Wintergirls

  “Is there any of Nanna’s strawberry jam left?”

  “I threw it out. Didn’t trust the seals after so many years. I bought some plum preserves and honey.”

  Eating plain toast will detonate her. “I’ll have some honey.”

  When the bread is done I scrape on a microscopic layer (30) of it and pour a cup of coffee, black. She pretends not to listen or watch as I crunch through my breakfast. I pretend that I don’t notice her pretending.

  “Why are all the pictures on the floor?” I ask.

  “I’ve been meaning to paint, but can’t decide on the color,” she says. “It’s been months. I should just hang them back up.”

  We have nothing else to talk about. Thank God for the newspaper.

  After the dishes are washed, I shower and brush my teeth, not letting my eyes stray to the mirrors. I dress as slow as I can and pray that there will be a natural disaster that requires all doctors to go to the hospital for the rest of the day.

  “Lia?” she calls. “Aren’t you coming back down?”

  She’s waiting in the family room. When I walk in, hair dripping down my back, she pats the couch cushion next to her, once, like she isn’t sure if she means it or not.

  I sit on the other couch, the one with the electric blanket.

  “So,” she says. “What would you like to do?”

  “I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

  “We could talk.”

  I should have gone back to bed. “Okay.”

  “How’s school?”

  “It sucks.”

  She leans forward to straighten the journals on the table between us. “Have you turned in your application yet? Taken the campus tour at the college?”

  “I don’t need a tour. I’ve been hanging around there since I was a baby.”

  “It might give you a new perspective. You could meet the person who leads the tours, make a couple of new friends. It might help with your motivation.”

  And so it begins.

  I throw off the blanket and stand up. “This is stupid. You’re going to lecture me and boss me around, I’m going to yell back, it’ll be like always. We can’t even pretend to get along. I’m out of here.”

  She puts up both hands. “Wait. I’m sorry. No lectures, I promise. Just a few more minutes, please?”

  I sit and stare at my feet.

  “When you lived here,” she continues, “and you visited your father on the weekends, what did you do with him?”

  “We mostly went to bookstores and read. Sometimes he’d take me to play squash.”

  “Do you like playing squash?”

  “No. It’s a horrible game.”

  “Why did you go with him?”

  “It made him happy.” I wait for her to recite everything that is wrong with Professor Overbrook, the catalog of his flaws and bad habits, and irritating gestures, but she doesn’t. She is staring at my feet, too. She looks lost.

  I sit back down. “Can we watch TV?”

  “Good idea.” She picks up the remote and points it.

  We watch the Discovery Channel all morning. It’s better than talking, but it’s not as good as sprinting out the front door.

  She does not comment on my lunch of lettuce and cucumbers. I don’t say anything when she disappears into her computer for most of the afternoon.

  The fight simmers gently on the back of the stove all afternoon, the bubbles rising up and popping, ingredients falling to the bottom, then surfacing again. It doesn’t boil over until the sun sets.

  Mom decides we’re having sushi for dinner. I decide I’m not going with her to pick it up. She decides we’re eating at the dining room table, because when things are formal, she’s in control. I decide to read while I’m eating. She decides that I will eat four pieces of sushi and four pieces of sashimi and a bowl of udon noodles and tempura-fried shrimp. I decide that I’m not hungry. I drink green tea in a cup without a handle.

  She doesn’t push me to eat, so I know something’s up. She waits until her plate is empty to drop the bomb. “I want you to move back here.”

  “No.”

  “You made good progress at your father’s for a while,” she continues, “but that seems to have stopped.”

  The floor rustles under my chair and vines grow up between the polished oak planks. I do not want to talk about this or listen to her talk about this.

  She continues her speech. She must have worked on it for days. “I don’t expect to be invited back to your therapy sessions. What goes on there is between you and Dr. Parker. But I think this would be a healthier environment right now.”

  I grow the vines up the legs of my chair and weave them into a tight spiral around me until they reach the ceiling. I can barely see her through the thorns. They block out most of her words, letting me drift off into a half sleep. A sharp question brings me back.

  “How about next weekend?”

  “What?”

  “To move your things back here. Next weekend. I’ve already scheduled it off.”

  “I’m not moving back.”

  I need a diversion. I force my hand through the vines, pick up a piece of sushi and shove it in my mouth, swallowing it without tasting. The only way out of this is to play normal.

  “What about every other week?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want to. I don’t need to. Look, I’m eating. I’m healthy. I’m normal. If anything, coming back here will trigger me. This is where I lived when it all started. Cassie’s house is right across the street.”

  My brain (NO!) and stomach (NO!) scream at me (NO! NO! NO!) but I force a spoonful of noodles past my teeth and swallow.

  “How about we just try a short test—a week?” she suggests. “You could come for Christmas break and go back to your father’s when school starts in January.”

  “The whole break?”

  Her mask slips and her shoulders slump. “Do you hate me that much?” she asks in a raw voice. “You can’t even spend a week of your vacation here?”

  The noodles stop halfway down my throat. “We can barely be in the same room for an hour, Mom. What would we do for a week?”

  “I could teach you to play bridge,” she says.

  “I’d rather learn poker.”

  “I’ll have one of my interns show me how to play. So you’ll come for the break?”

  “Sure.”

  She smiles. “Thank you, Lia. That’s a start.”

  Her eyes well up with tears and I cannot be in this room anymore.

  I stand up. “Can I use your computer? I have homework.”

  “Sure. The password is—”

  “Lia. I remember.”

  I spend fifteen minutes Googling Cassie’s name and checking local news sites to see if they’ve run any more stories about her. They haven’t.

  My fingers reach through the screen and comb through the garbage until they find the home of the shrieking chorus, hungry girls singing endless anthems while our throats bleed and rust and fill up with loneliness. I could scroll through these songs for the rest of my life and never find the beginning.

  i need some inspiration

  I need a text buddy for fasting tomorrow. . . .

  Please help!!!

  good luck today beauties, you’re strong

  and will make today amazing

  yeah i feel gross right now . . . only ate a bowl

  of cereal today which is good

  if I eat that I’ll have to run to get rid of it,

  but I’m too tired to run

  ever felt like this?

  The blogs and chat rooms are always filled with the buzzing of tiny wings, flies beating themselves against the inside of the monitor, not knowing why they’re trying to escape. It will never change.

  I type in the address of Cassie’s secret blog. She stopped adding to it after she freaked out last summer, but she didn’t delete it. I wonder if she stared at it as much as I
do.

  The Internet beams through me like I’m a paper bag, waves a magic wand, and flash, the pictures of two girls

  flash waving from a tree house, lips stained grape-Popsicle

  flash wearing identical bathing suits

  flash eighth-grade Christmas break at Killington, the Christmas Dad went on his honeymoon, the Christmas Mom had hardwood installed in the whole house, the Christmas I refused to go with her to visit a new hospital in Costa Rica, the Christmas the Parrishes took pity on me and loaded my suitcase in the car for the drive to Vermont. I brought a backpack loaded with Tamora Pierce books, a small knife, and vodka stolen from Mom’s liquor cabinet.

  We skied for a week and a day. Cassie and I were eighth grade going on twenty-five, all grown up with lift passes and practically our own apartment, a mini-suite next to her parents in the time-share condo. We flirted with the guys working the lifts and pretended they flirted back. We obsessed about which bathing suits to wear to the hot tub and wrote down the calories in every bite of food.

  flash us taking our own picture, cheeks sucked in

  flash us comparing the size of our butts

  For New Year’s Eve, her parents gave us a bottle of alcohol-free champagne. After they left for the party at the lodge (“Don’t let anyone in, girls, we’re trusting you”) Cassie mixed it with my vodka. We ate homemade gingerbread cookies and drank until our heads floated out the door, down the stairs, and into the frozen night.

  The fingernail of a new moon watched us stumble across the bunny hill behind the condo. We made snow angels and tried to blow smoke rings with our smoky breath. Cassie got on all fours like a wolf and howled at the moon, eyes glittering. I made a bad wolf. I couldn’t stop giggling. She howled louder and wilder, trying to bring real wolves out of the woods, or at least ski-lift operators, until somebody opened a window and told her to shut up. We collapsed in the snow, laughing.

  Fireworks exploded overhead. Bells rang. Strangers shouted in one voice because it was New Year’s and everyone was given a fresh start.

  “We have to make resolutions,” I said. “I resolve to read a book a day all year.”

  “That’s stupid,” Cassie said. “You already do that.”

  “So what’s yours?”

  She thought about it. “Resolutions are lame. I want to swear an oath.”

  “I swear to go back inside because I’m freezing my butt off.”

  “No, listen.” She sat up and grabbed my arms. “It’s midnight, it’s a magic time. Anything we swear tonight will come true.”

  This was third-fourth-fifth-grade Cassie, the girl strong enough to punch boys and crazy enough to throw up in the roses. I would have followed her into a pit of fire.

  We got on our knees.

  “I swear that I will always do exactly what I want.” She offered her hands up to the moon. “I will be happy and rich and skinny and hot. So hot the boys will beg.”

  I giggled again.

  “Stop it,” she hissed. “Your turn. Think before you open your mouth.”

  I would never be popular. I didn’t want to be; I liked being shy. I’d never be the smartest or the hottest or the happiest. By eighth grade, you start to figure out your limits. But there was one thing I was really good at.

  I took the knife out of my pocket and cut my palm, just a little. “I swear to be the skinniest girl in school, skinnier than you.”

  Cassie’s eyes got big as the blood pooled in my hand. She grabbed the knife and slashed her palm. “I bet I’ll be skinnier than you.”

  “No, don’t make it a bet. Let’s be skinniest together.”

  “Okay, but I’ll be skinnier.”

  We rubbed our hands and mingled our blood because it was forbidden and dangerous. The stars whirled above us and the firecrackers blazed. The moon stood watch as drops of blood fell, careless seeds that sizzled in the snow.

  flash first day of ninth grade, bad haircuts

  flash tenth-grade prom pictures with seniors we couldn’t stand

  flash last year, cast party, Cassie, drunker than they knew, me watching from a corner.

  My mother knocks gently and opens the door. “It’s getting late. I put fresh sheets on your bed, in case you want to stay here tonight.”

  I keep my eyes on the screen, fingers screaming across the keys to delete my history. She can’t see what I’m doing. She moves to the window and pulls the curtain to the side.

  “Oh, no,” she says. “That’s not good.”

  I shut down the computer and join her. Across the street, Mrs. Parrish is sitting on the curb, rocking back and forth, her arms wrapped around her body, wearing a thin nightgown and ratty slippers on her feet.

  “I’ll take care of her,” Mom says. “You should go to bed.”

  “I need to get back to Dad’s,” I say. “I wasn’t planning on spending two nights. My stuff for school is there.”

  Mom leaves first, while I’m packing. I clean up the kitchen and start the dishwasher. Before I can escape, a bone-handled knife from Nanna Marrigan’s good silverware chest slips into my purse.

  My car doesn’t die until I pull into Jennifer’s driveway.

  039.00

  Driving with blinking red lights on the dashboard made the engine of my car seize up. Dead engines are an expensive mad-Daddy bad thing. I am thoughtless/irresponsible/ just plain stupid sometimes. When he hollers at me, a vein over his left eyebrow pops up and quivers. The roar of his thunder makes Emma run to her room, with Kora and Pluto right behind her. Jennifer tries to referee by asking Dad if he wants to go for a walk with her, but he blows her off and rages at me for another half hour.

  I want to tell him that it’s just a stupid car, but bits of me are scattered all over town: the graveyard, school, Cassie’s room, the motel, and standing in front of the sink in my mother’s kitchen. It takes too much energy to gather all the bits together, so I just sit there and watch him implode. It’s not like he can punish me anymore. What’s he going to do? Make me stay in my room? Take away my phone privileges?

  I have to take the bus to school from now on.

  Emma’s soccer season ends and basketball begins. I practice with her in the driveway. She can dribble three times before the ball takes off. It’s my job to fetch it back.

  She talks constantly, never stopping to breathe: the kids in her class, her teacher’s twitching eye, the fish sticks in the cafeteria, the smell of the bathroom, Winter Concert rehearsals. She wants to learn how to ski, ice-skate, and snowboard. Riding a snowmobile looks like fun, too. She wants me to convince Dad to buy one for us. She asks me if I believe in Santa and if Santa is the cousin of Jesus, because she thinks they’re related but they sure don’t look like it. When her teeth start to chatter from the cold, I make her hot chocolate from scratch. I am so strong that not even one grain of sugar lands on my tongue.

  I need to record her voice babbling so I can listen to it when she’s not around.

  Mrs. Parrish leaves a message for me on the house phone every day for two weeks. She wants/needs/demands/ begs/requests/deserves/would give anything just to talk to me. For ten minutes. It is important/vital/critical/ imperative/necessary/essential/crucial that I call her back. Once she says my mother should be there, too. The next time she says never mind about my mother, just as long as I call her back.

  People at school are saying that Cassie died of a heroin overdose. I’m not sure if I should tell the truth. Is it better to be known as the girl who died with a needle in her arm, or the girl who broke herself by puking too hard?

  The yearbook staff is having a huge fight about how much space to give to her memorial. The people who knew her think it should be a full page. The people who believe the rumors about how she died think a half page at most or maybe her parents should buy a quarter panel so Cassie’s picture could be with the local hardware store, insurance agency, and florist.

  I leave a message for Elijah every day for two weeks. I say I found the junkyard, but he doesn’t call bac
k. I bet he figured out what a mess I am, which is bad because I need him to tell me more about Cassie’s last day. It might help me figure out how to make her go away.

  She hasn’t gone away. If anything, being buried has made her stronger and angrier.

  Cassie opens her Pandora’s box every night and hitches a ride to my room. She doesn’t watch from the shadows anymore. She attacks. Once the sleeping pill straps my arms and legs down to the mattress, she opens my skull and rips out the wiring. She screams holes in my brain and pukes blood down my throat.

  It’s easier to skip the sleeping pill, wait until Dad and Jennifer are both snoring, and spend three or four hours on the stair-stepper. When I finally crawl into bed, my pillow smells like burnt sugar and cloves and ginger.

  I am 098.00.

  I am 097.00.

  I sharpen Nanna Marrigan’s pretty knife and hide it under my mattress, just in case. I am 096.50.

  Some nights I don’t sleep at all. After working out, I knit, stitch by stitch, music on my headphones, rocking back and forth. It started as a scarf last year, but then it grew wings when I wasn’t paying attention and demanded to be called a shawl, which I did, and then, when it was buried in the basket, it multiplied and turned into a blanket of a hundred colors and a thousand stories. I don’t use yarn from a store. I buy old sweaters from consignment shops, the older the better, and unravel them. There are countries of women in this scarf/shawl/blanket. Soon it will be big enough to keep me warm.

  My mouth and tongue and belly have begun to plot against me. I doze off in my room and bam! I’m standing in front of the refrigerator, door open, hand reaching for the cream cheese. Or the butter. Or the leftover lasagna.

  “Take a bite,” the white light inside the refrigerator tells me. “A tablespoon, a teaspoon. Heat up a plate of lasagna, slow, at forty percent power in the microwave, and then pop it in the oven, top rack, at four-hundred degrees until the cheese bubbles and the edges brown. Sit down with Jennifer’s silver-plated fork and the bone-handled knife and carve off one square inch. Take a pill to slow down time—you’re going to want to enjoy this. Fill your mouth with melting cheese and sausage and tomato sauce—summer fresh/short skirt/dancing tomato sauce—and a slab of pasta as thick as your tongue. Swallow. Light up the stars in your brain, electrify your body, buckle on your smile, and everybody will love you again.”