by Julie Buntin
“Chelsea sang Ezekiel today,” Tidbit said. So that was her name.
“Ew,” said Marlena, and then sang a perfect imitation of Chelsea’s nasal soprano.
We all got in line for the concession booth, where the school sold Yoo-hoos and blueberry muffins and cookies from a wholesale box to kids who didn’t bring packed lunches or feel like eating Salisbury steaks or the doughy pizza. “I’d recommend the Pop-Tarts,” said Marlena, which for some reason made us howl. Marlena was counting change out into the palm of my hand, trying to see if she had enough money for a Pop-Tart and a Yoo-hoo, when Snub Blonde bumped lightly into my back. A few dimes fell onto the floor. I glanced back at her and she met my eyes innocently, holding hands with Micah, the guy who’d left the drawing on my textbook in Algebra.
Marlena bent over to pick up the coins I’d dropped. Behind me, I heard Chelsea say, distinctly, “Junkie whore has a new girlfriend.”
“Can I just borrow a dollar?” said Marlena. Her bra straps were always showing—dirty beige ribbons that gaped against her skin.
I nodded and pulled a folded dollar from my pocket. Chelsea was saying something to Micah, but I couldn’t tell what. “Whores,” I heard again, so quiet she might as well have mouthed the word, and “gross.” “Tuna,” she said, or something that sounded like it. I suddenly felt like I might cry. Marlena kept chattering away, though she must have heard them too, and so I didn’t. We paid for our Pop-Tarts and went back to our table, whispers following us like eyes.
Probably, they all volunteered to join me for detention because I seemed upset. But when they did, Marlena offering first, and without missing a beat, Greg and Tidbit too, what Chelsea had said evaporated. It was replaced by a soaring and euphoric warmth. I’d never had so many friends.
* * *
The biggest surprise of the day was French III, a class of four, just two quiet girls in identical outfits of flared jeans and T-shirts, besides Marlena and me. Mrs. Lupin spent the entire hour moderating a getting-to-know-each-other conversation because she believed that without feeling “à l’aise” we would never progress to a “véritable compréhension” of French language and culture. I learned that Marlena’s favorite color was noir, that she loved Led Zeppelin, that she’d always wanted to go to Alaska, that Sal was her favorite person, that she thought marriage was a “manly” and offensive concept, and that she liked cats more than dogs. Mrs. Lupin talked only in French, and I could barely follow. But not Marlena—she spoke as fast as the teacher, cracking jokes, I think, going by her inflection.
“You’re fluent,” I accused her, after class.
“Ferme ta bouche, ma pêche. My dad is from Quebec. I’ve been speaking Québécois since forever. That’s why I’m such a crap speller. It’s the easiest class.”
“Mar,” I said, since we were finally alone. “I have Mr. Ratner for first period. He was so inappropriate.”
“Aren’t you being a little dramatic,” she said, after listening to my story, and so I dropped it, disappointed that she didn’t see it as something we could have in common.
* * *
Detention was staffed by the tennis coach, a toned old lady named Linda who barely registered that we were there at all. With Tidbit sitting on his lap, Greg pulled up a crappy-looking website with an all-black background. “Greg’s World,” the header read, in bright white Comic Sans. He clicked on a video in the middle of the screen, the one he’d made that day at the Mapletree. It took an agonizingly long time to load, the QuickTime player freezing and then buffering forever.
“Why don’t you put your stuff on YouTube?” I asked. Jimmy was into the site, which at the time was still a novelty—I didn’t hang out there, but I intuitively knew it was cool, and felt proud of myself for thinking to suggest it.
“I just feel like, people are coming to Greg’s World for something specific. Why would they go to YouTube?”
“Just post on both,” I said. “It’ll give you a bigger audience.”
“You’re smart,” Greg said. Tidbit slid off his lap and moved to the chair beside him.
We spent a while trying to help him come up with a username. Marlena voted for “Greg’s World,” a classic, but Greg thought it would be misleading. Tidbit suggested “GregIsHot,” but we all ignored her. “Michigan Jackass” was discarded for being too derivative. We went through dozens of possibilities—“BushLOVER,” “Chchchchanges,” “BombsAway14,” “GMantheCandyMan”—before, somehow, Greg settled on “NotYourSanta.” He made a long speech about how the key to getting attention online was to make yourself familiar and inaccessible at the same time, a combination that read as cool. Hence the Santa, hence the “not your,” hence the project in general.
“That is actually nonsense,” said Marlena.
“So says the girl who never even had a MySpace,” he snapped.
He pulled his camcorder and some associated cables from his backpack and connected them to the computer. Within minutes the video appeared, the quality far better than it’d been on Greg’s World. “Good thinking, Cat,” Greg said. “I’ll have to cut you in on the profits.”
Marlena and I pretty much lost interest the second the profile existed—Tidbit, sensing her in, edged her computer chair closer and closer to Greg’s. Greg replayed the video over and over.
Halfway through the video, Ryder appeared in the background. He opened the door to the little room, walked over to the TV to pick up a canister of acetone, and carried it back, not noticing that he’d left the door hanging open, so that his entire set-up was caught on camera—the cough syrup bottles and the unpeeled batteries, the empty two-liter and the feminine bottle of nail polish remover, the same kind Mom used, even the garden rock. Every time the hit counter ticked up, Greg grunted with pleasure. Nobody pointed out that most of the hits were from us, but Marlena met my eyes every time Greg made the slightest sound, so that I spent most of detention on the verge of cracking up.
* * *
Marlena hitched a ride home. Jimmy picked us up and I let her slide into the front seat, where she fiddled with the radio knob and he teased her for straying, always, back to the country music station that seemed to play the same four outdated songs on a loop—all barbecue stains and friends in low places and Jolene, Jolene.
“We can listen to country,” Jimmy said. “But only if you sing.”
She stayed for dinner, and after we finished eating—she hardly touched her food, but praised my mom so much it made us all uncomfortable—I helped her with her English homework. She was a sloppy writer. I basically just did it for her while she sat next to me, talking to Jimmy in a contented, directionless way. At one point he got up, disappeared into the bathroom, and came back with a tube of Neosporin and a cotton ball. He dabbed it against a cut on her temple that I’d barely noticed, looking at her with a reverence that annoyed me. “A bunny tail,” she giggled.
Mom sent Marlena home with a Tupperware full of tuna casserole for Sal after making Marlena promise that if she needed anything at all she should feel free to come over and take it right out of the fridge. I stood in the doorway, watching as she trudged through the unshoveled snow. Despite the temperature, she walked slowly. I tried not to let myself fully articulate what I was feeling, which was that the day had been the best ever, that it was the start of a new life for me, a real life, full of friends and maybe a little danger.
Marlena carried her coat over one arm. The plastic bag hanging from her wrist clunked against her thigh, bare except for a film of torn stocking. Halfway between my house and hers she stopped in her tracks and tilted her head so far back I thought for sure she was going to fall. She began to spin in a circle, her arms out, the bag twisting until the handle buried itself in her wrist. She spun and spun and spun and then she quit and just stood there, swaying dizzily, so long I grew tired of watching her. But then the barn door opened, throwing a block of orange light onto the snow, and a man’s voice towed her toward the house. In the stretched shaft of light, the shadow she cast
appeared to have wings. It gave me the creeps.
Omissions
There are things I wish weren’t part of this story.
So far I’ve made no catalogue of what she swallowed that day at school, what she inhaled. I did not describe the cigarettes we smoked together between French and detention, standing on a toilet in an out-of-the-way girls’ bathroom near the gym, exhaling into a ceiling vent so the smoke didn’t creep out into the hall. I didn’t tell you that she received texts all day, text after text, or how every time she looked at her phone something happened to her face. I left out the fact that after meeting with Cher, Marlena took another Oxy and fell asleep in the crawl space under the auditorium stage for three hours, high enough to remain unconscious throughout the whole of jazz band rehearsal, which is why she was so early to lunch. I barely mentioned the scabbing-over cut on her left temple, intentional-looking and still slightly damp with blood.
Over the course of our friendship, I learned about Marlena’s pills in pieces. They were bluish and their precious core was protected by a time-release coating that needed to be sucked off before the pill was crushed with a school ID against a textbook or the kitchen counter and cut into chalky lines, snorted with a rolled-up dollar bill, a straw snipped into sections, a torn piece of notebook paper. They were small and yellow or small and white and could be dissolved under the tongue. They were bright orange and made you shit, or they were oblong and snowy and blocked you up for days. They came out of Marlena’s pin, one and two at a time, or from an unlabeled tube in her tote bag, all mixed together, appearing when we were in some bathroom or in my room with the door shut or walking through the woods on our way to the railcar, where I had to hide in the fringe of trees so I wouldn’t be seen, because she needed some money. She kept careful track of her pills. In her palm, they were all different colors and sizes and they were tiny doorways, expanding the options of the place where we lived by a millionfold. They were called Oxys and benzos and Addys and Xany Bars and Percs. Ritalin and Concerta were just Ritalin and Concerta and were not ideal—Ritalin too weak, and Concerta, with its coating and plastic barrier, was too much work. Mostly, she thought nicknames were stupid.
Marlena got Oxys and Percs from Bolt, Addys from the richer kids at school, generic benzos from her dad’s topmost dresser drawer, E and whatever else from Ryder, who was a minor league dealer and an amateur, idiotic cook, but could be counted on to always have something. They cost a lot of money, especially Oxy, a dollar a milligram, more, but she had an arrangement. The first time she bumped an Oxy in my presence we were skipping school, hiding out at her place, and I was too intoxicated by the whole thing, our friendship, this new world, to be anything more than curious. I asked her for some and she asked me for thirty dollars. I laughed, thinking she was kidding. She wasn’t. Here, she said, and gave me a Vicodin. I ate it, heart racing, excited and anxious and a little reluctant but wanting, more than anything, to show her that I thought it was no big deal. An hour went by, and then two, and nothing really happened; we watched TV for hours, I felt a little sleepy, but that was it. An anticlimax that made me even less afraid. She didn’t share Oxys with me or anyone. Pills were okay because they originated with a doctor, and they weren’t meth, which would kill you. It felt like a full-body orgasm, we’d heard, which was appealing, but would make you lose your face and teeth. Meth was gross, Marlena said. For rednecks. She had terrific scorn for it, and didn’t seem to equate what she was doing with her pills to her dad and his railcar lab, her mom and her vanishing. I looked up Oxy on the Internet, once, when she was shivering in my bed, calling Bolt over and over and over again, crying a little though she hardly seemed to notice her own wet face, and I comforted myself by reading a very long and detailed article that argued that if you took Oxy as directed, which she claimed to mostly do, it wasn’t addictive. Her skin smelled curdled; she threw up first in my neon-pink trash can, and then in the bathroom while she ran the shower. The next day I washed my sheets.
Marlena was protective of me, in her way. I wasn’t allowed to bump anything; she liked to remind me that I was fifteen, as if she hadn’t put anything up her nose just two years earlier, at my age. When she shared pills with me, which was rare, it was Addys, mostly, or Ritalin—fun to do together because they made us talk and talk and talk—and I had to take them regular. One of those times, the two of us trapped in an elaborate conversation that lasted from nine in the morning to seven at night, pacing all through the woods, sucking down a hundred cigarettes, she told me that if she were a drug, she’d be a pill as big as a marble, a magical new compound. “Snort me or swallow me,” she said. Her high would be like sleeping: anything could happen and nothing would hurt, except the user would be fully awake. “And me?” I asked. What would I be?
“You?” she said, confused.
That night, after my first real day of school, after she fake-ate dinner, she fixed my algebra worksheet. When she was done, she pulled a crumpled soft-pack of Parliaments from her shoulder bag, flipped open the top, and shook a white pill the size of a vitamin into her palm. She put it on her tongue as if she was buttoning it into her skin, as was her ritual, and then took a swig of my orange juice. “What’s that, Mar?” I asked, and she shrugged. Maybe it actually was a vitamin—she was even fascinated by those, the bottle of horse pills my mom kept on the counter, with their promise of health. Then she popped open the house pin on her chest and caught the disc that fell out, placing that in her mouth, too. “For my vapors,” she said. “To keep my strength up.” I laughed at her, like it was all a funny joke. Because at that point, it still was, I didn’t know any better yet, or maybe I did, maybe I always knew, that’s the problem with my memory.
Within an hour, her voice had a little slump, like her words were wearing dirty clothes, having trouble standing up straight. Her pupils pinpricks, lids heavy. Next door, Sal was alone, fridge empty, curled under a pilling blanket as he watched South Park on a junk TV. Deep in the woods, Marlena’s dad was shut up in that railcar with Bolt, making something that had already killed people Marlena knew and loved, and that would keep on killing until even the ones that were left would be changed forever, would walk around with parts of them already dead.
Meth was a drug, but pills were a cure.
I told you the good things. It was the first best day of a life I thought I wanted, and for just a moment, even in the act of looking back—well, to keep it like that I needed to leave parts out. But I don’t know why I lied about sneaking, as a child, into the living room, and seeing Mom and Dad on the couch. A few times I crept down there after they put me to bed, to steal a snack and read, as I said, or watch more TV. But not once did I find them together. That part was my invention, I will admit it now, but they must have had moments like that, even if I wasn’t there to see them.
And doesn’t that mean both versions can be true?
II
New York
Our apartment is in a newish building near the Gowanus Canal, all glass and shiny angles. Liam likes clean edges. Most of the area has been developed into blocks of condos like ours, but right next to us there’s an empty lot studded with broken glass and needles, where a colony of feral kittens runs wild. I emerged from the subway, checking my phone—a little after seven p.m. Because I’d left work early, it wasn’t much later than I usually got home. The hour made me feel less drunk. I stopped in the bodega across the street, to buy a six-pack of Stella, Liam’s favorite, and a can of Fancy Feast. I pulled off the lid and left the puck of meat near a tire. The kittens watched from underneath piles of wood and flutters of shredded plastic, their eyes flashing gold. A few brave ones darted out toward the can, then back into hiding, then toward the can again, waiting to see what I’d do. When I turned to leave they all tumbled out, fighting for whatever they could get.
I gave Sam, the doorman, a dizzy nod, and pushed the elevator button. Sam and I struggled with eye contact; he hadn’t half carried me to my door in months, but still. In the apartment, a bl
ast of heat and sautéing garlic, and then Radish, butting her head against my shin. “Hey, babe,” I said, going for loud, cheerful, sober. I never knew whether it was better to confess that I’d had a couple, or to wait until Liam asked.
“Hi,” he shouted back, a little distracted. I stepped out of my shoes and hung my coat on the rack. Left the six-pack on the floor and went straight for the bathroom. I hiked my dress to my waist and peeled off my black tights, hanging them, phantom feet dangling, from the towel rod. After I peed I stared at myself in the mirror for a minute. Why four? My eyes were okay. Brown, brown, mascara a bit iffy, but fine, as far as I could tell. Steady. Liam said that they went in, kind of, their focus off, when I was hammered, and I actually knew what he meant, because Mom’s do that too. A not literal in-ness, but visible to intimates. She’d been so young when she had me and Jimmy that now she was wilder than ever, her and Roger—when they came to visit New York, they always overdrank and overate, Mom getting loud and silly, her eyes drifting by dessert. My wrinkles were also following Mom’s pattern—deepening V between the eyebrows, trapezoidal outline from nose to corners of mouth. I was thirty before I felt attractive in my body, and now, just a few years later, I could already see the ghost of my older self in the faint lines on my face.
And what secrets was Liam keeping from me? We’d met at twenty-four. We were coming up on ten years, three of them married. He wanted to have a baby, but that wasn’t exactly a secret. I still had time. I told him soon, I told him later. My body, I said. What about our Saturdays? I didn’t say I was afraid of being sober for nine months. Afraid I couldn’t do it, or worse, afraid I’d find myself pregnant and ambivalent, still wanting my nightly drinks. Or that it would stop me—pregnancy, a baby with grasping fingers and Liam’s serious face—and I really wouldn’t drink anymore. The part of me that I hated most missed those drinks preemptively. And what if I did stop, for a while, but when the kid was five, six, ten, I started again? A glass or two, some nights a couple more, me like Mom was, there but muffled, there but gone.