Without Marlena to hold us together, Ryder and Greg and Tidbit and I lost touch. In July, Ryder was arrested, caught on camera vandalizing a trout fishery a couple miles from Marlena’s house. Greg got a job at Hooker’s, the dry cleaner downtown, and enrolled in the community college. He didn’t disable his YouTube profile, but he took every last video down. Sometimes I saw one of them from a car window, or at the beach, or just walking on the opposite side of the street. We didn’t talk. As far as I know, they’re all still in Silver Lake.
I did not succeed at Concord, not as I had as a freshman, and not as I’d imagined I would. My dorm room was a bleak cement square. The cafeteria served stroganoff, cheesy casserole, vats of chili—I survived on apples and chalky cubes of tofu. On Saturdays, I signed off campus and walked to the nearest grocery store, where I stole pints of no-name vodka from the bottom shelf of the liquor aisle. Back in my room, I poured the vodka into plastic water bottles and lined them up in our mini-fridge. My roommate, a serious girl from Mexico City, who was deeply frightened of me, may have known that I was often drunk, and certainly knew that I skipped a lot of class, but did not tell. Haesung had fallen in with a new group of girls, and our interaction was limited to a kind nod when we passed each other in the halls. My genuine apathy and cultivated taste for self-destruction gave me a kind of cool-girl air, so that I found myself left alone and treated with a kind of nervous respect. My grades slipped. I would go weeks without doing work and then suddenly put all my energy into a paper or project, rescuing myself from failure with a single exceptional grade. My closest friend was my suitemate, Jessica, who had a prescription for Adderall—once, desperate for a pill, which I needed to help me write fourteen pages overnight, I traded her my jacket for twenty orange milligrams that I crushed with my school ID. I licked the desk clean of powder and pointed my middle finger at Jessica when she laughed. On cold days, I wore three sweatshirts, one on top of the other. I lost pound after pound, until I was as skinny as Marlena. I had a fling with a very popular boy named Alejandro, who had gauges in his ears and kissed me earnestly. He told me he loved me the first time I gave him a blowjob, his hips jerking when he came, hot and bitter, against my throat, a taste not unlike the nasal drip of a pill, except more and gluier and easier to rinse away. I felt nothing when he said it, and nothing, later, when he held me against his chest in his narrow bed and cried, having heard I’d made out with someone else. Most mornings, come dawn, when the alarms shut off, I sneaked out my dorm’s back exit and wandered down to a semicircle of pines on the far border of campus, where I smoked the cigarettes I somehow always had. I liked to watch the sun come up. I liked how I could rely on its ludicrous beauty—giant slashes of color, a swirl of birds scattering up and up—and how big and empty I felt, watching it without her.
*
I chose to stay on campus instead of going to Silver Lake for Thanksgiving. It took some convincing, but I got Mom to agree by telling her that I was drowning in schoolwork, that tons of kids stayed behind to work on their college applications. Spring break, I’d do the same. But for winter break, I had no option; the dorms closed.
The day he came to pick me up, Jimmy waited for me in an armchair in the dorm lobby, his hair in his eyes, causing a ripple of agitated interest in the girls, who pretended not to look at him when they rolled their suitcases by. The two of us passed the long car ride north in silence. After months among the ivy-swaddled buildings of Concord, our house, sitting at the end of its short, unpaved driveway, struck me as unutterably pathetic, the sum total of my family’s failures—a small-windowed, grayish box on a street of trailers and A-frames, closed in by snow and trees and the shadow of Marlena’s barn, which radiated emptiness like a toxic gas. The weather was the same as the day I met her. Sleet. Mom came outside before we were fully parked. You’re so skinny, she kept saying, touching my hair, my shoulders, my arm, trying to hold my hand. She does this still, touches me too much whenever we are together, as if to prove to herself that I, her prodigal daughter, am real.
With one exception, I spent my fourteen days in Silver Lake almost entirely on the couch, watching TV until my brain felt like static. I could feel Marlena’s house out there, empty but breathing still, watching us. I slept a lot, and ate a lot. Probably, I was withdrawing from the Adderall. Mom had begun a long-distance relationship with Roger, a ski-shop manager she’d met online, who would eventually become her second husband. She wandered around the house chattering to him on the phone; for New Year’s, she drove to Ann Arbor, to celebrate the changing year with him. Jimmy and I sat at home alone. Both of us went to bed before midnight.
A day or two before I was scheduled to go back down to school, restless and thinking of her, I took my cigarettes, crammed my feet into a pair of Mom’s boots, and set off out back. I went the long way around the house, so that I wouldn’t have to walk through the little section of yard where Marlena and I so often met, that valley between our houses. I passed the jungle gym where I first touched the incongruously silky skin of Ryder’s penis, where Marlena and I made up our stupid songs about love. The trees thickened. I’d done things among them and I remembered as I walked, there, that tipped-over tree where Marlena and I once watched the day break, there, poking up from the snow, a knot of roots where I’d squatted, drunk, and peed as hard and fast as I could, praying the others wouldn’t see.
On that soggy winter day, numb rows of pines extended out around me for miles, their needles dull and white-tipped. In the clearing, the snow was unbroken. A tatter of caution tape still marked the railcar, hanging limply from the handle. The day was windless and campfire-scented from the neighborhood trash fires and so unseasonably warm that I’d begun to sweat—with every step, my boots sank to my shins, so I had to shuffle the snow aside, building my own snaking path.
I touched the tape, my fingertips cleaning off the dirt, revealing the brighter yellow underneath. I hadn’t been so close to the railcar since that early day in Silver Lake, when I’d gone out for a walk and discovered it. The times I’d come out here with Marlena, when she’d had to get something from her dad—or probably, it suddenly occurred to me, just Bolt—she’d make me wait way back in the trees, so I wouldn’t be seen. For my own good, she said. Like most of the trailers in Silver Lake, the car was propped up on cinder blocks. The black paint was peeling, especially on the windows. In places the color was scratched or rubbed out, so you could see through the dirty glass to the other black-painted side.