Silver Girl

by Leslie Pietrzyk

  As for me, I did what I always did at these parties: stand at the keg. Listen to words drift through the idiotic swirl, out from the loop-the-loop of people hammering at what they thought was important. Disappear.

  Wait.

  At a frat party, it was possible that no one noticed a girl alone for a long time, the single girl—you, me—standing quietly near the keg, until, finally, someone did. Someone would be slightly intrigued—slightly curious about this girl, me, wondering how and why she was standing alone. Someone would observe that this silent girl looked utterly comfortable within the quiet space of herself—of myself. This someone would not be so at ease himself, but he secretly would want to be; perhaps he longed to escape chaos for this coveted silence. The calm of the quiet girl would be noted and envied.

  This someone comes early or maybe he comes late, but he always comes, like bills in the mail (my father might say), and as soon as he speaks, you realize the sham of your silence: you aren’t comfortable at all. You aren’t comfortable in this quiet place—what you are is trapped. And here’s the person to rescue you, you think, to rescue me, to rescue the girl standing alone.

  He says, “Who do you think did it?”

  What about poor, sad Penny, you think, wanting her mother? This wasn’t a game. You say, “I bet we never know. Bet he gets away with it. It will end up being the perfect crime.”

  “No,” he says. “No, no. There’s no such thing as a perfect crime.”

  You smile at him. Sweet boy. Sweet, sweet boy. Then you fuck him anyway. I mean, I did. I fucked them anyway.

  Strategies for Survival #2: Denial

  (fall, junior year)

  There was also this. This shard of my life I thought could be kept separate.

  I had seen Tommy on the night Penny got dumped off. When he found me at the library, it was the usual. He had seemed morose, almost sulky, taking his sweet time to come, making me work for it, as if seeing my effort was the truest pleasure for him, and afterward he shoved one hand through his hair and suddenly asked how Jess was. Her name was a bomb exploding, and I said, “Fine,” a slice of a word, jagged as broken glass, but he said anyway, “Sometimes I feel bad about how it ended with her. I don’t want her going through life hating me,” and I said, “Don’t be obtuse,” assuming he wouldn’t be 100 percent sure what the word meant, and he laughed, sort of, and said, “You calling me fat?” which was unamusing because it sounded like a question, not a joke, and I despised how easy it was to be right about the things I assumed about him. Then he said, “Seriously. How bad does she hate me? Thinking about her makes me feel goddamn shitty.” He slowly tugged his jeans zipper, focusing his eyes on his crotch. The pathetic narcissist. He said, “I could do it all better if we could just start over, you know, a clean slate. I wasn’t ready to be engaged, but maybe I am now.” I let a pause build, curious, truly and sincerely curious, about what his autopilot brain might decide I’d enjoy hearing next, which was: “And why the fuck isn’t she giving me back that goddamn ring? My dad is really on my case about it, so tell her I need it the fuck back.”

  I said, “That’s what you feel shitty about? Jess? A stupid ring? That’s all? Not anything else? Not one thing else?”

  His body jerked straighter, no more slouching against the sink. It was almost as if light hit his face the exact right way, making him look clever. “She never told you why.” A statement, not a question. A pretentious way to speak. Like he was my professor.

  “About you at the Theta picnic?” I said. “She tells me everything.” Jess and I had overheard two girls in the bathroom at Harris Hall talking about Tommy and Sydney together at some stupid sorority picnic in September. I thought people did that kind of stuff only in 1950s TV shows, but apparently not. She finally dumped him. “Going cold turkey,” she announced, “off men forever.”

  “You really think I’d be caught dead at a Theta picnic?”

  “Well, yeah,” I said.

  “Christ. And you always so smart.” He arched his neck backward as if to loosen a kink. There was a small pop. I suddenly felt nervous for no reason. He said, “What it was, what it really was, was I didn’t go to her sister’s funeral.”

  My heart clattered. “Me neither,” I said. “I didn’t even know about it.” I dropped into a near-whisper, and so did he: “She told me not to. She told me to stay the fuck in Louisville. That’s what she said, exactly that: ‘Stay the fuck in Louisville.’”

  “Someone sent newspaper clippings,” I said. “That’s how I found out.”

  “That’s fucked,” he said, no more whisper. “Someone tells you to stay the fuck in Louisville, that’s what you do, right?”

  My reflection in the mirror grimaced. I would have gone, would’ve hopped on a Greyhound. I would have been there. I imagined myself wearing an old-fashioned but elegant black hat from a thrift store, a wisp of dark netting obscuring my face. Drawing Kleenex out of a velvety black purse and pressing it into the palms of people sitting beside me. The rippling notes of “Amazing Grace,” wreaths ribboned with DEEPEST SYMPATHIES, murmurs about God.

  I said, “You screwed up. Did you say so to her?”

  “Yeah, well, you’re so perfect,” he said.

  Except she didn’t even tell me. He turned abruptly, our eyes meeting in the mirror. So unfair how good-looking he was, his easy life. His father had made some phone calls, wrote some checks—like I figured all along—and got Tommy into DePaul law school, a dozen el stops south. Provisional, but in.

  She knew I wouldn’t have had the money for a bus ticket. She knew me. She was saving me. A kindness. I had to think that. It wasn’t true because I never said things like that to her, all direct like, “I don’t have the money.” But it could be true. I said, “You think that’s worse than this?” I waved one arm in a grand semicircle, as if “this” meant nothing more than the hideousness of this poorly decorated bathroom. “It’s all bad,” I said. “All of it. And you were too at that fucking picnic. People were talking about it. Sydney was talking about it.”

  “At least Jess told me,” he said. “She wanted me there. What kind of friend are you? Speaking of ‘all of it.’” He circled his arm, mocking me, indicting me.

  I backed away, bumping against the hand dryer that roared on. “Liar,” I said, and he said, “You’re a slut,” as if the thought just occurred to him, and I said, “Then what does that make you?” hoping for enough time to escape, that the door would click shut before he would figure out that there was no equation for him, that me being a slut (and, yes, I was) was irrelevant to who he was. “You’re a stupid liar,” I shrieked at the door. The childish words echoed across the quiet library, and I was late meeting Jess for the movie and she hated missing the previews, so I leapt into a full-out run, footsteps thumping the carpet, pounding down the stairs, fast. Maybe I ran the whole way.

  RECKLESS

  (spring, freshman year)

  Jess liked to talk about skiing. That’s what her family did for vacations, ski down mountains in Colorado. Breckenridge, Vail, Aspen... the names were poetry written in a language foreign to me. I was from Iowa. There was skiing near Davenport, down a largish hill. Someone manufactured the snow. I didn’t know what “powder” was, but I knew it didn’t get dumped on a hill in Iowa.

  “What do you like about skiing?” I asked her in March, when we met for the traditional nine o’clock study break by the vending machines in the library. There were no heating vents in the room, as if someone had decided that keeping us cold meant we wouldn’t linger, which meant we’d get back to the books faster. It was a real possibility at this school. We made all kinds of paranoid assumptions. This would be the first year Jess’s family wasn’t taking a ski trip because Linda’s spring break was a different week than ours, which Jess had been complaining about: “Like anyone notices if Linda misses a week of school. Because of her, no skiing for me.” When I thought about skiing, I thought about going fast, about being reckless and icy air whipping your cheeks red, an
d that’s what I expected Jess to say, that she liked hurtling down a mountain, flying. She racked up speeding tickets her father yelled about then paid. She walked fast. She talked fast. She was impatient and clawed through ideas fast.

  But she didn’t mention speed. She looked around like someone might be listening—which no one was, because a thousand different conversations clattered at nine o’clock break, a thousand shrieks of affected laughter—then lowered her voice so I could barely hear and said, “I like that my sister hates skiing. She’s afraid, and I’m not. I like being braver than her and people seeing it.”

  It felt like she wanted to say more, and I waited because I had never thought about someone purposely going out of their way to feel brave, but she stayed silent. So I asked, “Afraid of breaking her leg or something?”

  Jess swirled her arm in a grand yet dismissive gesture. “The big baby. If only it was that because that makes sense, sort of, though no one’s breaking their leg on the bunny hill. But no, she’s afraid of my father. He does all the hard trails, the black diamonds, double blacks, even the backcountry, and she’s always freaking that he’s going to die out there, that the ski patrol will have to dig him out. So my mom goes overboard to make Linda feel better, yelling for my dad to slow down, which is crazy. He’s really a great skier, everyone says a total natural, especially for someone who didn’t grow up in the Alps or whatever. He’s not going to die. Linda’s just...” She clamped her mouth shut.

  I stared at the vending machines, at the line of candy I couldn’t buy because I didn’t have any money. Right then I was that poor because I had given my roommate everything I had for my half of the phone bill, which still wasn’t enough. Jess would have given me quarters—or anything I asked for—but I was sick of asking, pretending to her that I left my money back in the room. I imagined a whole life ahead of me asking, asking, asking.

  I waved away the open bag of peanut M&M’S when she wiggled it under my face, offering to share. I smelled chocolate on her breath, peanut under the chocolate. She had accidentally dropped a green M&M on the floor that rolled under the chair opposite her, and now I stared at it when I got angry from staring at the brightly lit vending machine. Dinner had been the pits, el ranchero, which I couldn’t choke down; it was processed gristle coated with a slick of bland, soupy tomato sauce and a dab of liquid orange cheese. Anyone with sense—and money—would order pizza or go out. I was starving.

  “She’s also afraid of horses,” Jess said.

  “Horses are big animals,” I said. “And skiing’s dangerous. Maybe it’s okay to be afraid of those things?”

  “It’s lonely not having a normal sister.” Jess held a red M&M between her finger and thumb, examining it as if it were a jewel. My stomach growled and I coughed as cover-up. But she didn’t notice. “Anyway, I’m not afraid of anything,” she said. “And neither are you.”

  “Spiders?” I asked. There had been an incident two nights ago involving a large spider in her dorm room. She woke me up and dragged me over so I could whack it dead with my shoe. I scooped up the carcass with a tissue, which I walked to the bathroom to flush because she didn’t want it in her room.

  Jess popped the M&M in her mouth, crunched down. That made a loud sound. Even though we were surrounded by people, it felt like we were alone. The overhead fluorescent light flickered oddly and quickly, like a surge. Then she laughed. “I was letting you be brave,” she said. “I was letting you earn your keep.” Her eyes met mine. Daring me.

  There was a moment that felt long to me but maybe not to her. I decided to laugh. “I promise to kill all the spiders for you,” I said, though big spiders creeped me out, and I hated smashing something dead only because it wandered up the wall of a dorm room instead of staying put outside.

  She shook the last M&M into her mouth. She crumpled the bag and tossed it at the garbage can but missed, so I picked it up and dropped it in the trash. I didn’t mind, I told myself.

  Strategies for Survival #6: Thinking

  (fall, junior year)

  When headaches seized me now, I ate baby aspirin. I liked its chalky orange flavor and how my teeth ground the pills into dust. I popped four at a time, or six, or eight or more. They didn’t fix my headaches like Tylenol did, but I chewed them up anyway.

  The killer was out there running around. That’s what everyone said. But it was equally possible that the killer had been mowed down by a city bus or died in his sleep, the sweet stories filling his obituary printed in the same paper calling him a cold-blooded killer in shrieking headlines. He might be the guy on the 11:40 jet to Oslo or the guy who delivered mail. He might be someone’s dad, mowing the lawn. Everyone talked about when he would be caught. Talked about “he” and “him.” As if women and girls never once might think about murder.

  As if women and girls never once might be angry. Or desperate.

  As if women and girls never once might scheme out an airtight plan, every detail considered, even, say, a detail like shredding written checklists into a handful of tiny pieces and stuffing some in the neighbor’s trash and some at the bottom of a garbage can in the park and flushing the rest down a toilet in a McDonald’s on an interstate highway crossing a long, lonely state. As if women and girls never thought this way, never lived a secret life or wondered about revenge.

  As if women and girls never stood alone late at night, fingers gripping the edge of a porcelain sink, as they stared down their reflections in the bathroom mirror, letting silent questions accumulate: Who am I? How did I get here? Now what?

  As if women and girls might never face only one hard choice after another; as if women and girls might never simply get so very, very, very, very, very, very tired of doing nothing, nothing but thinking, thinking round and round in vast loop-the-loops that never ended in a tidy circle—tired of not being allowed to do anything but think and think and think. As if women and girls might never ACT.

  PRETTY

  (fall, junior year)

  Did Penny’s mom want to be buried or cremated? Buried where? Ashes sprinkled where? A church? A priest? No one knew, Jess’s dad told me on the phone. Jess was still down in Oak Lawn with her mother, but she was making at least some classes, because one afternoon I watched her from the bathroom window at my work-study job as she meandered across the plaza. She wore a burnt-orange coat that I hadn’t seen before, but that was her walk: kind of jaunty, like a sailor in a movie musical. Two hours after Jess had left on Sunday, a locksmith came to install a deadbolt on the outside of Jess’s bedroom door, which would ding our security deposit.

  Penny had taken over my bedroom, leaving me on the lumpy couch. We had a routine where we’d wake up around nine and eat peanut butter on toast while Andy Griffith reruns played on the TV Jess’s dad had bought for Penny that day he took her shopping at Old Orchard. During commercials, she and I chitchatted carefully about Mayberry and its citizens. Penny thought Andy should marry Helen Crump already. Penny wanted Juanita to barge into the courthouse one of these days and demand Barney buy her lunch. Penny said it was really sad that poor Opie was growing up without a mother. “Like me,” she said, twisting strands of hair around her index finger. I agreed. I agreed with whatever Penny said during these mornings. We didn’t switch on TV news because it was all Tylenol: the task force, the FBI, Mayor Byrne, gray-suited men from Johnson & Johnson and their calm voices.

  After I left for my campus job, class, the library, or wherever I had to be, I think Penny watched game shows until Jess’s dad showed up, which sometimes he did and sometimes he didn’t. He’d drive her to a shrink’s office, and there were lawyers and cops and government do-gooders and paperwork and sometimes meetings that involved her that she had to be at and, every so often, a packet of schoolwork that she never cracked open. But in the apartment, it was only TV—Andy Griffith, game shows, and, at night, baseball, the kitchen table littered with scribbled scorecards she had drawn on graph paper. Mostly she talked about Andy Griffith. She liked that the show was blac
k and white, which surprised me. When I mentioned that eventually it changed to color, she said, “Gross. So Mayberry looked like every other stupid TV town.”

  Jess’s dad said to call him every day at his office. His secretary always patched me through to where he was, even if I was parked on hold for ten minutes. I knew I didn’t really have to call just because he told me to, but I was afraid not to. I guess I wondered what he had to say. And I had questions I was too chicken to ask.

  First he’d want to know how Jess was, and I’d say she was fine. Then a pause where I would silently hope he wouldn’t ask more about Jess and he wouldn’t. We’d talk about Penny: Was she eating? Was she sad? Did I think she should get back to school? Had the “goddamn pack of jackals,” the reporters, found her? What did she need? He’d given her twenty bucks to give to me for groceries—did she? (“Yes,” I lied, so that was a mental note: Ask her.) He banged out questions like a hammer. I was surprised how sorry for him I was. Even sorry for him, though, I was still afraid of him.

  He never asked anything about me. I wouldn’t expect him to.