Marlena Read online

  And so I missed a lot. About Marlena, and especially about my family. Those three people with whom I’d spent most of my life would turn out to be as unknowable as everything else.

  * * *

  The next morning, I took the bus to school—no sign of Sal, though Marlena said that he rode it—and kicked around near the entrance for a while, waiting for everyone to go in, thinking I’d see her, or maybe Greg or Tidbit, which was the only name I’d heard for the painfully skinny girl.

  The day before, after Ryder quit fiddling around behind the curtain, he’d joined Marlena on the bed. They retrieved another joint from Marlena’s Altoids tin. She went outside to light it, and when she came back in the two of them shared it with Greg and Tidbit. Now I’m aware that at any point that afternoon, the four of us could have blown ourselves up. The precaution Marlena took, lighting her joint outside to keep from igniting whatever shit was coming off the pile of chemicals in the corner, was a half-measure at best, like being told something will kill you, shrugging, and doing it anyway. All these things read like signs to me now—she would have known the risks back then, I think.

  When Greg made like he was going to hand the joint my way, Marlena snatched it from him, giving me a crinkly-nosed smile, and just like that I was out of the circle. I sat on a bedside table, my knees pulled up to my chest and my back against the wall. My only other option was the mattress, with Marlena and Ryder. Her leg was snugged into the space between his thigh and groin and his leg was hooked comfortably over hers, so that his knee grazed the inside seam of her jeans. Their touching was thoughtless, in a way that I couldn’t relate to. His hand wrapped around her waist and traveled up her shirt, his fingers rippling the fabric.

  Where should I put my eyes? I’d never been kissed, or even held a boy’s hand. Even Haesung had had a boyfriend. It seemed rude to watch, but Marlena was the one keeping the talk afloat. And wasn’t it also childish not to look, as if I were embarrassed, or worse, somehow into it? When I stood, explaining that I had to be back by three so as not to miss my ride (I said it with extra emphasis, like I was getting picked up by someone more exotic than my brother), Marlena lifted her head dazedly from its place on Ryder’s chest and said only, “Okay,” before nuzzling her face back into his T-shirt. Greg and Tidbit were still very focused on the bike. They’d messed up something with the chain, and couldn’t get the pedals to spin.

  “You were never here,” said Ryder. His eyes were as soft and brown as a cow’s.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Not even if they try to cut off my hand.”

  “Ha-ha,” said Tidbit. She licked a smear of grease on her palm and rubbed it with her fingers. I stepped outside, releasing a plume of pent-up smoke into the winter air.

  The first bell rang and the last of the morning stragglers made their way into Kewaunee High. I went around to the doghouses, but left almost immediately, not wanting to lurk (This lurker is Cat), waiting for people who weren’t waiting for me. I had even less of a reason to go to class than the day before. If I did go, in fact, I might be asked why I hadn’t appeared on Thursday, and then Mom would be dragged into the mess.

  But there’d been no message on the machine when we got home from China King Buffet the night before. For now, I was safe.

  I walked downtown, traveling the route Marlena had shown me. Everything was happening in consequence-less free fall. I’d felt something like this before, briefly, in an airport, traveling without my parents. There was a giddy pleasure to going off the rails—I caught myself smiling, and then stopped, blushing, as if someone had caught me.

  At the Horizon Café, I bought a black coffee, though Dad had taught me to like it with cream and sugar. The girl behind the counter, her hair dyed tomato-soup red, looked at me funny after I ordered, but soon got bored trying to guess my agenda and returned to her cell phone. I curled up in the window seat and read the Kewaunee News cover to cover—“Waterfront Mansions for Sale,” “Local Teen Sings Solo at Governor’s Dinner,” “87-year old Annie Kowalski is survived by her seventeen grandchildren…,” “Ski Season in Full Swing.”

  I left the café and wandered to the library, flashing my Concord Academy ID at the librarian, whose desk floated in the middle of the room. She barely nodded. I didn’t know what else to do, where else to go. The library was a cobwebby expanse, big as a tennis court. Next to the kids’ corner, a row of computers looked out a floor-to-ceiling window facing the street. I sat down at one, shaking the dirty mouse until the screen sprang to life. I stared at my face in the frosted-over window above my computer. I was prettier in reflection. The fragmentary me that lived in shop windows, puddles, the hood of a car passing by, the dark spot in Marlena’s eye—that girl was sheer potential.

  I typed Becky’s name into the search engine, but found nothing. I logged into my Hotmail account and opened my most recent email from Dad. It was nearly a month old. I’d barely looked at it, because below the single line of text—how’s my catherine!? missing you! check out the quality of this new scanner! pretty cool, right?—there was a picture of him and Becky. My hand trembled against the mouse. Becky had graduated from Grand Valley State University the year I started middle school, which meant she was tops twenty-seven or twenty-eight. In the photo, she nestled up against my dad, smiling big, holding a bouquet of ugly flowers. You could tell crappy flowers by their neon-colored veins. They had cheap dye jobs, like the girl in the café who thought that by altering something essential about how she looked, she was making herself more herself.

  Something ricocheted off the glass above my head. It took me a second to register the origin of the noise. I glanced at the librarian clicking away. The cat on her sweatshirt winked at me, the fluorescent light glinting off its rhinestone irises. Another volley of pings drew my eyes to the window. Outside, no more than a few feet away, Marlena, Ryder, and Greg formed a triangle. Pebbles filled Ryder’s left hand, scooped from the landscaped area near the library’s hedges. He flung them at the glass separating me from them, aiming right for my eyes.

  I closed my email. In bird’s-eye I saw myself get up, chair spinning a little as my body left it, leaving through the main doors, just as I really did. But a girl, another one, remained at the computer, safe inside the library, as I walked away. In other words, I watched myself split in two.

  * * *

  We climbed the steps of St. Patrick’s in the midday sunshine, like, This is a perfectly normal thing to do on a Tuesday at one in the afternoon. Inside the lobby, they all three dipped their fingers into a basin of holy water, not joking around, and crossed themselves. The church was empty, a bowl of pretty speckled light, Jesus strung on a cross at the altar, his chin dangling toward his chest, torso tense and muscled, almost obscenely so. I plunged my hand into the water, too, and dabbed my fingers forehead to shoulder to chest to shoulder again, confused about which body part to touch in which order. We followed Marlena along a dim passageway. Ryder kept pinching Marlena on the butt and then running loops around her when she tried to slap him. The third time, on his way to her, he tugged the back of my hair. His knuckles whispered against my collar.

  We reached a gymnasium, wincing in the brightness. A single-serve carton of whole milk straddled the half-court line, its mouth open, plugged with a straw. A closet bisected a row of scuffed mats fastened to the wall. We shut ourselves inside. Ryder dragged a trash can full of basketballs from a corner. Underneath was a trapdoor, and behind that, a ladder stretching into the shadows. “Newbies first,” Marlena said. She looked at me, bored.

  When I reached the bottom, I craned my head at their three faces, so like how they’d been outside the library window. A triangle, Marlena always at the top. How much of that was a trick of my perspective? Ryder nudged her with his shoulder and she smiled at him uncertainly, disappearing from view. The trapdoor thudded shut.

  The gloom clung—I felt like it was on me. Marlena’s voice rose and fell like an angry neighbor’s in a nearby apartment, mixed with the sound of laught
er. Behind me something exhaled, a greasy wind against my ear, the temperature of a belch. Nobody in the world knew where I was. I reached out a hand to steady myself, but my fingers glided along the dusty surface and slipped through, into thin air, and I stumbled, banging my shin against the ladder.

  I climbed up and pummeled the trapdoor with my fists, almost losing my balance. The opening flooded with light and I scrambled toward it, heart slamming.

  “Wow,” said Ryder. “We were just getting some flashlights.”

  I pulled myself up, using the trash can for support. “Sorry,” Marlena said, and blew on my skin, her breath coffee-stale. “He’s feral.” She inched her shirt over her thumb and rubbed at my nose. “You’ve got dust on you.”

  Ryder went first this time, followed by Greg. Ryder gave a spooky, trilling moan as he disappeared down the hole.

  “I’m not going back in there.”

  “They’ve done that to me so many times,” Marlena said. “It’s way less scary with the flashlights, promise.”

  What was I supposed to do? The time had long passed for me to say no to them.

  We traveled through a tunnel, the floor and walls made out of cement. Steam rose and fell like breath, coming from a row of boilers. Greg and Ryder each held a flashlight. The beams chased each other up the ceilings, where graffiti spelled out crushes and grudges and nonsense. Marlena hooked her arm through mine, keeping me so close that when we got out of step I elbowed her side.

  “These are the church warrens,” Greg said. “They were built along with St. Patrick’s, at the same time as the elementary school, which used to be a nunnery, so the nuns could get to church and do chores for the priests without getting cold and stuff in the winter.”

  “Oh.” I focused on Marlena’s arm instead of the black habits I could see floating in the unlit places behind us.

  “Chores like blow jobs,” Ryder said.

  “This was our elementary school,” said Marlena. “None of our parents even go to church, but I had my confirmation.”

  “Because of the free lunch, baby,” said Ryder. “The hungry shall not want, all that Catholic stuff.”

  “I can see that theology is your forte,” I said.

  “THE PRISONER SPEAKS!” Ryder shouted, turning the flashlight dead on my face. “And her words, how they burn!” Marlena smacked the butt of his flashlight so the beam bounced crazily across the walls.

  The tunnel passed through an archway into a room that bellied out over a kind of valley, where more silent engines huddled in the dark. Maybe inside each one a nun slept, hands folded over her chest. “Home sweet home,” said Ryder, shining the flashlight onto a pile of blankets nested against a metal railing. Greg sifted through them until he unearthed a bag of Doritos. Its foil wrapper shot off sparks when it caught the flashlight’s sporadic eye. Down there they did the same thing, pretty much, that I’d seen them do. Marlena got out a joint; Ryder terrorized us all in turn; Greg finished the Doritos, shaking the bag into his opened mouth, and wiped his fingers on his jeans, leaving a smudgy trail across his knee, visible despite the bad light. This was hanging out. I couldn’t stop comparing it to what I did with Haesung. We painted elaborate designs on our nails, quizzed each other in French, practiced pop songs on our instruments. We took place in the sunshine. We were children, and they were something else. Teenagers, I realized, with some wonder.

  The joint circled around and around, its woodland smell dissolving into space. No one passed it to me. How had I made it so clear to them where I fell on the subject of pot, when I wasn’t actually sure? Marlena lay down and put her head on my thigh. I sat with my legs outstretched, pressing my knees against the floor until my muscles were stiff, because when I relaxed, her skull drifted a few inches toward my crotch.

  “So, what,” Greg asked. “You’re just not going to go to school?”

  “I guess not,” I said. “I was supposed to start at the beginning of third quarter. But I just didn’t. I don’t think anyone’s even noticed.”

  “Badass,” Ryder said, and I went hot with pride, though my leg ached from the strain of keeping perfectly still.

  “She’s from Detroit,” Marlena said, though I wasn’t, exactly. Pontiac was a suburb, and lame. I didn’t correct her. Her hair, always greasy at the roots, rivered across my knee, tickling me when she fidgeted. “Damn, girl, your legs are comfortable. Squish, squish, like a pillow.” She sat up, tornado-ing smoke into my face. Marlena was different with me when we were with the boys—she flirted with me, almost meanly, the same way she flirted with them.

  “All that freedom, and you go to the library,” Greg said. “Isn’t that kind of contradictory? Like, No school for me, I’m just going to go bookworm it up.”

  “Whatever, dude,” said Ryder. “Those computers have no security filters.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure she’s really taking advantage of all that free access to porno.”

  “I didn’t say porno! Who said porno?”

  “Isn’t it a bit sexist of you to assume I’m not?” I interrupted, grabbing the joint from Marlena. I held the green-tasting cloud in my chest for a long couple seconds, just as I’d seen them do. I smoothed down the itch in my throat, my eyes watering.

  “Badass indeed,” Greg said, a faux snootiness to his voice, as if he were holding a teacup in one hand, pinky extended.

  The joint went around and around and around. Was I getting high? Time felt like a drop suspended at the faucet’s rim. It fattened but did not fall. I was thirsty to an almost luxurious degree, my tongue too big, a funny taste caught in my throat, dusty apple peels, a flavor straddling the verge of sour. If this was being high, it didn’t seem like such a big deal. I’d been more out of control after guzzling Mountain Dew. The pot was replaced with a dented canteen (Oh! Alcohol! I thought dumbly, after my first sip) that burned the fuzz right out of my mouth and made my fingers slacken. I kept on taking my turn when it came back to me, even after Marlena shook her head and slurred, “Get that away,” up until Greg held it upside down to prove that we were “cashed.”

  “No,” Ryder wailed, smacking the canteen from Greg’s hands so it went skidding through the bars and over the dropoff. It clanged into one of the tanks below before settling somewhere unseen.

  “Nooo!” I wailed too.

  I was not scared, or nervous, or thinking. They were saying things but the words were just sounds, like when you rewind a video with the volume up and everyone talks in reverse. I don’t remember. It’s not uncommon for me to black out while drinking. There’s a theory that alcoholics are suspended in amber, forever twelve, or twenty-one, or fifteen, whatever age they were at the time of their first drink, consumed by the same old fears and desires. Their development hijacked and replaced with a row of bottles, stretching on and on and on. Those hours in St. Patrick’s would be the start, then. The stop.

  The last vivid memory I can retrieve from that afternoon is of Marlena. She’s leaning into my face, her cheeks iridescent as if recently wiped clean of tears, her mouth against my chin, finding my lips, and then her tongue, something uncooked and too-wet about it, something silly, and just as I begin to formulate a word for what is happening, kissing, she disintegrates into laughter, breathing it into me until it bubbles from my throat and overflows, like her laugh is my creation. And a smell, like scratching a branch with your nail until its green flesh shows, the residue left behind on your fingers. My first kiss, the one against which I’d measure all others, at least for the next few years. My first drink.

  After that, there’s nothing.

  Have you ever tried to demarcate the hours between the moment you thought you’d never fall asleep and the instant after opening your eyes, your bedroom flooded with the befuddling, sugary pink of dawn? Between point A and point B you exist, you are alive, your breath slowing, your body temperature dropping, the shadows cast by your furniture elongating and shrinking as the moon revolves through the sky above your flimsy house, if that’s even where you really are.
Every night, anything could happen, and you would never be the wiser. What I’m trying to say is that day, I learned that time doesn’t belong to you. All you have is what you remember. A fraction; less.

  * * *

  I woke up in darkness. A desk, a lamp shape against a wall, a rocking chair, and soon I began to piece things together. Later in my life, I’d wake up not knowing where I was and it would be other lost mornings that came back to me first, so that I’d have to fight my way through those jumbled memories too. That morning at Marlena’s often surfaced. I was in a bed. A blanket covered my legs up to my knees, and someone slept just a few inches away. Their breath seesawed through the room. I wore only my bra, and, I realized after investigating with a hand (which moved less like a part of me than a creature, scuttling), a pair of shorts, open at the fly like men’s boxers. My (?) underwear still on. A soreness along my right leg, particularly noticeable when I shifted onto my side. I pressed the skin just below my hip, experimentally, until a bolt of pain made me flinch. I wasn’t tired, but my thirst was hysterical. Something horrible had happened in my mouth; it seemed possible that I had died and somehow woken up.

  In the darkness, Marlena’s hair shone silver, as if strung with tinsel. The blanket, a diamond-patterned motel quilt, was shrugged all the way over her shoulders, so that she was just hair and those tendony arms slung around her pillow. She always slept on her stomach. On later nights, this was the pose she’d assume when our talk trickled out, when we were too drunk or tired to say anything more. It was how I knew she was done with me. She’d go from sprawled on her back staring straight at the ceiling, or curled on one side so we were face to face, to what I came to think of as her goodnight-for-serious position. After flopping onto her stomach, she’d snug the arch of her left foot over the outside of her right knee and raise her arms over her head. A ballerina fallen over mid-plié. Her breath was always bad. Those nights it was often a relief when she turned away.