The Princesses of Iowa

by M. Molly Backes

  “God, I’m sorry, but I’m not, because Jake’s a real asshole and he has, like, no redeeming qualities and I have no idea why — well, whatever, it doesn’t matter — but, Paige, seriously, I’m sorry. I am.”

  I nodded. “I’ll see you later,” I said, and let myself out of the car.

  I drove aimlessly, unwilling to go home, in love with the empty freedom of driving. Mr. Tremont didn’t want to be a political figure; he just wanted to be a poet. It was my fault he had to make the choice. I was the cause of the whole mess; I was at the tangled center of the web. It was my fault Jake had been drunk, my fault he fought with Ethan, my fault he got caught. My fault Shanti told on him, my fault he tagged the door, my fault he thought Mr. Tremont was gay in the first place.

  I was the cause, and I could be the solution.

  Twenty minutes later, I was pounding on the Austins’ red front door, with its fox-shaped knocker slamming his little chin against the metal plate behind it until Mrs. Austin appeared with her face of ice. “You’re not welcome in this house.”

  “I have to see Jake.”

  Her fingers curled in fists against her skeletal hips. “You are not welcome here. You may leave of your own accord or you may leave with a police escort. It’s up to you.”

  “Will you please tell him to call me?”

  Mrs. Austin frowned. “I don’t think so. Please leave now.”

  I sighed, letting my shoulders drop. “Okay. I’m leaving.”

  She slammed the door and I got in my car and pulled away from the house, but halfway down the long driveway I parked behind an old oak and jumped out, dashing behind trees and hurtling over bushes through the woods until I came out behind the house. I ran up the side yard and threw my keys at Jake’s window. They clattered to the ground, and just as I threw them again the window slid open and Jake’s face appeared. “Hey.” He snatched the keys from the air in front of him and looked down. “What are you doing?”

  “I have to talk to you,” I said, and I must have sounded desperate enough, or maybe just crazy, because he nodded and slid the window back into place. I stood on one leg as I waited for him to reappear, counting the seconds I could hold my balance, until I thought I saw a flash of movement in the kitchen window and bolted back into the safety of the trees.

  Jake showed up a moment later, moving slowly through the damp autumn forest. “Paige?” I watched the way he walked, carefully, mindful of each step. He seemed stripped of something, exposed.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He settled himself down on the crumbling log beside me. “What’s up?”

  “Jake.” We stood in the misty trees talking about nothing until he laughed quietly and I asked, “What?” and he said, “I was just trying to think of an excuse to kiss you” and I said, “You don’t need an excuse.”

  I dug my fingernails into the center of my palm, into the health line, the life line, the love line. “Jake. You have to tell the truth about Mr. Tremont.”

  He glanced over his shoulder. “I shouldn’t be out here,” he said. “If my dad knew . . .”

  “Jake, listen.” I wanted to grab him, shake him, but I was afraid, for the first time in my life, to touch him. “You have to tell the truth. You can’t just fuck with people’s lives like that! You have to fix it!”

  His eyes stayed trained on the ground before him: twigs poking up through wet yellow leaves, a mossy rock, a crushed rusting can. “I can’t.”

  “But Mr. Tremont!”

  “I’m not like you, Paige. I have too much to lose.”

  I laughed harshly. “Not like me? Nothing left to lose because I’ve already fucked up beyond belief?”

  He didn’t say anything for a long time.

  “Brave.”

  The word shocked me into speechlessness and I couldn’t look at his face. Finally I stood up. “I have to go.” He stood, too, and impulsively I reached over and hugged him. “I’m sorry. About everything.”

  He hugged me back tightly, burying his face in my shoulder. We stayed like that for a long minute, entwined, until I unwound his arms and stepped back for the last time.

  “I have to go,” I said softly, and walked off into the quiet trees.

  That night, I sat in my wing chair by the window, staring at the places where the stars should be. I couldn’t save Mr. Tremont, couldn’t save Jake, couldn’t even save myself, so what was the point of trying anymore. I searched the sky for a star to wish on, not that I had anything to wish for anymore, but the sky behind the moon was smooth, jewel blue, and the night clouds were surprisingly white. It was a strange sky, a daytime sky transposed onto night. I stayed by the window, drifting in and out of dreams, until morning.

  The local news channels picked up the story of the protesters, but since Mr. Tremont refused to talk to the media, and since he’d willingly resigned, the story fizzled out pretty quickly. It turned out that many of the God Hates Fags protesters weren’t even from Willow Grove — they’d been bused in from Kansas. Still, that side had had its share of locals, more than enough to leave a bad taste in my mouth.

  On Thursday, Dr. Coulter stationed the school security guard and the local truancy officer outside to usher students in to their classes, and the protests dwindled without the energy and numbers of the students. By late that afternoon, there were just a few people left, and they weren’t even carrying their signs — they’d propped them up against trees and were sitting on the benches, chatting with one another.

  I heard all this secondhand from my sister. I’d hardly slept at all after talking to Jake Wednesday night, and I decided to take a mental health day on Thursday. I got my dad to sign an excuse for me. My mother never would have allowed me to stay home only two days before the homecoming dance, but she seemed to be taking a mental health day of her own and didn’t come out of her room until dinner. I wasn’t even sure that she knew I was home. I stayed in my room, napping and watching bad daytime TV, and she stayed in hers, and the house beyond our doors seemed emptier than it would have if no one were home at all.

  On Friday morning, already running late, I stopped for a latte on the way to school. It was October 1, the day we’d been looking forward to since middle school. The parade, the game, and somehow I’d managed to break up with my potentially-homecoming-king boyfriend just days before. If my eighth-grade self could see me now, she’d punch me.

  But I didn’t care. I was listless and slow from strange dreams and too much sleep, and I was only half awake in the crispness of early morning. Flashes of dreams from the night before came to me as I shuffled across the student parking lot — snippets only, and nothing that added up to any kind of narrative logic. But I remembered driving, remembered long highways unwinding before me, and the sense that no matter how much I drove, I couldn’t get to where I needed to be. Wherever that was.

  As I neared the school, I saw flashing blue-and-red lights bouncing off the brick walls of the field house. I slowed my pace, not wanting to burst on the scene like a voyeur. What was going on that they needed police at school this morning? Not the protesters; only a few persistent marchers were still out front by now, and anyhow, if the school had wanted to call the police on them, they would have done so the first day.

  I turned a brick corner to reach the parking lot behind the auto shop and immediately saw that I needn’t have worried about standing out as an onlooker. A swarm of students and teachers gathered on the boundaries of the lot, watching the proceedings in the muttering quiet of a concerned crowd.

  In the center of the circle of bystanders and authorities sat a car, crushed in the front like a crumpled beer can. Two firefighters dressed in black worked together with a large tool to cut away at the roof of the car, peeling it back. With growing horror, I made out a dark figure in the front passenger’s seat, hunched over and unmoving. The car must have hit something — the heavy steel Dumpster? The brick wall beside it?— and bounced back.

  The car wrenches sickeningly across the country road, everything
out of control, slow-motion, flipping over an embankment and falling, turning, an eternity through space to the riverbed below.

  A couple of EMTs leaned over a body on the ground, checking for a pulse. Flashes of red and blue lazily swept the crowd, and though it was a sunny day, the enclosed lot seemed to be lit only by the spinning lights.

  Over near the cruiser, a police officer stood behind a person in a yellow sundress, pressing her up against the car with one hand against the back of her neck and slapping a pair of handcuffs around her wrists with the other hand. I could just make out the officer’s voice reciting the familiar Miranda rights. Keeping a hand on her head, the officer turned and shoved her down into the backseat of the car, and I gasped. It was Nikki. I turned to the girl in front of me, a short blonde I didn’t know. “Why are they arresting her?” I whispered.

  “She’s drunk,” she whispered back.

  She’s half dressed and barely conscious and you grab her purse and keys and shirt and drag it all out of the frat house with your other best friend, the bitch, at your shoulder saying “What about Jake? How could you do that to him?”

  “What?” Nikki couldn’t be drunk, it was eight in the morning — this wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. The blond girl nodded, keeping her eyes on the scene unfolding before us. The firefighters were nearly finished cutting away the car, and one of them called for an EMT. Inside the destroyed car, the girl slumped in the front seat looked a lot like . . . “Is that my sister?” I pressed my hand over my mouth, feeling sick. Mirror’s soft black-and-red hair fell in strings across her face, and her white tank top was covered with blood.

  My sister. My awesome, stubborn, beautiful, bitchy, passionate, funny, amazing sister. Covered in blood. I wanted to rush the scene, pull her up, take her place. If one of us was going to be hurt, it should be me. I was the one who deserved it. I was the awful one.

  It wasn’t real. Of course it wasn’t real. It was Nikki’s presentation, the one she’d been working on since last spring, since the real accident. It was what everyone had been talking about at the edges of my awareness all month, what Shanti had called emotional manipulation, something about reenacting your guilt complex on a public stage, the public theater of fright, to scare kids away from drinking and driving after the dance tomorrow night. DIEDD. And Nikki had cast herself as the culprit, the reprehensible drunk who kills all her friends. My God.

  It wasn’t real, I knew it wasn’t.

  But it felt real.

  One of the EMTs rushed over to Mirror from where she’d been working on yet another body, this one lying on the rutted pavement. “She was thrown from the car,” whispered the blond girl.

  Lacey staggers out of the car, crying and crawling up the hill, her bare knees damp with spring dirt. Nikki’s unconscious in the backseat, the driver’s seat smashed back and pinning her to the seat. . . .

  “Oh my God,” I whispered again. Nikki was in the backseat. Lacey and I were both thrown from the car because we were both in the front seats. Because Nikki wasn’t driving.

  Nikki wasn’t driving. “Oh my God!”

  The body on the pavement was wearing khakis spattered with blood and a stained pink sweatshirt. Elizabeth Carr. Her hair fanned across the rocky parking lot, rippling slightly in the breeze as an EMT bent over her, giving her mouth-to-mouth respiration.

  The girl pointed, still not taking her eyes from the scene. “And that guy.”

  He was lying on the pavement near the car’s smashed hood, sprawled on his back. I had been too distracted by the firefighters cutting the car up to notice him earlier, but now that they were strapping Mirror onto a stretcher, I could see him. It looked like he had been flung through the windshield onto the pavement in front of the car. There were no words for the feelings flooding through my system, the terror and sadness and shock. The whole drama was carefully orchestrated to trigger panic and sorrow and fear in us, the innocent onlookers; I knew this, and yet my body reacted as if it were real, as if my eyes and chest and heart and skin simply refused to listen to what my brain told them. Emotional manipulation, a modern passion play — whatever you wanted to call it, it was working. I just kept whispering the same words over and over, hardly hearing myself. “Oh my God, oh my God.”

  Screams hang suspended as the car swerves sickeningly across the country road. . . .

  . . . Lacey’s fingers grip the wheel, desperate to regain control. . . .

  The EMT kneeling over the boy stood up slowly and shook her head at one of her colleagues. She looked sad. One of the other EMTs walked over and pulled a white sheet over the body, patting the first EMT lightly on the back. She reached down and pulled the sheet all the way over the boy’s scratched and bloody face, and as the white linen covered his features, I suddenly recognized them beneath the bruises and blood. It was Ethan.

  Everything stopped. The sun stopped in its trek across the sky, hanging between motionless clouds. In the cage of my ribs, the ventricles of my heart stopped pumping, the blood completely still in my veins and arteries. Ethan.

  Ethan, keeping me out of the cold night rain. Ethan, stretched out along the farthest edge of my bed, staying all night just because I asked him to. Ethan, bent over his notebook writing, his sentences opening into entire galaxies of meaning and light. His brown eyes, seeing me.

  Time unfroze as the sad EMT gently zipped Ethan into a body bag and dragged him over to a hearse parked behind the fire truck. I was shivering, I realized, trembling to such a degree that I thought I might lose my footing and fall to the ground, scrape my knees on the same pavement that had cradled Ethan’s body. “God,” the blonde said quietly, “that hearse is so creepy.”

  Nikki. Elizabeth. My sister. Ethan. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t stop shaking. And then I was crying, choking and gasping as tears ran down my face.

  Next to me, the health teacher nodded grimly. “Pretty terrible, isn’t it?”

  I nodded hysterically, breaking into fresh sobs. The police cruiser put on its sirens and pulled away. Through my tears, I saw Nikki looking forlornly out the window, her forehead pressed to the glass.

  The black hearse followed the cruiser, slowly carrying Ethan away. I couldn’t breathe.

  “Keep that in mind the next time you kids want to drink and drive,” the health teacher said gruffly. Was she talking to me specifically? Did she know that I was in the accident last spring?

  The ambulance pulled out of the parking lot after the squad car, lights and sirens going. I rubbed my eyes with my long black scarf. As the crowd began to stand, stretch, and disperse, I noticed for the first time that some people had been seated on metal bleachers.

  The health teacher gestured to the scene. “Let this be a lesson to you. You could kill the people you love! You could end up in prison for the rest of your life!”

  It spells DIEDD, because we could have DIED.

  I took a deep breath, looking at the toad-faced health teacher. “It wasn’t real.”

  “Oh, it’s real, all right,” the health teacher said, frowning at me.

  “But Ethan and the others aren’t really dead.” I clenched my scarf in my fists.

  The health teacher crossed her arms, looking morbidly satisfied. “They would be, that’s for sure!”

  A girl behind her said, “They wouldn’t have a hearse in real life. That’s not accurate.”

  “Yeah,” her friend agreed. “They load bodies into ambulances, not hearses.”

  The health teacher shot them an evil look. “Get to class.”

  “Everybody knows you shouldn’t drink and drive,” the girl said. “I can’t believe the school spent so much money trying to scare us.”

  “Ethan’s not dead,” I said again, just to make it perfectly clear. Not dead. He wasn’t dead.

  “He will be, if you kids drink and drive. . . .” the health teacher said, but I was hardly listening. I had to see for myself. I had to find him.

  He tastes like vodka and ash and mint and teeth and his hand sl
ides up your arm and it’s warm and it’s different from being with Jake; his lips ask questions and his fingers trace the skin down your neck and wander back up into the forest of your hair and you haven’t kissed anyone but Jake in two years and you really shouldn’t be doing this. But he’s so gentle and you’re so sleepy and it’s all brand-new, like you’re exploring room after room of an infinite mansion, each room more beautiful than the last. . . . “Paige! Prescott! I’m shocked!” And Prescott practically jumps to the other side of the couch, abandoning you to the cold center. “We weren’t —” he says. “Nothing happened. . . .”

  Lacey ignores him and says, “It’s time to go. Where’s Nikki?” and you don’t know and she acts like somehow that’s your fault, like you can’t do this one simple thing, “Are you such a slut that you put your snatch before your friends?” and you protest that nothing happened — nothing happened! — you try to catch her to make her listen, you want to grab her by the shoulder and spin her around and make her believe that nothing happened but she’s not listening, she’s stalking through the halls opening every door in the house, startling couples in compromising positions and surveying piles of passed-out bodies before she finds Nikki half naked and being licked from navel to neck by some creepy dude you’ve never seen before.

  “Time to go,” Lacey announces. “Sorry, Charlie.” She crosses her arms until Creeper backs off and Nikki rolls off the bed, giggling. “Moooomm, do I have to?” She laughs and Lacey nods without smiling and you’re gathering Nikki’s things and she’s like, “My shirt, where’s my shirt?” and you throw a T-shirt off the floor at her and she’s like, “That’s not my shirt. I need my shirt, my shirt. I got it at the Mall of America last summer,” and Lacey lets out a loud huff and bends down to look under the bed. Creeper starts snoring and Lacey flings a shirt at Nikki, who hugs it and squeals and then hugs Lacey and says, “You’re such a good friend, thank you so much for that,” and Lacey nods and says, “Time to go,” and pushes her out the door.