“Are you boyfriend and girlfriend, or?”
“It’s not like that. It’s not serious, serious. It’s just fun. Anyway, I’m kind of like, raw, after Ryder. And he has his own stuff. His ex. That Jenny girl.” She didn’t think it was serious, or he didn’t? Who deserved more of my wariness, my protection? Sometimes, when I saw them together, I believed I was seeing the real thing. “I guess you don’t really get this,” Marlena said, switching to my opposite lid. “How would you?”
“That’s kind of insulting.”
“Oh, Cat, I only mean you’re not very experienced. Just try to be happy for me, and not weird. This is so exactly what I need after Ryder.” She stared right into my eyes when she said that, like she knew about what we’d done together in the rowboat. She licked her fingertip and smudged a stray bit of liner along the outer corner of my eyelid. I didn’t know how to bring it up. Even imagining telling her gave me a kind of phantom anxiety. Because what if she didn’t believe me?
“I’m not cool with you doing whatever you do with Bolt while you’re hooking up with my brother.”
“Okay,” said Marlena, capping the kohl pencil. “Well, we’re not together.”
“He’s my brother. And he really likes you.” She used the eyeliner to poke around in the makeup bag, avoiding my comment. “Hello?”
“Fine,” she said. “I won’t.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“You wouldn’t do that.” The hurt in her voice startled me into backing down.
“No. I wouldn’t. Of course not. Just please try not to lick each other in front of me.”
“I will do my best to restrain myself. But if he walks around in boxers all bets are off.”
“Ew. Oh my God. Ew. I hate you.”
I wiggled away, so that our knees no longer touched. I wished that Jimmy, who only had one day off a week, would take on more hours. In a remote way, I cared about how she handled his heart. But because I’d never really had mine broken, I didn’t know the danger he was in. As long as he worked all the time, we could go on like this, everything pretty much the same.
Because Marlena’s pin was busted and safely tucked away in the pocket of one of my sweaters, and because she was so happy and she looked so well—she’d put on a little weight, and the slight plumpness to her cheeks made her look sweet and younger—I thought maybe she’d eased up on the Oxy. Days went by without her texting Bolt; I knew, because when she texted him her face took on a certain cast, a furtive combination of anxiety and desire, her bottom lip in her mouth, her eyes skittish. Her voice got quieter. But I was wrong. A couple of weeks after the party I unzipped her backpack, looking for cigarettes. She’d dashed over to her house, to tuck Sal in, and I didn’t feel like waiting twenty minutes or whatever for her to come back. I fished for the pack and my knuckles rattled against a big white bottle full of OxyContin, almost full, the kind you see on the shelves at the pharmacy, not made out to anyone. Jimmy didn’t like that she took Oxy—I’d heard them arguing about it—so she’d become more secretive. Now her high was so constant, her supply so steady, that there’d been no nausea, no valleys in her mood.
I could have called my brother and told him. Probably, he was the only one who had a real shot at stopping her. But was it relief I felt, some strange, sick version, when I saw those pills and knew that no matter how ecstatic she seemed with Jimmy, always fiddling with his hair, sprawling across his lap, texting him deep into the night, that he hadn’t been able to solve her problems, either? I wanted to be her most important person, because she was mine.
I put the pills back in her bag and never mentioned them to anyone.
*
The recording was my idea—we’d post it to Greg’s NotYourSanta account, because Marlena didn’t want to make her own profile. Greg had uploaded a few other videos, but the bike one, with Ryder cooking in the background, was by far the most watched. My stomach wrenched when I saw it onscreen, paused on the opening shot in the Mapletree, the stained mattress, the acetone stacked near the TV, but I pushed the feeling away. Nothing had happened yet.
“No offense, guys, but my fans aren’t really after videos of girls singing folk music,” Greg said. He had about fifty followers, though the commenters were active.
doublevision11: Hoho what a f*cking crackhead
treatmelikeanangel: Proactive www.proactive.com
dillypickle44_1: HAHA LAUGHING MY ASS NOTYOURSANTA IS MY HERO
nanabooboo: This guy goes to my school and I have seriously never heard him speak.
melleryeller: omg can’t stop watching this?
He had a point.
“Yeah, but you already have people built in. It doesn’t make sense for us to start from scratch,” I said. “You have an audience. We’re just going to borrow it.”
I shot the video with Greg’s camcorder—just Marlena singing. She picked a Neko Case song about a girl who was so lonely and tired she wished she was the moon, mostly because it suited Marlena’s range and she could play the bones of it on her dad’s acoustic guitar. I was the director. I had her balance on the base of the jungle gym’s slide, a braided ribbon tied around her forehead, the guitar cradled on her lap. I’d drawn a tiny blue star on her left and right temples—we’d been toying around with the idea of starting a band, naming ourselves the Northern Stars. Sometimes we thought it was perfect; sometimes too stupid to bear. It was a windy day, and her hair kept blowing in her mouth as she sang. On the high notes, she intentionally let her voice wobble and crack, a little affectation that gave me the chills. We uploaded the recording and within three days the video had over five hundred views. Holy cow, strangers wrote. Can you say hummer? Get that girl a record deal. HOTTIE XXXXXX, sing to me forever. As more comments accrued, many of them dirty, Marlena stopped looking at the video.
“There’s lots of good ones, too, though,” said Greg, a little drunk on the online attention. “I think you should do another.”
“When you put a camera on anything it makes people think they’re looking at something professional,” Marlena said. “Besides, I don’t need to hear strangers tell me to suck their dicks. I’ve gotten that enough in my life.”
I said she sounded great, but she might be right about a second video. Whenever she finished learning how to play a new song, mentioned recording something else, I said I didn’t feel like it. I told her to stop being so full of herself.
“Who do you think you are?” I said. “Stevie Nicks?”