by L. E. Flynn
But I never saw who was in there with her, and Jasper told me he had never been to Trixie’s house. What I never considered is that somebody else had.
44
I HAVE TO train my brain to not think of Trixie, but I had a life before her and I’m having one now, after her. I don’t even care where she is, if she really is caught in the tide somewhere, her hair slimy with seaweed, or if she and Toby Hunter are shacked up in a cheap motel, making fun of all the suckers back home whose lives they tramped over.
Jasper was right when he kept saying that we need to move on with our lives. But now it’s not enough to just move on. I don’t want to do anything on Trixie’s terms. Wherever she is, I want to hurt her. If she ever comes back, I want her to stare at me like she has no idea who I am anymore. And she won’t. I’m not her sister, and I never was.
I don’t want to see Beau either. He sends me a two-word text: I’m sorry. But he has said those same words so many times that they have completely lost their meaning. I want to hurt him too, every single time I think about when he walked past me last year and didn’t see me at all. I was nobody to him and now I’ll make him nobody to me.
Moving on is different from getting even, and I don’t think there is a way to get even, to hurt them both like they hurt me. But there’s one way I can try.
I leave a note in Jasper’s locker.
Meet me at my car after school. I promise, no more searching.
I know there’s a chance he won’t show, because he left pretty much the same note for me yesterday and I wasn’t there. He doesn’t owe me anything. He could walk away from me just as easily as Trixie did. There’s nothing binding us together except the fact that the same girl pretended to care about both of us.
But he does show up, holding the note between his fingers with a little half smile. I’m standing behind my car because I can’t handle having another person hop into it with me.
“What’s going on?” he says. “You figured out where she is?”
I shake my head. “You were right. We need to live our own lives. So I figured today is a good time to start.”
He slips my note into his pocket. I wonder what he’ll do with it, if he is the kind of person who saves anything remotely sentimental. I think about the note I found that he wrote for Trixie and wonder if it’s still in my bedroom, buried in a desk drawer.
“What do you have in mind?” he asks.
“I don’t know; what do people do around here when they’re not searching for missing girls? We could go get some food. Or see a movie.” For some reason, I can’t picture Jasper doing either of those things, and I immediately feel bad for thinking it, because he’s used to people seeing him as some kind of freak.
He doesn’t say anything at first and I think I have horribly misread the situation, and he only kissed me because we were both missing the same person and wanted to somehow feel closer to her by getting closer to each other. Then he takes a deep breath, like he’s relieved, and I let myself consider that he might actually like me, and that I might actually like him back. “That sounds really good. Maybe we can skip the movie, though. I think we’ve both had enough drama lately.”
It’s his attempt at a joke, at least I think it is. I guess Jasper might have a sense of humor. Everything I know about him is tied to Trixie, and I want to break him out from under her spell.
“I’ll pick you up at seven,” I say, my mouth so parched that my words almost get stuck there.
Later, when I’m alone in my room, I pretend it’s a real date, that he asked me. I put on makeup and style my hair and pick one of my favorite outfits from last year, a shirt I added ruffles to and a corduroy skirt. I don’t even give myself time to worry about whether they’ll fit, and to my surprise they do, even if the skirt cuts into my stomach more than it used to. Maybe it really was all in my head, my weight gain, and the girl—the girl who snatched me out of my old life so she could prop me up on her shelf with the rest of her unsuspecting victims. I stare at the spot where my sewing machine used to be and remember the day I got rid of it. It’s just a hunk of metal taking up space, I told Trixie when she noticed it was gone. But it was more than that.
Mom knocks gently on my door before letting herself in. “You look nice,” she says, sitting on the edge of my bed. “Are you going somewhere?”
“I’m having dinner with a friend,” I tell her. “Her name’s Sarah.”
She looks so excited that I feel bad that Sarah doesn’t exist. I should have known she would glom on to the mental picture of me and a new and improved best friend. I wait for some underhanded speech about how I should think for myself and not be so impressionable, but it never comes.
“I’m glad you’re going out,” she says. “You know I was worried about you starting senior year without a close friend. Sarah sounds really nice.”
I haven’t told Mom anything about Sarah, who is obviously fictitious, besides her name. That’s how desperate she is for me to be normal, how badly she needs to not imagine me eating lunch alone in my car.
I text Jasper when I get to his house, and when he doesn’t answer right away, I wonder if I should go ring the doorbell. My heart starts to hammer erratically. I should have worn something nicer. Maybe I’m supposed to meet his parents. But then I see him bounding down the driveway in his typical all-black uniform, hands in his pockets.
“What kind of food do you like?” I say after he gets in the car. “There’s a vegan place that just opened up on Ramsay. Green Machine. We could try that.”
I don’t actually want to eat vegan food, especially since Mom seems determined for us to eat it at home. But almost every other restaurant has some association with Trixie, and I don’t want her there, the invisible third person on this date.
“Sure,” Jasper says. We spend most of the ride in silence, which I punctuate by changing the radio from station to station, trying to find a song but only getting news. Jasper surprises me by turning it off.
“Ever notice the news is only ever bad?” he says, and then his hand is on my leg, just resting there on the bare skin below my skirt.
“I guess,” I say, pulling into the Green Machine parking lot, which is small and dark and empty besides my car and a white minivan. I don’t want to think about bad news or bad friends or bad decisions. Before I can say anything else, Jasper undoes his seat belt and leans over, his lips grazing mine. He cups his hands around my cheeks and I make the mistake of keeping my eyes open when he kisses me, softly at first, then urgently, like there’s something inside me he’s desperately trying to suck out. I fixate on the skin between his eyebrows, how it’s pinched together, a world of tension. I kiss him back and wrap my hands around his neck and finally shut my eyes, and then I feel his body on top of mine. One of his hands slides from my face and into the neckline of my shirt, and I should stop him but I don’t because it feels good and he’s touching me like he wants to touch me, not like he only wants to touch me because he won’t remember it in the morning.
I only pull away when he takes his other hand from the side of my face and slips it up the front of my skirt.
“What’s wrong?” he says, a line appearing between his eyes. I push my hair off my face and pull away from him, and Jasper settles back into his seat and stares straight ahead. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to take things that fast. You’re a virgin, aren’t you?”
Little pieces puncture me, shards of broken glass that used to be something whole. I don’t know if I’m happy or mad that Jasper kissed me, that he wants to do more than kiss me. I don’t know why I pushed him off me, if it’s because I still feel loyalty to the one person who did the worst thing a friend could do, or because I still love somebody who will never love me back. I don’t owe them anything. I want them to see this, to feel everything I felt because of them.
“There’s something you should know,” he says, and this time I lean over and kiss him. I don’t want to talk anymore. I press my lips against his and open my mouth slightly
at first, then more, until I hear him moan into me and pull on the back of my hair gently.
We never go into the vegan restaurant. We don’t say another word for the rest of the night, and I don’t open my eyes again. I run my fingers over his jawline, memorizing its sharp edges. I press my palm against his chest and am shocked at how light and fast his heart beats. I take his bottom lip between my teeth and bite gently and he reacts by grabbing my face and covering my cheeks with his hands again, which are still cold. I don’t let him take my shirt off, but I let him bury his face between my breasts and plant tiny kisses there.
By the time I get home, my lips chapped and swollen and my head spinning, I understand more than ever that you don’t have to say anything at all to tell a lie. Lies come in many forms. A nod. A kiss. A caress.
I don’t know how many lies I told Jasper tonight, or how many he told me. Maybe one side of the scale is tipped and one of us is about to fall off with no safety net.
Or maybe we’re even.
45
“THERE HE IS,” you said, ducking down in the front seat. “No, don’t look. I don’t want him to know we’re looking.”
I bent my head down obediently but I peeked anyway. He wore all black, helplessly out of place in a pastel school like Robson. He took giant strides when he walked and his head bobbed constantly, like there was music playing in it.
“Tell me again why we’re spying on your not-boyfriend?” I asked.
Trixie hunched over her knees and smiled. “Pure curiosity. I just wonder who he is when he’s not with me. If there’s any hope for him to be normal.”
I felt sorry for Jasper in that moment. He was an experiment to her, a sideshow freak who she wanted to see perform on command, a specimen she wanted to study under a microscope. I wondered how she kept up the charade, how she acted when she was in bed with him. I wondered if he had any idea he was being used.
But I guess now I could ask myself the same thing.
46
DR. ROSENTHAL ISN’T all that bad, for a middle-aged man I have been forced to talk to about my life. He mostly lets me talk and doesn’t seem to care when I stumble over the answers to the questions he does ask. He’s nice, kind of fatherly, which is weird for me to think, because I’ve never had a father in my life and don’t know what one would actually be like. The only real example I have to go by is Mr. Heller, and I don’t want to think about him.
We don’t spend that much time talking about Trixie. Maybe Dr. Rosenthal thinks it’s because I blame myself, that I was her best friend and should have known she was hurting. What I almost want to tell him is that I’m the hurt one. I’m the girl with the knife sticking out of her back. He doesn’t make many notes but when he does, I imagine he’s writing something like Seems disaffected by tragedy. He probably thinks I’m blocking it out for self-preservation. Or that I’m a psychopath.
Mostly, we talk about me. About what I think of myself. About my fear of getting on the scale and my avoidance of the clothes I wore last year. He reads a lot into the fact that I dumped my sewing machine at Goodwill, even though I tell him it’s no big deal, that I was just getting rid of things I didn’t use anymore.
“It seems like fashion has been a big part of your life,” he says, and it’s embarrassing hearing it out loud, like he’s talking about someone else.
“It was just a phase,” I tell him.
“But now you’re avoiding your closet, and by association, the person you were before Trixie came into your life. Fiona, it seems to me like you’re struggling with poor body image and your self-confidence has taken a nosedive with everything else you’ve been through.”
I put my hands in my lap and hunch my shoulders in, like that’ll make my body smaller and easier to hide. No shit. It’s all her fault. I want to be alone with my thoughts but there he is, wanting a response, maybe expecting me to thank him for figuring me out.
He keeps talking. “Negative body image affects a lot of teenage girls. It’s easy to feel the need to compare your body to those of your peers, or seek reassurances from them.”
How the hell would you know? I want to say, but then he might think I have anger-management issues on top of everything else. But he doesn’t know what it’s like to be a girl. Life is one big comparison, no matter who you’re friends with or not friends with. When it was me and Jenny and Alison, I wanted Jenny’s skinny legs and tiny waist, along with Alison’s perfectly toned arms and her collarbone that protruded just the right amount. When it was me and Trixie, I wanted her confidence, her ability to wear whatever she wanted, to not have to dress up for life. I wanted her complexion, which never seemed to break out like mine. I wanted to live in her skin, cover myself with it like a blanket.
“I’m going to give you some homework, Fiona. I want you to do some research on negative body image and write down some things you like about yourself, both physical and otherwise. Be honest about it. We don’t have to talk more about this if you don’t want to, but I think it would be a good idea.”
I leave his office without a prescription, no miracle cure for everything that’s wrong with me. I’m not sure what I was expecting. Now I’m supposed to go home and ask Google why I hate how I look, and that wasn’t part of the plan.
But Dr. Rosenthal doesn’t seem to think I’m fat at all. Not that he’d tell me if he did. Maybe it’s all in my head, and it’s not that I’m trapped in the wrong body but that my body is trapped by the wrong brain.
I’m walking toward the elevator when the door from the stairs opens and Alison bursts through, her gym bag that she brings to cheerleading thrown over her shoulder. She must have come directly from practice, which also explains why she’s in leggings and her hair is in a wet bun on top of her head.
“Fiona,” she says. “Hey. How are you?”
I mean to say “I’m good,” because that’s what people always say, but instead I say, “I’m here.” That makes her laugh.
“Yeah. I know what you mean.”
There’s an awkward silence and I realize for the first time that she’s here too, that she must be here to talk to somebody, same as I am. Besides Dr. Rosenthal, there are three other doctors whose names are on the waiting room door.
“Look,” she says. “I know a lot is different from how it used to be, and we haven’t hung out in ages, but I meant what I said at school. I’m still here if you need someone to talk to. You know, someone you don’t pay to see.”
I stare down at my ballet flats. “Thanks. Same.” I wonder why someone as perfect as Alison has to be here at all.
“My mom’s making me see someone,” she says. “She’s convinced I’m, like, damaged somehow, because of what happened at my parties. Maybe I am damaged. I heard a girl at school call me Sister Suicide. Like it was my fault.”
“It’s not your fault,” I say, with a bit too much venom. “People are going to do what they’re going to do. You couldn’t have changed anything.”
“Thanks,” she says. There’s a pause, and maybe she’s waiting for me to tell her why I’m here, because she told me, but I can’t bring up the words negative body image in front of her perfect body, the thigh gap in her leggings that I’ll never have and the fact that when she takes her hair out of that bun, it’ll magically form perfect beachy waves.
“I should go,” she says. “I’m pretty sure they charge by the minute, not the hour.”
“I should go too. See you around.” When I’m standing in front of the elevator, I get a burst of courage and whip around. “You’re right. We should hang out sometime. If you want.”
She turns back and smiles. “Yeah. I think I would.”
47
YOU AND I had our rituals—our fake IDs, our random drives, our lazy sprawl across your bedroom carpet with convenience-store junk food cellophane-shiny between us. But before you, I had traditions too. I was a creature of other people’s habits.
Jenny, Alison, and I did the same thing after each football game. We’d head to Aliso
n’s house and take off our makeup, our Robson red lipstick, and we’d put on face masks and make nachos. My half was only ever cheese, because I didn’t like the other stuff Jenny and Alison added. Onions and black olives and peppers and—gross—artichokes for Jenny. When the nachos were done, we’d eat them standing over Alison’s kitchen counter.
“I wish cheese had no calories,” Alison always said. “I’d live off it if it didn’t all pile up right here.” She put her hands on her hips, trying to force them inward.
“I’d live off chocolate pudding,” Jenny said one week, then changed her mind to cheesecake the next. “I just wish my ass wasn’t so lumpy. And I swear, my arms are getting fat.”
“You’re both perfect how you are,” I would say every time, because that was my role. I was the physical support during games and practice and the emotional support the rest of the time.
One night, Jenny hugged me after I said it. “You’re the perfect one. Do you even know how awesome you are?”
It was over-the-top, but that was Jenny. She gave out hugs and compliments like they were nothing. Sure, they cost nothing, but they were also the hardest things to give, because they meant letting your guard down, exposing your insides.
“I love you guys,” Alison said, wiping crumbs off her lips. “I literally have no idea what I’d do without you.”
I felt the same way, although I never said it back. I never thought I’d have to find out what I’d do without them. But when Trixie came along, there wasn’t room for everyone. There were only so many dolls that could fit on her shelf.
48
THE PARKING LOT behind the Green Machine becomes my and Jasper’s spot. He says his parents are always home at night, and I don’t want to risk Mom finding him at my house, so I pick him up and we drive there on nights that I know Mom won’t question where I’m going or who I’m with. It’s easy to lie to her, as long as I text her and let her know where I am. I’m at the movies with Sarah. Sarah and I decided to go shopping after school.