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It's All Your Fault

Page 19

by Paul Rudnick


  “I never saw Heller again, or even talked to her. Until two days ago.”

  I’d never told anyone this story. Everyone in my family knew the details, so they left it alone. Although even now, every once in a while, I’d catch my parents looking at me with these worried expressions, as if they still weren’t sure I’d survived. I know that telling a secret, or making a confession, is supposed to make you feel better, as if a weight’s been lifted. I didn’t know how I felt. I was trying not to look at Heller.

  “We have to do it,” said Sophie. “How far is the quarry?”

  By the time Heller had driven us out to the quarry it was late afternoon but there was still sunlight. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected to find but everything looked just the way I remembered. The quarry was both beautiful and intimidating, like a picnic spot on the moon. You could see where the miners and their machines had sliced through the rock, but trees and grass and vines were reclaiming any area with soil and even sprouting through cracks in the granite.

  There wasn’t much of a breeze and there was no one else around so the surface of the water was smooth, with glinting sunbeams; the quarry was too small to be called a lake but much wider and deeper than a pond. The fence was still there although it had rusted and there were scraps of yellow crime scene tape fluttering from the corners. I wasn’t sure if this tape had remained from what had happened four years ago or if there had been other accidents since then.

  “Come on,” said Heller, leading Sophie around the fence and onto the flat layer of rock that overlooked the water.

  I needed to stop this. We’d told Sophie the story. We’d seen the quarry. Heller knew this was the last place on earth I wanted to be. Why was she torturing me? Why did she want me to relive the worst moment of both our lives? Why couldn’t we get back in the car?

  Then I knew why. Heller wanted to convince herself that nothing was her fault. Heller wanted to prove that she was still braver and stronger than me.

  “This is like … where an asteroid hit,” said Sophie. “Or where the Loch Ness Monster stays when he comes over here for a visit.”

  “I love it here,” said Heller, looking out over the water. “You can still see clear to the bottom.”

  I didn’t want to get any closer to the water to check if this was true, and I didn’t want to go anywhere near the crane, which was still hanging over the quarry itself, with the chain and the hook attached. The arm had rusted even more and the green paint was faded and peeling. I didn’t know why the police hadn’t removed the whole rotting mechanism—maybe it was too solidly anchored to its cement base.

  “We shouldn’t have come here,” I said. “We have to leave. Right now.”

  “Catey, it’s okay,” said Heller. “You don’t have to do anything. This is just for Sophie, and I’ll show her how to do it.”

  Heller looked at me but I couldn’t read her expression. Was she challenging me? Ignoring me? Or was it something else? Did she almost look—like she wanted me to understand something?

  Heller and Sophie took off everything except their underwear. Sophie’s pink-and-blue topknot looked even more bizarre when combined with her round white body and her neon lime-green bra and panties, with a pattern of black bunny heads with Xs over their eyes, as if they’d been electrocuted.

  “Okay, Sophie-toons,” said Heller, “the trick is to get some momentum going, to swing back and forth, and then, when you’re ready, you let go, once you’re all the way out there.”

  “I think I get it,” said Sophie, who was shivering, although I couldn’t tell if this was from fear or being almost naked.

  “NO,” I said, as forcefully as I could. When I heard my own voice I was shocked by how determined I sounded.

  “Catey, I told you,” said Heller, “you don’t have to do anything. You can just watch.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “This is about me and Sophie.”

  “Heller,” I said, and my voice was shaking with rage. “Do you really think this has nothing to do with me? Is that what you really fucking think?”

  I couldn’t believe I had just used an f-bomb, but I’d needed it. Heller cursed all the time so her swear words barely meant anything. My using an f-bomb had startled Heller and Sophie.

  “Catey?” said Heller.

  “Are you okay?” asked Sophie.

  “No, I am not okay,” I said, which was something I would ordinarily never admit. I was the girl who would never complain. I was the girl who my parents and everyone else would say was a blessing and no trouble at all. I was the girl who was always okay, or who would lie and pretend to be okay. Until now.

  “I almost died here,” I said. “I was unconscious for a week. Because of you. AND YOU NEVER CAME TO SEE ME. YOU NEVER EVEN CALLED. MY BEST FRIEND NEVER EVEN CALLED.”

  “I wanted to! But I wasn’t allowed to talk to you! Your parents wouldn’t let me! My mother wouldn’t let me! It wasn’t my fault!”

  “It wasn’t your fault? Did you really just say that? Heller, EVERYTHING that happened here was your fault! I never would’ve come out here if you hadn’t made me do it! I never would’ve jumped if you hadn’t kept calling me a coward and a pussy and fraidycat Catey!”

  “I WAS TRYING TO HELP YOU!”

  “BY ALMOST KILLING ME? Sophie, you can’t listen to her. This is exactly what Heller always does. She puts herself in charge of everything and she makes everyone else feel like they’re tiny, like they’re nothing compared to her. She makes everything seem like fun, like a wild crazy adventure, until it’s not. Until someone gets hurt. Until someone almost dies!”

  “Shut up, Catey,” said Heller. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I know exactly what I’m talking about! I know everything about you! I was here, four years ago! I listened to you!”

  “AND YOU SHOULD HAVE!” said Heller as she took a step toward me. “You’re exactly like you always were! You’re such a fucking good little girl! Just like everybody always says, everybody you spend your entire life sucking up to! Just so they’ll say, Look at Catey! She’s so smart! She has such perfect manners! Her parents are so proud of her! But you’re still scared of EVERYTHING! Is that what you want? To be terrified for the rest of your life? Is that who you are? Is that all you are?”

  “Guys?” said Sophie, who sounded really worried. “Please don’t fight. I mean, you were friends, right? Like best friends?”

  “Were we?” said Heller.

  “I don’t know! Don’t friends love each other? Don’t friends try to find each other, no matter what’s in the way? Heller, I loved you so much and I kept waiting. For something. Anything. But you were too busy. Because you were a star. Which is why you don’t have any friends, not real ones. You have fans and followers and haters and stalkers, but you don’t have a single real friend.”

  “Heller?” said Sophie. “Like … is that true?”

  Heller stared at me in a way she never had before. She stared at me as if she wanted to kill me. Which didn’t make me panic but it did make me shiver. It made me incredibly sad, sad in a way I’d never been, even in the hospital. Heller was right. I was going to be sad and scared for the rest of my life. And alone.

  “I’ll go first,” said Heller. She stood next to the mechanical arm, in her expensive black lace bra and panties.

  Heller stood with her bare feet spread apart and her arms raised as high as they could go. In her most booming, actress-y voice she announced, “I am Heller Harrigan, Daytime Emmy Award nominee and People’s Choice Fresh New Face First Runner-Up! In the names of Anna Banana, Lynnea, and wacked-out chicks everywhere, I will conquer this quarry! Because I’m not afraid of anything!”

  She grabbed the chain and wound her legs around it, balancing one foot on top of the hook. Even when she was little Heller had always behaved as if she was in a movie, with the cameras and millions of people watching. Heller was a really good actress, but since she was born, Heller had been a star.

 
Heller howled like Tarzan or like somebody who’d just won the lottery or like someone who was determined to use her voice to drown out everything else in her life, and she swung all the way and then she started showing off by making the chain spin her around really fast so she became a blur, and then she centered herself and swung so far that her body was almost parallel to the water. She let go.

  As Heller dropped she grinned and waved her arms to prove that she was reckless and free, but when she hit the water she got a surprised look on her face, as if she’d forgotten the water was there. She disappeared for a few seconds and then a few more, just long enough to make Sophie and me worry that something had gone wrong and to make me worry that she was trying to drown herself just to get back at me. To prove some sort of impossibly self-destructive point. To have the last word. Then Heller shot out of the water with her hair plastered down her back.

  “YOW!!!” Heller yelled. “It’s warm, but not that warm! But it’s good! It’s fabulous! Sophie, are you ready?”

  Sophie looked at me and then she ran over and hugged me, which I wasn’t expecting. She was a little sweaty and smelled like oranges and lilacs.

  “I am so scared. I’m scared of dying. I’m scared of having to go back into the hospital. I’m scared of having to watch my parents watch me barf. I’m scared of everything. But I don’t want to be.”

  “Sophie, you don’t have to do this. I don’t know if jumping will make you any less scared. It might just make you cold and wet and you could get really hurt. Even if you don’t jump I’ll still think you’re the bravest girl I’ve ever met.”

  Sophie thought for a moment and then she said, “No, I want to do it. I have to. Kids with cancer never get to do this.”

  Sophie shrieked, like someone in a horror movie getting stabbed by a pitchfork. She ran over to the chain, stared at it and grabbed it. She wound her leg around the chain, imitating Heller, and she shoved herself off the edge with her other foot. At first she couldn’t manage to swing out very far or very fast; she was moving in slow motion.

  “Momentum!” yelled Heller, who was floating on her back. “Back and forth!”

  Sophie started to swing a little farther each time by shoving her body forward. She wasn’t as graceful as Heller but she was getting the job done. Her foot slipped and I gasped, but she had a firm grip on the chain so she didn’t fall. She managed a wide loopy swing, then the chain bent into an L shape, and she yelled, “Brap you, everything!” and let go. As she dropped, her arms and legs pinwheeled in different directions so she looked like a cartoon rabbit trying to run really fast in midair. She grabbed her knees and curled her body inward, hitting the water with a loud noise and a major splash.

  “Classic cannonball!” yelled Heller. “Sophie rules!”

  Sophie popped up almost instantly, sputtering, with her wet topknot glued to the side of her head. She raised a fist in the air as Heller hugged her.

  “Yay!” Sophie yelled. “I did the chain! And I still have my underwear on!”

  Before this weekend I’d had an idea of myself, or at least a goal, of the sort of person I’d wanted to be. I’d be a Girl Scout crossed with a nun and a headmistress, with a collection of Good Conduct medals and Headed for Sainthood trophies, all of which I’d be too modest to accept. I’d go to Parsippany Tech and get perfect grades and I’d not only do my family’s taxes, I’d travel to underprivileged countries as a member of Accountants Without Borders. I’d be exactly what Heller said I was: a prisspot in granny panties. I’d spend my entire life keeping my head down and behaving myself and trying desperately to never secretly congratulate myself on being so perfect, because the second I did that, the second I tried to be happy, or proud of myself, or weird, or different, that was when my own personal Cancer Kings, which were my Anxiety Monster and my Guilt Goblin, would come roaring out of their subterranean caves, looking for me and cackling.

  Now those monsters had me in their jaws for a gleeful tug-of-war, as I felt my chest tighten and I could hear every vicious, taunting thought rushing into my brain, telling me that I was worthless and useless and worse. My throat was starting to contract and my fists were clenching and I began looking around wildly for trees to count, or license plates without the dreaded number 9 on them, or a bathroom where I could wash my hands again and again, only not a public bathroom because the germs would swarm over me and eat me alive.

  It was me or those monsters and it was a fight to the death. I told my legs to move, to power me right over to that crane. Four years ago the chain had been damp, which had made my hand slip. I kicked off my shoes and I peeled off one of my kneesocks and I tugged it over my hand like a protective mitten, and I used that mitten to get a tight grip on the chain. From below I could hear Heller and Sophie calling my name as I placed my foot decisively on top of the hook. Once I had both of my hands on the chain, I shoved, using my whole body, and I swung out over the water. I could hear the mechanical arm creaking and I could feel the cool air rushing past me as the setting sun blinded me.

  I swung back and forth with the distance growing higher and longer with each swing. I felt like I was swinging so far out that I might leap off and land on my feet on the far side of the quarry. For better or for worse—and since it was me, for worse was more likely—I was doing this.

  I was doing the craziest, most defiant, most irresponsible thing I could think of, not because Heller had dared me and humiliated me but because I wanted to. I had to. I had to stop hating Heller and hiding inside my blazer and worrying myself into a fate way worse than drowning. I had to save my own life. Or end it.

  I swung all the way out. I let go of the chain and as I started to drop I heard a splintering crunch, and I saw that a few yards above my head the mechanical arm had broken off, wrenched by my weight from its cement base, and that hundreds of pounds of rusted metal were plummeting right toward me as Heller and Sophie screamed.

  I hit the water, I was under the water, and just inches away, the mechanical arm crashed into the water beside me and I could feel a jagged chunk of metal brushing against my elbow as the water churned and bubbled, making it impossible to see anything.

  My head burst out of the water as Heller and Sophie each grabbed one of my arms and began dragging me toward the shore. The mechanical arm and the chain and the hook were far below us, sinking to the bottom of the quarry. As far as I could tell, while I was wet and dyed and pierced and gasping for air, I wasn’t hurt.

  I heard the police sirens, more than one, wailing and getting closer and closer.

  Here I am in my jail cell where I belong. I don’t know where the police brought Sophie and Heller. I intend to plead guilty to whatever I’ll be charged with, to avoid an unnecessary trial and so I can begin serving my most likely lifetime sentence in a prison far away from New Jersey because I don’t want my family to feel obligated to visit me and so I can stop embarrassing them with headlines about Convict Caitlin, The Shame of the Singleberries, or Crime-Crazed Caitlin: Parsippany Punk.

  Since I won’t be attending college anywhere I’ve decided to spend my prison term in the most humble manner possible, maybe by scouring the prison bathrooms on my knees with a toothbrush, or maybe every morning I can make all of the other prisoners’ beds without being asked to. I can become part of a ministry-behind-bars where I can teach arsonists to make flameproof holiday wreaths, and I can be used as a scared-straight example to visiting at-risk high school students; I can show those students just what happens when a person makes one wrong and sinful decision after another. I’ve also decided that for the rest of my life I’m only going to wear one kneesock as a sign of remorse and repentance, and maybe in the prison crafts room, I’ll even carve simple wooden crucifixes where Jesus is wearing only a single, drooping sock.

  “Whatcha in for?” asks the girl in the sleeveless biker vest. “Jaywalking? Overdue library book? Cheatin’ at Scrabble?”

  “Ms. Singleberry?” says a uniformed guard. “Will you please come with me?”

/>   I’m sure that the guard is going to fingerprint me and take my mug shot, which, with my ragged hair and the stud through my nose, can be used in one of those ads to stop people from smoking or doing drugs. Instead he takes me down a hallway and into a conference room with a long table and folding chairs. My mom and dad are here along with Aunt Nancy, Dave and Barbara Schuler, and Wyatt. Sophie and Heller are sitting off to one side wrapped in blankets, although I’ve insisted on wearing my still-sopping skirt and what’s left of my blouse, because that’s all I deserve. When I see all of these people I don’t know who to apologize to first. I run over to my parents, who hug me while I blubber, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m the worst person who ever lived …”

  “Hush,” says my mom. “You’re safe, everyone’s safe and in good health, and that’s all that matters …”

  “Are you worse than Hitler?” my dad asks, smiling, which confuses and even irritates me because I was trying to confess and apologize and accept my punishment, so I say, “Dad! I’m much worse than Hitler! Look at my hair!”

  “The Honorable Judge Henry Bryce Drandower presiding,” says a bailiff. “All please rise.”

  Everyone stands as Judge Drandower enters the room from another door, although he isn’t wearing his judicial robes. He’s a little older than my dad, and he doesn’t look happy to be here, especially on a Sunday. I hear Aunt Nancy mutter under her breath, “Fascist hatemonger,” which is something I’ve also heard Aunt Nancy mutter at a waiter who didn’t bring her enough bread, at a crossing guard who asked her to please wait for the light, and at a lady who’d overcharged her for gourds at a farm stand.

  The judge looks at everyone, scowling. He stares at Heller, who looks especially bedraggled and shrinks into her blanket.

  “Sit,” says the judge sternly, and as everyone sits, he says, “This is a preliminary hearing so I can decide which charges should be brought and against whom. Attorneys won’t be necessary just yet, although sometimes I wonder if attorneys are ever necessary. I would now like everyone to laugh because I just made a little joke and you want me to like you, don’t you?”

 

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