“Hey! What’s up? Doing some shopping?” She looked down at the basket of food and toilet paper. The large hunk of meat balanced on top felt shameful there and I couldn’t explain why.
“I needed to get out of my house.”
“I hear that. Who even rents DVDs anymore, right?” She kept talking, something about a fight with her mother, and her brother being annoying. My attention drifted as I glanced at the butcher, noticed him eavesdropping. I mentally steered back to Sabrina. She wore an oversized hooded sweatshirt, striped scarf, and the same scruffy boots as before. The outfit would’ve looked masculine on anyone else, but her face and pigtails added a soft girlishness. Again I was struck by the theatricality of her makeup. She was certainly going to be memorable in a small town like this.
“Hellooo, Jane, are you listening to me? Am I boring you? Well I’m bored, that’s for sure. I was going to rent a movie, but everything they have here I’ve seen a hundred times or is total shit. Besides, I can download newer stuff. I have my mom’s car, want to hang out? I thought about calling you, but never got your cell or your email, and I couldn’t find you online. God, I sound like a stalker. Anyways, we should definitely exchange numbers, either way.” She stared at me expectantly.
“I have to get these groceries home to my mother, and . . . uh . . . get her to bed . . . She’s unwell.”
“Oh, yeah I get it.” Sabrina visibly deflated. I felt a pang of guilt. She was as lonely as I was. She was reaching out. Why are you so scared of her?
“If you want to give me a ride home to put away my groceries, maybe then we could . . . hang out after.” She brightened immediately, clapping her hands together.
“Awesome. I was going to go home and slit my wrists if you said no. Not really though, God, that sounded so pathetic and psycho. Just ignore me.”
I felt little bursts of euphoria behind my eyes. I was, weirdly, having a good time. Sabrina’s stream-of-consciousness mouth was very entertaining. Her energy was attractive. Even being near her made me feel more aware. Being seen, being talked to, was starting to make me feel more substantial.
I stepped up to the counter as Sabrina walked away to call her mother.
The sour-faced cashier rang up my items quickly, and then we were out. I was envious that Sabrina needed to call someone to check in. As we exited the store, the same boys were lingering on the bench. Their conversation petered out and stopped again as we passed. This time I didn’t bother to look at them when they stared. Sabrina did though, spinning, incensed, and calling out to them.
“What the fuck are you staring at?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”
One of them chuckled, braver than the others. The blond one, Brent.
I reached out and took Sabrina’s arm. It was like an electric shock, the touch. She felt it too, and turned to me, startled, her penciled eyebrows up high.
“Just leave them be. There’s no point,” I said.
She nodded and we walked away, shoulder to shoulder. Suddenly she spun around and flipped off the boys with both hands. I laughed in spite of myself.
We arrived at a sensible maroon sedan. I had expected Sabrina to drive a big glossy old hearse, or a giant Bondo-colored Cadillac. Something big, rude, belching smoke. But this boxy, efficient vehicle just screamed “Mom’s Car.” Looking at it, I raised my eyebrows and Sabrina huffed and flipped me off too, and pressed the fob to unlock the doors. Instantly the general store behind my back stopped weighing on me, and the boys on the bench barely registered. It was amazing how just one person who actually saw you changed the world.
We slid through the night. “Wow, you live pretty close to me. I’m down the street at 55 Elm Grove,” Sabrina said as she drove. The darkness was so different from inside the safety of a car.
Sabrina had the radio on loud, a band she seemed to know well, singing along off-key. The synthesizers and guitars were mashing away together while the vocalist shrieked. I liked the intensity and the newness of the sounds. An altogether different feel than what I usually found listening to the radio or my mother’s old albums. When we pulled up to my ramshackle house, I got out to open the rusted gate.
“Jesus, this is like if the Addams Family house had a baby with Strawberry Shortcake or something. I love it.”
I looked up at my house, trying to see it through Sabrina’s eyes. The car bumped and dragged up the driveway to the front. We finally stopped with a lurch and I quickly went for the handle. The house took up the horizon, a dark shape skewering the bruised night sky. When I looked at it, all I saw were flaws: the drooping porch, the broken windows, the crooked, amethyst-tipped lightning rod jutting off the ostentatious turret. The qualities I found shameful didn’t faze Sabrina at all.
“I’ll be right back.”
I grabbed my grocery bags from the backseat. Sabrina shut the engine off and was standing beside me when I turned, laden with my purchases.
“No way, I have to come inside. Your house is amazing.”
“It’s not really . . . guest friendly, and my mother’s quite ill. We don’t have people over.”
“Pleeeease?” She clasped her hands and batted her heavy, mascara-coated eyelashes.
V.
“So like I said, it’s just me and my mom, and she’s very sick. We don’t have any money, and I’m a terrible housekeeper. You’re the first person I’ve ever brought here.”
As I opened the door, a blast of musty, wood-smoke-filled air hit us. Sabrina followed on my heels into the foyer.
I tried to see it through her eyes: the grand curving staircase, the chandelier, the stained-glass windows. Or was she distracted by the mounds of magazines, books, and debris, the clothes and shoes piled on the stairs? The rugs covered in cat hair. At the back, the dingy kitchen, and to the left, the parlor. The small wood stove provided the only light.
My mother’s figure outlined by the scant firelight in her usual chair was like something out of a horror story. Sabrina looked around, eyes wide. In the kitchen, I quickly put the food away.
“Should I go say hi to your mom?” she whispered.
A million nasty replies bubbled up in my mouth, but I pushed them down. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll let her know that I’m going out for a bit. She’s not much of a talker. She probably won’t even look at you.”
I finished putting everything away, unsure if I should just drag Sabrina back out the way we came, or show her around. She was poking around the dimly lit kitchen, noting and recording every detail. I couldn’t quite gauge how I felt about her being here, besides a mild anxiety.
“I just love creepy old houses. Please make this girl stuck in a new, ugly subdivision happy and jealous and show me around?” I was surprised by the word “jealous.” The idea that anyone could be jealous of my life seemed absolutely insane.
“Well . . . this is the parlor. My mother spends her days here since it’s the warmest room in the house.” The walls were stacked high with bookshelves, and two worn club chairs faced the small wood stove, which was settled haphazardly inside the flue where the old original fireplace still stood.
Sabrina noted the artwork as we went up the stairs and into the hallway. I pointed to my mother’s room: the large brass bed, the faded velvet drapes to keep out the chill and the light. The threadbare Oriental carpet. Her bedpan, her walker, her adult diapers. Sabrina could see all of this from the doorway and could probably smell the stink of sickness absorbed deep into the fabric.
On the hallway wall outside her bedroom door was a cluster of photographs, the largest one showing a smiling child with a shock of red hair and not a care in the world. Sabrina walked over to look closer at the photos. In particular, one from when my mother was a teen. She had just aged out of the gangly, awkward phase and was transitioning into the woman she would become. It was a birthday picture, fifteen according to the cake, and my mom smiled at the camera demurely, more aware than in her younger photos. Her proud, beaming parents stood on either si
de of her.
“She was so beautiful.” Sabrina reached out a finger to touch my mother’s face. I watched a film of dust come off on her fingertips. “You don’t look much like her, or your grandparents.”
“No.” I stepped back into the shadows of the hall. I turned on the light. “Apparently, I look like my father.”
Sabrina didn’t follow me, instead she flipped through the canvases littering the hall, releasing an explosion of dust.
“Did she paint all of these? They’re really cool.”
I glanced back dismissively and nodded, then took her into my room. It was a strange feeling watching her cross the threshold into my sanctuary, a trill of fear at literally letting someone in. This was the only place that was solely mine. I realized I was holding my breath, and forced it out as Sabrina came farther into the room.
“I love the curtains around your canopy bed. Reminds me of A Christmas Carol, actually.”
I nodded, feeling helpless and awkward.
“Any ghosts peep in the curtains at you while you sleep?”
I shook my head.
Sabrina walked the perimeter of the room. I had never entertained, per se, but even I knew that this behavior was odd. The way she was studying every detail, like she was casing the joint or something. When she’d completed the circuit, she came to the small desk with my schoolbooks, touched my few childhood toys, flipped through the library books I was reading, then turned to me.
“Your house is a strange place. Like you and it are something out of a fairy tale.”
I flinched a little. But there was no malice that I could see. She meant it to be a compliment. I shrugged, which apparently was one of the few things I could do to communicate, and eased myself onto the bed. Sabrina mirrored my move and sat beside me.
“So what’s wrong with your mom, exactly?”
I stopped myself from shrugging again, looking out the window into the night beyond.
“She’s just sick. Only forty and she looks like an old woman in a nursing home.”
“Forty? Wow. Who else takes care of her? Do you have a nurse come in or something?”
I shook my head, hands limp in my lap.
“It’s only me. It’s always been me.”
“That’s crazy. What do the doctors say?”
My pulse sped up; I could feel myself becoming defensive. “I don’t know. She stopped going years ago. It’s all so pathetic, huh?”
“No. It’s just sad. What if something happened to her?”
“I just need to keep her well until I turn eighteen and graduate. It’s not too far off. Then I’ll have some options . . .”
I tilted my head up at the ceiling, tracing the veiny cracks in the plaster, the water stains blossoming in the corner from the leaking roof. The whole house felt fragile.
“Not that there’s much to lose.”
I said this quietly, almost as an afterthought. I felt unbelievably vulnerable. Sabrina was quiet. I could almost hear the cogs turning behind her heavily made-up eyes. After a pause she lay back on the bed, hands over her head.
“That is some heavy shit, Jane.”
My heart sank. Was it too heavy a burden for a new friend? But Sabrina simply laughed and rolled over to face me and without a second thought, changed topics.
“So, Jane, do you like anything from this century? Like what kind of music do you listen to? I’ve been into this very synthy German Darkwave band lately. And I love this smutty fantasy series, Helix One—you ever read it?”
I’d heard of none of them, and she promised to share them with me. When I confessed I read mostly art books and pulp mysteries (because it was all I had in the house), she wrinkled her nose.
“You could go to the library. I know Hob’s Valley is basically a street, but they do have one of those.” She went on to tell me about her old life in Boston. “It’s way better than here obviously—there are restaurants and you can take the train, and go do stuff. But my school was terrible, all stuck up bitches, and when they go after you, they really go after you.” She got quiet, thoughtful. “Like a dog with a bone. Better to get the fuck away from all that, get my GPA up.” She told me she wanted to go to Emerson, that she wanted to be a graphic designer. Then she moved onto food: she loved Chinese food (of which there was none in town) and she hated tomatoes. My head swam with the deluge of information. I let her talk, appreciating having someone to talk to.
Eventually Sabrina stood. “Can I have a glass of water?”
“Sure. I can get it for you.”
“Nah, it’s fine. I’ll grab it myself.” She went downstairs, taking her bag with her. A few minutes later she returned, giddy. Rooting around in her giant shoulder bag, which resembled a pillow case covered in skulls more than anything, she produced a small bottle of whisky.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked, but I knew.
While drinking was the favored pastime of most kids in my school, I’d never tried it. Most of my knowledge of alcohol was PSA-related, honestly: teen pregnancies, DUIs, and social media bullying. I could vaguely recall my mother occasionally sipping some wine or an amber cocktail that smelled medicinal and was full of ice when I was very young. But not often, and while I’d passed the dusty bottles in the cabinet a thousand times, I’d never thought to drink out of one of them. I was shamefully out of my depth.
“I found it in your liquor cabinet downstairs. So, what do you say, hmmm?”
I thought of the large ornate credenza in the rarely used dining room. The rows of dusty old bottles there and Sabrina stealing something. I was conflicted, afraid of being drunk, afraid of losing control. Afraid of her.
“Oh, loosen up, Jane. I can put it back if it’s that big of a deal. Just thought it would be fun!”
Sabrina went over to my stereo, griping over the album collection around it. She found an old CD of my mother’s and soon early 80s new wave filled the space.
“Well?” She waved the bottle back and forth until I finally nodded. Grinning devilishly, she cracked the bottle open and took a long, aggressive swallow, recoiling instantly with disgust after swallowing it. She made a face, eyes streaming, before putting a fist to her mouth. “It’s really strong,” she choked out. Sabrina held it out to me, eyes red, wiping her chin with her sleeve.
I looked at it with distaste. “You’re really not selling me on this.”
“Oh, come on. Just a sip. Just one! Come on . . . you know you waaaaant to . . .”
It was clear she wouldn’t stop offering, so I took the bottle from her and our hands brushed. An electrical current seemed to run between them. Her hand so warm, compared to my cold one.
I put the bottle to my mouth, smelling both the sharp fumes of the alcohol and the vanilla from Sabrina’s lip gloss. I took a tentative sip. The liquid burned down my throat, scalding my stomach. But as the burn faded, the heat remained, the warmth soothing me. It seeped into my limbs and face. I felt more aware of the blood in my body than ever before. I laughed aloud at the sensation, handing the bottle back to Sabrina.
She was spinning in my rickety desk chair. After her second, nearly gag-inducing drink, she slid off her boots, revealing pink socks with polka dots. Her nervous energy was being smoothed away by the alcohol. She sang along to the CD and fingered all the items on my desk in an idle way. I wanted to ask Sabrina more about herself, to make her talk about her life and her hopes and dreams, her desires for the future. She noticed me watching her and raised an eyebrow.
“What’s your family like?” I said.
She took another drink, this time with ease, “My family is pretty boring. Not fucked up like yours. But, I guess they’re happy. I’m still barely speaking to them because of this move. I mean, it’s crazy. And social suicide. But they don’t get it. They were, like, king and queen at their prom. The fucked-up thing was my parents actually thought this move would be good for me. Because I didn’t really have a lot of friends at my old school, and there were some jerks who were always teasing me, like o
nline and in class. It’s not like anyone was really sad over me leaving or whatever. Anyways, I don’t want you to think I was a loser. I just fooled around with this guy and it became this whole thing. I’m sick of mean girl bullshit, you know?”
She swayed a little in her seat and I could see the alcohol now, looking at me through her eyes. She took another pull before handing the bottle back to me. The whisky made her vulnerable too.
“Was he your boyfriend?” I asked carefully.
She groaned and spun the chair, covering her face and peeking out through her fingers, “No, I liked him, had for a long time. Thought he was out of my league y’know? But then one night I see him at this party. I normally wouldn’t have gone, but I did, and he was there and we were drinking and smoking out on this porch. Like all night. I thought we really connected.” She sniffed. “Anyways, we fooled around, and then at school Monday, it was a big joke. He’d told everyone, made fun of me. It sucked.”
“I’m sorry.” And I meant it. Sabrina’s tough exterior hid a pretty sensitive person. I’d only known her a day and even I could see that. “I know what it’s like to be on the outside looking in. To not get the joke or whatever.”
“I noticed that here, actually, how people like . . . I’m trying to think of how to say it that doesn’t sound totally horrible . . .”
“Just say it.”
“They aren’t making fun of you, more like they’re freaked out by you or something. It’s like they’re scared of you.”
I was sitting on the bed pulling at a loose thread in the comforter, my fingers working of their own accord.
“It’s always been that way, even when I was a kid. Most people want nothing to do with me. Even my mom, honestly. It’s why I thought it was strange you wanted to be my friend.”
“Huh. I don’t know, you seemed cool and weird. I’m cool and weird, and I would prefer to hang out with a cool outcast than a bunch of bitchy girls. Anyway, all this maudlin shit is bumming me out, and you too. We talked about what I want to do, but what are you going to do after high school?”
Parasite Life Page 4