by Katrina Leno
“The mother is the one who’s supposed to take care of the kid.”
“I think that ship has sailed,” Magpie said.
“Have you talked to Eryn lately?” Ann Marie’s voice was surprisingly steady for someone so clearly inebriated. She hardly slurred at all. But Magpie could tell that she was drunk, very drunk, not only because she had fallen and cut herself but also because of her bloodshot eyes, her dry lips, the smell that pulsed off her and permeated the room, the thick, choking, lingering smell of alcohol.
“Eryn changed her phone number,” Magpie replied. She righted the end table and carefully set the lamp back on it.
“I tried to call her, but nobody answered,” Ann Marie said. “I’ve tried to call her so many times.”
“That’s because she changed her number.”
“But is she all right? How are we supposed to know if she’s all right?”
“She’s fine, Mom. She’s probably a lot better off than either of us.”
“I don’t think she even said good-bye. I can’t remember.…”
Magpie could remember. And she knew why Ann Marie couldn’t: because she had been so drunk that she had fallen asleep on the bathroom floor in a small pile of vomit. Eryn had opened the door and found her there and cleaned her up and put her into bed and then left. Magpie had watched her go as she stood on the front steps with the door open behind her and a growing hole opening wider and wider in her stomach, an open wound that ached and throbbed more and more as Eryn backed her car out of the driveway and drove away down the street.
Magpie had stayed outside for a long time, ignoring the incessant ringing of the house phone (her father) and the incessant chirping of her cell phone (Allison).
When she’d finally checked her text messages, there were eleven from her soon-to-be-former best friend, who was tipsy and insisting that Magpie meet her at a party in the rich part of town. A party at her boyfriend, Brandon Phipp’s, house.
Magpie went back inside.
Ann Marie had left a half-empty bottle of vodka on the kitchen counter.
Magpie had never tried it before, never even had a sip, but she poured herself a glass of orange juice and added a heavy splash of vodka. She drank the glass quickly, liking the burn of it, pouring herself another and another, each with less orange juice and more vodka, until she had finished the bottle and felt warm and numb from the inside out.
She got dressed and went to the party and if she could have changed anything about her life, she would have chosen to just get in bed instead. She would have faced Allison’s inevitable wrath the next day; she would have been able to apologize for not being in the mood to leave her house. She would have turned off her phone and gotten into pajamas and locked herself in her room and cried herself to sleep and woken up the next day having done nothing to cause her best friend to hate her so violently and completely that any hopes of rekindling their friendship were dashed as soon as they entered her mind.
But she’d gone to the party because she was the stupidest person in the world, because her heart had been broken twenty times already that night, because she wasn’t capable of making the right decisions, because her mother was passed out, and because she didn’t want to be in the house with her for one second longer than she had to be. Because Eryn had left and Magpie’s father had left and Magpie’s entire family—extended aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins—would all soon take Magpie’s aunt’s side. Because she would get to them first, and it is so very hard to believe anything except the first side of the story that you hear. Magpie knew this; it did not make it easier when she and her mother were not invited to Christmas dinner.
“You need to get some sleep,” Magpie told her mother now. “You need to drink some water.”
“Please tell Eryn to come home,” Ann Marie said, but she allowed Magpie to help her to her feet, and she followed her obediently into the master bedroom. “Please tell her it’s okay to come home now.”
“I’ll tell her,” Magpie said, pulling off her mother’s alcohol-stained shoes and pushing her back on the bed.
“I have to get changed,” Ann Marie said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Magpie replied. “Nothing matters.”
“These aren’t my pajamas.”
Magpie pulled the covers up to her mother’s chin and tucked them in too hard. She had a wild idea that just a few more inches of blanket would cover her mother’s mouth and nose, blocking her airways, suffocating her. Magpie could sit on her mother’s hands and Ann Marie wouldn’t be able to move and she wouldn’t be able to breathe and then she would die and everybody would think it was the alcohol that had done it. Magpie would be removed to—
Where?
To her father?
No, she would simply not tell anyone her mother had died.
She could live that way until she turned eighteen. She would buy the first ticket out of Dodge. When they finally found Ann Marie’s body, it would be only a skeleton, and Magpie would be only a memory: a whisper of a real girl. Gone, gone, gone.
She held the blanket over Ann Marie’s face for just a moment.
Her mother whined softly through the cotton.
Magpie tucked the blankets underneath her mother’s chin.
Magpie read “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” the next morning before school, and when Mr. James arrived twenty minutes before the bell rang, she was just finishing the last paragraph.
It wasn’t a very nice story at all. It was about a girl, Connie, who is home alone when a man named Arnold Friend shows up at her house. They talk a lot—weird, rambling conversation about how Arnold Friend knows Connie is going to leave with him. And at the end she does leave with him for no reason Magpie could figure out. It’s pretty clear things won’t end well for Connie. It’s pretty clear Arnold Friend doesn’t have anything good planned for her. But he just talks to her, and she leaves. It didn’t make any sense at all.
Mr. James sat at the desk next to Magpie. She had her textbook open; her yellow notebook was safely inside her backpack. She didn’t want Mr. James to touch it again. He tapped the English book instead.
“What did you think of it?” he asked.
“I didn’t like it.”
“Okay! Tell me why.” Mr. James settled back in the chair.
“She just let him take her. She just went with him. And he’s clearly going to kill her. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s an interesting bit of psychology, isn’t it?”
“But why would she go with him?”
Mr. James was very quiet. He had an expression on his face, a very hard-to-read expression, but one that made Magpie enormously self-conscious. She thought he must know, that the gossip of the student body had inevitably reached the teachers, that everywhere she went in this school everyone must see her for what she really was.
But then Mr. James shook his head a little, and the expression was gone.
“I think you’ve got a really unique perspective on this story, Margaret. I’d love to hear more of your thoughts. How about you write me up a little essay—nothing huge, just a few paragraphs—expanding on your ideas. Get it to me next week. No page requirements, no word count, just your opinions down on paper. Does that sound good?”
“I can do that,” Magpie said, and in that moment she felt like it was the truth.
The hallways were mostly deserted as Magpie headed to her locker thirty minutes after the last bell. She felt still buoyant after her talk with Mr. James, but that buoyancy popped the moment she turned the last corner to her locker.
She froze in her tracks.
The back of Allison was at her locker, putting away her things.
The back of Allison was only ten feet away.
The back of Allison had heard footsteps approaching in the otherwise abandoned corridor and was turning slowly—
Magpie darted back around the corner and ducked into the first door she saw: a restroom. She had never before felt so thankful
for a restroom’s impeccable placement. She went into a stall and shut the door, and she counted to five hundred before she let herself come out again.
The back of Allison was gone.
Magpie put her books into her locker, and she left the school as quickly as she could.
Ann Marie had not gone to work.
The kitchen looked like a small explosion had gone off, but Magpie figured out that her mother must have tried to make pancakes, the only thing to eat in the house besides her stockpile of macaroni and cheese. Ann Marie, asleep on the couch, was covered in powdered mix and sticky with syrup and smelled strongly of the cheap vodka she drank. Magpie covered her mother with an afghan—not out of any affection, but so she wouldn’t have to look at her.
Then she took out her yellow notebook and scribbled something in the margins of a free page.
And I can get there whenever I want. And I will know it when I see it.
Then she went into the kitchen and began to pile dirty bowls and frying pans and measuring cups onto the counter, and that is when she saw it through the window over the sink…
In the backyard, in her father’s shed…
The light was on.
Magpie froze, a perfect imitation of a statue, a glass batter bowl in her left hand, her right hand outstretched to turn on the sink faucet.
Nobody had been in her father’s shed for six months. Magpie knew that for a fact. The key hung on a hook next to the back door, and it had a dusting of filth on it from six months of no one vacuuming or dusting or bothering to take her shoes off when she walked into the house.
The door of the shed was still shut, which meant the padlock was still on it because the door would swing open if the padlock wasn’t there. And that meant no one could possibly be inside because you couldn’t lock the door while you were inside. So the door’s being shut meant the door was locked meant nobody was inside… So how was the light on?
Magpie placed the glass bowl on the counter and leaned forward, looking through the window up at the evening sky. Had it been raining? A bad thunderstorm had once tripped their house alarm; maybe something like that had happened? But the sky was clear and blue, and the backyard was empty, and her mother was snoring, and the garden shed’s light was on, and her hands were shaking, she realized suddenly. Her hands had started shaking.
She walked to the front of the house.
The simplest explanation was, more often than not, the correct one, and Magpie would find her father’s truck parked in the driveway, and he would have come for his things and brought someone to help him load the heavier machinery into his truck, and he would have done it at night because, Magpie hoped, he was too ashamed to show his face in the daylight. That is how she wanted to picture her father: too ashamed to exist before the sun went down.
But his truck was not in the driveway, and Magpie went outside and stood in her front lawn with bare feet, and his truck wasn’t parked anywhere on the street that she could see.
She turned back to the house.
Everything looked normal.
Her neighborhood was filled with the normal sounds of a neighborhood: someone’s radio on too loud, crickets, a whir of a car’s engine as it raced down the street parallel to hers.
Magpie decided she was overreacting.
She walked around the side of the house.
The light in the shed was still on, and she could see nothing moving inside; everything was still through the two windows that sat high on either side of the door.
She glanced at the pool to her left, glistening and serene in the low light of dusk. The pizza float was resting on the small platform.
She turned back to the shed.
And nothing had changed. Not a thing out of place; not a thing touched or disturbed.
Except the light.
The light was off.
TWO FOR JOY
At lunch the next day Ben greeted Magpie with a few books on Amelia Earhart and asked if she wanted to get together that weekend to work on the project, either at the library or at one of their houses, and Magpie said sure, that sounded fine, but really what she meant was I think there’s something wrong with my eyes.
Because the shed’s light had gone on and off, on and off, on and off three more times the night before, and each time Magpie had stepped outside to check on it, it was as dark as the night sky above her.
That afternoon after school, in the safety of the bright, bright sun, she would open the door and go inside and unscrew the single light bulb that hung on a chain from the ceiling and was turned on with a string.
Obviously, there was a faulty wire. Obviously, Magpie’s eyes were fine.
“Do you have a preference?” Ben asked, and Magpie looked at him for so long that finally he added, “I mean, do you want to go to one of our houses or the library?”
“I like the library,” Magpie said.
This was true, she did like the library, because she liked quiet places where you were explicitly not allowed to be louder than a whisper. But there were other reasons for her choice: She did not like her house; she did not like other people’s houses. She liked neutral ground, neutral territory, a fair and fighting chance for everyone.
She tried her best not to close her eyes and see a single light bulb lit up when it should have been dark.
“That works for me. Saturday around one?” Ben asked.
“One is perfect. I’ll look over the books before then,” she said.
As if to prove this—to herself or to Ben or to the universe—Magpie took a daily planner from her backpack. It had not been opened in a while; the last six months were white and pristine. She found May 7 and wrote neatly: Read Amelia Earhart books.
“Okay, I better get going,” Ben said. “Got a meeting with the guidance counselor.”
“Are you going to eat that?” Brianna asked, leaning over Magpie to point at the remains of Ben’s sandwich.
“All yours,” he replied. He handed her the sandwich, then pushed his almost-full coffee cup and a small Ziploc baggie of apple slices toward Magpie. “See you in history, Mags.”
The lunch table without Ben felt suddenly off-kilter, tipped on edge. Magpie ate a slice of apple and washed it down with coffee.
Magpie concentrated on the coffee so intently (a trick she had learned: look intimately interested in whatever you had in front of you and people tended to leave you alone) that she almost didn’t notice something brush against her left arm. A small clearing of a throat. The coffee cup lifted up, stolen. Magpie looked to where Ben had been sitting.
Clare, smiling, pretended to take a sip of the coffee but then set it back down in front of Magpie.
“Earth to Mags,” she said lightly, tucking her short blond hair behind her ears.
Up close, Clare was thinner and paler than Magpie had noticed before. Her eyes had deep circles underneath them; the mascara had rubbed off in a dark smudge. Sensing Magpie’s scrutiny, maybe, Clare wiped a finger underneath her bottom lashes and let out what Magpie thought was a rather affected laugh.
“Sorry,” Magpie said. “Zoned out.”
“Totally different view over here,” Clare said, indicating the table. Then she leaned back, grinned, and added in a whisper, “So, you and Ben, huh?”
“What do you mean?” Magpie asked, feeling the back of her neck go hot.
“Don’t worry—our little secret. Ben and I are friends. I know he likes you.”
The dynamics of the lunch table were still being revealed to Magpie. She’d previously thought the inhabitants of the table sat together out of necessity rather than any sort of kinship, but every now and then, little alliances presented themselves to her. Clare and Ben, for example, and before that, she’d learned that Brianna and Luke often got high and went shopping together. She filed away this new information and forced herself to smile.
“He told you that?”
“Yeah. He thinks you’re—wait, how did he put it?—a real sweet piece of ass.”
&nb
sp; The heat on Magpie’s neck cooled instantly, leaving her cold and uncomfortable.
“I’m totally kidding,” Clare said quickly. “He just said he thinks you’re really sweet and smart.”
“Oh,” Magpie replied. “That’s nice.”
“I shouldn’t have said that,” Clare added. “The sweet piece of ass thing. Sorry.”
“It’s totally fine. It just caught me a little off guard.”
“He would also literally murder me if he knew I was talking to you about this. But I just had to ask… Do you like him?”
“I’m not sure,” Magpie said honestly. “I do like him, of course. As a friend. I just never thought about… I just have…”
“Baggage, sure,” Clare finished. “Why else would you be sitting at this table? Why else would you be talking to me, Clare ‘McBaggage’ Brown?”
But she was smiling. It occurred to Magpie that this was the most she had spoken to Clare in her entire life. Had Magpie, like so many of her classmates, ostracized and avoided Clare when her father had killed himself? They’d been eleven or twelve; the news had spread through the school like a brushfire; Clare had been absent for a full month and returned an untouchable stranger. Whispers had followed her in the hallways. Students had turned their eyes downward to avoid her. Teachers did not call on her.
“Baggage,” Magpie repeated, but what she really wanted to say was more along the lines of I am so sorry if I let them erase you.
“Honesty is the best policy,” Clare said, shrugging, a little apropos of nothing. “I just mean, it’s okay if you don’t know what you want yet. Just be honest with him and yourself, and shit will all work out. Not like you asked for my advice, of course. But I know Ben’s put up with a lot in his life. A lot of people saying one thing, doing the other, that type of thing. People supporting him initially, then flaking. Wait—do I sound like his protective older sister right now?”
“Sort of, yeah,” Magpie said, but she was still smiling. She liked Clare. She liked Ben. Everything was normal. Everything was okay. She had made it up, the light bulb in the shed. Her eyes were playing tricks on her. She needed to eat more vegetables.