The surreality of Nicolette Holland walking around my place simulates the sensation of reading in a moving car. The room looks to be expanding and contracting to the rhythm of her pulse, despite my disdain for people who lay claim to weird sensory experiences—unless they’re in the desert with a bag of shrooms.
I know her pulse because she said my ice cream was giving her brain freeze. My index finger is pressed to the indentation under her right temple.
“No, I’m happy to report that you’re still a sentient being.”
“Because there’s blood flow to my brain? Guess again. Blood flow is overrated. The sweet old lady I work for could run a marathon in her walker, but she doesn’t know my name or what I’m doing there half the time.”
God, this girl is good, whether she’s making this up or if it’s true; she’s even better if it’s true.
“What are you doing there?”
“Stealing her jewelry.” She smiles up at me and nibbles on the cherry I stuck on top of the spray-can whipped cream. Of course she’s the girl who’d be stealing jewelry off defenseless old ladies. At least it’s a step up from playing with a blade.
She yelps, “Don’t look at me like that! That was a joke. If she ever had any jewelry, it’s buried in her garden anyway. She buries teaspoons. I have to dig them up and put them back when she’s asleep. I don’t want to embarrass her.”
The girl who steals jewelry from old ladies or the girl who has a nighttime protocol for sparing her senile employer’s feelings?
I watch her eat the grotesquely oversize sundae I made because I wanted to keep her in my apartment for as long as possible, ladling on caramel and chocolate sauce and scoops of mint chip. I scrolled through years of her photos online to figure out what kind of food would tempt her. As it turns out, anything with sugar does it for her. She had a Twix appetizer.
Let’s just say, she’s not the kind of girl who eats only reduced-fat lettuce leaves.
She licks green ice cream off her lower lip. In the bedroom, I have a duffel bag full of weapons any one of which could finish her off before the remnants of the sundae turn to slush. I try to visualize using each one on her. I don’t get further than picturing myself shooting her from a distance, and then only when I imagine her flattened into two-dimensionality, a laminated paper target with a frozen face and immobile limbs.
She says, “For sure this is my dinner. Thanks. I might not have to cook myself anything to eat for days.”
“I don’t cook. If not for In-N-Out, I’d have to eat grass and leaves.”
“I spent yesterday making peach cobbler and five quarts of borsht. Do you know what that is? Beet soup. It’s what the lady I work for wanted for breakfast.”
“What’s the matter? Did you learn to cook in a giant family and forget to divide?”
When I ask her a question I know she’ll have to answer by making things up, it feels as if I’m torturing her, playing with her the way a cat bats a gopher back and forth across a patio before devouring it.
“Six kids,” she says. She doesn’t miss a beat.
“I’d lose track of their names.”
“My parents were highly practical. Angie, Bonnie, me Cat, Davey, Edie, and Frank. Which is a lot of alphabet to stuff in a trailer.”
“Don’t you call them mobile homes?”
“You’re such a know-it-all! Has anybody ever mentioned this to you?”
All my friends and a couple of disgruntled teachers might have mentioned it.
“Ours was definitely a trailer,” she says. She has it down. “Not as bad as it sounds. But you know what? Homeschooled. We never got out of there!”
It’s a brilliant idea: no Reunion dot com or googling of the graduating class list or having to tie herself to a specific location where any curious person could find out she never was. She is, I realize, driving where this goes, dishonest and hypnotic.
I say, “Is this trailer nearby?”
“No! They disapprove of me. Religious zealots. I had to take off before they shunned me. I can’t go home.” She frowns, and if I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was real. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
She abandons her sundae to walk around the room, pausing at the wall of bookshelves, touching the spines of the books. “You read a lot of poems.”
“This is a sublet. They’re not mine.”
“You’re subletting from a girl, right?”
“And you know this because . . . ?”
“This shelf. Emily Dickinson. Sylvia Plath. In school, when we did this poem she wrote, it was like contraception day in homeroom. You know, boys to the right, girls to the left. Yay abstinence, but if you succumb to sin and personal degradation, say hello to this condom.”
I touch the pocket of my jeans containing my wallet and silently greet the condom.
“Interesting school.”
I watch her remember that she just said she was homeschooled. Her face registers something and then smooths itself out.
“Waaaay down south,” she says, returning to her sundae, blocking her mouth from view behind a heaping tablespoon of mint chip. “I got sent there for part of a year so I’d have a school experience beyond the inside of a trailer before college.”