“You feeling any better?” she asked. I shielded my eyes from the light.
“I think I’m going to die,” I said.
“Let me get you some Excedrin—those really work,” she said, and she turned back into the hallway. I heard her in the bathroom next to Josh’s room, opening drawers and turning on the sink, thought what a good friend she was. She came back in carrying two Excedrin in the palm of one hand, and an orange plastic cup in the other. I propped myself up on some pillows, feeling like I might throw up again, and swallowed the pills down with the water.
“Lie down for ten more minutes,” she said, “and that will kick in. Then I’ll take you home so you can meet your mom in time to get Meghan.”
I wished I were Sarah, without wishing she were me. How nice would it have been not to have been me that morning, or any of the mornings that followed it? Someday I want to be the one taking care of my friend, rather than the basket case getting cared for. That said, I wouldn’t wish what happened to me on the evilest villain in the universe, so maybe I’ll never have a chance like Sarah had.
When she dropped me at my house, with the rest of her Excedrin bottle in my jacket pocket, I gave her an impulsive hug before staggering out into the driveway.
“We’ll get through this,” she said, and I knew right away that I would always remember that she said “we’ll” instead of “you’ll.”
I managed to say thank you as I walked up toward the house. When I got inside, I was relieved to find it empty, and a note from my mom saying they were at the Grill and that she’d come get me at eleven so we could pick up Meghan.
I took four more Excedrin, not realizing you’re not supposed to take more than eight in twenty-four hours, and put my head back down on the pillow. When the pills finally hid my headache under a numb bag of sand, I struggled up, took another shower, put on clean corduroy jeans and a sweater, and picked up my phone to call my mom. I had nine missed calls from Sarah and seven from Molly. So Sarah had told Molly. I couldn’t blame her. But I couldn’t bring myself to call them back, even after listening to their messages. Sarah’s were like, “Let us take you out tonight and cheer you up,” and Molly’s were all, “Dying to see you guys this weekend—call me!” because she didn’t want me to know for sure yet that Sarah had told her.
I went into my mom’s bathroom and used all her makeup. By the time she got home at eleven, I looked like I was wearing stage makeup, and felt slightly better.
“Wow,” she said, “you got dressed up for Meghan!”
I nodded. We drove out to the Detroit airport, small-talking. I used my best professional acting talent to hide everything until I left her in the car and went into the baggage claim to collect Meghan.
But my mom was suspicious. She kept casting glances at me sideways and asking if everything was all right. And my phone vibrated so nonstop in my purse that it was as if the bag were a living animal throbbing on my lap. I glanced each time to make sure it wasn’t Meghan, but it was just Molly and Sarah, over and over. I thought they were probably together, calling on a rotation.
“Why aren’t you picking up your phone?”
“Because you and I are in the car together, talking.” Even I could hear how unconvincing this was.
“Did something happen with you and Sarah?”
“No, Mom, everything’s fine.”
“What did you guys do last night?”
“We just hung out, okay?”
“Okay. Was Molly there?”
“No, she had to babysit her sister.”
“Are you sure you’re okay, Judy? You look—I don’t know, tired, maybe.”
“I was up late.”
As soon as we pulled up outside the baggage claim, I bolted from the car. Inside the airport, I had a rush of the thought that I could leave. I could just board a plane and fly to some other land far away and never return. Or at least not return until a hundred years from now, when no one would care about whatever had happened last night. I’d be like Rip Van Winkle. Or Sleeping Beauty. Except the mere thought of Sleeping Beauty getting kissed reminded me of Kyle and the floor started melting under me. I was like this, in chaos, when Meghan shouted my name from across the room.
I looked up and she was clomping toward me in huge, illicit heels, waving. She threw her arms around my neck and kissed all over my face, definitely leaving lipstick marks everywhere. She looked fantastic, all tan and wearing a tight yellow sweater and jeans with her high-heeled boots. Under any circumstances other than the ones I was now under, I would have asked right away how she had talked her mother into them; they were definitely not orthopedic.
“Oh my god! Judy! I’m so happy to see you!”
“Me, too,” I said.
She backed up and took a look at me. “Oh my god. What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
“I’m really glad you’re here,” I said. “I’m fine, just super hung-over.”
“Wow, hungover, really? I guess your life has gotten exciting, huh? You’ll have to tell me.” She grabbed a black roller bag with a pink ribbon tied to its handle and heaved it off the conveyer belt. “That’s it,” she said. “Your folks outside?”
“My mom,” I said.
She looked at me. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
I gave up on my keeping-it-secret-forever plan instantly. I wished I had told her about Kyle from the very beginning, so she would have background, could help more.
“I think something bad might have happened last night,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t actually know.”
“Well,” she said, sounding concerned but happy, “we have five whole days to talk about it. And your play! I can’t believe I finally get to see you act.” She started moving toward the door, yanking the bag along.
“I know. Thank you so much for coming.”
Something in my voice made her turn and stop. “Was it something really bad last night?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Did you do it?”
“Yeah, but—”
“But what? You lost it last night ?”
“No, before. A few weeks ago, with the guy whose house I was at, though.”
“No way! You lost it!? Was it the guy you told me about? The peeing-at-the-party guy? I can’t believe you didn’t tell me—I thought we had a pact! You bitch!”
She slapped me on the arm, delightedly, but when I didn’t respond she sobered up. “So if you’d already lost it to him, what was so bad about last night?”
“His friends were there, and they’re not cool at all.”
“Are you guys, like, dating? Hanging out with his friends and everything?”
“Not really, that’s the thing.”
She waited.
“I think something crazy might have happened.”
“Like what?”
“I woke up naked, not with Kyle.”
“Oh. With—?”
“Meghan?”
“Yeah?”
“What if I—?”
“What if you what?”
“You know—fooled around with this other guy?”
“Did you wake up with one of his friends?”
“Only sort of, I mean, I was alone, but he was kind of right there—he was—”
“Was he naked, too?”
“He had on boxers.”
“Where was Kyle?”
“I don’t know. I ran.”
“You ran?”
“I mean, I didn’t literally run, but I left quickly.”
“How’d you get home?”
“I called that girl I was telling you about—Goth Sarah? And she came to get me. I didn’t look for Kyle.”
“Maybe that’s all good, though, right? Maybe you were just too drunk, so Kyle put you to bed somewhere else because he didn’t want to, you know, when you were too drunk to be into it. I mean, this other guy wasn’t, like, with you when you woke up, right? Maybe—”
“I don’t think
it was all good,” I said.
I stopped there, because I couldn’t bring myself to say out loud to anyone, even Meghan, why: that I felt unlike myself, that I hadn’t been able to find my underpants, that I remembered something, a kind of hazy picture of Alan near me. I didn’t say Chris had been there too, and that I’d known exactly the way his body moved, in the instant I saw it upstairs on the living room couch, even though I couldn’t remember why or how that was true. None of this was possible to say, even to Meghan. I knew I had seen a puzzle of Alan parts too, and I knew it because they were different from Chris’s and Kyle’s; Alan stomach, hips, legs. I didn’t think I was imagining any of it—how could I have seen that stuff so clearly in my mind? And Kyle had been there. The worst part was that I thought I remembered laughing. Had Kyle been laughing? And if so, at what? Had I been laughing too? Maybe we had all just been joking around, having a good time. Or maybe I was just going crazy now, and none of it was real. I hoped so. Meghan and I walked outside the terminal, where my mom was circling. As soon as she came back around, she waved from the front seat of her car. Meghan waved back before lowering her voice and saying to me, “Why don’t you call Kyle and ask what happened?” We walked toward my mom.
“I can’t bring myself,” I said.
“Ask him at school on Monday, then. We’ll find a way.” She opened the door to my mom’s car. “Hi, Peggy!”
The whole way home, Meghan and my mom chatted cheerfully about her older brother’s baseball playing and her older sister’s college, and Meghan’s art class or something, while I put my phone on airplane mode, and then leaned my head against the cool window and talked myself out of throwing up.
That night we had dinner at the Grill with Sam, and even though I felt terrible about it, I didn’t call Sarah or Molly. Seeing Meghan, who had nothing to do with D’Arts, and didn’t even know the people involved, was too big a relief to be sacrificed by getting back into the real conversation about it, whatever that was going to be. I couldn’t imagine going back to school, and Sarah and Molly were evidence that that would have to happen. Plus, Molly was so—I don’t know, good, I guess. I just felt like she might be judgmental. So I avoided them both, thinking they’d assume it was because Meghan was a better friend and now that she was in town, I wasn’t interested in hanging out. I didn’t sleep at all that first night. I felt bad about Sarah and Molly, and brink-of-death panicked about Kyle. Meghan slept in my bed and I paced the room for like ten hours, checking my computer and phone every five minutes, opening books only to close them again, watching the silent, still street glitter under the lamps out the window. Time is a heavy, thick thing at night, and it moves like glue. That was the first Kyle Malanack all-nighter I’d pull. I took six more Excedrin, exceeding the limit again, which is part of what kept me up, since those things are like 80 percent caffeine. I also chewed two entire packs of gum.
On Sunday, I turned my phone on, and had sixteen messages from Sarah and nine from Molly, who wasn’t pretending anymore. “Call me right when you get this,” she said. “Did something happen? Are you okay?” I didn’t call back.
Meghan and I spent the day downtown, shopped at Urban Outfitters and Barnes & Noble, had lunch and dinner at the Grill with dozens of old people and a couple of Michigan students who sat on the same side of their booth and alternately sipped from their drinks and made out. As soon as they started kissing, I felt my stomach twist, wondered whether whatever had happened at Kyle’s would make me horrified by love for the rest of my life. When an old woman clucked disapprovingly at them, loudly enough for everyone to hear, Meghan threw me a knowing grin, not realizing she and I weren’t on the same side anymore. I was like the old lady now, disturbed that I had to watch their disgusting session. Of course, her reason for thinking it was inappropriate probably wasn’t that she had woken up less than forty-eight hours ago with a gaggle of naked teenage guys, unable to remember what she’d done. I wished I were the old lady, and then saw Meghan looking curiously at me. I wondered if I’d ever be able to explain how I felt—to anyone. The mere thought of trying made me feel exhausted and lonely.
I didn’t see anyone from D’Arts, and I worked on convincing myself that even if something had happened, as long as I never mentioned it again, and no one else did either, I could just pretend it hadn’t, and go on. I would just pretend. Pretend. Stay quiet.
The idea that that might work gave me a little comfort for a day.
12 Because people are fundamentally animals, it makes sense that I knew before I knew for real—that something was very wrong, like I-can’ t-make-it-go-away, parasite-clinging-to-your-insides-gobbling-up-your- life wrong. I mean, more than what-had-happened wrong. I mean lasting, scary, something bigger than I had ever imagined.
There was the way the hallways seemed suddenly to expand and contract. They were long and daunting and dark, even before precalc, when morning light blasted in from the windows and lit the school like a stage. There was the way several seniors who had never talked to me moved their bodies a bit closer to each other when they saw me, the sharper voices they used, a weird, silent laughter underneath their “Hello, Judy.” The fact that they said hello at all, which they had never done before. Maybe it was just Meghan, I hoped, maybe I had just multiplied the dwarf thing to the next power by bringing her to school. Or maybe it was because Runaways was going up that night, February 8. Yes, maybe that was why the building had that stomach-turning energy. Everyone was just nervous, that was all. All day I felt like my stomach was a bleeding ulcer, like I might fall, like the floor was uneven, moving. I kept telling myself it was Runaways, that I was just nervous, too, I mean, it was the first show I’d done at Darcy.
But then Goth Sarah cornered me in the doorway to American lit and was like, “What the hell is going on? Are you okay? Are you mad at me?”
“No, no,” I said, “I just couldn’t deal with it this weekend. I’m so sorry.”
Right as Ms. Doman was about to start class, Molly came in and looked over at me, like “What the hell?”
I looked back at her, mouthed, “Sorry.” I passed notes to both her and Sarah, saying, “I’m sorry, and I’ll explain everything I can asap.” Molly turned and nodded, but when I passed the one to Sarah, she read it and her expression didn’t change at all and she just stuffed it into her notebook without looking up at me or writing back. Meghan was watching us like a puppy at a Ping-Pong match.
On the way to AP bio, I told Meghan that Sarah was mad at me and had every right to be, and that hopefully we would all hang out, at lunch and after school and before the play and as much as possible before Meghan went back to California, and I’d fix it.
“Why is she mad?” Meghan asked.
“It’s a long story,” I said, “but she’s been a really good friend and I never tell her anything. Kind of the same with Molly, I guess.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe because I don’t want any of it to be true.”
Then she went to the library to do homework, since Mr. Abraham didn’t allow visitors in his top-secret dead-cat lab. I went to AP bio alone and dissected Cletus the Fetus’s vascular system with Rachael Collins, and it was the happiest hour of my life, because Rachael and I have that kind of relationship where even though we’re high school lab partners and it seems like we see each other constantly, she’s so polite and quiet that we still barely know each other and so we didn’t have to talk about anything except anterior ventral veins. I made labels: cephalic, jugular, axillary, subclavian. But toward the end of it, I started thinking of my own neck, of what an autopsy of my body would look like. And as soon as I began to think of that, I thought of myself on the table, that black slate or whatever-it-was table, naked, cut open by my classmates, them laughing and labeling my jugular as they sliced it open but no blood came out, because I’d been deblooded like the cats. And as soon as I imagined that, and I mean really imagined it, the way you can sometimes understand death and forever in the dark of yo
ur bedroom as a little kid, the smell of the cat hit me. And it smelled like clammy, chemical death, and I gulped down a bunch of air, trying to push the rising nausea back down, but the more I swallowed and breathed the more dead cat and veins and stomach and muscles came into my body through my lungs and I could feel my skin prickling and rising in a chill, and even that made me think of cats, the way they arch their backs and the hair stands on end, and Rachael was like, “Are you okay, Judy?” And I realized all the blood had drained out of my body and I had to excuse myself and run to the girls’ bathroom.
I locked myself in a stall, and right away considered staying there for the rest of the day, or even the rest of the year. I could write an “out of order” sign and stick it on the wall and hope it would keep people out forever. I sat on the toilet, pulled my legs up, wrapped my arms around my knees and buried my head in them. Even though it smelled like pee, being away from the pickled cats was such a relief that I felt the nausea subside a bit, and I sat there for a long time, maybe even fifteen or twenty minutes, focusing my mind on outside things: a coral reef I had swum in when Chad and Sam and I were kids; the image of my mom’s purple terry-cloth bathrobe hanging from her and my dad’s bathroom door; the leather cover of my most recent diary, with flower imprints and a thin strap. I thought of blank pages of paper, my pink pen, scripts, the smell of books. I kept my mind on good smells, maybe because the bathroom reeked more and more, maybe because of the cats.
Then the bell rang and the doors started opening and girls came in to chat and put on frosted lipstick and I heard a stream of pee and then Kelly Barksper’s voice come out from a stall like, “Did you hear what it was of ? Oh my god.”
But no one responded and she was like, “Kim? Are you still in here?”
And then she left her stall, didn’t even wash her hands, or at least I didn’t hear the water running, and then the door of the bathroom opened and closed again and I didn’t hear anything else. But the nausea was back, so bad and intense that I had to climb down from my perch and throw up into it. I was bent over the toilet, retching, praying no one would come in, when I remembered suddenly that Meghan was there, that she’d been in the library waiting for AP bio to end, that she’d be waiting at lunch for me. So I dizzily wiped my mouth with a piece of toilet paper, thinking how scraps of it would probably be glued to my face for the rest of the day. Then I inhaled and opened the stall door, just as Elizabeth Wood and Amanda Fulton walked in. When they saw me, I knew for sure that something horrible was going on, because of the way they stopped and stood absolutely still, staring at me. Amanda’s mouth was open, like she was going to say “oh my god,” but nothing came out.
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