by Megan Abbott
I liked my mom, but the only time we ever cuddled that cozy together was the night we ate a whole box of stale Russell Stover one of her bad dates had given her two weeks after Valentine’s Day. One of her crowns came out in the molasses chew and it cost twelve hundred dollars to fix and two years to pay off.
Later, I saw them saying good-bye, Mrs. Fleming stepping into her car, which was large, sleek, and so white it hurt your eyes, like looking into the sun.
Even though we hadn’t met, she waved at me too, like a pageant queen making a grand exit, greeting all her admirers.
I walked over to get a better look at the car. Inside was white too, like the smooth curves of a giant molar. And the gold trimmings like molar crowns.
“Mom,” Diane said, untangling her hair, “this is Kit.”
“Kit,” she said. “Pleased to know you.”
“That’s some car,” I said.
Her smile, which reached up to the bottom rims of her gold sunglasses, was so warm it made me sweat a little.
“Honey, this isn’t a car. Do you know what this is?” she said, sliding into that white leather front seat.
“What?”
“A promise.”
It sounded like something my dad would say, and that made me feel sorry for Diane.
“My boyfriend is trying to entice me to move in with him,” Mrs. Fleming said, tilting the sun visor down with a flash of her hand, showing a big, fireworks-size sparkler on her ring finger. “To entice us both. Don’t you think Didi would love celebrating her sweet sixteen on the beach?”
“Sure,” I said, looking over at Diane, who, with her ramrod posture and gold post earrings, her immaculate sneakers (scrubbed, no doubt, with a toothbrush and bleach each night), looked like no Didi ever in history.
“Didi,” she said, “think about what we discussed, okay?”
Then, with one more flash of her hand, that asteroid-size ring, she turned the wheel and drove away.
Diane and I both waved until our arms ached, like this was the last time Miss Suncoast Peaches might visit our town.
Then, the last full day of camp, on the overnight trip to distant Rialto for a track meet, I had the talk with Diane that would knock around in my brain ever after.
We were bundled four to a room at Wheels Inn, which was what they called a family hotel, with an enormous foggy aquatic atrium at the center, like a hothouse for dying grandparents and abandoned children. Two waterslides and a bumper-boat pool and the sharp echo of kids screaming all night, their throats gurgling, as though about to meet their watery graves.
I shared a room with Diane and two girls from Valley East, Shauna and Sarina, and we swapped secrets all night, which is what you do on overnight trips, especially when you might never see these girls again, different schools, different worlds.
You felt like you could say anything. Be anyone.
Shauna confessed she’d stuck a fork in her brother’s ear when he was a baby and now he had only 80 percent hearing and no one but her knew why.
Sarina confided her boyfriend sometimes choked her until she passed out, which made me feel bad for her and for all the girls like her. Except girls like her made things harder for the rest of us.
Diane, however, wouldn’t share anything. She said nothing had ever happened to her.
“Not even at Sacred Heart?” Shauna asked. It was a private girls’ school so it seemed exotic. There were always rumors about it, about death cults and sex games and anything else we public-school kids could conjure, all of us piled on top of one another in windowless basement classrooms, no disposable income and no mystery at all.
“No,” Diane said. “We work really hard. There isn’t really time for anything else.”
“Are you religious?” Shauna asked. “Maybe that’s why nothing’s happened to you.”
“No.”
“Did your dad make you go there so you wouldn’t get pregnant?” Sarina asked. “Because it’s always Catholic-school bitches who get pregnant.”
“My mom liked the idea,” Diane said. “She went to an all-girls school too.”
“But you live over by the Foothills. Big bucks. What’s it like there?” Sarina demanded, a look on her face I didn’t like, but what could you expect from a girl named Sarina?
I thought I saw a throb of panic at Diane’s temple, and it was my turn anyway, so I told them the story I wish I’d never told. About how I used to dog-sit a pair of liver-coated baying bloodhounds in the Foothills for a man my mom knew from the rescue clinic. We called him Stevie Shoes because he was a sales rep for some sportswear company and always had a trunkful of sneakers. One night, he came back early from a business trip and offered to drive me home, which saved me a half hour and a bus transfer. On the drive, we got to talking about music and the way certain songs seemed written just for us and before I knew it I’d let him put his hands down my jeans, and it was all thumbs and fingers, hip bone pressing. The radio was playing old songs I didn’t like, the Eagles even, but somehow they sounded soulful at the time and he’d been telling me how hard his divorce had been on his kid and all these grown-up things and soon enough hands were in all places, both of ours, and my chin was buried in his shoulder, breathing so hard from all of it.
The whole time, I kept my eyes on the mini dream catcher hanging from his rearview mirror, its purple feathers tickling my chin whenever we pushed forward.
“We didn’t do everything,” I said, and I could smell the car freshener and feel the funniness of his business suit, his grown-up belt, its buckle pressing against my cheek. “But pretty close.”
“I bet he was married,” Sarina said. “No single guy has a dream catcher in his car.”
“He was divorced,” I repeated, “but he was still really old and not appropriate.”
Which was what Ms. Castro, the guidance counselor, had said.
I didn’t tell them how, when he dropped me off, he gave me a pair of brand-new running shoes with pink spikes from his trunk, the same ones I was wearing now.
I found myself looking down at them, touching a finger to one of the rubber studs.
As if she could hear my thoughts, Diane was looking at them too.
And then I couldn’t believe it, but I started crying. Shauna and Sarina put their arms around me sloppily, patting me like a punched dog. They were crying too, for their own reasons and their own secret sorrows. We were just a quivering mess of hard shins and soft flannel, of Sour Patch–fueled girl misery.
Sitting on the opposite bed, Diane watched, immobile.
Finally, she looked at me, tucking a stray silk bit of hair behind her ear, and said she was sorry.
“It’s okay, Kit,” she said. “My mom always says, you don’t have a self until you have a secret.”
I didn’t know what she meant or how she meant it.
I remember looking up, my hair and Shauna’s hair tangled in my face. And Diane just kept looking back at me, those blue eyes like daubs of paint.
“Diane’s right. It’s fine,” Sarina said. “But did you let him put it inside?”
Later that night, just as we were starting to settle in, tank tops and shorts, sharing two bottles of beer we’d stolen from a room-service tray and rubbing our feet with smelly lotions, Diane started to feel sick and bent over the trash can by the bed.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” I said, holding her hair back in case.
My hands kept fumbling because her hair was so soft. It felt like what I imagined Cinderella’s might.
“It’s probably the cheese sticks or the gummies,” Shauna said to me.
“It’s okay,” I whispered to Diane. “Most runners do it once in a while.”
“I’m not doing it on purpose,” Diane said. “I swear.”
“Bingeing is bad for your electrolytes,” Sarina said, overhearing us. Lying back on the other bed, legs swinging over the edge.
“She didn’t eat anything,” I said. I’d never seen her eat anything ever. Her legs like a stork’s
in her running shorts.
“I’m sorry,” Diane kept saying, her chest heaving. Nothing was coming out, not even a long, lean spit string like when I tried to purge up a half a bag of Chips Ahoy or a whole jar of Jif or some other poor choice before cross-country weigh-ins.
I believed her and felt bad for her, her long face and pale eyebrows and ears with no lobes and still the prettiest girl I’d seen in real life.
“Just throw it all up, then. By throwing up you acknowledge your binge was bad,” Shauna said, “and you’re fixing your mistakes.”
Diane didn’t seem to be listening, her eyelids glistening, face flushed, like how I pictured Cathy in Wuthering Heights, which we’d just read for school. Cathy was wicked and wonderful and I’d never known a character could be both at once. Everyone in class hated her except me.
“Lie down, Diane,” I said. “Don’t listen to them.”
“It’s just my period,” she whispered. “My period must finally be coming.”
I said she must be right.
At last, I settled Diane into bed and got in next to her. From the other double bed, Shauna and Sarina watched like we were putting on a show, sniping and calling me Madame Lezzifer and making kissy faces, but I didn’t care. When I went to pull up the tatty hotel bedspread, Diane reached for my arm as if to hold it there, to comfort her. I’d never spooned with anyone other than my mom when I was little and she’d lock my dad out and he’d come pounding on the garage door all night till the cops came, shaking their heads, flashlights resting on their shoulders. But I spooned a little with Diane, or almost spooned, our bodies close enough that I could feel all her breaths, ragged and high. It was more like sleeping with a big doll.
For a while, it felt nice taking care of someone so timid and distressed. Until finally it felt strange, even though she never even moved. Strange because Diane was strange—wasn’t she? A locked box without a key.
The next day, camp was over, and that’s when I first saw Diane’s dad. He stood outside the field house, a man with a trim mustache, even though no one really had just a mustache then, not even cops. He was leaning against his car, jiggling his keys, his business suit blazing under the late-afternoon sun.
“Do you know Diane Fleming?” he asked. “Is she inside?”
“Yeah,” I said. I’d seen her lingering over by the showers, brushing her wet hair in long strokes. “I think she’ll be out soon.”
He smiled, nudging his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose. “I was worried I had the wrong place. We’re driving to Johnny Hall’s for dinner.”
I’d never been to Johnny Hall’s, but I’d heard about it because it rotated while you sat and ate oysters, and its domed ceiling twinkled with artificial stars. “Do you want me to tell her you’re here?”
“She knows,” he said, waving his phone as some kind of proof. “Guess no one your age is in a hurry to spend the evening with her dad.”
I smiled at him without saying anything because there’s no good response to that.
“Well, if you see her…,” he said, and I felt a swell of feeling-sorry for him so heavy it ached.
When Diane came out of the field house, I watched. They were very formal together, her dad opening the door for her like they were on a blind date. She didn’t look at him.
“I don’t feel very hungry,” I heard her say, “and I need to see Mom.”
A few days later, I got a postcard from her. I don’t know how she got my home address, and I’d never known anyone under sixty who sent postcards.
Kit, thank you for making me run faster. Remember: you don’t have a self until you have a secret. Thank you for sharing yours.
I smiled, but then came a funny quiver.
“What secret?” my mom asked, holding the postcard up to the light as if it were a cipher.
“Just some running tips,” I said, shrugging. “Like where I got my shoes.”
And that was it. The whir of school and work, the stink of chicken fat, a junior-year boyfriend of sorts, and I mostly forgot about Diane, except for every time I pulled my Marie Curie book, now accruing a small fortune in library fines, off my shelf. The picture on its plastic dust jacket, fogged over Marie’s stern face, somehow merged with the picture of Diane in my head.
But then, more than a year after cross-country camp, I saw her again. Wearing that same look of grave purpose as she walked through the water-stained halls of Lanister High.
It was the fall of our senior year, and Diane was a new student, a transfer. Amid the sea of lank ponytails, a spray of tattoos, of crop tops and low jeans, she stood apart from everyone. Her focus always seemed elsewhere, head down, lost in her own thoughts, a shadow falling between her eyes like a warning.
I was seventeen and there were so many things I didn’t know yet, but I knew about hiding.
“I know her,” I said. “I know that girl.”
“Who?” asked Alicia, poking her head around my locker. “Church Barbie?”
With those bluebell eyes and uptilted nose, she was even prettier than she’d been at fifteen. But if she had Barbie’s molded breasts, they were well covered by her shirt, the ruffled white blouse of a Sunday organist, and if she had Barbie’s long, rubbery, toe-point legs, they were cloaked by a pleated circle skirt hanging past her knees.
“Didn’t you hear?” chimed in Ashley Moon. “She’s the one with the dead dad.”
“What?” I said. “I met him.” As if that somehow meant it couldn’t be true.
“Yep,” Alicia said. “It’s going to be like Tyrus Turner.” After Tyrus’s mom died suddenly from meningitis, no one talked to him for months. It was like something black and poisonous was coming off him. He was invisible, but worse.
“Do you know what happened to him?” I asked. “Her dad?”
“A heart attack, I think. So, what’s she like?” Alicia asked, her hand on her hip, the wariness of teenagers everywhere, watching Diane make her brisk way down the long hall.
“She’s very serious,” I said. “And she’s…”
I didn’t know how to finish the sentence, so I just let it drift.
Next period, in gym class, we were side by side again, right at the start line.
Her eyes were on my running shoes. Everyone’s always were, the pink spikes glaring like bloodied teeth.
“Hey, Marie Curie,” I said.
She turned and smiled, just a little. Which is the most she ever smiled except that time with her mom. It was like she was afraid to or her face didn’t work that way or something.
“I think we’re in AP Chem together,” she said. “Fifth period, Ms. Steen.”
“Yep,” I said. And I found myself swallowing twice. “See you there.”
We ran together that day, never more than a stride apart. I didn’t have her long legs and grace, but I made up for it with sheer pumping power. She made me work harder, and I made her work harder too.
By the end of practice, I knew it was time to replace my running shoes, the spikes whittled too flat now, and I’d have to go back to the outlet-mall ones I’d worn before.
She turned to me, those little beads of sweat like a delicate tiara around her golden-brown brow, and said, “You’ve gotten so much faster.”
“You too,” I said, because we’d finished on the very same foot stroke.
“We’re both so much better,” she said, eyes on me. “No one can touch us.”
NOW
Diane Fleming. The name, Dr. Severin’s scarlet-rind mouth saying it, hovers over me.
We all watch her leave the conference room, her phone hissing, the shush of her crepe trousers. Behind, the tart smell of her perfume.
“You’ll have to tell me what this means,” whispers Alex as we shuffle out, a gloomy pack of lightless grad students and postdocs, our pockets stuffed with energy bars.
“What this means,” I say under my breath, “is there’s one less spot on the PMDD study for us. And you didn’t need me to tell you that.”
“
I guess not,” he says, holding the door for me, “but it sounds nicer coming from you.”
For once, he doesn’t smile.
“Well, condolences, all, but she’s hot stuff,” Maxim says. “Fleming’s the rising star on Freudlinger’s team.”
His expression is the gravest among ours. Maxim has worked for Severin for six years, longer than anybody, nearly a perma-doc. He even provided the only sliver of personal information we’ve ever heard about Severin: that she once had a lover named Diego who dove off oil rigs for a living and took off his shirt at the alumni banquet to show off a chest scar from an encounter with a moray eel. He was a peacock, Maxim told us with a look of distaste.
With his dark hair and his hooded eyes and his Italian shoes, Maxim even looks like Severin. He’s a long shot for the PMDD team, though. There’s a feeling that she barely notices him anymore and that he should have moved on long ago to another lab, a faculty job.
“I just texted my friend at MIT,” Juwon tells us, looking at his phone. “He says she was the most talented undergrad they ever had. She was working with Cooper her sophomore year.”
“I saw her once at ACS,” Zell says, his face unusually grim. “In the elevator. Man. She was…”
His eyes unfocus mysteriously, like they do when he talks about huffing propofol at his old job.
“She was what?” Alex asks.
“You’ll see,” he says, shrugging. Subdued for the first time ever, even in his SCIENTISTS DO IT ON THE TABLE PERIODICALLY T-shirt.
“Severin poached her,” Maxim says. “That’s what counts. That’s one spot down.”
