I pressed my hands against the pleather until my heartbeat slowed. I gulped my beer. “Eh, just the usual.” The beer was warm, but I drank it anyway because Greta and Soo and the rest of them were drinking it, and they were my real family, the collective Daddy Warbucks to my orphan Annie.
“You know, a little parental freak-out and some Spider-Man-style escape.”
I wanted to tell Soo about the fight with my dad, but sometimes it seemed like the past couple of years weren’t real. That wasn’t me screaming and throwing things. That wasn’t me in the middle of the sidewalk, face-down, kicking my legs, being dragged off in the ambulance. That was someone who lived inside me. My devilish alter ego. Mr. Hyde. It wasn’t me. So I just told her, “I used my Spidey sense.”
“You’re such a dork,” she said, and she was smiling, but I wasn’t sure she said it to be funny, because when they had rescued me from the funeral and what would have been a lifetime of depressing days after it, my dorkdom—though softened by my guitar playing and encyclopedic memorization of Public Enemy lyrics—was still firmly intact.
The truth was, I had never been cool, but Ginny had been the quintessential popular girl. Not the cheerleader kind. The beautiful-girl-with-the-short-dyed-black-hair-and-bright-green-eyes-and-cat’s-eye-glasses kind, the introduce-your-kid-sister-to-Elvis-Costello-and-Velvet-Underground kind, the skip-school-but-still-get-good-grades kind, the run-with-the-fast-crowd kind. I had been scrambling to keep up with her even before she was gone.
“I’m just glad you’re here.” Soo lifted up her beer. Oh. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I had kept up. “Cheers.”
Before I had even clinked her can, Justin sidled up to us. The perfect eighteen-year-old human being, Justin was a jock and an art room druggie all at once, Johnny Depp-meets-Scott Baio looks with shaggy, chestnut-colored hair and green eyes. He crouched down next to Soo and picked up her hand and stroked it. I pretended to vomit. Justin got that look, like he didn’t know if he should laugh.
“Oh, no—don’t take it personally. I’ve just had too much to drink.” I raised my nearly full first beer. He still didn’t laugh. “I’m just messing with you,” I said, and lightly punched his arm.
“Ow,” he said. At least I’d thought it was lightly. “I’m getting another beer.”
Soo went with him, and Greta sat with me. In her fuchsia Cyndi Lauper dress, strapless with a fluffy crepe skirt on the bottom, her Converse high-tops and her long, feathered, perfectly curly strawberry blond hair—achieved naturally, no perm necessary—she looked like a movie star: Kim Basinger, but somehow even prettier. Greta. She was good at tennis and still a hippie chick and a cheerleader anyway. She was so good at holding her liquor. So statuesque. How could one person be so many good things? No wonder she always had a boyfriend. Everything about her was pretty. I was wearing one of my mom’s old T-shirts with the sleeves cut off and the bottom sliced into fringes, and cutoff Lee jeans.
“Drink up, kid,” she told me with that perfect smile. I’d do anything she said. So I drank, even though I much preferred my mom’s iced tea, the kind she made from the mint she grew every summer in pots on our porch. Beer no longer tasted like toe fungus (or what I thought toe fungus would taste like), but I would never actually like it. “So what’s up?”
“Let’s see,” I said. “I’m currently locked in my room, as you can see.”
“Ah, the father,” she said.
“Yeah, it sucks when they pretend that they actually care about you so they can ground you.”
“That’s what they say. Luckily my dad doesn’t even pretend.”
“God, you are lucky,” I said, smiling at her joke. I wondered if she knew how lucky she was. I’d never met her dad, but I figured he must be wealthy and handsome and worldly and kind if he’d sired her.
Justin and Soo stood in the corner now, holding hands, cocooned in a private world. “Mmm, young love,” Greta said, as if they were so naïve, as if she knew something they didn’t. What did she know?
Greta had not gone a day without a boyfriend since she was twelve—break up one day, find a new one the next. But Soo hadn’t dated much. She’d been more like me: on the sidelines, occasionally pulled into the action but never claimed. And now she was In Love.
What did she know? What did they all know?
In the evening after Ginny’s funeral, Greta had retrieved me from the reception and taken me with her and Soo and their friends, driving in some older boy’s car with the windows rolled down and the soft spring air on my face, stunned and numb and comfortable in the womblike enclosure of Ginny’s friends, with Janis Joplin’s “Bye, Bye Baby” blaring through the speaker: You just got lost somewhere out in the world, she sang, and you left me here to face it all alone. I’d never heard Janis Joplin before. Her voice was sort of like sandpaper and sort of like an organ played by the goddess Athena.
Ginny’s friends smoked and drank—things I had not done until that night—and we ended up at a roller-skating rink called Diamonds, because roller skating had been Ginny’s favorite activity, and there was lots of toasting her, drinking from Ginny’s own flask—how did they get that?—the flask I was sure my parents never knew she had. The first time I drank that cheap bourbon, I felt my gray matter turning black, felt the stars dim, a feeling I both craved and hated.
And then, suddenly, all fogged in my brain, I was laced up and floating in circles around the place with Greta and her then (and now again) boyfriend, Tiger. I was wearing something I’d taken from Ginny’s closet, before my mother cleaned out her room: a pink and gray striped shirt with thin bands of silver between the stripes. Disco-ish, but I hadn’t yet learned that we’d declared war on disco.
Greta had gone off to the parking lot with Justin and Tommy to drink some bourbon from the flask, and Tiger and I were still roller skating around the rink by ourselves, and then I felt his hand grab mine, his fingers curl around mine, a feeling it seemed I had waited my whole life to feel. We rolled and glided together across that shiny floor, strobe lights blinking, “Eye of the Tiger” blaring through the speakers, which somehow made it feel like fate, even though that was one of the least romantic songs ever. Dark circles of sweat stained the armpits of my shirt, so I tried to keep my arms plastered to my sides, but that was hard to do and hold Tiger’s hand at the same time, and then my palm was so sweaty that my hand slipped out of his and he drifted away and I didn’t know how to get him back.
Later, in the bathroom, when I showed Greta the sweat stains, she said, “Don’t worry, honey,” and took off her white button-down shirt and helped me into it, and then she said, “Hold on a sec,” and took out her Love’s Baby Soft and sprayed it on my neck and then put some strawberry-scented gloss on my lips, which I immediately got on my front teeth because I had never worn my retainer and my overbite had come right back after my parents spent all that money on braces, as they had reminded me constantly before something far worse happened. “There,” she said. And she left the bathroom, looking oh-so-chic in her thin white tank top.
I stood there and looked at myself in the mirror for a few minutes, trying to like what I saw. But it just looked like me with a little lip gloss and Greta’s shirt. I wasn’t particularly fond of my teeth, the way one of them jutted out, or my hands with their stubby fingers. My head was too small and my brown eyes were too close together and my brown hair was frizzy instead of perfectly curly like Greta’s and the space between my nose and my upper lip was too big and I was so, so, so, so, so short and everything about me was off. Worst of all, I was alive.
As I came out, there was Tiger, and he pressed me up against those icy concrete walls and kissed me and it was wrong and bad and it was amazing and I didn’t understand. Why had he turned his attention toward me? Did he feel sorry for me because my sister had died? Did Greta know? Tiger was so cute: half Puerto Rican, half Irish, dark skin, dark eyes, a gold chain around his neck, a football jersey, totally out of my league. Or maybe totally out of m
y league until Ginny had let me step into hers. Ginny, with that little space between her two front teeth, always visible because of her huge smile, and that too-loud laugh, and her perpetually perfect wave of blue eye shadow and her fingerless lace Madonna gloves—she had walked off, or driven off, leaving a path for me. Was I supposed to be happy about the life she’d left me in her wake?
And then the kiss stopped and Tiger walked back out to the rink. And the evening ended. And we all piled in the back of the car, me and Greta and Tiger, and the two of them made out, but he reached back and held my hand for a minute, gave it a squeeze. A consolation prize. Greta got love and sex. I got a hand squeeze. Ginny would never have anything again.
When I got out of the car, Greta handed me the flask.
Now I picked out records to play: Sam Cooke, Hüsker Dü, R.E.M., the Ramones, and, what the heck, Nina Simone’s cover of the Bee Gees: You don’t know what it’s like, she sang, to love somebody like I love you. That feeling of one tune connecting to the other, making a story out of a series of songs, of being hit right in the chest when the music gets it right—it was the best.
“Good mix,” Tommy said, nodding his head, hand stroking his stubbly chin like he was appreciating Van Gogh’s The Starry Night (as if Tommy would know what that was). Apparently Tommy was talking to me again. “Except that Hüsker Dü shit is totally screwed up.” The song was “Don’t Want to Know If You Are Lonely.”
“I’m known all over town for my screwed-up-ness,” I said. Which, sadly, was true. I could feel Tommy looking at me, now that he was drunk and swaying. “And, Tommy, Hüsker Dü is rad.”
We all drank and drank and drank and then we smoked and smoked and smoked. For a long time, I put my head on the back of the couch and looked at the drop ceiling, all those little pockmarks like some kind of constellation that I couldn’t quite figure out, a map I couldn’t read. Every time I looked down from the ceiling, people were making out—Soo and Justin, Tiger and Greta. Tommy studied the record covers in faux oblivion. Tommy. So not my type. Short hair, thick wrestler’s body, not so smart, too into Rush. I liked them tall and skinny and long-haired and into Big Star. At least in theory I did.
Somebody passed me a joint, and I took a long hit and laid my head back again and listened to the song that was playing now, the Velvet Underground with Nico’s smoky voice singing “I’ll Be Your Mirror”: Reflect what you are, in case you don’t know. The song ripped open a hole in my chest, and for a minute it was hard to breathe.
When I looked up, my vision blurring, Justin had his hand on Soo’s face like they did it in old movies and they both had their eyes open and they kept stopping to look at each other and squeeze hands.
“Get a room, why don’t you?” I called, my words all slurry and echoing in my own ears. Soo looked over at me, her eyes fierce. And then she left. She just left me there, Bye-bye, baby, bye-bye. She probably went upstairs to her bedroom, and I knew what she was doing there, something I’d never done even though I’d thought about it once last year when that nineteen-year-old boy Anton Oboieski was on top of me and I knew everyone else was doing the same thing in the rooms all around me but then he opened his eyes for a second and narrowed them at me, as if realizing only then that I wasn’t Ginny. When he closed his eyes again, I pressed against his chest and said, very softly, “Sorry,” and grabbed my plaid shirt and leggings and crept out of the room, waiting with a warm, undrunk beer until the rest of them were finished. Since then, I’d let those boys do so many things to me but that one thing—I was just saving that one thing. I was holding on to it in the hope that someday I’d want somebody and he’d want me, too. The same amount.
Now Tommy grabbed me and shoved his hand down my shirt, and I was enveloped by the whole thing, the music and the drugs and the meaningless touches. I just left my body and let it happen, let him grope and paw and lick and kiss. I let myself get erased.
It was almost five in the morning by the time I got home. Justin had come back to retrieve me, driving Soo’s Le Car, and now the two of them were dropping me off as I groaned, prostrate on the back seat.
I forced myself to sit up when we got to my block. “I gotta walk from here,” I said, even though I had vertigo. I pushed the door open and hung my head between my knees.
“You drink too much,” Justin said. I waited for Soo to object but she didn’t. I liked the protective shield my friends provided more than I liked alcohol, but Justin didn’t know that. And besides, it was they who had introduced me to all the illegal substances I now regularly consumed. Everything was their idea.
“Yeah, I do everything too much,” I said. “This has been pointed out to me before.” The therapist had said to me, I believe you have some kind of impulse disorder and essentially feel all of your emotions too strongly to regulate them.
To which I had replied, Have you ever heard of the term fuck off?
I scooted out of the car and hobbled down the street, past Mrs. Moran’s and the Chins’ and Missy Tester’s house. One pinpoint of light shot across the sky, the beginning of the meteor showers, the preview to Vira, and then it was really quiet in that perfect small-town way, crickets and rustling leaves, and I so did not want to be alone.
I crept up alongside the fence that separated our yard from the big house’s grounds, toward the back door of our house. Amid the low sound of the crickets and the occasional thrum of a car driving down Grand Street, I heard something. Someone was playing guitar, somewhere over by Mrs. Richmond’s. I recognized it—the lick from the Jam’s “English Rose.” Whoever it was played all those notes almost perfectly but really quietly, so you wouldn’t hear it unless you came right up close. Which I did. I walked up to the fence and stood on a metal pail to get a look, because I wasn’t sure if I was making it up or not, what with my head throbbing in that terrible coming-down-from-being-wasted way, and my stomach reeling from all that watery beer.
On the front step of the big house sat a boy—or, not a boy, but maybe a college kid—with a beat-up Guild on his lap, picking out the notes and occasionally stopping to look up at the cornflower blue early dawn sky. He was tall and thin and had long hair, and he had on a worn blue-and-yellow-striped rugby shirt and ripped jean shorts and combat boots with the laces undone, and he was beautiful. He was just beautiful. Then I somehow kicked the pail out from under me and it clanged and the boy looked up and I swore he saw me as the light went on in my father’s bedroom. I scampered inside and forgot to shut the screen door slowly and it slammed. The whole house shuddered.
I slinked up to my room. My father was standing outside my door, arms crossed, hair all spiky and bags under his eyes from interrupted sleep.
Rosie called, “You woke me up, you jerk,” from inside her room. Rosie could fall asleep almost anywhere instantly, and slept hard, so this was a rare and unwelcome event. She opened the door and threw her hands in the air. “Get yourself some help.” Then she went back into her room and collapsed on her bed.
My father didn’t say anything. He just watched as I went into my room and shut the door.
I took out my Saturday Night Fever record, wiped it clean with the red velvety lint brush that seemed like the most luxurious thing in my life sometimes, and I placed the stylus oh-so-gently on the record and plugged in my headphones, so big and fluffy, giant leather clouds over my ears. I put the needle on track five, “If I Can’t Have You.” Don’t know why, I’m surviving every lonely day … I lay down on my Snoopy-in-space pillow and cried along with the beat, just cried and cried until I fell asleep.
Somehow I slept the entire day, squirming to life in my bed at four p.m. I woke up with my head throbbing, the sun bright in my window and making me squint. I breathed in and felt that tentacle-ish pain in my chest—I almost liked that sensation, the ache of having smoked far too many cigarettes the night before. It was a kind of trophy.
Outside my room, my father waited. Had he been there all night? All morning? All day? But no. He’d clear
ly been out somewhere, for he stood there very calmly, holding a sea-foam-green hardhat and a brochure. I could make out the pictures: young people smiling happily in those same hardhats amid a backdrop of tall pines.
“What in god’s name is that?” I asked, rubbing my knotted, bed-headed hair and fake-yawning.
He handed it over to me, placed the hard plastic right in my hands and pressed them against it.
He said, “I figured out what to do with you.”
Chapter 2
It started in that strange, atmosphereless time two years ago, right after Ginny died, when my father took me on what he’d termed a “special time trip.” We traveled by train up to his friend Pablo’s country house in Vermont, hours of staring out the window as the trees grew thicker and the sky clearer and I thought about when we’d scattered my sister’s ashes by the observatory. I kept seeing that moment over and over again: my sister as dust, gone back to nature. Occasionally on that train ride, my father would squeeze my shoulder with one hand and I’d feel my whole body soften. We barely said a word the whole time.
His friend was a nice shaggy hippie fella—a professor of biology at the local college in our town, who studied trees and did his research up there in that dense forest. I occupied myself by sitting in front of the fire in Pablo’s living room and leafing through his Illustrated Encyclopedia of Outer Space. I got fixated on the idea of absolute zero, the lowest possible temperature: –459.67 degrees. Why, I wondered, wasn’t there an infinitely low temperature? It made me feel better, as astronomy always did: there were constants in the universe, if you knew how to look for them.
Pablo took us into the dense forest and hand-drilled into a sapling and pulled out a straw-shaped cross-section of it to show us all the rings; each ring counted for a year of the tree’s life. “It’s just a little bit older than your sister was,” he said. I think he meant to make me feel better, but nausea rose inside me at his words.
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