The Beginners

by Rebecca Wolff

  Evil, by Cherry Endicott, Grade Twelve

  What is evil? The dictionary may not give a real answer at all because it gives us only words, no feelings or objects to help the words sink in. When you think of evil you think of the devil, witches, dictators, etc. When you think about evil, you think about badness, anger, hurting people, etc. Evil is something you can’t explain or something powerful you can’t control. Some of Webster’s words are morally wrong, wicked, harmful, injurious, characterized or accompanied by misfortune or suffering, unfortunate disatstrous, sin, harm, mischief bad wished upon a person, corrupt, vile, misery, sorrow. Sin and morally wrong are two that show evil well only reduced. Evil is sin to the thirteenth power.

  Evil is a human characteristic for the most part, but it can be found in animals, objects and certain activities. I think evil is more easily recognized in the make believe world of myths, fairy tales, legends, and dreams. Some examples of them are; the evil stepmother in cindarella, Hades right out of Greek myths, these are just a few. They’re easier to pick out because they are pure evil as opposed to people in real life which may have an evil side. There is an extensive list of things associated with evil: black magic, organized murder, black magic, the devil, etc. The question is why are they associtated with evil? My thought on this question is that they have to do with purposely causing human suffering. The devil is said to come and get murderers when they die or he kidnaps innocient people to use as servants. Or course evil is one of the things that makes life interesting. My own fears are of the evil things in this world. Organized murder is evil because it’s secretive and all planned out with secret missions and messages. Cults and seances are evil in our mind because they are controling people and going against their will, or messing with destiny. Definitely not last and not least, black magic; just the colors black and red are associated with evil. All the superstitions that have to do with bad luck or losing your soul are evil. Anything that is unknown like UFOs, ghosts or life after death is considered evil. Not to mention mummies, witches or a ouiji board, and rising people from the dead which is disturbing their long sleep. The list goes on and on, but there are things they all have in common. Death, the unknown, and fear.

  Some people associate power with evil; because of all the powerful things that cause disruption or powerful things they don’t understand they call evil. You can’t understand evil until you feel it near you: you are scared. In my mind hypnosis is a powerful and unexplained force that can and cannot be evil, it certainly can be used to go out and do evil things. With all these evil things lurking around how do we go on with our everyday lives? The answer is that evil is in our minds and comes out when we want it to, if you searched hard enough you would find the evil forces all around you but we try not to do that.

  28.

  October

  I found Cherry down at the mill.

  For so long I’d relied utterly on her constant companionship, her protection, really, her unfaltering presence in all the classrooms, playgrounds, school assemblies, hallways. Without her I found myself to be unusually difficult to see. Virtually invisible, I seemed to be, to my classmates. Walking the hallways, I understood that it had been only her physical, tactile, visceral presence at my side that had kept me material, had evinced from my schoolmates the occasional wave, or smile, or chit of conversation, all of it directed slightly to the right or left of me, depending on where Cherry stood. She had been like a magnet that collected my scattered electrons into a semblance of human form.

  But now Cherry, also, did not speak to me at school. She was always looking the other way when I caught sight of her, clinging to the arms of new friends, girls we’d never given a second thought to before. It was as though I’d become invisible to her, too. I could only stand the pain of this rejection by reminding myself that I was both its cause and its object: she did not like my new friends, just as I did not like hers.

  Then, a few weeks into the new school year, a few days after our sequential interviews with Mr. Czabaj, Cherry was suddenly absent. A week went by, then two, then three, and still she did not appear around any corners; she did not materialize behind her locker door as it slammed shut; most notably she did not tug on my elbow in the lunch line, as I awaited a slice of floppy pizza and carton of milk, to wistfully tell me where she was sitting. She wasn’t sitting anywhere that I could see.

  I THOUGHT I MIGHT learn something by observing the group of shiny twelfth-grade girls to which Cherry had lately become attached. I had watched the progression of her inclusion, her enclosure into the group, that fall; by the time Cherry disappeared from school she had already virtually disappeared into it. It was overwhelming, their collective affect, stiff and sweet as carbon monoxide. A girl might walk down the hall effulgently, and a vacuum of absolute powerlessness swallowed the watcher. I had seen Mr. Corless, the Spanish teacher, working to maintain his composure in the nearness of Cathy Dennison, a bearer of this invincible light, this unwieldy heat, this chalice of waste. And I had seen Cathy Dennison’s father, Tom, struggle to fasten his eyes on his club sandwich at the Top Hat one day when a gaggle of girls came in straight from volleyball practice, all flushed and damp in their polyester warm-up suits. The true daughters of Wick.

  I THOUGHT I WAS invisible, but one of them spotted me, as I sat under a tree in front of the school near the usual bench around which they congregated to light up their cigarettes after the final bell had rung. Teresa Gagnon nuzzled her face into her friend’s ear; Christine Farnsworth looked at me and then back at Teresa, who repeated whatever she had said to the group at large. They all turned their glossy heads in my direction, and then Christine detached herself from the group and stood before me with the sun directly behind her blondness, a blazing halo. I had to shade my eyes to look up into her face. I squinted at her for a minute before I understood that she was not going to lower herself to join me on the ground, so I stood up, a full six inches taller than she.

  “Hey, Ginger,” she said, convivial. “We were wondering if you know what’s going on with Cherry. You guys used to always hang out together, so we thought maybe she would have called you?” I was expecting something else: a bullying, a dressing-down, a comeuppance. Look what you’ve done. You have not been a good friend. You’re a slut. You freak. Weirdo. The last thing I expected was to find myself consulted. “I went by her house, and we’ve all left messages, but it’s like she’s evaporated. It’s just weird. If you talk to her, tell her we’re all thinking about her and we miss her.” Christine wheeled around and regained her remaining friends.

  YOU COULDN’T EXACTLY SAY that I went looking for Cherry, that day, but I did think that I would find her. There were only so many places we knew how to get to. I rode my bike through town, across the little bridge and down to the mill. The oaks on the riverbank had turned a brilliant yellow-orange, and the red brick structure looked even redder against the saturated blue of the sky, that kind of deep, cornflower blue that you usually only see in decorative glass objects. I leaned my bike against the guardrail, climbed over it, and half-slid down the little hill to the riverbank, to our accustomed spot under the trees, from where I could almost discern the busted lock on the iron doors.

  I SAW HER LYING THERE, facedown, under the trees. I saw her red canvas sneakers first, then her bare legs, still brown from summer. I saw her white shorts and pale yellow sweatshirt, her black hair in disarray around her shoulders. Her head lay cradled on her folded arms, as though she slept, or as though she had crumpled forward and landed gently, fortuitously.

  I crouched a few feet away, and remembered the dream I’d had when sleeping with my face in Raquel’s diary: the dream of the reservoir, of lost towns, of lost houses and families and drowned girls. I remembered that the last thing I saw under the water, before I woke up, was Cherry’s pale body floating, her black hair wreathed around her blue face, her black lips, her empty sockets.

  I DON’T KNOW what sound I made, but it was enough to make Cherry flop over and sit up
abruptly. I shot to my feet and danced a few yards backward in a jig of horror. But Cherry’s face was not the face of a dead girl, a girl who had been ripped away from her life prematurely, as I had imagined such a face might look: forlorn, bereft, endlessly removed, but yet infused with a gentle taste for vengeance, a need to make the living share in her despair. The look in her eyes might change swiftly from imploring to desecration. To desecrate the living. No, Cherry’s face was stained with tears, pale and shiny, her cheek reddened where it had rested against her arm. Her nose was running. “Ginger,” she said accusingly, and was clearly alive. “You scared me. I’ve been here every day, after school, but you never come to find me.” A double accusation: I scared her and I didn’t find her. I tried to remember where I had been yesterday, after school. Oh yes, at the Motherwells’. And the day before? I didn’t seem to be able to remember that far back.

  “I need to talk to you . . . I need to tell you something. I wasn’t sure I could talk about it at all, but . . . now I realize it’s my responsibility—” Cherry looked at me intently, wiping her face on her sweatshirt, one sleeve and then the other.

  But I didn’t want to hear what she had to say. It was enough to know that she was alive, and weeping. I turned to go, to leave her there. I was beginning to feel visible again, in the old way, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to let it take effect. I might have preferred it if she was dead.

  “Wait!” She grabbed my arm, and yanked me roughly down to the ground. “You sit here. I’ll hide your bike.” I watched her clamber up the hillside, push my bike into the bushes on the other side of the bridge, and slide back down the bank. She looked thicker than I remembered her, swollen, as though she’d been left in a bowl to rise overnight like dough. She plopped herself down, facing me, and crossed her legs. The seat of her white shorts, I mused, would undoubtedly be soiled, besmirched. She was more than a little out of breath, but had an unusual air of resolution. She would say what she had to say.

  “Look, I’m sorry that I’ve been ignoring you at school. My parents told me to stay away from you, which was really hard for me!” She looked at me, and paused, as though waiting for reciprocation. But I was waiting, too. “After that night . . . I was ashamed of myself. I tried to tell you, that day, and when Randy came instead I told him, but now he’s really angry about it and I’m afraid of what he’ll do. I finally talked to Mrs. Downey”—that was our hygiene teacher—“and she made me feel better about it . . . about what happened. She said it wasn’t my fault—” and suddenly Cherry burst into tears again. Not just tears, but sobs, great, racking sobs that bent her over into her own lap. I sat silently, still waiting. I knew from long experience that if I offered sympathy, in the form of a pat on the back or a soothing murmur, it would only bring on a fresh torrent. I sat still, and eventually my patience was rewarded. Cherry straightened her back and wiped her red eyes again on the damp arm of her sweatshirt.

  “Ginger, you’re my best friend . . . you still are. So you have to just trust me. Mrs. Downey says I have to trust my friends to support me, and that they have to trust me to tell them the truth.” Again she paused, this time, it seemed, to gather her wits, or her resolve. She plunged in.

  “You have to stay away from those people.” She drew herself up a little higher, placed her hands on her abdomen as though it were a crystal ball. “That night, when I got sick at their house . . . At first I couldn’t believe what was happening. I kept thinking, ‘Maybe he’s just being nice and trying to comfort me.’ But then he tried to give me a back rub, and I was like ‘Mr. Motherwell, you’re making me uncomfortable.’ Because I remembered from what Mrs. Downey said in hygiene class that that’s what you say to someone if they’re touching you in a way you don’t like. And they’re supposed to stop. But he didn’t stop—” her voice quavered, her eyes filled, and she paused a moment to regain control.

  “He kind of put his face right up close to my face and just kept looking into my eyes like that would make me do whatever he wanted, like I was supposed to let him kiss me or something. And this whole time, Raquel’s upstairs, and I swear to God she must have been awake, and then he . . . and then I just pushed him away from me and grabbed my shoes and ran out the door, barefoot. I didn’t even stop to put them on till I was halfway back to town.”

  As Cherry neared the end of her story I couldn’t help but hold it up for comparison against Theo’s approach to me, so different, and so differently received. It occurred to me that he had never once kissed me, there in the mill. I felt slighted, a hole opening in the fabric of the memory of that night. I regarded Cherry’s full lower lip: pink, tremulous, unsuspecting. I allowed myself for a moment to re-envision the scene at the mill. There I was, seated appealingly on the table, Theo’s thin jacket under my bare ass. What if I had expressed some appropriate reservations. “Mr. Motherwell—Theo—I am too young. I’ve never done this before. What about Raquel?” What if I had attempted to hold him at bay, to demur, to defer? Again I called up the scene, and myself murmuring entreaties, disclosing discomfort. I thought it quite possible that with the addition of only a very few protests on my part, Theo’s already assured advance could have been made even more so. I could have drawn him out. He might have spoken to me, might have murmured to me, cajoling, might have kissed me; I could have tasted his mouth. I remembered now, with surprising olfactory nuance, the thick, almost burnt scent of his skin, his hair, his breath, as he had brought his face near mine on his way down between my legs. Wine, wood smoke, dried sweat, inexorability.

  “And then,” Cherry continued, “I didn’t know where to go, because I didn’t want to go home, and I didn’t want to make your parents suspicious, so I went over to Randy’s house and sat on his back stairs for a while, but he didn’t come home. Finally I went to my house. I was completely freaked out. I felt like I must have done something to make Theo think that I wanted to . . . or maybe it was the clothes I was wearing. Do you remember, I had on my white T-shirt that says ‘Juicy,’ and my black shorts that are kind of high . . . but Mrs. Downey says that it’s never the fault of the victim. ‘That’s typical victim thinking,’ she says, and no matter what, it’s not my fault. . . .” Again, the sharp relief she felt at being absolved from blame by this hygienic authority caused her voice to break and her eyes to fill with tears.

  “And here’s the other thing I wanted to tell you. . . . That day that Randy found me at the mill, when you were supposed to come meet me . . . I . . . I did it with him.” She blushed and looked away from my eyes for a moment, then back, and continued somewhat apologetically. “I think I was just so upset, and he was being so sweet to me. He’s been so sweet to me. . . . I really wanted to talk to you about it. I always thought that we’d tell each other right away when we lost our virginity”—as though we had a collective hymen—“and then it was like the opposite, it was like I lost my best friend at the same time that I lost my virginity. . . . I just felt like I couldn’t tell anybody, not even you . . . or maybe especially not you. You’re so good, and you never do anything with boys, and I just felt like such a slut!” Cherry burst back into tears now, her dark eyes remaining fixed on mine this time, beseechingly, and her nose pinking up. “I got home and just crawled into bed. I didn’t feel that well the whole next day, and . . . I still don’t feel well . . . I . . .”

  This would have been the moment at which I should have offered some comfort, should have said that it sounded like she’d been through quite an ordeal, should have effected a rapprochement. I should have asked her why she had been staying home from school—Was anything wrong? I should at least have passed along the kind regards of Teresa and Christine and the others. But I did not. I was thinking how odd it was that I had not even considered seeking Cherry out to tell her about my own Very Special Beginning—but then these exploits, like Mr. Penrose’s magazines, seemed to exist in a different realm from our friendship, which, after all, had been based in childhood, in childhood’s innocence. Wasn’t this what we both had b
een ever so swiftly paddling away from, each in her own little boat?

  After a full minute of my silence it must have become clear that I was not going to offer any of the expected condolences. Cherry’s face screwed up into an unbecoming ball and she sobbed. “Doesn’t anything matter to you anymore?”

  I WOULD NOT SAY that nothing mattered to me. I felt protective of my new life with Raquel and Theo, of its special distinction. I did not want to lose the hope it offered me, hope for a future in which nothing that I already knew would continue. In which I was already different.

  It is not true that nothing mattered to me. It is more accurate to say that for me such seemingly pressing questions as the ones Cherry asked, albeit indirectly—who to trust, of whom to be afraid—had the quality of dilemmas faced in a dream, a lucid one, one from which I could wake up whenever I wished; one whose decisions I could therefore delay making indefinitely, and whose implications would only grow richer, more fascinating, the longer I delayed both decision-making and awaking.