No matter where I turn, there she is. Everywhere. She’s everywhere. I can’t get away from her. And I’m going to have to see her tomorrow, which, after that photo, after everything… I can’t do it.
I rip the poster off the wall and hurl it. Chest heaving, I glare down at my phone lying on top of a dirty practice jersey and dread having to pick it up again. Because then I’ll have to see the last few screens open—a text from her asking to talk to me, saying she’s sorry. She’s sorry. And next to that, group chat messages I can’t read and a half-naked picture of Erica with her boobs scribbled on, probably just one of many from Zac’s room that I can’t make myself look at.
I stomp down on my phone, putting all my weight into it till it crunches under my Chucks. Ruined. I broke this, too. What else am I going to break? But even as I think it, the air gushes from my lungs and a sick relief washes over me. Now I won’t have to keep looking.
ERICA
I PACE AROUND MY ROOM, thinking about school tomorrow and roasting in my pajama pants and long-sleeved shirt. The whir of the box fan only blasts me with warm air, doing nothing to unclench the knot in my chest.
I’ve since wrapped my palm in a white hand towel, even though I know better. The fibers will stick to the wound, and the color white makes everything look more gruesome. I know how to clean a cut, but I didn’t have the strength after scrubbing down the bathroom. And there was no resurrecting the mirror, though luckily, it’s the only visible casualty aside from some duct tape on the shower curtain. I don’t even know what I’m going to tell Mom. It’s not like you can accidentally tip over a mirror mounted to a wall. But judging from the light growing through the window, Mom should be getting here any time now.
After the mirror incident and scrubbing Thomas’s name off as best I could, I’d tried to draw. It’s been several days since I’ve posted any new material to my webcomic—not that anyone but me has access to my uploaded cartoons, even though I keep vowing I’ll make it public soon. Still, earlier I’d fetched my notebook and markers out of my car, arranging the pens by color on the coffee table. It’s my rainbow ritual, and normally it soothes me. Start with the last panel, Erica Strange always urges me. Figure out where you want to end, then how to get there will follow. But then I’d made the fatal mistake of paging through the notebook. It was all there: the original Thomas doodles and cartoons, the notes we’d written back and forth in between, the teasing in his slanted handwriting about me liking “creep-bucket” Edward Gorey, and, of course, the quick sketches of Thomas’s lacrosse game, of our first kiss. I’d slammed the sketchbook shut then and flung it across the room. It was all too much. Everything is a reminder, a portal back to freeze-frames of Last Night, to finding his name on me. I told myself my hand hurt too badly to draw anyway.
And now, thinking about tomorrow, I can’t shake the sick feeling I get thinking about seeing my classmates again. Every single one of them is a ticking time bomb—lean one person who knows against the wrong someone else, and they explode my whole world. I would give anything in the world not to go tomorrow. But I need to get it over with.
Caylee must know most of what happened by this point. At least she thinks she does. It’s why she won’t return any of my calls or texts, even after what I told her. She probably called everyone she knew after leaving Juiced and has decided she knows all there is about the party. So, now I really have to make sure she hears my side of things tomorrow. Maybe she’s even seen the naked picture of me, but she can’t blame me for being passed out. She can’t.
Amber, on the other hand, texted me immediately after our phone call, trying to solidify her plan to meet up before class. I didn’t text back. But if Amber’s even wondering what happened still, then that must mean she hasn’t seen any photos. At least, not the ones of my bare breasts.
As for Thomas… I need to look him in the eye tomorrow and see what he has to say for himself. Erica Strange would. I just hope I have the nerve. I think of the five names on me—Thomas’s name—and my chest feels ready to implode.
Stop. You have to stop. But my mind keeps yo-yoing back. How the hell can I go to school? There’s no pretending this didn’t happen.
But what did happen? What do I know to be true about last night? I know I was in the backyard with Thomas, that we went upstairs together. And that’s where everything gets hazy. I remember Thomas giving me a piggyback ride inside, probably upstairs to Zac’s room. Wait, do I remember that? Or is that just because Caylee told me it happened? Regardless, I know I was in Zac’s room with everyone Zac mentioned—Zac, Ricky, Forest, Stallion, Tina, and Thomas, too. So, six people were in the room with me. And Caylee confirmed that those same six people later came down the stairs together.
But between going upstairs with Thomas and them all coming down later, someone took my clothes off, or maybe they all did, and everyone wrote their names on me, plus other horrible stuff. Everyone but Tina. At least, I never found her name. But she did take photos of Thomas and me in the backyard, and Zac said Ricky took photos in the room—topless photos of me passed out. Zac said they didn’t rape me, and when I checked this morning, I didn’t feel raped. Not in the way I normally think of it, anyway. But I… I still feel so violated.
Tears spring to my eyes. So, what am I missing? I more or less know what happened, just not who did what or why they would even do it. Ricky called everything a “joke.” Was that all it was to them?
I press hard into the memory, eyes clenched shut, trying to root around in my mind’s dark corners. In Zac’s room there’s… not a memory. Just a feeling. Anger, maybe? But is someone angry at me, or am I angry at someone, or is my mind just throwing up faulty support beams under a collapsed memory, trying to make sense out of nothing?
My head starts to throb, and I drop my focus.
Plopping down on my bed, I snatch up the pile of anatomy books I’d borrowed from the library in the hopes they’d help my form drawing.
In a particularly dusty anatomical guide, instead of human figures like I’d envisioned, the pages contain morbid illustration after illustration of disfigured skeletal creatures interspersed with text. Not exactly uplifting. I toss the book—it hits my hamper and bounces to the floor—and shove aside the remaining volumes.
Staring up at my bulletin board, then over at the folder of all the drawings I’d done of Thomas and me, I feel stupid beyond words. I texted him tonight—texted him—and the whole time his name had been on me. What’s worse, he hadn’t even texted me back. Erica Strange would be so proud.
Maybe he was with them right now—the guys—laughing over my texts. Laughing at the stupid girl who thought she’d mattered, who thought she could be a part of it all. With Thomas, with Bay City. Maybe Ricky was right and it all was a stupid joke to Thomas. Because why else would he do it? I haven’t taken his picture down all day because, somewhere in me, I truly thought there could be a different explanation. And I’ve been waiting for him to offer it up. To tell me that his name on me wasn’t or couldn’t mean what I thought it did.
I’ve been so foolish.
My room is full of Thomas, but it won’t be for long.
I take down half the cards and mementos tacked to my bulletin board and scattered around my desk: the Lead Paint album cover; the LACMA ticket stub; Thomas’s failed Spanish homework; the photo of us from the beach; the note he wrote me. Next comes the folder of drawings.
I grab the old printer-paper box from my closet that’s filled with knickknacks from my childhood that I haven’t looked at since we moved months ago. The towel wrapping my hand snags on a corner of the box, but I tug it free. Then, folding over the tape of each Thomas memento so they won’t all stick together, I stack each reminder, each memory inside, tucking them away on the highest shelf in my closet, in my mind. Next, I cast around the room for his sweatshirt and shove that in my backpack, trying not to smell him on it. What would he say if I tried giving it back to him tomorrow? Maybe I should just leave it on his truck.
; Having closed down every visible reminder of Thomas, no tears come. Only the realization that the world is not the place I thought it was.
Something presses—has been pressing for a while now—at the back of my mind, tugging like an impatient toddler I only now noticed. It’s been with me since this morning when I woke up in Zac’s room, since the walls were gray instead of purple.
It’s a simple thought. A statement, really. Only a subject, verb, and modifier dancing on the wind like rustling leaves.
I want to die.
Maybe this was the only way the thought could fully reach me—in this new state of numb, like all the tubes of paint colors have been bled from the world and mixed together into a murky grayish brown. The no-name, throwaway color that your paintbrush rinse water turns to after one too many dunks.
I crawl into bed, eyes staring beyond the neon green stars of my ceiling. I can’t do this anymore. I don’t want to. It’s an obsidian thought, a black shiny sphere, cold and smooth, as I roll it around my mind.
I’m up and out of my bed, yanking open my closet door and dragging the sagging box of childhood memories back out, now topped with reminders of Thomas. Tossing everything Thomas aside, I find the ratty stuffed bear Mom and Dad had bought me at a toy store in Milwaukee; stacks of birthday cards from years past; journals covered in stickers and filled with earnest hopes; a lone surviving tiny teacup and saucer from a Peter Rabbit tea set; picture after picture of Isabela and me from grade school, reminding me I was once so young and impressionable, that I had a best friend I had to leave behind, one I forgot to call or text after I met Caylee.
Below that is my ballerina jewelry box, filled to the brim with the shiny, candy-colored necklaces I used to wear by the dozen; a bracelet that changed color with body heat, the coolest thing to my fifth-grade self; a ring with a pink stone I’d gotten from my great-aunt for my eighth-grade graduation.
I dig my hand in until my fingers find the familiar soft worn leather. I pull the pouch free, its bulge and weight telling me it’s still filled with the marbles Grandpa Joe gave me the Christmas before he died. Before he shot himself in his basement. That Christmas trip had been the last time Dad had gone to Seattle with us, and he and Mom had fought a lot. Dad had never wanted to go in the first place since he hadn’t been a big fan of Mom’s dad, calling him “moody” and “antisocial,” but that was before Grandpa Joe’s death, after which Dad stopped mentioning him at all. Not that Dad could’ve known, but I don’t think Mom ever forgave him for it.
During that Christmas trip, in Grandpa Joe’s living room that always smelled like fresh oranges, Grandpa had handed me this pouch, unwrapped, his craggy face holding no expression. I’d been around eleven at the time, not sure what to make of it. He’d taken the pouch from me and dumped them into his palm, as worn and leathery as the pouch itself. Holding each marble up in turn, he’d explained each one’s meaning based on its color. Though I can’t remember them all, a few stuck in my mind:
The red one: love
The yellow one: friendship
And then he’d gotten to black. Holding it up, he’d said, “And this one… death.”
Maybe it was because he’d died shortly after that, or maybe it was because I’d been so young at the time, but that moment left a strong impression on me, one I’ve never forgotten. I’d sort of been afraid of the black one after that, and it had always stayed in the bag while I played with the others until some point when I forgot all about the marbles.
But then, a few years ago, around the time Mom and Dad started fighting for real and my anxiety got super bad again, I rediscovered the pouch. I don’t remember how it began, but I started squeezing a marble in my hand depending on what emotion I was trying to conjure in that moment. Yellow for hope. Green for safety. Blue for calm. After Dad left, I practically wore the shiny finish off the blue one with all my squeezing, rolling, fretting, and especially trying to ward off panic attacks, something my old therapist called a “healthy coping mechanism.” In truth, each color got a lot of use back then to help calm me—all except that black one, probably because it still reminded me so much of Grandpa Joe and the devastation on Mom’s face when she and Dad had sat me down and told me what’d happened to him. It also felt… dangerous somehow.
Then, when we moved, I’d put the marbles back in their pouch so they wouldn’t get lost and sorta forgot about them again. I told myself I didn’t need the marbles anymore, that they were stupid and childish.
But now, they don’t seem stupid or childish. And now, it’s the black marble I want.
I dump them all into my palm and roll them around, feeling their cool surfaces, hearing the soft clink as they bump together: orange, green, red, yellow, white, purple, even the slightly dulled blue.
For half a second, I don’t see it, think it’s disappeared, or wonder if Past Me threw it away. But then the blue one shifts and exposes a sliver of obsidian. I pull it free, a dark orb with shimmering silver flecks, and stare at it in wonder. Like a caged constellation.
It’s the black one I rest in my palm as I dump the others back in their pouch and shut them away in the box. I roll it between my fingers as I curl up in bed, then squeeze it tight. It calms me somehow.
Lying alone in the dark, I hope tomorrow will be better. The dark marble brings me comfort—the hard sphere pressed into my palm like the heavy thoughts clinking around my mind.
Through the living room, I hear the click of the front door unlocking, then the sound of creaking hinges and jingling keys. Mom’s old-lady shoes squeak across the entryway and onto kitchen linoleum, followed by the fridge door breaking suction.
Squeezing the marble in my hand, I swing my legs off the bed, left hand holding the towel to my right, and check that my long-sleeved shirt covers any trace of writing.
In the kitchen, the yellow light of the fridge casts a greenish tinge across Mom’s scrubs. She must sense my presence because she glances around the side of the fridge, then leaps into the air. “Dear God, Erica! You scared me!” Her hand flies to her heart. “What are you doing up so late? It’s nearly two in the morning. You should be in bed resting.”
“Sorry, Mom.” I’m already tearing up.
Concern twists her face. “What is it, Bug? Are you feeling… Wait, what’s wrong with your hand?” The fridge door slams, and then she’s next to me, cradling my fist and slowly unwrapping the towel.
“I cut it.” Tears stream down.
“How?”
“The bathroom mirror…” My voice breaks, falling away.
She pulls at the towel, but the blood has stuck it to the wound. “I need better light.” She flicks the overhead switch, the sudden brightness blinding me momentarily and pulling at the ache behind my eyes.
“Have you washed it yet?”
I shake my head.
She throws on the cold tap. “Well, this isn’t going to feel great, but it needs to be done.” After checking the water’s temperature, she leads my hand under the stream, soaking the towel. Carefully, she pulls it free, exposing the wound. Slowly, the dark red falls away, revealing an angry pink slit.
“Oof, Bug, it’s deep. Does it hurt much?”
Though it hurts far less than I’d expected, I nod through my runny nose.
“Keep the water on it, okay?” She disappears into the bathroom, where I can hear her pull open the cupboard and rifle through the contents.
I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the mirrored heart-shaped ornament that hangs above the sink. What’s reflected back isn’t pretty. Bloodshot eyes stare out from a halo of frizzy hair. Without a blot of makeup, my features seem blurry, like watercolors gone wrong. My mouth is a taut line, emphasizing how puffy my face is.
Mom comes back with a plastic bin containing an armada of medical supplies, which she dumps onto the counter. Gauze, medical tape, and old prescription bottles spill out. On reflex, I flinch as Mom raises my hand for closer examination.
“Sorry, Bug.”
Without
all the blood, it doesn’t look nearly so bad.
“Well, you’re borderline in need of stitches, but it’s nothing a few butterflies won’t fix.”
She rips a box of adhesive strips from her first-aid stash and pats the wound dry with a pile of gauze, following it up with a thin line of ointment then butterfly Band-Aids that squeeze the skin back together.
The tightness on my cheeks tells me my tears have nearly dried.
“So, you did this on the bathroom mirror?” She applies another line of ointment. “What happened?”
“It fell and broke.” My voice does the same. “And it cut me.”
She pauses. I know she must be wondering how I managed to break a bathroom mirror bolted to the wall, or maybe she’s thinking about the cost of replacing it since we’re only renting this place.
“I’m sorry about the mirror,” I blurt out. “I’ll buy a new one. With my birthday money.”
She lays several cottony squares of gauze over the wound. “Don’t be silly. These things happen. I’m only glad this isn’t worse. You could’ve really hurt yourself. I’ll call the landlord and tell him he should’ve properly mounted that thing.” Thank god she doesn’t ask how these things happen as she reaches for her tape, or maybe she’s too tired for the truth today. “What’d you do with the broken mirror?” she asks.
“Dumpster.”
Her brows squish together. “Bug, I don’t want you going to the dumpster at night by yourself. Next time you leave it by the door for me to take down, okay? Alleys are no place for young women after dark.”
Her words spring an image to mind, one of Mom in the early hours of dawn, walking down the apartment stairs in her scrubs after a long shift to toss away my trash. The scene is so depressing, though I don’t know why, exactly. It pulls at something in me, threatening to bring more tears.
Out of her line of sight, I roll the marble between the fingers of my free hand and manage a nod.
After the Ink Dries Page 11
