Girl in Snow Read online

  “My mom’s been such a bitch lately,” Ronnie said. “Menopause or something. That girl shit makes me want to kill myself. Can you imagine? Bleeding out your pisshole every month.”

  Cameron didn’t think it was their pissholes they bled from. Mom had explained it once, but any discussion of female anatomy was dangerous around Ronnie, who truly didn’t care whether Cameron talked or not.

  They sat on the swings, popping open cans of Mountain Dew with cracks, bubbles, hisses of cool steam. Ronnie pulled out his cell phone, squinting as he typed a text message. Ronnie had his own cell phone, one of the first kids at school to be so lucky. A green Razr flip phone, sleek and sophisticated. Cameron didn’t like to be around people who texted without his own piece of plastic to shield him. We already have a phone at home, Mom said. We don’t need anything fancy. She finally bought a cell phone for emergencies, but the battery was never charged.

  “This playground sucks,” Ronnie said, putting the phone back in his pocket. “Do you remember when we were kids and we had to play on this shit? It looks so sad. God, though, I could get used to scheduled naps and arts and crafts again.”

  Cameron faked a laugh. He looked at the mountains. They loomed on the outskirts of town, persistent shadows that stood and watched. The mountains probably found it all amusing, these families in their beige houses lined up on the street like stationary soldiers. The mountains made Cameron feel so scrubby.

  “And Beth DeCasio! During art class, do you remember? She’d paint those watercolor pictures of horses that looked like Satan. Swear to God, if I could get my hands on one of those now, I’d worship it like the fucking devil. Beth got hot this summer, didn’t she?”

  “I guess.”

  “Her tits look like water balloons. You could just pop ’em.”

  Ronnie had bitten his fingernails down to ten circular bumps, red at the edges and brown underneath. Now, he used them to scratch off a flaking piece of scalp.

  “How would you fuck her?” Ronnie asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  Cameron had never thought about fucking Beth DeCasio. Not that she wasn’t pretty. Beth DeCasio was very pretty, with her shiny black hair and tight tank tops and the way she walked in small skirts.

  “You know,” Ronnie said. “Like, doggie style? Rough? Passionate? Sensual?”

  Last year, Mom found the porn magazine in the top drawer of Cameron’s dresser. It was the three-year-old issue of Playboy Ronnie had stolen from his dad. The issue with Rayna Rae in the center, legs spread—Cameron spent hours wondering about the pink between her legs, so slippery and rubbery, something you’d want to touch just to see how it would feel.

  Cameron came home from school to the magazine, open on the coffee table and covered in sticky notes dictating the portions Mom disapproved of. You can’t expect women to look like this. You see the shape here? She paid thousands of dollars for those breasts. They had a long talk about changing bodies and the objectification of women and Cameron couldn’t remember the rest of the conversation. He hadn’t looked at Mom once throughout the entirety of the talk, because this was the most shameful and miserable and embarrassing moment of his life. When it was over, Mom didn’t hug him or kiss him on the forehead. She took one step toward him, hesitated, and turned around, murmuring something about dinner in twenty minutes to mask the fact that Mom and Cameron were changing.

  She was a woman. He was a man. This would always exist between them. She could lecture him all she wanted—about fake breasts and loving people gently, differently—but all this aside, neither of them had any control over what kind of man Cameron turned out to be.

  Cameron had just watched internet porn for the first time, and it made him want to cry. Those shiny women—their springy bodies that went smack, smack, smack. He watched with a tingling and urgent fascination. It wasn’t love, he knew, because love was not supposed to hurt anyone, but it felt somehow related. It rose like love, it swelled. Sex. Mystery of mysteries. The biggest hurt.

  “Doggie style,” Cameron answered.

  “My mom reads Cosmo,” Ronnie said. “There’s some seriously kinky shit in there. I mean, you gotta see it; I’ll bring it to school tomorrow. This one article talks about how you should freeze fruit and run it down a girl’s body—like, can you imagine a frozen fucking banana . . .?”

  There was an oak tree on the right side of the fence that separated the playground from the Thorntons’ yard. Even from the distance of the swing set, the bark curved in a way Cameron wanted to remember, burying its roots in the ground and snaking up like vertebrae climbing toward the base of a neck. The oak looked hundreds of years old, out of place in the painted metal playground, grinning and jeering at him, crying and pleading with him, touching Cameron in places he had not been touched before.

  “Let’s be real though,” Ronnie said. “Beth wouldn’t fuck either of us, would she?”

  The wet wind pushed the branches to the left, blowing damp green leaves onto the Thorntons’ lawn.

  Ronnie bit the end of the Bic, and ink bled blue all the way down his chin.

  Jade

  “You’re late,” Aunt Nellie says.

  “Sorry.” I don’t sound very convincing.

  “You hear about that girl?” Aunt Nellie says. She stands behind the concierge desk, hands on her hips. Her eternal post. I swear, Aunt Nellie will die behind that desk someday, with a handful of Life Savers Mints stuffed in her uniform pocket.

  “What?”

  “The dead girl.”

  “Yeah, of course I have. Everyone’s talking about it.”

  “You think he did it? That neighbor boy of hers?”

  “No,” I say. “I don’t think he did.”

  “Well, you’re one of the few. Anyway, you’re late, and the guest for Room 208 is waiting to check in. Hop to it.”

  After cleaning Room 208 (where someone has crushed a trail of M&Ms into the carpet), I take my break behind the kitchen dumpsters.

  Melissa, the housekeeping manager, only lets you take breaks if you’re a smoker. This seems backwards to me, but I own a single pack of Virginia Slims for this purpose. I forgot them today. I wind through the kitchen and mime a smoking signal: Melissa wears a hairnet as she unpacks grocery-store croissants from the freezer, preparing for the morning’s continental breakfast. She nods permission. Sometimes she’ll join me outside, and I’ll light one up just for show, but I always end up coughing my brains out. Last time, I nearly puked in the rot-lined dumpster after Melissa had gone in for a room-service call.

  I’ve stashed a Coke in my apron pocket to get me through the last two hours of this shift. Tonight feels particularly desolate. Cars whoosh by on the highway across from the hotel; garbage wind wafts over me. When I came outside, the sun was still glowing amber over the foothills. Now, I can barely see its forehead. I crack open the can of Coke and lean against the wall.

  Halfway through the can, I notice that I have company.

  Querida stands a few feet away, shimmering in the kitchen light that filters through the open door. I clear my throat, announcing myself in the shadows.

  “Ah,” she says. “You scared me.”

  “Sorry,” I stammer.

  Querida’s jeans tent over her calves in an outdated bell bottom. Her waist bulges a bit beneath a zip-up sweat shirt. She has an accent—I’ve never heard her speak before. Spanish, maybe.

  “Is it okay if I smoke here?” she says, though she’s already flicking a lighter. She tosses a tangle of long black hair over her shoulder and inhales, shoulders slumping as smoke fills her lungs.

  “Do you want one?” she says, passing me the pack.

  “No, thanks,” I say, and take a sip of flat soda.

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

  A Screenplay by Jade Dixon-Burns

  EXT. HOTEL—NIGHT

  Celly stands by the dumpsters behind the building, the highway just feet away. Cars whoosh by, a noise like a sea. Celly takes a
drag of a cigarette and exhales the smoke coolly. WOMAN (28, beautiful) stands beside her.

  CELLY

  Will you tell me how it feels?

  WOMAN

  I’m sorry?

  Celly blows a thin line of smoke away from Woman, then turns to face her.

  CELLY

  To be loved like that. How it feels. I can’t imagine.

  “I am sorry?”

  “What?”

  “Did you say something?” Querida exhales a plume of smoke from the pursed corner of her mouth.

  “No, I—”

  “You asked how it feels.”

  “Oh,” I say. “I mean, how does it feel to be loved like that? Like you and that guy upstairs?”

  I can’t believe I’ve actually asked her such an idiotic question, this pretty woman in casual jeans, cloaked in her misty aura. Lust. Querida takes another drag; I wish I’d accepted a cigarette. I feel like a child, swirling around the last sip of flat Coke in a can.

  “Wow,” she says, with a laugh. “This is a question.”

  “Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “No,” she says. “It is okay. If I am being very honest, I have not thought enough about it. I’ll let you know later, okay?”

  She drops her cigarette on the filthy pavement and stamps out the flame. Pulls her sweat shirt tight and retreats back into her sparkling heart-pound world.

  “What’d you bring me today?” Howie asks.

  Howie wears a peeling visor and an Ann Arbor sweat shirt he found last January. He leans against his shopping cart, legs crossed, jiggling one bare foot. The first time I saw Howie’s feet, I nearly vomited—they’re swollen. Cracked. So black with grime you can barely distinguish his toes.

  “Sorry,” I say to Howie. “Slim pickings.”

  I hand him a block of cheddar cheese, the cheap kind that comes by the prepackaged pound. It’s practically plastic, the sort of cheese the patrons of the Hilton Ranch won’t miss. Howie is well acquainted with the lost, back-end contents of the Hilton Ranch’s walk-in refrigerator: the half tub of olives I brought last Thursday, the still-frozen breakfast croissants from the Thursday before.

  Howie pulls his cheek to the side with one swollen finger, using his molars to bite into the naked hunk of cheese. Like a sneer. Saliva leaks from the corner of his mouth into his crusty beard.

  “Why do you eat like that?”

  “Doesn’t hurt as much. You wouldn’t know. All that money your grandma paid for your teeth could feed me for a year, little Celly.”

  Howie thinks my name is Celeste—call me Celly. I am an orphan living with my ailing grandmother in the hills (my parents were killed in a tragic car accident). I am nineteen, and engaged to be married to the love of my life. I justify these stories with canned artichokes—like if I leave some offering, I’m allowed to lie.

  “Come sit,” he says.

  “That’s okay.”

  I sat on Howie’s blanket once, last winter. After a few minutes, he reached one nubby finger beneath my ski jacket and into the waistband of my jeans.

  “You hear about that girl?” he says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Pretty girl, she was,” he says. “I saw her picture in the paper. They came talking to me, but I don’t know nothing about her. Pretty girl, she was; pretty girl, I told them. But you know, Celly, my little Celly-girl, she’s got nothing on you.” Howie’s gaze travels from my neck to my boots. His eyelids droop.

  This awful habit: trying to see myself through other people’s eyes. This is probably why I visit Howie on Thursdays, adding half a mile to my commute home from the Hilton Ranch. Around the back end of the suburb, past the small patch of forest, is the library, Howie’s shield from wind and snow. I park Ma’s car down the street even though half the time Howie’s eyes are shut and when they’re open it’s impossible to know what he sees.

  “How’s your Ed-ward?” Howie asks. He licks his lips with a glazed, lazy hunger.

  “Actually,” I say, “I have big news. Edouard and I are leaving in a few months. We’re moving to Paris together before the wedding.”

  “Paris, eh?” he says. “Paris, Paris, Par-eee. That’s great for you, Celly; that’s great for you, my Celly-girl.”

  I wish I wasn’t such a good goddamn liar. I swear, for the rest of my life I’ll remember how Howie looks now: huddled in the shadow of his shopping cart, gnawing the block of cheese I stole from the Hilton Ranch, swaying back and forth, lost in some fantasy.

  Maybe he’s picturing me, in love, in front of the Eiffel Tower. Maybe this makes him both happy and jealous. This might be what I came for.

  Then I see it: a painting. It rests between Howie’s shopping cart and the graffitied wall of the library. The bottom is browned and muddy from snow. But even then, her ankles—a ballerina. She’s lacing up her shoes. It’s Lucinda’s Degas, the same image she printed out and taped to the front of her notebook. Not hers, of course. Its long-lost twin.

  “Where’d you get that?” I ask, but he’s nodding off, out of it. “Howie, where did you get that painting?”

  “Found it,” he says, and his chin lolls against his chest. His eyes sink closed.

  The surrounding night feels all-encompassing, so thick it could swallow me. For the first time, I wonder if I’ve spoken with him—Lucinda’s killer, whoever he is. If I’ve sat across from him and had normal conversations, both of us ignorant to the dark in each other. Cameron. Howie. Zap. Anyone. Me, and my stupid spell. I think of the man from Modern Witchcraft, hanging from the ceiling in a house of locked doors. Lucinda, holding her Degas notebook. You don’t even know him; he’s not crazy. And Cameron, standing on her lawn just minutes before she was smacked so hard that she fell and cracked her neck. And of course, Chapter Two: “Signs from the Dead.”

  The Image.

  A chilly wind slithers between Howie and me. I blow on my hands to warm them. I don’t bother to say good-bye, because Howie is gone, burrowed deep in his demented mind. I slide back into Ma’s freezing car. The simple rumble of its engine is a relief, company. And me? I am glass. A bristle. A stutter.

  They’re at the dinner table. Terry has three cans of beer in front of him, which means the meal has already progressed into argument. Amy sits on the couch, curled up with a plate in her lap, earbuds in and bopping her head to her Discman, which is probably playing Kelly Clarkson. The house smells vaguely like Indian food.

  “Look who it is,” Ma says from the head of the table. Her lips are stained purple with wine. She sips from a mug with a snowman on it. Presumably, the wineglasses are dirty. “Glad you decided to join us.”

  “I was working at the hotel,” I say. “Like I do every Thursday.”

  Ma is drunk. She runs her fingers through her frizzy, dyed hair, preening for an audience. When Ma is drunk, she stares at her own reflection in the kitchen window, puckering her lips, batting her eyelashes. Ready for her debut.

  Terry tilts his beer can to examine its contents. This is his way of avoiding confrontation: Pick at the lint on your shirt. Scratch at a spot on the table. If no one notices you’re alive, maybe you aren’t, and maybe that’s for the best.

  Ma hates when I call him Terry. But there’s no reason to call him “Dad,” even though he is my biological father. He’s home at nine every night and gone by six the next morning, always wearing some version of the same short-sleeved button-down, floating through the house like a ghost or an old Labrador.

  When things get bad with Ma, Terry slinks up the stairs. He fakes yawns. His eyes rove over the bruises on our arms—Goodnight, girls, he says, and instead of looking at us he fiddles with the glossy fountain pens in his shirt pocket.

  “You missed it,” Amy says, pulling out an earbud and twisting it around her pointer finger. She looks smug. “The neighbors have been calling all night. Apparently they have a lead. They’re arresting someone at Jefferson High.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know, but Zap has bee
n in for questioning.”

  “What?” I ask. “They’re arresting Zap?”

  Amy shrugs and puts the earbud back in. Ma takes a gulp of wine, twirling a strand of hair with long plastic nails. The smell of Howie’s clothing is still in my nose, mingling with hours-old Indian takeout.

  “Your food’s in the fridge,” Terry says.

  “You can heat it up yourself,” Ma adds.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  Upstairs, I leave my lights off.

  The bottle is on the top shelf of my closet, underneath a baby blanket Ma is too sentimental to touch. I’ve only got about three inches left, because half the bottle was payment to Howie for buying. I don’t like the taste of rum, but I don’t drink for the taste. And I don’t drink much. It’s only for nights like tonight. I twist off the top and take as much as I can, trying to usher it past my tongue, straight down my throat. It runs south. Moments like these, I morph into the spitting image of Ma; my hands just like hers, clutching the neck of a bottle. These are the moments I feel sorry for her.

  I slump against the closet door and wait to feel better. Guilt isn’t something I feel often. It’s a pointless emotion—completely unproductive. I hate the way guilt festers, then absorbs.

  I try to remember the Cameron I saw at the cafeteria table today, so lonely. Or the Cameron from the principal’s office yesterday, pressing his hair down over his forehead, fragile and nervous. Both of these images end in that of Zap, cuffs rattling on his wrists, hands behind his back.

  Guilt reminds me: Cameron was a shadow shaped like a boy the night Lucinda died. She pried her bedroom window open and Cameron stayed, motionless, as Lucinda climbed to the roof of the porch. She jumped, landing on her hands and feet, crouched, a few feet from where he stood.

  Wherever she is now, Lucinda knows this. The Image. She’s asking me something. But she should know by now—girls like me don’t answer to girls like Lucinda Hayes.