“You did drug your brother,” I said, finally.
“Touché.” She exhaled a series of rings, her throat going pfft before each O left her mouth. I was impressed. “I’ve hot-boxed the shit out of this doghouse so many times. If we made a bonfire out of this place, the whole city would get stoned. Babies would get stoned. I’m serious. Fetuses in the womb would get stoned. They’d be like, ‘Ahhhhh, Mom, what the fuck.’”
“Won’t that stuff mess up your voice?”
“What, pot? Haven’t you ever heard of Janis Joplin? Or Stevie Nicks, you think she didn’t smoke weed?”
“Of course I have,” I said, though I hadn’t. The first time Marlena sang “Rhiannon,” picking out the chords slowly on Jimmy’s guitar, I asked what it was. We have to fix this, right now, because your soul is at risk, she had said. She texted Ryder to tell him not to come pick us up, and we spent the rest of the night listening to Fleetwood Mac’s first album until every word imprinted itself on my DNA. It’s Marlena’s music, not the stuff that was on the radio then, that really gets to me. She loved the Pixies, David Bowie, Frank Zappa, and Sublime as much as she liked the slowed-down, good-for-singing stuff, Joan Baez, Billie Holiday, Loretta Lynn, Etta James, and of course the goddess Joni Mitchell, old-school singers her dad introduced her to. I don’t listen to those songs. Years ago, a date played Fleetwood Mac on his antique record player and I was fifteen again, a disorienting sensation, like turning a corner too fast. I told him I wasn’t a fan.
She rubbed her wet eyes with the back of her hand. “Shall we?” she said, and for the second time in less than two hours I acted as her mirror. I stood an instant after she did. I even adjusted my backpack, without thinking, when she shifted the straps across her shoulders.
*
I followed Marlena into the residential neighborhoods surrounding the school. These houses had chimneys and shutters and multiple stories, elegant, weather-beaten shingles, wraparound porches. Marlena claimed to know the last name of every single family who lived in every single house, on both sides of the street. I tested her, pointing to a yellow one with bay windows, a ramshackle brick one with an iron gate. She could always identify the occupants, or she was a very good liar. She told me rambling stories about the people inside; the Grinells, where the father (the brother of the probate judge!) was once arrested for trying to stab the mother, the Davisons, where the oldest son was a famous recluse and suspected albino.
“Mar,” I interrupted. “Where are we going?”
“Oh, ha. To Ryder’s, sorry.”
Just beyond the post office we intersected with a set of train tracks, following them until they ended in a pile of torn-up ties. We continued up the road until we reached a motel called the Mapletree, one word, advertising NO VACANCY/CABINS AND ROOMS. A picket fence enclosed the main building, where neon tubing on a long window flashed out “B-A-R,” one letter at a time. I’d never been to a place that seemed more vacant in my life. A dozen or so one-room cabins dotted the woods around us, as rickety and slapped together as houses a kid would build out of Lincoln Logs.
“He lives in a hotel?”
“Sort of,” said Marlena. “Him and his mom share an apartment in the big building. But it’s cool, because he can pretty much do whatever he wants in the empty cabins. Some have people living there, but lots don’t.”
“So how do they make money?”
“They have renters. There’s this crazy guy whose whole face got burned off, so he just has these holes, like sort of shaped like what should be there? Like nose hole, eye hole, mouth hole? One time I ran into him out here in the dark when I was leaving Ryder’s and I swear to god I almost shit myself.”
The bar—which presumably doubled as the lobby, because there was a sign with room rates hanging next to the register—was full of a tea-colored light that fell through the lace curtains flanking the single window. There was nobody in the room, but a TV against the back wall played a rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond, the volume turned to deafening. A grocery bag on the bar top had Marlena’s name written on it in marker, letters all capitalized. She lifted out the contents one by one: four family-sized cans of Campbell’s Chunky Soup, beef barley flavor, a few rolls of toilet paper, and some mildewy ears of corn, silk tassels hanging limply off the ends.
“From Ryder’s mom,” she said. “I don’t know how to cook this.”
“My mom grills it.”
“Très gourmet.” She loaded everything back into the bag and slid it off the counter, carrying it against her hip. “I guess they’re in 42,” she said, and I followed her through a door just to the left of the TV, which opened onto a salted pathway trickling through the snow, pocked here and there with soda bottle caps and candy wrappers, pieces of tissue, coffee filters maybe, stained a reddish pink. There were only about eight cabins, but the numbers jumped around, as if designed to confuse anyone looking for a specific place. When we reached 42, the number painted in tiny red letters on the door, Marlena shouted, “Knock, knock!” The door swung wide, broken, maybe, nearly hitting her in the face. She stepped back, the groceries shuffling in the bag. “Goddamn,” she said. “You don’t have to break it down.”
“Who’s she?” said Ryder. A smell, like boiled eggs, had followed him out. Up close he was smaller than he’d seemed that night in the car. My height, barely. His hair a pale reddish color somewhere between blond and brown. His nose had a babyish snub, and dozens of faint freckles that intersected with his strawberry birthmark—a lopsided tear, stuck to the skin below his left eye. I was hurt he didn’t remember.
“She’s cool, I promise.”
“She’s cool? You can’t just bring random people over here.”
Marlena directed the next part past Ryder’s head, into the cabin. “Greg, Tidbit, will you tell him to leave me alone?”
“Leave her alone,” a girl’s voice shouted.
Marlena slid past Ryder and disappeared. I tried to trail her, but Ryder grabbed my wrist, startling me, and squeezed until my tendons bent under the pressure of his fingers. “Are you a loudmouth?”
“No,” I said. My consciousness had migrated into the place where our skin touched.
“Not good enough.”
“I’m not.” I tugged my arm, but his fingers clamped tighter. His eyes looked weird—skittery, his pupils fat, as if he wasn’t quite seeing anything. “Ryder, that hurts,” I said, and he let go. “I don’t have anyone to tell,” I told him, rubbing where he’d touched. “You guys are the only people I know.”