I’m homesick. I’m everything-sick. I don’t want to be anywhere.
My mother appears like a vision through the curtains.
“You can’t sleep out here, honey. Too many wild animals.”
I quickly rub the tears away. I don’t want her to see me, even in the dim light of the lantern.
“Ali? Are you crying?”
“No.”
She curls around behind me, leaning into the hammock.
“When you were little, I used to do this thing to your back,” and she tickles her fingers up and down my spine. “Spiders going up. Spiders going down.”
My body melts as she does this. It’s kind of the best feeling ever.
“Do the crack-an-egg,” I say.
I close my eyes, and my mother lightly hits her fist at the top of my head, spilling her fingers across my hair and neck and down my back.
“Crack an egg on your head, let the yolk trickle down,” she whispers.
* * *
* * *
In the morning, my mother and I bike over to Riverbend Hot Springs because everyone bikes in Truth or Consequences. No helmets required. I wear sweats and a bright green trucker cap that looks like it’s from 1975. My mother owns a collection of hats.
We pass an orange van that’s been parked there for five years. It’s very T or C. People sometimes drive an orange van here and then just never leave. It’s the kind of place people come to drop out of reality. People like my mother.
We ride into the parking lot, and the sign is bright blue, the same color as the sky behind the mountains. At Riverbend, the woman at the front desk is sweet and cheerful with braids in her hair and tanned cheeks. There’s a sign on the door that says LEAVE WITH A SMILE.
I want to smash that sign.
I woke up angry and I can’t shake it. I want to stamp on things. Even the little yellow flowers that follow the footpath to the front office. I want to bully those who have bullied me. I want to make everyone pay for it.
* * *
* * *
It’s a rocky little climb down to the pool. It faces the river and mountains and we have it to ourselves.
I’m in my T-shirt and bra and undies and we dip down into the pool. The water is hot, as in 103 degrees. My shoulders release into the water. I lean my head back on the rock and stare ahead at the mountains across the river.
My mom reaches out with her foot and touches mine under the water.
“Your feet used to be so tiny.”
“They’re bigger now. I’m a big girl.”
“Your dad told me what happened at the house, Ali. The graffiti. You gonna talk to me about it?”
But I don’t say anything and my mother sinks down into the pool. Her lips surface at the water’s edge. Blub, blub, blub. Her curls flatten out around her face.
I hoist my body up out of the water and perch on the wall. Stare at my mom. Blubbing in the pool. Taking the heat. Sammi’s mom braids her hair before breakfast. She doesn’t have to ask her dad to drive her to the store to get tampons. Her mother knows exactly what she needs. And it’s just there in the cabinet or next to the toilet. Magic. Sometimes Sammi will walk into her house and see her mom sprawled out on the couch and Sammi will spread herself across her mother’s body. Like they’re the same person.
My throat tightens, and I want to hold back all the tears that are fighting to break through, but I can’t. I splash the water on my face so that they’ll blend in. Doesn’t matter. I can’t stop crying. I hate it. I want to shut myself off. My mother lifts herself up, her skin pink from the heat, then reaches out and touches my hand.
“I could have used you around the past couple of months,” I say.
“I’m just a phone call away; you know that, honey.” But she sounds like a commercial.
“So you’re just going to pretend like everything is great because you live in this weird little town where everyone lives in run-down houses and people blast classical music from their trailers and no one has enough money to fix an orange van on the street? It’s always sunny here, right? Everything’s just perfectly fine.”
“Ali, what’s going on?”
“I’m being real, that’s what’s going on.”
My feet are going to explode in this water; it’s so hot. I tug them out, yet I’m still panting. Steam rises into the air.
“Ali, drink water.”
“Stop telling me what to do.”
“I don’t want you to dehydrate.”
“This is not about me dehydrating! Stop focusing on me dehydrating!” I want her to see right through me so I don’t have to say a word. “Because I’m the one who walks around without a mother. I’m the one who every day only has a dad to come home to. I’m the one who can’t go to the mother-daughter events. I’m the one doing all this without you.”
My mother takes a deep breath. Closes her eyes. “Ali, you booked a flight in the middle of the night to come here. What’s happening right now? Talk to me. I feel so in the dark. Your father said there was a lot of stuff happening, but ‘stuff’ can mean many things. I want to hear it from you. I want you to talk to me, Ali.”
“Talk to you? What else do you want me to say?”
She reaches her hand out to me and I swat it away. I would like to hit her. Hard. Harder. Like in the face. Or in the chest. But what kind of person hits her mother?
Only someone as angry and disturbed as me. Only someone as broken as me. Someone who gets raped by a guy she was totally in love with. Someone who betrays a group of girls like Blythe and her friends, who were nothing but nice to me.
Okay, so they were mostly mean. But sometimes nice!
“You don’t know what’s going on with my life at all,” I say, and it pours out. People in other pools stare at us. And I can’t stop it. My arms twist into a crazy, enraged concoction. “You have no idea what it feels like not to be able to run to you. That I can’t even tell you that a boy—”
“A boy what?”
But I’m silent.
“He what?”
I twist around in all sorts of pained movements—hands to forehead, slapping palms on rock, splashing feet in water. I want to tell her so bad. I want to purge it. I’m so tired from carrying it around. It hurts. The pit of my stomach deep down; I can’t hold it there anymore. It’s been trapped for so long and it wants to come out. It wants to be birthed and gutted and expelled, and I can’t even close my mouth fast enough before it comes out without me even having control of it.
“I didn’t want to have sex with him. Even though I did. But then I didn’t.”
“Then you didn’t?” she says. Her face trembling. Her eyes wide. Waiting for me to say it. And I don’t want to say it. I don’t want to say it at all.
She’s staring at me still. Waiting for me. Her face. “What, honey?” She takes my hand. “Tell me, baby.”
So I say it. I finally say it.
And after I say it, I glance down at the rocky bank of the Rio Grande, but the river itself isn’t fast moving. It’s shallow, I know, because I’ve been tubing in it before and I scraped my ankle across the bottom. I want to jump into it. Because now I’ve said it out loud. Now that I’ve told my mother, where will I go? Back to her tiny peach house that’s falling apart? Back to the hammock?
I want to throw up.
My face in my hands. Her arm snakes around me. Her thigh next to mine. The heat. Too much heat. She hands me a cup of cold water. “Please, honey. I’m begging you. Drink.”
“I want to run away,” I say. “I want to run away and never come back.”
“I know about running away, honey,” she says. Her voice quavering. “It doesn’t work. I promise you it doesn’t.” She whimpers an awful sound of defeat. Whispering over and over. “I’m so sorry, Ali. I love you so much, Ali. You’re going to be okay, Ali. You’re so s
trong, Ali. I’m so proud of you, Ali. We’re going to get through this, Ali.”
And I feel like she’s talking to someone else. Someone who’s not me anymore.
* * *
* * *
Down the street. I can barely walk, but I trudge through the gravel road. My bike holding me up. The sun behind us. The dust in front. Walking through it like it’s nothing, like it’s part of us. All that unforgiving sunshine. Not one cloud. Just the glaring sun and the blue forever. We go slow, and I tell her what happened. How it happened. About Sean Nessel. About Blythe. About the article I wrote in the Underground.
Back in her house, I don’t know how long later. She’s a good listener. She tells me she’s been working on that. Listening. She rubs my temples with lavender. She strokes my hair. She kisses my tears. We sit there tangled for a while, saying nothing. She’s soft. My mother is so soft.
Sometimes when I’m watching her, I’m watching myself. Her eyes. Her chin. The shape of her jaw. I have so many of my dad’s mannerisms. But I’m all her.
49
BLYTHE
Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. All the college freshmen are coming home to rule the town. Everyone will meet up at the Sweep, the dive bar that doesn’t card. The dive bar where people make out inside the antique phone booth. The place where the forty-year-old alcoholics line the barstools, in their Danzig and Megadeth T-shirts thinking it’s 1996 or whenever they were seniors. When the pores on their faces were smaller. When their cheeks were less reddened. The women are worse. They glare at us with such hate. I’m surprised they don’t call the cops. Most of us are underage.
I don’t see Dev anywhere. Maybe he’s with Sean; though the last time I spoke to Dev, it sounded like he hated both of us. I know we broke up, but I didn’t expect him to cut me off completely. He won’t even answer my phone calls. I find myself wanting to talk to him every day, the only rational person in my life, and now he’s just gone. It’s brutal. And it’s all my doing.
Cate and I walk in. Donnie and Suki are catching up later.
Past the bartender, in the corner of the room, I see Amanda Shire.
A friend of hers, Satya Ferris, her Cate, her henchman or henchwoman, whatever, sits next to her. Obviously Satya never lost her freshman fifteen because she doesn’t look like the anorexic girl I knew when I was a freshman. The girl who echoed Amanda Shire’s sentiments. The girl who told me to listen up. The girl who said I should smile.
Most people see Amanda as a mythical creature. When she comes home it’s like they bring out the parade floats. Amanda Shire. Sitting and flipping her hair at a dive bar full of underage kids. Maybe it was just me who saw her as a mythical creature. The weird things I noticed. Her hairless skin. Her soft blond eyelashes. How she had no trace of anything out of place ever. Even when she sat cross-legged in a bikini at Bry Jacobson’s pool party. Her skin, under there, near the outline of her bikini bottom, near perfect. No shade or stubble. No red dots like I have. No ingrown hairs.
“Amanda Shire.”
Her face lights up. She jumps too quickly.
“Lil sis.” Air-kiss.
“What are you doing here?” I say, air-kiss back.
“I guess I just want to see who will show up. But I don’t even know anyone anymore.”
“That’s because you’ve aged out of the Sweep,” I say.
She side-eyes me. “You’ve gotten ambitious, Blythe.”
I’ve become you, I want to say.
“Remember all those times riding for pizza instead of going to the gym at the end of school in Billy Casten’s car? Remember Bry’s pool parties? Remember Kramer? You were the cute little mascot. So eager to please. Such a beautiful girl so early on.” She sips her drink. She orders a round of shots and passes them to me and Cate. I drink it, the alcohol burning the back of my throat like it always does. But I want to keep up with her. I want her to know that I’m not really behind her the way she thinks I am. I’m way ahead.
She passes me another shot. It goes down easier this time. My mind fills with more rage. Something easy-going and moody plays on the jukebox—the whole music collection is from the 1980s. That jukebox is like a treasure chest. It’s on automatic. The owner doesn’t want anyone touching it. It’s the nicest thing in this place.
The words beat out like soft rockets.
My body fuzzy from the shots. I stare at her. She doesn’t even look at me. Just through me. Over me. Looking for anyone. Opportunist. She’s just waiting for someone to arrive. My neck stiffens. My hands squirm. All of it right here in my throat.
“I’m not leading the Initiation this year.”
“What did you say?”
“I’m not leading the Initiation,” I say, repeating myself, but louder this time.
“Oh, no?” Her face pinches. Her forehead stuck in irritated lines. “Then who is?”
“Hopefully no one,” I say. “Hopefully not a freaking soul.”
She hops off her barstool and slides in close to me. I can feel Cate next to me, her body moving in too. Her arm to my arm.
“You don’t even know what goes on in half these schools in the country, do you? And I’m not talking about sexual predators who you read about in the news. I’m talking about guys you know who just ignore all the signals and pretend like everything they’ve ever learned means nothing. And then they feel bad the next day. They feel oh. So. Bad.” She and Satya make these little pouty faces.
“You’re still in high school,” Satya says. “You don’t even know.”
“Don’t you get it, Blythe? This Initiation, it was a social experiment. It’s not perfect. But it worked. It worked for a reason. You don’t know what it was like before we started doing it. Girls were afraid to go to parties. And I’m not talking frat parties. I’m talking high school parties. A girl was raped with a fucking toilet plunger,” she says. “Do you not understand, Blythe? We did that to help girls . . . we helped you.”
I snort—too loud, but I don’t care. I’ve already done too much to turn around from here. All the humiliation from that night as a freshman turning into anger.
“You helped girls by shoving dicks in our mouths?”
She comes closer, breathes in my face. Her breath full of tequila and whatever else she drank.
“First of all, lower your voice.”
“First of all, I’m not one of your sorority sisters.”
I see Donnie and Suki walk in.
“Everyone wants something from you, Blythe. You might as well give it to them in advance, because that’s when you have the control. Not at a party when you’re wasted. Not when you’re in some room with a guy all by yourself and you don’t even know what’s happening. When you’re doing it to them. That’s when you have the power. Don’t you get it?”
“What’s going on?” Donnie says, interrupting. Her body taking up space between me and Amanda.
“Your friend Blythe has gotten some things wrong.”
“I doubt it,” Donnie says.
“I’m not doing the Initiation. No one’s doing it. It’s over,” I say. “That’s what’s happening.”
“If this is going to be a thing?” Amanda says.
“There’s no thing,” Cate says.
“Oh, Blythe.” She whispers my name like she’s casting a spell over it. “Do you know he lost his virginity to me?” Amanda grabs my hand, jerks me toward her.
“What?”
“Sean. He was my little angel for a whole year. My little bitch.”
Donnie pulls my other arm, trying to get me out of here.
“You and Sean?”
“That’s right,” she says. “Just ask him all about it.”
“Amanda,” someone says.
I stare dumbly, watching Amanda turn her head. It’s Bry Jacobson. The infamous pool party guy.
“Bry!” Am
anda squeals, brushes past me, knocking me into the bar, and jumps into Bry’s arms. “I’m so glad you rescued me.”
“Yeah, no one does the Sweep anymore. Everyone’s jailbait here.”
I feel Donnie’s hand tighten as she drags me through the crowd. People stare, their faces full of hate.
Donnie turns to me just before we get outside. “How are you going to possibly end it, B? You know these younger girls. You know they want to be part of it. They don’t understand until afterward how bad it is. You cut your head off as the ringleader and someone else will sprout up in your place. You know this.”
“There are ways,” I say.
Dev is in the parking lot when we walk out. Surprising all of us.
“What are you doing here?” I say.
His eyes look bloodshot and puffy. Like he’s been crying. His usual spark, his usual cheery face, all of it gone.
“I need to talk to you,” he says.
Donnie, Cate, and Suki tell me they’re going to meet me at the car. No one wants to get in the middle of this.
His face is turned inside out. “I’m so messed up in the head, B. I’m so messed up right now.”
“You broke up with me, Dev. You think you’re the messed up one?”
“Why did you have to start this shit between you and Nessel, huh, B?”
“Wait—I . . . I didn’t start anything.”
“You started it by fighting with him and tearing everything we had apart. And then the two of you? I thought we were like this.” He curls up his three fingers. “And now—I can’t even go out with my best friend because I don’t know who he is. I don’t have a girlfriend. Somehow I’m the only innocent person here, and I lost both of you. I don’t want to talk to anyone. I don’t want to go out. I don’t want to eat. I can’t sleep. My head feels like it’s going to explode. Like I’m going to die. I’m totally alone.”
Something Happened to Ali Greenleaf Page 22