Body of a Girl

by Leah Stewart

  It’s the bathroom, and Peter is sitting on the closed toilet, his arms wrapped around his stomach, rocking back and forth.

  “Are you okay?” I say, because that’s what you ask, even when you know the answer is no.

  “I need something,” he whispers. “I need something bad.”

  I go in and crouch beside him, my hand on his warm thigh. “What do you need?”

  He runs his hand over my head, smoothing back my hair. Then he brings his hand around to my face, cupping my cheek. He’s staring into my face like he’s going to learn something there, and then in one motion he brings his other hand to my other cheek and slides forward off the toilet so that he’s kneeling with me on the floor. Before I can think, he’s kissing me, his hands are inside my shirt, and there’s such urgency in him I can’t help but feel it too, like an ache in the pit of my stomach, a buzzing in my skin.

  “You’ll do it, won’t you?” he murmurs in my ear, and I lean back, frowning. His hand still cups my breast. “Won’t you?” he asks, his voice imploring, and I don’t say anything because I’m not sure what the answer is. Then he says, “I want you to do it too,” and I realize he’s not talking about sex.

  “Do what?” I say. I pull on his arm to slide his hand out from under my shirt.

  “Her-o-in,” he says in a voice that suggests I should have known exactly what he meant.

  “You want me to do heroin?” I say. I put my hand on his shoulder and push myself up to a standing position.

  “Yeah,” he says, standing too. “What else did we come here for?” We stand in this dirty bathroom staring at each other, and I wonder if this is like the first time he kissed me, if he sees something in my face I didn’t even know was there. “What else?” I repeat stupidly.

  “Don’t you know?” he says, and then there’s a knock at the door. “Peter?” Nate’s voice says. “Olivia? Are you guys okay in there?”

  Peter steps around me and whips open the door. Nate is standing there, his hand raised to knock again, his mouth a perfect O of surprise. “Listen, Nate,” Peter says. “We’ll be okay. But we’d like something to take our minds off it, you know?”

  “I’ve got nothing, man,” Nate says, spreading his fingers wide.

  “We have some,” Peter says. “Can you do the honors?”

  “Yeah, sure, of course. Anything I can do to help,” Nate says. “Jesus. All you gotta do is ask, you know that.”

  Nate and Peter leave the room, and I follow, because I don’t know what else to do. I feel responsible for what he’s about to do. I’m the one who showed him Allison’s stash. I’m the one who asked him to bring me here to see her friends. Maybe he thinks when that heroin hits his brain he won’t even remember her, and he can imagine nothing better than to forget her now.

  Nate leads us into his bedroom, away, he says, “from the rest of those greedy fuckers.” This room too is hung with posters and almost bare of furniture, just a little table next to a double bed in a surprisingly ornate wooden frame. Peter reaches for my bag and I let him have it. From the box he takes a small foil package.

  Peter looks at me, hesitating.

  “If this is the same stuff I had,” Nate says. “It’s pristine.”

  I rock back and forth a little on the bed. I keep swallowing, as though something is lodged in my throat. Unsure where to fix my gaze, I let my eyes drift from poster to poster. Only one is in a frame. I keep reading it over and over. Syd Barrett. The Madcap Laughs. Is this what I came here for, to find out what it feels like, to know what the dead girl knew? Being here is beginning to feel like a dream, like I can do anything because in the morning I’ll blink myself awake and none of this will matter.

  Nate puts some of the heroin in a metal spoon and heats it over a candle flame. I watch it turn to liquid amber. I watch him draw the liquid into a syringe and turn to Peter. Nate is smiling, heavy-lidded with desire and anticipation. “You want to go first?” he asks Peter.

  Peter shakes his head. “Her first,” he says. He fixes his gaze on me.

  “Which arm?” Nate asks me, like a nurse giving a vaccine. I extend my right, then change my mind and hold out my left. I look down at my arm and imagine that I can see the pulse fluttering wildly inside my wrist, like a trapped moth. I resist the urge to switch arms again. Carefully, Nate sets the syringe down on the bedside table and wraps a black belt around my upper arm. He pulls it, tighter than any blood pressure cuff, and I watch a large vein rise to the surface of my skin. Nausea rises in my throat, and I look up to see Peter staring at my arm, his face white and sick.

  Nate leans over and picks up the syringe, then crouches down in front of me, balanced on his toes. A little frown of concentration appears between his eyes. He starts to bring the needle to my arm, then hesitates, looking up at me. “First time?” he asks, and I nod. “This is going to feel like nothing you’ve felt before,” he says in a teacher’s calm and patient tone. “The important thing is to relax and enjoy it. It’s the greatest feeling in the world.” He turns his eyes to my arm again. “Like nothing you’ve felt before.”

  My heart pounds inside my ears. I think of Allison’s face, her laugh, her enormous, aching voice. When I do this, in at least one way we will be the same.

  “Clench your fist,” Nate says. “That’s right.” Slowly he moves the syringe closer to my arm. I close my eyes and feel the prick of the needle entering my vein. I gasp. I think I feel my whole body melting. I see Allison again, not her face, but her body, her body like a broken doll.

  I jerk my arm away, clamping my mouth shut to keep in a scream.

  Nate rocks back on his heels. “Shit,” he says calmly. “I didn’t even touch you yet.”

  There is a silence. I stare at my unmarked arm, the purple vein plump and ready. “I . . . I,” I say. I feel the blood rushing to my face, flushing my cheeks.

  “It’s natural to be nervous,” Nate says. “I’ll try again.” He leans toward me. I take a deep breath, trying to calm myself. The needle comes closer. I watch, and I know I won’t be able to let him put it in my vein.

  I am a coward, and that is why I never get what I want.

  “You know what?” I say. With my right hand, I pull at the belt, trying to undo it. It just gets tighter. I keep my eyes on my arm, afraid to look at Peter, afraid I’ll see disappointment in his eyes. “I changed my mind.”

  “Oh,” Nate says. He looks confused.

  “So you go ahead,” I say.

  “But . . .,” he says.

  “You go ahead,” I say again firmly. I hold out my arm. “Take this off.”

  “All right.” He seems cheerful again. He undoes the belt. I rub at the red mark left around my arm. Then I turn my eyes to Peter. His face is drawn. He closes his eyes and I notice that his hands are shaking. “Nate,” he says, keeping his eyes closed. “I’m next.”

  Nate sighs. “I know it,” he says. He lifts the belt to Peter’s arm.

  “Peter, don’t.” It’s out before I meant to say it. He looks at me, his eyes gone dead. “We can’t. This is stupid. I’ve got to tell the cops.”

  “Jesus,” Nate says.

  “Don’t do it,” I say, staring at Peter, and this time it sounds like a threat. “I mean it. I’ll call your mother.”

  Peter closes his eyes. He looks beaten. “Fuck,” he says under his breath.

  “Look, this is too much controversy for me,” Nate says. “I’ve got a joint you can smoke.” He fishes a plastic bag out of his pocket and pulls a joint from it. “Wouldn’t want you guys to feel left out.”

  Peter says nothing else to me. We sit pressed together on the bed, passing the joint back and forth, while Nate tightens the belt around his own arm. We watch Nate slip the needle under his skin. After a moment, Nate gets up and stumbles out of the room. We are silent. Nate returns, holding a clear plastic bowl. He sits, then calmly vomits into the bowl and sets it on the ground. I try not to look, feeling my throat constrict. “How’s it feel?” Peter asks him.

/>   Nate smiles, his head nodding gently. When he speaks, it’s with a wheeze. Inside his blue eyes his pupils are tiny black dots. “Sorry,” he says. “Just really high.”

  I keep my eyes trained on him, as though if I look at him hard enough I will catch some edge of the sensation he feels. I meant to feel it myself. Here I am again, just looking on.

  We watch Nate float there for a while, then I take Peter’s hand and stand up, and he stands too. Quietly, we file past the silent people in the red living room and let ourselves out.

  Outside the apartment building the air is still and warm. A couple passes us, holding hands, the girl talking brightly about something, waving her free hand. Peter leans down and kisses me on the cheek. His cool lips feel good against my flushed skin. “What was that for?” I ask. “I thought you were angry.”

  “I was,” he says. “But I know you were trying to look out for me. Allison was the same.”

  “She wouldn’t let you?”

  He shakes his head ruefully. “No one wants me to have any fun.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I wish everyone would stop saying that,” he says. “Don’t apologize to me again.” He opens the car door. “You don’t want to go home yet, do you? I feel like going for a ride.”

  The tension rushes from my body. I lean against the car for support. I am weak and frightened, and I’m glad he doesn’t know it. “A ride sounds good,” I say, and get in.

  In the car, I’m half asleep, not paying attention to where we’re going. When the car stops, I open my eyes. He’s taken us to the crime scene. It seems inevitable that we should be here. Peter turns off the car and we sit and listen to the silence. He gets out, and after a moment I get out too. He’s leaning against the front bumper, his arms folded across his chest. I walk over and lean back with him, his shoulder pressed to mine. “I know it’s morbid to come here,” he says. “I just keep thinking, this is the last place she was alive.” He waves his hand. “Something here was the last thing she saw.”

  I can’t think of anything to say. The image of her face on the television screen returns to me. Her dark hair slips across her cheek. Her lips move.

  Peter turns toward me. I can feel him studying the side of my face. I don’t move. “Olivia?” he says. He turns my name into a question.

  I turn toward him. He searches my face, then reaches a hand up slow and brushes his fingers across my cheek. I’m holding my breath. “Eyelash,” he says, and holds his fingers close to show me the lash resting there. “Make a wish.” I close my eyes and blow the lash from his fingers. With my eyes still closed, I hear him say, “Your life stops.” I open my eyes and watch him snap his fingers. “Just like that.”

  He looks terrified. I take his hand, locking my fingers with his. I want to throw myself open, feel everything as intensely as I can, the stars so bright out here where there are no lights, the air warm on my skin, the pressure of each of his fingers against mine. I could tell him the best you can hope for is these moments when you know it is you inside your skin. Your heart beats. You take a breath and warm air rushes into your lungs. There is no space your body cannot fill.

  “Look how bright the stars are,” I say.

  He leans his head back. We are quiet. “Yes,” he says. “Yes.”

  15

  It’s Saturday and I’m not supposed to be working. I snuck into the newsroom through the back door, because I knew if Peggy were here and she saw me she would turn me around and send me home. Luckily for me, another editor is on the desk. When I came in the room, he lifted his head from his computer screen just long enough to nod hello.

  I feel sick to my stomach when I think about last night. Sitting at my computer, making phone calls, taking notes—these are balms to the painful memory of my own stupidity, these are the route back to control of my story and myself.

  How Allison got the morphine is still a minor mystery. The lie detector tests are scheduled for next week. I’ve learned that the vial and the hypodermic were found in the trunk of the dead girl’s car. Morris thinks that Allison gave herself a shot while she was locked in the trunk, knowing that pain was coming. I’m reluctant to accept this. She would have known that a high dose of morphine would impair her ability to fight. She would have known that it might kill her if her captors didn’t. She would have been giving up.

  Angela still claims to know nothing about the drugs, and though I couldn’t say why, I believe her. I called Russell’s house again, and to my surprise he called back to tell me he wasn’t going to tell me anything more. He sounded weary, making a sad joke about going back to law school with firsthand experience with the law. They don’t answer the phone anymore, he said, because of the media, but mainly because of the obscene phone calls, the threats. “I’m sorry,” I said, for the thousandth time.

  “I’m sorry too,” he said.

  I haven’t called the Averys’ house again. I don’t want to talk to Peter, though I can’t stop myself thinking about him.

  Peter. I know him to be a strange and unstable person, too afraid of his mother, too much in love with his sister. Last night probably wasn’t his first experience with heroin; he may not only have known about Allison’s drug use all along, but have shared it with her. I don’t want to believe it. I recognize my weakness when it comes to that boy. If I could find the root of it, I would pull it out and cut it into tiny pieces.

  Perhaps they felt that way about Allison, the men who loved her. I write down their names. Russell Freeland. Carl Fitzner. Peter Avery. I add Antonio Roberts. This is the name of the man who tried to shoot his wife while I watched through the window. I add Kenneth Obie. This is the name of the man who put a bullet in his girlfriend Lucille Davis’s head. I leave a blank line for the name of the unknown man who killed the prostitute Bernadette Smith.

  I think about David, what he might do if he knew that I’d let Peter kiss me, that I’d let him touch my breast, that I’d not only let him but wanted him to.

  One thing I know. Nothing kills like a man’s love.

  David stands in the center of the roof of the Peabody Hotel, calling after me, while I run laughing around the perimeter, as close to the edge as possible. “Why don’t you catch me,” I say, stopping in front of him, breathing hard. He looks like he doesn’t want to play, but then he grins and lunges at me, arms out. I jump aside and dash back to the wall around the edge of the roof, leaning way out over it, just to see his eyes widen with fear for me.

  “Come over here,” I say. “It’s a great view.”

  “I can see just fine from here,” he says. “Please don’t lean over the rail. You know it makes me nervous.”

  David is afraid of heights.

  We’ve been to dinner downtown, where he told me all about his plans for the Allison Avery CD. “Gorgeous voice,” he said over and over. “Such a pretty girl. So tragic. I wonder if I ever did meet her,” he said. “You would think I would remember.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, you’re right.”

  After dinner I coaxed him up here, which I can every once in a while, because I love the view, I love the little duck house, I love the way the air is thinner up here, breathable. Sometimes there are tourists up here, couples holding hands, loud clusters of drunken college kids. Tonight it’s only me and David. I turn toward him and pose against the wall, arms out, head tilted. It’s one of those nights when my whole body feels tingly, like there’s magic in my fingertips and I could light the sky with one touch. “Come here,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “You come here.”

  “I want to kiss you under the stars.”

  “There’s stars right here,” he says, and folds his arms across his chest.

  “Come on, David,” I say. “You’ve got to confront your fears. Come to the edge and look over.”

  He shakes his head. I walk slowly toward him and he watches me warily. When I reach him I grab one arm and pull. His arms unfold, but he doesn’t budge, bracing his weight against me. “No,” he
says.

  I put my whole weight into pulling on his arm. He snatches his arm free and I fall, hard, on my tailbone. Sitting on the ground, my feet sprawled in front of me, I look up at him frowning over me. “You always do shit like this,” he says. Then he launches into a recitation of my crimes, the time when I leaned so far over the railing in a movie theater balcony that he grabbed me, certain I would fall. The time I let my father bully him into hiking up to a cliff, where his knees locked and my father and I had to half carry him back down. There’s more, but I stop listening, focusing my gaze on his legs, the soft brown hairs on his knees. “You’re not even listening to me,” he says. He sounds tired. “Olivia,” he says. “Are you even listening to me?”

  The thought of continuing this conversation exhausts me. I wish I could be transported out of here, that I could click my heels like Dorothy and find myself somewhere else.

  “What are you hoping to accomplish?” he says. “Are you trying to make me mad? Are you trying to give me a heart attack? It would be easier to just break up with me, you know.” He nudges me with his foot. “Olivia? Are you okay?”

  I look up at him. His face is in shadow. “I’m just trying to have a little fun,” I say.

  “Well, I’ve had enough fun. I’m going home. Are you coming?”

  “Don’t go home. I’m not ready.”

  “You can come or not,” he says. “I’m leaving.”

  We are both silent. From the duck house comes the sound of rustling feathers, the contented quacking of one of the ducks. On the street below the cars whoosh past. Someone laughs. A sweet smell, like flowers, rises on the air. David holds out his hand to me and when I take it he pulls me up to standing. He drops my hand then, and we look at each other, inches apart. “I’m not going home,” I say.

  “Suit yourself,” he says. We both turn. He walks away. I walk to the railing and lean on it. There is the city, like any city, beautiful on a summer night with the lights shining through the warm air and the people moving languorously on the streets below, calling out to one another, extending their hands. An urge to jump runs through me, a sensation so physical it’s hard not to let my body move. I feel as though jumping from this roof would not be suicide, but entering the city like a diver enters a pool, a fast and clean arrival in the center.