Wintergirls (2 page)

Cassie screamed in slow motion.

::Marshmallow/air/explosion/bag::

When I woke up, the emt-person and a cop were frowning. The driver whose car I smashed into was screaming into his cell phone.

My blood pressure was that of a cold snake. My heart was tired. My lungs wanted a nap. They stuck me with a needle, inflated me like a state-fair balloon, and shipped me off to a hospital with steel-eyed nurses who wrote down every bad number. In pen. Busted me.

Mom and Dad rushed in, side by side for a change, happy that I was not dead. A nurse handed my chart to my mother. She read through it and explained the disaster to my father and then they fought, a mudslide of an argument that spewed across the antiseptic sheets and out into the hall. I was stressed/overscheduled/manic/

no—depressed/no—in need of attention/no—in need of discipline/in need of rest/in need/your fault/your fault/

fault/fault. They branded their war on this tiny skin-bag of a girl.

Phone calls were made. My parents force-marched me into hell on the hill New Seasons. . . .

Cassie escaped, as usual. Not a scratch. Insurance more than covered the damage, so she wound up with a fixed car and new speakers. Our mothers had a little talk, but really all girls go through these things and what are you going to do? Cassie rescheduled for the next test and got her nails done at a salon, Enchanted Blue,
while they
locked me up and dripped sugar water into my empty
veins. . . .

Lesson learned. Driving requires fuel.

Not Emma’s Bluberridazzlepop cereal. I shiver and pour most of the soggy mess down the disposal, then set the bowl on the floor. Emma’s cats, Kora and Pluto, pad across the kitchen and stick their heads in the bowl. I draw a cartoon face with a big tongue on a sticky note, write YUMMY, EMMA! THANKS! and slap it on the cereal box.

I eat ten raisins (16) and five almonds (35) and a green-bellied pear (121) (= 172). The bites crawl down my throat.

I eat my vitamins and the crazy seeds that keep my brain from exploding: one long purple, one fat white, two poppy-red. I wash everybody down with hot water.

They better work quick. The voice of a dead girl is waiting for me on my phone.

The climb upstairs takes longer than usual.

I sleep at the far end of the hall, in the tiny space still decorated like a guest room. White walls. Yellow curtains. The sofa bed is never folded up, the desk came from a yard sale. Jennifer keeps offering to buy me new furniture, and paint or put up wallpaper. I tell her I haven’t figured out what I want to do yet. I should probably unpack the stacks of dusty boxes first.

My phone is waiting on top of the pile of dirty clothes, right where it landed when I chucked it at the wall early Sunday morning because the constant ringing was making me crazy and I was too tired to turn it off.

. . . The last time she called
me was six months ago, after I got out of the hospital for the second time. I’d been calling her four or five times a day, but she wouldn’t pick up or call me back, until finally, she did.

She asked me to listen and told me this wouldn’t take long.

I was the root of all evil, Cassie said. A negative influ-ence, a toxic shadow. While I was locked up, her parents had dragged her to a doctor who washed her brain and weighed her down with pills and empty words. She needed to move on with her life, redefine her boundaries, she said. I was the reason she cut classes and failed French, the cause of everything nasty and dangerous.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

I was the reason she didn’t run away freshman year.

I was the reason she didn’t eat a bottle of sleeping pills when her boyfriend cheated on her. I listened for hours when her parents yelled and tried to stuff her into a man-nequin shell that didn’t fit. I understood what triggered her earthquakes, most of them. I knew how much it hurt to be the daughter of people who can’t see you, not even if you are standing in front of them stomping your feet.

But remembering all that was too complicated for Cassie
.
It was easier for her to dump me one last time.

She turned my summer into a desert wasteland. When school started, she looked right through me in the halls, her new friends draped around her neck like Mardi Gras necklaces.
She wiped me off the face of her existence.

But something happened. In the dead time between Saturday night and Sunday morning, she called me.

Of course I didn’t pick up. She was drunk-dialing, or prank-dialing. I wasn’t going to let her sucker me into being her friend again just so she could turn around and crush me one more time.

. . . body found in a motel room, alone . . .

I didn’t pick up. I didn’t listen to her messages yesterday. I was too angry to even look at the phone.

She’s still waiting for me.

I sit down on the mound of unwashed pajama bottoms and sweatshirts and dig out the phone. Open it. Cassie called thirty-three times, starting at 11:30 Saturday night.

RETRIEVE VOICE M AIL

“Lia? It’s me. Call me.”

Cassie.

Second message: “Where are you? Call me back.”

Cassie.

Third: “I’m not playing, Overbrook. I really need to talk to you.”

Cassie, two days ago, Saturday.

“Call me.”

“Please, please, call me.”

“Look, I’m sorry I was such a bitch. Please.”

“I know you’re getting these messages.”

“You can be mad at me later, okay? I really need to talk to you.”

“You were right—it wasn’t your fault.”

“There’s nobody else to talk to.”

“Oh, God.”

From 1:20 to 2:55, she hung up fifteen times.

Next: “Please, Lia-Lia.” Her voice was slurring.

“I’m so sad. I can’t get out.”

“Call me. It’s a mess.”

Two more hang-ups.

3:20, very slurred: “I don’t know what to do.”

3:27. “I miss you. Miss you.”

I bury the phone at the bottom of the pile and put on a heavier sweatshirt before I head for my car. Winter comes early in New Hampshire.

My timing is perfect, and I wind up in a traffic jam. The cars around me are driven by fat cows and bellowing bulls. We roll along, six mph. I can run faster than this.

We brake. They chew their cud and moo into their phones until the herd shifts gears and rolls forward again.

Fifteen miles an hour. I can’t run that fast.

Somewhere between Martins Corner and Route 28, I begin to cry. I turn on the radio, sing at the top of my lungs, turn it off again. I beat the steering wheel with my fists until I can see the bruises, and with every mile, I cry harder. Rain pours down my face.

. . . body found in a motel room, alone . . .

What was she doing there? What was she thinking?

Did it hurt?

There’s no point in asking why, even though everybody will. I know why. The harder question is “why not?”

I can’t believe she ran out of answers before I did.

I need to run, to fly, beating my wings so hard I can’t hear anything over the pounding of my heart. Rain, rain, rain, drowning me.

Was it easy?

I do not take any shortcuts, I do not forget to turn at the deli on the corner, I do not get lost, not even on purpose. I arrive at school on autopilot; late by their stan-dards, early by mine. The last buses have just pulled up to the front door.

I get out and lock the car.

The unforgiving November wind blows me toward the building. Pointy snowflakes spiral down from the cake-frosting clouds overhead. The first snow. Magic.

Everybody stops and looks up. The bus exhaust freezes, trapping all the noise in a gritty cloud. The doors to the school freeze, too.

We tilt back our heads and open wide.

The snow drifts into our zombie mouths crawling with grease and curses and tobacco flakes and cavities and boyfriend/girlfriend juice, the stain of lies. For one moment we are not failed tests and broken condoms and cheating on essays; we are crayons and lunch boxes and swinging so high our sneakers punch holes in the clouds.

For one breath everything feels better.

Then it melts.

The bus drivers rev their engines and the ice cloud shatters. Everyone shuffles forward. They don’t know what just happened. They can’t remember.

she called me.

I walk back to my car, get in, turn on the heat, and wipe my face on my shirt. 7:30. Emma is done with French now and is unpacking her violin. She’ll spend too much time rosining her bow, and not enough tuning the strings. The Winter Concert is coming up in a few weeks, and she doesn’t know the songs yet. I should help her with that.

Cassie’s at the morgue, I guess. Last night she slept there in a silver drawer, eyes getting used to the dark.

Jennifer said they’re doing an autopsy. Who will cut off her clothes? Will they give her a bath, strangers touching her skin? Can she watch them? Will she cry?

The late bell rings, and the last people in the parking lot sprint for the door. Just a few minutes more. I can’t go in until the halls are empty and the teachers have numbed them with boredom so they won’t notice when I slip down the halls.

I turn around and clear a place in the backseat, shoving all the tests, sweatshirts, and overdue library books to one side so Emma will have a place to sit when I pick her up. Jennifer insists on sticking her in the back.

It’s safer, she says.

There is no safer. There’s not even safe, never has been.

Cassie thought heaven was a fairy tale for stupid people. How can you find a place you don’t believe in? You can’t. So where does she go now? What if she comes back, eyes on angryfire?

7:35. Time to go to school and stop thinking.

No Honors Option for me, not this year. I am Contemp World Lit, Soc Sci 12—The Holocaust, Physics, Trig (again), and Lunch. No gym, thanks to a magic note from Dr. Parker. There are asterisks next to my name and footnotes that explain the situation.

. . . When I was a real girl
, my mother fed me her glass dreams one spoonful at a time. Harvard. Yale.

Princeton. Duke. Undergrad. Med school. Internship, residency, God. She’d brush my hair and braid it with long words, weaving the Latin roots and Greek branches into my head so memorizing anatomy would come easy. Mom Dr. Marrigan was furious when the guidance counselor kicked me out of Honors and dropped me down to College Track. The counselor suggested that I plan on going to my father’s college, because they had to let me in. Free tuition for faculty kids, she reminded us.

I was relieved.

That night Dr. Marrigan told me that I was too smart to be a slacker faculty kid. She wanted to have me privately tested, to prove that I was brilliant and that the school was not meeting my needs. But then I screwed up again and they slammed me back in the hospital and when I got out, I changed all the rules.

I used to fantasize about taking the Mensa test to prove that I wasn’t a total loser. Maybe I’d score total off-the-hook genius. I’d make one hundred thousand photocopies of the test results, glue them to the walls of my mother’s house, take a bucket of red paint and a thick brush, and I’d write HA! a million times.

But there was a pretty good chance I’d flunk it.
I
really didn’t want to know.

The buzzer sounds. Students float from room to room. The teachers tie us to our chairs and pour worlds into our ears.

The shades are pulled and the lights are off in the physics lab so we can watch a movie about the speed of light and the speed of sound and some other garbage that doesn’t matter. Ghosts are waiting in the shadows of the room, patient dull shimmers. The others can see them, too, I know it. We’re all afraid to talk about what stares at us from the dark.

Waves of physics particles stream through the room.

she called me thirty-three times.

A ghost wraps herself around me, strokes my hair, and puts me to sleep.

The buzzer sounds. My classmates grab their books and race for the door. I have drooled on the desk.

My physics teacher (what is his name?) frowns at me.

When he breathes through his open mouth, I can smell the night scum coating his tongue and the sunny-side-up eggs he ate for breakfast. “Are you planning on staying here all day?” he asks.

I shake my head no. Before he tries to be witty again, I grab my books and stand up.
Too fast.
The floor tries to pull me down face-first, but my night-scummy teacher is watching so I make myself strong enough to float away, stars swimming in my eyes.

1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 6 .7. 8 . 9 . 10 . 11 . 1 2 . 1 3 . 14 . 1 5 . 16 . 17. 1 8 . 1 9 .

2 0 . 2 1 . 2 2 . 2 3 . 2 4 . 2 5 . 2 6 . 2 7 . 2 8 . 2 9 . 3 0 . 3 1 . 3 2 . 3 3 .

“Dead girl walking,” the boys say in the halls.

“Tell us your secret,” the girls whisper, one toilet to another.

I am
that
girl.

I am the space between my thighs, daylight shining through.

I am the library aide who hides in Fantasy.

I am the circus freak encased in beeswax.

I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.

When I get close, they step back. The cameras in their eyeholes record the zit on my chin, the rain in my eyes, the blue water under my skin. They pick up every sound on their collar microphones. They want to pull me inside of them, but they’re afraid.

I am contagious.

I tiptoe to the nurse’s office, hand on the wall to keep me vertical. If I run or breathe too deep, the cheap stitches holding me together will snap, and all the stickiness inside will pour out and burn through the concrete.

The nurse ruffles her feathers when I slink in. She turns down the radio, cool jazz, and looks me over, hands on her hips, eyes sad and friendly.

“I thought you might stay home today,” she says.

“It’s got to be a shock. Cassie was real close to you, wasn’t she?”

“I don’t feel good,” I say. “Can I lie down for a while?”

“You know the rules.”

She is a crafty witch in nurse’s clothing.

“Okay.” I sit on the chair next to her desk and let her take my temperature and blood pressure.