She leans her wet head against my shoulder. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”
I push her off me teasingly. “Of course I don’t mind. It’s not like I’m some addict. And anyway, isn’t being straight-edge, like, a rebellion against rebellion?”
“Yeah. Like not having tattoos.”
“Or not sleeping around with losers.”
“Or not being sent away to a therapeutic boarding school for troubled teens.”
“So it’s decided. We’ll be straight-edge tonight. And tomorrow. And for as long as you want after. Whatever happens, we do it together.”
“Cool,” Vera says quietly. She slips her arm into my mine, and together we return down the hallway, back into the fug of pizza and drugs.
55
CAN I BE REAL for a second? Teen Fun Skipper is not a great band. They’re not even a good band. I’ve heard better in the basements of high school parties.
But honestly, it doesn’t even matter.
They’re loud and earnest and they have energy. And I’m dancing in a nightclub with greasy fogged-up windows, creaky ancient wooden floors, and walls layered in the scrawled message of decades of people who partied here before me. It’s 9:45 p.m., and if I were still at Red Oak, I’d already be in bed. Vera’s arm is around my neck, and even though we don’t know the words to Teen Fun Skipper’s unpolished songs, nobody in this crowd, who are mostly here to see the Lobotomizers anyway, does, either. It’s enough to pick up the choruses and volley them back to the stage as loudly as we can, to feel the screech of guitar feedback in the nerves of our teeth.
I’m having so much fun I almost forget that I’m completely sober.
I’m having so much fun I almost forget to think about my dad, who must know by now that I’m missing, and must be freaking the fuck out.
I’m having so much fun I almost forget to think about my sisters, who surely are being shielded from this information but must understand, with the precise intuition of their five-year-old minds, that something is terribly wrong.
I’m having so much fun I almost forget to think about Vivian, who must be frantic, and I’m having so much fun I almost forget to think about Freja huddled, sobbing, on the tiles in the middle of the locker room showers, how good it felt to bully her back in her place, and how bad it felt as soon as it was over.
I’m having so much fun I almost forget to think of my mom’s insurance money, how Dad used it to speak for her so that it feels like she’s been raised from the dead just to punish me all over again.
Almost.
At the end of their set, the girls do a sped-up punk cover of “Sweet Caroline,” and it’s actually kind of fantastic. I remember that song from Dad and Alanna’s wedding.35 How the whole crowd put their arms around each other in a huge circle on the dance floor, and all the grown-ups knew the words, everyone except me because I was the only kid there, and Alanna laughing under the heavy, protective weight of Dad’s arm, a protection that I was determined to pretend I didn’t mind sharing, and me on the other side of the circle, sandwiched between two of Alanna’s work friends, watching them, separate.
“Sweet Caroline!” all the grown-ups had shouted. Bah bah bah. “Good times never seemed so good!” SO GOOD! SO GOOD! SO GOOD!
At the time, I had cringed at their hopelessly cheesy adulthood. But right now I’m shouting along with Vera like it’s the greatest song anyone’s ever written.
So good! So good! So good!
That’s when I see him.
He’s pushing his way through the crowd and then is again absorbed by it, so I only glimpse him for a moment. Skinnier than I remember, and dressed in a Macalester sweatshirt, flood jeans, and a bowl haircut—college has taught him, I guess, to lean in to his innate nerdiness, sprinkle in some self-awareness and irony, and come out the other side a full-blown hipster. The kind of woke guy who goes to all-girl punk shows. Then again, maybe he’s only here because of the girl who was just holding his hand and whose neck he is now nuzzling, with her flesh-colored plastic glasses and hair pulled high to show off her blue-dyed undercut. I wonder if she’s the same girlfriend he had when we had our one night of whatever, or if it’s someone new.
One night of whatever? I imagine Vivian standing by my side right now, her notepad in hand, her eyes scanning the crowd between him and me. Don’t call it whatever, Mia. Call it what it was. The winter night that boy raped you, when you were four months into fourteen.
Scottie Curry. College coed. Living his life. Making his goals. Going on dates. While I’m—what—a homeless runaway deemed unfit for the real world. What made him pick me? Was it just bad luck, getting stuck with him as my lab partner? Or did he choose me? Is it really like Vera says, that trauma trickles down from mother to daughter, stains you like invisible ink, marking you as easy prey for certain cruel and clever boys and men?
I touch Vera’s hand.
“I’ll be right back,” I tell her.
I squeeze through the crowd, circle as close as I dare. I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t know what I want to do—maybe just be sure that it’s really him, here, in the same room as me. I’m about five people away from him when Esther rips out the last three chords of the song—bah, bah, bah!—and the crowd goes nuts, and someone pushes me forward so that I trip and knock straight into him and his girlfriend.
He turns around, annoyed, and I brace myself for whatever is coming, except nothing is coming, because it’s not him.
It’s just a different tall skinny white guy with big ears. He looks nothing like Scottie. It was all in my head, all in my mind, all in one of the broken doorways of my past that refuses to shut no matter how many times I slam it.
“Watch where you’re fucking going,” snaps the girl, and I become liquid rage, squeeze my fingers into fists, I’m about to destroy her, because I hate myself for still being afraid of him, for still seeing his ghost, hate Vivian for stirring it all up in me and making me face it, RAPE, I want to scream in this girl’s face, Do not fuck with me, you don’t know what I’ve been through and the things that I’ve done.
“Hey.” There’s a hand on my shoulder and I jump. My heart is wild in my chest. Not-Scottie and his girlfriend have returned their attention to the stage and forgotten me already. I turn around and it’s the paper towel gopher, Bobby’s younger brother from Jenya’s preparty.
“Hey.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah. Fine. Why?”
“You wanna see something insane?”
“Um—”
But he’s already tapping away at his phone, then holding the screen up to my face. I’m looking at his Facebook feed, at a post from ABC 5, the local news station. I’m seeing the word “MISSING.” I’m seeing two photographs, side by side—Vera looking younger and better groomed, dressed in a white school uniform polo shirt, and me, my most recent yearbook photo, a photo that, incidentally, I despise, because I look like the living embodiment of the smirking emoji and my hair is all frizzy because it rained that day when I was walking to school.
“Shit,” I whisper.
“Too bad there’s no reward listed,” Bobby’s brother jokes. “Otherwise I’d have to turn you in.”
“Funny,” I say flatly. I consider borrowing his phone and texting my dad to tell him I’m okay. That I’m not missing. But if I do that, the police will be able to trace my location. They’ll come busting in here and drag us back to Red Oak. I can’t do that, after how far we’ve come. I can’t do that to Vera. I hate it, but he’s just going to have to suffer for a little bit longer until I can figure out a plan.
I hand the phone back to Bobby’s brother.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asks. “You look a little freaked out.”
“Uh, yeah—I mean, I’m, like, a missing person. Police resources are being engaged, right at this minute, to track me down.”
“Well, I guess you might as well have fun before they catch you.”
He raises the hem of his PUP T-shirt, an
d I see the metal shape nestled in the space between his jeans and underwear.
“You snuck in a flask? What’s in it?”
“Gin.” His lip curls into a smile that isn’t terribly unattractive. Good teeth, no braces. “It was all I was able to steal from my grandpa.”
I want to—the easy escape that comes with it. The way everything seems to matter less. How fast it works, and how reliable the effects. And if I’d made the promise to anyone else in the world, I would break it right now, without thinking twice. But with Vera, it’s different.
I shake my head. “Thanks, but I’m good.”
He shrugs, pulls the flask from his waistband and takes a long swig.
“Listen,” I say. “I have to go find my friend.”
“Sure.” He takes another sip. “But good luck finding her in this crowd.”
Teen Fun Skipper’s set is over, and they’ve disappeared backstage while the new band sets up. I scan the crowded, hot room looking for Vera, but in my periphery, always in my periphery, I’m looking for Scottie, too. And Xander. And Dillon Keating. I’m looking for all of them, if they could just give me a minute to stand in front of them and say: I’m more than you ever gave me credit for. I walk in circles around the edges of the club, my feet sweltering in my snow boots, since as gifted as everybody once said I was, I didn’t even think far enough ahead in our escape plan to pack a pair of normal shoes. I thought so much about how to get here that I neglected to plan for how to live here. But now that I know my picture and name are splashed across the evening news, it’s way too late to try to go back.
She’s not in the bathroom—I call her name and look underneath every stall, getting cursed out several times in the process. Finally I give up and squeeze my way to the front, where Jenya and the other girls, flushed and sweaty from their set, have now gathered to watch the Lobotomizers warm up.
“Hey,” I yell into Jenya’s ear, “have you seen Vera anywhere?”
“Oh, she left.” She rubs a delicate hand back and forth across the stubble of her perfectly shaped head, keeping her eyes on the stage.
“What?”
“She left. After our set.”
“Sorry. She left?”
“Yeah, she said something about being tired.” Jenya turns and looks at me. “She didn’t look upset or anything. She was smiling. Don’t worry about it.”
So much for being in this together. I mean, I get it: she’s been going to forced bed, like a kindergartener, at nine every night, and it’s currently almost eleven. But, fuck, she could have at least told me she was leaving. I mean, has she been out of the real world so long she’s forgotten the cardinal rule of female friendship: you never abandon each other to face the night alone? Hasn’t she considered what could happen to me? What I could do?
I return to the back wall, and Bobby’s younger brother is still standing where I left him.
“Hey. Did you drink all the gin already?”
He smiles and lifts his shirt hem again.
I accept the flask, warm from the heat of his pubic bone.
That first sip of hard liquor is always like kissing someone you don’t love with your eyes wide open. It’s clean and astringent and it slices away your illusions. It’s only the next sip, and the one after that, and after that, that start to layer the illusions back in. But that first sip: it’s the only honest one you’ll ever get.
“What’d you say your name was again?” I manage the words as the burn of the liquor ignites my throat.
“I didn’t, but it’s Isaiah.”
“Oh. Like the prophet.”
He raises an eyebrow. “You’re religious?”
“No.” I laugh. Sip. “I just recognize that name from my mom’s funeral program.”
“Oh.” He blinks and accepts his flask back. “Sorry about your mom.”
“It’s fine.” I lean against the damp, sticky wall. “She was never a part of my life. I don’t even remember her.”
He seems relieved. I’m very good at making boys feel comfortable. He smiles at me again, for a beat longer than before, and I know, clear and easy, where this night is headed. He taps the flask. “You wanna help me kill this thing?”
56
THE LOBOTOMIZERS COME OUT SWINGING, lashing into a set full of relentless drums and authoritative guitars. The crowd, worked up by Teen Fun Skipper and frothing to take it to the next level, pours en masse into the mosh pit. I’m grabbing Isaiah by the hand, flinging myself headlong into the pit, and as soon as I’m there, I add Vera to the list of people I’m almost forgetting about. I throw my body against the bodies of others, thrash my head until my ears ring. My hair, wet with sweat and spilled beer, thwacks against my shoulders, flings droplets. I unzip myself and step out of my own body, throw it around as if it doesn’t belong to me at all. When I fall to the floor, banging my knee so hard I see stars, when an elbow checks me in my spine, I remind myself that the mechanics of physical pain are the same as those of emotion: pain is not real, it is only brain signals firing, and if you’re tough enough or drunk enough, you can just choose to ignore it.
Someone hands me a foamy half-finished beer; I slug back as much as I can and hurl the rest toward the stage. Two palms shove my back and I pitch forward, knocking over another stranger.
Different hands help me up. “Whoa.” Isaiah is grinning, his face ghoulish and chiseled. “You just don’t give a fuck, do you?”
I swish my head back and forth as he pulls me toward him by my belt loops. His mouth on my mouth, hot, sour, and strange. It’s not like what Vivian told me to see for my future. But that’s okay. It doesn’t have to be. It can just be what it is: fun, available, now. If he could only be just a little bit better than the others. I would be okay with that, if he could only be just that little bit better. Maybe that’s how it works with boys; maybe each one is just a little bit better than the last, until you find the one who makes you forget about all the other beds and bodies that now seem so squalid and ridiculous.
His kisses are deeper now, and the amps shriek with feedback. A reading from the book of the prophet Isaiah. These are the only Bible verses I know, but I know them. Word for word, backward and forward, because I’ve kept that funeral program stashed in a shoebox under my bed with a smattering of other stuff that used to mean something to me. I have returned to it again and again over the years, whenever I want to pretend I remember any of what happened, any of her.
I have brushed away your offenses like a cloud; your sins like a mist. Return to me, for I have redeemed you.
His hands creeping beneath the hem of my borrowed T-shirt as he presses his mouth against my ear and whispers the usual lines. You’re so hot. You’re so hot. I want you. I want you. Come with me. Come with me.
Can a mother forget her child? Can she feel no tenderness for the child within her womb? Even if she should forget, I will never forget you.
I look around the room, at all these unknown faces, and I don’t blame Vera for bailing on me, not really. Sometimes booze makes me cruel, sometimes crazy, but other times it makes me bighearted and expansive with love. This concert, I think, proud of myself for my empathetic nature in the face of so much bullshit, was probably a lot for her. To be deprived of real life for so long, and then to be thrown into it headlong, like this. I have brushed away her offenses like a cloud, her sins like a mist. And when I return to her, reeking of gin and Isaiah’s grocery store cologne, she will have no choice but to forgive me, too.
Isaiah’s arms are wrapped around my waist from behind. His chin digs into the hollow of my shoulder.
“Let’s get out of here,” he murmurs.
I don’t ask why because I know why, and I don’t ask where because self-immolating stupidity is part of the adventure. If you’re not willing to wager your whole life for the off-chance of a good time, you’ve got no right to call yourself a Troubled Teen. And so I jump happily off the cliff, gripping his unfamiliar hand, out of the steamy club and into the snow toward wherever it is
that we are going.
57
ISAIAH’S BROTHER’S APARTMENT IS practically right around the corner. A garden unit, the windows are packed to the top with snow. You can’t see out. There is a faded gray carpet, the usual furniture tableau found in the apartments of young, itinerant dudes—fake black leather couch, a coffee table ringed with drink stains. A laptop, a guitar, no posters or pictures on the wall. Kitchen counter cluttered with dirty plates, a box of Cheerios, a well-meaning attempt at healthfulness evidenced by a bunch of overripe bananas sitting in a mixing bowl. A duffel bag and balled-up blanket at one end of the couch, on the other, a thin white pillow discolored by sweat stains. Isaiah’s bed.
It’s not that I don’t find him attractive. I do. I think I do? I mean, he’s certainly not hideous. But Vivian, with all her prying and digging and questioning . . . she’s messed me up. I can’t trust my own eyes. Maybe, objectively speaking, he’s good-looking, but do I, personally, find him attractive? I don’t know. I can’t say. And if I can’t say, then why am I still sitting here on this fake leather couch in my wet socks, watching him crawl across the couch toward me? The flat little pillow slides to the floor with a soft thud. He takes off his shirt. A sad little amateur tattoo of a fish on his narrow belly. Skin as white as hormone-enhanced milk. Stringy muscles, arms sparsely haired. After so many days of being surrounded exclusively and constantly by women, his tall, straight, boy’s body seems to me as sharp as a knife.
I put my hands on the ladder of bone that marches from his chest toward his throat, and gently push him away.
“Can we just talk for a minute?”
He swallows. “Um, yeah. Sure.”
“Are you . . .” I can’t think of anything. “Are you crashing with your brother, like, long-term?”
You Know I'm No Good Page 16
