At first, I’m too confused to move. Then, I slowly gather my things. Everyone watches me walk to the door. I’m not who they think I am, I tell myself. I know I’m better than this.
I hear James clear his throat as the door falls shut behind me. Maybe the Group will turn their attention to Maria now, Maria, whose ribs show through her red turtleneck, whose dark eyes bulge out of their sockets. How is she, Maria, more deserving than me, when she clearly continues to starve herself?
I get my school stuff out of my cubby, and throw myself onto one of the couches in the small lobby outside Kevin’s office.
Kevin’s door opens and he waddles out, a bunch of papers in one hand. When he sees me on the couch, he pauses, and raises his eyebrows in mock surprise. “Kicked you out, did he?” he asks. “That’s good. You don’t belong yet. Hope you get there, kid. This place and those jokers have a lot to offer you.” I watch him do his fat-man shuffle down the hall to the small kitchen on the other side of the building.
“Fuck you,” I mutter under my breath.
I look back at my blank journal page. I have to survive here; that’s the bottom line. I read back through the goals I’ve written on the legal pad, and they really do sound pretty shallow after all. I hate to admit James was right. “Do all homework” is something a little kid would say. It’s too small, and anyway, academics have always been my strength. I was doing most of my work even when I was hungover all the time.
Being more honest with Mom and Dad doesn’t mean being honest in general. I have to be honest. I have to find some way to tell the truth about Hannah without destroying my own life.
It isn’t that I have to earn Mom’s and Dad’s trust back, either. I have to be trustworthy. Mostly, I have to start trusting myself. I have to think about what I’m doing, so no one else gets hurt.
I jot down a new and improved list of goals: focus on work, be honest, be trustworthy. Honesty and trustworthiness seem like almost the same thing, but I know that for me, they’re different.
These are the types of goals I can hold on to. I can pursue them, as James would say. Actually, I know if I don’t, something else really bad might happen.
It’s getting late and I’m tired, but I know I have to stick to my plan of meeting Andy at Michiko’s. I’m not telling Mom and Dad about meeting Andy, but then again, no one has said I can’t see Andy outside of school. Still, I feel my stomach tighten. I know what I’m about to do is wrong, and isn’t about pursuing the goals I just wrote, but I know my life outside the Center isn’t a place I can be totally honest and trustworthy about everything—not yet, anyway. At least if I can talk to Andy, maybe I’ll have one person in my life I can trust who might also trust me.
I glance at the clock. I have fifteen minutes before Mom picks me up. I turn to a blank page in my journal and start my accountability letter. What Martin said isn’t true, that I couldn’t come up with good goals before I wrote my letter. Anyway, I know now what I have to say to Mom and Dad, and I know what I have to leave out. Hannah’s story isn’t my story. I didn’t deal any drugs. I wasn’t the one who went back to Alex’s. I wasn’t the one who went into that room, with the black sheet on the window, and stayed. Hannah has the kinds of secrets a girl would want to bury forever. I can tell my own story, and leave Hannah’s secrets out of it.
Eighteen
I SHUT THE car door and walk toward the garage. Mom stares after me. We hardly spoke the whole ride home from the Center. I dreaded that Mom would suggest dropping me at Michiko’s and waiting for me to do my chores, but she seems to have forgotten all about my “job.” “I’ve got to go over to Michiko’s, remember?” I say. “Could you bring my bag in for me?” I make a show of taking Michiko’s keys out of my book bag and putting them in the pocket of my overalls. Mom gives me a tight smile, meant, I suppose, to show her approval of my commitment to feeding Michiko’s pets. At least she’s not suspicious of why I’m so eager to go.
I pull my bike out of the garage. Fortunately, I still have the road bike Mom and Dad got me when they had the idea I’d ride for exercise—riding the reservoir loop road, like all the triathlon dads. But I’d stuck to the old fixed gear since the road bike’s tires are too thin for the rock-strewn trails through the woods—the trails we actually use to get places. But now I have no choice but to clean the road bike off and ride awkward and hunched.
It’s a short ride—four blocks, and then three streets over to Summit, where Michiko lives. The houses on my street are all pretty big, with long steps out front and backyards big enough for kids’ games. Ours is a pea-green stucco with a big wraparound porch and wide, stone pillars. Mom has a garden in back and pots of flowers all around the house in the summer. I glance back at the house as I ride away. It looks more than normal.
The ride is over too fast. I wish I could do a loop or ride the few blocks to CVS and get some candy, but I’m already freaking out about meeting Andy, and even something small like detouring into town seems too risky. I pull into Michiko’s short, steep driveway. Her outside light has a sensor, which goes on as soon as I pull up to the house. I lean the bike against the garage, a few feet away from where my other bike died the night I crashed.
“Only a drunk could have survived that,” the cop told my dad the night of the accident. I glance up into the woods toward the Death Wish path. It looks pretty in the semi-dark, with the red and yellow leaves glowing in the moonlight. “Is that what you’re becoming?” Dad asked me in the morning at the hospital. “A drunk?”
I shook my head no. Everything hurt. But deep inside my bruised body was a part of me that had been unharmed by the accident, but crushed by Dad’s question.
I turned away and cried into my pillow and Dad stroked my hair lightly, but not for long. He didn’t sit at my bedside or ask why I was crying. When he walked away his footsteps sounded heavy and quick.
Drunks, I wanted to say to him, are craggy-faced, stink-breath old guys.
I’m a girl, I wanted to say. Just a girl.
I have my key in Michiko’s front-door lock when I suddenly have the unmistakable feeling I’m not alone. I’m half ready to scream when Andy steps out from behind the side of the house, near a single pine tree that is the exact shape and size of the perfect Christmas tree. I’m still shaking when he pats me on the shoulder and apologizes for scaring me.
“A normal person would have texted,” I say once I’ve calmed down. “Who goes jumping out at people?” Andy shrugs and smiles in a funny, shy way. I’m expecting him to be hyped up and scared, too, but he seems happy to see me. I can feel Andy’s closeness as he follows me into the house. It’s only Andy, I tell myself—so why does my body feel like a tightly wound spring as I step into Michiko’s gray-stone foyer and switch on the light?
I do everything I’m supposed to: feed Marco, who weaves between my legs as I dish out the fancy albacore tuna. I work my way through the spotless house into the living room, switching on the lights as I go. “She hates coming home to a dark house,” I explain to Andy, but he doesn’t say anything. He just runs his finger along my back, tracing the way my braid sits between my shoulder blades. It gives me the chills and I wriggle a little, but keep quiet. This is not us. We have never touched each other like this.
The bird sits in his nearly ceiling-high cage, squawking. “Oh bird,” I whisper. “Shut the fuck up.” Then I open the cage door and let him step onto my finger and then perch on my head, while I whistle “Mary’s Got a Gun” and change his water. I feel him going from one clawed-foot to the other, pulling my hair as he steps. Andy watches, shaking his head. “Mr. Bird,” I say, “meet Andy.” I’m showing off a little, I know, but the bird and I are pretty good friends at this point, and “Mary’s Got a Gun” is my addition to his song list.
“Andy,” the bird says. “Andy, Andy.”
“He knows his animal sounds, too,” I say. And then the bird says “Meow,” proving my point. I flush slightly.
“People are fucking weird,” Andy says. “K
eeping a bird like that, teaching it to say stupid things.”
“Yeah, it’s warped,” I say. “But I like Michiko. She’s not afraid to be different.”
Andy looks thoughtful, and for a second I think he’s going to start talking deep shit about himself, or about Jonas and the situation at home, but he just says, “Put that bird back in the cage, would you?” As I open the cage door and put the bird back in, Andy leans closer to me. The bird cocks his head, waiting, I know, for me to scratch him, but I shut and fasten the door of the cage.
We don’t have a lot of time.
“I’m scared,” I murmur. I start to cry a little. The tears come faster than I can wipe them away. Andy pulls me toward him and kisses me on the top of my head.
“I know,” he says in a hoarse whisper, pulling me closer.
“What do you think about her phone?” I ask.
“I don’t know. . . . Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe she just dropped it?” Andy murmurs. He kisses me on the mouth now, and I kiss him back.
I thought I had told Andy to come to Michiko’s so we could talk. But I don’t clarify. I don’t tell him what Mom said about the cops and their search.
Andy is two steps behind me on the stairs and catches up by stumbling, and then grabbing me around the waist. I flinch, because I’m not small where he’s touching me, but Andy doesn’t seem to care. I lead him down behind the stairs to Michiko’s son’s room. It smells of emptiness, of laundry detergent and furniture polish, of closed windows and still air.
I lie back on the scratchy red-and-black wool blanket that is still tucked in all around the edges. I feel a slight twinge of guilt as I kiss Andy again and he climbs on the bed next to me. We shouldn’t be doing this, not here, not now, and the obviousness of this makes me want to laugh, but I know if I do I’ll ruin everything, maybe forever, and so I somehow stifle it.
Andy’s lips are full and dark, almost brown, but his face is small, delicate, like the rest of him. His stomach is rock-hard, and lifting his shirt I can see every one of his ribs. He’s far too small for me, but I like his ink-dark eyes, and his girly thick lashes. I like the questioning, grateful way he looks at me. I like the silent, peaceful house around us and the almost-empty boy’s room we’re doing this in—the track trophy on the bookshelf, a kids’ microscope, an old laptop on the built-in mini-desk—everything is still, relics of a recently discarded life. Being here reminds me that things won’t always be like they are. We’ll move on, somehow.
I kiss Andy harder to show him that I’m into what we’re doing. I let him undo my overall buckles and slide his hand under my shirt. He feels around my back and undoes my bra with surprising skill. I think of all the other rooms in town like this one, rooms that have been left empty for real lives far from here, far from high school. It’s not our fault that this room is here waiting for us.
Andy pulls away from me and rests on his elbow, his breath warm on my neck. His dark hair is still spiked on top and gelled smooth on the sides. The last time we hooked up was in the woods on the way home from Senna’s. There had been stars out, and noise from the others in the garage, Chuck fooling around on his guitar, Hannah’s high laugh.
“Andy?” I say. “I need to tell you something.”
“Yeah?” he says. He stares at me with his big, dark eyes, and waits.
“I feel almost like we just met, or like we’re just starting to know each other for real.” I laugh nervously. “It’s kind of like all that other stuff that happened over the summer doesn’t even count. Does that sound crazy?”
There’s a long, uncomfortable silence. Then Andy moves over on the bed, and makes room for me right next to him. He turns my face to his, and kisses me on the lips. “Marci, I’ve liked you since eighth grade,” he says softly. “You were the smartest kid in Ms. Billings’s English class. Remember? You always got hundreds on all of her impossible vocab quizzes. You never raised your hand, but whenever she called on you, you had the answer. You were chill, quiet. You didn’t wear makeup. You weren’t loud, or mean, or gossipy. You didn’t bother anyone, or make fun of anyone, or act like you were smarter than anyone. You were just you. The best girl.”
I whisper into his shirt. “Oh my God. You’re so ridiculous.”
“I know,” he says. “It’s part of what got to me about us before. How it was all about being wasted. I still thought of you as that supersmart girl.” He pauses and looks at the ceiling. “But then you stopped being her.”
My heart sinks. I’m not sure what’s happening. Why is Andy here with me, in Michiko’s kid’s abandoned bedroom, if this is how he feels? I breathe deeply. “I’m going to find her again,” I say. “I think that’s kind of what rehab is for.”
“No,” Andy says definitively. “She’s gone.”
I pull away and sit up, alarmed; he smiles and grabs my arm. “No, not like that. I don’t mean it in a bad way. It’s just, I had you on a pedestal or something. I didn’t want you to do anything crazy or fucked up. I wanted you to be a kid still. That perfect girl. But then we were all fucking up, and I got confused, and I needed it to stop. I didn’t want to hurt you. Not the little-kid you, or who I thought you were. This you. Because I like this you. Rehab-or-whatever you.”
“I like you too,” I say. “I like this, here tonight. I like being able to have a real conversation with you.”
Andy is quiet for a minute. “You know that night at Alex’s?” he asks.
“Yeah. Terrible fucking night,” I say.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I told Hannah to find you, but I didn’t do enough. I shouldn’t have let you go off alone with all those fucked-up guys around.”
“Jesus, Andy,” I say. “Fucking Alex.” I bury my face in his chest, and he strokes the back of my head. “Why did Hannah have to get involved with him?”
“I guess it’s pretty much my fault,” Andy says. “You know the webcam he has in that room at his place is just one he has set up for the girls he actually knows? He’s got girls all over the county—girls with cameras in their own rooms. He has a network of these girls from the community college—friends of friends who want to make some money.”
“Shit,” I say. “I knew Alex was a dirtbag, but seriously? Fuck. What was Hannah thinking?”
“Well, Jonas is the one who set up the hosting system. Alex isn’t that bright a guy. I didn’t know about what Jonas was up to until Hannah got involved. Then he kind of freaked out, because she’s underage and he knows her and everything. He saw it like there was this division—Alex dealt with the girls and he did the technology. But then Hannah got started, and Jonas couldn’t really say that anymore. If my parents find out the kind of business Jonas is in, they’ll disown him. I don’t know what to do.”
I rest my head on Andy’s chest and he strokes my hair back from my forehead. I know it’s getting late, and that my parents will go crazy if I stay out much longer, but I can’t bring myself to leave.
“Andy,” I say. “You know the cops are looking for her now. Out wherever they found her phone.”
Andy pulls me close and speaks in a soft, low voice. “It’s all over town, Marci. They found it out near Playland, by the beach there, on some nature trail. Jonas heard from a guy he knows in Port Chester. Some EMT guy.” I’m surprised Andy has more details than I do. I try to picture the place he means. I’ve been out there before on class trips, on walks with my dad—and there was one time over the summer, I remember being in that parking lot late at night—one night we met up with Jonas and Alex, before spending the night at Senna’s.
I lean against Andy’s chest. “What do you think it means?” I ask. He picks up my braid and brushes the end against his hand, as though it were a paintbrush.
“Not sure,” he says. “Jonas claims to know nothing, and he swears Alex never went near her, but I just don’t know.” We’re both quiet, and then Andy leans over and kisses me again. The kiss lasts so long I wonder if we’re going back where we started, but it’s late, and eventually Andy
pulls away.
“Let’s get out of here, before Michiko gets home,” I say.
Outside, it’s gotten chilly, although it’s still mild for fall. Andy kisses me goodbye, then jogs around the back of the house where he’s left his bike. I get on my own bike and head out onto the bumpy street. I miss my old, fat-tired fixed-gear. My hands are cold and my eyes tear in the wind, half-blinding me. All the houses I pass are lit up and look warm and welcoming, but soon they blur together, and all I see is the darkness ahead of me.
Nineteen
THE NEXT DAY, I’m early for American Lit, and the classroom is almost empty, except for Chuck, who sits two rows over from me. Chuck stares at his copy of The Scarlet Letter, which reminds me I’m at least a chapter behind. He sees me come in, looks up, and nods, but then goes back to his reading. By some extraordinary stroke of luck, Ms. Callahan is in a departmental meeting, and we are getting the period to read. Mr. Walker, a semi-retired teacher, is the substitute. Walker is a nice guy and it’s a smart-kid class, so people file in, look up at the board, get the picture, and start to read.
I haven’t spoken to anyone since I saw Andy last night at Michiko’s. When I got home, my parents had both finished eating and were working in their separate studies. Mom hadn’t heard anything more from Elise Scott, and so it was a weirdly quiet night. Between the stress of being kicked out of Group, and running over to Michiko’s to meet Andy, I barely had the energy to do my homework and get through half of my accountability letter before passing out from exhaustion.
I want to know what’s happened with Senna, and whether the cops have questioned him, and whether he’s still suspicious that I know something about what Hannah was doing Sunday night. I think if I can get Chuck to talk, I can put my mind at ease. But even after I move a row closer to him, Chuck keeps reading and underlining, his eyes lowered. He must feel my gaze on him, because he glances at me darkly, as though warning me off. I shake my head and give him a what-the-fuck stare, but he’s back to his reading.
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