Every Secret Thing

by Laura Lippman

  “Right,” Sharon said, with a bright, placating smile. “Now, are you sure you don’t want a sundae?”

  “I guess I will. After all, starting tomorrow, I’m going to be walking a lot.”

  “You are? Oh, that’s great, Alice, just great. Really.”

  Was it great because walking was good for her, or great because it was Sharon’s advice? Alice had learned long ago not to ask such questions out loud. But she had never stopped thinking them. Sometimes, she felt her fat was like a cave, and she lived far inside it, watching the world with glowing eyes.

  Saturday,

  April 11

  6.

  Ronnie Fuller was used to waking in the morning with strange yearnings. She just kept forgetting she was now in a position to do something about them. Some of them, at least.

  She had been home for almost a month, for her birthday was in March, a few weeks before Alice’s, a fact that almost no one ever remembered: Ronnie had a birthday, too, and it came first. Still, even after a month at home, she had to think for a moment when she opened her eyes before she could place herself in the world. Her new room, a middle bedroom with no windows, was dark as a submarine and somewhat plain. Her mother had said Ronnie could do whatever she wanted with it, but Ronnie couldn’t think of what to do.

  On this particular Saturday morning, she awoke with a desire for honeysuckle, but it would be another two months before the first blossoms appeared, longer still before they could be sucked. She decided to look for a substitute at the convenience store at the foot of the long, winding hill where her parents now lived. She had the day off, so she walked straight there as soon as she was dressed. After surveying her choices through the fogged glass, she selected a Mountain Dew. She knew it wouldn’t taste like honeysuckle, but the color was close.

  The dark-skinned, turbaned man at the counter took her money without comment. “Terrorist,” she said, intending it to be a question inside her head, but somehow it slipped out. That happened to Ronnie a lot. She tried to keep her thoughts to herself, but they made themselves known, which usually got her in trouble. It didn’t seem fair.

  “Seek,” he said angrily, pointing to his forehead. “Seek.” Seek what, Ronnie wondered. Sick? Was he saying he was sick? Her mind was so busy turning over those questions that she turned the wrong way leaving the store, walking toward the old house by force of habit. Or so she told herself.

  Ronnie had arrived on her parents’ new-to-her doorstep on a March day of record-breaking heat, a black nylon overnight bag weighing down her right shoulder. The house had been empty, for both her parents were still at work, and the last brother had moved out months ago. She found the promised key under a flat rock in the front flowerbed, and let herself in.

  Familiar furnishings marked the new place as “home,” whatever that was, and it was clearly nicer than the old one. Her father used to say the town house on Nottingham was built of cereal boxes—it was damp and frail, the walls yielding easily if someone happened to bump them hard, or even throw a punch. And with three boys around, those things happened. Bumps. Punches.

  On that hot March day, it hadn’t occurred to Ronnie to be disappointed that no one was there to welcome her. Her parents worked, that was a fact of life, the acceptable answer to all sorts of requests—back-to-school night, cupcakes for the holiday party, field trips. Besides, Ronnie had gotten a nice send-off on the other end—not a ceremony, which would have been queer, but a handshake from her doctor and hugs from some of the staff. One of the counselors had given her a gift-wrapped box, which Ronnie had tucked away in her overnight bag, automatically saving it for later. She hadn’t been able to give a lot of presents over the past few years, so she didn’t realize people liked to see their gifts opened. And if someone had tried to tell her as much, she would have been puzzled by this information. Better to give than to receive, right? The giving should be enough.

  “Try not to jostle it too much,” the counselor had said.

  “Is it fragile?”

  “Not exactly. But—well, you’ll see. When you get home.”

  The counselor liked Ronnie. All the staff did, for she had been one of the better-behaved kids in the unit. Most of the juvenile offenders assigned to the Shechter unit were sullen teenagers whose borderline felonies, things like robbery and car theft, had been compounded by addiction problems. But Ronnie had all but auditioned to get her bed there, trying to convince the necessary people that she was just crazy enough, no more, no less.

  The campaign had begun by accident, around the time of her fourteenth birthday. Ronnie had taken to poking her body with a ball-point pen, inoculating herself wherever the skin was softest—crooks of elbows, tops of thighs, backs of knees. The pinpricks began to itch; she scratched. The infection got so bad that she ended up running a high fever, which meant a trip to a hospital emergency room. The attending doctor sent her to Shechter for observation. Once observed, she was sent back to Poolesville. But Ronnie had made her own observations. Shechter was clearly the place to be.

  She couldn’t have said why she liked it. After all, it was a program for crazy kids, and her family had fought hard against the assumption that she must be crazy, or confused about right and wrong, perhaps even retarded. The buildings at Poolesville were new and clean, and Ronnie usually preferred new to old. Yet the onetime school turned juvenile detention center was where she wanted to be. Maybe it was the lack of fences, or the rolling farmland that surrounded it. Maybe it was the dormitories of the nearby college, which provided a vision of a life that seemed as glamorous to Ronnie as any television show. From the front lawn, she could watch the college girls—what they wore, what they carried.

  But she understood that she could not say she wanted to go to Shechter, quite the opposite; she had to pretend to be going along with the rules and structure of Poolesville, had to deny the evidence of her own made-up craziness.

  Patiently, she began to cut herself with any implement she could find, nicking her body with pop-tops and pencils, nibbling herself with her own teeth, and when all else failed, scratching herself raw, until her calves were lined with long red tracks. What could they do? No matter how closely they trimmed her nails, they always grew back. They could cover the tips with Band-Aids, put her hands in restraints at night, but unless they were willing to rip out her nails all the way to the beds and extract her teeth, they could not disarm her.

  “You’re smarter than Yossarian,” her doctor said when she finally got her permanent bed at Shechter.

  “Who?”

  “Catch-22? ‘I am not the bombardier’?” Ronnie shook her head. “It’s not important,” he assured her.

  She liked the doctor, as much as she could like anyone who got to tell her what to do, who decided when she was right and when she was wrong. He seemed to be on her side. But she couldn’t be too forthcoming with him because he might turn on her, too. Ronnie had thought lying was something children were forced to do because they lived by others’ rules. She had thought growing up would mean lying less, but it hadn’t worked out that way so far. Yes, Shechter had been pretty good. But she would have been truly crazy if she hadn’t been happy to leave.

  Home. She had tried out the word on the new place the day she first saw it. So this was home. It was set up in the usual rowhouse floor plan. Good, there was a dishwasher. One less chore for her. And a microwave, too. She imagined her father bringing it into the house, imagined her mother asking, with equal parts pleasure and irritation: “What truck did that fall off of?” Ronnie hadn’t understood the question when she was younger, but she did now.

  Ronnie had climbed the stairs, knowing what layout to expect—a master bedroom across the front, which would get the light, one dark interior room, a small bedroom in the back, and one bathroom for all.

  Her room, the dark room in the middle, had a bed, a dresser, a small lamp—and nothing else. She pulled two bills from her back pocket and looked for a place to hide them. It was hard to hide things in an all-
but-empty room. She took the clothes she had packed in her overnight bag and placed them in one of the drawers, then hid the money in the folds of a T-shirt. No, her mother might go there. The bed was made with a new spread, white with little raised dots. When she left home, her bed had been covered with a Scooby-Doo spread, which would be pretty stupid now, but Ronnie wasn’t sure she liked the white one. She lifted the thin, bumpy cotton and slid the bills, a ten and a twenty, between the mattress and box spring, as far as her arm could go.

  The money had been intended for cab fare and it had started out as two tens and a twenty, old bills almost reproachful in their limpness, as if her parents wanted Ronnie to remember that their money was scrounged from pockets and purses and wallets, not snapped up from an ATM or a bank teller. From the moment she saw the money emerge from the envelope, Ronnie had known she would find a way to pocket it. She would take a bus home or hitch, but she would keep as much of that forty dollars as possible.

  Of course, the staff never would have allowed such a thing, so she had gone through the pretense of summoning a cab to the top of the hill, of waving to them all as she climbed in. It was then that the counselor had given her the small gift-wrapped box, the one still in her bag. She had felt grand, a bit like a girl in a movie—perhaps the one about the girl who learned she was a princess—riding down the hill.

  Then, as soon as the cab was off the grounds of the hospital and a few blocks down the street, she tapped on the Plexiglas and asked the cabdriver to let her out.

  “What?” he barked. He was white but foreign, with a strange accent and an acrid body odor. “You call for ride to Saint Agnes Lane, over by Route 40. You can’t get out here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Is illegal.”

  She was pretty sure he was lying, but she made the mistake of sounding weak: “You have to let me out if I ask?”

  “No, is dangerous. I get ticket if I discharge you here.”

  “So pull into that 7-Eleven parking lot.”

  “No. You call for long ride. You must go or pay.”

  She knew from the way his story shifted that he was making this all up. He was a cheater. Ronnie had never been much good at arguing with anyone, but cheaters were the worst.

  “Please pull over.”

  “You will pay.”

  “Pull over.”

  With a sigh so forceful it might as well have been a shout, he did just that. The meter said $3.50. Ronnie offered him one of the tens and waited for her change. The man took the bill and put it away.

  “You can’t take ten dollars for a three-fifty fare,” she said.

  “Extra dollar for call,” he said, pointing to a red light on the meter box.

  “That’s still only four-fifty.”

  He was ripping her off. Because she was a girl, because she was young. Such encounters had once made Ronnie fierce, with the focused rage of a small dog. But now she was supposed to work toward solutions. Unfortunately, the lessons of the hospital had assumed there was always some nice neutral person who could step in, a doctor or a principal, a teacher or a parent. Use your happy tones, Ronnie. Anger is just a letter away from danger.

  Here, in the parking lot at the 7-Eleven, there was no one to sort things out between Ronnie and the cabdriver.

  “I came for big fare, not little fare. Plus, you owe me tip.”

  She got out of the cab, frightened of her own feelings, frightened by the fix she was in. Now she had only thirty dollars, and thirty dollars might not be enough to take a cab all the way home. She could take a bus, but it would have to be at least two buses, and which two buses? Plus, she needed change for the bus, and no one would give her change unless she bought something, which would mean losing another dollar or two out of the thirty. Aware of the cabdriver’s eyes on her, she walked into the 7-Eleven with her head high, as if this had been her destination all along. Then she hid in the chip aisle until she was sure he was gone.

  Back on the street, she knew her only choice was to find a ride. She had never done this before, but her older brothers had. And there had been a girl at Shechter who had bragged about getting rides all the time. “I never had to do anything, either,” the girl, Victoria, had said.

  “But how do you keep them from, you know?”

  “You’ve got to be picky about who you ride with.” Victoria enjoyed having Ronnie seek her out, ask her advice. No one knew exactly what Ronnie had done, but rumors were rampant at Shechter because she wasn’t required to attend AA or NA. Which, at Shechter, usually meant someone was really nuts, scary nuts. Some people said authoritatively that Ronnie had killed her entire family, despite the fact that her mom visited regularly. Others said Ronnie had been part of a thrill-kill, that her boyfriend had talked her into murdering someone just for fun.

  Ronnie liked the idea of being credited with a boyfriend. She also felt a strange, sour pride in the fact that no one ever came close to guessing why she was really there. Anyone who was alive in Baltimore that summer would probably remember the story of the missing baby and how she had been found dead, and then the constant mention of two eleven-year-old girls, two eleven-year-old girls, two eleven-year-old girls, can you believe it, the baby was killed by two eleven-year-old girls. Now she and the event floated free from each other, disconnected. Victoria had no idea who she was or what she had done.

  Ronnie persisted, not afraid for once to show her ignorance. “Picky how?”

  “Go for guys in ties.”

  “Guys in ties?”

  “Yeah, and boring cars like your dad drives.”

  Ronnie’s father still drove a Coca-Cola truck, and the family car was an old AMC Hornet—at least, that’s what it was when Ronnie went away. But she knew what Victoria meant.

  “You want a businessman, like. A guy who will freak if you scream, or say you’re going to tell or go to the police. With a young guy, a guy closer to your age, he’s not scared of getting in trouble, so you got no—what’s the word?”

  “What word?”

  “That word for when you have control over another person?”

  Ronnie shrugged. She had no idea what Victoria was talking about.

  “Anyway, don’t go with anyone under thirty. Oh, and don’t stick your thumb out.”

  “But I thought that’s what hitchhikers did.”

  “It’s not your thumb that gets you the ride,” Victoria said. “Turn your back to the traffic, and walk as if you mean to be walking. But twitch.”

  She demonstrated. Victoria was a large, fleshy girl who wore tight jeans. Her bottom did shift a bit as she walked, but it just looked uncomfortable, as if it wished it weren’t packed so tight.

  Out on the street, Ronnie turned her back, as Victoria had advised, and walked as if she had a destination. She didn’t try to twitch. There was a golf course to her right, with lots of men playing, even though it was a weekday. Were they rich, or did they call in sick to their jobs? Her dad had been known to go missing from his job, as he put it, but he said it was bad luck to lie about being sick. He said the trick was to come up with a story that couldn’t be checked, a story that couldn’t hurt anyone. He had never told her what those stories were.

  She was almost past the golf course when she got the first offer. The boy was cute on first glance, and he drove one of those little Jeep-like cars, the sort of thing Ronnie would have liked for herself, if she ever learned how to drive. But there was something off about his face, the longer she looked at him, and Victoria’s advice carried the weight of a rule. No, thank you, no, really. I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.

  The next guy was older, behind the wheel of a van with the name of a painting company stenciled on the side, and he was freckled with paint. Not a van, Ronnie knew, although Victoria had not thought to tell her this. Never a van. She felt as if she were trudging along one of the board games she had played as a kid, Candy Land, or the one with the ladders. She had to pick carefully if she was going to get home with her thirty dollars.

 
The third one was just right, everything Victoria said. A tie and a four-door black car, not new, but not old. His face was shiny and red, although the interior of his car felt cool through the window he lowered to talk to Ronnie.

  “You need a ride?”

  “Well—I was just going up to the bus stop.”

  “How far are you going?”

  “Pretty far,” Ronnie admitted. “Saint Agnes Lane, over near Route 40.”

  “Outside the Beltway?”

  “No, in. Near—” What was it near? It wasn’t just that her parents had moved, it was that Ronnie was no longer sure what milestones had survived along the Route 40 corridor. Arby’s? High’s Dairy Shop? The Crab King? “Do you know that sign, the one that says you’re entering Baltimore City?”

  “So it’s on the city-county line?”

  “Just over, in the county.” Her mother had been so proud about crossing that line.

  “That’s not so far, if you know the right shortcuts. Hop in.”

  She did, arranging her black nylon overnight bag so it filled her lap.

  “You can put that in the back.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Or in the trunk.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  It was only once they were under way that Ronnie saw the problem she hadn’t anticipated: she had no idea how to answer the man’s questions, innocuous as they were. School? She had actually finished in January, because of summer school credits, but where was her diploma from? She couldn’t say she had graduated from Shechter Unit. Plus, if she said she was finished, she couldn’t say she was fourteen later, which Victoria said was the deal-breaker for most guys, being fourteen.

  “I go to…Towson,” she said, hoping it was the name of a high school.

  “Yeah? My cousin goes there.” He said a name, but of course she didn’t know it. He named more names. She just kept shaking her head and shrugging her shoulders. Maybe it was good for him to think she was stupid and didn’t know anyone at high school.