You Know I'm No Good

by Jessie Ann Foley

  “Rule of Six Inches,” she says.

  61

  “SO.” VIVIAN CUTS HER EYES at me as she pulls onto the highway going north. “Was it worth it?”

  I shrug.

  “You were drinking, I gather?”

  “Nah.”

  “It’s coming off your pores. Gin, when metabolized, has a very distinct smell.”

  “Fine. I’m sorry I disappointed you.”

  That’s the line that most reliably worked on my dad and Alanna. Adults love it when you abase yourself in front of them. But Vivian just laughs.

  “Of course you’re not sorry.”

  “Hey, at least I called you,” I snap. “We could have easily hopped on a Greyhound and disappeared. Then you’d have a lawsuit on your hands. I don’t know Vera’s mom, but she seems like the type who’d be big on lawsuits. She might still file one, anyway. I mean, you guys lost two students. For nearly two whole days. It was on the news.”

  “Yeah, well, there were other things on the news, too. Which apparently you missed.”

  “What, did Madison pull out the last remaining strands of her leg hair or something?”

  Vivian slams on the brakes, jerks the wheel, and pulls over to the side of the abandoned road. She whirls on me, then, her face a mask of fury, and tears are in her eyes.

  “You know what, Mia? I’m glad you ran away. I’m absolutely thrilled. Because if you hadn’t, you’d probably be dead right now!”

  “Wait,” I say. “What?”

  “Forgive me.” She presses her forehead against the steering wheel and takes a series of rapid breaths. I recognize the rhythm. She’s trying to control her anxiety.

  “Holy shit, Vivian. Are you have a panic attack? Because I—”

  “Just give me a minute. Please.”

  I give her a minute because I respect her but also because what else can I do? Teen Fun Skipper, Isaiah’s brother’s couch, the wolves, the bridge . . . it all seems like forever ago. Now I’m just a Red Oak girl again, speaking with my therapist, confused and angry and most of all, scared.

  “Okay.” She lifts her head from the wheel, fishes out a tissue from her coat pocket and blows her nose. “Okay.”

  An oil rig barrels past us, spraying slush onto the windshield and leaving Vivian’s pickup rocking gently in its wake. She takes a deep breath.

  “We had an incident the night you left.”

  “Um. An incident? I don’t—”

  “Your room—Madison wasn’t in it, thank goodness. We’d asked her to sleep under observation in the nurse’s office because of—well, you know I can’t discuss the issues of the other girls. All you need to know is she wasn’t in your room. And you weren’t, either, though Freja didn’t know that, of course.”

  “Wait, Freja? I don’t—what does Freja have to do with anything?”

  “Mia.” She looks at me, genuinely surprised. “Are you telling me you really didn’t know?”

  62

  NO, I REALLY DIDN’T KNOW.

  Some secrets at Red Oak manage to remain secrets. But now the secret’s out and so is Freja, ferried away, after a consultation with Nicoline Pedersen and her team, the Red Oak team, and the Mille Lacs County sheriff’s department, to a more secure place that’s better equipped to handle her particular set of issues.36

  “But I don’t understand,” I say dully. “I thought she was here because her mom thought this was a regular boarding school.”

  “No.”

  Vivian tells me then, as we sit side by side on an abandoned county highway in the middle of the night, how when she was twelve, Freja was found responsible for a series of small bonfires lit in the stairwell of her elite private school in Copenhagen before she got caught in the act and expelled. How she’d then been shipped off to an even more elite boarding school in London, where she’d been kicked out again, for the same reasons. Her family had managed to keep their daughter’s dangerous proclivities out of the tabloids, had sent her away to be homeschooled by a private tutor at Nicoline Pedersen’s remote ecofarm, far off on a dot of island in the middle of the Baltic Sea. And this had worked out well, until Freja managed to set fire to a stable at the edge of the property, incinerating nearly a dozen of Nicoline’s beloved Jutland horses.

  That’s when she was sent to Red Oak. She had no relatives, as it turned out, in Minneapolis.

  “But what,” I ask, my voice small in the pickup cab, “does this all have to do with me?”

  She’d started early yesterday morning, Vivian explains, before the snowstorm began, before Vera and I had started our adventure. During the passing periods between classes, she would return again and again to a little spot protected from snow by the overhanging roof beneath my bedroom window, feathering her nest in the dry winter grass. She began to stoke it right after lunch when the pyre was built and the sun was high. Angled Madison’s glasses, the ones Madison had gifted her and none of us knew why she’d kept, tilting them back and forth, gathering the concentrated power of the sun until the dry grass, the pile of twigs and scraps of paper began to smoke—

  What a bolt of triumph she must have felt in that moment, as the smoke turned to flame, and she encircled it, contained it, in a little bonfire, small enough to give off barely a wisp of flame, sheltered it from the wind like a newborn, until she snuck out there just after dinner, and again just before lights-out, to build it up higher so as to quickly and methodically kill me. She had wanted to turn me to ash, as revenge for what we did to her in the showers, probably, but maybe not. Maybe it was just another way to feed her compulsion, no different from purging or hair pulling or nail biting or hitting or cutting, this ache, this urge, to turn solid things and people into smoke. For Freja, as it turned out, was the final box on the troubled girl checklist: Freja was a fire starter.

  Her fire had eventually leaped up the timber walls of our cabin, come licking in through the window and belching smoke, swallowing and shriveling everything in its path. The fire alarms had gone off first, saving the other Birchwood girls, and then the sprinkler system, saving the dorm building itself from total destruction. But had I been there, sleeping in my bed like I was supposed to be, it might not have been enough to save me. I might have dreamed that I was a little girl again, feeling my favorite thing, that inside-outside feeling, water misting down onto my face, reminding me how big the world was and how safe I was inside my bed. Our aluminum bunk frame was melted into a shimmering lump; Vivian shows me a picture of this on her phone, as if to prove to me she isn’t making all this up. The out-of-date mattress was made of ultraflammable synthetic. Had I been sleeping in my bed, the last thing I ever would have realized was that I’d been wrong about my belief that there are some places in a person’s world that really are safe. In this way, I would have died cured of my last remaining illusion.

  When she’s finished speaking, Vivian unbuckles her seat belt. She reaches across the truck cab and holds me for a long time. I’ve never known what a mother’s love feels like, and I never will—except to understand that this, right here, isn’t far off. I bury my face in her long black hair, and now I smell it: the faint but unmistakable tang of ash.

  63

  WE PULL OFF AT AN EXIT somewhere in the state forest, onto another county highway filled with nothingness and trees and snow. It occurs to me that I don’t know what the road coming down to Red Oak looks like. I was asleep the first time I arrived, and when I left, it was through the back door. But even I know that it definitely doesn’t look like this: a prairie-sized parking lot bathed in flood lighting, illuminating the swirls of snow still falling intermittently from the sky. Ahead is a huge sandstone building, glitzy in that cheap way that makes you lonely just from looking: Lakeside Casino.

  “Um,” I say to Vivian. “What, are we playing a couple hands of poker before we head back?”

  “No.”

  I understand her well enough by now to know that there’s no point in wasting my breath asking her more questions if she doesn’t feel li
ke answering them. Whatever is about to happen, I’ll find out soon enough. I climb out of the cab and follow her across the parking lot toward the huge set of revolving doors that mark the entrance of the casino, our boots crunching on rock salt.

  The foyer is cavernous and run-down, reeking of cigarettes and filled with the constant ambient ringing of slot machines. Vivian leads the way, walking slightly ahead of me, past the front desk, then veers left, to the buffet. It’s a large room, draped in red and silver and gold holiday lights, with a mechanical Santa Claus hoisting his sack of toys to his shoulder again and again and again. Elton John is playing faintly from a speaker in the ceiling—“I hope you don’t mind, I hope you don’t mind . . .”—and it smells like boiled ham. There isn’t a soul in the place except for one person sitting alone in front of an untouched plate of roast beef and instant mashed potatoes, hands folded, waiting.

  “Dad.”

  Vivian slips away to get herself a cup of coffee and give us our privacy. I’m standing before him in my backpack and my heavy down coat, my boots dripping around me on this patterned carpet. He half stands, and my name bursts out of him in a sob. He’s holding something, some sort of fabric that’s black and torn and looks like it’s about to shred apart in his hands. When I step closer I see what it is—the burned remains of the duffel bag Alanna sent ahead of me when they ordered the transport men to take me away.

  “I got your text,” he begins. “Thank you. Thank you, baby. Because before I heard from you, I thought—” his voice breaks and he doesn’t say any more.

  “Dad, please—I’m so sorry.”

  I go to him, and he puts his arms around me, and I can’t even remember the last time I let him hug me but I know it’s been more than a year. More than two. Two whole years. I collapse against him, saying into his chest, “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,” and I hear him, above me, saying it back—“I’m sorry too I’m sorry too I’m”—until we say that stupid word so many times between ourselves it’s like we’re both breathing into the same balloon, blowing it up until it floats away, carrying inside of it all the other things we should have said but never could.

  He gives me a round token that’s good for anything I want at the buffet. I fill my tray with lukewarm french fries, a shriveled-looking piece of sausage pizza, and a large glass of orange Fanta.

  Dad watches me eat. He doesn’t say anything. I realize that I am starving. I eat everything on my plate, then go back for more fries, along with a salad that I fix for myself with an extremely high ranch-dressing-to-lettuce ratio. He watches me eat that, too. When I finally finish, he slurps down the last of his coffee and stands up.

  “You ready?” he asks.

  I assume he’s asking if I’m ready to get back into Vivian’s pickup, if I’m ready to say goodbye to him and return to Red Oak to complete the emotional work my mom’s insurance money has required of me.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I guess so.”

  “Good.” He takes my hand in his. “I’m taking you the hell home.”

  Becoming

  THESE ARE THE ONES WHO ESCAPE

  AFTER THE LAST HURT IS TURNED INWARD;

  THEY ARE THE MOST DANGEROUS ONES.

  THESE ARE THE ONES WHO LOVED YOU.

  THEY ARE THE HORSES WHO HAVE HELD YOU

  SO CLOSE THAT YOU HAVE BECOME

  A PART OF THEM,

  AN ICE HORSE

  GALLOPING

  INTO FIRE.

  —JOY HARJO, “SHE HAD SOME HORSES”

  64

  IN ORDER TO MAKE IT to Saint Ann’s School in time for 7:45 first bell, I have to catch the 6:30 a.m. train, which means I need to wake up at 5:45 a.m.—yes, you read that correctly—5:45 a.m. Do you know what 5:45 a.m. in a Chicago January looks like? I’ll tell you: it looks exactly the same as midnight. To get out of my warm bed at this hour, with frost lacing up my bedroom windows, the sky pitch-black and the hardwood floor like ice because Dad is currently winning his war with Alanna over the temperature of the thermostat—it goes against human nature. But I guess if you’re going to reinvent yourself, this is the price you have to pay.

  At least this was the advice of the family therapist Vivian recommended to us after my dad took me out of Red Oak and brought me home for good. We all went—even the twins, who mostly picked their noses and stared with skeptical confusion at the reprint of René Magritte’s The Son of Man37 hanging on the wall of Dr. Stuben’s office. It was awkward and painful—I could think of many better ways I’d prefer to spend my Saturday afternoons—and we talked about a lot of stuff, which I don’t feel like rehashing here. To be honest, though, it was a lot harder for Dad and Alanna than it was for me. I’m used to being forced to look inward. Alanna, for one, is not. It took some work to get her to come down off her high horse. But as much as it pains me to pay her a compliment, she put in the work. She came down. There was crying, there were hugs all around. Feelings were owned. Emotions were named. Behaviors were explored. Personal accountability was taken. If Mary Pat were there to witness it, she would have died of happiness.

  It was Dr. Stuben who suggested a fresh start—a happy medium between my old school, where my reputation might as well be hanging in the gym alongside the state champion basketball banners, and Red Oak, where, you know, Freja tried to torch my ass. A place far enough away where I can feel like a stranger, but close enough that I can still live at home. A school that my parents38 can afford without tapping into my murdered-mom fund.

  Saint Ann’s School for Girls, which is an hour away by train and has a very large scholarship endowment, meets all of that criteria.

  And today, the first of the new semester, is my very first day.

  The stars are still out when my alarm goes off, but I’m so nervous I get right out of bed without even pressing snooze. I slide my feet into the fuzzy purple slippers Lauren and Lola got me as a welcome home gift and pad down the hall to the bathroom, closing and locking the door behind me.

  I’ve been back home for five weeks now, and yet it still feels like a luxury, getting to be alone in a bathroom with a full-length mirror and a door that locks. There were no mirrors at Red Oak. A mirror could be smashed, and broken glass could be used as weapon on oneself or others. All we had were these dented metal squares over the dorm sinks, the ones that distort and reflect so dully you can never get a clear look at your own face. I got used to it, and grew to sort of prefer it over the constant scrutiny I’d once placed under my own body. Maybe that’s why, in the five weeks since I’ve been back, I still haven’t taken a good look at myself. And so now, when I stand before the mirror and begin carefully removing my clothing, piece by piece, I feel almost afraid. But I know I have to do it. I kick off my slippers, fold my T-shirt and pajama pants and underwear in a neat pyramided pile, and place them on top of the closed toilet lid. I loosen my hair from its ponytail, turn on the shower, and then turn slowly to face myself. It’s a bit like a reunion with an old best friend, the kind of friend who has both wronged you and sacrificed for you and who, because of that complicated history, you both love and hate.

  Me. Here I am.

  My body is a female body. The body of a woman. The curve of it. The cup of my collarbone, the flutter of muscle if I turn this way or that. I’ve waxed a couple times before—Xander liked it—but everything has grown back now. I’ve gained weight. My stomach is flat but lacking definition. My waist tapers in, then out again. My thighs, covered with downy blond hair, touch. That’s a bad thing, I’ve been told. But then I’ve been told that some guys like thick. Are you an ass guy or a tits guy? Do you like dark-skinned girls or light-skinned girls? Tall or short? I hate chicks with short hair. Too black. Too brown. Too pasty white. Too thin-lipped. Too thick-lipped. Too hairy—that’s so nasty, girls who don’t shave down there. Moles. Cankles. Cellulite. Small-ass titties. Huge tits, but only because she’s fat. On a scale of one to ten . . .

  How do you know if you’re pretty?

  Is it you who gets to decide?
>
  The freshman girl who walked into Scottie Curry’s bedroom two years ago with her tight jeans and sparkly body lotion didn’t think so.

  But what about now?

  I turn left and right. The heat of the shower is steaming up the room.

  Many have touched my body, many more have looked at my body, have leered at it, have judged it and compartmentalized it and ranked it on their various scales of attractiveness and acceptability. But has anyone ever beheld my body? Have I ever beheld my own body? I think of Vivian, her talk of semantic satiation. I say body in my head so many times that it doesn’t mean anything anymore, just two syllables, two puffs of air coming from my mouth. I say girl. I say woman. I run my fingers across the fading heart tattoo that Marnie etched, long ago, onto the petal-soft skin at the top of my breast. The closed-up holes running up my ears. Am I pretty? I still don’t know if I could say.

  But I know that I look good. I look healthy. I look like I’ve been through some shit. I look like somebody with a future before me that is emptied of everything but possibility.

  I close my eyes. I brush my fingers down the silhouette of myself. Before I get into the scalding hot shower to luxuriate in its pounding water pressure and Alanna’s rose-scented shampoo, I wrap my arms around myself, just to see what it would feel like to hold the body that is me.

  65

  Dear Vera,

  You better be behaving yourself enough to have mail privileges, because I really hate the idea of my magnificent words sitting all alone in your mailbox for weeks at a time just because you couldn’t be bothered to scrub a toilet or do your math homework.

  So, want to hear something crazy? I tried out for the soccer team. And I MADE it. I know, I know. I can hear your laughter all the way from Onamia: Mia Dempsey, Student-Athlete. But it’s really not a huge deal. My new school is tiny and its sports teams are generally terrible and I haven’t actually gotten any playing time yet, but nonetheless, I am on the roster. I have a uniform and my own shin guards. I have teammates who gift me hand-sewn scrunchies in our school colors and who invite me to carb-loading dinners on the nights before big games. And I never thought I would say this, but the whole thing has been sort of . . . cool. Being a part of something, you know? Don’t worry, I’m not saying I’m going to turn into some fucking jock now. I’m just saying that some of the things I once thought were stupid, I now think are sort of brave. And some of the things I once thought were brave, I now think are sort of stupid.