by Emily Layden
Sloane pushes her tongue between her lips and blows a raspberry in Blake’s direction. Blake giggles.
“Boring,” Sloane says.
Blake’s giggles morph into full-bellied laughter. “Remember the time you stole Jim’s golf cart?”
All three start laughing. Abby watches them openly now, the right side of her mouth curled into a smile, caught by contagion.
“And he was like”—Sloane sits up straight and puts her fists on her hips—“‘Young lady, if you bring that cart back here right now—’”
Blake and Bella finish her sentence: “‘We don’t ever have to talk about this again!’”
It seems entirely absurd and yet also completely inevitable—fated, almost—that an anecdote like this would be true: that these three girls would engage in an almost regular kind of mischief—stealing a golf cart, which seemed so wholesome compared to what Abby imagined (cocaine, mostly, and sweaty, glistening, constant sex)—and that, when caught, the adults in charge would be so charmed that all consequences would be quickly forgotten. Abby can picture it so easily: the golf cart tipping in the moonlight, their arms spread wide and glowing, long thin fingers combing through the wind.
“He was so worried I was going to crash,” Sloane says.
“So was I, honestly.”
Blake lets out an exaggerated sigh. “Ugh, it all seems so lame now, doesn’t it?”
Sloane frowns and nods, picking up her friend’s train of thought: “Like, this girl’s pranks are so self-righteous. Stealing Jim’s golf cart seems like amateur hour.”
“Who do you think it is?” Blake asks.
Sloane shrugs. “I don’t know, but she’s a genius, for sure. All the shit I’ve gotten caught for, and this girl manages to hang pictures all over campus in the middle of the night and not one security camera catches her?”
“She knew how the cameras were positioned, and she kept her hood up wherever she couldn’t avoid them.” Bella shakes her head. “Like a motherfucking spy.”
Sloane and Blake both spin in Bella’s direction, their necks nearly snapping. Bella has their full attention—and Abby’s, too.
“How do you know that?”
Bella reaches for the Nalgene from Sloane. She takes a sip, and then says: “Paulsen called me in about it.”
And Abby can’t help it, but there it is again: her insides swell, from her stomach to the back of her mouth, all of her anxiety throttled forward to prevent her from even breathing. All their chatter over the past three-almost-four weeks, the casual but visible ways they’d grown closer, maybe not like friends but definitely maybe like partners, and Bella hadn’t mentioned this to Abby, not once.
“Wait, what?” Blake says. “She thought you did it?”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” Sloane says. “You haven’t been here.”
“Yes, thanks, I’d forgotten.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Well, that’s what I said to Linda. But she had a theory: she thought there was an original prankster, and that this most recent … incident was the work of a copycat.”
“Why would she think that?” Sloane asks.
“I mean, we all thought they would end, right? With Breslin gone?” Blake reaches for the Nalgene. “We assumed the goal was to get the rapist off campus, if he was actually still here.”
Blake passes the bottle to Sloane, who takes a drink and then taps at the corner of her lower lip, wiping away a stray drop. “Honestly, I was on the fence about whether Karen was telling the truth until that man bolted.”
Blake shakes her head. “He had to have known how guilty he would look when he didn’t come back.”
“My question is”—Bella leans forward—“if this girl knew it was Breslin all along, why didn’t she just put his name right there on the Atwater Instagram?”
Sloane nods, like she’s mulling it over. “Good question.”
“Maybe she didn’t know,” Abby says, surprising herself. She’d forgotten that she wasn’t, in fact, directly involved in the conversation: She was supposed to be just an audience. Her cheeks burn. Sloane’s eyes narrow. Bella almost smiles, and it’s all Abby needs to forge ahead: “Maybe that’s why this one feels different, and why Linda would think it might’ve been somebody new. The initial pranks were sort of random.” She remembers learning about guerilla warfare in middle school social studies, the phrase bolded in the textbook. “Like she was just trying to create enough chaos to draw out and then get rid of the rapist, whoever he was.”
“And now what?” Blake asks.
Abby thinks about her first real conversation with Bella, the day the paintings appeared, and the reviews that accompanied them. “Well, this one feels like it has a message. The implication is that the school had been protecting its semi-famous faculty member over its students, right?”
“But is he really famous anymore?” Sloane asks.
“No,” Abby says, “but at the time he was. In 1995, I mean.”
“And once they made that choice,” Bella says, catching Abby’s eye, “it’s not like they could turn around two decades later, when he was sort of a washed-up—but still talented!—has-been and say, ‘You know, you’re not famous anymore and we’re kind of worried we can’t trust you around teenage girls, so, you’re fired.’”
“Right,” Abby agrees. “They had to commit, and then they had to keep committing, because otherwise they’d have to admit that they put two decades of art students in danger.”
Bella frowns—pulling her lips to one side in a half pucker, a disappointed kind of contemplative gesture—and the high Abby feels dissolves, the buzz of a rapid-fire back-and-forth with Bella in front of Sloane and Blake swiftly replaced by her usual process of internal abasement. How careless she’d been, lumping her roommate into a pile of potential casualties.
“The school will never admit it made a mistake,” Sloane says, flatly. “Speaking of, what did you say to Linda?”
“I told her that it was a very traumatic thing to learn that your creative mentor of two years is a rapist,” Bella says, dully.
Blake gasps. “No, you didn’t!”
Bella exhales. “No, I didn’t. Honestly, I didn’t really say anything. I didn’t do it, and her hauling me in only confirmed that they have no fucking clue who did. So I said that I was happy to be back at Atwater and eager to rebuild the community’s trust in me and that I had no interest in jeopardizing any of that.”
“Spoken like a true Linda Paulsen veteran,” Sloane smiles.
Bella nods. “And she warned me that I’m on, like, super-strict zero-tolerance no-strikes probation or whatever, and basically that I had better watch it.”
There’s silence for a moment, as Sloane hands the Nalgene to Bella, who takes a long pull, nearly emptying it. She swirls the remainder at the bottom, rotating the bottle in small circles by holding the mouth in her fingertips like a perched spider.
And then Sloane blurts out: “Can I see your tattoo?”
Blake snorts. “What are you talking about?”
“Bella has a tattoo.” Abby flushes again, but then Bella smirks at her, the tiniest smile of coconspirators, and Abby wants to stay inside this very specific moment—where she and Bella alone have a secret—for the rest of her life.
“Ha! See! Even Abby knows.”
“What? You told Abby before us?”
Laughing, Bella wraps her arms around her waist, peeling her sweatshirt up at the hem. She lifts it just to her chest, pulling the edges of the hem up over her shoulders in the back so that the corners of skin between her sports bra and her shoulders are exposed, and then half turns, directing her left side back toward the wall and her right, dotted with three hollowed-out stars, toward Blake and Sloane.
Abby noticed the tattoo the week Bella moved in, although she’d never asked about it. Bella is the kind of girl who is comfortable naked, and at Atwater, being comfortable naked is like having sex or drinking casually in the dorms at night: it signals tha
t you are equipped with some kind of superior knowledge. In the evenings Bella takes long showers and sits at her desk in her towel for hours, mindlessly browsing the internet. When she changes she slides out of her towel easily, casting it aside without shimmying on a pair of underwear first. She switches bras like a normal adult person, not putting on a sports bra over a regular bra and then unclasping the latter (as Abby does, when Bella is around). She puts on her bra and underwear next to her dresser, by the drawer where those items live, and then strides across the room to her armoire, where she stands for a minute or two while figuring out what to wear.
This means that Abby spends a lot of time figuring out where to look while Bella is naked or half-naked. And the whole business of not looking sharpens whatever she isn’t supposed to be looking at, like how Bella always, only wears thongs, or how her bra and underwear never match like Abby had assumed they would, or that she likes bright colors, which is also not something Abby would have guessed: lime green, highlighter pink, Valentine’s Day red. Or how she has a tattoo near her right shoulder, three little stars, inky blue black.
The tattoo itself is not necessarily an aberration. There have been other Atwater girls who’ve had them over the years, most of them PGs, girls who were already eighteen. It had been a little bit of a surprise, to Abby, that a girl like Bella has a tattoo—Bella who summers in the Hamptons and whose parents went to boarding schools and then Ivy League universities. For the most part, Bella doesn’t talk about her semester at Riverdale, just like Abby doesn’t talk about her dad or her mom’s increasingly persistent panic attacks or the crumbling house. Abby imagined that it must have pained Bella to admit, after she’d fought so hard for it years ago, that a Manhattan day school wasn’t the right choice, after all. But she also sensed that it wasn’t the school that didn’t fit so much as the being home every day, the daily routine of checking in and out with her parents, the constant being accounted for—none of which Bella would have rankled against had she not come to Atwater in the first place.
There are two other things about the tattoo that puzzle Abby: (1) the design, which seems cliché and a bit uninspired, a tattoo had by a million girls the world over, and (2) the quality of the tattoo, something she hadn’t noticed initially but which sunk in, like the artwork itself, the more she laid eyes on it. The edges are blurred, like bleeding ink on wet paper. It is, in other words, and in Abby’s opinion, a bad tattoo. Not bad like, your-ex-wife’s-name-in-a-heart bad, but just bad.
And now she is watching Blake and Sloane have all the same realizations, at warp speed and with Bella’s permission, their noses leaning toward the constellation, able to scrutinize and wonder right up close.
“Do your parents know?”
“When did you get it?”
Bella laughs. “In New York, and I don’t think they know, but I guess they could have seen it at some point, just like apparently people around here saw it.”
“So, like, does it mean anything?” Sloane asks, leaning back.
“One for the three of us: Me, my sister, and my brother.” Bella shrugs. “And I like stars. I think they’re cute.”
“Did it hurt?”
Bella appears to turn this over for a minute. “Honestly, yeah. But … I didn’t have it done the traditional way, so…” She trails off. The silence holds for a second, as Blake and Sloane each try to wait the other out.
“It’s a stick-and-poke, isn’t it?”
They turn and stare at Abby. Bella’s smile is wide this time, with a raised eyebrow: unmistakably, the look of a person impressed.
“A stick-and-poke?”
“Like a prison tattoo?”
“How did you know?”
When Abby doesn’t answer immediately, Bella turns back to Sloane and Blake, Blake with her jaw half-open, Sloane steely-eyed. “A friend at home did it.”
“Like, a friend who owns or works at a tattoo parlor tattooed you in his or her tattoo parlor?”
“No.”
Something in Bella shifts. She rolls her shoulders back, holds her chin at an angle, slightly upward. One eyebrow slides a millimeter higher than the other; the slightest dimple nestles into her left cheek. It’s not pride, exactly, but maybe a look of mischief managed. They are all the kinds of girls who do things for effect: to be able to say they did; to one-up one another in badassery. She’s won this round, and she knows it.
“It’s a stick-and-poke, like Abby said. My friend Maren—you guys don’t know her—did it at home one night when we were just hanging out. She has a few, too, and I wanted to learn how to do it.”
“So did it hurt?”
“You wanted to learn how to do it?”
Bella laughs as her friends speak over one another. “It hurt a little bit, yeah. I guess it hurts more than getting a ‘regular’ tattoo.”
“Aren’t stick-and-pokes, like, extremely unsanitary?”
Bella shrugs again. “I didn’t get an infection, so I guess it was safe enough.”
Abby imagines Bella, cross-legged on the floor of her Upper West Side bedroom, music lazily streaming from her open laptop, a bra hooked on her closet door handle. It seems totally plausible, to Abby, now that she thinks about it, that Bella would’ve done it this way. It would have been so ordinary to do it the other way: To make an appointment at some high-end tattoo shop, one in the East Village with a zillion Yelp reviews and an owner profile in the New York Times; to walk in on a Tuesday afternoon and ask for three little stars on her right shoulder. The tattoo artist would have humored her, not at all fooled by her fake ID but rather used to a steady parade of lanky girls with perfect skin and American Express cards, and neatly placed the three little stars on her shoulder. The whole thing would’ve taken less than ten minutes. Worst of all, there wouldn’t have been a story to tell.
“So you know how to do this?” Blake is clearly impressed, and finding it harder to hide.
“Yeah, but I’ve done it only once.”
“To who?”
“Whom.”
“Maren. After she did mine, she let me do one on her forearm.”
“She just decided to get a tattoo so you could practice?”
“Well, she has, like, two dozen tattoos, and anyway stick-and-pokes aren’t really permanent…”
“What do you mean?” Sloane is hungry for anything that will undercut Bella’s story.
“They don’t penetrate as deeply, so they fade over time. Not like, over six months, but they won’t last a lifetime.”
Sloane’s left eye narrows briefly. “Damn, girl. Good for you.” She glances at her phone. “It’s late. I’ve gotta get to bed. Blake?”
“For sure.”
“’Night, kids.”
“’Night,” Bella echoes.
Abby smiles, not sure whether she’s included.
Their guests bounce out of the room, leaving the door slightly ajar. Bella and Abby listen for a minute, waiting to hear the judgment Bella’s friends will surely save until out of earshot.
“Well”—Bella shrugs at the empty room—“that cat’s out of the bag.” She pauses, then turns to Abby directly. “How’d you know it was a stick-and-poke? I feel like you’re not the kind of girl who hangs out on tattoo Tumblr or Insta.”
Abby is not sure exactly what makes her do it. But something about the last hour has both strengthened the kinship she feels with Bella—as though Abby is her greatest ally in her second chance at Atwater. And so she begins to tell Bella about her dad.
“He died when I was eight,” she explains, and she is grateful that Bella doesn’t try to empathize or offer condolences in any real way. She looks at her roommate attentively, expectantly, as if she knows this essential tragedy of Abby’s life is not actually the point of the story.
“I don’t remember a lot of the details,” she admits, “but it was liver cancer, and there was this window—six months or whatever. He didn’t want any kind of treatment, no trials or experiments. He just wanted to spend the time with my m
om, and with me, I guess.
“We had always been this trio. Even though he’s not my ‘real’ dad, he and my mom got married when I was two, and he made it official and adopted me and everything. But in those few months I felt like I was always walking in on him and my mom, on these little private moments they’d be having. Maybe they were just conversations about his cancer, or treatment, or maybe it was stuff they didn’t want me to hear about the funeral and his will and life insurance and whatever—I don’t know, I’ve never asked.
“Anyway, my dad had a bunch of tattoos. A full sleeve on his arm—a forest sprouting from his wrist, up to the crook of his elbow, and birds bursting from the trees up his bicep—and song lyrics on his chest and a pair of wings on his back, and his brother’s initials on his shoulder, and just all over.” Abby remembers how she used to trace them, laying on top of him on the living room carpet, their bellies pressed together. “But my mom—despite all her wild-child tendencies, the fact that she had me when she was nineteen, and that I think she’s tried every drug under the sun—she didn’t have any tattoos, not one. And then one day she did. I noticed it when she was driving, a set of numbers on the inside of her second finger on her left hand. They were small and slightly crooked, bleeding at the edges, raised slightly on reddened skin.
“I guess he gave it to her, one night after I was asleep, and she did the same to him. Just sitting at the kitchen table. The numbers were our zip code, the place where they built a life together, where my mom says she finally felt at peace.
“Later she told me that she wanted to get a real tattoo, that when they had the idea that night she said that she’d make them an appointment at a shop in Burlington, but it was my dad’s idea to do a stick-and-poke. He said that he wanted her to have an out. That if my mom ever moved on—which he wanted her to do, even though I don’t think she ever will—that the tattoo would eventually fade, that if it made her sad she wouldn’t have to look at it forever.”