On it were numerous text messages she hadn’t bothered to open.
Hannah had texted Merissa a half-dozen times, and Merissa failed to reply.
Chloe had texted Merissa a half-dozen times, and Merissa failed to reply.
Easier just to delete. Tink knew: No Big Deal.
(Merissa had never learned what the favor was that Tink had wanted to ask of her.)
(Merissa had never learned if Tink had asked her other friends for a favor, too.)
Hannah and Chloe approached Merissa at school, with hurt, accusing eyes. “Merissa, what’s wrong? Why are you avoiding us?”
Merissa smiled her bright, indifferent smile.
“I’ve been busy.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Is something wrong? With who?” Merissa’s eyes were evasive.
Merissa wore a long-sleeved jersey, not unlike a Tink jersey. Floppy sleeves over her wrists to hide whatever little scabs and scars circled her wrists like barbed wire.
(Did Hannah see? Was Chloe suspicious?)
But it seemed they wanted to talk to Merissa about their friend Nadia. For it seemed that people were saying things about Nadia that couldn’t be true—a rash of texts and posts calling Nadia S. a slut.
“A slut? Nadia?”
Merissa was shocked. Then Merissa was disgusted.
“Who would call Nadia a slut? That’s crazy.”
“Some guys.”
“Who?”
Hannah and Chloe named several senior boys. Merissa was grateful that Shaun Ryan hadn’t been named, though she was determined not to care.
“Why would they call Nadia a slut? They don’t even know her.”
Hannah said hesitantly that maybe Nadia had gone out once with one of these boys—Colin Brunner.
“Brunner! Oh, I hate him. He’s crude.”
Colin Brunner was a big, swaggering boy who played varsity football and basketball—the kind of Stereotype Jock you are always surprised actually exists outside TV sitcoms and movies like Animal House II.
“How’d Nadia get mixed up with that jackass? When was this?”
Evidently, the previous weekend. Nadia hadn’t said a word to them but . . . people were talking.
“That isn’t like Nadia. Nadia wouldn’t.”
Merissa spoke vehemently. She felt a wave of indignation, thinking, Anyone who insults my girlfriend insults me.
But the feeling didn’t last. She was just too tired. The (secret) little cuts and scratches inside her clothes were hurting her.
I don’t want to hear it. I can’t help anyone. Couldn’t help Tink and can’t help myself.
“Merissa?”
Reluctantly Merissa lingered to speak with Mr. Kessler after class.
She could see the concern in the teacher’s eyes. She felt a stab of resentment and chagrin.
“Is something wrong, Merissa? You’ve seemed distracted in class lately.”
Merissa felt blood rush into her face. She felt a wild impulse to run out of the room.
She hated it that other students would notice—were noticing. How Mr. Kessler was asking Merissa Carmichael to speak with him after class as he sometimes asked students who’d performed poorly or in some way required help—or discipline—while others left blithely, without a backward glance.
Mr. Kessler was tactful, and considerate—speaking quietly so that no one else could hear. She knew that Virgil Nagy, who was always glancing at her, smiling at her, and trying to get her attention, was alert to their teacher’s interest in Merissa this afternoon, and was slow to leave the classroom.
“The work you’ve been doing lately—the past two weeks or so—just isn’t up to your usual high standards, Merissa. Not to mention last Friday’s test. Are you aware of this?”
Merissa shrugged. It was very hard to meet Mr. Kessler’s gaze. “I—I guess so.”
What an inane remark! Merissa felt her lips twitch, the impulse to smile was so strong.
Mr. Kessler said he’d been checking with Merissa’s other teachers—Mrs. Conway, Mr. Doerr, Mr. Trocchi—and they’d all reported that Merissa had seemed distracted in class lately; and Mr. Trocchi had said how surprised he’d been that Merissa had dropped out of the senior play after the first week of rehearsals.
“Please tell me—or us—if anything is wrong.”
Merissa stood silent. How she resented these strangers, conferring about her! The secret little wounds, scratches thin as pencil lines but rough to the touch like stitches in the flesh, pulsed with heat, inside her clothes.
She felt a thrill of elation. He can’t know. None of them can know.
“We all realize, seniors are under tremendous strain. You do so many things—activities—there seems to be no letup, sometimes. And your personal lives, we know, can be very intense. . . .”
Where was this going? Merissa wondered. Personal lives!
Did Mr. Kessler know of rumors about Merissa Carmichael’s “separated” parents?
Were there rumors, or was Merissa only just imagining that there might be?
Like rumors about Nadia Stillinger.
(Merissa hadn’t seen any text messages or posts about Nadia, but then, she hadn’t wanted to look.)
“Maybe I’m just tired of the obstacle course. Like the equestrian competitions you see on TV—poor horses made to jump over ever-higher obstacles, until they trip and fall and break their legs—and have to be put down.”
Merissa spoke bitterly but with a smile. Mr. Kessler stared at her in astonishment.
“Why, Merissa—is that how you feel? Is that why you dropped out of the play?”
“I didn’t ‘drop out’ of the stupid senior play! I resigned the role of Elizabeth Bennet because I don’t respect the character, and because I’m not really an actress. People who can act, and who would do a better job than I could, should be in the play—not me.”
Merissa snatched up her backpack and turned to walk away.
She was trembling with indignation and hated it that tears had sprung into her eyes.
Wanting to call back over her shoulder the phrase that had caught in her brain like litter blown against a chain-link fence—No big deal!
She knew she’d made things worse. Mr. Kessler would talk of her with her other teachers—at Quaker Heights, it was joked that the staff obsessed about students, since each student paid so high a tuition; the ratio of faculty to students was approximately one to twelve, unlike public schools in the vicinity, where the ratio might be more than twice that figure.
Mr. Kessler called after Merissa, “If you want to discuss this further, Merissa, just see me. Will you?”
Merissa hurried out of the room without seeming to have heard.
No, no, no, no, no! Damn you, just leave me alone.
Leaving Mr. Kessler staring after her: Merissa Carmichael, who’d always been, in his classes, both smart and sweet.
Merissa Carmichael, who’d been, as Mr. Kessler recalled, a friend of the girl who’d killed herself the previous June, just before the end of classes—the red-haired ex–child actress who’d called herself Tink.
So that in his bewilderment Mr. Kessler was led to wonder—(but of course he rejected thinking anything so ridiculous)—if the rebellious and self-destructive spirit of Tink Traumer had somehow entered the exemplary Merissa.
Ugly rumors spread fastest.
Rumors that Merissa Carmichael’s father had left Merissa and her mother and was living just a few miles away from them, in the new condominium village on the river.
Like small flames, a wildfire was spreading among people who knew Merissa Carmichael and people who half knew Merissa Carmichael and people who didn’t know Merissa Carmichael at all.
Merissa didn’t want to know. She tossed her cell phone into a drawer, not caring if the damn thing broke.
Merissa had been thinking she was becoming immune to him.
If he didn’t call her when he’d promised—No Big Deal.
If he failed even to invent reasonab
le excuses for these failings, as he’d once done—No Big Deal.
“It’s just a—phase. A stage. He’s overworked, he isn’t thinking clearly. . . .”
Merissa’s mother spoke pleadingly. She was increasingly distracted. You could see that something terrible was happening to her, Merissa thought.
Like erosion, from the inside out.
Merissa shrank from her mother. Those eyes!
Except when her mother didn’t come into Merissa’s room in the evening, as she’d used to do—to question her in that intimate, prying way that so annoyed her but to which she’d become accustomed—Merissa missed her.
“Oh, hey—Mom?”
And there was Mom on her bed, the bed that had been her and Merissa’s father’s bed, partially dressed, one shoe on and one shoe off as if she’d been flung from an accident scene, hair disheveled and mouth as flaccid as a fish’s mouth, breathing in a hoarse, rasping way, terrible to hear.
“Mom? Are you—drunk?”
Merissa wanted to think yes, her mother was drunk. Not drugged, not sick, not desperate, not comatose. If she was just drunk, Merissa could despise her.
“Good night, Mom!”
Merissa dragged a cover over her mother’s inert body, switched off the overhead light, and shut the door.
Poor Mom! Poor loser.
I don’t need you. Either of you.
That night, lying in the bathtub, soothed by warm, sudsy water—(Merissa rarely took baths, only showers)—drawing the razor-sharp paring knife lightly, experimentally, across her abdomen where beneath, one day, if Merissa didn’t prevent it from happening, there might be a fetus, an embryo, the thought of which filled her with a kind of panicked dismay; and she must have drawn the blade a little too forcibly, for suddenly skeins of bright blood streamed out, fearful to see.
For this was more blood than she’d seen. This was more than her usual small, shallow cuts.
Panicked, thinking, Not yet! There will be a sign.
14.
(BLADE RUNNER)
Merissa knew: The male of the species Homo sapiens is a sexual being, by nature polygamous. The instinct of the male is to have sexual intercourse with as many fertile females as possible to propagate his DNA and, in this way, to propagate the species.
There was marriage—family—morality. There was Thou shalt not commit adultery.
“Bullshit.”
Startling to say this word aloud. But it felt good.
A word that Morgan Carmichael was heard to say, often. A word with which Morgan Carmichael seemed to be on familiar terms.
Which Merissa Carmichael rarely said. In fact, never.
There were Quaker Heights girls who used such words frequently, and easily—almost as frequently and easily as the boys.
Shit. Fuck. Go to hell—bitch!
Slut. Hate you.
“Hate you both.”
Merissa laughed, like a child saying forbidden words aloud for the first time.
DEATH ANGEL BLACK SWAN BLADE RUNNER
Holding her breath, Merissa clicked on BladeRunner.com.
Immediately there popped up on her laptop screen the most amazing image Merissa had ever seen. Blade Runner was a girl of about Merissa’s age, you could tell by the smooth, taut skin of her exposed neck, though she was wearing a sexy black-satin half mask so you couldn’t see much of her face, and her hair—(platinum blond, like Merissa’s)—was pulled back tight, tight enough to hurt her scalp, like the hair of a ballerina, and Blade Runner’s narrow, slender chest was bare, her small hard-looking breasts with taut nipples like berries, and in Blade Runner’s smooth, pale skin were constellations of cuts, some freshly bleeding, some scabbed over, some healed and some scarred. Merissa stared and stared, feeling faint, forgetting to breathe.
Then the camera moved lower on Blade Runner, so that you could see yet more cuts, an embroidery of cuts, in the thin flesh of her midriff, in her abdomen, and in the feathery-pale hairs at the pit of her belly.
“Oh! Oh God.”
Merissa had never seen anything so—beautiful.
It was crazy, of course—Blade Runner was crazy—sick—but smiling calmly and provocatively at the camera, lifting her arms so you could see her underarms, where, too, there were small cryptic wounds—and—
“Merissa? May I come in?”
Merissa was stunned: Her mother had rapped on the door to her room and was opening it before Merissa could draw breath to reply.
Asking Merissa, in a bright voice, what she was doing “hidden away” in her room alone so much, with the door closed—“Seems like I scarcely see you anymore.”
Merissa was sprawled on her bed, in jeans and her long-sleeved GUERRILLA GIRL jersey, which she wore sometimes as a pajama top. Textbooks and papers were spread about her like camouflage, and on her laptop screen was a Quaker Heights Day School webpage, photos of microorganisms Mr. Kessler had posted for an assignment.
“You rush through dinner and don’t even watch television any longer. I miss you!”
This was pathetic—Merissa hadn’t watched television with her mother in recent memory. Occasionally she’d watched with her father—the World Series last fall, History Channel documentaries on World War II, special news broadcasts, reruns of The Simpsons. Next to the internet, the newly discovered website blogs of Blade Runner, Black Swan, Death Angel, and others devoted to cutting, piercing, tattooing of the most amazing kinds, TV was mostly just boring.
“I’m working, Mom. I have tons of homework before I even get to calculus—which is really, really hard.”
“But why are you working all the time? Does everyone at your school work so—frantically?”
Merissa shrugged. It was ridiculous, the way her mother was peering at the computer screen—at the highly magnified pictures of unicellular creatures—as if, if she stared hard enough, she would know what on earth they were. (Protozoa?)
Merissa herself scarcely knew. She’d been neglecting Mr. Kessler’s assignments as she’d been neglecting Mr. Doerr’s calculus assignments. She did other things with her computer and then, near eleven p.m., when she was supposed to go to bed, she became panicked and tried to compensate for wasted time: too late.
She wasn’t even texting her friends any longer. All that—that total waste of time—she’d eliminated. Yet still, she hadn’t time for homework, studying for tests, planning special projects.
“I can’t believe that everyone at school works as hard as you do, Merissa. I’ve talked with the mothers of some of your friends—like Hannah—and they say—”
“Talked with who? What do you mean—‘talked with’? About me? Are you talking about me?”
Merissa was edgy, irritable. She had tried to eat as little as possible that night at dinner, preferring to escape upstairs to her room as quickly as she could.
(Maybe, after Mom went to bed, Merissa would go downstairs—quietly!—and into the kitchen, to get a smoothie from the refrigerator to bring back upstairs with her.)
“Well—no. Of course not. But I’ve been worried—wondering . . . Where is Hannah? I haven’t seen her here in a while.”
Merissa’s mother tried to speak lightly and without reproach—she was a very nice woman, Merissa knew, not at all bossy or bitchy like certain of her friends’ mothers, and nothing at all like Tink’s monster-mother, Big Moms—still, Merissa was tired of being spied on.
“Hannah is busy, Mom. Just like me.”
“You used to study together. Has something happened between you?”
“You’d have to ask Hannah, Mom. Or Hannah’s mother.”
“Oh, Merissa! Please don’t be sarcastic; it doesn’t become you.”
Still, Merissa’s mother was trying to speak casually, even teasingly. When Merissa happened to overhear her on the phone speaking with Merissa’s father, this was the tone she used: a desperate sort of lightness, interrupted by nervous laughter.
Merissa knew: Her mother was determined to seem cheerful around the house so that Meris
sa couldn’t guess how anxious she really was.
(For Merissa eavesdropped shamelessly now. And cynically. At first it had been accidental, and before that—years and years before—she hadn’t cared in the slightest what her mother talked about with her women friends on the phone, or even with her father. Now all conversations had to be monitored. Their contents had to be decoded, assessed. If Merissa overheard her mother saying, “Oh God—money! Will I need to be worried about that, too?” she knew that her mother was worried about separation, and divorce. Really there was only one subject in the household any longer—Merissa’s father—whether he would return to them, or leave permanently.)
Merissa said, “Hannah has her own friends. A boyfriend.”
“She does?”
“Everybody does. No big deal.”
No big deal. NBD. What Tink had said, in her last text message.
“But—”
“But what about me?” Merissa laughed. “I don’t want a boyfriend. I don’t want to do the things you have to do, to have a boyfriend.”
Merissa’s mother was silent. As if Merissa had reached over and punched her in the thigh.
“Well, I—I don’t know—how does Hannah have a boyfriend then? I thought you all went out together—you met boys at the mall, and went to the movies. . . .”
Merissa felt her face heat, just a little. The lie about Hannah had sprung from her lips like a poison toad in a child’s fairy tale.
“Maybe it’s Nadia, I mean. Nadia Stillinger.”
“Nadia? I haven’t seen her in a while, either.”
Because Nadia is a slut. Even a rich girl has to be a slut if she’s fat. You don’t have a clue, Mom!
“I’m just wishing that we could spend a little more time together, Merissa. Now that your father is . . . Now that it’s just us here, for a while at least. Since you’ve been accepted at Brown, I don’t see why you have to work so hard. . . .”
“Mom, don’t be silly. The admission to Brown isn’t absolute. I still have to finish my senior year, and I have to keep my GPA up, of course.”
“And I don’t see why you dropped out of the senior play, that would have been enjoyable, and fun—you’d always wanted to have a lead in a school play, and your father was so impressed. Now—I don’t even want to tell him.”