Back Talk

by Danielle Lazarin

  Mirabelle stopped on the stairs, turning to face Julian. “Stop fucking pricking me.”

  “What?” Julian looked at her as though she were crazy.

  “I said stop fucking poking me with your fucking compass.” Mirabelle tried to fix her face into an ugly expression, but she always looked pretty, even when angry.

  Julian smiled politely, and took one step up toward Mirabelle. He leaned in as close to her face as he could without touching her, his dark, pouty lower lip looking as though it might graze Mirabelle’s chin.

  “I wouldn’t stick shit in your”—and here Julian looked around, to make sure the other boys were watching what he was about to do—“skinny. White. Ass.”

  I stood just behind Mirabelle’s right shoulder, facing a crowd of boys with whom I’d barely felt brave enough to make eye contact for the past two years. Their sudden laughter made me flinch. But not Mirabelle; the heat rising from her body wasn’t embarrassment, but a tiny thrill.

  The buzzer sounded for fifth period. Neither Mirabelle nor Julian moved.

  “Boo,” Julian said, before pushing his way past her, leading the boys up the stairs to class.

  • • •

  Two weeks after school let out, junior high already a memory we were both trying to forget, the day was sticky hot. Mirabelle and I took the bus to a carnival where the old Pathmark had been. We rode the Spider first, delighting in the grip of the floor loosening under the soles of our sneakers, in our bodies rising up from under the safety bars. We screamed like children.

  Perhaps it was the heat that drew us to the Himalaya, whose backdrop was painted to look like a wall of ice, a scene of polar caps and polar bears. Music blared continuously from the ride’s central speakers, drowning out the fair games’ bells and whirrs. When it was our turn, our hips banged against each other’s, against the metal sides of the car, as we rode the Himalaya forward and backward, our car swinging wildly with our lightness, our heads snapping back as the ride changed direction.

  We rode three times in a row when the lines were short, and a boy came by to collect our tickets, wilted by our sweaty hands, after each go. He smiled at Mirabelle sideways, and she smiled back, a flush rising up to the dip of her tank top. When we’d had enough, we lifted the bar and stood, our knees buckling; we fell into one another. Mirabelle hooked her elbow into mine and we tried to walk normally down the ramp, but after we passed through the gate the boy held open for us, Mirabelle said, “I don’t feel so well.”

  I left her on a bench along the side of the children’s roller coaster while I went to get her something cold to drink. When I returned with a large lemonade, she was on her back, an arm draped over her face.

  “She okay?” asked another boy from the Himalaya; he’d sat inside the deejay booth. He was well groomed though not particularly handsome, but he had intense blue eyes and dark lashes. They were blinking on me.

  “She’ll be fine.”

  He lit a cigarette, asked, “This okay?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He took a few drags while Mirabelle hogged the drink. My throat felt dry, but asking her for a sip seemed mean.

  “What’s your name?” he asked me, stomping out the half-smoked cigarette with a clean sneaker.

  I smiled at him, squinting against the chalky white sky. I didn’t know if I should tell the truth.

  “Nicole,” Mirabelle answered for me, and I wanted to stick an elbow in her ribs.

  “You live around here, Nicole?”

  “Up the hill.” I nodded in the direction of our houses.

  “Oh, up there, huh?” He pointed his chin up Riverdale Avenue, and it seemed like a faraway land, an inestimable climb.

  “You?”

  “Jersey.” He waited for me to respond, but I just nodded. “But I work all week. You girls coming back here tonight?” Mirabelle rattled the ice cubes in the drink. “Because my cousin’s coming by. We could get you in for free.” We weren’t allowed to go to the fair at night.

  “We have to go,” Mirabelle said, sucking up the last of the lemonade.

  “You feel better?” I asked her.

  “I feel fine,” she said, rising.

  “I’m Josh, by the way,” he called out after us as Mirabelle, her hand sticky on my wrist, led me back toward the rides.

  “Good-bye, Josh,” Mirabelle said just to me.

  The rain was light at first, the red and yellow bulbs at the top of the Zipper brilliant against the pale gray sky. But then a single flash of lightning, and a rumble of thunder, and the rides were shut off one by one. They rounded us up like sheep and shooed us out in groups, handing us tickets for a full day as compensation.

  Because of the lemonade, we were a dollar short for bus fare home. We spent our change calling Mirabelle’s mom from the gas station on the corner, and then mine, but neither of them was home, so we walked. Mirabelle’s hoop earrings, which the guy had made her take off before getting on the Gravitron, jingled in her pockets. She put them back in as we walked uphill. The rain curled the ends of Mirabelle’s hair into semicircles, pulling it away from her ears, where the hoops shone bright against her neck.

  Two blocks from the top of the hill, a good mile from home, our sneakers were soaked, our bare feet blistering against their slick, rubbery insides. My shorts kept bunching up against the backs of my thighs. I suggested we hitchhike.

  “Go ahead,” Mirabelle dared me. She started walking faster, looking up at the sky as if it would suddenly stop raining.

  I stuck my thumb out on the corner of Greystone and 239th, mostly because I knew Mirabelle would be a little scared if I did. Before either of us could regret my boldness, a blue sedan pulled over. The driver, a woman, motioned us inside, the auto-unlock of the doors like gates being opened. Mirabelle opened the back door, leaving me the front seat. The woman cleared bags and papers onto the floor for me.

  “Thank you,” I said, surprised my plan had worked, and that we had landed in exactly the kind of car our mothers would be relieved to see us in.

  “Oh, please, I had to. This weather . . .” She was younger than she had first appeared to be through the rain-streaked window. No wedding ring, raspy voice.

  Mirabelle slid into the backseat next to the woman’s two girls, who unbuckled and re-buckled their seatbelts accordingly. The older one eyed us warily, embarrassed by what her mother had done. But Mirabelle was doll pretty, and when she checked to make sure the clasp was closed on her hoops, their little mouths opened with awe.

  “Those are pretty,” the smaller one said, reaching up to stick her fingers into the earring’s diameter.

  At the turn before our houses, the woman said, “Look, I know I shouldn’t be saying this, considering I picked you up and all that, but you girls should be careful with this kind of thing. There are a lot of creeps around here.”

  “We don’t usually . . . we’ve never . . . ,” I began.

  “We know,” Mirabelle said, smiling apologetically at the woman in the rearview mirror.

  Later, in front of my bedroom mirror, we pushed our shorts off our hips and compared the size of our bruises from the ride: Mine was a lemon; Mirabelle’s, a peach.

  That night, after the storm cleared and the fair reopened, someone dropped a knife from the top of the Ferris wheel. It spun and spun and entered Kiara Nelson’s skull at a forty-five-degree angle while she waited in line with her father. The blade severed multiple arteries in her brain, sending Kiara into a coma from which she’d never emerge. We weren’t allowed to go back to the fair. Not that summer, not ever.

  • • •

  In September Mirabelle’s mother found the notebook. As they always had since we were young, our mothers gathered us in one kitchen to scold us.

  “Can you tell us why you are doing this?” my mother asked, shaking her head.

  We shrugged, one after
the other.

  “You understand why this is disturbing, don’t you?” Mrs. Diehl asked us, her hand on top of the notebook we’d never see again.

  Mirabelle fixed her gaze on the marble countertops. I stared at my mother, who refused to meet my eyes.

  “Nicole?” Mrs. Diehl came forward to touch my shoulder.

  “What?”

  “You understand why we’re going to have to take this away, right?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Whose idea was this?” my mother asked. She directed this question at both of us, but her eyes waited on Mirabelle, who, when we were smaller, had always been the first to own up to what we’d done wrong, to cry through her confession of drawing on the walls with crayons or digging up the flowers for a game we’d invented. After, there’d be a private scolding for me at home, during which my mother would say I’d taken advantage of Mirabelle, manipulated her, and that I should be more mindful of my influence over her.

  But Mirabelle didn’t say anything, and we both waited them out, our arms crossed over our chests, till they sent us out of the room. I didn’t get that lecture this time.

  • • •

  Waiting for the 10 bus to school in late November, it felt like it might snow soon. We were only a few stops from school when Mirabelle suggested we cut. At the high school, the bus driver waited for us to file out with the other kids. He looked at us in his rearview mirror and shook his head silently before letting the doors hiss closed.

  When we returned to where we’d started, we slipped our knapsacks under our jackets and walked briskly home. Our parents were at work; we left our bags by my back door and set off on a walk. Leaves, brown and brittle, swirled around our ankles, following us as we walked down the road. I felt happily invisible as we moved deeper into the neighborhood.

  As the houses got bigger and the streets got quieter, we came to a house that looked abandoned, in the way only houses in our neighborhood could be: wrapped in tarps and guarded by a construction Dumpster, its renovations on hold for the winter. Mirabelle tried a window along the back side of the house; it opened without a fight. The room we climbed into was filled with a concrete gray light, dark enough to make me wish we had a flashlight, or candles. The house smelled of construction dust and cold, and faintly of the wood from a neighbor’s fireplace.

  The house was just a shell, its insides ripped out. We snaked through the rooms silently, holding hands. When we got to what was once probably, or was going to be, the kitchen, we sat on the floor, looking out onto the Hudson through the old French doors. There seemed no rush to get anywhere; no one would be looking for us in the place we’d gone.

  “I’m thinking of going away,” Mirabelle told me then, the first words either of us had spoken since we’d been in the house.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s a boarding school in New Hampshire that we’re looking at.”

  “For next fall?”

  “No, for January. It’s expensive, but my parents think it’s better for me,” she said, and began to cry.

  I looked at her, her knees drawn up to her chest, her fingers turning salmon pink in the cold.

  I listened to the trains along the river below, to the cars on Palisade Avenue. I let Mirabelle cry next to me in the cold and empty house, because that is what she wanted to do.

  • • •

  Although her parents went to see her at school two or three times the next semester, I never took the invitations they extended to me to join them. I could tell from her voice during our few phone calls that Mirabelle didn’t really want me there, that we both needed the space. We wrote each other letters; mostly I sent her gossip about the kids we knew, and she told me about how bad the food was and what the buildings on campus looked like. Neither of us mentioned the new friends we were making.

  Mirabelle came home for the summer while I was still finishing up ninth grade. She had a boyfriend, but not the kind her parents had wanted for her, not some East Coast old-money type but a pale Irish kid from Yonkers named Joseph with a shaved head and a diamond earring. He’d pick her up three blocks from her house in a rumbling Oldsmobile that smelled like a lifetime of smoke. He was somebody from school’s cousin’s friend. “Not all of them are snobs, you know,” she told me. “There are some real people there, too.”

  I had fallen for a neighborhood boy, one of the kind she would say weren’t real, and he wasn’t: He had thick, godlike eyebrows, and T-shirts with little rips in them; he went to a private school, and was two grades above me. Every few weeks I let him push me up against his garage and kiss me, his chest a little too strong against mine; I let him make me keep it all a secret. I’d look at him longingly across the driveway as we both helped our parents in the yard on the weekend, waiting for some signal of recognition. He’d concentrate on the grass or the spade in his hand. I wasn’t real to him either.

  I saw Mirabelle and Joseph riding around one afternoon on Milton Avenue, where I was picking up hamburger meat for my mother from the butcher. At the four-way stop, Mirabelle pulled out a piece of golden hair from her mouth, where it got caught in a laugh. She waved as they turned the corner, her face turning more childlike when she noticed me. I waved back, but I was already looking at the car behind them by then.

  Mirabelle came by the house later that night with her mother, who sat with mine at the kitchen table, drinking beer, sun-kissed and loud, as if they were the teenagers. I didn’t understand then how they could love each other so unconditionally, how they didn’t seem to want or need anyone else, didn’t need a little breathing room.

  Mirabelle and I sat in the yard, our heels tucked up against our shorts bottoms on the old wood chairs.

  “Did you see me today, on Milton? I waved.”

  I thought about pretending I hadn’t, decided not to.

  “I did. I waved back, but you were already gone.”

  “Oh, I didn’t see.”

  “Where were you going?”

  “Just around. Just driving.”

  I picked at the backs of my heels with a fingernail, flaking off hard skin.

  “Hey, you should come with us one day,” Mirabelle said.

  “Sure,” I said, but I knew I couldn’t stand to be in the backseat of that car, watching his hand cup her shoulder, massage the back of her neck, slink through her hair. It was too goddamned hot to be close to anyone those days, but I knew they did it, knew they pulled over to the shady places and went at it. I could tell by the way Mirabelle moved. She didn’t need to tell me herself.

  • • •

  After dinner, we walked over to the park—although it was nearly nine, the night wasn’t dark yet. We each took a swing, leaving one between us. The seats bore the memory of the day’s sun, swollen and forgiving in their warmth, metal that would have stung our thighs had we let it meet our skin earlier.

  I was the first to stand up on the swing, but it was Mirabelle who said, “Contest?” and I said, “Why not?” We began to bend our knees and pump, our hands slippery on the chains, the fence flying up to meet us. We had heard that these sorts of games were dangerous, that if we were to become part of local legend, if other girls were to keep watch over us, one of us must level out with the top of the set, then catapult over the chain-link to the street on the other side, land in a heap of wasted child body, lie in rivers of blood. Be gone. We had heard such things had happened.

  Looking for a Thief

  I am the master of my fate,

  I am the captain of my soul.

  —William Ernest Henley, “Invictus”

  The boys are setting up a tent in the dining room. Margaret, in the kitchen, can hear the chairs squeaking and moaning against the floors, Wesley’s exaggerated grunting as Matthew directs the boys to push. After she puts the chicken in the oven, she goes to check on them, rinsing her hands in the sink beforehand. Indeed, the
dining room table is now crooked against the far wall, the chairs lined up like executionees on the perimeter. In the middle, a tent she and Ian camped in a long time ago, sun bleached and ratty, at half-mast. The boys rigged it to the legs of the dining room table; it worked well enough to hold them. Its opening faces the window, outside which snow steadily falls. It has been snowing for three days, through the weekend, and now, Monday, a snow day from school.

  Wesley’s socks are unmatched, and one of them, likely belonging to Jonas, flops off the tip of his toe. Wesley scratches his nose, surveying the scene. “I don’t think that’s right,” he says, pointing to a corner whose poles bend in the wrong direction. Wesley is the baby, and he has just discovered that he can correct his brothers, and sometimes even be right.

  Matthew crawls out from inside the tent on his knees, inspects the corner to which Wesley is still insistently pointing. “Huh,” he says, as though it matters, and goes back inside to perform some other operation.

  Margaret takes a seat on one of the chairs, and instinctively, Wesley comes to her, pulling himself back onto her knees. She can smell the sweat gathering under his turtleneck, from the thrill, perhaps, of a day spent with his brothers. They watch the other two boys work around the misbehaving pole. Jonas works silently, but Matthew mutters to himself, little huhs and ohs that don’t indicate anything to anyone but him. Both boys push and prod the fabric, its metal parts clanging against one another, against the floor, as the tent is raised and lowered and raised again. Wesley gets up occasionally to stand over Jonas and Matthew, but Margaret can see there is no place for him to insert himself.

  Margaret wants to be able to help, to lay the tent on the ground and direct the boys step by step, as she directed Ian so many years ago, but she wouldn’t know how to put it together anymore.