by Julie Buntin
“Okay,” I said. “That’s fine.”
Becky kept texting. She was more ordinary-looking than I remembered, and that made it even sadder that my dad had left my mom, who was—objectively, I thought—a million times more attractive. As soon as Becky sensed my dad coming back with the food she placed her phone facedown on the table and gave me a whoopsie grin.
“What’d I miss?”
“It wouldn’t be girl talk if we told you.” I smiled tightly. Becky picked up her phone with one hand and used the other to propel a chicken tender into her mouth.
“So,” Dad said, after we’d silently eaten everything on the table but a half-moon of burger bun. “You going to talk to me about what’s been going on at school or am I going to have to beat it out of you?”
“Dad,” I said, playing a girl I wasn’t anymore. “I’m fine! It’s fine. I didn’t want to go at first, but I’m okay now, I’ve made some friends, it was just a thing, you know? I even like it.”
“I told your mom it was nothing,” he said.
“It was nothing,” I agreed. IhateyouIhateyouIhateyou. I tilted my head so my hair would better hide my face.
“You were always too good for your own, well, good, I thought. A little rebellion is healthy for a kid. When I was your age, I was a real pain in the ass,” he said. “And hey! I turned out okay. I’ll never be the president of the United States, but I’m okay.” He told me about the time he’d thrown a firecracker into a sewer grate on Calyer Street and flooded an entire city block, about the time he’d guzzled bong water out of a fishbowl and “tripped balls” for a week, about the time he stole Poppy’s speedboat and drove it fifty miles up the bay during a thunderstorm to visit some upstate girl whose name escaped him now. Becky wouldn’t stop touching him, pinching the back of his neck, running her hand across his arm, tilting her forehead onto his shoulder. At one point he brushed her hand away like it was a wasp. He might not want us back, but he sure as hell wasn’t in love with her, this silly Becky. Dull as she seemed, she knew it, too.
After hugging me goodbye, he pressed a folded bill into my palm. “Don’t tell your mom,” he said, making a cuckoo sign near his head and looking at me like, Know what I mean? “And, Cath? Whatever you’re doing with the cigarettes—knock it off. I can smell it in your hair.”
As I watched them drive off, the woman from inside the restaurant was pacing the sidewalk, a cell phone clamped to her ear. She lifted her hand and gave me a startled smile. I smiled back and unfolded the crumpled bill, a fifty.
The next time I saw him, I was seventeen years old and a day away from leaving Michigan for New York City, for a future that would be defined in part, by his failure. By then it was too late. I would never forgive him for how he’d had me fooled.
* * *
Mom laughed with the cashier as she paid for our gas. A man held the door for her as she walked out. She pulled her coat around her body as if to protect it from him. I watched him watch her pass. He stared at her behind so long, adrenaline started pumping through me, spelling danger. If there were no men except Jimmy in the entire world, I wondered how much better life would be for me and everyone I loved. Mom climbed into the car, bringing the cold with her and the interest of the man, still watching her, now us, as he smoked a cigarette beside a Dumpster. Before turning the keys in the ignition, Mom unpeeled a Hershey’s bar and took a bite, handing me the rest. We hadn’t talked about seeing Dad, except when she asked me if he’d set another time to meet. He had not. The chocolate was so sweet it made my tongue sting.
“What did you wind up eating, that night,” I asked, as she steered the car out of the parking lot. I could still feel the man’s eyes, even though I could no longer see him. “After he left?”
“Weird question. I ate Rice-A-Roni. Carbs from a box. I remember it because I did a freaky pregnant thing—I cracked a raw egg into it, and stirred it all together.”
“That is disgusting,” I said, but we could both tell my heart wasn’t in it.
We were driving by Kewaunee High School, just twenty-five minutes from Silver Lake, before I spoke again. The sky had turned hard and nickel gray, a color that, if you knocked on it, would make a tinny sound. Sometime soon it would rain or maybe snow. I looked out the window at the landscape that would always have a claim on me, that would call me back for years after I left, and pressed my forehead against the glass until I could feel the cold needling into my brain.
“If you knew that early on that he was so bad, why were you with him in the first place?”
“He was charming,” she said, after a while.
“That’s it? He was charming?”
I hated what the phrase He was charming suggested—a setup at a mouse-ridden pizza place, gray slush on the road, a futon that smelled like dog hair and old popcorn. I hated that I was the result of that.
“He made me laugh. I had my first orgasm with him.”
“Oh my God. Boundaries, please.”
“If I teach you anything, let it be to not be blinded by good sex.”
“Noted.”
“Speaking of sex—”
“Yeah, no, stop.”
“Just, if you’re having it, you can tell me.”
“I’m not.”
“Okay, well, if you do.”
“I won’t.”
“You won’t ever have sex? All right, honey. Whatever you say.”
I just wanted to get home, where my friends were, where Marlena was waiting. She’d been so nice since that night at the barn—it helped dispel my last lingering doubts that she really and truly wanted me around. I was in the peril of my life, and I did not know it. While Mom was filling the gas tank, Marlena’d texted me again.
Hurry up!!!
* * *
How can I describe the horrible pleasure of being not good? Even at fifteen I wasn’t dumb enough to glamorize Marlena’s world, the poverty, the drugs that were the fabric of everything, but I was attracted to it all the same. I always wanted more, more, more; what I had was never good enough. Instead of public school, I had to have Concord Academy, with its courtyards a whirl of fall leaves, my initials monogrammed on my collar, the textbooks full of whole worlds of language I was desperate to understand. And yet, how easily I’d replaced my desire for that place with my desire to fit in seamlessly in Silver Lake.
Perhaps that was why I was so afraid of the terrible electricity, the terrible self-rootedness, that overtook me those sleepless nights, when I slid my hand down my stomach, below the band of my pants, and discovered a need that was completely my own. With it had come the sense that if I surrendered to that edge-of-cliff feeling, afterward I would be transformed. I would belong to myself in some new way. Every time, I stopped too soon.
* * *
Marlena came by as soon as she saw our car pulling into the driveway. Still six months from November, our friendship half over, both of us, or me at least, blind to what would end it. I didn’t even know Bear River existed until they found Marlena there.
Mom made tuna casserole. I remember, because Marlena asked her to leave out the peas. I also remember that we couldn’t get high. Mom, for once, was dangerously close to being out of wine, and Marlena’s investigation of Jimmy’s room turned up no more than a few flakes of weed, most of it collected from his windowsill. What we really wanted was E, or Marlena did, but that was almost impossible to get, and the only person who would text her back was charging twenty dollars a pill. We spent so many nights trying to rustle up ways to get fucked up, and now I wonder who we were doing it for—Marlena pretty much always had her Oxy, and I cared less about the drugs than I did the built-in us-versus-them nature of wheedling our way into a score. That particular night, we gave up more quickly than usual.
Instead, we talked, like we had so many other nights, side by side on my mattress in the dark, quilt pulled up to our chins, my dad somewhere near the Canadian border, hers in the railcar nearby, neither of them thinking of us. I want to believe it didn’t have
anything to do with pills, the way Marlena was that night. Her voice quiet and flat and breaking, as she spoke, like the surface of a puddle, so that I didn’t know how to respond to the things she said. Like that her life felt like a sentence, that it had been barreling down on her since she could first speak, that it really wasn’t much of a life at all. Nothing but her voice in my dark bedroom, the tip of my nose cold as ice, our feet clammy and trapped in the sheets, a rustling now and then when she turned onto her side, when she adjusted the pillow, starlight pouring in as usual, because I never had real curtains.
Marlena, thirteen, Bolt kissing her for the first time behind her house, her parents nowhere, how mostly she just remembered letting her jaw go slack, his tongue like a finger in her mouth. A few months later, she kissed Ryder, just to see how it would feel to be the one whose tongue did the moving. The first time she took Oxy it made her think of hot-air balloons—but not of riding in one, of being one. How she used to take Sal out to the railcar when she needed something from her dad, money usually, before she was old enough to know that him just breathing whatever fumes wafted through the cracked windows, the propped-open front door, might be enough to ruin his lungs forever. She thought of her mom whenever she saw worms drying out on the sidewalk after a rainstorm, question marks stuck to concrete. Marlena’s mom used to open all the windows when it rained; Marlena’s dad called her a witch, and even though at fourteen Marlena was too old to believe something so stupid, for a long time she thought her mom had put a curse on them when she left. And if she did, what was it? Which part of her life was the cursed part? Sal got so angry sometimes, triggered by the smallest things, Marlena thought he might give himself a seizure. The summer afternoons her mom used to drive them all to Dairy Queen, to the beach, Sal would always ruin it, dropping his ice cream on purpose, sabotaging the day before someone else did. If Marlena took exactly the right amount of Oxy and began drinking at exactly the right point in the swell of her high, she could be a hot-air balloon for a long, long time, and didn’t I think she deserved to say goodbye to herself sometimes, considering? Marlena in the back of Bolt’s truck, the summer before I moved up north, the first time she ever gave him head. His penis had a strong taste, she said, like Play-Doh. He’s the exact same age as my dad. They were on the basketball team together, two kids from Silver Lake. If she could have anything, one wish, it would be for money. That was it. Just lots and lots of money, like in that children’s book where the lady makes the noodles, she remembered it from fourth grade, how when they read it aloud to her class she was so inspired she drew her own version, money spewing money spewing money, and everyone had laughed.
I did nothing. I was fascinated but not really scared, as if I were listening to a story that I didn’t quite believe was true. I’d known already, of course—that their relationship was a transactional one, favors for pills, favors for food, cigarettes, rides, probably even money. I’d been waiting all that time for her to tell me, for her to just come clean, stop, and in a way I was grateful. I looked up to Marlena—she was tough and beautiful and I never once thought she wasn’t in control. She was beyond me in so many ways; how dumb of me to feel so close, as we talked, that I imagined our outlines blurring.
* * *
That night, after we talked our way into a world with new edges, bright and singing, the dawn pressed up against my bedroom window like it was jealous, we fell asleep in our clothes on top of my bed. I woke up around ten and she was gone, the bedspread rumpled where her body had been, but no longer warm.
I grabbed my phone off the bedside table and texted: Where did you go, everything okay? A worry pricked me, that something had happened next door, that her dad had come home and freaked out when she wasn’t there. I rolled over and pressed my face into my pillow, my eyes tacky with sleep, still tired. A few minutes later, she opened the door to my room and pushed me toward her side of the bed, her fingers skinny-strong and annoying. I shifted reluctantly.
“I was in the bathroom,” she said.
She wasn’t, and she knew I knew it.
New York
Drink to being a girl. Drink to how every day, we had less time left. Drink to only being each age once. Drink to her hair in sunlight, in snow, in the parking lot of Walmart in the minutes between twilight and dark just after the lamps switch on, her hair underground, below the lake’s surface when you open your eyes and it swirls between you so you can’t quite see her grinning, bubbles escaping from her mouth. Drink to powder. Drink to a face in a rearview window, the way the room’s smell changes when he comes in, the tear in her voice when she whispers, I’m not afraid. Drink to condoms. Drink to birthdays, to saying I love you, to saying no. Drink to doing it for the money. Drink to nicknames. Drink to the bitter drip in the back of your throat. Drink to closing your eyes when you swallow. Drink to a yes you don’t mean. Drink to knowing her less than one year. Drink to questions without answers, drink to raising your hand, to asking anyway. Drink to it was just a summer. Drink to a cut on the upper part of your arm, how blood has nothing to do with the way something hurts. Drink to holding the knife. Drink to salt. Drink to never forgetting, and drink, again, to the lie you tell when you say you won’t. Drink to where what’s forgotten goes.
Raise your glass. Drink to trying, like this, to bring her back.
Michigan
In the next handful of weeks, I went out of my way to avoid Marlena’s dad. When I saw him getting in and out of his truck, speeding off on his snowmobile through the field behind our houses, I was overtaken by a disorienting mortification, so profound and self-effacing it turned me temporarily invisible. Sometimes out of nowhere I’d feel his fingertips burning my spine, unhooking my bra, the lit end of a cigarette that climbed up and up and up. And then the questions. What if I had stayed? What did I do wrong? Why do I want him to think I’m pretty? I could hardly bear to look at the barn. Marlena was good at shelving difficult things, which could be maddening—when I tried to bring up her mom, or what she’d told me about Bolt that night in my room, she often just refused to answer—but in this instance I was grateful. Now, when we hung out in Silver Lake we hung out at my house or outside, sometimes meeting at the jungle gym. Sal came over a lot more, too, and once even spent the night under a giant fort we made out of sheets in the living room.
During school I was hungover most of the time. I read novels I hid in textbooks, and focused intently on drawing cartoons and writing ten-sentence stories that would make Marlena laugh. Somehow, I finished the year with four As and two C minuses—one in Algebra II, of course, despite Marlena’s homework resuscitations, and the other in Botany/Soil Ecology, which had been capped off with a dreadful final. Beside my grade, in red capitals, Mr. Ratner had written: A TRULY INCREDIBLE DISAPPOINTMENT. I wondered if he knew. After a few weeks, he’d gone right back to normal. Soon, his wife would be pregnant with his second child.
It helped that many of my courses were an echo of things I’d already taken at Concord. I must have done some work—I can recall studying with Marlena on my living room floor, filling out worksheets, that sort of thing—but not much else. What do I remember instead? Chelsea’s eyes, pawing me during choir or English, because—and I vividly remember this—someone had started a rumor that Micah and I were fucking, which made me the target of boys who called me Kitty-Cat in the foul notes they slid into the grate of my locker. I remember smoking cigarettes—cascades of cigarettes, ten cigarettes for every halfway secluded corner of the campus, two hundred cigarettes in the out-of-order restroom, five hundred cigarettes in the wood-shop doghouse, before it got warm enough outside to make that location dangerous. I remember the morning—staring into the bathroom mirror, one of my eyes ringed with black, the other nude—when I realized that eyeliner had become as essential as underwear.
And I remember Ryder, just a few days before the end of the school year, running down the front steps. Mom was dropping me at school a few hours late, because I’d missed the bus. It was suspicious only because h
e seemed to be trying to look casual, as if it wasn’t odd for him, a seventeen-year-old dropout, to be leaving the high school at eleven in the morning on a sunny day in June.
As the days went on, the person I desperately wanted to be and the person other people believed I was were moving slowly toward each other, and that was the source of my all-consuming happiness, a joy so complete that I walked around in a kind of blackout state, missing most of what was happening around me—Mom’s increasing nighttime absences, the mystery of Jimmy, who I encountered in the dark hallways of our house like an inconvenient ghost, a person I sort of knew whose face, disturbingly, echoed mine. Something was going on between him and Marlena, but I convinced myself that none of the evidence was enough to confirm it. I remember a collage of nights spent curled in the passenger seat of whatever car we could get, Marlena driving, the radio turned up so loud I felt the bass in my chest, the sky vast and dark and we were racing toward the edge, about to tip ourselves into oblivion. I remember being happy, completely present. I have never felt that thoughtlessly alive again.
* * *
Marlena and I were walking through the woods, from the railcar, and as she talked about how weird Ryder had been acting, how she wanted to cheer him up, it came to me, the keys, the keys to the perfect castle my mom cleaned, tucked into the hanging planter near the door, the keys to the house that I knew would be empty until the Hodsons arrived, a few weeks later than usual because their daughter was getting married, a big destination wedding in Mallorca.
“Oh, Mallorca,” said Marlena. “I much prefer Monaco in the summertime, but I do try not to judge the choices of others.”
“You know how the petite bourgeoisie are, dahling, always trying for the cutting edge.”
“DAY-CLASS-HAY,” Marlena shouted, then hysterics.
“No, but really,” I said. “Think about it. Big house, totally empty, fully stocked bar that’s seriously like an actual restaurant’s. And I have the keys. Or, okay, I don’t have them, have them, but I know how to get in.”