Last Train to Babylon

by Charlee Fam

  55

  I’M BREATHING NORMALLY again by the time I get to my car. It’s been sitting idle in the driveway for months, and I can’t remember if I even put gas in it the last time I was home. I jam the key into the door, and a light flickers on from inside the house, as if on cue. I haven’t had even a full glass of wine, but I can already feel a lecture coming on from Karen. Make smart choices, Aubrey, she’d say. You’re an adult now. I’m not going to tell you what to do, but make smart choices.

  I pull the key out of the door and stuff it back into my bag. I’m not in the mood to hear it tonight, and besides, Eli’s new girl is blocking me in with her BMW. I brush past her shiny car—the black paint like a mirror, catching the light from the streetlamps. It’s spotless, almost metallic in its perfection, and it makes my own white, 1990s Saab look sullied and cheap under the motion-sensor lights.

  My car hasn’t been washed in years. I don’t see the point, really. It just gets dirty again the moment it hits the parkway. Either that, or it rains.

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  The air is still, and I can smell a fireplace burning somewhere on the other side of the street. I swipe my finger along the BMW and decide that I have the new girlfriend pegged already—assuming it’s her car and not her parents’. She most likely commutes to some local college—probably Nassau—because her father bribed her with a shiny new Beamer if she swapped room and board for community college. Well, joke’s on her. They got away with maybe a thousand dollars a semester in tuition in exchange for a $30,000 car, and now she’s stuck at home in her twin bed, surrounded by Little League trophies and photos of friends she hasn’t seen in two years. That car wouldn’t even buy her a year at a private college, yet it’s meant to be a symbol of wealth, a nod that says, Hey, I make more money than you. I’m better than you.

  I catch my own reflection in the BMW door—I look squat and rotund—and I hope it’s just the car, but I stand there an extra second too long and suck in my stomach and see if it makes a difference. It doesn’t and so I walk, picking up pace on the sidewalk. I pull my phone out of my bag and stare down at the one new voice mail from Adam. I hold it to my ear and hit the button, and my feet are already carrying me toward Riverside Drive.

  “Um, hey, Aubrey, it’s me.” His voice is deeper than I remember, husky even. He clears his throat, as if contemplating whether or not I would still know who “me” is. “I’m just calling about Rachel. I figured you’d be in town. Anyway, call me back if you want.” I replay, and replay again, his voice charging in my ear. I’m about to listen one more time when I realize I’m turning onto his block.

  I stay across the street, and keep my hood up.

  I can see Adam’s house, clear across the street.

  Um, hey, Aubrey. It’s me.

  A soft yellow glow emanates from the upstairs window on the right. It’s Max’s room. Or at least it used to be Max’s room. I picture Adam up there now, cross-legged on the navy-blue carpet, sifting through the contents of his dead brother’s desk. I wonder if Rachel’s death triggered something for him.

  I’m just calling about Rachel.

  Of course Max’s death had never been officially ruled a suicide, but I always had a feeling that Adam knew more about Max than he let on. And maybe the same goes for Rachel.

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  I figured you’d be in town.

  I reach in my bag for a cigarette, but remember that I’ve already had my two today, so instead, I take three deep breaths and squint toward the upstairs window. I can’t make out any shadows or figures or anything, so I sit down on the curb, a pile of wet leaves at my feet.

  Anyway, call me back if you want.

  I feel bad for Adam. Well, as much as I can muster up any sympathy after what he did. I hold my phone and hit the callback button. A deep, almost husky voice answers the phone.

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  Chapter 6

  August 2005.

  BEFORE THERE WAS Adam, there was Max. Sort of. We weren’t a thing or anything. But I had known Max first. It was a sporadic, slightly awkward encounter that involved a mattress in the woods and a coffee tumbler full of tequila. It was the summer I turned fourteen, and just a month before Max was found dead in Clear Pond Park, hanging by the hood of his sweatshirt from a six-foot fence.

  Everybody had their suspicions—he hopped the fence, got himself caught, and had been too drunk to wriggle free. I never really knew what I believed. I’d only met him once, but I remember the details of that day so clearly—how Rachel was already outside when I woke up that morning. How my window was open, and from my bed, I heard her chatting up Karen in the driveway.

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  Rachel had been spending a lot of time at my house that summer. She lived with her mom, stepdad Jeff, and six-year-old sister, Chloe. It was weird over at Rachel’s house, like they all had a bond, and Rachel was this outsider, like she was some drunk uncle, crashing on the couch every night. Even if her parents never said it outright, I could feel it when I went over there. Rachel was a reminder of her mother’s mistakes, an extra expense, an intruder on the happy little biological family of three. Her home life had always been kind of screwy. Not in an abusive way or anything, just screwy. Her mother worshiped Chloe and would come home from work, toting a single cupcake with neon-pink frosting, or cute little princess outfits, while Rachel just sat there in her hand-me-downs from her older cousin Diane. And as a result, Rachel had some serious daddy issues. It didn’t take a shrink to figure that much out. Her father left when she was a baby, and the only father figure she’d known had been Jeff, who was kind of a creep.

  That afternoon, we were sprawled out in our bathing suits in my backyard over damp towels. I wore a one-piece, and Rachel wore a bikini that was too tight. The grass was flattened beneath my blue-striped towel. I had one of those aboveground pools, built into my deck, and we spent most of that summer dipping in and lying out. I never tanned well, though; my skin tone fluctuated between olive bronze and streaky red.

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  Rachel sat up and pulled her knees into her chest, her stomach bunching up into a single, thick roll. She realized, and pulled her knees in closer to conceal it. “You know her parents are sending her away, right?” she said, popping another piece of Trident into her mouth. She nudged her head toward the fence at my neighbor Tonya Szalinski. Tonya was a year older than us, but you wouldn’t know it; she’d been left back in fourth grade and was a bit spacey. Karen called her slow. But I thought “spacey” was a better word.

  “Where’d you hear that?” I asked. Rachel pulled on her shorts and a T-shirt. Her shorts were shorter than usual today. They were ripped denim, probably recycled from a pair of Diane’s Levi’s. The off-white jersey tee hung loosely off Rachel’s pudgy shoulder. She was still sort of fat back then. Rachel had always been chubby growing up, but not in a typical fat girl kind of way. She held weight in her face, her shoulders, her gut, but she always had thin legs. And still she commanded attention everywhere she went. Self-esteem had never been an issue for her.

  But at some point, earlier that summer, when I wasn’t paying attention, she’d thinned out. Her stomach had flattened, but her shoulders still seemed too broad and her head too big for the rest of her body. And she still had that extra roll when she sat up in a bathing suit.

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  She flipped her hair to one side and casually exposed her bikini strap. She didn’t have much to fill, on most days. Though, some days were noticeably bustier than others. I blamed Judy Blume. Once Rachel and I started reading Deenie and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret—and more recently Summer Sisters and Wifey—all she started caring about were boys and boobs. Her stepfather, Jeff, noticed, too, and I think that’s why she started spending more time with my family. He’d say things like, You’re really filling out there, girlie, or Maybe you shouldn’t eat that second slice of pizza, you’re gonna want to lose that baby pudge now that you got boobs.

  “I just heard,” she said, her voice lowered to the edge of a whispe
r. “I heard that she got caught jerking off with a pencil in the back of the chorus room last year, and that Ms. O’Brien flipped out and called her parents, and that they’re just sending her to some special school or something this year.”

  “Jerking off?” I deadpanned.

  “You know what I mean,” she said, flipping her hair over her shoulder again. This was also the summer Rachel’s hair turned orange. Too much Sun-In and lemon juice had turned her ash-blond hair this awful unnatural shade of rust.

  “You’re such a liar,” I said, stretching out on my towel. I reached down and pinched the damp nylon, snapping it against my stomach. I craned my neck toward Tonya’s house. I could see her sitting out on the back deck of her high ranch, her thick black hair hung over her shoulder in a sloppy braid. She was strikingly pale, and I wondered how she didn’t fry out there in the heat.

  “I’m not lying,” Rachel whispered. “Ally was in the class. She saw it.” Rachel fingered her collarbone, a sick grin spreading across her face. She was most sure of herself when she was telling secrets. “Whatever. Don’t believe me. Let’s just go do something,” she said, forcing her body up off the towel.

  “Like what?” I pulled a white, cotton cover-up over my head. The dampness from my bathing suit seeped through.

  “I dunno,” she said, “but you’re boring me.”

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  I swatted at a bee, slipped on my flip-flops, and we started to walk through the gate toward the street. I hated myself back then. At least I hated the way I’d let Rachel tell me what to do all the time—no backbone to tell her to shut up. To tell her that she was boring me.

  “We could go to the Jumps and watch the skaters . . .” she said, her voice trailing off in this dreamy singsong way.

  “No,” I said, before she could even finish the thought. I could see through her intentions like plate glass. Rachel couldn’t stop talking about Brendon Shaw or how Ally Marlo had made out with a junior in the woods behind the Jumps. She’d recently begun making comments about my older brother, Marc, waving at him coyly, and saying things like, “I bet your brother has a huge dick,” when he left the room.

  She started to make a face.

  “I don’t want to go there,” I said, a little whinier than I had anticipated. The thing about Rachel, though, she always got her way. We walked side by side, away from my house, and passed the Szalinskis’ as she called out, “Put it away, Tonya!” Rachel sputtered in laughter, grabbed my hand, and dragged me out of sight toward the Jumps.

  I hated everything about the Jumps. It was a sketchy clearing in the backwoods of Clear Pond Park that stank of dirt and gasoline. It was littered with garbage, broken glass, oversized tree roots—a girl in flip-flops’ hell on earth. But mostly, I hated that it was where my brother hung around with his dirtbag friends.

  I scuffed my flip-flops against the road, and every time we passed a parked car, I caught Rachel glancing at her own reflection.

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  “You know your brother’s there, right?” she said, looking at me with what my mother would refer to as bedroom eyes.

  “Obviously,” I said. “Which is exactly why I don’t want to go.”

  “Why not? You afraid they’ll make you smoke a little pot?” She straightened her shoulders, pushing her chest out. “You know Diane’s friend Leslie gave this guy a hand job there.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t care what he does. I just don’t want to go hang out with my brother. And I’m sure he doesn’t want to hang out with either of us.” I emphasized the either of us to shatter any delusion that she and Marc were pals. Marc hated her. Most of that grade did—especially the girls. Rachel was a flirt. And high school girls could not stand the idea of this slutty little soon-to-be freshman scamming on their men.

  Rachel scoffed, and I rolled my eyes. At that point in our relationship, I could have made a full-length film solely of Rachel’s scoffing followed by my eye rolling.

  “God, Aub, you’re such a narc.” She nudged my shoulder and cackled. I wasn’t in the mood, even if she was joking. I jerked my elbow into her ribs and walked out into the street. Rachel’s face twisted and contorted into what appeared to be the onset of a tantrum, but she caught her reflection in a Volkswagen and composed herself. “God, I’m only kidding. Relax.”

  I kicked a rock into a sewer, and turned back toward my house. I had things to do. But before I could make it across the street, Rachel dashed over to my side and grabbed me by the elbow.

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  “No, wait,” she said. “I completely forgot I had this. You’re going to love me.”

  “What?” My stomach twisted, and I realized I hadn’t eaten anything.

  “First, tell me I’m your best friend.” She used the same singsong voice and danced around me like a deranged elf—like the Rachel I now imagine to be dancing around inside my BlackBerry. “Say it! Say I’m your best friend.”

  “Okay. You’re my best friend,” I mumbled. I crossed my arms and waited.

  She walked behind me, gripped my shoulders, and led me off the road into an area shaded by trees. “Here.” She pulled out a pack of Camel Lights from her faded pink shoulder bag. I felt my tongue get thick.

  “Where did you get those?” I had only smoked once before, when I was twelve. Marc let me share one with him in our garage, and I’d never told anyone but Rachel, but I sort of liked it. Growing up in the nineties meant suffering through hundreds of antismoking assemblies. So from kindergarten on, it was ingrained into our moldable little minds that smoking wasn’t cool. It was rebellious. It was dirty. It was unhealthy. It was a gateway drug to other atrocities like booze and sex and heroin. And if you smoked, you would get cancer and then you would die.

  “I found them in Jeff’s dresser,” she said. “Here take one. And don’t forget that I’m your best friend.” She said it almost as if she was reminding herself. She handed me a cigarette.

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  Rachel pinched one between her own lips like a pro. She had this small gap between her two front teeth. Of course she’d smoked many-a-cigarette with Diane. I craned my neck around toward the street. “No one’s coming, narc.” She smiled again.

  Rachel stood a good two inches taller than me. I stared past her, to a spiderweb behind her head. She lit her cigarette first and shot me a fleeting smile. She coughed once, blew smoke out through the space between her teeth, and took another puff.

  Smoke streamed off the end of her lit cigarette as she balanced it between her lips.

  She lit mine with another match. My silver-and-sapphire mockingbird ring twinkled from my right hand—a gift from my grandmother two years earlier, and I hadn’t taken it off since. But with the heat, the ring cut into my swollen fingers. I wished I could take it off, but I didn’t have pockets or a bag. A tiny blast of sulfur struck my nostrils. I tried to be effortless, wanting so bad to do this better than Rachel had. But when I sucked in, I choked on the smoke, and dropped the cigarette onto the ground.

  Rachel finished her cigarette and pulled a bottle of cheap perfume out of her bag. It smelled like baby powder soaked in vinegar, and she doused her hair and shirt. I could still smell the cigarette on my hands—feeling dizzy as we cut through the trees to the other side of the road.

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  That’s when we saw them, Max and his two friends, standing outside the clearing of the Jumps—two acres of state-owned wooded area that backed the park. Rachel nudged me and started toward them. The boys spotted us and stopped on a small patch of grass between the woods and the street. There was a tall wire fence that barricaded the Jumps, and a crooked, reflective sign that read NO TRESPASSING. But to the left of the metal sign, there was a child-sized gap in the fence, like someone had pulled the wiring apart with a pair of pliers.

  “So you ladies coming in?” Max asked, holding a piece of the metal fence back in this gentlemanly way.

  Rachel narrowed her eyes at me, I shrugged, and we ducked through the fence and followed them into th
e woods.

  It had been my first time drinking, and I remember that first swig out of the metal coffee tumbler full of tequila. The rusty-key-flavored liquid flowed through my esophagus and flared up like a burst of sulfur beneath my breastbone.

  Rachel was sprawled out on her back like a starfish, right in the middle of an old, beat-up mattress that some teenagers had dragged out there earlier that summer. She had only taken a few swigs from the tumbler—less than I had—but she was rolling around and giggling, sloppy and hysterical.

  “My God.” She swooned, arching her back. “I’m actually drunk.” Max Sullivan and the two older boys grinned at each other as Rachel kicked and writhed between them. “This is amazing, Aub.” She leaned over and blew smoke onto my neck.

  “Enjoying yourself?” One of the older boys smirked. I didn’t see Marc anywhere, and I didn’t recognize any of these guys as his friends. I was relieved, and it seemed like Rachel had forgotten about him, too.

  “Just taking it all in,” Rachel said.

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  I rolled my eyes, and caught Max staring in my direction. I looked away and took another swig. Each time the warm tequila hit my lips, I cringed, my face puckering. I remember trying so hard to act natural.

  I rolled a piece of spearmint-flavored gum into a ball with my two front teeth and the tip of my tongue. It had lost most of its flavor and started to taste like spearmint-rusty-key-brass-flavored gum. I spit it out onto the cracked dirt and took a drag from one of the older boys’ cigarette. Purple smoke ribboned above my head, and I let my body fall against the bare mattress.

  The sun was low in the sky, but it illuminated the copper-colored earth with its dull, orange glow. Even though it was still August, dead leaves lay shriveled and curled, like dried fire around the perimeter of the mattress.

  “Has anyone ever told you that you have the greenest eyes?” Max said as he fell onto his side and leaned over me.