by Kit Frick
“KM-what?”
“German industrial rock—probably not your thing. But it’s awesome to cook to.” He gestured toward my plate of spring rolls. “Have a seat, birthday girl.”
His lips on my forehead. His eyelashes against my cheek.
“But you’re still working.” I glanced down at the little plates. “Besides, it’s not like they’re going to get cold.”
“No, seriously. Your birthday meal will be served in a series of small courses. A tasting portion of every salad and cold app on the menu, prepared especially for Ellory Holland, on the first day of her seventeenth year. May it be filled with good food, good music, and good company.”
“I think we’re off to a very good start.” I picked up a spring roll and popped it in my mouth.
“Which reminds me, we should have a proper toast.” He disappeared into the back of the walk-in, and my phone chirped, ki-ka-ri. I swiped it on, and the screen filled up with a series of texts.
RET JOHNSTON
Hey birthday lady.
BEX LANDRY
We’re over at Jenni’s drinking wine coolers in your honor.
JENNI RANDALL
Not that you like wine coolers.
BEX LANDRY
It’s all we could find in Jenni’s basement.
ELLORY HOLLAND
Don’t have too much fun without me!
RET JOHNSTON
Jinx.
A second later, my Insta dinged, and I opened the app. Ret had posted a picture of the three of them huddled together in Jenni’s living room, holding up a sign: GIRLS’ NIGHT IN ON ELLORY’S BIG NIGHT OUT. HAVE FUN & HAPPY SEVENTEEN!
Matthias emerged from the walk-in with a bottle of Prosecco and two champagne flutes before I could fully dissect the subtext of Ret’s post. I’d spent all weekend with her—Saturday at her house and Sunday birthday brunch with the girls. But the night itself had gone to Matthias, and Ret wanted me to know that she loved me, but she noticed.
I fixed a smile on my lips and turned to my boyfriend. “Where’d this come from?”
“Ricky, where else? He’s a beer and whiskey guy, this must have been a gift. He’ll never miss it.”
I stared down at the table. Suddenly everything was a little off. Ret was being passive-aggressive, and I was having flashbacks to the beer Matthias had brought to Jenni’s party.
“What’s wrong?”
I shook my head, shaking it off. Maybe I was reading too much into Ret’s post. And was I seriously upset that my boyfriend had brought me champagne? Live a little, Bonnie Parker.
“Let’s celebrate,” I said, grinning until I felt as excited as I looked.
He grabbed a dish towel and popped the cork with a loud hiss. “To my beautiful girlfriend on her birthday.”
The spicy plum sauce was cool and hot at the same time, and the little bubbles in the Prosecco burst brightly against my tongue and lips. I refused to worry, and then I forgot that there was anything to worry about. I was happy. I was exactly, precisely happy.
I wanted to remember that moment. Capture it. It felt so secret and perfect to be there, in the center of Matthias’s special light. I closed my eyes and recorded the night in a series of movie stills across the back of my eyelids:
Me, grinning.
Me, with plum sauce on the corner of my mouth, still grinning.
My arms in the air, head tilted back, singing “Little Red Corvette.”
A stack of empty white plates.
Pale yellow bubbles bursting against my lips.
His lips against the mouth of the glass. His lips against my lips.
Matthias wouldn’t let me help with the cleanup either. I gave up protesting. I sat in the kitchen, stuffed on appetizers and a little tipsy, watching him move between the counter, the walk-in, and the sink. Swift, precise, confident. Sexy. He locked up and we emerged onto Second Street. I’d promised my parents I’d be home in time to open presents, but it was still early.
“Want to walk down by the water?” I asked.
“Okay if I make a quick stop first? I just have to duck into Sally’s.” He jutted his chin toward a formerly white sign across the street that read SALLY’S PUB.
“Sure, no problem.” I took his hand and started to walk toward the street.
“This is going to sound kind of weird, but would you mind waiting here for me?”
I stopped. “Oh. Okay.” So he was embarrassed to bring me inside. I dropped his hand and wrapped my arms around my waist.
“It’s just, it’s twenty-one plus, and I didn’t tell them I was bringing anyone. They know me, but I . . . it could be awkward.”
“Sure, I get it,” I said quickly. That sounded totally reasonable. I felt like an outsider in his world.
I waited for Matthias for five minutes that became ten. I leaned against a parked car and stared across the street at the flickering pub sign. Nothing. I checked my phone. Nothing. What had he said he was doing inside? Getting tickets for a show?
He hadn’t said. Was he meeting someone? Another girl? Should I text him? I shouldn’t text him. I shivered, even though the night air was muggy and warm against my skin. I waited.
Finally, Matthias emerged and ran across the street. “So, so, so sorry.” His lips moved light and quick across my cheekbones, my lips, my hair. It felt like I was being covered by a kaleidoscope of butterflies. “Those bastards made me wait.” He kissed me again, a hundred times, and soon I was laughing, and we were both laughing, and he was pulling me down the sidewalk toward the river.
* * *
The lights of the capitol building sparkled out across the water, and the ground was hot beneath the streetlamps. His hand in my hand, my feet on the pavement. Solid, real, good. The dogwood trees. The white stone law offices. Two ducks out for a night swim, chasing each other, wings flapping. Familiar, real, ours. What had he been doing for so long at that bar? He didn’t tell me. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the late July air that refused to cool, not ever, not even at night. The slight mist lifting off the water, settling on our skin. The sense that tonight would go on into tomorrow, and everything would still feel new and special and wonderful. That all the tomorrows were ours for the taking.
We paused at the top of a set of stone stairs that would take us down to the water’s edge, deeper into the night. Matthias pressed his lips into my hair, his breath warm against my ear.
“Forgive me?”
“For what?” I asked, and I meant it.
“I love you, Ellory.”
His voice was low, catching just slightly on the night air like a door on a rusty hinge, then swinging wide open, inviting me through.
I didn’t hesitate. I stepped inside those three words, and I didn’t look back.
8
OCTOBER, SENIOR YEAR
(NOW)
Two more weeks go by until I get up the nerve to go find her. Or before I cave, depending on how you look at it. I see Abigail twice more in that time—again at my locker, one day after school. Then hanging around outside the metal shop, just before lunch. I avoid her.
The notes don’t stop either. Now there are three—one for each week since they started. Always folded into neat triangles, always at the bottom of my locker. The words rise off the page, float in front of my eyes, then sink into a meaningless puzzle. I’m afraid. Paralyzed by indecision. I take them home, keep them in a shoe box at the back of my closet. I wanted to tell you. I wanted.
But I don’t go down to the river because of Abigail, or the notes. I go because therapy stopped working.
It’s not Dr. Marsha’s fault. At first, I lived for our sessions. It was part of the arrangement when I left Pine Brook last April. Mom took a work hiatus to supervise my at-home lessons for the remaining weeks of the spring semester. I went to yoga on Fridays. I saw Dr. Marsha three times a week that eventually became one by the fall. I only had to go back to school for finals, and they let me take those in an empty classroom, away from all the other students.
Let me or made me. It’s all a matter of perspective.
When Principal Keegan determined I wasn’t a good candidate for Pine Brook’s “Restorative Justice Teen Up” program, finishing out the rest of my junior year at home was the only other option aside from transferring, which I refused to do. I didn’t need restoration, or justice. And I wasn’t a runner. I just needed time to heal. Principal Keegan called it long-term suspension. My parents agreed on the terms that it wasn’t expulsion, that I’d be allowed to return to Pine Brook for my senior year, and that it would appear on my transcript as a medical leave of absence.
For four months, I clung to therapy like a lifeline. Dr. Marsha was the only person I could really talk to, the only one who never judged, never tried to scrub me clean with pitying looks. When I left for art camp in Philadelphia, we continued our sessions over Skype. I wasn’t magically cured, but I was managing the cocktail of emotions she called “an experiential sense of loss.” I was coping.
Then I returned to Pine Brook. Then Ret sat across from me in AP English like everything was totally normal. Then I knew that everything I thought I’d worked through in therapy was a giant, glaring lie. Hi, my name is Ellory. I’ve been lying to myself.
I go to the river because it’s time to face her. It’s time to face myself.
When I finish in the shop after school, I drop my stuff off at home and tell my mom I’m going to the mall with Bex. She’s thrilled, cooing about how happy she is to see Bex and me making plans again. I get in the car before I can feel bad about lying to her too. I can walk to the river from our house, but I need the car to keep up my mall ruse. I park on a side street right around the corner and walk the rest of the way. It’s unusually warm for early October; the capital is in the middle of an autumn heat wave. The beads of sweat that break out across my skin feel feverish, sticky. I think about turning back and actually driving to the mall.
When I get to the river, I take three deep breaths, in through my nose and out through my mouth. I can feel my insides crackle as I slip through the break in the guardrail. Crack, crack, pop.
At first I think she’s not here. I scramble down the hill to the base of the bank, but there’s no one. “Ret?” I say softly.
I look first to my right, but the strip of grass and dirt is empty save for the occasional soda can and dirty T-shirt. Farther down, the stretch of ground that runs beneath the bridge is heavily spackled with debris. Ret’s nowhere in sight, and I can’t imagine her hanging out with the beer bottles and dirty diapers, so I start walking in the opposite direction. As the bank extends away from the bridge, the grass gets taller and the shore more uneven. I lose my footing on a patch of wet rocks, and my hands slam into the ground. A thin red line appears on one palm where a rock bit into me, and I bring the skin to my mouth.
“Ellory?”
I press through a rough tangle of weeds, and there she is, tucked back into a hollow in the bank, earbuds in, cracked copy of Jesus’ Son in her hands.
“I thought you’d never come.” She pops the earbuds out.
I sink down next to her, and she takes my bleeding hand in both of hers like a concerned nursemaid.
“You cut yourself.”
I jerk my hand away, and her lips twitch down.
“I’m fine.” It’s the first thing I’ve said to her since the day she pulled me aside after English class, over a month ago. It’s a complete and utter lie.
For a moment, we sit side by side on the bank, letting the river sounds fill the silence between us. But silence sucks, and soon we’re passing a bottle of amaretto back and forth.
“Better than a Band-Aid,” Ret says. My hand throbs in response. I lift the bottle to my nose and inhale. The liqueur smells syrupy sweet, like toasted almonds and maraschino cherries. The scent reminds me of my mom; she likes to pour a tablespoon into her evening coffee on winter Sundays, one of her few little luxuries. I take another long gulp; I don’t want to think about my mom.
Ret raises her eyebrows and takes the bottle back again.
“Didn’t peg you for an amaretto drinker,” I say, because it’s better than more silence.
“Ever since Veronica joined AA, I’ve been working through the liquor cabinet. I’ll drink whatever.” She tilts the bottle back and takes a drink, then passes it back to me.
Now it’s my turn to raise my eyebrows. “Your mother is an alcoholic?”
It clicks then that I’ve seen Veronica a few evenings this fall, coming out of the United Methodist next to Wegmans. The older brother of my childhood best friend—the one who’d moved to Georgia before the start of ninth grade—had attended meetings there. The thought that Veronica was there for the same reason has been hovering at the back of my mind for weeks, and now the pieces fall into place.
Ret shakes her head. “Not exactly. It’s the third group she’s tried since April. She hates them all. It’s hard to find the perfect support group for her niche brand of parental remorse. But she likes AA the best. Everyone’s pretty fucked up.”
I nod and take another drink. Aside from the United Methodist sightings, I’ve seen Veronica only one other time this year, at the gas station by the mall. She was sitting in the passenger’s seat, burrowed deep into an overcoat despite the late summer heat, while a man in his forties stood outside her car and filled up the tank. I slouched down in the Subaru’s driver’s seat and watched, making sure they couldn’t see me. Ret’s dad split years before we became friends, but I knew it was him. This man had Ret’s lapis eyes, her pale skin. I barely breathed until they finished and drove off.
“I heard your dad was in town,” I say, attributing my sighting to the Pine Brook rumor mill. “Did he move back in?”
Ret’s face clouds over, and she leans into the bank. She clearly doesn’t want to talk about it, and I decide to let it go. Her business.
“What were you listening to?” I ask, changing the subject. I want to ask what she does this year when she’s not here, drinking alone. I want to ask if she ever brings Jenni, or Bex. But a part of me already knows that she doesn’t. There’s no cosmos, not anymore. We’re all scattered, spinning off into space.
“Oh.” Ret brightens up, and I slip one of her earbuds into my ear. “Listen.”
I recognize the music immediately. It’s the third track on Adios, KMFDM’s studio album immediately following Symbols. Old Ellory spent too much time listening to their entire catalogue the summer before last, trying to impress Matthias, or Ret, or both.
“You know this was their breakup album,” I tell her.
Ret closes her eyes and doesn’t speak for a minute. “They got back together,” she says.
I slip the earbud out and hand it back.
“You don’t want to listen? I thought you were so into them.”
“Things change.”
She turns off the music and slips her phone into her bag. I take another drink, and by now I’m feeling warm and relaxed inside, like soft cashmere sweaters and mugs of hot cocoa. Now I’m ready to really talk.
“I didn’t come here to rehash the past,” I say.
“No?” Ret straightens up, tilts her chin toward me. “Why did you come here, Ellory May?”
Because you invited me. Because I couldn’t stay away. Because I still hate you. Because you destroyed everything. Because I still love you. Because I still hate myself. Because I’m dying without you.
“Because I need you to promise me something,” I finally say. I glance down at her wrist, bare and pale where the black band still hugs mine. “You can’t talk to me in school,” I tell her. “No more chats after English. If you see me in the halls, you ignore me.”
“You don’t want to be seen with me.” Ret’s voice radiates hurt.
I force myself to look her right in the eyes. “You know what would happen.”
“I need you, Ellory,” she says. This time I let her take my hand, hold it tight. “Now more than ever.”
She’s manipulating me, but she’s also right. She does n
eed me. “We keep things private,” I say.
“You, me, and the river,” Ret agrees.
“And no more KMFDM. No wallowing in the past.”
“I’ll drink to that.” Ret holds the bottle to the sky, then tilts it back, taking a long swallow. She hands it to me, and I take another drink.
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—”
“I took the one to the river,” Ret says. Then she hits me right back. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—”
“I took the one back to you.” I say it because it’s the only thing that’s felt truly honest in a while. I say it because it’s what she needs to hear. And even now, a part of me needs to make her happy.
Then I push myself up to my feet. The world rushes up at me, and I stumble, catching myself against the side of the bank. “I have to get home.”
She nods but doesn’t make a move to stand up. “Come back any time. You’re always welcome.”
I walk along the bank to where I can see the break in the guardrail, then scramble up the hill to the road. Good thing I walked here, left the car around the corner from the house. I wrap my arms around my waist and walk quickly, trying to sober up. I need to pee. I need to think. Dr. Marsha would not be pleased to hear about my afternoon activities: drinking, hanging out with Ret. Dr. Marsha thinks okay-ness is a destination, that all I need to do is keep walking in a straight line.
I know she cares. But she’s still full of shit.
I keep walking and think about our next session. I should tell her everything, but at least for now, I want Ret for myself. I’m not ready to share her with Dr. Marsha or anyone else. I slip in through the back door and announce that I need to take a shower before dinner, that some kid spilled soda on me at the mall. I’ll go back out and move the car into the driveway later; hopefully my parents won’t notice I’m back, but it’s still gone.
I step into the shower and let the hot water cascade down around me. I can see Dr. Marsha’s approving face as I tell her about my college applications, how I’m getting straight As, how my healthy, drama-free fall is going so well. Her smile is a kind trick; it says that there is forgiveness in the world and sunshine and moving on. It says I can have these things if I want them. After today, I’m not sure I want them.