by Megan Abbott
“He was rubbing on you like it was Boy Scout camp,” Evie said later. “Like if he rubbed hard enough he could start that fire, get that merit badge.”
Evie would say these things and it made everything easier, all at once. We would laugh and laugh, and boys hate it when you laugh together, at them. “It was like rubbing a pink eraser to the nub,” Evie said. “He was gonna rub on you till you were just the metal tip.”
That night, that very same night, though, I felt the soft part of my underthigh, the pink stipple of brush burn, tender like new skin. It did things to me.
I wake up with a start, my legs jackrabbiting to the foot of my bed. It must’ve been a car door slamming, a clap of thunder, a raccoon in someone’s trash can, an early-summer bottle rocket, something. I jerk my feet, ankles free from the knot of sheets, and wait for a minute, trying to listen for it, but there’s nothing but the heavy buffering of the sleeping house. That lonely, lost feeling where it’s like everyone else has sunk into some velvety splendor-world except you.
My retainer sliding against my teeth with a tickle, I lie back and fix my eyes on the bleary whites of the soccer ball corkboard hanging on the back of my door.
It takes only a few seconds before I remember it was the dream. The dream woke me up and the dream was this:
Evie is on my bedroom floor, tucked in her sleeping bag, deep pink like two plush lips, on the floor by my bed. I glance down at her and see her mouth is stuffed with plumes of cotton, like from the top of an aspirin bottle. Eyes dark, loose in her head, she’s looking up at me and one hand darts out in tan, bony twitches, the cotton sputtering from her mouth in wisps. And I can’t decide if she’s laughing. It seems like she must be laughing, like we’re in the middle of a joke together and I should be laughing too, but I keep hearing things, strange, bleating sounds, and I am unfocused.
I feel a hard tug on my ankle, her fingers gnarled, her eyes large and stricken, and she whispers, and it’s like a slumber party movie with glinting hacksaws and bright cleavers, and my heart runs cold. “Is it now? Is it now?”
The dream fresh on me, I sit up again, try to shake off the murk of it, but it’s hard. That face, the feel of Evie’s hot hand wrapped around my leg, I am still there. I count to ten three times, like when I was a kid and the thunder rolled over the house. It always works and it does now too.
Just as I feel myself settling into sleep, though, I think I hear my mother’s voice, chattering and then lifting into a long sigh.
That strange, untethered feeling comes back, like things have slipped from their right place while I’d slept. I can’t think of any time since the screaming maw of the divorce that she would be on the phone at such an hour. And then it was always a grasping, urgent voice, filled with sobs and gnashing teeth.
This one lilts, filled with coaxing laughs.
It sounds like she’s outside, and I remember how it was that time right after my dad left, finding her in the driveway, cord stretched outside, crying behind the screen door, her face behind her hand.
But then I hear a deeper voice and I know. I know she’s not on the phone at all. I know it means that man is with her. My brother, Ted, saw him first, from his bedroom window. He told me about it the next day and then I watched for it. Dr. Aiken, that’s his name, Ted says so.
And check out the wedding band, Ted said, but I’ve never been close enough to see it.
He always arrives very late and he never comes inside. That’s how I know they’re out on the screen porch together again and they’re drinking tumblers of whiskey sour and he’s rubbing his face in his hand and saying, again and again, “I know I should go home, Diane, I know I should.”
But he doesn’t, or only at five, when I see him, shoes in hand, tie hanging around his neck, tripping across the front lawn to his car.
The next day, Evie and I are standing in front of the school, tapping our sticks against each other in time. The dream from last night is hovering in my head, and I think I might tell Evie about it, but I keep stopping myself. No one ever really wants to hear your dreams.
Anyway, we are having a day of no talking, just being, walking together, tapping our new hockey sticks and yanking our sweaty shirts from our chests.
Still, I can’t keep my eyes off the violet stain flaring over Evie’s temple. It looks like it could move without you, get up and go. It’s like a purple butterfly, I tell her, flitting from her face.
She puts her fingers on it and I can almost feel it pulsing on my own face, a gentle throb.
“What did your dad say?” I ask, and I imagine Mr. Verver’s wrinkled brow, like when I slipped on their stairs, running way too fast in my stocking feet, skidding down three steps, and making brush burns all up my calves.
“He bought me a raw steak at Ketchums to put on it,” she says. “Mom said it cost more than their anniversary dinner.”
It sounds like Mrs. Verver, who says everything with a yawn.
“All night,” Evie says, a grin creeping, “he kept calling me Rocky.”
We both roll our eyes, but we love it. When the boys tease, you don’t want it to be you, but with Mr. Verver, his teases are like warm hands lifting you.
Evie thrusts her hockey stick out in front of her like Zorro. “Dusty said I looked more like a battered wife on a TV show,” she says.
Then she tells me how, after dinner, her dad took her for pecan pie at Reynold’s, the good kind, gritty-sweet on your teeth. The waitresses felt sorry for her and gave her an extra scoop of ice cream.
I think of sitting with Mr. Verver, gooey pie plates between us, and how the waitresses probably always give him extra scoops. Waitresses were always doing that with Mr. Verver, just like the mothers who buzzed around him at the PTA meetings, filling his plate with sugared cookies and inviting him to their book clubs.
I wish Evie would have invited me to Reynold’s. Like other times, with Mr. Verver dabbing Cool Whip on my nose.
Out of the blue, my ankles feel itchy and I wish I could take off my gym socks.
I look down the street, which has that four thirty hush. The summer heat seems early, hovering above the asphalt.
“Where’s your mom taking you?” Evie asks, watching a car flutter upward at the speed bump in front of the school.
“The mall,” I say. “Are you going to wear your sister’s old dress?” I remember the lavender Laura Ashley with the gored skirt that Dusty wore to her own middle school graduation. All those ringlets dangling down her back and her face bright with achievement—it wasn’t something you forgot.
A maroon car shimmers out of nowhere and glides past us quickly.
“I don’t know,” Evie says, kicking her shoe toe into the pavement.
Squinting, she looks down the street. “I think I see her.”
We both watch as my mom’s tan Tempo floats before us on the horizon.
“We’ll give you a ride,” I say.
“That’s okay,” she says, twirling her hockey stick over her shoulder. I hear the stutter in my mom’s car as she pulls up.
The moment stretches out, I’m not sure why.
Evie is looking past my mother’s car, down the street.
“Someone’s lost,” she says.
“What—” I start, but then we both watch as the same maroon car drifts past us again soundlessly. Something in my head flickers, but I can’t place it.
I turn back around and there’s that Evie face, cool and orderly, the line for a mouth and her smooth, artless expression, like a soft sheet pulled fast, hiding every corner.
I twirl my stick around and clatter it against hers.
“Call me,” I say, turning toward the idling car. My mother is looking at us from behind big sunglasses, smiling absently.
I open the door and lean in. “Mom, can Evie come with us?”
But when I turn around, Evie’s gone, slipped behind the tall hedgerow, behind the stone columns of the old school.
Do I see it in her expression, as she looks at
me, as she pulls her face into blankness? Do I hear her say, in some low register, a creeping knowingness always between us? Do I hear her say, This is the last time, this is the last time?
This face, my face, gone forever.
Three
The phone rings. It’s ten thirty at night. I’m brushing my teeth when it happens, and I hope it’s not my dad calling from California, calling from his apartment balcony, a sway in his voice, talking about the time we rented canoes at Old Pine Lake, or the time he built the swing set in the backyard, or other things I don’t really remember but that he does, always, when he’s had a second glass of wine.
But it’s not him, and my mother sounds rattled and confused.
“I’ll be sure to speak to her right away,” she says, and I try to think of things I might have done. Late for Algebra twice last week. Would they call your parents at ten thirty at night for that?
After she hangs up, she drops her arms to her sides, and I can see her take a long breath.
Pushing wisps of hair behind her ears, which is what she does when her nerves run high, she sits me down at the kitchen table.
“I’m going to ask you something,” she says, “and I need you to tell me the truth.”
I say of course I will.
“Okay,” she says, and her hands tremble, and I feel bad about whatever I did even though I can’t imagine what it might be. “Do you know anything about Evie not coming home from school today?”
I shake my head and say I don’t know anything. I don’t know anything at all. Even though I’m telling the truth, it somehow feels like I’m lying.
My mother, her face gone soft and pink, takes my hand in hers and asks me again. And then once more.
But I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t.
Somewhere, though, somewhere in my head, in the back pitch of it, there’s something. There’s something. I just can’t reach it.
Four
It’s happening, that’s what I think, but even as the words come to me, I don’t know what they mean. In some tucked-off way, it seems like whatever is happening had already been happening, for so long, a falling feeling inside, something nameless, a perilous feeling, and I don’t know what to do with it.
I saw her, that hank of dark hair, sports socks tugged high over knees. I saw her.
Evie was there, and then Evie was gone.
Fingers pushed between the blinds in our den, I peek through to the Verver house, lights blaring in every room.
Just five nights before, I slept over, trading pj’s and listening to music and even reading aloud a chapter from the thick paperback Mrs. Verver kept by her lounge chair, the one with the woman’s mouth on the cover, open, and a man’s finger touching it. Evie said the finger looked hairy, and she didn’t like how they were always having sex standing up. But we read some of the scenes two, three times, taking turns. I kept thinking what it might be like, all those bodies and rushing blood and thrusting tongues. Everything seemed rough, bruising, wet. It made my stomach go tight and we put it away and I was glad.
I kept thinking about the book after we went to bed, Evie’s room dark, my eyes on the soccer ball mobile making lively shadows on the wall. Dusty and Mr. Verver were in lawn chairs on the back patio, their voices floating up. I could hear them laughing and his laugh always so serene, so serene, like he is.
You always feel Mr. Verver through the whole house, that laugh of his, deep and caramely. He makes the house feel so full, crowded with bright things and mischief and fun. When we were younger, he’d play board games with us and he always cheated, but you couldn’t care. He’d announce it, like it was his own special strategy, and then he’d wink at you, and it was like you were in it with him. You found yourself wanting to help him. Dusty always scolded him and sometimes took his turn away. The games would go on for hours, and you never wanted it to stop.
“Dusty’s back from her date,” Evie whispered, and it was only then that I realized she was listening to them too. I sat up in my sleeping bag and nudged toward her bed.
“With Tom Mullan?” I asked, and Evie said shush.
“Listen,” she mouthed. “Just listen.”
Dusty and Mr. Verver’s voices hovered, so delicately, through the window. We could hear Dusty, wry and giggly at the same time, which is how she always is with her dad and no one else.
“So then he stops the car and—”
“Just tell me he didn’t say he was out of gas.”
A peal of Dusty laughter. I remembered the week last summer when my brother took Dusty out a few times and wondered if she sat back here with Mr. Verver and they laughed together about him.
“No, he just stops the car and turns to me and says, ‘Babe—’ ”
“Babe? He called you ‘babe,’ did he? Poor kid. He’s in way over his head.”
“He says, ‘In that white dress, you look like an angel.’ And then—”
“But you are, babe, but you are…,” Mr. Verver said, and I could practically see his grin.
“Dad, stop!” Dusty was wheezing with laughter, trying to get words out. “So he leans over, and next thing I know he’s practically swallowing my ear.”
“Well, did you return the favor? I raised you with manners, didn’t I? I mean, he promised you dinner, didn’t he?”
Dusty’s laughter was just breathless squeaks.
“C’mon. What did you do?” Mr. Verver chuckled. “The poor little squirt.”
“What could I do? He swallowed my pearl drop earring and nearly choked. I couldn’t stop laughing. I hit him on the back, and it popped out.”
“I bet it popped out,” Mr. Verver said, and there was the briefest of gasping pauses before both of them let loose a new stream of uproarious howling.
Evie kept staring at me, waiting for me to smile or say something, but I didn’t because I didn’t know what she wanted.
All I could think was how wondrous it was—oh, the two of them. Everyone wanted to fall under their enchantment, her gaze hard and appraising, his so soft, so welcoming.
That was how it was in that house, and there was so much fun to be had. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I remember thinking—was it just five days ago?—to talk about boys with Mr. Verver? To play Uno with Evie for hours and watch Dusty try on her pastel dresses and listen to music with Mr. Verver until dawn?
It is a long night and my mother walks the halls, checks the window latches three times, the front door. She seems to walk all night, bumping into chairs, turning the television off and on. And I try to sleep, I try to sleep away the thoughts spreading dark stains through my head.
But I have thoughts, and the thoughts feel like they will be very bad dreams.
My mother walks me over to the Ververs the next morning. On TV you have to wait twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours before it means something. It’s been only a half day. This is what I tell my mother as she holds my hand so tightly for the seven steps between our houses.
She stops and looks at me, her face pinched. “Not with children,” she says. “They don’t make you wait with children.”
“Oh,” I say, and she looks like she wants to say more but is stopping herself, making herself stop. But then she can’t.
“With children,” she says, “every minute matters. Everything can be ruined in a half hour. You have no idea.”
I feel a hard rake across my chest. It’s the most awful thing I’ve ever heard. What could she mean? What does that mean?
Wired so tight, she doesn’t notice my flinch, and before I know it, she’s yanked me through the Ververs’ side door.
There are two detectives in the living room, and they ask my mother to wait while they lead me upstairs. I’m still thinking about Mr. Verver’s face when he’d answered the door for us, brimmed high with feeling, his whole body jumping, his hands scratching at his upper arms, bouncing on his feet.
He’s trying so hard, that’s how I see it. He’s trying so hard, and Dusty was making coffee, her whole body cocooned in a
big sweatshirt that made me perspire to look at, and she was trying to concentrate, and the grounds kept scattering, and when she knelt down, I saw the long swoop of a tear hang off her eye, but she covered it quick with her ballooning sleeve, and by the time she rose and turned to me, she was dry-eyed, focused.
Upstairs in Evie’s room, with the two men in blazers and ties, my head feels hot, and everything’s twitching in me, like nerve endings snipping and snapping. It’s all too much and here I am, and I have to know things, tell things.
I take breaths, many of them, deep ones. First, they ask me if anything in the room looks different, but it doesn’t. They make me look around, but there’s nothing to see. Nothing I can see. All I can think of is how strange it is to see the room that’s all Evie—a soccer ball lamp, tidily arranged schoolbooks, neat rows of pencils with bright eraser toppers, and that Magic-8 Ball she keeps on her desk (Ask again later, it always said)—filled up with two men in striped ties who have to bend their heads to avoid the eaves.
Then, for half an hour or more, they ask me many questions, over and over again. They sit me down on the twin bed, that nubby yellow bedspread of hers. I don’t know where to look, so I focus on the luscious strawberry crusted over my knee from practice, running my fingernails under its hard edges, tugging ever so gently.
“Lizzie,” one of them says, “did Eveline—Evie—did she say she was waiting for someone?”
“No. She was just going to walk home.”
“Do you usually walk home together?”
“Yeah, but I was going to the mall.”
They repeat the earlier questions. I repeat my answers, running my fingers over my knee, the crinkles of the scab. The questions shift.
“Did Evie have a boyfriend?”
I feel my face rash up with red, and then I feel silly for it.
“No,” I say.
“Did she ever talk about boys to you? Boys she liked, or who maybe liked her?” One of the detectives sits down beside me, crunching the tiny bed lopsided.
