The day before, after Ryder quit fiddling around behind the curtain, he’d joined Marlena on the bed. They retrieved another joint from Marlena’s Altoids tin. She went outside to light it, and when she came back in the two of them shared it with Greg and Tidbit. Now I’m aware that at any point that afternoon, the four of us could have blown ourselves up. The precaution Marlena took, lighting her joint outside to keep from igniting whatever shit was coming off the pile of chemicals in the corner, was a half-measure at best, like being told something will kill you, shrugging, and doing it anyway. All these things read like signs to me now—she would have known the risks back then, I think.
When Greg made like he was going to hand the joint my way, Marlena snatched it from him, giving me a crinkly-nosed smile, and just like that I was out of the circle. I sat on a bedside table, my knees pulled up to my chest and my back against the wall. My only other option was the mattress, with Marlena and Ryder. Her leg was snugged into the space between his thigh and groin and his leg was hooked comfortably over hers, so that his knee grazed the inside seam of her jeans. Their touching was thoughtless, in a way that I couldn’t relate to. His hand wrapped around her waist and traveled up her shirt, his fingers rippling the fabric.
Where should I put my eyes? I’d never been kissed, or even held a boy’s hand. Even Haesung had had a boyfriend. It seemed rude to watch, but Marlena was the one keeping the talk afloat. And wasn’t it also childish not to look, as if I were embarrassed, or worse, somehow into it? When I stood, explaining that I had to be back by three so as not to miss my ride (I said it with extra emphasis, like I was getting picked up by someone more exotic than my brother), Marlena lifted her head dazedly from its place on Ryder’s chest and said only, “Okay,” before nuzzling her face back into his T-shirt. Greg and Tidbit were still very focused on the bike. They’d messed up something with the chain, and couldn’t get the pedals to spin.
“You were never here,” said Ryder. His eyes were as soft and brown as a cow’s.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Not even if they try to cut off my hand.”
“Ha-ha,” said Tidbit. She licked a smear of grease on her palm and rubbed it with her fingers. I stepped outside, releasing a plume of pent-up smoke into the winter air.
The first bell rang and the last of the morning stragglers made their way into Kewaunee High. I went around to the doghouses, but left almost immediately, not wanting to lurk (This lurker is Cat), waiting for people who weren’t waiting for me. I had even less of a reason to go to class than the day before. If I did go, in fact, I might be asked why I hadn’t appeared on Thursday, and then Mom would be dragged into the mess.
But there’d been no message on the machine when we got home from China King Buffet the night before. For now, I was safe.
I walked downtown, traveling the route Marlena had shown me. Everything was happening in consequence-less free fall. I’d felt something like this before, briefly, in an airport, traveling without my parents. There was a giddy pleasure to going off the rails—I caught myself smiling, and then stopped, blushing, as if someone had caught me.
At the Horizon Café, I bought a black coffee, though Dad had taught me to like it with cream and sugar. The girl behind the counter, her hair dyed tomato-soup red, looked at me funny after I ordered, but soon got bored trying to guess my agenda and returned to her cell phone. I curled up in the window seat and read the Kewaunee News cover to cover—“Waterfront Mansions for Sale,” “Local Teen Sings Solo at Governor’s Dinner,” “87-year old Annie Kowalski is survived by her seventeen grandchildren…,” “Ski Season in Full Swing.”
I left the café and wandered to the library, flashing my Concord Academy ID at the librarian, whose desk floated in the middle of the room. She barely nodded. I didn’t know what else to do, where else to go. The library was a cobwebby expanse, big as a tennis court. Next to the kids’ corner, a row of computers looked out a floor-to-ceiling window facing the street. I sat down at one, shaking the dirty mouse until the screen sprang to life. I stared at my face in the frosted-over window above my computer. I was prettier in reflection. The fragmentary me that lived in shop windows, puddles, the hood of a car passing by, the dark spot in Marlena’s eye—that girl was sheer potential.
I typed Becky’s name into the search engine, but found nothing. I logged into my Hotmail account and opened my most recent email from Dad. It was nearly a month old. I’d barely looked at it, because below the single line of text—how’s my catherine!? missing you! check out the quality of this new scanner! pretty cool, right?—there was a picture of him and Becky. My hand trembled against the mouse. Becky had graduated from Grand Valley State University the year I started middle school, which meant she was tops twenty-seven or twenty-eight. In the photo, she nestled up against my dad, smiling big, holding a bouquet of ugly flowers. You could tell crappy flowers by their neon-colored veins. They had cheap dye jobs, like the girl in the café who thought that by altering something essential about how she looked, she was making herself more herself.
Something ricocheted off the glass above my head. It took me a second to register the origin of the noise. I glanced at the librarian clicking away. The cat on her sweatshirt winked at me, the fluorescent light glinting off its rhinestone irises. Another volley of pings drew my eyes to the window. Outside, no more than a few feet away, Marlena, Ryder, and Greg formed a triangle. Pebbles filled Ryder’s left hand, scooped from the landscaped area near the library’s hedges. He flung them at the glass separating me from them, aiming right for my eyes.
I closed my email. In bird’s-eye I saw myself get up, chair spinning a little as my body left it, leaving through the main doors, just as I really did. But a girl, another one, remained at the computer, safe inside the library, as I walked away. In other words, I watched myself split in two.
*
We climbed the steps of St. Patrick’s in the midday sunshine, like, This is a perfectly normal thing to do on a Tuesday at one in the afternoon. Inside the lobby, they all three dipped their fingers into a basin of holy water, not joking around, and crossed themselves. The church was empty, a bowl of pretty speckled light, Jesus strung on a cross at the altar, his chin dangling toward his chest, torso tense and muscled, almost obscenely so. I plunged my hand into the water, too, and dabbed my fingers forehead to shoulder to chest to shoulder again, confused about which body part to touch in which order. We followed Marlena along a dim passageway. Ryder kept pinching Marlena on the butt and then running loops around her when she tried to slap him. The third time, on his way to her, he tugged the back of my hair. His knuckles whispered against my collar.