*
The only class Marlena went to with any consistency was choir, so most weekdays when I was skipping, after getting dropped off at school by the bus or Jimmy, I met her in the doghouse and from there we traveled our circuitous route around a square mile or so that included downtown, the Mapletree, the underworld at St. Patrick’s, and the breakwall with the lighthouse sitting fatly at its end, where we smoked cigarettes and pot and had once split a mysterious pill that Marlena found under the Ping-Pong table on top of which her family ate their meals. No amount of Internet searching, not even combined with Marlena’s vast knowledge of pills and their varieties and uses, brought us any closer to identifying the small white circle, about the size of a pencil eraser and unstamped. We ate it at eleven in the morning; forty-five minutes later we determined that it was Ecstasy. We spent the rest of the day camped out in the warrens of St. Patrick’s, tracing our arm veins with a thread Marlena pulled from her hat and arguing about heaven. Marlena believed, I did not—that is, until the Ecstasy started shrieking through my bloodstream, setting off fireworks in my fingertips. I decided wasn’t heaven really a concept, a state of mind, and shouldn’t we aspire to have it here, now, instead of in the unreliable future, the future where we were just as likely to be worms as celestial beings, which could be its own kind of heaven, if you really, really thought about it, and so on, for hours. When we were coming down, both of us flat on our backs, our heads tipped toward each other so that they touched, I asked her what sex feels like. “Sometimes it feels like an itch deep inside of you, like in your belly,” said Marlena. “Sometimes it fucking hurts. I’ve had it where it feels like nothing at all. It’s just sex, Cat. It feels like sex. If I had to score it, like, the Olympics, I’d give it a three point five. A four.”
On the days she didn’t skip entirely, I waited for her in the library or the bookstore, biding my time until choir or trig, her unlikely second favorite class, was over. I never connected my truancy with what Dad had done for months, when he pretended to go to work and instead did whatever he did—Becky, certainly, but probably also hours’ and hours’ worth of dumb, time-killing things, the same things I found myself doing. Staring out café windows, tracing the same ten blocks. It was a small town; the only reason I didn’t get caught is nobody knew whose kid I was.
On those long, class-less days, Kewaunee was both our prison and something like an amusement park—any minute could crack open into an adventure, because weren’t we too big and gorgeous and wild for this tiny town, two girls who thought they could only be seen if they allowed it, creeping around J. C. Penney, walking out with six layers of lingerie under our clothes, sneaking into the pub and snaking a coat hanger into the cigarette machine until we dislodged one or twenty packs of Parliaments, unleashing tied-up dogs, coaxing forty-year-old Fred Dixon who lived in an apartment above the Laundromat to drink the yellow water from the bottom of his bong until he threw up out the window and we scrambled down his fire escape screaming with laughter, ordering elaborate coffee drinks in a German accent, cutting each other’s hair in the bathroom of the Mapletree bar and then feigning ignorance when Ryder’s mom demanded we account for the mess, tying stolen thongs around the park benches in the town’s center, singing slowed-down versions of radio songs on the street corner for the four people who walked by, feasting on day-old croissants from the trash can outside the French bakery where they refused to serve us, tattooing the names of our enemies on the walls of every public restroom we could find our way into, driving Ryder and Greg crazy by speaking only in Pig Latin or not at all, with just our eyes and hands, communicating via signals only we understood? We were soooooo bored, hideously, tragically bored. Didn’t we deserve better? Weren’t we the most special thing this place had ever seen?
Nostalgia is no longer considered a sickness, not technically, but it was once—the seventeenth-century Swiss physician Johannes Hofer gave the affliction its name, from the Greek words nostos (home, or even, return home) and algos (pain). A disease, responsible for suicides, the appearance of ghosts, the arrival of disembodied voices. Driving its sufferers manic with longing. Acute melancholy, but specific to an object or place. The diagnosed cases turned up in certain seasons—autumn, commonly—and in the presence of certain songs. “River.” “Landslide.” “California.” “Country Roads.” A-C-G chord progressions. Better to sing. Nostos algos. I want to go home—a phrase that’s stuck on a loop, that I hear before falling asleep, waiting in line for my coffee, tapping the elevator button and rising through the sky to my apartment, worrying the words like a lucky stone, and yet my desire is not attached to a particular place—not to Silver Lake, not to Marlena, not to Mom or Dad or Jimmy. I want to go home, I want to go home, but what I mean, what I’m grasping for, is not a place, it’s a feeling. I want to go back. But back where? Maybe to the first time I heard Stevie Nicks, to watching the snow fall outside the window with a paperback folded open in my lap, to the moment before I tasted alcohol, to virginity and not really knowing that things die, back to believing that something great is still up ahead, back to before I made the choices that would hem me in to the life I live now. A life that I regret sometimes, I think, only because it’s mine, because it’s turned out this way and not some other way, because I can’t go back and change what will happen. What happened to her.