You Know I'm No Good

by Jessie Ann Foley

  “Yeah.”

  “How come?”

  “Well.” His Adam’s apple jumps. “Things at home aren’t great.”

  I can latch on to this, I think. Talk for a little. Then leave.

  “I get it,” I say. “Things at my house were the same. My dad and stepmom, they’re . . .” I’m trying to think of the right adjective, but before I can locate it, he starts kissing me again. Which, I guess, fair enough, you don’t go home with a guy you just met so that the two of you can chat. We both know that. And now his head is bowing down, revealing the greasy center part of his hair, and the skin of my neck is pinched between his lips.

  Are you saying the sex with these boys was satisfying?

  What do you mean satisfying ?

  Physically. Emotionally. Did the sex make you feel good?

  Yeah. Definitely. Otherwise why would I bother?

  His mouth has moved down to my collarbone. Trying to pretend he’s smooth, gentle, with the neck kissing. He’ll be trying to pull my pants down in three . . . two . . .

  There it is.

  I push his hand away, just to prolong this lie, that maybe this isn’t the same old thing, that maybe, by some miracle, I met somebody special at a punk-rock show who shares a name with the ancient scribe who supposedly wrote something that somebody read at my mother’s funeral.

  The hand slithers back this time, with more determination. I push it away and stand up.

  “I have to use your bathroom,” I say.

  He sits up and blinks. “Uh, yeah. Sure. It’s down the hall.”

  There is a buzzing fan installed in the white-tiled ceiling, its edges etched with mold. Or maybe the buzz is coming from inside of me. I stand before the sink and look at myself in the mirror. Sometimes, when I’m in-love-with-the-world drunk, I think I look prettier than I actually am. But sometimes, I’m too ashamed to even make eye contact with the haunted wreck of a girl looking back at me. According to ABC 5 news, I have made the unfortunate, inevitable transition from Troubled Teen to Missing Girl. I should be worried, should be running scared, but the truth is, I don’t think they will ever find me. Not because they’re not searching, but because I’m not here. I’m nowhere. How can they ever find me when, even as I stood in front of them, they never really saw me? I close the toilet lid, which reeks of pee, sit down on it. The gin is starting to curdle inside me, and I bury my head in my hands.

  “Hey.” I hear Isaiah call from the other room. “Are you okay in there?”

  I clear my throat. “Yeah. Just give me a minute, please.”

  Xander used to ask me: What do you girls do in bathrooms?

  I told him, laughing, Oh, you know. Cocaine and selfies, mostly.

  What I didn’t tell him: that lots of times we just stand there before the sinks, staring at our reflections, trying to see ourselves through your eyes.

  Allow yourself to imagine something better, Vivian once said to me. Something that is deserving of who you are. Something better than what you’ve had.

  And now, because I’m free of her and don’t have to give her the satisfaction of knowing I was listening, I do what she told me to do. I allow myself to imagine something better. Not my whole future, that would be too hard. Just a single moment of it.

  I close my eyes and imagine myself away from this place and this moment.

  I stay very quiet.

  And I see it: a time in my life ahead of this time. I’m a grown-up. A real grown-up. Not the pretend kind I tried to be in Scottie Curry’s bed.

  And I love someone.

  And someone loves me.

  And we’re alone together in a cool, quiet room. Dark.

  Our hands, our mouths—

  And this someone holds me so tight, so closely and so good that all I can think, again and again, is that one word: “love.” I think it and think it, Love love love love lovelovelove until the word loses its elastic, becomes meaningless, pulls apart inside of me and my body arches, aching, into the last scattered beats of its echo.

  “Hey.” I’ve been locked in the bathroom so long that he’s fallen asleep on the couch. “I’ve gotta go.”

  “Huh?” He sits up. “Why?”

  I have brushed away your offenses like a cloud; your sins like a mist.

  “I just—I don’t know.”

  He half stands. “But—”

  The word—“sorry”—almost comes off my tongue, but I bite it off.

  “It’s nothing you did,” I say instead. “It’s just me.”

  “Um, all right.” He rubs his eyes. He sounds a little annoyed, but he doesn’t press it, at least. He’s not the worst guy in the world, I guess. He picks up his T-shirt, lifts it over his head. In the split second where he is blinded by cotton, I reach down to the coffee table and slip his phone, bright and unlocked, into my pocket. If he asks me for my number, he’ll probably realize it’s missing while I’m still standing here in front of him. But I know he won’t ask. Which means he won’t notice it’s missing until I leave. He’ll spend a little time searching the couch cushions, his coat pockets, before it dawns on him that it was me who stole it. I figure I’ve got about five minutes.

  I yank on my snow boots, dripping dirty slush all around his front door, zip up my coat, pull down my hat. I lift a hand in goodbye, in preemptive, secret apology, and as soon as I’m back outside in the air-splitting cold, I break into a run.

  58

  ONE THING I NEVER KNEW, probably because I’d never thought about it before, is that the city of Minneapolis is bisected straight down the middle by the huge muddy churn of the Mississippi River. I discover this as I’m running through the frozen darkness of Northeast, zigging and zagging down random streets to distance myself from Isaiah, my fingers tapping his phone screen to keep it unlocked. When I think I’ve come far enough to feel safe, I slow down to a jog through an alley clogged with frozen leaves. When I come out the other side I find I’m standing at the edge of the water before a huge blue rainbow, an electric arch in the darkness. The river burbles in the usual way of rivers, but huge chunks of ice, layered on top of each other along either bank, bump up against one another, and that sound is like a chorus of constantly clearing throats. It’s the loneliest sound I think I’ve ever heard.

  A few cars pass back and forth over the bridge, but there’s also a narrow walking path across, totally abandoned of people. A sign at the beginning of the walkway reads: Lowry Avenue Bridge, est. 2012. Which means this bridge is younger than I am.

  I walk down the pathway, which smells of seaweed and concrete, fish and car exhaust. The electric arches have painted my whole body blue. Standing above open water, with no buildings or trees to buffet me, the wind is a scream. I curl my gloved hands around the steel railing, take a deep breath, and look down. I let myself imagine what the water would feel like. It would feel like nothing. It would be too cold to feel. If I fell through these bars, I would shatter against it on impact, fulfilling the destiny I escaped that night in the back of a speeding pickup on Lake Shore Drive, that other night on the splintering skylight in Goose Island. I would step, gasping, into the history my mother left me.

  Another gust of wind blows up a flight of leaves from the tree banks, and one leaf, dry, perfectly red, lands and sticks against my cheek. It feels like the brush of fabric, of wool, and I remember again my dad and Alanna’s wedding. Not the last song of the night, “Sweet Caroline,” but the first: “Blue Skies.” Willie Nelson. Our song. Because it was me, not Alanna, who he’d danced with first. I remember leaning my head against his suit, his lapel against my cheek. He was my whole world, then. I know now that I probably could have tried a lot harder to be a good daughter. But him, he always did the best he could. And that’s why I’m still here, far more a product of his presence than of my mother’s absence.

  I take Isaiah’s phone from my pocket. I tap in to the messages app. My fingers are shaking so hard I have to try again and again before I can type in the number I’ve known my whole life.
<
br />   Dad, it’s me. I’m safe. I’m okay. I’m sorry, and I love you. More soon. Xo

  Then, with a scream I didn’t know I had inside of me, I hurl the phone over the bridge.

  59

  I HAVE TO ASK a cashier at a BP for directions back to Jenya’s place, and I’m relieved to learn it’s only a few blocks—my fingers feel like icicles and my jaw won’t unclench. The streets and sidewalks in this part of Minneapolis are much wider than the ones in Chicago. It feels like I’m walking on a prairie bordered in neon. Nobody’s around. Anybody who matters to society is safe inside, and the street is dotted very sporadically with an addict, a huddled shape of homelessness, a yipping and raving man in taped-together boots. And me.

  When we first arrived at her apartment, Jenya told us we could find an extra key beneath the stone frog statue on the stoop that is now buried beneath a fluffy white cone of snow. But when I lift up the statue, there’s no key. I push against the front door and it squeaks open, unlocked. Vera didn’t leave me completely out in the cold, I guess.

  I climb up the silent stairs, let myself into the apartment, listen to my breathing, take in the smell of weed and rinsable hair dye and cold pizza. Everybody’s still gone. I kick off my boots, shed my snow-wet coat, and pad across the creaking wooden floors back toward the tiny overheated porch where Vera and I have made our nest.

  I figure she’s probably already asleep, but when I walk into the Greenhouse, I see her fragile shape in the darkness, folded on the floor between our two pullout couches, rocking and rocking.

  I run to her, my socks slipping on the dusty floor.

  “What happened?” I’ve skidded to my knees in front of her, gripping both of her bone-hollow arms between my fingers. “What’s wrong?”

  She shakes her head, gulps a great swallow of air.

  “I can’t do this,” she manages.

  “Do what?” I’m shaking her gently. Her face is mottled with tears. “How long have you been sitting here like this?”

  “I don’t know. I left the show. I’m sorry I bailed, but . . . Mia, I can’t do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Be here.”

  “Where? Jenya’s? Because we can always try—”

  “No, here. In the fucking world. I can’t.” She pushes her long, tangled hair off her face. “I could have gone home last year, if I wanted. And again six months ago. And again three months ago. But I’m too scared. I just want to live at Red Oak for as long as I can, where nobody can hurt me. I’m a coward. I’m so full of shit . . . I’m not who you think I am at all.”

  I remember how she came after Freja, pretending not to believe anybody would ever voluntarily surrender to a life at Red Oak. So I guess she’s a hypocrite—the quality I hate most in people. But the weird thing is, I don’t care. I just feel this surge of love for her. For putting on a brave face this whole time, for me, when everything inside of her was falling apart.

  “You’re exactly who I think you are,” I whisper. “It’s okay.”

  “I swear I thought I could do it. I thought I could see, just see, if maybe I was ready. And at first I thought I was. But then, the music, and the strangers, and I started to look for you but I couldn’t find you . . .” She begins to cry again.

  “I’m so sorry. I never should have left your side. I’m so sorry.”

  “Mia, I need to go back.”

  “You want to go back to Red Oak?”

  Her head sags between her skinny knees. She nods.

  “But—are you sure? I mean, I get that this”—I wave my arms vaguely around the apartment, out the windows at the city twinkling with ice and light—“it’s going to be an adjustment at first. But if you stuck it out a little longer—we could do anything, Vera. We really could.”

  “Like what? We have no plans, no money. I know you didn’t believe we’d really make it here any more than I did. If you had, we would have thought this through beyond just crashing for a couple days with Jenya.”

  “I know, but we did make it here, didn’t we? Not one girl in the history of Red Oak has ever successfully run away, until us. We’re alphas. Remember? We can do anything.”

  “No, we can’t.”

  “Yes we can. We can get jobs. There are grocery stores here, clothing stores. We can wait tables. Or Starbucks! I can protect you, Vera. I swear I can.”

  “You know you can’t.” She leans against me as I stroke her hair. “No more than I can protect you. Who understands that better than us?”

  I don’t say anything because I know she’s right.

  “Okay.” I pull gently away from her and stand up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Wait here for me. I’ll be right back.”

  Back at the BP, I ask the woman working behind the counter to google something for me. She writes it down on a losing lottery ticket. Then I ask to borrow her phone. She won’t let me unless I hand over my driver’s license as collateral. But I don’t have a driver’s license, so a nice lady in line behind me, buying vape pods and Ho Hos, lets me borrow hers instead.

  Two rings.

  “Vivian?” I hear my voice, girlish and strange. I lean my head against the cool window of the refrigerated section, staring at the neat rows of milk behind the glass. “It’s Mia.”

  60

  BACK AT JENYA’S, I take off my coat, place my boots by the door, and quietly begin to pack my things.

  “What did you do?” Vera watches me, hugging her knees.

  “I called Vivian.” I fold a sweatshirt in half, fold it again. “She’s on her way.”

  Vera expels a breath, digs in her pocket, and holds out her twenty-dollar bill to me.

  “Vera.” I laugh. “I don’t want your money.”

  “No, take it. It’s the least I can do. I may be a coward, but I’m not a rat.”

  “You sound like you’re auditioning for a mob film.”

  “Shut up. I’m serious, Mia. If you leave now, you can get on the train or the bus or whatever and go—anywhere. I won’t tell them where you are. They can torture me if they want; I’ll never say a word.”

  “Vera, come on.” I grab the bill from her hand and flick it away. We both watch as it flutters to the hardwood. “We’re in this together, remember? If you’re going back, so am I.”

  “No.” She shakes her head. “You don’t want this, Mia. You hate it there.”

  “It’s not so bad.”

  “But you don’t belong there.”

  “Don’t I? Did you know that, while you were sitting here tonight, minding your own business in perfect sobriety, I drank a bunch of gin and hooked up with Bobby’s brother? And then I stole his phone and chucked it into the Mississippi River.”

  “Well, I’m sure you had your reasons.” Vera manages to raise an eyebrow, a small flicker of her old self.

  “I did. But still.”

  She stretches her long legs out in front of her and leans her head on my shoulder.

  “So, Bobby’s brother, huh?”

  “Yep.”

  “How was it?”

  “It was like most things.” Our fingers twine together, and the radiator hisses like a living thing. “Could’ve been a lot better, could’ve been a lot worse.”

  An hour later, Dee, Vivian, and Mary Pat are standing in the middle of Jenya’s front room, looking around at the Pussy Riot and War on Women posters hanging on the walls, the overflowing ashtrays and greasy pizza boxes crowding the coffee table. Dee’s mouth curls with disgust, but Mary Pat and Vivian remain inscrutable as always.

  “Girls,” Mary Pat says, stepping forward and showing us her upturned hands in some weird sort of peace gesture. “I’m so glad you called us. Is Jenya here?”

  “No,” Vera answers.

  “Hm.” Mary Pat smiles tightly. “It would have been so nice to say hello to her.”

  An adult euphemism for It would have been so nice to rip her a new one, I think, but I’m fairly certain my snarky observations would be unwelcome in
the current moment.

  “You guys are so lucky you turned yourselves in when you did.”

  “Dee,” Mary Pat continues, not looking at her but still smiling tightly at us, “while I appreciate your sentiment, I really prefer we not use the language of the prison industrial complex. The girls here aren’t ‘turning themselves in.’ They’ve simply decided to come back to us. And for that, we commend them.”

  I snort at that one—I can’t help myself. Plus, it’s fun seeing Dee squirm. But Vivian shoots daggers at me, so I shut up.

  “You know, it’s strange. Of all the nights to run away . . .” Mary Pat uncharacteristically trails off, a look of confusion, maybe even fear, on her face. Come to think of it, they’re all acting weird, skittish, even. Vivian keeps fidgeting, keeps sweeping her eyes around the cluttered, drab room, and Vivian is not a fidgeter. But I can’t figure out if that’s just the way they are in an environment they can’t control, or whether there’s something bigger at play.

  They follow us into the Greenhouse to search our packed bags and our coat pockets. As we head out the door and down the narrow stairway, there are no handcuffs to keep us, no hands steering us tightly by the arm. Red Oak does not share the militaristic or patriarchal values of other therapeutic schools—and yet, I have the unmistakable feeling that I am being recaptured, and that even if I tried to run, this time, I would never be successful.

  When we’re outside, standing in front of Jenya’s apartment between piles of plowed snow, Mary Pat guides Vera by the arm toward the Abductionmobile. “Vera,” she says, “you ride with Dee and me. Mia, you go with Vivian.”

  “We can’t ride together?”

  “No, I’m afraid you can’t.”

  They give us a moment. At least they give us that.

  We stand across from one another as a fine snow falls between us like television static.

  “I’m sorry,” Vera whispers. “Don’t hate me.” A tear slides down her face and drips onto her scarf.

  “Vera. I would never.” I reach out to give her one last hug, but Dee’s arm comes down between us like a toll gate.