You

by Caroline Kepnes

  While you and your dad were getting ready for the festival, I hunkered down in my motel room and read up on this fucking festival. When you stepped out for a cigarette, I looked out at you and I knew I had no choice. You were a vision in your costume, drowning in red velour as your hair poured out from under a little red bonnet. You were smoking and pouting in the parking lot of the Silver Seahorse Motel. You are the only girl in the world who could look so serious and so silly at the same. Your dad stepped outside to join you, in a top hat and tails. He gave you a white furry muff.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” you asked.

  “Put your hands in, keep warm.”

  “But, I have gloves.”

  “Beck, can you just give me a break here?”

  You sighed and put your hands in that lucky muff and I want to put my hands in you. I’m taking too long to get dressed and the Irish shopkeeper taps her knuckles on the door. She wants a sneak peek, of course. “It’s so nice to see young people like you getting into the spirit,” she calls. “If you don’t mind my saying so, I think those pantaloons are going to suit you quite well, you know.”

  “Yep, in a second.”

  “And I’m not sure if I mentioned,” she says for the third time. “Rentals must be returned within one week of rental date. Otherwise you might have an old Irish slag knocking at your door in the wee hours. Are you ready?”

  “In a second,” I say and maybe Irish women don’t speak English. Celine Dion is still screaming about her goddamned heart and I’m choking on mothballs and self-loathing and if you would have told your dad about me, he could have rented costumes for both of us. Then you’d be in here with me and I wouldn’t even notice the mothballs or the schmaltzy Canadian crap. But, you lied to me. And now I have to walk out of the dressing room and tell the Irish lady that I’m attending the festival on my own.

  “Handsome chap like you won’t go very long without finding a nice lass, I’m sure.” She chortles. And there’s a mirror behind her and fuck. This costume certainly does look good on me—my top hat is taller than your father’s top hat—but this costume is not a disguise.

  “Do you have any beards?”

  She objects jokingly, “Are you quite serious, young man?”

  “It’s cold out there.”

  “We have beards but they’re not at all Dickensian.”

  “I don’t care,” I say and she grips my twenties and fumes. Small towns are scarier to me than cities. This woman, who seems all kindly and obsequious a minute ago, is melting down because I want a beard.

  “I’m in kind of a rush,” I say, the slightest bit of an Irish affect.

  She lowers the volume on the ancient tape player. Celine Dion on cassette isn’t very Dickensian either, but she concedes and points me toward the non-Dickensian, nonrefundable beards, which are in a box in the back marked JOHNNY DEPP/DUCK DYNASTY.

  Fucking America, Beck. I just don’t know sometimes.

  LIFE is aggravating when you’re alone in a costume on a party boat with people who are all together, in costumes, on a party boat. We’re not even close to docking at Port Jeff yet and I shouldn’t have boarded the ferry. I didn’t think it through. What if you recognize me? You’re not gonna want to introduce me to your father while I’m in pantafuckingloons.

  I should have gone back to New York but there’s no turning this festive boat around so I’m trying to focus on the good: You haven’t tweeted once since you’ve been here or sent one e-mail. But bad thoughts creep in. Your father is back in the picture. What if this means that you tell your mother to shut off your phone? Calm down, Joe. I know your passwords and I will always find a way into you, but I like having your phone. I like thinking of your mother paying for me to protect you. It’s hard to be rational in a costume and I try again to think good thoughts. You are capable of going offline and you’re lying to everyone, not just me. And in a way, I’m having an easier go of it than you. You and your old man sit on bucket seats in the main cabin. You look gorgeous, of course, the Rose on our Titanic vessel to my crafty, upbeat Jack, and if we were in this together, oh Beck, I’d find my way under that skirt of yours.

  But neither you nor your father appears very excited for the Festival and I gather that he drives this boat. Deckhands give him shit for being in costume and the Captain of this particular trip steps out of the wheelhouse and insists on getting a picture of you and your old man. You don’t want a picture but your old man insists and I’m tempted to storm across the deck and start a mutiny. But I have to let you and your dad work this out on your own. I know when you need your space. That’s why I got the beard.

  Your dad asks you if you want a drink and you shrug.

  “You want to make this as hard as can be?”

  “I just said, I don’t know.” You sulk and you turn into a teenage girl around your father, which makes a lot of sense.

  “Well, Guinevere, do you or do you not want something to drink?”

  “Coffee,” you snap. “Fine.”

  He called you Guinevere and a group of semidrunk Chuck Dickens fans are starting to sing Christmas carols and some fat guy in a Ben Franklin getup (oh, America) is trying to pass by and loses half of his beer on me. And the air is thick with mothballs and salt water and Coors and I do not like it here one bit. Because you ran away to see your dad who is alive (alive!), and because I want to be there in case you need me, I am gonna have to sell a fucking Dickens on eBay to cover the expenses of the motel, the costume, and the psychotherapy I’ll no doubt need when I realize I am permanently fucked up from that day I froze my ass off in pantaloons and stood on a deck with a bunch of quarter-wits. The half-wits are at home watching Great Expectations, the movie.

  THE only thing worse than the boat trip to the festival is the festival itself. The Public Rape of Charles Dickens is an atrocity, Beck. Who knew such crap existed? You knew. You stay away from your half brother and your half sister, both of them kids, little ones, six and eight I’d guess, in costume, everyone in costume, and Charles Dickens would be disgusted that his entire life’s work is celebrated by rich old retirees who have nothing better to do than blow money on rented knickers and petticoats and wigs and cross Long Island Sound only to gather with other like-minded nitwits and stroll about the village of Port Jeff, where they compliment one another on their fucking costumes and gorge on candied apples and act like it’s fun to tour old homes and listen to eighteenth-century guitar and gorge again on caramel popcorn and get their faces painted (as if painted faces have anything to do with Dickens) and listen to chamber music. Honestly, Beck, of all these white motherfuckers on this boat right now (seriously, no black person would ever do this), how many do you think could pass a test on Oliver Twist? How many do you think read his lesser-known works?

  But there was no way for me to not follow you into this town. And it’s a good thing I’m always here, the Kevin Costner to your Whitney Houston, because people get weird in costumes, even old white dullards from Connecticut. They’re slightly soused on beers (day drinking is allowed when you’re celebrating Dickens), and more than a couple of dudes have gotten a little too cheerful with you and I’ve got a list in my head of everyone who needs a beatdown. I’d never hit a woman, but your stepmother doesn’t like you and she’s jealous of the attention you get and her kids aren’t all that and our kids will be cuter and how does my anger with you always soften into love?

  “Guinevere,” your stepmother says. Your dad calls her Ronnie and she’s fighting forty with Botox and bronzing powder and Spanx. You’ll embrace your age and you’ll be beautiful unlike Ronnie, who barks, “Did you give me change from that vendor with the candy apples?”

  “You gave me a twenty.”

  Your father looks like he’s gonna explode and he turns his attention to the shitty little kids, as if they need him right now, which they don’t.

  You pout. “The candy apples were like five fucking dollars a pop.”

  Now your dad gives a fuck and he chast
ises you. “Guinevere, honey, come on.”

  “Fine,” you say, so brittle you might break. You pull both your hands out of your muff and the muff hits the pavement and you start fishing around in that giant Prada bag and your stepmother picks up one of her unimpressive children and lodges the kid on her hip.

  “Prada,” she says. “Did you get that on eBay?”

  “It was a gift,” you say, and sometimes you do tell the truth. You hand her two dollars and she takes it and you look up at your dad.

  “Can we go?”

  THE Dramamine I bought in the gift shop isn’t working and the ride back is worse than the ride out. I’ve spent the bulk of it in this tin can of a bathroom and the colonial Connecticunts are all banging down the door because they’re all sick from too much food and fun. And this beard itches and this boat rocks and this toilet won’t flush. I jiggle the handle. Some asshole fists the door.

  “Some of us got colons too, buddy!”

  I don’t dignify him with a response but the goddamned boat breaches—is the Captain drunk too?—and I get slammed against the wall and when I throw up I try to move my nonrefundable beard and it drops into the mess in the toilet.

  Plop.

  There’s no way out of this one and the faucet gives barely more than a trickle. If I don’t get out of here soon, I’m only going to draw more attention to myself. There is nothing for me to do but bow my head and pray like hell that you aren’t part of the lynch mob forming outside of the door to the latrine. If there is a God, you are holding it until you are back in the safe confines of the Silver Seahorse.

  And there is a God. There are only four people waiting and it sounded like a dozen and I make a run for the stern. The wind bites back there and hopefully I will be alone and hopefully I can ride out the rest of this trip without ruining your day. I think you would be scared if you saw me and I think it would sound like bullshit if I told you that I went to meet family and there are tears streaked across my cheeks and I can’t tell if I’m crying or if it’s the wind. I miss my warm, scratchy beard and the pantaloons are made of paper and my legs are fucking freezing.

  Finally, the boat slows as we ease into the harbor and then something unimaginably horrible happens to me, something so bad that I might jump off the boat. If it was summer, I would already be in the water because your little half brother and half sister are playing hide-and-seek (great game to let your kids play on a boat, Ronnie), and I hear Ronnie calling for the little tykes, who are hiding behind a box right in front of me.

  Breathe, Joe. Breathe.

  I hear Ronnie running and she gets here fast and grabs each kid by the hand and looks at me. “What a day, right?”

  She’s flirting with me because she’s jealous of you and I’m on team Beck and I know how to get back at her. “Yes, ma’am.”

  She didn’t like that and my ma’am had a two-fold purpose. It was supposed to make her feel old (done), and it was also supposed to make her go away. But then two deckhands come out of nowhere and the boat is turning ever so slightly and the deckhands are unraveling rope and the tired, drunk Connecticunts are coming this way because it’s just my fucking luck that this boat docks and offloads from the stern.

  And if there is a God, then you are fighting with your father and you are lost in conversation. If there is a God, I will be the first one off this boat. If there is a God, this slow-moving steel beast will get there already so your stepmother can take her kids home and feed them the mac and cheese they’re screaming about. And if there is a God, then we are docking right now, we are, and there is a kid on land hoisting a ramp, there is. We are getting there and I will be third, maybe fourth off this boat and people are starting to get pushy.

  And if there is a God, that is not you I hear behind me. And if there is a God, Ronnie will not ask me (me!) to move out of the way.

  “My husband is trying to get through,” she says and she knows how to exact her revenge as well. Your father squeezes by me and apologizes for the close quarters. He turns his head and whistles for you, just as the boat finally settles and the deckhand releases the ramp that connects the boat to the land.

  “Coming!” you say. “Jesus Christ, people this isn’t Ellis Fucking Island.”

  And I love your sense of humor and disgust and I love you and that’s why, like a flower to the sun, I turn my head a millimeter, just enough to see your beautiful face and long enough for you to see mine, before the deckhand slaps the ramp down and locks it into place and I shove my way through that crowd and get off that fucking boat.

  23

  EVERY time I approach an exit, I want to pull off and find a gas station and change out of this musty costume. But I don’t. I am paralyzed behind the wheel. I am so panicked that I can only go forward. And the reason is horrifyingly simple: You have called me four times in the last hour since the ferry docked and this can only mean one thing: You saw me.

  “No!” I shout and I feel like I’ve been driving forever and I punch the steering wheel and the Buick veers into the right lane and I cut off a truck and the trucker blows his horn and I open my window and I roar, “Go fuck your mother!”

  If he responds, I don’t hear it and I roll the window up by hand (Mr. Mooney is a cheap old bastard), and I gotta slow down because it would suck to get pulled over right now. And it’s not like this is my fault, you know. You lied to me. Your father is not dead. I was on that boat because you lied to me.

  Maybe I don’t know you as well as I think I do. But that’s ridiculous; we have a connection. It’s just that you messed up. You were supposed to tell me all about your dad, no matter how ashamed you were. And I was supposed to listen and love you and tell you that you were good. And then you would ask me about my life and I would tell you and you would listen to me the way I listened to you and then we would have been closer.

  I ride up on a girl going too slow and she flips me off hard. She has a bumper sticker TAILGATERS FLUNKED PHYSICS, and a Boston College sticker and I hate driving and I would like to ram this car into her Volvo and watch her bleed out but no, Joe, no. She’s not the bad guy and she won’t pay for your mistakes.

  This is on you, Beck. You messed up big time and you know I followed you and you know. You know. I lay on my horn and tailgate that bitch until she puts on her blinker. When I pass her I slow down so I ride right next to her with one hand on the wheel and one hand giving her the bird. The bitch laughs and I move on. Fuck her. Fuck you.

  You will never forgive me and I need to never see you again and I need this family in the Land Rover to fuck off with their skis and their brand-new tires and I ride up on them too, hard, and my phone rings.

  You.

  The kid in the backseat disobeys his father and turns around and you know what I know about that kid? That kid will wind up at Choate Rosemary Hall (alumni sticker in the rear window), and that kid will be smoking dope and popping pills before his thirteenth birthday and everyone will think it’s so fucking glamorous because he’s popping pills in the woods off in Connecticut. I give him the finger. I give him a memory. I know what that kid will become and I know he won’t pay for his bad choices. He’ll get sympathy and respect and I veer around them and jump in front and slam on my brakes and the father beeps, pissed now, alive now, and I rev up and I’m out of there, fuck them and their skis and their snow boots. The heat in this car is broken and I’ll never get over the cold from the ferry. I’ll never be able to look at Dickens without going back to this day and I pull over to a rest stop and I shut off the engine. It’s so fucking quiet. It’s so December and it’s so over.

  My phone rings, again. Loud. You.

  I ignore (again), and I delete the message because I can’t bear the idea of you screaming in fear at me and accusing me of being a stalker. No. This is all wrong and I punch the wheel again and my knuckles are bruised and the bruises will heal but you will never forget the time that guy followed you to Connecticut and put on a costume (a costume!) and stalked you at a festival.


  I am probably already an anecdote in the hopper in your head, fodder for a story, a thing of the past, just another suitor. I cry. You call. I shut off my phone. I shut off your phone before your mommy shuts it off, which she probably will, eventually. It is a dark day. Literally.

  I drop off Mr. Mooney’s keys and he’s got his oxygen tank and his bowie knife and someday I’ll have a oxygen tank and a bowie knife because you’re never speaking to me again and I know it. He means so well and he’s such a stand-up guy, a veteran in overalls and here I am and I can’t look him in the eye right now because it’s so hard to admit that as much as I admire him, respect him, well, I don’t want to be like him. I’m a terrible person and he’s a good man and he’s holding the door open and old people are painfully lonely when they’re alone. It breaks my heart how obviously, badly he wants me to come in and have a Pabst with him. A good guy would go in, but we all know I’m a fucking tool.

  He tries to joke around. “What’s with that outfit, Joseph?”

  I forgot about my costume and I think. “I went to a costume party.”

  He doesn’t want to know about the party. “Shop’s good?”

  “Yeah, real good, Mr. Mooney, real good.”

  I offer him the keys but he shakes me off. He’s still holding the door open. He’s not the kind of man who would ever verbalize the fact that he wants company. But he gets it, the way I tuck the keys into my pocket and step back. He retreats into his dank molding home.

  “You hang on to those keys,” he tells me. “I never use the car anyway.”

  “You sure, Mr. Mooney?”

  “Where am I going?”

  “Well, I can take you there if you need.”

  He waves me off and he won’t need to go anywhere. There’s a dude from church who takes him to the doctor. And at this point in his life, there is nowhere else to go. I should go inside. But I just can’t right now.