“Oh, so you’re not afraid of anything?” Val said, shoving a three-ring binder into an already full box.
“Being obsolete, maybe,” Gordie said. He tossed a stack of notebooks into a clear plastic bin and lifted his gray ARMY T-shirt to wipe his face. I tried really hard not to notice his stomach and thought of how Alice had banned the word fluttery from our lexicon.
Alice dug the stick into the thick wood floor so violently it left a shallow gash; she still refused to move from her perch or join in our sorting. Even without her, we got a lot done. By the time we had sorted the mountain of supplies and boxed up the notebooks and binders, colored pencils, rulers, and other glaring reminders that yet another back-to-school was around the corner, it was dusk. And we were hot and filthy.
“Let’s go find some biscuits with honey,” Gordie said, lifting a plastic bin.
“Where are we going to find biscuits with honey?” I said. “This isn’t Georgia.”
Jean tried to push Alice to Val’s car while she was still seated on the bucket, but she toppled face-first onto her impressive string of suck its.
“Ahh. Cut the shit, Jean,” she yelled, scrambling to get up from the barn floor.
“Ha. Now you’re as gross as the rest of us,” Val said. “We need to swim.” Val put her hands on her hips and raised her eyebrows at Gordie.
“Nope. My parents are having a party.”
We stood around drinking water and trying to decide whether we should drive all the way to the beach or just go home and shower like normal people.
“Wait, I know where we can go,” Jean said.
“Where?” Val said. “I’m not going to the town pool.”
“My girlfriend’s house. She has a great swimming pond.”
“Good one,” Val said.
“Not kidding,” Jean said.
“How have you not mentioned you have a girlfriend?” I said, wondering if he was serious.
“Or that you know people with ‘swimming ponds’?” Val added.
Jean just smiled and jumped in the car.
We navigated the back roads in near darkness and tried to keep up with Jean’s crazy driving.
Alice didn’t say much from Val’s backseat. She checked her phone and bit her nails and sighed a lot. But at least we got her out of her house and away from her dark arts and dark thoughts.
We finally pulled behind Jean on the side of a back road and walked single file down a path in a heavily wooded area. The path led to an unkempt lawn that stretched up a steep hill.
“I don’t feel like swimming. I just want to go home,” Alice said. She lagged behind the rest of us and held her long white-and-navy-striped skirt in a bunch near her knees.
“Fine, Alice. I’ll take you home. Let’s go.” Val turned down the path.
“Forget it,” Alice said, marching forward.
I fell back and walked alongside her.
“Can you try to put Izzy out of your mind, just for a little while?” I said softly. “You’ve been a really good friend. You’ve done everything you could, Alice.”
She nodded and smacked at the growing swarm of mosquitoes.
Jean ran around the back of the house, which was covered in flat, hand-painted butterflies, hummingbirds, irises. The house had tattoos.
We grilled Jean about his supposed girlfriend and found out she was an eighteen-year-old Japanese girl named Umi who he’d met the summer before when he asked her to model for one of his masks. It turned out she lived in France and her sculptor mother owned the house and let Jean use the art studio over the garage.
“How do you communicate?” Alice said.
“In French, obviously,” Jean said. He laughed. “I hooked up with Umi last summer, which her mom sort of doesn’t know about. She certainly doesn’t know the full extent of it.” He raised his eyebrows and flashed a smile. “She made Umi stay in Paris for a stupid internship this summer, but we talk pretty much every day and she’s coming here for Christmas break.”
Jean pointed out the studio but wouldn’t let us in because of his half-finished top secret mascot project.
“Alice, what’s wrong?” Val bent over Alice, who had sat down in the grass, cradling her phone. She ran her hand through her hair and tossed her phone on the ground. I reached for it and looked at the text. It was from Izzy.
Pooch. Please help me. I’m at the shrink’s. I’m so cold.
Alice jumped up. “I have to go get Izzy.”
Gordie put his arm around Alice. “We have to go get Izzy.”
FOURTEEN
WE LEFT JEAN’S and Val’s cars at the farm stand and loaded into the Range Rover, bound for Westhampton.
“A guy from the city rents a summer house in the middle of nowhere,” Alice said. “He’s a friggin’ psychiatrist and he got his license suspended after they caught him prescribing Oxy to anyone with cash. Now he’s dealing heroin. He’s, like, forty years old and hooking up with girls half his age in exchange for drugs.”
“That is sickening,” Val said.
“Oh, you don’t know the half of it,” Alice said. She wrapped her arms around the front of her and stared out the window. “The shrink is even worse than Hector. I can’t believe her parents let her go out. She just got out of the hospital.”
For a while nobody said anything. We were anxious about what we would find at the trap house. Val sat between Alice and me furiously texting Javi, who had been looking for her.
“Is anyone else a little nervous about this?” Jean said as we turned onto a narrow road. It was so dark we could barely see in front of us.
“Pull up over there, Gordie,” Alice said. “Cut the lights. You guys stay here. I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Wait, you’re not going in there alone. Let me go with you,” Gordie said.
“Hell no. You look like a narc.” Alice threw her wallet and keys on the dashboard.
“I’m going,” I said.
“No, you’re not.”
I followed her anyway, leaving the others fighting in the Range Rover about who looked the least like a narc and should be going with us.
We held on to each other and followed the beam from Alice’s phone light up the long driveway. Three cars were parked near the garage. According to Alice, none of them was Hector’s.
“Maybe your spell worked,” I whispered.
Alice tried the door. It was open. The hot, dank house smelled like rotten garbage. We walked down a narrow hallway toward a back kitchen connected to an open great room. The room was hazy with cigarette smoke, and eerily quiet except for a low moaning and the sound of running water. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the smoky dimness.
There were mattresses laid out in the middle of the floor, and people lying on the mattresses. I noticed the arm of a man flung out, covered in scabs, and a woman in white shorts and a Snoopy T-shirt lying next to him, her eyes half open. And there was a girl perched inside an open fireplace, with soot covering her feet.
“Where’s Izzy?” Alice said to an old guy lying on the couch staring at the muted TV screen. The light from the screen danced across the faces of the mattress people. A discarded pizza box on a glass-topped coffee table housed a pile of needles and a square of charred foil. The man on the mattress dragged his filthy fingernails across his stomach. I took a few steps closer to the fireplace. The girl turned her face and smiled at me.
“Ward, focus, I’m trying to find Izzy,” Alice said to the old guy on the couch. Her voice was strong and fearless. She was superhero Alice, and I was her awkward sidekick.
“I think she’s in the shower,” the guy said, his eyes still staring straight ahead.
Alice turned toward me and rolled her eyes. “Dirtbag,” she said. “Let’s check upstairs.”
I grabbed Alice’s hand. It was cold and clammy. She squeezed my hand back and pulled me toward the stairs. At the top, a stained-glass sailboat night-light lit a small bathroom that stank of urine. Brown stains splattered the tiled wall. Wa
ter ran from the sink faucet.
“Should I turn it off?” I whispered.
“No. Don’t touch anything. Stay here.” Alice put her hand flat on my chest. “I mean it, Sadie.”
I stood there while Alice stormed down the hall and flung open a door.
“Get the fuck away from my friend,” she yelled. A few seconds later Alice came out of the bedroom with Izzy, who was wrapped in a crumpled sheet.
“I decided to stay,” Izzy said. Her stringy hair was stuck to her face.
Alice held Izzy’s hand and yanked her along. “Come on, Sadie.”
I followed them down the stairs and helped half carry the barefoot Izzy through the maze of trees. We pushed her into the backseat next to Val and squeezed in.
“Oh, thank God,” Val said. “We were freaking out.”
“Who’s this?” Izzy said, touching my face with ice-cold fingertips.
“Remember Sadie from Girl Scouts?” Alice said.
“Hi, Neigh!”
“Hi, Sadie. You’re still doing Girl Scouts?” Izzy said, smiling. She turned toward Alice. “You’re my best friend, Pooch.”
“Yes, sweetie, I am.” Alice’s expression softened. Her eyes filled with tears.
Gordie drove straight to the hospital.
Jean turned on the playlist and we serenaded Izzy with “Blackbird” by the Beatles all the way to the emergency room.
Alice’s dad met us at Gordie’s car. Her mom was on the phone, pacing near our bench, trying to figure out how to find Izzy’s parents, who were out at a charity gala. Alice and her dad rushed Izzy inside. I imagined the people from the golf club were already playing a mean game of telephone starting with Isn’t that a shame? Another one of our girls on heroin and ending with Damn immigrants holding our kids hostage.
We lingered on our bench in dazed silence until Alice told us that Izzy had been admitted and she was going to stay with her. As the rest of us sat in the farm stand parking lot talking about the trap house, Alice texted a picture of herself eating Izzy’s roommate’s hospital food while Izzy slept. She captioned it Yummy.
Gordie dropped me off last. The whole way home he told me how pissed he was with himself for letting me and Alice go into that house alone.
“We’re not delicate little violets, Gordie. We don’t need a bodyguard to protect us.”
“I didn’t say you were. It just felt really wrong sitting in the car while you and Alice went into that house.”
We talked in my driveway. I didn’t want to leave.
“Gordie, do you think I could get a hug?” I said, my voice cracking.
He smiled. “Yeah. You can get a hug.”
He got out and met me on the passenger side. He scooped me into his broad chest and hugged me for a long time. “Some fucked-up shit, huh?” he whispered.
“Ya think?”
“Can you do me a favor, Sadie?” He stepped back, held my shoulders, and looked down into my eyes. “Can you never go into a trap house again?”
“I have no desire to ever go into a trap house again, Gordie. Trust me.”
“Good. Glad that’s settled.” He squeezed my shoulders. “Good night, Sullivan.”
It was too much. All of it. The smells and sounds and spattered blood of the heroin house. Izzy’s vacant eyes. The diamonds. The ridiculously unclear expectations of an old dead man.
I bypassed my parents’ floor and crawled between them in their queen-size bed. I lay facing the ceiling, playing with Flopper’s tail and thinking wild thoughts amid the weirdly comforting snores and nose whistles of my mother and father.
“Look who decided to grace us with her presence,” Dad said the next night, only half joking.
Grandma Sullivan banged around in the kitchen while Mom set the table and Grandma Hosseini carefully removed teacups from the china cabinet.
“Hey, Grandma, do you know how to make homemade biscuits?” I asked Grandma Sullivan as she salted the boiled potatoes.
“I do.”
“Can you teach me how to make them?”
She eyed me suspiciously. I had never shown interest in doing anything in the kitchen.
“I suppose.”
“Tonight?”
“No. I’m going for lotto tickets after supper.”
“I’ll take you and we can get biscuit supplies.”
“I’ll be too tired.”
“Please?” I gave Grandma Sullivan a pouty lip.
She eyed me again. “I guess we could whip up some biscuits.”
Later, after we’d eaten half the biscuits with vanilla custard and fresh, sliced strawberries, I left a glass container of biscuits with a tiny tub of farm stand honey and a note addressed to Gordie Harris on Gordie’s front step. The note said: Kinky 3, Thanks for introducing me to Keith and Frances. It was really nice to meet them. Hope you’re still craving biscuits with honey. I’ll collect my five cents later. —Cakes
I flipped through my Guide to Northeast Colleges in the dim light of my sweltering room. It was after midnight, still too early for Shay to be back in her bunk, but I tried her anyway. When she didn’t answer, I texted, Should I put Pepperdine on my list? I wondered if Shay even wanted me near her, after her string of avoidance texts, all of which had to do with how busy she was.
I’ll let you know if I ever make it to Pepperdine, she texted back. These campers are driving me crazy. I’m never having kids.
I wrote, Remember when we babysat that kid who wiped his ass with a bath towel and put it back on the rack and you used the towel to dry your hair?
She didn’t write back.
I didn’t want to go to sleep. I was getting anxious at the thought of waking with that deep ache in the pit of my stomach. I considered starting the report Mom had been hounding me to write, but rehashing the incident didn’t seem like a good late-night activity. I logged on to baby Ella’s grandmother’s Facebook page. She hadn’t updated it in weeks. I clicked on the NeighborCare link. The sum collected hadn’t changed. Still $120.
Still not enough.
The only thing I could think about doing in the middle of the night was to remove the fortress of junk I had stacked in front of the suitcase in my already overcrowded closet and dislodge Andy from his garment bag. I extracted the cheesecloth bags from Andy’s dismembered legs and loins and set them on the middle of my bed. One by one, I dumped the contents into the pink plastic barf tub.
Counting diamonds was strangely therapeutic.
FIFTEEN
“YOU’RE WEARING THAT?” Mom said when she arrived at the farm stand to get me for my appointment with Willie Ng’s therapist in Sag Harbor.
“Did you want me to wear my prom dress?”
“How about something that doesn’t have stains all over the front?”
“This is residue from blueberries, because I work at a farm stand. It’ll be a good thing to start with in the therapy session. It’s a metaphor for the stain the incident has left on my psyche, at least according to you.”
“Sadie, why do you have to be like that? I just want to help you process what happened.”
“Mom. I barely even think about what happened. I have no idea why I’ve been so freaked out at night.”
“We’re here to figure out why. Let’s just go into this with an open mind, honey. Can you try not to be so irritable? I just want you to have what I didn’t have.” What Mom didn’t have was any kind of emotional support when all hell broke loose in Iran and her family was forced to flee, which meant no chance of college for Mom.
I crossed my arms in front of me and stared out the window as she sped down the back roads.
“Don’t mention anything about Willie Ng,” she said under her breath before we went into the white clapboard house turned psychiatric wellness center.
Mom stayed the whole session, which went better than I thought it would. I cried, mostly because he got me to talk about the baby and how terrible it was that she had to go through that ordeal. Mom cried talking about how scary it was
to see me in the hospital and how anxious she got every time the phone rang. I was beginning to think she needed therapy more than I did. The therapist, an old white guy with thick white hair and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt that had more stains than mine, talked about the effects of traumatic events, and that my bad nights were normal and, basically, that everything was going to be okay.
After we blew our noses, I told Mom I would be willing to see the guy alone next time and that I was sorry I had been cranky. She smiled and rubbed my back.
“Can you imagine Willie Ng in here talking about his porn?” I joked.
“Not funny, Sadie. The Ngs are going through a hard time right now.”
We went for manicures and Chinese food and talked about Mom’s life in Iran before all hell broke loose.
“I wish my mother believed in therapists,” Mom said, her mouth full of noodles.
“You can’t not believe in therapists,” I said. “They’re not fairies.”
“They might as well be to Grandma Hosseini.” Mom cracked open a fortune cookie and read, “Your shoes will make you happy today.”
We looked down at Mom’s cream-colored high-heeled sandals and my once-white Converse, caked with grime, and laughed. “Profound, Mom,” I said. “Really deep.”
The Unlikelies came over to “watch a movie on my laptop.” Dad and Mom were already settled on the porch drinking decaf and eating peach pie out of the pie pan.
“Why don’t you just watch it on the television?” Dad said. “Why are you all going to crowd around a laptop?”
“It’s not really a movie. It’s a new YouTube thing,” I said, turning up Dad’s Springsteen music ever so slightly, just to make sure they couldn’t eavesdrop, before ushering Alice, Val, and Gordie into the front hallway and letting the door slam behind me.
“That wasn’t suspicious at all,” Gordie said, lying down on my bed after we made our way up to my room.
Alice was distracted with her phone. She looked up and smiled weirdly at Val and me. “Izzy’s parents want you guys to visit Izzy with me,” Alice said.
The Unlikelies Page 11
