I have a future, a life, a clean and bright condo in Lincoln Park with dozens of bookshelves and not a single Bible. I meet friends in downtown Chicago bars and clubs and speakeasies where the cocktails have ingredients like lilac and egg white. I have friends now, period—and boyfriends, if you can call them that. As many as I want, nameless and indistinguishable, rotating in and out of my bed and life and on my own terms.
Most nights, I don’t even have nightmares anymore.
I swore, many times, that I would never go home. But now I know better. Any self-help book in the world will tell you that you can’t just run your past away.
Barrens has its roots in me. If I want it gone forever, I’ll have to cut them out myself.
—
Main Street. What used to be the chapel—a one-story concrete building with no windows where we used to go on Sundays, until my dad decided that the pastor was interpreting scripture as he pleased, infuriated particularly that he seemed too lax on “the gays”—is now a White Castle. The library where my mother used to take me to story hour as a kid now touts a sign for Johnny Chow’s Oriental Buffet. When I was growing up, we had practically no sit-down restaurants at all.
But so much is the same: the neon light from the VFW bar still flickers, and Mel’s Pizza, where I would ride my bike sometimes to get a slice after school, is still churning out pies. So much might have tumbled out of memory intact—the Jiffy Lube Pit Stop, Jimmy’s Auto Parts Supply, the run-down porn shop Kaycee Mitchell’s father used to own. Might still own, for all I know. Temptations has a new roof, though, and a new electric sign. So business has been booming.
I spot a crow on a telephone wire and another one nesting farther along. One crow for sorrow, two crows for mirth…
Past Main Street nothing looks the same: brand-new condos, a Jennifer Convertibles, a sit-down Italian place advertising a salad bar in the window. Everything is unfamiliar except for the salvage yard and, just beyond it, the drive-in movie theater. Site of many birthday parties with kids from Sunday school and even a depressing Thanksgiving right after my mom was buried. Our claim to fame, prior to the arrival of Optimal Plastics.
More crows perched on a pylon. Three, four, five, six. Seven for a secret, never to be told. A murder of crows.
Being back is giving me that tight-chest, lumpy-throat feeling. I grip the steering wheel tighter. At the first red light—the only red light in Barrens—I hold my breath and close my eyes. I am in control now.
The guy behind me lays on his horn: the light has turned green. I press the gas pedal just a little too hard and shoot forward into the intersection. When a familiar orange sign flashes in my peripheral vision, I signal to turn without thinking and swerve into the parking lot of the Donut Hole—this, like the drive-in movie theater, is totally unchanged.
I turn off the ignition. Sit in silence. After just a few seconds of no air-conditioning, it’s painfully hot. It must be eighty degrees—much warmer than it was in Chicago. The air is chokingly heavy with moisture. I wrestle off my leather jacket and grab my purse from the floor of the passenger seat. I could use a water.
As I’m opening the car door, a blue Subaru pulls up next to me, jamming its brakes at the last second and making me jump. The driver honks twice.
I slide out of the car, annoyed by how close the other driver has parked, and then notice the woman in the car is smiling at me and giving a frenzied, two-handed wave. She motions toward the Donut Hole and I have a split second to decide if I should turn back toward Chicago and forget this whole thing. But suddenly I am paralyzed. Somewhere along the line, my fight-or-flight instinct turned into freeze, turn invisible, wait for it to pass.
Misha Dale. Blonder, heavier, still beautiful, in her small-town way. Smiling. I used to dream of her smile—the way, I imagine, bottom-feeding fish must dream of the long dark funnel of a shark’s throat.
Misha at twelve: getting all her friends to pelt me with stale lunch rolls when I walked through the cafeteria. Misha at fourteen: planting an animal femur in my locker, claiming it was one of my mother’s bones, whispering that I kept body parts in my freezer, a rumor that achieved such aggressive popularity that Sheriff Kahn came over to check. At fifteen, she organized a campaign to raise money for the treatment of my acne. At sixteen, she circulated an online petition to have me suspended from school.
A sadist with a beautiful smile. She, Cora Allen, Annie Baum, and Kaycee Mitchell fed on me for years, grew fat and strong on my misery, ecstatic when junior year I tried to swallow half a bottle of Advil and had to spend a week at Mercy mental hospital—something my father refused to ever acknowledge and of which we have never spoken.
Next time, I’ll help, Misha whispered to me in the hall when I finally got back to school.
Terrible girls. Demonic.
And yet, I’d envied them.
—
“I don’t believe it. I heard you might be coming back.” Her eyes have softened but her smile is the same—sharp, and slightly crooked. “And your car! Lord knows you’ve done well.” She folds me briefly into a one-armed hug. She smells like cigarettes—menthol—and the heavy perfume used to mask them. “Don’t you remember me? It’s Misha Jennings. Dale,” she corrects herself, shaking her head. “You’d know me as Dale. My Lord, it’s been a long time.”
“I remember you,” I say. Panic flashes in me, quick as the baring of teeth. She heard I was coming back—but how? And from whom?
“You coming in?” She gestures toward the Donut Hole. “They’ve added about a million varieties in the past year. All thanks to Optimal, I guess. We’ve had something of a population boom around here, at least by Indiana standards.”
The mention of Optimal is bait—it must be. But this time she’s not the one who gets to stand on dry land and cast.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I’m coming in.”
“The jelly is still my favorite.” Her voice has softened, too. She genuinely appears happy to see me. “Do you keep in touch with any of the old group?”
I hesitate, suspecting a trap. But she doesn’t seem to notice my confusion. There is no “old group.” At least not that I was a part of. I just shake my head and follow her inside. I notice that when she yanks open the door, she makes sure to step ahead of me.
The Donut Hole is home to its namesake, the donut, as well as a truly random assortment of drugstore supplies and our historical society “museum,” a corner display with pamphlets for the taking. There’s even a small, unofficial free library in the Donut Hole—you leave one, you take one. The particular odor of artificial air freshener, musty old travel guides, and baked goods is like the barrel of a gun, shooting me into the past.
“Must be fun coming back after so long.” Misha bypasses the donut counter and heads instead for a wall of pharmaceutical products, where a handwritten sign blandly announces No Pharmacist/No Suboxone/No Sudafed Sold.
Misha picks out antacid, baby shampoo, lilac-scented body lotion, a box of Kleenex: all so normal, so domestic, and so at odds with the vicious girl who preyed on me for years.
“Fun isn’t the word I would choose.” Mistake is closer to it, especially now as I’m standing in front of Misha at the Donut Hole. “I’m here for work.”