by Emily Layden
Abby finally pauses here. She does not tell Bella about how the tattoo makes her sad for another reason: It made her feel like there was something between her parents she could never fully know; it shifted irrevocably the way she had previously thought of the three of them as a single unit, all on equal footing, the Three Musketeers. There was her mom and dad—and then there was her.
“Does she still have the tattoo?”
Abby looks up at her roommate and nods. “About a year ago she started talking about having it done officially, making it really permanent.”
“But then it wouldn’t be the thing your dad gave her.”
Abby nods. “I guess not.”
* * *
It happens on a Thursday two weeks later. Back in her room during a free period, Abby goes to the bathroom before heading up to class. She walks in, pees, does a perfunctory water-only hand rinse before it registers.
Shortly after the special issue of the Heron leaked, Mrs. Brodie ordered the plastering of campus with a series of informational flyers. They hung stapled to bulletin boards above water fountains and common-room couches, taped to locker room mirrors and the insides of bathroom stalls—reproduced so many times and displayed in so many places that they became like a kind of wallpaper, absorbed in the periphery but no longer really noticed. If someone were to ask Abby, for example, what to do if someone tells you they’ve been the victim of sexual assault, she could not call up the four-item list on the flyer of the same name; she saw it so frequently that she never really read it, never allowed the instructions to penetrate.
This is why she does not immediately discern the flyer taped to the mirror above the first sink as an aberration—to Abby it’s just another bulletin, another reminder that “Help Is Available at Atwater.” But the font is different on this one, not the standard Atwater sans serif, but girlish block letters scrawled in Sharpie; the production quality is lower, not a professional printing job on glossed paper but a photocopy run on a library printer, the toner streaked in even lines.
TATTOOS BY BELLA.
Oh no no no no no.
Perfectly safe! 100% sterile! Long-lasting, but not forever!
And, printed neatly at the bottom: See Bella Nitido to get stuck.
Cartoonish doodles backdrop the writing: stars, hearts, a lightning bolt, palm trees, astrological signs. Sample designs.
Abby peeks over her shoulder, double-checking under the stalls, before reaching out and ripping the flyer from the mirror, tearing it where it meets the tape. Like she’s disposing of self-incriminating evidence, she carries it with her back to their room before crumpling it and throwing it in their own trash bin, where she can safely see to its removal.
* * *
“Did you fucking see this?”
Abby is sitting on her bed, working distractedly through her homework, when Bella bursts into their room. It’s the slow and quiet window between classes and dinner, when most of their classmates are busy with after-school sports or clubs or theater. They have the hall to themselves, more or less, Abby who fulfills Atwater’s PE requirement with a combination of low-expectation teacher-run classes like yoga and Insanity, and Bella, whose late-arrival meant her schedule would be a cobbled-together one.
She stands before Abby, her backpack still on, the flyer wrinkled between her fingertips and palm.
Abby nods. “There was one in our bathroom.”
“Jesus, fuck—” Bella turns on her heels and moves for the door.
“I took it down.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
Bella generally wears her emotions close. It’s part of her whole thing. She keeps her face set with a sort of mild-mannered inscrutability—she isn’t exactly hiding, but she also isn’t sharing—and since returning to Atwater she’s really dug into it.
Now, though, the Bella who stands before Abby has cracks in her. Her eyes are red-rimmed and bright, wetness reflecting in the afternoon light. Her hair has crossed from intentionally messy to disheveled, the roots a little greasy. She picks at her cuticle occasionally between her left thumb and middle finger, making a tiny impatient clicking sound she doesn’t seem to notice.
“It was them, right?” Bella asks.
“Sloane and Blake?”
“Yeah.”
This seems like dangerous territory to Abby. Corroborating Bella’s hunch would be to simultaneously disapprove of Sloane and Blake. On the other hand, Abby might be the only other person who knows about the origins of Bella’s tattoo, and therefore the only other person with the knowledge to write those flyers. She gambles: “I think so.”
Bella steels herself. Abby watches her jawline tighten, flexing where it slopes up to meet her ears. “Did you see them anywhere else?”
“No—just here on our floor. You?”
“Over in the Student Center bathroom.”
Abby lets out a low sigh. “Not good.”
“Not good.”
“Do you want me to help you? We can split up, I’ll go over and check Lathrop while you take Avery…” She trails off.
Bella shakes her head, not dismissively but as if she hadn’t been listening; in response to something else. “I’m sure Admin knows.”
Abby is quiet a beat too long.
“I’m so fucked.”
“Why? It’s not like it’s true.” Abby is careful to say it steadily, with no hint of a question’s upward inflection.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s believable enough. And, as Linda reminded me, I’m on the world’s strictest probation. She’s looking for literally any excuse.” She takes a step forward and turns on her heels, slumping against Abby’s bed, her backpack perched on the mattress. “I don’t get it. I don’t know what they get out of this.”
“You know,” Abby says, slowly, “it sort of reminds me of the paintings.” This is the second thing she’d thought, after finding the flyers nestled among the school-sponsored instructions for seeking help: that it also reminded her of seeing their art teacher’s butterflied faces plastered around campus. Both made Abby’s intestines plummet in her abdomen.
“Except those had a purpose. This…” Bella trails off, tracing veins in the ceiling. “This is just a game to them.”
It is a revelation to Abby, who’d assumed that the motives were always more calculated, that girls like Sloane and Blake played a particular brand of three-dimensional chess that Abby herself would never be able to learn.
For the first time since becoming roommates, Abby actually believes she and Bella are the same age. She’d always seemed older and worldlier, educated in make-outs and beers and the perks of prettiness. But the Bella in front of her now has flyaways around her forehead and a tiny pimple by her jaw and swollen, puffy eyes, and the whole thing doesn’t even add up to the tragically beautiful, ill-fated-heroine thing you see in the movies. She just looks sad.
* * *
The next day, Abby tears down flyers in the school building and in the gym and in the bathroom outside the dining hall. At lunch, Bella tells her she found them in the Student Center and in Trask, where they were tacked on the small bulletin boards outside every single practice room and studio space.
At dinner, Bella refuses to leave their room.
“I don’t need to make it easy on Linda Paulsen,” she explains. It occurs to Abby that Linda is not likely to hand down an expulsion in the dining hall, but she figures it’s not really about avoiding the Dean of Students. Bella mentioned earlier that neither Sloane nor Blake spoke to her in English, the only class the three of them had together.
The knock comes during study hall, as Abby is pretending to read, her eyes skirting back and forth again and again over the same paragraph about Daisy Buchanan’s voice, too associatively tense with expectation. Linda Paulsen stands at the door, her mouth turned slightly downward.
“I need to speak with Bella,” she says. It is not a question.
Abby looks quickly at her roommate, who does not meet her eyes.
“Should I
go? I can go read in the common room.”
“You don’t need to—”
Paulsen interjects: “That would be great. Thank you, Abby.”
She closes the door behind Abby, who wanders down the hall to the common room where Ms. Trujillo has tucked herself into a corner of the couch, her knees beneath her, chatting with Tiffany Xu. She looks up at Abby as she enters, empathetically: of course she knows what’s going on. Linda Paulsen probably cleared the interrogation with her beforehand.
Abby takes a seat in the armchair in the corner. It sags in the middle and the slipcover needs replacing—it’s speckled with suspicious stains—but it has the best view of the Bowl, which glows orange and hazy beneath them, Atwater’s own little halo of light pollution.
It hasn’t been five minutes when Paulsen’s voice interrupts her daydreaming. Whether this is good or bad, Abby can’t say.
“Sorry for intruding, Abby. You can go back in now, if you like.”
“It’s no problem,” Abby says, even though it was, of course, a big fucking problem.
With a head nod, Paulsen turns and walks down the hall, toward—Abby imagines—the next offender on her list. Abby waits until she is safely out of sight before standing and returning to her room, ignoring Ms. Trujillo’s sorry-about-this half smile on her way out of the common room.
Bella sits at her desk with her neck craned over her phone, its blue light reflecting on her pale skin.
“My mom always says to wait twenty-four hours before sending the angry text or email.” Abby imitates her mother’s good-natured nagging: “You might feel differently in the morning.”
“Well, I’m sure your mother is a very wise woman, but—counterpoint—sometimes rage is worth releasing. Plus, I might have bigger problems in twenty-four hours.” She finishes tapping and places her phone with a thud facedown on her desk. She leans back in her chair, extending her long torso, running her hands through her hair, smoothing it away from her face.
Normally, Abby is not one to prod. The machinations of school discipline were between Linda Paulsen and whomever she was rehabilitating. Plus, it is generally better to stay out of these things: The more you know, the more likely you are to appear before Linda yourself. But Abby realizes that in this particular moment, she is probably Bella’s only friend on campus.
“So what’s the verdict?”
Bella sighs. “Nothing official yet, of course. I have to go before the Disciplinary Committee tomorrow at three thirty. But Paulsen has already called my parents and told them that they need to be here tomorrow afternoon.”
“Is that standard?”
“No. And Paulsen reiterated that I was admitted on a ‘probationary status’ and that ‘the terms of my probation were made abundantly clear.’”
“Did you tell her you didn’t do it?”
Bella shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It has to matter.”
Bella looks up at her roommate and almost smiles. It is not a look Abby entirely likes: it seems too close to pity.
“You know, maybe it’s for the best. I didn’t want to come back here, anyway.”
This stings. “Then why did you?” Abby asks.
Bella shrugs. “Why does anyone come here?”
The public school Abby would have attended had she stayed home graduated about forty kids a year. At the ceremony every spring, the principal invites the fourth- and fifth-generation students to stand. In two hundred years, their families haven’t left rural Vermont. Their parents work at the ice house and the gristmill and for the highway department.
But this wouldn’t have been Bella’s fate. Bella is from a place and the kind of family that grants unlimited opportunity. It isn’t just that Atwater unlocks doors, Abby knows. The moment she opened her welcome package two years ago, all thick creamy paper in dreamy blues, Abby felt it: this school sinks into your veins.
“‘Once an Atwater girl,’” Abby says, parroting Mrs. Brodie.
“‘Forever an Atwater girl,’” Bella finishes. They laugh, and Abby is struck by how natural it has come to feel, casual banter with her roommate. She would miss her.
“So … are you looking for clients?”
Bella flicks her chin up and wrinkles her forehead.
“I mean, if you’re going to get in trouble anyway … might as well actually do the thing, right?”
“You’re insane.”
Abby shrugs. “It’s not permanent, right?”
“No, but—don’t do this for me.”
Abby makes a dismissive pssh. “Don’t flatter yourself.”
Bella is quiet for a minute. “Okay. When do you want to do it?”
“Is now good?”
“Then you won’t have any time to reconsider.”
“That’s the point.”
“Okay.” She pauses. “Okay. Let me get my stuff. Can you go to the bathroom and grab some paper towels?”
Abby watches as Bella sets up her workspace. It is the most meticulous she has ever seen her roommate, who—she learns—keeps her supplies layered neatly in a small plastic container in her dresser. She makes her desk into their workspace, placing a square of plastic wrap beneath a square of paper towel, tacking down the corners with Scotch tape. The necessities are minimal: a tiny bottle of black liquid, the size and shape of the paint tubes Abby remembers from her childhood; a dish to hold the poured ink; a lighter; a tub of Vaseline; a bottle of rubbing alcohol; a pencil. What appeared to be a coin purse is actually a small sewing kit, from which Bella pulls a spool of black thread and a circular plastic ring of sewing needles. Delicately she slides a needle from its position; with her other hand, she clicks open the lighter. Slowly she twists the needle through the flame, watching it flare neon orange and then black. Returning the lighter to the desk, she finds the end of the thread and begins wrapping it around the needle, near the tip, building a small black chrysalis around the hot metal. The pencil, as it turns out, is carved with a single neat slice, into which Bella slides the needle, holding it in place with a single piece of tape. The whole thing takes less than three minutes. Months later, Abby will think about this moment—Bella’s preparedness, her efficiency, the very fact that she had brought the kit to campus—and the facts of the case will suddenly shift for her.
“So. What are we doing?”
Abby hasn’t thought about it. In fact, she hasn’t ever thought seriously about getting a tattoo. “Umm…”
Bella laughs, breaking the intensity that had settled between them. “It’s hard to do detail. Simpler is better.”
“That’s not very encouraging. Are you bad at this?”
They both laugh. “For your information, I’m excellent at this, as I am at all things, ever,” Bella says. “It’s just sort of a primitive way of drawing. Trust me.”
“Clearly, I do.”
“What matters to you?”
Abby runs through the options. School, but her class ring sort of covers that. Kitty, but she isn’t ready to be literally labeled as a crazy cat lady. Home. “Vermont.”
“Ahhh,” Bella sighs affectedly. “Home.”
“Whatever, stars.”
They laugh. “Yes, we’re all walking clichés, utterly predictable,” Bella waves her hand dramatically. “Okay, okay. What do you think of when you think of Vermont?”
Abby waits. Bella raises her eyebrows.
“Oh, I was just giving you time to make the usual ‘cows?’ joke.”
“I’m serious!” Bella smacks Abby across the shoulder.
Abby looks away from Bella and fixates on their shared carpet. It needs vacuuming. “My dad used to take me fishing in this creek near our house. We’d catch all kinds of trout. Well, he’d actually do most of the catching. I would get bored after a while and pick bunches of wildflowers on the shore. Buttercups and clovers, mostly. When we went home, Dad would make this big show of presenting the fish and my little wilted and crushed bouquet of wildflowers, like even though his fish would literally feed
us, my crumpled flowers were just as important an addition to the table…” She trails off, remembering how he’d throw his arms open wide, fish in one fist, flowers in the other.
“That’s perfect.” There is no snark or affect in Bella’s response.
Abby shrugs. It was.
“Sooo … a flower? A fish?” Bella looks at Abby.
Abby wrinkles her nose. “All I can picture is one of those Jesus fish bumper stickers.”
“Ugh, no, not like that. I can’t be super detailed, but I can handle a little more detail than a single curved line. Where’s this going, anyway?”
“Somewhere I can hide it.”
Bella snorts. “Chicken.”
“Maybe. But only one of us in this room is about to be kicked out of school again.”
“Touché. How about on the side here?” Bella reaches toward Abby, placing her fingertips on her rib cage below her breast. “It’ll only be visible in a swimsuit.”
To Abby, it seems as good a spot as any. She nods.
Bella tap-taps through her phone. “Okay, give me a sec.” She rests her phone on her desk, next to her work station, and positions a notebook in her lap. She scribbles for a minute, erases, looks back at her phone, bends her head again. Finally she places the pencil on her desk, gives the sketch an approving look, and holds it up for Abby. “What do you think?”
Bella drew the trout as if from above and swimming upstream, its rounded mouth pointing toward the top of the paper, its tail curving to the left. Four fins—two on each side—slip from the fish’s abdomen in half circles. It’s soft and smooth and graceful. Abby remembers how on a summer morning the fish would sun themselves, suspended against the current, still despite the fury around them. She looks at Bella. “It’s perfect.”
Bella cracks a wide grin. “Okay,” she says. “Let’s do this.”
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