Lunchtime: and people were watching us.
Tink had always been easy with people staring at her. She’d pretended to be annoyed, but really, she’d enjoyed the attention. (To a degree.) When Tink had been with us, we’d often laugh so loudly that everyone in the dining hall would look at us—(yearningly?)—but we never exchanged glances with them.
Now they had their revenge. For Tink was absent from our table: Her chair, between Hannah and Merissa, was empty.
No one had planned it that way. Somehow, it had just happened.
“Hi—Merissa? Hannah?”
The yearbook art director, Devra Holman, stopped to speak with Merissa and Hannah, carrying her cafeteria tray. Devra was a nice girl whom we all liked, and so it would have been a polite gesture—it would have been a natural gesture—to invite Devra to sit between Merissa and Hannah to eat her lunch, as the three conferred about the yearbook cover; but no one, not even Merissa and Hannah, thought to invite her.
If Devra had pulled out the vacant chair at the end of the table, the girls of Tink, Inc., would have exclaimed, Nooo! You can’t. That chair is Tink’s.
Maybe Devra sensed this. Maybe she felt the presence of Tink Traumer at the table, as others did.
And so, Devra didn’t pull out a chair to sit with us. And no one invited her. And after a few minutes’ consultation with Merissa and Hannah, Devra continued on her way to sit with friends at another table.
4.
“PROMISE!”
If ever you feel that you are sad and confused and tempted to imitate your friend, please see me: Will you promise?
This was Mrs. Jameson, our school guidance counselor/psychologist. But it could have been anyone who knew us—any adult.
Parents, relatives. Teachers.
Soon after Tink d**d.
Soon after Tink did that thing to herself.
Will you promise? Please?
Sure! We promise.
Always tell an adult what she/he wants to hear. Especially if it’s an adult with authority over you, like Mrs. Jameson.
This was Tink’s philosophy: Promise them any damn thing, then do whatever damn thing you were going to do anyway.
We guessed that was what Tink did. Whatever damn thing she’d wanted to do anyway.
Except without telling us, either.
There are some secrets so toxic you can’t share. Especially if you love who it is you’d have to share with.
5.
“TOXIC SECRET”
For a long time Merissa said nothing to any of her friends—Tink’s friends. Then, one day in the late winter of senior year, when they were alone together, studying French in Merissa’s room, she said to Hannah Heller, “Before Tink went away—a few days before—she said to me, ‘I have a favor to ask of you.’ And I said, ‘Sure, what?’ But then Tink changed her mind, and looked embarrassed, and said no, it was nothing. She said there were some things that were best kept secrets, because secrets could be ‘toxic’ between friends. . . . And I never found out what it was.”
Merissa brought the subject up as hesitantly as she’d brought up the subject of whether, in their dreams, Tink spoke to them as she’d spoken to Merissa—because she didn’t want their friends to feel hurt, believing that Tink favored Merissa.
Of course, Merissa believed that Tink did favor her. Tink likes me best! Tink saved my life.
(It was ridiculous, of course. For Tink was no longer among us.)
(Yet such petty jealousies among friends survive even d**th.)
Hannah said no. She didn’t remember Tink bringing anything like this up with her.
“When was this, exactly? Just before . . .”
Hannah bit her lip. It was very hard to say, Just before Tink d**d.
“Yes. Just before.”
Hannah said definitely no. As far as she could remember, Tink had never suggested any sort of favor.
Not a favor from you. But a favor from me! Merissa thought.
Merissa asked her friends one by one, in private. She had to speak to us singly; she could not text message such a delicate question.
Each of them said no. No, Tink had not ever asked them for a favor, or even suggested such a possibility—“Are you sure you’re remembering right?” Martine asked. “I don’t think that Tink ever asked anyone for favors.”
Quickly Merissa said, “Probably I misunderstood. You’re right—Tink never asked us for anything.”
But why not? What would have been so hard about that, to ask someone who loved you to do something for you?
Maybe you’d be alive right now, Tink—if you had.
6.
“ETERNITY PUSHING THROUGH TIME”
It was about six weeks after Tink first appeared at Quaker Heights Day School that, one day at noon, in the school dining room, the idea came to all of us virtually at the same moment: “Let’s invite Tink to sit with us!”
Tink had just entered the dining room, alone.
Usually, Tink was alone. In the school corridor, on the sidewalks outside school, in classes, or at assembly—Tink was alone.
Which isn’t to say that Tink seemed lonely. But Tink was definitely alone.
People looked at her. Stared at her. Whispered about her. And Tink was both aware of them and indifferent to them, which made her appear, amid the clamor and bustle of the school dining room, all the more alone.
“You go ask her, Merissa. She’ll say yes to you.”
“Ohhh no! You ask her.”
“C’mon—we can all ask her.”
So we did. And Tink looked at us in that blank, deadpan way of hers that seemed to signal, Who the hell are you?—but in the next instant relented and smiled, saying instead, “Hell, yes—I was hoping you’d ask me.”
Ever after that, Tink was our friend. And ever after that, everyone at Quaker Heights Day School envied us.
It wasn’t that Tink Traumer ceased being a bratty bitch. But people began to discover that she was other things, too—smart, funny, witty, unpredictable, original.
In classes she daydreamed a lot. She’d slouch in her seat and in a protective crook of her arm she’d be reading a paperback book—Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, George Orwell’s 1984, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Yet often she could answer an irritated teacher’s question, as if, with a part of her mind, she’d been listening attentively all along.
“Tink? Let’s hear what you think.”
And Tink would uncurl her legs in the grungy black leggings, shake her head as if to clear it, and give a reasonably intelligent answer.
Tink didn’t audition for the part of Emily in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, to Mr. Trocchi’s extreme disappointment, but she showed up now and then on the set to help with lighting, costumes, directing—she’d seemed to want to help but not to be relied on.
(Mr. Trocchi asked Tink’s advice repeatedly—you’d have thought she was a young teacher and not a student. And then, near the end of rehearsals, Tink just vanished—didn’t even come to opening night—but that was another story.)
In Mrs. Conway’s English class, Tink procrastinated writing her term paper so that, finally, she received a grade of F for the paper—but startled us one day by reciting, in her low, scratchy, dramatic voice, an Emily Dickinson poem that embodied a theme the class had been discussing about identity and anonymity:
I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us . . .
In Mr. Kessler’s class, Tink impressed us by describing the Darwinian theory of natural selection—“It’s, like, a hundred million seeds are tossed up into the air, and a few of them are blown to somewhere safe, and take root, and grow—and the same thing happens with their seeds—the stronger seeds survive, and the weaker seeds become extinct—they pass on their characteristics to the next generation through their genes—it’s kind of cruel, and stupid, but there’s a logic to it, I guess.”
Tink jammed her fists into her eyes as if she was about t
o cry—(this made us uncomfortable)—but let her fists fall, and laughed; and from what Mr. Kessler said, you could see that Tink was almost correct—he’d had to expand her remarks, but essentially, Tink had described the complicated process of natural selection accurately.
What was weird, and what definitely made us feel uncomfortable, was that, for Tink, the scientific theory was somehow personal.
“Tink—what’s your interpretation of congruence?”
After a few weeks Mr. Doerr had come to pronounce the name “Tink” with a particular relish, like one who prods a sore tooth for the pleasure of making it ache, but he’d come around also to liking Tink, it seemed, at least some of the time.
About congruence Tink spoke earnestly: “It’s like—like figures that are equal to each other—like, two triangles are congruent if their sides are equal in length and their angles are equal—like people are congruent, like twins, if the same kind of thing has happened to them—it makes them different from other people but like each other—congruent.”
Mr. Doerr crinkled his forehead as if he’d never heard such an original definition of congruence—but he nodded yes, this was more or less the idea, he would have to amplify by going to the blackboard and drawing figures.
It was surprising how often Tink came up with the right answer to Mr. Doerr’s math homework problems, though usually she had no clear idea why the answer was correct, nor had she the patience to elucidate the steps leading to the solution.
Tink’s grades in math, as in most of her classes, were erratic. One day F, another day B-plus, and another day D—you had the impression that Tink was like one of the hundred million seeds she’d described, tossed up into the air and swirling crazily around.
Tink argued that math was like music—“Either you have perfect pitch or you don’t.”
Mr. Doerr denied this: “No, no, no. Math is rational, and can be learned. Music you must have a gift for, but math you can learn.”
“But what if you can’t learn? If you know the answer but can’t learn how to get it?”
“Of course you can learn. It’s a step-by-step procedure. Some young people are just impatient. Answers by themselves are not enough—you must have proof.”
This was Tink’s dilemma: Even when she had the correct answers, so long as she lacked proof to the answers, she never got grades above B-plus, and often much lower.
And since she daydreamed in class and, though it was forbidden in the classroom, compulsively monitored her cell phone text messages, as well as cut classes for no legitimate reason, she was always on the List—not the Honors List but the Other List.
“They won’t expel me here, at least not for a while,” Tink said, “since Big Moms paid full tuition through next June. The past two schools I got kicked out of, she’d only just paid the term tuition—that was a mistake. They hate to refund.”
Senior boys who’d joked about Tink’s looks when she’d first arrived in our school, how unsexy she was, like somebody’s kid brother, found themselves drawn to her, trading wisecracks with her, even asking her out—but Tink told them her mother wouldn’t allow her to go out until she was eighteen years old.
“Is that true, Tink? Eighteen?”
We commiserated with her, but Tink just laughed.
“I’m not going out with any guy, maybe ever. I know from my mother’s sad, sordid love life that getting mixed up with men is about the stupidest thing you can do.”
Tink could say such things about herself, but of course you could not ask Tink about herself. She’d flare up like a cat whose tail has been stepped on—“Excuse me: Is this a conversation, or a bloody interview?”
Especially, you dared not ask Tink about (A) her (ex-) acting career or (B) her family.
(Poor Chloe, who’d blundered asking Tink about her father—“He’s the owner of a football team? Or is it a baseball team?” and Tink turned on her with a look of fury, asking, “Do you know something I don’t know?” and Chloe stammered, “I—I don’t know what you mean,” and Tink said, “You’re asking me about my ‘father’ like you know that I have a father—which, in fact, I don’t.”
For it would turn out that Tink’s mother had not been married when Tink was born and that her father’s identity had never been revealed even to Tink; though Veronica Traumer had been involved with a wealthy man who’d been a co-owner of a major football team, this man was not Tink’s father, and had not even been in Veronica’s life at the time Tink was born.)
Though Tink took cell phone pictures frequently, you could never take a picture of her, still less a video; she had a phobia about seeing herself on YouTube.
“Don’t ever take my picture without my permission,” Tink growled. “And don’t worry—you won’t ever get my permission.”
Tink’s own pictures were sometimes of people but more often of natural things—misshapen trees, rock formations, massive clouds, derelict houses and buildings. Her pictures were stark and strange and dreamlike and beautiful, and you could never have guessed that the squirmy, smirky little red-haired girl was the creator of such images.
Her major project was a sequence of photos of the nighttime sky taken with a digital camera and superimposed on portraits of people, for a striking effect—“Eternity pushing through Time.”
It was one of Tink’s night-sky photographs Merissa and Hannah would use for the school yearbook cover, superimposed on miniature portraits of every member of the senior class. And it did have the eerie effect of Eternity pushing through Time.
A terrific cover, everyone said.
Just a little scary, but—terrific.
7.
TINK QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“I’d like to be your friend—but only if you promise not to ever, ever count on me.”
8.
“GAMMA GOBLIN”
Tink surprised us, as well as our gym instructor, Ms. Svala, one day, performing on the parallel bars like—almost!—a trained gymnast.
With an air of sudden inspiration, having watched other girls perform, or try to perform, Tink bounded onto the mat between the bars and lifted herself with a look of frowning concentration into a handstand, which she managed to hold for several precarious seconds, her legs and small feet quivering with strain over her head.
For weeks Tink had been sulky and rebellious in gym class—she hated, she said, “physical” things—even more, “organized physical things.” It wouldn’t have been far-fetched for Tink and Ms. Svala to get along well—they were both high-energy, impatient people—but somehow it never happened, for Tink bridled against authority: “Nothing pisses me like being told what to do. Even when I want to do it.”
And nothing annoyed Ms. Svala like girls who resisted her cheery good nature. Girls who, when she called out her high-voltage greeting, only just mumbled in response, or scowled instead of smiling.
“Bloody Gestapo,” Tink said. “What if somebody doesn’t want to be happy?”
So one day when she suddenly took a turn on the parallel bars, as if she’d wakened from a trance, we were taken by surprise, and we clapped as our unpredictable friend swung swift and double-jointed as a monkey; then dropped to the mat, executed several perfect somersaults, leapt up, pivoted on one foot, and somersaulted back—all with a look of intense concentration, biting her lower lip.
Then suddenly—Tink was sweaty, and tired. Wiping her flushed face with the backs of both her hands.
We all wore short white gym shorts and T-shirts, except for Tink, who alone was allowed to wear long sleeves. You could see—you could glimpse—that there were marks—(scars?)—on Tink’s wrists.
We whispered together, “Do you think that Tink has cut herself?”
(There was a rumor that, at one of her former schools, which had been a boarding school, Tink Traumer had left suddenly after she tried to “harm herself” in some mysterious way. But now that we were Tink’s close friends, we hated such rumors and never listened to them.)
Hannah said, “It could b
e that Tink has some kind of—I don’t know—medical treatment? Like, my uncle goes to the hospital every month for a blood infusion—there’s something wrong with his white blood cells and he has to have gamma goblin. . . .”
“Gamma goblin?”
We laughed at this. Hannah laughed. What was she trying to say?
Another girl was lifting herself on the parallel bars, on tremulous arms. Unlike Tink, this girl wasn’t small-boned and sinewy but of average weight, with a little belly and soft, fleshy thighs—not a gymnast’s body, and not very interesting to watch.
Tink was approaching us, lifting her long hair off the back of her neck. Though she pretended to dislike attention, she’d been pleased that we’d applauded her performance—but she didn’t like it that we were talking about her in an undertone.
We didn’t want to think of Tink having any kind of medical treatment, ever. We wanted to think of her as the girl we’d have liked to have been if we hadn’t been born the girls we were.
“Good work, Tink! Next time, we’ll take it slower.”
Ms. Svala was impressed with Tink, too. But Ms. Svala understood that you couldn’t push Tink, you’d always be disappointed if you expected something of her.
9.
A TINK TALE: “BAILING OUT”
There was no reason.
There were many reasons.
There came the razor blade between my fingers.
There came the current like electricity through my arm—through my fingers—directing the blade into the soft, yielding flesh of the inside forearm.
Why doesn’t matter.
How requires precision.
Big Moms had hope for me, she said. As she had hope, still, for herself.
Hel-lo! I am Veronica Traumer and this is my little daughter, Katrina. Say hello, Katrina, c’mon, let’s see that dazzling smile.
Oh, where is that dazzling smile?
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