Little Wrecks

by Meredith Miller

  “You seen Ruth or Isabel, Lefty?”

  “They’re afloat. Left. With eggs. On a boat.”

  “They what? We don’t know anyone with a boat, Lefty. Are you sure?”

  “Magdalene Warren.” Jeff comes up behind her and leans both elbows on her shoulders like she’s his personal piece of furniture. “Come on,” he says. “Sorry, Lefty, me and Magdalene gotta go.” Jeff walks away without looking back.

  And she follows him. Her stomach feels like someone dropped a rock in it.

  “Didn’t you see me when you came in the park?” He sounds a little pissed off.

  “Yeah, you were talking. I didn’t want to bother you.”

  “You’re not gonna bother me, Warren. We like each other, don’t we?” Charm now, but he put it on so fast it doesn’t convince her. Or maybe it does.

  “Someone was saying a dealer up in South Highbone got robbed. We were just talking about it. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.”

  He grabs Magda by the arms and kisses her. As soon as he lets go she sits down on the grass and looks at his knees. She has to work hard to stay in her own body and keep breathing. If she stood up right now, she’d fall over.

  “I like you, Magdalene Warren. You with me?”

  She reaches in her pockets for cigarettes and all she comes up with is a multi-tool and an empty cassette case.

  “You don’t listen so good,” Jeff says. “I asked you a question. You with me?”

  “I . . . um . . . I don’t know.” The cigarettes are in her inside pocket, but if she takes one out of the pack, she might shake when she tries to light it.

  “Let’s go somewhere else,” he says. “Come on.” He isn’t going to wait for an answer.

  “I have to go back home, for Henry.” It’s kind of true.

  Jeff sits down and puts his legs over hers. He kisses her again, and reaches inside her coat to put his hand under her shirt. Then he stands up and says, “I give you my number, you gonna call me?”

  “I’ll try.” She doesn’t have enough breath left to make more words than that.

  “Huh?”

  “I said I’ll try.”

  Now he looks mad, for sure. He writes his number on a 7-Eleven matchbook, throws it down into her lap, and walks away.

  Lefty is chanting now, on the bench by the bandstand, sounding like a medieval monk. There are sailboats passing each other at the mouth of the harbor, and someone is playing “Stairway to Heaven” on an acoustic guitar at the end of the pier. Two guys are sitting on the rocks at the edge of the water with a bottle of Night Train and a chess set. If they let Carson McCullers make tourist postcards, they’d look like Highbone Park on a Saturday morning.

  four

  IT’S MONDAY AGAIN, but Ruth doesn’t feel like she could get away with anything. Ever since the robbery, it’s like an ax is hanging over her, ready to fall. She keeps waiting for people to jump up and say they know everything, about Matt’s weed and Danny’s tires and her and Isabel and Mackie and the things she still wants to do.

  What would Magda say? Well, she won’t say anything because Ruth didn’t tell her where she’s going. She’s been hiding in the girls’ room, waiting for Magda and Isabel to leave school. When she comes out the swinging door, the marble floors are empty and shining, and her shadow stretches unbroken from the girls’ room to the door of Administration.

  The guidance counselor’s office has spider plants in macramé plant hangers and a sign that says, Someday schools will get all the money they need and the army will have to hold bake sales to buy bombs. Ms. Jimenez, her guidance counselor, looks exactly like the kind of person who would have those plant hangers and that sign. As soon as Ruth sees her, she worries that her mom might know the lady. She looks like the kind of woman Caroline Carter would hang out with. She has two long braids and an Indian shirt.

  “Hi, Ruth. It’s good to see you,” Ms. Jimenez says. “Sit down and relax.”

  “How can it be good to see me? You don’t even know me.”

  Ruth stands in the doorway, wanting to leave and wanting to stay and wishing she could ask Virgil Mackie what to do. Whatever he would say, it wouldn’t be, “Calm down.” It wouldn’t be, “Smile, everything’s fine.”

  Why is she turning herself over to people who want to smooth out her jagged edges and slow down her breathing? She doesn’t want to calm down. The situation doesn’t call for calm.

  Ms. Jimenez is chuckling. “Okay, but it isn’t every day a student comes to see me by themselves, without somebody making them. Have a seat. Is there something special you wanted to talk about?”

  Why else would she be here?

  “You’re not allowed to tell anyone what I say, right?”

  “Well,” Ms. Jimenez says, “not unless I think you or someone else is in serious danger. That’s the rule.” She smiles.

  Why the fuck is she smiling about serious danger?

  “I’m a little worried about stuff, but I don’t want to be shrunk. I’m fine; I don’t want somebody to turn me into some kind of Stepford wife. I just can’t always talk to my friends or my mom.”

  “Do I look like I’m into the Stepford wife thing?” Ms. Jimenez laughs again.

  She’s a little overly jolly for somebody who deals with the soul-death fallout of suburban families all day.

  “There are some questions I have to ask you,” Ms. Jimenez says. “They might seem strange, but it’s a requirement, so let’s just do them quick, and then we can talk, okay? Do you ever think about hurting yourself or anyone else?”

  “Just the president.” Ruth laughs now, but it doesn’t sound the same as Ms. Jimenez’s laugh at all.

  “Seriously, though. Can you answer truthfully? Do you ever have thoughts about hurting yourself or anyone else?”

  “Of course I do! Have you been outside this office lately? Do you have any idea how messed up the world is? You can’t fix it with Buddhist chanting and macramé workshops, you know. It’s a little beyond that.” Ruth is shouting. She goes quiet and looks away out the window. “But, you know,” she says, “it’s only just thoughts. They’re free, right?”

  “I can see you’re angry, Ruth. I just want to be clear. It’s okay, we all have bad days and we all feel mad sometimes. So, sometimes you feel so mad you wish you could hurt yourself? Or hurt someone else?”

  “Show me a woman who doesn’t fantasize about hurting herself,” Ruth says, “and I’ll show you a liar. The whole world is designed to make us feel helpless. We can’t even trust each other. What are we supposed to do with all that? And then people like you want to make us calm down. We should be shouting and burning things down.”

  Outside the window, the lacrosse team is warming up, with their girlfriends standing on the sidelines in little bunches. It looks like rain, and the seagulls are circling over the football field, screaming. The sound they’re making is exactly the sound she wants to make, but the world won’t let her.

  These days, she can’t even predict her own actions. It’s like she’s in a big surf and trying to ride it, all the time. They say drowning is like falling asleep, once you stop struggling, once you calm down. But Ruth just keeps gasping for air, wanting to grab on to something. Here she is now, grabbing on.

  “Ms. Jimenez? I read somewhere that if people are gonna go crazy, you know, schizophrenic, it happens when they’re teenagers. Is that true?”

  She smiles. That is her actual reaction.

  “Okay, I’m asking you if I’m losing my grip on reality. I want to know whether I’m going to spend the rest of my life surrounded by dirty linoleum, playing checkers on Thorazine. Do you have maybe another facial expression for that?”

  “I’m sorry, Ruth. I’m trying to let you know that you’re safe here.”

  “Not really working. Sorry.”

  “The number of teenagers who worry that they have a serious mental illness is a lot bigger than the number who actually do. How’s that for an answer?”

  “Pretty vague. How many
of those perfectly sane hypochondriacs go weeks on end without sleeping and are too afraid to tell anyone what they’re thinking because most of it is completely nuts?”

  “Are you having trouble sleeping, Ruth?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Have you asked your mother to take you to the doctor about it?”

  “Seriously, Ms. Jimenez? I’m here because I don’t want to talk to anybody about what’s happening to me. I mean, I do, but I can’t. I’m not going to the doctor with my mom. He’s known me since I was born.”

  “Okay, listen, lack of sleep can have all kinds of effects on you.”

  “Can it make you see things? Imagine things happening?”

  “Yes. And I think you should see the doctor about it.” Mrs. Jimenez tries to look stern. It doesn’t really work with the braids.

  “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” Ruth says.

  She really wants to talk about her mom and Danny, about how to get rid of him and make her life go back to normal. There’s a door open in her head and she doesn’t know whether to go through. The way she felt at the edge of Ms. Jimenez’s office is the way she feels all the time now. Wanting to go through, but also wanting to stay on this side.

  “How can it be a bad idea just to talk to someone?” Ms. Jimenez thrusts her head forward and puts on a “caring and concerned” face.

  “I don’t want to live in Highbone, Ms. Jimenez. Not even for another year. I feel dizzy all the time, like there’s no gravity here.”

  “Well, you’ll probably have to be here a while longer, Ruth. So, what can you do to make the time go by?”

  “Well, drugs and sex seem to be the preferred options. I’ve been, you know, exploring my dark side, which is distracting. Sometimes things are just a little much. I live with my mom, you know? She won’t talk about my dad, so I kind of had to guess.”

  “You’ve never known him?”

  “I sort of know who he is, but I can’t talk about it to anyone. He’s married to someone else and he’s kind of a bigwig. I mean for Highbone. For some reason, it’s started to bother me lately. It never did before. Then she has a new boyfriend and he practically lives with us now, but no one’s asked me. My friends are changing and being weird. I don’t get all this crap about men. Boys. Whatever. Just kind of, why would you do that, you know? Be powerless on purpose?”

  “Maybe some guys are okay?” Ms. Jimenez sounds like she’s trying to convince herself, not Ruth.

  “I haven’t seen one I’d want to touch me, that’s for sure. But my friend Isabel, she’s ready to give up her whole personality just so somebody will make her feel pretty for five minutes before they stop talking to her and she feels like she’s gonna die. I don’t get what that’s about. It kind of freaks me out. I wouldn’t really hurt myself, though, Ms. Jimenez. It’s just sometimes I think if more girls showed people how things are, people might notice, you know?”

  “I think I do, Ruth,” Ms. Jimenez says.

  It’s nice not to have to pull punches; she can curse and talk about sex and doing acid and Ms. Jimenez will just have to sit there using the caring-and-concerned face until she gets permanent wrinkles between her eyebrows. She can’t tell anyone because of the counselor thing. Still, it turns out there’s a lot Ruth can’t seem to say, in here or anywhere. Except to Mackie.

  “My friends used to be the only thing that mattered to me. They’re just not the same anymore. I feel cut off, like I’m underwater all the time. I’m talking to them, but just bubbles are coming out. I don’t trust them anymore. I’m the only one left with any kind of soul.”

  She can feel her words ringing in the air of Ms. Jimenez’s little hippie office. Dark side. Soul.

  Soul is the part without weight. Some god puts it in the scales and it’s supposed to be lighter than a feather. Bodies are heavy, subject to gravity and people’s assumptions. Lately, Ruth feels like she’s trying to get away from her body all the time. Following Magda, listening to the sound of her pockets or watching her build things out of spare parts, always used to make Ruth feel solid again, real. It doesn’t seem to anymore.

  “So, those things are making you mad? Making you think sometimes you want to hurt yourself? That’s understandable, but does that reaction make sense when you think about it, Ruth?”

  Maybe she should backtrack a little, before she winds up upstate in some special school or something.

  “Look, Ms. Jimenez, most of what happens to girls is invisible. It’s just sometimes I think, if we did the bleeding on the outside, if we showed it, things might have to change. I know that’s stupid, though. I do. Thinking about it just makes me feel better sometimes.”

  Ms. Jimenez looks at her like she is expecting more. It’s freaky the way shrinks do that, controlling people with their silences. Do they really wonder why no one likes them?

  “You should go into the art room,” Ruth says. “You wouldn’t believe how much of the stuff kids make is about blood. Drawings, paintings, sculptures, veins, cuts, floods of blood everywhere. Mrs. Farrow says she’s going to let us have a show about blood in the gallery. She says it’s always like that, every year with every group of kids our age. Blood. Blood. Blood. That’s kind of what I’m talking about. We all think about hurting ourselves. Mrs. Farrow thinks it’s interesting. She’s cool.”

  Out the window, the lacrosse girlfriends on the field are holding each other’s legs while they do handstands. They pretend it’s embarrassing when their tops fall down and their bras pop out.

  “Look at that.” Ruth points. “That is what girls do. How am I supposed to deal with having an actual brain in a world like this? It just gets to be a bit much sometimes.”

  “Would you like to come back, Ruth?” Ms. Jimenez says.

  “That’s your response?” Ruth would feel bad for being so rude, but Ms. Jimenez doesn’t change the totally bland expression on her face no matter what Ruth says. It kind of makes you want to try and shock her. Maybe that’s a shrink trick, too.

  “It’s important that whoever you’re with you feel safe and happy, Ruth.”

  “Yes, Ms. Jimenez, I get that. I’m telling you I don’t. Not anymore. I feel scared, all the time. Unless I’m pissed off. Really, really pissed off.”

  This isn’t where help is going to come from. How could she have thought it was, even for a minute? This might be the actual definition of desperate, believing that the school would hire someone who could help you with real life.

  “Well, I’ve really enjoyed meeting you and hearing what you think, and I think we could talk more,” Ms. Jimenez says. “I’d like to. Would you?”

  Lacrosse practice is over by the time Ruth leaves the school. Out on the empty field the world seems farther away than it was the last time she saw it. All the time now, she’s looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope. People like those lacrosse girlfriends acting out things she doesn’t want to understand.

  Ruth didn’t tell Ms. Jimenez about Danny’s car, which was the reason she went to see her in the first place. Or about Virgil Mackie. No one knows about Mackie.

  All the things she did say, though, have come out of her like weights. She’s lighter now, cleaner. It isn’t Ms. Jimenez who did that, though, it’s him. The past few days, it’s like Virgil Mackie took the lid off her, letting out the scalding steam.

  Ms. Jimenez got distracted by all that talk about blood and suicide, and forgot all about the second question. She forgot to ask Ruth if she felt like hurting other people.

  “My space goes two ways together, twilight’s forever.” She sings it again on the way home. This time of year, with school almost over, night starts to tiptoe up, sparkling, instead of falling on you out of nowhere the way it does in November. And then there’s everything that’s happening inside her, the stuff nobody can see. She stops to lean against the empty brake repair shop and gather up enough strength to go through the trees home. Inside her head, it’s all going two ways together.

  “I’d
offer you a joint, but I don’t think you need one, little Carter.”

  “Jesus, Charlie. You scared the crap out of me.”

  “What you doing back here?” he says.

  “I came back here to get away from people.” Ruth shifts sideways and puts her back to the wall.

  “This is South Highbone. No getting away from people here. Heard about Matt?”

  “Uh, no. What?”

  “The guys from Nassau County who front him stuff are pissed off. Really pissed off. Apparently he owes them a load of money he can’t pay ’cause someone robbed his weed.”

  “. . .”

  “Got nothing to say, Ruthie? Isn’t he your neighbor?”

  “Kind of. So, um, you robbed him, huh?”

  “No. Here’s a funny thing. You three been smoking up all week, but none of you have bought anything off me in ages. Weird, right?”

  “I stole some from my mom.” That lie isn’t too hard. It’s pretty much the truth.

  “You know where your mom keeps her stash, huh?” He looks over at the back of her house.

  “Charlie, don’t rob us. It won’t go well for you.”

  “Yeah, me and you get each other, though, don’t we? I mean, we’re both from up here. Sit down. Have a cigarette.” He shakes a soft pack of Camel nonfilters at her until one comes halfway out.

  “I don’t know if we ‘get each other,’ Charlie.” She reaches to take the cigarette and leans back against the wall of Mr. Macanajian’s garage. “I kind of doubt it. I don’t really know you, but I’m guessing we don’t have lots to talk about.”

  “No, I don’t know you either, but we could fix that.”

  Guys really say stuff like that. No, even weirder, it usually works for them.

  “Isabel’s the one you should be talking to, Charlie.”

  “Maybe later. I’m talkin’ to you right now.”

  And then Charlie’s body is covering her, leaning into her. His tongue is in her mouth and all the shadows around them have shattered like black glass. There is a glare inside her head like someone switched on an interrogation lamp in a room full of sharp light and cigarettes. She pushes and twists out, scraping herself away against the wall.