Halfway House

by Katharine Noel

  As soon as she completed her last lap of warm-down, she pulled herself out of the pool and walked, wobbly-legged, toward the bathroom. The rest of the team was still around the pool, getting their things, talking about school. Her brother and his friend Cole stood, listening to a girl. She was much shorter than they were and was telling a story, gesticulating wildly. Luke and Cole both had towels wrapped like skirts around their waists, arms crossed over their chests, identical smirks. Cole was much more handsome, but Luke always had a girlfriend and Cole never did. Luke and Cole glanced at each other over the girl’s head, and Angie looked away quickly, hatred prickling in her throat. When she’d fucked Cole, it had been here, sneaking away to the showers in the middle of practice. It had been fun and funny. Afterward, whenever she and Cole saw each other, they grinned without speaking. Since her break, though, Cole had been distant, as if she was just his friend’s older sister. No: more like a friend’s mother, someone you were polite to but didn’t really see.

  Their team used Cort’s Y from 5:45 to 6:45; now people were arriving for the open swim, the first lithe old women and the double-amputee guy in the wheelchair. If she looked at them, her thoughts would get too fast. She kept her head down.

  In the shower room she turned on the water, very hot, and stood beneath it with her arms up to her chest, fists tucked under her chin, eyes closed. Hot water striking her shoulders was the only thing that felt good anymore. Showering and smoking. Food didn’t taste like anything; thinking about sex made her feel exhausted and sick. Sometimes thinking about Abe relieved her, but she had to be careful; she returned to memories of him so often that they were wearing thin. Some had actually begun to tear along their folded and refolded creases. The first time he said he loved her—had she been in the car or getting out? The first day he came into the deli—hadn’t he lingered, reading the descriptions of sandwiches, working up to coming over, waiting for the place to clear? Or was she thinking of another time?

  “Did you write the paper for English?” Alice Newman asked from under the next showerhead. Angie’d been friends with Alice Newman for a long time, and she forced herself to be normal for a minute.

  “I think so,” she said.

  Other girls came in, turning on showers. As they called to one another, the steam held their voices. “Does anyone have a tampon?” Marcia Davis was asking. Someone else said, “They were all over each other. I mean, all over.” Through the steam, their bodies were blurred and indistinct, like the illustrations fronted with tissue paper in old books. Angie’s vision of the girls swam up out of the fog—a girl took three steps across the room, bent to pick up a bottle of Finesse—and then sank away.

  * * *

  During the day, moving from anatomy to European history to art, she grew heavier and heavier until she could barely walk. She couldn’t skip classes. Skipping classes would bring her too close to last fall. She wasn’t taking chem., but otherwise she had most of the same teachers that she’d had a year ago when she spun out; the first class she missed they’d be on the phone. She could have eaten lunch with girls from swim team, but instead she spent lunch period in the library, head down on one of the tables but unable to nap or even close her eyes.

  She’d worried that people would ask about the hospital, but the only people who had were Abby and Tracy, two juniors. Angie hung out with—or maybe just near—them between classes on the school’s back steps, where you were allowed to smoke. Abby and Tracy listened obsessively to The Cure. Not only listened to The Cure but dressed like Robert Smith, the lead singer: long black coats, black eyeliner and black lipstick, and hair dyed dead black. They wanted to know about shock treatment, which she hadn’t had, and bizarre suicide attempts, which she said she didn’t know about. A lie: people in the hospital and at the farm talked about suicide all the time.

  She wasn’t shunned, exactly. She still had friends on the swim team. Sometimes other kids stared at her, but as soon as they realized they were staring, they’d look quickly away, busying themselves. If people made fun of her, they weren’t doing it to her face. She probably had Luke, at least in part, to thank for that: in people’s minds he’d neutralize some of her weirdness.

  The bell rang for the end of lunch, and she rose from the library table slowly. In the hallway, the pay phone was free, and she gave in to the desire to call Abe. She’d tried to reach him twice today already and had just gotten the machine.

  Abe sounded surprised to hear her voice. “Aren’t you supposed to be at school?”

  “I am at school. In C Hall, in front of the trophy case.” Abe thought it was funny that the public high school’s buildings were lettered; St. Gregory’s had been too small to need anything like that. She twisted the stiff metal-wrapped phone cord around her wrist. “Do you love me?”

  “You know, I did last night, but today I woke up and thought, Hmm, no, not so much anymore.”

  “Not funny.”

  “Well, you always ask. I love you.”

  “I have class,” she said. “I’ve got to go.”

  She shouldn’t have called. Now she’d wasted her one thing to look forward to for the day. Midway through Spanish, so jittery she hadn’t heard a word of the lesson, she got the hall pass and called Abe back. Usually when his machine answered she hung up, but now she said, “It’s me. Are you there? If you are, I guess you don’t want to talk. I’m sorry I was so weird. You’re probably not there. If you are it’s okay. Never mind. Sorry, I’m sorry.”

  After Spanish she had AP English, then calculus. Midway through that class she got another hall pass.

  “Are you there? Abe, really, if you’re there, please pick up. … Okay, you’re not there, I guess. Ignore this call. Pretend I didn’t—sorry, I’m being—you’re just never there when I fucking need you, and it’s fucking getting to me, I guess. This is stupid, talking to your machine.”

  She hung up, walked toward calculus. Math classes were held in F Hall, dim and low-ceilinged, with orange lockers stretching into the distance. At the far end of the hall were heavy doors with wire-reinforced glass windows at the top letting in some light from the stairwell. Angie had a moment of vertigo, thinking of the hospital; for a moment she felt locked in. She turned back, ran to the phone.

  “Hi, guess who? That’s right, it’s me. Ha-ha. Anyway, I just wanted to say, I shouldn’t have—I take that stuff back, I know you’re busy—I’ll talk to you later, I guess. Will you call me later? I’m sorry. This is stupid. Sorry. Sorry.”

  She had to stay after school to talk to Mr. Diebhorn about her lab reports. Her drawings were sloppy—“dashed off,” he said—and her test scores had been slipping. He had a broad nose, wide nostrils filled with hair. The hairs, dark, locked together, made her feel sick and hot.

  “I know you had some trouble last year.” When he said trouble he cocked the first two fingers of both hands. Little Bunny Foo-Foo, hopping through the forest.

  Angie glanced down at her lap. Her hands were shaking. She realized she’d dressed like a blind woman: a stained Yale sweatshirt over a green silk blouse. She had on ancient beige corduroys, too short, so that you could see her socks. She tried to remember choosing clothes this morning but couldn’t.

  “I don’t plan to start making allowances that allow shoddy work—”

  Had she walked around like this all day?

  Mr. Diebhorn looked at her, templing his fingers. It was her turn to say something. She tried to replay his words through the noise in her head, which was like a phone left off the hook, persistent and distracting. She wanted not to think of last fall, she pushed against it with her mind, but pictures came, the boys she’d slept with. She’d been sure her physics teacher, Mr. Ridgeback, was in love with her, and on a day when he’d asked her to stay after school she’d tried to seduce him. She could still feel the silly, sexy smile she’d had on her face, walking toward him across the room.

  She had to say something. She forced herself to look toward Mr. Diebhorn, focusing on the periodic t
able behind his head. Lithium was the third element, Li. Because she’d been thinking about sex, she imagined, unbidden, Mr. Diebhorn naked, his penis pushing raw and red through thatched pubic hair. She felt completely disgusting.

  Whispering, she said, “I forget what you asked.”

  He exhaled noisily. Not looking at her, he asked, “Whom do you think I’m teaching up here? Am I entertaining myself?”

  “I don’t know.” Even with her eyes closed, she could see his awful penis. She pressed her hands over her face.

  “You don’t know,” Mr. Diebhorn said, loading the words with sarcasm. Then, oddly quiet—though she sensed his sadness was for himself—he said, “No, I suppose you really don’t.”

  The second-floor bathroom had three metal-doored stalls. It had just been cleaned: the toilet seats were all up, and there was the smell of chlorine. She thought of when she’d thrown herself into the pool. Everything in her head was a way she’d humiliated herself. Here was jumping into the pool, here was falling at Jess’s church, here was trying to get into Thad’s room the night he broke up with her. She wrapped her hand around Mrs. Salter’s ankle. Lizzie Travnor burst into the room where she was having sex with the freshman; Lizzie said, “Whoops, sorry,” shut the door, and then started laughing. Inside the room, above the freshman, Angie laughed, and laughing she ran toward the lip of the pool. She walked toward Mr. Ridgeback, unbuttoning her shirt. She opened the door of the chemistry room, shut it behind her. Lizzie Travnor laughed. Am I entertaining myself? She walked toward Mr. Ridgeback, smiling, reaching up for the top button on her shirt.

  For some reason toilets at school didn’t have lids; there was no place to sit. She closed herself in a stall, wedging herself beside the toilet so that her back was against the wall. She put her hands over her mouth and screamed. Fuck, she yelled, the word backing up into her head. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

  The door opened and shut; footsteps crossed to the sink, then paused. “Angie?” said a girl’s voice.

  Angie scrambled to her feet. Fuck again.

  “I saw you come in here. It’s Kristin. Kristin Cannon?” Footsteps echoed in the small room as she crossed to Angie’s stall and stopped outside. “Are you okay in there?”

  “Fine.”

  “I was hoping I could talk to you.”

  “Go right ahead.”

  Kristin giggled nervously and was silent. Fuck, fuck, fuck for real.

  Angie straightened her sweatshirt and flushed the toilet, then pushed open the stall door and strode past Kristin to the sinks.

  She twisted the knob for hot; water sang in the building’s old pipes.

  “Do you think …? Your brother used to talk to me. … I can’t sleep, I have no appetite. I just—I know there’s nothing you can do, but maybe if I could just talk with you—”

  Angie looked at Kristin in the mirror. “Are you serious?” Clearly she was, her face pinched with unhappiness. In the last few months, Angie had become excruciatingly aware of degrees of outsiderness, but Kristin was normal enough, even kind of pretty. She had teased bangs, dark eyeliner, a long colorful sweater over tight black stirrup pants—the look of almost every girl at Applefield High.

  “I know it’s ridiculous,” Kristin said. “You’re probably laughing your ass off. I should stop. Coming to your house, I mean. I even could; I just don’t want to.”

  Carefully, Angie turned off the sink. Hoisting her bookbag onto her shoulder, she walked away, pausing in the doorway to say, “You’ve got no chance with Luke because you’re totally fucking crazy.”

  She let the door slam behind her; it echoed in the empty hall. The lockers—blue metal in A Hall—stretched narrowly away, lock after lock after lock. Angie’s quick footsteps rang.

  She turned from A Hall into E. At the far end, a custodian was polishing the floor. She moved the heavy polisher slowly, with both hands. The way she turned slowly to the right, then slowly, slowly, to the left, reminded Angie of the people you sometimes saw on the beach in Portsmouth with metal detectors, headphones covering their ears, eyes down as they scanned the sand.

  Angie stopped short. Oblivious to her presence, the woman moved away up the hall, smaller and smaller. Angie held her breath, praying the woman wouldn’t see her before she got hold of herself. She was going to get hold of herself. She was going to Yale.

  Eight

  “Don’t move,” Ben said.

  He jumped up from the futon and moved naked across the room, penis bobbling between his legs. Above him, clothesline strung with prints crisscrossed the apartment. The air from the electric space heater made the photos twist, their shadows dappling the floor.

  Grabbing a camera from where it hung on a chair, Ben turned back to the bed. “Your hair looks amazing all spread out like that.”

  Jordana smiled lazily and he took her picture. Then, feeling loosened and slow, she rolled onto her stomach. The shutter clicked; he reached and pulled the sheet down and clicked the shutter again.

  “Stop,” she said, because she didn’t want to seem vain. She sat to reach for the sheet and twitch it up again. He took a picture of her, then another when she made a face at him. He laughed, and she was secretly pleased.

  Holding the sheet around herself, she stood and approached him. Ben danced a step back and took another picture. She advanced and he retreated, stumbling a little and laughing, until she’d backed him against the table. The camera almost touched her face. He took one more picture, put the camera down, and kissed her. “Do you want some wine?”

  “It’s three in the afternoon,” she said.

  Ben shrugged and moved away, opening a drawer and scratching around for a corkscrew. Though he was only a few years younger than she, she sometimes thought of him as closer in age to Luke: how unattached he was, maybe, or how he seemed to take things as they came. Whereas Jordana had turned—even before Angie’s break, she realized—into someone who worried.

  The first time they’d slept together, Ben had touched her hip, which was so jutting and sharp that he’d jerked his hand back: “What’s that?” She’d started laughing, and then he had. She laughed often and easily with him. When she’d told her best friend, Beth, about Ben, she’d had trouble articulating why she liked being with him, other than that it was … fun. The word seemed weak, as did comfortable or sweet. But she loved the relationship’s sweetness, its comfort.

  On the clothesline hung photos Ben had taken for the paper: a homecoming parade, a single-car crash. Between the newspaper and wedding photography and the occasional odd job—he used his truck to haul brush or move furniture or, with a blade attached in winter, plow snow—he cobbled together a living. His juggling of bills was one of the self-consciously bohemian details he was proud of and brought up often, pretending to disparage it. But other things, things he seemed not even to notice, impressed her more. He had no credit cards, no television, no bureau—he kept his clothes in an open duffel bag on the floor. No stereo, just a cheap Sony boom box. He’d turned the small kitchen into a darkroom and moved the fridge into the living room, where it left rusty water stains on the carpet. A folding table that served as both pantry and kitchen held cereal, rice, canned soup, an electric hot plate. His belongings would have fit in the back of his truck.

  She turned on the radio, fiddling the knob. An evangelist, a ZZ Top song, heavy metal, easy listening, The Cars. It seemed like any time she turned on the radio anywhere in New England she found a Cars song. Normally she would have turned to the classical station, but it felt weird to do that here.

  Sitting down on the couch, she tilted her head back to see the pictures hung above her of a wedding Ben had photographed the previous week. The necessary shots of bridesmaids lined up, of bride and groom dancing. The bridegroom smashed cake against his new wife’s mouth.

  “You know what this is called?” Ben asked, holding the wine bottle with two fingers.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s called wine.”

  “No, this space here.” He pointed to the
bottle’s neck, above the wine and below the cork.

  She still hadn’t gotten used to his earnestness. It made her sarcasm feel prickly and cheap.

  He said, “It’s called ullage.”

  “I can’t believe there’s a name for that.”

  “It’s true. I photographed a story on wine making in New Hampshire.”

  She managed not to say anything, though wine making seemed like just what New Hampshire was totally unsuited for, with its freezing winters and muggy gnat-clouded summers. People wanted to be able to do everything. She pointed her chin at the photograph of the bride trying to smile, her face smeared with frosting. “What happened there?”

  “You haven’t seen that? A lot of guys do it.”

  “Is it supposed to be funny?”

  He nodded, pulling out the cork with a tiny grunt of satisfaction.

  “It seems so aggressive,” she said.

  “Yeah, like, ‘You made me go through this whole spectacle, now fuck you.’” He poured the wine into two glasses—one a juice glass with a peeling decal of Snow White on the side, the other an actual goblet that he handed to Jordana. He wandered a few steps away, running a finger along the bottom edges of photos. Unlike Pieter, Ben wasn’t self-conscious about being naked. He raised his arms to unclip a photo and reclip it more securely, then turned and walked back toward the couch. Though they’d just had sex, desire twisted her stomach. His brown curls stood up all over his head, and his eyes were the yellowish-green of olive oil. Sitting on the floor, he hooked one arm up over her knees.

  She stood at the door of her daughter’s room. Angie sat at the desk, a pile of textbooks at her elbow. In the next room, Luke had the stereo turned up so loud the bass thumped in the floor beneath their feet. This was when Ben felt most unreal to her, immediately after she’d been with him.