Companions in Ruin

by Mark Allan Gunnells

  A lecture, fine. That was to be expected and was nothing unusual. Another of those “When are you going to learn some responsibility?” speeches Julie could have dealt with. In fact, that may have been all she’d gotten, but in the middle of her mother’s scolding, Julie had received a text from her other bff Denise and had told her mother to hold on a minute while she responded. That had sent her mother into a fury that resulted in Julie’s current circumstances.

  Grounded for the entire weekend. That was bad enough, seeing as it would mean she’d miss the dance on Saturday and Gretchen Speck’s pool party Sunday afternoon, but her mother hadn’t stopped there. Oh no, it wasn’t enough that Julie couldn’t go out; her mother cut her off completely from the world outside.

  No cell phone, no computer, no I-Pod, no DVD, no cable. Her mother had removed all the offending items and locked them away in the hall closet, saying that Julie would get them back Monday.

  “It’ll do you good to unplug for a bit,” her mother had said. “Kids today are too dependent on technology anyway.”

  “A whole weekend, mother!” Julie had protested. “I’ll go stir crazy. What am I supposed to do?”

  “Try reading a book, you might like it.”

  With a bitter snort, Julie now glanced over at the three-shelf bookcase across the room. The top shelf contained framed photographs, the second her unicorn figurine collection, the third shelf being the only one with any actual books on it. Most of them were books she’d had to read for school, or books she was supposed to have read for school. A shelf full of boredom, that was what she saw when she looked at the uncracked spines.

  Julie stood up and started pacing around the room, looking at her posters of Zac Effron, the Jonas Brothers, Spencer from The Hills, and Johnny Depp (who knew an old man could be so hot), stopping at her window to stare out at the world from which her mother had barred her. She felt like screaming but knew it would do no good. She could tell when her mother was resolved, and on this matter Julie had no doubt her mother would not budge.

  Feeling near tears, she turned on her television. With the cable disconnected and no antennae, she could not pick up any stations, just gray fuzzy static, but she found the noise soothing in a strange way. Listening to the sound of nothing, she returned to her bed, pulled her knees up to her chest and rocked.

  HOUR TWO

  Julie was pacing again. She just couldn’t seem to sit still for more than a minute, she was so full of hyper energy that she had no way to work off. She thought she could actually see a track worn into the carpet from where she’d been walking from her bed to her window and back again. Her room, which she typically thought of as her refuge from parental dictatorship, had become her prison. She felt as if the walls were closing in on her, the ceiling grinding down to crush her into a sticky paste.

  The claustrophobia winding steel beams around her chest and making it hard to breathe, Julie opened her window, a soft breeze sighing in to cool the sweat on her brow. She inhaled deeply, hoping the taste of the outside would help calm her. Instead, the sounds of life going on beyond these walls—the laughter of children down the block, a television blaring from next door, cars grumbling their way down Main Street, someone whistling a Rhiana song—made her feel even more isolated and trapped. She slammed the window shut and buried her face in her hands.

  She perked up when she heard the house phone ringing downstairs. Creeping across the room, she opened the door a crack to listen. Her mother’s voice drifted up from the first floor, soft but audible. “Sorry, Julie can’t come to the phone right now. No, she won’t be going to the dance; she’s grounded for the weekend. You can talk to her at school on Monday, Suzie.”

  Julie eased the door closed and beat her head against it twice. She bet Suzie had finally picked out a dress for the dance, a dress Julie would never get to see, a dance she wouldn’t get to attend. It was so unfair what her mother was doing to her. Didn’t the whole “cruel and unusual punishment” thing apply to children as well as criminals? If it didn’t, it should.

  Her mother came up shortly after and asked if she wanted to come down for dinner. Julie refused, eating alone in her room. If her mother and brother were the only company she could keep for the next couple of days, she’d rather be by herself.

  HOUR THREE

  Julie was on her hands and knees, rummaging through the clothes and shoes that littered the bottom of her closet. Somewhere in this mess she thought was buried an old portable CD player she’d once used before she’d gotten her I-Pod. She’d already found a few CDs, outdated true (who listened to the Backstreet Boys or Jewel anymore), but it would at least give her something to do. If she could find the player, of course.

  She was just about to give up when she moved aside a fuzzy sweater her grandmother had given her last Christmas and which she’d never worn and there was the CD player, small and round and hot pink. The headphones were still attached.

  “Yes,” she said, but quietly so her mother wouldn’t hear, and snatched it up. There was a No Doubt CD already inside, so she put on the earphones and hit PLAY, ready for a musical distraction from her predicament.

  Nothing happened. She punched the PLAY button again, then again, but still nothing. Flipping the CD player over, she opened the compartment for the batteries. Empty.

  “Damn it!” she said under her breath. She didn’t think she had a single battery in her room. She did a quick search of her drawers but came up empty handed. The remote for her television had batteries but they were the wrong size. Her mother kept batteries in a bureau in her bedroom, but Julie certainly couldn’t ask for them and she was afraid she’d get caught if she tried to sneak in there and get them. A weekend grounded was bad enough; she didn’t want to make it worse.

  Disgusted, Julie kicked the CD player back into the closet.

  HOUR FOUR

  Out of desperation, Julie had pulled some books off her shelf. A Separate Peace she gave up on after one chapter, The Great Gatsby after only a couple of pages. The Scarlet Letter did not hold her interest, even though the premise of a tramp who did it with a hot preacher sounded promising enough. She had some old Sweet Valley High novels left over from when she was younger, but they now seemed silly and childish. She had the complete set of the Harry Potter series, but she saw the movies as they came out and saw no need to ruin them by reading the books.

  One by one, Julie tried a book then tossed it to the floor until she had a small pile at the foot of her bed. She reached down and snagged the third Potter and started ripping the pages out then methodically shredding each page into long thin strips. No particular reason, just to give herself something to do. The strips she let fall into her lap, creating a drift of mangled words.

  Her mind went blank, a total void of thought, and her hands moved as if mechanically, finishing with one book and reaching for another. She stared not at the growing pile in her lap but straight ahead, her gaze unfocused, as if trying to will her consciousness out of her body and thus attain freedom.

  HOUR FIVE

  When Julie came out of her trance-like state, she discovered she’d gone through several books and the bed was covered in the little black and white strips. She shoved them onto the carpet, where they fell like joyless confetti. Her mother would be furious when she saw the mess Julie had made, but she didn’t care. It was her mother’s fault for being so unreasonable in the first place. How else was Julie supposed to keep herself occupied in this total sensory deprivation?

  Getting an idea, she ran back to the closet, pulling down outfits and tossing them to the floor until she found a peach blouse on a wire hanger. It wasn’t the blouse she wanted, but the hanger. Untwisting and straightening it out, she went to her television. She’d heard of people using hangers for antennae back in the days before digital cable and satellite dishes, so maybe she could at least get something on TV to watch.

  On her television set, the antennae—had there been one—would have screwed into an outlet in the back. Not knowin
g what else to do, and afraid to stick the hanger directly into the outlet lest she be electrocuted, she just wound one end around the rim of the outlet. Turning the TV on, she flipped through the channels, trying to find something, some ghostly image, some scrap of distant dialogue, but she was rewarded with nothing but more of that static, and the sound was no longer soothing but drilled into her brain like needles.

  She turned off the TV, leaving the hanger stuck to the back. She decided to just try to get some sleep. She normally had no bedtime on the weekends, but what was the point of staying up late if you had nothing to do?

  HOUR SIX

  She couldn’t even escape into dreamland. She tossed and turned, continually trying to find a comfortable position but only winding up more uncomfortable with every passing minute. The darkness was oppressive, like a living force that was enveloping her and trying to squeeze the life out of her.

  Unable to stand it any longer, Julie sat up and turned on her bedside lamp. She felt shaky and vaguely nauseated. If only she could talk to Suzie or Denise, if only she could share with them what she was going through, even if just through email or instant message.

  Climbing out of bed, she retrieved her backpack from the vanity under the window, pulling out a notebook and pen. She sat down and started writing a letter to Suzie, telling her everything she’d tell her if she were able to communicate wither directly. How her mother was a heartless monster for doing this to her, how she felt like she was losing her mind in this tiny cell of a room, how she’d been counting on Jeff Vassey seeing her in her bathing suit at the pool party Sunday to finally get him to ask her out, how she was missing all her favorite shows and her mother wasn’t even TiVoing them, how missing the dance on Saturday was going to put the nail in the coffin of her social life, how she hated her little brother for needing a ride home from Little League in the first place, how she hated not knowing who might have emailed her and was awaiting a reply she couldn’t send, how her mother was absolutely ruining her life.

  When she was done, Julie looked down at the four pages of notebook paper she’d filled, front and back, and just felt empty. Sure, she’d gotten it all down, but with no way to actually send it, the information served no purpose, a one-way communication. She ripped the pages from the book, crumpled them up and tossed them over her shoulder.

  Feeling totally at a loss, Julie got up and paced some more, wringing her hands, her nails scratching shallow cuts into the palms, but she didn’t notice.

  HOUR SEVEN

  She sat cross-legged on the floor, a sock pulled down over either hand, using them as puppets. She was pretending they were characters from Gossip Girls, and she acted out scenes as if watching a new episode, keeping her voice low so as not to wake her mother or Kip. She knew what she was doing seemed a little crazy, but it was just a game, just something to pass the time, like when she’d played with her Barbie dolls as a girl.

  In fact, she wished she still had her dolls. Acting out the show would be a lot more realistic with them than these stupid sock puppets. Maybe then she wouldn’t feel so crazy doing it.

  HOUR EIGHT

  Julie had arranged her unicorn figurines about the floor. With a pair of scissors she cut up the strips from her books into even smaller pieces and began to sprinkle them down on the unicorns, making it snow in their magical kingdom. She giggled softly to herself as she danced about the congregation of porcelain horned creatures, dusting them with the shredded pages.

  When she was done, she stretched out face down on the carpet, her head close to her favorite figurine. “Wasn’t that fun?” she said to the inanimate object. “I bet you’ve never seen snow before. At least those dull old books were good for something.”

  HOUR NINE

  She’d found some old Dixie cups on the shelf in her closet, along with a packet of paper plates with dancing bears on them, tucked away in the very back corner. They were left over from her eleventh birthday party five years ago. She hadn’t even realized she’d saved them all these years. Luckily she had, for now they would come in very handy.

  She didn’t have any string, so she took the scissors and started unraveling one of her shirts until she had a long thread she could use to tie two of the cups together. When she was done, she eased the window up just a bit and tossed one of the cups over the ledge, holding on to the other one so that the crude homemade device hung half in and half out of her room.

  “Suzie, can you hear me?” she whispered into the cup then giggled. “It’s me, Julie. Are you out there?” She waited, but when she received no response she said, “What about you, Denise? You reading me?” Still nothing. “Jeff? Anybody?”

  She waited a good ten minutes but still no one answered her. Reeling in the other cup, she sat fuming. Obviously her mother had anticipated this and had somehow jammed the signal so that she couldn’t get through to anyone.

  Still, Julie wouldn’t give up. She’d find a way.

  HOUR TEN

  Julie took the poster of Johnny Depp, a shot of him done up as Captain Jack Sparrow, down off her wall and laid it across her bed, lying next to it. She placed her three-dimensional hand over his one-dimensional chest and told him how grateful she was that he was here for her during this trying time. He was the only one who truly understood her. She whispered to him her secret pains, her most shameful secrets, and her deepest dreams, and he offered her nothing but support.

  She looked up at Zac, Spencer, and the Jonas Brothers, all staring down at her from their places on the walls. Children, that’s what they were. But Johnny…he had maturity and sophistication. He was a real man, one who could whisk her away from all this.

  She leaned over and kissed him as her hand strayed under her nightgown.

  HOUR ELEVEN

  The unicorns were in on it. They had joined forces with her mother to keep her isolated; why else would they be refusing to speak to her?

  She took her favorite and dangled it out the window, threatening to drop it if it didn’t fess up. When it remained stubbornly silent, she made good on her threat and let it plummet to the ground below.

  One by one, its brother and sisters followed, all resolutely refusing to speak to her. She got a small satisfaction by watching them all plunge to their deaths, but it was fleeting. She turned to Johnny for comfort, but he too had turned taciturn. She took the scissors to him.

  HOUR TWELVE

  Julie sifted through the debris of the books she had turned into confetti, suddenly convinced that some important message was hidden in them, a message that held the key to her freedom. Here was a scrap with the word “ant” on it, another with “never,” a few with only partial words, one with “total” in italics.

  She kept rearranging them, trying to form coherent sentences, desperate to find out what the universe had to tell her. When she could make no sense of the random words and letters, she shoved up a handful and crammed it all in her mouth, swallowing it down, hoping by digesting it all the message would come to her.

  Instead, she threw up in the corner.

  HOUR THIRTEEN

  It was stifling in her prison. Perhaps her mother had turned up the heat as a further form of torture. She ripped at her nightgown, tearing it off her body. Sweat covered her skin with a glossy sheen, but she felt no cooler. Perhaps the heat was coming from inside, burning at her core and slowly cooking her organs and incinerating her from the inside out.

  She yanked the rest of the posters from the walls, unable to stand the feel of the eyes on her, and cut them up. She took parts of the different boys and used her own sweat to paste them to her body. Zac’s left eye over her right nipple, Spencer’s right eye over her left nipple, and the mouth of one of the Jonas Brothers—she didn’t know which one—tangled in her pubic hair.

  HOUR FOURTEEN

  She sat by the window and cried. She knew now that she had been tricked. The unicorns had never been against her, they had indeed been her friends. Their tongues had been removed, probably by her mother, that was wh
y they wouldn’t speak to her. They couldn’t.

  And she had killed them all. Those precious, innocent animals. How afraid they must have been as she’d dangled them out the window, how desperately they must have wanted to communicate with her, the frustration of not being able to.

  She had been so quick to judgment, had not even given them the benefit of the doubt. What a cruel bitch she was, no better than her mother. But there was one difference. Her mother felt no remorse; Julie did. She would have to pay for what she’d done.

  She took the scissors and began carving symbols of penance into her thighs.

  HOUR FIFTEEN

  Julie’s mother made her way down the hall to her daughter’s bedroom. After a night to sleep on it, she started to think perhaps she’d been a bit too harsh with her daughter. Yes, Julie needed to learn responsibility, but it may have been going overboard to take away everything. She planned to offer her daughter some conciliatory pancakes and make this deal: no going out today, no cell phone or computer, but she could have her I-Pod and cable back, then tomorrow she could go to the pool party.

  She knocked on Julie’s door even as she opened it, and she was instantly assaulted by the stench. It smelled like excrement, and in fact something brown covered the walls, forming obscene words and pictures. Shredded paper was all over the floor, the bed covers as well as what looked like most of Julie’s wardrobe had been cut up. The carpet was stained in places with what looked like blood.