And looking at him, I wondered if he thought that about me, too.
He opened the screen door. I came in. The kitchen was quiet.
“TV room?” he said.
I nodded.
We went in. I sat down. Then he sat, too. The light from the table lamp was shining up and down in warm swaths against the red walls. Tate was wearing shorts. His knee was touching mine.
“I’m sorry about your hands,” he said.
“What?”
“Your hands,” he said again, and nodded at where I’d folded them in my lap. “I should have come to help you, or something. When you tripped.”
What could I say?
I kissed him.
It is hard to be kissed back by someone like Tate Kurokawa and not feel at least a little bit beautiful. It is hard to be kissed like that and not think about almost nothing, and not be swallowed up. I felt glorious. There was truly no other word for it.
Tate kissed me on the lips and on the corner of my mouth and then on my neck and then on the lips again and then we were lying farther on the couch and my hand found its way to his hair and I was trying so hard to notice it all, to save it all up in perfect detail so that I could have it forever.
There are not many perfect moments—that much, you know. And maybe this wasn’t one of them. Maybe I wasn’t actually beautiful. Maybe I didn’t actually know Tate, and maybe there was nothing true or tender about the way he kissed me because I simply didn’t know any better. All I knew is that when I left, it was like I’d left my heart in the palm of his hand.
It was late when I got back. Late, and quiet. But all the lights were on.
I creaked in the back door.
“Hello?”
The kitchen was the same mess as before. But no dogs came barking. And for some reason, Almost-Doctor Andrews was sitting at the counter.
“Plum.” He got up, too quickly. “There you are.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was—”
He looked so pale.
“I don’t know how to tell you this,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
Five
For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men, and things.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
I can’t even begin to explain what this was like.
But I will try.
It wasn’t serious. It wasn’t life-threatening. She was going to be fine. That’s what I remember being told, over and over. Almost-Doctor Andrews whisked me to the hospital in his tiny, impeccably clean Honda. I took tiny breaths the whole time: at the counter, up the elevator, down the hall, to the doorway. Everything telescoped; everything felt far away, like it had happened long ago.
She had drowned, Almost-Doctor Andrews explained. Almost. She had almost drowned. She had almost drowned in a bathtub in a bathroom with a locked door and only the dogs wouldn’t stop barking, so he slammed into the bathroom shoulder-first and found her. You don’t think of people drowning in bathtubs, but you only need a few inches of water to drown, everyone knows that, and you aren’t supposed to take that kind of cough medicine when you’re not sick, even if you are sick, you’re supposed to be careful, because it makes you so sleepy, and yes that’s the point, that might be why, but you still aren’t supposed to, you can’t keep your head up, you could hurt yourself, you could get hurt.
There was a question and it vibrated between us, but I couldn’t ask it, not of poor Almost-Doctor Andrews at the wheel looking drawn and unshaven, the first time I’d seen him that way, and I wouldn’t ask it, I vowed that I would never ask that question for the rest of my life, I would never, never, never.
But I still wanted to know, in my sick ugly way. I wanted to know if she’d done it on purpose.
The hospital, terrible in the same ways that all hospitals are terrible, anodyne and sterile. We sat and waited. I put my mittened hands between my knees and preoccupied myself with the smallest pieces of my surroundings, the digestible parts. I couldn’t think about anything bigger or I would burst open like a dam. So I noticed the cushions of the waiting couch, the gray-brown color of cat food. The Exit sign that flickered. The refrigerated hum of the water fountain as it cooled water you just knew was tooth-chilling and tasted like lead. The nurse in lollipop scrubs behind her scratched-up pane of glass—maybe bulletproof. You never knew. You never knew who might try to throw a punch or come into a hospital with a gun. You never ever knew.
“Plum.”
I looked up. Mom, still in her black party clothes, washed-out and green-skinned in the ugly hospital light. She grabbed me by the shoulders and slammed me to her chest.
“Mom.”
“She’s okay.” Mom pushed me away. “It wasn’t serious. She’s going to be fine.”
“I’ll get some coffee,” Almost-Doctor Andrews said, even though no one had asked. That was just what you did in hospitals, if you were a good person: you got the others coffee. He disappeared through the double doors.
“She’s going to be fine,” Mom repeated. “She aspirated water. She did lose consciousness. But it was less than three minutes. No reason to believe”—her voice caught—“brain damage. Or anything like that. They’re monitoring her body temperature. Giving her oxygen.”
Then, out of doctor’s words to repeat, she sank into a chair.
“Oh, God. I wasn’t there.”
I hadn’t been there, either.
“I’m sorry,” I said in a tiny voice.
Mom didn’t say anything. Almost-Doctor Andrews came back with two white plastic cups. She buried her face in her hands as he set them down.
“Iris,” he said gently. “Something to drink?”
“We should’ve done something,” she said from behind her hands. “We knew she was all . . . messed up. I don’t know.” She looked up. “Where were you, Plum? Why didn’t anyone . . .”
She started crying.
“We should’ve done something,” she said, and looked at me with big, wet eyes, and for some reason I found myself thinking of the nurse in her scrubs, her studious inattention, her focus professionally trained elsewhere, and yet she had to notice. There was no way she wouldn’t notice. People notice things like this. A crazy family. A bad mother. A sister, motionless. I was moved to tears, we say. But I had gone stiff and cold. There was no way to cry now. There was only being still and stiller, as if I could stop my own heart.
A doctor appeared. Details were given—I barely listened. We were summoned to a green curtain with a bed behind. She looked sunken, and not in a beautiful way. There was nothing actually beautiful about seeing my sister this sick. It was ugly and it hurt.
I ran away.
It is natural to think about your parents dying—they are older, it stands to reason. They don’t always make it past your own childhood. Grandparents, too, never exist outside a state of oldness, fragility; maybe they’re already gone by the time you arrive. But as I lay in bed that night, and thought of my sister sleeping, hopefully peacefully, I realized an obvious truth, that barring some terrible dual accident, one day one of us would have to live without the other. It was senseless—there was no world without my sister. No gravity. But one day, if I was lucky, I would be there to hold Ginny’s hand—or her mine, and—
Or it would be a phone call, across the country, across the world, from her husband or mine, a hospice nurse, a caretaker—
Or it could be in a hospital bed, young.
And yet how much of my life had I spent wishing her out of my life? Wishing finally to be alone?
I did not deserve a sister.
The next day I locked myself under the stairs.
I was almost too big for it, but not quite. It turned out that you could make yourself very small if you needed to, if you didn’t mind being uncomfortable. And I didn’t mind. I wanted it. I needed the eaves digging into my shins and the bruise on my head from climbing in the first time.
I didn’t want to go anywhere else, do anything, or see anyone. And no one would n
otice I was gone—not Mom, who was in her studio, not Almost-Doctor Andrews, who was practicing, and not Ginny. Not Ginny in her bedroom. The door was closed for a reason.
It was warm under the stairs, with its familiar musty-wood smell. The door pulled shut with the same crooked nail as always. There was nothing to see or do. It was private and, in the way of true privacy, calm—but not an easy calm; the kind of calm that is forcibly quiet, the calm of a beachfront after a tornado. I don’t know how long I sat there.
A scratching sound came at the door.
“Go away,” I said, to whoever it was. My throat felt thick.
More scratching. I closed my eyes and put my head against my knees and tried to ignore it.
“Stop it!” I flung open the door so hard it banged against the staircase. “Stop it, you idiot!”
Kit Marlowe shrank, his eyes bright and wide, and I felt a flash of guilt. He was just a cat. This wasn’t his fault.
“Kit, wait,” I said, but it was too late. I was alone. I was talking to no one.
And yet, in the middle of all this, I was still made to go to school.
The aim of school was allegedly receiving an education, an aim I respected. The academic environment, though, I found I could not understand. People had managed to internalize everything from mathematics to irregular Latin verbs for centuries without the aid of formal schooling. Those of us with enough discipline to become autodidacts would have fared perfectly well given enough books and peace and quiet. Forcing us into classrooms with our peers, insisting on standard hours, measuring everyone by grade point averages and standardized scores and my-dad-knows-someone and you-can’t-put-my-daughter-in-remedial-math was inefficient at best. Besides, if we were only there to learn, why did we have to go to Senior Teas and perform in Oklahoma! and eventually attend end-of-the-year picnics?
I was turning all this over in my mind when the school secretary stopped me not two steps within the Gregory School’s threshold.
“Plum. Your mother called—your sister’s absent?”
“She’s sick,” I said, the simplest-sounding answer.
“Oh dear.” She clucked sympathetically, but it was a manufactured cluck, with too much of a dart around the eyes to be genuine. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s her head,” I said, trying not to sound hoarse. This was me, equivocating.
“Oh,” she said. “Migraines?”
“Something like that,” I said. “I have to get to class.”
I wished for a larger student body, where the social spectrum was wide enough to swallow up individual incidents without system-wide disturbance. But this was the Gregory School, and if something had happened to 1/80th of the senior class—especially around college time—there was no way the other 79/80ths were going to ignore it.
So every day, the seniors at the senior table stared at me as I snuck through the front hall: Shiny-Hair Party Girls darting eyelinered glances at Sporty Senior Boys; High-Strung Smart Girls looking up from their advanced biology textbooks. Some might have been pitying, others just evaluating, scouring me for any evidence. I wasn’t used to being visible, let alone parsed and picked apart, and so I hurried onward.
Every day, I took my lunch into the bookshop and ate, unremarked upon by the Weird Sweatshirt Kids.
And every day, when I walked to my fourth-period class, I passed by the Loud Sophomore Boys at their picnic table. I did not even look in Tate’s direction.
And then, because I could not help it, I paused before the COLLEGE CHOICES bulletin board on my way to math.
It was just over two weeks into this routine when I noticed it. Someone had written over Ginny’s name.
VIRGINIA BLATCHLEY—CRAZY BITCH!!
My stomach twisted. The words were in black ballpoint, scribbled bumpily over the cork beneath the colored paper. Before I knew what I was doing, I ripped the piece of paper from under her picture and stuffed it in my pocket.
The High-Strung Smart Girls were clustered in their usual place under the math building staircase. Some had binders of loose-leaf open, some were tapping at their phones. Charlotte Forsythe was sitting in a chair facing the rest of the lounge area, and when she saw me coming—and she certainly saw me coming—she started laughing even harder at whatever Ava or Lily was saying to her.
“Hey, Plum,” she said, tipping her head to the side as I approached. “How’s it going?”
I took out the piece of paper and opened it on the table. “Someone did this.”
Charlotte’s eyes darted downward, then back up at me. Her smile hadn’t fully faded away.
“So?”
“So . . .” I looked at the other girls, but they’d all fallen silent, lips pressed tight and eyes wide. “So why would someone do that?”
Charlotte glanced sideways at the others. “I don’t know. You tell me.”
“Tell you what?” My voice came out tiny and afraid.
“Plum, we aren’t stupid. Ginny isn’t really having migraines.” She leaned in closer. “Is she okay? You can talk to us, if you need to.”
For a moment, I wavered. I almost did. But then my mind clicked firmly into place.
“You did it,” I said. “You told them she was cheating.”
“I can’t talk about that,” Charlotte said, calm as ever. “It’s the honor system.”
“But you did,” I said. “And you know Ginny would never cheat.”
“Then how’d she get such a good score when she was out sick the day before?” Charlotte said. “Come on, Plum. We all know she was desperate. It’s okay. I know things are hard.”
She reached out to touch my arm, but I jerked it away.
“I can’t believe you,” I said, my voice rising without my meaning it to. “You had no proof.”
“Well, I mean, look, the way things are now . . .” Charlotte puckered her eyebrows. “Ginny just needs all the help she can get.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Plum.” Charlotte lowered her voice. “She tried to kill herself.”
“What?” I cried. “That’s not— Who told you that?”
“So it is true,” Charlotte said. “God, I actually can’t believe it.”
It took a moment to sink in. She had tricked me.
People were staring. People thumping down the stairs from second-floor math rooms, people loafing on the couches in the first-floor common area outside the computer lab, people eating mini-pizzas and drinking illicit Frappuccinos. All the High-Strung Smart Girls. Everyone was waiting for me to melt or shrink down or scurry away.
Propriety would’ve dictated that I not make a scene. That I be polite and brush this under the rug, keep a stiff upper lip. But I couldn’t. I quite simply had nothing to lose.
“Shut up, Charlotte,” I said. “You’ve spent the past four months trying to destroy everything Ginny’s working for. And you know what? You still couldn’t stop her. Did you ever think that the reason she got in and you didn’t is because she’s smarter than you? Sure, maybe she didn’t get financial aid, and she had to figure that out somehow, but guess what? Our dad is dead. We don’t have tons of money. So she did everything she could. And the only way you could actually stop her was by lying.”
I sucked in a breath. “Second of all, my sister is not psycho. She’s a good person. You know how I know? Because even though you’re the kind of person who makes fun of her and gossips behind her back and accuses her of cheating and writes stuff like this over her name”—I held up the paper—“she still calls you her friend.”
Charlotte’s tan had gone a spoiled-milk color. She crossed her arms under her breasts, badly faking an air of nonchalance.
“Honey, you don’t have any friends,” she said, sweet as aspartame. “So, no offense, but how would you know?”
“I have Ginny,” I said, and for the first time in my life it didn’t feel like a failure to admit that my sister was my friend, my only real friend. It felt true. It was true. My voice rose in my throat. “You�
�re a manipulative bitch, Charlotte.”
The last words came out so loud and clear I swore I could’ve heard them echo.
I was suspended. Patience Mortimer Blatchley—suspended!
You cannot call someone a manipulative bitch in the middle of the math building at TGS and not expect to get in trouble; I got in trouble. No one ever bothered to read the entirety of the student manual at TGS, myself included, but I was not surprised to discover that my behavior was a suspendible offense. I was, frankly, proud—although I tried not to appear so when the principal and the vice principal and the school psychologist were summoned to an informal disciplinary hearing to decide the terms of my punishment.
The verdict was three days of suspension and a follow-up counseling session with Dr. Kaplan. At TGS, there was no such thing as a “bad kid”; there were merely students with behavioral problems stemming from unaddressed emotional issues, the emotional nature of said issues increasing in proportion to the family’s contribution to the school’s annual giving fund. I didn’t think it would help my case to explain that perhaps Charlotte Forsythe was the one who could use counseling, but then again, “being a bitch” is likely not an entry in the DSM-V.
The suspension I didn’t mind. The true punishment was calling home.
Mom sounded like I’d woken her up, which I might have. “Plum?”
“Hello,” I said. “It’s Plum.”
“I know,” she said. “My only other daughter is upstairs. What’s going on?”
“I’ve been suspended,” I said. “There was an incident.”
“What?” Just like that, Mom was awake. “Did you get in a fight?”
“We don’t have fights,” I reminded her. “We have incidents.”
“So what was the incident?”
“Calling Charlotte Forsythe a manipulative bitch.”
Ordinary Girls Page 20