Zack is in the kitchen. Every once in a while he pops up holding some new treasure he has found: a box of rice, a can of mashed sweet potatoes, a bag of flour.
Clayton goes out again and comes back with another stack of wood, which I help him unload. Then I put a log on the fire. It sparks and sizzles.
Gabe stops playing the piano and comes over by the fire. Arabella follows behind him, but not so closely that it’s obvious. Clayton sits down in one of the heavy-looking chairs. It has wooden arms that are beaten up and scratched, and the thick upholstery is woven through with shades of brown. He takes off his boots and puts them beside the chair, holds out his feet. His socks are dirty on the bottom.
“How’d you get that scar?” I ask him. He raises his eyebrows. “On your side. I saw it when you gave me your sweatshirt.”
“Oh, that,” he says, like it’s nothing, but a big grin spreads across his face. “Gabe shot me.”
“Jesus, I hate it when you say it like that. It makes me sound like a psychopath. We were hunting.”
“According to him, I stepped right into his perfect shot.” He lifts up his shirt to show the scar. It is wrinkled and pink. “It just grazed me, but there was blood everywhere. I mean, the snow was bright red. Gabe started crying.”
“I thought I’d killed you. Sorry for being sad about it.”
“What were you hunting?” I ask.
“It was deer season.”
I’ve only ever seen deer as they run across the road, so strong and delicate at the same time. Too beautiful. “Do you eat them?”
“Sure. Venison stew. Deer-cutting sausage.”
I grin at the thought of a crowd of deer sitting around a table cutting up the sausage with their little hooves.
“Now what’s funny?”
“Deer cutting sausage.” I hold out my hands, fingers together, and make cutting and poking motions.
He shakes his head and tugs a skullcap down over his ears. I bet in the summer he wears a camouflage baseball cap, the brim perfectly curved. He’d be one of the Wentworth boys back home—the ones who tuitioned into Essex from the little farming town next door, too small to have its own high school. I’m not sure if I’ve ever spoken to one outside of class.
“Do you, like, take it apart yourself?”
“I field dress them, yeah. You know, cut it open, take out the intestines and all that stuff. My dad likes the heart.”
“Oh.”
“Then I bring it home and my mom butchers it.”
“You really know how to woo the ladies.” Gabe laughs.
I blush, and I think Clayton does, too.
Outside it continues to snow.
There’s a back door to the dining hall, but it’s covered up. When I can’t stand the stillness anymore, I open it and see a wall of white. I press the door closed so the snow doesn’t fall inside. Next to the door there’s a pair of L.L.Bean boots, the kind with a rubber bottom (green) and a leather top. They are far too big for me, but might fit Zack or Charlie.
Just inside the door is a tub filled with a shapeless stack of multicolored fabrics turned gray with dust and sun-faded. It’s probably the lost and found. I start to pull them out, unearth them. I disentangle the fabric and lay out the lost property. A camp T-shirt I pair with silky pink soccer shorts and a single yellow flip-flop. A sundress needs a cardigan, especially in this weather. Short jean shorts, a hooded pink sweatshirt, and a fishing hat. I make all these faceless, bodyless people, line them up like students in a class.
Clayton and Gabe watch me like I am a rare bird. Like no one in Pennsylvania ever dug through old clothes and spread them about. Like maybe they should have just kept on driving when they saw our car stuck in the snow.
Arabella, though, she comes over and helps me. It’s hard to find a match for everything, but we do it. I give the soccer shorts and T-shirt a fishing vest that still has a lure pinned to its pocket and a compass dangling down from a loop. Arabella’s combination of the jeans and denim jacket is a questionable sartorial choice, I know, but some people could really rock that look.
There is only one shirt left in the bottom of the bin, blue like a robin’s egg, a purple stain at the belly, and written in laundry marking pen on the collar: Lexi.
That’s how I find myself at the bottom of the lost and found.
Zack makes us dinner out of the various things he has discovered in the kitchen. It’s sort of a sweet-potato-and-rice porridge seasoned with cinnamon. “It could use some butter,” he says, “but it’ll do.”
Gabe goes up a set of stairs and comes back down with a six-pack that has lost two members and a bottle of something green. “It’s Chartreuse,” he explains. “Hayley drank so much of it that she barfed all over.”
“That sounds fantastic,” I say, and pull one of the cans of beer from the six-pack.
Charlie raises his eyebrows, but doesn’t say anything.
The beer is warm and flat, but I drink it anyway. I put the can between Clayton and me so we can share it. Zack sits down on the bench next to me and I shift over a little, which puts me right next to Clay. I think maybe he will slide down some more, but he doesn’t.
“So you really came all this way looking for Adrian Wildes?” he asks.
I glance over at Charlie. He has a mouth full of food, but he swallows and says, “Yeah, I guess we did.” He cracks his knuckles like snapping sticks. He knows I hate that sound, but then, he saved my life. I try to smile at him and my lips split. His face is flat and still as a lake at sunrise. Probably the way this lake is in summertime. I can’t tell what he’s thinking, if he’s mad at me or if he’s wishing we were back on the road searching for Adrian Wildes.
“I don’t think he ever came out here,” Gabe says. “He bought the place and everyone got all excited, but as far as we know he’s never been out here.”
“Who was it? It was Hayley and someone else, maybe Theresa? Anyway, they said they saw him at the Total-Mart once. In the music section. That’s how I knew they were lying,” Clayton says. He picks up our can of beer and takes a sip.
“We thought maybe he would come here to just, you know, take a break,” I explain.
“You thought he was holed up in a hotel with strippers and drugs,” Charlie says.
“But then I met the actual strippers and they told me about the camp, and his coming here made sense.”
A hunk of snow slips off the roof and falls to the ground with a crash. I shudder.
“Wait, you went to Sherri’s?” Arabella asks.
“What do you know about Sherri’s?” Clayton asks her.
“Nothing. Just that Hayley told me that you can make a hundred dollars a night working there.”
Clayton stares at her across the table. “Don’t even joke about it.”
“Who says I’m joking?” She’s not looking at Clayton, though, she’s looking at Gabe.
No, no, no! I want to yell at her.
Clayton shakes his head and seems to decide it’s better to just move on. “You know that river he went to see, it’s got a strong current even when it isn’t swollen with rain,” he says.
I like the way he says that: swollen with rain. It’s the type of thing Dewey DeWitt would tell us to pay attention to, but coming out of Clayton it sounds like, I don’t know, this is kind of hokey, but it sounds like he talks that way because he actually understands the way that nature works.
“What do you mean?” Charlie asks.
“Just that it would be really easy to be swept away. Even if it wasn’t on purpose.”
“He didn’t try to kill himself,” Charlie says, putting down his bent spoon.
“I’m not saying he did,” Clayton says. “I’m saying it would’ve been really easy for him to get caught up in it if he stepped too close. The bank could’ve given way or—”
“He didn’t get swept away,” Charlie says firmly.
“Okay, sure,” Clayton says.
“He didn’t,” Charlie says, his voice rising.
“He said ‘okay,’ Charlie. Ease up,” I tell him.
“Anyway,” Zack says. “We’ve had quite the adventure. We got to be interviewed for TV and these junkies tried to steal our car and we went to an old abandoned amusement park and Lexi nearly died of drowning and hypothermia.”
“Yeah, it’s been a real hoot,” I say.
“Shots all around!” Gabe announces.
“Vomit shots?” I ask.
“Hayley is a lightweight.”
We don’t have shot glasses, of course, so we use the little plastic cups from one of the cabinets, the kind meant for the littlest campers. “It kind of looks like bug juice,” I say, holding up my cup. “Or how I imagine bug juice. I never went to camp.”
“What about me?” Arabella asks.
“No way,” Clayton tells her. “You’re thirteen years old. I’ve already told you that when you are sixteen, I will give you a shot of something—something that actually tastes good. But you are still too young now.”
“How old are you?” she asks me.
“Fifteen,” I admit. “But, you know, practically sixteen.”
“It doesn’t matter. Lexi’s not my sister. You are.”
I glance over at Charlie. We lock eyes for a second, but I can’t tell what he’s thinking. We certainly never talked about doing shots on my sixteenth birthday, and he’s never once stopped me from taking a drink.
“Bottoms up,” Gabe says. We all tilt our heads back and gulp the Chartreuse. I try not to taste it, but can’t stop from feeling the sour burn.
“I went to fat camp,” Zack tells us.
“What?”
“When I was nine.”
“When you were nine your parents sent you to fat camp? Isn’t that, like, child abuse?” I ask.
“They didn’t send me. I asked to go.”
“You sent yourself to fat camp?” I ask. “And do they really call it fat camp?”
“No, it was, like, Dr. Dinkleschwitz’s Healthful Child Sleepaway Camp or something. It was pretty awful, actually.”
“Did you lose weight?” Gabe asks.
Zack pats his belly. “Nah, I held on to it. I figured I would need it later. I’m still growing, man. I need these extra stores.”
“So I’m guessing there wasn’t bug juice there.”
“Nope. Water, water, water.”
We clack our cups together and take a second shot. I figure the way Gabe is pouring, it’s more like our third or fourth shot, so I turn my cup over.
“You out already, Lexi?” Gabe asks.
“Oh, I could drink you under the table for sure, but I don’t like the thought of what that stuff is doing to my insides.”
Gabe rubs his eyes and I watch one of his long lashes detach itself and land on his cheek. “You have an eyelash,” I say.
“I have many,” he replies.
“Girls love ’em,” Clayton remarks, looking at his hands.
“No,” I say. “A wish lash. On your cheek.”
He reaches up and brushes it so it flies to the ground or the table or his clothes, but somewhere it cannot be seen. Lost forever.
I feel my eyes widen. “You can’t do that. You can’t just brush away a wish lash.”
Gabe looks at me with those buttercup eyes, golden green and perfect. I know what he’s going to tell me. That I am too old for wishes. That all of it is superstition. Easy to say when you’re an angel. He says, “I lose them all the time. Like a dog shedding. It seems a bit unfair to have so many wishes.”
“Maybe you could share them,” I say. “A wish charity.”
Charlie cracks his knuckles again. The first time maybe it was just getting the stiffness out, but this one is a message, loud and clear as gunfire: Shut it.
But then Zack asks, “What would you use the wish for?”
I could tell them, I suppose. I could say how often I wished for Seth to just love me, to not want more of me than I could give. The wishes I was never really able to formulate. Instead I say, “I wasn’t thinking of me. I was thinking of, like, starving children in Africa. Political prisoners in Russia. That girl that was kidnapped. The one on the news.”
“That’s very generous of you with something that doesn’t exist,” Ari says. She’s holding a book. It’s an old paperback novel with yellowed pages.
“Wishes exist,” I tell her.
“But not magic. Not luck.”
And that is true, I guess, for her and for me and for Charlie, pining for Gabe, winding up with Penelope and Seth. There was no magic there, no luck. No love.
NINE
Once upon a time, a princess was born in a kingdom on a cliff. The sea was so magnificent that no man could go to the edge of the cliff without throwing himself from it. The king issued a proclamation: any man who could resist the pull would have his daughter’s hand in marriage. Men traveled from near and far, but not one could pass the test. The princess could not bear the loss of life, so one morning she marched to the cliff’s edge. When she turned, she saw beside her a bold knight. Filled with envy and rage, he charged at her. She tumbled backward off the cliff and down into the water. She sank into the dark and swirling ocean until she found herself in the home of the sea witch. “Must I stay below the ocean forever?” she asked the sea witch. The sea witch shook her head. “What you need to do, my fair princess, is fly.” The princess said that she did not know how to fly. “Your wings are not broken, dear. Use them.”
NOW
“Why’d you go out on that ice, Lexi?” Charlie asks. I thought he was sleeping. His breath has been even and steady, with just a hint of a rasp.
“I didn’t realize I was out over the lake.”
“Really?” he asks.
We are in a room up above the dining hall. It must have been a lounge for the administrators or something. There’s a couch, a small table, and a bookshelf mostly empty except for a few old paperbacks and an outdated phone book. All the boys told me to sleep on the couch like I am more frail than they are, ready to break at any moment, but I said Charlie should have it. That’s where he is now, a blanket heaped over him.
“Really. What, you think I went out there on purpose? Like I wanted to go for a polar swim?”
“You nearly died,” he says.
“And you saved my life,” I reply. “You’re my hero, and I think that means I’m going to have to be indebted to you forever and ever. Like Morgan Freeman to Kevin Costner in that Robin Hood movie that Mom likes so much but pretends she doesn’t.”
“I’m not joking,” Charlie says. He’s fuzzy under his blanket, like someone has tried to erase him.
“Neither am I. I’ll follow you to your classes. Don’t worry, I’ll sit in the back row, and—” I’m about to tell him that I’ll text him the answers, but then I remember that he isn’t going to school and stop myself. The sudden break is a hundred times worse, of course, like drawing a big, fat X over it. “Danger, Will Robinson,” I mutter.
“Why didn’t you ever ask me why I wasn’t back at school?” he asks.
“Because Mom and Dad never talked about it. And anyway I just figured it was because of Penelope.” I stop myself from adding a “gack.” But really: gack.
“It’s not because of Penelope.” He rolls onto his side. I can see his eyes now, but they are devoid of color, like someone has come along and switched him into black and white.
“What was it then?”
I watch the blanket move. It’s like there’s a dog under there, snuggling up against him, trying to get closer and closer. But it’s just him, his body not sure what to do with itself. Like me. My body feels like it’s somebody else’s sometimes. Not in these clothes, though, so soft against my skin.
On the other side of me Clayton snores a little.
It’s a little too easy to think about what if I had met Clayton first. Like what if I lived in this tiny town, and instead of meeting Seth at that party, I sat down in a pool chair next to Clayton. Clay. What’s his last name? I try to im
agine. Clayton Banks. Clayton McGillicuddy. Clayton Stone. Each one a different version of him.
“I just couldn’t anymore,” Charlie says. His voice sounds like it did when we were younger and we would play and he would tell me I had lost all the games, the rules always changing. “I would go to class, and realize that the whole thing had passed by and I hadn’t heard a word. But I hadn’t been thinking about anything either. It was just gone. The time was gone.”
“Like you blacked out?”
“No. Like it was too much for it to even stick to me. And then getting out of bed felt that way. It was too much.”
“Were you eating? That sounds like how you get when you are hungry, Sloth-Man.”
He sighs. A big, fat, heavy, disappointed sigh. Like he is blowing out all the years we spent together. “I’m depressed, Lexi. I went to Health Services finally and they sent me to a counselor and they want me to take Prozac or Xanax or whatever, but I don’t want to and—”
“But nothing happened?”
“You mean like an incident to set me off?”
“I guess so.”
He shakes his head.
The red of rage is not crimson or fire engine. It is not golden at all. It is deep and dark. More burgundy than the sweatshirt I am wearing. Heavier than blood.
He is sad because of nothing. Nothing.
“You know,” I say, “you’re kind of a dick. I would have been less disappointed if you’d told me this was all about Penelope.”
He is silent. And then he says in a flat, even voice: “You say you aren’t an idiot, but your worldview is so limited you can’t see an inch beyond yourself. Just because you are all out of sorts because Seth Winthrop broke your little teenaged heart doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t make it through a breakup. We can’t be upset about bigger things.”
“You just told me it wasn’t anything.”
“It wasn’t a douchebag like Seth Winthrop.”
And I say, in a voice as flat and even as his: “Seth Winthrop raped me.”
I’ve never said the word before. Not out loud, and not in my own wormy little head. But that’s what it is, isn’t it? When you say “No, thank you,” and he does it anyway, that’s what it is.
Good and Gone Page 19
