Bad Girls with Perfect Faces

by Lynn Weingarten

  “Hey,” he said. “Have you . . .”—ever thought about what would happen if we —“. . . fallen asleep yet?”

  There was rustling. “Not yet,” she said. Xavier turned on the little camping lantern and the close space was filled with dim light. Sasha rolled over. She looked like maybe she’d been crying. Or maybe she’d been trying very hard not to.

  “Whatever it is, whatever is bothering you,” he said. “I know I promised I wouldn’t ask about it, but I want you to know I’m here. To help, to figure out, whatever it is. I’m here, same as all those times you were there for me.”

  Sasha nodded ever so slightly. She seemed scared.

  “You can tell me anything, you know that, right?” Xavier stared at her until she nodded again. But she wasn’t looking at him anymore.

  “I’m fine,” she said. He could tell she was lying. “I just want to go to sleep.”

  They lay there in the dark, not talking, not touching. And Xavier knew it was not the time to bring anything up. Now was the time to lie in silence with his outstretched hand open between them. If she reached hers out in the night, his would be there.

  Sasha

  At some point, the dark wall of the tent started to lighten. The sun was coming up and it was time to go. You were not sure if you’d slept at all as you lay on the ground next to Xavier. If you are tired enough, being conscious and being unconscious feel the same. You waited as the hours passed, your head filled with awful images you did not want to see. You were either thinking or dreaming, and it was impossible to tell which.

  Xavier snored quietly a few feet away. You went outside, you peed behind a tree. You came back and opened the jug of water and gulped and gulped. Water in and water out. You imagined it purifying you, washing you clean. But of course no amount of water could do that.

  Just over seven hundred miles to go. You had been going fast, but you needed to go faster. There were things to outrun. The smell, for example. And your conscience, which might catch up with you sooner than you’d hoped. For now, you would shut your brain off, shut your heart off. If you drove straight through, you could be there by nightfall. You could not let yourself think of anything but that. Seven hundred more miles of gritted teeth and thoughts banished from your brain.

  That’s all you had to get through.

  Well, that and the rest of your life.

  You were still trying your best to pretend. You were trying, trying, trying, but it was getting harder. Your brain didn’t want to comply anymore, your body didn’t either. Your chest felt tight, your head wrapped in cotton, and you could not think. The truth was jagged rocks under your skin, barely below the surface, and they kept coming up, up, up, threatening to break through.

  You looked at Xavier in the dim light while he slept. You knew that you had loved that face very much very recently, that you had loved it more than any you’d ever seen in your life. But right there, in that tent, you could not access those feelings at all. You could not access any feelings, really. Looking at him by the light of the early morning sun through the walls of the tent, he did not look like your best friend or someone you loved. He did not look like anything.

  “Hey,” you said. “Xavier.”

  He rolled over. Blinking, he started to smile.

  “It’s time to go.”

  He yawned and stretched.

  “Maybe we can stop at a drive-through,” he said. “Delicious fast-food breakfast is the greatest.”

  You had not really eaten in days. You had not slept in days. You made yourself drink water because water was necessary. You made yourself breathe because air was necessary. You breathed in and out. Air was very necessary.

  Without air, you would die.

  Back in the car. There was a smell now. Maybe because it had been so warm the night before. Sweet rot.

  Xavier sniffed, but was silent.

  You gagged, but there was nothing in your stomach to throw up. So it was decided: you would try not to breathe. Maybe you could do without air, too.

  Xavier

  They sat together in that swiftly moving metal box. Still, Sasha barely spoke. Xavier’s heart hammered, as though he was running all those miles they crossed, running and running, legs pumping, chasing after Sasha, who kept getting farther away.

  He had not changed his clothes or brushed his teeth or showered. He was self-conscious, sitting in the car for so many hours, so dirty and so close to Sasha. He’d never been self-conscious around Sasha before. Did he smell? Something in the car smelled, that was for sure.

  They stopped for gas at a rest stop. Xavier bought a travel-size toothpaste and a toothbrush and deodorant and a fresh T-shirt. He washed his face in the bathroom with hand soap and brushed his teeth, put on deodorant and threw his old shirt in the trash. He bought an apple-cinnamon air-freshener tree for the rearview mirror to give Sasha as a joke.

  He got back in the car. “Got you a present,” he said. “So you don’t have to smell me.” He handed it to her. She didn’t even crack a smile.

  They drove. They stopped at more rest stops, and Sasha continued the secret phone stuff she thought Xavier didn’t know about. She was texting Steph, Xavier was sure of that now. Xavier wanted to ask her about it, but knew he couldn’t. What could have happened between her and Steph in such a short amount of time? What could have happened that had made her have to run away? Had he hurt her? Xavier felt his hands curling into fists at the idea of it.

  If Steph had hurt Sasha, Xavier would kill him.

  They drove and drove and drove. Three hundred, four hundred, five hundred, six hundred, an impossible amount of miles zipped by under them. Sasha’s eyes were ringed in red. He offered to take over driving for a while. “You must be so tired,” he said. “Do you want to at least rest a little?” But she just shook her head.

  They passed through North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. They crossed into Florida and Sasha kept going. Xavier began to wonder if she even had a destination in mind. Maybe her plan was to keep driving until they went straight into the ocean. But when they reached the exit for the Florida Everglades, Sasha got off the highway and followed the signs until they were there. She eased the car through lush overhanging trees, past big blue lakes topped with a frosting of green algae. She exhaled. Maybe this was what they’d been heading toward all along. It certainly was beautiful.

  Sasha got out to pay the entrance fee.

  The sun was low in the sky, and the air in the car smelled like apples and cinnamon over top of that odd scent he could not place. Xavier sniffed himself and determined that he wasn’t the source of the stink. He remembered the time, many years ago, when a mouse had died in one of his family’s kitchen cabinets. It smelled worse and worse until they figured out what it was and his mom took the dead mouse outside to dispose of it. How strange, Xavier thought. How strange that this kind of smells like that.

  Sasha

  Leave your body and don’t crack. Do what you need to do, watch from outside, don’t feel, don’t think. You are not here. You are far away, operating the puppet hands that are your hands, operating the puppet legs that are your legs, the puppet mouth, the puppet heart. Do what you need to do.

  Leave your body and feel nothing.

  Leave your body just like she did.

  Xavier

  They were inside the tent, camped again for the night, and Xavier was reading out loud. “. . . in the vast expanse of blackness, there was a great and mighty roar. Space Captain Jones looked out the window of the ship and . . .” He had found a paperback book abandoned on a picnic bench, an old pulp sci-fi novel with planets and dinosaurs on the cover. He had hoped maybe they could revel together in its silliness, that it could be a fun, meaningless thing to distract Sasha from whatever was going on. But Sasha did not seem to be listening, and when she thought he wasn’t looking, she kept checking her phone, which he wasn’t even supposed to know she had with her. He went on reading, but after a while Sasha closed her eyes. “Sasha?” She didn�
��t answer, so he switched off the lantern. He heard her moving around then, like she was probably awake after all. He lay there for a while, wondering why she would pretend to be sleeping, until finally he drifted off himself.

  He dreamed they were in the car, but the car was full of soil, and flowers were growing thick out of the deep, damp earth in the back. Xavier and Sasha sat up in the front as the vines writhed and twisted behind them. He knew the vines were there, but he couldn’t see them, couldn’t see them until they slithered up front and wrapped themselves around their throats.

  Sasha

  At first, you could not even bring yourself to touch her.

  You had snuck out of the tent while Xavier slept, gotten back in the car, drove in the silvery gray of dawn breaking. You got out and stood in front of the trunk. Then there you were, with the birds, crickets, animals rustling, loud life all around you, but you were alone. A hot wind blew and you took a breath to steady yourself, shallow through your mouth so you wouldn’t have to smell her.

  There was no turning back now. You had done your research, picked the perfect place, made your way there. You kept her alive through her phone so that no one would start looking yet.

  There was one final step. You had to do this now. Everything had been leading to this.

  You reached out, felt the scratchy wool, the solid mass beneath it. You pulled back, your stomach turned over. You leaned down with your hands on your knees, gagged up bile, swallowed it down. Took a long deep breath. Told yourself to fucking pull it together, but you weren’t sure you could. Not this time.

  The first time you touched her, back there in the woods, it hadn’t been real. You were far away from yourself and you could not feel anything, not the weight of her, or what it meant. You watched yourself from a thousand miles away as you lifted her up, up, up, like she barely weighed anything at all. You had always felt so strong, hard muscles, big arms, thick thighs. You had always been proud of that.

  Things were different now. Standing there in the warm, damp air as the sun rose over the horizon, you were made of glass, about to break. You were about to shatter into so many pieces that you could never be put back together. But that couldn’t happen yet.

  You thought of Xavier back in that tent, you thought of him quiet and still in the dark, so worried about you, with no clue of what had happened. You thought of the uncertain future ahead of him, ahead of both of you. You thought of how hard you would try to forget what you were about to do, but you had a flash of understanding then: you would remember every detail of this forever. Neither time nor wishing nor desperation would fade it.

  You would always remember leaning into the trunk, taking a breath, wrapping your arms around her, and lifting the sturdy weight of her, unwieldy beneath the blanket. The stench of her rising up over the musty wool.

  You would remember how your every muscle strained as you staggered toward the lake, how your sneakers sank farther into damp earth the closer you got. Your arms started to shake, but you kept going. You tried to leave your body. You did not want to have to feel this, but you were locked inside that moment. And there was no way out.

  You would always remember how you put her down a few feet out into the lake, how you tried to be gentle, as though she could still feel it. The blanket shifted, and there was her face in the blue dawn light. Eyes blankly open, skin mottled, lips parted. You felt the sobs tightening your chest, rising up to choke you. You gathered rocks from along the shoreline, filled up the pockets of her cutoffs, the pockets of her sweatshirt, packing them full, praying they would be enough. She was so heavy then, and you lifted her legs, gagging as you touched her skin. You put her feet beneath your arms and dragged her in. You would remember how you had to close your eyes, because you could not bear to look at her, could not have continued if you had.

  You would always remember the water rising up to your shins, your knees, higher, higher, the same temperature as the air around you. You turned back, and Ivy was fully submerged, the lake and the light playing tricks with her face.

  You thought of people drowning. You thought of babies swimming in their mothers’ bellies. You thought of Ivy at that party, out on the grass in the dark, twisting and swaying, so beautiful when she danced, like she was underwater.

  You would always remember when you were in chest-deep, how you opened your eyes, dunked down, wrapped your arms around her, held her tight. You kicked as hard as you could, fighting against the weight of the rocks, the lake ready to claim her. The tears were streaming down your cheeks then. The sky was orange and pink and gold, the surface of the water a shifting, swirling mirror.

  You would always remember how you held her tightly.

  How you whispered, I’m sorry.

  And then you let her go.

  Xavier

  Xavier woke to the soft zzzzt of the tent being unzipped. He looked up just in time to see Sasha reaching one arm in for her duffel, the cool light of dawn behind her. Her clothes were soaking. She was covered in mud. He sat up. His heart was pounding.

  “Whoa, what happened,” Xavier said. “Are you okay?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Did you fall in a lake?”

  She shook her head.

  “Did you go swimming?” he asked.

  She stared at him blankly and shook her head again. “I need to take a shower.”

  She walked away from the tent toward the shower cabin, toward the slowly rising sun. He was so confused and worried that he crept out of the tent to follow her. He stood outside the bathroom and leaned against the wooden wall. He sat down on the ground and waited for her. She emerged a long time later, clean, hair wet, wearing fresh shorts and a T-shirt. Her skin was pink, like maybe she’d been trying to scrub it right off.

  She saw him. Blinked for a moment, as if she barely even knew who he was. “I was worried,” Xavier said.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Where are your wet clothes?” he said.

  “I threw them away.”

  He wanted to beg her for answers, for some explanation. But he knew he couldn’t.

  They went back to the tent. The sun was fully up now, the birds screaming loudly. There was a dog barking off in the distance. Xavier wanted to tell her everything he’d realized, everything he’d been thinking—the mistakes they’d made with each other and about each other, and how maybe it was not too late to fix them.

  She started breaking down the tent. “Let’s go home,” she said. And he felt then a flood of relief, because some part of him had thought that maybe she was not ever planning on going back. Something was still wrong, still very wrong, but if she was going home, it would be okay. He would make it okay. He had to.

  I knew something was wrong as soon as I got those texts. Those first texts from Ivy that did not even sound like her. I knew something was TERRIBLY WRONG and NOT RIGHT AT ALL. I breathed deep, like that dumb shrink told me once, to calm down. BREATHED IN AND OUT, THE TWO BEST DIRECTIONS TO BREATHE. But nothing helped.

  WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?

  HOW DO I STOP THIS?

  I wrote to this not-quite-Ivy: where ARE you even?

  No answer. So I had to figure out the answer ON MY OWN. I was ALL ON MY OWN AGAIN.

  Her Instagram had been updated with pictures she would never post. One was from a rest stop south on I-95 with a million comments under it from DUMB DUMMIES who thought it was really hers.

  As soon as I saw that very first picture, I got in my car and I started to drive.

  Drive drive drive

  DRIVE DRIVE DRIVE

  I sent texts along the way and sometimes she texted back.

  AND SOMETIMES SHE DID NOT.

  But it didn’t even matter once I figured out the pattern. Which was less a pattern and more just a line going STRAIGHT DOWN TO THE BOTTOM.

  So I followed it.

  Xavier

  Four hours later, Sasha was trying so hard to pretend to be holding it together, but she was on the verge of losing it
entirely. Xavier had melted down himself—he recognized the signs. And besides, she was his very best friend, possibly much more than that, as it turned out. He knew her better than she thought.

  They’d driven for two full days, plus four hours more, almost fifteen hundred miles. They’d eaten only rest-stop food and spent two nights lying on the hard ground while Sasha did a pretty unconvincing job of pretending to be asleep. Even if she wouldn’t tell him what was wrong, wouldn’t even give him the tiniest hint of a clue, Xavier knew two things for sure—Sasha needed real food and she needed real sleep.

  “Please,” he said. “Can we stop? Anywhere with beds, the next motel we pass. Just for a few hours, so you can rest. I don’t have money with me, but I’ll pay you back as soon as we get home, I swear I will.”

  And she looked like she was about to say no, but then instead she nodded, and they pulled off the highway and stopped at the first place they found. It was perfect. THE MERMAID HIDEAWAY MOTEL was printed on the big plate-glass front window in swirly script letters that were probably supposed to look like waves from the sea. And Xavier thought about how it would definitely be a great place for a mermaid to hide, because it was actually pretty far from the ocean really. Xavier turned to Sasha to make a joke about this, but then changed his mind.

  The parking lot was entirely empty.

  The lobby was empty, too, small and hot with an ancient air conditioner coughing in the corner and a worn turquoise carpet on the floor. There was a big glass table on the side near the huge window and a glass vase filled with fake flowers sitting in the middle. Sasha was staring at it, unblinking, like a mannequin. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and took a picture of the vase and the flowers. She didn’t seem to remember that she was trying to hide it from Xavier.

  Finally, a guy appeared at the desk, only a few years older than they were. Xavier talked to him while Sasha kept staring at those fake flowers. He said a room would be $110 for the night. Usually check-in wasn’t until three, but considering the hotel was entirely vacant, they could check in now if they wanted, and he would need a credit card for a deposit. Sasha said, well, we don’t have one of those, but what if we paid forty dollars extra in cash? The guy looked around to make sure no one else was watching, and he said okay. Xavier didn’t think the guy even officially checked them in, he just put the cash in his pocket and gave them the room key, not a key card because of how old the place was.