“What?”
“Like, if you need to put down your drink . . . I don’t know, this place is usually fine, but there are always creeps hanging around when it’s this busy.”
“Oh.” Laila hadn’t thought of that. She got the sudden sense of existing inside a PSA, as if somebody with a camera were going to squat down beside their booth and pan around the table and add text in postproduction that read “Real New Yorkers keep each other safe!” “Thanks,” she said. “Yeah, you’re right.”
“But also,” said Ella/Etta/Anna, lifting a baggie out of her pocket for a moment, “we were going to do some molly. I don’t know if you’re into that, but we tested it earlier and everything and I promise it’s not cut with cyanide.” She popped one as proof. The others laughed—mirror laughter, the same raspy, back-of-the-hand-to-the-lips laughter. Laila laughed too. The noise sounded manufactured to her own ears, but they didn’t seem to notice.
Hannah had done ecstasy every few weekends for the greater part of junior year, and in a protracted instant of decision-making, this seemed like a sufficient reason for Laila to say, Yeah, okay, I’ll take one. Because she could do anything Hannah could do. Because whatever happened, she could use it later, pour it out on paper, lavishly described. Because Laila needed to understand everything Hannah understood, so that Hannah no longer had the home-court advantage in reality, the ability to look at everything with a knowing, jaded eye and pretend she’d seen it a thousand times before. If Laila could call her bluff, maybe Hannah would never do this again, kiss her so hard she saw stars and walk off as if she were some footnote on a list of conquests. If Laila took this, maybe she would stop fucking thinking about Hannah, as if having Hannah would fix the horrible empty pit drilled down the center of her body—how delusional did she have to be to believe that? So Laila took the pill and swallowed it with half a mouthful of whiskey. She waited to stop thinking at all, thinking about any of this. She didn’t want anything of the world outside the marbled walnut doors. She wanted this circular table and these welcoming strangers and the feeling that some people in the world were doing okay. She wanted this night to open its mouth and swallow the rest of her life. As the ecstasy warmed her body, made her skin an electric field and her hands happy to touch anything alive, Laila journeyed from hall to hall in this thousand-person complex and saw herself in every single one, bent on escape and still trying to find something.
17
Laila awoke to the sound of a colossal mouth hushing. The sound surged and receded. The breeze at the hollow of her neck crept up to her jaw. She reached for it, but her hand became tangled in whatever covered her, waist to collarbones. It was soft and inside out. A coat, but not hers. A felt coat. The section that faced outward was glossed in silk.
Laila forced her eyelids up, replacing velvet black with dirty gray. The night sky had unrolled and seemed to flutter as she shook her head, which was a horribly misguided move. She felt each individual muscle pulling and tensing, compromising, to move the impossible weight of her skull. The thing perched atop her spinal column weighed a thousand pounds. During the night, somebody had apparently split her head open, packed her cranium with a leaden reproduction of a brain, and stitched her scalp back together with all the precision of a pigeon stabbing its beak at the ground. Nothing else could explain this.
She licked her lips and spat out what crept into her mouth. The grit of sand and salt. It occurred to her, then, that she shouldn’t be able to see the sky when she woke up; the sound of waves kept repeating—she was on a beach.
“Laila,” said a voice beside her.
“Ahh,” she said, scrambling a foot to the right.
There was a girl. Not one of the NYU girls. Somebody else, pale, tall. She had sleepy eyes and her hair blended in with the dunes. Her prominent ears looked like handles to the vase of her head. “It’s okay. It’s just me,” the girl said, which might have been calming if Laila had known who she was.
“Okay,” Laila said. She must have met this person last night, at some point after her final memories sputtered out. (Holding to the smooth metal of the spiral staircase, feeling its cohesiveness, admiring its warmth, as around her the bodies blended into pink.)
She didn’t have the energy for panic. What time was it? No. No time. Her phone was dead. She jammed her thumb harder into the On button. This time it had to work. This time.
“Check mine,” said the stranger. “It’s in my pocket.”
Laila peeled the coat away from her own coat—the girl was lucky she hadn’t frozen to death—and shook out the girl’s phone. The dead battery signal glared out at them.
“Well, great,” the girl said. “Ha, ha. Yeah.” She was standing now, looking around. She wore black jeans, and in the moonlight, Laila could see that her shirt said NO, NO, NEVER.
Laila stood. Her head flopped, a bowling ball balanced on a dandelion stem. Her hand clutched her stomach, but the sick feeling resided elsewhere in her body, too. It had traveled freely and set up satellite colonies. She’d never felt nausea in her hips and tonsils and forearms and ribs before. If she’d known this was possible, she would have felt more sympathy and less amusement when Hannah texted her in agony on Sunday mornings.
Hannah.
This other girl had given Laila her coat, a romantic gesture. They were alone together in the middle of the night. Had they kissed? Done more than kissed? Laila scrabbled at the void in her memory, trying to pull something out of it, anything—
“Where are we?” Laila said. Her voice broke. She needed to go home. She’d only wanted a bit of distance. She had to get home before her parents finished breakfast and knocked at her door.
“Not sure.” The girl didn’t seem to care much about this. “Awesome night,” she said. “So blue.”
Laila walked toward a bridge at the top of the beach, moving as quickly as her head would allow. The stranger followed.
“How long was I asleep?” Laila asked.
“Maybe an hour.”
They crossed the bridge, and Laila felt a flicker of familiarity. “This road looks . . . I think we’re at the Rockaways.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s it. You mentioned that. For sure.”
Dislike coursed through Laila’s body. She walked faster.
“Hey,” said the girl, as they shifted footfuls of white sand. “I wanted to say thanks.”
“What?” Laila heard the panicked edge to her voice and tried to dull it. “Thanks for what?”
“For talking last night. I was thinking before you woke up, and you know what? You’re right. I’m going to get the tickets, just get them, and start planning. What am I saving up for if I’m letting this go? Right?” The stranger nodded, convincing herself into something. “I can decide for myself how to spend my own money. I bet my parents are just trying to hang on to controlling me because I don’t live there anymore.”
Laila wanted to stick her head in the dunes. Earlier that night, she must have felt enough of a bond with this person to have some soul-baring conversation, to take some blacked-out adventure to the beach. Two people high and drunk out of their minds and looking for connection—they’d had everything in common. But now the world was real again. She’d run. Her life had caught up. The last seventy-two hours were snapping at her heels, and the girl had become a burden she needed to discard.
The disinterest was draining. Laila wanted to want to connect, to have the energy to care about other people. But she didn’t—couldn’t—care. Not sober.
Laila seriously considered the possibility that she was an asshole. Maybe Hannah had rubbed off on her. Hannah, who tasted like lime. Hannah, who smelled like wood smoke. The sense memory was so sharp and palpable that it displaced reality. Laila was there again, her hip pressed into the bench, with willow leaves batting at her hair. Hannah was holding her hands up in claws, negotiating the wind with newly painted nails, looking as if she were cradling a fantasy flame. Laila felt as if she were staring into a manipulated photograph. The angle of
Hannah’s face as she leaned down.
Laila could never tell Hannah she’d done this. Going to a club alone was pathetic rebound behavior. Twice as pathetic, since they’d never even dated in the first place.
Laila and the stranger walked to the subway stop. They sat on the A train side by side. For a moment, she considered asking the girl some leading questions. If she cracked this door back open and peeked through again, maybe she would feel everything she’d felt two or four hours ago. Had they staggered in unison through the streets of Bushwick and torn into wisps of music that trailed out from row houses, put clumsy hands at each other’s backs and shoulders? Had Laila told her about Hannah? About Mr. Madison? Had she been hunting for consolation from this person, forgetting that a stranger’s drunken reassurances would seem shallow and meaningless once the unforgiving daylight arrived?
Had she been looking for consolation some other way?
Laila wanted to stand in a hot shower, scrub away the stickiness, and fall beneath her covers. She’d probably broken eight different laws last night, and she couldn’t even remember what she’d felt as a result. She should have stuck to imagining reality.
The girl’s face looked flat and distant in the train lighting. She was sorting through her wallet, now, counting cards and dollar bills.
“Hey,” Laila said. Her voice sounded younger than Camille’s.
“Yeah?”
“We didn’t hook up last night, did we?”
The girl’s motions slowed. She pressed her wallet closed and looked at Laila, and Laila felt a sharper dread than she’d ever felt in her life.
“I don’t hook up with drunk girls,” said the girl. “Especially not when I’m drunk.”
Laila took a slow, cold breath. Her body felt like a taut rubber band being let loose by degrees. “Okay,” she said, tears prickling at her numb eyes. She blinked them away. She decided, then: She had seen enough, done enough. The reservoir of experience was full, and now she would lock herself away to empty it. If she’d become somebody who blacked out and woke up somewhere unrecognizable, she was unrecognizable.
Laila switched to the J train at Broadway Junction, and the girl boarded the C. Laila wondered if she would ever see the girl’s face again, hovering at the edges of a crowd. Of the millions of people in this city, the same handful seemed to make recurring appearances. But maybe that was the last glimpse she’d get, a flash of white-blond hair behind closing doors. Maybe they would see each other but not notice each other, see but not recognize, see but not remember. She was already forgetting the way that face had looked.
18
Eden had begun leaving video cameras around the house. Motion-activated. They saw her at one in the morning, walking and mumbling, and captured her six nights in a row. She liked seeing herself like this. “Creepy,” her brother had said when she told him about the tapes, but the sight of her rounds relaxed her.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because I always end up safe,” she said.
The one
“Laila?”
Laila looked up midsentence.
The world was an obstacle course for Jaime Piedra’s skull. He ducked beneath her lintel, dodged the Ecuadorian flag that hung over her door, and poked his head into her bedroom.
“Have you been writing all day?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“¿Cómo va?”
“Not bad.”
She’d snuck back in at six that morning, her parents already bustling around outside her bedroom door, obviously trying to speak quietly in order not to wake her. They hadn’t knocked until 7:45 and had decided to let her stay home from school for a second day. So she had to put the time to use.
Getting back to work felt right. Her hangover had half-receded and left the world looking sharp and dehydrated, like oil paint left in the sun. She prayed her father couldn’t tell. He seemed to have an uncanny knack for identifying hangovers, occasionally calling cousins at ungodly hours of the morning, listening for a few sentences, and mouthing “chuchaqui” over the counter at Laila. Hungover. This used to make her laugh. Now she understood her cousins’ anguish.
She wanted to tell her father to leave. Words were coiled like springs inside her fingertips. She had to scribble them out before they uncurled and receded.
“Is this homework,” he asked, “or your own stories?”
“Both. Ms. Nazarenko wanted us to rewrite our last assignment.”
“I thought she liked it.”
“I don’t know. She’s obsessed with editing.”
“You going to let me read this one?” he asked.
Laila heard the careful humor in his voice but didn’t smile. She was looking at Nazarenko’s notebook again, scanning her last paragraph. Something off about that sentence. If he would leave, she could murmur it to herself and pinpoint the stutter in the rhythm. “Sure,” she said with no conviction.
“Hey, I’ll hold you to that,” he said. “When do I get to see it?”
The unexpected pleasure in his voice caught her, and she looked up. “I don’t know,” she told him. The answer she’d given Hannah for years. But this time it wasn’t true. She knew her finish line now, a rippling red ribbon for herself to break through: 100/100.
She rewound, revised. “When it’s perfect.”
—
The funeral was on Sunday. Laila looked up the church on an online map and magnified the image until she could see the roof. She placed herself in street view and looked at the bland white walls of the building, the wrought-iron cages over the windows, and she knew she couldn’t go. She knew Felix, Leo, or Hannah would have gone with her if she’d asked, but she couldn’t ask them to sit there for an hour while she cried.
Besides, the service was for any of his family who could travel to the city. His grown-up friends. What had she meant to his life, compared to them? How could she watch them grieve and pretend her hurt matched up?
Instead, she locked herself in her room and reread all Mr. Madison’s emails. The whole backlog, from the first assignment she’d submitted freshman year to the last words—“p.s. This story is my new favorite.”
She looked up the insurance ad he’d mentioned, the one he’d remembered the moment after the accident. The video was thirty-six seconds, and cheerful strings played over a house fire. Two little kids asked about a stream of absurdly specific things trapped in the house. “What about my one-armed action figure that Buddy chewed in half while we were out at a baseball game?” “What about the dollhouse I painted with violet nail polish until I got a headache from the fumes?” “What about the Christmas tree I broke two crystal ornaments from this year?” “Mom, what about—what about . . . ?” The company motto unrolled eventually. “We know what all this means to you.” She wondered if he’d thought of this again, one more time, in the last seconds.
She turned off her computer, stowed it beneath her bed, and went back to her notebook. The internet was her enemy. She’d used to love the stream of pictures that made her snort and those twenty-second videos into other people’s worlds, but all that felt, suddenly, like both a waste of time and an unbearable responsibility. Hannah had been texting and messaging her, and she hadn’t replied. The edited videos Felix emailed her, the short stories Leo sent—she’d been ignoring all of it. Real life was what she needed. Reality.
Laila was back at school on Monday. She felt her friends’ concern at lunch over the way she looked, eyes bloodshot and downcast, hair an unbrushed blur, but otherwise, everything seemed too normal. The sight of people laughing in the lunch line seemed obscene and made her avert her eyes. Even her friends seemed too willing to accept that life was zipping along at a merciless pace. “Are any of you having a graduation party?” Felix asked over lunch.
Hannah scoffed lightly. “I think my parents would be more likely to ritually burn my graduation cap.”
Laila couldn’t laugh. Sitting at this booth felt masochistic, especially beside Hannah, whose forced nonchalance was
palpable. Laila’s eyes felt too open, although maybe that discomfort was from looking at Hannah in strained sideways glances. Hannah wore a white T-shirt so delicate that, through it, Laila could see the three moles that dotted her back, a small isosceles triangle at the center of her spine. The clasp of her bra ridged like a prominent Band-Aid beneath it, a tan a shade darker than her skin.
“The only celebration I need is this weekend,” Leo said, and Laila remembered. The Catskills. The eclipse. How had they only decided on this trip ten days ago? How had her life rattled around so many rollercoaster loops between then and now? Maybe she could fake an illness to stay home. Leo and Felix would understand, especially if she explained the Hannah situation.
Maybe not, though. “It’s just Hannah,” Felix would say. “You mean you two hadn’t made out by now?” And Leo—no, he would take the kiss too seriously, more seriously than Hannah ever would, maybe more seriously than Laila. His overanalysis could be disastrous to her perspective.
Laila flipped through another few excuses but then felt a surge of anger at herself. She’d been so excited about this trip. She’d already done enough she regretted because of Hannah—she wouldn’t let herself miss this, too. She would spend as much time as possible with Leo and Felix, and she would take walks, reinvigorate herself, bring her notebook everywhere.
“I’m going to need to work while we’re up there,” Laila said. “Our last revisions are due next Monday.”
“How’s it going?” Hannah asked.
Laila shrugged and didn’t answer.
She caught Leo and Felix trading an instant’s glance. Laila wondered at once if Hannah had told them something. They could have guessed on their own. Maybe Laila should have been more subtle about her avoidance.
“You’ll probably be twice as inspired up there, right?” Felix said, a little too loudly. “Don’t writers go into the woods and get all romantic about nature?”
Final Draft Page 17