by Ted Michael
“Oh, I didn’t decide that,” Stringbean said simply. “That’s a fact.”
“But you just said—”
“Pretty’s on account of what you’re around all the time. I’m the ugly one in the family. My mom is pretty, and everyone knows Junie Mae’ll be the pretty one like her.”
“You know, I thought you had a good theory going there for a minute,” Goose said, inconspicuously shutting off the camera, so as not to remind Stringbean it had been on, and throwing their rope line onto the dock, “but now that you kept talking, you sound pretty full of shit.”
Stringbean threw a peanut at him, and they maneuvered the boat up to the dock.
13. Flip-Flop II
The air beyond the shoreline was damper, chiller, grown-over with unfamiliar smells: must, rot, growth, neglect. Stringbean tracked old roads under decades’ worth of leaves and vines, kicking herself for wearing flip-flops instead of sneakers, which clearly would have been the sensible choice for woods exploration.
“I wish we could record the smells out here,” Stringbean mused. “It smells like—I don’t know, old fire. And decay.”
“That’s good,” Goose said. “It does.”
Stringbean barked suddenly, feeling something slimy underfoot. She reached down to pull a slug off her big toe, swearing under her breath.
“You okay?” Goose asked, shifting the weight of their supply pack on his shoulders.
“Yeah. Just a slug.”
“Wow,” Goose mugged shock at her, chuckling. “You don’t like ugly slugs?”
“Slugs are the only ugly thing I hate.”
“Interesting. I guess there are still things to learn about people you’ve known forever.”
Stringbean paused, contemplating this. There was so much longing Goose didn’t know.
They pushed deeper into the woods. The outline of the hotel’s main building was visible through the thick tapestry of trees: fir, pine, oak, birch, all deep in their summer bloom. The two waded through the carpet of leaves and needles, vines and roots.
“We are approaching the remains of the Grand Hotel Sault St. Marie from the south side,” Goose said into the camera. “It smells like fire and decay.”
14. Interlude: Back at The House
Junie Mae watched as the big machine next to Big DeeDee blinked and beeped. Big DeeDee shifted slightly in her sleep, narrow in the hospice bed since she’d lost so much weight, her arm sliding off its edge. Junie Mae crawled into the space at Big DeeDee’s side, burrowing into her nook.
“BeeDee,” Junie Mae whispered. “It’s me, Junie Mae.”
“I know that, pumpkin,” Big DeeDee whispered back, wiping a trace of drool out of the corner of her mouth. “What you got?”
“Do you remember how you told me that we should be grateful that Princess Diana wasn’t in pain anymore? Because she had been sad, and because she was in a car crash and it probably hurt a lot?”
Big DeeDee gave a dry laugh. “You woke me up to ask me about Princess Diana?”
“No, I wanted to ask you if we’re supposed to want you not to be in pain anymore. Because I think that might be hard for me, but I don’t want you to hurt a lot, either.”
Big DeeDee looked deeply at Junie Mae. “Well, that’s a tough one, pumpkin pie. I suppose I’ll make a deal with you. How about for now you don’t think too much about me hurting, but after I’m gone, you can be grateful that I’m not anymore?”
Junie Mae looked deeply at Big DeeDee.
“Deal.”
And they both went to sleep.
15. Broken Machine
Goose was trying very hard not to pee his pants in excitement: for one, this old, burned, rotting hotel was so flipping cool, and on the other hand, he’d been plotting getting here, particularly getting here alone with Stringbean, all summer.
There had been, in a way that felt undeniable to Goose, a tectonic shift this summer, a quickening, and even though Stringbean didn’t want to talk about it, he was beginning to think they needed to. It felt enormous, and he just couldn’t go on playing her weird machine songs in the dark and feeling all funny inside when he watched his sister’s old Dawson’s Creek DVDs instead of acknowledging it anymore. It was all getting too embarrassing.
It was impossible to overstate how much time Goose now spent thinking about Stringbean’s boobs. He didn’t want to spend this much time thinking about them. But they were always there, under the camera, under her layers of bondage, under her crossed arms. And in his dreams, in the cinema of his mind every time he closed his eyes. Stringbean seemed to have absolutely no idea that she was rapidly transforming into a high-octane babe. But this fact, the transformation of his oldest friend, his partner in crime, into a newly strange and beautiful creature, was as profoundly disrupting to Goose as anything ever had been. The only hidden part of Stringbean that mesmerized Goose as much as her boobs was her voice.
“We are in the main lobby of the hotel,” Goose said excitedly as Stringbean swiveled to capture the rotted Persian carpet, the sunken velvet chairs, a moss-covered reception desk, and vine-ravaged grand piano. “Stringbean, see if you can play the piano.”
“You play,” Stringbean said from behind the camera.
“I’m afraid of the bench,” Goose said, standing at the keyboard. He played a few bars of “Nearer My God to Thee.” The piano sounded wet, diseased, and demented. A key fell off.
Stringbean watched, mesmerized: this was great. She hoped the fading light and the flashlights would be enough to get it all onscreen.
Softly, as Goose picked at the ancient, soggy piano, Stringbean hummed the damaged notes along with his playing. This piano was a broken machine. Stringbean was in love with it, with its broken song.
Goose looked sharply at Stringbean. “I know you sing, String,” he said.
Stringbean’s humming ceased with a gulp. “What?”
“Come on. You’re not that careful about switching out the tapes. Why don’t you just sing? I like the way you sing.”
Stringbean crossed her arms and grimaced. “No.”
“But no one’s here.” A tinge of panic rose in Goose’s throat: had he pushed her too soon? “It’s just me. Here, I won’t look.”
He closed his eyes and kept playing. Softly, faintly, almost imperceptibly, after a moment, came Stringbean’s voice, her wordless tones, small but open-mouthed. Goose’s heart thrilled at the sound of her: her voice rangy and sonorous, the loveliest snarl. You’re beautiful, String, he said to her, inside his head.
16. Room 15: Goose
Covered in dust and elated, Goose and Stringbean pushed farther into the hotel. Goose’s heart thundered as he pushed open the least-burnt of the rooms, 15. The bedspread was still laid perfectly on the imploding queen-sized bed, lace and soot and spongy green growth. The last rays of sunlight withered from the broken window.
“See what happens if you put weight on the bed,” Stringbean said excitedly, zooming in on Goose.
Goose sat gingerly on the edge and the bed creaked impossibly, more a groan of exhaustion than a squeak of springs. Stringbean sang more earnestly now, trying to match the sickening tone of the bed. Goose now stared openly at her: from the piano, he’d tried to keep her from noticing that he noticed her singing, but the fact of it seemed to be acknowledged now, unleashing the secret of Stringbean’s voice.
Goose shifted around on the bed, not wanting Stringbean to stop singing. He laid back, sinking into its center: more groaning, a kind of hiss. He flipped over on all fours and gave a cautious bounce: a cough, a crack as a board burst below. Stringbean harmonized with the bed’s destruction. Goose watched her and her open mouth with the camera, transfixed. More recklessly now, he stood up on the bed, transferring his weight from foot to foot: deflating, cracking, groaning, crunching. Stringbean sang her lunatic melody louder.
Goose was bewitched by her excitement—he had never seen Stringbean look quite so uninhibited, quite so unselfconscious, quite so alive. Stringbean was a part of this video in
a way that she hadn’t been before—a voice on the tape, a performer and not just an eye. Her face emitted a light.
Goose began to jump up and down on the rotten, rickety bed. Stringbean’s spontaneous song reached a crescendo, screeching wildly, the sound of her bizarre and primal and pure. Goose jumped higher as she sang louder, trying to push through the ceiling for her. He didn’t want her to stop, never wanted her to stop, could hear a thousand little imaginary ceilings shattering inside her, wanted to see what kind of Stringbean emerged from that wreckage.
It was just then, at the soaring climax of Stringbean, Goose, and the bed’s strange trio, that the bed gave way under Goose and collapsed entirely, pitching Goose dangerously over its edge and shoulder-first onto the floor, knocking down a sign from the wall that read CONEY ISLAND OF THE WEST: THE IDEAL RESORT OF THE NORTHWEST. It took everything Stringbean had not to drop the camera as she ran to him.
“Oh shit, that was so stupid of us! Are you okay? Can you breathe?” Stringbean asked frantically, rolling him over to examine him.
“Oooowwwwww,” Goose groaned in a tone not unlike the bed’s. “That one’s gonna bruise.” He rubbed the floored shoulder.
“Do you think it’s broken? Is it dislocated?”
“Naw. I can move it okay.” Goose winced as he rotated the arm. “It just hurts where I hit the ground. Did you get it all on tape?”
Stringbean burst into laughter. “Yeah. I think so. No, I definitely did.”
“We’re using that clip. No arguments.” Goose stared hard at Stringbean. The gut-tingle she gave him was starting up again. “I like it when you sing. You sound kind of like Carol Burnett.”
17. Room 15: Stringbean
“Okay,” Stringbean said quietly.
The room reverberated, stunned after all the raucous action into sudden silence, and Stringbean felt a tectonic shift somewhere, one plate slipping under another, a new intersection. She was still out of breath and flushed, overheated from the plunge into the other side of her inhibition, unburdened and bare.
Goose sat up, still looking at her, not far from her face. The look made Stringbean feel something like indigestion.
“It’s, um—kind of nice to be alone.”
“What do you mean?” Stringbean said uneasily. “We’re alone all the time.”
“I know, but there’s always your family or mine, and Junie Mae running around—it’s quiet out here. It’s nice,” Goose said.
Stringbean immediately thought about running, but where? It was an island, and it’d get dark, and she’d get lost in a haunted old hotel. Then she thought, why am I thinking about running? It’s just Goose.
“I guess so,” Stringbean said. She smirked. “You’re lucky you didn’t hurt yourself any worse. You were just about to be another cautionary tale about kids and trampolines.”
“Stringbean, can I tell you something?” Goose blurted out, like he was in pain.
Stringbean was taken aback. “You can tell me anything. You know that.”
“IthinkI’minlovewithyou.” Goose’s words all swirled together like melted ice cream.
“What? No, you’re not.” Stringbean exclaimed, shocked. “Did you bang your head?”
“No, I’m fucking serious,” Goose said fervently. “You can’t tell me that things haven’t been sort of—different, in the last few months. That something’s changed between us.”
“I mean, we’re not ten anymore, sure,” Stringbean said, oddly warm and squirming.
“But don’t you feel the difference? Because it seems like you feel it too, but you don’t want to talk about it.”
The thing about Goose was that he was always willing to admit things: Goose was an open channel, a present force, an untainted reflection of things. With Goose, what you saw was what you got, and it was what made him such a good story-hunter, such a good partner in crime, such an easy addition to the yard and the kitchen and the living room and Junie Mae and the boat and the island and the business of dreaming.
Stringbean knew she loved Goose, but in love wasn’t something she’d let herself think much about. Because she thought that’s what other girls did, and scoffed accordingly. Because, deep down, she knew that ugly girls who thought about in love, who let themselves get attached to it, were probably heading for an emotional plane crash.
“I guess—I guess maybe there’s been an, I don’t know, a tension that hadn’t been there before,” Stringbean admitted.
“Yeah. I mean, um, I think in general there’s some stuff that wasn’t here before,” Goose said, coughing.
Stringbean glared at him, her message stern and silent: Don’t you know that we are never to talk about my boobs, ever?
“Don’t be disgusting,” Stringbean said.
“Don’t be mean,” Goose shot back. “Look, I’ve been trying to work up the guts to tell you all this for a while, so you could at least be nice about it.”
“I’m sorry,” Stringbean said, softening. “Look, you know I love you, Goose. You’re like, my everything. You’re the only person in this godforsaken town who I actually want to spend time with. Everyone else I’m just stuck with.”
“Well,” Goose said, “maybe I want you to be stuck with me too. Maybe I’m a little stuck to—on—you.”
Stringbean fought to avoid rolling her eyes.
“Come on, dude, think about this. Don’t you think it’s kind of weird? I mean, we’ve literally known each other since we were toddlers.”
“I don’t think it’s that weird,” Goose said, looking more crestfallen than Stringbean would have preferred. “I mean, how do people get together with people they don’t know first?”
“What exactly do you mean by get together?” Stringbean asked suspiciously. “I’m just saying, don’t you think there’s a point at which you know someone too—”
Stringbean was cut off, abruptly, by Goose’s mouth on hers. She was appalled. In any of the few imaginings of this moment that she’d ever permitted herself, she’d never dreamed that her first kiss would happen as she was literally midsentence.
A moment went by, Goose’s lips still pressed to hers. Cautiously, Stringbean pressed back. Goose happily pressed a little more. Stringbean moved her lips some.
No one was more surprised than Stringbean herself to discover that she liked it.
18. Interlude: How Stringbean Met Goose
It was back when Stringbean still had a dad, way back. There was a meeting he went to every Thursday night in the basement of the church where Reverend Gerald H. Nelson preached. And because Little DeeDee had a shift on Thursday nights, Stringbean came with her father and played with the ladies in the church playroom upstairs while he went to his meeting. Goose’s mom was there, and so was Goose. Goose introduced Stringbean to the kaleidoscope, Stringbean figured out how to break into it and mess it up, and that was it. They were inseparable. When Stringbean’s dad left about a year later, Goose’s mom just picked up Stringbean every Thursday night, out of habit or kindheartedness or both, and they kept playing with the kaleidoscope.
One night, Goose’s mother had run out to the grocery store, and the pair went exploring in the church—before the days of the video camera, but a portending of them. After successfully jimmying a lock into the office belonging to Reverend Nelson’s associate Reverend Andresson, the two discovered a cavern of wonders. Reverend Andresson was an avid hunter, and his office was crowded with mallards and pheasants, stag heads and foxes, a gaze of raccoons and a brood of chicks. In the center of the room, above the desk, was a majestic Canada goose, wings spread and neck darted as if in eternal flight, clearly the prize of the collection.
Young Goose was so transfixed, he reached up to pet the goose, to feel the avian feathers of its giant wingspan—and promptly snapped off the bird’s wing. It took a frantic thirty minutes of Krazy Glue, dental floss, stick pins, and other effluvium to repair the wing before Goose’s mom returned, during which Stringbean laughed so hard that the nickname affixed.
The fact of Stringbean’s becoming Stringbean was much simpler. According to Goose, it was just how she looked.
19. Roam Free
Stringbean and Goose were as tangled as the roots and vines poking through the hotel’s ancient, mottled parquet floor, rolling around together on the ground as they were. Stringbean had rationed herself so little anticipation of this moment that it had never occurred to her that she might enjoy it, but suddenly the possibilities of her body seemed to extend beyond dragging herself through the dirt (though, in a sense, that was also what they were currently doing) and bringing Big DeeDee ice cream, beyond her daily boob-bindings and other mummifications.
And it was Goose, Goose whose smell she knew, Goose who had spent his life down in the dirt with her, Goose who had previously accepted the boundaries of what she would and would not discuss, Goose who could not possibly be fooled into thinking Stringbean was anything but what she was: a strange, rangy, curious girl who rarely remembered to brush her hair, an apprentice eccentric, the girl who loved ugliness because it sang to her. Goose, for whom she sang, even through the veil of the camera; Goose, for whom she could be brave enough to sing.
For all these reasons, Stringbean had decided to keep kissing Goose. He had wrapped his arms all the way around her as things progressed into tongue-touching territory, his chest pressed to her layers of breast-suppression. Rubbing her back under her shirt, Goose brushed the ring of duct tape.
“Sweet Jesus, Stringbean,” Goose breathed, “what the hell have you got going on there? Is that duct tape?”
Stringbean hid her hands with her face, but for the first time, her impulse to dodge was intercepted by her own laughter.
“Yes.” She giggled. “It’s so embarrassing. There’s, like, nothing I can do to contain them.”
“Why would you want to?” Goose said, gape-mouthed.
“Because they just get in the way of everything .”
“But how do you know, if you’ve never let them, um, roam free?” Goose laughed with her.
Stringbean cocked her head. “Huh. I never thought about it like that. I think I was just hoping that if I could just sort of get a hold of them, they’d stop growing.”