by E. Lockhart
BL: I hope you’re not upset.
BL: I am upset for you.
BL: But bye bye Forrest! Immie, you can do way better.
BL: OMG La Jolla is so boring la la la why don’t you text me back? text me back you witch
Later that same day, email came in from Vivian herself, reporting that she was in love with Isaac Tupperman and she hoped Imogen would understand because there is no controlling the human heart.
—
In the days that followed, Jule set about living mostly as she thought Immie would. One morning she knocked on Maddie Chung’s door, carrying a latte from the café down the block. “I thought you might need a coffee.”
Maddie’s face lit up. Jule was invited in and met the wife, silver-haired and sleekly dressed, heading off to “run a corporation,” said Maddie. Jule asked if she could see the bookstore, and the owner drove her over there in a Volvo.
Maddie’s shop was small and untidy but comfortable. It sold a mix of used and new books. Jule bought two Victorian novels by writers she was not sure Immie had ever read: Gaskell and Hardy. Maddie recommended Heart of Darkness and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, plus a book by some guy called Goffman titled The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Jule bought those as well.
Other days, Jule went to exhibits Maddie suggested. Thinking of Imogen, Jule slowed her pace and let her mind wander.
Immie wouldn’t have paid close attention in any museum. She wouldn’t have tried to learn art history and memorize dates.
No, Immie would have walked lazily through, allowing the space to dictate her mood. She’d have stopped to appreciate beauty, to exist without striving.
So much of Immie was in Jule now. That was consolation.
THIRD WEEK OF SEPTEMBER, 2016
THE ISLAND OF CULEBRA, PUERTO RICO
One week before she moved to San Francisco, Jule was drunk on the island of Culebra. She had never been drunk before.
Culebra is an archipelago off the coast of Puerto Rico. On the main island, wild horses walk the roads. Expensive hotels line the coasts, but the town center doesn’t cater to tourists too much. The island is known for snorkeling, and a small American expat community exists there.
It was ten at night. The bar was a place Jule knew. It was open to the night air on one side. Dirty white fans whirred in the corners. The place was filled with Americans, some of them tourists but many of them expat regulars. The bartender didn’t card Jule. Almost nobody asked for ID in Culebra.
Tonight, Jule had ordered a Kahlúa and cream. A man she’d met before bellied up a couple of seats down the bar. He was a bearded white guy, maybe fifty-five. He wore a Hawaiian shirt, and his forehead was sunburnt. He spoke with a West Coast accent—Portland, he’d told Jule earlier. She didn’t know his name. With him was a woman of the same age. She had hair in messy gray curls. Her pink T-shirt showed cleavage, a little at odds with the print skirt and sandals she wore on her lower half. She started eating pretzel mix from a bowl on the bar.
Jule’s drink arrived. She drained it and asked for another. The couple was arguing.
“That whore with a heart of gold: she was my main problem,” said the woman in a Southern accent. Maybe Tennessee, maybe Alabama. Homey.
“It was just a movie,” the man answered.
“The perfect girlfriend is a whore that does ya for free. Disgusting.”
“I didn’t know it was gonna be that,” said the man. “I didn’t even know it bothered you till we started walking over here. Manuel said it was a good movie. We put it on; not a big deal.”
“It belittles half the population, Kenny.”
“I didn’t make you watch it. Besides, maybe it’s open-minded about whoring.” Kenny chuckled. “Like, we’re not supposed to think less of her because of her job.”
“You’re supposed to say sex work,” said the bartender, winking at them. “Not whoring.”
Jule finished her drink and asked for a third.
“It was just stuff exploding and a guy in a red suit,” Kenny said. “You’ve been hanging out with those book club friends too much. You always get sensitive after you hang out with them.”
“Oh, up yours,” the lady said, but she said it nicely. “You’re so jealous of my book club friends.”
Kenny noticed Jule looking at them. “Hey there,” he said, lifting his beer.
Jule felt the three Kahlúas wash over her like a sticky wave. She smiled at the lady. “That’s your wife,” she said thickly.
“I’m his girlfriend,” said the lady.
Jule nodded.
The evening began to tilt. Kenny and his lady, they were talking to her. Jule was laughing. They said she should eat some food.
She couldn’t find her mouth. The French fries were too salty.
Kenny and his lady were still talking movies. The lady hated the guy in the red suit.
Who was that guy? Did he have a raccoon? He was friends with a tree. No, a unicorn. The guy made of rocks was always sad. He was stuck being rocks all the time, so nobody loved him. Then there was the one who didn’t talk about who he was. He was old, but he had a good body and a metal skeleton. Wait, wait. There was a blue guy, too. And a naked woman. Two blue people. Suddenly Jule was on the floor of the bar.
She didn’t know how she got there. Her hands were sore. There was something wrong with her hands. Her mouth felt strange and sweet. So much Kahlúa.
“You staying at Del Mar, the resort up the road?” Kenny’s lady said to Jule.
Jule nodded.
“We should walk her back, Kenny,” the lady said. She was squatting on the floor by Jule. “That road’s not lit. She could wander in front of a car.”
Then they were outside. Kenny wasn’t anywhere near them. The lady was holding Jule’s arm. She walked Jule up the dark road to where the lights of the Del Mar shone.
“I need to tell you a story,” Jule said loudly. She had to say stuff to Kenny’s lady.
“Do you, now?” the lady said. “Watch your feet, there. It’s dark.”
“It’s a story about a girl,” said Jule. “No, a story about a boy. Long time ago. This boy, he pushed a girl he knew against a wall. Some other girl, not me.”
“Um-hm.”
Jule knew she wasn’t telling it the way it needed to be told, but she was telling it. Now she wouldn’t stop. “He had his ugly way with that girl in the alley behind the supermarket, in the night. Right? You know what I mean?”
“I think so.”
“This girl knew him from around town and went back there with him when he asked her to because he had a pretty face. This stupid girl didn’t know how to say no the right way. Not with her fists. Or maybe it didn’t matter what she said because he didn’t listen. Point is, this girl had no muscle. No skills. She had a plastic baggie full of milk and doughnuts.”
“Are you from the South, honey?” said Kenny’s lady. “I didn’t notice before. I’m from Tennessee. Where you from?”
“She didn’t tell any grown-ups what happened, but she told a couple friends in the ladies’ room. That was how I found out about it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“This boy, this same boy, he was walking home from a movie one night. Two years later. I was sixteen and, you know, I’m in shape. Did you know that about me? I’m in shape. So one night I went to the movies and I saw him. I saw the boy as I was going home. I shouldn’t have been on the street alone, most people woulda said. But I was. That boy shouldn’t have been alone, either.”
This whole idea suddenly seemed funny. Jule felt she needed to stop walking in order to laugh. She planted her feet and waited for the laugh to come. But it didn’t.
“I had a blue slush in my hand,” she went on, “the big kind you get at the movies. Strappy heels. It was summer. Do you like pretty shoes?”
“I have bunions,” said the lady. “Come on, let’s walk now.”
Jule walked. “I took off my shoes. And I called that boy’s name. I told him a fib about needi
ng to call a cab, there on the corner in the dark. I said my phone was dead and could he help me? He thought I was harmless. I had a shoe in one hand and a drink in the other. My second shoe was on the ground. He came over. I tossed the slush in his face left-handed, swung at him with the heel. It hit him in the temple.”
Jule waited for the lady to say something. But the lady was silent. She kept hold of Jule’s arm.
“He lunged for my waist, but I brought up my knee and caught him in the jaw. Then I swung the shoe again. I brought it right down on the top of his head. Soft spot.” It seemed important to explain exactly where the shoe had gone. “I hit him with the shoe, again and again.”
Jule stopped walking and forced the lady to look her in the face. It was very dark. She could only see the kind wrinkles around the lady’s eyes, but not the eyes themselves. “He lay with his mouth hanging open,” Jule said. “Blood out his nose. He looked dead, ma’am. He didn’t get up. I looked down the street. It was late. Not even a porch light was on. I couldn’t tell if he was dead. I picked up the slush cup and my shoes and I walked home.
“I took everything I had been wearing and put it all in a plastic grocery bag. In the morning I pretended like I was going to school.”
Jule dropped her hands to her sides. She suddenly felt tired and dizzy and empty.
“Was he dead?” Kenny’s lady asked.
“He wasn’t dead, ma’am,” Jule said slowly. “I searched for his name online. I searched every day for it and it never came up, except in a local paper, next to a photograph. He won a poetry contest.”
“For real?”
“He never reported what happened. That was the night I knew who I was,” Jule told Kenny’s lady. “I knew what I was capable of. Do you understand me, ma’am?”
“I’m glad he wasn’t dead, honey. I think you’re not used to drinking.”
“I never drink.”
“Listen. I had that thing happen to me, years back,” said the lady. “Like that girl you talked about. I don’t like to bring it up, but it’s true. I worked through it and I’m all right now, you hear?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“I thought you’d want to know that.”
Jule looked at the lady. She was a beautiful lady, and Kenny was a lucky man. “Do you know Kenny’s real name?” Jule asked. “What’s Kenny’s real name?”
“Let me take you to your room,” the lady said. “I should make sure you get there all right.”
“That was when I felt the hero inside me,” said Jule.
After that she was in her room and the world went black.
Jule woke up the next morning with blisters. Each hand had four pus-filled lumps on the palms, just below the fingers.
She lay in bed and looked at them. She reached for her jade ring on the bedside table. It wouldn’t slide on. Her fingers were too swollen.
She popped each blister and let the liquid soak into the soft white hotel sheet. The skin would callous over faster this way.
This isn’t a movie about a girl who breaks up with her undermining boyfriend, she thought. This isn’t a movie about a girl who breaks away from her controlling mother, either. It’s not about some great white hetero hero who loves a woman he needs to save or teams up with a lesser-powered woman in a skintight suit.
I am the center of the story now, Jule said to herself. I don’t have to weigh very little, wear very little, or have my teeth fixed.
I am the center.
As soon as she sat up, the gagging started. Jule rushed to the bathroom and pressed her blistered palms to the cool of the bathroom floor and heaved nothing into the toilet.
Nothing and more nothing. The gagging went on for what seemed like hours, her throat constricting and releasing. She pressed a washcloth to her face. It came back wet. She huddled around herself, shaking and heaving.
Finally, her breathing slowed.
Jule stood up. She made coffee and drank it. Then she opened Immie’s backpack.
There was Immie’s wallet. It had a million small pockets and a silver clasp. Inside were credit cards, receipts, a Martha’s Vineyard library card, a Vassar ID, a Vassar dining hall meal card, a Starbucks card, a health insurance card, and the key card for Immie’s hotel room. Six hundred and twelve dollars, in cash.
Jule opened Immie’s package, delivered yesterday. Inside were clothes FedExed from an online retailer. Four dresses, two shirts, a pair of jeans, a silk sweater. Each item was so expensive Jule put her hand over her mouth involuntarily when she looked at the packing sheet.
Immie’s room was next door. Jule had the key card now. The room was clean. In the bathroom, a grubby makeup bag sat on the counter. In it, Jule found Imogen’s passport, plus a surprising number of tubes and compacts, all disorganized. On the towel rack hung an ugly beige bra. There was a razor with a few stray hairs in it.
Jule took Immie’s passport and looked at the photograph next to her own face in the glass. The height difference was only an inch. The eye color was listed as green. Immie’s hair was lighter. Jule’s weight was significantly higher, but most of that was muscle and didn’t show under certain clothes.
She pulled the Vassar IDs from Immie’s wallet and looked at those. The meal card photo clearly showed Immie’s long neck and her triple-pierced ear. The student ID was smaller and blurrier. It didn’t show the ear. Jule could easily use that one.
She cut the meal card into tiny pieces with nail scissors and flushed the pieces down the toilet.
Then she plucked her eyebrows—thin, like Immie’s. She cut her bangs shorter with nail scissors. She found Immie’s collection of vintage engraved rings: the amethyst fox, the silhouette, the wooden carving of the duck, a sapphire one with a bumblebee, a silver elephant, a silver leaping rabbit, and a green jade frog. They wouldn’t fit on her swollen hands.
The next couple of days were spent going through Immie’s computer files. Jule used both rooms. They were air-conditioned. Sometimes she opened a terrace door to let the thick heat pour in over her. She ate chocolate chip pancakes and drank mango juice from room service.
Immie’s bank and investment accounts had a total of eight million dollars in them. Jule memorized numbers and passwords. Phone numbers and email addresses, too.
She learned Imogen’s looping signature from the passport and the inside flaps of Immie’s books. She copied other handwriting from a notepad Immie had, which was covered with doodles and shopping lists. After creating an electronic signature, she found the name of Immie’s family lawyer. She told him she (Immie) would be traveling a lot in the next year, going around the world. She wanted to make a will. The money would be left to a friend who didn’t have much, a friend who was an orphan and had lost her college scholarship: Julietta West Williams. She also left money to the North Shore Animal League and to the National Kidney Foundation.
It took a few days for the lawyer to take action, but he promised to arrange everything. No problem. Imogen Sokoloff was a legal adult.
She looked over Immie’s writing style in emails and on Instagram: the way she signed off, the way she wrote paragraphs, the expressions she used. She closed all Immie’s social media accounts. They were dormant anyhow. She untagged Immie from as many photographs as possible. She made sure all of Immie’s credit cards auto-paid from Immie’s bank accounts. She reset passwords using Immie’s email.
She read the local Culebra paper for news, but there was nothing.
Jule bought hair color in a grocery store and streaked it on carefully with a toothbrush. She practiced smiling without showing her teeth. She had a bitter pain up one side of her neck that wouldn’t leave.
Finally, the lawyer emailed a template will. Jule printed it out at the business office of the hotel. She put the papers in her suitcase and decided she’d waited long enough. She bought a ticket to San Francisco under Imogen’s name. She checked out of the hotel for the two of them.
SECOND WEEK OF SEPTEMBER, 2016
CULEBRA, PUERTO RICO
“I came here with my friend Bitsy Cohan’s family when we were twelve,” Immie said, gesturing at the island around them. “Bitsy had her jaw wired shut after a bike accident. I remember she just drank virgin daiquiris all day. No food. One morning we got a boat over to this tiny island called Culebrita. It had black volcanic rock like nothing I ever saw before. And we snorkeled, but Bitsy’s jaw caused snorkel problems, so she was very cranky.”
“I had my jaw wired shut once,” said Jule. It was true, but as soon as she said it, she wished she hadn’t. It wasn’t a funny story.
“What happened? Did you fall off a motorbike belonging to one of your Stanford boyfriends? Or did the evil coach of your track team put a hit out on you?”
“It was a locker room fight,” Jule lied.
“Another one?” Immie looked ever so slightly disappointed.
“Well, we were naked,” Jule said, to amuse her.
“Get out.”
“After track practice, senior year of high school. Full-on naked battle, in the showers, three against one.”
“Like a prison porno movie.”
“Not as sexy. They broke my bloody jaw.”
“Horses,” said the driver, pointing, and sure enough there were. A group of three wild horses with sweetly shaggy coats stood in the middle of the road. The driver honked.
“Don’t honk at them!” said Imogen.
“They’re not scared,” said the driver. “Look.” He honked again and the horses moved slowly out of the way, only mildly annoyed.
“You like animals better than people,” said Jule.
“People are assholes, as the story you just told completely proves.” Imogen took a packet of tissues from her bag and used one to wipe her forehead. “When have you ever seen a horse be an asshole? Or a cow? They never are.”
The driver spoke from the front of the car. “Snakes are assholes.”