Please Proceed to the Nearest Exit

by Jessica Raya

  The carpet stunk vaguely of vomit. Troy smelled of chlorine and aftershave. He lay on top of me, crushing me with his weight. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. His hands slipped under my top and to the back of my bra, groping around like he’d lost his keys.

  My bra sprung open.

  “You’re smaller than I thought,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said, crossing my arm over my chest.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said and moved on to my jeans.

  I felt his fingers on my zipper.

  “Wait,” I said. “Just wait.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Everything was wrong. Everything was wonderful. I just needed a second to realize that this was what I wanted. Troy and Robin, sitting in a tree.

  “I’ve never done this before.”

  “Come on,” he moaned. “You like me, right?”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I like you too, so shut up for a minute.”

  I felt the zipper release and closed my eyes, horrified. Caught in my old day-of-the-week underwear. They weren’t even the right day.

  There was a noise outside the window, the swish of long, dry grass. Then a metal twang and someone swearing under his breath. Troy stopped moving. I heard the tick-tick-tick of a bicycle wheel spinning in the air, the front door creaking open.

  “Hello?” Jamie said. “Are you here?”

  Troy’s hand slipped over my mouth.

  We could hear Jamie’s footsteps on the carpet, back and forth, back and forth, like something was being worked out. I couldn’t decide either. Go away, please don’t go—with every step, I changed my mind. Go, I thought finally. Please, please go. I definitely didn’t want him to see me on the floor with my jeans around my knees. I didn’t want anyone to see me this way.

  At last the front door slammed shut. Troy’s hand slipped from my mouth. “That was weird,” he said and got to work again. He tugged on my underwear, in a hurry now, the elastic sharp on my skin until it snapped. “Shit,” he said.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  Looking back, that was probably the wrong word to use.

  He pushed himself between my thighs and tore inside.

  I gasped. Girls at school talked about how it hurt at first and then it didn’t. But this couldn’t be right. The pain was too deep, too wrenching, like something inside me was breaking that couldn’t be fixed. I felt other things, his head stubble against my cheek, the carpet rubbing parts of me raw. I remembered Jamie’s hand on my foot, warm and gentle. What had happened between then and now? I turned my face away. It wasn’t a bad house, really. It just needed a bit of sprucing. Maybe they wouldn’t knock it down. Maybe Troy and I would buy it after we got married. This is where the bed will go, I thought. That’s where we’ll put the dresser.

  “I love you,” I said. Troy didn’t answer. To be fair, he probably didn’t hear me. There was a lot of grunting going on. His dog tags jangled against my collarbone. Troy loves you very much, I told myself.

  Troy groaned one last time and collapsed against me, his swimmer’s weight knocking the air from my lungs. The feeling of him slipping out of me was worst of all. He stood up and tugged at his pants, so I knew it was over. I sat up and cradled my knees.

  “So I’m gonna go to that party,” he said. “Do you want a ride home or something?”

  I shook my head.

  “I won’t tell anyone,” he said, zipping up.

  I nodded, grateful. It never occurred to me that I was the one who should do the telling.

  “You know, I thought you were lying about the virgin thing,” he said. And then he was gone.

  I pressed my fingers against my eyelids. If I didn’t cry, then maybe it hadn’t really happened. What had happened? I wasn’t sure. Troy Gainer was good-looking and popular. He said he liked me. He was the second boy I’d ever kissed.

  —

  It took forever to get into my jeans. They didn’t seem to fit anymore. I groped around for my underwear. I didn’t want them, but I couldn’t leave them either. I tried pushing them into my front pocket, but something was already in there. A piece of paper folded into a small, fat square, my name on one side in purple pen. I took it to the rec room where the chair leg still glowed orange in the fireplace. Nobody in Golden knew how to put fires out properly either. I unfolded the paper and smoothed it flat.

  Dear Robin, I’m sorry that you’re sad but you shouldn’t be because God loves you very much. He has special plans for you Robin just like He has special plans for me. So whatever happens try to remember that you are His SPECIAL LAMB. We both are. Those other girls aren’t anybody’s special anything.

  Sincerely, your one and only TRUE friend forever and ever,

  Carol Closter

  PS I forgive you for not talking to me in the library AGAIN even though it is RUDE.

  I wiped the tears from my eyes, folded the note back up, and put it in my pocket. Then I rolled up pieces of newsprint and arranged them around the chair leg like a teepee. I laid the underwear on top. When the flames caught, I blew on them gently, coaxing them toward the cloth. The polyester-cotton blend didn’t burn so much as melt, the black spreading slowly like gangrene. T…U…E…This would take a while.

  I went to the window and pulled back the curtain. Shadowed houses and scrawny trees. Dead geraniums slumbered in the window box. The tricycle was still missing one of its back wheels. Nothing had changed, but everything had. Beneath my thoughts was a quiet roar, a familiar sound but too far away to name. When light flared orange in the window, I touched my fingers to the cold glass, lost memories tugging at my whirring mind. The wine, I thought. I’m just drunk. By the time I turned around to check the fire, the mantel was engulfed.

  I ran to the kitchen and filled a plastic cup with water, but it was too little and I was too late. Fire crawled up the wallpaper. It peeled away from the walls like sunburned skin. I stood there, mouth open, cup in hand, as though I was making a toast and couldn’t think what to say.

  When the house fire I’d watched with my dad looked extinguished, the firemen had attacked the charred remains with their axes. With every blow that poor family had squeezed closer together under their blankets, but it had to be done. “The fire looks dead,” Dad had said, “but it’s in there, it’s alive. It’s just waiting for oxygen—and boom.” As if to prove him right, the front bay window belched flames that sent everyone reeling back several feet. “What’d I tell ya?” he’d said. “What’d I tell ya.”

  I knew it was hopeless. I could already feel the heat on my face. The flames would be everywhere soon, in the walls, under the floorboards, between the joists. Black smoke would choke the room until the windows burst. The walls would crumble like gingerbread. Then the beams would snap, the roof would collapse, and this fire would swallow everything inside in one bright gulp.

  I wanted it to. I wanted to see it gone. Jim Fisher’s little girl. A walking bad decision.

  Only when I heard the sirens did I drop the cup and run.

  —

  The ride home was endless. A million dark streets and sleeping houses, their windows like eyes. My heart banged against my ribs. Blood thumped in my ears. I pedalled as hard as I could, but my legs were heavy and my bare foot was aching again. When I reached my street at last, every house was on fire, their windows dazzling with orange light. But it was just the sun coming up over the hills. The world had not stopped spinning.

  Mom was asleep on the sofa. The TV was on. Station identification, no volume. As I crept past her to turn it off, she stirred awake.

  “What are you doing home? Did you and Melanie have a fight?”

  I opened my mouth and shut it again. I wanted to tell her, but I couldn’t say the words. I needed her to know just by looking at me.

  Mom held up a hand. “Earthquake,” she said, as if announcing the time.

  The floor shook. I stumbled against Dad’s armchair. I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to do. Put my head between
my legs? Breathe into a paper bag? What was it that never strikes the same spot twice? Mom jumped up, grabbed my arm, and pulled me under the sofa table. We knelt together, holding hands. She smelled of dirty laundry and unwashed hair. Where was the Chanel No. 5? The Final Net? I shifted away from her, worried she’d smell the wine on me, other things. All the smells in the world were wrong.

  We listened to things falling around us, calling the sounds like bingo numbers. “Pictures,” I said. “Crystal,” she sighed. It lasted less than a minute. Dad always said you had to be impressed by an earthquake’s efficiency, among other things.

  We stayed where we were for another minute, waiting for aftershocks. When none came, Mom crawled to the kitchen for her cigarettes. She sat on the floor, back against a cupboard, and lit her Salem.

  The phone rang, no doubt one of Dad’s customers. The important ones had his home number, though it was Mom who would usually talk to them, sitting on a kitchen stool, long frame hunched, offering what encouragements she could muster before the pot roast set off the smoke detector. “I supply the insurance,” Dad liked to joke. “Elaine supplies the reassurance.” For once Mom didn’t answer. The sound seemed to get shriller with every ring. Soon the phone was joined by the doorbell. Our house thundered like the inside of a belfry. “Where’s your shoe?” Mom shouted over the noise.

  “Hello? Mr. Fisher? Mrs. Fisher?” The knocking wouldn’t stop. Finally, Mom got up and went to the door.

  “Well, now,” she said. “Wasn’t that a lively way to wake up!” Mom had her country club voice on, cheerful but impersonal. Whoever it was, they weren’t getting through the door. “Oh, we’re fine, just fine. It was barely an earthquake at all.”

  From what I could see, she was right. Leather-bound volumes prayed at the feet of naked bookshelves. Glass had been broken, a ceramic lamp, a potted fern. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a glue gun and a bit of prairie ingenuity. Family photos lay supine on the floor, the three of us still smiling our phony smiles. Outside, the sun was sharp against a powder-blue sky, not a cloud reflected in the crystal pool. And behind that, of course, the pool house, empty but still there.

  “That’s kind of you, but as I said, we’re fine. My husband’s in the insurance business so—”

  Mom swayed back a step. I thought it was an aftershock, but she was the only one moving.

  “Are you all right, ma’am?”

  “Of course.” She touched her fingertips to her forehead. She stepped back again and clutched at the wall. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I don’t seem to be feeling very well at the moment.”

  The door swung open wide, and I saw the uniform, the walkie-talkie.

  “Ma’am? Oh jeez.” He barked into the walkie-talkie, something about ambulance and shock. “We got us another one,” he said just as Mom’s knees buckled and bowed.

  I tucked farther under the sofa table and closed my eyes like some dumb scared kid. Please, please, please just make it all just go away, I whispered. I won’t touch another boy, bottle, or fireplace as long as I live. I’ll be a better daughter. I’ll study hard and get good grades. I’ll sit in one of Carol Closter’s beanbag chairs if I have to. I didn’t have a cross on a necklace, so I reached into my pocket and touched the square of folded paper.

  When I opened my eyes again, the man with the walkie-talkie was in our foyer, with both arms around my mom. Not a police officer, I realized, but a neighbourhood security guard, one of the men who did crosswords in their cars by flashlight. He wasn’t there to arrest anybody. He looked barely old enough to drive. His arms shook trying to hold her without touching the breasts that spilled out from her gauze-thin slip. One of her hands was flung toward me, lit cigarette still dangling between her fingers. If you didn’t know better, you’d think they were dancing. You’d think we were all having the most marvellous time.

  4

  Early in the morning of April 1906, on what began as a calm spring day, an earthquake shook San Francisco awake. It didn’t last longer than a minute, but the fires that followed burned for three days. Some were set by green firemen unskilled in the nuances of dynamite. Some were set by property owners who, having built their dreams directly over the San Andreas Fault, couldn’t get coverage for quakes but had come by fire insurance easily enough. When the smoke cleared, more than three thousand people were dead and three-quarters of the city was destroyed. One of the worst fires was started by a woman cooking breakfast for her family. It was known as the Ham and Eggs Fire, which was also the punchline of many mornings in the Fisher household.

  This is one of the stories my dad liked to tell.

  My mom told different kinds of stories.

  She told the security guard that she was prone to fainting, that the earthquake had upset an old inner ear problem, but everything was fine now, really, thank you so much. She told Dad’s client that the damage always looked worse than it was, that there was probably nothing to worry about, and if there was, weren’t we all lucky to be so well insured. She told me we’d sweep up later, she didn’t feel quite up to it, she probably had an iron deficiency, she should take vitamins, cut back on coffee, get more sleep. And just like that, all questions and possible answers were swept under the rug. The actual shards of porcelain and glass we would just have to step around.

  If lack of sleep was Mom’s problem, she seemed determined to make up for it. After she waved off the security guard and said goodbye to the client, she unplugged all three phones, kissed my cheek, and went to bed for twenty-four hours.

  While Mom slept, I undressed, carefully, with my back to the mirror. Even with the curtains drawn and the lights off, I still saw the blood on the crotch of my jeans and the thin purple bruise on my hip where my underwear had dug in. I scrubbed the jeans with a bar of soap in the shower, then put them in a paper bag and shoved them under my bed until garbage day. The bruise wouldn’t come out no matter how hard I scrubbed. It was too warm for pyjamas, but I dug out a pair from the bottom of my dresser and put them on. I wanted every part of me covered. I would’ve worn a hat if I’d owned one. Scoured pink and wet-haired, I got under the covers and stared at the ceiling. Every sound through my window was a siren, every headlight a police car. At some point I fell asleep. When I woke again it was dark outside, and my hair had dried flat against the left side of my head. I knew I should get dressed, but that would involve getting out of bed. If they came to arrest me, it would have to be in my pink bunny slippers.

  Sunday, tired of sleeping, I flipped between the religious shows with the telephone on my lap, waiting for Melanie to get home from church. She said all TV preachers were phonies. When the Pope wore jewels, at least you knew they were real. But I liked the one in the silver suit and the bolero tie. His mascara ran as he cried for the lost souls watching at home. I figured you had to be pretty sincere to let yourself go like that in front of a live studio audience. Plus, there was nothing else on.

  The D’Angelos usually got home at one o’clock, then ate a late lunch. I called at two. “She’s in her room with Joyce,” her sister Claire said. “But she told me to tell you she’s not here. Aren’t you friends anymore?”

  Joyce had gone to church with them, Claire said, and she and Melanie had spent the whole hour whispering and making faces at the boys in the next pew. “They were whispering about you too,” she said. “But I couldn’t hear what they were saying.”

  I was only half listening. Over her, I heard the clock in the hallway ticking down to Monday morning. If they arrested me, at least I wouldn’t have to go to school.

  “I don’t think I want to be a teenager,” Claire said.

  “Me neither,” I said and hung up.

  The preacher in the bolero tie said there were operators standing by to hear my troubles and take my generous donation. I was dialling the toll-free number when Mom came into the room.

  “I must’ve caught that flu,” she said.

  “Me too,” I said and coughed like a Victorian heroine. “I should probably st
ay home tomorrow.”

  Mom lifted a hand and I leaned forward. Her palm was hot from sleep. My forehead must have felt ice cold in comparison.

  “You do feel warm.” She sat down beside me and pulled her legs up under her nightgown the way I used to when I was little. It billowed around her knees in soft blue waves. “All right,” she said, frowning at the set. “But for God’s sake, change that channel.”

  —

  My dad always said earthquakes had a way of getting inside people, that there’s a kind of damage that even Richter couldn’t measure. He’d had customers who survived the mildest of shakers only to quit their jobs, sell their homes, leave their wives. Not Mom and me. We battened down the hatches. We weren’t going anywhere.

  We traded the news for game shows. You can lose yourself far more easily in the splendour of someone’s brand-new dinette. We clapped our hands and bit our nails. We shouted out heartfelt advice. If our eyes teared up, it was only because we really wanted Marlene to get that snowmobile. “I never knew how wonderful these shows are,” Mom said. “That new car is going to change her life.”

  Whenever I hear the phrase mutually assured destruction, I think of this time. Plausible deniability is another good one. When they came up with Don’t ask, don’t tell, it made me laugh. As if being gay were the worst thing you could admit to someone. It would make a great name for a game show, though. For two weeks that spring, we were the stars of our own game show. It was called Let’s Pretend the Rest of the World Doesn’t Exist.