Weightless

by Sarah Bannan

  There were photographs, wallet-size ones, lying loose in the bottom – some of her, old ones, where her hair was shorter, lighter – the lighting looked more professional than the school shots did at Adams. She was airbrushed, for sure. A copy of The Bell Jar and Girl, Interrupted and A Room of One’s Own and Glamour Magazine. A Slim Fast meal replacement bar. Ibuprofen. Marc Jacobs Daisy, half empty. A pack of cigarettes: Newport 100s. Nobody knew she smoked. And gum, five or six packs of gum, all sugar-free. An envelope with her name on it: we opened it – a card. A bear on the front, blue and grey, with a balloon and a speech bubble: “Happy birthday, Daughter.” We opened it up and there were two words written on the inside: “Love, Dad.”

  The door opened and we felt a whoosh of air. We piled the things back into the bag and we left the stall, walked out of the locker room, the back way, not looking to see who had walked in, feeling a little afraid. We told each other that it was unlikely that it was Carolyn and unlikelier still that she would have seen us.

  We told a few people what we had found: a letter, birth-control pills, cigarettes, Slim Fast. Pictures of herself. Weeks later, we heard this story repeated back to us, about a bunch of girls finding Carolyn Lessing’s messenger bag, and about all the stuff they’d found. Only the list had changed and gotten longer. It included Ecstasy, razor blades, copies of Playgirl. Maybe somebody else had found her bag. Had found it in a different place, at a different time, with different things inside it. More interesting things, more exciting things. Because what we heard back just wasn’t the same.

  Chapter 11

  Carolyn’s mother had some big job at 3M. She was one of only a few female senior engineers at the plant in New Jersey, and the job in Adamsville was a promotion. Most everybody from the new part of town worked for 3M; there had been articles in the paper about how it had saved Adamsville, how it had made us rich, the town was now “booming.” But we didn’t notice much change, only that an Abercrombie came to our mall, and a bagel shop had opened, and Banana Republic was going to open soon, along with a Kate Spade store. Three Starbucks had come too. That year, though, around the time that Carolyn moved in, we heard about things closing: we were forced to watch the news in first period, and we heard about the “recession.” It didn’t matter to us, we said, but our parents looked a little more tired, maybe, and there was a little bit more arguing at home. We heard Shane Duggan’s dad lost his job, and Brooke Moore’s mom had had to take up hours at Parisian’s to supplement Mr Moore’s cut in shifts at Monsanto. Brothers and sisters of kids who had graduated from college moved home, while they waited to get jobs in Birmingham or Nashville or Atlanta. Really, though, nothing had changed. One of the Starbucks eventually closed, but it was stupid to have three anyway. Plus, drinking coffee was for posers.

  We heard that Carolyn’s mother was some sort of genius, and that she was like the guy on The Apprentice, only a woman, and that she had lived in the north all her life. We heard she was divorced, or separated, and maybe she’d had Carolyn when she was sixteen? Like Lorelai Gilmore. We weren’t totally sure.

  After we’d found her bag, we tried to be extra nice to Carolyn, tried to find ways to show her we were sweet, friendly, to show that we weren’t bitches who snuck around looking through people’s stuff. It wasn’t as if we thought she knew about it – nothing like that – but we still wanted to make things okay. Looking back, we wondered if we had already started to realize things wouldn’t always be so great for her at Adams, that maybe Taylor would end up dropping her too, the same way she’d dropped us. We asked Carolyn to go to Wendy’s with us after practice or we told her we thought her flip turns were great or we asked her where she got her bathing suit. In the meantime, Carolyn started talking to us a little more and we learned a little more about her. And a couple of weeks after the thing with the messenger bag, she invited us over to her house after school.

  As we drove to the other side of town, we didn’t say much to each other, didn’t talk about how excited we were to be going to Carolyn’s, to have been invited. Tiffany and Taylor had been there during the second week of school, but just to pick Carolyn up to go to the mall. Carolyn had told them honk when they got there, she’d run out, no need for them to come in, but Taylor said she had to go the bathroom, and then Tiffany did too, so she and Tiffany got to go inside and they used the half-bath in the front hall. Taylor told our study hall that the bathroom was “wicked” and that there were little tea candles and L’Occitane soaps and Tommy Hilfiger hand towels and tons of expensive crap . . . and that was “just in the BATHROOM.” Whatever, we thought. We were the first ones to get invited for, like, an afternoon, with an actual invitation. We weren’t sure what it all meant, Carolyn asking us, but we knew it was something. We tried to stay calm but we smiled to ourselves and we turned up the radio and looked out the window.

  “For Sale” signs lined the streets, along with wooden signs, red and black for Lincoln High – “Go, Cats!” and “Lincoln Number One.” On our side of town it was orange and black and bears. This was a new subdivision and every third house was under construction – hollowed-out spaces with trucks in front, nobody inside. Trees were thin and tall, new and spaced apart at even intervals. Our football team had tried to roll four of the houses on D’Evereux Drive last year and had failed, we heard, ’cause the trees were so far apart, and they had so few leaves. We knew that John Maltby lived on this street – he was quarterback for Lincoln – and so did Cadance Starrs, head cheerleader. The two of them had dated in the sixth grade, until they realized they were third or fourth cousins. We went to Cadance’s birthday party in eighth grade – she had invited everybody from church group – and the guys fixed it so that she did Five Minutes of Heaven with John – they were blindfolded and when they came out from the closet, and pulled down the scarves, Cadance started to cry. Our mothers made us write thank-you notes for attending, and we had to apologize in the notes too. Only Nicole did that, as far as we knew.

  As we drove into the subdivision, we tried to imagine the interiors of the homes – we had been inside some of them with our mothers during open houses over the past few years – but nobody had been inside Carolyn’s. Our houses were old, and our parents thought this made them better, but we didn’t think so. We had thick, beige carpets in every room, kitchens with crappy oak cabinets and ugly gold lighting fixtures. There were too many rooms in our houses, we thought, after having watched HGTV and seen “open-plan” places. Our houses were cluttered and too small and too old and our parents didn’t care. We tried not to care, too, but with Carolyn’s house, with all the new builds on the other side of town, it was hard not to.

  She had a circular driveway, and we parked behind her Honda and a silver Audi – her mother’s, we guessed. We rang the doorbell and heard footsteps. Carolyn opened the door and we breathed in the smell of freesia. She let us in and we shifted from side to side to side in the front hall, Carolyn taking our backpacks and putting them on the stairs. The floors were hardwood, and the hall was filled with sunshine – we looked up and saw a skylight. Carolyn smiled: “That was my mother’s idea. She had it put in after we bought this place.” She led us down the hall, the smell of freesia still strong. We said later that the house was amazing – furniture straight out of Pottery Barn and all eclectic and cool. Containers from the Container Store against the wall, and there were framed paintings evenly spaced as we moved through the corridor. We didn’t have time to look at them properly, we said later, but we knew that it was all bright and pretty and cool.

  Carolyn kept saying they hadn’t finished, but we didn’t know what she meant. The house was like something out of Martha Stewart or Real Simple or one of those magazines. The kitchen was at the end of the hall and it was all granite and steel and modern. Pretty jars and pots were stacked on the counters – in a way that looked cluttered but orderly. Like the apartment on How I Met Your Mother or something. Carolyn’s mom was sitting on a bar stool as we walked in, a newspaper in front of her on the gr
anite counter.

  Carolyn’s mother insisted we call her Abby. She was pale and didn’t wear make-up and her hair was so shiny we said later that we wanted to touch it. She had eyes that were small and green and sparkling. She was pretty, and we talked later about how she was like an old actress from the Independent Film Channel – maybe like Julianne Moore? – or a musician or some alternative person like that. She was skinny and pretty and older for sure, but not old like our parents. She looked a lot like Carolyn, we said later. They really could have been sisters.

  All of their food was weird: Abby fixed us a snack of wheaten crackers and hummus and almonds. When Carolyn asked for some chips, Abby made a face. “Chips aren’t food,” she said, and laughed. She was eating an almond in several bites. We sat and we ate and she asked us questions about our classes and Homecoming and she asked Lauren where she got her hair cut. She said that Carolyn needed a trim and asked Lauren how long she let it go between appointments. She asked us about swimming and if it made us hungry and if we ran cross-country. She asked Nicole what kind of grades she got and she asked Jessica if she had a boyfriend. She asked us what our parents did and where we wanted to go to college. We didn’t get a chance to answer any of her questions, not really, and before we had finished, she said she was going out and that she’d be back around ten or eleven.

  Carolyn let us into her bedroom, down the hall from the kitchen, and it was huge, like a showroom from Selling Houses. She had gadgets and books everywhere: her own MacBook, one of the old ones that was pink, with a handle. Four, maybe five bookcases and books everywhere. Pictures, dozens of them, some framed and some not framed, but lots with this thin, tanned man. Silver-haired. Like George Clooney, only not hot. When we asked who the man in the pictures was, she told us he was her dad. She told us he was a writer, a novelist, and that his books were published in lots of different languages. We had never heard of him but we didn’t admit it, and Jessica asked if she could borrow one of the books.

  “As long as you’re really careful.”

  “Of course.” Jessica smiled. Later, we all took turns reading it. A novel, hard to follow, about a man who was studying Physics in some New England town – or maybe it was in Europe? We couldn’t tell. He was trying to make a breakthrough or something. He had a wife who was leaving him because he was so obsessed with his experiments. But then he had all these other women that he had sex with. The sex in the book was weird – we weren’t even sure it was describing sex, only that we kept seeing the words “cock” and “wet” and we knew it had to be something like that. We read later that he was a “literary writer who struggled to find a sympathetic audience.” We had never read anything like it. In his bio­­g­raphy in the back, it said he lived alone and it didn’t mention Carolyn. At a sleepover months later, we got laughing about it – the book, the sex, the bio – and somebody said that she’d probably made him up, and we weren’t really sure if it was that funny, but we laughed at the time. It somehow got back to Carolyn, though, that people had been saying this, and we wondered how she could have known. We told each other that it must have come from somewhere else.

  A digital scale lay on the floor next to her desk and to its right, up on the wall, was a piece of graph paper, and penciled there were dates and numbers: 10/1: 113.2, 10/2: 113.0, 10/3: 113.7, followed by three exclamation marks, 10/7: 111.0, followed by a smiley face.

  Lauren used Carolyn’s bathroom. In her shower, she found Kérastase shampoo, Benefit bodywash, and on the sink counter were her GHDs, more Lancôme Juicy lip glosses, Marc Jacobs fragrance. Things we begged for but weren’t allowed to have, too expensive and too “mature.” Lauren looked in the medicine cabinet and she told us later what she saw: an orange pill case, with Carolyn’s name and address typed out. Something called Seroquel.

  We texted people about this later, to tell them about her house, about what we had seen. We took photos of her bathroom cabinet and the scale and put them up on Instagram, Facebook, wherever. Looking back, it’s easy to see how fucked up that was, how irresponsible we’d been, with information and with other people’s feelings. But we couldn’t have known what was going to happen. We couldn’t have known what those things meant or what they were for or why they were there or what she might do. At least this is what we told ourselves and each other, over and over, for years to come. We couldn’t have known.

  Facebook

  (Posts deleted and recovered)

  GEMMA DAVIES What can be found CL’s bathroom? crack, cloud 9, cristal meth & pepto bismal. GROSS

  10 people liked this.

  Brooke Moore and Carolyn Lessing commented on this.

  BROOKE MOORE Cloud 9 = crystal meth

  CAROLYN LESSING since you’ve never been to my house u are a liar

  GEMMA DAVIES Relayble sourse

  CAROLYN LESSING u shouldn’t believe everything you hear

  GEMMA DAVIES look whose talking. Stop spreading rumers about my freind

  CAROLYN LESSING She spreads rumors about me. I thought we were friends?

  GEMMA DAVIES ive lots of freinds

  CAROLYN LESSING I thought you were nicer than her

  GEMMA DAVIES PM me

  CAROLYN LESSING OK

  Chapter 12

  Adamsville Plaza looks like any other mall you’ve ever seen, only lamer, and smaller, and with hardly any good stores. Two floors, with a department store on each one. Parisian’s, the best, on the top, and a Kmart in the bottom. There’d been talk about a Kohl’s coming to Adamsville Plaza, but that never happened, so we travelled to Birmingham once a year to get the stuff that we couldn’t get here. Every three store fronts lay empty, mannequins dismantled and signs that said “Your Store Could Be Here!” Spencer’s Gifts was doing a going-out-of-business sale, and we heard Payless Shoes might be closing too, which sucked, ’cause they did the dyed-to-match pumps for Homecoming and Prom. Every corner had a fountain, and when we were little, we would throw pennies in and make a wish. We wondered what we wished for back then, we couldn’t remember, but now we knew what we wanted: for some guy to see us outside of Aéropostale and want our phone number; for Brooke Moore and Gemma Davies to come up to us and ask us to walk around with them; for something, anything, to happen.

  On game days, we went to Adamsville Plaza after school, hoping we’d be able to afford something new to wear, that there’d be some kind of clearance at Abercrombie that would put things at a price our allowances could manage. But mostly we sat around eating Great American Cookie Company cookies while complaining about our thighs. One day in late October we saw Carolyn there, walking through the food court with Taylor Lyon and Tiffany Port. We waved and said hello. Taylor and Tiffany ignored us, kept walking straight ahead, their eyes determined not to meet ours – but Carolyn stopped, looked right at us and waved.

  “Hey, you guys.” She walked over to us. Taylor and Tiffany hesitated a little, but then kept moving ahead, away from Häagen-Dazs and towards Payless.

  “Shopping?” Carolyn looked at us straight in the eyes. Jessica offered her a piece of cookie and she shook her head.

  “We’re getting new make-up,” Lauren told her, even though we were just walking around, had no money to buy anything.

  “It’s bonus time at Clinique.” Carolyn pointed toward Parisian’s. “But I think their stuff is gross.”

  We nodded and wanted to ask her where wasn’t gross, where she got her make-up in New Jersey, and if she had to wear make-up at all, her skin was so perfect.

  “Bobbi Brown is the best,” Carolyn continued. “But they don’t have that here. I can’t believe there’s no Sephora.” She sighed.

  “We don’t have anything here. It’s like living in a third-world country.” Nicole wadded up the bag that our cookies had come in, threw it in the trash can. “You have to go to Birmingham.”

  “My mom was saying that. About Birmingham. Not the third world.” Carolyn kinda laughed and so did we and she put her hand through her hair and we wondered if she used argan
oil or if she’d had it permanently straightened or was it just that silky? “I think we’re going next week or something. You guys should totally come.”

  We smiled. And then we weren’t totally sure if she meant it, and if she did, if we could convince our mothers to let us do this. A day of shopping with Carolyn Lessing. Epic.

  “Carolyn.” We looked around and saw Taylor barking at her from outside Aéropostale. When we looked over at her, she glanced down at her phone.

  Carolyn rolled her eyes. She took her phone out of her pocket, and it was all lit up. Lauren said she saw Shane’s name on the screen, along with a picture of him, his hair all sandy and in his eyes, his mouth open as if he were screaming in your face. We imagined Carolyn taking the picture, how close to him she’d have to have been to get that, how relaxed he must have been around her.

  “I better take this,” she told us, and then the phone stopped flashing. She shrugged her shoulders and she smiled and turned to walk toward Taylor and Tiffany, standing with their hands on their hips, pissed off with us for detaining their friend. And then she turned back. “You wanna come shopping with us?”