She’s reached the part where Anne is teaching herself to write in English by reading Oscar Wilde with the help of a dictionary. That’s almost at the end of the book, and Michelle can feel the tension building in her shoulders. The ending never stops hurting her, even though she always knows it’s coming. One minute Anne’s alive and thoughtful and emotional and growing up, learning about the world. And then she just doesn’t exist anymore.
Michelle’s known people who have died, and it seems so incomprehensible to her that the world goes on while there’s this sucking person-shaped hole like a vacuum in the middle of their lives. How can the universe retain integrity and the planets stay in orbit when a person can just stop?
A quiet knock at the door to the kitchen breaks her concentration, and Michelle has to blink several times before she recognizes Rose standing at the threshold of the room, messenger bag slung across the front of her rumpled school uniform.
“I figured I’d find you here,” Rose says with a lopsided, knowing smile. “Can you let Tommy know I’m skipping the rest of the day? Sometimes I take his books home when he’s heading out with you and Jay in the afternoons, but I’ve got gym this afternoon and I can’t be fucked enduring that shit today. So he’ll have to make sure he’s got his homework with him.”
Michelle motions for Rose to come inside. “Sure, I’ll tell him.” As Rose steps closer to where Michelle sits perched at one of the preparation benches, Michelle can see a new, sore-looking split in Rose’s lower lip. “You okay?”
Rose shrugs one shoulder half-heartedly. “Yeah. You know how it is. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Getting picked on is kind of my special superpower.”
“Mm,” Michelle answers noncommittally, not sure what she’s meant to say in reply to something like that. If Rose doesn’t have the good sense to turn sharp and hard and nasty, like Michelle and Jay, then that’s not Michelle’s problem. Rose is soft, and bruises easily. No wonder the bullies delight in tormenting her.
Rose breaks the awkward beat of silence between them. “Is that the Diary of Anne Frank?”
“That’s not really what it’s called,” Michelle answers. “But yeah.”
“I’ve always meant to read that,” Rose remarks.
“Here,” Michelle says, and closes the book, offering it out. “You can borrow it if you like.”
“But you’re still reading it.”
Michelle shakes her head. “I’ve read it a bunch of times.” She feels glad of the excuse to stop before the ending. “It’s no problem. I think you’ll like it.”
Rose takes the offered book, smiling almost shyly. Then her smile widens. “Wait, we can trade!” She rummages in her bag, pulling a battered hardback out after a few moments. “I just finished this one.”
“Goodbye to Berlin, by Christopher Isherwood,” Michelle reads from the cover. On the title page inside, in black fountain pen ink, is written To Rose, from Gretchen.
“A World War Two book swapped for a World War Two book,” notes Rose. “That’s kind of funny.”
“We’re the last generation, you know,” Michelle says, rubbing her thumb against the worn edge of the cover of the book in her hands. “The last ones who’ll ever have the chance to speak with the people who were there, who survived all this.” She pauses, thinking about it. “Except for the vampires, I guess.”
Rose frowns. “No.”
Michelle waits for her to say ‘they aren’t people’ or other words to the same effect. But after a moment, what Rose says is: “The only way to become a vampire is if you don’t survive.”
~
They drag Tommy’s bed over against the wall under his window, so they can sit on top of the comforter and tip their heads back to rest on the sill, staring up at the black of the sky. The brownies rest in a Tupperware lunch box between Tommy and Michelle, with Jay on Tommy’s other side.
“I remember reading this thing about how in that city in China where there was that earthquake, and a whole lot of kids died when their school collapsed,” Tommy says. “I remember reading that there was this cluster of babies born all around the same time, nine months later. Because families are only allowed one child in China, and suddenly there was this group of families who didn’t have a child anymore after the earthquake. Can you imagine being one of those babies, the nine-month-later babies? Knowing you wouldn’t be alive except that this horrible, awful thing had happened to your brother or sister, that your parents had gone through the worst thing that could happen in the world and you were born as, like, their salvation, their second chance.”
“Pot makes you so depressing,” Jay replies. Tommy doesn’t argue the observation.
“Pot makes me depressed too,” Michelle says. “Or maybe I just used to have it when I felt shitty, and now I expect shittiness and pot to go together. “
“I didn’t say it made him depressed, I said it made him depressing,” Jay says, but Michelle ignores him, and they all lapse into silence, munching on the brownies and thinking dark thoughts.
“I was twelve when my best friend Taylor… she killed herself,” Michelle blurts suddenly. “It’s so weird that we’ll say that in that way, but it’s always ‘so-and-so was raped’, like it just happened without anyone doing it. Like you might say ‘so-and-so was in line at the movies’. Just the way things are. It should be ‘this person raped so-and-so’. But it isn’t. Not often enough. But yeah. Taylor killed herself. I don’t know how. Nobody’s ever told me how. Maybe that should matter but it never has, not at all. The specifics seem so irrelevant. She was alive and then she murdered herself and that’s all. How she did it, who found her… what does that matter? What does that change?
“It fucked me up a lot. Because Taylor had all the things I didn’t have, the things I’d always told myself were the things I would be happy if I could just somehow magically get them. She was white and smart and funny, everyone loved her. She was straight and pretty and normal and it was like, fuck, if someone with all that still ends up broken under the weight of the world, what fucking chance does a freak like me have?”
“It’s like that poem. The Richard Cory one,” says Jay. “I had this one teacher at elementary school with a total crush on that poem. It’s all about how this guy, Richard Cory, everyone can’t help but look at him. He’s, and I bet I’m getting this line wrong, ‘a gentleman from sole to crown, clean-favoured and imperially slim’. The first time I met Blake, when I was terrified and thought for sure he was going to kill me, all I could keep thinking about was how that teacher would’ve said that Blake was just like Richard Cory. I guess we think of the dumbest and most random shit at times like that, when we think we’re done for.
“At the end of the poem, on a calm summer night, Richard Cory shoots himself in the head. I guess the poet was talking to people like you, Chelle. Explaining that even though it seemed like Taylor had it all; she didn’t feel like she did. Or it felt like that wasn’t enough to save her.”
“I guess. I guess we’ll never know for sure,” says Michelle. “Or I’ll never know for sure. She might have put it in her note. I don’t know what was in her note.”
They’re quiet again for a while after that.
Jay’s hair is getting a little longer than he usually lets it grow, the brittle angles of the cut across his forehead softening into heavy waves. There’s something softer in his eyes, too. Michelle wants to say it’s peace—Jay deserves to feel that, for a change, they all do—but that’s not quite correct.
She thinks Will, how different he looks now, and how Lily’s changed too, and about Jay’s new strange calm and it’s not fair, it’s just not fair. If there’s one thing that vampires are supposed to mean it’s that everything stays the same for once, that things stop changing all the time, that however horrible it might be at least it’s predictable and reliable. But everything’s still changing anyway. It’s not fair.
“You look like someone stole your Barbie doll or something,” Jay tells her with a smirk. Michelle s
norts.
“Yeah, and it was probably you,” she replies.
“That’s true, actually. I used to steal Sofie’s all the time.”
~
Tommy’s mom is way less strict than Michelle’s own parents, but kind of more hardass with her kids at the same time. For example, Rose and Tommy don’t have to keep their rooms clean or call in if they’re going to be out late most of the time. But their mom would be mad as hell if they did anything seriously fucked up, and probably beat the shit out of them and ground them forever, whereas Michelle’s parents would hug her a lot and be understanding and do whatever was necessary to protect her from the bad consequences of her fuck-up.
She can’t imagine Tommy’s parents ever acting the way Michelle’s own mother had, if Rose had been the one who’d tried to burn down a school library when she was eight.
And they fight all the time, too, arguments where they say awful shit and throw stuff and swear and storm out. But it doesn’t make Michelle scared that they’re going to split up, because it isn’t anything like the arguments her parents have. With Tommy’s parents, it’s like that’s the way they prove to each other how much they love each other, by taking that love for granted and getting angry and pissed off at each other while the love exists in the background.
They’re going away for a couple of weeks on something out of state, for Tommy’s dad’s work, and so their bedroom is kind of a maelstrom of piles of folded clothes and suits in dry-cleaning bags and toiletries and suitcases when Tommy’s mom calls Michelle in and sits her down on the edge of the bed.
“Here,” Tommy’s mom says, handing Michelle a box of thirty condoms. Her nails are talon-red. “That’s not a challenge to use all of them, but I figured it was better to get too many than not enough. I don’t know if you kids have done it already, and I don’t want to know, but I’m not stupid and I can’t imagine that a house inhabited by teenagers with no parents isn’t going to see some sex going on. I’m not coming home from this trip to find out my son’s gone and got his girlfriend knocked up, you got me?”
The usual levels of terrified awe that Michelle feels for Tommy’s mom are magnified about a dozen times over. “Yes, ma’am,” she manages.
“Give some of those to Rosie, too, if you think she’ll need them. I’ve figured enough out about this parent thing to know better than to try to give either of my kids birth control directly.” Tommy’s mom smirks.
Michelle gives another terrified nod and escapes as fast as she can.
Jay’s left, like he usually ends up doing when Blake calls him – Michelle would say he’s whipped, but it’s not like she spends all that much time away from Tommy, so it’d be throwing rocks from a glass house if she gave Jay shit about Blake – and so it’s just her and Tom left.
“Your mom just gave me this,” she says as she climbs onto the bed beside him, curling against his skinny frame and handing him the box of condoms. “I like the brand we get, though. These ones don’t taste right. I didn’t think I could exactly tell your mother that, though, so I just took them.”
“We can make water balloons out of them. When the weather warms up. It’s too cold to do it now,” Tommy suggests. Michelle laughs quietly.
“My responsible prankster.”
They’re quiet again after that. Michelle’s not always much of a talker. Not usually, in fact. Tommy’s not either, and sometimes Michelle likes to think that they get each other on a deeper level than that—that the reason they can hang out so companionably without too much chatter between them is because they just understand in an almost telepathic kind of way, a wavelength built for just the two of them.
That’s just bullshit, though. She knows it’s bullshit, or at least most of the time she remembers that she knows it. Sometimes she forgets. Everyone forgets sometimes, she figures. That’s how relationships go on working, they work because people forget.
They forget that it’s just chemicals in the brain, little bursts of happy drugs telling you that you’ve got a special connection with someone. Telling you that there’s a deep soul-bonding going on.
It’s just a potion of stuff inside Michelle’s head, tricking her into thinking that it’s Tommy who’s making her feel like that when it’s really just her own body’s recipe.
But if two people make each other feel like that, if it’s a bullshit that they share together, is that close enough? Michelle and Tommy take drugs together all the time and feel closer for it. Does it make so much difference whether it’s a synapse or a brownie, really?
ALEXANDER
Dear Tim
A sample of the intrigues and dramas which swirl around our world, presented for your amusement:
Sarah (one of Blake and Oscar’s lovely, clever friends; an actress) uses a coffin as her bed. This has quite captured the more macabre-minded members of our set, particularly Nell’s pet writer Bram.
Speaking of Bram, Blake (all these anecdotes involve Blake, of course; he has a delight in these little confetti-pieces of gossip which is quite beyond me. You have fallen in love with a man destined to be the toast of nowhere, I’m afraid.)
What was I writing? Ah, yes. Blake has informed me that Florrie, Bram’s wonderful wife (she is as shrewd as her husband is sentimental and we had a wonderful argument about copyright law while the others discussed supernatural fiction) is an old lover of Oscar’s. Blake claims that Oscar has confessed secret and enduring passion for her. I replied that Oscar’s trouble is that he’s in love with the idea of love, just like Constance is, and that these two facts together meant that their marriage was either very good luck, or destined to be very bad.
Blake gave me that infuriating look he wears when he thinks I am being very stupid, and told me that there was no dimension to love save for the idea of it, so my point was meaningless.
Nell was in the room with us, and when he said that she looked very unhappy. I went out walking with her. We wandered without speaking for some time, then chanced across a man boxing the ears of a youthful chimney sweep. Nell near to ripped the man’s head off in her feasting, then gave her purse to the chimney sweep and told the boy to find a fairer master and a good meal. Sometimes I find her even stranger than Blake.
~
Dear Tim
A predator’s trick becoming common in this teeming city: beautiful youths of the lower classes catch the eyes of wealthy men and the pair of them strike up the careful coded conversations of mutual criminality. Having established an affinity, the pair retire to some rented room in the area.
On cue, once they’ve had their pleasure, the youth’s father, brother, or other guardian will burst in and create a scene, threatening police and murder as retribution for molesting such an “innocent”. The wealthy man of course offers extravagant fistfuls of money, silver cigarette cases, and other trinkets of bribery in exchange for silence. The scene plays out so frequently that the tricked parties have come to view it as just another form of renting.
Blake and Oscar have both experienced the process firsthand: Oscar has been blackmailed several times, for his trusting, guiless heart is the best and worst of him. Blake loves to stage the turnabout, the moment when youth and guardian alike reach the horrible conclusion that their dupe has caught them in a game even worse than the one intended.
For my part, I leave the whole thing to play out as it will, and feel no desire to beat them at their trick as Blake does. If men who love men are little better than animals in the eyes of the law, better to be predator than prey. I’ll leave these panthers to their feasting, and fill my own belly somewhere else.
~
When Alexander tells Tim about the meeting with the professor, Tim frowns for a moment, deep in thought, and says “Let’s see if we can arrange a meeting. I’ll set up one of our spare identities in that house in Glenview, the one we just had renovated. It’s not rented out yet, is it? Good. We’ll set everything up and have Chloe feed the info back to our secret admirers. Then we can arrange a meeting on our own
terms.”
So that’s one concern out of the way, at least for the time being. The next one – because there’s always a next one; if Alexander wanted a quiet existence he’d find a different residence – presents itself less than an hour later, when Bette skips happily up the stairs to the top level. She’s bruised and battered, her blue silk dress a mess of tears and scrapes.
“Oh, Elizabeth—”
“Bette.”
“—what on earth have you done to yourself?”
“I threw myself off the overpass,” Bette tells him. Her eyes are bright, and someone who didn’t know her well might think that it was excitement or merriment that put the spark there. Alexander, however, knows that it’s the fevered brightness which comes at the edge of madness.
“I’d always thought about doing it when I was alive,” Bette goes on. “But I didn’t do it. Obviously. It would have killed me. But since I’m already dead, I did it. And then I had to pick myself up and walk back home.”
“I see,” Alexander answers, deciding that scolding her would be less than useless. Bette is one of nature’s rebels, and telling her that she shouldn’t do something is a surefire way to see to it that it gets done frequently and with gusto.
So instead of trying to tell her off, Alexander goes to see Blake.
As is usual at this time— a little too late to be evening, too early to be truly night—Blake is at his desk, papers spread out before him like a remarkably dull game of solitaire. There are printouts of several maps, different zooms on sections of the city, on the top of the piles, scrawled with notes in different shades of highlighter and ink.
“You need to learn to delegate,” Alexander says, and not for the first time. Blake ignores him, just as he has every other time Alexander has made the criticism. “I’m serious, Blake. Being a leader means knowing when to assign tasks to those whom you’re meant to be leading. It doesn’t mean doing it all yourself and then barking orders.”
Blake makes a noise of protest, not looking up from his maps. “I do not bark.”
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 68