It had started to rain during dinner: big, cold drops that landed forcefully on the sidewalk. Noah walked Sarah back to her hotel, holding an umbrella over both of them, minding the fraught space between their bodies. They hugged again in the lobby, and he told her to call the next time she was in town, but she made no promises, only told him that it had been nice to catch up and wished him a safe drive back. His car smelled faintly of coffee and the graham crackers Thomas had recently crushed under his thighs in the backseat, and of the rain soaking into his wool coat. Noah turned onto the highway toward home.
• • •
Claire was sitting on the couch with a magazine when Noah returned at 10:40. As usual, he paid her more than he should have and asked if she had a way home. He knew that sometimes Claire lied and said someone was coming, but she only pretended to wait and would walk home by herself. The town was certainly safe enough, and he couldn’t have gotten her home himself anyway, but he wanted to acknowledge that he understood she was trying to do him a favor. It was one of the things he liked about her, that even her lies were considerate.
“My boyfriend is on his way.” She looked at her phone for the time. “I should wait outside.”
“I’ll wait with you,” he said. “I’ve got to let the dog out anyway.”
They sat on the front steps, the concrete cold through Claire’s jeans. Mickey rustled the bushes along the fence, hunting for a tennis ball.
“Your boyfriend a nice guy?” Noah knew he was breaking a rule by asking this, but it felt good, normal, to ask after someone else.
“I’m thinking of breaking up with him but yes, he’s nice.”
“I’m sorry.”
Claire shook her head. “Don’t be.”
When Eli had said he loved her, the best she could muster was an apologetic look that sent his feelings back to him as unacceptable, as though they were a too-rare piece of meat.
The dog dropped the ball at Noah’s feet. He pitched it across the front lawn.
“How was your date?” she asked him.
Noah shrugged. “It was okay.”
The hopefulness Claire had sensed before was gone. “It was awful,” she said.
“Yes, it was awful,” he said, and laughed. “Not much better than high school dating, apparently.”
Claire laughed back, and slid off her wool hat, held it in her hands. It wasn’t so cold out; the night had calmed the wind, and the rain that was coming their way made the air thick. For her hair alone, copper red and shiny, as though it would be hot to the touch, Claire knew men looked at her: college students in restaurants downtown, fathers at high school football games. When she began to understand what it was they were looking at her for, she had taken to tucking her hair under a baseball cap, and she thought about cutting it short, but she loved it too much herself. She liked the feel of a boy running his fingers all the way down its length, and sometimes even knowing that by taking the cap off, she was getting them to see her, just at the moment she wanted to be seen.
Noah didn’t look at her then, but Claire thought he never really looked at anyone, and especially not at women.
“Maybe you aren’t ready yet,” she said to him.
“Maybe not,” he said, crossing his arms over his knees. “But I’m lonely, I guess.”
Claire thought she understood. How strange, how sudden Noah’s loneliness must have been. It was different from the way Thomas was lonely—primitive and confusing, occupying the shadow of his every look at the world. And it was different from the way Eli, despite everyone loving him—because of it—was lonely. Noah’s loneliness didn’t seem to want to be fixed, not now, anyway.
Claire could see Eli’s car idling at the gate. “That’s him,” she said, rising from the step and sliding her bag onto her shoulder.
Noah wished he could get a look at the boy whose heart he was sure Claire would break. “Good luck,” he said as she walked down the path from the steps. She gave Mickey’s ears a quick scratch before she closed the gate behind her.
• • •
Eli didn’t take her straight home. He drove around the neighborhood slowly, the stereo on low. Claire looked at the passing houses, the cars tucked neatly into the driveways. Eli turned off the headlights at the dead end at Indian Pond. They didn’t unbuckle their seatbelts; they didn’t touch. Their conversation steamed the car windows.
Eli had been her boyfriend since spring. He was quiet and smart and athletic, the kind of boy the mothers called lovely. Claire thought her own mother wanted the relationship to work more than she did herself, always inviting Eli over for family dinners and showing up at his football games. The sex, too. Her mother had asked Claire if she needed birth control, and when she said she wasn’t sleeping with Eli, her mother had said, Why not? and then apologized, laughing a little. You just let me know when you need it. Claire sensed that her mother wanted all the ugliness of her daughter’s growing up over with, as though the pain she was sure to experience was best to happen quickly. Claire wanted these years before adulthood, ugly as they might be, to take their time. She wanted her mother to be wrong.
“You’ve been quiet,” Eli said.
“I’ve been listening.”
They both sat facing the windshield.
“You do that a lot.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I saw you sitting outside with him, with that babysitter guy.”
“So?”
“You doing something with him?”
“Eli.”
“Claire?”
She looked at him, his hands resting on the wheel as if he were still driving. She thought about how Eli wouldn’t be able to sleep that night, how on top of the scouts, he would worry about her, and she would worry, too, because he needed to sleep. She thought that when he came to his senses, he would see that swimming was a surer bet than she was.
Claire felt unbearably warm in the car. She put her hand on the door.
“I’m going to walk home, okay?”
“Claire, what is going on?”
“I need to walk.”
She unbuckled her seatbelt, leaned across the gearshift to touch the soft fuzz at his hairline; he’d just cut his hair short for the season. She took his face in her hands and turned it toward her. She could feel his heart beating through her fingertips, fast and clear, the way he tells her it does on the starting block, the way it must reverberate in his ears when he pushes through the water. She loved this pulse, its constancy, its predictability.
“Let me drive you.”
Claire shook her head, kissed his perfect nose before she pushed the door open. “I just need to walk. Everything is okay. Sleep tight.”
She heard the window rolling down as she walked away. “You’ll be there tomorrow, right?” he called out after her.
Claire wanted to be there for him in the morning, to be wrapped in that warm bleached air of the school pool, everything turquoise and slippery. But she didn’t promise him anything as she pulled her hat over her hair and headed down the road.
• • •
Noah was turning off the outside light when he saw Claire across the street. She stepped forward off the curb; the streetlight caught her hair like a match being lit. She worried the tight loops of her hat between her fingers. “You okay?” he asked her from the front step, his voice at regular volume, the street so quiet his question carried to her.
Claire crossed the road without checking for cars. “Fine.”
Noah walked out into his dark front yard, meeting her at the gate. She looked to him for permission before unlatching it; he nodded and pushed it open for her. That afternoon, while Noah had gathered fallen leaves into bags, Thomas had planted his rubber dinosaurs in the grass; they stretched across one side of the yard in a neat zigzag pattern. Claire stepped between them delicately and deliberately, as though she
had put them there herself.
“I didn’t do it. I didn’t break up with him,” she told him. “Maybe my mother is right. Maybe I should just sleep with him. Get it over with.”
Noah pictured Claire’s mother, square jawed and serious, her tight New England smile as she sat across her desk from a client. He could hardly imagine her suggesting this to her soft, sensitive daughter.
“You shouldn’t do that.” He looked Claire in the eye as he said this.
Claire nudged a dinosaur with the toe of her sneaker till it fell over.
Noah’s legs felt heavy. He sank into the brittle grass of the yard, the leaves that had already fallen since he’d raked breaking underneath his back as he lay down. He closed his eyes. He could hear Mickey whapping his tail against the storm door, wanting out. He let him whine.
The sudden weight of Claire’s skull over his heartbeat felt wrong, the way it had felt wrong to want so badly to see Sarah tonight, or to come home to a house with a kitchen on the left of the door rather than the right, or how Thomas looked less like his wife as he got older, the way everything had felt wrong, underneath the impression of being right. He stroked Claire’s long, beautiful hair as though it were his daughter’s, or his dead wife’s, or Sarah’s, and it was just another Friday night. He remembered one, or maybe it was a dream he kept having, he wasn’t sure, but it was Friday night, and he was in bed with his wife, and there weren’t any kids yet, and she was teasing him about a teenage girl at the movie theater, how she’d blushed as he passed by. He’d pinched his then-new wife, playfully, and he did it again in the yard to Claire, on the back of her arm, to see if she felt anything, to see if she might pinch him back.
Gone
Mirabelle and I began collecting the names of the dead girls in December, after Marissa Hull fell out of an apartment window on Broadway. Marissa, fifteen, was six months pregnant, and although she was alone in the apartment before she died, there was little to suggest you could fall out a fourteenth-floor window in December, backward, without trying. Her sister, Helen, was in homeroom down the hall from us. We didn’t go to Marissa’s funeral, or the funerals of the other dead girls—forty-three by the next September.
We used the notebook Mirabelle’s mother had given her as an early Christmas present; Mrs. Diehl had hoped Mirabelle would work out some of the adolescent moodiness that had hit her harder than the rest of us that year. “Fuck that,” she told me Christmas night, tossing the notebook to me across my bedroom. The brown leather book, bound with suede ties, thudded next to me on my unmade bed.
“Merry Christmas,” she added.
Our parents were downstairs, finishing off the wine Mirabelle’s parents had brought for Christmas dinner. Their laughter came up to us through the radiators, tinny and ghostlike.
“It’s nice. You sure you don’t want it?” Mirabelle and I had always traded a small present or two, but I thought Mrs. Diehl would be upset if she knew Mirabelle had so eagerly given away this gift. When I opened the journal, Marissa Hull’s name was in the top left corner of the first page. “Oh, you can just cross that out.” Mirabelle waved her hands, brushing the name away. She pulled on the new purple-and-yellow-striped gloves my mother had knitted for her.
Then Mirabelle explained she’d been having dreams—in them, she’d be standing in front of the dry cleaner’s across the street from Marissa and Helen’s building. Marissa, no longer pregnant, would step out onto the ledge, face-forward. Mirabelle would wait for Marissa’s body to hit the pavement.
“But it never does.” She shook her shoulders, shedding the idea from her skin. “She just stands there; it feels like hours.”
I set the notebook next to me on the bed.
“I just thought that by writing her name down, somehow . . .” She combed her bottom lip with her straight top teeth, recently freed from braces; her lips were chapped because of this habit. “It’s probably exactly the kind of shit she wants me to do,” she said, meaning her mother. “Which is why I’m giving it to you.”
“I don’t think dead girls are quite what Sylvia had in mind.” We called our mothers by their first names only in their absence. We were still good girls then, but even if we’d been brave enough to try, we wouldn’t have known what to rebel against.
Mirabelle smiled wickedly, grabbed the notebook, and held it to her chest. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
All we had to do was open up the newspaper to see that girls disappeared and died like stray cats. The names stacked up in Mirabelle’s notebook easily, effortlessly: hit-and-runs, dog attacks, heart conditions, smothering by an older brother or stepfather who just couldn’t stand the girl anymore. We understood that most of the girls were different from us—less comfortable, mostly not white. The distance from danger was further for us, but that year we pretended it wasn’t.
We began passing the notebook back and forth, slipping it into each other’s knapsacks between classes every few weeks. Over the next nine months, the book’s spine cracked and its corners rounded from being shoved between our textbooks and under our mattresses, from being thumbed through on boring Saturday afternoons. Recording the names felt as inevitable as our summer salamander hunts or the spring we’d imagined the trees behind our houses hid witches and trolls when we were younger.
On one gray Saturday afternoon in January, at our usual corner booth at the diner, Mirabelle flipped through the out-of-date jukebox while we waited for our food. Through the window, I watched three boys climb out of a car in the parking lot.
A girl had been shot in a church in California, and Mirabelle, who had the notebook last, had added her name to the list.
“I thought we were sticking to New York,” I said, and took a sip of the milk shake we were sharing. The icy bits at the bottom made me shiver.
“Said who?”
Across the table, her chin in her hand, Mirabelle’s eyes followed the young men as they goofed around in the parking lot. They clipped each other’s shoulders and mussed each other’s hair. It used to be easy to get Mirabelle to agree with me; she never bothered to test my temper. But even as her growing disinterest in the world alarmed her parents, I’d noticed something else: She was less and less afraid.
“We need parameters,” I said. We had just learned the word in physical science, and I knew Mirabelle had been spacing out in class lately, drawing overlapping stars on the rims of her sneakers during lab.
“Parameters,” I repeated. “Rules.”
Mirabelle turned back from the window. The boys were on the front steps now; they’d straightened up and quieted down, adjusting their hair back into place. I knew it was Mirabelle who had caught their attention as she stared dreamily out the window, her cheeks rosy, her light lashes making her seem delicate, precious. I was, you could say, conventionally pretty, with hair that fell straight and sensibly halfway down my back, a few shades dirtier than Mirabelle’s halolike blond. I scared boys then, the way I met their eyes. Mirabelle had a way of disappearing with her body that only made you more aware of her presence. She was doing this now for them: the shifting carefully in her seat, letting her eyes fall on theirs only for a moment before she looked away.
Neither of us had much in the way of bodies then. We took each rounding of something that was once flat and bony as a sign that we were chosen, each pricking up of another consciousness in the world as a small affirmation. Of course we wanted to be desired.
I motioned for the book with impatient fingers as the boys were led to a table past ours. I began a list of the rules on the page across from Yvonne and Sierra Jeffries, five and seven, abandonment and starvation; and Paulina Krokos, twelve, car crash. We’d keep the dead girls’ names, their ages, and a brief description of how they died. Accidents counted, as did murders and suicides, of course. Eventual deaths—the fallout of beatings or multiple drug overdoses that weakened and failed a girl’s organs—were tricky, and the rule was, if
you went into the hospital following whatever had happened and you never left except through the morgue, it counted, no matter how long it took to die. The girls had to be under eighteen because above this they were women, and subject to another world of danger we weren’t ready to fathom.
We divided the Bronx by zip code: 10471, 10463, 10468. We’d take Inwood, which was technically Manhattan. Our borders were defined by the reaches of the number 1 and the 10 buses, farther out into the borough than we’d ever been, but seemingly within our reach. Eventually, we’d take in Yonkers and 10467, the neighborhood where our fathers had met as boys.
By the time we finished the rules, the streetlights were coming on along Broadway. We waited to be picked up in the diner’s vestibule, secured by our winter coats, rewrapped in our scarves. I wore Mirabelle’s gloves—I had forgotten mine—and she shoved her hands in her coat pockets, chewing a toothpick, leaning against the one mirrored wall. The parking-lot boys were leaving, too. Excuse me, they said, one after the other, as they passed through the space. We weren’t in their way, but they let their jackets brush against ours. They lingered, waiting for one of us to respond, or to blush, which was usually Mirabelle’s job, but she wasn’t in the mood.
• • •
At school that March the boys had a new game: sticking all manner of sharp objects—sewing needles, freshly sharpened pencils—into the backs of girls’ thighs while we walked up the stairs in front of them. Most of us were resigned to the snickering of the boys, who’d slip the objects back up their shirtsleeves and smile with a shit-eating grin if you turned around and looked at them. But when the point of Julian Wilson’s compass went into Mirabelle’s ass, she didn’t yelp, as most of us had been doing for weeks. Mirabelle and I had been coming up the narrower southern stairs from gym. The boys behind us were from the rowdier classes on the other side of the building, the boys you least wanted at your back. They were in eighth grade, too, but many were bigger, some of them having been left behind, and the others—the small and cagey ones—were worse than the slow-moving dumb ones. Julian was one of those smaller ones, popular for being bad, considered handsome by some girls, but not by us.
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