by Julie Buntin
“Oh, boo-hoo. Nobody’s parents have sex. That’s not why they got divorced. They got divorced because they couldn’t stand each other and probably because one of them was screwing someone else.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
Something about the way I said it gave me away. Maybe it was that I couldn’t look at her. Or maybe it was that my voice cracked halfway through yeah.
She flipped around, going from sprawled on her stomach to sitting at the foot of the bed, her legs dangling.
“Wow. Are you like, screwed up about it?”
“It’s not that.” My eyes boiled and I needed to stop talking but I couldn’t. “I just want to go home.” A few tears followed my nose to my mouth. I was trying, at least. “The messed-up thing is that I don’t know what that even means.”
Marlena leaned forward and wiped the tears into my cheeks with her knuckles. “It’s okay. Go ahead, let it out.” She hugged me. I tilted into her like a plank of wood. She combed my hair with her fingers from scalp to ends, like my mom barely ever did anymore. Without thinking I softened against her shoulder, eventually turning my face into her neck and crying so hard I shook.
“Hey,” Marlena said. “I’m here.”
Mom knocked. I jumped out of my chair, whirling to face the door.
“Girls,” she said.
“Yeah,” we answered.
She stepped into the room, taking in my tense stance and still-puffy eyes, Marlena’s rooted posture.
“Marlena, sweetie, you’re welcome to stay the night,” Mom said. “Do you need to call anyone, or anything?”
“Oh no,” Marlena said. “It’s fine.”
“Okay.” Mom watched us for a second. “I’ll just go to bed, then.”
* * *
As soon as the strip of space underneath Mom’s door turned black, Marlena and I set up camp. She rooted through our cabinets, pulling out a can of refried beans and a cat-food-sized tin of chopped green chilies, which were definitely not something we ever ate and may very well have come with the house. She mixed the contents of the two cans into a paste she smeared across a cookie sheet, and then covered the brown, sloppy mess with a layer of American cheese, sliding it all into the not-preheated oven.
“Oops,” she said, and turned it on. “Anything to drink?” I opened the fridge and pulled out a gallon of whole milk, fake chugging it until we both died. Marlena laughed with her mouth wide open, an ugly laugh. She bent over, punching herself in the thigh, not a sound coming from her except a kind of wheeze. After we calmed down, Marlena scrutinized the pantry again. Boxes of Franzia Chablis, Mom’s nighttime drink for as long as I could remember, filled the bottom shelf. Marlena weaseled one from the very back. “Your mom really likes her fine whites. There are about a hundred of these.”
While Marlena filled two giant plastic cups with wine, I reorganized the Franzia boxes so that the missing one would be less noticeable. A greasy puddle of nerves collected in my stomach. It wasn’t exactly unpleasant. I felt hyper-alert, like I always did with Marlena, that eye-of-the-storm feeling. Mom had no reason not to trust me, and she bought a new box every time she went to the grocery store. When Meijer had sales, she’d buy four. My chances of getting caught were small. I imagined Mom waking up because we were banging around and finding us drunk; Mom noticing the missing wine after randomly organizing the pantry; Mom smelling the cooking food and springing awake, sure the house was on fire. But I had memories—Jimmy and I shaking Mom by the shoulders after she fell asleep on the couch at eleven p.m. on a Saturday, Jimmy and I getting into a screaming fight in the bathroom outside her bedroom door one of those nights before the divorce when Dad still wasn’t home. Sleeping Mom didn’t wake up until she was ready. I shifted the Franzia boxes to cover the gap. We wouldn’t get caught.
It took two trips to transport the wine box, our glasses, the bean dip, and a sleeve of saltines, a substitute for the tortilla chips we did not have, into the living room, where we polished off both the food—not as bad as I expected, especially once I’d finished my first glass—and enough wine to make us attempt headstands against the living room wall. After an unknown amount of time, I hit my head on the coffee table so hard that the next morning my temple sported a bump the size of a halved Ping-Pong ball. Marlena let out a stream of startled nonsense that sounded almost like French. I pulled myself into the computer chair, turning on the modem, and Marlena draped herself across the couch. When the screen flickered on, I learned that it was after one a.m.
I scooped the last of the bean dip onto a saltine and typed in my email login and password, hoping for something from Dad. Nothing. I opened a blank email, wishing I was sober enough to write him something about all the ways he’d failed, wishing I knew how to put words to the horrible cosmos inside me, to explain. Would it worry him to get an email from me this early in the morning?
“Pay attention to me,” Marlena demanded, thrusting one of her legs over the couch’s armrest until her feet knocked my elbow, jittering my hand across the keyboard.
“Okay, okay,” I said.
“If you were going to kill yourself,” Marlena asked, snapping a cracker between her teeth, “how would you do it?” One of her arms was crooked behind her head. The white tips of her fingers curled against her jaw.
“Drowning. Like what’s-her-name. The writer. Virginia Woolf. Pockets full of horseshoes, or something.”
“Drowning! That’s terrible. That’s gotta be the number one worst way to do it. It takes such a long-ass time.”
“No, it’s like freezing,” I swiveled in the chair, for emphasis. “At first it hurts and maybe you regret it, but only for a second. And then it gets peaceful, and you just want to go to sleep.”
“I think I’d use a gun,” Marlena said, staring at our whirring ceiling fan. “Or maybe I’d just get, really, really high. Pfft. Like a blaze of glory.” She kicked my chair, hard, over and over, so that I spun so fast I nearly tipped to the floor.
“You know who I hate,” I said, refreshing my email in-box. Still Dad-less.
“Let me guess.”
“He has a mustache now,” I said. “I hate him for that. And for Becky literally being twelve. Also the time he was an hour and ten minutes late picking me up from Sunday school. The fact that I have his fucking eyes. And his stupid dimple.”
“You know having a mustache doesn’t really count as a reason to hate someone, right? Actually, most of these things don’t really count. The reasons I hate my dad are like, because he spent all of our money and I had to ask the neighbors for food.”
“The mustache does count, it does. It’s sick. It’s a symbol,” I said, but I knew I’d been childish. And then, afraid that I’d monopolized the conversation, “What about you?” I assumed she’d start in on Bolt—as we grew closer, I expected she would explain the mystery of his presence. “Who is on your shit list?” She sat there for a second, sucking on an ice cube. “Who, Mar?”
“Mr. Ratner,” she said, spitting the ice into her wine cup. “My freshman year science teacher.”
“Not Bolt?”
“He’s harmless,” she said, but she was lying, and even drunk I knew it. “Mr. Ratner is in schools around girls all day, five days a week. That’s probably why he took the job in the first place.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Mr. Ratner,” she said. “Because he was nice to me. Because he made me feel like I was so special, like I was better than everyone else. At first it felt like winning something, and he knew it did, that no teacher ever really paid attention to me before, except when they were marking me down for missing a test or whatever. He’d like look at me from up in front of the room, like Hey you, and I really believed that it was about that. Like that I was good at science.” It could happen to any girl; maybe that’s why she liked telling it more than talking about Bolt. One day, when she was searching in the supply cabinet for a beaker, Mr. Ratner slid his hands into the back pockets of her jeans. She left, and got a D, and though she t
echnically deserved it for not going to class again that semester, we hated Mr. Ratner with a particular intensity.
It didn’t take long for her to switch from crimes to justice. She spent a long time describing the punishment Mr. Ratner deserved—the violent and creative dissection of his balls by a diving falcon, lured by the mouse tied against the shaft of his penis. Marlena was the best at justice; the crimes depressed her. She wanted to serve hard-boiled eggs whose yolks were replaced with tiny sacs of a stranger’s jizm to the men who had wronged her. We wanted them murdered, dismembered, stored in ice chests, and then accidentally eaten by their own brothers. But never, in all the months we went on those bored rants, embroidering the crimes done to us by most of the men we knew, did she get to Bolt. How much of her gruesome, ridiculous made-up violence was really meant for him?
“I don’t know,” Marlena said, after suggesting that Mr. Ratner simply be lowered, headfirst, into a vat of skin-eating acid. “None of these feel psychological enough.”
“You’re right. What he did to you was really more of a mind game. He’s like my dad. A master manipulator, my mom calls people like that.”
“What in the world,” said Jimmy. “It’s three in the morning.” He stood on the threshold of the living room, blue shadows from the TV projected onto his face.
“Hi,” Marlena said, sitting up. She brushed the crumbs off her chest and pulled down her shirt.
“How was work?” I asked.
“Work,” said Jimmy.
“Awesome. Can you leave?”
“What if I want to watch TV?”
I groaned. Marlena scooted over until she was wedged up against the side closest to me, leaving two entire couch cushions for Jimmy. Despite all that empty room, he sat down on the cushion right beside her, crossing his right leg so his ankle hooked over his knee and the arch of his foot and the curve of her thigh were separated by a whisper.
“Would you like to change the channel?” she asked him, holding out the remote. He took it carefully, as if they were passing something breakable. I don’t think they touched a single time—Marlena was cuddled against the armrest. But when we finally got up to go to bed, just at the moment that night tips over to morning, he said her name.
“Marlena,” he said. “Night.”
“You too,” she told him, lingering near the couch.
“You need a toothbrush or what?” I called, too loud for the hour, from the open bathroom door. Whatever else they said, if there was anything, I didn’t hear.
* * *
The only class Marlena went to with any consistency was choir, so most weekdays when I was skipping, after getting dropped off at school by the bus or Jimmy, I met her in the doghouse and from there we traveled our circuitous route around a square mile or so that included downtown, the Mapletree, the underworld at St. Patrick’s, and the breakwall with the lighthouse sitting fatly at its end, where we smoked cigarettes and pot and had once split a mysterious pill that Marlena found under the Ping-Pong table on top of which her family ate their meals. No amount of Internet searching, not even combined with Marlena’s vast knowledge of pills and their varieties and uses, brought us any closer to identifying the small white circle, about the size of a pencil eraser and unstamped. We ate it at eleven in the morning; forty-five minutes later we determined that it was Ecstasy. We spent the rest of the day camped out in the warrens of St. Patrick’s, tracing our arm veins with a thread Marlena pulled from her hat and arguing about heaven. Marlena believed, I did not—that is, until the Ecstasy started shrieking through my bloodstream, setting off fireworks in my fingertips. I decided wasn’t heaven really a concept, a state of mind, and shouldn’t we aspire to have it here, now, instead of in the unreliable future, the future where we were just as likely to be worms as celestial beings, which could be its own kind of heaven, if you really, really thought about it, and so on, for hours. When we were coming down, both of us flat on our backs, our heads tipped toward each other so that they touched, I asked her what sex feels like. “Sometimes it feels like an itch deep inside of you, like in your belly,” said Marlena. “Sometimes it fucking hurts. I’ve had it where it feels like nothing at all. It’s just sex, Cat. It feels like sex. If I had to score it, like, the Olympics, I’d give it a three point five. A four.”
On the days she didn’t skip entirely, I waited for her in the library or the bookstore, biding my time until choir or trig, her unlikely second favorite class, was over. I never connected my truancy with what Dad had done for months, when he pretended to go to work and instead did whatever he did—Becky, certainly, but probably also hours’ and hours’ worth of dumb, time-killing things, the same things I found myself doing. Staring out café windows, tracing the same ten blocks. It was a small town; the only reason I didn’t get caught is nobody knew whose kid I was.
On those long, class-less days, Kewaunee was both our prison and something like an amusement park—any minute could crack open into an adventure, because weren’t we too big and gorgeous and wild for this tiny town, two girls who thought they could only be seen if they allowed it, creeping around J. C. Penney, walking out with six layers of lingerie under our clothes, sneaking into the pub and snaking a coat hanger into the cigarette machine until we dislodged one or twenty packs of Parliaments, unleashing tied-up dogs, coaxing forty-year-old Fred Dixon who lived in an apartment above the Laundromat to drink the yellow water from the bottom of his bong until he threw up out the window and we scrambled down his fire escape screaming with laughter, ordering elaborate coffee drinks in a German accent, cutting each other’s hair in the bathroom of the Mapletree bar and then feigning ignorance when Ryder’s mom demanded we account for the mess, tying stolen thongs around the park benches in the town’s center, singing slowed-down versions of radio songs on the street corner for the four people who walked by, feasting on day-old croissants from the trash can outside the French bakery where they refused to serve us, tattooing the names of our enemies on the walls of every public restroom we could find our way into, driving Ryder and Greg crazy by speaking only in Pig Latin or not at all, with just our eyes and hands, communicating via signals only we understood? We were soooooo bored, hideously, tragically bored. Didn’t we deserve better? Weren’t we the most special thing this place had ever seen?
Nostalgia is no longer considered a sickness, not technically, but it was once—the seventeenth-century Swiss physician Johannes Hofer gave the affliction its name, from the Greek words nostos (home, or even, return home) and algos (pain). A disease, responsible for suicides, the appearance of ghosts, the arrival of disembodied voices. Driving its sufferers manic with longing. Acute melancholy, but specific to an object or place. The diagnosed cases turned up in certain seasons—autumn, commonly—and in the presence of certain songs. “River.” “Landslide.” “California.” “Country Roads.” A-C-G chord progressions. Better to sing. Nostos algos. I want to go home—a phrase that’s stuck on a loop, that I hear before falling asleep, waiting in line for my coffee, tapping the elevator button and rising through the sky to my apartment, worrying the words like a lucky stone, and yet my desire is not attached to a particular place—not to Silver Lake, not to Marlena, not to Mom or Dad or Jimmy. I want to go home, I want to go home, but what I mean, what I’m grasping for, is not a place, it’s a feeling. I want to go back. But back where? Maybe to the first time I heard Stevie Nicks, to watching the snow fall outside the window with a paperback folded open in my lap, to the moment before I tasted alcohol, to virginity and not really knowing that things die, back to believing that something great is still up ahead, back to before I made the choices that would hem me in to the life I live now. A life that I regret sometimes, I think, only because it’s mine, because it’s turned out this way and not some other way, because I can’t go back and change what will happen. What happened to her.
Nostos algos—home pain, the pain at the utter core of me.
So, very quickly, as you can see, in no more than a matter of weeks, she was m
y best friend. I was the first person, she told me, whose brain moved as quickly as hers, who got the weird things she said, her jokes, her vile, made-up swears, and could sharpen them with my own. A best friend is a magic thing, like finding a stump full of water that will make you live forever, or wandering into a field overrun by unicorns, or standing in a wardrobe one minute and a snowy forest the next. I wasn’t about to take it for granted, with its strange coincidences and the passionate promises—spoken and unspoken—required for its upkeep. Day by day I made sacrifices, though they didn’t feel like sacrifices at the time, redefining myself according to who she was, until we became the perfect team—her impulsive and brave; me calculating and watchful; her dangerous, me trustworthy; her pretty, me sweet; her high, me drunk; and so on, et cetera. I asked the cashier for directions while she stole rings, hardcover books, a pair of men’s shoes; and then, after the shift change, I returned it all for cash. I drank lattes because mochas were her favorite. She sang the melody, I provided backup. Her blond and rail-thin, me brunette and almost chubby. Us two, one perfect girl.
Sometimes I was afraid—when I noticed a camera spying from the boutique ceiling, when the cop car circled the park while we hid inside the gazebo, the pot in Marlena’s pockets so dank I was sure that the police knew even with their windows up. When she met Bolt at the marina and told me to take a walk, come back in thirty minutes, an hour, and especially when I crept back early and saw her straddling his lap, her entire face a big, fake smile, how she’d be quiet for the rest of the day, curled up into herself, fingering the new baggie of pills in her pocket, gone no matter how I tried to get her to come back. Half the time, when Bolt came up, her entire body shut down, a computer going to sleep; a few hours later, she’d swat his name out of conversation like it was no more than an insect. Now I think she really just couldn’t decide. Bolt was one thing when she felt in control; when she used him to get her pills, how he’d do anything she said in return for favors, a kiss here and there, more sometimes, mostly when she was so high it didn’t feel real. But alone, or with me, I think when she thought about Bolt she was scared out of her mind, and—worse than that, for Marlena, a girl who knew how to live with fear—humiliated. That’s why I think she couldn’t tell me. She didn’t want me to think less of her, and somewhere along the way, one of the things I screwed up the most, was giving her the impression that if I knew, I would.