Follow Me Down

by Sherri Smith

  “I’m sure that’s not true. I’m sure they’d be very worried. What you did was very dangerous. Those pills are not something you should be messing around with. Why did you take them?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe part of me just wanted to die, like Joanna. It’s not like anyone would notice. It’s just Joanna, Joanna, everywhere I go. You know what people say to me? Your sister is an angel now. She was a drug dealer, and now it’s like that never happened. Maybe I want that too. To be perfect.”

  “Don’t say that. You can’t mean that. You’re actually quite lucky. Your friend Bailey really saved you tonight. You might not be here if it wasn’t for her.”

  “She’s not my friend.” Her head snapped up off the pillow.

  “You’re not friends?”

  Madison dropped down again, flipped onto her back. “Ugh, no. Bailey is, like, obsessed with me. I think she’s a lesbian. She made us friendship bracelets that are so lame.” She lazily stretched her arm out, but I couldn’t really see it. It was lost anyway among a stack of other bracelets that extended partway up her arms and made a jingling sound as she dropped her arm again. “She’s, like, I made these so we will always remember this year, and I’m, like, whatever. She even dyed her hair to match mine. I hate it.”

  “Well, imitation is a form of flattery right? Anyway, I think you should get back to the couch now.”

  “What was Mr. Haas like in high school?” She was trying to stay longer, I knew that. But I couldn’t resist plugging my brother’s virtues.

  “Popular, athletic, and very kind.”

  “What were you like in high school?”

  “Hmm … I don’t know what to tell you. Mostly I just studied because I wanted to get out of here.”

  “I looked up your graduating class on the wall at school. You’re much prettier now.” Of course this was what mattered, not the journey out of Wayoata, college, or a career in the big city.

  “Thank you. Are you ready to go back to the couch yet?”

  “Are you and Mr. Lowe getting it on?”

  “What? No. Where did you hear something like that?”

  “It’s OK. I think it’s a good thing. It might make him stop trying to counsel me.” She said it in a way that hinted to something lascivious that made me squeamish. My skin twitched.

  “OK, Madison, I really think it’s time for you to go back to the couch.” I was about to climb over her if I had to and turn on the light.

  She ignored me. “Sometimes, when I’m trying to make myself feel better, I think maybe it was all for the better, Joanna dying.”

  “Why would you say something like that?”

  “She was terrified of disappointing our mother, and now she never will. No one else knows this, but I saw a pregnancy test in the bathroom garbage at the dance studio. I knew it was hers. She tried to hide it by wrapping it all up in toilet paper and two maxi-pad wrappers but I saw it.” There was something so unseemly about this girl going through her sister’s garbage with the thoroughness of a crime scene investigator. I had to bite my tongue to stop myself from saying so because I needed her to tell me what she knew. “It was positive. I asked her if she was gonna start, like, vitamins or whatever or get an abortion, but she just screamed at me like a maniac. She was crazy pissed at me. She shook me so hard my teeth rattled.”

  My body clenched. “Do you know who the father was?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t gonna ask after that. Dylan, probably. I thought she was still a virgin, but then there were rumors that she was having sex with a bunch of different guys.”

  I was suddenly grateful to her, that she hadn’t gone around telling people Joanna was pregnant. It would have made things even worse for Lucas.

  “It would have totally destroyed my mother if she found out her prima ballerina was with child.”

  Odd wording, that—“with child”—and I could feel Madison was trying to endear herself to me. Make herself sound sweetly precocious.

  “My mom was a teenage mom too. She wanted to dance professionally. It ruined her life.”

  “I’m sure it didn’t.” Technically, if I remembered correctly, Kathy was just out of her teens when she got hastily married. It was something the town paid attention to, felt good about. All that money, and their daughter gets into that kind of trouble as well.

  “No. It did. It would have ruined Joanna’s too.”

  I didn’t know how to respond. If it made her feel better to think that, then I didn’t want to take that away.

  “Every family has its secrets right? That’s what they say. I hope Jo, wherever she is now, knows I kept hers. Oops. Well, I guess except for telling you. But you won’t tell anyone, will you? Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  She started hugging my arm, gave a little-girl sigh. “I just feel so close to you. No one else could ever understand what we’re going through. Tickle my neck?”

  I forced her up and back to the couch. I tucked her in tight, and when she asked for a kiss, I pressed my lips to her forehead and said, “Sleep tight.”

  When I woke up again, Madison and Bailey were gone. So were five of my Ambien that I carelessly left out on my brother’s nightstand.

  16

  I checked the drawer, opened the plastic bag. The hair and journal were still there. The flap of the envelope was still tucked inside so it didn’t look like it’d been messed with. Even so, I wished I had licked the glue seal and then I’d know for sure. I dug around Lucas’s kitchen for anything with caffeine, and the best thing I came up with was an energy bar. No pills today! I said this to myself with the springy bark of a boot camp instructor all up in your face. No pills. None. Today I was going on the straight and narrow. I was going to find my brother.

  * * *

  I carefully extricated the journal from the plastic bag, to avoid seeing or touching the hair, and dropped it onto the coffee table. The English writing journal was always such a joke because the teacher got to skip out on the last fifteen or twenty minutes of class, intoning, “Think, explore,” just before taking off for a cigarette.

  I started flipping through the pages. Reading random parts. It was all hand printed. These kids can’t read cursive writing. It’s like some ancient hieroglyphic to them, Lucas had told me, incredulous.

  At first it had the sanitized treatment of a school journal with the requisite exploratory responses to novels.

  Lord of the Flies is, in some ways, a lot like dance tryouts. The savage girl in all pink taffeta, her flexed toes pointed like spears, her tight scalp-pinching bun rests on her head like a plush throne ready to receive the crown she is vying for (a solo!), her glittery makeup, red, red lips like warrior paint. Ready to do battle.

  I skipped to the next entry.

  … Lennie Small reminds me of my brother: big and oafish and totally capable of killing something from overpetting it. (Who would ever let Lennie run a rabbit farm?! That would be an all-around bad business decision.) OK, just kidding (humor is my only defense against such a depressing book!). But I do worry about my brother sometimes. He’s, well, delayed in some ways, and that makes him a little vulnerable to manipulative people. He likes to do what’s asked of him, without thinking much about what he’s being asked to do. Does that make sense?

  ANYWAY … On the bright side (of a very dark book), my own personal economic “depression” has ended—I just got my first job! So excited. I can work during my spares! My boss is already hinting toward a promotion. Paycheck = I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-C-E.

  p.s. Full disclosure: You said the only rule to apply to our journal writing was to be honest writers. So here goes … I didn’t finish the book. Not yet anyway. I bailed when I overheard someone talking about a dead puppy. I wasn’t sure what was worse, you knowing I didn’t read it and getting a bad mark or thinking I did and had such a lame response. I will try (against all odds!) to finish before our essays are due.

  Several entries, four months’ worth, extolled the virtues of her BF, Dylan. He wa
s the only one who really understood her, who let her be her. All was big bubbly letters and hearts. Then it was over with Dylan.

  … I am trapped behind glass, waving a white flag. I see you go on like it was nothing, and my heart breaks. You said it was forever, but forever for you is four months. You let her get to you, I know it. All feeling gone, an empty heart.

  The sanitized feel had loosened up. Turned increasingly candid. Like a reality star who claims to forget the cameras are even there, Joanna seemed to be doing the same thing, ignoring the fact that her journal wasn’t private. Three quarters of it was about her mom.

  My mom wants me to be part of her grand delusion that I am going to be famous. Anytime I try to tell her that I’m not good enough, it’s like she can just blink that truth away. Just like that, three rapid blinks, and the delusion is back, intact, and I’m forced back on board. I have to show her. Somehow.

  I tried going out with a friend after dance class. Just a friend, but oh no, my mother had to join us for hot chocolate. She talks about all the other girls in the class, and I get so embarrassed.

  My mom took me shopping (she never just gives me a credit card and lets me go like she does for Madison—no, she wants to come with me). She actually makes me feel bad if I say I’d rather go with friends, then she’ll make some excuse that she can’t give me any money. I’ll point out that I would get a job if I could, if she didn’t make me practice all the time. (She doesn’t know about my job so I have to keep asking her for money, so she doesn’t suspect anything. It sucks having money I really can’t spend. But makes saving a cinch.) We’ll fight, and somehow I end up with her at the mall buying things I don’t want to be seen in. I cried in the change room, as I took off a white blouse she insisted that I get. I didn’t want it. It was way too young for me. But she bought it anyway, and she thinks I’m wearing it right now, because that’s what she wanted me to wear today. She actually put an outfit out on my bed today! I’m sixteen years old! Who does that? I’m so glad she hasn’t caught on that I change at school.

  Maybe I’m too hard on my mom. I won first place last week in Minneapolis!! The judges’ comments were amazing, and I felt incredible. I didn’t even like the dance she choreographed, but I guess she was right. Sometimes she is right. I forget that.

  UGH! I can’t even believe I wrote that last week. Things are terrible again. She wants to send me to rehab! Who goes to rehab for weed? (Sorry—I know we aren’t supposed to include any “illegal doings” in here that you would have to report, but the drugs found in my locker are pretty common knowledge at this point.) I told her I don’t need rehab, I just need more spending money. She doesn’t listen. She just blames Dylan, but he didn’t have anything to do with it. You know what? It was fun. I liked being a drug dealer. I liked being seen as less than perfect. I even got along better with the girls at the studio. There, I said it. (Don’t report me.)

  My mom has sicced my brother on me like a guard dog. He watches me. He drives by the school parking lot all the time to make sure my car is still in the lot. I think he likes it. Watching me. I hate her.

  Ben, the butterfly squasher. He was a big boy. Took after his mother, more so than his twiggy father. The only entry on Madison read:

  In a way I wish I could be more like her. She does what she wants. Yesterday I didn’t get home from the studio until eleven at night to reheated steamed vegetables and a salmon patty, while Madison got to have her friends over (all her loyal followers) and bake frosted cupcakes, her lips and fingers all pink from gorging on all that icing. She thinks our mother favors me. Even when she’s trying to be spiteful toward me all I want to do is trade places with her. She came into my bedroom and ate a cupcake in front of me (which doesn’t sound terrible, but she knows I’m on another one of Kathy’s “special diets”), relishing each and every nibble. All I want to do is trade places with her. “You’re so gifted,” Madison will say to me, but in a way that’s kinda mean. She’s so lucky she can’t dance.

  The tone of the journal shifted after her assault in January. Entries were left half finished, it looked like she just dropped off. Like she couldn’t be bothered to continue or didn’t have the energy. She quoted sad lyrics from songs and filled the margins with drawings of girls with really large, watery eyes. When Joanna and Dylan reunited, things lightened up again, but Joanna sounded wiser. She never retreated into the puppy and rainbow thing of their early romance.

  By February, the entries grew increasingly personal toward Lucas.

  You wanted to know when I last felt safe. I’ll tell you.…

  I think I felt safest when I spent my summers at my grandparents’ lake house. Carefree days by the dock with cucumber sandwiches and tall glasses of lemonade. The smell of my grandfather’s cigar smoke that everyone hated but I kinda liked. This was before Kathy totally hijacked my life. Then it was summers in the studio, all day long. Before the whirlwind dance conferences in LA and NYC, and those midnight flights back to Wayoata so I didn’t miss school. When the days were all loose and easy.

  My favorite room in the lake house was the attic, under a circular skylight. At night, if it was a full moon, it would look like this giant orb glowing on the floorboards. I’d lie in the middle of it and stare up at the starry sky through this massive peephole. It had this fairy-tale feeling, like I could slip through it, upward into the stars, into an alternate universe, and return with special powers that’d make me great at everything I tried. Or else I could almost convince myself I was moving. I was in a spaceship traveling away, up, up, and away. Whatever. Kid stuff. Still, it was like nothing could touch me when I was inside the orb.

  I will never feel safe like that again.

  Other entries were like listening in on a frustratingly one-sided phone conversation on the bus.

  You know that thing I mentioned yesterday? Well, never mind. It doesn’t matter anymore. I’ve been thinking about what you said, and it’s true—it’s better not to worry so much. Great advice. (You’re so much more helpful than Eric, who just asks a bunch of questions, then never says anything other than trying to get me to listen to lame music when I want advice. LOL)

  What thing? What advice? What should Joanna stop worrying about? And not that I thought Eric’s music therapy was exclusive to me, but I couldn’t help feeling a little crestfallen. It seemed almost pitiful that it was something he still routinely pulled. Was he really trying to connect with kids through music (music their parents listened to?), or was he just trying to get out of doing any actual work? Or worse, was he straining to still come across as the youthful, cool teacher? (I did notice yesterday he was wearing a leather wristband!) And here my brain started to fizz like an Alka-Seltzer—was the music thing what he did with girls he took a special interest in? Girls he thought were especially “self-possessed” and could handle a more “mature” relationship with him. Wasn’t it weird that he’d slept with me? I was his ex-student! But then Zoey was Lucas’s ex-student. I couldn’t have it both ways. I read the next line.

  I thought about you before I fell asleep last night, and I felt safe. I felt like you were right, that it might all be OK. I just need to wait it out.

  Wait what out? Her mother? High school? So she and Lucas could run off together?

  There were also several references to various injuries:

  I know, I know, I’m on crutches again.:(THANKS for helping me this morning with my books.…

  … SORRY for the sloppy writing. At least I have an excuse—my wrist is sprained (again!).…

  … THANKS for letting me sit in your classroom over gym class. Bummed though that I have this stomach infection.…

  She brought up an “accident” that involved her BFF Abby. That was how she wrote it, in quotations, meaning it might not really be an accident:

  … Sometimes I just want to get Abby and Mrs. Peters alone, explain everything, but Abby just looks at me like she’s scared of me. Then sometimes I get angry—like how could Abby really think I was involved? Tha
t I would just stand by and let my mother do that to her? She knows me better than that, or least I thought so. I guess my mom really is making sure we are heading toward some Grey Gardens existence. (See! I told you I didn’t fall asleep during the movie, which for obvious reasons, I hated!☺)

  If you weren’t there for me … Well, like you say, “what if” are the two most dangerous words when put together.

  Why would her friend be scared of her? What did Kathy do? When did Lucas start peddling self-help clichés?

  OMG. Now I know why Eric doesn’t say anything. You’ll never believe what happened yesterday. I came home for lunch. I wasn’t feeling well, and who’s there sitting across from my S’mother???? Eric!!! There was money on the table!! I can only assume that my mom was paying him to find out what I’ve told him. So this whole time I’ve been confiding in Eric, he’s been telling my mom everything. It makes sense now, how my mom found out Dylan & I were back on. That’s disgusting—there should be a law against it! Thank God I didn’t tell Eric everything!!! Can you imagine?

  So Eric was auctioning off Joanna’s secrets to Kathy. That was not the guy I hung out with. What kind of lowlife could do that? How did I sleep with such a lowlife and not even know it? Were my teenage girl goggles that rose-colored?

  It was so two-faced. To Joanna. To me. He acted like Joanna was any other student.

  I felt fooled by him. Was his side job selling teens’ secrets to their parents? Those deep, dark things that kids managed to hold back from social media. Was he playing me too? Waiting for me to drop some gold nugget he could sell to the press? But it wasn’t like he was soliciting me for information. He didn’t even seem to care if I talked at all, which I took as him being sensitive. How was I going to solve anything if I couldn’t even figure out who was an asshole and who wasn’t?

  I went over the day we spent together. Nothing stuck out. It was nice. A nice day! That’s how I would describe it.

  I thought of his hand on Madison’s shoulder. Lingering there. What was that? Who was he? And what kind of mother would even think to buy off the guidance counselor?