“Please.” He didn’t look angry as much as distressed. “Don’t make me do this.”
And because he’d caught me again, because my excitement had made me so unreasonably careless, I felt angry instead. “You don’t have to do anything.”
“Please, just leave.”
I could have. I could have pretended to leave and waited for him to pass before I went up to Kip’s room, or I could have actually left, returning to the Hovel without looking back. But I felt betrayed—by him, by Chapin, by all the other apprentices, by all of Vandenberg, really, for trying to keep me from doing what, to me, felt so right—so I didn’t. Instead, I said, “You can’t make me,” a response so childish I felt sure he would laugh.
He didn’t. “You’re right; I can’t.” He opened the door wider, and I pushed past him while he walked away, back towards the stadium.
The panic was immediate, hitting me as soon as I began to ascend the stairs. What if Kip wasn’t back yet? What if he crossed paths with Raj as he came towards Perkins; would Raj know it was him? Would Raj say anything to him? What if Kip didn’t come at all and this, all of this, was for nothing?
But I didn’t worry for long. Kip stood waiting outside his door. He reached out and took my hand once I was close enough.
“C’mon,” he said. “We’ve got thirty minutes, and I want you at least twice.”
He kissed me, and it seemed to me that I would do anything, sacrifice anything, go to any outrageous and perilous lengths, for things to always be this way.
* * *
I wasn’t surprised, yet was somehow still devastated, when I didn’t hear from him the next night. I didn’t hear from him the night after that, either, or the night after that. After three nights of silence, I looked at Betsy Kenyon’s profile page. Kip had sent her a link to a video, a dog chasing around its tail. Betsy had commented in reply, Johnny! An inside joke, I assumed. As much as it’s a cliché, sometimes your blood really does run cold. I’d looked it up once—after I’d seen Zeke Maloney kiss that other girl at the bar and gone stiff with cold, after I’d run to the bathroom to run my arms under the hottest water the faucet could produce, after I’d regained feeling in my achy, tingling arms—because I thought I was dying. Epinephrine and cortisol are released into your bloodstream, and the heart beats faster, and the vasoconstriction of arterioles—required to increase blood pressure—creates the tingly icy sensation. And I felt it then, tingling up and down my arms and legs, my whole body washed in sickening coldness.
I checked my mailbox every day, waiting for a note to appear, waiting for my death sentence. None did; Raj must have been waiting, too.
And then soon enough it was Thanksgiving, and I was packing my bags to return home for the first time in three months, for the first time since I’d met Adam Kipling and I’d become a person I wasn’t sure my parents would recognize.
SIXTEEN
My mom had volunteered to come pick me up to take me back to Lockport, but I wanted to take the train instead. It seemed more romantic to me—the scenery whooshing by, the clacking of the wheels on the track, pretending for a few hours that you were someone else going somewhere else. “Well, coordinate with your sister, at least,” she said. I promised I would, but when I woke Wednesday morning, the day before Thanksgiving, I realized I still hadn’t spoken to Joni. I called her—she would be getting a ride home with her boyfriend (a junior from Hunter, I’d learn later, whom she’d been dating for over a month). I called a cab to take me to the Metro-North station, feeling guilty for my relief. More than anything, more than the romantic appeal the trip held, I really just wanted to be alone, to glide home in silence, to spend the time thinking about what I would say to my family.
I can’t pinpoint the time that I grew apart from them, because that would imply there was a time we’d been close. Yet my family was not estranged, dysfunctional, broken. I got along well with both my mom and dad, and Joni and I were civil, save for petty fights. My parents had always been great friends—they were pals, really, more than lovers. They were both of medium height with small frames, kept their graying brown hair trimmed just above the nape of the neck, wore similar ill-fitting polo shirts and khakis. Our longtime neighbors, the Castillos, called them the Abney Twins, a nickname that tickled my parents endlessly and made me feel almost unbearably sad. Together the four of us had gone to the Grand Canyon, to Maine, to Florida, once even to Puerta Vallarta as a surprise one Christmas. We were a good family, a happy one, but a family in which the members were acquainted the way coworkers are. We knew one another’s birthdays and hobbies, favorite foods and strange quirks, but not, say, what we most wanted, or what we most feared, or who we were after we went home for the night and let our façades fall away.
I wished I wasn’t so embarrassed by my parents, so disappointed in them. But I also wished that my mother hadn’t worn her gardening shoes and baggy old men’s jeans to our mother-daughter book club meetings when everyone else’s mothers wore heeled boots and the same jeans as their daughters. I wished that my father knew the difference between “good” and “well” and didn’t whistle “Camptown Races” while he sat on the toilet. I wished they didn’t treat me like I was fragile, even damaged, one sudden move away from crumbling.
Joni, in turn, was embarrassed by me—her sullen big sister, volatile and strange and perpetually alone. My therapist told me once that I may be projecting, but I was so dissatisfied by the derivativeness of her analysis that I never gave it any legitimate consideration.
On the train, I chose a backwards-facing seat and set my bags beside me. Most of the boys had already left Monday or Tuesday night, as had my fellow apprentices, and my train car was free of them, free of the burden of familiar faces. The train doors snapped shut, and I watched the spire of Morris Chapel, just visible above the trees, grow smaller and smaller until it disappeared. I had expected a feeling of liberation; life at Vandenberg had grown nearly intolerable, after all. My roommates seemed to purposely evade me, Dale to fear me, and all the while I was waiting, waiting, for Raj to decide to turn me in and end it all. But as long as Kip was there, as long as he was close to me and as long as there was hope, Vandenberg was made tolerable. I felt panicked, really, as the train pulled me away. Kip wasn’t there, of course—Kip was home—but still I wanted to stay. Vandenberg had become inextricable from Kip in my mind and therefore was the place where I belonged.
Sometimes I read through our text messages. Sometimes I went through the pictures tagged on his profile (though I’d been through them all, at this point, dozens and dozens of times). To pass the time on the train ride back to Lockport, I did something different: I took out a notebook and recorded—from the first time we kissed at the end of September—every time Kip and I had been together. I tried not to confuse myself with the ones I’d imagined, the dreams and fantasies that felt so real I was sure, even days after, that they’d actually happened. I counted seventeen. Three of those times had just been kissing. That didn’t seem right; I recounted. Seventeen. It felt like one hundred, one thousand. It felt like I’d been with Kip more times than I’d be with anyone, ever. I tore out the list from my notebook and crumpled it, pushing it towards the bottom of my bag, wishing I hadn’t made it at all. Everything seems lesser than it is in your mind when put down on paper.
I wondered how I would possibly have enough to say to my family for the next four days. I feared that if I spoke too little they would see I was slipping back into that precarious place, the one that had made my mom first take me to therapy years ago. Because—though they may not have been able to pick out an outfit I’d like or a guy I’d want to date—they’d learned what it looked like when I wasn’t doing well, and it was by more than just the state of my skin. They knew me, and strangely, I wished they didn’t.
* * *
Joni’s new boyfriend, who I hadn’t known existed until that morning, was joining us for Thanksgiving—another surprise. Alex was Canadian, and his parents didn’t celebrate Thanks
giving, so he’d bring pumpkin pie, and he would be staying. My mom didn’t usually allow guests for extended stays, especially during what was supposed to be family time; while other families loved big parties, loved hosting and having cousins and aunts and uncles and neighbors and friends spilling through the door, we kept to ourselves. “Our house wasn’t designed for entertaining,” my dad always claimed. But really, it was our family that wasn’t designed for entertaining. We liked things small, quiet; we didn’t like intruders. But I suppose I can’t speak for Joni, as I really don’t know Joni at all.
“Hey,” he mumbled, shaking my hand. He was extremely tall, the kind of tall most people can’t help but comment upon (I didn’t), and I had to crane my neck to look up at him. I wondered where he would sleep, if he would be sequestered to the guest room or if my parents would acknowledge that he and my sister had undoubtedly shared a bed before.
Little had changed in the house. The third step still creaked, the downstairs bathroom faucet still dripped. From the walls our faces could be seen in various stages of maturation, trapped and oblivious. Though curtains had been opened and shut and overripe bananas had been replaced with new ones, the house had the feeling of being untouched, unlived in, as though awaiting my return to release its breath. I hadn’t lived at home for over four years, and still I felt this way; I probably always would.
My bedroom felt the strangest, like a crypt, like a memorial. I set my bags on the bed where ten-year-old Imogene had slept, and fifteen-year-old Imogene, and twenty-two-year-old Imogene. The books on the shelves, the clothes left in the closet—everything was a reflection of my former selves. Rather than making me feel reacquainted, returning made me feel more distant from myself than ever. Who was the person who read those books, wore those clothes? Surely she wasn’t me.
“Dinner!” my mom called up the stairs.
Next door, in Joni’s bedroom, I heard the unmistakable wet smacks of kissing.
* * *
Thanksgiving was always at the house of Aunt Carol, my mom’s sister, in Buffalo, but the night before belonged to my mom. We ate in the dining room, unused except for special occasions, the table set with the fancy china and the real dinner napkins. My mom had made roasted chicken and lit a few candles. I felt an unfamiliar shame for our shabbiness due to the interloper at our table. Alex was quiet, his reticence seeming more reproving than respectful in my mind. Joni’s hand was on his thigh.
My mom beamed. “It’s so nice to have both my girls home.”
My dad, always quiet, nodded in assent.
“It’s nice to be home,” I said, wishing I meant it.
“So tell us about school, Imogene.” My mom scooped a spoonful of mashed sweet potato onto my plate without asking, a gesture that made me irrationally, childishly angry. “You’ve been so busy we’ve barely heard from you since you’ve started.”
I slid the glob of sweet potato to the edge of my plate with my fork. “I’m not in school. I work at a school.” I felt bad almost immediately for my insolence but didn’t take it back.
“Okay. Tell us about working at the school then.”
It was the last thing I wanted to talk about, the preordained subject for me to be asked about. “It’s good,” I said. Knowing this would not be enough, I added, “Really good. It’s been a really good experience. I really like it.”
“Alex went to boarding school,” Joni volunteered. “He hated it.”
My mom was not to be deterred. “What about your class? And the lacrosse team? How are the students?”
“They’re all great,” I said. “It’s all going really well.”
“Where did you go again, Alex?” Joni poked him in the ribs.
“The Phelps School,” he muttered.
“The Phelps School,” Joni repeated.
“I’ve heard of it,” I said, though I hadn’t.
My mom was visibly frustrated now. “Do you have anything to tell us about what’s been going on with you, Imogene?”
I wondered, when Raj finally revealed what I’d done, how my parents would be informed. Would they get a letter in the mail? A phone call? Perhaps they wouldn’t be told at all; perhaps we’d all be able to carry on, continue the ruse, remain tangential parts of one another’s lives. “It’s all going fine, really. There’s nothing much to tell.”
A beat of silence passed before Joni spoke. “I finished that art project.”
“Oh yeah?” My mom turned to her. “How did it turn out?”
As she continued to speak, describing a project that seemed a familiar subject to all but me, I realized that I’d been wrong. My mom smiled as Joni spoke, my dad nodded warmly. We weren’t all strangers. The interloper at the table was me.
Joni mentioned something about birds, and I thought suddenly that I could tell them about the hawk watch field trip to Hook Mountain—something benign, something inconsequential, but something that demonstrated that I was willing to share. As Joni continued to speak, I practiced the story in my head. One of the boys was convinced that bald eagles didn’t exist. It was the biggest bird I’ve ever seen. There would be no mention of the missing boy, Christopher Jordan’s peeing over the side of the cliff, Kip waiting for me outside the Hovel the next day. I just wanted to show that I was listening, that I wanted to be a part of things.
“Growing the beard out for the winter, Dad?” Joni asked.
My dad ran his hand along his chin. “Ho, ho, ho.”
“Alex tried to grow his out but I wouldn’t let him.”
My mom laughed. “If only your father listened to me like that.”
The moment for telling my story had passed. I tried to smile and laugh along, wishing they just wouldn’t ask anything about Vandenberg, wishing there wasn’t so much I couldn’t tell, still wanting to keep it all to myself.
* * *
After dinner, I retreated to my room to read. Downstairs, I could hear the four of them in the kitchen, talking over decaf coffee. (I’d used my dislike of coffee as an excuse not to stay.) Joni was telling them about Alex’s participation on the hockey team, Alex’s apartment on the Lower East Side, Alex’s parents inviting her to visit Vancouver for New Year’s. Unable to read, I set my book down and listened, as though I was sitting down there with them. I should have stayed down there with them. Sitting upstairs alone, I wasn’t sure why I’d excused myself at all, but now it felt too late to go back.
I’d never brought a guy home before, but I imagined what it would be like if Kip were there. He wouldn’t need me to talk for him; he’d be charismatic, irresistible. He’d pal around with Alex, pull him out of his shell. He’d talk politics with my dad. He’d help my mom with the dishes. Joni would love him.
I sent him a text message. Happy Thanksgiving! I said. I thought to add, How’s home?, but it felt too chancy to pose a question, to demand a reply. With Happy Thanksgiving, it was okay if a reply never came. And it didn’t, though I waited up for a while, until the voices downstairs went quiet and the doors shut and the lights went out. Alex slept in Joni’s room; through the wall, I could hear them have sex.
After a few sleepless hours, I got out of bed and went to my dresser, where I turned on my lamp, adjusted my magnified mirror, and began picking at my skin. Nearly an hour passed before I finished, my dresser littered with bloodstained tissues, my face red, inflamed, unrecognizable. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, I thought. The reflection in the mirror felt like someone else’s; it didn’t seem conceivable that I could have done this to myself.
* * *
When I went downstairs the next morning, my mom was already awake and putting a kettle on the stove. She drew back in horror when she saw me. “Oh my god, Imogene,” she said. “What did you do?”
My hand went to my nose. I’d spent half an hour trying to cover the mess I’d made before venturing downstairs, but the effort had been in vain; there was no covering up what I’d done. “I know,” I said immediately. “I know it’s bad.”
She dropped the handle of
the kettle without turning on the burner and came around the kitchen island to study my face. “Oh, honey. This looks infected.”
“It’s not.”
“You really shouldn’t be messing with your face with dirty fingers,” my mom said, and I felt transported back to the dermatologist’s office, where each visit I was scolded, regarded with disgust for what I’d done. Dirty—the word was so debasing. At least the therapist had tried to help me figure out how to stop destroying my face, rather than trying to shame me into stopping. As if reading my mind, my mom asked, “Do you need to see a therapist again?”
“No.” My hand still hovered over my nose, protecting it from her scrutiny. “No, I never do this anymore. I just got carried away.” I wished she would understand—that they would all understand—that I couldn’t stop. If I saw a blemish in the mirror, it was impossible for me to leave it alone; it was an addiction. Apply a warm compress, the magazines said. Let the pimple run through its life span. Fuck that—my fingers itched to pick. I could read a thousand articles on bacterial infection and inflammation and scarring, and I would still never stop.
My mom nodded, unconvinced; she knew it was a lie. She retreated back to the stove. I wanted to turn the attention away from my face, to get my mother to look at me with something other than concern. “Mom,” I said, “I want to tell you something.”
Her hand was turning the knob on the burner but she stopped, turned it off. “What is it?”
“It’s nothing bad.” I fiddled with the mail on the kitchen island. Credit card offers, catalogues. Her eyes bore into me. “I just want to tell you something.”
“Okay.”
I was nervous. It was like telling her about my first period. It was a conversation I’d seen countless times on TV, but it seemed that watching it play out again and again had only made it more difficult for me to take an active role in the scene. “I met someone.”
“Someone…?” The meaning, which I’d thought would be so clear, was lost on her.
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