“Sometimes Joan goes places without me,” I said. “It’s not like we’re attached at the hip or something.”
While I was with Ray and Patrick I felt pretty normal. Stoned, but normal. Then it all got a little weird, but still, normal weird. I said goodbye and thanks for the smoke and wondered whether I was acting like a freak. I didn’t want to go home, but there wasn’t anyplace else. I must not have been paying attention when I crawled out onto the corner of Seaview Road, because when I got to the fence my arms were full of scratches. Little beads of blood were bubbling up out of the rips in my skin. I stared at them for a while and then walked down the broken edge of asphalt between the double yellow line and the woods.
That was when I started sinking into the road. The surface of the pavement came up to my knees and then it was crushing my chest. I couldn’t breathe and the whole world turned the blue color of reflected televisions. My mind split in half. There were two of me, and one of them knew it wasn’t really happening, but that one wasn’t helping. The road was rising up my ribcage. There was air all around me but I couldn’t suck any of it down my throat because the pavement was crushing my lungs.
Something in the weed.
I heard a squirrel running through the leaves, and the sound was so loud it scraped the inside of my skull. I told my legs they weren’t really trapped and they should move, but they wouldn’t. After a while the other half of my brain started chanting, “It’s only a drug. It’s only a drug.” That wasn’t helping either. A car made the curve behind me and rushed by so close I would have jumped sideways if my reflexes had been working. My heart choked up into my throat and I started to sweat. I went back to chanting, out loud this time.
Then I took one step. The blue air laughed at me, and the sound made little sparks like electric rain. The road pushed tighter against my chest. I could see every pebble embedded in the asphalt and every separate, specific glint in the coal tar between them. If I closed my eyes I wouldn’t see that, but I’d probably see something much worse, or nothing at all. I might fall out of myself and into the nothing. I pushed as hard as I could and took another step, then started running. I ran all the way back to Jensen Road and up into the attic, knowing if I stopped or even slowed down, the ground would swell up and swallow me.
Our attic has a big gap in the floorboards, a line that runs right across under the eaves. I imagined it holding everything down, and the attic floor tilted back and forth on that axis, trying to rise up. I crawled into the dormer window and pulled my knees up, afraid to take my eyes off that crack. I guess I spent all afternoon and half the night staring at it and saying, “It’s only a drug, it’s only a drug,” using the power of my mind to hold down the floor.
Around two in the morning, I looked down at the lights and the jagged silhouettes of the treetops around the harbor. I wondered where Joan had gone, and what kind of trouble Robbie would get into next.
Was he going to knife somebody or just step out into traffic? Maybe he’d slow down so much he’d stop moving, get into Mom’s prescriptions and start staying at home, staring at the walls. To be honest, that would make my life a lot easier. At least Joan would stop asking questions.
I thought about my dad, too. My mom said he didn’t do what the cops said, but she never gave us any details. He’s an accountant; how bad could it be? Did I want to visit him, or still be there when he got back, or ever see him again at all? I needed to think about what the alternative was, about my room and my attic and whether I could live without them.
I didn’t think about Ray, because why would I? Him and Patrick were off somewhere, laughing at me. If I told Robbie what they did, he’d probably beat them up. I wasn’t going to do that, and the rest of it didn’t matter. So I didn’t make any special place in my imagination for the picture of Ray Velker at Hatchet Mary’s, sitting up with his fingers moving and light in his eyes. I didn’t know how much that picture would matter, later when the world froze and we all changed.
I did think about Beatrice, with the gray finger marks from an open hand on her cheek. I wondered whether she wore her hair up or down. Whether she was twenty-five or forty-three. Why she wasn’t happy.
The answers to all my questions came eventually, and I didn’t want any of them. Sometimes I wonder why I stayed conscious. Why I stayed sane. I could have let go that night, let go of the half of me that knew what was real. If I’d let myself sink into the pavement, would I have stopped breathing? Would it have been like when you die in a dream and your heart stops? When your body just lets your mind throw you over a cliff and jump out of you while you’re falling? Your dream self hits the ground and shatters and your sleeping body rots at the crooked edge of the road under the leaves.
Or maybe I didn’t wonder any of that then. Not yet. Maybe I thought, Patrick Jervis dosed me and he’s a shithead, but everything’s fine now.
In a few hours I’ll find Joan, and everything will be fine.
When morning came, I went downstairs and turned the oven on, so the kitchen would be warm when I got out of the shower. I looked in the refrigerator, then shut it again and drank a glass of water.
When I went to the bus, Joan was leaning against the wall on the blind curve of Jensen Road. It was one of those sharp, golden days when you suddenly have more energy and you can feel the future right in front of you. I ran when I saw her, but I had to stop and catch my breath before I got there. I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and the whole world felt jagged and loud. I was still hollow and shaky and thinking about myself. Maybe her, too. I should warn her about Patrick and Ray and anybody else with suspiciously clean weed.
“You look pretty, Joan.”
“Shut up.”
“You can deny it; it’s still true.”
I wasn’t hitting on her. It wasn’t like that. Or anyway if it was, I was too stupid to realize it until way later. The reason I ran when I saw her was because I thought the air around her would be softer. The truth is, I used Joan to block out all the noise. We’d been part of each other so long, I never thought about the space between us. I get that now, but it’s too late.
Patrick didn’t show up for the bus, which was good because what was I going to say to him? He came the next day and saved me the hassle by completely ignoring me.
The sun sliced a shadow across the retaining wall, and the air smelled like hot tar.
When the bus came, we sat in the back with the burnouts and let ourselves sink down into the babble. If we needed to say anything we had to lean over and cup a hand around the other person’s ear.
“Where were you yesterday, in Hicksville again?”
“Maybe.”
It took me a minute to do something with the look on my face. I looked out the window and over into a delivery truck. The guy had a page of Playboy taped to his dashboard and an AA chip hanging from his rearview.
“What’s in Hicksville?”
“A friend. What are you, my mother?”
“All right. I was just wondering. Jeez.”
“No. You were just shocked that anybody else would hang out with me.”
“Why are you mad at me? What did I do?”
“I went to see Teresa, if you have to know. You know, the girl whose life your brother is trying to ruin?”
“I told you, Joan. Robbie’s a screwup, but he’s not mean. Even if he was, he’s not organized enough to be good at it. You know that.”
“Forget it. Where’s your lunch, Daisy?”
“My mom was asleep.”
“She didn’t get up and make a big production out of bananas and tuna salad? No lecture about not letting people pick on you from the person who nicknamed you Daisy?”
“She sleeps a lot lately. Everything with my dad makes her tired.”
When the bus pulled up at school, there were kids all over the football field and the halls were still empty. I wanted to go straight to Mrs. Farrow’s room, but Joan dragged me to the cafeteria for hash browns and orange juice. We sat by an open window and l
eaned our faces out to breathe in the smell that came up off the cut grass when the sun hit it. After a minute, she turned away from the window and caught me looking.
“What, Daisy? What is it now?”
“My mother thought I wanted to marry you.”
“Wow, I wonder how that conversation went.”
“Beatrice said her husband hit her.”
“You talked to Beatrice again?”
“Yeah, a few times.”
“You don’t even know who she really is, Daisy. She might not even be married.”
“Can me and you just share a houseboat without being married, though? Or maybe a sailboat even?”
“Yeah, me and you and the people from the yacht club. That’ll work right out.”
“We could put in a glass bottom. It’d be your version of heaven.”
“Heaven is a ridiculous concept. Surely your guru Arthur explained that to you already.”
“I’m just saying, we should start making plans. We’ll be out of here in two years. We could do anything.”
The idea that we might go in separate directions honestly didn’t occur to me. I wasn’t scared of it, because I didn’t think it was possible. I just thought about whether heaven was a glass-bottomed boat or whether Joan wanted something else. I found out later that we’d been in heaven all along. That heaven had no bottom. Turned out we could let go and fall forever.
I took metal shop, mainly because there wasn’t a class for people who wanted to figure out the phone system. I could take mechanics if I was willing to go on the BOCES bus, but I got enough shit from people already. I tried to get Joan to take metal shop with me. She said, “I am not gonna be the first girl to take metal shop. Live without me for fifty-five minutes.” Turned out I could do that. Just about.
Metal shop was full of greasy hair and cutoff jean jackets. The big ambition in that room was fixing carburetors for the Hells Angels on East Fourth Street. The first thing we made was a pair of bookends out of sheet metal. Later, I painted flames on them. That day it was just the T square and the tin snips, though. The shop was noisy, good for thinking in. I was wondering about when my house would be empty so I could turn the circuit breakers off and wire an answering machine into my bedroom light switch. I wasn’t really paying attention to the conversation until they got around to the angel dust.
“Hey, Daisy, I heard you had a bad trip.”
A bunch of guys laughed, and I tried to look like I still wasn’t paying attention. Ray didn’t say anything either. At least I don’t think he did. I was concentrating so hard on being invisible, I might have missed it.
“I heard you freaked out and ran away.” Aaron Woolf laughed and pushed up against me.
“It was cool,” I said. “I just had to go home.”
I finished with the tin snips and made my body relax before I walked across to hang them up. I was just trying to breathe my way through it, stay calm until they moved on to something else. I’m not proud of it, but it’s the truth, and it’s one more thing I didn’t tell Joan. How could I?
They started talking about going to a concert at Stonybrook, who was driving and who had some hash and could somebody get backstage passes.
“Backstage, that’s where you find some desperate ass.”
“Wanna come, Ray? Maybe you could finally get laid.”
See? If you just stay calm, they get bored and start on someone else.
“I got business to take care of.” Ray looked at me when he said that. I knew he meant business with Robbie.
“Yeah, you better stay home with your record player and your porn stash and a couple of old socks,” Aaron said. “Safer bet.”
So, that was the level of conversation at Highbone High School. You really wonder why me and Joan stayed home building blue boxes and taking apart fish? I put my metal shop stuff in a cubbyhole with my name on it and Ray came up to put his next to mine.
“Listen, you won’t say anything will you?” I could barely hear him. He wasn’t even looking at me.
“To who? What am I gonna say, Ray? That you’re a dick? Everyone knows that already.”
“It was Patrick’s idea about the angel dust. If Robbie thinks it was me, he’ll go nuts.”
“Relax, Ray. I don’t even care.”
It was true. I wasn’t mad at him. I was busy worrying I’d have to spend the rest of my life in that kind of conversation. If not for Joan and the telephone network, I was lost in a world of jean jackets and jerk-off jokes. I walked away from him and went into the commons to find her.
That was the last time I ever saw Ray Velker. I don’t have to wonder if he’s in any of my memories after that. If I’m imagining things. Sometime in those next few days, Ray disappeared.
I’ve spent months trying to unpick that memory, but even if they’d put me on the stand, I wouldn’t have been able to say for sure that was how the conversation went. How much those guys were hassling Ray. Whether he looked scared. I was too focused on myself at the time. Anyway, they never even questioned me. Not about that, anyway.
Last year they put televisions in the commons. The lockers are in these wells with benches in the middle. When we got back to school in September, every well had a TV on a rolling stand. Before Christmas, they started playing Video Concert Hall at lunchtime to prove how hip they were. I found Joan behind one of the televisions with her biology textbook and her five-subject notebook. I had to shout over “Video Killed the Radio Star” to get her attention, but I just thought it was the noise.
“Metal shop was okay. Thanks for asking.”
She looked up and brought her eyes into focus.
“We’re making bookends. Why are you behind the TV?”
“Anthony McNamara, bookend maker. It has a cool ring to it. This could be your vocation. Come on, there’s loads of wires back here. You’ll like it.”
I slid my back along the wall and sat down next to her behind the television cart.
“How was biology?”
“Boring. How’s Robbie?”
“He’s fine, Joan. Stop it.”
“I’m only asking.”
“When are we going to see your mother in the city? I went to all that trouble to get you the address.”
“You loved it. Riding around Long Island playing with pay phones is your nirvana.”
“I have to randomize so they can’t put my house at the center of a pattern.”
“Just put a colander on your head and get it over with. The FBI doesn’t care what you do. You’re paranoid.”
“Not true, Joan. So not true. The FBI are AT&T’s personal collection agency.”
“So, there’s a load of weirdos like you all over the country, using fake names and playing with the phone system?”
“Yes! If not for them, I never would have talked to Beatrice.”
“You’ve never even seen Beatrice, Daisy! What if she’s a dog?”
“Why are you being mean? We don’t want look at each other, we want to talk to each other.”
“Can’t you just stash some pornography under your bed and fail math like a normal guy?”
“I suck at normal. Which, by the way, so do you, Ms. Fish Guts. Now when are we going to see your mother?”
“What if I don’t want to? Did you even think of that, or am I just part of your phone game?”
“I was trying to help. We need to start doing things for ourselves. Nothing’s going to happen to us if we just sit here waiting for it.”
“Daisy, shit is happening to us. You’re just pretending it isn’t.”
“What shit?”
“Really? God, you’re just like my family!” I think she meant that as a criticism.
“Well, you’re nothing like mine.”
And then we were quiet for a while. There was a silence into which I could have said something. I could have told her about the angel dust, about being hassled in metal shop. That she wasn’t wrong about Robbie. Instead we sat underneath “Watching the Detectives” and said
nothing. We avoided each other’s eyes and looked up at all the cheerleaders gossiping by their lockers, at the art room kids moving through the commons in a scruffy bunch. In my memory I see Ray Velker walking with them, even though I know he wasn’t.
When I tell people here in Rockaway that I went to Highbone High School, they don’t know where I’m talking about. Then I say, “You know, Ray Velker?” and they go, “Oh!” or “Shit, man,” or something. Ray Velker is the thing that defines us now, but right then he was just part of the background noise.
Thinking back, I can almost feel the air in the commons that day, the things eddying around us. We were breathing in violence and desperation and other people’s hallucinations, but it was all invisible to us then. Like the fluoride in the water or the radiation from Brookhaven, the DDT and the Valium and the strontium 90. All the heavy atoms and alkaloid molecules that shape us and then break us apart.
Joan
IT WAS THE cheerleader who told me Ray Velker was missing, during lab. I remember the moment exactly.
“Nah,” I said. “Ray can only take so much school or his head explodes. I saw it once in eighth grade. It was messy.”
The cheerleader looked at me like she didn’t know black girls could do sarcasm. Or maybe there just wasn’t any room for sarcasm in between those Farrah Fawcett wings. I wished Charlie Ferguson was my lab partner, then I’d get to do all my labs alone.
“No really,” she said. “His parents called the police. My dad’s a social worker. He got called in. Ray’s missing, for real.”
Her name was Eileen, but it should have been Cindy. Or maybe Betty.
“He’ll show up. He probably drove to someplace like Robert Moses to get high and forgot to come back. You ready to dissect a cow’s eye? It’s next week.” I said it on purpose, to see her cringe.
I don’t know. She just pissed me off, with her tits and her blow-dry and her fake squeaky voice. Maybe she’s a perfectly nice person underneath all that, but she doesn’t occupy a perfectly nice place in the world. So what’s the difference? Last year, all the questions were like that. The ones science can’t answer.
How We Learned to Lie Page 9