The Last Kid Left

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  But Alex loved the dress, complimented her endlessly.

  And Emily discovered how much she liked to be praised.

  The dress articulated something she’d wanted to say for a long time.

  In the months that followed, she made her friend a dozen better things. A yellow dress for Homecoming. A yellow bumblebee skirt (Alex’s favorite color was yellow) with black and white stripes to match her hair, that was so short it got Alex in trouble with dress code after it distracted nearly every boy in school.

  When Alex quit smoking pot on New Year’s Eve, she cited Emily’s good influence. And also quit Diet Vanilla Coke because that shit was gross.

  They were best friends, they wrote it down, they couldn’t picture their lives without the other.

  So when Alex insisted in late March, beginning of spring—later to be known as the Night of Speed Metal—that Emily sneak out at two a.m., of course she’d found the guts, despite white-hot fear, to crawl awkwardly across the roof, hitch down the tree, and sprint across the field toward the headlights on the road. Half-thrilled, mostly terrified, all because she couldn’t risk to tell her brilliant friend no.

  Twenty minutes later, they’d pulled into a parking space across from a diner by the beach. The boardwalk was dark, windy, and cold. The ocean was flat and silent. There was muddy snow all around. Not even the Ferris wheel ran at that hour. And yet the sidewalk was full of kids she knew by face, at least a dozen kids who lingered by a dumpster, smoked cigarettes, only wore T-shirts and flannels as if it wasn’t still winter. She spotted a knot of Zetas, they listened to music off somebody’s phone. Did everyone normally sneak out? Was it typical to be out so late, and she’d been clueless once again?

  Alex led them inside the restaurant. The manager said loudly, “We’re closing in five minutes.” Her voice made a tableful of dudes turn to stare.

  They took a booth. Alex whispered, “I’m such a bad bitch.”

  “I guess.”

  “My therapist says I want to think I’m ‘of interest’ to somebody.”

  “She said that?”

  Two minutes later, the manager kicked them out. Alex perked up again, ignited by the outrage. The boys came out and lit cigarettes. Alex asked for one. They were all twenty or twenty-one, they were in a band, they’d moved to Claymore from Laconia to work tourist jobs while they practiced and played shows. The plan was to move to Brooklyn once enough money was saved.

  They played speed metal, the shortest one said, with influences of power ambient.

  Alex said, “I hate everything you just said.”

  “What’s your band’s name?” Emily asked.

  “The Power of Elephants,” said the short one.

  Alex said, “So what does that mean?”

  The tallest one said, after a brief moment of silence, “Do you ever think how, like, if kittens breathed fire, they’d only breathe a really small amount of fire?”

  “Why would I think that?”

  “Why wouldn’t you?”

  “You’re such dudes. I bet you don’t even play your own instruments.”

  “Yeah, well,” he said, “who the hell are you?”

  “I’m Miss America.”

  “I’m Emily.”

  The tall one had the head of an elephant tattooed on the back of each hand. He had a tiny dog next to him, a pit bull puppy on a leash. Emily kept an eye on how Alex watched the boy, how the boy watched Alex. She’d never seen Alex interested in a guy before, she was fascinated. Did it always happen so fast?

  The short boy said they lived around the corner. Everyone left together. On the walk, she pleaded to Alex again, through her teeth, “Can we go now, please?”

  “If you’re in trouble, you’re in trouble.”

  “But I’m scared.”

  “Don’t be a pussy.”

  The house looked haunted. The tall boy locked his dog in a cage under the stairs. Inside, the kitchen floor was uneven, it tilted to a hole through which she could see the plumbing. Alex and the tall one were quickly alone in a corner. Emily went into a den and sat on a dirty couch. The room was gross. The boys filed in. Someone lit a joint and passed it around. She would leave any second, she told herself. After all, she had enough money for a cab. The joint came to her, Emily accepted it awkwardly. She’d never smoked anything before in her life. Don’t be a pussy. She sucked on the end and burst out coughing.

  “You have to inhale,” one said.

  “Leave her alone,” said the short one. He handed her a water bottle.

  She drank almost the whole thing, then glanced up, worried. Did he want to share it? Had everyone stared at her? But they were occupied, they watched TV, a nature show, whales who flew through the ocean on wings. She got up and looked around the kitchen. Alex and the tall one had disappeared.

  “I love whales,” announced the short one.

  “I do, too,” she said from the doorway.

  She sat down again. Was she stoned? She didn’t feel stoned. The whales were nice to look at. The short boy leaned toward her across the couch. His hair was curly, it smelled like pineapples.

  “Do you want to come hear us play?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guys, let’s go.”

  Suddenly everyone was moving, like athletes summoned by a coach. They banged down a flight of stairs to the basement. Emily stayed seated, she felt light-headed and nervous, maybe she was stoned.

  The short one stood up. He had his eye on her. “Come on,” he said, and pulled her up by the hand. “You probably won’t get it but that’s cool.”

  She stood up but he didn’t budge. Suddenly she was right in front of him. She was at least three inches taller. She wondered what would happen if she touched his hair. Her throat went cold. What if he wanted to kiss her? Was this how it happened? Where was Alex to offer advice? She wanted him to kiss her, she realized. It thrilled her. So, what then? What if she kissed him? She ran the image through her mind. She liked his dimples, she liked the divot in his chin. Her arms got goose bumps.

  But then he pulled out a paper envelope and shook out what looked like potpourri.

  “Here.” Offering. “It’ll help you take it in.”

  “What are they?”

  “They’re mushrooms.”

  She swallowed them and finished off the water bottle. The taste was gross. They went downstairs, to murky darkness, a tool bench. Five or six mattresses leaned against the walls. The boys plugged in their instruments. Emily sat in a folding beach chair on the ground, closed her eyes, and thought about how the sun would be up soon, she had a track meet later that afternoon, she was in serious trouble.

  Then she felt weirdly light.

  The walls were expanding, or something like that?

  The boys started playing. It sounded like a single note, so thick it droned. She sat back in the dark, the crazy sound, and it was amazing. Though when she opened her eyes she didn’t like the boys’ faces at all, she couldn’t look at them for some reason, their geometry had become alien, so she stared at the plumbing in the ceiling instead, and that was so amazing.

  And the music was actually really subtle, while the indoors became outdoors, and her skull wasn’t a barrier anymore, and her memories were let loose to run.

  For the first time that she could remember in her life, Emily Portis disappeared.

  After forty-five minutes, Alex clomped downstairs. She found Emily smiling at the ceiling. In the neighborhood’s silence, four a.m. dark, Emily couldn’t look her friend in the face because Alex’s face was scary the way the boys’ faces had been scary, something about the angles were incorrect, so she focused on getting into the truck. Soon they chugged out of town. Emily rolled down her window. Alex talked. She herself couldn’t speak. Time had folded in on itself, so had Emily Portis. And every house they passed was densely unlit. Parked cars seethed with malicious parked car–ness. Trees bled tree-ness into the ground. In the distance the mountaintop was even blacker than the sky. Somewhere on
its side was her family’s old house. The mountain’s darkest outcropping sucked her home.

  “Hey, weirdo,” said Alex. “Why are you being so quiet?”

  She needed to open the door. Air rushed into the car. She undid her seat belt.

  “Shit! Emily, stop!”

  Alex braked so hard, the tires squealed. The car fishtailed in the road. Around them were thick woods full of sticky oil three feet deep, oil that slowly oozed toward them.

  She had to close her eyes against the horribleness that encroached.

  “What the hell? You think that’s funny? Are you nuts?”

  “It’s cool,” she said quietly.

  “What’d you just say?”

  “Don’t look at me.”

  “Why?”

  “They took away your face.”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry!”

  “Oh, shit. Holy shit. You’re high.”

  “He said mushrooms,” Emily said slowly. “He said they were mushrooms.”

  That was the night that Alex almost peed in her pants from laughing.

  And it became a founding story in their mythology, the Night of Speed Metal. Emily actually didn’t mind, she could see beyond the storm. To be teased by Alex turned out to be okay. Bigger than that, she liked to feel a little dangerous, she enjoyed it. She didn’t even get busted for sneaking out.

  By January, she tripped two or three times a month, by herself, sometimes in her room but mostly outdoors, in the woods. She’d hike up the mountain while Father was at work, she loved it. And the experience was always so agreeable, full of woolly branches and crunchy meadows, that each time in a rush of self-loathing and guilt and rebellious pleasure, she would justify the mushrooms as an act of obliteration, that she was a girl who needed to disappear, for her own sake and the world’s, and also because that’s how it truly felt when she’d blend into nature, the softness of the world, and all her dark thoughts ran away and left her unaccompanied. Blissfully, at least for a couple hours, she was no one.

  * * *

  Alex and her older sister, Meg, who went by Headdress, lived in a rickety, messy apartment nicknamed the Sisterhood, four blocks in from the beach, the second floor of an old brick building, above a bakery, with a rusted outdoor staircase spiked to the wall.

  Every time Emily visited, the apartment was a glum Mardi Gras: stuffed trash bags, empty soda cans, magazines, old pizza boxes, moisturizer bottles, Meg’s bikinis, Meg’s surfboard, Meg’s laundry, and all the smells of feminine musk. And in a corner would tower a neat pile of Alex’s books from school, her posters from Diversity Club, her stuffed backpack.

  The apartment was nicknamed the Sisterhood because it was just the two of them. They were on their own. Their parents, Fred and Kiki, were artists in New York City, though this fact of life, their being artists, their being feverish, hand-wringing, serious painters, who needed to live and work in New York and only New York, had not materialized until Alex was in seventh grade, back when she still went by Alexandra, and Meg at the time was seventeen.

  It happened over a long weekend, Alex had told her. Their parents presented them with a bold new family plan. That the girls would be provided with all the essentials and more, clothing allowances, eating-out money, vehicles, spending cash, college educations if so desired, extra money for Meg as compensation for guardian duties, extra allowance for Alexandra for putting up with Meg—plus, as a family, they’d come together one weekend every month, for longer vacations twice a year, with locations of democratic choosing, within reason—all so that they, Fred and Kiki, could pursue their art careers in New York City, without children, while the girls remained back home.

  “But why don’t we all just move?” Meg had asked.

  “I want to live in New York City,” Alex said.

  But this wasn’t the plan their parents had in mind.

  Meg became Headdress shortly after high school. She lasted one semester at UNH-Manchester, in the pursuit of a women’s studies degree. For which a class required anthropological work at a local strip club. Meg had never been to one. She befriended some of the dancers. For the sake of research, she started performing herself. Back in the day she’d done ballet and jazz, now she liked the freedom, the attention, the music, making money for herself. Her academic excuse quickly faded. Soon she danced full-time.

  Her nickname referred to the costume she wore, a Native American headdress with glass beads, wrapped feathers, strands of bells. She’d bought it off eBay. It didn’t stay in the club for long. Meg wore it to the grocery store, the mall, the beach, because it was good for her brand. To be seen around town, to remind those who’d seen her dance that it was perhaps time to see her again, and entice those who’d only heard word of her dancing—a clever brand needed to work on several levels of customer-activation. (Over time, Meg would explain marketing to Emily on multiple occasions.)

  From what Alex told her, her sister, Meg, aka Headdress, was alternately hopeful, morose, smart, and shortsighted, which depended on the lunar cycle and/or meds, and/or current boyfriends. Sexually greedy. Diagnosed depressed. Alex explained that, despite what Emily might generously think, Meg didn’t strip for school, wasn’t a dancer with a heart of gold. Was simply an exhibitionist with a rocking body who loved to make money and not have to face real-life decisions.

  As the younger sister, Alex had learned absolutely nothing good about life from Headdress, and not much more from Meg.

  The summer before her sophomore year, Emily spent many nights at the Sisterhood. Father tolerated sleepovers, as long as she kept up her GPA. One night in July, late, hot and humid outside, Meg ran up the stairs in a loose tank top and short cutoffs. A man shouted something. She went straight for the broom closet, came back with a shotgun, flew out the door just as the guy tromped up the stairs.

  He backpedaled into the night and said unpleasant things about women.

  “What the hell was that?” Alex snapped.

  “Chill out. It was nothing.” Meg read Emily’s look instantly. “He followed me home because penis. The only thing to see here is the need for the two of you to get your concealed-carry permits.”

  “That is such bullshit,” Alex spluttered, and went to her room.

  Emily didn’t budge, she was too scared, frozen by awe. Meg opened the window, poured herself a glass of wine, then remembered something, dug around in her bag, and tossed Emily a Ziploc baggie of mushrooms without a word.

  Emily and Meg didn’t hang out much because Meg scared her. Headdress frightened her even more. Both personas were twenty-seven but sometimes thirteen. It was hard to predict. Headdress, in particular, would invite you into weird little corners of her world. Her mysterious insomnia. Her bumpy relationship with Adderall. Her troubles at the club like when construction workers came in, and after a dozen dances her thighs would be scratched raw because the guys couldn’t be bothered to change out of their Carhartts. However, Meg liked to do mushrooms, too, and she had a connection at one of the clubs where she worked.

  After Alex stomped away, Meg ordered Emily to sit down. Given what had just happened, it was yet another opportunity to counsel Emily’s off-grid ignorant self on the ways of males. This didn’t happen infrequently, that Meg would assume a yoga pose and play mother, as though she believed Emily to be a lost creature who needed instruction. For example, she should never leave guys fully satisfied. Also never send naked selfies from her phone. “Your generation should just skip online dating. Or say in your bio you want to have a baby.” Because some dudes wanted romance, Meg explained, but others wanted you to be their mothers. Some guys you met, you texted, but should you ignore them for a little while, they flipped out. And some guys just wanted to smoke a girl out in exchange for a hand job. She should avoid those guys.

  Meg picked up a catalog. “Do you ever look at Victoria’s Secret? Honestly, it’s like my diet porn.”

  Alex came out, crashed into Emily on the sofa, cuddled into her side. The three of them co
uld smell the ocean, low tide, the sourness on the breeze.

  “Of course,” Meg resumed, stood up, removed her bra under her tank top, “if you’re in love, like, love-love? It’s totally different. You’re his slave. It’s the same for guys, they’ll do whatever you want at that stage. Alex will tell you, I had this one guy Darren.”

  “Mr. Salt Life. He was gross.”

  “No he wasn’t.”

  “You were, like, borderline assaulting each other on a nightly basis. Do you remember how drunk he got?”

  “Ew, you were listening?”

  “No I wasn’t.”

  They stared each other down. For her part, Emily couldn’t help but look at Meg’s breasts through her shirt, so unlike her own breasts.

  Meg said to Emily, “He was really hot.”

  “The only way Darren was hot,” Alex said, “is if you consider supercreepy to be really hot.”

  Meg pretended Alex wasn’t even in the room and lowered her voice. “I was in it for the sex. It was like a drug. Darren worked for his dad’s roofing company. One time, he was on a job site, I sent him a pic of me in bed. Like, hand in my underwear, ass up, and it was like, You’ll want this so bad you’ll break your neck. He told me he had to go jerk off in his truck.”

  “He should’ve broken his neck,” Alex said.

  “Look good, fuck ugly.” Meg shrugged. “At least he knew what he wanted. It’s a turn-on. Emily, most boys don’t. Most are like, ‘sit on my face,’ you know what I mean? All talk. Also, no matter what, believe me, the reverse can be true: if you love him, you’ll do anything.”

  “Like you were with Trevor,” Alex said.

  “The point is,” Meg said, “the heart pimps the body out.”

  Trevor was Meg’s only significant ex whom Emily knew of. Her big love, the one who got away, whom now she lurked online and in real life. According to Alex, he hadn’t been Meg’s type at all. Straight-edge, reserved, a wedding photographer who wore black leather suspenders and shirts buttoned up to the neck. They’d met because Headdress needed headshots. The months they’d been together, Alex said, were the happiest period of Meg’s life thus far. But then Trevor decided he wanted her to quit dancing. He was controlling, easily jealous. He never raised his voice, just turned dismissive, ice-cold; anger, he once told Meg, was an inefficient emotion. It was eight months since they’d broken up, and Meg had done everything she could to forget him, unsuccessfully. Occasionally she’d still park outside his mother’s house, in case he turned up to do laundry. Only recently had she begun to recover, she’d met a surfer dude who graduated the same year at CHS.