A.D.A.: When she was around you, perhaps. What about when she was alone? Did you ever think of that?
E.S.: Sure, of course I did. But it’s not what you think. See, I have this theory about her. I think Lil really liked girls and didn’t know how to show it, even though I tried to be there for her. I’m very liberal that way, whatever floats your boat, you know, but I don’t think she was ready to say it, which is weird ’cause her parents were so cool. Anyway, I guess it was just easier having a crush on a TV star.
A.D.A: That’s all you think it was? A crush?
E.S.: Yeah. Why, what do you think?
A.D.A: I think—
MR. BRICKMAN: Objection! Move to strike.
A.D.A.: Were you aware that Miss Speck stalked Miss Harrison in the last few weeks before her death?
MR. BRICKMAN: Objection! Move to strike the word stalked from the transcript. There is absolutely no evidence of this.
A.D.A.: She was at the theatre three times a week.
MR. BRICKMAN: It was her job! … Off the record.
OFF THE RECORD CONVERSATION
A.D.A.: Miss Sharpe, did you have any interaction with Miss Speck in the week before Miss Harrison’s death? The week of your high school graduation?
E.S.: To be honest, Lil and I weren’t speaking then. I mean, she tried, but … I don’t know, and anyway, I just find it hard to imagine any of this. I’m telling you, she was a total putz. She couldn’t even keep her shoelaces tied.
A.D.A.: She used your name to get a job as an usher.
E.S.: I know.
A.D.A.: What if the police had come after you?
E.S.: Okay, no offense, but be serious! [Laughter] She only used my first name. There’s more than one Edie in New York. And we played the name game a lot. Besides, she never did anything wrong at the theatre. In the papers, they all said she was the nicest girl. And a really good usher.
A.D.A.: Why were you and Ms. Speck not speaking then?
E.S.: People grow apart, you know what I mean? I had a new boyfriend, was in heavy-duty therapy, stopped smoking dope, I don’t know.
A.D.A.: When did that happen?
E.S.: Senior year.
A.D.A.: After Los Angeles?
E.S.: Yes.
A.D.A.: What happened between the two of you in Los Angeles?
E.S.: Nothing happened. I mean, it’s like I really don’t remember. You know how sometimes you’ve got a place in your head but you’re not sure if you were really there or you dreamed it? That’s what I think about L.A.
A.D.A.: You did go to the set ofWorld Without End, didn’t you?
E.S.: Yeah, yeah.
A.D.A.: And nothing happened there?
E.S.: Nah, we just stood and watched them tape a scene. It was kind of boring.
A.D.A.: You watched Brooke Harrison tape a scene?
E.S.: Yeah, but to be honest, we were more interested in her boyfriend, John Strong. He was so much cooler. We couldn’t believe he was there. They must have had plans that day or something.
A.D.A.: And after the taping … what happened then?
E.S.: I don’t really remember. We were smoking a lot and we found a whole bunch of pills at the house we were staying at, so like I said, the entire thing is sort of a blur.
A.D.A.: Thank you, Miss Sharpe. We’ll finish up after lunch.
I throw down the deposition and push my fingers into my eyes, rubbing them furiously until they burn. I wish I could gouge them out and never have to read anything again. But it wouldn’t stop the voices. Edie. Everyone at the theatre. At school. They’re all protecting me. Because I’m a girl?
Removing my hands from my eyes, I see tiny circles of light, then a figure coming toward me … Edie? When I focus harder I see it’s Chandon. She comes by sometimes when I’m in here and we play Hangman. Her face is so drained she looks whiter than me. Her lower lip trembles, and she’s hyperventilating. I take her hand, and my stomach drops.
“Mimi’s dead,” she says, and wails at the top of her lungs. My body springs to attention. Chandon collapses next to me in a fit of tears.
“What?!” I grab her shoulders and shake her. “Chandon, what are you talking about? You mean Angel, right? Chandon!”
I say her name a few more times and beg her not to cry, but she can’t stop and I suddenly feel like a jerk for trying to make her. Mimi’s dead? Can’t be. It doesn’t make sense. And I don’t know what to do for Chandon. I hear myself saying words I’ve never said before, things like it’s okay and don’t worry, as I gently rock her in my arms. She smells like sweat and cooking oil, and I imagine her in the kitchen of a small apartment frying chicken cutlets. Hours later you can still sniff the scent in her hair when she’s watching TV.
“It’s okay, baby,” I say, and it’s not my voice I hear but Blair’s, the way she’d soothed and smothered me with caresses. The memory strikes me so vividly I feel it course through my body. I stroke Chandon’s hair, tell her everything’s going to be okay, even though it’s a lie. Her shoulders buckle beneath me, her breaths growing deeper and deeper, and I stay with her as if I were a blanket, our shoulders rising and falling together.
We pass a few minutes like this before she fidgets beneath me. I pull back. She pivots until we’re face-to-face, our arms loosely connected. “It was so fucked-up, Long Island,” she says, “so fucked-up.”
I rub her back with my left hand, ask what happened.
“She was coming around with her pail last night, and a bunch of Stella’s bitches caught her. Gave her a massive blanket party.”
“Stella!”
“No, no, don’t think that way … it wasn’t you. They thought she was messing with one of their girls or something. Anyway, she was all alone ’cause a bunch of us was in the fishbowl playing cards and we didn’t hear nothing …” Her shoulders start shaking again, and I grip her tighter. “It was the worst thing you ever seen. They stabbed her forty-eight times. She lost too much blood, and we were fucking playing cards!” She wails, and I can only hug her, while inside I’m churning. Forty-eight times! Girls aren’t supposed to do things like that.
“We were playing cards,” Chandon cries again and again. There was nobody around to protect Mimi. Someone would pay for this. If not now, then later. On the outside. Chandon promises she’ll get revenge, and I hold her.
A guard bursts into the library and breaks us apart. The girl on duty must have freaked out and called. He is a hulky man I’ve seen only a few times before. He shoves my wrists into a pair of cuffs and says it’s time to take me home. I try and resist. “Don’t fuck with me,” he says.
“Fuck you!”
He yanks my cuffed arms up my back, and I scream. It feels like he’s torn off my shoulders. Pain shoots between them.
“Don’t you do nothin’ crazy, Long Island!” Chandon shouts.
“She is fucking crazy, you don’t know that by now?” the guard says. He shoves me into a freestanding shelf. A few books tumble to the floor. “One more word out of you and you’re going back in the cage. You understand?”
I nod my head, and he shoves me toward the door. As he drags me out of the library, Chandon cries, and all I can think is, it should have been me. Why am I not dead yet?
We reach my cell and he throws me down on my bed. I’m wondering what’s coming next, what he’ll do to me. I wrap my arms around my pillow, just as I’d had them around Chandon’s body, and with the guard watching I squeeze as hard as I can. The sheet and lining rip. A big chunk of foam pops up like a piece of toast. The guard says I’m fucking crazy, and you know what happens to crazy girls inside. “Please,” I look at him, “I need your help.”
He moves closer to the bed. “Say it isn’t so.”
“I need to use the phone.”
His face contorts as if he can’t believe I’m asking what I’m asking.
My back throbs like it’s been stabbed forty-eight times.
“Please!” I beg.
A smile crosses his lips, and he say
s I’m lucky he doesn’t beat the shit out of me. Such a lucky girl, he teases. I don’t tell him that’s what they all say. He says maybe there’s something we can do to get me to the phone. I know what he wants, I’ve done it before, though not with this one. From where I sit on the bed it’s an easy reach for his hips. I put my hands around him and rub my face against his crotch. The material is course. My cheek bristles. He pretends he’s shocked, but I have other evidence. I unzip his pants and take him in my mouth. He is silent. Then, a final gasp like he’s stubbed his toe.
He turns around and wipes himself on my sheet before zipping up. Without a word, he cuffs me again. We walk silently to the telephone in the fishbowl. He removes the cuffs. “You got five minutes,” he says, and sits down in a folding chair where he can keep an eye on me. I remove a folded-up letter from my sock and punch the number on top into the telephone. Someone accepts my collect call and tells me to hold.
“Davina Moore,” comes a voice so smooth it makes me think of sleeping on satin sheets at Blair’s. So long ago.
“Ms. Moore, I need …” I stammer, and suddenly can’t breathe. The air won’t get through my nose and throat. Like I’m breathing through semen.
“Are you okay?” asks the voice so sweet I almost want to hang up. I don’t know where to go with it.
“I’m sorry, I’m bothering you.”
“Not at all. I contacted you first, remember. Tell me what’s going on, Lillian. Why are you calling me now?”
“Can you come here?”
“Are you looking for a new lawyer?”
“No … I mean, I don’t know what I’m … Are you a feminist?
The articles all say you’re a feminist.”
Through the phone I hear her chuckle. “Depends,” she says.
“Is that good or bad?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, that’s a start. I’ll come by tomorrow.”
“No! That’s no good … it’s no good!” My voice is so shaky I’m going to lose it with that guard staring at me and I can’t believe I just had his dick in my mouth, surely no feminist would approve, but Mimi’s dead and Chandon’s a mess and I have to do something.
“Did you hear me?” she says. “I’ll be there first thing.”
“No, please …”
“What is it? Has something happened to you?”
“I’ve been drinking bleach,” I say, but my words are gobbled up in a giant hiccup.
“You’re what?”
“I’m not supposed to be here.”
“Lillian,” she says, and it’s the way she says my name, whole, the complete opposite of Brickman’s syllabic contortion, that makes me feel like I’m melting into the milky air, and for the first time since I’ve been at Rikers, I cry. “Lillian, please, you have to try and tell me what’s going on.”
The guard stands up and slowly walks to the phone. “I can’t. He’s coming. He’s gonna hang up.” Leaning his arm on top of the pay phone, he says time’s up. I whimper into the phone. “Please, Davina!”
“Hang on,” she says. “I’ll be right there.”
He clicks his forefinger down on the metal tongue and smiles. Tears roll down my cheeks. He removes his finger and the dial tone kicks my eardrum. I hang up the phone and hold out my hands to be cuffed.
EVERY COUPLE OF DAYS I CHECKED IN WITH TABITHA to see if she needed me to work. It wasn’t as easy as it seemed that first night. She said she had a new pool of ushers. Apparently, some of your fans had gotten the idea I’d stumbled upon. They were a crafty bunch.
I managed to get in a couple of times the third week, arriving early to check for you in the stairwell. But you were never there, and after the show you ducked out early or left through the front door to avoid the scene in the alley. You needed your sleep since you had to be at the TV studio at dawn. You were exhausted. That day in the stairwell you could barely keep your eyes open. I thought you needed a vacation and wanted to take you to my house in Southampton, early in the week while Jack and Nancy were at work and the theatre was dark. I was worried about you, afraid you might collapse one night from exhaustion or sip too heavily from your flask and slur your lines. And you were literally pulling your hair out. That was so weird. I tried writing you a letter expressing my fears, but couldn’t find the words. Instead, I sketched scenes in my book with a few swatches of dialogue, then transferred the best ones to pieces of oak tag the way I’d seen them do at the ad agency. They were like public service announcements, only private. Between the two of us.
Next time I worked, I would slip the boards under your dressing room door, only I couldn’t figure out when that might be. There was the small matter of graduation. I didn’t want to go, but my grandparents had flown in for the ceremony, and Jack and Nancy were planning a little party afterwards. Nancy had asked me if I wanted to invite Edie, and I was sure she was tormenting me. She must have known we weren’t friends anymore; Edie hadn’t been over in a year. I told Nancy I’d get back to her, but never did. She never mentioned it again, either.
On the morning of my graduation from high school, I woke up and found the kitchen smelling like a campfire. My grandmother was toasting her English muffin. She liked to burn the bottoms and drip honey on top. Grandpa sat at the kitchen table in his pajamas and a felt cowboy hat, munching on a bowl of Fruit Loops. It was the only cereal he would eat, which was fitting, according to my father. Watching him pulp those red, green, and yellow Os between his dentures made me sad. I poured a cup of coffee and loaded it with sugar. “Is that all your having?” Grandma asked.
“Yeah. I can’t eat in the morning.”
“Have a little breakfast. An English muffin, some cereal.”
“I’m really not hungry.”
“Nobody in this house eats breakfast. I never heard of such a thing,” she said. “So, you ready for the big day?”
“I guess.”
Grandpa looked up from his cereal. “What’s this all about?”
“Lily’s graduating from high school.”
“Really.” He turned to me. “What grade are you in?”
“Twelfth.”
“The twelfth grade! How did that happen so fast?”
“She’s growing up,” Grandma said, then to me: “Are you nervous?”
“Not really.”
“It’s okay to be nervous,” she said, and I realized I was looking down at her thinning scalp. Either I’d grown or she’d shrunk or it was all a matter of perspective anyway.
She was so happy to be there for my graduation, I pretended it mattered. “Maybe I’m a little anxious.”
“Why are you anxious?” Grandpa said.
“I’m excited about the ceremony.”
“What ceremony?”
“Hog, it’s her high school graduation.”
“Really? What grade are you in?”
I looked at Grandma, her brow furrowed and eyelids heavy.
She nodded, as if it was okay to answer. “Twelfth,” I said.
“The twelfth grade! How did that happen so fast?”
“Believe me, Grandpa, it wasn’t that fast,” I said.
The toaster oven popped open with a loud ring. Grandma slid out both sides of her muffin with a fork, dropped them on a plate, and drizzled a tablespoon of honey on top of each piece, watching the sweet liquid fall as if its presence rooted her in the world. Something she could count on. She must have gone through so many jars of honey in her life. If you lined them up, they would probably connect New York to Scottsdale. She sat down at the counter and took a crunchy bite. “Mmmm, just the way I like it,” she said.
I put my coffee cup in the sink and said I was going up to change. As I walked upstairs I could hear Grandpa asking why I was changing and Grandma explaining that it was my graduation. I wondered what would happen if she answered differently every time. Would he still forget the questions?
In my room, I put on the new U2 album I’d been listening to nonstop. They took their name from an old U
.S. warplane, the kind we used to spy on the Russians, when we were still spying on Russians. But they were antiwar. It reminded me of something Edie had said: We could be both pacifists and revolutionaries. The lead singer was both, and his voice ached with fury, the best kind of protest. My grandfather had taught me that, years ago in Scottsdale, when he played me the song about the man who never returned.
I forced myself to the closet to figure out what to wear. Inspired by the music, I selected a pair of army pants cut just below the knee, shiny new combat boots, and a tie-dyed T-shirt. Mixing images of war and peace. At the last minute, I stuck my gun into the back seam of my underwear. They were Hanes briefs like my father’s. I liked the fit, and the waistband was thick enough to hold the gun in place. Suited up, I felt like a Sandinista or Contra, whoever the revolutionaries were. I’d just about finished when Nancy called my name. It was time to go. I grabbed my blue cap and gown, which happened to highlight the blue I’d dyed my white streak the week before to match the vests at the theatre.
Grandpa was still wearing his hat and pajama top, only it was tucked into a pair of gray slacks that looked like plastic. He saluted me as if I were in the army, and my stomach dropped. Did he know I was armed? No, I was just paranoid, unless there were spy cameras in my room. It was something Jack might do, then keep the control panel in his walk-in closet. He watched everything else on video, why not me? My thoughts were getting really strange. I made a mental note to grab a couple of Nancy’s Valium before we left the house. Grandpa beat a drumroll with his fingers on the counter, and I heard the sad-mad singer’s voice. Looking at the old guy wasn’t easy. If I were a different kind of girl, the kind who walked around unarmed, a target, I might have cried. Grandma Rose came in and kissed my forehead. “I thought maybe you’d wear a dress. You don’t have any dresses?” she asked, and I said no.
“I lost that battle years ago,” Nancy said. I hadn’t realized she was in the kitchen. She was so sneaky.
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