Ellis had a boy. He had wolf teeth and a long black coat and he fucked her in her parents’ basement on the spongy pink carpet while I listened from across the room, cocooned in a sleeping bag. He left her things: silver bracelets, filmy stockings, Russian nesting dolls filled with round blue pills. When he didn’t call, she cried until her throat was raw. When she mentioned his name, Mikey would look away, and you could see his jaw get tight, his face darken.
Thinking about bodies fitting together makes me sad and hungry for something. I roll over and press my face into the pillow, try to make my mind go blank, ignore the itching of my scars. Louisa sighs restlessly in her sleep.
I don’t want to believe she’s right.
Jen’s mother is dough-plump, with round cheeks and pinched lips. Her dad is a fatty, the zipper of his coach’s jacket straining across his belly. Her parents stand in the hallway, watching us apprehensively. In a little while, Nurse Vinnie herds us into Rec and locks the door. We won’t be allowed to say goodbye to Jen. The girls flit about the room, pulling cards and games from the bin, setting up with Vinnie at the round table. Blue stands at the window. Her dirty-blond hair is tied in a messy knot today; the tattoo of a swallow gleams faintly on the back of her neck. After a little while, she murmurs, “There she goes.”
We rush to the window. In the parking lot, Jen’s father heaves two green suitcases into the trunk of a black Subaru. The day is gray and cold-looking. He tucks himself in the driver’s seat, the whole car sinking down with the weight of him. Jen towers over her mother like a bendable straw. Her mother pats her once on the arm and opens the rear door, leaving Jen to fold herself into the front, next to her father.
She never once looks up at us.
The car melts into traffic, disappearing down the long block of cafés and bars, Middle Eastern trinket shops, and the place where they sell twenty-two kinds of hot dogs. Mikey worked there one summer; his skin radiated relish and sauerkraut.
The sky is pulpy with dark clouds. There have been a lot of storms lately, unusual for April. The sound of Blue’s voice brings me back. “Poor Bruce,” she says softly, pointing out the window.
Barbero is standing in a corner of the parking lot. He’s not wearing scrubs today: he’s wearing a light blue hoodie and collared shirt, jeans and white sneakers, just like any other guy on the street.
“Oh,” I say. Then, “Oh.”
He liked Jen. His name is Bruce.
He’s got little wire-frame glasses on that make him look not so…oafish…but kind of…nice. Blue and I watch as he wipes his eyes, climbs into his own car, a rusty little orange hatchback, and drives away,
“Poor, poor Bruce,” Blue murmurs.
Bodies fit together. And sometimes they don’t.
Isis fingers the Scrabble tiles. Her nails are bitten down even farther than mine. Her tongue works at the corner of her mouth.
“Almost ready, Chuck.” She yanks a tile from the board. “Almost.”
I fiddle with my tie-dyed T-shirt and flowery hippie skirt. Mikey’s mom did come by with a box of Tanya’s old clothes, left over from her Deadhead phase: tie-dyed shirts and flimsy, whispery skirts, hemp sandals and grandma shawls. There were some old sweaters, though, too, and I’m wearing the best one: blue argyle cardigan with silver buttons in the shape of acorns. I didn’t get to talk to Mikey’s mom. If you aren’t on a visitor list, you can’t get in, and I don’t have a visitor list, since I broke the rules. I don’t know who would come, anyway, except for Mikey, but that’s weeks away. Casper promised she’d put him on my list. Otherwise I know there’s just one name on it: my mother. But I don’t expect her to come, and Casper doesn’t mention it.
When the phone in Rec rings, everyone looks around for Barbero. The phone only rings up here after a caller has been approved downstairs against a master list. Callers have to be checked against a list approved by your doctor, and only at the doctor’s discretion.
Still, we aren’t supposed to answer the phone by ourselves. “He must have gone to the shitter,” Blue says, shrugging.
The phone keeps ringing. Francie nudges Sasha. “Get it.”
“You get it.” Sasha resumes Connect 4. No one likes to play with her; she cheats.
Blue heaves herself up from the couch. “Wimpy Bloody Cupcakes,” she says to us. That’s what she calls us, every once in a while: Bloody Cupcakes. We could all be so cute, don’t you think, she said one day in Group. If we didn’t look like fucking zombies! She raised her arms. Her scars made her look like a rag doll horribly resewn.
“Crazy Hut. Who is calling, please?” She twists the phone cord in her fingers.
She drops the phone so that it hits the wall, ka-thunk, and dangles, helpless, on its white cord. “It’s your mother, Silent Sue.” She returns to her paperback, wedging herself into the stiff green couch.
I stop breathing. Isis is pushing tiles and muttering under her breath. Francie is busy watching a movie.
My mother. Why would she call? She hasn’t even come to see me.
Slowly, I walk to the phone. I press the receiver to my ear and turn away from the girls, to the wall, my heart beating like fucking crazy in my chest. “Mom?” I whisper, hopeful.
The breathing is thick, raspy. “Noooo, Charlie. Guess!” The voice threads through my body.
Evan.
“I pretended to be your mom! Her name was in some stuff in your backpack.” He pauses, giggling, and suddenly switches to a honeyed, high-pitched voice. “Hello, I need to speak with my daughter, please, Miss Charlotte Davis.”
I don’t say anything. I don’t know if I’m relieved or disappointed.
“We had to take your money, Charlie.” He coughs, a splatter of mucus. “You know how it is.”
The empty film canisters in my backpack, the one he and Dump dropped off. The canisters I kept what little money I could scrounge in.
Evan is asthmatic and the drugs and the street do nothing for him. I’ve watched him curl up into a ball, wheezing until his face is purple, pissing his pants from the effort to not pass out. The free clinic only gives inhalers with medical exams and they won’t look at you if you’re high and Evan’s life is about being high. He’s from Atlanta. I don’t know how he got all the way up here.
I keep close to the wall so the girls can’t hear me. Hearing Evan’s voice is taking me back to a dark place. I try to breathe evenly to keep in the moment, like Casper says.
Carefully, I say, “I know.”
I say, “It’s okay.”
I say, “Thanks for bringing my backpack.”
He coughs again. “You were pretty messed up in the attic, you know? I thought me and Dump was gonna shit our pants. All that, like, blood.”
I say, “Yeah.”
He’s so quiet that I almost don’t hear him. “Was it Fucking Frank? Did he…did he finally come after you? Is that why you did it?”
I scrape the wall with what little nails I have left. Fucking Frank and his black eyes and those rings. Seed House and the red door where girls disappeared. He had boxes of sugary cereal on the shelves, and beer and soda in the fridge, and drugs in special locked boxes. He had filthy skin but teeth that gleamed like pearls.
The men who came to Seed House for the room with the red door, they had hungry eyes, eyes with teeth that moved over you, testing, tasting. That’s why I hid in the attic for so long. Like a mouse, trying not to breathe so no one would notice me.
I say, “No. No, he didn’t get me.”
Evan sighs, relieved. “Yeah, okay, that’s good, yeah.”
“Evan,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“But he’s part of why I did it. You know? Like, the straw and the camel. Everything. Do you understand?”
Evan is quiet. Then he says, “Yeah.”
I wonder where he’s calling from—skinny Evan with his bad lungs and ripped pants, the funny houndstooth sport coat.
I ask him how he found me.
He tells me this is the place t
hey send all the nutty girls. He tells me, “Dump and me found a ride to Portland.”
The night they saved me in the underpass, Dump broke a bottle over the man’s head. It happened lightning quick. I saw a boy’s terrified eyes appear over the man’s shoulder and then the bottle in the air, gleaming against the yellowy lights. I picked slivers of glass out of my hair for days afterward.
Dump was mesmerized by the glass that glittered in the palms of his hands. He looked at me and his smile was a deep, curling cut. Bloody splinters of glass sparkled on the tips of his black boots.
The man who messed with me was at the bottom of the underpass, a lump of motionless, dark clothing. Evan wrapped me in his coat.
Evan tells me, “I just wanted to make sure you were okay and shit, you know?”
They said, Holy fucking shit. They said, We’ve got to get the fuck out of here. They said, You crazy fucking bitch, you can’t be out here by yourself.
“You were cool and all, for a wacko.” Laughter and coughing.
They walk-dragged me to a van and hauled me into the back. The seats had been taken out; the flooring was damp and there were patches of dirty carpet thrown over rust holes. Evan and Dump were keyed up, eyes popping, hands shaking. Did we fucking kill that dude?
I stayed with them for seven months.
Evan will die on the street, somewhere, someday. I have seen what he will do for a high. I have seen the sadness on his face when he thinks no one is looking.
“So, yeah, also, I wanted to tell you, and, like, I’m sorry and all, but I took your drawings.” Evan clears his throat. “You know, that comic book you made. I don’t know, I just like it. It’s cool, you know, like, seeing me in there. Like I’m famous or something. I read a little every day.”
My sketchbook, he has my sketchbook. Dump would say, Make sure you give me a cool superpower, like X-ray vision or something, okay? I wanna see through chicks’ clothes.
My heartbeat picks up. “Evan, I need that back. Evan, please?”
He coughs and gets quiet. “I’ll try, you know, see if we can get over there, but I don’t know, we’re leaving kinda soon. It’s like, I just really like that book. I don’t know. Makes me feel like I exist, seeing me in there.”
Evan, I say, but only in my head.
“You get out, you come up to Portland, okay? Like, head to the waterfront and ask around for me. We do good together.”
I say, “Sure thing, Evan.”
“Later, gator.” The phone goes dead.
Isis is nibbling at a new tile. I fold my hands in my lap. These are my hands. They have taken food from Dumpsters. They have fought over sleeping spaces and dirty blankets. They have had a whole other life than this one here, playing games in a warm room, as the night keeps moving far from me, outside the window.
Isis says, “How’s your ma? That musta been weird, huh?”
She has spelled ball. It took her ten minutes to spell ball.
I tuck my hands under my thighs and bear down on them. The pressure against my bones feels good. He has my book, but I have food, and a bed.
“She’s excellent.” My voice is mild and uncomplicated. “Going on vacation. To Portland.”
When I told Casper it felt ugly, do you know what she said? She said, Does IT feel ugly or do YOU feel ugly, Charlie? Because there is a difference, and I want you to think about what that difference might be. It will be integral to your healing.
They really fucking ask a lot of you in this place.
In Group, Casper asks us, who are our friends? Do we have a community? Is there someone we can talk to, who makes us feel safe, on the outside?
She asks, Who keeps your secrets?
You know, I know who I am. I mean, I don’t know know, because I’m only seventeen, but I know, like, who I am when I’m with people, or when they’re looking at me, and putting me into a slot in their mind. If you have one of your class photographs, I bet you can find me. It won’t be hard. Who’s the girl who’s not smiling? Who, even if she’s between two other kids, kind of still looks like she’s standing alone, because they’re standing a little apart from her? Are her clothes kind of…plain? Dirty? Loose? Kind of nothing. Do you even remember her name? You can spot the girls who will have it easy. I don’t even have to describe them for you. You can spot the girls who will get by on smarts. You can spot the girls who will get by because they’re tough, or athletic. And then there’s me, that one, that disheveled kid (say it, poor) who never gets anything right, and sits alone in the cafeteria, and draws all the time, or gets shoved in the hallway, and called names, because that’s her slot, and sometimes she gets mad, and punches, because what else is there? So when Casper says, Who keeps your secrets? I think, Nobody. Nobody until Ellis. She was my one and only chance and she chose me. You don’t know what that feels like, probably, because you’re used to having friends. You probably have a mom and a dad, or at least one who’s not dead, and they don’t hit you. Nobody moves away from you in the class picture. So you don’t know what it feels like to every day, every fucking day, be so lonely that this black hole inside is going to swallow you down, until the one day this person, this really beautiful person? comes to your school and she just seems to not care that everyone is staring at her in her black velvet dress, her fishnets, her big black boots, wild purple hair, and red, red mouth. She comes to the door of the cafeteria on the first day and she doesn’t even get in line for a tray, she just looks around the whole fucking zoo of second lunch period and suddenly she’s walking toward you, that big red mouth smiling, her enormous black backpack swinging down on the table, and she’s digging out Pixy Stix and Candy Buttons and sliding them to you, you (your pencil frozen in the air over your sketchbook because this could be a joke, some elaborate plan by the jocks, but no), and she’s saying, “Christ on a crutch, you are the only fucking normal person in this hellhole. I’m dying to get high. Wanna come over after school and get high? God, I like your hair. And your T-shirt. Did you get that here or online? What are you drawing, that’s fucking angelic.” That’s what she called things she loved: angelic. This pot is positively angelic. Charlie, this band is angelic. And it was like the world was coated in gold from that moment on. It sparkled. I mean it was shit, still, but it was better shit, do you understand? And I learned secrets. I learned that underneath her heavy white makeup was a quilt of acne, and she cried about it. She showed me the bags of junk food in her closet and she showed me how she’d throw up after eating too much. She told me her father had had an affair with her aunt and that’s why they moved and that her parents were working on it. And her name wasn’t really Ellis, it was Eleanor, but she decided to try something new when she moved, but oh God, don’t say it in front of her mother, because her grandmother’s name was Eleanor and she had recently died, and her mother would have a fit, an absolute fit, and Oh, wow, Charlie, your arms. Did you do that? It’s kind of beautiful. It makes me a little scared, but it’s kind of beautiful. I met this guy named Mikey yesterday at Hymie’s. The record store. You ever been there? Of course you have, look at you. He invited us over. You wanna go? He’s got, like, these angelic blue eyes.
And in her room, with the wild blue walls and so many posters and solar system ceiling, I could tell her anything, and I did. Charlie, Charlie, you’re so beautiful, so fucking angelic. Her hand in mine. She wore white flannel pajamas with black skulls on them.
And that was that. My secret keeper.
I did have this teacher once, in the fourth grade. She was totally nice, even to the bullies in class. She never yelled. She just let me be, really, she never made me go out to recess if I didn’t want to go, or to gym. She’d let me stay in the classroom and draw while she worked on grading or looked out the big square windows. Once, she said, “Charlotte, I know things are so hard right now, but they’ll get better. Sometimes it takes a while to find that special friend, but you will. Oh, gosh, I don’t think I had a really good-good friend until I was in high school.” She fingered the li
ttle gold heart on a chain around her neck.
She was right. I did find my special friend. But nobody told me she was going to fucking kill herself.
Every night, Louisa scribbles away in one of her black-and-white composition books. When she’s done, she caps the pen, closes the book, and bends over the side of the bed so that her hair tumbles over like a waterfall and I can see her neck, unscarred and pale, faintly dusted with down. She slides the book underneath the bed, says good night, and pulls the bedspread across her face. Tonight I wait until I hear her breathing flatten into sleep before I creep out of my bed and sink to my knees on the floor.
I peek under the edge of her bedspread. Underneath her bed are dozens and dozens of those composition books, all her secrets piled neatly into black-and-white rows.
I should make a correction. I don’t want to be misleading. I say that Ellis killed herself, but she did not die die. She isn’t in the ground, I can’t visit a graveyard and drop daisies over well-tended grass or mark an anniversary on a calendar. There were drugs, there was the wolf boy, and she slid very far from me, the wolf taking up all of her heart, he was that greedy. And when the wolf was done, he licked his paws, he left her gaunt, my Ellis, my plump and glowing friend, he took all her light. And then, I guess, she tried to be like me. She tried to drain herself, make herself smaller, only she messed up. Like Mikey said, cutting wasn’t her thing. I imagine her room soaked in blood, rivers of it, her parents fighting upstream to get to her. But there was too much, do you understand ? A person can only lose so much blood, you can only starve the brain of oxygen for so long, or you can suffer anoxic brain injury after hemorrhagic shock, which emptied out my friend and left only her body. Her parents sent her somewhere, a place like where I am, but far, far away, across whole states, and tucked her into her new home full of soft sheets and plodding, daily walks and drooling. No more hair dye, no more fucking, no more drugs, no more iPod, no more clompy boots, no more fishnets, no more purging, no more heartbreak, no more me, for Ellis. Only days of nothingness, of Velcroed pants and diapers. And so I can’t can’t can’t do what I am supposed to do: touch her, make it better, brush the wild hair from her face, whisper sorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorry.
Girl in Pieces Page 5