by Julie Buntin
I never said no, or stopped, or pushed her to tell me what was really going on, or even thought twice about going back to school, especially once I realized that no one was ever going to notice whether I went or not. Those days were so big and electric that they swallowed the future and the past. I’d look at her out of the corner of my eye, a half step ahead of me, her cheeks red, the laughing curve of her mouth, and know. If I gave Marlena up, I’d be leaving something important with her forever, something of mine that I’d never get back.
I believed that then, and look how it’s turned out to be true.
New York
My third martini was gone, and the lounge was full. Happy-hour drinkers. I’d had a small lunch. A banana. A cup of vegetable soup. I did order another drink, when the waiter came around. The check at the same time; if I paid, it’d be harder to say yes to another. The martini didn’t taste like anything anymore.
I finished it and most of the bowl of nuts that had appeared, at some point, while I’d been sitting there. My couch was still empty, though all the others were packed. A group of twenty-something women had descended, sitting on every available surface except for the one I’d claimed. Maybe they were trying to be polite. Or they thought I was waiting for someone. They wore their hair long and loose, and most of them had on jeans, hip-length button-downs, expensive silk T-shirts. I was close enough to hear them. I’m sorry, but, the tallest one said whenever she started to speak. The one slumped against the armrest was pissed at her husband, and told everyone why twice, three times, adding a detail to each version. One kept waving the waitress down, outpacing the others; another had nursed the same half-full glass of white since they arrived. Its steady, unchanging level made me anxious. The thin one picked up the triangle of white cheese with her fingers; her right-side neighbor speared the translucent slice of green apple with the tine of her fork. They touched their phones a lot. “Crap,” the prettiest one said to her glass, glancing up at the others after the conversation moved on, asking with her eyes for something she couldn’t say.
“It’s like she’s literally possessed,” said one woman to another, about some pregnant acquaintance, and I laughed so loud, staring right at them, that all of a sudden they became fully aware of me. They exchanged little horrified smiles.
“It’s true, though,” I said, but the words came out wrong. One of them tittered—a kindness. I verified that I’d signed the shocking check and written in a tip, and then put on my coat.
When I hope to become friends with a woman, we usually meet, early on, at bars. Dim places with complicated wine lists and small plates for sharing. We order elegant, expensive things, adjusting our choices to each other. The pretty circle of tuna, the way the raw gems tumble onto the plate when you tap the shape with your knife. The dense wedges of focaccia, rosemary threaded into the dough. Like sex and cooking and watching bad television, like eating, like existing in the world after twilight, talking has become difficult for me without a drink. After a little while, an hour, less if it isn’t going to work, I begin to notice the way she interrupts and charges forward with her story or asks me question after question. How she requests a second drink—when I do, which is usually before hers is done, or when she’s ready, or not at all. How she eats, carefully moving a portion to her own plate, napkin unfurled on her lap, or if she’s comfortable right away, using her fingers. If she picks. The quality of her listening. Her tone when she mentions her partner, the last person she fucked. Whether she cares what I think. Any and all tics, hand talkers, fidgeters, lip biters, eye contact avoiders, the woman I instantly adored who got too close when she was trying to make a point, who would put a hand emphatically on whatever part of me she could reach and try to touch me into understanding. I notice, and I begin to see the outline of the best friend, the girl she shaped herself around, according to. For so many women, the process of becoming requires two. It’s not hard to make out the marks the other one left.
Outside, I stood unsteadily near the entrance. The streetlight released its soupy glow. The entire world was a circle, shrinking, with me at the center. Its radius was short. I pulled out my phone, held it in my hand as I walked across the street and into Washington Square Park, where I sat on the lip of the fountain.
Sal answered on the second ring. Hello? he said. A question. I had to concentrate to keep my consonants from melting into vowels. It’s you, I said. I was drunk enough that it was no problem to pretend us talking on the phone was normal. He didn’t sound as old as he had on the voicemail. I almost said so. I experienced our conversation as if watching myself from an intimate distance. Saying, easily, of course I remember you, I’m so glad you called, tomorrow, sure, is six okay, sounds perfect, I look forward to it, see you then. And then, a little wobble in my voice, It will be good to talk about her, with someone who knew. I leaned into the silence coming out of the phone, the word yeah, when it finally came, after a solid pause. Yeah.
I hung up and texted Sal the address of the bar where we would meet the following evening, a place near work where you could also get coffee and tea. Why did he sound reluctant? This was just the sort of thing she would have liked. The two of us, after so many years, the drama of it, this further proof of her enduring appeal.
The park was full of people. Three beautiful girls, nineteen or twenty or so, clicked by in heels, their hair bobbed and shiny; I watched them magnetize the particles in the air, so that they drew the attention of everyone they passed. After a while, I got up to leave, but nobody looked at me.
Michigan
Five years after my short-lived days as a high school dropout, in a college English course, I learned Aristotle’s rule for story endings. I saw myself, jeans split at the knees, sitting beside my mother in Principal Lacey’s office, gnawing a Bic pen. So maddeningly young. How had I tricked myself into thinking that the murderer chasing us from the opening paragraph wouldn’t wind up killing someone in the end? Despite the fact that all along I knew. Surprising and inevitable—does anything better describe the feeling of getting found out in a lie?
The day I got caught in that one, Mom consulted my schedule, which was stuck to the fridge, and timed her day so that she’d be hungry exactly as I left World History and headed to Lunch Hour A. On the drive into town she picked up a five-dollar pizza from Spicy Bob’s, the takeout window inside the Shell station. She had no game plan, and wandered the perimeter of the cafeteria three times, pizza box in hand, before texting: At school with SPICY BOB’S, come out come out wherever you are! After a few minutes she popped into the main office to ask if they could call for me over the intercom. And so began what I imagine was a stand-up routine of miscommunication, with Mom insisting that I’d been coming to school since the start of the semester, and Mrs. Tenley (the attendance officer) insisting even harder that I’d never appeared at all and that my absence had led her to assume we hadn’t completed our relocation.
The second I got Mom’s text I’d asked Ryder to drop me off downtown, saying only that I needed to meet someone. I walked the remaining half mile or so to school with the straight-backed resolve of the wrongly accused.
“I told you she’d show,” Mom said. Her confidence wilted as Mrs. Tenley dragged us into Principal Lacey’s office, where we waited in fidgety silence for a procession of concerned adults to refill their coffee cups and arrange a sickle moon of chairs. Principal Lacey’s purple razor-burn bristled across his cheeks. In addition to him and Mrs. Tenley, we had to explain ourselves to a beaky, note-taking woman (“Oh, gosh, just call me Cher,” she said, during introductions) who was either a psychologist or a social worker.
“I went to the library, I don’t know. I walked around. You can ask the librarian,” I said, wondering if she’d remember the two hours I’d spent there, when Mrs. Tenley asked me to account for the six weeks I’d missed.
“But why?” asked Mom.
* * *
Earlier that day, I’d met Marlena and Ryder at the bus stop. I’d picked my outfit with s
pecial care, knowing that I was going to see Ryder first thing. My jeans flapped open-mouthed over the knees, and my shirt was a plaid button-down of Jimmy’s from years ago, too big but not huge, a safety pin hinging it closed at the intersection with my black push-up bra. A few buttons had long ago fallen off; I’d replaced each of them with a safety, having noticed that Marlena often DIY’d her clothes with staples or pins, preferring those quick fixes to sewing. The bus was inching like a caterpillar over the white hill into Silver Lake when Ryder drove up in his van.
Marlena opened the glove compartment and pulled out a jar of peanut butter that she tossed at me. Her peach-colored cotton dress flared at the waist. Underneath, she wore a pair of jeans. No staples or safety pins in sight.
“Be careful with that,” Ryder said, staring at the bus in the rearview. Marlena and Ryder had been on a break, as she called it, for a couple weeks. One day they were cold and pissy with each other, the next so flirty they shut everyone else out. Today, they were in between.
“Money, money, money,” said Marlena.
“My money,” Ryder corrected.
The jar weighed nothing. I opened it. All the peanut butter from its past life had been cleaned out, though a faint nutty smell remained. The inside was painted a muddy color, so that a first glance might trick you into thinking it contained peanut butter still; albeit a rotten, overly dark variation. At the bottom, a couple of plastic baggies, each big enough to hold a child’s retainer. I pulled one out, holding it by the seal up to the van’s salt-smeared window. The purplish crystals looked like rock candy without a stick. Fun, almost, though I knew better.
“Barney Blast,” said Marlena.
“It’s meth, right?” I realized I’d never said meth out loud. Marlena and I always danced around the word. “Why is it purple?”
“Meth?” said Ryder, mimicking me. Perhaps I’d called it the wrong thing. They said ice, or crystal, or even, jokingly, redneck cocaine, but I would sound even lamer calling it something like that. “Yes. It’s meth. A few drops of food coloring, that’s it. It’s all about the marketing. Doesn’t fuck you up different, but I can make people think it does, just because of how it looks.”
“Also he charges more,” said Marlena. “Because even though it’s absolute shit it’s very cute.”
“Now I know all your secrets.” They trusted me enough to let me come along—I felt grateful almost, honored. I would have done anything they asked.
“I’m terrified,” said Ryder. “You do realize you’re basically an accomplice, right?”
“Aw, she’d never tell,” said Marlena, swiveling around in her seat to give me her Ryder-is-an-idiot look—eyes cast up into her lashes, mouth a frown. “Peaches is a vault.”
“Barney?” I asked. Accomplice?
“I love you, you love me,” Ryder sang. He had a good voice, too. “Big purple Chester the Molester? Greg thinks people feel safer buying something named after a childhood memory. I think people buy drugs because they’re drugs, but the best leaders loosen their chokehold every now and again, to give their serfs the illusion of control. So Barney it is.”
“Does Greg know you refer to him as a serf?” I said.
“No,” Marlena said. “Because Lord Ryder only has the balls to say such things around us meek wittle girls.” Ryder laughed and ruffled her hair with one hand, continuing to steer with the other. I could never tell when teasing was going to make him angry or amused; I’d seen him furious over far less. Marlena didn’t seem to care either way.
I dropped the baggie back into the peanut butter jar, twisted the lid until I couldn’t tighten it anymore, and handed it to Marlena. She deposited it into the glove compartment. My fingers felt funny after. I rubbed the tips together, trying to determine if any dust or residue was left on my skin. Accomplice was a pretty word.
We drove through downtown, Ryder and Marlena singing along to some dumb old country song about barbecue stains. Every time Marlena flopped on my bed and confessed their break’s latest slip-up—we made out again, she’d sigh, but it didn’t mean anything—I felt a glimmer of jealousy. An idea had slipped into my head, in the weeks of their cooling. If Marlena wasn’t with Ryder, that meant he might begin to like someone else. The thought was sticky, and it expanded whenever he paid me any particular attention. Like now—how he pitched his voice under hers. How when she told him to change the song, he waited for me to agree before saying yes.
We turned into a cul-de-sac just a few miles from downtown Kewaunee, where mansions like the ones I cleaned with Mom made a neat ring around a circular drive. Marlena and I waited in the van while Ryder jumped out and banged on the door. At seventeen, Ryder probably weighed no more than a hundred and forty pounds. Standing straight, he wasn’t much taller than Marlena. Without a shirt, he was all sinewy, activated muscles, part animal and part boy. Marlena’s body, my body, our bellies rippled into accordion-folds when we sat, and the very difference between our two sets of breasts—hers small and broad, nipples like a Hershey’s kiss, mine bigger, sillier—seemed almost careless, as if God or whoever hadn’t bothered to come up with a blueprint for a woman’s body. When you looked at Ryder, you didn’t picture how else he could look. When I looked at myself, I saw a million different possibilities. A little less weight there, my breasts lifted just so, tanner skin, a different haircut, with pubic hair, without. Which one was the best? Which one would he like the most?
He banged on the door again, his palm flat.
“I hate when they don’t answer,” Marlena said. “I always think it means they called the cops.”
Ryder pulled his phone from his pocket and brought it to his ear. His hair was tongued into a coppery cowlick above his neck, and when he stood in profile you could just make out the faint tear of the birthmark etched against his cheekbone. From a distance, that mark gave him a tint of sadness that morphed, as he grew closer, into something else, something wild, like he was a pot of water seconds away from boiling over. He banged again.
The door opened a sliver. Ryder’s mouth moved and the door opened all the way. Two guys about Jimmy’s age stood in the open space. They both wore Polos, collars popped, a stupid, shit-eating grin on the face of the one who traded Ryder the peanut butter jar for a wad of cash.
“Richie Riches,” said Marlena.
After the guys disappeared back into their palace, Ryder stood there counting the money. He folded it up and tucked it into his pocket before returning to the van. The entire transaction took no more than a couple of minutes. Even rich boys, college kids, bought meth. I’d already lost any sense that it was something to be afraid of—that these guys did it too, in their big house, made it seem even more everyday.
That, of course, was another mistake.
We picked up Greg (standing outside the 7-Eleven, hands in his pockets, face a shriek of red), who blew into the backseat beside me in a whirlwind of chilly smoke, and went into Taco Bell. At the counter, Ryder ordered a party pack of twenty-five tacos (I’d only seen one of those in action once before, when a parent brought them to a Concord soccer game) and four extra-large pops. He paid with a fifty-dollar bill. I was starving, but allowed myself a single taco—I didn’t want Ryder and Greg to see me pigging out. The adrenaline rush from the morning was making me giddy; I spat Mountain Dew through a straw in Marlena’s direction.
“You slut!” she screamed, dousing my taco with hot sauce.
The cashier came over and told us our two options were to “zip it or go act like fuckwads somewhere else.”
* * *
“How anxious would you say you feel in social situations?” said Cher, resting her elbows on her knees like we were BFFs trading secrets. Her bangs drifted into her eyes. “Do you feel, do you think, with all the changes in your home life, depressed? Like nobody’s paying any attention to what you want and need? To how you, Catherine, feel?”
“I made a bad decision,” I said. The taste of ink, from the pen I’d chewed, spread bitterly across the roof of m
y mouth.
“She really has never done anything like this before,” Mom said. “I’m just so surprised. This isn’t Cathy. This isn’t how she is.”
Cher tossed her head, a kind of silent whinny, and looked at Mom like, You would say so, wouldn’t you.
“It is important,” Mrs. Tenley said, spitting out each word like a pit. “For you to let her talk for herself.”
It was almost refreshing to see myself as she did: a screw-up, a troubled girl, instead of the ass-kissing perfectionist I’d been my entire life. I needed to lead them far, far away from the reality of where I’d been spending my time. Not just for myself, but for Marlena, for Ryder, even for Greg. For us, I found myself thinking. What else could I do?
So, of course, I lied.
* * *
The lies you tell to get yourself out of trouble are sneaky. They evolve during the telling, because their sole purpose is to keep the truth—that I’d been involved in a drug deal with Marlena when I was skipping, maybe, or that I’d had too much to drink—protected. These lies don’t necessarily need to be elegant, though they do require a magician’s sleight of hand, the ability to draw attention to your fingers when it should be kept on your sleeve, where the cards are disappearing. I ask Liam about his day, no eye contact, and go straight to the bathroom for a shower, for example. That day, I described what I liked to do downtown, how I’d hide in the stacks at the bookstore and the library, where I went for coffee when I had spare change. I talked and talked, and the more I talked, the greater the distance between what they believed I’d been doing and what I’d actually been doing. Lying felt like flexing a muscle. It turned out, I was good at it.