Something smacked into the glass behind me and I jumped, slamming the base of my skull into the van.
“What the,” I said, and the smack came twice more, a palm against the window. The door slid open and Marlena grinned at me from under the automatic light, a blast of skunky smoke whirling around her. The boys were with her. The cute one’s hand was nestled under Marlena’s bare knee, and the acne-covered one sat in the front passenger seat, his seat tilted back. My cheeks twanged just looking at him.
“Don’t you ever get cold?” I asked.
“Not really. I’m like a vampire. But maybe if you stand there keeping the door open. Get in.” She slid over, into a kind of cave the boy’s body made to accommodate her. I climbed in and shut the door, thinking briefly of Haesung, how much she’d hate what I was doing, how she’d never have gotten in the car. The light clicked off. “Greg, this lurker is Cat. She lives in that little gingerbread house over there. Cat, that is Greg,” Marlena pointed to the front and the boy’s profile nodded, “and this is Ryder,” she kissed him noisily on the cheek, “and we are all really stupendously stoned and I’m one hundred percent sure that Ryder’s blacked out right now.” She flicked his ear, and in slow motion, he tried to bat her hand away. “See?” Though she’d called me lurker, her voice was warm.
“Nice to meet you?”
Ryder snickered, and my skin flared.
“So tell me, because I’ve been thinking about it and it literally makes less sense to me than anything in the world. Why the fuck did you move here? Nobody moves here. People are born here. People die here. People pass through here, I guess, but hardly even that.”
“Ram moved here,” Greg said.
“Ram’s dad was like the original pioneer of here,” said Marlena. “Doesn’t count.”
“My mom’s crazy,” I said. It came out faster than I intended, and I realized that I mostly meant it. Mom had worn the same tank top, braless, for four days. She did not have a job, or a single friend, and sometimes I walked into the living room to find her staring into space or even, horribly, asking questions of herself out loud.
“She must be. Ryder’s mom’s crazy, too, if it makes you feel better. And Greg’s is dead. And mine’s MIA, presumed dead, and if she’s not, she’s definitely crazy.”
Marlena laughed, and so did Greg, a little. I let myself, too.
“Well, sorry, I guess?”
“You didn’t kill them. And anyway, we’re the ones who should be sorry for you. You just moved to Silver Lake.”
“Where is the lake, anyway?”
“The lake to which we can attribute the name of this place is, really, called Silver Lake,” said Greg. “It’s a mile or so past the sign, one of the many small lakes inland from Lake Michigan. Not the finest of those, either. Lots of seaweed, zebra mussels, etc.” He pronounced etc. one letter after another, drawing out the sounds. Eee. Tee. Cee.
“Thanks, Professor,” said Marlena. “Also you’re not supposed to walk around barefoot on the sand because of the needles, so, yeah. Like I said. Welcome.”
“Basically, not worth a visit?”
“We go sometimes,” said Greg, “despite its flaws. Home, and whatnot.”
“Not mine,” said Ryder, his voice coming up from underwater.
“Ryder and his mom live in Kewaunee,” said Marlena. “He used to live in that trailer down the street, the one with the happy face on it? But he’s moved up in the world.” Kewaunee was the next real town over, on the bay, where the schools were, and the charming downtown, and the Walmart and the movie theater and the only Chinese place for sixty miles. Aside from me and Marlena and Greg, Silver Lake was just a gas station, a trout fishery, a church, and a sex shop.
“Marlena,” a voice shouted from outside, mean even from a distance.
“Hurry up, please, it’s time,” said Greg, in a put-on British accent.
“Oh, lord. Be quiet and maybe he won’t find me. Put out your cigarette, Ryder, he’ll see the cherry.” She shrank down in the backseat, and I copied her.
“Stalker,” said Greg.
“Marlena, your daddy’s asking for ya, hear? Sal’s whining,” the man called, nearer.
“What a liar,” Marlena whispered. “I put half a Dramamine in his milk. He’s conked out.”
“You drugged your brother?”
“Oh, don’t make it sound like that. I read about it on a parenting blog. Anyway, what am I supposed to do? Risk him walking in on a bunch of people all tweaked out in the living room like last year? Truly,” she said, sighing dramatically, “the only good thing about my dad being all slush-brained from that shit is that I will never, not in a hundred billion years, not as long as I live, touch that drug.”
“Yeah, but by touching Ryder,” said Greg, and Marlena reached around his seat and pulled his hair until he yowled.
Tweaked out, I knew, had something to do with drugs, though I couldn’t have said what. I was a young fifteen. My knowledge of drugs came from school handouts and TV movies with moralistic endings. The circumstances of Marlena’s life scare me more now, in retrospect, than they ever did then. I let more immediate concerns override the danger; the delicate web of connection between the three of them, and how I envied it; the way a cigarette tasted, how it looked burning in the dark. How when I did something that made me nervous, I was rewarded with a shock of adrenaline that obliterated my self-consciousness and fixed me to the moment. I still chase this feeling. I can capture it during happy hour, sometimes, a diluted version—it lives near the bottom of drink two.
“There goes my New Year’s,” Marlena said, tugging down the black tube dress she wore so that it wasn’t riding all the way up her thighs. Through the windshield I could see the man a couple cars ahead, looking into the windows. A minute and he’d reach ours. Without thinking about it, I tugged the handle and jumped out of the van, slamming the door closed.
“Hey,” I yelled, walking fast, so that I’d intercept him before he reached the car. “You looking for Marlena?”
“Who’re you?” he said. He wore a sweatshirt, the sleeves pushed up around his forearms, so that I could just make out his tattoos. This was Bolt, the guy from the truck, I thought, the don’t-touch-me guy, the guy who’d left her on her front lawn like an empty shell.
“Cat. Marlena’s friend.”
“Okay, Cat-Marlena’s-friend. Where’s Marlena?”
“She went walking around with Ryder, I don’t know, a little while ago. I was just in the van calling my dad,” I lied, grateful, for once, for my mousiness. In the lunar glow that Michigan gives off at night when there’s nothing but snow and stars, I could just make out the angry crease between Bolt’s eyes.
“That way?” He gestured toward the Silver Lake sign.
“No. Over there. Where the cars stop.”
“If you see her, you tell her it’s time to come in now.”