Girl in Snow Page 19

  Nostalgia is my favorite emotion. It’s like, you think you know how to deal with the passage of time, but nostalgia will prove you wrong. You’ll press your face into an old sweat shirt, or you’ll look at a familiar shade of paint on a front door, and you’ll be reminded of all the time that got away from you. If you could live it all again, you’d take a long moment to look around, to examine knees against knees. Nostalgia puts you in this dangerous re-creation of something you can never have again. It’s ruthless, and for the most part, inaccurate.

  I feel very small, standing on Zap’s stoop in my white dress and my army coat. This isn’t a bad thing.

  When I ring, Mrs. Arnaud answers immediately, still wearing her tailored black ensemble.

  “Hi, honey,” she says. “Please, come in.”

  WHAT YOU WANT TO SAY BUT CAN’T WITHOUT BEING A DICK

  A Screenplay by Jade Dixon-Burns

  INT. BEDROOM—DAY (LATER)

  Celly watches from the doorway as Boy sits on the edge of his bed, pressing his thumbs deep into his temples. He looks up.

  CELLY

  Hi.

  BOY

  What are you doing here?

  CELLY

  I came by to make sure you’re okay.

  BOY

  Thanks. I appreciate that.

  The two stare at each other in silence.

  CELLY

  (gesturing to the bed)

  Can I . . . ?

  Boy shrugs. Celly scoffs, hiding her hurt.

  CELLY (CONT’D)

  I know there’s a part of you that wishes we were young again, that we hadn’t lost our way or whatever.

  Boy watches the lines in his palms. Tracing. Avoiding.

  CELLY (CONT’D)

  I want you to remember how we got here, okay? The love that drove us to become the people we are. It meant something.

  (pause)

  Right?

  Boy finally lifts his head. He looks at Celly, earnest now.

  BOY

  It meant everything.

  Zap used to be messy. When we were little, he’d throw school papers in piles on his desk. His soccer cleats would leave mud cakes at the bottom of his closet, and his jeans were always splayed across the floor, like he’d stepped out of them and they were waiting there, patient, for his legs to fill them again.

  I consider doing our secret knock—two sets of quick raps, a horse’s patter—but we are old now. Instead, I knock twice, firmly.

  “Come in,” he says.

  Zap sits on the edge of his bed. His arms are crossed and his elbows rest on his knees; his body makes a perfect box. His shoulders form an angular T, and his head is bowed and limp in the center, thumbs pointed up toward his face.

  “Hey,” I say. Voice too high. “It’s me.”

  His bedroom is spotless. He’s painted the walls—one is red, the other three white. On the red wall, he’s hung a bulletin board, which he’s covered in pictures of him and various friends. The boys’ soccer team, crowded around a campfire. Leaning out of jeeps. They’re all very tan from a summer of lazy drinking on docks and joyriding dirt bikes through the mountains.

  He got a new bedspread. It’s black, and looks scratchy. The sheets and the comforter are both tucked in at the corners.

  “My parents called you, didn’t they?” he says, without looking up.

  “They’re worried.”

  I’m still standing in the doorway. I take a tentative step forward, hoping he’ll invite me in. He doesn’t. The seconds pass, miserably slow, honey slinking to the bottom of a jar.

  “I don’t know what they want from me,” he says, gaze still fixed on his hands.

  “I don’t know, either,” I say.

  It occurs to me that Zap and I have not been alone in the same room for nearly two years. It also occurs to me that two years is a very long time to avoid someone—to form new ways of speaking, to kiss girls with flat stomachs. To clean your room.

  Zap lifts his head. His eyes are puffy and ringed in tired circles. Under his gaze, I feel gigantic. My dress grabs me in all the wrong places and I cross my arms to cover the scabs from picking.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I don’t mean to sound rude,” he says. “But I’d really like to be alone.”

  And then I notice it: in the corner where he used to keep his Hardy Boys collection is a model airplane. It’s hand-painted and landbound in a clear glass case. When we were younger, Zap never expressed an interest in model airplanes, or airplanes at all.

  This breaks my heart. I guess that’s the difference between loving someone—really loving someone—and doing it from afar. It’s like, you can know every detail. You can memorize how he sits in class, with his legs all casual out to the sides. You can count the lines on the palm that shoots upward in math class, and you can know those knuckles. But those hands have created something delicate, a miniature and impeccable combination of glue, paint, and sticks. This took care, precision, and a certain level of tenderness—all of which you didn’t see.

  A year and a half ago, the Fourth of July. That’s when it really ended for me.

  Amy was off with her friends and Ma dragged me to fireworks—I could tell she felt bad for me, but not in a way that encouraged her to be nice. She spent the night telling me how I shouldn’t be wearing such short shorts, they weren’t flattering on a girl my size, and when was I going to start using the gym membership she paid for every month?

  The night was thick with mosquitoes. Kids pranced around on the shore of Windfall Lake, waving sparklers and lighting bottle rockets—this was the public part of town, where you went if you didn’t know anybody rich. Ma brought two bottles of champagne for herself, which she stuck in an old cooler from the garage. When she left to find a Porta-Potty, I dumped my soda in the grass and poured a healthy amount of champagne into my cup, which I hid behind my lawn chair. If Terry saw, he didn’t care.

  “I’m going for a walk,” I told Ma when she came back. She lowered herself into the lawn chair. Examined her nails.

  Jenna Lindhauser was throwing a party. I hadn’t been invited, of course, but I knew where Jenna’s house was, from the carpool schedule years ago. If the lake were a clock, Jenna’s house was at the three—Ma and Terry were at the six. I circled around, winding my way through the treelined suburbs, slapping my arms every now and then to scare the mosquitoes. By the time I reached Jenna’s house, the fireworks had started, cracking and popping over the lake. The side gate was propped open with a slab of concrete; from behind the house came loud music and laughing. It smelled like barbecue. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t been invited—no one would notice me. They never did. Maybe that’s why I went to the party in the first place. For that warm, unsettling feeling of fading into the background. Or simpler; masochism.

  Zap’s friends sat around a picnic table on the deck. He was probably in the crowd down by the water—the fireworks crackled red and blue and yellow, wilted trees over the lake, doubled in their reflections.

  I drained the warm champagne from my cup, thankful for the calm that came over me in its wake. I needed another drink. Jenna’s house was bright lights and marble, and I wound my way through the dining room, then the living room, in search of the kitchen.

  On the way, something stopped me. In a small, dimly lit hall off the dining room, animal sounds came from behind a cracked door.

  I knew what sex sounded like. I’d watched internet porn (albeit minimally). Soon, I would do it myself: only two months later, I would have sex with a nineteen-year-old named Jason who was staying in our hotel on our family vacation to Ohio. It would hurt, but I wouldn’t bleed. He would pull my hair. He’d make me leave right after because his parents were coming back from the casino. I would never hear from him again.

  I didn’t know what I’d find at the end of this unlit hall, but it would be personal, intimate. Something I wasn’t meant to see. I would f
ollow anyway, for the sake of it. That’s what I do. I push people. I make them angry. I do things no one wants.

  The door was cracked open, and I peered in through the half-inch sliver.

  They were on the bed.

  I recognized his toes. The second toes poked out farther than the big ones. And the calluses along the sides of his feet, from years of running in soccer cleats—flat and white, built up along Zap’s bones.

  Lucinda was perched on top, wearing only a pair of denim shorts. Her back was smooth. Her shoulder blades had ridges in all the right places, two flat pans covered in soft, doughy skin, and the flawless curve of her lower back. She was tiny around the middle, only a few inches thick in profile. She shook her hair out to the side and lengthened her back, brown nipples hard, cupcake breasts arched to the ceiling.

  Lucinda bent her head over him. Fast breathing. Gasps—a moan. Her hair was a sheet of gold as she bobbed up and down, her mouth sliding over him, her legs split to either side like she was going to devour Zap, consume his very being. It was almost pretty to watch. Like an absurdist painting of a crime scene: horrendous and exquisite, so much of both that you can’t look away.

  As Zap groaned under the spell of Lucinda Hayes, I stood behind the door, champagne sloshing in my gut, and thought: This is how it feels. This, here—her full lips wet around him, ice-tray teeth and warm tongue—this is how it feels to lose someone.

  Now, forty-five minutes after Lucinda’s funeral, Zap presses his palms to his eyes and I shift my weight in his bedroom doorway. There are plenty of things I want to say, but most of them are irrelevant.

  “How well did you know Lucinda?” I ask.

  “What do you mean?” he says.

  “I mean, you knew, right?”

  “Knew what?”

  “About her secret.”

  “Secret?” he asks.

  “About her and Mr. O.”

  “Come on.”

  “She was fucking the art teacher.”

  “Stop it,” he says.

  “I can see her bedroom window from mine. I can see everything.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not.”

  I regret this immediately. Partially because it’s a lie. Mostly because I derive a sick pleasure from the way his face contorts.

  This gives me a surging satisfaction, mingled with disappointment in myself and, of course, guilt. Ma always says I have serious inclinations toward sadism, and for the first time I understand what she means. Part of me did it to see if he would call me out. If he would say, You’re lying, Jade Dixon-Burns, because I know you. I’ve seen you. I remember you and you are a liar. But we’ve pulled very far apart—for the first time, probably ever, Zap takes my word at face value. He believes me.

  “You’re wrong,” Zap says halfheartedly. “It was that freak. That freak that always stood outside her window. I saw you two this morning, coming into the funeral. You’re trying to protect that pervert.”

  “Jade?” comes a quiet voice from behind. Mrs. Arnaud’s arms are crossed.

  “Thank you for coming over today,” she says, but it’s not in her usual husky voice. She’s heard me.

  I calculate the distance between me and Zap. It’s no more than five feet, but I swear, I’ve never felt further from someone. It’s like what Zap used to say about Alpha Centauri, the closest star in the sky. It looks so close, he would tell me, but did you know it’s actually 4.37 light-years from the earth?

  It should have ended a month before that Fourth of July. Late May, sophomore year. The same semester we built the fort.

  It was past midnight. I’d never gone to Zap like this before, and we were already beginning to fall apart, but I had a red stain in the shape of Ma’s palm ironed across my cheek and the acute sense that spending the night alone would crack something irreparable inside me. One of Ma’s fat rings had broken the skin just below my eye. I didn’t cry—salt water wouldn’t help.

  I’d stumbled to Zap’s house in a pair of broken flip-flops, drowning in self-pity and the memory of Ma’s vodka-laced voice. Useless little shit. I rubbed my arm where I knew it would bruise. I read somewhere that if you pushed hard enough on an unformed bruise you could stop it from flowering. This doesn’t work on me. My skin is too thin. Poor circulation.

  Zap answered the door in a black T-shirt and a pair of blue plaid boxer shorts. His skinny white legs stuck out the bottom. I rarely saw Zap’s knees; they were round and knobbly, naked outside the familiarity of his pants. He didn’t seem surprised to see me. He made a shushing motion, pointing upstairs. Mr. and Mrs. Arnaud were long asleep.

  We tiptoed up the creaky stairs and into the guest bathroom, which had a gold soap tray and embroidered towels. Zap clicked the door shut and flicked on the lights—the bulbs were harsh. Hot on my face.

  “My God, Jay,” he whispered. “What did she do to you?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Doesn’t even hurt.”

  I poked the small cut under my eye to show him how much it didn’t hurt, but my finger came away bloody. When I sucked on the nail, I tasted iron.

  “Jesus,” he said, pulling one of the embroidered towels off the rack and running a corner under the faucet.

  “Don’t,” I said, when he tried to lift the spotless white towel to my face. “Your parents will notice.”

  “Here.” Zap pulled his black T-shirt over his head. The static made his hair stand on end. “I have a million of these. We’ll just throw it out, okay?”

  He wet the sleeve and pressed it to the lacerated skin. The fabric was cool.

  “It was the TV remote,” I said. “I got the wrong batteries.”

  “What?”

  “Ma freaked out. Said she’d given me specific instructions, and if I couldn’t get a pair of fucking double A batteries how was I supposed to do anything? I told her to stick the triple As in her vibrator.”

  Zap opened his mouth the way he did when he laughed really hard, though he wasn’t laughing.

  “I don’t need your pity,” I said.

  “It’s not pity,” he said. “I’m just worried.”

  We stood in the midnight glow of the vanity lightbulbs that lined the bathroom mirror, and he pressed the cloth against my face. I’d seen Zap shirtless plenty of times, at the pool in the summer. He looked more naked here. I’d never noticed the way his skin changed color from his neck to his chest. A ripening peach.

  “What’s this?” His hands moved to my arm.

  A straight red line branded across my bicep, already purpling.

  “The upstairs banister.”

  Zap ran a thumb over the tender skin, shaking his head. It wasn’t disbelief—he expected this from Ma. We both did.

  “Do you still want to leave here?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Remember? You said we would move away. Go to New York.”

  “I remember.”

  Zap’s thumb wandered my arm, roving over goose bumps so softly I looked down to make sure I wasn’t imagining it. I wasn’t. His thumb was there, his nail clean and neatly cut, knuckle wrinkled in folds.

  Zap had three chest hairs. I’d never noticed them before. His stomach was a slate, his torso a triangle. A trail of hesitant fuzz crept from the seam of his boxer shorts, painting a straight line to his belly button. For the first time, I recognized Zap for what he was: a man.

  We both watched his hand crawl up my arm. The heat. The surface of his fingers slid up my shoulder and across my collarbone, into the hollow of my neck, up to the base of my skull until he was holding my jaw with gentle cupped hands that didn’t know where to go from there. His fingers shook. Small earthquakes.

  I’d never touched someone like that. I explored his waistband, tentative. He pressed against my stomach with parts of his body I knew existed but had never considered. And then we were all hands, all motion, breathing too fast, not knowing how to move forward or back. I pulled my shirt over my head. Unclasped my bra. I stood there in
my jeans and flip-flops, letting Zap see all the parts I could hardly bear to look at myself. The bathroom mirror taunted me, but I wouldn’t look, for fear I’d start crying. I reached into his shorts and held him, stiff and heavy, silk in my palm.

  Zap stopped. He opened his mouth, like he couldn’t figure out how to push us back to a moment before all this, a moment before we were both unclothed in the bathroom and he was hard in cotton boxer shorts—he couldn’t figure out how to tell me he hadn’t meant for this to happen.

  I hadn’t meant for this to happen, either. He never gave me the chance to say it.

  “Jay,” he said. “We can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t . . .”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  That was enough.

  For a long time following, I’d repeat these words to everyone I could, if only to wear them out, wring them of meaning. Take out the trash. I don’t want to. Ms. Dixon-Burns, why don’t you write the answer on the board? I don’t want to. Take your sister to school. I don’t want to. Talk to me, please, Jade, I’m only trying to understand you. I don’t want to.

  And that night, before I stormed out the front door with my bra unhooked. Please, just put your clothes back on. I don’t want to. Don’t you understand? I don’t want that. I don’t. I don’t want to.

  Cameron

  Things Cameron Wondered as He Stood Outside The Hayeses’ House at 3:37 p.m.:

  1. How do you know if you deserve the world’s sympathy?

  In his memory, Lucinda stood at the Thorntons’ kitchen sink.

  From Cameron’s spot behind the oak tree, Lucinda was framed in the oval pane. She watched her own reflection as she washed dishes, baby Ollie crawling across the kitchen floor, sucking a plastic block, while the old gray dog gnawed a slobbery toy in the corner. Lucinda wore a tight athletic shirt: her ribs curved out like a pair of wings sewn tactfully to a caterpillar’s body. Once, Cameron read that no two butterfly wings were the same, and this made him want to feel Lucinda’s unique contours.