Marlena

by Julie Buntin

  Marlena slid one of her improvised cocktails to each of us. She held her hand out to Ryder, wiggling her fingers, and he dropped a pill into her palm. His mood was now unreadable. He took a gulp of his drink and then spat it back into his glass. “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever tasted.”

  I agreed.

  “I like it,” Tidbit said loyally, tipping her head onto Greg’s shoulder. Ryder grabbed a bottle of Grey Goose and poured it into a new glass, until the glass was almost full.

  “Wow,” said Greg. “That is seriously foul. I should get that on video. I feel like people would really be impressed to watch someone drink that.”

  “Just shots, my friend,” said Ryder. “Just all at once.” He edged a cigarette out of the pack in his pocket and headed for the backyard. I followed him. I didn’t want to watch them, either. Outside, Ryder unearthed a bag of charcoal from under one of the benches, emptied it into the chimney, and drizzled the mound of stones with some of the vodka in his glass. He tossed in a match and the coals roared, blinding us for a second before the chimney calmed it into a normal little fire.

  “You trying to kill us?” said Jimmy, appearing in the doorway. “That’s a really great idea. Definitely do the most noticeable thing possible so that the neighbors definitely see.”

  “Chill out, big man. It’s fine. It is all good.” Ryder was already on his way to very drunk. I could see the alcohol working in him, dulling his fear, his anxiety, his paranoia or whatever it was that had been making him so weird lately. He was an erratic drunk, easily angered, but he had his moments.

  “Don’t do it again,” said Jimmy, shutting the French doors on us.

  “Your brother sucks,” said Ryder.

  “Yep.”

  “Dayton’s the fastest way to get here, right?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  He sent a text, then looked from his phone to me, his face aglow with firelight, his birthmark sweet.

  “You won’t be mad?”

  “That depends.”

  “The Mapletree isn’t safe anymore. I’m low on cash and I have five tabs of E to unload, and then that’s it, I’m out. I can’t keep these pills on me. Just seemed like a safe place. It’ll take ten minutes, not even.”

  “Jesus, Ryder. What are you thinking?”

  I was only pretending. I recognized that he thought I would be, should be mad; it wasn’t hard to slip into a kind of mild outrage, to wear that attitude for a little while. It mattered to him, how I felt. He would stop giving me this small, pandering attention, so rare from him, from any boy, if I admitted I didn’t much care about his stupid deal. I’d lost the ability to judge choices, actions, on any kind of moral scale—if I could go as far as I’d already gone, breaking into the Hodsons’, skipping weeks upon weeks of school, nearly failing science, stealing and vandalizing and getting falling-down drunk—what made this any worse?

  “I should have told you. You ever have that feeling like, you know you aren’t good, you’re not doing things right—like you can see yourself screwing up, kind of like watching it on a movie, but even though you feel it happening, there’s nothing you can do to stop it?”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Sometimes I do stuff and while I’m doing it my head is screaming at me, Stop, don’t do that, stop, stop.”

  “But you just do it anyway.”

  “Yeah, mostly I do. What’s the point, you know?” The last question seemed tacked on, overly sarcastic, like he’d realized what he was saying and had to counter it with a joke, something that meant nothing. You don’t have to act like you don’t care, I wanted to tell him. Not with me.

  “When will they be here?”

  Ryder tapped his phone. “Soon, probably. They already left.” He raised his glass to me. There was less than an inch of vodka left. “Cheers.”

  “Cheers,” I said, and we clanged our glasses together, and drained them both.

  * * *

  Jimmy and Marlena and Greg and Tidbit were down at the beach when Ryder’s buyer showed up. I’d stayed with him in the house, claiming I wasn’t feeling well. Had Marlena noticed I’d been spending a lot of time with Ryder? Did she feel jealous? Let’s go down to the beach, she’d said. I love the beach at night. Her braid was loosening, her bangs messy and overgrown. Ryder didn’t feel like going—he looked at me when he said it, I don’t want to go, and that’s why I lied about not feeling well. Jimmy, who was supposed to be protective, didn’t care about leaving me behind, alone at the house with a boy I could tell he didn’t much like. Jimmy didn’t see me as a girl girl, just as I hadn’t really believed he was special enough to be with Marlena. But now the sparkling thing between the two of them was blinding. They took off for the beach, Marlena riding on my brother’s back, a bottle of champagne gripped in her free hand, Tidbit and Greg a few steps behind. Greg and Tidbit had disappeared into a bedroom shortly after we arrived; when they came out, fifteen minutes later, Greg seemed to have forgotten about his crush on me.

  Ryder and I played a round of pool. I knocked four balls into the pockets, one after another, and he was so surprised he slammed his pool cue against a barstool. A soft crack, like paper tearing. He hoisted the cue into the air—it jointed just above the middle, held together by a strip of paint. Gravity slowly pulled the pieces apart until the top half bounced onto the carpet. The side that ended in a whiskery tuft of wood pointed at me. We’re in trouble, I thought, with a sick lurch. Ryder was still holding the other broken half when the doorbell rang.

  “That would be Micah,” he said. “Does this make me look like a real drug dealer?” He jabbed the busted cue into the air a few times. There were so many cues—maybe, if we hid the broken one, the Hodsons wouldn’t notice. And also, was he flirting with me?

  “Micah? Micah who?”

  “I don’t know, Micah. Freckly like a ginger, rich kid, Marlena’s grade.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “What?”

  “I hate him. If this takes longer than ten minutes I’m going to kill you.”

  “I didn’t know you two have issues. I don’t keep up with all the KHS gossip.”

  “He like, sexually harasses me.”

  “It’s fun to hear you say the word sexually. Say it again.”

  I shook my head at him, blushing despite myself, and left the house. I sat on one of the benches near the fire pit, pleasantly drunk, my stomach warm. Everyone in northern Michigan was connected; related, sleeping with each other, buying the same tomatoes at the same dingy grocery store. Plenty of Fish matched Bolt with my mom because they were both single adults of a certain age, living in the same fifteen-mile radius. Tidbit was Chelsea’s best friend’s cousin. Micah and Ryder and Greg played on the same T-ball team in second grade. I didn’t want Micah to see me. Being alone in that house with drunk Ryder would give credence to the rumor that I was a slut. Chelsea slid open the doors.

  “Cat,” she said, exiting the house and sliding the doors shut behind her. She settled herself beside me on the bench. I wasn’t surprised. “So you are outside, avoiding us.”

  “Yeah. Not a fan of your boyfriend. And yet, here you are.”

  “I wanted to smoke. Sue me.”

  “The yard is big.”

  “No kidding. This place is nice. I guess this is your house? I know it’s not Ryder’s.”

  “Now that we’ve sold the penthouse in Chicago we’re not summer people anymore. My father’s taking early retirement. He wants to spend more time with the family.” Shrieks of laughter echoed in the air, coming from down at the beach. She started it.

  “You know what I don’t get?” She lit a Parliament, the longer kind, a one hundred, and blew the smoke out of her nose and mouth.

  “What?”

  “How do you even know these kids, anyway?”

  “What do you mean?” I’d meant it to sound bitchy, but it came out like I was asking her because I wanted to know. I did want to know. The truth is, I couldn’t explain it. It made, obj
ectively, when you looked at my life from a bird’s-eye view, almost no sense at all.

  “They’re bad news,” Chelsea said. “Marlena is fucked up. She scares me. I’ve known her since we were five and she’s scared the shit out of me since then. She’s the kid who’s got cigarettes on the playground before anyone even knows what a cigarette is. You just don’t seem like you fit.”

  Here was another person, telling me who they thought I was. If I didn’t fit with Marlena and Ryder and Greg, that meant I was supposed to fit with Chelsea and Micah and their group, with tanning beds and football games and rolling on E and how they were definitely going to share a big house together when they all went to Michigan State for four years before winding up exactly where they’d started, looking down on people like Marlena, on anyone different from them, forever and ever amen. If Chelsea had been my next-door neighbor, I’d maybe still be where I was now—only I’d have gotten there in Micah’s PT Cruiser. But her opinion would change the second she found out that this wasn’t my house, that she could hire my mom to clean her toilet for fifteen dollars an hour.

  “Marlena’s my best friend,” I said. “Also that’s hypocritical. You’re smoking right now.”

  “I’m just saying, Cat,” said Chelsea. “You’re really, like, normal. What do you even have in common with them? What do you even talk about?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She opened her mouth, emitting a big, perfect ring of smoke, and then sent a smaller ring floating through it. I was, grudgingly, impressed.

  “Screw you,” I said. Some of this was up to me.

  “I honestly thought Ryder would be dead by this point,” she said. “He’s like a fucking PSA.”

  She threw her cigarette into the fire. It landed a bit outside the flame, and shriveled slowly.

  “I would invite you to hang out sometime, but you’re tainted now,” she said.

  “Enjoy your drugs, crackhead,” I answered, showing her my teeth.

  * * *

  I don’t remember everyone coming back from the beach. It’s all snapshots. Ryder fanning his wad of bills after Micah and Chelsea and their friends left, Ryder and me sitting on the floor, leaning against one of the sofas, passing a bottle of something warm and pine-tasting back and forth. Like mouthwash made out of a Christmas tree, how his lips moved when he laughed at me saying that, how I wanted to touch the dark line between every single one of his teeth, how funny it was that spaces could be so small. To get upstairs, where I knew the food was, I had to hold on to the railing and use it to keep my spinning head from sending me backward. At the top, I saw them. Even in the darkish room, the spotlights turned to dim, I could see my brother and Marlena in the kitchen, Marlena sitting on the granite counter, the top of her body tilted toward him, her legs wrapped around his waist. Her braid had mostly fallen out and hair kept unhooking from behind her ears. Jimmy swept it back into place over and over again. I couldn’t tell what their mouths were doing. There were a million bedrooms in the house, a million walk-in closets, a million window nooks and studies, a million, trillion bathrooms. Why would they be making out there, in the plainest view? I swayed, took a few steps closer, not sure if I should stop them, feeling like it was my right, wondering if what I was seeing was what love is, two people in love, hadn’t I already learned that one of love’s side effects is turning off your fear of consequences, is making you do things you’d never do? On my way back downstairs I fell painlessly, and there were hands on me, putting me on the couch, a blanket over my chest. Outside they were talking; the wind came in through the door full of cigarette smoke. She drinks too fast, someone said, and someone else, a boy, maybe Ryder, I can never decide if she’s cute or weird-looking. Then mumbling, laughter. Marlena, I try to be nice but sometimes I’m dying to just scream, get over it already. She’s the baby of the family, Jimmy said. Or maybe it was, She’s a baby. I wanted to get up, to explain to them that it wasn’t about the divorce, it wasn’t about that at all, but the blanket was too heavy. The problem was how nothing, no one, ever, told the truth.

  * * *

  I woke up in the basement, all the lights off, my head sunk into the triangular seam where the armrest met the seat and the back of the couch. Through the French doors, now closed, the sky was timelessly dark. Basketball players as big as me dribbled a ball across the huge TV screen. Ryder was on the couch kitty-corner from mine, watching the game, sipping something from a mug.

  “You can turn on the volume,” I said.

  “She’s awake!”

  “I’m sorry for the party foul. I hope I wasn’t a huge mess.”

  “It’s fine. Marlena took care of you.”

  “What time is it?”

  “One oh three in the morning, and everyone is already passed out. Some party.”

  “I’m not.”

  Ryder fished around at the bar for something “low-key,” deciding on a fifth of Malibu that tasted the way body wash smelled. Outside it was cool enough that I was glad for my sweatshirt, but not quite cold. We passed the bottle back and forth as we walked to the beach, slipping off our shoes when the grass turned to sand. The sand against my bare feet made me shiver, and Ryder cupped my shoulders with an arm. That woke me up, but it was a funny kind of awake. I was drunk, probably, from before, plus the sugary Malibu was reactivating all the old drinks still in my bloodstream, but I felt sharp and myself underneath the alcohol. Like wearing a too-large glove and going to pick something up, how you have to navigate the extra fabric, adjust to the thing you’re wearing. I twisted away from Ryder and ran toward the lake, my feet skimming above the ground, until a wave slammed against my shins, so cold it reset my heart. I lifted my skirt and went deeper, the lake eddying around my knees, droplets and goose bumps condensing on the insides of my thighs. Far off in the distance, the lake met the sky, and that was the horizon—you could tell where it started because of stars sitting right against the water, how they weren’t wavery like the ones glinting off the waves, made of moonlight. Michigan was all lake and sky and stars, and I thought back to Marlena asking me that question about dying and still agreed with the answer I’d given. There would be beauty to drowning here, to living your whole life in this place, to never knowing the uglier world outside.

  Ryder was sitting in a beached rowboat. I hoped he’d been looking at me, at the picture I made in the water, but when I reached him, climbing into the narrow boat and settling myself against his side, his expression didn’t change.

  “What’s wrong with you lately?”

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  “I won’t tell.”

  “You will.”

  I folded my knees to my chest and covered my bare legs with my sweatshirt. Ryder hugged me to him. How many hundreds of times had I imagined myself being touched by a boy? Especially Ryder? His body was so warm—it must have been two thousand degrees warmer than my own. It was not how I’d imagined it would be; somehow it was both better and also deeply anticlimactic. As he traced the swell of my calf under the sweatshirt I relaxed, slumping against him, letting my head tip against his collarbone. Wherever his hand went, a tingle followed, and I was delirious with the pleasure of it, being touched by someone. There was no transition between kissing and not kissing—I looked up at him as he swigged from the nearly empty bottle, his throat paper white, my teeth a centimeter away from his jugular, and then the bottle was in the sand outside the boat and he had my bottom lip in his mouth, and I had no idea what to do.

  “Hey,” I whispered. “I don’t know. Maybe we should stop.”

  He did not stop. He kept kissing me, easing me back against the spine of the boat, rocking side to side as his hand spidered along my hip, and then under my shirt. What did my stomach feel like to him, my soft stomach, so unlike Marlena’s, how strange it was to have Ryder touching me there—palming my waist, pinching me. He wrenched my sweatshirt up until it covered the lower half of my face. He filled each of his hands with one of my breasts titties li
ke a fat girl titties and squeezed. He licked the places his fingers had been. Strange, strange, strange, his tongue flicking my nipples, what a strange thing for him to do, so obviously because he believed I would get pleasure from it. Silly-feeling, like being tickled in an ineffectual place. I made a soft sound in my throat, the lowest note I could hit in choir. It seemed appropriate. I felt sorry for him, somehow, the base of my skull bruising against the boat, his hands moving so clumsily, faster than I think he knew. I was no longer aroused, as I’d been before he kissed me, when he was all whispers and fingertips. Nothing about what he was doing resembled the chaotic, brain-numbing urgency of what I’d done to myself. It was like the difference between water and ice. Even my shame, which started the moment my shoulder blades hit the bottom of the boat, was of a different quality than the shame I’d felt when I touched myself. Now I was ashamed of desire writ large, of my body, of his body, of the dumb way we were moving, of what Marlena would think if she saw, of the fact that I didn’t much want this—and yet I wasn’t stopping him.

  I ran my fingers through his hair, tugging the curls near his ears. When he got tired of sucking my chest, his mouth slippery with his own spit, he kissed me again, and I understood that this really wasn’t about me at all. I was incidental. It came as a humiliating relief. His hand traveled up the inside of my skirt until he jammed one cold finger inside my—what? My cunt? My pussy? My vagina? All of those words were wrong; why were there no better ones? I yelped for real, a sound I could not control, and I imagined that I was her, Marlena, that I knew what was happening, that I liked it, wanted it—he must have learned this somewhere, this must be what they did together. What would she do? Would she kiss him back, her tongue forcing its way into his mouth, her hips bucking against his hand until he pulled his fingers out and unzipped his pants, cramming himself into her until she felt something snap inside?

  It was over, a gummy web between my legs, and I was now very, very drunk. It didn’t hurt as badly as the Internet said it would. I didn’t want to see his face, but I wanted him to see me. I wanted his fingertips back, I wanted him to fit his lips over mine, tasting their shape, to tell me he thought I was pretty, and that if I wanted to, we could try the whole thing again—and that I could decide what we did and when we did it and how. I hated that I wanted—so clichéd—for it to have been like two people having sex as an expression of love instead of what it was.