The Bridge

by Bill Konigsberg

  So she stood up onstage, in all black, and she belted out the words. She gave them some goddamn life.

  They say, why marry the cow when you can get the milk for free?

  Well, take it from the cow …

  That’s what he did. He took it.

  My milk.

  My innocence.

  My wonder.

  I will never wonder again, because it’s gone.

  GONE.

  He took my udders and squeezed, HARD.

  He took my udders as if they were there for the taking.

  And it’s my fault, too, and that’s the hard part to deal with.

  That I let him do it.

  No one made me smile at him, approach him and ask if he were

  basic. Which he took as

  permission.

  After,

  I was fucking SAD

  because at the moment of truth he closed his eyes

  and I knew then that he wasn’t with me.

  He was with him.

  It was all him

  and he used me.

  My body.

  A substitute for his hand.

  A plaything to be bought and sold

  On the market of love.

  Because we’re so, so beyond inequality of the sexes.

  RIGHT?

  So I stand before you

  a cow.

  Hurting.

  And I will not be married anytime soon. Not that I want to be. But still.

  I will have to think about how sacredly I hold my milk

  from this point on.

  The moment she finished, she rejoined the room. Almost instantly, she felt it. The awkwardness. Of her life. Seeping into the auditorium. Under the chairs it gathered, in the hearts of the girls and parents watching. She felt it and immediately she wanted to hide, and it took everything she had to walk off the stage slowly, not run, not bolt, to the smattering of uneasy applause.

  Her mom, of course, greeted her backstage with an ecstatic hug. Britt, too.

  “Sweetheart! Oh my God! That was so, so, so good. So powerful.”

  Britt draped herself over Tillie’s torso like a slinky dress and said, “Moo!” That made Tillie smile despite herself.

  Tillie peered around her mom’s hovering head. Where was Dad? He’d been there in the audience. Where was he now?

  And then, there he was. The three Stanley women exited into the auditorium from backstage and there was her dad, fiddling with his phone.

  “Earth to Frank,” her mom said, and her dad looked up.

  He looked like a stranger. Wearing a polite smile, like the kind you give when you meet the boyfriend of someone you don’t really give a shit about at a party, maybe. He gave her this light tap on the shoulder. The kind that says, Sorry to hear that your great-aunt died, near stranger.

  During the walk home down tree-lined Ninetieth Street, past the Cooper Hewitt Museum, past sandstone brick apartment buildings built for permanence, as if to highlight the collective invincibility of New Yorkers, Britt hung on their dad, pleading that she was too tired to walk and demanding a piggyback ride. Tillie’s mom strapped her arm through Tillie’s and leaned into her. But all Tillie could think was What have I done to disappoint him? How can I take it back?

  She felt him pull away then, in the following days. She’d see him in the mornings at the breakfast nook and he’d barely nod, and he’d stare at his phone as if he were the teenager with an attention-span issue and she the parent. Her sudden invisibility had a voice, inside her inner ear, telling her The Truth, which was that she deserved it. She deserved to be cast out. And every time she saw him sitting on the couch with Britt by his side, watching American Ninja Warrior, she felt like pounding her head into the mauve living room wall because of whatever the thing was that made him not love her anymore.

  Then one afternoon, last week. Tillie forgot to take the trash out to the compactor. Her dad, who last gave a shit about household chores never, knocked on her door and told her to come out to the living room.

  “The trash. Where is it supposed to be?” he asked when she got there. He was hunkered down on the couch, looking tense and also disoriented. She’d never seen him like this before.

  “Sorry,” she said, lowering her head slightly and lingering in the room. She needed more, had so many questions about what this was, and why. When he’d knocked on her door, she’d gotten this funky feeling in her chest, like something was about to go down. But the trash? Nothing computed.

  “Sorry is not good enough. You have to do better, Tillie. You just … have to. Do better.”

  She bit her lip. “Um. Okay. Sorry.”

  He shook his head. “This is becoming typical. You leave your shit around for other people to deal with. I don’t want to have to see … I don’t want to come home from a long day of work and see all your stuff around. Out of place. In the living room. I’m disappointed in you. I thought you were growing up. I thought you were getting older and more mature, but it seems like everywhere I look, there’s your … dirty laundry.”

  Tillie stared just to the right of her dad’s face. She felt stunned. What was this? “Sorry,” she said for the third time. “But, um. What are you talking about? What dirty laundry? I don’t leave—”

  “Well … actually, you do.” His face was red, and he exhaled and balled his left hand into a fist and placed it against his forehead. “You need to stop airing your dirty laundry.”

  “What?”

  “Some things are private, damn it. And you go and spill it at a talent show, in front of all your classmates? It’s humiliating, for Christ sake.”

  Oh. So this was what was up. Tillie stared at her father, suddenly hating him and at the same time totally unable to hate him because he was the person whose love had always meant the most.

  “We take care of our own shit. Stuff. And you’re not. Instead of dealing with it, you’re … airing it. No more. I mean it. No more.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “I was performing a piece. It was art. That’s what art is. You take from your life. You express it.”

  “Just stop, Tillie. Stop. It’s goddamn humiliating.”

  “But …”

  “Who’s gonna pay for your goddamn psych bills?” he yelled.

  What she heard was a snap, like a bone cracking. A clean break. Numb, she skulked off to her room and gently closed the door and got under the sheets on her bed and held her breath, hoping she could just—cease to be.

  It wasn’t just what he said; it was what he didn’t say, too. Never a moment where he said, as a dad, I heard what you said up there. You feel like a boy used you. Should we talk about this? Are you okay, Tillie?

  That was the start of the cold war in the Stanley household, and her mom, uncomfortably in the middle, calming everyone down. Tillie was grateful, and also she wanted to smash things.

  And then there were the actual voices of her classmates, in the hallways, mooing. In the cafeteria, saying, “Got milk?”

  Did they not get what their words did to her? How they reached inside her chest and tore up her heart?

  Damn her stupid need to get onstage. And what for?

  But was that worth fucking dying for? How many times had Tillie and her mom gone over this? What is and isn’t worthwhile? Sitting in the bagel shop, eating the last bite, Tillie realized she’d kicked to the curb her one ally in the world—two, Britt included—and it was cold outside, and the world didn’t know her or care, and she averted her eyes as she felt the tears start to gestate inside them again.

  No. No. No.

  And worse. Molly. Asshole Molly. Who took the insult and exploded it. Who might as well have said, Here, Tillie. Why don’t you watch this and then maybe kill yourself because you’re a waste of space?

  Tillie remembers: last Thursday. The text from Natasha, who wasn’t a friend, exactly, but was at least willing to acknowledge Tillie’s existence enough to ask for her French homework once in a while.

  Natas
ha attached a link and apologized in advance. Tillie’s throat constricted. What now? she thought. One time this past fall she’d been on Insta and saw a link to an eleventh-grade poll. How her jaw got tight because she just knew, and then she opened it and it was a mixed blessing. Marcia Fishbaum had been voted most likely to die a virgin. Savanya had been voted most likely to die alone surrounded by a hundred cats.

  She hadn’t been voted anything. And she was relieved, but also kind of pissed, because she had been forgotten again. Tillie liked Rhiannon Kelly’s post saying that the poll was mean. Tillie’s was one of eleven likes, and that was how she chose to voice her protest, and that was that.

  But this time she had been remembered. The video showed Molly in her bedroom. Tillie remembered it from sleepovers back when they were good friends, back in fifth grade. Now the walls were glossy white with polka dots instead of pink. Molly was wearing all black, and had stuffed her midsection with a throw pillow, it looked like. It made her look not just fat, but misshapen. She stood there acting meek, her body curled inward, her face a mask of faux pain—Molly didn’t have a fucking clue what pain really was, did she? Tillie’s gut twisted, because she knew what was coming, and it felt like insult on top of insult on top of insult, too unfair to be real. There was lots of laughter in the back—was that Isabella? Was that Gretchen? And then came the really horrible part.

  Moo.

  I’m a cow.

  I’m a sad, sad cow.

  Who gave her milk

  to a boy. The only boy who would take it.

  Because I’m gross.

  And I’m so, so sad. Look at me! Look at my pain.

  Sad cow, I am.

  I am a sad cow.

  Moo.

  Thank you! Thank you!

  She bowed, demure, in a way that Tillie read as stereotypically Asian, and Gretchen and Isabella howled in the background, and the video stopped.

  As did Tillie’s heart for a moment. She gently closed her laptop and got into bed. And when Natasha later wrote a text saying just ??—as if it was up to Tillie to react, as if she owed it to be like, Yeah, that hurt like fuck. She put down her phone and decided she wouldn’t be going to school for a while.

  When she went back on Monday, a lot of people came up to her and were like, That shit was so not cool. And then, as if hit by a wave of amnesia, suddenly on Tuesday it was walked back, even though Tillie hadn’t said a fucking word about any of it, and the narrative had changed. People were coming up to her and saying shit like, You know, if you’re going to be a performer, you’re going to have to toughen up your skin.

  As if she’d said something. Which she hadn’t. But the truth didn’t matter. Just the story.

  And Tillie still didn’t say anything, because even if it hadn’t been her complaining about it, maybe they were right in a larger sense, maybe she was weak and too sensitive, and she should have laughed, but she couldn’t, she couldn’t quite figure out how to be the girl who laughs along when all the girls laugh at you and call you a freak, and when the mooing started up again on Wednesday—thanks, Samantha, thanks very much—Tillie decided she didn’t care anymore. About anything. Because nothing mattered.

  “Are you done with that?”

  The man who asks wears a red Tal Bagel uniform.

  She nods. “Are you hiring?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. Want me to find out?”

  Tillie imagines taking a job at Tal Bagels for the day. Having a place. It’s warm here. Safe. If she worked here, she wouldn’t wind up on a bridge—which, oddly enough, is kind of where she wants to go. And if she goes, her life might be over, and really she doesn’t want it to be over. She just wants it to be different. But Tal Bagel different? She tries to imagine what her mom would say if she came home and said she had a job at a bagel shop. Yep. Institution for sure.

  “That’s okay. Maybe another time,” she says, and the guy walks away. Tillie gets up, reaches into her wallet, and pulls out a hundred. Her allowance for the week.

  “Here,” she says, tapping the guy on the shoulder.

  The guy looks at the money, looks back at Tillie’s face.

  She averts her eyes. “Bagels. For the people. Take some as a tip, and then maybe give some people their bagels on me, okay? I trust you. Whatever.”

  “Thanks,” he says, confused but not unpleasantly so.

  As Tillie walks back out into the cold and replays the moment, she realizes she did it so that if she does actually not make it back home today, if they somehow trace her steps, they’ll see this act of kindness and remember that she wasn’t all bad.

  She stops on Lexington and Eighty-Third and realizes she doesn’t know where she’s going next.

  Until she does. She slowly walks south.

  Toward Eightieth and Lexington. She’ll never forget where Molly lives. It’s the kind of thing you remember: the apartment of a double-crossing former friend.

  Based on the amount of time it takes for the elderly white doorman with the pale complexion to give Tillie a response when he calls upstairs and says, “I have a Tillie here to see Molly,” Tillie’s stomach ties in knots.

  She knows Molly isn’t at school, because she was suspended for a week. That doesn’t mean she’s definitely at home, but. It probably does.

  And this. This was a very bad idea. Who goes over to the apartment of their online bully? Tillie’s face purples as she tries to imagine what Molly must be saying on the other end of the intercom, let alone thinking.

  She’s about to dart back out onto the street when the doorman says, “Eight C,” and Tillie, a little stunned at her own ballsiness, lopes toward the elevator.

  In the elevator, Tillie feels it, like a knife in her belly. The wrongness of what Molly did. She has no idea what she’s going to do when she sees Molly, but one possibility is definitely violent.

  The elevator opens; Tillie takes a deep breath and walks out. Molly stands down the hall at her front door, arms across her chest. She is wearing a turquoise tank top, her hair is matted and frizzy, and she doesn’t have any makeup on. Tillie hasn’t seen Molly without makeup since maybe sixth grade. Possibly fifth. She looks a little like she has the flu minus the red nose.

  “What are you doing here?” Molly asks, her voice flat.

  The anger freezes in Tillie’s stomach and chest. “Hey,” she mumbles.

  It’s as if she’s not capable. Not capable of saying the thing she should say, and now, standing here in the middle of the hallway, she wishes she had thought a little more about this. She’s so stupid. She can hear it. See it. Molly, who might as well run eleventh grade at Spence, holding court in the cafeteria, talking about the appearance of that freak at her front door, Tillie, who just stood there while Molly waited for her to say something, like talk, like what human beings do all the time.

  “Tillie. What. Are. You. Doing here?”

  “I really don’t know anymore,” she says.

  Molly rolls her eyes, goes back inside, and closes the door. Actually closes the door. Tillie just stands there, feeling numb. For a minute, maybe. Feeling like a speck of dirt and totally unable to figure out what she does next, because—shit. Maybe she is a danger to herself? Because here are the feelings again, the creepy, crawly, lower-than-a-dirt-speck feelings. That stomach thing where it feels like she’s utterly empty inside and she just wants it all to stop. She needs it to stop.

  The door opens again. Molly comes back out and leans against the wall next to the door, crossing her arms.

  “You can’t just stay here all day, you know? Do I have to call the cops and say you’re trespassing? Because I will, you know. You’ve already ruined my life, okay? Can you, like, please leave me the fuck alone now?”

  Tillie makes sure her outside stays very still. Her face tenses. The words are so … wrong and unfair and … no. No no no. She holds her breath and the hallway goes dizzy.

  “Holy Jesus. Why are you so weird? Can you even be normal for three minutes? You came here? Be nor
mal. How were we ever even friends? What do you want? Say words, you freak. Say something.”

  Tillie doesn’t know why Molly keeps firing her weapon, or what she even means, and then she’s crouching on the floor, and she can’t feel her legs, and she needs to be lower, and then she is time, standing still, and the walls go funny and it’s madness, madness.

  “Shit,” Molly says. She disappears and the door swings shut and Tillie’s alone in the hallway and her existence goes inside out and sideways and then she’s in the sandbox and it’s maybe the fours? There were two sandboxes. One for kids who wanted to play rowdy, one for kids who wanted calm. She was in the calm box, but Trevor Rheim wasn’t being calm and he kicked sand in Tillie’s eyes and Tillie started crying and that’s all she remembers, all she—

  Tillie is on a rug, lying down on her side, her right arm stretched out above her head. Her shoulder hurts from the position. She has no idea where or why she is. She blinks a few times and her eyes adjust into a room with cream and peach walls, and she turns her head and there, sitting on the floor, leaning up against the cream-colored wall, with her legs splayed out like a rag doll, looking spent, is Molly.

  Tillie blinks a few more times and looks into Molly’s eyes. She can’t read what’s in there. Regret? Nothing? It’s almost slightly familiar but not quite.

  “So are you okay now?” Molly asks, her voice soft in a way that makes Tillie’s heart twist because it’s like she hasn’t experienced this tone from this particular voice since maybe sixth grade.

  “Um. I guess.”

  Neither girl says anything for a while, and slowly Tillie uses her arms to sit herself up. She looks around and she remembers the den from years ago. This same Persian rug, paisley designs in blood red and tan. She runs her fingers across it.

  “How did I get here?”

  “I dragged you.”

  “Oh. Um. Thanks.”

  Molly shrugs. “So why aren’t you at school, where I can’t be, of course.”

  Tillie takes a deep breath and decides not to say the thing that would shut Molly up. “I’m just … taking time for myself.”

  “Well. How nice for you.”