Blandine doesn’t talk about the bad stuff that happened to her before she met us, but you can tell her bad stuff was fucking bad. Can tell by the way she scrubs her hands raw with the steel wool in the kitchen. By the giant religious books she lugs around. The bird nests and twigs and valley shit she collects. Animal bones. Sometimes, when she’s not home, I snoop around her room, which smells like weed and roses. Glass bottles of spiky plants crowd the windowsills. Above her bed, she’s taped depressing internet biographies of people no one’s ever heard of. She keeps a lot of Venus flytraps.
No one has it easy in the Vacca Vale system, but Blandine had it the worst, being so smart and female. People want things from the Blandines of the system, and I’m sure her brain didn’t help. Thinking too much can zap you dead, and Blandine—she just shuts herself in rooms and thinks. Thinks and thinks and thinks herself into all kinds of doom, and by sundown she’s afraid of the doorknob. She’s the only one of us who didn’t graduate high school, but also the only one of us who would’ve gone to college. Once, I found a letter in her bedroom from some guidance counselor—an email she must’ve printed out—pushing her to apply to the Ivy Leagues. The counselor said she had a real shot at admission. We have no idea why Blandine dropped out. She was a scholarship student at the only fancy high school in town. Only one more year to go. She never talked about it. If you ever mentioned any kind of school to her, she’d either lecture you about how fucked-up the American education system is or she’d bolt.
Since she wouldn’t let us love her, Malik, Todd, and I started spending all of our time with each other.
I’m not embarrassed to admit that the animal sacrificing was my idea. Malik was getting on my nerves one night in February—a month into the love—because he wouldn’t stop cooking for Blandine, wouldn’t get out of the kitchen, and I wanted to make myself a goddam quesadilla. Thing about Malik is, he has absolutely no acne. You look at him, with his dopey, perfect smile and his dopey, perfect skin, and you feel a special kind of hatred. Plus, Malik is the only one of us four who has a good relationship with his foster family. He still goes to their place for holidays and takes their calls, laughing a lot when he does. Todd never talks about any of his families. When you bring it up, he gets that look on his face—the same look Blandine gets, actually. Like they’re trapped in a flooding car.
I’ll admit that Malik is the most attractive of us three guys, as far as physique, brains, talent, teeth, and disposition go. Then me and then Todd. Poor Todd. He looks kind of undercooked—like he didn’t spend enough time in the womb. As for me, I’m a six or a four, depending on who you ask. I’m under no illusions—I know that my body has faulty proportions, like I was designed by a five-year-old, and I know that I don’t really have lips. But I have a good personality. I can bench 225. And I can do fantastic impersonations.
Still—Malik is Malik.
So I super-hated him, in that moment, that night in February, as he stood shirtless in the kitchen, showing off his muscles and his skin, stirring all these sauces, flipping some goddam pancakes, bags of crazy groceries all over the floor, jazz fizzing from the shitty speakers that I found on the sidewalk, months back, on my own.
“Can you move for chrissake?” I asked.
“Almost done.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Just five minutes.”
“Come on.”
He didn’t reply, just kept wrapping raw steaks in strips of raw bacon.
The kitchen faces the living room, where Todd was sitting, staring at the screen we thrifted, watching this show called Tough Love, where spoiled parents send their spoiled tweens to live in places like homeless shelters or maximum-security prisons or sometimes soft-core war zones, depending on how much of a shit the kid is, to Build Character. Todd was breathing wetly, chewing radishes, sitting cross-legged on the couch. When the kid on the television fell into a puddle of mud, Todd laughed.
You probably think that Todd is the reason I’m talking to you now. What if I told you that he was the gentlest of us three? The one who hated the animal sacrificing the most?
On many occasions I’ve walked in on Todd watching a shaving tutorial—mostly lathering. Which is weird enough, but even weirder because, as you can tell, Todd has absolutely no facial hair. Not a speck. Picture it: some prepubescent kid, watching dad after dad teach the internet how to shave. When I asked him about it once, he just shrugged, said the videos relaxed him. Never elaborated because he didn’t care what I thought. But when Malik made fun of him for it, he shut the computer and locked himself in his room. Humiliated.
Malik went to school on the west side, but Todd and I graduated from Vacca Vale High. We weren’t close in school, just acquaintances, eager to carve out separate lives once each of us found out the other was in the system. In school, I watched Todd from a distance. He was usually with friends, but they seemed more like props, or self-defense weapons. They rarely spoke to each other. At lunch, Todd drew in a sketchbook. Our junior year, he won some kind of national award for a piece he did in art class, and the school put it on display in the lobby. I didn’t know what the hell the drawing was about, but I could tell it was good.
Malik and I often say that he puts the Odd in Todd, but the truth is, I envy Todd’s capacity for mystery. Maybe I read people too quickly, but I also read them accurately. Normally, I can hear the message underneath the message, you know? The true conversation inside a false one. But not with Todd. With Todd, information always seems like it’s missing. There’s something un-American about him that’s tough to describe. Like he belongs to no place. He hates teams. He’s obsessed with raw vegetables. He’s got glass skin. In high school, I’d never seen Todd join any kind of group. Never seen him fired up or ashamed, follow any trend or try to look cool, partake or submit. Todd wasn’t a leader, wasn’t a follower—just a drifter, happy that way. Until he met Malik.
Ironically, Todd’s probably the one Blandine would’ve liked best.
I was always fascinated by other kids in the system. Studied them like they were my blood siblings. Todd’s the one who told me about the Independence Workshop that could launch you out of the system and into your own life. He just came up to my locker one day and mentioned it—time, place, website. Left before I could reply.
During our sophomore year, Todd was suspended for a week because he disappeared from a field trip in Chicago. It was a history class, I think—I wasn’t in it. They were supposed to go to a museum. Traveled three hours to get there. But as soon as they got to the lobby, Todd broke off, hopped on a bus, and went to Ikea. He had never been to one before, only heard about them. He says he was dying to go. He spent the whole fucking day there. Says he read three comic books in three different family rooms, ate meatballs on a fake terrace, and took a nap on a totally black bed. No one bothered him. They just let you loiter, he says. Like a dream. All these cubes of clashing, imaginary houses, side by side, making no sense together. Then, around dinnertime, he found his way back to the bus that his class was boarding and went back to Vacca Vale with everybody. The school contacted his foster family—everyone was foaming at the mouth with hatred for this kid, this weird and selfish kid. No one believed him at first when he told them where he’d been, but when they did believe him, they hated him more. Convincing us you’d been kidnapped or worse, for fucking Ikea?
Todd says he’d do it again. It was the best day of my life, he says.
Back in our apartment, the first night of the animal sacrificing, as Malik made bacon steak in the kitchen, I turned to Todd.
“Can you believe this guy?” I asked him, pointing to Malik. Todd didn’t respond, just bit off another radish head. “Isn’t she a vegan?”
“Is that where you don’t eat meat?” asked Todd.
“That’s vegetarians. Vegans don’t eat anything—no eggs, cheese, milk, chicken, tilapia, nothing,” said Malik. “And she’s not a vegan.”
“You sure about that?”
“Believe me, we’d know if she was. Vegans make themselves known.”
“I think she said she ate rabbit once,” said Todd. “At her foster family’s. Or maybe she said she refused to eat it?”
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” I said. “Because she’s not even hungry.” Blandine had just told us so before she locked herself in her bedroom with her vaporizer and a jug of sweet tea.
“She is,” said Malik. “She will be. She just doesn’t realize it. I’ll make her realize she’s hungry.”
“You’re a fake,” I said.
“What?” asked Malik.
“You just do things for her to prove that you’d do things for her.”
“So?”
“Don’t you see how fake that is?”
“There’s nothing fake about proving you’d do anything for someone you’d legitly do anything for.”
I rolled my eyes. “You would not do anything.”
“I would too.”
“Oh yeah? Prove it.”
He gestured to the meat. “I am proving it.”
“No. For real.”
On the television, the camera zoomed in on a kid’s bare calves, which were covered in red, oozing sores.
“What do you mean, ‘for real’?” asked Malik.
“Put yourself in danger. Be a man.”
He scoffed. “Coming from you.”
“Would you kill for her?”
“Come on.”