13
THAT EVENING, during constructive relaxation, I decide I need a break from all my new classmates, their bickering, their drama, their rapacious need for attention. After I’ve finished my homework, I take Vivian’s advice and head over to the library. The building is nothing more than a tiny A-framed log cabin right at the edge of school property, with two narrow front windows and a red painted door, which, as she promised, is unlocked.
Inside, it’s totally quiet, except for the autumn rain pattering on the two wide skylights overhead. Dust motes swirl around in the book-scented air. It’s warm and dry, and best of all, most of the girls are playing in an interhouse Uno tournament,13 so nobody’s here but me.
At one end of the cabin, a fire burns low but steady in a black marble fireplace. I think of the fire-starter girls who go to school here and wonder why Mary Pat would flirt with disaster this way. But when I get closer, I realize that the fire is just a little flat-screen TV mounted inside the fireplace, and the screen is playing an endless loop of computerized flame. Which is so typical of adults: they like to give you the idea that they trust you, but when you step closer you realize it’s just an illusion.
Still, it’s cozy in here, with the radiators along the baseboards ticking and sighing. I walk between the narrow rows of bookcases, running my fingers along the spines, scanning the titles. One name jumps out at me because I remember Vivian mentioning it at our first session. Joy Harjo. I slip the book out from the shelf and look at the cover. Poetry. Not really my thing. It always feels so self-important: all Look at my gorgeous words with all their indecipherable deep meanings! Novels are what I like—the bigger the better, hence my love of Moby-Dick—long enough for me to get lost in. But I figure I’ll give old Joy a shot, for Vivian’s sake, because I’ve always liked doing nice things for people in ways they don’t know about and will never see. I toe off my wet shoes and curl up next to the fake fire in one of the two creaky velvet chairs on the hearth, flip to a random poem, and begin to read.
Ah, ah slaps the urgent cove of ocean swimming through the slips14
And before I even mean to, I’m thinking about her again, the most and least important person in my life: my mother, who was buried in a cove of ocean.
Well, a key, technically. Waltz Key Basin, in Florida. The water there was shallow and calm, and it spit her bloated, waterlogged body back on shore four days after Roddie put her there. I was three years old at the time, so of course nobody told me any of this. All they told me was that I wouldn’t be seeing my mom anymore because she was in heaven now. We weren’t a religious family, so I had absolutely no idea what that meant. I still don’t.
Ah, ah beats our lungs and we are racing into the waves.
There was no water in her lungs, according to the autopsy report I found when I was fourteen and got good at Google. Which means she was dead when she was dumped. She was drowned before she drowned, and I have spent many morbid hours since I read that report researching what exactly it feels like to be strangled to death. If Roddie compressed her carotid arteries, she would have blacked out and died quickly. But if he crushed her windpipe, it would have been long and tortuous and she would have been awake for all of it. Did you know that if your attacker is using his bare hands, as Roddie did, it can take you up to five whole minutes to die? Five minutes. At my old high school, five minutes of Mr. G’s British lit class could feel like a thousand years. So even though I have tried, I can’t imagine what five minutes of relentless pressure on your airway must feel like, your brain screaming for oxygen, and all the while as you kick and struggle and claw in a losing fight for your life, the face of your murderer—the man you thought you loved enough to run away with, abandoning your husband and your kid for—hangs over you. This is why, whenever teachers and counselors and therapists and whoever else try to lecture me about how bad choices have consequences, I always have to laugh. Who knows this better than I do? My mom made a bad choice when she chose to blow up her family and take off with some creep she met at a real estate conference. And, damn, did it ever have a consequence.
I snap shut Joy Harjo and consider Vera’s theory of hereditary suffering, of how pain is passed down like a mutated gene from one generation to the next.
If it is true, then I am fucked.
14
“SO,” VIVIAN SAYS. “You made it through your first week. How’s it going so far?”
“Well, let’s see.” I’m sitting cross-legged on her big leather chair and picking at a piece of dried granola from breakfast that’s stuck to my leggings. “I hate my dad and stepmom. I want some McDonald’s and a cup of coffee. I want to look at Instagram. I want to look at a male human. Not even touch one, necessarily. Just look at one.”
“On the bright side, I hear your classes are going well.”
“They’re independent study. It’s not like they’re hard. You just, like, sit in front of a computer and answer practice questions.”
“If you get bored, maybe you could tutor some of the other girls. I hear you’re something of an algebra whiz.”
“I don’t tutor. That’s what teachers get paid for.”
“Did you know that ‘algebra’ comes from an Arabic word?”
“No, I did not.”
“Al-jabr. It means ‘reunion of broken parts.’”
“Oh, I get it. You’re going for profundity today. I, the broken girl, find solace in a discipline that puts broken parts back together.”
“I’m just telling you where the meaning of the word comes from. Etymology interests me. Are you always this defensive?”
“Pretty much.”
“Well,” she says, trying a different tack, “it looks like you’ve made a few friends. I’ve seen you hanging around with Vera and Trinity quite a bit. Madison, too.”
“Yeah.” I look out the window. It’s been raining constantly, a cold, steady drizzle that, the girls tell me, should be turning into snow any day now. “Vera and Trinity are pretty cool. Madison is . . . tolerable.”
“Tell me about your friends back home. What were they like?”
“I didn’t have any friends back home.”
“Really? None at all?”
“I mean, I had people. My phone was always blowing up. Dealers, fuckboys, moth girls, that kind of thing. But I didn’t have actual friends. We were just people, usually available to each other to get into some shit. That was good enough for me.”
“Was it?”
“Yep.”
Vivian steeples her fingers and shoots me her therapist’s signature tell-me-more look. I roll my eyes.
“It’s not that I didn’t want friends. But I also liked looking at people in terms of what we could do for each other. There was no messiness. No gray areas. No commitments. If that makes sense.”
“It does, though I have to say, it sounds pretty clinical to me.”
“Maybe, but at least we were being real with each other. I can’t stand fakeness.”
“You value honesty.”
“Yeah. I do.”
“Would you say that honesty is one of your core values?”