by Nina LaCour
I pull out Ingrid’s journal, and I’m pretty sure that I deserve to, seeing as it’s only six forty-five and already a bad day. But when I open it everything just gets worse.
17
Obviously, I skip photo this morning.
I sit on the path behind the apartments, pathetically alone, and wait for 8:50 to come. I turn my back to the buildings and look at the hill and the trees. I start to count the trees. Then, without really realizing it, I start to think of one thing I did wrong for each tree I look at. Wide oak—I didn’t tell anyone when Ingrid cut herself. Baby oak—the time I told her I was getting sick of hearing about Jayson’s arms and his blue shirt. Tall tree with bare branches—the way I would leave when she got depressed and stopped talking. I should have stayed. I should have just sat quietly, so that she knew I was with her. Pine tree—the afternoon I lied and said that I didn’t feel like hanging out with her every single day, when really I just didn’t want to steal nail polish from Long’s because I felt so shitty the one time we did it. I could tell she was about to cry, even though she turned around and left. That was the day she got caught with eyeliner and hair dye stuffed into her backpack. I pick out a smaller pine for not being there to get caught with her. Then I look out to where there’s this huge group of trees in the distance, and I count those for all the times I called her some name, or told her she was being stupid—because even though I was always joking, it might have hurt.
The morning fog spreads from tree to tree like a blanket of regret. I take my camera out of my backpack. I want so badly to take a picture. But I don’t.
18
I walk into my precalc class and surprise myself by sliding into the seat behind Taylor.
“She slit her wrists,” I say.
Taylor turns around to face me. He looks uncertain, the way he does when he can’t find the value of x. I make sure to lock eyes with him. Anger is tying knots in my stomach.
“What?” he asks.
“Slit her wrists, bled to death. That’s how she did it. Usually it doesn’t work, I guess, but she meant it.”
He looks uncomfortable, pale. His eyes dart away from mine.
“Now you know,” I say.
I lean back in the chair, away from him. Mr. James reviews the homework on his ancient overhead projector, but I can’t concentrate. I just see her. I blink hard, then stare at the desk, hoping the blankness will push the image away. Someone has written YOU SUCK in ugly black marker on the top right corner. I rub the letters so hard that my thumb cramps. The words don’t get any lighter. I’m breathing hard and I think Taylor turns to face me again, but I choose not to look.
“I have to change desks,” I mutter to no one, and grab my backpack and walk down the aisle until I find a desk with a clear surface, no marks.
But I still see her as if I were there in her house that morning. Like it was me instead of her mom who pushed Ingrid’s bathroom door open and saw her naked in the bathtub, eyes shut, head heavy, arms floating in that red water. I look up at Mr. James’s projector, but what I see are the gashes in her arms, along the veins. I can’t hear what he is saying. First the sounds go away and then everything loses shape.
Slowly, slowly, I lower my head until my face is flat against the cold desktop. I concentrate on breathing, feel my heart working hard. I can hear the clock faintly ticking. I look to the wall, to the spot where I know it is, and through the buzz of Mr. James’s voice, I wait for it to come back in focus.
19
Ingrid’s skin was the smoothest texture, so pale that it was transparent. I could see the blue veins that ran down her arms, and they made her seem fragile somehow. The way Eric Daniels, my first boyfriend, seemed fragile when I laid my head on his chest and heard his heart beating and thought, Oh. People don’t always remember about the blood and the heartbeat. The lungs. But whenever I looked at Ingrid, I was reminded of the things that kept her alive.
The first time she carved something into her skin, she used the sharp tip of an X-Acto knife. She lifted her shirt up to show me after the cuts had scabbed over. She had scrawled FUCK YOU on her stomach. I stood quiet for a moment, feeling the breath get knocked out of me. I should have grabbed her arm and taken her straight to the nurse’s office, into that small room with two cots covered in paper sheets and the sweet, stale medicine smell.
I should have lifted Ingrid’s shirt to show the cuts. Look, I would’ve said to the nurse at her little desk, eyeglasses perched on her pointed nose. Help her.
Instead, I reached my hand out and traced the words. The cuts were shallow, so the scabs only stood out a little bit. They were rough and brown. I knew that a lot of girls at our school cut themselves. They wore their long sleeves pulled down past their wrists and made slits for their thumbs so that the scars on their arms wouldn’t show. I wanted to ask Ingrid if it hurt to do that to herself, but I felt stupid, like I must have been missing something, so what I said was, Fuck you, too, Bitch. Ingrid giggled, and I tried to ignore the feeling that something good between us was changing.
20
Dad greets me at the bottom of the stairs, dangling my favorite pair of sneakers by their laces.
“Look at these,” he commands. “These are shocking.”
He shows me the bottoms, where the rubber is almost worn through. Shaking his head, he says, “People will think we deprive you. They’ll call Child Protection on us. We need to find you new shoes ASAP.”
I roll my eyes at him. It’s Saturday morning, and he’s wearing a polo with the most hideous shorts in history. I glance down at his shoes. Unfortunately, they are spotless.
“Fine,” I say.
I trudge upstairs and look in my mirror, rub some cover-up under my eyes so that I don’t look too terrible to go out into the world, heave my backpack over my shoulders, and meet him back downstairs.
“You don’t really need that, do you?” he asks, pointing to my backpack.
“My wallet’s in it,” I say.
“I’ll buy you shoes,” he says. “You don’t need your wallet.”
I’m not leaving her journal behind. “Well, I have, like, all my stuff in here. I might need something.”
He shrugs. “Suit yourself.”
In the car he asks me how the brainstorming is coming.
“Brainstorming?”
“What are you thinking of building?”
“Oh.” I look down at the black leather seats and trace my finger along a seam. “I’m still deciding.” I try to sound like I have some ideas and I’m just not sure which one to go with yet.
He nods. “Well,” he says, “I can’t wait to see it, whatever it is.”
I don’t say anything back and soon he turns the radio on. We listen to two mechanics with thick Boston accents joke around and give car advice.
“Are you thinking of getting your license soon?” my dad asks.
I shrug and look out the window. Everywhere is brightness and I want to shut my eyes.
He glances at me. The mechanics on the radio chuckle. After a while my dad pats my knee.
“No hurry,” he says. “You can take your time.”
Not too long ago I would have been happy to go shopping, but when we get to the department store it’s just too much—all these racks of shoes, all this stuff that I’m supposed to want. People are swarming around me, moving from pair to pair, saying, “Oh, how cute,” picking up shoes and turning them over to look at the price tag. I just stand here, wondering where to start, forgetting what the point of anything is. I can feel my dad looking at me. I can tell that he wants me to do something, but I can’t.
Finally, he picks up a pair of green Converse displayed on a round table in front of us.
“What do you think?” he asks.
“They’re nice,” I say. And I think of Ingrid’s red ones, and how she would write things on the white rubber tips and along the sides.
“We’ll take these,” my dad says to a salesman. “Size eight. Right, Caitlin?”
&n
bsp; I nod.
“Don’t you want to try them on?” the salesman asks.
“She’ll return them if they don’t fit,” my dad says, and hands him his credit card.
While we’re waiting for the salesman to ring us up, I see this girl from school. I don’t know her, I don’t even know what her name is. She’s in a special program, not the one for the kids with learning disabilities, but the one for what the counselors like to call “at-risk youth.” We catch eyes over a display of boots.
“Hey, you go to Vista, right?” she says.
“Yeah.”
Her hair is dyed a million shades of brown or blond. It looks like she changes the color every couple days and now her hair is rebelling—blond around her ears, light brown at the roots, orange peeking out on the sides.
“Your name’s Caitlin, right? I’m Melanie. You might not know me because I don’t walk around campus that much. I eat lunch on the baseball bleachers with some people. It’s kind of out of the way, you know?” She says this really fast and nervous.
“I recognize you,” I say. I want to ask her how she knows my name, but I think that I already know why, and I don’t want to make her explain it. My dad walks up to the cash register to sign the credit-card slip. Melanie’s not looking at me. Instead, she’s picking up all the boots on the table and turning them over to see the price stickers. The weird thing is that she’s hardly looking at the boots themselves. I’m not even sure that she’s reading the prices until she winces at one and says, “Ouch.”
“Three hundred dollars,” she mouths as she drops it back on the table. I’m not sure if she’s saying it to me, or to the boot, or to the display in general.
I try to picture myself hanging out with this girl and the rest of her anonymous friends, removed from the rest of the people at school. Maybe it would be easier.
Dad comes back carrying a bag with my new shoes.
“Bye,” I say to Melanie.
She lifts a hand and wiggles her fingers at me, but doesn’t look in my direction.
Leaving the mall, Dad asks, “Do you know her?” He says it a little too loudly, too casually. My parents are pretty open-minded as far as parents go, but I can tell Dad’s a little worried. I’ll put it this way: you don’t need to know that Melanie’s in the “at risk” program to know that something’s not quite right with her.
“No,” I say. “She’s just some girl from school.”
21
On Monday morning I get to campus early enough to stop by my locker. As I put my math book onto to the top shelf, I get an impulse to unstick Ingrid’s hill for a minute and look in the mirror. All I’ve been doing in the mornings is showering and throwing on jeans and old T-shirts. Most of the time the bathroom mirror is all fogged up by the time I get out of the shower, so I don’t even catch my reflection. I look at the white shirt I’m wearing today and realize that it might actually be my dad’s. It’s so big it billows out around me. I wonder what Ingrid would say if she knew how I’ve been letting myself go. You’re not serious about leaving the house in that? Or maybe, Lady! Pull yourself together! I touch the edge of her picture and decide not to risk looking.
Thumping comes from down the hallway, and when I glance away from the hill, Dylan’s right next to me, finding the combination on her lock.
“Hey,” I say, trying to make up for being so rude on Friday.
Wearily she lifts a hand in greeting and mumbles something in a language I’m not positive is English.
“Excuse me?”
She points to the silver thermos in her other hand.
“Too early,” she slurs. “Haven’t finished coffee yet.”
When I step into the photo room, the first thing I see is a list on the chalkboard of people with missing work. There are a few names up there followed with one or two missing assignments. My name is the only one followed by All.
I think of all the photographs I’ve wanted to take and it hurts. It feels awful. But giving Ms. Delani work that I actually care about would be like inviting her to tear me apart. No thank you. I slump in my back-row chair, half listening to her explain our next assignment: a still life. She passes her books around to show us examples. I study the inanimate things. A bowl of fruit. A stack of books. A pair of dramatically lit, worn-in dancing shoes.
Out of nowhere, inspiration strikes.
I can hardly wait for lunch. When it finally comes, I spot the hall monitor heading for the back parking lot and walk quickly in the opposite direction. On the sidewalk at the edge of campus, I set my camera on a tripod and look through the lens. I frame my photograph so that it includes the road and the sidewalk on the other side of the street. I wait. I see a car approach the block, and get ready. It comes whizzing by and I snap the shutter. Soon two more cars come and I photograph them. I stay there all lunch, waiting for cars, taking their pictures as they jet past me. I know this isn’t really art. It’s only something done out of spite, but each time I press the shutter release I feel better.
22
“This was interesting,” Mr. Robertson says. “A real array of songs here.” He walks up and down the aisles of desks, dropping our essays facedown. “Only two A’s, though. Caitlin, Dylan, nice work. The rest of you didn’t go deep enough. There are layers of meaning in poetry. You need to look closely, not just skim the surface.”
I glance over at Dylan. She sees me and looks away. When Mr. Robertson hands her paper back she drops it into her backpack without even reading what he wrote.
Walking to my locker, I decide on the words to use. It’s been a while since I’ve put any effort into talking to people. When I get there, Dylan glances at me but doesn’t say anything. She has a small poster of two girls in her locker.
“Who are they?” I ask.
“They’re this band that I like. These cute queer girls from Canada.”
“Oh,” I say. I think about all the things that I’ve heard about her and I decide to just ask. It’s not like I have anything to lose. “So are you?”
“What.” She smirks. “From Canada?”
“No,” I say. “Queer.” I try to say it as if it isn’t the first time I’ve ever asked someone that, like it’s no big thing at all.
She reaches for something in her locker and leans in so far that I can’t see her face. I hear her say, “Yeah,” and it echoes a little bit. I try to think of a response, but suddenly my brain is like a television that doesn’t work: just static. So I stand there, quiet. She finishes filling up her bag with books and leans toward me.
“This is the part of the conversation,” she says, “where you tell me something about yourself. Something similar to what I told you. This is where the interrogation turns into an exchange.”
“You’re asking if I’m queer?”
She lifts an eyebrow at me. I feel stupid.
“No,” I say. “I’m not.”
She closes her locker. “Well, I know it sounds crazy. But I’ve heard that your kind and my kind can coexist quite peacefully.” She smiles and this time it’s in a nice way. “I’m going to that noodle place on Webster,” she says, and I realize that she isn’t going to ask me to come again. She isn’t desperate.
“I’ll go, too,” I say.
We walk out of the science hall.
“Do you have a car?” I ask her.
“No,” she says, like I just asked if she had a hundred bucks she wanted to loan me. “Do you know how many problems would be solved if people stopped using oil so much? Wars, terrorism, air pollution . . . Just to name a few.”
As we step on to the street, Alicia McIntosh stares at us from the window of her boyfriend’s Camero. I pretend I don’t see her.
23
The noodle place serves Thai soups in huge bowls, but inside it looks like the diner it used to be—posters of Elvis on the wall, lit-up jukebox by the entrance. We slide into opposite sides of a booth with red vinyl seats. Even here, Dylan slouches. She drums her fingers on the table and reads the menu. She doesn�
��t seem to need to talk to be comfortable. I, on the other hand, am desperate for something to say. I read the menu and decide on coconut-milk pineapple soup. Dylan orders hot and sour soup with mushrooms and green beans and a large coffee. She looks so rowdy, but she’s really polite to the waiter. She smiles and says “thanks” like she means it.
“So why did you change your mind?” she asks me.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what happened the first time? When I asked if you wanted to come. You just weren’t hungry or something?”
I’m not used to people being so direct, and I don’t know how to answer her. “I can’t remember,” I say.
She nods slowly, like she knows I’m lying, then looks down at her paper place mat and smiles.
“So what song did you write about?” she asks.
“ ‘ Close to Me,’ ” I say, even though I doubt she’s heard it.
“The Cure, right?”
“Yeah, you like them?”
“Sure,” she says. “My parents have a couple of their albums.”
The waiter brings our drinks to the table.
“Cream and sugar?” he asks her.
“No thanks.”
She hunches over her coffee and breathes in the steam.
“So what was your analysis?” she asks.
I open my backpack to get my paper out, and notice that the section holding Ingrid’s journal is half unzipped. The top corner of the journal peeks up at me. I yank the zipper closed and pull out my paper, hoping to find a couple sentences that at least sound fairly intelligent.
“ ‘ The song deals with feelings of regret,’ ” I read, “ ‘ and not having the ability to know someone well enough, or to understand them completely.’ ” I stop there and shrug. “Well, there’s more,” I say. “It goes on.”
