That Weekend

by Kara Thomas

  Kat grabs her phone and pulls up Instagram. I scoot closer to her.

  “Ben looks miserable,” she says.

  I yank the phone out of her hand so I can see for myself. Ben, seated at a table, flipping off the camera, Shannon DiClemente hovering over his shoulder.

  Kat grabs the phone back. “Oh my God, look at Shannon’s eyeshadow. Did she blend with a broom?”

  My cackling halts when Kat scrolls over to the next photo: Anna Markey in floor-length white silk, strawberry-blond hair in a side-swept chignon. A literal goddess.

  “Boring.” Kat keeps scrolling. “Like her face.”

  Anna Markey is beautiful—the type of beautiful that caused panicked murmurs among the senior class girls before she even set foot in Brookport High School for the first time—but Kat wants me to feel better.

  And this is why, no matter how weird things may have become between us, I am still best friends with Kat Marcotte. Some days I wonder why she even picked me to be her best friend when Kat has a coveted Brookport Village address—the common denominator among the wealthiest, most popular kids at school. But that’s never mattered to her. Kat has always chosen me, even when I’m the least appealing option.

  No matter how far I stray, I know I’ll always have a home to come back to in Kat.

  * * *

  —

  Kat and I are giggly-tipsy by the time Jesse gets back with the pizza.

  “I’m not even hungry,” I announce as I pour myself into a dining room chair. “I ate half a block of cheese.”

  Jesse stares at Kat, who is struggling with the chair across from me. “And you?”

  “I ate the other half.”

  “Wow,” Jesse says. “Love that I drove all that way for thirty dollars of pizza and Cinnasticks.”

  Despite his bitching, Jesse winds up eating almost an entire pizza by himself; while I wrap up the leftovers, Kat sets up a movie on Netflix in the living room.

  Jesse is asleep by the halfway point, and when the credits are rolling, I realize I have no idea how the movie ended. I blink the sleep out of my eyes until they come into focus on the couch. Kat curled against Jesse, fast asleep on his chest, their hands intertwined.

  I get up quietly and brush my teeth before heading into the bedroom.

  Kat and I would sleep in this very room when we were kids. Facing each other in the twin beds, staying up late into the night talking about nonsense until Mrs. Marcotte had to knock on the door and tell us to cut it out or we’d be overtired in the morning.

  I flip off the light and crawl into one of the beds. Toss and turn for a good bit. The thick quilt is too noisy on my skin. I kick it off; overhead, the blades of the fan rotate with a dull hum, but the air doesn’t reach me.

  My buzz is wearing off, my wine-warmed veins now thrumming with unrest. When I close my eyes, I can see only them, Kat curled against Jesse’s body like she was made to fit there.

  Kat and Jesse are in love, and even though they’ve been together almost a year it’s hard for me to look at them and not take a trip to What-If Land, a place I don’t like going to.

  What if. What if.

  Jesse and I were a few weeks away from starting freshman year when he asked if I could meet him at the playground by the marina at the end of my road. I knew something was seriously, horribly wrong when I got there and he was sitting on the merry-go-round, staring at the chain-link fence, hands resting on his knees.

  I couldn’t even get the words out—what happened—before he grabbed me and threw his shaking arms around me. I patted his back awkwardly. We’d never hugged, ever, and it was the first I’d seen him cry since that day on the bus in sixth grade.

  Ovarian cancer. His mom went to the emergency room thinking she had appendicitis and returned home with a prognosis of four months to live.

  I told him I was sorry and he put his head on my shoulder and said it in my ear: I love you.

  My body was still numb with shock when he started sobbing again. I sat there, arms around him, until he pulled away and mumbled that he had to go home.

  I’ve replayed that moment a million times, my skin tingling, trying to convince myself I’d heard him wrong. And then that he hadn’t meant it like that. Or that he had meant it like that and simply regretted the words the second they left his mouth.

  Because we never talked about what he said on the merry-go-round ever again. Jesse seemed to want to forget it ever happened, and I played along because I knew he needed me to. He needed a best friend, not a girlfriend.

  His mom died six weeks later, despite her prognosis.

  Even though we still talked every night on Messenger, high school changed things. Jesse made friends with some of the upperclassmen and started to play guitar in their band, hitching rides home with them instead of taking the afternoon bus with me. When I heard that Jesse had hooked up with some girl from Westhampton Beach after Battle of the Bands, I pretended I didn’t care.

  Last summer, when he shrugged and said that he and Kat just kind of happened, even though I hadn’t asked, I pretended I didn’t care. But I’m starting to think there’s only so much pretending a person can do before it all becomes too much.

  I kick the blanket off me and climb out of bed.

  The living room couch is empty, the blanket folded neatly where Jesse and Kat had been sleeping just a few hours ago. The bay window overlooks the lake; the moon, glinting off the surface of the water, lights up the room.

  I unlock the back door and tiptoe outside, triggering a motion light.

  I follow the light the path carves to the lake. Deposit myself in an Adirondack chair on the dock and draw my knees to my chest. After a beat, the motion light below the deck goes out, leaving me in the glow of the moon.

  I need to let it go. He loves her, she loves him, and I love both of them. If I don’t let this go, I’ll lose them both.

  If I’d just asked him, before it was too late, what he meant on the merry-go-round, I would have been able to get over it years ago. Get over him.

  Wood creaking. Footsteps on the dock behind me. I jolt, nearly tipping my chair backward and into the lake below. A tall, sleepy figure in a white tee and basketball shorts emerges. Jesse scratches the back of his neck, eyeing me curiously.

  “Jesus, Jesse,” I say. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  He lowers himself into the Adirondack chair beside me. “What are you doing out here?”

  A breeze drifts over us. I rub my bare kneecaps. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  Jesse drags his chair a couple inches closer to mine. “Me neither.”

  Why? I wonder. He’s closing the physical distance between us, but he still can’t meet my eyes. I don’t have to be a body language expert to be able to tell he’s wrestling with something he wants to say to me.

  That stab of paranoia is back. Does his not being able to sleep have anything to do with my behavior while I was blackout drunk the other night?

  “I would have thought you guys would be taking advantage of that master bed.” I slap away a phantom mosquito from my leg so I don’t have to look at him as I say it.

  “We don’t just have sex all the time, Claire.”

  Hearing my name stings; to Jesse, I am always dude. He only ever uses my real name when he’s annoyed.

  “Sorry,” I say. And then, because I can’t help myself: “Sore subject?”

  Jesse taps his fingers against the arm of his chair, in tempo with a song only he can hear. He’s always doing it, and he doesn’t even realize it half the time. After a moment, his fingers go still. “We haven’t done it.”

  I draw my knees up to my chest and pull my sweatshirt over them. “Seriously? You’ve been together a year.”

  “Why are you so shocked?” There is just enough moonlight for me to see color creep into Jesse’s cheeks. “Sex is
a big deal.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a big deal.” I shrug. “Ben turned out to be an asshole, but I don’t regret that he was my first.”

  “Turned out to be? I thought the entire reason you liked him was because he was an asshole.”

  I take off my flip-flop and lob it at him. It bounces off the base of his chair as Jesse laughs. He goes quiet, tilts his head. I have to look away.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Ben was your first?”

  Blood flows to my cheeks. “Yes. Who the hell else would I have slept with?”

  “I don’t know—I thought you and Amos, maybe.”

  “No. Ew, Jesse.”

  “Really?” He catches himself. “Didn’t you have a thing for him?”

  “You think I just have sex with every guy I have a thing for?”

  “That’s not what I said, Claire.” Jesse nudges one leg of my chair. “What’s your deal?”

  “What do you mean?” I hug my knees closer to my chest, against my accelerating heartbeat.

  “You’re different,” Jesse says quietly. “Half the time I feel like you can’t stand me.”

  That’s not the problem; it’s never been the problem.

  If I’d just asked him, I would have been able to get over it.

  “Do you remember when you found out your mom was sick?” I ask.

  “I mean, I don’t love doing that. But yeah.”

  There’s no sound out here; nothing except for the metallic trill of crickets in the distance, and my own heart thwacking violently in my chest.

  If I just ask him, I can finally get over it.

  I breathe in, out. “Do you remember what you said to me that day, on the merry-go-round?”

  Jesse doesn’t reply. When I tear my eyes away from him, I can feel that he’s looking at me. It hits me that he’s not saying anything because what could he possibly say right now that wouldn’t crush me?

  I stand and swat a gnat away from my ear. “Well. I’m going back to bed.”

  “Claire,” Jesse says.

  “Don’t. Forget I said anything.” I break his gaze, unable to stand the pity in his eyes. “Jesse. Please forget that this conversation ever happened.”

  NOW

  Someone pounds on the bathroom door as I yank paper towel sheets out of the dispenser.

  “Claire? Is Claire Keough in there?”

  I hobble from the sink to the door. On the other side, my nurse stares back at me, hand raised, mid-knock, a murderous glint in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I was about to pee myself.”

  “Follow me,” she snaps.

  The emergency room smells like Purell and burnt popcorn. When we get back to my curtained area, the nurse says, “You need to put that gown on.”

  I turn my back to her while I strip, shame hot on my skin. Eventually the nurse must get tired of watching me fumble with the strings in the back; she ties them for me before guiding me onto the cot. She picks up my shorts, damp and streaked with dirt, and panic flows through me.

  My phone wasn’t in my pocket in the bathroom; I have no way of getting in touch with Kat and Jesse and telling them where I am.

  “Did those rangers find my phone?” I ask.

  “Nope. Whatever you came in with is what you’ve got.” The nurse kicks the brake up on the bed and wheels me out of the curtained-off area.

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  “If you didn’t notice, we’re swamped today. I don’t have the time to babysit you.”

  I rapid-blink away the sting of tears. The motion sends a fresh wave of pain radiating through my skull. I just needed to pee. “Is there any way I can get Tylenol or something? My head is killing me.”

  “No medication until you’re seen by a doctor.”

  I don’t dare ask when that will be. The nurse parks me in front of the nurse’s station. She stuffs my clothes into a plastic bag and drops it at the foot of the cot. Panic zips through me: I’m alone, I’m hurt, and I don’t have my phone to call Kat and Jesse.

  “Wait,” I say as my nurse is turning on her heels to disappear.

  She folds her arms, bare and freckled, over the chest of her magenta scrubs. “Do you need something?” she says.

  I hesitate, my eyes falling to the impatient tap of her neon-pink Nikes. I shake my head. I swallow and make the words disappear. I’m scared.

  * * *

  —

  From my spot beside the nurse’s station, I can see the TV over the bed in the room opposite me. I focus on the reruns of Law & Order while I wait. Someone comes to draw my blood, take a cup of my pee. When my nurse finally returns, she’s carrying a bag of fluids. She hooks me up to an IV without making eye contact. Still salty I went to the bathroom without permission, I guess.

  I am mustering up the nerve to ask when a doctor will be by to see me when she whisks away again. A man stops her—white short-sleeved shirt, khakis, a clipboard. He says something to my nurse that I can’t hear, and she jerks her head toward me. I sit up straighter.

  The man approaches; he’s clean-shaven, his jaw dotted with razor burn. He looks down at his chart, then at me. His voice gives a post-pubescent crack as he says my name: “Claire?”

  “That’s me,” I say.

  He perches at the edge of my cot, his chart balanced against the knees of his khakis. “I’m Eli, a social worker here.”

  Of course, they’d send a social worker to talk to me. I have no phone, no wallet, no memory of how I wound up alone on that trail.

  “Do you want to talk about what happened to you?” Eli’s eyes are an unnatural shade of sky blue; he could say he’s fifteen or forty and I’d believe either.

  “I don’t remember. I was supposed to go camping with my friends….”

  Eli cocks his head, waiting for me to complete my thought. I try to reach back, to this morning again—waking up, loading our backpacks—but nothing is there. I was supposed to be with them, so why did I wake up on the mountain alone?

  Eli looks at my chart again. “I see you live on Long Island—what are you doing in Sunfish Creek?”

  “My friend Kat’s grandma has a lake house here.” My chest clenches; I need Kat to get here and take control of this situation. To tell me whatever happened on that mountain, however I wound up hurt and alone, it wasn’t my fault. It’s not my fault my parents are on their way and we’re busted and Kat’s parents are absolutely going to kill her—

  “Did anyone come here looking for me?” I squirm in my cot so I’m sitting upright. “A girl and a boy—maybe they’re in the waiting room?”

  Eli rests his chart on his knee. “I don’t think so. If you give me their numbers, I could try calling them for you.”

  “I don’t have their numbers memorized.” I press the heel of my hand into my brow bone, where a fresh burst of pain threatens to crowd out every other thought in my head. How long has it been since the paramedic said he’d call the ranger station and send someone to the campsite searching for Kat and Jesse? Should they be back by now?

  Eli sneezes, nearly sending me jumping out of my gown. “Sorry,” he says, nudging his nose with the back of his hand. “Allergies. Do you know the address of the lake house you were staying at?”

  I open my mouth, falter. “I don’t know—it’s on Quarry View Drive, but I’m not sure of the house number.”

  Eli clicks the top of his pen and drops his gaze to the chart. Below it, his leg is jiggling in a way that makes my pulse tick up. “Claire, any problems with alcohol or other substances?”

  “Do I have any prob—no.” I stare at him, at that jiggling leg, and something in me deflates. “Why are you asking me that?”

  Eli pauses mid-scrawl. “It’s standard when a patient is experiencing memory loss.”

  “I w
asn’t drunk—” I falter, thinking of the blood and pee I handed over, which, for all I know, could prove me a liar. “I don’t remember drinking.”

  Eli makes eye contact with me and lowers his voice. “We do have rape kits here, if you’d like your nurse to perform one.”

  I don’t know what’s more horrifying: the thought of that Nurse Ratched shoving a Q-tip inside me, or the idea that something like that happened to me during my missing hours. Fear crowds out the air in my lungs. “I don’t—I wasn’t—”

  I don’t know why I can’t bring myself to say it. Maybe because I can’t trust my own memory enough to say it confidently. But I know in my gut that I wasn’t raped, and if I was, I wouldn’t want to talk about it with a man wearing a tie and a short-sleeved shirt.

  Something curdles in my stomach. I feel like I’ve been hit over the head with a brick. Were we drinking? Could I really have gotten that drunk?

  No, that doesn’t feel right. I’ve never once had a hangover this bad that didn’t involve Exorcist-puking the next day.

  “I don’t need a rape kit,” I say. “I need to talk to my friends.”

  Because they’re the only ones who can tell me what the hell happened on that mountain.

  * * *

  —

  I’ve been in the emergency room for more than two hours, and I still haven’t seen a doctor. Thanks to BathroomGate, my nurse is refusing to speak to me, but I got an aide to admit that the doctor is probably waiting for the results of the CT scan I haven’t gotten yet.

  When a man in scrubs stops by my cot and asks if I’m Claire Keough, I practically leap off the cot. “Yes.”

  Maybe my parents are here. Maybe Kat and Jesse are here.

  The man in scrubs kicks up the brake on my cot. “I’ll be taking you to your CT scan.”