Henry’s got a van. We’ll need that. And he’ll be dedicated. Sure, there might be some complications. But what’s life without a little drama, right?
Tess Kahle: She’s the one who paints the carnivorous plants. Huge canvases of these sexy as hell, pussy-lipped, dripping Georgia O’Keeffe–style flowers swallowing people whole, like fucking boa constrictors. They give some guys instant hard-ons. I’d like to hang one above my bed and fuck someone all night while looking up at one of those paintings. Tess is building a scaled-down sculpture of one of those plants in class. She’s using sheets of Plexiglas, PVC pipe, and plastic soda bottles. Instead of one person, she’s got the plant swallowing a whole series of Ken dolls—the plastic is a bitch to work with, but I admire her for trying it. She knows how to stretch her limits.
Tess closes the journal, turns off the flashlight, and sits in the dark. Holding the book on her lap, she draws her knees to her chest, wraps her arms around them, and begins to rock, Suz’s book at her very center.
She can’t help but feel a twinge of pride to think that Suz had watched her, handpicked her for the group. She had once been good enough, intense enough, to catch the eye of someone like Suz.
How did she stray so far from who she once was? What happened to the girl who made those paintings? The girl with guts. The girl who knew what was sexy, how to push all the boundaries.
She wants so badly to be that girl again. To feel alive. She reaches down and touches the journal. DISMANTLEMENT = FREEDOM in raised nail polish letters. Then, she pushes the journal aside and touches herself. There. Fingers slipping under the waist-band of her pants, under the boring old-lady panties she buys in four-packs at Wal-Mart. Closing her eyes, she pictures the flowers she used to paint. But it’s no good. She tries something else. A dark, mysterious man. Still nothing. She switches fantasies like clicking through a child’s plastic viewfinder. Then, she goes back to the flower paintings. She becomes the painting hung above Suz’s bed, suspended from the watermarked ceiling of her Sexton dorm room, and she watches Suz watching her. She watches as Suz brings a girl into bed. A long-limbed, faceless girl. Winnie, maybe, before she was Winnie.
I’d like to hang one above my bed and fuck someone all night…
Suz and the girl move as if their bodies are liquid. Symbiosis, Tess thinks, though it doesn’t make sense. But neither does being a painting. Symbiosis. Bodies entwined. It’s all open mouths and sticky skin. Pistil and stamen. Pollen in the air. Moist nectar.
Suz is moaning, screaming, digging her nails into the other girl’s back, but all the while, she keeps her eyes locked on the painting, on Tess, who moans right back, satisfied at last.
Chapter 21
HENRY STAGGERS DOWN THE path. Trips on tree roots. He brought a flashlight, but the batteries are dead. He’s feeling his way. He used to know it by heart.
The path opens up on the beach, which is really just a tiny patch of sand and mud with a wide, flat rock in the center. The sacrificial stone, Suz used to call it. She’d lie across it naked sometimes, sunning herself like a stranded mermaid.
He sees her and his breath catches in his throat, filling it. When he opens his mouth, he lets out a croak like a bullfrog.
She’s floating out in the water. Facedown. Dead-man’s float.
“Suz!” he croak-shouts. His heart jackhammers in his chest, making his whole body vibrate.
What if time is not a linear thing? he wonders. What if it loops and circles; what if we can go back?
Is this what he has done—gone back to the night Suz died?
And now, will he be given the chance to save her?
He’s standing at the water’s edge, trying to will the courage to dive. She hasn’t moved. She’s just floating there, her pale blouse billowing in the water around her like a phosphorescent jellyfish.
Then, just as he’s about to dive, she lifts her face, folds her body so that she’s upright, treading water.
“Swim with me, Henry.”
“You’re dead.”
“Am I?”
I checked you for a pulse. I filled your clothing with stones.
“They never found a body,” she says.
Impossible, he thinks. He was there. He saw what happened.
“Come swim with me,” she calls, and suddenly, it doesn’t matter to him if she’s dead or not. It doesn’t matter that he’s terrified of the water. He leaves his clothes on and walks out into the lake, toward her.
The lake envelops him. The water is warm, but still he shivers. Shivers like a man sure he is walking toward his own death. He should, he thinks, put up a fight. But what’s the use?
Suz is laughing, teasing, calling his name. Henry, Henry, Henry. Siren song.
He’s up to his chest now, ankle deep in muck, and she’s swimming wide circles around him.
“You’re dead,” he repeats.
“Am I?” she asks. She swims in behind him, wraps her arms around his waist. Breaths on his neck. Hot dragon breath. He’s trembling harder now.
“Do you still love me?” she whispers.
Love me. Love me not. Love me.
Should he answer her question with a question?
He remembers the night she burned her wooden man, how as he watched her face all lit up with flames, love hit him like a punch in the solar plexus. He stayed up all night writing her a letter to try to explain his feelings, but the next day, when he sneaked into her studio, he had the courage only to leave a simple, unsigned message: I love you, Suz.
“Yes,” he gasps. He could never play games with Suz. She was the one person he’d always been honest with. Too honest, maybe.
“Best of all?” she asks.
“Best of all.” Yes, it’s true. What a relief to say it out loud.
He starts to spin around, desperate to get his hands on her, and she stops him. “Close your eyes, Henry.”
He does. He’ll do anything she asks.
“Close them tight and make a wish, babycakes,” she says.
A wish. But isn’t this the one and only thing he would ever wish for? To have her back again?
He doesn’t care that he watched her die ten years ago. He’s swimming with a ghost and he doesn’t care. If this means he’s dead too, then he welcomes it. Dear God, yes. He opens his eyes, reaches for her, gets only her hair, which he tugs on gently, trying to turn her around. If he can just kiss her, put his lips against hers and taste her one more time…
“Suz,” he breathes.
Her hair comes off in his hands. She turns to face him, her face no longer gentle and seductive, but mocking.
This is not Suz.
It’s Winnie.
Chapter 22
THIS IS HOW IT began. A series of seemingly random events: a road trip, someone’s alarm didn’t go off, a lost set of car keys, some killer Thai weed pulled from a pack of Drum tobacco. But now, reading the journal here in Henry’s studio, Tess wonders how random any of it really was.
It all started with a trip to Boston to see a modern-sculpture exhibit. Berussi’s entire class was going. Henry offered to drive a group down in his orange Dodge van, which Suz called “the Love Machine.”
“Bet you get a lot of action in the Love Machine, Henry! Try to tell me you haven’t got some nasty old mattress back there!”
Suz said she’d ride with him. Then, under her name on the sign-up sheet, she added the names of Tess and Val. Spencer, Val’s boyfriend, wrote down his own name.
But when they all met in the parking lot at six A.M., there was no Spencer. “I’ll go get him,” Val said.
“Nah, you stay here,” Suz said, volunteering to run to the community center to call him.
“Dude who answered said he was sick and we should go on without him,” Suz reported when she got back to the van. Only later would they learn that Spencer wasn’t sick. He simply overslept because someone had pulled all the insides out of his alarm clock.
But it didn’t matter then. What mattered was that Spencer ha
dn’t been there in the beginning. He wasn’t one of the chosen.
It was a quiet ride at first. Suz sat in front, next to Henry, and kept flipping through the radio stations, looking for songs she could stand.
Tess closed her eyes in the backseat, trying to sleep. She kept squinting at the back of Henry’s head, wondering what it would be like to touch him there, to run her fingers through his hair. Val sat beside her, hunched over her notebook, scribbling away, hiding behind her hair.
“What are you writing, babycakes?” Suz asked.
Val shrugged her shoulders. “Nothing much.”
Suz laughed. “I really doubt that,” she said.
Then, just before they were out of Vermont, Suz announced, “I have to pee,” and asked Henry to get off at the next exit and look for a gas station. They found a tiny Texaco out in the middle of nowhere. The bathroom was out back and Suz had to get the key from the pimply-faced teenager behind the counter.
Henry and Tess went in for coffee and snacks: two stale crullers and a package of Gummi worms. Val stood outside smoking, insisting she didn’t want anything to eat or drink.
“She seems a little lost without Spencer, huh?” Henry said to Tess when they were by the register. Tess shrugged. She thought Val seemed a little lost all the time, no matter who she was with.
When they all met back at the van, Henry couldn’t find the keys.
“I coulda sworn I left them in the ignition,” he said. He searched his pockets. The others looked all over the parking lot, in the store. No keys.
“It just doesn’t make sense,” Tess complained. “They couldn’t have just disappeared into thin air.”
“We could hot-wire it,” Val suggested.
Henry laughed. “Right. And who knows how to do that?”
Val looked at Suz. “I figured Suz might.”
Suz shook her head. “Sorry to disappoint, babycakes, but I guess my limitless talents have a limit after all.”
“Do you have a spare set?” Tess asked.
“Back at the dorm,” Henry answered.
It took them ten minutes to search for enough change to call Henry’s roommate, Isaac, on the pay phone. Isaac wasn’t there. He was off campus at his girlfriend’s, whose phone had been turned off because she didn’t pay the bill.
“Jesus!” Tess moaned as she stood next to Henry, listening to his end of the conversation.
Henry left a lengthy message at the dorm, giving the name of the gas station, the town they were in, the exit number, and the location of the spare keys. “Tell him I’ll give him a hundred bucks. My firstborn. Whatever it takes for him to get those keys down here,” Henry said to the kid who answered the phone.
“We could hitchhike,” Val suggested after Henry hung up.
“No one’s gonna pick four of us up,” Tess said, already imagining the horror of being separated from the others, alone in some serial killer’s car.
“Tess is right,” Suz said. “I say we stay put and wait for Isaac to rescue us. Besides,” she said, crossing the parking lot to the grassy slope behind the gas station, “It’s kind of pretty here. We’ve got provisions. A bathroom. And this…” She pulled an enormous joint out of her pouch of Drum.
Henry, Gummi worms, and marijuana—Tess couldn’t possibly ask for more. “I vote for staying,” Tess said, plunking herself down on the hillside.
They formed a rough circle in the dead brown grass and Suz lit the joint. It was early December, but freakishly warm. Tess’s knee was pressed against Henry’s, and from time to time, she reached over to take a Gummi worm from the open package on his lap. When they were good and high, weaving fallen brown oak leaves into their hair, whistling through grass blades, and all secretly hoping Isaac would never show up, Suz said, “Do you want to hear something that will change your lives forever?”
Tess held her breath expectantly, looked over at Henry, whose eyes were glistening, all lit up and locked on Suz.
“It’s something I realized that night, when I burned my sculpture.”
They each nodded, drawing in closer, as if Suz herself were the fire this time and they all wanted to get warm.
“Art, true art, isn’t about putting marks on paper or canvas. It’s not about building sculptures. It’s about tearing it all the fuck down.”
Suz had mastered this way of talking, this beautiful ebb and flow of words that drew Tess in, trapped her somehow, made her never want to leave.
“Think about it,” she went on. “Destruction is the beginning of all creativity. Without it, there can be no transformation. No rebirth. It’s the most powerful force there is.”
Tess nodded vigorously. The whole thing made perfect sense. Tess felt as if her whole concept of not only art, but the world itself, was being cracked wide open right then and there by this girl in black leggings and combat boots.
Suz was beautiful, but not in a magazine-model kind of way. Her teeth were a little crooked, her nose a bit too small for her face, but these things made her more stunning somehow. The thing that drew them to her was the thing that had made all of them come to Sexton in the first place: they were all outsiders, people on the fringe. And no one, it seemed, understood this better than Suz. She turned her difference into a source of power, power that radiated from her, humming, a live thing that sent sparks out to anyone who listened.
When Suz had finished describing her epiphany, her vision for a group of renegade artists, Compassionate Dismantlers, she had them all—hook, line, and sinker.
“So who would be in this group?” Henry asked.
Suz smiled, licked her lips, looked at each of them in turn. “You. All of you.”
“Just us?” Tess asked, her heart beating a little fast at the thought that she was one of the chosen.
Suz nodded. “It needs to start small. Be people who are committed. People we can all trust. We’re going to be doing some seriously crazy shit—breaking and entering, fucking stuff up. The group needs to be made up of people who can keep secrets.”
Henry nodded. “I can keep a secret.”
“So you’re in, then?” Suz asked.
“I’m in.”
“Me too,” said Tess, looking at Henry when she said it.
They all looked at Val.
“Val here,” Suz said, leaning over to brush the hair back away from Val’s bloodshot eyes, which were focused on the brown grass, “she’s a walking secret. A born Dismantler if I ever saw one.”
Val looked up at Suz, smiled shyly.
“So what about it, babycakes? Are you ready to meet your destiny head-on? To set the whole motherfucking world on fire?”
Val nodded.
“Say it,” Suz said. “Say you’re going to set the motherfucking world on fire.”
Val stood up, cupped her hands over her mouth, and shouted down the hill, to the valley below, “I, Valerie Delmarco, am going to set the motherfucking world on fire!”
Suz laughed. “Beautiful,” she said. “Now we’ve got our first mission to plan.”
Chapter 23
SHE LOWERED THE RAZOR blade, traced the surface of her skin gently, a soft, wanting caress, then, not being able to hold back another second, pushed the blade into her left forearm. Relief so sweet she let out a little moan.
The cut she made was short, not too deep. Just right. Perfect. She raised the blade, let herself do it again, another cut perpendicular to the first. No need to hurry. She could savor each luscious second. The others had gone swimming. She told them she was tired and needed a nap.
“What the fuck is this? What the fuck are you doing?” Suz swept back the makeshift curtain surrounding their bed. “Give me the razor!”
“Suz, I…What are you doing back?”
“Just hand me the fucking razor blade. Now!”
Mutely, Winnie passed the blade to her and watched as Suz left to throw it away. When Suz came back through the curtain, she was in tears.
“I thought we were done with all this shit,” she said.
“Why?” Suz asked, but Winnie could not answer. Suz took hold of Winnie’s arm, studying the cuts the way a doctor or scientist might. She kissed them lightly, then poked the tip of her tongue out and licked away the blood. “I love you,” Suz said, and Winnie pulled Suz’s face up to kiss her. Winnie tasted her own blood on Suz’s lips, salty and metallic, like a lucky penny.
“THE WAY I SEE it, the cutting is all Spencer’s fault,” Suz said to Winnie later, as they sat naked in the little tent room they’d created with tapestry walls. Suz touched her lighter to the metal bowl of the bong she’d made from the plastic honey bear, took a hit from the pointed spout of his cap. “And the others. The whole string of fucked-up boys who treated you like a little-girl sex toy.” She passed the bong to Winnie, then ran her fingers gently over Winnie’s scars, which tingled with Suz’s touch.
“Spencer put you in a box. Took away your very personhood. Invalidated your feelings. So of course you cut. You cut to feel something real.”
Suz had part of it right. The part about cutting to feel. But she was wrong to blame Spencer or any of the other boys Winnie had been with. It wasn’t about them.
After Suz was gone, Winnie started cutting again. Not often. Just when she needed to feel something. After Suz died, Winnie lived inside a void, a quiet vacuum in which no sound, no touch could penetrate. She felt nothing. Only when she took out the blade and drew it over her skin, forming neat little lines in rows along her arms and thighs, crisscrossing the old scars, only then did she remember what love was like.
Last Friday, her stepmother forwarded the postcard to her. To understand the nature of a thing, it must be taken apart.
Interesting. Very interesting.
Isn’t it just, babycakes?
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