The new girl, Jessie, peeks out from behind a freezer and smiles timidly. I don’t bother saying hi.
People are already lined up outside the door by the time we open at eleven. Bill’s excited and talking too loud, cracking stupid jokes that make my headache worse. All I want to do is prepare food so I don’t have to talk to anyone, but Bill says Jessie needs practice on the soft-serve machine. What kind of idiot needs practice on the soft-serve machine? This is who I have to share my tips with?
Not that I’m making any tips today. I can’t stop myself from being rude to pretty much every person I serve. I keep getting orders wrong. I ring up someone’s hot dog and sundae and it somehow comes out to $127.83. At one point, I totally zone out while taking an order. I just blank for I don’t know how long, looking out into space, like my brain shut off for a minute. I come back to the customer saying, “Hello? Hello? Anybody there?”
As she walks away, I hear the lady say to her husband, “I heard about there being a lot of problems out here with kids and prescription drugs. They call it hillbilly heroin. It’s just so sad to see it in person.”
I want to scream at her, “I’m not a hillbilly, you redneck!” but before I have a chance Bill comes over with a concerned look on his face that almost makes me start crying. He puts his hand on my shoulder and says in a soft voice, “Kinsey, are you okay?” and for a second I want to tell him everything. I want to tell him how Camille won’t leave me alone, how I’m afraid to sleep, how I think I’m going crazy, how it should be me who’s dead and not her. But then I see Jessie not even trying to hide the fact that she’s eavesdropping, and the lady who thinks I’m a hillbilly drug addict staring at me while she chews her disgusting meal, and I will not give them the satisfaction of seeing me fall apart.
“I’m okay,” I say, and try to smile as convincingly as possible.
“Are you limping?” Bill says.
“It’s no big deal. Just twisted my ankle a little, running. Happens all the time. It’ll be fine in a couple days.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be on your feet.”
“I’m fine,” I say, my smile shaking no matter how hard I try to maintain it. “I promise.”
“Okay,” he says. “But maybe you should switch jobs with Jessie for a while.”
I pretend I am an assembly line. I pretend I am a machine. I put hot dogs in buns. I put ice cream in cones. I put yellow goop on stale corn chips. I tune out all the chatter around me. I start to feel all right. The Advil’s doing a good job with my ankle. I have a lot of things to count.
But then I turn around, and all of a sudden the sun is shining on the freezer in a way that makes it look like fire. The chrome reflects the light and turns everything orange.
I try to breathe but nothing comes.
I am only my muddy reflection in orange chrome.
I am the absence of a face.
I am just a hole.
I look away, toward the door and the sea of people. I try to settle my eyes on something. The door opens and someone walks in, someone so familiar I can sense it all the way over here.
My eyes find her face. It’s Camille.
She looks at me and smirks. Her eyes crinkle the way they do when she thinks something’s funny. But different. With an edge.
I hear her voice in my head: You can’t outrun me, Kinsey.
I hide behind the hot dog machine. I am crouched on the floor between it and the wall. Greasy dust bunnies collect at my feet, threatening to bury me. The world is wobbling and I feel cold, so cold.
Jessie’s face pops around the corner and I shudder backward. But there is nowhere left to go.
“Are you okay?” she says, but the look on her face says she already knows the answer.
“Yes,” I snap.
She walks away and I hear her talking. “Um, Bill,” she squeaks. “Um, I think Kinsey is . . . I think she’s having some problems.”
Screw you, Jessie. What do you know? I am fine. Look, I’m standing up. I’m brushing myself off. I’m walking like a normal person over to resume my position at the soft-serve machine. “Kinsey?” Bill says behind me, and as I turn around my right arm somehow comes with me, outstretched, and I don’t even feel it as it knocks over the cone dispenser. But I watch the fall in slow motion, the cones flying through the air and smashing to the floor. I hear Camille’s laugh echoing out of the air vents. As I fall to the ground, I can sense everyone in the restaurant come to see what the commotion’s about, crowding around the counter, looking at me on the floor. I can hear the hillbilly heroin lady saying, “See what I mean? So sad.” My arms move but they seem to be making a worse mess. I don’t know if I am breathing.
Bill comes over and kneels down. I am shoving smashed cones back into the dispenser. He puts a hand on my shoulder and says my name. I don’t respond. I can’t. I have to keep cleaning. I have to keep moving. I’m afraid of what will happen if I let myself be still.
“Honey, stop,” Bill says. He grabs my hands, both of them, and I am immobilized. A sound comes out of my mouth like something deflating. Not words. I am incapable of words.
“I think you should go home for the day,” Bill says.
“I’m fine,” I say, but my voice sounds thin, like paper.
“You need a rest.” He smiles, and I know he’s trying to pretend it’s not a big deal. But I know he knows it is. “You need to rest your ankle so it gets better. Jessie and I can handle the rest of the day.”
I nod because I’m too tired to speak. I am too tired to fight anymore.
He helps me up. I scan the room and all the customers look away. They scuttle back to their seats, embarrassed for me.
“You don’t have to come in tomorrow if it still hurts, okay? Just give me a call later and let me know how you’re feeling.”
I can’t tell if this is pity or kindness. I don’t know how to tell the difference. All I know is it hurts and I want Bill to stop looking at me like this, stop talking in this tone of voice. I just want out of here.
I take off my apron and grab my backpack from under the counter. The restaurant is silent. Jessie’s sweeping up the smashed cones. Customers pretend to eat their meals, but their eyes keep darting over to the show behind the counter.
“Do you want me to call Annie?” Bill says. “I bet she’d come by with the truck and give you a ride home.”
I shake my head no and walk outside before he can protest. A wall of heat greets me as soon as I leave the air-conditioned building. I am vaguely aware that I should be feeling something. Humiliation, maybe. Shame. Fear. But I feel nothing. I am too tired and too empty to care.
Camille, is this what it’s like to be a ghost?
I get on my bike and start pedaling. I am not going home. I am not ready to be inside that house again, not ready to possibly face my mother. I just go and go until the forest opens to fields and the fields turn into neighborhoods and the sidewalks lead into town. I park my bike at the library. I am covered in sweat and my ponytail is only half-intact. I enter the library looking like a crazy person. I sit at a free computer and don’t even care who sees what I look up:
how to do exorcisms
Unfortunately, most sites say the first step is to be full of the Holy Spirit. Since the only time I set foot inside a church was at Camille’s funeral, I think that’s going to be pretty unlikely. I’m not sure Camille’s going to take me seriously when I tell her to be quiet in the name of Jesus. Most sites recommend hiring a professional exorcist. One says I should definitely wear purple. One says that demonic possessions are often mistaken for mental illnesses, but prescription medications will only make the demons sleepy. The further I look, the more I’m convinced I’m hopeless.
“What are you trying to exorcise?” says a voice behind me. I scream, and the sound reverberates around the quiet library. I turn around and see Hunter. The handful of people
scattered around the library stare at us. The librarian glares at me sternly.
“Sorry,” I mumble to the librarian. I turn to Hunter. “You are following me,” I growl.
“That’s kind of conceited, don’t you think?” He smiles his lazy smile. How can it be so easy for him to smile?
“What are you doing in my town?”
“Your town?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Wellspring has a fine library. My town does not.”
“What do you want with the library?”
“If you haven’t noticed, along with computers with which people can look up how to do exorcisms, libraries also have these things called books, which I coincidentally like to read.”
My slow brain tries to formulate something cruel about being surprised that a loser like Hunter even knows how to read, but before I can say anything, a loud “Shush” comes from the direction of the librarian.
“Did you call me yesterday?” I whisper.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“When I saw you the other day at the beach, I got the impression you needed a friend.”
Something inside me cracks a little, sends a lump to my throat that I have to swallow down. “I have plenty of friends,” I say, but even I know it sounds like a lie.
“Okay,” he says.
“Excuse me.” The librarian coughs from her desk. “Will you kindly take your conversation outside?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Hunter says with a smile. He gives her a military salute, and a tween girl by the magazine racks giggles. I grab my backpack and follow him outside.
“Seriously, why were you looking up exorcisms?” he says as the door closes behind us.
“I wasn’t,” I lie. “I mean, I just sort of ended up there. You know how that happens. You start off doing something on the Internet and then somehow you end up in some weird place.”
I am acutely aware of how messy my hair is, how my clothes are stiff with dried sweat and sticky with spilled ice cream, how I must smell like hot dogs. Even though I hated him a moment ago, I am hit with a sudden need to not leave, to stay with Hunter, like despite my lack of sleep over the last few days and the nightmares and hallucinations, I suddenly feel safer than I have in a long time. I start to panic. My chest tightens at the thought of him walking away, of being left to ride home, alone, with my demons.
But just as I recognize that I’m not breathing, Hunter says nonchalantly, “Want a coffee? I’m buying.”
Air enters my lungs, and the pressure on my chest loosens. I nod my agreement, trying not to look too grateful. We walk in silence over to the coffee shop. I try to focus on my steps. I count them instead of thinking about how this was one of Camille’s and my favorite places to go, how I haven’t set foot in it since she died.
The familiar smell of the café makes me nauseous. I have never been here without Camille. It looks different—less glamorous, more dingy—without her in it.
I order a quadruple iced espresso.
“Whoa, killer!” Hunter says. “That’s some serious caffeine.”
“I’m a serious person.”
“Yes.” He laughs. “You are a very serious person.”
We sit at a table in the back. I am grateful Hunter didn’t pick Camille’s usual table by the front window. She loved being able to see everyone coming and going. She loved everyone being able to see her. Just one of the million ways we were different.
I try to focus on the community bulletin board behind Hunter’s head. I count all the flyers I recognize from my mom’s weird friends offering massage, acupuncture, private yoga classes, something called Reiki. I feel all eyes in the café on us.
“How do you like being famous?” Hunter says.
“Ugh.”
He laughs.
“You seem okay with it,” I say.
“Why do you say that?” He takes a sip of his hot chocolate. What kind of guy orders hot chocolate with extra whipped cream?
My mouth opens before I have a chance to think about what’s going to come out. “Why do you seem so . . . okay?” I hear myself say, and suddenly the air seems so thin, like all the fog that’s accumulated over the last few days gets cleared out. All the people in the café disappear and the crappy music fades away, and it is only me and Hunter at this table. I relax and it feels like melting, it feels like losing five hundred pounds, and all I want to do is keep letting go. I don’t want to fight anymore.
“I’m a mess,” I whisper, and it feels like I’ve never said anything truer in my life.
He looks at me from behind the wall of his hair, and there’s something in his eyes that goes way deeper than his cool and brooding affect, deeper than his reputation, something sad and old and achingly familiar. He nods but says nothing, and for a second, I feel like I’m looking at him as Camille must have, like she’s inside me looking at him through my eyes, and I’m filled with so much warmth all of a sudden, like gratitude that he’s looking at me with those eyes, that somehow him seeing me makes me a better person, like how Camille made me better. “I’m a mess,” I say again, and my voice breaks, and for a second I think I’m going to finally lose it, I’m going to break down right here in front of all these people, in this coffee shop, with this sound track of cheesy pop ballads, and I just can’t do it, I can’t. So I tighten myself up again. I zip up my armor. The air thickens back around us and makes me impenetrable.
“Me too,” he finally says. My mouth can’t open in response, so we sit in silence for a while. But it’s not an uncomfortable silence like so many others. It’s like we’re floating. Like we’re meant to be here.
“I started drinking like crazy after she died,” he continues. “It was too easy, you know? It always has been. I’m a waiter part-time at one of my dad’s restaurants, and I just steal bottles of booze from the bar and of course no one does anything because I’m the son of the guy who pays their wages. And I just drink and drink so I don’t have to feel anything.” He takes a sip of his hot chocolate. “But it never really goes away. No matter how hard I try to run from it.”
The silence returns. I’m afraid to look up. I’m afraid of seeing my reflection in his glassy eyes.
“Do you think it’s possible to die from sadness?” he finally says.
I feel something growing inside me, something warm and solid. Maybe it’s gratitude, but that’s not strong enough a word. The feeling is fiercer than that. It’s like I want to grab myself by the shoulders and shake me. I want to scream at myself, Why did you wait so long for this?
“I don’t know,” I say so softly I can barely hear my own voice. “Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning. I try to move but that just makes it worse. Like it gets thicker and tighter and heavier the more I try to fight it.”
“It,” Hunter says.
“Her,” I say.
“Yes.”
I look into his eyes. They are deep blue pools I could drown in. “I can’t say her name out loud.”
“You don’t have to.”
I look down and suck out the last of my coffee. The sound is shockingly loud. It breaks the spell, returns us back to the café. I feel some magic slip away. I want to hold on to that place where we were floating, removed and above all of this, in the silence that was just ours. But it’s gone.
“So now what?” I say.
“I don’t know,” Hunter says. “Just life, I guess.”
“I don’t have one,” I say, shocked by the words as soon as they come out of my mouth. What is it about Hunter that is making me talk like this?
Hunter gives a sad smile. “We can be friends, you know?”
I nod weakly, so wanting that to be true. Maybe we can. Maybe this is a beginning. All the disdain I felt for him, all the judgment, has morphed into something new. I’ve always thought he was such a loser, not good enough f
or Camille, somehow beneath us for being so obviously broken. But now, it is those same things that make me want to trust him, that make me think that maybe I don’t have to be alone in all this. Because now I am broken too.
“Want to go do something?” he says.
“No,” I say, and I only half mean it. “I need to go home. I need to sleep. I haven’t been sleeping.” Something aches in me, wanting to tell him the whole story. But it is not time for that. It may never be time for that.
“Yeah,” he says. “You look like you could use some sleep. No offense.”
“None taken.”
“Do you want a ride?”
“I have my bike.”
“I have a really big backseat. You could fit like ten bikes back there.”
“But won’t it mess up the leather interior or something?”
“Do I seem like the kind of guy who gives a shit about leather interior?”
I smile, and I swear I hear my cheeks creak from disuse.
“She smiles!” Hunter exclaims.
“I bet you’re very proud of yourself.”
“Absolutely.”
We go back to the library to get my bike. The grumpy librarian is hiding behind a tree smoking a cigarette. Hunter lifts my bike into the back of his car no problem. We don’t say much on the ride home, but it isn’t awkward. The seat is so comfortable, I catch myself nodding off a couple times.
“Give me your phone,” he says when we pull up to my house. “I’m going to put my number in it.”
“I don’t have a cell phone.” For the first time ever, I’m not embarrassed saying it.
He leans over me and gets a pen out of the glove compartment. His arm brushes against my chest. He smells good, clean, like expensive soap, so different from how I saw him days ago in town on his skateboard, with greasy unwashed hair and the bottle of liquor in a paper bag.
“Give me your hand,” he says. His hand is warm around mine. It is soft and strong at the same time. He writes his number on my palm.
When I get out of the car, it feels like part of me stays inside with him.