The Bargaining (2 page)

Matches.

It's like nobody else is even here. Like you're alone in your own little world.

“And to hell with the rest of you.” I finish Pop's thought.

I slide the box open and lay down on my bed for the night, rolling the thin sticks between my fingers.

The worst whooping I ever got was the night I set the lawn on fire. I cried so hard my throat burned for three days afterward. But that's what Pop never understood. It's not about doing whatever I want. It's about control.

And even he can't control fire.

Now I let myself light just one match. There are only four, and I don't want to burn through them all. Not if I'm going to be here all night.

The house leans against a stiff gust of wind outside, its frame crying out, and I remind myself I'm the only one in the woods.

I'm alone.

I curl up with a moldy sheet and think about my brother. I don't mean to, but he drops into my brain before I can make him go away, and all I can do is stare at his face until he finally opens his mouth.

“I shouldn't be here,” he says to me, and I try to remember him ever actually talking to me that way. Like I was ever somebody he would talk to at all.

“So go home then,” I say, just wanting to sleep. “You're the only one they care about anyway.” Dreams never end well for me. They just waste good hours of nothingness.

“I can now,” he says, giving me a look like he's . . .

“Sorry,” he says. Like he's sorry.

I try to ask him what he means, but he turns around and starts walking away. The back of his head and everything below it are covered in mud and leaves, like he's been snoozing in the dirt for the last six months.

He's walking toward a road overgrown by shrubs and ­tangled branches. Just before he rounds the corner, he turns back to me, his face flat and pale.

“I think this is where loneliness grows,” he says, and makes it to the last tree in the road before turning one more time.

“It stops hurting eventually,” he says.

And he disappears behind the last tree, the road swallowing him up.

Then the trees fold over themselves, erasing the road and the light that shone down on it, their branches tangling and writhing like snakes lunging for the last remaining rat, thickening the air and knotting the ground until they're at my feet, climbing beneath the legs of my pants, binding my arms and my chest and prying my mouth open, piercing my eyes and devouring me where I stand.

I wake under the moldy sheet in the old house, the light from the moon finding the tiny moth-eaten holes and spilling silver rays on the mattress.

Dreams. Such a goddamn waste.

But my heart is still acting like it wants out of my chest, and maybe that's because I can barely breathe under this stupid sheet.

I start to pull it away, but when I hear tapping on the window, I stop.

A branch.

But that doesn't make me feel better, the memory of my dream too close to the edge of my waking mind.

Then the tapping sounds more like thudding on the glass. More like a sharp knuckle rapping.

I hold still, warning my heart against abandoning me.

When I hear the window slide open, my stupid heart stays where it is, and at first I think it's playing dead, a possum behind my ribs.

But then I hear dragging, and my heart beats back to life long enough for me to drop the sheet and strike one precious match to burn the sharp, dragging knuckle straight to hell.

Before it takes me.

1

Spring 2013

T
HE INK ON THE BATHROOM
stall door is a rainbow of ­degradation.

“Amanda and Jay 4Ever” in purple.

“Amanda Ziegler is a str8 up SLUT!” in blue.

“U don't even know her!” in green.

“The whole basketball team knows her!” in orange.

Amanda Ziegler was before my time, so I only know her as the third stall from the left. She might have been a math genius. A prodigy. A jock. A tortured artist.

She could have been my best friend.

But her legacy is str8 up SLUT, sealed in blue ink, written into the record forever. Or until they renovate the girls' bathroom.

The bell rings. The sound of thirty doors opening at
once, the sound of a thousand pairs of rubber and cork soles squeaking and thumping against the linoleum in the hallway. I count time this way now. Mom says I'm languishing, but she has no idea how much work it takes to account for all that movement around me. Two pairs of feet approach the door to the bathroom.

One two.

One two.

Then they push inside.

“But do you think she was high when it happened?”

“Of course she was high. Major tweaker. You know how I had biology lab with her my sophomore year? She told me she'd sneak into my house and stab my eyes out with a scalpel if I looked at her. I swear to God. I wasn't even looking at her! Well, a little, but you know, when you act like a total psycho, you really just want attention.”

“You're so rude.”

“Whatever. I'm just telling the truth. I'm not going to be all fake now and make her out to be some misunderstood saint, like some people.”

“You know Alex's cousin, C. J.? The smart one who goes to Truman? He was there. He told Alex all they found was one of her shoes.”

“Shut up.”

“There was, like, a coyote den nearby or something.”

“Gross!”

“And apparently there was some major drama going down before she wandered off.”

“If Rae Fenwick was involved, there was definite drama.”

“Yeah, but I guess she totally threw down with that girl, Penny.”

“No way . . . I thought they were all besties forever.”

I can only seem to focus on one sense at a time. Watch this now. Listen to that later. Too much, and I'll experience massive sensory overload, and wouldn't that be horrendous? For my brain to explode? For me to be found in the very same stall where Amanda Ziegler was immortalized as the tragic slut she maybe never was, beneath an air conditioning vent that's sputtering to its breaking point?

I watch these girls I've never even met as they devour each new revelation, drops of my life smeared across their lips.

I watch their mouths move through the crack in the door, how they form my name, form Rae's name. Only after they've stopped moving do I hear what they say.

Air pants through the vent above me like a protective dog trying to drown out the sound of their talking. But the air conditioner coughs a dying breath before quitting, and sound reaches me eventually.

“You lying heifer, there's no way that's true.”

“I swear to God. Dragged off by wild dogs. It's maybe, like, the worst way ever to die.”

I push out of Amanda Ziegler's stall and move to the sink, washing my hands even though I don't need to. I only came in here for a little quiet, and now this place is louder than the halls outside. I'd rather count a million steps from a million feet than listen to one more word in this tiny room.

One of the girls clears her throat, and I can feel them both staring at me in the mirror, waiting for me to give them something more to snack on.

It's what I'm supposed to do. Girls like me feed conversations in bathrooms.

I shake the water from my hands. I focus on my own reflection. Same charcoal sweater I put on today, slouching off my shoulder, a neon yellow bra strap exposed, skinny gray jeans. Short brown hair, gray eyes, Asphalt Magic eye shadow. It's still me.

Except that I can't recognize the girl behind all those pieces. I blink back the memory of the last time I felt this way.

The air conditioner above Amanda Ziegler's stall coughs back to life. And in that second—under cover of fresh sound—the girl closest to me laughs. It's tiny, hardly detectable if not for the fact that I can see her face in the mirror,
the way her mouth distorts as she tries to mask it. It's obvious she's nervous, that the act wasn't entirely voluntary. But the other girl doesn't know that, and she picks up the laugh where the first girl dropped it.

I let my hand connect with her blushed cheek as many times as I can before her friend pulls me off her and some teacher pulls her friend off me.

Deep red spots decorate the front of my gray sweater. Asphalt Magic smears from eye to temple. But I don't care. For the first time in months, a new sense has made its way into my body's vocabulary. I have regained the sense of touch.

And it feels amazing to smack the shit out of this girl I've never met.

I wonder if Amanda Ziegler ever bloodied a girl's nose. I decide that maybe she did. I only come down from my new high when I realize how proud Rae would have been of me.

One large Rubbermaid bin with a matching blue lid is all I bring to Dad's house. Mom kept rolling suitcases into my room, shoving clothes I didn't need and yearbooks I didn't care about into them.

“You're going to want them once you're up there,” she kept saying. And when I didn't say anything, she just kept packing, which was maybe her way of apologizing for being
so utterly wrapped up in everything except the unraveling life of her daughter. Or maybe it was her way of clearing out my room so she didn't have to do it after I left. Ever since the capital D-Divorce, she's been very focused on a career she never cared about before.

Not that I was really up for hearing “Quit feeling sorry for yourself,” her unique brand of comfort, or how hard this was making
her
life. So when she acted so surprised that I only loaded the Rubbermaid into the car, I finally did say something.

“If you want to get rid of me so badly, why not just leave me on the curb with the rest of my stuff instead of shipping me off to Seattle? It'd be a lot cheaper.”

We didn't talk for the entire three-day drive to Dad's. It's not that I didn't have more to say. It's that I knew she wouldn't hear anything but the sound of her own wounded feelings crying out, and nobody could be heard over that.

Besides, it's going to be nothing but noise the minute we get to Dad's.

“I'm not saying that, and you know it. Why do you always do that? You twist everything I say.”

“I don't know, Dale. I'm just evil, I guess.”

“And there she is. Passive-aggressive Natalie. I was won
dering how long it was going to take before she showed up.”

“Oh grow up, would you? Christ, I can't say two words without you—”

“What about that doctor you were taking her to?”

“It didn't work.”

“And that Pax, Zylo, whatever, what about that stuff she was taking?”

“It. Didn't. Work. How many times do I have to say it? Nothing is working.”

I lift the lid from the Rubbermaid and pull out the pad and paper I packed last. I want to write a letter to Rae, but it's the wrong time. I set them aside and pull Troy from the box next. Considering I won him at the Maricopa County Fair three years ago, it's a wonder he's still in one piece. Everyone knows how crappy those stuffed animals are, and Troy the Miraculous Pink Unicorn has defied the odds by at least a year. His horn is bent and there's more than one bald patch exposed, but he's otherwise in decent shape. I won him after shooting the hat off a plastic cowboy with a water gun. Rae always used to tell me she was the one who won it. Like I wasn't there.

“It's just that we should have talked about this more. You know how nuts my schedule is going to get this summer with that job up in Vancouver starting in a couple of months.”

“Well I'm sorry the timing isn't convenient, Dale. Exactly how many more conversations were you hoping to have?”

“Don't do that. You don't have the monopoly on parental concern. You treat your custody like a trophy, lauding it over me whenever you've decided maybe, just maybe, moving her to Phoenix on your own was a bad idea.”

“Don't you dare blame me for this. And keep your voice down, for God's sake.”