Beautiful (3 page)

I am on the ground. I am looking up at James's giant moon head and he is not laughing. He is looking at me like I have done something wrong, like I am not Cassie the Beautiful Seventh Grader, and all of a sudden none of this is funny and I want to cry.

“What did you do to her?” he says to Alex. He is angry. He is going to hurt us.

“What do you mean?” she says, and for some reason I hate her. I grab her hand anyway and she pulls it away, and I know I am supposed to stay on the ground.

“What the fuck did you do to her?” He is holding her by the shoulders. He is shaking her hard. Her head rolls around.

“Ow,” she says, like she is starting to think about not laughing.

“You ruined her, you fucking bitch. You ruined her,” is what he says, like it is the worst line from the worst movie ever made. I cannot hear what they say anymore because my ears are full of dirt. I can feel the ground and I wish it were mud so I could roll around in it, so I could be covered in brown. I could run away and be invisible in the dark. I could live in the trees and no one would find me. I am planning this. I am taking notes in my head to remember later. I don't know what I will eat, but I've heard there are people who eat worms, bugs, rodents. I will eat these things. I will need nothing.

I cannot hear but I can see Alex talking her way out of something. I can see James calming down like she's got a spell on him. I can see her giving him the other piece of acid she did not give me, and he is putting it in his mouth and smiling with his big, straight, sparkling teeth. I see all of this, but all I hear is the dirt crunching in my ears and
you ruined her
over and over. I don't know what it means, but I like the sound of it. It sounds like a movie, dramatic and important, and I am dramatic and important and worthy of having a movie made about me. There are people who will pay money to watch me get ruined. I am on the ground and can't get up and I feel like a movie star, the beautiful, tragic
kind of movie star whose life ends too soon, whose death makes people remember them as brilliant.

James looks at me like I am something salvageable, like the something that got ruined is still there somewhere. He helps me up and says, “So you're not so straight,” and I say, “No,” even though I still didn't know what that means. And he says, “How are you feeling?” and I feel my feet leave the ground and the air in my lungs feels heavy and warm and full of mud, and he says, “I took some, too. I'll be like you soon.”

The boys from the lunch table are shadows on the other side of the empty yard, watching and grinning like they know something I don't. They are drinking something brown out of a bottle and smoking something that does not smell like cigarettes. I am supposed to walk now but what I want more than anything in the world is to lie on the ground and look up and feel like I am at the bottom of something.

There are stairs a mile long that lead up to a deck with nothing on it. I hear my steps echo on the wood and I am waking up the whole neighborhood. There's a door that leads into a sci-fi kitchen, all shiny silver chrome with knobs and levers, the kind of kitchen in the magazines Mom buys, the kind of kitchen on the shows about rich people. The boys and Alex are here somewhere, but I do not see them. They are in the sink. They are hiding in cupboards. They are not in the
refrigerator that is cold and full of boxes of takeout, a door full of condiments. There is a block of cheese with blue spots, and another that is round and dusty. I hold them in my hands and watch them melt through my fingers, staining my skin with the smell of feet that will never wash off.

James says, “What are you doing?” and I say, “Nothing,” and he slaps my hand for handling the cheese, the fascinating cheese with names in different languages. He says I have to leave the kitchen. He says we can only be downstairs. It is pitch-black and I cannot hear the sound of my footsteps. Downstairs is his floor, his entire floor. Downstairs is his bedroom. I can make out a Ping-Pong table. My feet feel expensive carpet. My fingers do not feel a light switch.

He tells the boys to stay. He tells them we need to talk. They laugh and I laugh and I don't know what I'm laughing at but it is laughter and it feels better than the slap on my hand and the smell of the cheese and the cold steel refrigerator and the kitchen that is never cooked in. The boys sit on the couch and one of them farts and the other ones laugh. Alex opens drawers and touches things. James does not slap her hand. He is busy leading me into his room at the end of the hall. There is already music playing.

His walls are white brick. They are not real. They are the Pink Floyd album cover like my dad has. Painted, professional,
commissioned by parents who are not here. The walls are dripping because I am on acid. He is not yet on acid. The tab is still on his tongue, dissolving, tasting like spit wad.

I'm thirteen and I'm on acid. He's fifteen and he will be on acid soon. I'm on his bed and under The Wall and listening to Pink Floyd. I do not know why James listens to music my dad likes. I do not know why I am looking at his stereo, the real kind, with different levels stacked on top of each other and blinking lights—green, red—with speakers as big as I am, playing Pink Floyd and reminding me of snow.

He is wearing a baseball cap and I want it off his head. It makes him look like a normal boy. I want his hat off because he is not that kind of boy. I would not be on my back like this for that kind of boy.

I pull off his baseball cap because I need him to be someone else. His hair is flat and straight like a girl's and falls into his eyes. He takes the hat out of my hand and puts it back on his head. He says, “Stop it,” and I laugh, and I do it again and he grabs it again and I think it's a game but he does not, and he says, “Fucking stop it,” and pins my wrist onto the bed, and I stop it. Then his tongue goes in my mouth and this is nothing like a first kiss is supposed to be.

Alex opens the door and says, “Can I use the phone?” James waves his hand and I can't tell if he's giving her permission or
shooing her away, but she comes in and sits on his desk and picks up the phone and starts dialing. He takes off his hat because it is getting in the way of our faces and I know better than to ask why it's okay if he does it now but not when I wanted him to, and I cannot see what he looks like now because I'm closing my eyes.

Alex is on the phone talking to everyone she knows. I can feel her sitting on the desk next to the stereo blinking red and green, stop, go, and James's tongue is in my mouth and it tastes like something dusty, small, darting around and hitting my teeth like it's looking for a way to get inside me, a trapdoor, searching for something hidden and unlocked. And Alex is watching and telling everyone she knows, “Cassie's on the bed with James and they're slurping.” She keeps saying “slurping” and it sounds like something ugly, and her cackle ricochets off the wall, the white bricks like the album cover, and it is too loud in here, it is too bright, and the slurping makes spit and the spit makes choking and I close my mouth and lock his tongue out and he says, “Get the fuck out, bitch,” and I think he's talking to me, but Alex cackles and hangs up the phone and James says, “Turn off the lights,” and she does, and “Close the door,” and she does, and my teeth open and his tongue goes inside and I try to keep up but I have no idea what I'm doing and I'm scared because it's just me and him and I can't
see anything but the green and red lights, and he's the only one who knows his way around here in the dark.

There's a mouth on mine and teeth scraping and I'm thinking of cheese. I'm thinking, why does expensive cheese stink? I'm thinking of my stubbly armpits that he's touching with his big hands. The sound of a zipper unzipping. The sound of Pink Floyd. And I'm thinking of snow. I'm thinking of driving fast through it, nothing but white shiny sometimes texture, patterns that shift and cackle because the sky is cloudy and the shadows are lying. And I'm wearing a white cotton bra that is not a bad-girl bra. He laughs. He says, “Is this a training bra?” and I look at the lights—red, green—and they tell me nothing about what I should answer. So I shrug as well as I can shrug with his body on top of mine and my right arm under his hot hand and my left arm not wanting to move at all and my shoulders cold and shuddering under Pink Floyd snow.

His fingers are inside me and I am trying to make my mouth move. I feel something that feels like sickness, something all through my body, like poison slowly filling me up. I don't know if my mouth is moving because I can't feel anything except the poison. There is something running in my brain. I cannot see it but I know it is coming. I can feel the pounding of the footsteps shaking everything. I hear pants unzipping, somewhere far away, and I don't know how long this is
supposed to take but I hope it is fast because I want to go home. I want this feeling to stop. I want to give him what he wants and leave. I want to leave Alex out there with nothing to sit on. I want to leave the lunch-table boys to their farting and drinking. I want to leave James with his hat and his hair and his hands and his tongue and his wall and his stereo saying stop, go, directions that I do not hear.

Something in the other room crashes. He says, “Fuck,” and runs out the door without zipping up his pants. I feel myself floating without the weight of him on my body. I hear the boys yelling and Alex cackling, and the CD is over and it's definitely time to go. I zip up my pants and put on my bra. I put on my shirt tangled in sheets. I walk out of the bedroom. I feel the ghosts of his fingers inside me.

There's a vase broken on the floor. James is yelling at the boy with the bottle in his hand. The other boys are burning each other with the hot metal on their lighters. Alex is sitting on the couch and looking at me like,
“Well?”

“I'm going home,” I tell her, and my voice sounds far away.

“No, you're not,” she says.

“It's past my curfew,” I lie.

“Did you guys do it yet?” she asks. I shake my head. “You have to stay a little longer. You have to stay until you do.”

“I have to go home. I'll call you tomorrow.”

I walk toward the door. James stops yelling and says, “Aren't you going to spend the night?”

The boys say, “Aren't you going to spend the night?”

Alex says, “Yeah,” and I say nothing and all of them are looking at me like my life depends on what I do now, and everything is quiet and waiting and I want to run. “I have a curfew,” I say. It is the closest thing I can say to something I'm not allowed to say, something not “No,” not “I want to go,” not “I don't want to be in your bed, not with your dripping walls, not with your hat on or off, not with you touching me, not with your fingers inside me or anything else from your body.” I cannot say that. I cannot say anything close to true, just “I have a curfew” and James's hands are on my waist, pulling, his voice sick sweet: “Come on, baby.” Alex's voice: “Wait.” The lunch-table boys: “Cock tease.” My voice tiny, inaudible: “I have a curfew,” again and again, and his hands are pushing me away and his voice is hard: “What are you, a little girl?” Alex: “Jesus, Cassie.” The lunch-table boys: “Cock tease. Little girl.”

Yes, I am a little girl. I am nothing you want. I am leaving. I am walking out the sliding glass door that doesn't slide so well and across the dirt yard, down the hill, and across the train tracks, to the marina and through the shadows of masts
of sailboats. The bench isn't comfortable. The bathroom is closed. There is nowhere to hide and stop and breathe. The lake is pockmarked with little tsunamis. Bells ring. Seagulls sleep.

I run up the hill away from the lake, past the rows of three-car garages, past the restaurant with the fifteen-dollar salads, past so many red and green lights. I run home to the apartment by the train tracks, darker even than the mansion by the lake. There are no leather couches, no smelly cheeses, no kitchens from magazines, no Ping-Pong tables, no Pink Floyd or expensive wall paintings. There is only black air and black shapes that make no sound. There is only my room and everything put exactly where it's supposed to be. There is my bed and my desk and my clothes and my books and a note from Alex still creased from elaborate foldings.

I will not sleep. I will sit here biting my nails until they bleed. I will look out the window at the black trees that used to be green. I will listen to the sounds the ghosts make. I will sit here in this dark and not remember anything. This is my place. Dark. A cave. Not a square house at the end of a gravel driveway. Not an island, rain-drenched, clouded with green. Those are not the skyscraper trees that talked behind my back. They do not whisper about the barefoot girl who is always alone. I am not the girl. She does not
have a plastic shovel. It is not the weekend and my father is not home and my parents are not outside tearing up the earth and pretending to grow things. I am not wearing rubber boots or carrying a plastic shovel or asking Mom how to grow things, asking Dad how to grow things. No one is saying “Not now.” No one is tearing up the earth. The trees aren't laughing.

I am not trying to sink in mud puddles. I am not telling the earth, “Take me.” I am not dreaming of quicksand and earthquakes and monsters that steal me in the night. I am too old for pretend games, too old for Barbies, too old to take them into the forest and drown them in the stream, too old to tell them there is no one to save them and watch their still, serene faces covered with water, not scared, not fighting back, no screams coming out of their little painted mouths. There are no dolls. There is no girl. There are no parents building bonfires to destroy the things they uncover, no roots, no weeds, no blackberry bushes, no things with thorns, not left to burn, not left to grow unattended. I am not the girl with the fire or the shovel. This is not my forest. These are not my doll parts burning, not my legs, my arms, my head, my smooth pink torso. I am not watching them melt, not watching their perfect plastic faces turn grotesque. Smoke is not chasing me and making my eyes sweat. My eyes
are not burning. I am not crying. I am not standing behind my mother and she is not facing the wall and she is not saying, “Smoke follows beauty.”