You Know I'm No Good

by Jessie Ann Foley

  “Does this mean you’re kicking me out?” I ask. “Because I can have my bag packed in five minutes.”

  “Mia, give it a rest!” my dad snaps. “You think this is funny?”

  “No, I don’t think it’s funny. I didn’t think it was funny when my roommate pulled out all her eyebrows alone in her bed. Or when she told me she doesn’t matter and she hates herself. And I don’t see Freja having a disciplinary hearing over that.”

  “Mia,” Vivian says, “you don’t need to concern yourself with Freja’s consequences. We’re here to talk about you.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m sick and fucking tired of talking about me. I’ve had about as much self-exploration as I can handle. So let’s just cut to the chase. Are you gonna kick me out or not?”

  “I’m sure you’d love that,” Dad says, “but you’re not getting off that easy, kid.”

  “Cool, well, in that case, I’ll just chill here until Vivian decides, based on completely subjective factors, that I’m ‘cured.’ Or until you guys run out of money. Which won’t be very long now.”

  “As a matter of fact, smart-mouth,” says Alanna, “we have plenty of money to pay your tuition.”

  “Bullshit!” I laugh. “I know how much you make. I know how much Dad makes. I know what this place costs per month. And I’m better at math than you are.”

  “You think you’re smarter than everyone, don’t you? But you don’t know everything. Not by a mile.”

  “Alanna—”

  I watch as Dad puts a hand on her arm and gives her a look.

  “What?” she snaps.

  Something weird is going on here. Her smug, secretive face. His look of rising panic.

  “What’s going on?” I demand.

  “Tell her!”

  “Jesus, Alanna. This is not the time nor the place.” Dad rubs his hands over his face and leans back against the couch.

  “Uh, Mr. and Mrs. Dempsey,” says Mary Pat. “If we could get back to the matter at hand—”

  “Time nor the place for what?” I interrupt.

  Dad shoots Alanna a withering look, which I would have enjoyed much more if it weren’t for this feeling that’s now lodged itself in the middle of my stomach, as hard and knotty as a peach pit.

  “What?”

  Dad glances over at Vivian, who nods at him, almost imperceptibly. Which is when I realize that whatever secret it is that he’s holding, I’m the only one in this room who isn’t already privy to it.

  “Mia, we have to tell you something,” he says. “And you’re not going to like it.”

  I stare at the screen, at the face that is a digital approximation of his face, the Wi-Fi around here not high enough quality to capture the nuances of his tired familiar eyes.

  “This is a valuable discussion to have,” Mary Pat bleats, “but right now we’ve convened to discuss Mia’s consequences.”

  I ignore her. My dad does, too. Allies, still, despite everything.

  “We’ve had some—ah—financial assistance with your Red Oak tuition, honey.”

  “Okay,” I say slowly. “You mean like a scholarship?”

  “Not exactly.” He runs his hands through his hair again and stares up at the ceiling. “It’s— Christ. Okay. We— Your mom had a life insurance policy.”

  I stare at him. “And?”

  “And.” He clears his throat. “It was for a lot of money. That’s a relative term, honey,” he adds quickly. “For some of your new friends, it wouldn’t mean much. It’s not in the millions or anything. But it’s a lot for us. And since it paid out, when you were a little girl, I’ve just sort of . . . sat on it. I thought that spending it would feel like we were monetizing her. Like we were giving pieces of her away. But then I realized that she is gone, Mia. She’s never coming back. She bought that policy to take care of you. And here you were, wild, out of control, and I was losing you, and I thought—she would want this. This is how I should spend that money.”

  “Mom’s life insurance.” I repeat the words dully.

  “When you finish here or—or reach maturation, or whatever they call it—there should still be some left to help pay for your college. And that’s what I’m—that’s what I’d love to spend the rest on.”

  I don’t know why I’m so upset. He’s right—she’s gone. She’s dead. She’s been dead forever. She’s been dead so long she might as well never have been alive. But still. It feels so terribly wrong. Like a desecration of the very little I have left of her. I close my eyes and reach for breaths, the way I’ve been taught to do, which is so much harder and less effective than pills that I don’t know why anybody ever bothers.

  “So the only reason you have this money,” I finally say, “is because mom got murdered. This is her death money.”

  “It’s not—I don’t want you to think of it that way.”

  He looks to Alanna to back him up, but she, for once, is silent. She squirms uncomfortably and stares at her French manicure.

  “And you took that money?” I turn on Vivian and Mary Pat now. “You knew where it came from, and you took it?”

  “Mia—” Vivian tries to put a hand on mine, but I yank it away.

  “Don’t touch me. You’re disgusting. Taking dirty money that only exists because a man put his hands around my mother’s neck and squeezed until she was dead? And then threw her in the ocean like a piece of trash? So much for smashing the patriarchy, right? You think that if you don’t say anything, that if you keep it a secret, that absolves you? You’re like some mob wife. As long as the money’s flowing, you don’t give a shit. That’s what you both are. Fucking mob wives.”

  “I understand you’re angry,” Vivian says softly, “but I think that’s an extremely imperfect analogy.”

  “Fuck you, Vivian. You don’t understand anything about me.”

  “Mia,” Dad pleads. “I knew your mom better than you did. She would have wanted this. She wouldn’t have wanted you throwing away your potential, your gifts, running around with these . . . these losers the way you—”

  Because I know they’re probably true, his words make my heart dry up.

  “You don’t need to worry about me, Dad,” I say as calmly as I can, pushing away from the table and standing up. “I have better taste in men than Mom did.”

  I turn away from his face on the screen. I turn my back on him, just like he did to me that October day when he hired those transport meatheads to come take me away.

  39

  IT’S FREEZING OUTSIDE, and I’m not dressed for it because I was planning on just going to this stupid disciplinary hearing and then back to my dorm, but instead I go for a walk in the woods.

  The cattails are frozen, the fronds snapped off by the wind or buried under the snow. The lake is a frozen coin surrounded by a parabola of dark green fir trees. The sky is so heavy with gray clouds it looks like it’s ready to sag onto the treetops. And everywhere around me, this true forest silence, as round and shimmering as a bubble.

  It’s this silence that I just can’t stand. I imagine my mother, Allison Dempsey, young, gorgeous, the type of woman who doesn’t love being a mom but who loves being my mom, walking into some financial office and buying insurance for herself, just in case something awful happens to her, because she knows herself, she knows that she is reckless and stupid and wild, and even if she’s not willing to change her behavior, she’s at least willing to be take responsibility for all the things that will continue happening once she’s a ghost. Maybe she knew that Roddie was a psycho; maybe she saw all the writing on the wall, but she still ran away with him anyway. But it’s cool, it’s fine, it’s not her fault: she bought life insurance.

  All these years, I thought boys were my problem. Boys who push and force and take and laugh. Xander. Scottie Curry. Dillon Keating in the woods. The boys who put their hands on me at the beach or gave me drugs at anonymous parties in leafy suburbs whose streets I don’t know. The little scrum of hockey boys who kept making sex noises when I was trying to re
cite my stupid poem for Poetry Out Loud in Mr. Chu’s sophomore English class. “A savage race,” I whispered, staring them down with their stupid floppy haircuts, “that hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.”24

  But now I realize that when I really think about it, it’s the women in my life who have hurt me the deepest, who have done the real damage, who have made me the way I am. My mom, who abandoned me. My stepmom, who treats me like an extra appendage in the body of our family. The girls in school who chased me down, stepped on the heels of my shoes, threw things at me, called me the worst names. Marnie, who dropped my ass when I started gathering my slut rep.

  And now I can add Mary Pat and Vivian to that list.

  What I’ve always said—what I’ve even said, specifically, to Vivian —is that maybe I’ve given my body away too many times, but the compromise, the thing that keeps me feeling like a human, is that my mind is mine alone. Untouchable.

  But Vivian—I let her in. I told her things. I named names, I told specifics.

  I cried to her. I asked her to help me, and she did. I trusted her, which was such a stupid amateur mistake. Look how she pushed me and pushed me to talk, to tell things. I wasn’t comfortable, and she knew it, but she pushed me anyway.

  I should have recognized the language.

  You need to trust me, Mia.

  You can tell me.

  You need to open up. Open your mouth

  and speak.

  Open your legs

  and let me in.

  I’m not like those other guys.

  Trust me.

  Leaving

  I FUCKED UP, I KNOW THAT, BUT JESUS,

  CAN’T A GIRL JUST DO THE BEST SHE CAN?

  —LANA DEL REY, “MARINERS APARTMENT COMPLEX”

  40

  SOMETIMES, WHEN I’M FEELING really low and I don’t know how to dig myself out of it, I tell myself there is no such thing as sadness or anger. For that matter, there’s also no such thing as happiness or even love. It’s all just chemical reactions. The firing of synapses, a shot of dopamine, a burst of serotonin, brain waves connecting with nerves. Say, for example, you are betrayed by your father. Or a couple of senior girls call you a whore on a school field trip. Or your stepmother skips your eighth grade graduation to go to her real daughters’ ballet recital. Or you find your mom’s autopsy report25 on some internet site for voyeuristic sickos. Any of these things might make you think you’re sad, hurting, brokenhearted. But I think it helps, in these moments, to remind yourself that you’re really nothing more than a biped, a lump of matter receiving chemical signals. You can choose to pay attention to these signals or not, just the same way you can choose to heed or ignore a walk signal or a stop sign.

  Here’s what I’ve been thinking, though: if feelings and emotions and thoughts aren’t actually real, then what does that leave?

  Action. Legs lifting, arms pumping, boots moving across snow.

  Which is why I have decided to run away.

  41

  AFTER LIGHTS-OUT the night of my disciplinary hearing, I wait until Madison is asleep, then sneak down the hall to Vera’s room. I toss a Snickers bar, saved from the care package Lauren and Lola sent me at Thanksgiving,26 onto Soleil’s bunk, who takes the bribe and skulks off to the bathroom so Vera and I can talk in private.

  “I’m running away,” I tell her. “Will you come with me?”

  “Hearing went that bad, huh?”

  “Worse.”

  “Mine was relatively painless. But then, my mom’s in the Maldives, so she wasn’t able to take the call. She passed it off to my dad, who is only too glad to farm out my moral education to others.”

  “Will you come with me? I need to go. Like, soon.”

  “You know it’s an eight-mile hike through straight-up wilderness to get to the highway, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that it’s winter?”

  “Yes.”

  “In Minnesota?”

  “Yep.”

  “And that there are bears and wolves and shit in these woods?”

  “Are there? Because a forest full of wild predators sure sounds like a convenient story for Mary Pat to tell us to make us all too afraid to run away.”

  “I’m not saying I’m afraid,” she says through a yawn. “And I’m not saying I won’t do it. I’m just saying, shouldn’t we at least wait until spring?”

  “No.”

  I tell her, then, finally, the story of my mother. What Roddie did to her. How her body had washed ashore at Waltz Key with seaweed in her hair, a plastic grocery bag tangled around her foot, and black bruises around her neck. How her death taught me that if you have no memories of someone, they can’t even visit you in your dreams. And then I tell her about my tuition money, how I feel like people are robbing her grave to pay for this shit, and now that I know this, I swear I will die myself before I spend one more day as a Red Oak girl.

  The whole time I’m talking, Vera sits and listens quietly, her expression unchanging. And when I’m finished, she looks outside at the dense snow-covered pines, then nods.

  “Now that,” she says, “is what you call a core issue.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “Of course it is.” She leans in, then, and hugs me for a long time, with arms so skinny it’s like being held by an empty dress on a hanger.

  “I just hope we can get away with it,” I say, my words muffled in her long, greasy hair.

  “Mia,” she says, pulling back and holding me at arms’ length. “In the words of Mary Pat: ‘Hope is not a strategy.’”

  42

  THERE’S NOTHING UNUSUAL about going for a walk in the woods. In fact, solitary nature walks are a practice that Red Oak not only allows but also encourages, due to Mary Pat and Co.’s belief in the Healing Properties of Mother Nature™. Granted, we aren’t allowed to go farther than the lake, and we can’t go in groups or pairs. But as long as Vera and I stagger our exits, we won’t arouse suspicion, even if someone sees us go.

  So it’s never been a question of leaving, only of escaping.

  Our first order of business is to sneak provisions out of the cafeteria—a harder task than you’d think, when you’re not allowed to have pockets. But all week, we manage a steady trickle—an apple tucked into a sports bra, a granola bar stuffed down a sock, bags of pretzels shoved up the sleeves of our hoodies. The day before we’re set to leave, Vera even manages to stroll out of the lunchroom with half a loaf of bread stuck down her pants—which, given her hygiene habits, I don’t plan on eating, no matter how hungry I get.

  We’re going to leave after lunch, right before afternoon classes begin. Vera will go first; ten minutes later, I’ll follow. She’ll wait for me at the far end of the lake, beneath the giant white spruce that marks the end of our walking trails, the farthest into the woods we’re allowed to go because that’s when the security cameras end and we fall off the map into the great green Minnesota wilderness. This will give us almost five hours before sunset, which should be more than enough time, all things going in our favor, to make it to the highway before dark. From there, we’ll hitchhike to Minneapolis and track down some girl named Jenya, Vera’s roommate before Soleil, who told Vera, at her maturation ceremony, that she was never returning to her parents’ house in Pennsylvania, that she would punish them forever for their betrayal of sending her here by settling in Minneapolis, in Northeast, specifically, with all the hipsters and artists, where she was going to start an all-female punk band named Teen Fun Skipper,27 and that if Vera ever got the chance, she should come crash.

  So we’ve got Jenya, we think. We also have sturdy snow boots, hats, thermal gloves, balaclavas and long down coats;28 our store of stolen food, an aristocratic compass that survived the sinking of the Titanic, and a single tightly rolled sleeping bag belonging to Vera, who isn’t allowed access to bedsheets29 due to her history of suicide attempts. It’s made of cheap synthetic material, not designed for actual outdoor camping, but it’s big enoug
h that we can share it if something goes horribly wrong and we end up needing to sleep in the woods overnight.

  But I try not to think about all that could go wrong. If I do, if I really consider the idea of hiking through eight miles of wilderness in the dead of a northern winter with an emotionally unstable New Yorker and century-old compass as my only guides, I know that I’ll lose my nerve.

  Vera, meanwhile, seems unperturbed, relaxed, borderline insouciant. When I start to second-guess our plan—the dangers, the conditions, our lack of any wilderness experience, et cetera, she quotes Virgil one day—“‘Fortune favors the bold!’”—and Dua Lipa the next—“‘Boy, I don’t give a fuck!’”

  Which makes me feel better. Sure, she’s no more of an outdoorswoman than I am, but she is a survivor—and one of the smartest people I know. If she’s not scared, why should I be?

  It’s only on the appointed morning of our leaving that a thought occurs to me: maybe Vera didn’t agree to run away with me because she’s loyal and tough and brave. Maybe it’s because she had once wanted, so badly, to die.

  43

  LIKE MOST OF THE OTHER GIRLS at Red Oak, Vera and I are accomplished liars. So when the big day arrives, even though my heart thrums with intent, nobody suspects a thing. We go to breakfast, group chat, and morning classes like normal. It’s Charlotte from Conifer House’s sixteenth birthday, which is a happy coincidence, since everybody is preoccupied with planning the sad little affair being thrown for her after dinner in the cafeteria.

  We’re right on schedule for an on-time departure, when, after lunch, just as we’re slipping out of the lunchroom to grab our stuff, we hit a snag.

  “Gals.” Mary Pat comes toward us out of nowhere, blocking the doorway with her squat, utilitarian body. “Chef Lainie could really use some help squeezing oranges for the party punch.”

  “Come on, MP,” sighs Vera. “Can’t you get Madison or someone else who’s actually domestic?”