The Lives of Desperate Girls

by MacKenzie Common

  But just like telling Tom about Chloe, sharing the truth about Helen didn’t seem to be enough. Nothing I had done had changed the fact that there was a killer out there, that the country was actually full of dangers for First Nations people. I had shed light on Helen’s last day, but nothing I’d done changed the fact that she was dead and that more girls in the future would likely fall prey. Sitting on that porch, I felt conflicted about the whole investigation.

  Eventually, Bobby checked his watch and realized he had to get home to help with dinner. I watched him cut across the lawn to his house, his feet flapping at the bottom of his legs like the oversized paws of a puppy. I didn’t know if Pat was expecting me to leave too, but I had one more thing to talk to her about.

  “Uh, this is kind of a weird question…,” I began, hesitating over the giant leap in intimacy I was about to take, “but, do you believe in ghosts?”

  “Why do you ask?” Pat inquired, her eyes unblinking as she studied me from behind her glasses.

  “A while ago…I think I saw something. I think I saw my best friend, Chloe, like I was seeing her ghost,” I stuttered, sure that Pat would either laugh at me or order me to leave. I didn’t mention the dead children; it seemed insensitive when I knew Pat had lost her sister at that school. In a way, the whole thing was callous, asking a grieving mother about ghosts. I hoped she understood that it was only because I trusted her.

  “To be honest, Jenny, I don’t really know if I believe in ghosts. But if you want, I can tell you what my grandmother told me about Anishinabek beliefs.”

  “Please do,” I said.

  We had never learned much about Native beliefs in school, other than the fact that they were connected to nature. That fact was repeated so often that it became stripped of all its significance, implying a winking implication of savagery to a culture based on respect for the natural world.

  “Well, my grandmother told me that we enter the world from the east, like the day. So when we die, our spirit moves west like the sun, to rejoin the spirit world and the Creator. But spirits aren’t confined to that world. They return to earth in dreams or in visions to convey messages or help those they have left behind, even their descendants who never met them. I’ve also heard of people building spirit houses on top of graves so that the spirit has a place to stay, in case it doesn’t immediately depart for the spirit world.

  “My grandmother told me of ceremonies to honor the dead,” she continued. “Some people actually call them Ghost Dances. They were held in the fall after the leaves were gone. These dances would last four nights, and they took place during the full moon. People would dance and fast to celebrate the dead and thank them for their help. That, and other ceremonies in the sweat lodge, were supposed to lift grief from the heart and confusion from the mind.”

  Pat had recited all of this flatly, the way one might read a passage from an anthropology textbook. She ended her explanation with a shrug of her shoulders, as if she were ambivalent about the content.

  But it was an interesting lesson. I liked the idea of Chloe’s spirit hanging around, visiting me from the spirit world. The Ghost Dance sent chills up my spine as I thought of the full moon that had dangled from the sky that night at Tom’s. It was obvious that I hadn’t conformed to any of the ceremony’s rules. Natives fasted and danced while I had gotten drunk and gone running through the woods. And yet, seeing Chloe that night had somehow lightened my grief.

  “Are you going to do any of those things for Helen?” I asked carefully, not wanting to violate Pat’s privacy. Pat bit her lip and shielded her eyes to stare beyond the porch. The sun was low in the sky and the children were packing up their toys and heading home, their chalk drawings abandoned like spills in supermarket aisles.

  “No. You know, traditional beliefs are difficult. When I was in school, the sisters constantly taught us that they didn’t matter, that Christianity was the way forward. A lot of us lost our faith in the old ways. But many of us never really embraced Christianity, not when the Christian world was so cruel to us. So we were left with nothing to believe, caught between two worlds like ghosts.”

  I nodded. It was times like this when I realized that Pat’s history created a rift between us that I could never really bridge. She was a member of an oppressed minority group who had grown up in a time when it was even more dangerous to be a Native than it was today. I was a white teenage girl who had seen so little of the world. I still had trouble understanding any experience different from mine.

  “It must have been terrible, all of those people trying to force you into the white world. Um, I know I’m white…,” I began, feeling like an idiot for stating something so obvious; the blond hair and blue eyes were a bit of a giveaway, “and I know I can never really understand what you’ve experienced, but I’m just wondering…is that what you see when you look at me? All the white people who treated you so badly?” I asked the question in a rush of words, unsure if I really wanted to hear the answer.

  Pat smiled and shook her head. She patted my arm, her hand soft and warm.

  “Jenny, Bobby told me that you met his mother once. Barb had a hard life, and she’s never been able to forgive the people who hurt her. But when I look at you, all I see is a girl with a good heart, the kind of girl I would have liked Helen to be friends with. Yes, being white means you may not fully understand what it’s like to be Native in Canada. But if understanding isn’t totally possible, then caring is the next best thing. And you care.”

  “I do care,” I said softly, bowled over by the poignancy of her words. Pat was quiet, but it seemed like she was always thinking, always mulling things over until she had an answer so insightful that it caught you by surprise.

  We sat in silence until it was time for me to head home and start my homework. Pat saw me shift to get up and held out a hand to stop me.

  “Wait. Before you go, I have something for you,” she said, prying herself out of the narrow chair.

  When Pat came back she was holding a folded pile of sky-blue fabric. Mysteriously, the fabric seemed to jingle as she walked, a bright sound emphasizing every footstep.

  Pat sat down again and carefully unfolded the fabric. It was a long skirt, horizontally striped with embroidered bands made of every shade and color imaginable. At the base of each band were cone-shaped, silver bells, attached to the dress only at the narrow end.

  “I made this jingle dress for Helen a couple of years ago. She danced in a pow-wow with her cousins. She didn’t want to do it because she was so shy, but they convinced her. Have you ever seen anything like this?” Pat asked. I shook my head.

  “Well, women wear jingle dresses to dance because there’s a lot of bouncing steps and look what happens,” Pat said, holding the skirt up and shaking it. Every upward movement raised the bells up and then brought them down in a cacophony of metallic melody, like a dozen churches announcing Sunday services. The skirt was suddenly alive with noise and movement and I smiled, imagining a bunch of girls dancing in outfits like this.

  “It’s amazing. I can’t believe you made this,” I said. Pat laughed.

  “It took some time, but it was worth it. When Helen was out there dancing with her cousins, she forgot all about how self-conscious she was and she just let herself move. It’s how I like to remember her—happy and free.”

  Pat’s smile was wide and her eyes were distant as she relived her happy memory. I could almost see it myself: Helen’s hair bouncing along with the skirt, her white teeth flashing like the silver of the bells.

  “Jenny, I want you to have this. I know it’s not really the kind of thing people wear in day-to-day life. I just want you to have it so you’ll have something to remember Helen and me by.”

  She pressed the skirt into my hands and I held it gently, with reverence. I had never been given anything so precious.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll treasure it. But I wouldn’t have forgotten you anyway.”

  Chapter Thirty–Six

  June
18, 2006

  As eleventh grade ended, I was beginning to accept that Chloe was truly gone, and a sense of peace emerged as the realization sunk in. I was even willing to forgive my classmates for how they had bullied Chloe. They had been callous, but I didn’t think of them as murderers anymore. They hadn’t known how deeply they’d hurt Chloe because to them she was a star, impervious to the everyday indignities of growing up. So many kids heard the stories about Chloe secondhand, and that distance allowed them to be mean.

  Some people were capable of directly inflicting pain, but the majority only struck out after they averted their eyes. Their lack of empathy made the kids at my school cruel, but I believed it was only a temporary condition. Choosing to have faith in humanity made it easier for me to envision spending another year in Thunder Creek.

  But the one thing that still bothered me was the fact that Devon, Mike and Liam would never know how much they had made Chloe suffer. Devon and Mike had hurt her first, but no boy could have betrayed Chloe more deeply than Liam.

  It made me seethe to think of them living out happy and normal lives. I saw them going off to university next year. I knew Devon and Mike were going to party schools, but Liam had completed his perfect four years of high school by getting into McGill University, the kind of school that took great teenagers and made them even better. I saw them all going to college parties, meeting girls at keggers and playing on ultimate Frisbee teams. I saw them finding good jobs in Thunder Creek and marrying the kind of girls who kept their volleyball team jackets from high school because that team was like “family.” I saw the guys and their pretty wives building lives together and raising a couple of photogenic children. And someday, those guys would contentedly review their lives, confident that they had deserved all of their happiness because they were good people. Chloe’s disappearance would be largely forgotten, other than as an anecdote at a dinner party, or a tragic story about first love that Liam would use to build intimacy with future girlfriends.

  It’s a sad fact of life that we never know how many hearts we’ve broken and how many tears were spilled because we existed. But I wanted them to know. I wanted Chloe’s memory yoked to their backs, weighing them down with blame. Every time a bad thing happened to them, I wanted them to know that it was no great injustice for life to echo back the misery they had caused.

  I never went to the police. I knew my story was weak and that the cops didn’t see me as particularly reliable. It also wasn’t smart to make hopeless accusations in small cities. Accusations refracted through a million personal connections and could have huge effects on the people around you. Maybe that was right and maybe that was wrong, but it certainly wasn’t the most immoral choice that had ever been made in Thunder Creek.

  But I hadn’t forgotten Tom’s offer of retribution. I craved a symbolic act of justice that would ensure they never felt completely blameless again. The night before graduation, Tom and I finally put his plan into action.

  I waited until midnight before I left my house, confident that my mother would never know I was gone as long as I was back before she woke up. I snuck down the stairs as quietly as I could, carrying my sandals. I stepped outside, breathing in the muggy air of a June night.

  Shadflies coated my car and hummed around the streetlights in infernal clouds. Shadflies were a unique feature of Thunder Creek summers, attracted by the warm, shallow waters of Fisher Lake. For two weeks a year, the whole city was covered in quivering, thin insects with long beaks and transparent wings. They were harmless, but their sheer numbers rendered them disgusting. Shadflies would coat every available surface, so that when the wind blew, the sides of buildings undulated like cornfields. Cars would skid on piles of them, wheels helplessly losing grip on the slick surface. For two weeks, piles of shadflies would form on the beaches like barricades erected against the sea.

  And then they would be gone. Shadflies only live a day. In a cruel twist of evolutionary fate, they are born with no mouths and have no way of securing sustenance. Shadflies sit dumbly on their chosen surface and starve to death, their only contribution being to lay the eggs of the next doomed generation. Their story made the lives of humans seem so much more meaningful.

  I opened my car door carefully, the shadflies refusing to give up their grip on the surface. I cleaned the bugs off my windshield with spray and glanced in the rearview mirror, confident that the plastic bag from the hardware store was in my trunk. Tom had bought the supplies weeks ago so that no one would remember a guy buying red paint. Our plan would work better if it seemed like an anonymous accusation from the universe.

  Driving down the silent streets of Thunder Creek, I felt more nervous than I’d expected. As I parked my car in the Walmart lot where Tom and I were meeting, I tried to convince myself that this would be fun. Chloe would have liked it; I could imagine her watching me and laughing hysterically. It was a comforting thought, but it didn’t change the sinking feeling I had in my stomach.

  The parking lot was empty, the streetlights forlornly pooling on asphalt still warm from the long-gone summer sun. I lifted my hair off my sweat-sticky neck and tried to ignore my pounding heart. Finally, Tom’s truck pulled up, and I watched his lean shadow move toward my car. I could hear the scuff of his shoes over the thrumming crickets in the nearby bushes.

  “Hey,” Tom said, sliding into my passenger seat. He fiddled with the seat, pushing it as far back as possible to accommodate his long legs.

  “Hey,” I said, patting his leg.

  “You ready?” Tom asked, leaning in for a kiss. I nodded, my lips sticking to his in the humid summer air.

  This was it. Our last adventure together. Tomorrow, Tom would graduate, and the day after he would be gone traveling. It was surreal. What had seemed so far off had now arrived: Tom was leaving. It made every moment feel more urgent to me, as if I were trying to feast on every word and touch in the hope that I could remain permanently satiated.

  Yes, I had Bobby, Jake, Pat and even my mom, but they all seemed pale and insubstantial substitutes for the throbbing intensity of my time with Tom. Of course, I knew I couldn’t ask him to stay. Not because I was too proud, but because I knew he wouldn’t do it. Still, this was the second person I cared about this year who had chosen to leave me. This time, at least I knew where Tom was going, but Asia was inconceivably far for a girl who had never left Ontario. Part of me wanted this night to last forever, and part of me wished it was already over so I could be past the part where we said goodbye.

  “Which house should we hit first?” Tom asked as I started the car.

  “Liam’s,” I said firmly. “In case something goes wrong, I want to start with him.”

  “Sounds good,” Tom said.

  We parked down the street and snuck up to Liam’s spacious five-bedroom abode. It was an immaculate home, the lawn lush and meticulously trimmed. Flowers bloomed in the garden and the porch was bright white and smelled of fresh paint. You could imagine the photogenic gatherings that happened in such a house: lemonade on the porch in summer, presents opened under exquisite color-themed Christmas trees, Thanksgiving dinners on mahogany tables where family members actually took the time to say what made them grateful. The house was timeless, and I knew Liam and his siblings would be able to fondly return to it over the decades, college girlfriends in tow, followed by wives, and, eventually, children. Yes, it was a picture-perfect family home, and we were going to vandalize it.

  Tom and I shook the spray cans and worked quickly, the paint dripping down the white garage door. We kept glancing furtively over our shoulders, hoping that an insomniac neighbor or random police car wouldn’t ruin our plans. My stomach was roiling and I could barely breathe through my panic. When we were done, we hurried back to the car and moved on to our next stop.

  We had chosen the night before graduation because we wanted to ruin something special for these boys. Tomorrow, the boys’ families would wake up in their cozy, middle-class homes. I could almost hear the pleasant “can you believe
how old you’ve become, we are so proud, on to the next adventure” conversations that typically happened on the big-milestone days. Maybe they’d eat celebratory food, dishes that were famous within the insular world of their family: Mom’s special pancakes, Dad’s legendary omelets. Then they would get all dressed up, those happy little suburban families, and they’d go outside to get in the car. And that’s when they’d see it.

  RAPIST—spray-painted in red, dripping letters that completely covered the garage. The family would stand there in confusion, trying to come up with an alternative meaning for the word. They would look around and realize that only their garage was vandalized, that this message had been meant for them. Here they were, enjoying a sunlit morning at home, while every morning jogger, dog walker and Saturday-work commuter saw something they would never forget. It was an accusation, a slur lobbed directly at them. It was a word almost never spoken above a whisper, and yet here it was, splattered across their garage door like eggs on Halloween. And the punishment was more fair than when I had Psycho written all over my locker. I had slapped a girl. They ruined one.

  Everyone would be frozen to the pavement, their jaws dropping down to graze tie-knots and locket necklaces. Fathers would be scrutinized along with their sons. Mothers would demand explanations, plausible stories about disgruntled coworkers or ex-girlfriends getting revenge. Everyone would swear they didn’t know anything, and finally they would conclude that it was a sick joke. Plans would be made to buy cleaning supplies on the way back from the graduation. The family would climb into their car, the father pressing a button to raise the garage door. Everyone would breathe a sigh of relief as they watched the word RAPIST fold itself away like a map. The father would spend the entire graduation worrying that someone would steal the expensive road bicycle he bought to stave off aging when he turned forty.