The Night Gwen Stacy Died (3 page)

Her father had studied her hard around the eyes. He said, “You can’t start a life
in a language you don’t understand, Sheila.” Sheila had been ready to say more, to
defend the fact that she already understood loads of conjugations and vocabulary,
but her father hadn’t taken his eyes off hers. He held her stare until she looked
down at her fingernails. Historically, in the family hierarchy, her father was the
parent with whom Sheila could have a reasonable dialogue, a good argument. When things
became heated, her mother got a breathless look and went to fold laundry in the other
room. But lately, her father was the quiet one, as if defeated by the thought of competing
with a foreign country for his daughter’s affection. It was Sheila’s mother these
days who would say things like, “Honey, we just don’t understand why you feel you
need to do this.” As if Sheila had announced that she was going off to war, as if
she were proposing to irrevocably disown them all.

“I mean, how will that work, exactly?” her mom had asked. “Are you going to come home
for Christmas, or are you just going to start celebrating holidays with a bunch of
foreigners instead of with your family?”

Now Sheila opened the fridge and found a plate of some kind of meat and mashed potatoes.
Her parents finished washing the dishes and hovered around her briefly, like insects,
like hummingbirds.

“How was your day?” her mother asked.

“Fine,” Sheila said. She peeled back the plastic wrap and set the microwave for two
minutes.

“Learn anything at school?” her father asked like some dad on television.

Sheila thought for a second. She thought, a scalene triangle has no equal sides, no
equal angles. She thought, je veuille, tu veuilles, elle veuille. Also, something
about the Ancient Mariner and his albatross necklace.

“Not really,” she said.

Her father nodded and folded his towel on the counter. Her mother kissed her forehead.

“Turn off all the lights before you come up, sweetie,” her mom said.

Sheila sat at the kitchen table with her plate. There was a time when her parents
would sit with her and keep her company while she finished eating, but that time seemed
to have passed. There was a time when there were things to say to these people—her
parents—things to explain, to ask, to offer, and it made her bottom lip tremble in
the start of what could be, but was not, a sob, to watch her father fold his towel
and take the stairs slowly up to his bedroom, the weight of his hand on the banister,
because maybe it was her fault that in seventeen years she had already exhausted the
possibilities for communicating with the people who had produced her.

Sheila sat under the cool light over the kitchen table, raking her fork through her
mashed potatoes, flattening and raking, flattening, then raking, conjuring a white
field on her plate, an alien terrain that required her attention, a plot of land that
required nothing so much as her specific and ardent and immediate care.

IN THE MIDDLE
of the night, it was always the same. The dreams told the dreamer, pay attention.
The dreams told the dreamer, consider
this
and consider
that
, and for the most part, it was fine to consider these things, to engage the subconscious
in the exercise of willful consideration.

Always the dreams told the dreamer, Let’s pretend the world is this way for a few
minutes, I mean, no big deal, no commitment, just something to do until you wake up.

Come on, say the dreams, it’ll be fun.

Imagine: A stairway. A city map. A girl in her underwear. A lion lives in your basement.
A migratory bird explains microclimates in the Pacific Northwest. A train runs on
the output of your mental energies.

Hypothetically speaking, none of these dreams would present a problem. The dreamer
actually thought of these dreams as enjoyable. But there were other dreams, too. The
other kind started the same way, with a directive—pay attention. But this time it
wasn’t a suggestion; it was more like a demand. It was more like a threat. These dreams
felt more like lived events that would happen somewhere to someone if the dreamer
didn’t intercept them in time.

Here’s one: You are driving to Chicago. Why Chicago? It’s difficult to say, but every
fifteen to twenty miles the signs on the road are counting down to that city, so in
the logic of dreams, this word,
Chicago
, becomes synonymous with
destination
. A beautiful girl sits beside you in the car. A gun rests in the glove compartment.
The gun is small and cold; you know this because before it was in the glove compartment,
it was in your hand, pointed toward the girl. The girl you know from somewhere, she’s
been in your dreams before, but you can’t place her, you can’t name her in the same
way you can name this place where you’re going.

There is a sense of urgency. The windows are open and the breeze picks up your hair
and slaps at your cheeks and chin. The mile markers count down: fifty miles, then
fifteen, then the unknown skyscrapers are a visible glow ahead in the distance. You
hear a radio playing softly somewhere. You see a parking lot, a pigeon flap one wing
helplessly, crushed metal floating in stacks down the surface of a narrow river. An
entire scrap yard of flattened cars, half of them inching downstream, the sun catching
the light off a resilient fender. The other half stacked on top of one another in
an empty lot, their true colors muted by all the dust that has settled. The dust is
the residue from nearby explosions. Sometimes there are explosions, the dream advises.
You try to pay attention.

Then there is the cramped apartment you don’t recognize. What happens next is the
thing you can’t shake. You see a man walk into the room. His eyes are clear and slightly
familiar. The rest you see in fragments, flashes that blur and fade around the corners.
You see him walk into the bathroom with a clenched fist, open his fist above his mouth,
and invite the small trail of white pills into his body. They stick in the man’s throat,
and you see him start to cough, to choke. You see the man start to moan, and everything
that follows. By now it is impossible to stop watching, to turn it off.

He reminds you of someone you know. In the terror logic of the dream, the vision,
the threat, the premonition, you understand that you are the only one who can save
him from himself.

AS SHEILA DISMOUNTED
in the school parking lot, she always inhaled as much of the outside air as she could
before heeding the last warning bell, locking up her bike, and submitting herself
to the eight-period day. She caught her breath with her hands resting on her knees
while she watched the rest of the student body—her peers—disengage from cars, embraces,
conversations, and wander, group by group, into the building. It was senior year.
Everyone had already become whatever they were going to be to one another for the
rest of their time together. Alliances had been formed, rivalries established, and
now the name of the game was hang on like hell to what you had worked to get, and
hope for the best. Reinvention was futile; deliverance was not up for discussion.

She walked into first-period English and took her seat.

“Okay, people,” Mrs. Gavin was saying, “announcements. Listen up.”

Good morning, said the voice over the PA. Can I have your attention please? Annual
blood drive starts tomorrow. As always, type O, we’re depending on you! The votes
are in and the theme for Spring Fling, as decided by popular demand, will be Girls
Just Wanna Have Fun! The voice over the PA reminded the students that it was Spirit
Week and said they should feel comfortable expressing their school spirit by creatively
incorporating the colors of the Cougar—blue and orange—into their manner of dress.
The students were reminded that hats, bandannas, head-coverings of any kind were not
permitted. T-shirts with offensive language or T-shirts bearing explicit product insignia,
also unacceptable. The students were encouraged, as always, to use good taste when
selecting socially appropriate ways to show their school enthusiasm during Spirit
Week. There would be a pep rally the following Friday in anticipation of Spring Fling,
which was something everyone could look forward to, but, of course, the antics that
ensued during the last school-wide pep rally would not be repeated.

The announcements droned on. Sheila made a pillow of her crossed arms on her desk
and placed her head there. No matter what was said over the PA on a given morning,
Sheila could rest assured that it did not apply to her. She had been fairly successful
up until this point of her high school career existing just on the periphery of whatever
was going on.

She knew how to give a straight answer to a question. She knew how to make eye contact.
She had decent grades, mostly Bs. She had two physical assets: wide eyes, long legs.
This physical evaluation was not Sheila’s own. These were only the facts; these were
the parts of her body that boys’ eyes rested on when they glanced in her direction.
Otherwise, everything about her was expected. She was on the skinny side, and tallish—but
not so tall that her height summoned attention—with long, light brown hair. Light
brown, dirty blond—the same hair everyone had.

She had one ally in the cafeteria: Anthony Pignatelli. Anthony was the only real friend
she had hung on to since the start of high school. She knew some people assumed they
were a couple, and as far as Sheila was concerned, people could say whatever they
wanted about her and Anthony Pignatelli. He was a normal kid, and he made her laugh.
Which was more than you could say about most people.

To the untrained eye, the cafeteria might appear to be simply a place for students
to eat, but in fact, it was composed of two disparate social spheres, universally
referred to by their relative size: Small Caf and Large Caf. Small Caf was crowded—skinny
girls shared metal folding chairs at the most populated tables—because it was preferable
to squeeze together than to surrender one of their own to Large Caf. Large Caf, by
contrast, was underpopulated. Empty chairs abounded. Much in the way that a deserted
city with formerly big ambitions might feature large parks and grand, sweeping avenues
but a few too many boarded-up windows as a result of its waning population, the space
in Large Caf made it quite easy to detect who was eating alone; who had shimmied a
folding chair up to the end of a table to seem a part of it but was, in fact, not;
who clearly must be recognized—even by the residents of that respective Large Caf
table—as extraneous.

Freshman year, before Sheila had understood all of this, she’d sat at a Small Caf
table while half its residents were still in the lunch line—a table of girls. The
girls did not make any attempt to remove her, but when the table had reached capacity
and Jessica Reynolds had to pull up a folding chair from another table, someone finally
leaned in and made contact. “Who are you?” the girl asked.

“Sheila,” Sheila said.

“Sheila,” the girl repeated slowly amid laughter, nodding as if homing in on some
shared truth.

Sheila took a bite of her sandwich. This had been back before she completely gave
up on the entire student body. This had been back when she still cared about things
like what other people thought.

“To Sheila,” someone raised a Pepsi in the air, and the table drank to her.

Sheila forced a smile.

Then someone else raised her drink, and it happened again. It happened six times during
the lunch period. Sheila finished her sandwich and never stepped into Small Caf again.

She was wary of groups. There was an impenetrable exchange of glances, an unspoken
etiquette to which she had never felt privy, and tables in Small Caf obviously operated
by these same unknowable rules. Sheila had always preferred the company of intense
and loyal outsiders. If there were only two people in a given conversation, there
was not as much room for error, margin for misinterpretation. As a child, her only
friend had been a reclusive raven-haired girl in the neighborhood named Amelia. Amelia’s
father was perpetually away on business, and her mother had a habit of sleeping until
noon and spending the day pacing around the kitchen in lacy pajama shirts, refilling
her glass from an endless supply of a blended drink. Amelia’s family was from Miami,
and the way that Sheila’s own mother pronounced the word
Miami
, Sheila had the impression it was an untrustworthy landscape: polluted and dangerous.
She had always thought Amelia’s mother very glamorous, but Amelia did not agree. Amelia
was not allowed to come out of the house and play until her mother woke up, so Sheila
would often spend the long late morning hours camped outside of Amelia’s bedroom window
with a folding chair and a notebook, and together, through the screen, the girls would
write plays with titles like
Amelia and Sheila Save the Day
and
Amelia and Sheila Save the Day Again
. On summer nights, they gave performances on the concrete patio of Amelia’s yard
and all the adults would line up folding lawn chairs in the grass: clapping awkwardly,
making stiff chitchat during intermission. When Amelia was eleven, her family moved
back to Miami. “Well, that’s the way it goes, honey,” Sheila’s father had said. “That’s
life.” This had seemed an unnecessarily heartless assessment of the situation, but
it was true. She and Amelia wrote letters for the first few months, but before long,
they fell out of the habit.