by TE Carter
“Yeah. Okay,” I said.
“Pick you up at eight?”
“Um … I mean, I’m going to be out. Can I just meet you there?” He’d dropped me off at school after that day by the river and now, I realized he didn’t know where I lived. I realized I didn’t want him to. I didn’t want him to come to my house. Didn’t want him to see the way we’d forgotten to take down the screens and how they’d torn in the winter. Or how my dad had gotten the Christmas lights stuck in the gutters, so they were still hanging there. I didn’t want Caleb to know these things about me.
“All right, Elusive Ellie,” he said. “Then give me your phone.”
“Why?”
He held out his hand, waiting. “So I can put my number in it. And you can call me this time.”
“You can call me, too,” I said. I handed him my phone and he programmed his number in.
“You’re cute. I’ll see you around. Saturday. Don’t forget,” he said, giving back my phone.
I’d never missed having a mother. Not until Caleb. I’d had my dad and Fred and there were the few kids I talked to at school or church on Sundays. Besides, I didn’t have much to compare my life to, so I didn’t know to miss her.
The characters from books and movies and TV weren’t like me. Some had moms and some didn’t, but their stories weren’t like mine. They didn’t spend five nights a week making themselves macaroni and cheese from a box. Their lives were interesting and mine was … mine.
I sometimes thought being around Kate was like having a mom. She told me how to wear my hair and what to notice when people said things. She told me people lie. That’s something a mom might have told me.
After Caleb, I started to wish my mom had stayed. Not that my dad had been the one who’d left, but that she’d been there. I wished for someone who could have explained what I felt with him. Could have told me about love and sex and all the things I needed to navigate alone.
Wishes grow inside of you. They attach themselves to your bones and make you ache when you try to ignore them. I hate everything about wishing. I hate how I look back at the moments that made me. I hate remembering, and I hate wishing it had been different. There were so many yeses that should have been nos and so many nos that should have been inferred.
A girl could drive herself crazy reliving the minutes she wishes hadn’t happened, the things she needs to take back.
chapter ten
He’s done with Gretchen now. Her smile was lost with the other parts of her he tore away. She’s shaking as she tries to put herself back together.
The lightbulb flickers; it’s dying.
When I was really little, when Dad was still at the factory, I’d been home with Mrs. Otis, the woman who lived down the street. I was sitting in her kitchen, trying to color. She’d decided to watch something on TV. It was either a soap opera or some police show; I don’t know what it was, but I know I wasn’t interested. It was something for old people.
Overhead, the light kept coming in and out. I stared up at it, watching it fight. Watching it gasp for life. Even light wants to live. Even light feels the heaviness of darkness when it’s time.
The door opens, scraping the carpet. It’s worn through. Stained. Brown like the walls.
Poor Gretchen. She thinks it’s over.
“We need a new lightbulb,” he says.
“So get one.”
Gretchen watches them. They’re a contrast; for all the violence, one has clean hands. The other … he likes the way they cry. He likes watching them register it. He doesn’t pretend here.
I won’t give them their names. They don’t deserve names. They don’t deserve to be someone.
“There aren’t any upstairs. I’ll have to buy one.”
To listen to the mundane, to hear them talk of lightbulbs while Gretchen watches, while she tries to figure out what comes next, it can make a person sick.
“So buy one,” he says. The other one shrugs and leaves. He’s done here now anyway.
The new one closes the door. Gretchen starts to cry.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“Fuck you,” she says again, but it’s quiet this time.
He laughs.
As always, I close my eyes, but it’s never enough. The sound gets through. The memories get through.
There are things we know and then there are things we wish we didn’t.
I tell myself that the way this happens, that it can happen, is because people prefer not to know. Our town needs what it needs, and there are sacrifices. It’s only girls.
I can’t hate people like I should, though. There’s too much good left. It’s the good that keeps me sane.
There is still music and there are paintings and snowstorms and backyard ice-skating and Christmas trees and then there’s pizza and fairy tales and tulips and the way the sand on the beach squishes between your toes. I know those aren’t all because of people, but we share these things because they’re good. I think of those things and I try not to hear her crying. Try not to remember the carpet. How it burned my knees.
It’s so cold here. The walls outside don’t keep the chill from the room.
I want to be warm again. I want to curl up in bed with my dog and sip on soup while I pretend to be sick and my dad is off from work and my biggest fear is about finding a hypotenuse.
I want to live where there’s good.
I want to live.
chapter eleven
I didn’t tell Kate about Caleb until the second time he talked to me. It’s like I knew it might not last. But after he asked me to Gina Lynn’s party, I went to Kate.
I hadn’t seen her much since school started. We’d spent two months in the summer together. Mostly we went to the mall and she gave me directions for fading until no one made fun of me and then we went to her house and fell asleep on chairs in the backyard. We barely talked. I don’t know what she got from spending time with me, but she was there for me and that was what I needed.
And now I needed her again. I went to her house and stood on her porch. When she opened the door, I told her I needed to be better than just enough now. I needed to be pretty.
We were in her room and I gave her the full rundown of the one day I’d had with Caleb. There wasn’t much to tell, but I wanted her to know because if she knew, she could make me the right kind of girl.
“What kind of people remake other people’s memories?” Kate asked, as she pushed a pile of clothes off her desk chair and patted the seat. “They just take these people’s houses and try to pretend nothing ever happened? Like those people didn’t exist? They’re just erasing people.”
“I don’t know. It’s weird, isn’t it?”
She sighed. “This whole damn town is weird. Sit still.” My hair needed to be fixed first. She grabbed her scissors and hacked off the moldy bits. The result was an asymmetrical mess, but at least I didn’t look like a salad topping. “Is he nice at least?”
“I think so?” We’d only spoken the two times, unless you counted a rogue comment the first week of school.
“You don’t know?” she asked, and she sat down across from me, pushing my bangs from my face.
“Not really. I like him, but I don’t really know him. Do you think I’m being stupid?”
“What do you like about him?”
I leaned back in the chair and tried to answer her. I couldn’t explain what I liked, but maybe she could help me find the words. Just like she helped me find the girl they wanted. “He’s confident. I like that he’s so sure of himself.”
“I knew Noah, Caleb’s brother. The older one. What is he? A senior now?”
I nodded. “Was he nice?”
Kate shook her head. “No, but he had that same confidence. I never really understood it. Girls adored him. He was … something. There was something about him.”
“Good something?” I asked.
“I don’t have time to take you to the mall before tomorrow,” she said, not answering me. “
Do you want to borrow something?”
“Will it fit?”
“Stop it,” she said. “We’re the same size.”
I looked at her as she got up and went over to her closet to search for clothes. My dad couldn’t afford to keep dressing me anyway, but I didn’t want to tell her that.
We weren’t the same size. Not really. We may have weighed the same and we were around the same height, but Kate’s body was put together like it should have been. Mine always felt accidental. Some parts were too big and others too small and clothes either clung to my chest or hung on my hips because of it.
“I think Caleb has the same something,” I told her. “I can’t explain it. But I really want him to like me.”
“He’s not special. There are plenty of guys. If he doesn’t like you, Ellie, it’s not you, okay?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Because I didn’t. I couldn’t speak to what it was. Outside of physical responses because he invaded my space so easily.
Kate shrugged, flipping through hangers. “Look, people liked Noah. I never saw it. But there was always a group of girls who thought he was the reason they existed. Caleb wasn’t really on my radar, but I can imagine it’s partly the same thing. I don’t know what it is about them.”
I got up to help her, but she shooed me back to the chair, carrying a pile of clothes. “There are a lot of stories about the Brewards, though. Just be careful, okay?”
“What kind of stories?”
“You’re not…” She paused. “You remember when I asked this summer? If there was a guy?”
“Yeah.”
“You said this was for you,” she said, tossing the clothes onto her bed and sitting down again. Waiting for me to start going through them. “You said there wasn’t a guy.”
“There was Jeremy. He just wasn’t the reason,” I reminded her.
“Have you ever had a boyfriend?” she asked.
I looked down at my shoes and shook my head.
“Just be careful. Guys like Noah and Caleb are going to have very different expectations,” she said.
“You mean about sex and stuff?”
“Yeah, and stuff.”
Kate’s room looked like mine. Somewhat. Except all her magazines and posters and ideas weren’t of the people she wanted to be but of the ones she felt like she was. It was a subtle difference, but she wasn’t borrowing from other people’s lives. She just lived her own. I think that’s why I liked her. She let me borrow from her. Not just her clothes, but with Kate, I could borrow what it was like to be good enough.
Maybe that’s what I liked about Caleb, too. That day, in the house, was borrowed. I sat in a borrowed house, making borrowed memories with a borrowed boy. He’d said we were only pretending that day, but I was always pretending.
“Try these on,” Kate said, picking up a pair of jeans.
“You don’t have to let me borrow these.”
“I don’t need them. Besides, I’m reinventing myself. You should take them. It’ll give me a reason to start over. I can buy myself a new wardrobe, too. We’ll both be entirely new people by the time summer comes around again.”
Can you call someone a friend when they don’t know a thing about you? And when you don’t understand them, either?
Kate and I shared nothing except proximity, but she was the closest thing I had to a friend. There’d been a few kids I talked to at Saint Elizabeth’s. They’d been there at school when no one else had been, but not beyond that. And after we went to different high schools, they hadn’t stayed in touch. They forgot, because life went forward and I was part of them before.
Forgetting is the most human activity we have.
I tried on the clothes, even though Kate had stopped paying attention. She stared at the ceiling while I tried to show them off.
“I need out of this place,” she said. I stood in front of her in her clothes, but she wasn’t looking. She wasn’t talking to me.
I didn’t say anything. I never said anything. I just kept trying on clothes.
I have so many memories of moments like this. Not just with Kate. My memories are full of times when I quietly functioned, as if I was nothing but a part of the scenery.
Kate wasn’t watching me. She’d said she wanted to leave Hollow Oaks. And I didn’t know what to say or how to help. I didn’t ask questions, either, because I was worried about Caleb and my clothes and everything I wanted. Everything I needed from Kate. Not what she needed in return.
“I like this one. Do you think he’ll notice me in this?” I asked. I don’t even remember what the outfit looked like. I didn’t like it more than the others; I wanted to change the subject because I didn’t know what else to do.
“Yeah, you look good,” she said, even though she still wasn’t looking.
After a while of me standing there in her clothes, she got up and picked up the rest. She threw them in a bag and put it down in front of her closet.
“This should be plenty.” She leaned the bag against the door so it wouldn’t topple over. “But if you need more, just let me know before I leave. When I go, I don’t want to bring anything from here with me.”
I know it was selfish. Kate had started to crack. Her sadness seeped into that day. She was vulnerable in that moment, and I could have asked. I could have tried to understand. I could have tried to know what she knew about our town. About the people in our town.
Memory is tricky. I don’t remember anything else in particular about that day. I don’t really know if what I remember is even true. Maybe I’m a liar and none of this is how it happened. I think that was the conversation we had. I think her sadness was part of that moment for me, but that’s only my story. It’s only my memory of what went on, and Kate may say the day was entirely different. She may remember only that I didn’t ask why she was so sad.
Maybe it would’ve been different if I had. I wish I had, but what’s the point of wishing? We’re all just what we are. We can’t go on wishing we weren’t. Wishing is just as selfish in the end.
chapter twelve
Almost everyone was invited to Gina Lynn’s party. Except me, of course, until Caleb invited me. It’s the almost that hurts the most. Almost is like being half real.
People pulsed through her house when I arrived, but I didn’t see her anywhere. I didn’t see Caleb, either.
Hey, where are you? I texted him.
Porch.
Nobody noticed me as I cut through the room. I made my way outside, into the cold. Spring was playing games with us. Weeks earlier, it had snuck in overnight, erasing our memory of winter in a matter of hours. When we’d gone to bed, winter had lingered in the snowbanks and in the way the trees still hunched over from the weight of it. And then suddenly, spring. We woke to birds singing, birds who appeared to have been shipped overnight on a secret train, and we remembered music.
But now, winter was trying to force a comeback. Everyone outside stood looking at the pool, wondering what happened. I was shivering, wearing a skirt and thin shirt I’d borrowed from Kate when spring was still a promise.
I saw him from the periphery. From the in-between where the people inside faded into the background, but the people outside were only figures in the night. It made sense; I was a periphery girl.
“Hey,” I said to his back.
When he turned to look at me, I swear the light from the porch surrounded him. But I think I made that up. I think I want to remember him that way. I want to believe there was something that made him special. I want to believe that loneliness doesn’t just mess with our hearts.
“Ellie! You came,” Caleb said.
“I said I would.”
“I know. I wasn’t sure, though. I worried. You’re late.”
I’d walked to the party, after telling my dad I was going to a friend’s. He wouldn’t have stopped me from going to Gina Lynn’s. I didn’t have other friends, so it wouldn’t have made a difference if I’d said her name. But, for some reason, I lied. I lied and I do
n’t know why I did.
“Yeah, well, I was doing things.”
He laughed. “Mysterious things. Of course. I’d expect nothing less from my Elusive Ellie.”
My. I heard it. The claim he laid on me. I smiled at the word.
He moved closer and I stepped back. It was automatic. Since earlier in the week, by my locker, I hadn’t stopped thinking about the possibility. But now that he was close again, I was scared. I was afraid of the way I knew I’d hurt if he waited months to talk to me again. I didn’t want to fall for a guy just because he’d smiled at me and said my name a few times. I was afraid of what would happen if there was more to it than that, but I was also afraid of how I’d feel if there wasn’t.
“I don’t think I’m supposed to be here,” I said.
I’d always imagined being wanted. Of someone loving me. Choosing me. But here was this boy and if he kissed me, I knew I’d always worry about going back to not being wanted.
“Why not?”
He kept coming closer and I kept backing up, but then I was against the house itself and he was right there. I took a step forward, even while my mind told me to escape into the frame of the house.
Caleb put his hand on my arm and I hated how easy it was. I hated how he made me feel. I hated that I didn’t want him to stop.
“Gina Lynn didn’t invite me,” I said, even though I didn’t care at all about the party.
“So? I did. I want you here.” He took a piece of my hair and twisted it around his finger. “I wanted to see you tonight, Ellie. I’ve thought about you every day.”
“But it’s not your party.”
He smiled and leaned closer. “You’re beautiful and sweet and I want you here, okay?”
I’d always imagined kissing. It was something that happened all the time to other people. I even saw my dad kiss someone once.
I don’t remember her name. He didn’t date much, but there was one woman. When I was six or so. I remember her hair. It was dark, but outside, it shone in the light. I loved how it told two stories. I didn’t know how they’d met, but I watched when he went outside to meet her. She stood by her car and he went to her and they kissed. It was the way I imagined strangers realize they know each other across space. That you meet someone and suddenly there’s a recognition that a place in your life belongs to someone else. It was like, when he kissed her, that place didn’t feel empty anymore.