“Delusions of grandeur,” Jacie added. Before Maggie had started homeschool, they’d taken Psych together, along with a million other things. It was a tiny jab, but Maggie didn’t feel the way she’d used to about Jacie’s tiny jabs—like they were a necessary part of any friendship. She knew, now, that things could be better than that.
Her mom came to get her about an hour and a half later. Maggie knew Gill Creek was only a few hours away, but saying good-bye made her feel like she was returning to the ends of the earth. Jacie got teary-eyed, and they made their good-bye quick.
She and her mom drove for about an hour in silence, neither of them even turning on the radio, both lost in their thoughts.
“How was the interview?” Maggie finally asked.
“Good.” Her mom nodded. “Good, good. I think I’ll get a call back.”
“That’s great, Mom.”
Maggie looked out the window, her mind moving this way and that. “Mom?”
“Yeah, Mags.”
“How do you know when you give too much or too little to someone else?” she asked tentatively. “Like, how do you figure out how to be really kind, but then, not get . . . you know . . . walked on? How do people figure that out?”
Her mom thought for a while. “I think there probably aren’t many people who have it figured out perfectly. I guess it’s just little increments, always correcting this way or the other, like a seesaw. I don’t know if there’s any perfect balance between standing up for yourself and being generous. Although your dad sees it differently. He doesn’t measure things like we do. He lives by that Saint Augustine quote: ‘Love, and do what thou wilt.’ He’s a hippie.”
“I don’t think Saint Augustine was exactly a hippie,” Maggie said.
“Well, you’ve always been smarter than me.” Her mom glanced over at her, like she had a lot on her mind but was choosing her words carefully. “Mags, I do know that guys come and go when you’re young. But your friends . . . those are the people who stay.” It sounded to Maggie like stock parent advice—distant and cliché. Maybe her mom knew this, because she went on. “Honey . . . I know you’re upset. Something with Pauline and you and Liam.” Maggie picked at the upholstery under the window. Her mom always seemed to know everything Maggie didn’t tell her; it was one of her gifts, like her green thumb and her knack for charming strangers and her head for numbers. “And you’re trying to just hold it in and get over it on your own. But if you don’t let it out . . . it’ll keep growing. Things you bottle up can get bigger than you. Talk to Pauline. Get angry, that’s fine, but just let it out.”
Maggie thought about it on the way home while her mom played eighties soft-rock music on the radio.
When they climbed out of the car in the driveway that night, Maggie lingered while her mom went in. She took in the yard and her house. It looked beautiful and warmly lit and cozy, nothing like what they had started with. They’d taken something difficult and made a life out of it. Maggie realized how far they’d come, how much the house had become hers. She understood why, when she had been talking to Jacie, she’d felt like she’d lost something. She didn’t belong there anymore. She belonged here. Even with the fear and the heartbreak, Gill Creek had become home without her knowing it. And she wanted to stay.
Instead of continuing into the house, she turned and crossed the thick, wide, white field to Pauline’s front door.
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MAGGIE KNEW SHE SHOULDN’T BE THE ONE WHO WAS NERVOUS, SO SHE TRIED TO look like she wasn’t. Pauline drove, Maggie sat up in the front seat, and Liam in the back. They barely had to look at one another on the way to the theater, and Maggie held her chin high as she watched the trees pass the window. Her anger seethed under the surface, but she tried to be nice; she’d said hi when he’d gotten into the car as if it were no big deal. She willed herself to have a good night; she didn’t want to think she’d made a mistake in coming. She wanted to be ready to do this and be past it.
Her mom had said, when she’d told her they were going, that superhuman emotional strength hadn’t exactly been what she’d had in mind when they’d talked. “But you’re determined,” she said, taking in Maggie’s face. “You’re a determined girl.” And Maggie was.
Inside, not content to sit with the rabble downstairs, Pauline immediately found a back staircase to the balcony, which was off-limits. Once settled in above, they sat peering down on the crowded lower tier, watching people they knew and others from nearby towns trickling in. James Falk and some of his friends settled into one of the middle rows, and Maggie was thankful they didn’t look up.
Pauline almost sparkled with the nervousness of the three of them being together but, also, happiness she couldn’t hide. Maggie’s chest felt like there were hot coals in her rib cage. She tried to douse it with Sprite.
Her mom had told her to let herself get angry at Pauline, but she hadn’t. It had felt too much like putting her soul out even further to get pummeled. So instead she’d told her that she wanted to forget. And so that was what they were all trying to do. They were going to collectively forget that anything had ever happened between Maggie and Liam. Pauline and Liam had ended up together, just like all the experts had predicted, and they were all going to live with that. A movie was a good place to start, it seemed, because they barely had to talk.
Around 2:00 a.m., in the intermission between the third and fourth movies, the three snuck out onto the wide fire escape and sat dangling their legs over the edge, their puffy coats making their shadows against the brick back wall of the theater look like abominable snowmen. They watched the empty street below, so quiet with everything else in the town shut down.
“How’s James taking the breakup?” Maggie asked, trying to think of something to talk about to distract herself. Her voice sounded distant, like small talk, as if Liam and Pauline were strangers.
“He says he’s going to beat up Liam.” Pauline rolled her eyes. “He’s called my house a few times; it’s like he thinks he owned me or something. You know, he’s not such a perfect guy like everyone thinks he is. He has a temper.”
“I never thought he was perfect,” Maggie said. “What about your mom?”
Pauline and Liam looked at each other. “We haven’t told her yet about, um, us.”
From inside the opening of Snow White began to play, and Pauline pulled Liam up to dance. He cooperated, looking self-consciously at Maggie. Then Pauline ducked and pulled Maggie up and twirled her slowly around. Then she pushed Maggie and Liam together.
“Why are you guys so stiff?” she asked, jamming their hands together. “Dance like you know each other. Don’t be dorks.”
“Pauline.”
“Well, are we friends or not?” she asked. “Are we going to fix this or not?”
Liam spun Maggie around once, twice, in his awkward way. But he avoided her eyes. Finally, as soon as Pauline allowed it, Maggie pulled out of his hands and sat back down, feeling like she could disintegrate and be perfectly content with that instead of being here.
Pauline shivered and blew mist rings above her head. “Sorry.” She looked sadly down at her mittens. Her voice faltered, then came back. “I had this dream we’d all move somewhere warm together one day. Like Austin. We could go to the Chili Parlor Bar. I could learn guitar and be a singer-songwriter. Liam could build houses. You could work at one of the high-rises, doing something where you wear a suit.”
“You have a different life’s dream every week,” Maggie said. The ice melted, just a crack.
They gazed down on the alley. “We could catch the killer from here. We’ve got a bird’s-eye view,” Pauline said, and sank back against Liam for safety unconsciously. Maggie looked away.
Suddenly, inside the theater, there was a scream. Pauline’s and Maggie’s eyes met, and they all three hurried inside to see what h
ad happened.
But it was only the movie. Snow White had bitten the apple, and the witch was cackling.
“I’ll be glad when this is all over,” Pauline said. “When I can hear a movie witch cackle and not automatically think someone’s just been murdered. I have to pee.” She looked at both of them thoughtfully, as if second-guessing herself, and then disappeared while the two of them walked back out onto the fire escape.
Maggie and Liam sat down silently on the cold metal.
“Don’t you dare say you’re sorry,” Maggie said, when she saw him open his mouth.
He closed his lips. Then he started again. But he couldn’t help himself.
“I don’t think even you can know all the things I’m sorry for,” he said. “About the dance and Pauline and being a coward since then. I feel disloyal to Pauline if I come talk to you and disloyal to you no matter what . . .”
His voice crackled a little. He wagged his feet back and forth agitatedly.
“I want to wish it—you know, you and me—never happened. Because then I’d still be your friend, and things would be simple between us. But then I’d wish away all this stuff that was . . .” He searched for words, getting desperate. “That was so . . .” And he didn’t have to say it. She could see everything he meant by it—he didn’t want to banish the wrestling in the snow and the times in his room and the sauna. . . . She wondered if life would be easier if people could talk to each other in pictures.
“If this had happened differently.” He paused, flustered. “If it hadn’t been that I met her so long ago and that she’s . . . in my bones. It’s been her, ever since I was little. I did love you.” Words finally failed him. Which was good, because each word was an arrow in Maggie’s heart. She wanted to ask him if he really thought Pauline would stay with him. She changed her mind every five minutes, about everything. But Maggie guessed that was the risk he was willing to take. And she wanted to be above saying such petty things.
Finally she collected herself enough to say something back. “Liam, I think . . . when things happened . . . maybe we were both just missing Pauline.” She turned her eyes to his, finally. “It didn’t mean . . . so much.” She’d never been a good liar, but she thought she was being convincing now. Her voice sounded steady and calm. Liam visibly winced. “We were missing her,” Maggie repeated. “We were bored.” The words were so small compared to the real feelings. She could have said it had been like being broken open for the first time. But instead she forced her mouth into a thin, steady line.
“You know,” she went on, “it’s stupid. I’ll probably be moving soon. I’ll be graduating soon. There’s a guy back home. It was all just . . . cabin fever.”
Maggie could feel herself hiding; her whole face felt like a mask. She made the wildly hurting parts small inside herself.
Liam had been surprised into silence. His eyes looked wide-open and honest and hurt. But they both knew he had no right to be hurt.
Finally he knotted his hands together in defeat, as if whatever had really needed to be said had been said. “I still don’t know why you would have let a crazy person like me get his hands on you.”
Maggie softened. All the anger flooded out of her for a moment. “You’re not crazy,” she said. “It’s small towns that are crazy. The next place you live will be different.”
“What if people always say that, but really it’s never any different? What if everywhere you always felt like that, like somewhere else is the right place and you are in the wrong place? What if it’s just a personality trait?”
“Things will be better someday.”
The door creaked behind them, and Pauline came out on the stairwell. “It’s freezing out here,” she said, and it sunk in that she was right. They followed her indoors.
On the way home at dawn, Maggie leaned her face against the car window and watched the scenery, pretending to be asleep. When she pulled her face back, the window was wet from where her eyes had been watering, the moisture shot through with the glare of the moonlight bouncing off the snow.
That night Abe barked at the woods until dawn, and no one paid attention to him. Everyone was too wrapped up—completely and passionately—in life. How could anyone who was alive think about being anything else?
Maggie glanced out her window and saw Pauline and Liam lying beside each other in the back field, on an old camping tarp in front of a bonfire. They had zipped two sleeping bags together for warmth. He had her face in his hands and his thumbs lightly on her cheeks. There was the sense that they were the only two—not just alive, but possible and real.
The warmth they created rose like steam from where they lay on the ground and reached and dissipated into the night air. It leaked into the cracks of the houses.
Maggie sat in her bedroom that night, listening to songs on her dad’s old radio. She stared at herself in the mirror—her scattering of freckles, two tiny beauty marks on her right cheek, so familiar she could point to them in the dark. Later she wouldn’t understand why she did what she did. She got out the paints from the back of her closet. She mixed them on her palette—making lush purples and forest greens and deep orangey reds out of a tiny bit of cyan, the right amount of yellow, an instinctively well-sized blob of magenta.
She unrolled an old canvas, sat in front of it, and made one broad, quick stroke of reddish purple. Then she took the brush and, for no reason she could say, ran it along the underside of her wrist, leaving a long, thin stripe of the same color there—like blood, only more deeply dark, more rich. She painted her elbow and then up along her arm. She turned to her full-length mirror and painted along the curve of her neck, and then the insides of her arms. Green, purple, orange.
The smell of campfire smoke wafted in through the miniscule spaces around the glass, and the reflection of the moon on the snow blinked up at her window. Etta sang, and Maggie painted herself black and blue.
That night a shadow tried to push a girl into a car in downtown Gill Creek, and she managed to scream for help. A policeman nearby saw the struggle from where he was parked at the side of the road, got out, and chased the attacker into the woods. By morning over thirty cops were beating the bushes and trailing through the trees that stretched back behind Al’s Grocery in the direction of Water Street. Though they’d brought dogs in to follow the scent, they’d lost him, his trail vanishing at the lake’s edge, as if he’d walked across the ice to the middle of nowhere.
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MAGGIE AWOKE TO PAULINE’S VOICE IN THE YARD, CALLING FOR ABE. HER MOM was in the kitchen looking over a finance book, studying for her second interview with the bank in Chicago.
When Maggie walked outside, pulling her coat and boots on over her pajamas, Pauline was standing in the middle of the field at the clothesline, staring out at the woods and huddling in her long, thin, plaid coat. A light breeze blew tiny ice crystals against their faces.
“I haven’t seen him for two days,” Pauline said. “I thought he’d at least be back when I woke up this morning. He spent another whole night out somewhere. You think he’s okay?”
Maggie nodded. “Yeah. Of course.” She tried to sound confident to reassure Pauline. But it wasn’t like Abe to let her out of his sight.
“Do you think someone took him?”
“No.” Maggie shook her head. “No, that’s crazy. He’s probably off looking for some girl dogs. He’ll be back.”
“My mom called the ASPCA,” Pauline said. “I can tell she doesn’t think he’s coming back. She adores that dog—you wouldn’t think so, because she never pets him—but she does. He lost one of his tags.” Pauline held up a little red tag, then dropped it again in the snow.
She looked out at the back lot, where Abe had stood guard between the house and the woods. “He watches out for me,” she said plaintively. “I just know something’s hap
pened to him.” Pauline stared into the trees. “We’re meeting Aunt Cylla halfway for breakfast,” she said, tossing back her head in frustration. “She and Mom are doing a benefit together this weekend in Milwaukee, courtesy of Tidings Tea. Mom says I have to go.”
“Do you wanna come inside for a few minutes?”
Pauline followed Maggie in and up to her room. She pulled off her scarf but kept her coat on, trying to warm up. Maggie turned on the radio while Pauline ran her fingers along Maggie’s books: Jane Eyre, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Cat’s Cradle . . .
“I wish I had your brain,” Pauline said. “I have no attention span.”
Her fingers lit on Maggie’s sketchbook, and Maggie moved forward to pull it away from her, but it was too late. Pauline had opened to a random page and stared down at the picture Maggie had drawn. It was of Pauline, her hair falling over her shoulder in a soft braid, some wisps wild and escaped, her eyes faraway, lit up but also a little sad. Maggie had drawn it from memory. She’d done another perspective on the next page, from behind, and had included Pauline’s scar down the side of her back—like a stripe on a beautiful flower—as if she would have been missing something without it.
Pauline looked up at her, eyes wide.
“I don’t see myself like this,” Pauline said.
“See yourself how?”
Pauline touched her finger to the drawn face. “You make it look like I have a beautiful soul.”
Pauline flipped through the pages. Through drawings of Abe and Maggie’s mom and the house, her dad poised over a banister sanding it, the sauna in the woods. “I thought you gave it up, drawing.”
“I picked it up again recently.”
Pauline settled on a flower Maggie had drawn. It was a winter flower, delicate, vivid. “That’s like you.”
Maggie smirked and rolled her eyes. “That’s a flower.”
“Yeah.” Pauline pulled back the book. She went on flipping the pages. And just as Maggie remembered that the back pages were full of Liam, Pauline came to them. There were Liam’s hands; there was the model ship hanging from Liam’s window. Maggie hadn’t drawn Liam himself. It had felt overwhelming to look at him that long.
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