The Lives of Desperate Girls

by MacKenzie Common

  “Mom?” I asked. “Whatever happened to Carol?”

  “She’s a mental health counselor in Alberta.” my mom said, a smile in her voice. “She sent me an e-mail last year. She’s married, has three kids and does a lot of camping in the Rockies. She sent some beautiful pictures.”

  “Oh. I thought you were going to say something terrible happened to her,” I said, relief flooding my voice.

  “Oh, Jenny,” my mom murmured into my hair. “Sometimes sad stories have happy endings.”

  —

  I spent that Friday night organizing my school things and doing the homework assignments that were only moderately late. I could still get partial grades, and I knew I would need all the marks I could get. It was strange to sit down and decide to care about schoolwork, almost as if I was pretending to be someone else.

  I had never been particularly academic. When I was young, I used to get in trouble for daydreaming in class. I would sit by the window and watch the janitor rake leaves or a dog meander around the playground equipment, lifting its leg on the red plastic slide. Inevitably, I’d be asked something and register nothing before the question mark. Back then, Chloe called me the “space cadet.” We were both dreamers. It was just that Chloe actually thought her dreams would come true.

  By the time I started high school, I had accepted the fact that I was completely average. There were no hidden talents or opportunities for greatness lurking in my genetic make-up. Until this year, my grades had been an assortment of Bs and Cs. It seemed daunting to think that next year I would have to get As. Still, stranger things had happened in Thunder Creek.

  I didn’t crawl into bed until the slim hours past midnight, but it was gratifying to see a stack of completed assignments on my desk. It also occurred to me that I hadn’t checked my phone once, and that Tom hadn’t texted me. I might have texted him then but I was just too tired. The moment my head hit the pillow I felt myself tip backward into sleepless oblivion. I had no dreams that night.

  Chapter Twenty–Six

  March 25, 2006

  On Saturday I did the week’s grocery shopping. It was almost comforting to mindlessly roam up and down the aisles. My thoughts didn’t run any deeper than considering whether I should buy spaghetti or penne pasta, strawberry or blueberry yogurt. Grocery shopping really was the closest I came to meditation.

  But my inner peace didn’t last long. I was loading my bags into the back seat when I saw the cop car through my window. I sighed and shut my door.

  “Well, if it isn’t Jenny Parker,” Officer Trudeau said. Officer Bragg was riding shotgun, drinking out of a tall thermos.

  “Yep, that’s me,” I said, resisting the urge to roll my eyes. “How are you guys doing?”

  “How are we doing? Not good, Jenny,” Officer Trudeau said, waving me over.

  I jammed my hands into my pockets and grudgingly walked over. I leaned into the car and, for a fleeting moment, worried that she would smell pot on my coat. I had been wearing the same jacket a few weeks ago when Tom and I smoked a joint.

  “You see, Jenny, we are really running out of leads on Chloe Shaughnessy’s disappearance,” Officer Trudeau said, searching my face intently.

  “Oh?” I said awkwardly. “I’m, uh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Are you sure you don’t remember anything else?” she asked. “Maybe Chloe mentioned a new boyfriend? Or someone she talked to online? Was she having problems at home?”

  “No, Chloe didn’t mention any of that,” I said nervously. “And Chloe didn’t have any problems at home.”

  “How lucky of her to have a perfect life,” Officer Trudeau said, her voice verging on sarcastic. “But seriously, you were her best friend. Who doesn’t confide in their best friend?”

  “I am her best friend,” I said through gritted teeth, emphasizing the present tense. “And I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

  Officer Trudeau’s eyes bored into mine. I felt an irrational urge to run away. I could even feel the muscles in my legs flex, readying themselves to evade justice. I took a deep breath and tried to quiet the quivery feeling in my chest.

  “It’s what you do know that I’m worried about, and whether you might be stopping us from catching a criminal before something else happens. I will find out what you’re hiding. You can be sure of it,” she said. With that, she put the car in reverse and I stepped away from the window.

  I stood there and watched them drive away. The white car slid across the gray parking lot, passing salt-stained minivans full of haggard mothers negotiating with their children about breakfast cereal.

  I didn’t feel safe even after they disappeared over the horizon. I knew they were out there, watching and waiting for me to slip up. But I wasn’t going to let go of my secrets that easily.

  Even the secrets I didn’t want to keep.

  —

  Tom texted me that afternoon as I sat at the kitchen table studying. The message said: “Want to hang out tonight? My dad’s out of town so you could stay over. We could talk about the Helen thing.”

  That second sentence set my heart racing. The thought of spending so much uninterrupted time with him was alluring but terrifying. What if he realized I was boring or totally inexperienced with guys? The thought of a whole night alone made me sweat. There would be no reason to stop anything.

  Still, I couldn’t say no. If I did, I knew I would spend the night at home alone, wondering what might have happened and wishing I’d been brave enough to find out. I would have gone to bed aching with loneliness and trying to imagine what lying next to Tom might feel like. I wished he hadn’t texted me, but now that he had, I couldn’t ignore the new possibilities it presented.

  I wrote a note to my mom explaining that I was staying at a new friend’s house for the night and that I would have my cell phone if she wanted to get ahold of me. I left the note on the kitchen table under the saltshaker and then I texted Tom back: “Sure, see you at eight.” I did it not because I was brave but because I was lonely and because Tom seemed like the only person who could help me through this terrible year.

  Chapter Twenty–Seven

  It was still light as I drove to Tom’s. Spring came so quickly to Northern Ontario. As I drove along the twisting road, I could see that the ice was breaking apart on the lake. It had become dark and waterlogged, splitting into jagged sheets that floated freely in the frigid water. Within a couple of months, the lake would be warm and the beaches would be clogged with sunbathers and kids in water wings. Tonight, though, the darkness of the open water and the half-submerged ice seemed menacing.

  I pulled up to Tom’s house, feeling even more nervous than the last time I’d been here. It was almost as if I was taking another step away from who I’d always been and becoming someone different. I used to have the same feeling when Chloe and I would get ready together for house parties. I could remember straightening my hair in her bathroom mirror, confident that somehow tonight would change everything. This would be the night that one of the boys I had gone to school with for ten years would morph into my personalized Prince Charming. This would be the night that my terminal quietness would evaporate and the thunderous pressure of words in my head would become easy conversation. My optimism was fueled by the countless teen movies that promised viewers that somehow, a disappointing adolescence could be redeemed by one crazy night at a house party.

  Inevitably, Chloe and I would come home late with aching feet and teeth covered in the sugary film left by Bacardi Breezers. The boys hadn’t changed overnight, and my flaws still existed. We never regretted going, but only because we had no other ideas on how to spend a weekend.

  Tom must have heard me arrive because he stood in the doorframe and watched me walk up the drive. His hair was rumpled and came to a point high above his forehead. He was wearing a dark green sweater that bulked up his slim frame. Standing there, he looked somehow older than seventeen, and it occurred to me that in a few months he would be done high school. I felt
an ache at the thought of him leaving someday, at the idea of being at Thunder Creek High and being even more alone than I was right now.

  “Hey,” Tom said, turning his body so I could slide past him and into the house. My hip brushed his hand and that was enough to make my stomach bubble with nerves.

  “Hey,” I said. I dropped my backpack to the floor and glanced over my shoulder at him. Tom smiled at me, and the look in his eyes, warm and knowing, made our silence seem heavy with significance. The world shrank to the size of the two of us. The thought that I might have chosen to stay home alone now seemed ridiculous. It occurred to me that Tom probably hadn’t heard about the incident with Taylor, which was just as well. I wanted to forget all about it.

  “I was thinking we could order a pizza,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve had dinner yet…”

  “No,” I said, relieved that we were talking about something as ordinary as pizza. “Pizza would be great.”

  “Cool.” Tom shuffled into the living room. “I’ll be honest, I like really weird pizza toppings, so if you want to do half-and-half I’d totally understand.”

  “Yeah, that’d be best. I just like plain cheese,” I said.

  Tom laughed. “Of course you’re a pizza purist. That fits you!”

  “I guess,” I muttered. I watched him call a takeout place and request a large pizza, half with cheese and half with sausage, pineapple and olives. I felt instantly proud of the fact that I wasn’t the kind of girl who let a guy order for her, because Tom’s choices sounded repulsive.

  “Anyways,” Tom said as he hung up, as if continuing a conversation we had already started. “Want to get high before our pizza comes?”

  “Uh, yeah, sounds good,” I said. He handed me a can of beer and I followed him into his room.

  Tom’s room was cleaner than the last time I had seen it. His laundry was all contained in a basket and his desk was tidy. He had made his bed, and somehow, the queen-sized expanse of mattress made me nervous. It seemed so adult to have such a large bed; from what I could see, he didn’t have faded Disney sheets like I did. I found myself tipping half my beer down my throat. It was a cliché, but booze was called “liquid courage” for a reason, right?

  Tom rustled around in his closet before finally extracting a blue and white bong. It was at least two and a half feet long and the glass was decorated with painterly swirls. I stood awkwardly in the center of his room, unsure if I should sit on his computer chair or the bed. Sitting on the bed might seem too forward, but sitting on the chair would be overly distant. Why couldn’t I be the kind of girl who parked her ass without analysis? It was strange how I felt simultaneously so awkward and so comfortable around Tom. Teen romances never told you that happiness could have an undercurrent of nausea, but maybe that was just me.

  Tom sat on the bed and waved me over. Decision made. I sat down next to him and watched him grind pot and pack a bowl. I desperately wished that he’d pulled out a joint or a pipe. I had never used a bong before. I’d never wanted to be the person at the party who had a choking fit and tipped dirty bong water onto a bedspread. More important, I knew that bongs were complicated, with holes that you needed to cover with your thumbs and metal bowls to be pulled out at the appropriate speed. The intimidating process made me feel, not for the first time, as if my peers were pulling ahead of me in terms of life experience. I sat on Tom’s bed, a virgin who couldn’t use a bong, feeling supremely uncool.

  “Do you want to go first?” Tom asked. I shook my head.

  “No, go for it,” I said.

  I watched him hunch over the glass, flicking his lighter and making the bong bubble with his breath. The chamber filled with milky smoke before Tom slowly pulled it into his lungs, the muscles of his back contracting with his breath. Tom sat up, his face tight before he finally exhaled in a great gasp of relief.

  “Don’t you worry about your dad finding your bong?” I asked. Tom shrugged.

  “I think he probably knows but chooses to look the other way. He’s like that about my smoking too.”

  “He doesn’t mind your smoking? But isn’t he a surgeon?” I asked. Tom flopped back on his elbows and drained the last drops of his beer.

  “He smokes too. You’d be surprised how many surgeons do. Their jobs are super-stressful.”

  “Huh,” I said, finishing my beer. “You do smoke a lot for a teenager, though.”

  “Yeah,” Tom sighed. “I’ve been smoking for three years now. Sometimes I think I should quit. I’ll quit someday. Smoking’s lame when you’re middle-aged.”

  “True,” I said.

  “Feel free to smoke a bowl,” Tom said, tipping his chin toward the bong on the floor.

  “This is sort of embarrassing to admit, but I’ve never smoked out of a bong. I’m not really sure how to do it,” I said.

  “Oh, wow, okay.” Tom looked genuinely surprised. “Well, that’s no problem. I can help you.”

  He sat up on the bed and pulled the bong up, careful to support the base so he didn’t break it. He tilted the bong toward me and tapped a small hole on the back.

  “Cover that with your finger,” he said. “I’m going to light this until you say stop. And don’t worry, I’m holding it in case you drop it.” I felt his hand brush my leg as he wrapped his fingers around the base.

  Tom lit the bong and I inhaled, transforming the weed into a glowing coal. The bong bubbled furiously. When I realized how much smoke was in the chamber, I urgently flapped my hand at him to stop.

  “That’s a big hit,” Tom said nervously, but it was too late; I sucked it all up. Instantly, I was aware of the contours of my lungs, expanded and full of the reeking sweetness of weed. My chest strained until the smoke finally came gushing out of my nose and mouth.

  “You didn’t cough,” Tom said with admiration. That comment made me feel strangely proud, as if the ability to hold in smoke was a great life achievement.

  “Thanks for helping,” I said, leaning back on the bed. My head felt completely disconnected from my body, floating far above its skeletal confines. My thoughts were so fluid that I wondered if they would come leaking out of my ears.

  “No worries. You just chill. I’m gonna go get another beer. Do you want one?” Tom asked after taking another hit.

  “Sure,” I said absentmindedly. I folded my arms across my chest and stared at Tom’s ceiling. The effects of the pot hit me in increasingly stronger waves, making it hard to understand any moment that wasn’t purely in the present. And yet, there was relief in momentarily forgetting the past. The past was what made me a girl with a missing best friend. In the present, I was just a girl on a bed. The mattress was so cushioned that my muscles ached with pleasure.

  Tom returned with the beer after what felt like a lifetime but was probably only a minute. He flopped down next to me and passed me my drink. I cracked it open and dribbled it into my mouth without sitting up. The liquid soothed my smoke-raw throat, and before I even realized it, the beer was done.

  “You chugged that,” Tom said with a smile, tossing my can into the garbage without getting up.

  I turned my head and looked at him. It was hard to make sense of his face when I was so close and so high. Tom was looking at me too, his eyes slowly roaming over my features. I felt our world contract even more, to just the inch of space between our faces.

  “I never noticed your freckles. But there they are, beneath your makeup,” Tom said. I blushed.

  “I try to cover them up. I think they look terrible,” I whispered. Occasionally, I would glance in the mirror and feel mute horror at the spots that covered my face, neck, shoulders and back. In my head, I didn’t picture myself with them; they inhabited no part of my self-image. I might have always had freckles, but I still viewed them as aggressive colonizers that had occupied me by force.

  “No, they’re unique, just like you,” Tom said. I couldn’t help snorting.

  “Me? Unique? I’m, like, the most ordinary person ever.”

 
“No, you’re quiet, but not ordinary. The problem is that some people don’t know how to tell the difference,” he said, his voice full of the arrogance of a boy who believes he understands the world.

  “But you can?” I asked, a hint of teasing entering my voice. Tom stared back at me, his eyes so steady and calm that I felt pinned down by his stare, like a butterfly in a natural science exhibit.

  “Yeah, I can. Probably because no one thinks I’m quiet or ordinary,” Tom said, his eyes crinkling as he smiled. This conversation felt incredibly right in our hazy state. It was like we were peeling back the superficial stuff to see the whispers beneath our skin.

  “You’re just cool,” I said. “I wish I was as brave as you. You’ve never cared about fitting in. Even in middle school, you showed up and you didn’t care if you made any friends. That’s pretty badass.”

  Tom laughed, his face so close to mine that I felt his breath on my shoulder.

  “That’s the farthest thing from brave! I’m awkward anyways, but I was actually trying not to make friends because I was terrified that I would end up fitting in here, and somehow that might stop me from going home. It was honestly me just being stupid.”

  “Wow,” I said. “You really didn’t want to live here. Like, willing to sacrifice quite a lot just to prove that.”

  His wry smile showed that he didn’t totally regret alienating his entire class. “Jenny, that’s why you’re the brave one,” he said. “Some people need to fit in. I needed not to. But it doesn’t seem to matter to you.”

  “Maybe it should,” I said, a smile tugging at my mouth. “Maybe if I cared more then I wouldn’t have slapped Taylor Sullivan. Maybe if I cared more then the cops wouldn’t think I was hiding something, and everyone wouldn’t think I was so weird.”

  “Maybe, but you wouldn’t be as interesting,” Tom said firmly. There was a slight pause as the entirety of what I’d said sank in. “Wait, so, you slapped Taylor Sullivan?”

  “Yeah, but she deserved it,” I said.