More than forty-five minutes had passed since she arrived at the party, and she stood up, unsteady on the soft ground, and walked to one of the kegs. She found an empty cup on the ground and filled it halfway with beer. She did another loop, amazed at how easily she went unnoticed by every other partygoer; David, she decided, was either sunk beneath the pond, forever lost, or having sex in one of the cars. She texted: Where R U? but did not expect a reply.
She returned to the same spot at the edge of the pond and took a few tentative sips of the beer. It tasted like fermented skunk. She’d never enjoyed the taste of beer, and yet she forced herself to drink more of it for reasons that her brain couldn’t actively unpack. Eventually, she realized that even if she drank the entire contents of the cup, it wouldn’t be enough to get her drunk, and she dumped out the beer and vowed to sit for fifteen more minutes and then leave. Just then, she heard someone shout, “Hey, bitch!” and, startled, Izzy turned around to see three girls running toward her. She put up her hands to defend herself from the screams of the girls, who suddenly stopped short, momentarily sobered. “Oh, shit,” one of the girls said. “We thought you were someone else.” One of the other girls leaned close to inspect Izzy and then slurred, “Someone we know.”
“Sorry,” Izzy said.
“Maybe she went into the pond,” the first girl offered.
“Here hold this, please,” the drunker girl said, placing a lit joint between Izzy’s fingers. Izzy instinctually began to refuse, but the weirdness of the please, which sounded out of place coming from someone so drunk, caused her to relent. She took the joint and the girls tore off toward the water, not even bothering to shuck off their clothes.
“Are you guys coming back for it?” Izzy asked, feeling like she’d been tricked into taking on a high-interest loan. The girls did not respond, were already shrieking at their bad decision, boys circling them to keep them from running back out. She put the joint to her lips and took a deep puff, holding it so long in her lungs that time stopped and then restarted. She took two more hits, her body immediately easing into inactivity. She watched the party swirl around her, two boys trying and failing to set a hay bale on fire, a girl throwing up into the pond and no one getting out or even caring. Without any sense of how long she’d been there, she flicked the rest of the joint into the pond and, though it took a few minutes, made her way to the truck that she’d signed out from the complex. She pulled onto the dirt road and tried to put as much distance as possible between herself and the party. As soon as she found the highway, slightly more buzzed than she had thought, her phone vibrated and there was a fresh text from David: R U Here? Izzy just kept driving, making her winding way back home.
When she made it home, driving five miles under the speed limit the entire way, she knew it was pointless to try to go to sleep. Instead, ravenous from the pot, she put on some fresh clothes and went into the kitchen. She then made herself some scrambled eggs and pureed some avocado, using the blowtorch to char it, Izzy showing off even without Chef Nicole to witness it, before mixing it up with the eggs. She made herself an iced coffee and took the food into the studio to continue working on the art project, but found Dr. Grind inside, his hands held behind his back as if being careful not to touch anything, looking closely at the tacked-up story by Faulkner. When she opened the door and made herself known, he turned to her without surprise; Izzy, knowing a lot more now about his childhood upbringing and his parents’ thoughts on development, imagined that they had trained him to treat any possible surprise with calm, reasoned actions. He smiled, gesturing to the story. “Sorry,” he said. “I was just doing some light reading.”
She set her plate of food and the iced coffee on the table and then stood beside him, looking at the story that she had now memorized and was almost entirely blacked out with marker at this point.
“I knew that everyone has been helping you with the project and so I decided that I should be a part of it as well. Then I spotted the saw and it looked rather complicated, and I was afraid to touch any of the letters for fear of ruining them. I thought it better to just observe.”
After Jeremy and Ellen had convinced her to accept outside help, other people had chipped in when they had free time. Julie, who was working on her novel, said that it really helped her writer’s block to carve out a few letters, toss them on the pile, and then go back to her computer and keep writing. Izzy had hidden the final page of the story in her house so that she could be assured of finishing it on her own.
“Have you read the story before?” she asked him.
“No,” he replied.
“It’s pretty sad,” she told him.
“I gathered as much,” he said, pointing to the first legible sentence, which read:
She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.
“Does it say something about me that I chose this particular story?” she asked, and he smiled and shook his head.