Noelle and Marlene want to help me feel better but all I want to do is feel worse, to shrivel up, to be the girl who went off the deep end when her best friend disappeared.
Noelle stares at my big fake tattoo. “So,” she says. “Can you go in the water with that thing?”
“In what water?”
Marlene sighs. “Water Wizz,” she says. “Class trip.”
“Oh,” I say. “Yeah. I can go in the water.”
Noelle bites her lip. “I was kidding,” she says. “You gotta lighten up at least a little.”
Marlene picks up her tray. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I have practice.”
She’s sick of this fight, sick of Noelle lecturing me to smile, wash my hair, go to the mall—there’s a sale at Rolling Jack’s, we’re gonna get new bathing suits—and I’m sick of being on the other side of this. Sick of saying that I don’t want to smile, don’t want to wash my hair, I don’t want to go to the fucking mall and try on bathing suits. I want to be sad and miserable because my best friend is gone.
Noelle picks up her tray. “For the record,” she says. “The tattoo on your neck looks stupid and Jon would be the first one to say it. And if he’s even half the person you say he is, he would say you really suck like this, Chloe.”
In art class it’s easier. People don’t know me, they don’t care, they like the fact that I’m trying so hard to look fucked up because most of them are doing the same thing.
Rosie Ganesh plucks a hair out of her cheek with her fingers. “Got it,” she says. “Look at that little fucker.”
Rosie Ganesh is a freak. She moved here last year and it’s just her and her dad and a bunch of chickens. She has piercings and she’s obsessed with Ian Ziering and wears T-shirts with his face plastered all over them. None of her quirks makes any sense, none of it goes together.
“Would you ever get a real tattoo?” she asks.
“Of course I would,” I say. “But they won’t let you if you’re not old enough.”
She grins. She’s missing one of her bottom teeth. “My aunt’s coming this weekend,” she says. “With her boyfriend.”
I stare at her. “So?”
“So her boyfriend is a tattoo artist,” she says. “He travels with a kit. Do you want a tattoo for real?”
* * *
—
At dinner, my mom can tell I have something on my mind.
My dad is so different now, so afraid of me. He picks up his plate. “In case you girls want some alone time.”
“Dad, no,” I say. “You can stay.”
He looks at my mom and she nods. They treat me like I just got home from a mental institution and might start breaking all the lamps in our house at any moment. They don’t like my new clothes or the way I never smile.
“Well,” I say. “My friend Rosie asked me to sleep over this weekend.”
My dad chokes on his Coke. “Wow, well that’s great. Who’s Rosie?”
My mom is tepid. “This weekend?” she says. “But you have Water Wizz.”
“I’m not gonna go.”
My mom’s heart practically falls onto the table. Thump. “Oh,” she says. “Well, isn’t this a class trip? Didn’t I sign a permission slip?”
“Yes,” I say. “But it’s obviously not a requirement.”
“But everyone goes.”
“Not everyone,” I say, and it’s a lie. Everyone goes. Even the kids in art class. It’s a big thing in the school, a rite of passage.
My mom shakes her head. “You know what I’m going to say.”
“You don’t have to say it.”
“Chloe, honey, it does you no good to protest things in your life that bring you joy.”
“It’s a stupid water park with piss in the water. Dad, you know that’s true.”
He nods. “Nobody’s saying you gotta go in the water, kiddo. But your mother’s got a point.”
Here it comes, another lecture on participation. I’ve heard it all before, my mom’s testimony that the best parties are the ones you force yourself to go to and my dad’s proclamation that the bus ride alone would be good for me, get outta Dodge, get you outta your head.
I pick up my plate and throw it at the wall. I’ve never done anything like that before. It doesn’t break. There was no red sauce, there is no physical mess, only a measly little blob of mashed potatoes. I want my parents to hurt like I do. I want them to miss him. I can’t stand how alone I am and I wish they cried more, I wish they were nicer to his parents and I wish his parents were nicer to me and I wish I’d been nicer to him. I might be going crazy. But the missing is too much, it’s like a tetanus shot that never ends, this needle in my arm, this ringing in my ears, Where is he how he is why? My mom puts her hand up.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”
* * *
—
Rosie Ganesh’s house is on a scab of land way far away from the center of town.
My mom puts the car in park. “Are you sure you feel safe?”
I groan and say what she needs to hear. “Mom, I’m fine.”
It’s a long walk up the driveway and my eyes are watering. The whole way here I was on my phone looking at all the videos from Water Wizz. I feel stupid for being here. Phony.
Rosie grins. “Are you getting cold feet?”
“No,” I say. “Why? Did your uncle forget the needles or something?”
She laughs, waves me into her house. “He’s not my uncle. He’s my aunt’s boyfriend.”
None of them are what I expected. I was thinking bikers but they’re more like hippies, cooking quinoa and talking GMOs and thrift shops. The tattoo artist boyfriend is Devin, and he has long hair and a smile that eats his whole face; it starts on his forehead and spreads over his skin, pulling it tight. His girlfriend—the aunt—her name’s Anita and she has a lot of tattoos and hair almost as long as Devin’s. Rosie’s dad is a farmer in overalls, he’s a giant, especially next to skin-and-bones Devin and Anita. He has a really red face but it’s not from drinking. It’s from sun and laughing. They’re all so goddamn happy and Rosie’s always with her gloom-and-doom stories. She’s a liar. She’s a phony. But then what am I? I’ve gone to the bathroom twice already just to see Water Wizz updates.
We sit down around a table outside like a normal family and the aunt’s boyfriend catches my eye. “I’m sorry about your friend,” he says.
I look at Rosie and she shrugs. “I mean it’s illegal for you to get a tattoo,” she says. “I had to tell him what’s up.”
We eat our veggie burgers and our quinoa and we talk about Jon, about other sad stories of kids disappearing, kids kidnapped, the black market, heroin, all the dark things in the world, all the possibilities of where he could be, why. Rosie says she was really moved by my art, That’s how we became such good friends. I look down at my empty plate and I am queasy. All I can think is, I am not your friend. I am no one’s friend.
Devin stands. “Okay,” he says. “Rosie, I think you should wait here. You ready, Chloe?”
I can’t believe what I am doing. I can’t believe what I am, who I am, following Devin the tattoo artist around this house I don’t know. Devin set his things up in Rosie’s art studio. He says he won’t say stupid things like relax and breathe. He says this is my chance to ask him anything, anything I want.
I blurt out my question. “Do you think Jon is dead?”
He sits in a chair. I can’t tell if he’s twenty-five or forty-five. Beards are weird that way.
“The thing is,” I start, “if he’s not dead, and I mean I really don’t think he’s dead, I don’t want it to look like it was RIP, you know?”
“True,” he says. “But a tattoo is really just for you, we can put it someplace small, someplace out of the way. It’s nobody’s business but yours.”
I blu
sh a little. I feel young. Stupid. I never thought of my tattoo as a thing for me.
Devin closes his book of fonts. He says it’s okay to back out, that we’ll tell Rosie that this was his decision.
“Thank you,” I say. “You’re a nice person.”
He laughs and hugs me and says that I shouldn’t believe anyone who tells me it’s gonna get better. “Ride the wave,” he says. “Don’t wait for it. Don’t fear it. Just ride it.”
Rosie’s no dummy. She knows I wimped out.
“If God himself walked in here and said you could trade me for Jon, would you do it?”
“Rosie, that’s stupid.”
My non-answer was an answer, and I’m not surprised when she doesn’t sit by me in art class the next day. She doesn’t ice me out or anything. She says hi and we crack jokes about everyone wearing their stupid Water Wizz shirts but we both know we aren’t friends anymore. It’s a thing you can feel, a thing I know well by now, when I see Marlene and Noelle in the hallway, how they’ve adjusted to being two best friends instead of three.
At night it occurs to me that I officially have no friends. No friends except Jon. And Jon always had one friend, he always had me. I pick up the book he was reading when he evaporated, the book about Marshmallow Fluff, but I fall asleep and dream about Carrig Birkus. In my dream, I have long hair and smooth legs, I wrap around him, tight.
My therapist says it’s natural for girls to separate lust and love, to rely on Jon for intimate connection and lust after Carrig. She says life is a process, a journey, not a destination, that fantasizing about Carrig doesn’t mean that I don’t miss Jon.
“Now,” she says. “Tell me about your class trip. I know this was going to be a challenge for you, I know it’s hard, but tell me about Water Wizz. Did you have fun?”
I gulp. “Great,” I say, because my whole life is a lie, even the part where you spill your guts. “I’m really happy I went.”
CHLOE
My heart isn’t broken, but it’s cracked.
I had been so loyal, saving every Telegraph, drawing him every night. My mother is happy about that; art is a positive coping mechanism. I would carry the number of days in the front of my head. But things have popped up, distractions. I got an A in art and they let me move up to a junior seminar. I got the flu. I fell behind in my classes and I forgot to save the Telegraphs. And suddenly I don’t know how many days Jon has been gone; I lost track at some point. All these life events that Jon missed made me feel less close to him, like this wound was healing and there was nothing I could do about it.
My phone rings. I still hope it’s Jon. I always hope it’s Jon.
But it’s not him. It’s never him.
It’s Marlene’s mom, wondering why I didn’t RSVP to Marlene’s birthday party. I feel my insides heat up in the bad way. I didn’t respond because I wasn’t invited. I’ve drifted away from Noelle and Marlene, fading into a haze on the floor of my bedroom with my sketch pads. I never said yay for Marlene making #1 singles on the tennis team, never helped Noelle hang posters for student council. They must feel stung. I take a breath. This is what my mom would call an achievable goal. I promise to go to Marlene’s party and my mom hugs me so hard that night. “It’s spring,” she says. “I want to see you have some fun.”
At the party, I rejoin the land of the living. Me and Noelle and Marlene stay up all night talking. Marlene is gooey, we missed you, just like her mom. Noelle is wary. She points her Dartmouth pen at me. “I think you should sneak downstairs and get us a bottle of Fireball.”
I tiptoe down the stairs, I open the cabinet. I think of our sunflowers in the backyard, how they lean toward the sun. I think that’s what this is. And I like being drunk. Noelle says my boobs got bigger. I forgot that I’m a girl, that I’m pretty. I’m not like Jon. I think of Jon’s eyes, how hard they were to get into, the opposite of Marlene’s family’s liquor cabinet. I hold the bottle of Fireball and close the cabinet. I hesitate before I go upstairs. This could be my life from now on, sleepovers and shots. Jon is probably dead. It doesn’t matter that I miss him. It didn’t bring him back. Time is passing and I can’t stop that from happening with my sketch pads.
The next day, I wake up with a hangover. I feel older. I go home and reach under the bed for the box of Telegraphs. I carry them outside into the blinding sun and dump them into our trash bin. I catch my breath. I stand there waiting for him to come back, because isn’t that how life works? The second you give up, you get what you want.
He doesn’t reappear. The trash truck comes and the papers are really gone. My mom doesn’t say anything to me about throwing away the papers, but when I get home from school I notice that she vacuumed under my bed, her way of saying thank you.
* * *
—
I kiss a boy at Noelle’s cousin’s party in Manchester. I don’t know his name. His tongue is enormous and alive. I don’t know Jon’s tongue. Probably never will.
Noelle kicks my leg at lunch. The Monday After My First Kiss Since Jon Disappeared.
“What?” I ask. I assume I did something wrong.
“Nothing,” she says. “It’s just good that you’re like, here.”
She’s bossy, Jon always said. But bossy can be good. I think she’ll run the world, be president or something. She taps her Dartmouth pen on the table. “We should hang out at my pool,” she says.
Sometimes I picture the crack in my heart. It flares up when something reminds me of Jon. He always said pools are full of germs, even the clean ones, especially Noelle’s pool because of the old tiles. Everything is connected to Jon, and Jon didn’t know how to swim underwater. What babies we were. Everything is Jon.
I snap at Noelle. “Your pool is gross. Indoor.”
“A pool is a pool,” she argues. “And I’m the only person who has one. So we should be the pool people. And we should make sure everyone knows. Boys love pools.”
Marlene shrugs. “I’m there if I can do laps.”
The last time Noelle tried to make her pool happen we were in fifth grade. I got an infection in my toe and I told her Jon said it was from her pool. She said he was the infection. She knows I’m thinking about him, siding with him. If I fight her indoor pool, I’m not gonna see her at all this summer. So of course I tell her that I’m in too.
* * *
—
Noelle’s parents retiled the area around the pool and Carrig started following me on Instagram and liking the pictures I put up of the pool, and suddenly this is our life.
My mom is happy I’m having a real summer. I like being in a pool. Once you’re in the water, you have to stay afloat. It’s simple. It’s comforting to be somewhere I’ve never been with Jon, and maybe the water is sealing up the cracks in my heart. Marlene and Noelle are the best in here, childish in the nice way.
One night we go to the movies with our wet heads and we run into them, the boys, the boys, Carrig and Penguin, and Eddie Fick. Noelle does all the talking. They are sick of the pond and they want to go in her pool. It’s a miracle, the way they want to be part naked with us. After we hang out with the boys, I go home. And now I can’t sleep. I imagine my toes in the water, brushing against Carrig’s. It doesn’t matter that he’s a jerk. He’ll be in shorts. No shirt.
I should hate him because of how he picked on Jon. Because of the picture he posted of himself, crouched over a dead deer. He was smiling like a new dad, like a football hero. #ByeBambi. He defended himself in the comments, Hunting is legal look it up dickwad.
He oversimplifies things. As a person he is oversimplified, it all goes together, his attitude, his rifles and his six-packs and his sweatpants. But in that picture of life and death, he was life. There was something forgivable about his smile. He’s not a monstrous old dentist extinguishing the life of an endangered species in another country. He’s just a kid. A dumb kid. A happy kid. A h
unter born in a place where people like to go hunting. You can practically hear his heart beating.
Saturday, I wear a red-and-white two-piece and my mom says I seem different. I blush. “There might be boys today.”
She smiles. “Good.”
They arrive. No shirts. I’m too shy to look at Care so I flirt with Eddie, a jock with tiny eyes, soft brains, a giant baby of a boy who could kill you if he wanted to, which he never would, being a giant baby. I always know where Care is though, and I sense him watching me. Noelle gets first pick and she goes for Penguin; she’s a winner that way, choosing the one who’s guaranteed to say Hell yeah, kid, come up on me right here. Marlene and Eddie pair off and then it’s just me and Carrig, treading water, hesitating, stupidest small talk in the world, How’s your summer; good how’s yours good. But it feels real. Lump in the throat kind of heavy, the sound of another world opening up. There is a string pulling us together.
I love Jon. I want Care. My heart must be bigger than normal. Or maybe that’s just this pool, this summer, the summer we got boys, the summer Jon became like an eyelash that gets stuck beneath the lid, that makes me blind and tearful, but eventually falls away.
JON
Chloe and I talked about death once. I told her I thought you just die, that’s it, and she said she thinks you transform into something, maybe not a bunny, but something. We were both wrong. Death is monotony. A walk in the woods. There is no way to know how long I’ve been doing this. Mr. Blair lags behind me and it’s always Monday morning in late November, the gray cold, the dead leaves on the ground, shimmying in the sky on their way down. I don’t know where we’re going, and though we never stop walking, we never get anywhere.
Providence Page 3