New Girl

CHAPTER EIGHT



I WOKE UP BRIGHT AND EARLY AT TWO IN THE afternoon. Dana had made it her business to amble around as loudly as possible until she finally fell asleep. I had lain there for God knows how long with my eyes shut, pretending to sleep and trying not to move.

I was trembling and weak when I awoke, and I felt that putting my head in a vise might be a lot more preferable to the pounding it endured now. My churning stomach needed something in it or it was just going to shrivel into a raisin. But I really didn’t feel like eating was going to go well. Even so, I made it down to the dining hall.

Sandwiches, soup, salad, chicken, pancakes…my stomach had all the options in the world and was rejecting even the thought of any of them. I groaned and turned to leave.

And then there was Max, walking in.

I gave a small smile. God I hope I don’t puke.

“Hi.” He looked uncomfortable.

“Hey.”

“Did you just get here?”

I nodded. “Yes. Trying to decide what to eat.” I looked around again at all the things I couldn’t imagine putting down my throat and keeping there.

“Do you want to sit with me?”

A chill filled my chest. I felt so stupid for letting myself drink so much last night that I was screwing myself over today. “Sure.”

We walked through the line together. I looked around me. I didn’t want him to know how bad I was feeling. I really didn’t want to give him the opportunity to picture me with my face in a toilet.

Potato soup. Nope. Would look the same going down as it would five minutes later.

Sandwich. Entirely too many textures.

Yogurt. Only one texture, but it was a nasty one.

Salad. That nail-polish-remover taste in the lettuce would remind me way too much of the alcohol directly.

Bread of any and all kind seemed out of the question. People always say bread and water is the way to go, but the very thought of either one of those things was absolutely revolting.

Chicken tenders. Maybe I could do that. Maybe. I grabbed them and a ginger ale, and sat at the nearest table.

I exhaled slowly and purposefully, trying to soothe my quivering stomach. I shut my eyes fast when I saw Max’s cheeseburger. This was going to be tough.

“Did you have fun last night?” he asked. “Before Dana freaked out?”

“Yeah, up until then.”

“Just…ignore everything she said. You’re obviously not disgusting.”

Only in this bizarre context could that give me the thrill of flattery.

“Thanks.”

“I don’t know why she attacked you like that.”

I shrugged. “I don’t, either.”

I considered the chicken tenders, and took another bite. Oh, big mistake. The second it hit my throat I had to cough and swallow hard.

“You okay?”

I nodded vigorously. Too vigorously. “Mmm. Oh, yeah, I’m fine.”

“Hey, so…” He looked uncomfortable. “I hope you didn’t take anything Dana said to heart last night.”

“I… No. I’m not even thinking about it.” My stomach felt as though it was being pulled like taffy. “You know, I just remembered something I need to do. I’m sorry.”

I fled from the hall like it was on fire. I jumped down the last four stairs of the staircase, and banged into a stall. I puked before I could get the door shut.

I was there for another fifteen minutes, my knees picking up God knows what off the floor, and my elbows turning red from being planted on the hard, plastic seat.

I wasn’t sure if I was miserable about having to dart from the conversation right then, or if I was okay with that. It had sounded a lot like I was about to get rejected when I’d never even offered myself.

I didn’t know. And before I could even begin to figure it out, the fluttering was back in my throat.

I slept until that night. Then of course, I could do nothing but sit up, wide-awake in my room. Dana read in her bed again, saying nothing about the night before, and all of Becca’s pictures still stared down at me. I looked away from them and spent the next ten minutes trying to read the spine of Dana’s book. Finally I saw what it was. It was called Coping, and was written by some doctor I couldn’t see the name of. I felt a small tinge of pity.

A knock came on my door at ten-fifteen. I opened the door to find Madison and Julia looking very serious. I had a feeling I was going to start feeling sick again.

“What’s up?”

“Would you mind coming over to our room for a minute?” Julia asked, as Madison looked at the floor.

“Okay.” I followed them, sat down on one of the beds, and they sat across from me. “If you guys are getting a divorce, I know it’s not about me.”

“It’s about Max and Johnny.”

“We just think it’s important for you to know a few things before your interest in either one of them goes any further.”

I was baffled. “My interest in either one of them? I don’t… What?”

Madison looked earnestly at me. “You already know Max was with Becca before she went missing. But what you might not know is that he was crazy in love with her. And so was Johnny.”

Johnny had loved Becca?

Julia took over. “But Max and Becca were so in love. He said he wanted to marry her and everything. She tried to break up with him a hundred times, and he always begged for her back.”

I found it hard to picture Max begging anyone for anything.

“If they were so in love, why did she try to break up with him so many times?”

They were silent for a few seconds, but then Madison spoke. “I really think they would have gotten married. And if—and when—she comes back…they’ll definitely get back together.”

“We just don’t want you to get hurt,” Julia explained.

“We don’t want that at all.”

“And if Johnny does have any interest in you, it’s kind of weird.”

My stomach was slowly plummeting. I didn’t even know him. “Weird, why weird?”

“I mean…she was the new girl last year. Now you’re here…in her room....”

“You even kind of look like her,” Julia said. She observed me for a moment and clearly decided that if I did indeed look like Becca, I was a much less attractive version. “No wonder he likes you.”

I froze. “I’ve only had a few conversations with him. I’m not trying to…anything.”

“But we also don’t want you to misread anything Max might say or do. He’s protective of girls, so if he talks to you it’s probably just him trying to make you feel better about how everyone is talking about you.”

“Is everyone talking about me?”

I wanted to go home.

The two girls stared blankly at me.

“Look,” I said, sparing them the duty of having to say yes, “I won’t go near either of them.”

“Do you promise?” Madison asked. “It’s really for your own good.”

“Yes. I’m— I’ve gotta go.”

I went back into my room. I wished I could run farther. It seemed suddenly to be a horrible idea, sleeping in the school you go to. Everyone was everywhere, every second of every day. And in high school, that’s pretty much the fastest way to lose your sanity.

I didn’t even know what I wanted, and Madison and Julia were assuring me that anything I might consider was out of the question. I couldn’t put one toe onto Becca’s property. Max could never like me. Johnny might, but I was supposed to know it was creepy. I got it. I wasn’t going to start “going after” anyone. I never had, and I wasn’t going to start now.

I sat down on my own bed, breathing hard. I looked straight across from me at all the many smiling faces of Becca, Becca and Max, Becca and Max kissing, Becca and Johnny, one of the three of them and Becca and the rest of her friends.

“Are you upset?”

I almost jumped at the sound of Dana’s voice. “Yes. I’m upset.”

“Why?”

“I’d rather not talk about it with you?”

Um. Obviously.

“Does it have to do with Max? I saw how you looked at him. You have feelings for him.”

“No, okay, I don’t.”

“You better not, because—”

“Because he was madly in love with Becca—I get it, okay?”

“Is. He is in love with Becca. She’s not gone. She’s not dead. I wish everyone would try to remember that every once in a while.” Dana threw down Coping. “Max and Becca are meant for each other…you couldn’t even begin to understand! Anything she did…it was just— She’ll come back and it’ll be for him, not for anyone else!”

Dana had gone from less than zero to over a hundred in five seconds flat.

“I didn’t mean to imply that she’s definitely gone or…or anything!”

“Yes, you did!” Dana’s eyes were wide and scary. She looked crazed. “And you don’t even know her! I knew her, okay? She’ll be back, nothing happened to her!”

“Okay!”

“No! She will! You have to understand that. And you’ll understand why no one will ever see you how they saw her, so you can just stop trying. Her hair? Her face? Her body? She’s physically better than you. Her hair is shinier and lighter, she doesn’t have stupid little freckles all over her face like you do, and she’s taller than you.”

I didn’t even know what to say. This was baffling. She just went on and on.

“And that’s just physically. But otherwise? Everybody loves her. She started everyone going down to the boathouse to have parties. She came up with that. She’s fun, and you’re drab. You and your hippie lifestyle—”

“Hippie lifestyle? Are you kidding?”

“Yes, you’re all tan and your hair’s all wavy, you’re always wearing flip-flops and beat-up jeans—you’re trying so hard to look like some kind of ad for Sex Wax. How much do you spend a year on self-tanner and highlights? How much of your life have you spent trying to look like you’re not trying?”

“I…”

It was impossible to defend. This was crazy. For one small and pretty irrelevant thing, I actually really didn’t use self-tanner. It was something my mom was always reprimanding me for. And as for my hair, it was the one thing I really liked about myself. I never highlighted it or colored it, and it always got lighter in the summer. But I couldn’t insist that to a crazy person. I couldn’t engage in this. And she was grief stricken. I wanted to understand her but she was making it impossible.

“Becca will come back,” she threatened, “and then you’ll see. If anyone is giving you any kind of second look right now, you’ll see how quickly that goes away, because you could never compare to her. You’ll never be as good as her. You’ll never be as pretty. You’ll never have what she has.”

That was it. I whipped around, and my hands were moving of their own volition. I was pulling thumbtacks out of the wall and gathering the pictures of perfect little Becca and hurling them at Dana.

“Stop it!” Horror was filling her eyes, and seemingly paralyzing her where she stood. “Becca put those there! You put them back!” She was screaming now, reminding me of that scene in Lord of the Rings when that blonde girl goes from beautiful to a big computer-graphic monster.

“No! You take these. Put them up on your own damn wall if you want to. Put them in a box for when and if she comes to pick them up, but I am not going to stare at these pictures anymore.” I threw the last of them on the floor and then threw the thumbtacks at her closet. It may have been the most violent act I’d ever made. “This is my bed. This is my shelf—” I picked up the remaining four picture frames “—and this shit is not mine.”

“You bitch. You f*cking bitch!”

“I don’t care what you think. I’m sorry you’re worried about your friend. I really, truly am. But you will not belittle me and my life because of it.”

I grabbed my wallet and key and left the room, slamming the door. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was, that every single door along the hallway was closing as I walked out into it. Great. If everyone was talking about me, then now they could add psycho to the list of things wrong with me.

I had no idea whether it was too late to go check out my phone, but I needed to call someone. My mom. Leah. Emma. Someone.

I ran to the cell phone office. It was eight forty-five. I glanced out the doors. Dark already.

“Hi, I want to check out my phone, please.” I handed him the checkout card I’d been given on my first day.

He handed me my phone. “Fifteen minutes.”

“Okay.”

I turned it on and darted out the side door into the courtyard. It was freaking cold, and my Florida-based wardrobe only made it colder. I called Home the second it turned on.

No answer. My desperation was starting to make my hairs stand on end. I needed someone to tell me that I was right.

But I had a bunch of voice mails.

The first one was from my mom:

“Hey, sweetie, I miss you already! I know you’re going to have a fantastic time at Manderley. You really are. It’s such a good school, you’re going to get into a fabulous college, and oh, you’re going to have so much fun. You’re going to make so many friends there. Oh, gotta go, I think I’m getting pulled over. Call me sometime soon. Love you!”

She sounded so sure that I would do well here. I made sure not to delete the message and listened to the second one. It was from Leah, my best friend. The first few seconds was just a bunch of screaming, talking and laughing. Then finally:

“…give me the phone, Michael! Jeez! Okay, finally! It’s all of us here—” she was interrupted by a bunch of people yelling their hellos into the phone “—and we just miss you so much! The senior cookout was at the A-Street Pier this year, and it’s so freaking awesome! Rita’s is giving out free desserts, and Mango Mangos is catering—I know you love their French fries and we just— Shut up! I’m trying to leave a message!” More laughing, and then my friend Emma took over the phone.

“Hey! Oh, my gosh, we miss you so much, seriously, it is not the same without you. Plus I don’t think the guys know who to lust after now that you’re gone—”

The phone exchanged hands again. My throat was tight, and there were chills going up and down my back. “It’s totally true—” I recognized Jake’s voice “—you were the hottest thing to ever happen to SAHS.”

“Anyway,” Leah said, taking the phone back, “we miss you, and you would have loved this cookout it’s so much fun. Not as much as if you were here though. Call me back! Or write to me on Facebook or something—jeez—I can’t believe I haven’t heard from you yet! Must be too busy with all your— Stop it! Okay, love you, bye!”

More laughing until they got the call to end. There was one more voice mail from home, left only an hour ago. It started with barking I recognized. Then I heard the small barely-familiar-with-a-phone voice of my little sister Lily.

“That was Jasper saying hello. He misses you lots, I can tell, and he’s always sleeping in your bed! I think he’s really sad every time someone comes to the door because it’s not you. You have to come home soon so you can pet him and hug him, because he’s really sad and missing you. He got a new collar and leash! I lost the other ones…but that’s okay, because these are pink! Daddy let me pick them out, and Mommy thought it was silly because Jasper is a boy, but I think they look good with his black fur. He’s really cute. Also another doggie moved in next door and Jasper is always talking to it. It’s making Mommy irritated though, she says, because now they’re always barking. But I said it’s cute because it’s like 101 Dalmatians and they’re doing the twilight bark. You know, when all the dogs talk before they go inside for bed? Anyway, Daddy is doing that thing with his finger that means ‘wrap it up’ so I have to go. Oh—wait, here’s Daddy, he wants to talk, too. Bye!”

My eyes were burning now. “I just walked in, I’m not sure how long she’s been talking or if it cut her off.” I heard Lily in the background saying she had just called me. “Anyway, we miss you and can’t wait until you come home. Love you, talk to you soon.”

And that was it. I used to hear every one of those voices every day, and took them completely for granted. I couldn’t even mentally utter the old saying about “knowing what you’ve got.” I just missed them, even after this short period of time. I was so incredibly nostalgic for a life I knew I’d never, ever have again. But at this moment, I wanted nothing more than to give up on this stupid place and go back home. I looked at the weather app on my phone. It had been eighty-three degrees back home. The next two days were sunny, and the third had thunderstorms. I loved thunderstorms.

As for Manderley, the weather was anticipated to be overall gloomy, with a temperature of sixty the next day, with cold rains and a low of forty-three. Cold rains are really, really different than warm thunderstorms.

I tried home once more. When there was no answer, I left my own voice mail. “Hey, everyone, um…” Here it was. My opportunity. If I told my parents I hated it, they would let me come home. I could be home in forty-eight hours, sitting in the living room with my mom. She’d listen to my woes sympathetically and without judgment. I could be back at my high school in time for Homecoming. “I miss you all so, so much. I— It’s…”

If I left, everyone would know why. If people talked about me, they’d say, Remember that new girl? No, not Becca, the short one with the stupid freckles.

Becca left here, alive or not, and left behind a legacy. I wasn’t as good as her, only because she was so…whatever she was. If I walked out now, I’d be telling everyone they were right. If I left now, I’d be a coward who runs scared from the ghost of a girl who haunts the halls.

“Manderley is amazing. I can’t wait until you can see it in person. The classes are pretty hard, but not worse than I thought they’d be. Love you all. Lily, give Jasper a paw-shake and a hug for me, okay?” I briefly envisioned how good it would feel just to scratch his ears and give him a squeeze. “Love you. Miss you. I have to go turn my phone back in now. I still love it by the way, thanks so much for getting it for me.” I was rambling. “Okay, bye now.”

I texted each of my friends, giving them a brief and respectively varied miss you, wish I was home, xoxo, and then turned the phone off. It felt like saying goodbye to my visitors and returning to my jail cell.

The only way I could think of to extend the visit would be to go to the library, to the one computer equipped with the ability to do anything but look up journal articles and other scholarly things, and log on to Facebook for the first time since I’d left home.

I really shouldn’t have. It was just more of the same torturous happiness from my old life. My friends wrote to say they missed me. It was really flattering and nice, but it just hurt. It hadn’t been long since I’d left, but it felt like it had been so much longer. Leah wrote, Already forgotten about us, huh? Ugh! Fine, go make your new friends…what do I care? Haha, just kidding. Miss you, come visit!

I looked at the pictures from the cookout, and everything else my friends had been up to lately. It was like digging into my own flesh to find a bullet. I couldn’t even get through the whole album of all of my friends wearing sweatshirts with shorts and flip-flops, still sporting sunburns at the cookout. Leah had tagged me in one picture as an extra marshmallow on a stick and her and Emma pouting.

I glanced at the other albums, of them just two days before, swimming in Lucy’s aunt’s pool in the afternoon and then in the hot tub at night.

Then I thought of something. I hesitantly typed her name into the search box. And then there she was.

Rebecca Normandy. Her profile was restricted so that I couldn’t see anything but her profile pictures and the comments on her wall. It was really kind of disturbing. She’d been missing for almost five months, and there were still comments from the past few days, from people whose names I didn’t recognize.

Miss you, beautiful.

I love you and miss you every day. Please come back soon.

XOXOOXO





Hey, remember that one time with the shoelaces and the Barbie? Oh, my God, the look on his face… Bahahaha come back, slut, I miss you!

They were all writing to her like she was checking her Facebook regularly. I wondered, with a pang, if she was. What had Dana suggested the other night? That she was off “handling” something.

I kept scrolling, and found Dana’s most recent post: I know you’re not gone. I know it. So stop. Come back. Or at least contact me.

There were tons more comments like those and like Dana’s. It was creepy. Spooky.

And it made me really wonder what had happened. Maybe she wasn’t even missing. Maybe everyone knew where she was, and she was just…hiding for some reason. That would be crazy…but maybe that’s what it was.

But if she wasn’t…what had happened? Blake had said something about a boat that went missing that night in the storm. Had Becca taken it out? She couldn’t have. It was pitch-black down there at night, and in a storm? She could have just called a cab, like Blake had said, on the payphone in the lobby and…left.

To make my brain strain more, I clicked on her pictures. I could only see a few, but they were enough. In the one she had set as her default, Max was kissing her on the cheek, and she was smiling. In the next few, she just looked pretty. She looked like she was trying to look pretty, but she was undeniably succeeding. All the comments on her pictures confirmed it.

A sudden jab of uncharacteristic jealousy struck me. She’d been new at Manderley last year. How had she managed to make so many friends here, made such an impact, while I was greeted with only hesitance quickly followed by disinterest? Madison and Julia made some kind of an effort with me, and Johnny was nice. Max was…something. Blake was nice, too, I guessed. But Dana…

There was only a handful of people I’d even talked to, and all of them—except maybe for Cam, who rarely spoke—seemed morbidly and irreversibly affected by Becca. They all knew her. It’s not like each of them talked only about her, but somehow that seemed more significant.

I don’t know what happened to me, then. I was depressed about being away from home and jealous of Becca one moment, and then the next, something shifted in me. It was as if my skeleton turned to iron—I was strong, and I would not have my happiness and fate decided by some popular girl who had reigned before I got there.

It wasn’t up to Becca or Dana how I lived my life.