I scooped the last of the bean dip onto a saltine and typed in my email login and password, hoping for something from Dad. Nothing. I opened a blank email, wishing I was sober enough to write him something about all the ways he’d failed, wishing I knew how to put words to the horrible cosmos inside me, to explain. Would it worry him to get an email from me this early in the morning?
“Pay attention to me,” Marlena demanded, thrusting one of her legs over the couch’s armrest until her feet knocked my elbow, jittering my hand across the keyboard.
“Okay, okay,” I said.
“If you were going to kill yourself,” Marlena asked, snapping a cracker between her teeth, “how would you do it?” One of her arms was crooked behind her head. The white tips of her fingers curled against her jaw.
“Drowning. Like what’s-her-name. The writer. Virginia Woolf. Pockets full of horseshoes, or something.”
“Drowning! That’s terrible. That’s gotta be the number one worst way to do it. It takes such a long-ass time.”
“No, it’s like freezing,” I swiveled in the chair, for emphasis. “At first it hurts and maybe you regret it, but only for a second. And then it gets peaceful, and you just want to go to sleep.”
“I think I’d use a gun,” Marlena said, staring at our whirring ceiling fan. “Or maybe I’d just get, really, really high. Pfft. Like a blaze of glory.” She kicked my chair, hard, over and over, so that I spun so fast I nearly tipped to the floor.
“You know who I hate,” I said, refreshing my email in-box. Still Dad-less.
“Let me guess.”
“He has a mustache now,” I said. “I hate him for that. And for Becky literally being twelve. Also the time he was an hour and ten minutes late picking me up from Sunday school. The fact that I have his fucking eyes. And his stupid dimple.”
“You know having a mustache doesn’t really count as a reason to hate someone, right? Actually, most of these things don’t really count. The reasons I hate my dad are like, because he spent all of our money and I had to ask the neighbors for food.”
“The mustache does count, it does. It’s sick. It’s a symbol,” I said, but I knew I’d been childish. And then, afraid that I’d monopolized the conversation, “What about you?” I assumed she’d start in on Bolt—as we grew closer, I expected she would explain the mystery of his presence. “Who is on your shit list?” She sat there for a second, sucking on an ice cube. “Who, Mar?”
“Mr. Ratner,” she said, spitting the ice into her wine cup. “My freshman year science teacher.”
“Not Bolt?”
“He’s harmless,” she said, but she was lying, and even drunk I knew it. “Mr. Ratner is in schools around girls all day, five days a week. That’s probably why he took the job in the first place.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Mr. Ratner,” she said. “Because he was nice to me. Because he made me feel like I was so special, like I was better than everyone else. At first it felt like winning something, and he knew it did, that no teacher ever really paid attention to me before, except when they were marking me down for missing a test or whatever. He’d like look at me from up in front of the room, like Hey you, and I really believed that it was about that. Like that I was good at science.” It could happen to any girl; maybe that’s why she liked telling it more than talking about Bolt. One day, when she was searching in the supply cabinet for a beaker, Mr. Ratner slid his hands into the back pockets of her jeans. She left, and got a D, and though she technically deserved it for not going to class again that semester, we hated Mr. Ratner with a particular intensity.
It didn’t take long for her to switch from crimes to justice. She spent a long time describing the punishment Mr. Ratner deserved—the violent and creative dissection of his balls by a diving falcon, lured by the mouse tied against the shaft of his penis. Marlena was the best at justice; the crimes depressed her. She wanted to serve hard-boiled eggs whose yolks were replaced with tiny sacs of a stranger’s jizm to the men who had wronged her. We wanted them murdered, dismembered, stored in ice chests, and then accidentally eaten by their own brothers. But never, in all the months we went on those bored rants, embroidering the crimes done to us by most of the men we knew, did she get to Bolt. How much of her gruesome, ridiculous made-up violence was really meant for him?
“I don’t know,” Marlena said, after suggesting that Mr. Ratner simply be lowered, headfirst, into a vat of skin-eating acid. “None of these feel psychological enough.”
“You’re right. What he did to you was really more of a mind game. He’s like my dad. A master manipulator, my mom calls people like that.”
“What in the world,” said Jimmy. “It’s three in the morning.” He stood on the threshold of the living room, blue shadows from the TV projected onto his face.
“Hi,” Marlena said, sitting up. She brushed the crumbs off her chest and pulled down her shirt.
“How was work?” I asked.
“Work,” said Jimmy.
“Awesome. Can you leave?”
“What if I want to watch TV?”
I groaned. Marlena scooted over until she was wedged up against the side closest to me, leaving two entire couch cushions for Jimmy. Despite all that empty room, he sat down on the cushion right beside her, crossing his right leg so his ankle hooked over his knee and the arch of his foot and the curve of her thigh were separated by a whisper.
“Would you like to change the channel?” she asked him, holding out the remote. He took it carefully, as if they were passing something breakable. I don’t think they touched a single time—Marlena was cuddled against the armrest. But when we finally got up to go to bed, just at the moment that night tips over to morning, he said her name.
“Marlena,” he said. “Night.”
“You too,” she told him, lingering near the couch.
“You need a toothbrush or what?” I called, too loud for the hour, from the open bathroom door. Whatever else they said, if there was anything, I didn’t hear.