Remember how you used to have fifty different names for me? Stupid stuff, like Syrup, and Melvin, and Turd. When I was a kid I thought that was like the funniest thing on earth, whenever you’d call out Syrup, Syrup, in the grocery store or at the playground.
I’m going to stop expecting things from you now. I am going to stop calling and texting and I’m going to stop asking you questions in my head, thinking of what you would do or say, whether you’d be proud. I bet if I really tried I can remember all fifty. Can you remember even five? The three I just reminded you of don’t count.
Seems pretty backwards, but that’s life, I guess.
PS. The funny and stupid and embarrassing thing is I was always proud of the fact that I’m more like you than Mom or Jimmy. The follies of youth, or whatever.
PPS. Anyway, I hope you’re not dead or something and your silence isn’t because the Canadian government just hasn’t figured out who your family is, because then I’ll feel really guilty that I wrote this.
I hit Send without rereading.
And if he deleted the message and pretended that everything was fine? Well, whether I could forgive him would depend. It would depend on how he explained himself, whether he’d ever even try.
Because I was still here. I was right here, where he’d left me.
*
Yes, Dad showed me how to use a compass, yes he told me some things about trees, yes, sometimes he drove me to the movies and listened to me rehearse for choir tryouts and when I was a little, little girl I remember that he threw me in the air, that he’d kiss my forehead with a fish noise and I’d laugh until I went blind. But what about the stuff I intentionally try to forget? What about the time he and Mom were screaming and he pushed her and she fell against her StairMaster and he kept coming and her foot got trapped and she broke four of the fine bones there, so that she had to wear a plastic boot the whole time we were in Florida on our only true family vacation? What about the time he called Mom an alcoholic and then started smashing things in the kitchen, I was no older than ten, and Mom took me and Jimmy to a hotel where we lived for a week? What about when I was even littler, right before we moved to Pike Street, and I hid in the back of the U-Haul, and when he finally found me he pulled down my pants and hit me with a wooden spoon until Mom started to cry? What about the whole months when he disappeared, what about Becky, what about how sometimes when I asked him questions he didn’t answer, he just stood there staring out the window or at the TV or walked away, leaving me to wonder what I’d done wrong, why I couldn’t make him stay?
By the first days of August, two months in the sun had done something to me, or maybe it was the fault of the weeks, how each one edged me closer to sixteen. My skin was a thorough, reddish brown, my hair white-blond at the temples. I’d become a strong swimmer. If Dad passed me in the grocery store, or walked by me and Marlena sunning ourselves on the beach, I was sure he wouldn’t recognize me.
*
Jimmy and Marlena got in their noisiest fight, at least the noisiest one I ever heard, the morning after Marlena and I got brain-cell-slaughteringly drunk and used a steak knife to carve identical inch-long cuts into our upper arms, halfway between the swell of our shoulders and the crease of our elbows. We bled all over the place, laughing loud enough to wake everyone up, only no one was there—my mom was with some boyfriend we hadn’t yet met, Jimmy was at work, so it was just us, us and the giant box of wine that we’d pretty much drained, us and the steak knife and the blood, the two of us amazed at how little it hurt. And then, hours later, before we passed out, Marlena sobbing on the couch, saying something about not being good enough for anyone, me patting her back, telling her no, telling her shh, bewildered.
“You are so messed up,” I heard him yell at her, the two of them in the kitchen, me curled up on the bathroom floor like a worm. “It’s disgusting. Whatever crazy shit you want to do to yourself, Marlena, I can’t stop you. Honestly, I’m getting tired of trying. But leave my sister out of it. She does whatever you do. She’s fifteen years old. Take some goddamn responsibility.”
“What about me?” she said. Was she crying? “It’s like none of you ever even think about me.”
“Now you’re just being ridiculous,” Jimmy said, and something slammed, and then they didn’t say any more.
For ten years or so I had the scar, noticeable any time I wore something sleeveless, an equals sign with half of it missing. A few months ago, I glanced in the mirror before going out, and realized that it was gone, absorbed into my body like nothing.
*
I hadn’t seen or heard from Ryder for a couple weeks when he texted one hot August night, my window open all the way. Black flies hurled their bodies against the screen, drawn by my bedside lamp. Marlena and Greg and Tidbit and I were full of theories about Ryder’s disappearance. Marlena thought he’d met someone, an idea that made me prickly, Greg thought his mom was sick, Tidbit agreed with both of them to the point of canceling herself out, and I, of course, didn’t say a word.
Ryder must have known that I was alone. Had he texted Marlena, who was at a movie with Jimmy, first? Or maybe he knew my brother’s schedule, that he had that night off. Manipulation was part of Ryder’s nature—I wouldn’t put it past him.
Whats up
Where the hell have you been?
Nowhere
Okayyy
I folded my page, irritated. Marlena was going to like this one, The Turn of the Screw. She loved to be scared.
That’s all you’re going to say?
Miss u
HaHA
Srsly
Then: Send me a pic
My phone had a crappy little camera, and he was always asking for pics. “Of your boobs and ass,” he told me helpfully, the night I touched him through his pants in Marlena’s jungle gym.
give up, not going to happen
Ok then i’ll come get u
I blushed like a moron.
why? what do you want me for
i want to kiss you
I want to kiss you. I imagined him kissing me. He was slower than he’d ever been in real life and he kept most of his spit in his mouth, and he knew my favorite color and that I don’t like marinara sauce, and he didn’t smell like pot or cigarettes or beer, and we were in my bed not in some hot-boxed car or up against a tree or hiding from the house lights in my backyard.
i want to fuck u again so bad cat he wrote before I could answer.
why?
because u r hot
I spent a long time thinking before I typed you are full of shit go back to telling me what you want to do to me.
Then I was actually turned on.
i want to lick ur tite pussy
“Tite”?
no thx.
Had I ever said no to him before? I hadn’t that night in the rowboat, or the time after that, when his name suddenly showed up on my phone, asking me to hang out, or the night he wanted to “go for a walk” while the others watched TV.
pretty plz
no
im gonna leave now
i said no Ryder
why u being a cocktease? be there in 15