Beautiful Broken Girls

by Kim Savage

  Ben watched the action in his house from the Cillos’ rhododendron. Downstairs, window lights flickered as his parents paced past. He imagined the scene when he walked through the front door. He would have to face their panic, and lie that he had tried to run away. It had consequences, but it was the only excuse that was credible. There would be lecturing and berating. His mother would cry. It would be hours before he felt his pillow beneath his head.

  The night air smelled crisp and cold, and he drank it in as an antidote to whatever the Zoloft was doing in his system. He thought he might like to stay outside all night, and he knew it was wrong and possibly evil that he should be happy at this moment. He ought to be feeling dread, for the punishment that awaited him, and disappointment, for his failure to confront Mr. Cillo. But the air was invigorating, and Ben was heading for a relic that he alone could interpret, contextualize, catalog.

  It would be days before his parents would let him out of their sight, if they allowed it at all. His future in Bismuth was tantamount to a prison conviction. He would need a plan, but not now. Ben slid the note into his shorts and jogged through his side yard to the corner of the cement patio. He was relieved to see the long vertical blinds to the kitchen slider drawn tight. Flashes of red and blue light backlit the house; the cops had arrived, and parked at the front curb. He wondered if the cops were the same ones that had arrived seven years before, after dinner, on another crisp November night when the police came to personally deliver the news that Ben was on Coach Freck’s special list, and to prepare his parents with their own list, names of experts trained to talk to children who had been victimized. Ben’s breathing went trippy. He slipped from his backpack and flattened himself against the house, the vinyl siding cold against his back, and tried to steady his breath. He listened to the robotic bleats of walkie-talkies, and the doorbell chime, then sprinted across the backyard to the play set, taking its stairs in one step and tucking his long body into the lookout. He collapsed to the floor and studied the blinds for movement. Certain they were still, he pulled the note from his pants pocket.

  End at the end. Only one place left to go.

  Ben ran his eyes over the note once, then twice. He squinted and read it a third time. From the front door came the grateful voices of his mom, then his dad, followed by the formal voices of policemen. Ben folded the note in half, stashed it low in his pocket, and set his jaw. He swung his legs over the stairs and eased down, slipping through the backyard and into the shed. He felt for his father’s heavy plaid work shirt hanging on a long nail until his hand brushed its satisfying heft. He needed warmth for where he was going.

  Ben slipped from the shed in the shirt and crusty work gloves, a flashlight under his arm and a trowel weighing down the left pocket of his lacrosse shorts. He lifted his bike from its side and mounted it, tires swishing on the night-damp tar. As he coasted down his driveway, something made Ben look right. In the window of the living room that was also his living room, Ben saw a sliver of the den where Mr. Cillo stood, facing the wall, in the same spot Ben had left him.

  Ben rode like a demon, bare calves and thighs numbing fast in the wind. They might notice his bike was gone, not a detail the police would check, but a detail his parents would check, were they sure he had stopped home before running away. They might have found the pills he didn’t swallow in the bushes, another fact they’d leave out when sharing their grief with the officers, who’d seen so much from this neighborhood, being as it was nearly three months since the Cillo girls’ drowning. Do you call it a drowning when you put rocks in your pockets? Ben let these thoughts race through his head, because they distracted him from the maddening fact that it was taking so long to get there. Mira wanted him to go to the quarry, like she had, on a warm night when the wind from his bedroom window blew soft across his belly, a tickle or a kiss. Not like this night, when the wind punished him in proportion to the speed with which he rode, drove him backward, made every rotation of his pedals feel like a Sisyphean feat. Camped beside the front door of his enemy, the night had lured him, and now it fought him.

  Or maybe it was the drug.

  He couldn’t get to the ledge where she stepped, in bare feet, and fell, weightless, her energy spent by her own race to get to the quarry and the labored hike through, drenched with sweat. It would probably be easier to exhaust yourself than to let adrenaline kick in and begin flailing, trying to save yourself as you dropped one hundred feet into the water. His monkey mind tossed this away—it was too visceral—and he focused on his feet, unfeeling now, two clods at the bottom of his legs that needed to press. He stood, forcing his weight into his feet, and cars slowed as they passed him, surprised to see a bicycle on the highway at this hour, cursing him for being young and reckless.

  He reached the rotary in twenty-six minutes. He knew that, despite what his parents had decided to tell the police, they still had to have the quarry in the backs of their minds. And there was the fact that the quarry was a dumping ground for everything, from refrigerators to old paint to bodies. The police would come to the quarry. They might even come to their ledge, his ledge, the place where Mira was sending him. And for that reason, he needed to be inhumanly fast.

  Ben coasted into Johnny’s Foodmaster. In the lot sat the usual few abandoned cars in the glow of the store’s after-hours low light. Ben rode wide around the cars, behind the store, past the bike cage and to the end of the asphalt until he reached the woods. His pedals resisted, then his wheels caught traction. He rode as far as the underbrush and the incline allowed, about a quarter of a mile, until mud mired his tires and he could go no farther. He slid off his bike and wrapped his chain twice around a young tree and locked it. The moon was large. He pitched the flashlight deep into the scrub, and covered the bright metallic bits of the bike with branches. Up the hill, the trapezoidal shadow that was the top of the quarry loomed, and he ran his hands through his hair until it stuck up in the front. He rubbed his palms together, but they felt disconnected, so he stopped and began to climb. After a while, the aquatic roar of the expressway grew fainter, and he thought he heard laughter. Shivering, he focused on the crunch of his feet on gravel, walking harder. He patted the note in his pocket, reminding himself that this quest was not something he’d constructed, a distraction from reality. Twice, he stopped to place his hand on his belly and breathe. Alone on the hill, his breath sounds were magnified, and he hated the Darth Vader sound, which he was sure made him seem weak to Mira looking down from heaven. Fixing his breath was something he hadn’t had to do since the year after Coach Freck. He was no longer scared that his parents were spiraling with worry, or that he’d broken into a man’s home. He wasn’t even terrified of what he might find.

  It was that some element would be off, and he would not experience it the way she had.

  When he reached the clearing, his legs buckled and he staggered to the altar, sinking down. Mica stuck to his knees. The exhaustion was sweet, and he let it wash over him.

  “This is how she felt,” he said in his most convincing voice.

  His vision was hazy, and again, sleepiness crept in. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, speckled with mica, and he felt the tiny shards against his eyelids, working their way in, but he was too tired to care. He sat for a moment, rubbing, until he heard a noise. He froze, listening for far-off sirens and the voices of grown men brandishing flashlights and barking dogs.

  “Why did you have to touch her?”

  Ben palmed the rock and twisted his upper torso. At the edge of the clearing stood a girl in a ragged, loose-weave sweater.

  “I’m hallucinating,” he said in his surest tone, meant to ward away mirages and ghosts.

  The image shimmered.

  “That’s good,” he whispered. “You are a figment of my imagination. Go away.”

  The image shimmered again. Ben made fists and dug at his eyes. He stopped and opened them slowly. The image remained.

  “Go away!” he yelled, trying to stand but fallin
g, his legs like water.

  “Why did you have to touch us?” the girl said as she came closer, not walking exactly, her feet never grazing the ground. Ben fell and scrambled back to his feet, backed up and fell again, his legs sprawled. As he neared the tip of the altar, rocks came loose underneath and tumbled over the lip.

  Ben blinked hard, but the image remained a few feet in front of him. Francesca slid her jaw side to side with tiny clicks. Ben realized she was waiting for an answer. A stock image from every cheesy movie he’d ever seen played before his mind, of a man talking to a ghost, then the camera pans back, and he’s talking with no one. That was what this was, he decided. Not real. He had three pills in his body that he’d never taken before and no food. He’d ridden to Johnny’s in twenty-six minutes. He’d spent half the night jammed into a dead girl’s closet. He was a little high, and possibly asleep, and Francesca had invaded his dreams.

  Why not Mira? he wondered. Never Mira.

  “Listen, I figured out Mira’s notes. I know what your father did to both of you. And I can make it right,” Ben pleaded. “I’m gonna send a letter to the newspaper, and everybody in Bismuth’s gonna know what kind of a guy he really is.”

  The mirage laughed, and it was the sound of splintering glass. Ben shielded his face as though shards flew at him through the air.

  “You broke us!” it shrieked. “Every single one of you broke us! Look at me!”

  Ben dropped his hands. Its face—her face—was perfect and intact and hard, beautiful in the way people had said Francesca Cillo was beautiful. She loomed larger, and Ben forced himself to still. “My father had nothing to do with this. My father had the right idea, keeping us away from all of you. The minute we let you in you destroyed us.”

  Ben struggled to sit up. “You’re right. I was as bad as the rest of them. Please, just let me wake up.” Ben closed his eyes and reopened them. She was still there, an angry shimmer. The air carried a new, sonic buzz, loud and getting louder. It was like the sound of june bugs; impossible in November. Francesca pointed her chin at the frigid water. “Go on. She wants you to find it. She wants you to see the truth.”

  The image fragmented into glints, and then there were only the trees that lined the clearing. Ben felt the charge in the air dissipate, and a chill followed. Beyond, a siren rang in the distance. Then the dogs. It would take them exactly twenty-eight minutes to reach the clearing, if they didn’t stop to see the bike, and if they weren’t hauling dredging equipment and diving gear.

  Ben stood at the ledge’s tip and looked down into the freezing, molasses-colored water. He was going to have to jump.

  Logistics flooded Ben’s mind. According to Kyle, when the girls went missing, the ambulances had come in on the other side of the quarry, the only way passable by emergency vehicles, and the divers, rather than jumping, made their way down to the lowest ledge on the opposite side and basically waded in from the shallows.

  He would be jumping right into his rescuers’ arms. Unless he was quick.

  His head pounded, blood or panic overloading his brain. The dark quarry water terrified him. But once the police found him—and they would find him—he might never get here again. And not reading Mira’s words was more terrifying than any poison.

  Ben emptied his sagging pockets: phone, pills, trowel. He exhaled hard and long, then filled his chest with night air. Flexed and rose up on his toes, and lifted his arms to the sky. Pushed away from the rock. And dove.

  Flying through the air, Ben shut his eyes against the g-force rush around him, streaming wet granite veined with glitter. And then he hit the surface like a blade, and his ears fuzzed over in an underwater vacuum-hush. His outstretched hands touched something hard—quarry trash, plant matter, a skeleton—and he pulled away, panicked, arms and legs flailing, pushing his way to the top, where the moon rippled like a beacon. He swam for it.

  In an explosion, Ben broke water. The air seared his lungs. For a while, he only bobbed and gulped oxygen. In the distance, he heard a demented ambulance siren, warped by the quarry acoustics or some tweaking of his own inner ear. He swam for the wall, kicking hard, still gasping, his arms pulling him along to the scooped base rock where he had begun his ascent that summer day past Connie to Mira, shame turning into exhilaration with the touch of her falling hair. He boosted himself out of the water and shivered uncontrollably in the hard moonlight. The siren whine again. Ben moved like an animal, on all fours, his nose close to the ground examining every spot of the low landing ledge, for this was the only place left. One rock seemed deliberately placed. He rolled it aside and felt the depression in which it had sat. His fingers grazed something man-made, plastic and paper, and he held the object up to the moonlight. He knew the orange EpiPen was Connie’s before he read the typed prescription that said Connie Villela on the wrap-around label. Covering the prescription was a note secured by a purple ribbon. He sat upright and placed the pen in the middle of his folded legs. He tugged off the ribbon and unfurled the note.

  Francesca thought she was touched by God.

  But we couldn’t prove it. And because of that, Connie died.

  We didn’t plan for Connie’s heart to stop forever. We didn’t plan for our hearts to be broken.

  Here’s what we learned: when you touch things, they can break.

  MARCH 2016

  The sludge of mud and pine needles gave way to baked earth as they entered the clearing where the slope flattened before dropping off. Everyone called it the field, but it looked more like a scorched battleground. Oak saplings stretched a few feet toward the sun, shedding brown leaves in the slight breeze. Patches of shaggy pines grew low, dwarfed by species or conditions or both. The girls paused to rest, smoke blooming from their mouths. Mira smelled moisture locked in rock, and it smelled clean, not like the other smell that sometimes rose from the quarry lake, like rotten eggs, a hot smell that would be yellow, were it visible. Mira wondered if it smelled better because it was nearly spring, and she had never been to the quarry any time but summer, and never alone.

  Francesca’s hair had escaped her ponytail and it fell wild across her shoulders. She raised her arms to the sky.

  “Do you feel as amazing as I feel?” she called.

  Mira opened her mouth to speak, but it was Connie’s voice that came.

  “I feel free!” Connie said, twirling, her face turned to the darkening sky. Connie giggled, leaning backward and spinning in circles. Mira turned, realizing Francesca had stepped behind her. She had ditched her coat, and her clavicle rose and fell above the collar of her blouse. “We’ve never come here alone before,” Francesca breathed. “It feels good. Don’t you think so, Mira?”

  Mira said nothing.

  Francesca stepped closer, the side of her white hand brushing Mira’s cheek. Mira stiffened.

  “Keep your faith in me, sister,” she said.

  Mira stepped back. A rush of wind tumbled toward them from the city below, and Connie crushed against Mira and giggled while Francesca stood tall, her hair blowing about, framing her face like a dark halo. Francesca feels everything too much, Mira thought, and pulled her own jacket tight around her.

  The afternoon grew purple.

  “It’s getting late,” Mira whispered. Her voice was hoarse and hot in her throat. No one seemed to hear her, and Mira wondered if she’d said it aloud.

  Francesca clapped. “Time to play! Hide-and-go-seek tag. I’m it!”

  Mira touched her throat. Her memories of hide-and-go-seek tag involved the neighborhood boys, sweaty and flushed, trying to corner and kiss them. Eventually she and Francesca had refused to play, though Connie was always up for a game. The only boy who hadn’t tried was Ben. He’d found Mira hiding behind the fence door with the black metal latch that, propped open by thick grass, formed a perfect pie wedge in which to hide. Ben had bounded up, thrown the door shut with a click, and crouched, staring at her, panting. He was supposed to yell “It!” Instead, he turned and ran away, toward Piggy wedged beneath th
e carriage of his Winnebago.

  Francesca covered her eyes. “One, two, three, four, five…”

  The girls shrieked and ran.

  “Mira!” Connie stabbed a finger toward a thatch of pines. “Hide!”

  Francesca flicked open one eye. “Nineteen, twenty!”

  Mira thought: run. She darted for the scrub and crouched behind its thickest parts, still visible to Francesca. Connie lay on her side behind an oak log.

  “Ready or not, here I come!” Francesca beelined for Connie. She scrambled from the log but was overtaken by her cousin, who slapped her on the back. Connie howled.

  “You’re it!” Francesca said.

  Connie turned and ran toward Mira. Mira blinked, for the Connie gunning for her looked younger, hair streaming, cheeks pink. And it was that gangly Connie run, the opposite of self-conscious, the way she’d moved in the years before she noticed boys. Frozen, Mira smiled despite herself.

  Connie was upon her.

  “You’re it,” Connie cried, dancing a victory jig. “Now you have to play! The party pooper has to play!”