This is being a teenage girl: you bottle everything up. But not all in one bottle. You get a few. You let things out in different circles, to different people. Some to your teachers, some to your friends, some to your besties, some to your family, even some to boys. When it bursts out of you, it’s onto your phone, your locker, your room. You don’t choose which part of yourself you show to the world. You choose all the parts you don’t.
And in Lucia’s room was nothing: A dresser (Mindy thought—junkyard). A wardrobe (Mindy thought—curbside). A sewing station, not just with Lucia’s girl-clothes on the rack but with underwear worn away at the elastic, shorts with holes at the groin. Mindy’s mom had a whole hobby room for that sort of thing. A few posters so oddly placed that Mindy wondered if they covered holes in the wall, and so normal that they hit Mindy like a hip-check. Chris Hemsworth in a towel, a wrinkled pin-up of the Jonas Brothers, a Spider-Man ad from a magazine that’d been torn out and taped up.
And the oasis in the desert was Lucia. Swathed up in a sagging bed, holes in the mattress pad, mismatched sheets, pillows squashed flat by time, comforter bleeding cotton. Only her face came out of the little burrito she had made of her bedding.
“You’ve missed five days of school and three Harry Potter marathons on ABC Family,” Mindy said.
Lucia grinned blandly. A cheerleader smile-smile-smile! “Hey! Did you know that if your dad ever starts doing heroin, you can stay fashionable by cultivating a vintage look? You keep up on makeup, a little jewelry, some new shoes, most people will never notice that everything else is from a thrift shop. And obviously, you make your own clothes, do a home Gucci knock-off, it’s not like anyone will know. Plus, little boys, they can wear the same clothes forever.”
“Lucia, stop it.”
“Food, food is easy. All those barrels at the supermarket, they go to the church—church people actually buy stuff just to give to you. The craziest shit too. Like, cake mix and green peppers… Hard part there is getting them to just let you pick the damn stuff up, because they’ll want you to go to a whole thing and listen to a sermon for poor people and eat salsa dip and you just want to take the food and go because you have a job on the other side of town that might as well be Mehico to everyone in school. And I don’t eat much to begin with, so…”
“El, I don’t care that you’re poor.”
“Of course you don’t. You have money; why would you care about it?” Lucia reached over to her nightstand, clearing some schoolbooks off the top. The only other things on it were some cheerleading trophies. Gold-pewter girls flying through the air, only bound to Earth by the trophy stands. “You brought food?”
“Yeah. No cookies though.” Mindy set the Tupperware on the nightstand. It was hard to look at Lucia. The aura she put off was of rotting meat, putrid drink. Her lips were thin, and her skin didn’t catch the little light in the right way. It made her look gray. Like she’d been burnt into ashes. “Lucia, you look gray.”
“I haven’t been keeping up with my exfoliating.” Lucia unscrewed the bottle of Sprite first. “Need to drink this quick before Abe or Artie find it. They never get soda, so if they go over to a friend’s house and some mommy has Diet Coke, I get little crack addicts for a day. God forbid I don’t get them Count Chocula Frosted Shits at the grocery market—”
Mindy had seen evidence of little brothers downstairs. Crayon drawings on the wall that’d only been scrubbed at with water, not Clorox. The faded lines stayed behind like scars. “Lucia, how are you feeling? C’mon, tell me.”
“Like shit, Mindy. Simple as that. I feel tired and hungry. So damn hungry. Not the kind of hungry where you just have to wait until your boyfriend shares lunch with you; like he gives a shit—” She smiled condescendingly at Mindy. A tired smile. “Hungry like there’s a hole in my stomach. Maybe I’m dying. Maybe that’s what it’s like when you die. You keep getting hungry, and itchy, and horny. You just can’t eat, can’t scratch, can’t fuck. Can’t even sleep. Do you think death’s insomnia, Mindy?”
“I think death’s what happens when you get old. Eat your soup.” Mindy moved to sit down on the bed. Lucia held out her hand, motioning her to stop. It was the first time Mindy had seen her fingernails unpainted.
“I don’t want you to catch what I have, Minz.”
“Eat. Please.”
Lucia pulled the Tupperware into her lap, struggled with the lid, finally got it. The spoon took longer. “I can’t afford a doctor.”
“I can find one. Someone who’ll just come here as a favor.”
“I’ll be fine, Mindy. I’ll get better in a few days. I always do.”
“You have to let me do something. Take the boys to soccer practice or whatever. You do that, right?”
“Always so charitable. At first. Takes a while for the resentment to set in. Why can’t Lucia be middle class? Isn’t there a form she can fill out?”
“I don’t sound like that,” Mindy said to Lucia’s nonspecific falsetto. She didn’t want to fight. A little voice whispered that she didn’t want her last memory of Lucia to be fighting. “Do you remember the night of the party?”
“Must’ve been an alright party, because not really.” Lucia’s drawl had too much phlegm in it to be properly sarcastic.
“You came over to my house, remember? You were really out of it.”
Lucia tried the soup. “What kind of sick are you when food doesn’t taste like food?”
“Did you take something or…or could someone have given you something to take…”
Lucia was staring at the ceiling. “Everything tastes like water. Maybe my tongue’s messed up. You remember that chart they gave us where it shows what part of your tongue tastes sweet and what tastes bitter…least the part that tastes water is okay.”
“That chart’s a myth. Your tongue doesn’t work like that.”
Finally, Lucia looked at her. “You being the expert on my tongue.”
“Did you take something?”
Lucia blinked, and in all her brittle hair, her drained face, Mindy could see the blue of her eyes. “Only your heart, darling.”
Mindy’s teeth ground down on the nothing Lucia gave her. “Let me see your arm.” Lucia looked at her. For the first time, those blue eyes were surprised. “Your left arm, Lucia. Let me see it.”
Lucia kept it at her side. Under the covers. “I think it’s time for you to go.”
Mindy stood and wondered why she wasn’t so frustrated, now that they were parting. Maybe it was true love. “Get some sleep. Drink plenty of fluids.”
* * *
She is Lucia, sick in bed. She is wrapped in the cocoon of her sheets, shielding herself with them because the night is too bright and the silence is too loud and the days are even worse. The days bleed. Her arm burns with the venom of the sunlight that stung her. She scratches at it (it itches it itches it itches) and peels away a layer of dead skin. And another layer. And another layer. And another layer. Always another layer, peeling and peeling, an onion that doesn’t make her cry. Underneath is something the white of bone.
Nothing is a mystery to her anymore except her own body, which has betrayed her for reasons of its own. As a cheerleader, she pushed it to its limits, made it tight and tense and loose and limber. Now it punishes her. It takes her further than its limits. It makes her see everything, hear everything, smell everything.
Because now she can hear the door downstairs open—her baby brother Artie, only seven years old, still so young she has Facebook posts talking about how she got him a glass of water or helped him to the bathroom.
She smells the fear—a bad dream, she wonders if it was of her—and knows with a sister’s knowledge that because she is sick, he will not bother her, and because Mom doesn’t care, he will not bother her. He goes to Abe instead, who is ten years old. Abe wakes, and she hears them trade curses like Pogs, foul words without the proper inflections to make them offensive, babies playacting arguments.
Abe relents. He takes his brother to t
he kitchen. Mindy hears the spongy whisper of the carpet absorbing their steps become the slap of the scuffed linoleum deflecting them. Abe strains up to get a glass that was once a jar of grape jelly. He fills it with water but his grip is clumsy; he is still half asleep. The glass falls. It shatters and Artie is too young not to panic. He steps on a piece. There is blood in open air.
Lucia winds herself up in her sheets, makes a straitjacket of them. She thirsts. It’s perfume in an unscented world, fresh water on a sea of salt, food in a famine. Not as fresh as Mindy, nothing’s smelled as good as Mindy, but it would do. Who wants a vintage wine when they’re dying of thirst?
Is this the moment she stops being Abe’s sister and becomes his boogeyman? Swallowing him whole. Swallowing Artie and Mom and Mindy and the whole world, to sate her hunger, to choke the black hole.
No.
It’s a revolutionary thought: don’t find a way to win the game; instead refuse to play. Does her body—the treacherous thing—think she’s afraid of pain? Because she’s not. She’s a cheerleader. She’s risked broken bones with every stunt. She’s scraped enough skin off her body to make a vest, left blood on the gym floor like semen at a Motel 6. And no one tells her how to finish her routine. She decides for herself.
No, she doesn’t bite, she doesn’t drink. She gets out of bed. She strips herself bare. She walks naked through the empty house, her house. It doesn’t hurt anymore. She opens the doors one last time. She looks in on Abe and Artie. They’ve fallen asleep in the same bed, Artie’s foot swathed in six different Spider-Man Band-Aids. She’d almost yell at them for the waste, if it still mattered.
Her arm burns insistently. Another flap of brittle translucency comes easily off in her hand as she goes to her mother’s room. Looks in on her. Maybe this will be good for her. What do they call it, a wake-up call? Shock her back onto the Twelve Steps, give her a good story for those anonymous meetings. She goes to the back door, steps into the backyard with its high fences. No reason to give some early-morning jogger a thrill. The sun is coming up. The sun is coming up, and her skin sizzles like bacon on a skillet. She only wishes the sprinklers were on to help wash the burning newspaper of her skin away. To wash her away when she’s yesterday-barbecue-ash on the back porch. She burns and it doesn’t hurt, it really doesn’t hurt. It just feels so good to scratch that itch, like chicken pox she can actually dig out of her skin, and it all comes off like a sweaty bra at the end of a twelve-hour shift.
She is burning, and her only wish is that Mindy would understand.
CHAPTER 10
The PA system crackled in the middle of first period. Mindy was dissecting a frog. It didn’t bother her like it did the other girls. Next to the dream she had, it was like a cartoon. She couldn’t stop thinking of Lucia burning, even though she’d seen El come out of her house on the way to the bus stop, a huddled mass of hoodie and jeans. She’d run out after her, but by the time she’d come out of her own front door, Lucia was gone. Not answering her phone again. She must’ve sent a couple hundred texts to Lucia’s phone. There was only one she left in her Drafts folder, like a grenade with the pin still inside. It read, I love you.
Then the principal was clearing her throat in everyone’s ear at once. Mindy knew the routine. Principal Haywood was not newfangled. She only interrupted class for emergencies. Hospital beds. Dead bodies. Finding a copy of Maxim on school grounds.
Please don’t let it be Lucia, Mindy sent out to the universe. She wrote it on her mind in letters too big to be ignored. And the universe listened.
Quentin had been taken to the hospital. He would miss the next game, victim of an animal attack. Something had bit him right in the neck.
Millarca High was abuzz when the bell rang. Electric in the way that only gossip could make it. Mindy noticed glances striking at her, but it was only Pammy who was rude enough to confront her.
She and Tera fell in on either side of Mindy as she hit her locker combination, like raptors preparing for a kill. “You!” Pammy said, “You finally did it. You finally made her like you.”
“Did you cast a spell on her?” Tera demanded.
Mindy stopped to look at her. “A spell? If you’re going to spread rumors about me, can you at least pick one and stick to it? Am I a lesbian or am I a witch?”
“Both!”
“What is this, Buffy?”
“Buffy? What’s that? Is that a spell?”
Mindy was about to let her disgust have its way and stomp off, let them pepper her back with insults, but then she heard it. Not a commotion—the halls were still a din of noise. More like a bubble of silence that was traveling, getting bigger and bigger. People sensed it. They clustered into groups, turned their heads to the end of the hall like it was the Blitz and they’d heard an air raid siren. But all Mindy heard was the slap of wedge heels.
Lucia came around the corner not as Lucia, but as someone else. No belly-baring top; no skirt or shorts. Leather pants that could’ve been borrowed from Catwoman scrolling into sinister-looking boots, red-tinted sunglasses, a snug black-and-white striped shirt under one of those leather jackets every girl wanted after watching Grease, all chrome studs and necklaces strung down by the dozen. Meaningless little girl things on chains: coins, lockets, bits of mineral, bits of crystal. But all that was a costume. Shock and awe. What shocked Mindy was her.
She was white. Not just pale or pasty, but white, a brilliant white, the white of a tropical beach struck by the sun. All her skin was a creamy, milky white, and yet somehow it seemed pristine in its uncompromising starkness after the mottled gray of her illness. Her hair had been chopped to her chin and dyed into a tousle of raven-black bed hair, freshly fucked hair. Her lipstick was dark, her eyeliner wings sharp enough to cut. The blue of her eyes shone entombed in eye shadow.
She walked right by Mindy. Didn’t even look.
A few seconds later, it was clear no one was brave enough to follow her. So Mindy did.
“You do something with your hair?” she asked, catching up to Lucia.
“No, I just woke up like this.”
“Oh. Because you look like you’re either going to sing ‘Cherry Bomb’ or help Criss Angel with a magic trick. Seriously, what’s with all the black leather? We’re in Texas. Aren’t you hot?”
Lucia stopped to look at her. Her eyes were almost white within all that black. “I’m always hot.”
Mindy nodded. The weight of Lucia’s gaze was so much heavier than before. “You hear about Quentin? Crazy, right?”
“Maybe it was bad karma.”
“He volunteered at the soup kitchen.” Mindy tried again. “I dreamt you hurt yourself.”
“Like, I wore UGGs?”
“No, you…went out in the sun.”
“Are you forgetting which of us is a ginger?” Lucia sighed. “You know you can stop pretending you care now, right? Since I’m not going to eat you out or anything.”
And Mindy stood there, staring at her, as Lucia turned and walked away. Maybe she couldn’t take that look. Or maybe she was just bored with Mindy. But as she left, Mindy realized the strangest thing of all about Lucia’s new look.
All those necklaces and she wasn’t wearing her cross.
* * *
In her own pre-grief, Mindy hadn’t noticed the outpouring of Quentin-love. The trophy case that smelled of him had become his shrine. Someone was selling buttons identifying the wearer as one of the Quentin Morse Support Squad, and the locker room and boys’ room spoke of a coyote hunt. And as unnoticed as an asterisk in a magazine ad, the school counselor, Mr. Pletsky, had made himself available for grief counseling.
Mindy thought she was the first person to take him up on it. When she went into his office, she found him building a little house out of trust exercise cards. The top one, the one he was just adding, read Ask your therapy partner what you can do to make his day more fulfilling.
“Hey, Mr. Plets,” Mindy greeted, amicable as a family reunion.
Mr. Pletsky was a b
lack man, musclebound and gentle as a kitten. He never raised his voice; it was already at the level of a rockslide. “Ms. Murphy! My favorite student!” Everyone was his favorite student. “What can I help you with? Please, tell me.”
Mindy sat down across from him and a pillar-card reading Give your therapy partner a personal item and trust him to return it. “Well, Mr. Plets, I’ve been having these nightmares lately? I think it’s what happened to Quentin. I mean, he was such a big, strong guy and something just—it makes you afraid to walk the streets at night.”
Mr. Pletsky nodded sympathetically. “It’s a dangerous world we live in, Ms. Murphy. Dangerous. Dangerous. But there are a few simple steps we can all take to—”
Mindy had to keep him off-balance. Move him, work the mid-section. She heard Lucia urging her on like a ringman in a boxing match. “I keep having these nightmares. There’s this animal—sometimes I’m running from it, sometimes I’m fighting it, sometimes it’s, it’s eating me…”
Mr. Pletsky raised a hand to his lips. “Oh dear.”
“I know, it’s silly. It’s silly. But I thought, maybe if I had some of the facts… I mean, the truth can’t be as scary as my dreams, right?”
“No, child. No, never.”
“I heard that Quentin lost a lot of blood…” Mindy focused all her Jedi powers on Pletsky. Tried to make him go along with her as hard as she’d ever tried to float a pencil as a kid. “That’s not true, is it?”
“I’m afraid it is, Mindy.” Mr. Pletsky hung his head. “Two whole liters. Thankfully a car was passing by; if someone hadn’t called an ambulance… Obviously, we’re not allowed to advocate any religion here at school, but thank Xenu…”
“And the blood, was it…there?” Mindy asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Was it…with him? Like, on the ground? Around him? Or was it…” Mindy made a butterfly of one hand.
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