In Her Skin

by Kim Savage

  The music slows for the last song. A girl strides out, some musical star, a skinny thing, in a sleek purple gown, and she’s our age—mine, Temple’s, Vivi’s—or close. She cradles the microphone like a pro, and I wonder if that’s how you held your mic when you were on that talent show. The words on the wall disappear: it is no longer our turn to sing. Everyone hushes, and I find myself moving to the edge of my seat. When she hits the first note, it is pure and un-showy and the opposite of every song that came before.

  On my own

  Pretending he’s beside me.

  My breath catches in my chest. I do not want, do not need a song to make me feel.

  All alone

  I walk with him till morning.

  Too soon. I’ve had a year to learn how to swallow the pain of Momma, but not nearly enough time to take losing Wolf. This song and these words are choking me.

  Without him.

  I feel his arms around me

  Tears, hot and fresh, well up. I need this to stop RIGHT NOW.

  And when I lose my way I close my eyes

  And he has found me.

  The sobs seize and rack my body. I gasp to stuff the cry back inside. I leap from my seat and run for the nearest exit, climbing over bare legs and tuxedo pants and stepping on purses and breaking the things inside. I don’t know if I’m being followed and I don’t care: I should not make a scene, don’t want to make a scene, and I’m so out of control I can’t think myself out of this. I fly into the ladies’ room past an attendant with wide eyes and slam the stall door.

  Resting my forehead against the metal wall, I push out a hard breath.

  “Vivi?”

  You. You followed me.

  “Don’t try to talk,” you yell from behind the door. “I know this is hard. That song: ‘Pretending he’s beside me.’ The words trigger you. You miss your dad, obviously.” You pause. I imagine ladies in gowns passing in and out, and wonder if they are whispering Lovecrafts behind their hands.

  “That’s it, isn’t it? You miss your dad?”

  I brush my nose with my wrist, hard. It’s a gift, Jo. Take it.

  I raise the bathroom lock and crack the door. “I do. I miss him something awful.”

  “Would it help if I told you that performance—in fact, this whole place—kills me inside?”

  I step out slowly, my puffy face reflected back in the mirror. You move to the mirror beside me. “What do you mean?” I say.

  “That girl up there? That should be me. I had everything: an agent, a contract. But I busted my own voice and lost any chance I had.”

  I turn to face you, but still you stare in the mirror, as though you’re talking to that girl, the prettier one without the snot and tears.

  “My whole life, I’ve been able to make everything I want to happen,” you say. “By talent.”

  Jo is a talented con.

  “By luck.”

  Jo was lucky to meet up with Wolf.

  “Or by force of will.”

  Jo forced herself inside Vivi.

  “I get that,” I say.

  “Except for the one thing I want,” you say.

  Jo could not keep her momma alive. I swallow. “I get that, too.”

  “My body betrayed me. My throat is thick with scars. I’ll never be able to force it to do what I want it to do again.”

  “You can’t sing even one note?”

  “Not in a way that’s worth it.”

  “But if you really like to sing, isn’t any way worth it?”

  You smile sadly in the mirror. “If only it were that simple.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say, reaching for tissues to wipe my red nose.

  You throw back your shoulders and puff your chest. “Anyway. It is what it is.”

  I don’t believe you think it is what it is for a minute.

  You lock arms with me, wordless now, and we walk back to the hall as sisters, me a little messier, you a little more relaxed, into the music and to our parents. The conductor is letting a man named Connolly conduct. The orchestra plays on while the guy obviously doesn’t have a clue, and everybody thinks it’s a hoot.

  You laugh, lusty. “I never understand what difference it makes if the conductor waves his little baton or not.”

  I squeeze your arm a little tighter. “Neither do I.”

  * * *

  I seem to be on lockdown.

  Also: there is no discussion of school, or checking in with Ginny, or the cops, and will I ever get to be with you? I have never met anyone with so many places to go and things to do. I wish hard on spending time with you, and you seem to want to spend time with me, but day after day it doesn’t happen. How are we supposed to be sisters if your mother keeps us from being together, and she has done this, for seven days now, with excuses ranging from homework to lessons to getting more sleep. I can’t help thinking that it will happen every new day, that we will connect, you spreading your shine onto me, wanting to, even though my real self is in disguise. The intuit in me feels it.

  On Friday when I hear you come in from school at the unusual hour of Actually After School, I nearly trip running down the stairs. Mrs. Lovecraft has her head in the refrigerator, asking about your homework.

  “I have tons of precalc, and I can’t work here. I need to go to the library,” you say.

  “I’ll call you a car,” Mrs. Lovecraft says, muffled.

  “We’ll take the train,” you say.

  Mrs. Lovecraft backs out of the fridge. “We?”

  “Vivi and me. What, is she going to keep hanging around here day after day with you?”

  I cringe. I can’t go to the library because of the small matter of Brown Tooth knowing where I belong, and it’s not with you. I might be clean, and in clean clothes, but I still look like me, if you knew me.

  Mrs. Lovecraft flashes tight palms. “Hold on. I’m not sure about you two going alone—on the train alone—together.”

  My cheeks pink just thinking about it.

  “You can’t keep Vivi bubble-wrapped forever, Mother,” you say with an edge that would have sent Momma looking for a belt.

  Mrs. Lovecraft licks her lips and becomes very still. You cock your head and stare her down. Finally, Mrs. Lovecraft says, “Well, I suppose it can’t hurt. Here, you’ll need this.” She tears through her purse and fumbles with her wallet zipper, digs out a twenty and hands it to me.

  “What’s this for?” I say, because libraries are free.

  “You can’t go out without money, silly,” she says.

  In a flash we are gone, you with a pack on your back and me tagging along in the hoodie you tossed me, clutching the insides of my pockets and my unnecessary twenty. You walk like you mean it, leaving the smell of clean hair in your wake. I hope that Vivi, after being held captive and abused, would walk like I already walk out of habit. Street people cave their chests and keep chins tucked, unless confronted, which is when they fill themselves with air and take up space. I don’t get the sense that Vivi ever took up much space in her life, so I shape myself into my usual comma and drag along.

  We stop at a light and I catch up. “Thanks for taking me,” I say.

  You pull one earbud out and stare.

  “I said thanks for taking me along,” I repeat.

  “Of course.” You fumble with the earbud and pop it back in. “I wasn’t going to leave you alone with her.”

  You confuse me. Your mother is kind, and you ought to know how lucky you are to have her and this and you leave me off balance in a way that sets my chest on fire.

  “I feel like a tagalong here. It’s not as though I have homework.”

  I can’t tell if you can hear me or not. I try again.

  “I mean, I guess they’ll be sending me to school again sometime soon. It’s just, no one’s talked about it yet, and it’s, like, still the school year.”

  More walking.

  I try one more time before we duck into the subway station. “We don’t have to be best friends aga
in.”

  You pluck both earbuds out and pause, your whole face rearranging in thought. It takes you almost a minute to return to me.

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” you say. “We absolutely have to be friends again.”

  * * *

  Clean clothes and a sparkly companion aren’t going to help me if Brown Tooth is working. And she’s always working—unlike you, whose sunken backpack contains no precalculus book, something your mother didn’t notice but I did, and when do you study, anyway, to keep up all that sparkle?

  At the main entrance, the iron lanterns have spikes meant for stabbing things, and the wind on the library plaza beats us back. I pull the hoodie around me as we are swept inside with a rush of tourists taking pictures of the white marble plaques, and I want to warn them it’s too much to take in, I’ve tried and it is dizzying, and you are gone. I look for you up the stairs; no tight back, no swinging hair. I look to the security guard, but he looks into his phone. I look to the massive sculpted lions on the first landing, but they are bored. I imagined we would go to Bates Hall, the place where I first found you tucked into a carrel with your same old book. I still imagine this.

  I climb the marble stairs.

  “Vivi!” you call over the tinny roar. You are below, at the start of a hall that leads to the bathrooms. You wave and I fight against the crowd. When I reach you, you look confused.

  “Where were you going?” you ask.

  Vivi would not know this place, would not remember it. A nine-year-old girl does not go to the public library. Unless she did. Maybe you and Vivi came here as kids: you lived a short T-stop away.

  “I just figured we’d go where everyone else was going,” I say brightly.

  “But not where I was going,” you say.

  “No,” I say cautiously.

  The corners of your lips turn up, a hint of mocking. “Then you have changed.”

  You spin abruptly and I follow you down a hall where the gold fades. Thankfully, this is not Brown Tooth’s beat, this is no one’s beat, and the hall is empty. After several turns we arrive at a bronze elevator.

  “I want to show you something,” you say, hitting the up button.

  The ancient elevator is slow to come, and our broken reflections shimmer back at us. When it does arrive it is confusing, with a button labeled STACK SIDE and other buttons, and I can hear pistons and gaskets as it moves, and this steampunk-y elevator is why I love my library, but I try not to let love relax me. You punch Three with the side of your fist and hold the rail. The ride is slow and jerky and I feel sick, but maybe that’s fear. We exit the elevator and my legs wobble.

  A sign says RARE BOOKS LOBBY AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, with an arrow.

  “This is where you go to work on precalculus?” I ask.

  “Something like that,” you say, smiling.

  We stop at a window facing the empty courtyard below, a pretty place where people with money eat in warm weather. You exhale sharply, fixed on getting what you want to say right.

  “I’m going to be honest. At first, I didn’t know how I felt about getting you back.”

  “I figured.”

  “What I mean is, I have loads of friends, but I haven’t had a friend like you since you’ve been gone.”

  The words been gone instead of, say, were kidnapped are weird, and I will chew on that later. Now my eyes travel across your face: the wide-set eyes made wider by the middle hair part, the chin that tips up, the lips with their excessive softness. Are you beautiful, or are you strange-looking? Why can’t I decide? And what does a friend like you mean?

  You register my silence. “Was that weird to say?”

  Silence does work best with you! Now I am in control. “It’s fine. Show me what you want to show me.”

  You sigh and curl your arm around mine, and we are back on the right track. It’s like I’m slipping into your mission, whatever that is, and though my whole life has been spent getting ready to go on missions—the stings, the scams—I’ve never been glad about it. The inside of your arm is cool, and touching you is making parts of me flame, and this has happened before, feeling pleasure when I should be repulsed, or at least, feel nothing. You lead me to a room called ART, a topsy-turvy room with long, empty tables and statues of nude Greeks and one clock that reads 10:58 over another clock that reads 8:53. Out of habit, I look for the adult: a librarian focuses hard on shuffling papers at her desk. Before she can register us, you pull me through this strange room to another, lined with iron balconies that lead to locked rooms with glass doors. The Koussevitzky Room is dim and medieval and the kind of place normally I would love to explore, but you drag me through another door. A sign tells me we are in the lobby for the RARE BOOKS AND MANUSCRIPTS DEPARTMENT, which sounds like a place Momma would have liked because rare means money. There is an adult here, too, but this librarian cares that we are here, because whatever is behind this door is worth something.

  You drop my arm and at once I am cold.

  The librarian shoves clear plastic glasses up her nose and smiles. She’s not much older than us, but in my world, this is a bad thing, because the older they are, the easier they are to con, and I have to remind myself that the only person I’m conning is you. And you want to show me something, which I’m getting excited about, because this place is nerd heaven. Something awesome hits me: maybe Vivi was smart, book smart, or else she wouldn’t have been friends with you, and this means I get to be book smart, too.

  This is the role I was made for.

  The young librarian holds the school ID that you passed her, but it’s not the red Parkman School ID that I stole. It is blue and white and says Lasell College, and the little face in the square is not Temple Lovecraft, though it’s close. The young librarian blinks behind her glasses and says it’s nice to see you again, but she doesn’t mean it, because she is bored with her job, and though this room is loaded with ancient books tied with string behind glass, it has to be hard, without daylight, and with the hum of wandering tourists who see books as objects and not ways to learn things. You slide out a superlight, superexpensive laptop and hand the librarian your backpack, too.

  (I can’t help it. This is how I see things. Expensive, not expensive. Worth stealing, not worth stealing.)

  Now you’re filling out a card to explain our purpose for going into the next room, and I want to know what that purpose is, but you’re done and the librarian is buzzing us into the next room, blue with artificial light. The light is awful but the smell is not: I breathe deeply. It is the smell of ancient things. Shouty signs read STAFF ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT and THIS AREA IS UNDER VIDEO SURVEILLANCE.

  “Be very specific today ladies,” calls a woman beelining toward us, a Mad Hatter type, oddball, speedy. She is tall with a white buzz cut and is slightly scary but you are not scared. You smile and thank her and promise to be specific in your searches, as always. My eyes go to the other three people in the room, each at a different table, the way New Englanders sit. They each have one file folder and a laptop, except for an old man who writes by hand. One, a dreadlocked girl, is taking pictures. They are all lost in their work, and that looks nice to me; peaceful. You place your computer at the only empty table and walk away from it, a casualness only rich people have with expensive things, toward one of the big bureaus filled with drawers and topped with jars of scrap paper and stubby pencils. I am about to find out what “very specific” means. You pull open a drawer labeled DI–DY, filled with cards. It’s nicely old-fashioned. You scribble something onto a slip of paper, do the same at a second drawer, and return both slips to the lady, who disappears into the back room. A man comes out to take her place, and because I am a student of people patterns, I get it: we’re not allowed to be alone in this room. No one is. This room is full of valuable things, and I wonder how one would get away with stealing them, and something new hits me—shame—because these are not thoughts Vivi would have.

  “What did you request?” I ask; a nice, normal question.
r />   “The Poe and the Dickinson. For our project,” you say, the last part overloud, though the man who replaced the lady is not listening. I must seem dense to you, but that is fine, because Vivi’s brain would not go directly to cheat or even steal like mine does. We sit in the hum of the humidifier and quiet taps on keyboards and whooshes of a phone camera. The old man falls asleep on his arm and begins to snore. None are the sounds that I know and love: the hushed tones, the squish of wet boots, the phlegmy coughs you hear in this cold city.

  When the replacement librarian takes a call at his desk, I whisper, “Why are we here?”

  “Because this is where the good stuff is,” you whisper back.

  The lady hurries out with three long folders. She warns us to keep them flat and not to use a flash if we take pictures. We lean and almost touch heads. Your clean smell is yum and I am looking at Poe’s “The Raven.” Poe’s handwriting is impossibly neat, almost girly. Nothing’s crossed out, so either the dude was on his game or this is a later copy. At the bottom, it says Edgar A. Poe; swirly, a ta-da at the end. It’s cool, and I have the sense I am looking at something I shouldn’t.

  “What’s it about?” I whisper.

  “Basically, a guy misses his girlfriend, gets crazier and crazier, and by the end he realizes she’s dead and he’s never going to see her again,” you explain.

  “And he needs a bird to tell him that?”

  “Apparently.”

  We laugh at the same time. Apparently. I like the way you talk. I would like to sound more like you. I ought to sound more like you. The lady, who has now replaced the man, gives us a sharp look, and I like being bad with you. You slip the poem back into its folder and pull out a letter dated February 14, 1849, that’s addressed to F. W. Thomas.

  “This one’s awesome,” you tell me. “He’s trashing Bostonians. Check it out.”