by Julie Buntin
“Were you a virgin?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then you should get the morning-after pill.”
“Okay.”
“You’d be a better kisser if you paid attention to what I was doing.” He lit a cigarette. No book I’d ever read described what had just happened to me—it was never like that. I’d kissed him back; after getting over the surprise of his finger inside of me, I’d been turned on for a moment before being overtaken by a dissociative combination of fear, self-consciousness, anxiety. And pretending—pretending I was brave, that I knew, like her, what I was doing, as if I was not myself—that had excited me, too.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He snuggled me against his chest. It felt nicer than anything he’d done so far, his arms fitted around my own, our fingers laced. “Just chill out a little. I’ll teach you.”
Inside me, Ryder’s semen was swimming around, semen that had been in my best friend too, semen that at that very moment was doing its biological best to ruin my life. Come. I’d made Ryder come. It happened so quickly, the whole thing, the kissing included, over in just a few minutes.
“You’re a good kid, Cat.”
“You kind of suck.”
He laughed. My mouth tasted funny. I was thirsty. I felt my pulse in my brain. We watched the lake hit the shore, tiny wannabe waves, one after another. They slapped the sand and then dribbled away.
“I gave the police some information about Marlena’s dad,” he said.
“Information?”
“You know about the railcar, everyone knows. They know. I just gave them a few details they were missing.”
“Did you tell her?” She would have told me. She hadn’t told me about Jimmy, but she would’ve told me this.
“Somebody saw one of Greg’s videos. The idiot put them up on YouTube. It’s like, a public site. There’s all this shit in it, me and the Mapletree and you can see where I cook. I kept getting emails from this creepy address with a bunch of Xs, and all they’d say was like, I see you, or HA-HA. Do you know what that feels like? Like someone’s watching you?” He rubbed his birthmark as if he was trying to erase it. I hadn’t even seen his penis. Or touched it, really—not with any part of me that could make sense of what it looked like. “I can’t go to jail, Cat.”
“So what’re you, like an informant?” This was all my fault. How horrible and thrilling, that my presence in their lives, one stupid suggestion, had set in motion actual events.
“I didn’t say that much. I told them about the railcar, you know. The one in the woods, near Marlena’s. That’s all they wanted.”
“What about her?”
“It’s not like I’m the only person who’s come forward about this. She’d never know it was me—she doesn’t have to.”
“The other day, before lunch. I saw you coming out of KHS.”
“I didn’t know where else to go. I don’t have like, a lawyer. Principal Lacey is a good dude. He and Cher called the cops in. They’re making me go to court school next year, do some community service—it’s better than jail.”
“What’s court school?”
“Nontraditional alternative education, says the pamphlet. School for dropouts and druggies, says everyone else. You can’t tell her, Cat. You’ve met her dad. You know what’s happening. Don’t you think it’s better for her, for Sal, if he goes away?”
“I think that’s her choice.”
“Don’t tell. Please.” He nuzzled my neck, kissing me below the ear. The goose bumps on the insides of my thighs came back. What did I want from him? More people will watch, I had said. Ryder kissed me on the lips, the way I’d wanted him to all along. I tasted him, a combination of Malibu, cigarettes, and a salt that was likely me, and knew, with an aching bloom of regret, that even if I lost a thousand memories of that time I’d never lose this one. Above us, the sky, a shattered mirror of the lake, and of course, the stars—as distant and unknowable as every single person I’d ever met, even myself.
* * *
The Hodsons fired my mom in a voicemail. Within three days most of her other Coral Springs clients called and fired her too. “We don’t have work for you here anymore,” they all said. Mom tried getting in touch with Jane Hodson to find out what was going on, but she wouldn’t answer her phone.
“I took beautiful care of that house,” Mom told me, more baffled than upset.
We’d done an okay job of cleaning up—Marlena and I were my mom’s helpers, after all, we knew what we were doing—but we couldn’t fix the missing pool cue, the cigarette burn on the rug in the basement, the ransacked bar. The morning the Bakers called, Mom kicked the kitchen trash can so hard it tipped over, eggshells and coffee grounds spilling onto the linoleum. She slammed the door to her room, leaving the mess behind. “Mom,” I called, after what seemed like a fair amount of time passed. I twisted her doorknob; it was locked. I could spring it with a bobby pin, but decided to leave her alone. Back in the kitchen, I righted the trash can and mopped up the trash, spraying the area with disinfectant and scrubbing it, on my hands and knees, with a washrag. The bar at the Hodsons’ was so vast—how had they noticed those few things missing?
Three days. That’s all it took for word that my mother was a thief to spread from the Hodsons to the rest of her clients. I could see them talking about her while they ate Gouda and crackers on the deck of their sailboats, the lights of Silver Lake twinkling onshore. I told myself that Mom deserved something better than cleaning up after rich people. But when weeks went by and the only other job she could find was one making sandwiches fourteen hours a week in a deli near Burt Lake, a twenty-five-minute drive from home, I wished I could take it back.
Mom never asked me about the Hodsons, and I have no real reason to believe she thought I had anything to do with what happened. But still, I think she knew, somehow, anyway.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” she said.
By July we, like twenty percent of Michigan’s population—Mom loved that statistic—were on food stamps. I was surprised to find out that they weren’t actually stamps. The food money came in the form of a Bridge Card; essentially a debit card, the backdrop a corny sketch of the Mackinac Bridge at sunset. I had the impression, somehow, that we were not the people that this money was intended for—Mom made it seem like the Bridge Card was just a temporary thing, or even that she’d manipulated the system in some way in order for us to be eligible, as if it were less shameful to conduct a low-level scam than to legitimately qualify for government aid. In my twenties, I struggled with pervasive anxieties about money—that I would lose my job, my apartment, and free-fall into destitution, or wind up back in Michigan. When I mentioned my fears to Mom, she’d correct me, angry. You had everything, she’d say. Remember Christmas? Remember that school? She was right. But it took me a long time to learn things that many in New York seemed to know instinctively: not to spend whatever you have at once, out of fear that if you don’t it will be taken away or simply, magically, vanish; that if you have a job and do it, it can be, to a certain extent, relied upon; that if you find yourself in possession of a large sum, it’s rude to talk about it; that if someone offers to pay for you at a restaurant or a coffee shop, you do not have to apologize repeatedly or immediately pay them back. Whenever I got a raise, or just had extra money, I felt compelled to tell people. Liam was the first person to tell me point-blank that that was off-putting.
Once a month, our Bridge Card balance was reloaded. The atmosphere in our house depended on how close we were to the reload date—the week of, it was easy at home, relaxed, but after two, three weeks, I could feel a tightness in the air again, the fridge getting emptier and emptier, Mom on edge. She hated using the card to buy expensive stuff—strawberries, frozen shrimp, single-serve yogurts—so she sometimes waited in the parking lot and sent me in to check out the groceries. Nobody expected teenagers to be anything other than stupid with money, she said. Once the checkout girl called me out on
using a Bridge Card that wasn’t mine—a nasty move, since she’d seen me and Mom before—and Mom had to come in and cut the line, explain, show her ID, while the tourists waiting for their turn looked at us like we were trash, eyeing the brand-name high-fiber cereal on the conveyor belt. Marlena was obsessed with the Bridge Card; the second she turned eighteen, she planned to get one too. To help cut costs, Mom downgraded us to the most basic cable—Jimmy and I were still on Dad’s cell phone plan, otherwise I’m pretty sure we would have lost our phones, too.
Jimmy upped his hours at Kewaunee Plastics. Many of his shifts started in the late afternoon or evening and ended at dawn, and though it hadn’t been confirmed, I suspected he was paying more rent, maybe because he felt guilty about the part he’d played in getting Mom fired. Sometimes he left envelopes on the counter, “MOM” written in Sharpie across the front—I’d peeked inside one once, and counted three twenties, folded up into a little rectangle like a tip for the guy who washes your car.
* * *
After the party, I saw Jimmy and Marlena making out no fewer than one million times. Whenever Jimmy was around, I was always turning a corner and finding him and Marlena nuzzling each other against a wall or knotted up on the couch or, once, giggling in the bathroom at one in the afternoon, steam creeping under the door. It was disgusting, and whenever I saw it, I felt that old feeling, so familiar from before Marlena and Silver Lake, as if everyone else in the world lived on one planet, Earth, and I was watching them all through a telescope from somewhere light-years away.
“I want to make sure you’re okay,” she said. “We don’t want to make you upset.”
“Why would I be upset?” I asked.
We.
“I really like him,” she told me, drawing a black line along my eyelid, right up against the lashes. I tensed my face, striving for ambivalence. What was weirder? Being happy for them, or this off-key discomfort, this prickling anxiety that everything was about to change?
“Are you boyfriend and girlfriend, or?”
“It’s not like that. It’s not serious, serious. It’s just fun. Anyway, I’m kind of like, raw, after Ryder. And he has his own stuff. His ex. That Jenny girl.” She didn’t think it was serious, or he didn’t? Who deserved more of my wariness, my protection? Sometimes, when I saw them together, I believed I was seeing the real thing. “I guess you don’t really get this,” Marlena said, switching to my opposite lid. “How would you?”
“That’s kind of insulting.”
“Oh, Cat, I only mean you’re not very experienced. Just try to be happy for me, and not weird. This is so exactly what I need after Ryder.” She stared right into my eyes when she said that, like she knew about what we’d done together in the rowboat. She licked her fingertip and smudged a stray bit of liner along the outer corner of my eyelid. I didn’t know how to bring it up. Even imagining telling her gave me a kind of phantom anxiety. Because what if she didn’t believe me?
“I’m not cool with you doing whatever you do with Bolt while you’re hooking up with my brother.”
“Okay,” said Marlena, capping the kohl pencil. “Well, we’re not together.”
“He’s my brother. And he really likes you.” She used the eyeliner to poke around in the makeup bag, avoiding my comment. “Hello?”
“Fine,” she said. “I won’t.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“You wouldn’t do that.” The hurt in her voice startled me into backing down.
“No. I wouldn’t. Of course not. Just please try not to lick each other in front of me.”
“I will do my best to restrain myself. But if he walks around in boxers all bets are off.”
“Ew. Oh my God. Ew. I hate you.”
I wiggled away, so that our knees no longer touched. I wished that Jimmy, who only had one day off a week, would take on more hours. In a remote way, I cared about how she handled his heart. But because I’d never really had mine broken, I didn’t know the danger he was in. As long as he worked all the time, we could go on like this, everything pretty much the same.
Because Marlena’s pin was busted and safely tucked away in the pocket of one of my sweaters, and because she was so happy and she looked so well—she’d put on a little weight, and the slight plumpness to her cheeks made her look sweet and younger—I thought maybe she’d eased up on the Oxy. Days went by without her texting Bolt; I knew, because when she texted him her face took on a certain cast, a furtive combination of anxiety and desire, her bottom lip in her mouth, her eyes skittish. Her voice got quieter. But I was wrong. A couple of weeks after the party I unzipped her backpack, looking for cigarettes. She’d dashed over to her house, to tuck Sal in, and I didn’t feel like waiting twenty minutes or whatever for her to come back. I fished for the pack and my knuckles rattled against a big white bottle full of OxyContin, almost full, the kind you see on the shelves at the pharmacy, not made out to anyone. Jimmy didn’t like that she took Oxy—I’d heard them arguing about it—so she’d become more secretive. Now her high was so constant, her supply so steady, that there’d been no nausea, no valleys in her mood.
I could have called my brother and told him. Probably, he was the only one who had a real shot at stopping her. But was it relief I felt, some strange, sick version, when I saw those pills and knew that no matter how ecstatic she seemed with Jimmy, always fiddling with his hair, sprawling across his lap, texting him deep into the night, that he hadn’t been able to solve her problems, either? I wanted to be her most important person, because she was mine.
I put the pills back in her bag and never mentioned them to anyone.
* * *
The recording was my idea—we’d post it to Greg’s NotYourSanta account, because Marlena didn’t want to make her own profile. Greg had uploaded a few other videos, but the bike one, with Ryder cooking in the background, was by far the most watched. My stomach wrenched when I saw it onscreen, paused on the opening shot in the Mapletree, the stained mattress, the acetone stacked near the TV, but I pushed the feeling away. Nothing had happened yet.
“No offense, guys, but my fans aren’t really after videos of girls singing folk music,” Greg said. He had about fifty followers, though the commenters were active.
doublevision11: Hoho what a f*cking crackhead
treatmelikeanangel: Proactive www.proactive.com
dillypickle44_1: HAHA LAUGHING MY ASS NOTYOURSANTA IS MY HERO
nanabooboo: This guy goes to my school and I have seriously never heard him speak.
melleryeller: omg can’t stop watching this?
He had a point.
“Yeah, but you already have people built in. It doesn’t make sense for us to start from scratch,” I said. “You have an audience. We’re just going to borrow it.”
I shot the video with Greg’s camcorder—just Marlena singing. She picked a Neko Case song about a girl who was so lonely and tired she wished she was the moon, mostly because it suited Marlena’s range and she could play the bones of it on her dad’s acoustic guitar. I was the director. I had her balance on the base of the jungle gym’s slide, a braided ribbon tied around her forehead, the guitar cradled on her lap. I’d drawn a tiny blue star on her left and right temples—we’d been toying around with the idea of starting a band, naming ourselves the Northern Stars. Sometimes we thought it was perfect; sometimes too stupid to bear. It was a windy day, and her hair kept blowing in her mouth as she sang. On the high notes, she intentionally let her voice wobble and crack, a little affectation that gave me the chills. We uploaded the recording and within three days the video had over five hundred views. Holy cow, strangers wrote. Can you say hummer? Get that girl a record deal. HOTTIE XXXXXX, sing to me forever. As more comments accrued, many of them dirty, Marlena stopped looking at the video.
“There’s lots of good ones, too, though,” said Greg, a little drunk on the online attention. “I think you should do another.”
“When you put a camera on anything it makes people think they’re looking a
t something professional,” Marlena said. “Besides, I don’t need to hear strangers tell me to suck their dicks. I’ve gotten that enough in my life.”
I said she sounded great, but she might be right about a second video. Whenever she finished learning how to play a new song, mentioned recording something else, I said I didn’t feel like it. I told her to stop being so full of herself.
“Who do you think you are?” I said. “Stevie Nicks?”
* * *
Summertime transformed northern Michigan. Kewaunee swelled to twice its normal size, and all day, every day, sailboats coasted across the bay. The roads, which were mostly empty all winter, clogged up with traffic, so it took even longer to get from Silver Lake to downtown. For us, good weather meant the beach. We split off from the tourists and camped out in the dunes, on a little shelf we’d found where there wasn’t much grass and where we had both a clear view of the water and some privacy. We went in funny combinations, depending on who was working and when—often it was just Tidbit and us, since Greg had gotten a job at the Dairy Queen. Now and then Ryder came too, and sulkily watched us from a blanket on shore, his shoulders freckling in the sun, a tuft of sandy hair at his breastbone that I always found myself wanting to touch. We texted sometimes, in a desultory way, and had kissed again since the night in the rowboat—once in his car, the center console digging into my hip, after he gave me a ride to the failing Family Video, and again a week or so later, under the jungle gym behind Marlena’s house. I’d enjoyed myself that time, and had even let my fingers stray down to the hardening lump in his pants. “Don’t stop,” he said, his face a blur of shadow, but after a few minutes I did, feeling a surge of glee when he groaned with legitimate pain. It helped that I didn’t like like him, really, especially after what he’d told me about Marlena’s dad and the police, and that what we did gave me very little sexual pleasure. It was enough that in profile he looked a bit like Cary Grant from the poster that hung in the Gaslight Cinema lobby. That, and the buzz I felt when I could tell he wanted me.