Mom made tuna casserole. I remember, because Marlena asked her to leave out the peas. I also remember that we couldn’t get high. Mom, for once, was dangerously close to being out of wine, and Marlena’s investigation of Jimmy’s room turned up no more than a few flakes of weed, most of it collected from his windowsill. What we really wanted was E, or Marlena did, but that was almost impossible to get, and the only person who would text her back was charging twenty dollars a pill. We spent so many nights trying to rustle up ways to get fucked up, and now I wonder who we were doing it for—Marlena pretty much always had her Oxy, and I cared less about the drugs than I did the built-in us-versus-them nature of wheedling our way into a score. That particular night, we gave up more quickly than usual.
Instead, we talked, like we had so many other nights, side by side on my mattress in the dark, quilt pulled up to our chins, my dad somewhere near the Canadian border, hers in the railcar nearby, neither of them thinking of us. I want to believe it didn’t have anything to do with pills, the way Marlena was that night. Her voice quiet and flat and breaking, as she spoke, like the surface of a puddle, so that I didn’t know how to respond to the things she said. Like that her life felt like a sentence, that it had been barreling down on her since she could first speak, that it really wasn’t much of a life at all. Nothing but her voice in my dark bedroom, the tip of my nose cold as ice, our feet clammy and trapped in the sheets, a rustling now and then when she turned onto her side, when she adjusted the pillow, starlight pouring in as usual, because I never had real curtains.
Marlena, thirteen, Bolt kissing her for the first time behind her house, her parents nowhere, how mostly she just remembered letting her jaw go slack, his tongue like a finger in her mouth. A few months later, she kissed Ryder, just to see how it would feel to be the one whose tongue did the moving. The first time she took Oxy it made her think of hot-air balloons—but not of riding in one, of being one. How she used to take Sal out to the railcar when she needed something from her dad, money usually, before she was old enough to know that him just breathing whatever fumes wafted through the cracked windows, the propped-open front door, might be enough to ruin his lungs forever. She thought of her mom whenever she saw worms drying out on the sidewalk after a rainstorm, question marks stuck to concrete. Marlena’s mom used to open all the windows when it rained; Marlena’s dad called her a witch, and even though at fourteen Marlena was too old to believe something so stupid, for a long time she thought her mom had put a curse on them when she left. And if she did, what was it? Which part of her life was the cursed part? Sal got so angry sometimes, triggered by the smallest things, Marlena thought he might give himself a seizure. The summer afternoons her mom used to drive them all to Dairy Queen, to the beach, Sal would always ruin it, dropping his ice cream on purpose, sabotaging the day before someone else did. If Marlena took exactly the right amount of Oxy and began drinking at exactly the right point in the swell of her high, she could be a hot-air balloon for a long, long time, and didn’t I think she deserved to say goodbye to herself sometimes, considering? Marlena in the back of Bolt’s truck, the summer before I moved up north, the first time she ever gave him head. His penis had a strong taste, she said, like Play-Doh. He’s the exact same age as my dad. They were on the basketball team together, two kids from Silver Lake. If she could have anything, one wish, it would be for money. That was it. Just lots and lots of money, like in that children’s book where the lady makes the noodles, she remembered it from fourth grade, how when they read it aloud to her class she was so inspired she drew her own version, money spewing money spewing money, and everyone had laughed.
I did nothing. I was fascinated but not really scared, as if I were listening to a story that I didn’t quite believe was true. I’d known already, of course—that their relationship was a transactional one, favors for pills, favors for food, cigarettes, rides, probably even money. I’d been waiting all that time for her to tell me, for her to just come clean, stop, and in a way I was grateful. I looked up to Marlena—she was tough and beautiful and I never once thought she wasn’t in control. She was beyond me in so many ways; how dumb of me to feel so close, as we talked, that I imagined our outlines blurring.
*
That night, after we talked our way into a world with new edges, bright and singing, the dawn pressed up against my bedroom window like it was jealous, we fell asleep in our clothes on top of my bed. I woke up around ten and she was gone, the bedspread rumpled where her body had been, but no longer warm.
I grabbed my phone off the bedside table and texted: Where did you go, everything okay? A worry pricked me, that something had happened next door, that her dad had come home and freaked out when she wasn’t there. I rolled over and pressed my face into my pillow, my eyes tacky with sleep, still tired. A few minutes later, she opened the door to my room and pushed me toward her side of the bed, her fingers skinny-strong and annoying. I shifted reluctantly.
“I was in the bathroom,” she said.
She wasn’t, and she knew I knew it.
New York
Drink to being a girl. Drink to how every day, we had less time left. Drink to only being each age once. Drink to her hair in sunlight, in snow, in the parking lot of Walmart in the minutes between twilight and dark just after the lamps switch on, her hair underground, below the lake’s surface when you open your eyes and it swirls between you so you can’t quite see her grinning, bubbles escaping from her mouth. Drink to powder. Drink to a face in a rearview window, the way the room’s smell changes when he comes in, the tear in her voice when she whispers, I’m not afraid. Drink to condoms. Drink to birthdays, to saying I love you, to saying no. Drink to doing it for the money. Drink to nicknames. Drink to the bitter drip in the back of your throat. Drink to closing your eyes when you swallow. Drink to a yes you don’t mean. Drink to knowing her less than one year. Drink to questions without answers, drink to raising your hand, to asking anyway. Drink to it was just a summer. Drink to a cut on the upper part of your arm, how blood has nothing to do with the way something hurts. Drink to holding the knife. Drink to salt. Drink to never forgetting, and drink, again, to the lie you tell when you say you won’t. Drink to where what’s forgotten goes.
Raise your glass. Drink to trying, like this, to bring her back.