“I miss my phone,” says Louise. “Sometimes I worry that selfies are what made me real.”
She holds her right hand up, mimics holding a self-facing phone. With the other hand she primps her hair, making pouty movie-star lips into the nothing. How much easier it is to pretend to be something you’re not. Recently Louise has gravitated to a clot of Southeast Asian girls who dorm on the south side of campus, doctors’ daughters who, like her, have assimilated into a culture that demands skinny arms and big boobs, light skin and boy hips. They speak in code about the pressures they feel to be “pretty,” to be “sexy,” to fit in. They are a closet full of clothes, all trying to become a clean white shirt. And the impossibility of this has miswired their brains.
“It’s the behavior point,” Simon tells her. “The moment technology stops being a tool and becomes instinctual. The toothbrush, for example. That first cigarette of the day. Language. I’m saying actions we take without thinking. Wake up, check your phone. Irrational, involuntary motion. Just watch the first weekers, clammy, jittery. It’s not anxiety. It’s withdrawal.”
He takes a cautious mouthful of fish, trying not to think about microplastics.
“Upper East Side?” Louise asks him.
“West Village,” he tells her. “The pink building, used to belong to Julian Schnabel.”
“Ooh, rich boy.”
“Financially,” he says. “Morally we all seem a bit bankrupt.”
She reaches up to pull a hair from her eyebrow but discovers she’s pulled them all already, giving her the look of an abstract artist’s rendition of a person. It’s a gesture she makes a hundred times a day. Sometimes, when her eyebrows are thick, she puts Scotch tape on them to remind herself to leave them alone.
“San Francisco,” she says about herself. “Just outside. Renters.”
She makes a face—forgive me. It is instinctual, this need to apologize for her life, to round herself up to an acceptable number.
“My grandma took out a loan to send me here,” she says. “When she dropped me off and saw the horses, she asked if she could stay.”
“Depression?” asks Simon.
“Something,” says Louise, then turns and makes the selfie gesture again, as if capturing the moment. Simon notices she’s bitten her nails all the way to the quick.
“Let’s just say I like the feel of a good pair of crafting scissors on my supple Black thighs,” she tells Simon, opening her legs suggestively. Slowly she draws up her skirt. On the inside of her thighs, near her panty line, Simon sees the scars. Old rail lines for trains no longer in use.
Louise meets his eye seductively.
“Wanna feel ’em?”
Simon blushes. She is a few months younger than him, but light-years ahead. It is a performance, of course, a way to draw attention and approval without having to expose the real Louise inside. This is what they all do here at Float, thinks Simon, hide in plain sight.
A voice calls out.
“Louise!”
Louise sighs, pulls her skirt down with a face like, Spoilsport, then turns and waves a hand in the counselor’s direction.
“Sorry.”
Simon sees the counselor staring at them. He waves as if to say, She did it. Not me. Unconsciously, he fingers the paper bag in his pocket. He has the impulse to show her the map of the compound he drew his first night here, marking the emergency exits and location of the smoke alarms. Every day he walks the exit route, memorizing the number of steps, in case he has to escape in a blackout during heavy smoke conditions. Before he’d even sat down, his eyes had found the door nearest to his seat, his mind measuring the distance.
It’s June. Around the country the suicide epidemic has already begun. There are whispers inside the facility. A noticeable bump in night terrors. A slight uptick in patients with suicidal ideation. A feeling of hopelessness in group sessions. The horses felt it before we did, Simon will realize later, watching them whinny and shy away from patients, as if the smell of death was already on us. After midnight, residents hear what sounds like screams coming from the stables, waking them from their sedation. Is this the rapture, the trumpets of St. Paul? But when the sound comes again, it’s clear they’re just the neighs of agitated equines.
“It’s so boring here,” says Louise. She takes the short straw from her orange juice, pretends to light it like a cigarette. She is the queen of exhausted pantomime, her eyes weary, the eyes of a sixty-year-old woman. What have they seen, those eyes, to wear her young soul out?
“I drank all my mouthwash last night,” she tells him. “Lefty Pete said it might give a buzz, but he’s full of shit. All I got was the runs.”
She is a party girl, fifteen going on forty. Simon knows her type, though those girls never paid him much attention. He is skinny and tall and looks younger than his age, like someone took a ten-year-old and stretched him out because they thought it was funny.
She pokes at her food for a moment, then pushes the plate away. If asked what she’s anxious about, Louise would say “Three things. Everything. Nothing. Myself.” If pressed, she would turn the question around on you, because though she’s desperate for attention, the one thing she really doesn’t like to discuss is herself.
“Are you a good kisser?” she asks.
“Medium,” he tells her. “But that’s not in the cards for us.”
“Says you.”
“I think we’re just gonna be friends.”
“Boring.”
“You say that because you’ve never had a friend before.”
“I’ve had friends.”
“A real friend.”
“And what’s that? A real friend.”
“Someone you can trust.”
She thinks about that, then looks at him with a challenge in her eyes.
“That’s a big word.”
“Stapler is bigger. Minivan.”
She makes a face.
“Be honest. You’d spend real American money for a blowjob.”
“Nope. Scout’s honor.”
She leans forward.
“I’m really good at them,” she says softly, licking her lips.
“I’m sure you are.”
“But you’re not interested.”
“Sorry.”
“Because—”
“You’re not my type.”
“You like blondes?”