Marlena Page 6

“Who’s she?” said Ryder. A smell, like boiled eggs, had followed him out. Up close he was smaller than he’d seemed that night in the car. My height, barely. His hair a pale reddish color somewhere between blond and brown. His nose had a babyish snub, and dozens of faint freckles that intersected with his strawberry birthmark—a lopsided tear, stuck to the skin below his left eye. I was hurt he didn’t remember.

  “She’s cool, I promise.”

  “She’s cool? You can’t just bring random people over here.”

  Marlena directed the next part past Ryder’s head, into the cabin. “Greg, Tidbit, will you tell him to leave me alone?”

  “Leave her alone,” a girl’s voice shouted.

  Marlena slid past Ryder and disappeared. I tried to trail her, but Ryder grabbed my wrist, startling me, and squeezed until my tendons bent under the pressure of his fingers. “Are you a loudmouth?”

  “No,” I said. My consciousness had migrated into the place where our skin touched.

  “Not good enough.”

  “I’m not.” I tugged my arm, but his fingers clamped tighter. His eyes looked weird—skittery, his pupils fat, as if he wasn’t quite seeing anything. “Ryder, that hurts,” I said, and he let go. “I don’t have anyone to tell,” I told him, rubbing where he’d touched. “You guys are the only people I know.”

  “I’ll find out if you’re lying,” he said, but I could tell he believed me.

  Inside the cabin it felt like nighttime, even though the overhead was on. Someone had taped sheets of blue tarpaulin over each of the windows. The eggy smell was worse, more chemical, as if the walls were painted with cleaning fluids or just plain bleach; every inhale I took through my nose felt like a slow stripping of the skin inside. I heard a loud whirring, a fan or an air conditioner, but I couldn’t see where it was coming from. There was an unopened canister of acetone on top of the TV. Ryder vanished behind a door that, I presumed, led to the bathroom. Marlena was sprawled out on the bed, belly side down beside a yellowy pillow, her groceries and backpack next to her. At the bed’s foot a skeletal girl used a camcorder to film Greg, the other guy I’d met in the car on New Year’s. Such a slick piece of technology seemed extremely out of place in that room. It occurs to me now that it was probably stolen. I perched on the corner of the bed closest to the exit.

  Greg was taking apart a child-sized bike. As he pulled off the seat, the back tire, he explained everything he was doing, and then carefully laid each part on the ground in front of him—effectively dismantling and rebuilding at the same time.

  “They’re making a movie,” said Marlena. “Greg thinks he’s going to be a star.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  Greg looked up from the bike for a half second. “Because it’s awesome.” He wiped the sweat off his upper lip, the lone part of his face spared by acne.

  “But why a bike?”

  “We found it,” the girl said.

  “Shit,” Ryder hissed. “Shit, shit, shit.” Something clanged. “Fucking shit.”

  “Great,” the girl said. “I love that.”

  “You okay, babe?” Marlena asked, and when Ryder didn’t answer she got up and walked over to the door, opening it all the way. It wasn’t a bathroom—more like a very crowded walk-in closet, where Ryder stood over a card table covered with half-filled two-liter bottles, a decorative basket overflowing with batteries, weird shiny ribbons, and a giant rock like the kind my mom used to separate sections of the garden. There was a squished box of generic cold and sinus pills at his feet. The smell made it hard for me to breathe. Here and there a couple of pieces of clear plastic tubing wound around the bottles, and my stomach started to fizz a warning, telling me Leave, telling me These people aren’t worth it, this is not for you, it doesn’t have to be, you can still go.

  Marlena put her free hand on Ryder’s shoulder.

  “Don’t touch me,” Ryder said, shrugging her off. He was fiddling with something. There was a fan propped in the open window above his head, turned backward, blades spinning fast. Greg and the girl started laughing, the sound a little unhinged, and the fizz traveled from my stomach to my fingertips, saying Go, Cat, go. It’s just, even saying go, something about being there, that fizz, felt good. It felt like having fun, or some cousin of it, and I had missed that feeling.

  A handful of the containers were rigged together with the tubing, but I couldn’t really make sense of what it all added up to—the whole thing reminded me of a deranged project at a science fair, the C+ attempt of a kid with useless parents. I didn’t immediately think drugs, despite what I’d already pieced together. These were drugs, but they weren’t drugs. Right?

  It’s so simple now, to recognize it all for what it was, my basic, human inability to see the forest for the trees, which Dad once told me was the biggest problem with my “otherwise perfect brain.” He’d kissed me when he said it, right where my hair parted. But forest, trees, whatever—when Ryder carefully scraped something from one of the coffee filters and placed it on the minuscule scale, I knew what he was doing, even if I didn’t know the science behind it, all the street names that had led me there, whether he was high at that moment, what my involvement was, simply by being there, watching him, simply by not turning around, going back the way I came, how that one swallowed action would determine who I grew up to be.

  * * *

  Me and Marlena in the woods, six months past that day at the Mapletree, summertime, four months or so before she died. We sneaked out of our houses and met up in the jungle gym. We didn’t wear shoes: it had been part of the dare, one of the ways we showed off our wildness. In the morning I’d pick grit out of my heel with my thumbnail, lower my feet into the steaming bathtub, and hiss, the pain a kind of sweetness, as dirt and blood spiraled through the water. I’d asked her before, tiptoeing around it, but those nights, crickets thrumming all around us like the mad whispers of the world itself, me drunk or sober, her pretty much always at least a little high, the stars sliding down into the trees like something that had held on for a long time and was ready, finally, to let go, I’d push her for a why. Over and over I asked her. If she hated meth so much, after it scrambled her dad’s brains, drove her mom to who knows where, after her cousin Barry died when his backpack exploded, why was it okay for her that Ryder cooked? How could she spend the money he made off that shit, how could she wait in the car while he sold it to teenagers from Boyne City, to his mom’s friends, to the fudgies who overflowed from the beachside condos in the summer? “You’re so naïve,” she said, that glow to her that lives in lost things, that sets apart the gone forever like the worst kind of blessing. Was the light there then? I can’t remember her without it. “I want to know what the world looks like to you. I want to be able to see things like you do, to decide so easily that one thing is right, that this is good”—she plucked a blade of grass and set it carefully on the blanket—“and that this”—she plucked another—“is bad,” and tore it up.

  Marlena called me naïve, but what I really think she meant is privileged, a word people use like an insult in New York, but that I’ve always taken to mean safe. Privilege is something to be aware of, to fight to see beyond, but ultimately to be grateful for. It’s like a bulletproof vest; it makes you harder to kill. When we shook out the blanket, the torn-up blade of grass fluttered in pieces to the ground.

  “It’s about money, Cat,” she’d say. “That’s all it is.”

  * * *

  By the time Jimmy pulled up in Mom’s new-to-us Subaru—she called it the bootie, because it was black and shaped exactly like an ankle boot—I’d just made it back to KHS and was waiting, as if I’d been there since the last bell rang, under the overhang by the main doors. Students swarmed the parking lot, their shouts rising in foggy bursts.

  Jimmy idled alongside the curb. I jumped in, slamming the door. “Drive, please,” I told the glove compartment.

  “That bad, huh,” he said.

  I knew that the most efficient way to lie and get away with
it required maintaining a kind of wounded reticence, another thing I learned from Dad. “What’s with the patchouli-smelling cologne in your glove compartment, punk?” I heard Mom ask once, almost flirting. She couldn’t even accuse him of something without trying to be cute, trying to convince him to like her. She’s less like that with Roger. Marlena’s manner with Ryder reminded me of how my mom danced around my father. And she’s cool, I promise. Her jumpy, too-quick smile, her lips cracked from the cold, flaky skin glued in place with hot pink gloss. Mom had forced a giggle and turned her focus to the chicken, flicking on the oven light and staring through the glass as if it’d asked her a question. Dad took his beer into the TV room where he sat in silence, all huffy and something else, almost disgusted, like she’d just spat on him. I heard the whole exchange, standing in the refrigerator’s blank light, This is fine, just getting a drink, nothing odd going on here.

  “Oh, c’mon,” Jimmy said, trying, and I shot him a look without looking, casting my eyes to the side, to gauge if he was suspicious. He fiddled with the heat, turning it down and then up to blasting, so that the blower filled the car with noise. There was no way I smelled normal. A chemical sharpness clung to the edges of every breath I took. Plus the backpack slumped against my feet was so deflated for a girl supposedly enrolled in two AP classes that I kept trying to nudge it under the dashboard to keep Jimmy from noticing.

  “What do you want me to tell you,” I said, making eye contact with a child in a car opposite ours, stalled, too, at the light. “It was a regular day.” Snowflakes like sequins on Marlena’s shoulders. Ryder, shoulder bones elbowing through his T-shirt, his powdery smell, a few wiry strands emerging painfully from his cheek. All that trash on the table, what it added up to.

  “It gets better, you know, this high school bullshit. I swear to you.” He was trying to be nice, but I felt myself getting pissed off. He’d been on Homecoming court. Plus, he was a boy. It was different. In high school, girls did the liking; boys got to pick. He had no idea what I felt like.

  China King Buffet was between a women-only fitness center and a Hallmark store, in the strip mall that segregated Silver Lake from Kewaunee. We only had Chinese food twice a year—after the first day of school, and after the last. A family tradition started by Dad, I told myself, but it was probably Jimmy, the one who still puts soy sauce on everything. Mom was waiting at a table in the corner, drinking a smudgy glass of wine. “I sent Jimmy to get you so I could hold a table,” she said, getting up as if to hug me. “It was on the way!”

  Mom could identify what you’d had for lunch hours after you’d eaten. “Pepperoni pizza today,” she’d say, kissing me on the cheek after I traipsed off the bus. I twirled into my chair, trying to avoid her, and lifted a water glass, sloshing half of it onto the neck of my shirt.

  “Look at those suckers,” she said, glancing at the people waiting for a table. I hated how she loved to pretend like the dumbest, most obvious things were minor miracles.

  When the waiter came, Jimmy ordered what we always did; veggie fried rice, sweet-and-sour chicken, chow mein, but three eggrolls instead of four for the table. This time, no beef broccoli. As the waiter marked down our orders, I reopened the menu and scanned the options.

  “And an order of Peking Duck, please.” It was the most expensive thing listed, by at least ten dollars. The waiter’s pen hovered over the pad. He looked at Mom, like, Huh?

  “You don’t like duck,” Mom said, her voice remote and teacherly, as if she were talking to someone else’s child.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “It’s twenty-seven dollars,” Jimmy hissed. “You’ve never even had it.”

  “I had it at a friend’s.”

  “What friend?” Jimmy asked.

  “Haesung.” I could almost remember eating duck at Haesung’s. Dark, greasy meat, sugary sauce in a tiny ceramic bowl, Haesung’s kitchen table, made of easily dirtied glass. “Her parents made it all the time.”

  “Okay,” Mom said. And then, to the waiter, “We’ll have the duck, but no eggrolls please. And no chow mein.” The waiter nodded and disappeared, relieved.

  “Great,” said Jimmy. “Thanks for taking off the one thing I like.”

  “You didn’t have to go to school.”

  “You’re right,” Jimmy said. “I just had to work for eight hours.”

  “Enough,” said Mom, and we all fell quiet.

  Jimmy started telling me I needed to scrape the beads of dried paint out of the carpet in my room. I told him he wasn’t my father so he could shove the paint beads up his ass. Then Mom told me to knock it off, and Jimmy told her to stop butting in, and I said that they were both ruining my life and Jimmy called me a fucking maniac and Mom rolled her eyes and finished her wine and ordered another glass and all three of us went silent for a little bit before the waiter brought the fried rice.

  The duck arrived a couple beats after the rest of the food, floating through the dining room on a huge platter, drawing the gazes of every table. There were a dozen pieces of meat on the plate, all covered with golden skin. The spectacle made me blush, which Jimmy noticed with something like triumph, leaning back in his chair.

  “Yum,” Jimmy said. Under the skin, the meat was sort of purple.

  “Someone certainly has enough to eat,” Mom said to her wineglass. Fried rice was my favorite, but I refused to take any. Instead I ate so much duck my face felt swollen.

  As we were leaving, Mom stopped in front of a bulletin board inside the foyer and studied the flyers: lost pets and calls for babysitters and personal ads and advertisements for music lessons, all edged with phone numbers that waggled in the heat from the radiator. She tore off a couple of numbers and stuffed them in her coat. Before my parents divorced, Mom hadn’t worked, aside from the odd babysitting job here and there. On school mornings, she would wake me up with a ritualistic cheerfulness—throwing open my door, setting out the cereal and the milk, warming the car for twenty minutes before we drove to school. I hadn’t really paid attention to it all until, in Silver Lake, it stopped. She had liked to hunt for flat stones to paint on—a hobby that pained me. Haesung loved the one my mom made for her; she kept it on her bureau. Her initials curled around the waist of the tiny cello painted on the stone’s broader side. I keep one of those rocks on my desk at work—a flat gray stone transformed into a sunflower, two of the petals half chipped off. Another on the shelf above the stove. I put my phone beside it when Mom calls me, hitting Speaker so I can hear her while I cook or open mail, her voice filling the apartment. I regret that I spent so many years trying to escape her; the second I really did, I wanted her back. I can say it easily—I love my mother. But that year, and for five or so after, I could hardly think it. I remember hating how all my friends adored her—I sometimes wished she wasn’t mine, so that I could love her so easily, so naturally, too.

  “Look, housecleaning,” Mom said when we were in the car, turning around to me and waving a slip of paper. “Thanks to you kids, that’s something I know I’m good at.” I wasn’t listening. All I cared about was how long I could get away with not going to school.

  * * *

  That night, I had a lot of trouble falling asleep—a condition that had seemed to come with Silver Lake. I slid my right hand under the waistband of my pajama pants and knuckled my middle finger into myself. A tingle spread all over my lower body, so that I lifted my pelvis toward my hand. I shut my eyes, trying to erase what cycled through my mind as my finger moved; a collage of colors and smoke and the chipped lilac on Marlena’s nails and words too, like Dad, like her, like no and then yes, okay, yes, yes, yes. Through it all swirled the image of a muscular, tattooed arm wound up in hair, white-blond but somehow mine, as in a dream when you’re yourself and also not. My scalp itched.

  The sensation intensified, frustratingly so, and sweat broke out along my upper lip and around my temples. I threw the covers off my body and pushed my pants partway down, still rubbing myself over my underwear, full of a weird,
physical certainty that if I stopped, whatever huge and terrible thing I was on the verge of would not happen. I looked up at the window, suddenly nervous that Marlena, all the way inside her sleeping house, could somehow hear me. I pressed into myself harder, but the urgency ebbed and the feeling turned back into a tingle. I removed my hand and covered my eyes with my palms. My fingers smelled. I pinched the skin on my upper arm, tugging it away from the bone. Flabby. Flabby and gross.

  It was as if, for a moment, I’d forgotten who I was. My body embarrassed me, especially the parts whose normalcy I couldn’t confirm by judging them against other people’s. Haesung, I knew, had liked to use the detachable shower head in her parents’ bathroom to come. But I couldn’t replicate the intensity of what she described—every time I told her I thought I’d done it, gotten myself off, she looked at me smugly. “It’s not something you think,” she’d say, quoting from the women’s magazines I’d read too. “It’s something you know.”

  “I know that I think I have,” I’d say, but her look would stay. What was it supposed to feel like? I usually tried in the shower, standing up, with my eyes screwed shut. Finally, after what felt like a million long, agonized minutes, I would feel something, like teetering on the edge of an itch, the start of a crescendo—and then, gone. Haesung told me to fantasize, so I’d picture the guys from the Abercrombie billboard, who would eventually devolve, thanks to my focus, to rows and rows of abs. Back then, I secretly believed there was something wrong with me. This worry extended beyond sex, but was especially potent in that arena, mixed, as it was, with a powerful current of shame. I don’t know where that came from. Maybe it had something to do with Mom and Dad, how they were either icy or on top of each other, the atmosphere in our house determined largely by something that went on—or didn’t—in their bedroom, and that caused both of them a lot of grief. Or maybe it was just the fact that I was a girl.

  I got up and went to the bathroom, where I washed my hands twice in scalding water, soap frothing up my forearms. Back in bed, I couldn’t shake the sense that I’d been seen. Somewhere along the way, I’d internalized the idea that sex, my body, wasn’t something I could take pleasure in unless a man did first. If I wasn’t hot, and so far I’d had no reason to think I was, what was my body for? I burrowed under the covers, pulling them over my head. Like so many teenagers, I was always worried that someone would catch me up to no good, and full of a contradictory, deflated surprise when no one found me out—or ever paid anywhere near as much attention to me as I paid myself.