Marlena

by Julie Buntin

  “That’s not a grade.”

  “I think I’m the first person who ever got one. They made a grade up for me, that’s how crap my grades are. I’m not going to be able to take care of Sal if I’m a high school student with no money. What’s the point? I’m not going to go to college anyway. Candice agrees with me, we’ve already, like, talked and talked about it.”

  “You’re going to be a dropout, you realize that, right? A high school dropout.”

  “Hey! Both my parents were dropouts.”

  “My point exactly.”

  “I can get my GED—I can do that while I’m working.”

  “What does Jimmy say?” Since she started living with us, I found myself asking her what Jimmy said, like Jimmy was the dad and she was the kid, and Jimmy and I were her parents, or something.

  “He says I can get my GED and take classes at NCC, if I want. He also said I’m too smart for that place.” She was bragging, in her way. Hadn’t he said the precise opposite to me, or at least implied it, all those months ago, when I’d thrown a fit about going to KHS?

  * * *

  And school started again. Without her it was lonely and also kind of better. I got to like what I liked about it, without distraction. I paid attention in class. I raised my hand. In English, when I started to talk, the kids in the back audibly groaned. I didn’t skip—though I still crept out during breaks to smoke with Greg and Tidbit in the doghouses, in the copse of carved trees behind the football field. I was just a junior, but because of Concord, probably, I’d started to receive college brochures. Mostly for Michigan schools, little liberal arts places. I requested info from a handful of places in the New York area. I thought I might apply to one of the cheaper ones—Hunter, it was called. Marlena and I spread all the materials out all over my bedroom floor.

  “At NYU you can major in evil,” she said. “What a waste of money. Everyone gets a major in evil just by being alive. At least a minor.” She loved looking at the college pamphlets. She spent hours with my highlighter, marking stuff like the percentage of students who go on to master’s programs, whether or not the university offered a cappella groups and chamber choirs, literary journals and a campus newspaper. She was doing the research for both of us.

  “Honestly, Mar, I really don’t care,” I told her one night, as she blabbed on about kitchenettes in city dorms. It was true. Nothing about college mattered to me except the address.

  * * *

  September, the air sugary from the maple leaves just about to turn, warm enough still that at Bayview, the fancy restaurant downtown, they let us sit on the balcony. Marlena stood her leather-bound menu up on the table and read from it hands-free, trying to act like knowing French meant she understood all the nuances of the way the dishes were prepared. Marlena had some extra money from work, and she wanted to go out to eat at a real restaurant, not a fast-food place. We ate escargots without flinching and watched the sun set over the lighthouse and drank sparkling water and the bread came with oil to dip it into instead of butter, and it was the first of a million more dinners like that.

  * * *

  Sometimes I wonder how I’d tell this if I didn’t have so many books rattling around inside me. The truth is both a vast wilderness and the tiniest space you can imagine. It’s between me and her, what I saw and what she saw and how I see it now and how she has no now. Divide it further—between what I mean and what I say, who I am and who I appear to be, who she said she was and acted like she was and also, of course, who she really was, in all her glorious complexity, all her unknowable Marlena-ness, all her secrets. Imagine each of these perspectives like circles in a Venn diagram, a tiny period in the middle, the darkest spot on the chart. Maybe that is the truth. But my version of the story is all we fucking get.

  * * *

  For her eighteenth birthday, I had to give her something unexpected. Something thoughtful; something she wasn’t aware she wanted. It had to cost almost nothing, because I didn’t have any money to spend. I wanted my gift to illustrate to everyone, to her, how much better I knew her than anyone else. The pin came to mind out of nowhere, the last few minutes of trig, me dozing at my desk in the overbright room. That evening, I dug Marlena’s pin out of its hiding place in my old sweater pocket, pleased by my cleverness, and the next day I took it down to the watch repair place during lunch. They fixed it in two seconds flat, for free.

  She spent September 27, the day she turned eighteen, less than two months before her death, with Sal at his foster home. I pushed, but she wouldn’t let me go with her. Privately, Candice told me that Sal’s new foster mom had experience with special needs children and that she was nice, not one of those people who took in foster kids for the checks they came with. After Marlena died I visited Sal a handful of times. The home seemed like an okay place, a dirty two-story on the grimier side of downtown, too many kids, shoes piled up near the back door, sticky old toys overflowing from bins in every corner, but there were always cookies or brownies on the counter, laughter coming from the rooms upstairs.

  Sals so mad at me, Marlena texted, in the middle of choir. he wont look at me & he keeps acting like he doesnt know who you are!

  give him a minute, M

  .… poopooppooooopp

  it’s your birthday!!!! be happy!!!! you’re a legal adult!! you can buy me cigarettes!!!

  im TRYING

  i know <3

  Jimmy and I had made her a cake over the weekend, while she was working an extra shift. We poured Betty Crocker yellow cake mix into a bowl that wasn’t quite big enough. Powder splatted out all over the counter when we added sprinkles by the fistful. The sprinkles were Bridge Card eligible, and the frosting too.

  “Are you sure that’s how you make it confetti,” he said. Having Marlena around had made him handsomer, somehow. He looked less angry all the time. That, and she’d cut his hair, snipped it into little blond layers. I suspected that he was in love. He’d put off college for another year, and I knew that meant he was probably never going to go, that Marlena was a good enough reason for him to stay.

  “Why not? It looks right, doesn’t it?”

  The cake came out of the oven with the sprinkles all sunk to the bottom.

  “I can never decide if your weird on-and-off confidence about random shit is going to take you very far, Cath, or totally fuck you over.”

  “Well, thanks, I guess.”

  “I’ve got my money on far. You’re our last bright hope for the future.”

  “You can still go. You could start in the spring. It’s not too late. I bet you could still get your scholarship, even.”

  “Yeah, I know. But I don’t want to anymore.”

  “How? How could you just not want to? I don’t understand it.”

  “Just don’t.”

  He cut a little segment of the cake out of the pan and split it in two, handing me half. The cake was hot and the sprinkles at the bottom created a kind of extra-sweet crust. We smeared a can and a half of chocolate frosting on top, using it to plug the hole where he’d taken out our taste.

  “Are you guys going to become like, official?” I asked, while he spelled out a message to her in blue sugar gel. His arm twitched, squiggling the curves of the B.

  “So nosy. How would I know? But, I guess, I hope.” His skin flushed. “When she’s ready. When her life gets a little more back to normal. If she wants. Oh, Christ. Don’t repeat that.”

  “Well, have you asked her?”

  “Yes. I have.”

  “And she just keeps saying no?”

  “For now,” he said.

  * * *

  “HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO OUR FAVORITE ONE” is what he wrote across the surface of the long, flat sheet cake, a message so long it covered the frosting like a filled-up page. The B’s loops were deformed. We didn’t know how else to say what we meant.

  * * *

  I carried the cake out to Marlena, who was sitting at the kitchen table in jeans and one of my collarless T-shirts, her hair in
a half ponytail, her face lit up in places by the candlelight. “Happy birthday,” we sang, Mom and Jimmy harmonizing, a wetness only I saw, I think, flooding Marlena’s eyes when I placed the cake in front of her. She blew out the candles in three tries, cursing herself for being a smoker.

  “I’ve never had a birthday cake like this before,” she said. “What happened to the B?” Jimmy shrugged, his face giving him away.

  I’ve gone over and over that year, and this is where I often pause. This, right here, in our little cardboard house with our too-sweet box cake, Marlena’s eighteenth birthday, an instant that in memory is somehow removed from the fact of her death, as if she were spared, still around somewhere, moving on with her life, thirty-six at the time of this writing, an age I will be soon. Look at her, sitting at our table. She’s waiting to find out which of all the things that could possibly happen, will. I need someone else to see her. That half ponytail, bound together with one of my hair ties, her ears sticking out a little, the candlelight glowing through them, pinking her skin, the shadow of her collarbone, all her thoughts, all the things she wanted that I never even knew, everything we lost.

  Marlena only had two things to open, since Jimmy’s present was mysteriously “on its way.” From Mom, a used cookbook with recipes for thirty-minute meals, and a white button-down shirt. “I’m sorry they’re so practical, sweetie, but anyone with little kids around needs to know how to make food fast. And the shirt’s for work. So you don’t always have to go washing the one you have.” Mom was on her third glass of wine, and we were all sweeties.

  “Thank you. It’s perfect. I’ll have to tell them that at the hearing. ‘Can cook at least ten kid-approved thirty-minute meals’!”

  “You can practice on me,” said Jimmy. “I’ll eat all that Frito pie shit.”

  “Isn’t it so funny how you just can’t imagine where you’re gonna wind up? I never saw you guys coming, and now you’re like family.” She gave us one of her too-big, too-beautiful smiles, that one she deployed when she was trying to get something.

  “Open mine,” I interrupted, hating myself.

  I’d wrapped the pin up in newspaper and taped it all around with Scotch tape, so it was stupidly hard to open.

  “Is it a bomb?” Jimmy asked.

  Marlena sucked the frosting off her knife and slid it under the tape.

  “Where’d you find this?” Her voice, flat. My stomach fell.

  “I didn’t take it. I just found it, on the floor. By the couch.” The lie was reflexive.

  She held it up to a candle flame in the center of the table and then brought it in close to her eye, a jeweler inspecting something dubious. “It’s been lost for a long time. I thought it was gone.” Her Marlena-ness was fading, turning her back into a regular teenager, all that happiness gone. No one could tell but me—Mom too buzzed, Jimmy too stoned.

  “That your pin?” he said, reaching for it, but she didn’t pass it to him. She popped open the door, closed it, popped it open again.

  “I had to get it fixed. I didn’t want to tell you I found it because I was going to surprise you! I wanted to fix it and surprise you.” I didn’t know why I was apologizing.

  “It’s good as new, anyway.”

  “What’s that?” Mom asked. “Kind of ugly, isn’t it?”

  “Something I used to wear a lot,” said Marlena, and she poked the needle through her shirt.

  * * *

  October came, as it was always going to. The day before Marlena’s custody hearing, we wandered through the woods chain-smoking, a tiny bit drunk off the forty we passed back and forth as we rehearsed the questions Candice told Marlena to be prepared to answer. Leaves clung to the sleeves of the sweatshirts we wore, hoods up, drawstrings tied against the chill. Marlena was breaking out—on her chin, a zit the size of a pencil eraser. I was on my period; hers still hadn’t come back. I noted its absence every month, jealously. The air smelled like moss and rot.

  “Ms. Joyner,” I said in a dramatic baritone, my fake lawyer-voice. “What are your responsibilities at Mulvie’s? Describe your weekly schedule.”

  “It makes me nervous to hear you talk in that voice, and you suck at it.” She finished the bottle and placed it carefully between the roots of a tree, as if we were going to return to it on our way back, pick it up and invent a recycle bin.

  “You want me to talk in my regular voice?”

  “I’m going to blow this. I can’t talk in front of a room. Plus all those people know my dad. How’re they not going to be thinking of him when they look at me?”

  “Maybe you should acknowledge it. Hey—I know my dad fucked up, but I’m not him, and I hope you won’t take his crimes into consideration, or something, when you’re making this decision? Are you getting kind of cold?” I had cramps, coming and going, waves of pressure. I wanted to go back, but it seemed insensitive to ask if we could turn around.

  “I wish Candice could just speak for me.”

  “Doesn’t it matter, what Sal wants?”

  “Who even knows what Sal would say if they asked him if he wanted to live with me. He’s been such a little shithead lately.”

  “Probably don’t call him a shithead.”

  “I’m the only one who knows how to deal with that little shithead!” she yelled to the treetops, kind of singing the word head, so that it ricocheted off the branches, vibrating into the sky. Then, quieter, to me: “Are you convinced?”

  * * *

  I hardly slept that night. Marlena kept sighing and turning over, pulling the blanket with her, baring one of my knees, my foot, to the cool air. I knew she wanted to talk, but I had an in-class essay in English, first period, and I was nervous about having to write four pages in less than an hour. “Hmm,” she said, a sigh that turned into an actual sound, and flopped onto her stomach, pulling the cover completely off my legs. I tugged the blanket back hard enough to uncover some of her skin, too. “Sorry,” she whispered, and got up, moving around my room in the dark for a few minutes before leaving, shutting my door behind her with an overly cautious click. That woke me for good. I lay there until the window went gray with morning, anxious about where she’d gone, hoping she was just on the couch or with Jimmy, not off with Bolt or someone worse.

  Just before my alarm was set to ring, she opened my bedroom door and turned on all the lights.

  “Wake up,” she said, holding a coffee mug. “What do you think I should wear?”

  “I’m sleeping.”

  My alarm went off.

  “Like I said. Get up.” She set her mug down on a stack of books and started fussing around in my closet.

  “We already talked about this.” I got out of bed, which basically just meant standing up—my mattress was still on the floor—and removed her coffee cup from the book, where it’d left a ring. “I told you not to put cups here.”

  She stepped into a shift dress of my mom’s that I’d worn to Admitted Students Day at Concord a trillion years before. There was already a pile of my stuff pulled off the hanger and thrown onto the foot of my bed. “Can you zip?”

  Up close, she was so thin that her spine was painful to look at, marbles against her skin. My bra, a red and lacy one I was too shy to wear, was clasped on the very tightest hooks—even so, I could have slid two fingers between her back and the band, no problem. “I thought you were going to wear black pants and that birthday shirt.”

  We watched each other in the mirror, Marlena grabbing the loose fabric at her hips and frowning. “I think the dress looks more grown-up.”

  “It doesn’t fit right.”

  “I’ll wear a sweater. And thick tights. Don’t you think it’s better?”

  “Frankly, I don’t think what you wear is going to make the difference, but the dress looks fine.”

  I left for the bathroom, carrying my clothes with me. I still hated changing in front of her when I was sober. She would sit around in a T-shirt and underwear, but I always turned and faced the wall, unhooking my bra and pullin
g it out through a sleeve, so that my body was never fully uncovered, not even for a second. Even though she’d seen it all already, all those drunken nights. In the bathroom, I splashed water on my face, droplets sliding down my neck, soaking my tank top. Mom and Marlena joked that when I finished with the bathroom, it was like an elephant had taken a sponge bath in the sink. Of course she hadn’t remembered about the test. In the scheme of things, it was very small, so much smaller than what was happening to her. She wasn’t the bad friend. I’d kept Ryder’s secret for him almost entirely out of selfishness. I didn’t want Marlena to put it all together, to realize that Ryder would never have gotten caught, would never have ratted out Marlena’s dad, if it weren’t for me, sitting there in the computer lab, trying so hard to be cool, encouraging Greg to post that dumb video on YouTube. I didn’t want her to know I’d lost my virginity to a boy that had belonged to her since she was a little kid, a boy, I was sure, who didn’t even much like me.

  “Seriously, do I look okay?” she asked, when I reentered my room. She stood in front of my mirror, her face bare, her hair gathered into a low ponytail.

  “You look great.”

  “Yeah, but like, capable?”

  “Yes, yes, yes, yes.”

  “I’m sorry. I love you.”

  “I love you, too. It’s going to be fine.”

  Unframed by eyeliner, her irises were somehow even more blue, dramatically so, a color so bright you could almost hear it. She wore the pin I’d given back to her, stuck through the fabric near the right side of her collar, just where she liked it. It looked ridiculous with the dress.

  “Don’t wear that,” I said, touching the place on my shirt where the pin would be, if I were wearing it. Her reflection looked at mine.

  “Why?”

  “I know you’ve still got stuff. Pills. I know you still have some, and I just don’t think you should take any. I think you need to be sober for this.” An accident. A thought I barely knew I had. Would she really walk right into the courtroom with Oxy pinned to her shirt? I told myself she wouldn’t, but of course she would. The best place to hide something was in plain sight. That was why she’d started wearing the pin in the first place.