by Amy Reed
I can hear Kasey crying. I know the sound of her cry. I have heard it so many times during our quiet nights together—when her dog died, when she found out her parents were getting divorced, so many times during the cancer. But now it’s different. I am not the comforter. I am the reason for her tears.
“Will, come on!” If I yell loud enough, I will not cry.
As soon as I feel him next to me, before he even gets a chance to open his mouth, I tell him I don’t want to talk.
“Fine,” he says with a tired voice.
I fall asleep on the drive home and wake up in Will’s arms as he carries me to the front door. For a moment, I feel so cozy and safe, but then I’m filled with a surge of anger. How dare he just pick me up? How dare he carry me around without my permission?
“Put me down,” I say. But he doesn’t. I try to wriggle free, but that makes him hold on tighter.
Mom and Dad are standing in the open doorway before we get there. “Jenica called,” Mom says. “She said you were coming.”
“What happened?” Dad says.
I am so tired. I am too tired to be angry. “Will you put me down now?” I say with as polite a voice I can.
Will is so gentle. Part of me doesn’t want him to let me go. It is cold outside of his arms. My feet touch the cement of the front steps and I want to be in the air again, held by someone strong.
I do not look up. I do not want to see my parents’ faces. I can imagine their disappointment, and that is all I can take right now. Actually seeing it is more than I can deal with. I blindly make my way to the bathroom without bothering to speak for myself. I will let Will report the events of the evening. I am too tired to lie. All I want is a toilet to lean on. That is all I deserve. I may not even deserve that.
I throw up the measly contents of my stomach. I listen to myself retch and dry heave so I don’t have to hear Will tell my parents how worried he is about me. I feel the sting of stomach acid, taste the poison of so many kinds of liquor. I smell the toilet’s faint trace of urine and toxic cleansers mix with the sour contents of my stomach.
There is something so satisfying about this kind of vomiting, something so cathartic. There’s a feeling of getting something done. Not like chemo, where the vomiting accomplished nothing. It didn’t get any of the poison out. It never made me feel any better. It was just a sign of my body destroying itself.
But I do feel a little better now. Empty. Purged. The cool, hard porcelain of the toilet base is comforting in my arms.
I hear the door squeak open. “You ripped Jenica’s dress.” It is Will’s voice, with a hard edge I’ve never heard. “There’s a huge rip down the side.”
“Arghmmn” is what I think I manage to say.
I feel a blanket draped across my shoulders. He throws a pillow on the floor next to me. “Here,” he says. “Your mom gave me these. She was too mad to come in here herself.”
Mom, mad? What is he talking about? Mom doesn’t get mad.
I lift my head and open my eyes enough to see the blurred outline of him in the doorway. “Can you turn off the lights?”
“Anything else?” he says after the room goes dark.
“Will you rub my back?”
“Jesus, Evie,” he hisses. “How did you get so horrible?”
Nothing so mean has ever come out of his mouth. Nothing has ever been said with so much anger and disgust.
I hear the door close behind him. I hear his footsteps as he walks away, back into his own life. I hear the murmuring of his and my parents’ voices. And I am glued to the floor of the bathroom, shivering under the blanket that is far more kindness than I deserve.
if.
Dear Stella,
I’m done with school and I’m done with this family. I’m done with Will and Kasey and lunch-table friends. I’m done with concerned teachers and homework and tests and thinking about my future. I’m done with caring if I fail junior year. I’m done with giving a shit what anyone thinks about me. I’m done with giving a shit about anything.
I don’t care if I get in trouble, if I get grounded, if Dad looks at me like I’m the biggest disappointment of his life, if he slaps me across the face in front of Mom and Jenica, and Mom is finally so sick of me she doesn’t even say anything, doesn’t even defend me, the one ally in this family I thought I had left, and the sting of it goes from my skin to my bones to my blood to my heart and freezes up any of the love I still had left, so cold that it shatters into a million pieces, but there are no screws, no titanium rods, no smart doctors to sew up this fracture; there is just me and my fury and the ice in my veins, just the people I used to love screaming at each other about the best way to punish me, my family turned into monsters because of what I have become, their sweetness turned sinister, their love turned rancid.
I am the kind of girl who deserves to get slapped by her father. I am the kind of girl who deserves to sleep on the bathroom floor, to be kicked awake by Jenica’s slipper, even though it should have been a stick or a sword or a knife or a gun; I should have woken up to real pain, real punishment, something worse than being grounded for eternity, something worse than a hangover, something worse than spending a Sunday in the comfort of my room. I deserve something harder, harsher. I deserve something cruel, something that leaves a mark, something irrevocable. Because the damage I’ve done can never be taken back. The bridges I’ve burned cannot be rebuilt. The love I’ve chewed up and spit out and ground into the mud cannot be cleaned up and made whole again.
I feel sick. God, I feel sick. But I know I deserve to feel even sicker for all the disease I have spread. I am contagious. I make everyone around me sick. I’ve made my family sick. And you, Stella. I made you sickest of all.
I’m not going back to school. I can’t face those people again after what happened last night. I’m never going to visit poor Caleb in the hospital; I’m not going to let him think I’m someone worthy of his devotion. I’m doing Will and Kasey a favor by not begging for their forgiveness, not begging for them to give me another chance. I’m doing everyone a favor and getting out of their lives.
They are my history. They are before, yesterday, behind me, gone. The future is a vague “maybe”; it will only happen by accident. It is nothing I can count on.
There is only now, only this moment. There is only me and there is only Marcus. He is all I have left. He is the only person who matters. Without him, there’s nothing. I’m nothing. I’m just scars and history. Without him, I evaporate. I turn into dust.
This prison of a room cannot contain me. The window is open and the ground is not too far down. It is night and I am an outlaw and Marcus is waiting for me down the street with his car running and he has no idea what I’m leaving behind.
Love,
Evie
thirty.
JUMPING INTO MARCUS’S CAR LIGHTENS MY GLOOM immediately, but even his kiss can’t get rid of my headache and hangover. I need something stronger.
My jaw still stings where Dad hit me, but I can forget about that now. I can leave it in that house to fester with all the other family drama. I don’t have to take it with me. I don’t need to bring it into my world with Marcus. He doesn’t need to know. It does not need to spoil our perfection.
“Are you okay?” Marcus says as he pulls away from the curb.
“Yeah, I’m great,” I say, trying to make my voice sound as cheerful as possible. “Why do you ask?”
“You look kind of tired.”
“Didn’t anyone tell you you’re never supposed to say that to a woman?”
“Oh, sorry,” he laughs. “But you do. Look tired.”
“I’m fine. Just a little hungover.”
“What’d you do last night?” he asks, and I know there’s nothing behind his curiosity, but still I feel exposed, embarrassed, like somehow he already knows what a fool I made of myself last night.
“Just hung out with some old friends,” I say. “Nothing special. I wish I had been with you instead.”
> “Yeah,” he says, smiling, his eyes locking on mine. “Me too.”
“Hey, watch the road!” I say as we swerve slightly and barely miss sideswiping a parked car.
“You’re just so beautiful I couldn’t take my eyes away.”
“Yeah, sure. Where are we going, by the way?”
“You’ll see,” he says. “You want to know what I did last night?”
Strangely, I don’t. As much as I don’t want the rest of my life infecting our world, I don’t want his, either.
“I got stoned and ate Taco Bell and watched my friends Dan and Edwin play video games.”
“Wow. Sounds thrilling.”
“Yep. We sure know how to party.”
“I can’t believe that’s what you did instead of hanging out with me.”
“I know. It’s pathetic. But I was thinking about you the whole time. I couldn’t shut up about you.”
“Oh yeah? What did you tell them?”
“I told them how smart and funny and beautiful you are. How I’ve never met anyone like you. How I feel more alive when we’re together. How when you look at me I know you really see me.”
My chest flutters and I’m so happy, I don’t mind that we’re driving through a part of Oakland where boarded-up houses are covered with graffiti and dark, shrouded figures are hunched in doorways. “You told them all that?” I say.
“Well maybe not in those exact words. I had to translate it into dude language they’d understand. But they know I’m crazy about you.”
“Well, good. Because I’m crazy about you, too.”
“I’m glad we’re in agreement on this issue,” he says, grinning.
I look out the window and finally realize where we are—in West Oakland, by the bridge. We drive past liquor stores and the BART station and into the part of town where no people live, where the streets are empty except for a few parked semi-truck cabs without trailers. We pass a busted RV that looks like it’s being held together with duct tape, light peeking through the cardboard covering the windows, hinting at life inside. Besides that, there are no people anywhere.
“God, it’s creepy down here at night,” I say.
“I like it,” Marcus says. “It’s peaceful.”
“It’s scary,” I say. “Wait, why are you slowing down?”
“We’re here,” he says. We’re the only car parked on the street except for a burned-out metal skeleton without wheels several yards away.
“Where? This is nowhere.”
“It doesn’t look familiar?”
“Well, yeah, it looks familiar. We’re by the bridge.”
“Exactly.”
“I’m confused.”
“Just trust me.” He pecks me on the cheek, then gets out and pulls a big hiking backpack out of the back of the car. He opens my door and offers me his hand. “Madam?”
“Are we going hiking?”
“Yep,” he says, and starts walking. I lock my door and follow him toward the bridge.
After a few minutes, we turn left down the road that goes to the parking lot for the Bay Bridge Trail. A gate has been lowered to keep cars from entering, but we walk around it.
“Look familiar now?” Marcus says. He takes my hand and we walk in silence to the tunnel where we first met.
Luckily, the lights inside the tunnel are working now. Otherwise, I don’t think I’d be brave enough to follow Marcus down the stairs, even with the big swig I take from the bottle of vodka he shares with me. The tunnel is illuminated with the sickly blue glow of fluorescent bulbs; I can hear them buzzing in the concrete silence.
“It’s weird there’s no homeless people here,” I say, hoping the sound of my own voice will make me less scared. “This would be a perfect place to sleep.”
“There are cameras everywhere,” Marcus says. “And cops come through here several times a night. If anyone tried to stay here, they’d get kicked out right away.”
“What’s keeping us from getting caught?”
He turns to me and smiles. “Luck.”
After a few hundred yards, a set of stairs leads up to the administration building that sits on its own little island between the east- and westbound lanes of the freeway. We walk around the building as the late-night traffic buzzes by us. On the other side is another set of stairs that go down under the other half of the freeway. We enter another long white tunnel, but this one has a much lower ceiling and is lined by several small staircases going up. “That’s how the toll booth workers get to work,” Marcus says. The first staircase is labeled with a stenciled sign: LANES 1 & 2; the next is LANES 3 & 4, and so on. The sound of the freeway is much louder here than in the other tunnel. I hear the boom of a car stereo playing something in Spanish. It’s so weird to think people have to walk through here to get to work, then climb a set of stairs to pop out of the ground in the middle of a freeway and sit in a box breathing traffic fumes all day. But how different is any other life, really? Most people’s lives are spent in some kind of box. Most people’s lives are some kind of toxic.
I don’t know why, but it seems appropriate to stay silent, as if this is someplace worthy of reverence. It is so empty, so still. Unlike the rest of Oakland, which seems perpetually covered in a layer of crumpled brown paper bags and cigarette butts, it is strangely clean down here. It’s as if we discovered it, as if no other eyes have seen it but ours.
We pass several sets of stairs until we get to the end of the tunnel and the very last staircase. The sign says BUS STOP. We climb the stairs to a tiny isolated platform on the edge of the freeway, overlooking all the tollbooths and lanes of traffic. An OUT OF SERVICE sticker covers a faded AC TRANSIT sign.
“This is so weird,” I say. “Who would catch a bus here?”
“No one, apparently.”
“Now what?” I say. A short metal fence separates us from a darkness that I’m guessing is the Emeryville salt marsh. Radio or cell towers blink in the near distance. Unless we climb the fence, there’s nowhere to go but back.
“You know what to do,” Marcus says with a grin, setting his backpack down.
“What are you talking about?” But just as I say it, I know the answer. “Oh, hell no,” I say. “Are you crazy?”
“It’s a little fence. You don’t even have to climb. Just throw your leg over.”
“Yeah, but then it’s, like, eight feet to the ground.”
“That’s nothing. Aren’t you dying to know what’s on the other side?”
Whatever it is, it’s probably better than turning around and admitting defeat. It’s definitely better than going home.
“What is it with you and fences?” I say as my hand wraps around cold metal.
“I like to go places I’m not allowed.” He throws his backpack over the fence, then leaps after it, landing perfectly on two feet on the ground beneath me.
I take a deep breath and jump. I feel the foot of my good leg hit the ground, and for a second I think I made it, as gracefully as Marcus, but my other foot gets the timing wrong and I stumble. I lose my balance and fall to my hands and knees.
“Oh, shit!” Marcus yells. “Are you okay?”
I think for a second. I don’t know yet. There is something like pain, but I can’t quite locate it. It could be a scrape. It could be something worse.
Marcus’s hands are on me, checking, searching. “Evie,” he says, his voice thick with worry. “Oh, Evie.”
“Ow,” I say, then I roll onto my ass and start laughing.
“Can you move your legs?” Marcus says.
I do a few slow kicks and nothing terrible happens, though my knees are sore from the landing and I will have bruises tomorrow for sure. My palms are coated in blood and gravel, but it looks way worse than it really is.
“Fuck,” Marcus says, holding my hands in his. “I’m such an idiot. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not that bad,” I say. “Nothing a little vodka can’t fix.” I wipe my hands off on my pants and stand up. Marcus pulls the bottle o
ut of his bag and hands it to me. I take a big swig, then pour a little on my hands to disinfect, and the sting tells me I’m going to be okay.
“Will you ever forgive me?” Marcus says as he brushes me off. I pull him close and kiss him as my answer.
“I didn’t break you?” he says softly when we come up for air.
“Do I look broken to you?”
“You look beautiful.”
“So now what?”
“We’re almost there.” He hoists the backpack onto his shoulders and takes my hand. “Can you walk?” The ground feels stable; paved, even.
“Is this a road?” I say.
“Something like that, yeah.”
We start walking, the freeway raised on our left side. Then Marcus leads me to the right, and the road is replaced by a mixture of sand and rocks. The farther we get from the freeway, the more my eyes adjust to the darkness and I see the murky shapes of water lapping against a sandy beach, a border of driftwood and beach grass, then darkness over the marshlands for probably a mile until it reaches the solid ground of the city.
“What is this place?” I say.
“It’s our own private beach.”
He leads me to a spot at the other end of the beach, past where the light from the freeway ends. I turn around and see it sparkling in the distance, the fast lights of traffic and the majestic span of the Bay Bridge leading to the famous San Francisco skyline.
Marcus opens his backpack, takes out some blankets, and lays them over the rocky sand. He pulls some snacks out of a crumpled grocery bag.
“Have a seat, my love.” He hands me the vodka bottle. “Want to go camping with me?”
“What else did you bring?” is what comes out of my mouth. Not “Thank you.” Not “Wow.” Because the first thing I think is, What if the vodka is not enough?
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind,” I say. “This is wonderful. This is so romantic.” Then, “Did you bring your pipe? Want to smoke a bowl?”
“Sure,” he says, and I think I hear some sadness in his voice.