by Meg Haston
The popular girls (there were popular girls even in the mountains, which should not have surprised me) were always trading things in the dark after lights-out: gum, scented lip gloss, folded paper sculptures that predicted who you would marry and how many children you’d have. I waited, stared at the upper bunk above me. Nobody ever passed me anything. Until now.
The water runs cold too soon. I reach for my towel, dry off, and change quickly into my pajamas. The thin cotton of my yoga pants clings to my legs. They’re smooth, and for the first time all day, I feel good. I wrap the razor in my jeans and head back to my room.
It’s dark, and I hear muffled sobs.
“Are you okay?” I slap the wall, feeling for the light switch.
“Don’t turn the light on.” Her voice is broken, thick with tears. “Close the door?”
“Okay.” It’s pitch-black once the door clicks behind me, and wavy gray lines rise up in front of my eyes. “But I just—do you need anything? Do you want me to call one of the nurses or something? Are you sick?”
“No,” she says quickly. “I just . . . my dad called tonight and he said they’re definitely coming for my Ninety-Six. They’ll be here tomorrow.” She sniffs. “I don’t want them to come, Stevie. I’m not ready—” The sobs drag her words under.
“Did you tell Kyle?”
“He can’t do anything. They’re—my—parents.” The bed shakes beneath her.
“Hold on.” I drop to my knees and find the drawer. Cram my folded jeans and T-shirt and bra into it, and feel around until I find the pointy metal underwire. Then the pills. The sleeping pills are slick, with shiny plastic coatings. I take two, and slam the door shut.
“Here.” I feel my way across the room, moving slowly, awkwardly. My big toe slams into the side of her bed. I swallow the pain. “Move over.”
The bed creaks beneath her, and I sit on the edge. “Swallow these.” I find her hot wet hand in the dark and press the pills into her palm. I hear her gulp them down. She says something—I’m not sure what—in shuddery gasps.
“I’m getting in,” I say, and slide in next to her. “And you better not hog the covers.” I pat the mattress until I find the bunny. I wedge it between us.
She laughs a little at the ceiling. Her body is still shaking. The pillow is wet, but I don’t know if it’s from my hair or her tears.
“Sorry,” she says.
I roll onto my stomach and rest my hand on her, in the crook of her elbow. I wait for her to fall asleep. I can feel the throbbing of her pulse, steady beneath her skin. Her breathing evens out after a while.
“Yeah. Me, too,” I say.
day eighteen
Monday, July 21, 5:45 A.M.
ASHLEY is still sleeping when I wake the next morning. I’m careful not to disturb her. I sit up so slowly that a minute, maybe two, goes by before I can see the red digits on the face of her clock. Time for weight and vitals, exactly. My body has slipped into the routine here without asking my permission.
“Ashley? Time for vitals and stuff, okay?” I slide out of bed and slip the toes of my right foot under my left pajama pant leg, just to check. The skin is still smooth. I smile in the dark.
“We can walk over together if you want.”
She makes another mushy sound and buries her head beneath the pillow.
“Okay.” I find my way to my side of the room and find my jeans bunched up in the drawer. I tuck the razor in the very back, between layers of sports bras. I dress in the dark, run my fingers through my hair, and rub the crusty sleep from my eyes. I think about waking Ashley again before I leave, but then I remember that her parents are coming today. They are moving this way like low yellow clouds before a storm: Her mother applying lipstick in the airplane bathroom. Her father checking his cell one last time before a mauve-lipped flight attendant with plastic hair asks him for the third time to put it away, please. Sir.
I let her sleep.
“Stevie? Can we check in briefly, please?” Shrink waves me down after breakfast. She’s signing charts at the nurses’ station.
“Oh. Yeah.” I draw my belly button toward my spine, or try to. It’s does nothing; my stomach is disobedient. Somewhere in me, the acidic, stringy pineapple is growing. The quarter of a cold, hard waffle sits unmoving. I try to focus on something else, anything else. Distracting, as Shrink would call it. I assess her clothing: loose jeans, white T-shirt. A fitted blush-colored blazer. She looks comfortable.
“Are we supposed to have a session?” I ask.
“Well, it’s been an intense couple of days for you. Just want to see how you’re doing. Want to take a walk?”
“On red?” I jangle my wrist in front of her nose.
She gives her head a little shake, but I think she’s smiling.
Outside it’s hotter than usual, the clay hard beneath my feet. I run two fingers over my mother’s face. It’s hot enough that I should be sweating. At home, I’d be sweating. We walk along the edge of the yard and I toe the line between the grass and decorative stone like it’s a tightrope.
“So how are things going this morning?”
“I’m kind of worried about Ashley. Her Ninety-Six starts today.”
“Worried that it’s going to be a difficult time for her?”
“Yeah. But not just that. She’s been all over the place lately. Up and down.” I don’t tell her about the crying last night. Too personal. “She won’t sleep all night and she has a ton of energy, and then it looks like somebody sucked the air out of her.”
“Ninety-Six can sometimes be tough. But it also has the potential to be incredibly rewarding. To make space for healing.” A glossy non-answer, straight from the brochure. She should be riding a horse when she says that.
“But I don’t think Kyle gets how upset she is.”
“I hear that you’re concerned about her, Stevie.” When we get to the edge of the riding ring, she stops at the fence and rests her forearms in the space between the bars. The rusty paint is chipping, and I run my fingers over the irregular border. “I can assure you that Ashley’s treatment team will continue to give her excellent care.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“That. Assure you, and excellent care, and stuff. I’m just telling you she’s upset. I’m telling you like a normal person.”
“Okay.” She looks at me in a real way. “I hear you, and I’m glad you let me know. But I want you to be able to focus on yourself, so I’m telling you that we will take care of her. But I do hear you.”
Ashley’s parents are scheduled to get to the villa after afternoon snack, during the second reflection time of the day. Ashley and I sit together on the patio, her back to the lawn so she can see them when they come through the doors. We’re bouncing together like birds on a wire, our eyes furtively clicking from each other to the door each time it opens.
“Is this dress okay?” Ashley wipes her palms on a melon-colored T-shirt dress. She curled the hair around her face with a skinny silver wand this morning. She’s wearing too much mascara, but I don’t tell her that.
“Yeah. You look great.” Around the lawn, it seems like everyone is on alert: sitting a little more upright, a little more tense. Some of the girls roll their jean shorts down to an acceptable length. Some roll their shorts even higher. It’s quieter than usual out here.
“It’s always like this when a new set of parents come.” Ashley wriggles her painted toes. “Isn’t that weird? It’s like, it’s my parents, but everybody gets nervous or something.”
“Yeah. Weird.” Somehow I’m nervous too: my stomach keeps flopping around in my gut like a dying fish on land. It’s not my mother walking through those doors. It’s not her.
Ashley’s parents are only partly what I expected. When they come through the doors, the mother is wringing her hands, which I didn’t think anybody did anymore. She’s older than I pictured, wearing mom jeans and a perfect white shirt and a black blazer. Gold drips from her wrists and knuc
kles and ears. She could be pretty beneath all the makeup. The father is what I imagined: tall, good-looking, wearing a golf shirt that’s meant to look casual and unbearably expensive at the same time. He smells like woody cologne and tobacco.
They’re not so bad, I think first. And then I remember what they’ve done.
“Hey, Mama. Hey, Daddy.” Ashley stands up and her face freezes in this kind of panicked grin. I reach for her hand and squeeze it. It is sweaty and limp.
“Hey there, Ash.” The mother’s voice breaks a little. She doesn’t move, except for the hand-wringing.
The father clears his throat and looks at me.
“Oh. I’m Stevie,” I say. “Ashley’s friend.”
“Pleased to meet you, honey,” says the mother.
The father nods.
“Stevie and I are roommates, too,” Ashley chirps. “She’s from Atlanta.”
“Outside of,” I say.
“That’s lovely,” says the mother. She stretches her neck and looks around the grounds. The other girls are trying to pretend they’re not watching. But everyone is staring at the strange animals roaming the grounds—and we all know what parents are capable of.
“Well, this is just . . . lovely,” the mother says again. “The grounds are beautiful, Ash. You didn’t say how beautiful it was here.”
“Should be, given what we’re paying,” grunts the father.
Ashley tenses.
“How was Spain?” she asks. I’ve never seen her so careful.
“Well, we left early, you know,” says the mother. “To come here.”
“Right,” says Ashley. “Sorry.”
The four of us stand there. The father checks his cell phone and doesn’t try to hide it.
“I should probably go journal or something,” I say.
“No, that’s okay!” Ashley says. So I stay and watch them watch each other. They look like confused strangers standing in a lopsided triangle, like the one Ashley made out of yarn. It makes me wonder what makes anybody family. I think that maybe for some people, family is just the people you’re standing next to when awful things happen.
day nineteen
Tuesday, July 22, 9:45 P.M.
WHEN I get back to Cottage Three after evening snack, there is a thin ray of light fanned out beneath my door. I frown at it. Ashley should be out, with her parents.
“Hello?” Carefully, I nudge the door open. Inside, Ashley is pacing. Lapping the room with the bunny bunched awkwardly in her fist.
“Hey! What are you doing here?” I stay close to the door.
She doesn’t stop. Just marches to the closet and back. She’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt and a tailored blazer. I don’t recognize any of it. “I couldn’t, you know? It was just, like, too much. I didn’t want to stay with them again tonight.”
“Your parents?” Duh.
She sniffs and looks up, and my breath stalls at the back of my throat. Her face is so made up, it’s almost grotesque. Caked on foundation and circular pink cheeks. Slashes of bronzer across her cheeks, as if she’d been slapped. Twice, and precisely. Her curls are exact. Crisp. The part that makes me want to cry and scream all at once are her eyes. Lined with black waxy liner, the lids filled with a bruised purple. Lashes so thick, her eyes are at half-mast. The color creeps down her cheeks, like she’s melting.
“Oh my god.” It’s a whisper.
“My mom, like, wanted to take me for a makeover or whatever. She thought it would be a fun girls’ thing or something, and my Dad wanted to watch the game back at the hotel, so . . .” She starts pacing again, silent tears burrowing through the layers of color.
My hand shoots out, but I retract it, knowing I can’t stop her.
“Come home with me,” I blurt out. “After this. You don’t have to go back there, Ashley. You don’t.”
She lets out a sound like she’s laughing or dying. I can’t tell which. “Right. You really want me coming home with you.”
“I do,” I say forcefully. “My dad’s a nice guy, okay?”
That makes her cry harder.
“Don’t,” I say, and hate myself instantly. “I mean . . .”
There’s a soft knock at the door.
“Get out!” Ashley’s scream is strangled.
“Do you want me . . . Should I call someone?” Cate’s voice is small on the other side of the door.
Ashley’s eyes go wide, so I say, “It’s okay! She’ll be okay.”
“Uh . . . okay?” I hear nothing, then the quiet click of the door down the hall.
“Ashley. Come here. Let’s get you cleaned up, okay?”
“I’m okay. I’m okay,” she says. “Sorry. I’m okay.” She wipes her nose with the back of her hand, smearing snot across one cheek.
“No. I know,” I say gently. “Can I . . .” I reach out to touch her, but she stiffens. “Just . . . hold on a second, okay?” Kneeling next to my bed, I take my last fresh towel from the drawer. “Come on.”
She nods furiously and follows me down the hall to the bathroom. I guide her to the toilet and nudge her to the seat then rummage through my shower caddy on the sink and find everything I need.
“You’ll feel better,” I promise her, which sounds like a lie even to me. I twist the sink faucet all the way to hot and dip the bunched up corner of the towel beneath the spray. Then I squirt some of my face wash on the edge, and rub the fabric together. “Here.” I lean over her, pushing her hair back, and wipe her face in slow, small circles. The colors swirl like watercolor.
“Thanks,” she says. She keeps crying.
I rinse the towel and start again, with a fresh corner.
“It wasn’t . . . my parents.” Her breath is shallow. “If that’s what you think.”
“Huh?”
“It wasn’t my parents who did . . . that to me. The stuff on my back? It was my brother.”
“What?” I crouch in front of her. Try to meet her gaze with mine, but her eyes are everywhere, and they won’t settle. “What are you—you don’t have a brother.”
“Yeah, I do. I just never talk about him because it gets me too upset. He’s four years older and he’s always been kind of . . . messed up. My parents sent him to psychiatrists and stuff, but he wouldn’t take his meds.”
I have to force myself to breathe.
“When we were little, he would hit me, and at first I thought that was a normal brother-sister kind of thing because my friends said their brothers hit them, too. But I don’t think it was the same. And then when he got older and my parents would leave us alone to go out, he would wait until he thought I was asleep.” Her face crinkles up, but there are no more tears.
I don’t know what to say. I have no idea what to say because when you have a brother like the brother I have—fuck, had—the words she’s saying just don’t make sense. You can’t imagine, you can’t possibly understand, and you know it. So you keep your mouth shut.
“And it’s like, I would hear the match and smell the smoke and I wanted to scream.”
I press the cloth to her cheek, catching tears.
“But I couldn’t, you know, because I think he wanted that? I think he wanted me to scream.”
I think I might be sick. “Did your parents know?”
She shakes her head, then nods. “Not for a while, I don’t think. My mom walked in on me in the bathroom once, when I was like ten. And she just stared like I was some sort of freak and then she said, you should put on lotion. I’ll get you some lotion, and then she walked out. And after that my brother was out of the house, but we never talked about it.”
“Have you seen him since?” I want to kill him. For real.
“No,” she squeaks. “But on this trip my parents keep, like, bringing him up. They’re like, so Rick’s doing really well with his medication and I’m like, fuck Rick and his fucking medication, and fuck you for ever talking to him again.”
“Yeah. Yes. Fuck them.”
She makes a swallowing sound and then jumps up qui
ck, pushing me back. Then she bends over the sink. The tiny bathroom fills with the sour smell.
“It’s okay,” I say quickly. “It’s okay. You go back to bed, and I’ll clean up.”
“Noooo,” she wails into the sink.
I find her shower caddy—purple with sparkles—and rummage through it. “Where’s your toothbrush?”
“At the hotel.”
“Okay. Just put some toothpaste on your finger, then.” They don’t allow mouthwash here, either. The alcoholics get desperate.
She obeys begrudgingly, like a small child at bedtime. I rinse out the sink, wipe it clean with my bath towel, and stuff the towel in the trash can. I guide her down the hall and into bed.
“Want a pill? I’ll get you a pill.”
She doesn’t argue, so I bring her a sleeping pill, and one for myself. She sticks out her tongue and I place the capsule on its bumpy red tip. She tilts back her head and swallows. I do the same.
I start to go back to my own bed, but she makes a whimpering sound, so I crawl in next to her with the lights still on.
“My brother hurt me,” she says.
“I know. I think you’re really brave,” I say. “For telling the truth.”
“Tell me about your brother,” she says.
My eyes well up. I clench my fists around the covers.
“Please? I think it would help,” she whispers.
“His name was Joshua. He was really, just . . . good. It’s hard to explain. He died almost a year ago. In a car accident. I was in the car, too. I’ve always felt responsible.”
I can’t say any more than that, and she doesn’t ask. We lie there, one next to the other, pinned to the sheets by grief.
day twenty
Wednesday, July 23, 3:26 A.M.
ASHLEY bucks in her sleep, restless and sleep talking into her pillow. After a while I leave her bed and find mine. My brain buzzes, heavy and veiled as the pill starts to creep in.