“Vera, choose empathy. Have you considered what all that citric acid would do to Madison’s hands?”
“That’s what rubber gloves are for.”
“Hm. Well, don’t you think if you’re going to be enjoying the punch later, the right thing to do would be to assist in the labor to make the punch? Here at Red Oak—”
“‘—we divide our labor as a community,’” Vera finishes. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m familiar with your communist spiel.”
We know we can’t refuse any further; it would be suspicious and we might get written up for narcissistic behavior.
“Thank you kindly, comrades,” she calls as we head for the kitchen, and the joke is so peak Mary Pat that, even though our nerves are jangling, we both collapse into laughter.
Since we’re not allowed to handle sharp knives, not even under supervision, Chef Lainie has already done the prep work of slicing a giant pile of oranges in half. She hands us each a plastic juicer, and we get to work impaling and twisting the fruit, dumping the sweet juice into a big sparkly plastic punch bowl. She wipes her knife dry, locks it in the drawer, then pulls over a cafeteria chair to supervise, lowering herself into it with a giant groan.
“Whoa, Lainie,” says Vera, pulling an orange wedge free of its rind and popping it into her mouth, “you sound like my grandma. You’re not that old, are you?”
“Pushing fifty, which you probably think is ancient.” She grimaces. “But it’s not that. Broke my hip in a car accident when I was a teenager. Got it held together with titanium plating. Doesn’t bother me much, but Lord if it don’t get sore when a storm’s about to kick up.”
“A storm?”
Vera and I exchange a glance as I crush another orange against its spike with the heel of my hand.
“Nothing in the forecast. But this ache is more reliable than any weather report. We’re gonna get a big snow dump, of that I am certain. Aggh. Mia, baby, go get me a bag of tots from the freezer, if you don’t mind.”
I do as I’m told. Lainie takes the industrial-sized bag of Sysco frozen tater tots from me and rests it across the lap of her checkered chef’s pants. Vera and I continue to impale oranges on our juicers, filling up the punch bowl, while Lainie oversees our work with the occasional grunt or moan. When we’re finally finished, our fingers stained and pruney, she directs us to cover the bowl in plastic wrap and stick it in the walk-in cooler.
“I suppose I should escort you two to class,” she says, rocking herself back and forth, her face a grimace, in preparation to stand up.
“Lainie, is that really necessary? I mean—look at you. You just need to, like, sit.”
“You know the rules, kids. Walking around campus in pairs is not encouraged.30 How can I be sure you’ll go straight to class?”
“Because,” Vera says, “where else is there to go around here?”
Lainie looks out the window, at the iron-gray sky, the impenetrable trees, the soft hills of untrammeled snow.
“Well, I suppose you’re right.” She looks slowly back and forth between us, squinting directly into each of our eyes. “I suppose, just this once, I can trust you.”
44
“SHE KNOWS, DOESN’T SHE?”
“Totally.”
“The way she looked at us. Straight in the eyes. Daring us to lie to her face.”
“She must not know us very well. Of course we’re gonna take that dare. We didn’t become Red Oak girls for nothing.”
“Do you really think she knows?”
“Soleil must have eavesdropped and ratted us out like the useless junkie she is.”
“But then why hasn’t Mary Pat said anything?”
“Oh, you know MP. That would be too directly confrontational. Why pass up an opportunity for some organic learning? She’d rather send her subordinate out with this ridiculous story about a ‘snowstorm,’ set a trap, and see if we make the ‘responsible choice.’”
“So you don’t think it’s going to snow.”
“What I think is that it’s pretty convenient there’s been nothing, not a thing, in the forecast—which, I’ll remind you, we’ve been following all week. Oh no! Lainie can just feel it in her bones.” She laughs. “It always amazes me, how little credit they give us. I mean, they’ve seen our IQ scores.”
When we reach the academic building, Vera stops and pulls up her collar. “So what do you want to do? I’ll abort mission if you’re spooked. It’s your call.”
I turn my face up to the sky, at the dark spread of low clouds and the motionless trees.
“I’m still going,” I say. “I understand if you want to bail.”
Vera grins, slides her arm through mine, and we break hard to the left, toward Birchwood House, where our packed bags await.
“‘Fortune favors the bold,’ baby.”
45
I KEEP WAITING FOR A SIREN TO GO OFF, or for Mary Pat to come loping after us, her snow pants swishing, screaming about responsible choices, or for an invisible fence to electrify us once we get past the big white spruce that marks the place where the cameras end. But none of that happens. We just walk away from Red Oak: first Vera, then me. I meet her at the tree, and we keep walking. It doesn’t take more than ten minutes before our familiar woods thicken into wilderness, and that’s when we feel the first snowflakes, so delicate and slow it’s like they’ve materialized in the air around us instead of falling from the sky.
For the first hour, the snow falls gently but steadily, nothing more intrusive than walking through a dust-filled room on a sunny day. The cold is manageable, even invigorating, as Vera and her Titanic compass lead the march. We sing songs, exchange dirty jokes, listen to our laughter bouncing off the trees. It feels like we’re making good progress, our young, strong, thoroughly detoxed bodies heading east toward the highway.
It’s sometime during the second hour that the wind picks up and the snow thickens. We pull down our balaclavas as the gusts toss bits of ice at our faces like fistfuls of gravel. Talking soon becomes impossible, the condensation of breath icing up the fabric of our hats, so I drop back and let Vera take the lead.
We go on like that, silent, heads bowed, moving toward the unseen highway, for what feels like forever. I get very used to the sound of my own breathing and the dark shape of Vera’s back in her long down coat and boots, backpack and rolled sleeping bag secured to her shoulders, and everywhere else: whiteness.
It’s a little while into what must be our third hour that Vera stops short in front of me.
“Holy shit!” She points up, through the whirling snow, at the high branches of a nearby pine tree.
I follow her finger, and there it is, perched above us on a dark green branch: an owl, white as the snow falling around it, with an underlayer of scalloped black feathers, its beak a yellow hook, its eyes perfectly round, claws curled expertly around its perch. It’s staring down at us with a look of such haughty ennui I kind of want to be its best friend.
I haven’t thought of Xander in a long time, but I’m thinking of him now as I look up at this magnificent creature that bears almost no resemblance to the stupid cartoon mascot painted on the center of his basement basketball court. What did I ever see in him, the spoiled rich boy with the pocket full of pills, languishing on the bleachers in my gym class? His sleepy eyes, his fumbling touch, handling my body like it was an overcomplicated but necessary vessel in his quest to get himself off. What kept me coming back? What was I trying to prove? Who was I trying to hurt? Did I really hate myself that much? Vivian’s words return to me, though I wish I could ignore them: Some cognitive psychiatrists believe that humans are often unconsciously drawn to the repetition of painful experiences.
“Whatever you’re thinking about right now,” Vera says, grabbing my hand and scattering my thoughts, “don’t. Just keep moving.”
She’s right. My life, this moment, is no longer about thought or reflection. None of that shit is real. Only action is real. Before I keep walking into the wind, I turn back
to look at the owl one more time, who follows our departure with a steady gaze of disdain.
46
HOUR FOUR. We should be getting close to the highway by now, but civilization feels as far away as it has ever been. I strain to listen for the whoosh of cars, the trumpet of a semi, but I can’t catch anything above the relentless wind. The snow seems to be coming from all sides now, and the sunlight, already hidden in a thick cover of cloud, is beginning to dim. Vera is just a couple feet in front of me but I can barely see her. She comes in and out of my vision, the gusts dissolving her like a picture on an old television with a broken antenna. When I try to call to her, my voice is caught and carried away in the scream of the wind. She reaches out so as not to lose me, and we trudge forward, hand in hand, blind.
Soon we are engulfed in darkness. It is not a darkness that city people can even begin to understand. Even at Red Oak, which always felt a little remote and alien to me, there were motion lights in the quad and red-glowing emergency exits at either end of our dorm hallway. Here, there is nothing. It’s sort of like the space-simulation booth at the planetarium, but without the fake stars, and without the comforting knowledge that this is all just an exhibit. Here in the wilderness, the huge indifference of the universe has breath and teeth; you can feel it everywhere, but it can’t feel you at all.
We lurch on. Vera’s grip is the only thing solid, the only thing tethering me to earth, and even now my fingers are becoming too numb to hold on to her. I stumble on something, lose my balance, and plunge forward, my limbs heavy and thick in the snow. I can’t feel Vera anywhere. Am I drowning? To be flung through a windshield in a violent car crash, to overdose, to have my body strafed with bullets at school or at a movie or in the school-supply aisle at Walmart; to be strangled to death with a rope, a pair of tights, a stranger’s merciless hands—these are all methods of dying that I have contemplated because they are all realistic scenarios in which a modern American girl might lose her life. But I’ve never considered, up until now, the idea that I could be murdered by weather itself. I didn’t know such a thing was still possible, here in the denuded corporate planet of the twenty-first century. I yearn for a Xanax bar, a couple nips of vodka, something to take the edge off, but my brain is terrifyingly pure and clear. It understands exactly what is happening to me right now: that we are in the middle of nowhere in a place and a climate that absolutely does not fuck around. The Great White North. The Whiteness of the Whale. In essence, whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows?31
“Vera.” I try to call for her, but my voice is caught in my throat. My breath is coming faster and faster, I can’t feel myself at all, and when the sharpness and clearness of my thoughts begin to fuzz around the edges, I realize that maybe it really is happening: I am dying. And I don’t want to die; I very badly do not want to die, but it’s hard to feel anything right now but relief.
Because I’m not afraid anymore.
I am floating above the membrane of the world. And then the darkness is complete.
47
“MIA.”
“Mia.”
“Mia.”
I open, slowly, my eyes. My head and limbs ache. I am curled in what appears to be the belly of a rotting tree, slick with moss and smelling like the beginning of the world. All around us, the wind howls. Vera crouches beside me.
“What happened?” I murmur.
“You fainted. Are you on Lexapro? It makes some people light-headed, you know. You scared the shit out of me. I almost lost you out here. If you’re on Lex, you should have told me ahead of time.”
“I’m sorry.” I look up, into the intense brown of her eyes, the only part of her face I can see beneath her balaclava. “I’m not on Lexapro. I think I was at some point, but that was like three therapists ago.”
“Then what happened? Talk to me. No fucking secrets.”
“I think I’m just panicking because we’re going to die and it’s my fault.”
“We’re not going to die. At least we’re going to try not to.” She squats down beside me and begins digging clumsily with her numb fingers through the front pocket of her clear plastic backpack. She pulls something out, opens her gloved hand to reveal a crumpled plastic baggie. At first I think it’s drugs. Which won’t do anything to save us, obviously, but which, given the circumstances, I also would not turn down. But it’s not drugs.
I try to laugh, but my face is too numb to make the necessary expressions. “Where did you . . .”
“Dee led a meditation hour in the chapel last year with some candles and forgot to lock them up afterward. I’ve been saving them in a rip in my mattress for a just-in-case type of situation. I was thinking along the lines of if I were to somehow happen to come across a cigarette and want to light it, but being stuck in the middle of the wilderness during a massive snowstorm with no shelter but a rotting log works, too.”
I swallow the lump in my throat. I thought I was dead, and here comes Vera, with matches.
“I gathered up some dry leaves and sticks and shit while you were passed out. But full disclosure, I don’t exactly know what to do with them. I’m no Girl Scout. As you well know.”
I sit up and close my hand around the box of matches.
“On my honor, I will try, to serve God and my country, to help people at all times, and to live by the Girl Scout law.”
“Shut up.”
“Dropped out when I was eleven.” I shrug. “But I think I remember.”
“You better.”
And I do. The trees are so thick overhead there’s no snow on the ground around us, and we form a circle with nearby rocks, clearing a space for our firepit. I layer the area with the dry leaves and some fallen pine needles, then arrange the sticks in a lattice formation, with Vera holding the sleeping bag around me to block the wind. It takes half the book, but eventually the fire catches. When it does, we attack each other with hugs, jumping up and down, screaming with joy. As the flames lick up into the sky, illuminating the bare trees, hissing and crackling and, God, so warm, we lean into it so close our clothes smoke, agreeing that it is, without question, the greatest physical pleasure either one of us has ever felt.
We each eat a granola bar and a couple apples, washing down our meal with handfuls of clean snow. Vera goes over to the edge of our makeshift camp to relieve herself. As she squats down, her pants around her ankles, a cloud of steam plumes around her as her pee hits the snow, and she leans back and howls at the sky. I know she’s trying to be funny, but I don’t laugh—I feel a jolt zip up my spine, half terror, half love, and I join her howling, because we’re alive, and we’ve got fire, and we’re really doing this thing, taking back control of our own crazy lives.
The snowstorm has finally passed, and the clouds have cleared the way to reveal a big, fat moon. We position the sleeping bag as close as we can get it to the campfire without melting the cheap polyester it’s made of. We take off our boots and shove them full of dry leaves to soak up the wetness.32 Then we line them, smoking, up to dry, leaving on our double layers of damp wool socks, and climb in together, curling around each other, zipping ourselves inside.
I’m exhausted to my marrow, and the warmth of the fire and our bodies is making me even drowsier. But I’m afraid to let myself fall asleep. Isn’t that when people freeze to death? In their sleep? I’m quite sure I’ve read that somewhere.
So I suggest Vera keep us awake by telling a story.
“What kind of story do you want to hear?”
“A love story.”
“I don’t know any of those. But I can tell you about Edgar.”
“Who’s Edgar?”
“The last guy I dated. The guy who got me sent to Red Oak. One day, when I was fifteen, I bailed on my piano lesson, and instead he picked me up and we drove out to the Berkshires for a picnic with a little tent and some blankets.
“I brought
along some containers of things from Citarella that I’d seen my mom serve at her fundraising lunches—Caprese salads, Marcona almonds, figs, that kind of thing. Edgar brought some H. It was the first and only time I’ve tried heroin. He injected, but I wouldn’t. I snorted it. I had standards, Mia.” She laughs a little. “It made me feel so good I couldn’t stand it, I thought I was going to die. It was unbearable. I get how people spend their whole lives chasing that first high, I get how people would burn down their whole lives, trade in everyone they’ve ever loved, just for that feeling.
“I was supposed to be home in time to meet with my Latin tutor, but I sort of forgot that time was even a thing that existed. Me and Edgar, we stayed up all night. Saw the sickest mountain sunrise I’ve ever experienced. The whole sky turned this magnificent blood-pink color as it spread out over the shadows of the peaks . . . it made me cry my eyes out—and you know I’m not a crier. Maybe it was because of the H, but honestly I don’t even think so. I was crying, I think, because I knew I had come up against the end of something. And I was relieved.
“We drove back toward New York the next morning, but we ran out of gas in Rhinebeck, and a kindly state trooper who stopped to help us ended up arresting Edgar for statutory rape and kidnapping. My piano teacher and my tutor had both called my mom when I was a no-show, which was how she actually noticed I was missing, and she’d called the police.”
“Wait,” I interrupt. “Statutory rape? But how old was Edgar?”
“Thirty-eight.”
“What?”
“Oh, relax, Mia. I’ve always been mature for my age.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I mean, okay, would it have been nicer to meet a boy my own age? Sure. But the boys at my school were all horrible to me, and anyway, what would we even do? Go to fucking prom together?”
She’s right: I can’t imagine Vera, wild, zitty, furiously beautiful and beautifully furious Vera, with some hairsprayed updo and a satin sweetheart dress, slow-dancing around a crepe-papered gym to Top 40 with some elderly junkie named Edgar.
You Know I'm No Good Page 13
