by TE Carter
I sighed. “I don’t think I can,” I said. “Not yet.”
“Whatever you want. It’s your birthday. Just tell me when to stop.”
I eventually did—after he’d found his way under my skirt, his hands on the edges of my underwear. I had to say it three times, but he did stop.
We lay on the bed, my heart beating and my body agonizing over not continuing. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just not ready yet.”
He leaned over and fixed my shirt, pulling it back up so only my arms were exposed. “Don’t apologize. You don’t need to be sorry. I’m sure you would be amazing, but I can wait for you.”
We spent a few more hours there, never making it downstairs to finish the cake. I don’t know what he ended up doing with it. If he threw it out later. If he left it there to rot. If he gave it to someone else. By the time it was after midnight, I figured I should go home and we didn’t have time for cake.
“You should drop me off here,” I said when we got close to my house. We were at a park and Caleb pulled up to the curb.
“Why won’t you let me come over?” he asked.
“My dad’s asleep,” I told him.
He turned the car off and kissed me. “I wish we could have stayed.”
“I can only imagine what kind of trouble we’d have gotten into.”
“I doubt it. You can’t even imagine the things I think about doing with you.”
I walked home and I wondered what would happen if Caleb ever saw where I lived. I wondered if he’d turn to kiss me some night and see the way our lawn had more dirt than grass. I didn’t want him to see the remnants of the broken fence that still formed an edge around the yard. I didn’t want him to see the real me. I wanted him to see the girl in another girl’s clothes. The one who pretended with him in borrowed houses.
When I got home, my dad was asleep. He’d left the kitchen light on, and in the middle of the table were two cupcakes and a card. It was of a hummingbird, with a prewritten silly “happy birthday” wish. He’d gotten me an iTunes gift card.
Under the gift card was a note.
Happy Birthday, Ellie. Fifteen. You’re growing up so fast. I know you’ll be late, but just in case you’re hungry … Love, Dad.
chapter fifteen
Time, when you’re young, doesn’t pass in the same way. It feels endless. It’s hard to keep track of how seasons change, of when days become months, because we fill time until there’s nothing left of it. We fill it with parties and bonfires and school and sports and relationships and people, but it’s never enough. Because there’s so much time, we need to fill it entirely. Boredom frightens us.
School was out for only a week and we were already bored. It was interminable time. Kate was getting ready to leave for school in Ohio, and my dad worked. And now, because of Caleb, I was part of other people.
Nearly a year had passed since that day I went to Kate and asked her to help me. In a year, a whole world had grown around me. We don’t have timelines or memories of how we change. Not exactly. There’s time and it moves, but then we seem to wake one day different. Like everything else, change just is.
We were all at Gina Lynn’s, sitting by her pool. I’d been there a few more times for parties. They all generally went the same way. People pretended to want to have conversations, but eventually, we all ended up separated. Caleb and I spent a lot of time in Gina Lynn’s sister’s room. It turned out her sister lived with her only a few weekends a year, because most of the time she was with their dad. Gina Lynn hadn’t told me. Caleb hadn’t even told me. It was just something someone else knew and then I did and then it was truth.
Caleb and Gina Lynn were swimming. Everyone else sat around on the edges of the pool, watching time pass in slow ticking strokes. Boredom staring us down across three months of summer.
Caleb’s brother, Noah, started the game. They called it loser baiting. He’d graduated and he wasn’t spending time with us, but he’d started it and from him, it grew until everyone took part. Well, everyone who was at Gina Lynn’s that summer.
The game was stupid, but we were stupid and we were bored. That’s how these things happen, I guess. Someone says it and it grows from an idea into a part of us, until we can’t remember life before it.
“Have you seen these, Ellie?” Jasmine asked. She gestured for me to lean closer, to see what was playing on Kyle’s iPad.
“Seen what?”
“Noah started this thing. These videos are awesome.”
When you’re fifteen, it’s easy. It’s easy not to feel anything because it’s not you. It’s not your experience, and sure, it was mean, but the fiction of others is just that—it’s fiction.
“This is my favorite,” Jasmine said.
The woman was fat. Not curvy like me or even just plump. She was obscenely fat, and she wore tight pants that folded over themselves with the rolls on her body. Her shirt was too short, and skin came out below the fabric, over her pants.
It was Gina Lynn’s voice in the video. “Hey, honey,” she said. “You dropped something.”
The fat woman turned, waiting in line at whatever fast-food place they’d filmed it, her hands full of ketchup packets. It was stereotype as entertainment, because they found people at their worst. Maybe she was going home with the ketchup after getting food to feed her family. Maybe she was picking up an order for her office. But she was fat and she was waiting in line for hamburgers and she was carrying ketchup, so she was a target.
Kyle ran onto the screen in the video, knocking the ketchup out of the woman’s hands. “Oops. Sorry,” he said, and then he disappeared.
Gina Lynn kept filming, zooming in on the woman’s backside as she bent over to pick up the ketchup. “In its natural habitat, the fatty scavenges for sustenance,” she whispered.
There were so many of them. An old man looking for directions to the train and getting confused when they told him he needed to travel to 1894 for the railroad. A woman getting angry at a pharmacist because she needed the generic but her prescription wouldn’t allow for substitutions. Her poverty was the punch line. All people just trying to survive, turned into mockery and ridicule for us. Because we were bored and we had nothing to do with ourselves and they weren’t us.
I should’ve said something then. Should’ve pointed it out that day, but I thought I was part of them. I was happy to be part of an us, and so I kept my mouth shut.
When the factory closed, my father was ashamed. He wasn’t proud of working there, either, but it got worse later. When he ended up at the store, he stopped talking to his family, his friends. We still visited my grandparents before they died, but sooner or later, the world outside fades away if you don’t make an effort to hold on to it.
Hollow Oaks was barely a town. We had a bank and a pizza place and a post office and a few random local stores. And we had the monolith on the hill. The big-box store that hovered over us all, the monster that it was. Before the store, my dad said the whole area had been trees and a field. It was the field where my mom had told him she was leaving. I guess it was poetic to have it torn away. To be where he had to remember, every single day, the life that wasn’t.
Dad didn’t wear a uniform. Just a vest over his clothes. I was supposed to iron it for him. He could’ve done it himself, sure, but I’d ironed it since I was ten. Every Friday. It was our routine. Once I started spending time with Caleb, though, I moved it to Thursday because I was out on Fridays. And then summer came and I was out all the time, and we walked into the store and I saw how wrinkled it was.
It didn’t matter. Not really. It only mattered because there was one person I could rely on, and now, he couldn’t rely on me.
“Can I help you?” he asked. He looked at me like he looked at the rest of them. With tired eyes, not registering that he knew me. He was ashamed and I was ashamed and we pretended he didn’t spend his days doing this.
“¿Qué? ¿Hablas inglés?” Mike asked. “No español.”
“Can I help
you?” my dad repeated. “I don’t speak Spanish.”
“Sí, sí, yo quiero tacos.”
“¡Viva México!” Gina Lynn shouted. She had her phone up, recording it. I clenched Caleb’s hand, but I said nothing.
We weren’t Mexican. My dad’s great-great-great something or other had come from Peru and my mom was Puerto Rican. We’d lived in Hollow Oaks my whole life. My dad had never left New York. It wasn’t even the good New York. Not the city, with its sparkling sidewalks and energy, or Long Island, with its celebrity summers and palaces. We lived in a part of New York as forgotten as the houses that filled it.
My dad tried to play along. He helped Kyle find hemorrhoid cream, because it was his job. He didn’t know that they’d add sound effects to his walk and label the video “Stay in School.” When they found the cream, and he picked it up to give it to Kyle, he didn’t know someone would add a comic book splash over his back saying, “Too Many Tacos. Ass Is El Fuego.”
“Smile for ICE,” Gina Lynn said.
He looked at me, and I stared at the floor. I don’t know if he recognized Caleb. Or if he just saw me holding a boy’s hand and that was enough of an explanation.
Later, I sat at Gina Lynn’s house with the rest of them, watching them upload it, seeing the comments people posted, laughing when I was supposed to.
I don’t expect to be forgiven for it. I can’t forgive myself, but this is what happened.
When we left Gina Lynn’s that night, I told Caleb I needed to stop by the store for something and had him leave me there. I waited until my dad got out of work, sitting on the trunk of his car.
“You should know better, Ellie,” he said when he came out.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. I was, too. It hurt to watch him cross the parking lot in his wrinkled vest and old, ragged clothes. He couldn’t replace them because he’d spent all he had buying mine. The ones that let me belong to a group of people who made a name for themselves through his humiliation.
He said nothing on the ride home and went right upstairs to bed. I took Fred for a walk and cried in the comfort of night.
When my dad left for work the next morning, he didn’t say good-bye. We never talked about it again. The only thing he ever said was that I should have known better.
Maybe it’s better I’m gone.
chapter sixteen
Gretchen turned me into a hashtag. I like that.
They don’t.
“Who gave this to you?” he asks.
“Nobody. They were on every single car when I got out of school.”
The wall pays for this news.
“Fuck. Fuuuccckk.” He drags the second one out, as if it’s the only way to summarize what they’ve done, how eventually even the perfect plan fails.
I stare at him. He’s wearing shorts, standing in the doorway of the room, holding one of the papers.
Shorts. That means it’s spring.
I disappeared in November.
How many months has it been? Five, at least. Is anyone still looking?
I wonder if a body can survive the winter.
“What were you thinking?” he asks.
He shouldn’t have asked. His brother moves from the wall and it’s them, together, in the same dance. But it’s different now. They’re not as soft. They don’t cry. Neither one of them begs as their drumbeat violence fills the room.
The paper floats to the carpet. From the floor, I look up at myself. It’s an old photograph. A school photo from last year. Taken out of the yearbook. It was before my hair faded. Before Kate chopped off the moldy remainder. The blue streaks look terrible. I look like I was trying too hard.
I was trying too hard.
#WheresEllieFrias screams in white from the black bar under my picture.
The guys land on the floor, fists and hands and anger collapsing with them.
“You shouldn’t have brought her here,” he says.
“I didn’t see you complaining.”
“Fix it. You have to fix it.”
He takes out his phone, dials, waits. There’s a pause, and his expression changes. He’s charming. Sweet. The person she trusted when she ended up here with him.
“Hey, Gretchen. Yeah, it’s Noah. How are you? Listen, about these flyers…”
I watch his brother instead. Those eyes. The steel sees right through me. It always did. He never saw me. All the pretty promises were just words.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Noah argues on the phone. “Will you fucking listen?”
It’s weird to hear him beg. To believe there’s any power in it. He should know better than anyone how little pleading does. He tries to speak over her, tries to change her mind. He’s not listening to what she says in reply. At least not processing. All he hears is no. He doesn’t know how to hear no.
“Fucking bitch,” he says, smashing the phone against the wall. “Come on. Let’s go. We’re going to fix this place. She won’t remember where it was.”
“Do you think we should move her?” Caleb asks. “What if—”
Noah punches another hole in the wall.
“No, not yet. The weather. And with this. No. Fuck. We are so fucked.”
I should feel relieved. Happy. Something. But they leave, forgetting again about me, letting me wait while they find ways to hide what they’ve done.
Maybe I’m too angry to feel anything else. And I am angry. Just not about the right things. The things I would’ve expected to be angry about. I’m not angry about being here. I’m not even angry it happened. Mostly, I’m just angry that it could. That it keeps happening.
I’m angry that it’s spring.
They’ll come back. They’ll paint over the holes. Maybe clean the carpet. They’ll clear the closet where they store the little treasures they’ve kept. And then they’ll go somewhere else.
I lie back and wonder. Wonder what I’m waiting for. What I’m even holding on to anymore.
chapter seventeen
I should’ve been angry with Caleb. I was, at first. After that night, with his friends and the video and my dad, I tried to pull away from him. I took longer to respond when he texted, or I found reasons to stay home and curl up with Fred and a bowl of macaroni and cheese rather than be with him. I told myself he wasn’t them or the videos, but still he was part of them, and I hated how it spread to me when I was around him.
But there’s only so long you can lie to yourself. I’d learned to fit Caleb into my life, in the places I needed him, and I felt him missing in those days that followed. I missed how it felt when he’d call me pretty.
Eventually I gave in and we sat by the lake, in the back of his car, and I made him two people. I separated that night from the others, because we do these things to protect ourselves.
“You seem upset,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“Is it what happened? The other night? You’ve been … quiet. Tell me, Ellie.”
Over time, it had grown softer to be with him. I don’t even know what I mean by that, but that was how it felt. At first, being around him, kissing him, his hands on me, all the physical space between us was like forcing yourself to sit on one of those cold, metal folding chairs for hours. It wasn’t right, but we did it anyway. In the months since, though, it grew to be comfortable. I sat, resting my head against his chest, his hand on my hip, and we seemed to finally fit.
“It’s not right. What they do.”
I had to say it. It was between us, and I wanted there to be nothing between us. I wanted him to be the guy I imagined him to be.
“Gina Lynn and Noah and them?” he asked.
“They’re people, Caleb. They hurt. It hurts to watch them hurt. It’s not funny.”
He leaned his head down on top of mine. “That’s why I like you. You’re not like them. You’re so different from them.”
“They’re your friends, though.”
“Are they?” he asked.
The sky turned from orange to pi
nk to purple while we sat there. I thought about it. I didn’t know how to define a friend. I didn’t even know what made me me.
“You’re right, Ellie. I’m sorry.”
I’d been trying to convince myself that what I felt for Caleb was special. And then, he validated how I felt. He heard me that night, and he agreed it wasn’t okay what they did. That’s how it happened for me.
It was a word that I’d reserved for coffee when fishing and relish on hot dogs and my father and Fred and various shades of blue.
“Caleb, I…”
When you fall in love with someone, it’s better when it’s in summer. Summer is a stolen season. It’s time out of time, and everything that happens in summer feels so much more infinite. I’m glad I fell in love in summer. I’m glad that night existed. Despite all the nights that came after, despite everything that happened, I’m glad I knew what it was like to be heard.
“I love you, Ellie,” he said.
Who can say what makes something true? Sometimes a thing is true, and then maybe it’s not true anymore. But it doesn’t mean it never was. Caleb did love me. I believed it then and I still want to believe it. I have to, even if everything else says he didn’t. But I wish I could understand. I wish I knew how something can be true and reverberate the way it did that night—and then be so carelessly false. I wish I understood how a person can hold such contradictions.
I wish I understood how easy it is to lie.
Later, I tried to tell Kate about it. She was packing for school, and I said the words I hadn’t said to Caleb.
“I think I’m in love with him,” I said. He’d said it and we’d spent the night in his car, and I didn’t say it but he knew. There was no way he didn’t know.
“Which of these do you like?” She held up two shirts. One was a plain green T-shirt and the other one was a Beatles shirt. She didn’t listen to the Beatles, and I wasn’t sure what she was even asking.
“I don’t know. They’re fine?”
“I don’t know which one to bring,” she said.