Miss Misery

by Andy Greenwald

  Her parents were under the impression that she was spending the weekend at a prospective pre-med student program at BYU, safely ensconced with no one but ardent fellow Mormons to entertain her; Mr. and Mrs. Bortch wouldn’t worry about their daughter until she didn’t show up at home again on Sunday. Ashleigh had pawned her stereo the day before and then used the cash—plus all the money she had in her bank account—to buy a one-way ticket from Salt Lake City to JFK. From there she had taken a bus and two subways and walked. She had gotten my address from the phone book.

  I was impressed, of course, but also mortified. This girl didn’t know me, and I certainly had no idea what to do with her. The fear and loneliness and unhappiness that had propelled her to fly to the other side of the country were as foreign to me as Cantonese. I wasn’t a runner—I was a dedicated wallower—and my own teenage years had been generally spotless. For me to act as a confidante, let alone as guardian, to someone nearly a decade my junior was just impossible to comprehend. Not to mention incredibly inconvenient. For the longest time I had had nothing better to do than screw up my own life. Now, when I was finally gathering the necessary strength to work on fixing it, other people kept crashing their own problematic lives into mine. I felt like the only bumper car in the ring with its power turned off.

  As I showered, I considered the various things I could say to Ashleigh, but all of them were subtle variations on the phrase “get out!” I sighed and rinsed the shampoo from my hair, letting the water run all over my face. It wasn’t waking me up, particularly, but it was making me feel peaceful. The rhythm of the water was warm, dreamlike. Too nice, actually. I twisted the faucet and the water slowed to a trickle, then disappeared. Dripping and goose-bumped, I stared lazily out the window. Another beautiful day, bright blue and brilliant. Mrs. Armando’s garden was an explosion of green below me, and in the backyard next to hers two young boys splashed in an inflatable kiddie pool. I couldn’t kick this girl out. She had turned to me. I couldn’t turn away.

  I dried myself as best I could, threw the Tintin T-shirt back on, wrapped my towel around my waist, and walked out into the kitchen. Ashleigh was sitting at the kitchen table poring over old issues of Transmission. In her lap was a box of Kix cereal that had to have been at least a year old.

  “This is stale,” she said, popping another handful into her mouth.

  “I know,” I said. “But please—help yourself.”

  She looked up at me with giant shining blue eyes. “Thanks,” she said. I couldn’t be mean to this kid—she was living and dying on everything I said.

  “I’ll just be a second,” I said. “I’m going to get dressed, and then we are going to have a talk.”

  “OK,” she said, turning back to the magazines. But I could feel her eyes back on me as I passed her en route to the bedroom. “Man,” she said. “You look just like all the emo boys in my high school.”

  I froze. “I what, now?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “All the emo boys are super skinny like you. Of course, they all have eating disorders, so they can wear girls’-size jeans. Like this guy I was crushing on for a second? Bert? He had a smaller waist than I did. That totally sucked.”

  “Huh,” I said. “I’m gonna go get dressed now. I promise I won’t wear any girls’ jeans. You can check.”

  “OK!” Ashleigh resumed crunching the stale cereal and I made it to the bedroom without further incident.

  After I was dressed—in men’s jeans and a plain gray T-shirt—I asked Ashleigh to sit with me in the living room. She took the futon, still covered in sheets from the bed I had made for her the night before. I pulled a chair in from the kitchen and sat on it facing her to make the whole thing seem more official.

  “Golly,” said Ashleigh. “You sure have a lot of newspapers lying around.”

  “Did you just say ‘golly’?”

  She blushed. “Yeah, sorry. My parents make us say stuff like that. So we don’t get in the habit of cursing or blaspheming or anything.”

  “Gotcha,” I said. “I hope I don’t offend you if I curse.”

  She grinned. “No way.”

  It was odd and disconcerting to be around someone so completely and totally young—but no, it was more than that. The kids at the party yesterday were young, but they were familiar—they were basically the same as me. This girl came from an entirely different planet. Her skin was whiter than white, and her hair was the sort of washed-out, straw-colored blond usually attainable only through multiple bleachings. She wasn’t chubby, but she definitely wasn’t skinny, either; her round and freckled cheeks seemed woefully out of place on such a tall frame. In fact, her body and head seemed to belong to two different people. Her body was that of a grown woman, but her movements belied her age: She fidgeted constantly, as if a small but distinguishable current were being run through her nerve endings. Her face was as wide open as the full moon, and her blue eyes had a hunger to them that was almost uncomfortable to look at. She giggled and talked bigger than she was, but having her in the room felt like playing host to a deer—something wild and willful and prepared to bolt at any moment.

  “OK, Ashleigh,” I said. “Why did you run away from home?”

  She frowned, and when she did so her lower lip stuck out almost comically from her face, as if it had been stung by some ornery wasp. “I told you all about this. I thought you were listening.”

  “I’m sure I was listening,” I said as patiently as possible. “But why don’t you tell me again just so we can have everything on the table.”

  She glanced at the chaotic coffee table in front of her. “It looks like you’ve got plenty on the table already.”

  “Cute,” I said.

  She smiled then, but as she began to talk, the smile washed away from her face like a sand castle at high tide. “I hate my life, basically. I hate it so much. And I just got sick of it, you know? Fed up. They treat me so badly, and they didn’t just invade my privacy this time. They freaking destroyed it. And so after all of that all I could think about was what we talked about. And I just wanted to do it for myself.”

  I was confused. “What we talked about?”

  “Yes!” She balled up one of the newspapers on the table and winged it at my head. Why were these younger women always trying to hit me? “Sorry,” she said. “I just don’t want to know that you weren’t listening. Nobody ever listens to me.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I listen to you. I just want you to remind me what we talked about.”

  “The other day,” she began, picking at her fingernails, “when we were online. We were talking about what you do if the entire world thinks of you as a different person. If you’re totally misunderstood or not, like, you know…appreciated.”

  My mind raced backward. It sounded familiar. But I thought we had been talking about me.

  She went on. “And I realized that when I was giving advice to you, I was really talking about myself. That you had to shake those other people. You had to take the false image of you that they carried in their brains and kill it dead. You had to, like, take it over.”

  “Uh-huh.” I nodded.

  “So when my mom tore my room apart the other night, something in me snapped. And I realized—she can’t do this. She can do all she wants to the imaginary me, the one who loves church and obeys them and is going to get married and go on a mission and blah blah blah. But when she comes in here…” Her cheeks were red and her eyes were moist. “I mean, when she goes in there, that’s out of her, like—what’s the word? For places a policeman is in control of?”

  “Precinct?” I said. “Jurisdiction?”

  “Yeah.” She nodded. “That one. That’s just not her business. I won’t let her mess with my real self anymore. It doesn’t belong to her. It belongs to me.”

  “OK,” I said. “That sounds reasonable. But why did you get on a plane? For God’s sake, Ashleigh, why did you come here?”

  She blushed more deeply. “Once I knew I had to protect the rea
l me, I got even more upset. Because I realized that no one knew the real me. Only maybe Krystal—she’s my best friend—but she’s as powerless as I am. I told an older girl that I knew once about how I really feel and how I don’t believe in the church or in God and stuff—and she stopped speaking to me. But not until after she told my mom what I had told her. Which was majorly not fun. So I was thinking that I only get to be my real self online, with the people I meet there. And the person that I thought of…” Her voice went all small and her eyes didn’t leave the rug. “The person I thought of was you.”

  “Me,” I repeated dumbly.

  “Yeah,” she said shyly, her eyes desperately seeking out mine. “You.”

  “Ashleigh, I’m sorry, but why me? We’ve never even met.”

  She groaned. “Don’t you get it? That’s, like, exactly what I’m saying! If you knew me knew me, all you’d see is what the rest of them see. But online you listened and you…I dunno, you took me seriously. And you have this freaking amazing life where you get to listen to free CDs and meet rock stars and, like, write books.” She said the latter as if she were quoting from scripture, like she was saying I had the power to bend steel or shoot beams of force from my eyes. “It’s all that I’ve ever wanted, and I just had to get away. I had to come get it. Before…I dunno. Before it was just, like, too late.” A single tear traveled the lonely road over her freckles and down to the bottom of her face.

  “Hey,” I said. “Hey, don’t cry.” I got up and retrieved a box of tissues from my bedroom. “I get it. I hear you. I do.” She blew her nose noisily into a tissue. “I’m…flattered, really.”

  She looked up at me, eyes alight, nose still buried in yellow tissue. “You are?”

  I smiled at the sight. “Yeah. I am.”

  “So this is gonna work?” She snuffled again, balled the tissue up in her left hand. “You’ll help me?”

  “Yeah,” I said, hearing it aloud myself for the first time. “I’ll help you.”

  She was practically levitating off the futon. “I can stay?”

  I raised my hand. “No, Ashleigh. You can’t stay.” She deflated. “You’re going to have to go home somehow—before you get found out or I get arrested. But we’ll figure it out together, OK? Together?”

  Her face went in a hundred different directions. “OK. But…”

  “But what?”

  “I just…before you do anything with me, there’s one thing I’ve really always wanted to see.”

  “What, in New York?”

  “Yeah.”

  “OK, name it. Anything.”

  Her face lit up again. “Are you anywhere near Coney Island?”

  On the raised subway platform, waiting for the F to arrive at Fourth Avenue, Ashleigh tore through a cinnamon bun I had bought for her at my local coffee place and stared expectantly down the track. “Haven’t you heard that watched pots never boil?” I asked her, but she ignored me. I felt sorry that we were on the Brooklyn-bound side of the tracks. It was impossible to see the Statue of Liberty from here, and I knew she would have appreciated it.

  During the half-hour ride out, Ashleigh bopped from one end of the car to the other, staring at maps and the ads for Captain Morgan Spiced Rum and trying hard not to stare at our fellow passengers. Across the aisle from where I sat and where Ashleigh occasionally joined me were two Russian women speaking animatedly to each other. One was older, her thick eye makeup lacquered on her wrinkled face like icing on a cake. She wore a white sundress with red poppies stitched into the fabric. Her companion was much younger—probably my age exactly—and tall and lean and blond. She wore tight acid-washed jeans and a white blouse with a wide, lacy neck. She was, in fact, incredibly beautiful, with a haughty air to her; the only thing standing between her and perfection was a remarkably angled nose that mimicked a double-black-diamond ski slope. I took the two to be mother and daughter. Ashleigh took them to be fascinating.

  “What language are they speaking?” she asked me in a hushed whisper.

  “I think it’s Russian,” I said.

  “Wow.” Ashleigh’s eyes registered respect and amazement.

  “There are a lot of Russians in Coney Island and Brighton Beach; it’s like the primary language spoken out there.”

  The women seemed to sense that we were speaking about them, and they turned and faced Ashleigh, the older one giving her a broad wink. Ashleigh turned ten shades of purple and dropped her face to her hands.

  When her embarrassment passed and the train was outside again, elevated and passing the lettered avenues, I asked her, “Why is it that you want to go to Coney Island so badly, anyway?”

  “It’s, like, my favorite song. By Death Cab. Do you know it?”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  She sang tentatively, swallowing every other word. “‘Everything was closed at Coney Island…I couldn’t help from smiling!’ Or something like that.” She blushed again.

  “Well,” I said. “Nothing is going to be closed on a holiday weekend in the summer, I’ll tell you that much.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I didn’t think of that.”

  “You might even get a chance to ride the Cyclone.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s like the oldest roller coaster in the country. It’s super old, super wooden, and super scary. Like this cross between an amusement-park ride and a medieval torture device.”

  Ashleigh’s eyes widened. “Cool.”

  I had to admit I was having fun. Despite the potential illegality of all of this—and despite my still not having dealt with the doppelgänger drama—I realized that this was the first summer day I had taken for myself in ages. Showing off New York, having a visitor—even a runaway Mormon visitor—allowed me to step back, to relax. To do all the things that were only a subway ride away from my daily life but usually felt farther from me than Utah.

  “You were right, by the way,” she said. “It is hot here.”

  “I told you.”

  “It’s different hot back at home. It’s less…soupy.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard.”

  At Avenue U, Ashleigh ran to the window and stared out over the boundless urban landscape in front of her: row house after row house, life after life, all passing beneath the solitary train car. She ran back and took her seat next to me. “It’s so…huge.”

  “And just think,” I said, “this is only one fraction of one borough of the entire city.”

  She shook her head. “Where I live, everything is just flat. You can see it all in one look, and if you can’t, there are always the mountains.”

  “That sounds nice.”

  She shook her head harder. “It’s not when you live there. For tourists and stuff the mountains are beautiful, or they mean, like, skiing or whatever. For me, they’re always at the edge of everything I do. Like a barricade or something.”

  “Keeping the world out?”

  “No,” she said. “Keeping me in.”

  Right before we arrived Ashleigh elbowed me in the side and said, “By the way, the phone rang when you were in the shower.”

  “It did? It tends to do that.”

  “I picked it up.”

  “You what?”

  She raised her hands in mock surrender. “That’s what people do, right? When phones ring, they answer them?”

  I rubbed my brow. “Not everyone.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s OK. Who was it?” My mind churned. A long-lost relative? The juvenile-crimes division of the NYPD? Amy? That would be perfect—just the thing she needed to hear was a female voice at the end of the line.

  “It was weird—just some guy. He asked for you and I said you were in the shower. Then he just laughed and hung up.”

  “That’s creepy, Ashleigh. What did he sound like?”

  “That’s the thing. He sounded just like you.”

  The F train dead-ends at Coney Island. With its long journey (from the farthest edge of Queens, through
the arteries of Manhattan, and then straight down across Brooklyn) completed, the train shuddered, groaned once, and then fell silent. Ashleigh and I joined the rest of the early thrill seekers—a motley assortment of young and old, pale and dark, most clutching towels and sand pails and beach chairs for the long sunny day ahead—and headed down the stairs. I’ve often thought that the Coney Island subway station resembles a giant, open mouth—constantly spewing its contents into the bizarro universe of Astroland, the boardwalk, and the beach. The smell of sand and salt water filled the air as we hit the sidewalk, and even now, at just before ten in the morning, the rumble and rattle of the Cyclone was audible and with it, every few moments, a symphony of shrill roller-coaster screams.

  “This place is freaking crazy,” said Ashleigh, and I couldn’t think of any better way to put it myself.

  We jaywalked Surf Avenue with the rest of the crowd and plunged ourselves into the cacophony waiting for us on the other side. “Stay close,” I said to Ashleigh, and then chuckled at my weirdly parental tone. There were street vendors everywhere hawking sunglasses and balloons: Spider-Man, Pokémon, SpongeBob by the hundreds. The day was just beginning, but the sticky heat was out in full force; the humidity was less noticeable here by the ocean, but it already felt more oppressive than the day before. We cut left and tried to maneuver past a gaggle of slow-moving moms and kids waving and pointing at the cheap toys for sale all around us. Ashleigh gawked down each alleyway at the midway games and flashing arcade lights. Rides whooshed and children wailed; a posse of shirtless black men with white do-rags wrapped around their heads walked by chomping on morning hot dogs from Nathan’s, daintily picking at thick-cut cheese fries with tiny red plastic forks. A bald Chinese man offered back massages on a special chair just off the curb, an island in the midst of roaring pedestrian waters. I tried to imagine what this was like for Ashleigh—like going from a sensory deprivation tank into a carnival dunk tank, probably. Her eyes were wild with delight, and she kept turning back to look at me, to make sure I’d seen whatever she had seen too, that I could somehow verify it as real, as actually happening.