The Dead Enders

by Erin Saldin

  Georgie—I push the thought away. She was probably doing us both a favor.

  Again, I let myself feel the smallest flare of hope. Maybe this Weekender has what I need. Dead Ender girls never stop wanting more, but Weekender girls don’t want. They have. What they don’t have, they get. And that’s almost beautiful.

  It’s the one lesson my dad passed on to me before he left.

  DAVIS

  In She Woke Before Me, Jane is always wearing the same thing: a threadbare blue T-shirt, old jeans, men’s oxford shoes that are scuffed at the toes. She’s always wearing this because that’s how I always think of her, because that’s what she was wearing when we first kissed and it’s also, coincidentally, what she was wearing when she told me that I was awesome and great but just not quite it, you know?

  I twirl my pen in my hand. Behind the park bench where I’m sitting, I can hear the occasional rumble of a motor as cars cruise down Main, looking for parking. In front of me, though, it’s all silence and water. The lake stretches north from the edge of downtown, bushes and trees and rocky shoreline giving way to cliffs and granite and, eventually, wilderness at the far end. Some city planner was smart enough to draw up a little park at the southern shore, sandwiched between the Gold Fork Grand and a little string of gift shops. There are a couple picnic tables, a volleyball court. A handful of benches. I think they trucked in the sand.

  Here’s the panel I’m working on now: Jane sits at a table across from me. She’s looking to the side. Her hair is kind of tossed behind one ear in a sexy way that insinuates that my hands were just touching it. She’s wearing the outfit. Eyes large and round. Conversation bubble: I’d like to spend just one day inside your head, Davis.

  Somehow, it doesn’t sound quite right, coming from her.

  I’ve been working on the book for a couple months. It’s a graphic novel. About Jane. About things she’s said, ways she’s looked at me, funny quirks she has, like how she glances at the ceiling and shakes her head in a quick little shimmy whenever she’s trying to find the right words for something. (For instance: Her head shimmied like that after she said I wasn’t quite it.)

  More and more, though, the book includes things she might have said, given time. That’s what happens, I guess, when you only date for a couple months. In my find-the-arsonist-win-back-the-girl dream, there’s always a kind of slow-mo scene where I present the book to her and she basically evaporates in tears of regret about the time she wasted thinking I wasn’t it. My hope is that she’ll be so busy being sorry that she won’t notice where I’ve taken creative liberties.

  Creative liberties. That’s generous.

  I shut the journal and toss it into my backpack as I stand and look at my watch. Almost noon. Damn. Two weeks of summer break gone and what have I got to show for myself? Another solitary morning. Jane’s hair. A stomach that’s telling me I’d better eat something before the meeting I’ve got soon. The meeting. I’ve been avoiding it all week. I turn my back to the lake and trudge across the street toward the Open Six Hours.

  Honestly, I just love living in this town. I mean, it’s a place where a store calls attention to itself by bragging that it’s open for six hours!, as though most places are only open for a measly three or four. Sometimes I think that Gold Fork is a tiny town that aspires to be an urban metropolis, despite the fact that it has the ethos of a Ukrainian hamlet. My mom has told me more than once about how she used to take me outside in the winter without a hat, back when I was a baby, and how women would stop her on the streets to yell at her. One woman, I believe, went as far as to kick off her boot, pull off her own sock, and try to wedge it onto my cone-shaped head.

  (It’s no longer cone-shaped, by the way. Now it’s just kind of round. Like a squash. I try to break up the monotony of my head with square glasses, interestingly collared shirts. Does it work? You’d have to ask Jane.)

  When I walk into the Open Six Hours, Ana’s there. She’s just standing in the candy aisle, looking lost. She’s wearing some sort of sweaterdress, even though it’s the second week of June, and she’s staring at a Peppermint Pattie in her hand.

  “Tough decision,” I say. “Go with what’s familiar, or try something new?” I reach around her and pick up a PayDay bar. “Retro, classic, and hearty,” I tell her. “Could totally reinvent your day.”

  “Hi, Davis,” Ana says.

  Are her eyes always this sad? I look at her until I realize that I’m just standing here, holding the PayDay like an idiot. So I keep going. “The question you have to ask yourself is, do you want to feel the wind in your ears as you swish down an Alpine slope”—I point at the Peppermint Pattie—“or do you want an afternoon of good, clean fun, helping your dad fix up his old Mustang?” I hold the PayDay a little higher.

  “Alpine slope,” she says, and opens the wrapper to take a bite.

  “You gotta pay for that,” the girl who works the register calls from across the store. She talks like she’s stored chewing gum in each cheek. “You can eat it here, but you gotta pay before you go.”

  Ana nods, keeps chewing.

  “Rebel,” I say. The candy bar is starting to feel heavy in my hands. I’m weirdly nervous, not sure what to say. It’s like we’re the only people in the waiting room at a doctor’s office. And there’s only one magazine, and it’s Better Homes and Gardens. “So, Fellman’s was pretty good.”

  “Yeah,” she says, chewing. She’s a dainty chewer.

  “Thanks for—” I don’t know how to finish. “You know, thanks for listening to me talk about my book. For not saying it’s, you know, navel-gazing. Which I guess it kind of is.”

  She laughs, takes another bite. “I wouldn’t. It looked good—from what I saw of it.”

  It had been so easy to talk to her. She’d told me more about Vera, about their lazy afternoons together on the patio at the Royal Pines. I’d told her that I didn’t know many people who could work in an environment of diminishing returns—that was the phrase I used—and she hadn’t gotten mad. Instead, what had she said? I’d like to spend one day inside your head, Davis.

  It sounded good. So good that I let myself imagine what it’d be like if Jane said it.

  And for a quick second, I let myself remember what it was like to first get to know Ana. How excited I’d been when she joined my mom’s youth group—the quiet girl I’d seen in the halls but had never had the guts to talk to—and how surprising she was, subtly funny and kind. How she told me about her desire to learn her grandparents’ language, even though her mom said there was no need, since it was just the two of them. How I’d harbored a hope that—

  That was then, I remind myself. This is now. If there’d been a question mark at the end of a sentence about me and Ana before the chapel fire, the flames wiped it away and started a new chapter. You don’t get the happy ending when you’ve caused that kind of damage. You just don’t.

  “Well, thanks,” I say again. “Hey. Did you think—” I pause. “Did you think something was off with Erik?”

  “Not really.” Then she adds, “What’s going on?” She swallows. “At Fellman’s, you kind of seemed weird. I mean,” she says quickly, “that’s not exactly the word I want. Off, at least. Around Erik.” She takes another Peppermint Pattie.

  “That’s two,” says the girl behind the counter. “Third one’s free.”

  Ana raises her eyebrows and tears open the package. “Want my third?” she says.

  “Yeah.” I grab one too. Hold it in my hand. “Thanks. I needed this.” Then I say, “It’s going to sound stupid.”

  Ana grins. “I doubt that.”

  “Okay. Well, what do you know about Erik’s dad?”

  Ana tilts her head. “Not much. Erik’s not very forthcoming about personal stuff. But he’s been gone for a long time, right?”

  “Since elementary school, at least.” And because two hours of searching through old files and even, at one point, a box of old microfiche didn’t give me anything other than that one photogra
ph of the young family, I try to think back. Because of course I can remember Erik, fast even in elementary school, the best at PE when being best at PE was the only thing that mattered. (Not that that’s changed.) But his parents? Book fairs and parent-teacher nights. Always Erik’s mom, looking flustered and alone. Always a raised voice. Someone’s fault—the teacher’s, the principal’s. Something wrong. Always. “He must’ve left when we were really little—like kindergarten or earlier. I don’t remember him.”

  “He wasn’t here by the time Mom and I moved in. Do they keep in touch?”

  “Don’t know. I kind of doubt it, though.” I pause, and then I say, “I think I saw him at Toney’s.”

  Ana steps back. “What? How do you know?”

  “He looks like him. Even kind of sounds like him, if you can believe it.”

  “You talked to him?”

  “For a second. About nothing.”

  “But why hasn’t Erik said anything?” she asks. “At least to Georgie, you know?”

  “I don’t think he knows,” I say, and take a bite of my Peppermint Pattie. “And I can’t be the one to tell him. If I’m right about this.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “It can’t be you. Sometimes the two of you are”—she waves the wrapper in the air—“just fine. And then other times . . .” Ana shrugs.

  “I know.” For a second, I’m back at the chapel again, standing outside the blaze, yelling for Ana. Erik’s next to me, yelling something I can’t quite hear. The sound of broken glass. Ana coming out, blood dripping down her arm. And later, when the fire trucks were there, the chapel already a pile of smoking rubble, Erik turning to me and saying, “Never mind. What I said earlier? I was kidding. Forget it.”

  Forget what?

  The fire may have brought us all together—we started it, after all—but that moment, when Erik thought I heard something I didn’t hear, has kept a screen between the two of us. I don’t think I’ll ever know him. Not really.

  “Thing is,” I say, “I’m never quite sure that he won’t slip a muscle relaxant into my drink or glue my sleeping bag shut or something, just for a laugh. He’s never seemed to want my feedback.”

  But she doesn’t seem bothered. “I think you’ve watched too many of those eighties high school movies,” Ana says. “That’s the only time anyone actually wakes up with gum in her hair or gets out of the shower in gym class to find his pants hanging from the basketball hoop.” She laughs.

  “I respectfully disagree,” I say, taking another bite of my Peppermint Pattie. “May I present a snapshot of my seventh-grade year. One: snowballs down the back of my sweater. Two: porn in my locker. Three: fake notes from cheerleaders asking me to meet them behind the Dumpster after school.” I don’t tell her that the porn was the worst—so much more humiliating because puberty was arriving at a rather glacial pace.

  “That’s bad,” Ana admits. “But that wasn’t Erik, was it?”

  “Not that I know of,” I say. “All I mean is, Erik doesn’t talk about his life outside of”—I hold up one finger—“track.” Two fingers. “Girls.” Three fingers. “Other girls. And maybe that’s all his life is. But it doesn’t make me the ideal candidate to tell him about his dad.”

  Ana looks at me. “You’re always counting in threes,” she says. “Why is that?”

  “Because it makes sense,” I say. “It makes things make sense.” I blush, then add, “A little order is in order, you know?”

  Ana’s nodding. “I get that. It’s got to be nice, looking at any given situation and dividing it up into equal parts. Then you can take them one by one and not have to worry about the whole.” She crumples the Peppermint Pattie wrapper in her hand.

  I stare at her. “Right.” It’s how I’ve felt about most things. School, Gold Fork, even Jane. If I could graduate in three years, I would. If we could drop a season—summer, probably—and end up with only three to deal with, I’d be happy. Relieved, even. And if I had been able to figure out Jane, understand her dimensions, annoyances, her reasons, maybe I’d have had a chance, instead of addressing her whole person and thereby screwing it up from the beginning,

  It takes me a minute to pull myself away from the image that’s appeared in my mind suddenly of Jane walking away. Always walking away. “Also,” I say, “three is a prime number. And therefore, inviolable. You don’t fuck with three.”

  “I’ve always said.” Ana smiles. Then she says, “I have to pay for these,” and holds up the crumpled wrappers. “What’re you doing now?”

  I think about the meeting I’ve got in a few minutes. No way I’m going to tell Ana about it. “Nothing,” I say. “Just—work.”

  “Okay.” She squints at me but doesn’t say anything else.

  “Until next time,” I say, saluting her. “Go forth and, you know, whatever.”

  “Bye, Davis.”

  As I head down the street to Grainey’s, I wonder how often Ana’s at the Open Six Hours. I know where the others usually hang out in the summer. If Georgie’s not working, she’s in the alley behind the art store, hanging out with her strange group of harmless stoners, a bunch of guys (and a few girls) who all have long hair and sweet, kind of clueless smiles on their faces at all times. Erik’s in the high school’s weight room, even in the summer, or off somewhere with some girl. Jane is probably finishing lunch with her best friends at the diner on Third. She goes there almost every day. Has a grilled cheese with tomato soup. Cuts off the crusts and dunks them in the soup before working through the rest of the sandwich. Eats with one hand propped on her cheek, like she’s considering each bite. Crosses her ankles under the booth, smiles at me, and says, You’re just not quite it, you know?

  But Ana? Aside from the Den and Vera, I don’t really know what she does. After the fire, something about her shut down. We were so busy hiding what we’d done that we couldn’t waste time with the what-could-have-beens. And now, two years later, I’m pretty sure I imagined the whole thing. Ana was never interested. That was a fantasy, like everything in my life.

  • • •

  She shifts uncomfortably in the chair across from me at Grainey’s. I don’t blame her: We’ve been avoiding each other for two years. Me, because of the obvious. And she, because I think when someone’s heard you screaming from inside a burning tent, you tend to want to keep some distance.

  This is the closest I’ve been to Chrissy Nolls since that night at the chapel. I have to fight the impulse to jump out of my chair and flee.

  “What do you want to know?” she asks, and looks at her phone. Swipes up, swipes down, like she’s almost too busy to be here. Adds, “My mom said this would be quick.”

  “Um.” I look down at my open notebook, which is obscenely blank. I was so nervous about this meeting that I didn’t even bring questions. For a second, I wish I’d followed Ana wherever she was headed this afternoon. Anything to avoid this interview. I try to remember what Dan told me to ask. “Do you think there’s a connection between the two fires?” I write the question as I ask it so that I don’t have to look at her.

  “No.”

  A long pause while I wait for her to say something—anything—else. Finally, I say, “Oh. You don’t?” to my notebook. A question about as professional as a whisper.

  “No.” Her voice is certain. I look up at her, and she’s leaning forward against the table, her hand on the back of her neck, covering the burn. “The chapel fire was an accident. Ember from the campfire, most likely. Why would anyone think the two were related?”

  “Good point.” It’s hard to look her in the face like this. She’s right—the fires can’t be connected. Because we definitely didn’t start the Nelson fire.

  “I can’t believe I let my mom talk me into this interview,” she says. “Like talking about it’s going to help. Thank God I graduated. Now I can get away from this place. That’s what you want to ask me about, isn’t it? How the fire’s affected me?” She slowly pulls her hand away from her neck like it’s hard to do, like the ha
nd is stuck fast, which it probably is. She’s been covering it for two years. (Like Ana, I think, and push the thought away.)

  The burn is worse at the back of her neck, I know, but I can’t see it from where I’m sitting. From here, I can only see the way it weaves up the sides, stopping before it gets to her ears. The pink ridges of skin, puckered and puffy, disappear at the bottom into the collar of her shirt.

  “I can’t wait until I can leave in September. State university,” she says. Her mouth is set in a grim line. “Where I’m just the Burned Girl, and not Our Burned Girl.” She rests her hand against her neck again. “So yeah,” she says. “That’s how the fire affected me.”

  “Oh. Okay. Good.” I write that down, even though I know none of it’s going in the article.

  “It’s funny, though,” she goes on. “You’re not the first person to interview me.”

  “I’m not?”

  Her smile is a straight line. “The police. Can you believe it? Wanted to rule me out, they said. Me: a suspect. What crap.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “I didn’t know that.”

  “You wouldn’t,” she says, and I’m hit by a vague memory of Chrissy-before-the-fire. Easy laughter. Pictures of kittens and puppies up in her locker.

  That’s not the girl sitting across from me now.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she says. “It wasn’t me. You think I ever want to go back up there? That’s the last thing I’d do.” She glances around Grainey’s, taking in the Weekenders and their iced mochas. “Screw this place. Once I leave, I’m gone.”

  • • •

  I don’t get anything else out of Chrissy—not that I expected to. I doubt Dan’ll see my notes and think there’s an article in here somewhere, and that’s fine with me. I bike home through town in the midafternoon heat, following the lake road as it turns toward the west side.

  And here’s where my dirty little secret comes out. Because, see, while generally only the Weekenders have places on the lake, and generally this leaves the rest of us to mock their wrap-around decks and stone fire pits and fleets of boats and other, as they like to say, “water toys,” specifically, that’s not exactly the case. Specifically, in fact, one of us lives on the lake. Specifically, me. An old house, sure, built in the seventies, when Gold Fork was just becoming the destination that it is today and therefore lacking that sort of log cabin appeal that everyone’s always clamoring for, but a house on the lake nonetheless.