’ve ever seen on a girl in person, as close to an ear-to-ear smile as you can get. I twist the nail polish bottle closed and place it back on the makeup shelf. Clarisse reaches her slender arm toward me, offering the can to me. And I take it.

  The small closet becomes smaller, and the walls thin themselves out, transforming into papery palm fronds almost ready to fall from their trees. I think I feel something shift inside the bowl of my skull, but on second thought, no, it’s subtler than that, more like a vibration, a small swarm of bees buzzing in the distance. Clarisse is moving her lips, but I only hear the sea—the waves swelling with air, getting fuller and fuller with each inhale.

  The doorbell rings in the distance, an entire ocean away from me. I raise my arms toward Clarisse, and she grabs my hands, pulling me to my feet. We walk out of the closet, and position ourselves on Clarisse’s bed in typical girl poses—on our stomachs with elbows on the comforter, our heads in our palms. If only we had the slick pages of a teen magazine open nearby.

  Uncle George knocks twice before opening Clarisse’s bedroom door with one hand, cardboard pizza box balanced on the palm of the other like a waiter’s tray. “One New York style with sausage and mushrooms,” he says, and his white teeth shine a smile in my direction. He glides over to Clarisse’s desk, placing the pizza box down along with paper plates and napkins. Then he pulls two cold cans of Wild Cherry Pepsi from his jeans pockets—Clarisse’s favorite soda.

  “Thank you,” we say in unison, our girl voices blending like harmony, my voice a little higher than the low lilt of Clarisse’s. Everything about her seems dense, filled with heavy air. George smiles and throws us a thumbs-up in our direction with his right hand.

  “Enjoy,” he says. “Let me know if you need anything.”

  “We will,” Clarisse says. We watch our reflections eat pizza in the mirror above her dresser.

  We’re each on our second slice of pizza when Clarisse ends the silence.

  “So what did your dad do?” she asks. She grabs a napkin and wipes grease from the corner of her mouth.

  “Um, he owned a tree service business,” I say with my mouth full of cheese. I take a second to chew and swallow. “Mostly palm trees. Planting and removing. Landscaping stuff. What did your dad do?”

  “First-degree murder, kidnapping, and capital sexual battery,” Clarisse says matter-of-factly. She reaches for another piece of pizza. “Those are the official convictions, but I can give you all the gory details too, if you want.”

  I laugh nervously, realizing what she meant by her original question. “Oh, you want to know what my dad did.”

  Clarisse is looking at me through the mirror, her eyes square on mine. “Come on, Evelyn,” she says. “I showed you mine. Now you show me yours. Haven’t you ever played that game before?”

  I look down and stare at my paper plate for a moment, searching for patterns in the grease spots as if they were clouds in the sky. “Mass shooting, I guess you’d call it. I mean, I don’t know his actual convictions. He killed twelve people. The Ponce de Leon mall shooting in St. Augustine.”

  “Oh wow, then he’s famous, right?” Clarisse asks and then licks her fingers.

  “I guess so.”

  “My dad was Florida-famous for a while, but most people outside the state have probably forgotten about him by now.”

  “How long has it been?” I ask, hoping I don’t sound overly interested in the answer. In the past, I’ve had a tendency to ask too many questions when I’m getting to know someone, appearing too invested in knowing every little detail about the person, acting more like an overzealous interviewer than a possible new friend.

  “Ten years this year. Happy anniversary, right?” Clarisse says, laughing at her own joke. She gathers our used plates and napkins, stuffs them inside the pizza box, and throws the box on the floor. It lands without a sound. “Where is he?” she asks.

  We’re having this entire conversation through the mirror, speaking to each other, but also speaking to reflections of ourselves.

  “He’s on death row. At Raiford. Where is your dad
?”

  “Same,” Clarisse says. She turns her head and smiles at me this time, not at the girl in the mirror. A feeling of relief rushes through me, like ripping off a Band-Aid and realizing that the wound beneath isn’t nearly as bad as you had imagined. In fact, if you look closely, you swear you can already see a scab beginning to form, the skin working to rebuild itself, the body’s own magic trick.

  “Time for dessert now?” I ask, motioning toward the closet. I want to feel that fuzzy feeling again, go back to that gauzy world.

  “Hell yeah,” Clarisse says, and she grabs me by the wrist. She leads me back inside the small space, where we take turns, one inhale each, until once again there are no sharp lines, no thick boundaries. Everything is blurry. Shoes are piled up in the corner like severed feet. The walls are tinged pink, as if painted with the wisp of a paintbrush dipped in blood.

  We both lie on our backs, looking up at the ceiling. My left elbow touches Clarisse’s right elbow, bare skin to bare skin. My brain tingles, the synapses on fire, an engine warming up for liftoff, as though my head could become a rocket ship, detach from my body, and climb up, up, up to the sky.

  The sky is nothing like the ocean. It doesn’t have an ending, does it? If you send yourself into the sky, will you fly and fly until you reach a boundary, smashing into a wall made of pure blue crystal? In the ocean, you will eventually reach bottom. You will reach the ocean floor, where the strange creatures live without light.

  If you travel too far under the sea, your chest will implode—too much pressure exerted upon your body, too much to bear. If you travel too far in the sky, you will explode. Not enough pressure acting upon your body to keep your insides inside. I’ve always wondered which is a better way to die.

  “I have another question for you,” Clarisse says to the ceiling. “About your father.”

  “Okay, shoot,” I say, and we both start laughing again. “Sorry,” I say when we finally compose ourselves.

  “Are you afraid of him?” Clarisse asks.

  “No. I’ve never even met him. He’s been locked up since before I was born.”

  “You’ve never been to Raiford to visit him?”

  “No. Have you been there?”

  “Just once. After he was sentenced. My mom wouldn’t let me go to the trial, and she said she wanted me to see him one more time before, you know.” Clarisse’s voice lowers at the end of the sentence.

  “What is Raiford like?” I ask. I’ve imagined visiting my father, sitting across from him in the visiting quarters, a pane of reinforced glass separating us. I’ve imagined my father’s hand reaching for the black telephone receiver so I can hear him, although I’ve never allowed the daydream to go any further, never allowed myself to actually conjure a voice for him. Still, I imagine how his lips might curl into a smile as he realizes how much I look like him, a young girl version of himself, like a reflection in a magic mirror.

  “Scary. And pretty depressing, actually. Which is why we never went back. I remember sitting there and looking at him and wondering if he ever thought about the little girl he killed. She was about my age, and we looked similar. I wondered if I reminded him of her.”

  “Were there any signs? Before he did it? Did he have a history?”

  “No signs, no history. He was just an ordinary guy. It seemed to come out of nowhere. It makes me angry, what he did. But it also makes me afraid…”

  “Of him? He’s away for life. He’ll never be able to hurt you or anyone else ever again.”

  “No, not afraid of him so much, although I guess that’s a part of it. More like afraid of myself. Not all the time. But sometimes, when I think about what he did and how he just snapped.”

  I turn my head toward Clarisse, and she is still looking up at the ceiling. A tear frees itself from the corner of her eye, rolling down her temple. She wipes it away with her fingertip. “I don’t know, maybe I’m being crazy, but if there was something in him that made him do it, then maybe that same something is in me. Do you ever think about stuff like that?” Clarisse breathes deeply and holds the air in her lungs for a few seconds, waiting for me to answer.

  “We are individuals, just like Greg says. Remember?” My left hand reaches for her right hand, and I lace my fingers with hers. “We get to start from scratch.”

  Clarisse turns onto her side and exhales, her warm breath tickling my neck. She buries her head in my armpit and slings her other arm across my rib cage.

  I feel a pulsing within me, as though I can feel my own heart pumping blood through my veins. My blood, but my father’s blood too, and as soon as I think it, I try to stop the idea, the thought that will gather other thoughts and accelerate like a runaway truck if I don’t hurry up and slam on the brakes.

  To start from scratch didn’t begin as a baking phrase. It had to do with a starting line for a race that was drawn or scratched in the dirt. If you started from scratch, it meant you started from the same place as everyone else. You started at zero.

  Clarisse and I started at zero when we were born, in spite of what our fathers did. We were born from our mothers’ bodies, a mercy that I cling to. Our mothers grew our tiny cells, forming our bodies inside their wombs. Yes, our fathers added ingredients to conjure us into being, but they aren’t raising us, aren’t doing any of the difficult stuff that comes afterward. And I’m hoping it’s the afterward that will matter most for us—the kneading of dough, the waiting for us to rise.

  Chapter Nine

  When I open my eyes in the morning, it takes a moment to remember where I am. I’ve spent so few nights away from home, that my body needs time to adjust. I roll over, and Clarisse is already awake, staring at her phone in her hands.

  “About time,” she says. “You know you snore, right?”

  “I do not!” I pull hardened bits of sleep from my eyelashes.

  “Fine. I’ll just have to record you next time,” Clarisse says, and my heart quickens as I think of next time.

  “What are you doing?” I ask. I grab my phone from the nightstand, sit up, and move closer to her.

  “Lurking on Instagram,” she says. “I have someone I need to check up on every now and then.”

  “Keep your enemies close, right?”

  “And your ex-boyfriends closer. This is Jake,” she says, tapping his image on her screen with her fingernail. “Just look at him. He’s so fucking perfect I want to die.” She scrolls through his Instagram feed, showing me a picture of him behind the wheel of a black convertible. “He’s rich too. His parents are both doctors.” She scrolls some more, and stops on a photo of Jake shirtless on the beach. “And he loved going down on me. Loved it.”

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “He graduated and then went to FSU. He said he wanted to do the long-distance thing with me, but then he started dating this fake bitch.” She clicks to a girl’s profile. “Just look at her smile,” she says. “Her teeth are so blinding white, it’s obnoxious. She’s like a brainless Barbie doll.” She scrolls through the photo feed to show me—beach Barbie posing in a string bikini with her hands on her hips, drunk Barbie holding a red Solo cup, Jake hugging her from behind.

  “I have someone I like to check up on too,” I say. I unlock my phone and start swiping through my camera roll, looking for the right screen shot to show her.

  “Oooh, an ex? Let me see.” She cuddles up to me, resting her chin on my shoulder so she can see my screen.

  “No, not an ex. Just this guy I know online. He’s cute, right?” I look at Clarisse from the corner of my eye, watching for her reaction as she considers the photo.

  “Yeah, he has that scruffy professor vibe going on. Have you met offline?”

  “No, we’ve never met. He’s not from around here. He lives close to Gainesville.”

  “Shit, then you should definitely go hook up with him sometime. I’ll come with. I’m not really into older guys, but you can just drop me off at UF. I’m sure I’ll find a party to stumble into.” Clarisse smiles at th
e idea and then turns her attention back to Jake’s feed, examining a photo of him riding a waverunner. “What’s your guy’s name?” she asks.

  “Andy,” I say. I lock my phone, making him disappear.

  I open The Catalog of Everything I’ve Done Wrong, add an entry: lied to someone, even though they might be the only person who could understand the truth.

  Chapter Ten

  At Wavelengths tonight, Greg is talking about judgment. Specifically, he’s telling us that we have a right not to be judged, blamed, or labeled because of a parent’s incarceration.

  “It’s important to remember that, if someone is judging you, that’s their action. They are making that judgment through their lens, their experience. And it has nothing to do with you.” I’m looking down at my feet, not because judgment-and-blame-and-labeling talk makes me uncomfortable, but because I’m afraid I might burst into flames if I look at Clarisse. It’s a special kind of fire—it feels so good it hurts. If I’m not careful with Clarisse, I’ll burn and burn until I’m unrecognizable, nothing but charred remains.

  “None of you are to blame for any of this.” Greg has his overly serious face on now. His eyebrows lose their arches, forming straight lines above his eyes, and he purses his lips, as if he’s just tasted something slightly sour and he’s trying to camouflage his reaction. “It’s a completely normal feeling—to feel responsible—but it’s just not true. Feeling blame can lead to guilt. And guilt is not a useful emotion. It’s not a part of the journey.”

  Greg reads a passage from his therapist book, a large white binder that he keeps in his messenger bag. “Guilt and shame often go hand in hand. The same action may give rise to feelings of both shame and guilt, where the former reflects how we feel about ourselves and the latter involves awareness that our actions have injured someone else.” He reads to the group the way I remember elementary school teachers reading aloud to the class, looking up from the text every so often to make eye contact with the audience. “In other words, shame relates to self, guilt to others.” Greg is wearing a black collared shirt tonight with tiny silver snaps instead of buttons. It’s a long-sleeved shirt, but he has the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. I stare at the dark hair on his forearms, another focal point to distract me from Clarisse, who is pitching heat into the room like a girl-shaped furnace.