The In-Between

by Stewart, Barbara

  twenty-three

  The girl who lives in the last house before the river is downstairs on our couch. Autumn Pulaski. She and her mom came by with brownies to welcome us, the new neighbors. Autumn’s mother said they baked them this morning, but I’m really hoping that Autumn had nothing to do with it. She’s got a nervous condition that makes her pick at her skin: Acne. Freckles. Bug bites. Whatever. She’s full of holes. That’s mean. She’s okay, I guess. I just hate meeting new people. Unless you immediately click with the other person, it’s awkward trying to find stuff to talk about. I’m not like my mom. She can talk to anybody.

  My mom and Mrs. Pulaski went off to the kitchen for coffee, leaving me in the living room with Autumn. I wasn’t really dressed for company. Not that it mattered. Autumn was wearing cutoff sweatpants and one of those wrestler tanks with the oversized armholes. I plunked down on the couch, trying to look bored with the whole situation. Autumn took it as a cue to plunk down, too.

  Me: So, what’s there to do around here?

  Autumn: Don’t eat the brownies. Our cat licked them.

  Me: Uh, thanks?

  The clock on the bookcase ticked away in slow motion. After five minutes of staring at each other, I decided it would be less painful to stare at the TV instead. I turned it on. The second I put down the channel changer, Autumn snatched it up and flipped to a show about people with bizarre addictions, like eating dryer lint or sleeping with a waffle iron.

  “I’m a digger,” Autumn announced. “But I’m trying to quit. Do you like air hockey? My mother says I can get a tattoo when I’m sixteen. I heard you were in a car crash.”

  It caught me off guard, her bringing up the accident. She was the first person to ask about it. I touched my forehead and watched a woman in a commercial sniff her family’s laundry.

  “I was. I died. But they brought me back to life.”

  “When I die, I want an open casket,” Autumn said. “I’m too pretty for a closed casket.”

  Is she for real? I wondered. She’s joking, right?

  Autumn was picking at her back. Her armpit was showing. I could see she hadn’t shaved today.

  “What?” she said, checking her fingernail for blood. “You want a closed casket?”

  “I think I’ll have one of those brownies,” I said and got up and left the room.

  I just heard the screen door slap shut. I think they’re gone. I know they’re gone. Here comes my mother pounding up the stairs. It’s not a happy sound.

  twenty-four

  Today when I was carrying some boxes up to the attic, I came across Lucy’s cat bed. It was covered in orange-and-white fur. I swept up a little pile with my fingers and put it in a zip-top baggie. I have some of my father’s ashes, too, in a small jar with a black metal lid. My mother had already broken the seal on the urn. She’d placed my father’s watch inside—the one she’d had engraved for their anniversary. He was wearing it when he died. The crystal was cracked, but it was still ticking, smooth and steady as a heartbeat. Tomorrow we say good-bye. We’re burying him in the cemetery in the bigger small town.

  twenty-five

  My mother’s at the dinner table slumped over a glass of wine. This was a lousy day. Actually, lousy doesn’t even begin to describe it. What kind of day are you having when the jerk running your father’s funeral keeps calling your father Dick? My father is Richard. Sometimes he went by Rich. I get it. People make mistakes. But did he not see the only two people in the cemetery cringe every time he said it? Did he not see the crushed rose in my mother’s fist? I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to strangle him with his paisley tie. It was the worst eulogy ever. I couldn’t even listen. I focused on the sun glinting off the urn, the leaves shushing in the trees. I was watching a bird peck at a crumbling gravestone when something over by the crypts caught my eye. Under a willow, a stone angel, her hand raised. I thought she waved, but I know that’s not right. My brain was playing tricks again.

  When the jerk was through butchering my father’s memory, he wanted to talk, console us with a few shallow observations about life and death. I turned and stalked back to the car. He should’ve met with me before the funeral. In five minutes I could’ve told him a few things about Richard Moss. I would’ve told him that Richard did not like sports. He didn’t cook things on a grill. He wasn’t into cars or guns like Scilla’s dad. He didn’t fish or hunt or drink beer.

  My father was sick more than he was well. But when he was well, he loved to read. Anything and everything: books, newspapers, my stupid poems. He loved looking at the stars and telling bad jokes. He loved music, especially jazz. I have some of his albums on my MP3 player. There’s one song in particular, by a guy who blows the saddest trumpet ever. Listening to him, you want to die. Not my dad. It had the opposite effect on him. You know how Ritalin is speed, but give it to kids with ADD and it slows them down, makes them normal? This song was like Ritalin. It made him want to live. When he played it, I knew he was on the mend. The darkness was lifting. This is for you, Daddy.

  twenty-six

  It’s happening again. That unnerving feeling that I know things, things impossible for me to know. It makes me dizzy, as if I’m watching everything from far away. I was not in the room in our old house when my mother packed the box she marked MINE. It contained personal stuff, important stuff to her: mementos, keepsakes, souvenirs. I know I sound like a bad magician preparing everybody for a really dumb trick, but it’s true. The box was sealed. Today, I sat on my mother’s bed and watched her cut the packing tape with a knife. And I knew what was in that box. I just knew.

  High school yearbook. A rose from my grandmother’s casket. Drawings I’d done as a kid. My mother dropped a small velvet pouch on the dresser. It sounded like buttons. I’m not sure which is creepier: that I knew it was baby teeth or that my mother had saved them. I couldn’t breathe. The visions kept coming. Concert tickets. Letters. A stack of photos rubber-banded together. I opened the window, inhaling sharply. The air was warm and smelled electric. A storm was coming. Wind shook the tree out front. Through the leaves I watched a girl in yellow shorts go flying by on a bicycle. Seconds later, the same girl, dressed in pink this time, went flying by again.

  I turned to my mother and asked if she’d ever had a miscarriage.

  She raised her eyebrows in surprise. I’d caught her off guard. “Why would you ask that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you go through my things?”

  Blood rushed to my face. My heartbeat quickened.

  “You did, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t. I swear. It’s another one of those things. Like the lamp. Like the water stain.”

  “I never had a miscarriage,” my mother said.

  I turned back to the window. The girls—one in pink, one in yellow—were across the road now, straddling their matching bikes. They looked up and waved. The sky rumbled. I closed the window.

  “Sometimes you scare me, Elanor.”

  My mother went back to her box. Digging. Poking. Searching for something.

  “Is this what you’re talking about?” She handed over two grainy, black-and-white photos on thin, filmy paper. I’d seen them before. I knew them, had held them.

  “I was pregnant with twins. That’s you. There were two babies, and then one day one of the babies disappeared. It wasn’t a miscarriage, though. A miscarriage is different.”

  “If she didn’t come out, where is she?”

  My mother let out a sound like a leaky tire, a sound that said, Can we not do this now?

  Fine. You can learn anything on the Internet. It’s called Vanishing Twin Syndrome. It’s more common than you’d think, but that doesn’t make it any less freaky. My mother was telling the truth. The baby never left her body. It entered mine. “Absorbed” is the word they use. A nice way of saying “consumed,” I guess. Devoured. Ingested. It all means the same thing: I’m a cannibal. Like I’m not defective enough.

  twenty-seven

 
On the bed beside me is a plain white envelope. Jackson postmark. Liberty stamp. My name and address in purple ink, in Priscilla’s slanty hand. It came while Mom and I were at the mall getting our hair cut and shopping for school. It’s after midnight and I still haven’t opened it. I’m paralyzed by this crazy fear that it contains something hurtful and mean. A rising dread that makes my fingers tingle. She was my best friend until she wasn’t. And then I tried to die. But that didn’t change anything. She still treated me like I was something noxious. Like I polluted the privileged air she shared with Natalie Paquin. Priscilla was responsible for The Worst Year of My Life. What could she possibly have to say to me now? I should just open the stupid letter already.

  My heart races. It’s good. It starts “Dear Ellie” and ends “Your Scilla Monster.” She’s sorry about my dad. She’s sorry about everything. When she heard what happened, she went to the cemetery and sat with my stone angel and cried. Over the summer, she’s had time to think. She’s changed. Can we be friends again?

  I should run downstairs and send an e-mail that says I forgive her and love her and maybe she could come stay with me next summer. But I can’t. I don’t know what’s holding me back. I keep rereading her letter. It’s short. Scilla never liked to write. In English she always picked the biggest font for her essays. Teachers aren’t stupid. She always got marked down for it. What am I waiting for? Maybe it’s New Ellie. Maybe it was shopping with Mom. We pretended I was on one of those shows where they make you toss your ugly old clothes and help you pick all new outfits. Miniskirts. Leggings. Silver knee-high boots. (Mom wasn’t sure about the boots, but I begged until she gave in.) Fat metal bracelets to hide my scars. The only difference is we don’t have a lot of money, so we ended up at one of those fashion discount stores. Everything looks great until you examine it closely and realize it’s defective. Like me.

  Who am I kidding? I’m not going to waltz into school on Wednesday and suddenly be the kind of girl who everyone is dying to know. I’m not that lucky. That’s not how my life works. I’ll write her back. I know I will. Just not now. I’m waiting for the In-Between girl. I took one of my mother’s pills and my eyelids are heavy. The window is open and I can hear the crickets chirping and the trees sighing. I’ll sit here until I hear her coming down the hall. My stone angel. The floorboards will groan. My bedsprings will creak. Beneath the sheets, I’ll feel her warmth. My heart glows in her presence. When she’s with me, I don’t need Priscilla or Autumn or anyone else. What we have is ancient and binding. An eternal pact written in blood. Breaking it would set the monster free.

  twenty-eight

  When Autumn’s not picking at her skin, she’s picking at her nail polish. She’s doing it now. Sprawled on my floor, listening to my MP3 player. She gives me the skeeves. I don’t know why she can’t sleep on the couch. This is all my mother’s fault.

  Today Mrs. Pulaski invited us down to their place for a cookout. Hamburgers, hotdogs, stuff like that. My mom brought macaroni salad. Their house is big and old and needs more work than ours. There’s blue shag carpeting throughout, and avocado walls, and all their furniture is sad and tired, stuff you’d see sitting by the side of the road. I learned some things about their family. Autumn’s dad is a deadbeat living in North Carolina, and her brother, Will, is in the military, which explains the ARMY MOM sticker on their station wagon. Their yard is mostly dirt because the river floods every spring, and the chicken coop is empty because wild dogs ate all their hens.

  I also learned Autumn’s mom works third shift in a factory that makes a million pills an hour, and that her grandma stays with her at night but she’s away for the long weekend. Which is how Autumn ended up on my floor. She was going to spend the night alone, in her own house. All Mrs. Pulaski said was, “Can my daughter call you if anything happens?” You know, like the house is burning down, or someone’s breaking in.

  “She’s welcome to stay with us,” my mother said.

  Autumn looked about ready to pee her shorts. Off she ran to pack a bag. As I watched her go, I saw a girl—my girl, my stone angel—in the tree. Her shape, her shadow, in the bark. She waved. She was leaving. Good-bye. I knew my mother couldn’t turn around and uninvite Autumn, but I said, “Make her bring a blanket and pillow. I’m not sharing my bed.”

  My mother acted all innocent. “Why? What’s wrong?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  My mother made a face. She was ashamed of me. “You’ve got a bad habit of making snap judgments,” she said. “Give her a chance. I think you two have a lot in common.”

  Translation: She’s a reject, too.

  Thanks for the vote of confidence, Mom. Just because I’m a reject doesn’t mean I want to be friends with one. Making up with Scilla is sounding better and better.

  The worst part about Autumn staying over is I won’t be able to sleep. No sleep equals no stone angel. No girl from the In-Between. I need her to feel normal. I’m going out of my mind. I’m an addict, cold and edgy, craving that crazy high I get when we’re together. I saved my bed for her, but it doesn’t matter. Her message was clear: She won’t come around with Autumn sprawled on the floor, humming out of tune, her giant feet stinking up the place. I hate her. Make her go away.

  twenty-nine

  “Are you nervous?”

  That was from Mom this morning, up before dawn making me breakfast. Today was the first day of school. My first day of high school. My stomach was in knots, but when she asked, I said no. I didn’t want another pep talk.

  If we’d stayed in Jackson, I would’ve had another year of middle school. Here in Pottsville, ninth grade is high school. The school isn’t actually in Pottsville. It’s in the bigger small town, on a hill surrounded by pines. I have to ride the bus, which blows. In Jackson, I used to walk. Every day with Priscilla—until she turned on me. Then I walked alone, the long way, the roundabout way, to avoid crossing paths.

  When I boarded this morning, all eyes were on me—the new girl in the frilly skirt and killer silver boots. It was unnerving at first, but then I saw some smiles and thought, This is my New Beginning. Old Ellie was back in Jackson, a distant memory. Everyone was watching to see where I would sit, but I waited for Autumn to find a spot first. She stalked down the aisle—head lowered, stringy hair in her eyes—clutching her backpack to her ugly cardigan. She was wearing the kind of boots you’d see on a farmer cleaning out a stall. Keep going, I thought. Right out the emergency exit. When she plunked down in the last row, I thanked God and slid into an empty seat in the middle.

  I was digging through my bag, trying to look focused and bored at the same time (a look that always worked for Natalie Paquin), when a girl with swoopy bangs and a toothpaste commercial smile leaned over the seat and said, “Hey, I’m Jess.”

  “Elanor,” I said. “Call me—” Jess shot back like I’d breathed garlic in her face.

  My heart sank. Stupid Autumn was hovering in the aisle. Jess made a face like, You know this loser? I didn’t move. Autumn just stood there. The bus driver hollered, “Pulaski, sit.” Jess looked down at Autumn’s feet. “Nice boots.” She smirked.

  It was over before it began. Autumn ruined everything, tainting me with her reject status. They could smell it on me. Loser. I wanted to elbow her sharply in the ribs. She rambled on about some stupid thing. But I stuck my earbuds in my ears and pretended she was invisible, staring out the window at the fields. I’ve done nothing to make Autumn think I’m her friend. Waiting for the bus, I’d barely said two words. She thinks because she slept over we’re somehow united, like I’m supposed to be her ally. She couldn’t be more wrong. Truthfully, I don’t even care about being friends with people like Jess. Girls like her are nothing, zero. Not while I’ve got my stone angel. She’s all that matters. Really. But I want it to be my choice. Me rejecting them, not the other way around.

  I’m not going to lie. The rest of the day was a disaster. Nothing played out the way I’d imagined. How stupid am I? Did I really think it was going
to be all that different from Jackson Middle? They have rich kids and poor kids and geeks and princesses and jocks and clowns and bullies just like every other stupid school in this stupid country. Compared to Jackson, though, it’s small. Really small. The only classes I don’t have with Autumn are foreign language—I’m taking French, she’s taking Spanish—and gym. Usually I hate assigned seating, but today I was grateful every time a teacher pulled out a chart and told us to get ready to move. It got me away from Autumn. There’s not a huge spread between M and P, but there’s a Nelson and a Patterson and a Pierce keeping me from stabbing Pulaski with my pencil every time she starts picking.

  If only they had assigned seating in the cafeteria.

  “You talk in your sleep,” Autumn said, sliding her gray plastic tray down the empty lunch table I’d picked by the juice machines. She plunked down across from me and stuffed a fry in her mouth. “Don’t you want to know what you were dreaming about?”

  I stared at my food-pyramid lunch from home and dreamt that if I ignored her she’d move to another table.

  “‘Take me with you,’” she said, digging at a scab on her neck. “That’s what you said.”

  “Can you not do that while I’m eating?” I snapped. “It’s gross.”

  The scars on my wrists started itching. I glanced around the cafeteria at the tables filled with normal boys and girls. Boys and girls with friends. Boys and girls joking and flirting and gossiping. I wanted to go sit with them, but walking up to strangers and introducing yourself is awkward. Just thinking about it made my legs shake. It was easier to stay with Autumn.