Miss Misery

by Andy Greenwald

  “God,” said Cath. “That’s so American.”

  But as the pops and flashes began again—louder than before and with greater frequency, reds and whites and blues oozing and melting over one another in a relentless cacophony of noise and color—I felt Cath Kennedy snake her small bony palm into my own, felt her body push into my side. I squeezed her hand as the last dying embers exploded in the sky and she squeezed it back. I turned and found her looking at me strangely, her eyes reflecting the colors of the flag, sparks like fireflies dancing in her pupils.

  “Cath,” I said.

  “Shut up,” she said, and pulled my head down to hers and kissed me on the mouth.

  It was a good kiss, too, completely free of awkward fumbling or closed-mouth half starts. It was as if we had done this before, even as the unfamiliar curve of her thin lips and the surprising taste of cigarettes on her tiny, darting tongue sent a shivery thrill running through my body. I turned into her and raised my arm to her ear. She squeezed my side, those furious fingers working their way under my T-shirt, when a cry came up from behind us, interrupting everything.

  “Holy shit! What the hell is in this dip?”

  Cath giggled and took my head in her hands. “Let’s go back downstairs,” she whispered, and I nodded in agreement.

  Back in her room now, with only the desk lamp on, we tried kissing again and it seemed to work, so we kept at it, her leading me backward in half steps until she was sitting down on the bed and I was standing awkwardly above her, trying to kneel down and kick my shoes off, and she was scooting backward trying to make room for me, our mouths still connected, while she raised her arms over her head and worked her T-shirt up and—whoops, had to stop kissing for a moment—off, and there went the T-shirt and I was lying on the bed with her, trying not to be on top of her but more off to the side because this was going awfully fast, hoping she would take the lead and put me wherever I needed to be. The air conditioner was on way too high and it made the small hairs on her arms stand up and the soft skin along her stomach rise in goose bumps. I ran my palm along it and she made a noise in my ear, something soft and sudden like “oooom,” and so I did it again. She wrapped a leg around my waist and let her mouth wander away from mine now, across my cheek and up to my ear, her small tongue at my lobe now, but all of a sudden it didn’t feel sexy so much as it felt young—like this was a move from Seventeen magazine and we were making out in her father’s Toyota Camry. Carefully I moved her mouth back to mine, and she sat me up slightly and started to lift my shirt off, her hands tickling and wheedling their way up my sides to my rib cage. The only noise in the room aside from the rustling of her sheets and the tangling of our limbs was the hum of the air conditioner, and I wished now for that synthpop music of hers—anything to cover up the silence, to give me a soundtrack for doing whatever it was we were doing. She tugged at my shirt again and I gave in, raising my arms above my head, and while my eyes were covered she sat up all the way and ran her lips along my collarbone, her tongue down my sternum. I pulled my shirt the rest of the way off and looked down at her fine black hair as her head danced delicately along my body. I lay back down with her then and saw her small chest, the almost comical lace of her white bra against the sharp angles of her shoulder blades, her nothing biceps—and then I felt the passion leave me in one giant rush.

  “Cath,” I whispered as gently as I could manage, half hoping she wouldn’t hear me.

  “Mmmm,” she breathed, kissing my neck, rubbing her hand—oh, God—along my waist and ever so slightly lower.

  I closed my eyes. “Cath,” I said again. “Cath, I can’t do this.”

  All of a sudden she was alert to me, and her soft body turned rigid. “What are you talking about?” She spoke at full volume. What was I talking about?

  “This,” I said, pulling back slightly. “This is fast…we should…talk about this.”

  Cath pushed me off her and sat up. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “I’m just not sure if this…is what we should be doing.”

  Cath crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Why not? You don’t want me?”

  I blushed. “No, that’s not it, I…”

  She kicked at my crotch. “Because I can tell that you do.”

  “Yeah, Cath,” I said, “I do. I really do. It’s just that…” She stared, a flush in her cheeks. “I have a girlfriend, still. It still means something to me. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry?” She reached around on the bed for her shirt, found mine instead, and pulled it over her body. Now she was navy blue and the slogan on her chest advertised a favorite band of mine that was entirely inappropriate for the situation: The Jealous Sound. “I don’t fucking get you, creepo. I really don’t.” She stood up and retrieved a pack of cigarettes from her desk, extracted one, and lit it. “If you have a girlfriend, why aren’t you with her? If she means that much to you, why are you here with me?”

  I sat up, feeling vulnerable with no shirt on. “I don’t know.”

  “If you’re so faithful, why did you start a secret diary about being so fucking unfaithful?”

  “You read it?”

  “Of course I read it. And you know what? I couldn’t tell where the one you started and the other began.” She exhaled and leaned against the wall. I said nothing. “You wanted this life all the time—yet you managed to still be in la-la land with Annie?”

  “Amy,” I said feebly.

  “Whatever.” Cath stomped across the small room, back and forth, back and forth, pointing her cigarette at me like a pistol. “Seriously, tell me—if you even know. If you are so sure that you can’t betray her or whatever, why aren’t you over there with her now?”

  I knotted my hands in my lap and stared down at my knuckles. The skin on my right fist was still chapped and raw from the punch I had thrown the night before. “I always told her that we’d be together forever. She was the one who had doubts. I was completely certain. About us. About the future.” I looked up at Cath, who was staring back at me. “I guess the only way to describe it is…it’s like I carried the future in front of me like a carrot on a stick. The closer I got to it in terms of years or situation or life or whatever, it was always the same distance away. Like I was never going to actually reach it.”

  Cath let out a bitter laugh. “You’re comparing your girlfriend to a carrot.”

  “No! No. Well, maybe. It’s just that I knew the path I was on and what I wanted it to be, but I was never prepared for it to actually happen. You know?” I sighed. “Maybe it’s for the best, her leaving. I promised her a future for years, but it was never going to stop being the future. It was never going to become the present.”

  Cath stopped pacing and sat down on the bed across from me. “Mm-hmm.”

  I rubbed my forehead. “It’s just…when I talk about it, I feel like I’m running in place. No, not in place; like in one of those—what were they? Those exercise balls you’d put a gerbil in? So it can run around on the floor but never actually escape?”

  “David,” Cath said.

  I looked up. “Yes?”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “What? No!”

  “First your girlfriend is a carrot, now you’re a gerbil in a plastic ball. Hello? Why can’t you talk about this like a human being?”

  I shook my head. “Yeah, but…”

  “But what?”

  “Gerbils really like carrots.”

  She smacked me in the shoulder.

  “You have got to do something about that aggression,” I said, staring at the red, Cath’s-hand-sized mark that was forming on my body.

  “Yeah, well, you’ve got to do something about your psychological meltdown.”

  “I know it.”

  “So seriously, why did you start that diary?”

  I considered the question, maybe for the first time. “I guess I bound up so much of my life in her that when she left…it’s like I was nothing. And I had this urge to be something, to do s
omething. And all of the lives that I was reading about seemed so much fuller than mine. Full of all these things that seemed so appealing. So impossible.”

  “David, they’re not like that. They’re just the parts people choose to share.”

  “I know.”

  “And look at the parts you chose to share.”

  Silence.

  “But what about you, Cath? The long nights? The drinking? The sex? That’s what you were presenting to everyone—what did that mean about you? What does that say about you?”

  She threw up her hands. “What does it say about me? I’ll tell you: whatever I want it to! I don’t care! It’s my actual life, David—it’s what I’ve got. It’s not some walk-on-the-wild-side fantasy. I’d fucking love to have what you apparently threw out, and until I get it I can do whatever I fucking want.” She paused, lowered her voice. “You’re just running and running, but you’re not running to anything.” She stubbed out her cigarette, considered her words. “I’m not a plot device for you, David. I’m not some evil harpy thrown into your life to cause your downfall. I’m just me. And I deserve better than this.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “You’re right.” She leaned back, stretching one leg across mine, and I felt all the heaviness of the past week in that solitary contact. “I guess I want everything. But I just don’t want to deal with the consequences.”

  “David,” she said, sounding suddenly more tired and old than she had any right to, “you need to figure this out. Quickly. You can’t be two people, David. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “You either want to or you don’t. There’s nothing else to it.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Decide,” she said.

  But I didn’t decide, not then. I couldn’t. The more I pushed away from Cath Kennedy, the more I wanted her to pull me back. And the more I tried to eliminate the doppelgänger, the more divided I felt. We talked a bit longer and we even made out some more, but the passion was gone and the reason for doing so even more lost. I had wanted Miss Misery, but I had met Cath Kennedy instead. And the funny thing was that maybe after everything, I wanted Cath Kennedy more. But wanting and doing are two separate things—each with its own set of responsibilities and consequences. There was no Miss Misery. There was only Cath, and she was real and made of bones and feelings and not to be trifled with. Not halfheartedly. Not without fixing myself first.

  So eventually I got up to leave, and Cath let me—I put my shirt back on and even turned away as she changed into one of her own. I knew I had to call Amy again. And I knew I couldn’t hang up until everything was resolved.

  At the door Cath said, “Thanks for coming.”

  And I said, “Thank you for inviting me. I really had a wonderful time.”

  We stood a little longer, awkward in the formality of the moment. Then Cath’s face brightened. “I almost forgot!” She reached into her skirt pocket, pulled out my driver’s license, and handed it to me.

  “How—how did you get this?”

  Cath beamed, shrugged. “I found it on the floor of the Madrox last night on my way out. I guess the other you was too fucked up to remember to hold onto it.”

  “Wow,” I said, staring at it. David Gould. Five feet nine inches. Brown eyes. Organ donor. Never before had I been so happy to see the simple details of my life in front of me. “Thank you.”

  “No problem,” said Cath, kissing me on the cheek and pushing me gently out the door. “Try not to lose it again—and try not to forget it either.”

  It was after midnight when I got off the subway in Brooklyn, and the streets were quiet. Walking home, I turned my face up and closed my eyes; tried to catch the warmth of the night in my mouth, tried to swallow it and trap it and make it part of me, the only calm part left. Sooner or later, this craziness had to come to an end. I realized, maybe for the first time, that only I could end it.

  As I neared my building it appeared that someone had left some luggage on the top step. Was someone moving out? But no, it wasn’t luggage—it was a person, huddled over and keeping still. A bum? A locked-out member of the Armando family? It wasn’t—oh, God—it wasn’t the doppelgänger, was it? Bringing my nightmare quite literally to my doorstep? But no, it wasn’t him either. I approached quietly, swinging open the gate, and only then realized that the huddled figure was, in fact, a teenage girl with long blond hair. The girl was wearing a gray sweatshirt with a unicorn on it and listening intently to headphones, which she threw off as she caught sight of me. No way, I thought. It couldn’t be. I rubbed my eyes.

  “Ashleigh?”

  The blond girl on the steps sprung up. “I thought you’d be taller,” she said, and threw her arms around me.

  Chapter Thirteen: Roller-

  Coaster Screams

  [from http://users.livejournal.com

  /˜thewronggirl87]

  Time: 8:11 a.m.

  Mood: Decided

  Music: Dashboard Confessional, “This Bitter Pill”

  I reserved the ticket and I just finished packing my bag and that’s it. I’m outta here. I’m done. They think I’m catching a ride with Jonathan Howland and his family but by the time they figure out the truth, I’ll be across the country.

  I am tired of living a lie. I am tired of having the people who made me and are supposed to love me the most hate me, undercut me, try to hurt me. And I am tired of lying to them. Having to be two people—the good one and the real one. Leading a double life. I’m so freaking sick of it. I know that this seems like a crazy thing to say but all I want is a life that’s less complicated. And I can’t get it here. Mom coming in here last night and searching under my bed and taking every CD that she found—every notebook, every scrap of paper. That was the last straw. When she touched the parts of me that I had created, that I’m responsible for…when she balled up the papers and ripped some and clenched them in her furious hands it was like she was doing that to me. Balling me up and ripping me and throwing me away. It hurt so deep.

  So I’m leaving. I’m leaving everything. My family doesn’t know me and they don’t want to know me so I’m going to the one person I don’t have to lie to. The one person who understands me better than anyone else. And the one city where you’re allowed to start all over.

  This isn’t like that poem we read in school last year about the two roads in the forest. My life has never been like that. My life has been nothing but dark, miserable forest. And what I’m doing today is the first time I even saw a road.

  If anyone ever finds this and reads this just know that I’m happier—maybe even happy. I’m sorry for all the hurt I caused everyone and mostly I’m sorry for letting everyone down. I’m sorry Jessie that I won’t see you grow up but you’re perfect and light and all I could ever do was mess you up, make you dark, or drag you down. Maybe one day we’ll know each other again and you’ll forgive me.

  Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. ::crying:: Good-bye.

  In my dream, I was sitting in the chorus room at my old high school. I thought I was waiting for Mr. Davis, the beloved music teacher, but in fact I was waiting for the dentist. It seemed that one of my teeth—my favorite tooth, actually, the sharp incisor on the right side—was loose, and I was waiting for him to show up and examine it. But there was a bowling alley next door, and the noise was so loud that my tooth started rattling around in my mouth, and then it fell out. For a while I thought it was OK because it was just a baby tooth, but then I remembered that I’d lost all my baby teeth twenty years before, so this one was really gone. Gone for good. So I was swallowing blood and waiting for the hygienist—Cath Kennedy dressed as a candy striper—to notice that one and now two and then three of my grown-ass adult teeth were falling out of my mouth. And she wouldn’t notice. No one would. My teeth were like rock candy—brittle and crunchy—and they fell out of my mouth in packs of two or three. But then someone was calling my name (finally!) and I turned but it wasn’t Cath Kennedy or any member of
my high-school faculty. It was someone else, someone young, saying, “David. David. David.”

  “David.”

  I opened my eyes. I was in bed. And Ashleigh Bortch was standing in the doorway repeating my name. I turned.

  “Good morning!” she said merrily.

  I rubbed my face. “Good morning, Ashleigh,” I said.

  She was dressed as she had been the night before, and she was sipping a glass of orange juice. “Why do you have a pigeon feeder in your window?”

  “I don’t,” I said, struggling to get a firm grip on consciousness.

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s…” I cleared my throat, sat up. “Never mind. It’s a pigeon feeder. What time is it?”

  “It’s eight a.m.,” she said sprightly. “It’s when I always wake up.”

  “Even during the summer?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I keep my alarm on year-round.”

  “Fantastic,” I said. “Um, I’m going to take a shower. And then we’re going to talk.”

  “OK,” said Ashleigh.

  “You can’t stay here, Ashleigh. You have to go home.” I did my best to look stern, sitting as I was amid my unmade bed wearing a bright red T-shirt with a picture of Tintin on it.

  But all she said was, “You’re out of OJ!” And then she scampered back to the living room.

  Ashleigh Bortch had run away from home, and the only place she had felt safe running to was here. To New York City. To my apartment. To me. She had tried to explain all of this the night before, sitting in my kitchen, clutching the mug of chamomile tea that I had made for her and doing her best not to cry. In turn, I did my best to reason with her, tried telling her that she didn’t know me, that she couldn’t run away from her own life—that it’s better to stay and fight and deal with it. That she was breaking the law—or worse, that I was breaking it by even having her here with me. But she didn’t listen to any of that. All she said was, “But you know me better than anyone else!” And her eyes got red and weepy and I could tell how tired and scared she was, and I looked in the mirror and my own eyes were red and exhausted. So I told her she could sleep on the futon for one night—but that tomorrow we’d have to work on sending her back home.