It's All Your Fault

by Paul Rudnick

  “And then the guy with the shotgun turned toward you,” said Sophie, “and he said, ‘Overcome this, bitch.’ And you said …”

  “ ‘I am not a bitch. I’m a good Christian girl and I’m gonna send you straight to Hell,’ ” said Heller and Sophie in unison.

  “He dropped the shotgun!” said Heller. “He said to the other guy, ‘She’s scaring the shit outta me!’ They both ran out of the store! And you told the lady behind the counter to call the police and to show them the footage from the security cameras, and the lady was so grateful and she kept thanking you and asking if there was anything she could do for you. You told her that you’d only done what any decent person would’ve done, and then you said …”

  “ ‘BUT I WOULD LIKE SOME SKITTLES,’ ” said Heller and Sophie, jubilantly high-fiving each other.

  I looked down at my lap and there it was: an empty bag of Skittles.

  “Did I … did I pay for the Skittles?”

  “You tried to,” said Heller, “but the cashier was so happy, because you’d saved her life, that she just handed them over. And she said that Tiffani did really good work.”

  “So what you’re claiming,” I said, “what you’re telling me is … that I deep-kissed a boy I barely even know, then I got a tattoo, then I got my nose pierced, then I stole a car, then I exposed myself to a passing vehicle, then I got my hair chopped off by a person named Tiffani, then I threatened a stranger with a gun, and then I stole a bag of Skittles. You are telling me that I am an unstoppable one-person crime wave.”

  “You’re a superstar!” said Heller.

  “You’re the baddest bitch on the planet!” said Sophie. “And you’re still wearing kneesocks!”

  I couldn’t fathom, let alone begin to accept, any of this. I couldn’t have done any of the things Heller and Sophie had just reported, even if I’d been drugged. Even if Heller had forced me to. Except—my hair. My nose. My arm. The convertible. The GUN.

  I jumped out of the car. I stood there, turning in every direction, flailing, as if I could corkscrew myself back in time and reverse everything.

  “Get in the car,” said Heller, sliding behind the wheel. “I’ll drive.”

  Should I run? Should I flag down a passing car and beg the driver to take me to a police station, where I could file charges against Heller? Should I lie down in the middle of the road so I could get run over?

  “Get in!” said Heller. I pulled myself together. I had to take control. I would demand that Heller drive us back to the hotel, as a start. I would wear a scarf over my hair until it grew back. I would have the stud removed and pray that my nose would heal. As for whatever was under that bandage—I couldn’t think about it, not yet. I got in the car.

  “Catey,” said Sophie, “totally thanks to you, we’re, like, ready. To do the last thing on my list.”

  “No,” I said. “Don’t you dare. We’re not doing anything else, ever. We’re done. We are going back to the hotel. THEN WE ARE GOING TO CHURCH.”

  “Just one more thing!”

  “No!”

  “Like what?” asked Heller.

  I tried to keep protesting but I was so upset I couldn’t even form words.

  “Okay,” said Sophie. “Okay okay okay. Here goes. I did the squiggle machine and I got my tattoo. But all of that was kind of a warm-up. I need to do something, like, okay okay okay—dangerous.”

  Sophie took a deep breath and bounced up and down on the seat.

  “Something that could kill me.”

  Sophie,” I said, trying not to scream. “If even half of what you and Heller just told me is true, then I think we’ve done more than our share of dangerous activities for one day. For one century. You’re already dealing with a life-threatening illness—why would you want to get any closer to dying?”

  “’Cause you’re totally right,” said Sophie. “I’ve spent, like, way too much time having cancer and almost dying all over the place. And yeah, for a while I was all like, why? Why me? Why would God, or whoever is pulling this stupid stuff, why would they give cancer to a kid? To any kid? Or even, like, to any grown-up? So I talked to my parents and my specialists and to a ton of therapists and to this online priest and my friend Julie’s rabbi and to some Buddhist guy at the airport, and to other kids with cancer, and I always end up with, like, the same damn thing: No … one … knows. Boom. Total boom. Don’t blame God, because maybe it’s part of God’s plan, or maybe it’s out of God’s control, although come on, why would you want to believe in some ditz-ass God who keeps secrets, or who can’t stop all the crappy stuff from happening? What kind of God is that, like, part-time? Is God like, what, some fucking unpaid intern, geeking off? Or I don’t know, is it, like, my fault, did I get cancer ’cause I ate too much gluten, or not enough gluten, or because our house is too close to some high-tension wires, or because my mom used her cell phone while she was pregnant, although I figure that if using your cell gives you cancer, the streets are gonna be empty.

  “So finally I just stopped asking, because, please, come on, like what did I expect? There is no answer. I even made up a word for it, like it’s halfway between boom and crap: brap. Just brap. Like, deal with it. But while I was sitting there in that recliner, getting more chemo pumped into me, I don’t know why, but I started thinking, like, what if cancer was a person, no, not really a person, more like a thing or a raptor or the bad guy in a movie, like Darth Vader or that bitch who tries to kidnap Coraline and sew buttons on her eyes? Only my cancer dude was, like, three thousand feet tall with green eyes and billions of sharp little teeth and he was from outer space like in the Alien movies, and all he wants to do is kill me.

  “And once I got home I started drawing pictures of him and I started calling him the Cancer King. All I kept thinking was, How can I kill him before he kills me? I figure that, like, what I need to do is, I’ve gotta show the Cancer King that I’m in charge. Of, like, whatever’s gonna happen. And no, of course I don’t want to die, because dying sucks, and because someday I might want to see if I could sneak into the factory where they make Skittles, or go to college and then drop out and invent something and make a billion dollars, or even have sex, which, I’m sorry, but I still think that sex sounds like bullshit, like it’s two people pretending to like it while they’re really thinking about Skittles. So I want to do something dangerous, or at least scary, but it’s got to be something that has absolutely nothing to do with cancer. Something, like, totally Heller Harrigan, right? So that way I can tell the Cancer King, ‘Hey, dickwad, watch this! Brap you!’ ”

  I was going to scold Sophie about her language but she was already looking at me like, Really?

  “I know what we have to do,” said Heller.

  “What?” I asked.

  “The quarry.”

  No. NO! How could she? How could Heller even suggest going back to the quarry? For the past four years I’d spent most of my time trying not to think about the quarry. No, that’s wrong. I’d been trying to pretend the quarry didn’t exist.

  Heller glanced at me in the rearview mirror as she pulled the car back onto the highway. Why was she doing this? Was she deliberately trying to hurt me? Had she been planning this all along? For all those years I’d hated Heller, but over the past two days my feelings had started to change. We’d shared things about our lives. We’d worked together. We’d laughed.

  But now I wondered: Did Heller hate me?

  I got very quiet. My mouth was dry. My hands were starting to flutter.

  “The quarry?” asked Sophie, who knew she was onto something, and because she was thirteen, she wasn’t about to leave it alone. “What’s the quarry?”

  Heller was still watching me, carefully, in the mirror.

  “There’s this incredible quarry, you’ll see,” she told Sophie. “It’s practically the whole side of a mountain, only a mile from where Catey and I grew up. Up until fifty years ago it was still active and they used it for granite and limestone, tons of it; there used to b
e a sign saying that this quarry provided the stone for half of the civic buildings in Trenton, the state capital. But then, I don’t know, I guess they’d chopped out all of the granite they could use or the company went bankrupt, because the mining operation got shut down. There’s this underground spring, so over the years the whole quarry filled up with water, and it’s really clear springwater so you can see right to the bottom. People started going out there, because it’s so beautiful to look at and to go swimming and just hang out.”

  “Stop it,” I whispered, because that was all I could manage. “Please stop talking about this. Right now.”

  “But this place sounds fantastic,” said Sophie.

  “Catey,” said Heller, “we have to talk about it. This whole weekend it’s been sitting there, in the corner, staring at us, and you’ve been like, oh no, everything’s fine, everything’s fabulous, except you haven’t seen me or contacted me for four years. Until I became a big movie star.”

  “That has nothing to do with it,” I said, trying to keep my voice as direct as I could. “I almost died. And you didn’t care. You never care.”

  Heller matched my seriousness. “That’s not true.”

  We were negotiating, and I wasn’t about to back down.

  “Fine,” I said. “You can tell Sophie. After you tell her we will never talk about it, ever again. Just the way that after this weekend we will never have to see each other, ever again.”

  “Oh my God,” said Sophie. “This is like a dark secret that has haunted the two of you forever. Like if you went into an abandoned house and then murdered someone and ate them. Or if you got abducted by aliens and the aliens made you dance in front of them and then the aliens Instagrammed it to all the other planets, so that the entire universe was laughing at you. Or maybe you’re, like, secretly eco-terrorists and four years ago you blew up a factory that manufactured those plastic diapers, and you didn’t mean to hurt anybody but one of the diapers exploded and killed someone. This is the best day ever!”

  “There’s a chain at the quarry,” Heller began, “and it’s attached to this big mechanical arm, it’s sort of like a crane, which was part of how they’d move the granite, because they’d wrap the slabs with rope and then attach the rope to this hook at the end of the chain and hoist the slabs up, and swing them over to where the trucks would be waiting. Even after the quarry shut down and got filled with water, the arm with the chain and the hook were still there. So people started daring each other to balance their feet on the hook and hold on to the chain and swing way out over the quarry and then jump off into the water, which is really deep. Over the years it became this thing, like right before the seniors graduate from Parsippany High, they do the chain, or guys would get drunk at a bachelor party and drag a keg out to the quarry and blast music and do the chain.”

  “But sometimes people would get hurt,” I said, because Heller was making the whole thing sound like fun. “Someone even drowned, this sixteen-year-old girl.”

  “Whoa,” said Sophie.

  “Because she’d dropped acid and didn’t know what she was doing,” said Heller. “But after that the police put up a fence and warning signs and they tried to stop people from doing the chain, or even just going swimming or sunbathing on the rocks. Which meant, of course, that everyone in Parsippany was always daring everyone else to sneak out there. Especially Catey’s brothers.”

  “Who never even went out there!” I said. “All they would do was talk about it and make plans but they’d never do it, because they knew that our parents would slaughter them and then ground them forever.”

  “Catey’s brothers were always picking on us, and calling us babies and guppies and nice little sweetie-pie girly-girls.”

  “Which we were,” I said. “At least I was.”

  “I couldn’t stand it,” said Heller. “As far back as I can remember, if someone told me I couldn’t do something, or I wasn’t allowed to do it, because I was a girl or because I was too young or because I was a scaredy-cat, well, watch out.”

  “Which is why I totally love you so much,” said Sophie. “Like when I would play with my Anna Banana doll, I would make her dump all of my Barbies into the toilet and try to flush them. Which doesn’t work, unless you just flush their heads and even then sometimes their ponytails still won’t flush, they just sort of swirl around in the water.”

  “It was my thirteenth birthday,” said Heller, “and I’m sorry, but in a whole lot of cultures that makes you an adult. I mean, in some places, thirteen-year-old girls get married or they go to work, to support their families.”

  I was going to tell Heller that because we lived in America, thirteen-year-old girls didn’t have to do any of those things, but then I remembered that Heller had done most of them.

  “I was getting all geared up,” said Heller, “to become this big star, or at least to become something major, or at least to get the hell out of Parsippany. I wanted to mark the occasion. I wanted to get started on doing stuff that scared me. I wanted Catey to come with me because she was my best friend in the whole world, and because nothing really counted unless I did it with Catey.”

  Which was exactly how, four years ago, Heller had convinced me to disobey my parents and the law and common sense, and go with her to the quarry. I’d known every step of the way that what we were doing was wrong, but it had been Heller’s birthday, which her mom had forgotten all about.

  Aunt Nancy had forgotten Heller’s birthday before and the next day she’d always feel terrible and she’d try to make it up to Heller by taking her for a special belated-birthday sushi dinner at a Thai takeout place, or she’d tell Heller that birthdays and parties and cake were just a westernized consumerist construct and that fully actualized beings didn’t need birthdays. Heller would always defend Aunt Nancy and she’d try to act as if everything was fine but I don’t think anyone is that fully actualized, especially about birthdays. My mom would always remember Heller’s birthday and she’d remind Nancy, who’d still forget, maybe because celebrating anyone’s birthday made Nancy feel older. My mom would always invite Heller over for cupcakes.

  On Heller’s thirteenth birthday my parents had been out of town because my grandma Peggy, who lives in Florida, had broken her hip. Catherine had been assigned to take care of the rest of us, but because there’d been so many kids, and because Catherine had been packing to go away to college, it had been easy for Heller and me to slip away.

  “It was around four in the afternoon,” said Heller. “We rode our bikes out to the quarry. It was such a gorgeous day; it was August, so it was still light out. The quarry was deserted so it was really peaceful and quiet except for the birds and the little waterfall. I guess I was feeling all full of myself, because it was my birthday, and I was trying really hard not to be mad at my mom. I knew that Catey was scared of a lot of things, well, of everything, so I thought it would be good for her, to do something wild. Well, wild for Parsippany.”

  Heller glanced at me in the mirror, daring me to correct her. I couldn’t. But she was only telling her side of the story.

  I’d been so scared because we were sneaking out and because we’d had to bike down a narrow path through some spooky woods to get to the quarry and because I’d never been to the quarry before. I’d felt as if we’d traveled really far, as if we’d left New Jersey, and I was relying on Heller to protect me and to remember how to get home.

  “Once we got out there, I was dancing around,” Heller continued. “I was so excited to get away from all of my troubles at home and I just wanted to get started on my big new life. I grabbed that chain and I balanced my feet on the hook at the end of it. I felt like I was a pirate, setting sail, or like I was flying, or skydiving out over the ocean. I was swinging back and forth and all around and I was yelling, because it just felt so great. I swung all the way out and I let go, and it felt like forever, but it was really only a few seconds before I hit the water. It was summer so the water was warm and I started floating on my ba
ck looking up at the sky and at the granite cliffs, and I saw Catey standing near the edge, all the way up at the top.”

  “Catey?” asked Sophie. “What did you do?”

  “I … I … I’d watched Heller jump, but she’d do anything, especially if it was dangerous. I didn’t want Heller to think I was a scaredy-cat, and I wanted to be like her, and most of all … I didn’t want to be like me. I don’t really remember all of it. I thought that maybe I could change everything about myself, and maybe by the time I hit the water I’d be this brave, happy, cool new person. I grabbed hold of the chain, but I was clinging to it, because I was terrified. The chain was only moving a few inches back and forth but I was too scared to either jump back onto the cliff or swing all the way out, the way Heller had. Heller was shouting, ‘Catey, come on! Catey, you’ll love it! The water’s so warm! Don’t be such a baby! Quit stalling!’ I tried to swing outward, to use my body weight, but I was so clumsy and I didn’t know what I was doing and then my hand slipped. I tried to hold on with my other hand but I couldn’t and so—I fell.”

  “Oh my God oh my God oh my God … ,” said Sophie.

  “I fell, I don’t know exactly how far, but then I slammed into the rocks and then I finally dropped into the water, but by that time I was unconscious.”

  “I dragged Catey to shore,” said Heller. “I didn’t know if she was dead or alive. I started screaming to see if there was anyone around to help but there wasn’t, so I called 911 and I sat with Catey and I tried to do CPR and mouth-to-mouth and finally an ambulance showed up and all these cop cars.”

  “I was in a coma for a week,” I said. “They had to drain fluid out of my skull where it had built up, and I’d also fractured my arm and my pelvis. When I finally regained consciousness I had to stay in the hospital for another month because the doctors weren’t sure if I’d have permanent brain damage. They finally decided that I was going to be okay and that everything would heal, and they let me go home.” I rubbed my arms, because remembering all this was making me feel ice-cold. Sometimes my left arm still ached, because there was a steel pin in it.