You Know You Want This

by Kristen Roupenian

  Mom and Dad had heard of Charles Manson, but they didn’t want to talk about him at the dinner table. Jessica thought about calling Courtney and Shannon to see what they were up to, but then she imagined them wanting to sneak out to smoke cigarettes, and the last place she wanted to be was outside, at night, where Charlie might find her. Probably she was better off just staying at home. Home was the safest place for her, because Charlie didn’t know where she lived, and even if he had followed her home at some point, which he almost definitely hadn’t, they had a super-top-level security system that her dad had installed when they moved in, not to mention their dog, Bosco, who was a German shepherd mix and didn’t like anyone he hadn’t met when he was a puppy. She was safe. She was fine. No way was she going out to meet Charlie in the park at midnight and she was absolutely fine.

  * * *

  After dinner, her mother put on a movie, and as the clock ticked past ten o’clock, Jessica thought about the first time she’d seen Charlie, and about how she’d thought he was a skateboarder, and all the questions he’d asked her about the Guns N’ Roses album, and how much he’d liked the music. She thought about him swaying to the song she’d played for him, cupping her headphones against his ears, and about how she’d felt in those seconds when he’d first touched her face, and about how his eyes were so blue. She thought about the cassette tape, still buried deep in her bag, and she wondered what would happen if he came to get it from her. She thought about what would happen if she did go out to the park, and gave him his cassette tape back, and told him what her favorite song was, and let him take her wherever he wanted to go.

  * * *

  Her mom, dad, and brother fell asleep on the couch before the movie was over. This was a thing that happened not infrequently at their house on movie night, and usually it annoyed the crap out of her, but tonight, she thought she might cry. She looked at her mom, with her ridiculous feathery haircut that made her look like a scared old bird, and her dad, snoring through his mustache, and her brother in his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pajamas. What would they think if they knew she’d been approached by some nasty-looking guy, a guy who’d shoved his filthy thumb in her mouth and thought the Manson murders were the best thing ever? Her mom and dad would be so upset. They would be so scared. The thought made her feel brave, and when the movie ended, instead of waking them up and telling them to go to bed already, she went to her room and got her pillow and her blanket and brought them back to the couch. She kept watch over her mother and her father and her brother and herself until midnight had safely passed, and when the clock had finished chiming, she pulled the blanket up to her chin and ended her vigil by chanting to herself, Fuck you, Charlie, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

  * * *

  The next night, her family was watching the news when the first story came on, about the little girl who was Jessica’s age and had the same hair and freckles as Jessica, and who had been taken out of her bedroom during a sleepover by a man with a knife, a man whose face in the wanted poster was a scarily familiar thing.

  It took nearly an hour for Jessica’s parents to get the story out of her, and for them to separate out the relevant details from her hysterical sobbing about Axl Rose and Charles Manson, but when they did finally understand what she was trying to tell them about man and park and sleepover, they called the police. It took them another two hours to get through to someone at the station, because Polly’s kidnapping was quickly turning into the most notorious crime that had ever taken place in Sonoma County, and the calls from the crackpots and the pranksters and the reporters and the psychics were already flooding in.

  * * *

  Forty-eight hours later, Jessica was visited at home by a pair of lady police officers, and in this interview, the police learned, among other things, that while Jessica didn’t know the drifter’s real name, he had given her a cassette tape, which he’d touched with his dirty hands, and he’d put that cassette in a case, and given it to her, and that cassette was still sitting at the bottom of her schoolbag. They went to their police car and got out their white rubber gloves and their tweezers and their evidence collection bag, and then they took the tape away from her, thanked her gravely, and told her parents they would be in touch soon.

  * * *

  Months went by, during which more than four thousand people swarmed over every inch of Sonoma County, calling Polly’s name, and a black-and-white version of Polly’s school photo was papered onto every wall and tree and telephone pole in the state of California. For a little while, it seemed like all anyone in the entire country could talk about was what had happened to Polly, and Jessica was certain that soon the police would return and confirm her culpability, expose her to the world as the girl who had first crossed paths with the kidnapper and so invited in evil. But when the police did finally find Polly, in a shallow grave off of Highway 101, it turned out the man who had killed her was an old man whose resemblance to Charlie in the poster had been nothing but a trick of the imagination, or the light.

  Nearly a year later, a manila envelope arrived at Jessica’s house, bearing the return address of the Petaluma police station. While Jessica was certain that the envelope contained the tape Charlie had given her, her parents seized it before she could look at it, and she never saw the tape, or the envelope, again.

  By the time she turned fourteen, Jessica understood she had been wrong, that Charlie had not gone after her and taken Polly in her place, that the timing of the two events was nothing but a coincidence. Nonetheless, she continued to believe, for the rest of what remained of her childhood, that what had happened to Polly and what had happened to her must somehow be connected—if not as a matter of practical fact, then by some gravitational pull that flowed deep under the surface of things.

  * * *

  After she went away to college, Jessica came to believe that this early impulse to link her own experience to Polly’s had arisen from a childish self-absorption, the impulse to see herself as the center point around which the rest of the universe revolved. As Jessica then saw it, the man who had killed Polly was a supernova, a great and devastating force of harm, while Charlie was an insignificant dwarf star. From where she had stood when she was younger, the small and close and the huge and far away may have appeared, briefly, to be equally luminous—but that was an illusion, nothing more.

  In the end, Jessica told herself, she had gotten off easy. After all, the only damage Charlie had inflicted on her was a small scratch on the back of her throat that she may or may not have imagined. Compared with what had happened to Polly—compared with the infinite number of bad things that had happened in the universe—her brush with evil was just a tiny pinprick of light, nearly imperceptible against a backdrop of whirling constellations made up of other, brighter stars.

  And yet, long after she had married, and had children of her own, and moved far away from California, Jessica still had trouble falling asleep until after midnight had passed by. As her twin daughters slept peacefully in the bedroom next to hers, she would stand at her window, peering out at the vast, terrible, light-punctured night, and catch herself wondering if Charlie was still out there at the park, waiting for her to arrive.

  Sardines

  This is Marla’s first wine afternoon with the moms since The Incident. Tilly is playing outside with the other little girls, all hurt apparently forgotten, but Marla is nursing her grievance along with her Merlot. She can feel it scratching at her, her anger, wedged in the space where the two halves of her rib cage meet.

  “We’re so glad you and Tilly came this afternoon,” Carol says, cupping her streaky wineglass in two hands. Her nails are short and stubby, clipped just above the quick.

  “I missed you guys,” Marla says. “I really did.”

  “Oh, of course, of course,” Babs says, her eyes watery and pink. “But we all understand why you had to take a break.”

  There is a moment of silence during which they all mournfully acknowledge the seriousness of The Incident.<
br />
  “God, those fucking sluts,” Kezia exclaims at last. “I swear, if I hadn’t squeezed Mitzi’s basketball of a head out of my own goddamned cunt, I would have murdered her for what she did to Tilly.” She waves her glass at Carol, whose daughter is adopted. “No offense.”

  “The point is, we’re really sorry,” Babs says, blotting at her eyes with her drapey linen sleeve. “I had nightmares about it. We all did.”

  “That’s sweet of you,” says Marla. She, too, has been plagued by a recurring dream—Tilly in a yellow field, twirling and sobbing and tugging at her hair. Marla herself has no presence in the dream; she is simply a camera that pulls back to reveal a vast expanse of nothingness: the field, the country, the continent, the planet containing nothing but Tilly, alone, alone, alone.

  “How are you doing with all this, honey?” Carol asks.

  Good question, and the answer is: not great. In the chaos immediately following The Incident, after reasoning, arguing, shouting, and shaking had done nothing to snap Tilly out of her crying fit, Carol—pacifist, medical-marijuana-card-carrying, Earth Mother Carol—had slapped Tilly across the face. The force of the blow had bounced the glasses right off Tilly’s nose, and Marla, who has never struck her daughter, nor even considered such a thing, had clapped a hand across her mouth to suppress a snicker. Some of the messier aspects of parenthood are impossible to anticipate until you crash right into them. Discovering that, in certain circumstances, when someone smacks your daughter you respond with crazed laughter has proven to be a new and unwelcome entry on that list.

  “Tilly seems okay and that’s what matters,” Marla says, realizing she’s been staring into space. “If she can roll with it, I should, too. You know?”

  “Kids are real resilient,” says Babs, and all the women bob their heads. Bullshit, Marla thinks. Maybe some kids are resilient. But are all of them? Is Tilly? Resilience—the ability to brush off pain—is something Marla herself has only fitfully and imperfectly grown into, over time. The petty miseries of her own early childhood are some of her most vivid memories, even now.

  “I guess she turned out to be a tough little shit in the end, your Matilda,” says Kezia. “Mitzi says the two of them have started playing some game on the bus?”

  Marla yields to a temptation she’s been struggling against for the past ten minutes and sneaks a glance out the window to where the girls are gathered. They sit sprawled across each other in the sunshine, a pastel tangle of polka-dotted headbands, frilly socks, bright hair. “I don’t think they’re actually playing the game on the bus?” Marla says. “They’re only planning it? Or talking about it? I don’t know the details. It’s something Tilly picked up at her dad’s.”

  “You make it sound like an STD!” Babs says, and just as the ickier implications of the joke occur to everyone, there is a ripple of soft movement on the lawn.

  “Oh,” Marla says. “I think they’re starting.”

  She drifts over to the window, letting her wineglass clatter in the empty sink. It’s past five, and the late-afternoon air has grown honeyed, gold and slow. On the freshly mown lawn, all the girls are standing up, brushing strands of cut grass off their knees, their hands.

  * * *

  “I’m sorry you think I’m being a dum-dum, Till-Bill,” Marla says. “But could you maybe explain it in a different way? What exactly do you mean, the opposite of Hide-and-Seek?”

  In the car’s rearview mirror, Marla can see Tilly twitching her limbs in agony, like a frog forced by electricity to dance. “I don’t know what else to say! It’s just like Hide-and-Seek! But the opposite! You know?”

  Marla grits her teeth and counts down from five. “No, I don’t know, Punkin. You mean, nobody hides? Or you don’t look for them?”

  “Please stop making me explain it, please!” Tilly is literally pulling out her hair in frustration: she’s got two thick handfuls wrapped around her fingers and is yanking it viciously out to the sides of her head, like wings. Trichotillomania, their therapist has labeled the behavior. Marla has been instructed not to make a big deal of it, but instead to gently redirect.

  “Okay,” she says. “Your birthday is coming up next month! Are you excited?”

  “I want the party to be at Dad’s house,” Tilly says. She begins kicking a staccato pattern on the back of Marla’s seat.

  “I’ll see what we can do about that, Babygirl,” Marla tells her, stomping down on the gas as she blows through a yellow light.

  * * *

  Tilly has a secret.

  In her head, Marla enumerates the evidence: the flat fishy gleam in Tilly’s mudbrown eyes. The giddiness of her laughter. The way she alternates between logorrhea and stubborn silence whenever Marla asks her about a certain game.

  Marla is not the only one whose suspicions have been aroused: all the moms are united in their distaste for the way their daughters have started to behave. The game has enmeshed all of the girls in a taut web of constant texts, passed notes, IMs. “What could there possibly be to babble on so much about?” Babs asks Marla over the phone. This seems like a silly question, as in Marla’s experience ten-year-old girls can talk nonstop about anything, forever. But Marla, too, finds it hard to comprehend the avid fervor the game has inspired.

  Collective investigation on the part of the moms has uncovered the game’s name, Sardines, and a rough outline of the rules, which are innocuous as far as any of them can tell. Yet the way Tilly has been acting reminds Marla of nothing so much as the week her daughter discovered what would happen when she typed boobs into the browser of the family computer—the overeager way she would hurry into the den after school, calling out in a trilling, syrupy voice, “Oh, nothing!” whenever Marla asked her what she was up to in there.

  Marla would prefer to blame the other girls—vicious, clique-y little beasts, they are—but in fact Tilly herself seems to be the ringleader. That, too, is strange, because Tilly has always been a little bit excluded, either picked on or left out. Although all the other moms are too polite to say so, the game’s apparent ability to rescue Tilly from her position at the bottom of the social hierarchy is a large part of its unsavory aura. It’s unnatural, Marla thinks blearily one night, right before she falls asleep.

  Something unnatural is going on.

  * * *

  Tilly’s dad agrees to host the party, which means he has agreed for it to be at his house, as long as Marla does the organizing and runs the thing. He has not agreed to Marla’s request that he tell his live-in girlfriend to vacate the premises for the afternoon, and therefore, in order to fulfill Tilly’s birthday wishes, Marla will have to spend four straight hours distributing party favors alongside the twenty-three-year-old whom she once found fucking her husband on the family’s living room couch.

  Does this put Marla a little bit on edge? Does it make her a little bit impatient with Tilly’s refusal to drop a single hint about what she would like to do at the party other than play Sardines?

  What kind of cake do you want at the party, Tilly? Chocolate? Strawberry? Funfetti?

  Whatever.

  Other than the neighborhood girls, is there anyone in particular you want to invite?

  Not really.

  Should we have a theme this year? Pirates, maybe? Or clowns?

  Nah. Sounds boring.

  What kind of games should we play?

  Duh. Sardines.

  Okay, sure, but what else? Do you want a piñata? A scavenger hunt? Capture the Flag?

  MAMA, WOULD YOU PLEASE STOP BEING DUMB, I SAID SARDINES.

  Why yes, it does get under Marla’s skin. Yes, as a matter of fact, it does.

  * * *

  The other moms will all be in attendance at the party, and at first Marla is glad for their support. Her troops will outnumber those of her enemy! She won’t have to enter the lion’s den alone! But on the morning of Tilly’s birthday, Marla lies miserably in bed, wishing she hadn’t asked any of them to come.

  After discovering Steve and his litt
le girlfriend in flagrante, Marla had sketched out dozens of schemes for revenge—swapping the lube in the girlfriend’s bedroom drawer with superglue, tying her down and tattooing SLUT across her face. And yet somehow, day by day and drip by drip, all her fearless fury has dwindled down to this: she will spend a day smiling tightly and choking down her rage as her nemesis parades around victorious—unhumiliated, unsuperglued, untattooed. How could Marla have let this happen? How could she have resigned herself so meekly to defeat?

  The snoozed phone alarm starts chirping, and Marla shoves it under her pillow to shut it up. A minute later, Tilly skips into the bedroom, a preening flamingo in her bright pink birthday dress.

  “Mama!” she says sweetly. “Mama, you sleepyhead! I told you I wanted birthday waffles! Did you forget?”

  * * *

  The first time Marla had dropped Tilly off at Steve’s new house, she’d felt sick: the rambling colonial was the kind of house worth buying only if you planned on someday filling it with kids. But she’s got to admit it’s the perfect place for a birthday party—high-ceilinged, full of funny little rooms, and surrounded by a smooth green lawn that tumbles down a hill into an expanse of unkempt, brush-filled woods. She parks the car and pops the trunk, unloading bags of party supplies as Tilly scampers up the driveway to her dad.

  Marla’s survival plan for the day involves pretending that The Girlfriend doesn’t entirely exist. She engages in elaborate conversational acrobatics in order to avoid mentioning her by name, never looks at The Girlfriend directly but instead plants her gaze slightly to the left of her face. (She also has a small tube of superglue in her pocket. Superglue with a strikingly similar consistency to Steve’s favorite brand of flavored lube. She probably won’t use it. Almost certainly not. But still.)