“Well, I like you, too, Mia.” Her smile widens into such a wedge of earnestness that I have to look away. She reaches over to hug me, and I try to bat her arm away, but she is here for this hug, so she feints past and wraps her arms around me anyway.
I will admit this to no one: it feels pretty nice.
16
TRINITY HAS THIS giant bin of nail stuff, and on the Friday of my second week, during constructive relaxation, Vera borrows it and invites me down to her room to give ourselves pedicures under the surly supervision of Dee, who is straddled at Vera’s desk chair, scrolling through her phone and loudly eating an apple. I still have some chipped red paint on my toes left over from the summer, but when I dig through the bin, I can’t find any nail polish remover.
“Banned substance,” Dee barks, looking up briefly from her screen to glare at me. “Didn’t you read your handbook?”
“That’s dumb. How am I supposed to take this red off my toes?”
“Nail polish remover contains alcohol,”15 Vera says as she shakes up a bottle of jet black organic polish. “Girls might try to drink it.”
“What kind of psycho would drink nail polish remover?”
“I’ve had it a couple times,” says Soleil. Vera’s roommate is a shifty-eyed blond junkie from Los Angeles who makes her own clothes—or used to, before she came here and lost access to needles, both the sewing kind and the vein-injecting kind. When you ask her a question, it takes her so long to respond that when I first met her I thought she’d somehow smuggled in some edibles or something.
“Are you serious? You drank nail polish remover?”
“Mm-hm.”
“What did it taste like?”
Soleil fixes her limp stare on me for so long I’m about to repeat myself. Finally she says, “Worse than mouthwash, better than pruno.”16
Dee makes a little grunt of disgust and turns her attention back to her phone while Vera bursts out laughing. “Oh my God, Soleil. They can say what they want about me, but for my money, you’re hands down the wildest bitch at Red Oak.”
Soleil’s face breaks out into a slow grin. On my first night, Madison pointed Soleil out to me as she brushed her teeth dreamily at the communal bathroom sinks and told me that her dad was some sort of big-time music producer, the kind whose name you don’t recognize but who owns half the beats on Top 40. She grew up in a glass palace in the Hollywood Hills, complete with an infinity pool that fed directly into the Pacific Ocean, and before she came here she attended that famous school all the Kardashians went to. With her heroin-chic good looks and her trust fund/burnout vibe, it occurs to me that Soleil and Xander would probably make a great couple. I wonder how much she knows about rare French Bordeaux.
“See, Mia,” Vera says, furrowing her brow with concentration as she brushes the glossy black paint across her toenails, “Soleil and I have this East Coast–West Coast rivalry thing going. She’s Tupac, I’m Biggie.”
“Don’t make that comparison, baby,” Soleil drawls from her perch on her bed, legs in the lotus position. “We’re white, and that’s culturally appropriative.”
“First of all,” Vera says, moving onto her other foot, “you’re white. I’m Arab.”
“Half.”
“Still. Not the same. Second of all, you’re a white person with dreadlocks, so you don’t get to yell at people for being culturally appropriative.”
Soleil sniffs, uncrosses her legs, and reclines back on her bottom bunk with her hands folded behind her head.
“And third,” Vera continues, “we are like Pac and Biggie, not racially, not culturally, but simply due to the fact that I’m pretty positive neither one of us will make it out of our twenties alive.”
“Vera!” I look up from my toenails, which I’ve painted red to match the chipped layer beneath. “Way to be morbid.”
“Seriously,” agrees Dee.
“What? It’s true!”
Soleil looks up at me with her big blue California eyes and nods sadly in agreement.
“Look,” Vera says. “I know Mary Pat goes out of her way to try and differentiate Red Oak from, like, prisons or drug rehab facilities, but the fact is, we have about the same recidivism rates as those places. Isn’t that right, Dee?”
“Leave me out of it.” Dee picks at a curl of apple skin stuck between her teeth. “I’m just the muscle.”
“Well, it is true, okay? When they get out of here, the vast majority of girls fall right back into the crazy shit that got them in here. It might take a week, it might take a year—but the odds are against us. Just look at the three girls who came to Red Oak the same month I did. They all maturated17 last year. And today? Jackie’s a stripper, Olivia’s a junkie, and poor Makayla’s dead.”
“Stop gossiping,” Dee yawns. “I could write you up for this.”
This elicits a brief moment of silence from all three of us. I concentrate on finishing my nails. I want to ask how Makayla died, but I don’t want to get written up and I’m also not sure I really want to know.
“Now, when I get out,” Soleil finally says, “I don’t want to roll with the same old crowd, get back into hard drugs and all that . . . and I’m gonna try not to. I swear I am. But it still might happen. And if it does, that will suck. Because I really don’t want to die.” She shrugs, stifles a yawn. “I probably will, though. What can you do?”
“Yeah,” Vera says quietly. “What can you do?”
“Um,” says Dee, looking incredulously between them. “A lot?”
We all burst out laughing at that, because one of the things about the outside world that you miss in a place like this is the chance to shock people. But later, as I walk back to my room on my heels so my pedicure doesn’t smear, I find that our laughter wasn’t enough to dislodge the dark feeling that began welling up inside of me when Vera first bought up the question of dying young.
17
WHEN I WAS IN EIGHTH GRADE, my homeroom teacher, a harried but well-meaning geriatric named Mrs. Jones, recruited me to join the math scholars club. This involved weekly meetings, word-problem-athons (don’t ask), and matching T-shirts,18 culminating in a research project that we had to present to a citywide competition.
I did my project on the Twenty-Seven Club—the group of famous musicians who all died suddenly and tragically at the age of twenty-seven. My goal was to find out whether there was a real statistical significance to the number of famous people who died at that age, but my findings determined that only 1 percent of rock-star deaths since the 1950s occurred to twenty-seven-year-old people. In other words, the whole idea of twenty-seven being a cursed, mystical year of death was more of a cultural myth than a mathematical reality. Which, anticlimactic as that was, didn’t stop me from winning first place and a thousand-dollar college scholarship voucher. What an interesting topic! One of the panel judges had said as she pinned a ribbon to the heinous floral blouse Alanna had purchased for me for the occasion. What made you choose it?
Well, some of the coolest people of all time died at that age, I answered in a tremulous voice. Kurt Cobain. Jimi Hendrix. Kristen Pfaff. Janis Joplin. Amy Winehouse.