Michigan
In the next handful of weeks, I went out of my way to avoid Marlena’s dad. When I saw him getting in and out of his truck, speeding off on his snowmobile through the field behind our houses, I was overtaken by a disorienting mortification, so profound and self-effacing it turned me temporarily invisible. Sometimes out of nowhere I’d feel his fingertips burning my spine, unhooking my bra, the lit end of a cigarette that climbed up and up and up. And then the questions. What if I had stayed? What did I do wrong? Why do I want him to think I’m pretty? I could hardly bear to look at the barn. Marlena was good at shelving difficult things, which could be maddening—when I tried to bring up her mom, or what she’d told me about Bolt that night in my room, she often just refused to answer—but in this instance I was grateful. Now, when we hung out in Silver Lake we hung out at my house or outside, sometimes meeting at the jungle gym. Sal came over a lot more, too, and once even spent the night under a giant fort we made out of sheets in the living room.
During school I was hungover most of the time. I read novels I hid in textbooks, and focused intently on drawing cartoons and writing ten-sentence stories that would make Marlena laugh. Somehow, I finished the year with four As and two C minuses—one in Algebra II, of course, despite Marlena’s homework resuscitations, and the other in Botany/Soil Ecology, which had been capped off with a dreadful final. Beside my grade, in red capitals, Mr. Ratner had written: A TRULY INCREDIBLE DISAPPOINTMENT. I wondered if he knew. After a few weeks, he’d gone right back to normal. Soon, his wife would be pregnant with his second child.
It helped that many of my courses were an echo of things I’d already taken at Concord. I must have done some work—I can recall studying with Marlena on my living room floor, filling out worksheets, that sort of thing—but not much else. What do I remember instead? Chelsea’s eyes, pawing me during choir or English, because—and I vividly remember this—someone had started a rumor that Micah and I were fucking, which made me the target of boys who called me Kitty-Cat in the foul notes they slid into the grate of my locker. I remember smoking cigarettes—cascades of cigarettes, ten cigarettes for every halfway secluded corner of the campus, two hundred cigarettes in the out-of-order restroom, five hundred cigarettes in the wood-shop doghouse, before it got warm enough outside to make that location dangerous. I remember the morning—staring into the bathroom mirror, one of my eyes ringed with black, the other nude—when I realized that eyeliner had become as essential as underwear.
And I remember Ryder, just a few days before the end of the school year, running down the front steps. Mom was dropping me at school a few hours late, because I’d missed the bus. It was suspicious only because he seemed to be trying to look casual, as if it wasn’t odd for him, a seventeen-year-old dropout, to be leaving the high school at eleven in the morning on a sunny day in June.
As the days went on, the person I desperately wanted to be and the person other people believed I was were moving slowly toward each other, and that was the source of my all-consuming happiness, a joy so complete that I walked around in a kind of blackout state, missing most of what was happening around me—Mom’s increasing nighttime absences, the mystery of Jimmy, who I encountered in the dark hallways of our house like an inconvenient ghost, a person I sort of knew whose face, disturbingly, echoed mine. Something was going on between him and Marlena, but I convinced myself that none of the evidence was enough to confirm it. I remember a collage of nights spent curled in the passenger seat of whatever car we could get, Marlena driving, the radio turned up so loud I felt the bass in my chest, the sky vast and dark and we were racing toward the edge, about to tip ourselves into oblivion. I remember being happy, completely present. I have never felt that thoughtlessly alive again.
*
Marlena and I were walking through the woods, from the railcar, and as she talked about how weird Ryder had been acting, how she wanted to cheer him up, it came to me, the keys, the keys to the perfect castle my mom cleaned, tucked into the hanging planter near the door, the keys to the house that I knew would be empty until the Hodsons arrived, a few weeks later than usual because their daughter was getting married, a big destination wedding in Mallorca.
“Oh, Mallorca,” said Marlena. “I much prefer Monaco in the summertime, but I do try not to judge the choices of others.”
“You know how the petite bourgeoisie are, dahling, always trying for the cutting edge.”
“DAY-CLASS-HAY,” Marlena shouted, then hysterics.
“No, but really,” I said. “Think about it. Big house, totally empty, fully stocked bar that’s seriously like an actual restaurant’s. And I have the keys. Or, okay, I don’t have them, have them, but I know how to get in.”
“Oh my God. When did you become such a criminal!?” I blushed and took a bow, the sun dappling my shoulders with warmth. We’d been resolutely sleeveless since the start of May. “Is this my influence? I sort of really want to take credit for this.”