Pretending to Be Erica

by Michelle Painchaud

Merril sighs. “Okay, but call us tonight, yeah?”

  “For sure.” I glance back—James is already at the entrance. I jog to catch up with him. Taylor leans over the counter and grabs at James’s sleeve.

  “What did the populars say? You look fucking angry.”

  “Nothing. I’m fine,” he murmurs to her, and pushes out the doors.

  Taylor sees me and sneers. “You shoulda known better. Bringing him to your popular people get-together? That’s like sticking a fish on the ground and expecting it to run.”

  “I just—”

  “Yeah, you just. Didn’t for a second think about his feelings, did you? Selfish bitch.”

  I flinch and rush outside to gulp cold air. “James! Wait up!”

  He slows. “What?”

  “I’m sorry. Whatever Kerwin said to make you want to leave, I’m sorry for it.”

  I follow him to a beat-up Cadillac. It has to be a decade old, at least. The brown paint is worn dull, the inside scattered with music things—a guitar, empty packages of picks, and music books. He unlocks the car and reaches in for a half-finished bottle of soda. He takes a gulp and makes a face.

  “Warm. Disgusting.”

  “I’m sorry,” I try again.

  He shakes his head. “Don’t be. It’s me. You’re the only one who doesn’t know. Even transfer boy found out. I guess I should’ve expected it.”

  “Found out what?’

  “If I tell you”—he pours the soda on the cement, the splash loud—“I’ll look pathetic. That’s the last thing I want right now. I’m sort of cool in your eyes, right? At least one percent?” His voice is pleading. I nod. “One percent is good. Let’s keep it at that.”

  “No matter what you tell me—”

  He cuts me off. “You have secrets, right?”

  I freeze, my heart contracting painfully. Yes. A really, really big secret. I have secrets on top of my secrets in order to make my secret look less like a secret. I’m made of secrets.

  “I have a secret too.” He opens the car door. “Everybody in this town knows it, so it’s not much of a secret, but for four days, five days, a week, maybe, I want you to still see me as a pretty cool guy. You’ll find out eventually, and I’ll look like a moron. But for now just stay oblivious, okay?”

  You’ll find out my secret eventually too, James. But by then it’ll be too late.

  “Do you need a ride?” His offer breaks my silence.

  “If it’s okay with you. My house is in Jefferson’s Creek.”

  “Not too far, then. Enter the chariot of fire and grandeur.” He smirks and motions to the passenger seat. I slide in. The car rumbles to life, a massive beast waking from winter hibernation.

  “Sorry about the smell.” He reverses out of the parking spot. “Brought takeout Chinese home last night.”

  I sniff. “I don’t smell anything.”

  “I swear, I’m practically re-eating the beef broccoli every time I breathe in.”

  I laugh. He waits until we hit the freeway to turn music on. It doesn’t so much cover our silence as enhances it. It’s electronic—alternative and sparse with lyrics.

  “I thought you played piano?” I ask. “What’s with the guitar in the back?”

  He tenses.

  I let out a breath. “It’s so obvious when you want to say something that’s hard for you.” He says nothing. “Your shoulders get high, your arms get straighter, and your mouth curls down. Like this.” I make an ugly face. He glances at me and chuckles. There’s a silence the music helps fill.

  “Piano is the ultimate instrument. To my dad. Everything else is inferior,” James finally says.

  “But you like guitar.”

  “I’m in a band. Sort of.” He shakes his head. “Dad doesn’t know that.”

  “Do you play gigs?”

  “A guy I met on the Internet and I do collaborations. I play the guitar and piano; he does the electronic stuff.”

  “Let me guess—your band name is James and the Giant Peach.”

  “Close.” He smirks.

  “Giant Fig?”

  “I lied. No name yet. But Giant Fig is pretty interesting.”

  “Have you told your dad?”

  James sighs. “And give him a coronary? I don’t want to kill the guy. Telling him what I really want will just hurt him. I’ve learned that now.”

  He sounds so despondent, so resigned to his fate. He doesn’t want to do what his dad wants him to. Violet always wanted to do what Sal said. Conning. She likes it. But she likes this life of normalcy also. Telling Sal that would just hurt him, too.

  “I know this is a dangerous subject,” he starts. “But what kinds of music do you like?”

  I have to think up something quick. Sal played lots of Elvis and old music in the car.

  “You’re going to laugh,” I murmur.

  “I won’t. Honest to God.”

  “And you won’t hate me?”

  “I’m not a music Nazi.”

  “The Ink Spots. Billie Holiday.” I sigh. “Elvis. Janis Joplin. Bob Dylan. My dad—the guy who used to be my dad—loved all those older bands.”

  “Whoa, you covered at least three separate decades there.”

  “They’re all old to me,” I say with a huff.

  He laughs and switches lanes. “All right. So, favorite song?”

  “Ever?”

  He nods. I bite my lip and watch the just-budding trees flash by outside.

  “I don’t think I’ve found it yet.”

  His mouth twists with a smile I’ve never seen before. And I’ve seen every smile.

  “That’s the right answer.”

  6: Cheat It

  The desert stretches on forever, the lights of the Strip faded against the twilight sky. Bare fingertips of light hovering on the horizon are all that are left of the world’s luckiest place. The desert is pale sand, khaki and dry and spiny with the bones of dead things and cactuses—saviors of the thirsty and the masochistic.

  Ten-year-old Violet waits by the side of the road, her thumb out. Her braids are long and pale. It’s been two weeks since she slept in a real bed. Five days since she had a bath. Seven hours since she last ate. Sal paces the shoulder lane. Their stolen car is a smoking husk, having been driven until the gas ran out, over the sands and potholes of off-road Nevada until the police lost them. The bumps had been fun, but Violet’s tired now. She can’t show that though. Sal might get mad. She blinks back sleep and holds her thumb higher.

  “Let’s play the face game, Vi”—Sal looks to her—“on whoever picks us up.”

  She nods. The headlights of a truck cut the ribbon of cooling asphalt. At a distance they are two white fireflies, flickering in and out of the night. Embarrassed. Shy. They get more confident the closer they rumble, and Violet’s pupils shrink to pinpricks. The lights slow. Sal gathers Violet up and opens the truck’s door.

  “You headed to Dallas by any chance?”

  The driver smiles. “Yeah, hop on in. Car trouble?”

  “Damn thing just blew up. It’s been on its last legs for years now.” Sal sighs. “I’m George, by the way, and this here’s my daughter, Abigail.”

  The driver kicks the truck into gear. Sal is a natural at conversation—not distracting, and mildly stimulating. He asks what the trucker’s shipping (furniture), where he’s from (Salt Lake City), and what’s the longest he’s gone without sleep in this job (twenty-seven hours, though, legally, it’s supposed to be just fifteen).

  “We just got back from a funeral,” Sal says. Violet watches his face carefully, keeping an eye out for which muscles he uses to make his lies or truths convincing.

  “You twitched your corrugator supercilii,” she murmurs. Sal squeezes her hand—a good job.

  “We weren’t expecting the car to break like it
did, really,” he keeps on.

  “Depressor anguli oris,” the girl mutters again. Another hand squeeze.

  The truck driver looks at her. “Is she all right?”

  “A little Tourette’s. She’s on meds for it, but she still says strange things sometimes,” Sal lies, and smiles.

  Violet watches as he says it. “You gave it away with your zygomatic major. Too pinched.”

  “Those are some awfully big words for a girl your age.” The trucker laughs nervously.

  “How many kids do you have?” Violet asks. The trucker scratches his head, smiles, and shifts gears. The eighteen-wheeler gives a little stutter.

  “None.”

  His smile doesn’t crinkle his eyes. Violet picks up on it. “A flat orbicular oculi. You have a kid. Maybe one you don’t want to have. Or maybe you lost it. Did it die?”

  “That’s enough, Abigail,” Sal whispers. “Don’t push it.”

  The trucker goes quiet. Sal makes apologies, squeezes Violet’s hand hard to let her know she needs to be quiet.

  But she’s curious. “Did you love your kid?” she asks.

  The trucker pulls the brim of his hat down, uncomfortable.

  “Did you hug it? Did you ever get to kiss it? Was it a boy or a girl?”

  “Abigail, I’m warning you—” Sal begins.

  “How did it die?”

  The truck screeches to a stop. The trucker, so genial before, puts his face in his hands.

  “Get out.”

  “We’re sorry,” Sal says, scrambling for words. “She’s just so uncontrollable sometimes—”

  “I said get out.”

  “We don’t have any way to get back—”

  “We’re close to Dallas. Someone will pick you up. Get out.”

  Violet watches the trucker’s face—drawn, his muscles taut. He’s honest. Broken and honest. He cared about his child enough to break down at her prying. Would Sal ever break down if she died? Sal exhales and yanks Violet from the seat with him, watching the truck sputter exhaust as it drives away. Reality seeps in with the cold night air. Streetlamps are faint, the darkness heavy. Sal rolls his sleeves up calmly.

  “Sal, I didn’t mean to—”

  Terror. Cold terror grips her intestines and twists them around each other. Sal keeps rolling his sleeves, slowly, and finishes at the elbow. Takes his first step toward her.

  “No! I’m sorry! I won’t do it again! I just wanted to see—”

  The sting of a palm on her face. Everything condenses to those five points of white-hot acid on her skin. Stars shatter themselves in her eyes.

  Just once. It’s always just one hit. One hard, unforgiving warning.

  “When I say stop, you stop.”

  He pulls her by the arm into town. Miles and miles of cold air nipping at the red slap. It fades. Nothing too permanent. Sal is never that messy, that uncontrolled. At the first gas station he walks into, he rips off a disposable phone.

  The little girl watches him work, the sickly light of the gas station showing his bones—white on black on muscle on sunspots on death. Sal’s face is never angry. Even in the darkness, even when he hits her, he never shows his real emotion. The face game is useless on him. He hides everything too well. Or he just has nothing to show.

  After the discipline comes the apology. The worst part isn’t the pain—it’s the fact that he always tries to make up for it. To pretend he’s sorry.

  He comes out, beaming, a candy bar offered to her in his hand.

  Violet plays poker with Sal and only wins when he lets her.

  Red and blue chips in the pot.

  In a different world, Violet is a girl like Erica. Maybe not as rich as Erica, but just as well loved, by a mom and dad who are around and have jobs and a small but tidy house. Maybe that Violet’s had a few boyfriends—blushing, stolen glances, smoldering hearts, smoldering afternoons on a sunlit bed, exploring, hands, mouth, crooks of necks, crooked smiles.

  This one has only read cheap romance paperbacks out of boredom, desperation—there is very little to do in an RV park. She reads on a bench littered with beer cans and gets weird looks. A neighbor woman smoking, hanging lingerie to dry, sings some Dylan: “Get born, keep warm.”

  7: Give It

  Michael Anders, age forty. Labeled a child prodigy at the age of seven. Toured the world playing concert piano for various orchestras at ten. Got into Julliard at seventeen (same age as James is now) and won a string of major awards for composition. Married a dance major and had James.

  That’s what Google says. I twirl in my computer chair. Having a huge fancy desktop PC like the one Mrs. Silverman gave me is a new experience—Sal had a laptop on its last legs. I hold my breath and type James’s name. James, at the age of six, had also been labeled a prodigy. His first major recital was at age eight. He sat at the piano and didn’t move, just stared at the keys. Started shaking, trembling so bad that when he touched the keys they wobbled in a sour note. His father withdrew him from the concert piano scene. The media had a field day—famous young composer’s son, someone everyone pegged for a success, flubbed his recital.

  No wonder James hates reporters. There are dozens of articles on his “failure.” Some writers used it as a platform to point out how parents shouldn’t pressure their kids; others used it as an example showing that familial ties aren’t everything in the music biz. But all agreed that James had been pushed into something he wasn’t prepared for.

  His family must’ve been disappointed. Everyone must’ve been disappointed. He’d learned to cope with it by keeping to himself. But James wouldn’t have stuck with music through so much shit if he didn’t love it. There’s no doubt he loves it. He’s just probably not the kind of musician his dad wants him to be.

  I have to stop. Stop reading these things, stop looking on the Internet at Merril and Taylor and everyone else who’s talked to me. I’m doing what a con artist would do to potential contacts—scope out their backgrounds and figure out how they can help you. These are not resources. They are people. Potential friends. Friends I can’t keep.

  There’s a soft knock on my door.

  “Come in.”

  Marie pokes her head around. She’s bearing a sandwich and a glass of milk. “How’s a snack sound?”

  I nod.

  She puts both on my desk and looks at the scattered textbooks. “What are you studying?”

  I don’t need to study, but scribbling on paper and leaving said papers on my desk gives the illusion of a girl who tries hard.

  “Algebra.” I hold up the textbook, my arm drooping. “It’s so heavy, though.”

  “Your mother never stopped telling me how good you were with math. So small, but you loved to do lines and lines of addition and subtraction. You are so naturally gifted at it, just like your father.”

  Sal knew that too. Talked to Erica’s old tutors—yes, of course she had them almost from birth. It’s why he put the emphasis on math when teaching me, I suppose. Marie puts the plate down.

  “The sandwich is turkey.”

  “Thank you.” She looks like she wants to say something.

  I clear my throat. “Is there anything else?”

  Marie starts. “Oh, no, it’s just”—swallows hard—“my cousin lost a child.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “An accident on the subway. I thought to myself, ‘Marie, there is nothing worse than losing a child.’ I have two, grown up. I came here to work for your mother three years ago. I saw everything clearly. Losing a child may be hard. Losing a child and burying no body is harder. The unknown . . . it does things to the mind.”

  “Everybody needs closure,” I agree softly.

  Marie nods. “Closure. That’s it. Your mother had none. It is good the body still lives.” She pats my hand. “But if it hadn’t, I would pray for the pol
ice to find it and put your mother’s suffering to an end. A mother should hold her child in life, and in death, too.”

  I stare at the sandwich, my lungs burning.

  “Closure,” Marie whispers. She smiles and gets up. “Do you have any laundry?”

  “Just some shirts. I put them in the basket.”

  “I’ll do a load. Study hard and well.”

  “I will. Thank you for the snack.”

  She closes the door behind her. I wait until she walks down the hall to wrench my bathroom door open and dry heave into the toilet. Marie’s words made me want to scream it all—that I was a fake. That the body is still rotting out there. The body is still out there. Erica is out there somewhere. Her mother has false closure.

  That night, I mince through the night-fallen hall, the paintings glowing in the soft guide lights. Mrs. Silverman’s door is left open a crack. I make my way to her queen-size bed. Pillows are scattered on the floor. A forest of makeup bottles crowds her dresser. She’s a lump beneath the covers, pajamas silk and face smooth. Her wrists peek out—thin and weightless-looking, like a malnourished bird’s leg.

  Wake up. I need to tell you something.

  Nobody really likes the truth, sweets. Sal’s voice. They just like their version of it.

  “Erica?” She yawns and looks up at me. “Is something wrong?”

  Erica’s still out there.

  “I couldn’t sleep. My room feels too big.”

  “You can sleep with me if you want.”

  I hesitate. Sal and I never slept in the same bed, not even when I was little. But Mrs. Silverman seems to expect it. Do families sleep in the same bed without incident? A normal girl, a girl raised by a normal family like I’m pretending, wouldn’t be afraid of people in her bed. I slide under the warm covers and watch her back as she turns over. Breathe naturally. In, out. She won’t hurt you.

  She shifts, turns over to look at me. A spindly leg brushes against mine. My neck hairs stand on end, and I fight the instinct to leap out of the bed.

  Mrs. Silverman’s sleepy eyes look alarmed. “Are you all right? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”