The Girl with the Wrong Name

by Barnabas Miller

She bolts past me, slipping through the door at the other end of the terrace. I follow her with my eyes, watching her stumble recklessly through the crowd until I see my own reflection in the glass.

  I can’t move. I can’t find any oxygen to breathe. I can’t hear anything. I’m stranded in deep space. The white gravel has become the surface of the moon. I’m weightless, suffocating, in a vacuum. I’ll expand like a grotesque balloon and rip apart at the seams if I don’t find some air.

  Racing back downstairs registers only in snapshots: knocking Helena aside as I run back through the bar, stumbling through the golden elevator doors, smacking the lobby button, pulling off my shoes to find what was left of my balance. Running barefoot across Battery Place, dodging fast-moving cars with their horns blaring, until I’m back in the bushes near Wagner Park, where I find Andy nervously waiting for me on our bench.

  When he sees me, his eyes go wide. “Jesus, what the hell happened?” He jumps up and reaches for me, but I back away. I know I owe him explanations and descriptions, but I can’t. I can’t say anything except, “Take me home.”

  “Theo, what’s going on?” he demands. The less I say, the more frightened he looks. “Did you find her? Was Sarah up there or not?”

  I don’t even know how to answer. I see his lips forming question after question, but there is only one immediate need powerful enough to cut through the haze.

  “Just take me home, Andy. Please take me home.”

  Is the camera still running? It must be, because I never pressed stop. I didn’t even check the screen once during the cab ride. I couldn’t break free from my catatonic state, other than to give the cab driver my address and pay him whatever was in my wallet. Andy was right behind me, matching me step for step as I climbed the back stairwell to my apartment. He kept trying to make me talk in the cab, but I couldn’t or didn’t hear him. Now, as I lock my bedroom door, praying my mother hasn’t heard us, he tries again.

  “Theo, please,” he whispers. “Please tell me what happened up there. You are scaring the shit out of me.”

  The dizziness is ten times worse after the bumpy cab ride. I drop my purse and shoes on the floor and take a few aimless steps around my room, still trying to find my center, still trying to get the world to stand the fuck still for just one second. I step to my bed, but sway back toward the couch. I step to the closet, but sway sideways toward my bathroom. Andy steps in front of me, blocking my route to the toilet.

  “Theo, stop, just stop. You have to talk to me. You have to tell me what happened up there. Did you find Sarah or not?”

  “What are you not telling me?” I whisper.

  “Hallelujah, she finally speaks!” He smiles, and I feel my stomach rise.

  “Don’t. Don’t try to charm me. She called me Sarah. Emma called me Sarah. Why would she call me that?”

  “Wait, Emma Renaux? She talked to you?”

  “She knows you. She knows who you are.” I’m slurring the words.

  “Theo, what are you saying? Are you drunk?”

  “She begged me to leave you alone. Or no, not me, Sarah—she begged Sarah to leave you alone.”

  “To leave me alone?” Veins bulge in his forehead; he’s stressed or lying or both. “I don’t know what you’re saying. I’ve never met that Renaux lady in my life. I told you, I just saw her hugging Sarah goodbye that day.”

  “Andy, we have all these things in common. Don’t you realize that?”

  “Who does?”

  “Me and Sarah.” I press on my chest to try and slow my heart.

  “Okay, we just need to breathe here,” he says. “We need to sober you up and calm you down. We need coffee—”

  “We both love the Harbor Café,” I say. “We both love to sit and watch the newlyweds at Battery Gardens. We both love daisies, for God’s sake. Who loves daisies anymore?”

  “Theo, please.”

  “We both have dark hair and Cupid’s-bow lips. You said so yourself. Why are all your memories of her so fuzzy? It was just a few days ago.”

  “They’re not fuzz—”

  “If you love her so much, then why can’t you remember her? You couldn’t remember which subway, you couldn’t remember where she lived. You could barely remember the color of her eyes. Do you actually remember her or not?” Lava scrapes the back of my throat, and I begin to choke. “Shit, move,” I croak. “Get out of the way.”

  “No, I am not moving until you talk to—”

  “No, I’m going to be sick. I’m going to be—”

  But it happens. I can’t stop it. I would have done anything on earth to prevent the moment, but I can’t. It flows over my tongue and spills from my mouth, an acrid pink champagne waterfall. Every heave is like fire. I feel the retching at the base of my stomach as the hot pink mess douses us both, soaking the front of his white Oxford shirt and the front of my black dress from top to bottom.

  And then it’s over.

  I’m not sure how long I stand there shivering, mortified—frozen in place like a child who’s just had an accident in front of her kindergarten class. I wait for Andy’s face to turn hard and cruel like Douchey Tim in the Magic Garden men’s room. I wait for him to bark at me with disgust.

  But when he speaks, his voice is quiet and calm and kind. “It’s okay,” he says.

  “Andy,” I whimper.

  “It’s okay. Just don’t move.”

  He carefully unbuttons his soiled shirt and peels it off his sturdy shoulders, dropping it to the floor.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say. “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

  “Let’s just start with the jacket,” he says. “Can you get the jacket off? Do you want me to help?”

  I nod. I’m a puke-stained child, and Andy is the paternal voice of reason. I do whatever he tells me to do. He helps me slowly pull the jacket off and drop it to the floor next to his shirt. I know the button cam is shooting our feet now, or the rumpled folds of my jacket, or nothing at all.

  “Okay, now the dress,” he says. “How do we get it off?”

  “Zipper in the back.”

  “Do you need me to help?”

  “I can do it.” I reach behind me and find the zipper. It slips twice from my sweaty fingers before I finally manage to pull it down. I peel off the revolting bodice and step out of the skirt, letting the dress fall to my ankles.

  The moment it hits the floor, I wake from my kindergarten trance. I’m not a five-year-old girl, and Andy is not my father. He’s a half-naked man, and I’m a full-grown woman, standing before him in a black bra and panties—close enough to feel his breath on my shoulder.

  The rest of the world goes dark, leaving a white-hot spotlight glaring down on our skin. I’m drowning in my nakedness and blinded by his. I’d shamefully pictured his naked chest more than once. I’d seen glimpses of it behind the tattered holes of his V-neck; I’d seen its outline under soggy white cotton. But here it was, unveiled, in the flesh, and every contour, every freckle, every wispy blond hair is exactly as I’d pictured.

  I look at his chest and think of Michelangelo’s David. Then I think of my fat, funnel cake–induced ass. I think of my fleshy stomach. I think of the gash on my cheek, and I shove Andy aside and run to the bathroom sink, snatching my white towel from the floor and wrapping it around myself like a giant Ace bandage. I lean over the faucet and blast the cold water, splashing my clammy face and neck.

  I grab the spearmint mouthwash next to the sink and drink in a huge mouthful straight from the bottle, swishing it around, spitting it out and taking a second mouthful—so much that it dribbles down the sides of my mouth. Then I flip off the cold water and flip on the hot until it’s scalding. I douse myself twice with boiling-hot water, trying to scrub away my face, but when I look up at the mirror, it’s still there.

  I forgot to use my mirror technique.

 
I forgot to focus on the tight close-ups and the individual features. Now I’ve accidentally taken in the whole picture, the whole face, the whole me. The hot water has fogged the mirror, enough to blur the scar. I can see the hint of a face; I’m just not sure I recognize her. I’ve tried not to look at her for so long. Who is this person with trails of tears pouring down her scoured cheeks? Who is this?

  Andy steps into the bathroom and turns me around. “Please don’t cry,” he says. But it’s too late; I’m already crying. I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t seen it in the mirror.

  “I’m seriously begging you,” he says. “You can’t cry. I have this problem when I see a girl cry, I just want to—”

  “Why can’t you remember her?” I plead for the answer now. “What really happened that night? What do you really remember about her? Anything?”

  Steam rises from the faucet behind me, billowing like smoke. Andy looks down at my towel and then up at my face. The look in his eyes compels me to hide my jaw with a swath of wet hair.

  “I remember that you were wrong,” he says. “You were wrong about her.”

  “About what?”

  “You said she ‘gave herself’ to me that night, but she didn’t. Because she had never . . . you know . . . Sarah was still a—”

  “Everything’s the same. Everything about us is the same.”

  His eyes roam across the features of my face, down to my shoulders and back again. “You do look like her,” he says quietly.

  “But you said she was a Pretty Girl.”

  “She is.” He steps into me. His bare right hip presses up against my stomach through the towel.

  “But then I can’t look like her.”

  “But you do. You look more and more like her every day.” He leans his face past my last inch of personal space, his bangs brushing across my forehead, his nose grazing mine, his mouth a breath away from mine. His fingers engulf my left arm and climb my bare shoulder toward my neck. I’ve never given over to anything in my life. I never even knew what it meant. But I feel my entire body giving over to his.

  My hands clutch the sink behind me, and I push myself up to meet his lips as my towel falls to the floor. But his caress doesn’t stop at my neck. Before my lips can find his, his fingers climb past my chin all the way to the left side of my jaw. His fingernails inch toward my scar, and I’m stricken. My body goes rigid. I want to punch and kick and ravage and destroy. I want to run as far and as fast as I can. It all boils down to fight or flight. And I choose flight.

  I duck down under him and grab my towel, draping it over my chest and running from the bathroom, jumping over the heap of ruined clothes and the puddle in the doorway. I grab a pair of sneakers and sweatpants by the closet. I trip as I climb into both, then grab a gray hoodie from the foot of my bed and rush out my door. I zip it up as high as it will go, pull the hood over my head, and run to the kitchen, to the back stairs, to the overcrowded street, to the only safe place in the world I know.

  Chapter Ten

  I hardly remember how I got to Max’s apartment building from my house. Subway? Cab? On foot? All three? I’d been counting on my camera to remember things for me, but I’d conveniently abandoned my iPhone in the puke-stained jacket on the bedroom floor. Now I could only record events with my actual brain, which was proving to be my least reliable organ.

  Miraculously, I was able to remember the key code to get into Max’s building, but once I reached his floor, I could only pound on his apartment door for as long as it took him to answer. No texts to warn him, no emails, just my fist.

  “Okay, shut up already!” I finally heard him holler from inside. I kept on knocking. “Whoever it is, I already hate you so much,” he grumbled as he flipped the lock and swung open the door. “I seriously do. I hate you with a deep—Theo?”

  Max stood tall and lanky in the doorway, his hair making all kinds of bed-headed decisions of its own, his blue track pants riding too low on his hips. I’d woken him up. He flipped on the foyer light, and I realized he was shirtless. The dark hair on his chest narrowed into a slim trail over his low-slung waistband.

  I spun away and tugged my hood down over my eyes. “Where are the freaking shirts tonight, people?” I croaked. “For the love of God, where are the shirts?”

  Max laughed groggily. “Excuse me? You just woke me up with the whack-ass knocking. I thought you were the cops from Cops. I had to answer shirtless. Good thing my parents are out.”

  “I just need you to put on a shirt,” I told the hallway carpet. “I’m not coming into this house until everybody puts on a shirt.”

  He yawned loudly. “I think I crashed watching Sports Center.”

  “That still leaves you without a shirt.”

  “I’ve got a variety of shirts in my room. Come in, and I’ll pick a real winner.”

  “I’ll wait,” I said.

  I felt him staring at me. “You’re serious?”

  “Yes, Max, I’m serious. Just go put on a shirt, and I’ll wait out here.”

  “Okay, fine,” he huffed. “But you need to dial down the crazy by, like, thirty percent before I get back.”

  “I can’t do that right now,” I called to him as he shut the door.

  An eternal half-minute later, Max swung his door back open in a black Shins T-shirt. His hair was still a wild black forest, but he’d made an effort to tame it. “Okay, I’ve shielded you from my nakedness. Now are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

  “I need your help. I know I completely screwed you yesterday, but I’m just . . . right now, I just need you to . . .”

  “Wait. Are you crying?” He tugged my hood down.

  “What? Hell, no, this is just allergies.” I pulled the hood back over my face and pulled my hands inside the sleeves.

  He grabbed my stump of a hand. “You suck at lying, Thee. Anyone ever tell you that?”

  Thankfully Max’s parents didn’t have any puritanical rules about coed visits from friends. Before The Night in Question, our sessions had always taken place on his bed. It was queen-size, large enough for each of us to stake out a full side of the mattress, flat on our backs, and stare at the ceiling (“the Freudian position,” we called it). We got to his room, and he shut the door, switching on the chrome floor lamp next to his desk.

  “No, too bright,” I said.

  He looked a little puzzled, but switched it off and turned on his TV instead, letting the fish tank screensaver light the room in a wash of aqua. “Better?”

  I nodded, then threw myself onto his bed and shimmied across the mattress till my back was against the wall. He crouched down to take his usual side, but something inside me screamed for him to back off.

  “I need the whole bed,” I whispered. “Could you just sit next to me?”

  He rose, his forehead creased. “Okay,” he agreed.

  Even in the pale digital glow, I could see the concern in his eyes. Or was it pity? I felt like an injured pigeon he’d just found on the street. The room grew pin-drop quiet. His apartment was downtown, on the twentieth floor of a converted office building, shielded from everything below with soundproof windows. Normally I loved it here; it was the antidote to my dilapidated, secondhand disaster area, all blond wood and white paint and chrome. (His mom had decorated the whole place). But tonight, I felt like I was trapped inside a huge IKEA fishbowl. Like I was on display for the whole city to see.

  “Thee, you have to tell me what’s going on,” Max urged. “Wherever you’ve been going, whoever you’ve been seeing, you have to tell me. You can’t keep going like this.”

  I pushed myself onto my knees and peered at Max across the rumpled bed. I hesitated, trying to find the perfect words, but it all just spilled out like tweaker babble. “Max, you’re the sanest person I know, and I need that right now. I need your sanity because I know what’s happening to me can’t actually be happening
. It’s just that people said some things to me tonight, and someone called me by the wrong name, and Lou has been saying all this stuff to me about how I’m a different person ever since, you know, ever since that night. I’m meaner and faster. And I haven’t really looked at myself in the mirror since that morning. I couldn’t really bear to look at myself for weeks, but tonight I looked, I really looked, and I just . . . I couldn’t tell. The mirror was so foggy, I know that’s all it was, it’s not some kind of ghostly possession, there’s not some freakish metamorphosis happening here. I just need you to confirm that it’s not happening.”

  Max didn’t answer right away. I couldn’t blame him; he probably wanted to be certain I was completely finished with my deranged rant. Eventually he took a deep breath.

  “Okay,” he began. “Can you just clarify what’s not happening? I’m not totally clear on what’s not happening.”

  “I just need you to look at me and tell me what you see.”

  “I see a hood.”

  I ripped back the hood and turned to the left, showing him the side of my face that wasn’t ruined. “What do you see?”

  “I see your profile.”

  “No, that’s not what I’m asking. Does this side of my face look any different to you?”

  “Different how?”

  “Different than before. Different than before that night.”

  “Still not sure what you’re asking.”

  “It’s a simple question.”

  “Then what is the question?”

  “Max. Am I me?”

  He paused. “Are you you?”

  “Yes. Am I definitely me?”

  He leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Now that is a deep question. This just turned into the best session ever.”

  “No, that’s not . . . Look, I know how I sound right now. I just need you to help me go over a few things. I just need to make sure.”

  “Make sure that you’re you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And how do we do that?”

  “Just ask me some questions.”