Beautiful

  My stomach is full and I am warm and I am crying. Rivers are flowing out of my eyes and no one knows but me. Tears drop and absorb into Mom’s bathrobe, making tiny black pools that will soon dry, leaving no trace that they were ever there.

  (SEVENTEEN)

  Alex called and said get ready because we’re leaving for Portland soon. She won’t tell me when, just “soon.” She’s paranoid like that. She doesn’t trust me with anything. She probably thinks I’ll tell Sarah. She probably thinks Sarah will follow us. She doesn’t want her to follow us. She wants it to be just me and her. Nobody else. Just me and her and her brother in Portland.

  My backpack’s in the closet with more than a hundred dollars that I’ve stolen, a few dollars a day over the last three months. There are five pairs of clean underwear and socks, one toothbrush, one tube of toothpaste, a bar of soap, a sweater, a pair of jeans and two shirts. That is all that will fit. I don’t know what you’re supposed to wear when you’re thirteen and running away to Portland and counting on a teenage drug dealer in a gang against fat people to take care of you. I don’t even know what it means to be in gang against fat people, if they have a uniform, a gang name, a special handshake.

  I keep thinking about shows I’ve seen, the movies with the girl on the streets, all dressed up like a hooker, all hard and tough. Then you always find out she’s actually really nice if you get to know her and she’s got some awful secret she’s running away from, something so bad that living on the streets makes more sense than staying at home. Her tragedy seems so glamorous, and she’s so sexy with her mixture of tough and sweet. She’s always smoking and drinking whiskey, snorting things up her nose or shooting things in her arm. But then someone gets to know her, a nice guy or a nice girl who doesn’t want anything from her. Someone gets her to cry, to tell her secrets, and you find out she likes pie and kittens, or she has an old baby doll she hides in her backpack and sleeps with at night.

  I keep trying to think of something like that to put in my backpack, something special, something that would get a close-up in the movie about me and show everyone how sweet I really am. But I don’t have anything that’s mine, not really mine, no pictures of people I love, no stuffed animals I’ve had since I was a kid. All that stuff is gone, or it never existed in the first place.

  Alex said she’s counting on me. She said it in the voice that says I have no choice. I said okay and hung up the phone. It is sitting there on the pillow next to me, between my head and the white, cracked wall. I talked to her in the dark, the weak blue-gray of cloudy dusk casting soft shadows on my body. The light is almost gone now. I am almost black, invisible. There is only a warm sliver of orange creeping under my door, but it does not reach across the room to me.

  It is the day after Christmas and school does not start for another week. I could stay in my room until then. I could fake mono and have my mother bring me food. I could flush the Ritalin and weed down the toilet. I could read and sleep and fatten up. I could return to school after Christmas break a different person. No one would recognize me. The kids in my class would say “Who’s that?” and I would be someone new, someone good, someone to be nice to.

  But changing is not that easy. Not after people know you as one thing and want to keep knowing you that way. Even if I showed up to school in pigtails and sweatpants, I would still be Ethan’s girlfriend. I would still be Alex’s best friend. I would still be that kind of girl. People don’t just let you change identities, not unless there’s something in it for them.

  What I’m supposed to do now is smoke pot and eat sleeping pills and sleep tonight without dreams. I am supposed to wake up, do the rest of the Ritalin, then panic in a few hours when it starts to wear off. I will call Justin even though I already know he’s gone for the holidays because no one’s picked up the phone at his house in days. I will call Alex because she can get anything and I don’t know the people she knows and I’m afraid to go to the arcade by myself. We will get fucked up and she will be my best friend and if I’m devoted enough she might let Sarah hang out with us as long as we don’t pay too much attention to each other. Sarah will be quiet and spacey and her eyes will have nothing in them.

  We will go to parties full of people I don’t know. We will go to Ethan’s house and watch the boys play video games. We will drive to the park and snort coke, and Alex will give Wes head in the front seat while Ethan fucks me in the back, and I will go to class and smell Justin all day long sitting next to me, feel his knotty finger inside me, and I will think of letting him do it again if it means I don’t have to think or feel anything.

  I could do all of these things or I can just stay still. I can lie here in my bed, not moving, not thinking. I can make the world stop. I cannot change it, but I can make it stop.

  I am lying in the dark in my small musty room and all I want is neon, fluorescent light, so bright it drowns everything out, so bright that the darkness sizzles away into tiny particles smaller than atoms, pushed into the corners of my vision, waiting for the light to give up and die out, waiting for the moment it will come back and take over again.

  “I miss you,” Ethan says, his voice flattened by phone lines. “When can I see you?”

  “Not yet,” I say. It is six days until school starts. “I still have a fever. I’m still throwing up all the time.” I cough to make it sound believable.

  “I’m dying,” he says.

  “Sorry,” I say, but I’m not.

  “You know, you could convert,” he says.

  “What?”

  “You could become Jewish. You could convert and we could get married and move to Israel. We could live in a yurt and raise goats.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say. I do not ask him what a yurt is.

  There is silence again. Sometimes when we are on the phone, no one talks for several minutes. The only sound is us sucking on cigarettes and blowing out smoke, occasionally coughing to remind the other that we’re still there. I usually paint my toenails or do homework at times like this. All I can do right now is stare at the wall.

  “I miss you,” he finally says.

  “I miss you, too,” I say, but the thought of him touching me makes my skin crawl. The thought of anyone touching me makes me want to throw up.

  “I hope you feel better,” he says.

  “Thank you.”

  “Take vitamin C,” he says.

  “Okay.”

  He starts to say, “I love you,” but I hang up before he finishes.

  The days are creeping closer to Monday. I thought lying in bed would slow them. I thought darkness and stillness and looking at ceilings would make them stop. But ceilings are not static. They change with the sun. Shadows rotate around stucco bumps as light moves east. The tiny mountains of paint are a wasteland with seasons. The hills of cheap texture record a countdown.

  The phone rings. The phone is always ringing. My arm reaches toward the nightstand out of habit. My finger presses the button. My voice croaks, “Hello?”

  “Are you okay?” Sarah says.

  “Yeah,” I say. It is five days until school starts. “How are you?”

  I can smell lasagna cooking and my stomach growls. I have eaten more in the past couple of days than I have eaten all month. People with the flu aren’t supposed to want to eat, but I don’t care. Mom says I do everything backward.

  Sarah doesn’t say anything. I wonder if she’s zoned out. I wonder if she even remembers she’s holding a phone to her ear. Any second now, I will hear it drop to the ground.

  “He’s been writing me letters,” she says quickly, her voice a burst of distorted sound so loud I have to pull the phone away from my ear.

  “Like what?” I say. It is just now that I realize my bed is starting to feel sticky. I wiggle my toes and feel something that must be a sweat-drenched dust bunny.

  “He says he knows where I am. He says he’s going to come and get me.”

  I lift my hand to my face and rub my eyes. I feel the greasy bumps on my unwash
ed forehead.

  “He’s not going to find you, Sarah,” I say, too much exasperation in my voice. “There’s a restraining order, right?” I don’t really know what that is, but the lawyer shows on TV always talk about it like it’s a big deal.

  “But he knows where Lenora’s house is.” Her voice is sharp and quick and panicked. I’ve never heard her like this. Even that night, when she told me what he did to her, she did not sound like this.

  “Sarah,” I say. I am smelling lasagna. I am wanting to smoke a bowl and eat lasagna and drink orange soda. I squirm around in my sticky sheets and feel them make a noose around my body. Neither of us speaks. I hear Mom banging plates and I don’t know if I’ll have time to smoke pot before dinner.

  “Hello?” I say.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “Don’t be sorry.”

  “I’m going to go find something to eat,” she says. Then a click. Then a dial tone in my ear.

  I put the phone down. I try not to feel the new tightness in my chest. I smoke some pot to get the silence back, to make her go away.

  “Where have you been?” Alex says. It is three days until school starts. It is three days until the world comes back and I have to be in it. It is New Year’s Eve and I’m still in bed in my pajamas.

  “I have the flu,” I tell her. I do not tell her that I’ve been avoiding her calls, that I’ve been lying in bed smoking pot since Christmas. I do not tell her that I never want to leave the house, that I plan on pretending I have the flu for the rest of my life if it means never having to get out of my pajamas or put on makeup or talk to anyone ever again.

  “Great fucking timing,” she says, and hangs up the phone. No “Happy New Year.” No “Get well soon.”

  I get out of bed and feel my body ache in the places that have not moved for hours. I open my closet and unpack the backpack designated for Portland. I put everything back in its organized drawer. I put the money in my sock drawer. I don’t know what I will do with it. Maybe I will spend it on something. Maybe I will put it back in my mother’s wallet, little by little, the same way I took it.

  I go back to bed and the cocoon of pillows and blankets and sweat and dust. I fold myself into it. I will stay here forever. I will stay in my bed in my locked room where no one wants anything from me. I will let my sweat make glue and the air make a vacuum. There will be no up or down or backward or forward. There will be no here, no there, no island, no Portland. There will be nothing but me, immobile. There will be no direction but inward. I will go further and further inward until there is no place left to go.

  (EIGHTEEN)

  I wake to a buzz echoing around in my skull, a long, tinny, mechanical swarm of noise coming out of the wall and entering through my ear. I hear my mom’s footsteps in the hall, the unlocking of the front door, a muffled “Hello.” I have never heard this apartment’s doorbell, the sick architect’s joke wired into the wall of my bedroom, the speaker right where someone’s head would be if they were horizontal like I am.

  I hear my mom’s voice. I hear Sarah’s. Don’t let her in, I think. I try to send Mom a telepathic message, but she doesn’t listen.

  I hear Sarah’s careful footsteps on the carpet, the timid knock on my door. I consider not responding. Maybe she’ll think I’m sleeping and leave. Maybe she’ll think I’m dead. I imagine her standing there for hours, staring at the door and not knowing what to do. But the image of her confusion makes me feel like an asshole.

  “Come in,” I finally say.

  The door opens slowly and she’s standing there, a black figure blocking the light from the hall.

  “Don’t get too close,” I say. “You might catch what I have.”

  She closes the door and keeps standing there in the shadows. I can’t see much, but I can tell her face is puffy.

  “What’s up?” I say, trying to sound cheerful. I have switched into make-Sarah-feel-better mode.

  The dark outline of her body shrugs its shoulders.

  “Sarah, I can’t even see you.”

  She walks toward the bed like a jumpy cat sniffing a new person’s hand, like she’s waiting for the slightest movement to make her run away and hide. She sits on the edge of the bed, her body rigid, tensed like she’s waiting for something to attack her. I don’t say anything, just look at her haggard face and wonder how someone so young can look so old.

  “I have to tell you something,” she says, barely audible.

  “What?”

  “I did something bad.”

  “Who’d you kill?” I say, but she doesn’t laugh or even smile. She squeezes her eyes shut like my voice hurt her.

  “Sarah, what did you do?” I am losing my patience. I am sick of everything being so complicated with her. Why can’t she just be normal?

  “I told Alex about the Ritalin,” she finally says.

  “What about it?”

  “That you were hiding it,” she says. “That you were hiding it from her.”

  I should feel something now, but I don’t. There is only the numbness I have developed and cultivated and turned into art. It starts with a thud, a soft bomb that hits my chest and spreads through my body, anchoring to my brain with black sponge. It is a numbness that allows me to wonder, “Should I be scared?” but it is only a thought, not a feeling, not real fear. It is a soft skeleton of fear. Porous, dissolving, lifeless.

  “Why would you do that?” I say. Not angry, not anything.

  “She made me.” Sarah looks at me, her eyes pleading, pathetic. “She said she knew something was going on, that you had a secret you weren’t telling her but she knew you told me.”

  “But she didn’t actually know anything,” I say. “You could have made something up. You could have told her to go fuck herself.” The numbness should be dissolving now. Little sparks of anger and fear should be breaking through the black cloud and sizzling it away. But the most I feel are little tingles of something unspecific. I’m thinking that there are far worse secrets than this.

  “Why would you tell her that?” I say. I am sitting up now. Somewhere inside I know this is something worthy of movement. My body makes me pay attention when all I want to do is go back to sleep. This is the most elevated I’ve been in hours and it’s exhausting.

  Sarah looks away and slowly lifts up the side of her shirt. I don’t know what she’s doing at first, but I am suddenly paying attention. The sight of her smooth skin makes me feel more awake than I have in days.

  At first I see a shadow, a blue-black shadow on ribs and side and stomach. But the shadow becomes liquid, a lake of blood under the surface, pain turned into pigment. Then it is solid, bruised flesh stretched over porcelain bones.

  “Jesus, Sarah,” I say. She doesn’t move.

  “Did Alex do that?” I say. She still doesn’t move, and for some reason I need to touch her. I lean over and put my hand on her ribs. She flinches, then slowly relaxes as I let my hand curl around the bend of her body. My fingers rest in the warm valleys between her ribs. I feel her distant little bird heartbeat. I can smell the shampoo in her still-wet hair.

  “She said she wouldn’t let us hang out anymore if I didn’t tell,” Sarah whispers.

  “She can’t do that,” I say, but both of us know that’s not true. Both of us know Alex can do whatever she wants.

  “Are you mad at me?” she says.

  “No.”

  “I’m not a good liar,” she says, her eyes tearing up.

  “Come here,” I say. “Lie down.” Sarah wipes her eyes with her fist like a little kid. She turns her back to me and lowers her body slowly, like every inch of movement hurts her. I put my arms around her and pull myself close. I absorb her warmth through every part of us that touches. She passes through my clothes and into my pores, into my skin and muscles and bones. She pushes all the numbness out until all I can feel is warm and good and full of Sarah.

  “I wish I could stay here forever,” she says, and I nod into the back of her neck. “My father could
never find me here.”

  “He’s not going to find you,” I say for the millionth time, but right now it seems like it could be true. Right now nothing can hurt us.

  Sarah turns around and faces me. “Promise?” she says.

  “Yeah,” I say, and all of a sudden I feel something. All of a sudden I am pulling her toward me and I am breathing in her breath and I am closing my eyes, and my nose feels her nose and my lips feel her lips. And she is soft and warm like Ethan and James could never be. And everything feels perfect for a minute. She is not beaten and haunted and I am not filthy and tired and afraid to go back to school. There is no school and there is no history. Alex is just a ghost, a bad dream. I would stay here forever, our arms holding on so tight we fuse together and become the same person, our arms holding on because we know as soon as we let go the nightmare comes back.

  “Maybe you could stay here,” I whisper into her mouth. “For a while.”

  “Really?” she says, her eyes darting open.

  “Yeah, why not?”

  She hugs me so tight it almost hurts. Her strength surprises me. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she says.

  “Is Alex home now?”

  “No.”

  “Go and pack up your stuff, and I’ll talk to my mom. I’ll call you when it’s okay to come over.” I feel my heartbeat quickening. I feel the numbness burn away.