*
At first, she seemed fine. Quiet, but fine, maybe even relieved that it was over, that now she had her answer. Her family was broken beyond repair. She must have felt at least a little bit free. She stayed with us the next few nights, sleeping in my room with me, and not once did I hear her crying, or wake up to find her gone.
But that Sunday, the two of us trapped at my house without a ride and nowhere to go anyway, she told me she wanted to start staying at her house again. “It’s gonna take two whole paychecks to pay this bill,” Marlena said. The cordless was on speaker, filling the room with the power company’s hold music. The electricity at her house had been shut off since shortly after her dad was arrested. Mom said she was lucky we hadn’t had a real snowstorm yet, otherwise the pipes would have frozen and burst for sure. No one else was home that night, Jimmy working as usual, Mom out on a date with a veterinarian Marlena and I called the Toe. (His real name was Tomas.) We were eating a Mulvie’s apple pie straight out of the tin. Marlena all bones, wearing nothing but a camisole of mine, a pair of Jimmy’s sweatpants, and my coconut hair mask, its scent stronger than the pie.
“I don’t know why you’re doing this. You can just stay here. You really want to sleep in the barn all by yourself?”
“It’s my house. I grew up there.”
“So?”
“So,” she said, that mocking voice again. “So? So maybe I want to go home. Maybe I’m sick of being here all the time. You and Jimmy always breathing down my neck.”
“You’re being such a bitch.”
She tucked the phone under her arm, picked up the pie tin, and slammed off down the hall. The door to my brother’s room banged shut. “Maybe when you’re gone you’ll stop using my shit,” I yelled. I didn’t care. It was a Sunday night and I had a paper to write. I was sick of her, too.
*
Sorry, she texted me the morning after we fought, a Monday, the day she moved out. It’s okay, I answered, seconds later. You’ve been going through a lot.
not an excuse
well you’ve always been a cunt
ur the only person in the world who uses apostraphes in texts
because i’m a GENIUSSSS ps it’s apostrOphe
holy shit!
what?
i just died … of boredom
Greg and Tidbit gave me a ride home that afternoon. I knew that Marlena was at her house, not mine, because the barn’s windows glowed, and the leaves in her front yard were raked into a pile. She let me in but didn’t look me in the face, her eyes skating around the periphery of the room. Her words dropped, hit the ground, rolled away. Something about independence, about finally having the time and space to be who she wanted, about focusing on her music, learning to play the electric guitar. A lot of what she said did not make sense. Now she was a grown-up, without her dad, without Sal holding her back, without anyone really, and she needed to figure out how to do that, what that meant. She opened the fridge and handed me a can of Natty Ice, cracked one herself. I was so much younger than her, and Jimmy didn’t really understand her life, they’d had such different childhoods. The golden boy. She knew he thought she was trashy, she said, and then laughed way too loud. “Hot, but trashy.” I objected to that, but she wasn’t listening to me. “My family,” she said. “Tell me honestly he doesn’t look down on my family. What passes for. Can you?” She finished her beer and started in on mine.
The barn was almost empty, all the trash cleared off the Ping-Pong table, the dirtier of the two beanbags atop a pile of trash outside the back door, the sink free of dishes, a perfume-y smell to the air, something that she’d lifted from my mom, a plug-in. Sal’s drawings had been replaced by tack holes in bare wall. Marlena said something about getting in trouble at work, making a mistake with the register, and I just nodded. After she finished venting, after some torturous small talk about school, as stiff as if we’d never met, I left. That was what she wanted, and so that’s what I did. I’d been distracted anyway, antsy, my head whirring with the little details of my day, thinking of my sort-of friend Caroline, how she’d asked me at lunch if the rumors were true, whether Marlena and I were close, how Caroline had leaned in, awe and fear in her voice, and whispered I heard she had sex with two guys at once.
I tuned Marlena out. She was messed up, losing the thread of her conversation right in front of me, and I didn’t want to deal with her. Because that’s what she meant by needing space. She wanted to get high without interruption, and I both knew it and did not object.
*
The next time I was over there, I saw a bent spoon on the barn’s kitchen table. It was November, maybe, near the end. I didn’t ask, and I didn’t tell. I haven’t, until now. And then, a few days later, I picked up her coat off the couch, to make room to sit, and a needle fell out. It slid out of her pocket, a sitcom punchline, so tidy, as if the universe itself was offering us another ending. A couple of centimeters of amber fluid inside. I put the needle back and draped her coat carefully across the armrest. I thought being her best friend meant keeping her secrets. I trusted that she knew what she was doing. That fall, she wore long sleeves even when she slept. I was no longer so na?ve.
*
Dusk, football weather, the air sulfurous from the fire smoldering in Marlena’s front yard; she’d been burning the trash from the barn in shifts. Mom and I were just back from the grocery store—her Bridge Card was newly full, and we’d returned from our monthly pilgrimage to Walmart with bags and bags of stuff, cans of tomatoes and beans, boxes of pasta, a humongous sack of rice. I was to unload the car while Mom put stuff away. Marlena and Bolt teetered out of the barn. They both wore ridiculous, bubblegum-pink sombreros, the kind you can win as a prize at a county fair, and Marlena had on the high-heeled boots that I knew were a gift from her mom, one of those precious things she was always saving for a special occasion that never came.
“Mar,” I called, but she jumped up into Bolt’s truck and shut the door. I started toward them, leaving a bag of onions on the driveway. The lights flashed on and the truck began backing out of the driveway. Bits of papery ash floated in the wind.
“Call you later!” Marlena shouted through her half-open window, as the glass slid up. A piece of the hat got stuck between the window frame and the glass, so that she had to unroll it and tug it out, jerking her head. I couldn’t see her face, underneath all that brim.
“Just for a drive,” she told me, when later came. “We just went for a drive around.”